Passing Strange (4 page)

And yet, even as he lived in the present, King had an ability to think beyond his immediate surroundings and to imagine how personal experience might play out as part of a more dramatic tale. In his small pocket journal, he plotted how to tell the
story
of his long mountain walks, jotting down shorthand notes to expand later into literary vignettes.
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The teenage King “wrote beautifully,” Gardiner recalled, “being trained to it by his mother who is gifted with wonderful power of expression and power to inspire enthusiasm for literature.” Indeed, as far as Gardiner could tell, all of King’s “literary and artistic tastes and his critical perceptions seemed the natural outgrowth of his mother’s mind and training.”
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At summer’s end, Gardiner moved back to his hometown of Troy, New York, to enroll in the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Dewey returned to Hartford to finish high school.
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But without any educational plans of his own for the fall, King felt unmoored. He moved to Brooklyn in late 1859 and found work with the flour merchants William Brown and Company. He chose to believe he secured the job on his own, but more likely he had help from George S. Howland, a widowed Brooklyn businessman and philanthropist then courting Florence King. Howland served as secretary of the board of the Brooklyn White Lead Company, which prospered, as the local newspaper explained, “due to his intelligence in all the chemical, mechanical and productive departments of the business.”
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Five years older than Florence, he had lost a wife and child in an 1854 shipwreck and buried two of his other children.
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His surviving son, John Snowden Howland—“Snoddy”—had a physical disability that, as Florence put it, left his body “like an exquisite vessel of cracked glass which a rough touch might shiver in atoms.”
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Howland likely saw in Florence a potential mate young enough to bear more children; in him, she probably spied financial salvation. They married in July 1860, and Florence inherited a nine-year-old stepson. But nothing could shake her devotion to Clarence. Her eighteen-year-old son would remain her intellectual companion and confidant, and Clarence would find it difficult ever to escape the grip of that maternal embrace.
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KING REVELED IN NEW YORK’S cultural attractions. He attended the opera and purchased a season’s pass to the National Academy of Design, where he particularly admired Albert Bierstadt’s grand
Base of the Rocky Mountains, Laramie Peak,
the first of the painter’s monumental Rocky Mountain landscapes to be exhibited in the city.
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But New York also struck him as a sinful place. “It was all very nice to talk about moral purity in a little city,” he wrote to Gardiner, “but Great Jones! Jim there are more than one seductive, wicked, beautiful, fascinating, jolly, voluptuous, apparently modest artful woman to one poor chicken here; they show you their necks and bosoms without intending to and all sorts of abominable wiles they practice on a fellow that are mighty inflaming.”
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He felt compelled to fight back against the dangerous lures of city life and went to church in an effort to fend off his melancholy and vague urban unease.
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After a few months, he proudly told Gardiner, “I have succeeded with Heavenly aid in eradicating melancholy from my heart and now that I am free from its bands my soul is much more free to look at all the world’s realities in a healthy light.”
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This new perspective made him more keenly aware of his own advantages in life, more thankful than ever for his mother’s devotion. “Now almost daily,” he told Gardiner, “I see some poor unfortunate little girl or boy with scarce food to keep them out of the grave and clothes to cover them, young and with a heavy weight of
deep deep
sorrow in every furrow of their little old hard faces. . . . Oh my God why were my young days cloudless and why did I have a kind devoted Mother, why was I permitted to live in ease while those whom thou lovest as well are going down to premature death from famine and degradation.” This first glimpse of the urban poor sparked his empathy and drove away his “sorrow and all discontent.”
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NOT EVEN AN INWARD-LOOKING eighteen-year-old could find shelter from the stiff winds of politics that winter and spring of 1860. Talk of slavery, states’ rights, and the impending possibility of civil war dominated the papers and the talk on the street. “I am more than ever a Wendell Phillips man,” King wrote to Gardiner that March, “heart and soul with the philanthropic ‘radicals’ ” allied with Phillips’s strong antislavery views. But he explained that his “mental” allegiance lay with the Illinois senator Stephen Douglas, who believed that the residents of the western territories should decide for themselves whether to allow slavery within their boundaries.
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The radical abolitionists had the right end in mind, but King favored a more tempered means of ending America’s peculiar institution.

King grew up an “enthusiastic abolitionist,” Gardiner recalled, receiving from his mother “an ardent hatred of slavery, and a clear foresight of the impending ‘irrepressible conflict’ of the Civil War.”
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But both Florence and Clarence took their lead from King’s grandmother, Sophia Little, with whom they lived while in Newport.
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“During the 1850s,” King later wrote, “she ate no sugar but free soil maple and refused southern oranges as they were to her mind ‘full of the blood of slaves.’ ”
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Little’s impeccable antislavery credentials extended back to at least 1835, when she attended the famous Boston meeting that ended when an angry mob seized abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison and dragged him through the streets with a rope tied around his neck.
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Later, during King’s boyhood, she helped lead the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society and earned local notoriety for shunning the neighbors unsympathetic to her criticism of the proslavery church.
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Mrs. Little “has suffered, and counted it joy to suffer for the enslaved,” pronounced her admirer Frederick Douglass.
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Little wielded her pen as a weapon. Her antislavery letters and poems appeared in Garrison’s abolitionist weekly,
The Liberator,
beginning in 1837.
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After Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, however, an enraged Little sought a broader reading audience and turned to the more popular genre of the novel, in the hope that her “feelings, concerning that law, should reach the ears of the people.” She completed her book
Thrice through the Furnace
months before Harriet Beecher Stowe finished
Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
But through “circumstances over which the Author had not control,” it appeared a few months after the March 1852 publication of Stowe’s novel. Mrs. Little deferred to her literary better: “While my little bark lay hindered in port, God had launched forth a noble vessel on the chafed waters of the public mind.”
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In her story of a slave family’s escape to freedom, Little lashed out at the institution of human bondage, insisting that “the dreadful truth exceeds anything my pen has here portrayed!” She wrote like the nineteenth-century religious poet she was, but even her sentimental prose did not mask her political sting. A reviewer for Frederick Douglass’s Rochester, New York, newspaper pronounced the novel a “thrilling” story and admirable testimony against the Fugitive Slave Act.
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Just ten when his grandmother’s book came out, Clarence left no account of his response. But Florence paid indirect homage to the novel in 1862 by naming the daughter born to her and George Howland “Marian,” after the saintly quadroon heroine of Little’s story. Her gesture suggests the place of the book in the family’s life. Clarence probably knew the novel well, and one imagines Florence referring to it whenever Marian asked about her name.

Like other readers, Florence seemed to understand the novel as a tribute to the common humanity of all peoples, whatever their race or creed. But Little’s radicalism had its limits. Although she soundly denounced slavery, her liberal views about race fractured—as so many abolitionists’ did—over the issue of intermarriage. The aristocratic white protagonist of her book, lured by Marian’s primitive charms, frees her as his uncle’s slave. “I never saw a white lady that had any heart; they fritter it all away by false education,” he tells her. “Your greatest charm for me, is the sensibility I have vainly sought for among my own race.”
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Little dismissed such racial romanticism, however, arguing that there could be no true love across the lines of color or class. An educated white man’s love for an untutored black woman would corrupt them both. So she wrapped up her complicated plot with a cluster of marriages that wed white to white, black to black, mulatto to mulatto. One can only wonder whether the adult Clarence King ever looked back on his grandmother’s novel with ironic appreciation for its uncanny anticipation of his own life.

 

 

FLORENCE KING’S MARRIAGE TO George Howland in the summer of 1860 freed Clarence from his day-to-day worry about his mother’s financial situation and let him imagine his way out of his job in Brooklyn. In the fall, he accepted Howland’s offer to bankroll his education and enrolled in the three-year course of study in chemistry at the Yale Scientific School (to be renamed the Sheffield Scientific School the following year). The school offered the best scientific training in America, and King sped through the program in just two years. As Daniel Gilman later wrote, he had “that token of genius which is said to be ‘the art of lighting one’s own fires.’ ”
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The Scientific School offered a stark alternative to the classical curriculum of Yale College, with a focus on chemistry, engineering, and independent work in its newly equipped labs. The “Sheffs” studied and lived apart from the other undergraduates who roomed together in the “college yard.” “They do not mingle,” wrote one student who arrived a few years after King, “and few acquaintances are formed.”
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The Yale Scientific School had developed slowly from the School of Applied Chemistry that formed in 1847, and it was still evolving when King arrived in the fall of 1860. The new building that opened that year allowed chemistry and engineering to be taught under the same roof for the first time and provided students with state-of-the-art laboratories for analytical chemistry and metallurgy.
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James Dwight Dana, veteran of the celebrated U.S. Exploring Expedition (1838-42) under Charles Wilkes and a pioneer in the scientific study of the Pacific, presided over the school as a kind of éminence grise and lectured on geology. The philologist William Dwight Whitney instructed the young scientists in French and German. Benjamin Silliman Jr. lectured on chemistry. George J. Brush, “the life of the school,” helped students do research with his superb private collection of minerals. Others taught crystallography, astronomy, and natural philosophy.
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Charles Darwin’s revolutionary
On the Origin of Species
(1859) had not yet affected the course of instruction; during the 1860-61 school year, the third-year curriculum still included classes in theology and “Paley’s evidences of Christianity.”
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But King’s fellow student Othniel Marsh had already uncovered some extraordinary fossils that would fuel the impending debate about evolution and help earn him a reputation as one of the nation’s foremost paleontologists.
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“I am happy in my studies,” King wrote to Gardiner. “I don’t love the practical minutiae of lower details of science although I work at these for discipline, but the lofty laws of creation, the connection of the material with the human the aesthetic and the eternal, the cosmical relation of God’s earthly planes.”
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Time would later temper King’s faith. But for now he sought a unified explanation of the world. “Nature the key to Art and Science, God the Key to Nature,” he scribbled in a notebook. “You Clarence King never dare to look at a peak of nature save with respect and the admiration you are capable of. Nature is a solemn force a glorious reality which ought to move us to high thought and true nobility.”
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The mining engineer James Duncan Hague, who first met King during his New Haven years, remembered him as “an active, sprightly youth, quick to observe and apprehend, full of joyous animation and lively energy” and not above engaging in midnight pranks that involved swapping the front gates of the stately Yale buildings along Hillhouse Avenue.
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A muscular five feet six inches tall, King excelled at athletics.
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He skated, played cricket, captained the baseball team, and rowed stroke on a racing crew. He also excelled in the classroom, mastering mandatory classes in mathematics, physics, chemistry, mineralogy, crystallography, geology, and German.
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In quieter moments, however, he still struggled with matters of the soul. “I find myself alone and I draw nearer to God, Mother and you,” he wrote to Gardiner.
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None of his new Yale friendships had muted the intensity of their old bond. “My heart is taken up with you,” Clarence wrote to Jim, “. . . my love for you grows always and is a most absorbing passion.”
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Campus talk that fall of 1860 revolved around politics: the impending presidential election, Abraham Lincoln’s victory, the likelihood of war. In a community of soldier-aged young men, the abstract issues soon became concrete. With the secession of the southern states and then the outbreak of war in April 1861, most of the school’s southerners, never more than a small minority, headed home. In a first flush of enthusiasm, at least thirteen undergraduates left school to join the military in the early months of war. Many more enlisted as soon as they received their degrees; from King’s small class at “Sheff,” three students eventually joined the Union side. But the reality of war soon intruded on the students’ youthful idealism. The College boys watched somberly in June 1861 as Theodore Winthrop, one of the first Union officers killed in battle—an abolitionist, a Yale man, a local boy of impeccable Puritan lineage—was laid to rest in the Grove Street Cemetery, across the street from the Sheffield Scientific School.
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Clarence’s own uncle, his father’s younger brother David, died in West Virginia during the war’s first year.
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