Augusta Browne’s American Bouquet, Part 2

The early editions (ca. 1841) of Augusta Browne’s American Bouquet bore a dedication to “Miss Sarah E. Wise of Virginia.” Although this flourish disappeared in subsequent imprints by Lee and Walker, the dedication to Sarah Wise presents an interesting connection from composer to consumer. The trajectories of these women’s lives raise questions about their respective actions during the Civil War some two decades later.

Augusta Browne presumably knew Sarah Wise in Philadelphia, before the Browne family moved to New York in May 1841. The piece was advertised for sale within days of her relocation to Broadway. Thus Augusta composed the American Bouquet and arranged for its publication while still residing in Philadelphia.

Dedications had various purposes in sheet music: to lend elegance, to flatter friends, to honor statesmen and celebrities, or to cultivate ties with leading families. I suspect the latter motivation in the American Bouquet. People who saw Augusta’s name alongside prominent Philadelphians would associate her with high society in the city. By incorporating a well-known family from Virginia, Augusta might have hoped to generate interest and sales among gentlefolk in the Old Dominion.

During the five years she spent in Philadelphia, Augusta dedicated her new pieces to prominent citizens of the city and to girls who attended female seminaries there. Numerous Southern plantation families sent teenage daughters to Philadelphia to complete their educations at elite institutions like Madame Sigoigne’s School for Young Ladies or Madame Grelaud’s Seminary. Both Sigoigne and Grelaud were refugees from Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Their schools were known for classes conducted in French and for cultivation of culture and the arts in their students. Southern belles boarded and attended alongside daughters of Philadelphia aristocracy at these academies.

Augusta’s precise connection to a specific school has not yet emerged, but she may have been involved in teaching music lessons to seminary students, or her younger sisters could have been enrolled as day students. Augusta may have taken some classes herself, in French, for example, as suggested by her liking for title pages in French on her sheet music.

Whatever the link may have been, Augusta made the acquaintance of Sarah Wise and other out-of-state girls to whom she dedicated music. Sarah Wise is exemplary because we can easily identify her family and follow her subsequent life path.

The Wise Family of Virginia

The Wise family monument in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery lists Sarah Elizabeth Wise’s birth in 1825 and death in 1864. The family embodied old Virginia gentry. The numerous Wise clan had lived and intermarried in Accomack County on the Eastern Shore since the seventeenth century. The Wise family of Virginia was powerful, prominent, landed, and, of course, slave-holding. Sarah’s father, Tully Robinson Wise III, served in the Virginia House of Delegates for Accomack County. Her mother, Margaret D. P. Wise (née Wise), was the sister of Henry A. Wise, U.S. Congressman from Virginia, 1833–37, and governor of Virginia, 1856–60.

In 1842 Sarah’s father was appointed to be first auditor of the U.S. Treasury during the presidency of John Tyler. Tully R. Wise succumbed to an illness less than two years later.  His wife was pregnant with their seventh son when he died in 1844. In the 1850 census, Mrs. Wise still resided in Washington with her many children.

As the sole daughter of the household, Sarah—Sally to her family—must have helped her mother with the youngsters. One boy was sixteen and already held a position as a congressional page, but the youngest boy was only five. Income was not an issue for this well-to-do family, so Sarah did not have to seek paid work. Surely there were many opportunities to meet eligible bachelors, but Sarah never married, perhaps believing that her mother depended on her help to raise the boys.

The Civil War Years

The best-known event of Henry Wise’s term as governor of Virginia was John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. Wise allowed Brown to be hanged rather than commute the sentence of the abolitionist convicted of treason against the state of Virginia. Wise favored secession in 1861 and became a general in the Confederate States Army, despite lacking any military experience.

When the Civil War broke out, Sarah Wise’s family returned to Virginia. Six of Sarah’s brothers served in the Confederate army. The women took refuge in Richmond. Sarah E. Wise was one of three women who applied for a clerkship in 1861 at the Confederate States of America (C.S.A.) treasury.[1]

Government work was new for plantation women, but perhaps Sarah knew about such employment from her years living in the District of Columbia. Such jobs, however slight, demanded good references and assurances of propriety. Economic need was considered, but high social standing helped. After years as a widow, with many sons in battle for the Confederacy and her brother the recent governor of Virginia, Mrs. Wise received a position, too.

In 1862 both Sarah and her mother were employees at the Treasury. They were described specifically as two of five “Ladies Trimming Treasury Notes.”[2] What was this occupation? Did they use large scissors or paper cutters to cut up printed sheets of Confederate dollar bills before bundling them for distribution? We can only imagine.

Serious issues beset the Treasury: growing paper shortages, metal in short supply for coins, and a lack of gold and silver reserves to back up the currency. Furthermore, general mistrust in paper money led to currency issued by twelve of thirteen states in the C.S.A., and even counties and parishes printed their own monies.

The C.S.A. Treasury was housed in the Custom House, a handsome federal building that had been completed only in 1858. The Confederate government placed offices for several of their government functions in the substantial building. The Treasury Department officers were located on the first floor on either side of the passage leading from the Bank Street entrance.

The granite structure incorporated internal brick arches and cast iron supports that rendered it far less vulnerable to fire that consumed much of the city when Richmond fell. The building withstood the flames and has remained in continuous service ever since. Now—after multiple expansions—the building is the Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Federal Courthouse.

Worry about Yankee invasion intensified in the Confederate capital in Richmond as Gen. George McClellan’s army pushed through southeastern Virginia during the Peninsula Campaign beginning in March 1862. Confederate Treasury secretary Christopher Memminger ordered the engraving and printing of C.S.A. treasury notes to be moved to Columbia, South Carolina, in April 1862. After hard fighting that culminated in the Seven Days Battles of June 26–July 1, 1862, Richmond had escaped capture and the Peninsula Campaign was finished.

The production of Confederate banknotes remained in Columbia. A new ten-dollar bill even featured an image of the South Carolina State House. On July 4, 1862, a newspaperman from the Charleston Courier mentioned seeing Mrs. Wise and another woman he knew, Mrs. Bartow, at work in Columbia, “cutting Treasury Notes, to aid in their maintenance.”

Sarah became ill with tuberculosis and died in Columbia from “consumption” on July 11 or 12, 1864.[3] She and her mother were described  as “refugee ladies from Virginia” in a newspaper obituary.

A local South Carolina poet commemorated Sarah in an elegy. Catharine Gendron Poyas (1813–82) of Charleston wrote “A Wild-Flower Wreath, for the grave of Sarah E. Wise,” and published it in her collection Year of Grief and Other Poems. Whether she had somehow met Sarah in Columbia, or simply responded to the obituary, Poyas called Wise a martyr and “silent sufferer, who so bravely bore / sad exile from her noble, bleeding State.”

The War Within Families

It seems ironic that Augusta dedicated her American Bouquet to this Confederate loyalist, a true daughter of the South. But the dedication had been decades earlier. One must wonder, did Augusta ever learn what became of the young Virginia woman who was the age to be a younger sister? Did Augusta’s two brothers in the Union troops face Sarah’s siblings across the battlefield in the skirmishes around Fredericksburg, Virginia, in 1863, when Augusta’s brother William Henry was wounded? He and brother Louis Henry Browne survived, and, remarkably, all of the Wise boys lived through the Civil War, although three were wounded. Sarah Wise’s mother died in Accomack in February 1866, less than a year after the fighting ended. You could say that she lived through, but did not survive, the war. Although she didn’t lose a son, she had lost her greatest support, her daughter Sarah.

Whether Augusta knew anything about the specific fate of Sarah Wise is unlikely, but she would have known about Gov. Henry Wise’s actions that determined the fate of John Brown. The Wise family’s views on slavery and secession were abundantly clear: they were activists on the Confederate side.

The Civil War left no American family untouched by loss or grief. The war years were anxious for Augusta, but how much more wrenching it would have been had her husband been alive when the war broke out in 1861.

In 1855 Augusta married a talented young portrait painter, John Walter Benjamin Garrett (ca. 1826–58), who had been born in North Carolina to slave holding parents. During the presidential election of 1848 he was an active supporter of Democratic party policies that supported state’s rights and slave ownership. At the time of his marriage to Augusta, Garrett’s siblings still owned one or two slaves in Tennessee. On Dec. 31, 1856, J. W. B. Garrett sold a slave in Memphis, a girl of sixteen named Lucy, who had belonged to his late sister, for $895.[4]

Garrett died suddenly in 1858 from a heart condition. Would he have been a Southern sympathizer in 1861, when the Civil War began? It seems very likely, given Garrett’s politics and cultural background.  He might have returned to Tennessee, where he still had family members, or to his native state of North Carolina to join the Confederate military following secession. Devotion and loyalty to her husband might have pressured Augusta to go with him.

The McClellan Family

The question of American women who had to face separation from their families because of the war was no idle concern. Another Philadelphia girl who received a dedication of music by Augusta Browne was Frederica McClellan (1821–99), the daughter of Dr. George McClellan, a pioneering surgeon who led in the founding of Jefferson Medical College in 1824. In addition to Frederica, his children included George Brinton McClellan (1826–85), the Union general known as “Little Mac,” who led the Grand Army of the Potomac in the Peninsula Campaign.

One of Augusta’s early Philadelphia publications, variations for piano or harp on the “Gypsies Wild Chant” from Alexander Lee’s opera Lo Zingaro [misspelled Lo Zangara by Browne’s publisher], bore a dedication to “Miss Frederica S. McClellan of Philadelphia.” The music was “No. 11” of Augusta’s sheet music, and it was advertised for sale by the publisher, George E. Blake, in March 1837. The dedication of “Song of the Skylark,” “No. 16,” to Mrs. Samuel McClellan, the wife of Dr. George McClellan’s brother (also a Philadelphia physician), further highlights Augusta’s connection to this prominent family.

Frederica McClellan married in February 1841, while Augusta was still residing in Philadelphia. Thus, Augusta would have known that Frederica’s husband, Thomas C. English, was a Southerner who owned land and slaves near Mobile, Alabama. After attending Jefferson Medical College, English took his wife home to his plantation, Cedar Hill, in Eliska, Alabama.

Frederica often visited Philadelphia and was present in the city when the Civil War broke out. Her brother—through his high status in the Union army—arranged for her safe return to Confederate territory. Family legend has it that Yankee forces spared Cedar Hill from destruction because Frederica was the sister of the famous general. Nevertheless, Frederica’s husband and her son George Brinton McClellan English fought in the Confederate army.

A Musical Silence

Frederica McClellan English exemplifies the sad division of some families owing to the secession and subsequent war. Her loyalty to husband and children left no other option. Augusta must have been relieved not to have to face such a choice, but she may have had lingering doubts about what might have happened had her husband not died prematurely. Would she, like Frederica, have been parted from her parents and brothers in order to remain with her husband? Would she have faced the overwhelming loss, danger, and deprivation experienced by many Southern women ?

Unlike countless American musicians, Augusta never published songs about the Civil War, its battles, soldiers, or worried families left at home. Perhaps she had no wish to participate in or profit from music marketed to appeal to emotions about the conflict. Indeed, Augusta published hardly any music during the war years. Two hymns, a sacred song, and a cozy parlor song about the household clock make up the total of her sheet music imprints between 1860 and 1865. Her musical silence may correspond to the personal turmoil that she experienced during the long ordeals of war and widowhood.

The years following the Civil War were a time of personal reconstruction for Augusta Browne. Relocations from New York to Baltimore and then to Washington D.C. added further adjustments to the long process of healing. It was not until the 1870s that Browne returned to composing new songs and piano music that regained some of the joyful optimism of the American Bouquet. [You can listen to the American Bouquet in Part 1 of this blog.]

[1] Edna Susan Barber, “Sisters of the Capital”: White Women in Richmond, Virginia, 1860–1880” (PhD diss., Univ. of Maryland, 1997), 123, n. 103.

[2] Confederate States of America. Message to the President of the Congress, transmitting communications from all the departments, except the War Department. [Richmond: s.n., 1862], 15. HathiTrust Digital Library.

[3] Ancestry.com, Columbia, South Carolina Obituaries, 1859–1877 [database on-line] (Provo, UT: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 1998). Based on Brent Holcomb, Marriage and Death Notices from Columbia, South Carolina, Newspapers, 1838–1860 (Berwyn Heights, MD: Heritage Books, 2015), 137.

[4] Shelby County (Tennessee] Register of Deeds, Book 0022, p. 405.