6. The Common Touch
6
THE COMMON TOUCH
Success as “the Blind Poetess” did not go to Fanny’s head. One afternoon, she was asked to show a visitor through the Institution. During the tour, the man happened to catch sight of a stack of volumes of The Blind Girl. “Oh, here is the Fanny Crosby book,” he said enthusiastically. “You must know her, I suppose.” Rather than chide him for not recognizing such an eminent person of letters on sight (after all, her picture was in the front of the book), she merely nodded.
“Is she a likable girl?”
“Oh, no!” she said, shaking her black curls gravely. “Far from it!”
Buying one of the books, he left Fanny his card. When he was gone, she learned her visitor had been none other than Johann Ludwig Tellkampf, an eminent professor at Columbia College.
Through sales of The Blind Girl, the name of Fanny Crosby became familiar in many households of New York and nearer New England. How proud her grandfather would have been—but alas, Sylvanus now lay buried in the little cemetery at Doanesburg.
Overworked, her constitution still suffered alarmingly. Dr. Clements, fearing a collapse, ordered Fanny to spend the summer at home, in complete rest.
Events both joyful and tragic had transpired there since her last visit two years previously. On Christmas Day 1843, Mercy had presented her husband with a living gift: their third daughter, Carolyn.
In spring, disaster struck. Thomas Morris abandoned Mercy and moved to Illinois to join Joseph Smith, the “Prophet” of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Thomas took with him two of the children by his first wife. But fifteen-year-old William, his oldest child, wanted no part of the adventure and hid until his father had left, then remained behind with his stepmother. Thomas ended his days in Utah as a gardener for Brigham Young, Smith’s successor.
It was on the heels of this tragic desertion that Fanny returned to her mother’s household. The rest and change of environment was just what she needed. In September, Fanny returned to New York in perfect health, to the amazement of her colleagues.
Fanny quickly got back into her routine of teaching and reciting her poetry for the dignitaries who visited the Institution. During the summer, The Blind Girl had circulated farther among the literary circles of the East.
One celebrity who previously had visited the Institution and now took a new interest in Fanny was Horace Greeley (1811–1872), the famous newspaper editor. He invited her to contribute poems to his newspaper, the New York Tribune. It was an influential liberal paper, backing the Whig party and social reform. Although a Democrat, Fanny was progressive in her political and social outlook and admired Greeley and most of the ideas his paper supported. She accepted his offer. “I hardly knew whether I walked or flew to my room that night,” she wrote. “I was so proud at having been recognized as a poet by such a great genius as Horace Greeley.”
By this time, Fanny was contributing to several periodicals: James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, the Saturday Emporium, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Clinton Signal.
That fall, former president Martin Van Buren took her out to dinner. A man of fashion and elegance, Van Buren was charmed by his young guest, and Fanny became attached to the middle-aged politician, who was in his sixties. “Down to his dying day,” she later wrote, “he was one of my closest friends.” What she meant by “closest friends” is questionable. Despite her piety, Fanny was something of a name dropper, even in old age, and often referred to prominent persons as “close friends” when she had met them only a few times.
FORMER PRESIDENT MARTIN VAN BUREN TOOK HER OUT TO DINNER.
The next year, Fanny had the honor of meeting her fourth president, the newly inaugurated James K. Polk. Polk and his staff made an official visit to the Institution, and Fanny was drafted, as usual, to recite a welcoming poem.
In April 1846, Fanny was again in Washington and once more in presidential society. Delegations from the institutions for the blind in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York appeared before Congress, again on behalf of those who wanted to establish free institutions for the blind in every state. The effort was unsuccessful, but Fanny renewed her acquaintance with President Polk when, at a White House dinner for her and her colleagues, she sang a song she had dedicated to him. She also met again former president John Quincy Adams, then a respected member of Congress. And she had been introduced to many other congressmen, including two future presidents, James Buchanan and Andrew Johnson.
Back at the Institution, Fanny sometimes grew weary of her position as poet laureate. It was annoying to be “expected, whenever anything unusual happened, to embalm the event in rhyme and measure.” Yet this was what her public demanded. For instance, Fanny—or “Fan,” as she now was often called—was obliged to celebrate in verse the killing of a mouse by a girl at the Institution. On another occasion, she was asked to write about an incident in which a teacher at the Institution awoke to find a mouse in his long, disheveled hair. Though mildly irritated to be asked to write such nonsense, Fanny would write it, even if it meant sacrificing time she otherwise would have spent writing genuine poetry.
Whenever she heard of the death of a prominent person, she automatically sat down and compiled an elegy. In February 1848, John Quincy Adams succumbed to a brain hemorrhage. Fanny composed an elegy entitled “Weep Not for the Dead” (in which she employed the pagan device of representing the soul of the dead man in the form of a bird).
Among those who took part in his funeral two weeks later were Henry Clay, the popular senator and presidential hopeful from Kentucky. The following day, Clay paid a call at the Institution for the Blind. James Chamberlain, the current superintendent, gave him a long-winded introduction at a formal welcome. Chamberlain introduced Fanny to the senator, and as she recited a poem of greeting, a Herald reporter noted that Clay seemed “much affected.” When she finished, Clay took her arm in his and led her to the front of the speaker’s platform. He told the audience, “This is not the only poem for which I am indebted to this lady. Six months ago, she sent me some lines on the death of my dear son.”
Indeed, Fanny had written “On the Death of Colonel Clay” in memory of Henry Clay Jr., a casualty in the Mexican War. Friends had persuaded her to send a copy to the senator. His voice trembled as he told the audience about the poem. Then, “he did not speak for some minutes, while both of us stood there, weeping,” Fanny recalled.
Two weeks later, General Winfield Scott, the hero of the Mexican War, visited the students unexpectedly. While Chamberlain feverishly struggled to prepare a welcoming program for “Old Fuss and Feathers,” Fanny was called upon to entertain him in the parlor. Fanny had a lifelong fascination with war—which seems incongruous with everything else we know of her gentleness and sensitivity. Even when she was an old woman, she remained proud of the fact she’d had relatives in every military conflict in which the United States had been involved, from the American Revolution down to the Spanish-American War and the Boxer Rebellion. She had enthusiastically supported President Polk’s policies in the Mexican War and had written several poems celebrating the frightful conflict, with lines like these:
In the halls of Mont’zuma
now revel the grave,
’Tis thine arm that hath
conquered the Mexican slave,
Thou hast burned thy sword
in the enemy’s breast,
They quailed at thy glance—
Thou has laid them to rest.
She recited some of these lines to Scott, and they were too much even for the military man. He was repelled.
Fanny gushed, “How did it seem when you really found yourself in the halls of Montezuma, General? Did you feel like shouting?”
The general growled, “No. I felt like falling on my knees and thanking God for the victory.”
He went on to tell Fanny, “War is a terrible thing—demoralizing, degrading, cruel, devastating in all its immediate effects.”
Fanny never forgot the general’s comments. It puzzled her to hear so highly esteemed a military hero speak with such distaste of his livelihood.
That summer, the president himself visited the Institution unexpected and unattended. In ill health, Polk, who was not seeking reelection, told the startled administrators he did not want a reception. He happened to be in the city and had come to the campus simply for a rest. He remembered the tranquil beauty of the grounds. Since Fanny and Polk had met, Chamberlain asked her to accompany the president on a leisurely stroll.
Though she walked with presidents, Fanny never lost the common touch. Throughout these years as the premier attraction of the New York Institution for the Blind, she was loved by her pupils as a devoted teacher and an affectionate friend.
THOUGH SHE WALKED WITH PRESIDENTS, FANNY NEVER LOST THE COMMON TOUCH.