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Materials > Readings > Henry Craft |
Henry Craft: The Memory of Love
Seen from the outside, Henry Craft lived an incredibly average life. His father, Hugh Craft, was born near Vienna, Maryland in 1799, and removed at an early age to Milledgeville, Georgia, where he became a prosperous merchant and planter. Hugh's first wife bore him a son, Henry, in 1823, but she died shortly thereafter. Hugh subsequently remarried and was just beginning a new family when the bottom fell out of his finances. Surrendering most of his worldly possessions to his creditors, Hugh collected his family and headed off to Holly Springs, Mississippi, the heart of newly acquired Indian country. Though somewhat awkwardly the only child of his father's first marriage, Henry seems to have had a happy childhood, and he greatly enjoyed growing up on the South's frontier. Holly Springs was quite possibly the most booming of all the boom lands of the Old Southwest. In January 1836 it was estimated that only twenty white men lived in the area; six months later the number was up to 3100. The census of 1840 revealed that Mississippi's population had nearly tripled in a decade, making it the fastest growing state in the country. Henry, then 17, literally helped his father carve a plantation out of the bush, and he would in later years remember these times as "the free roving of my woodsman days." His father set up a sort of real estate business and taught Henry to be a land examiner.
By 1847 Henry was twenty-four, had made a tidy sum in the land business, and was part of a social circle that met at neighboring plantations throughout the spring and summer for parties and dances. They were, he claimed, "the gayest of the gay," and it seemed as if "the laugh[ing] and danc[ing]" would "reign unbroken." He was particularly interested in one member of his gay party, Lucy Hull, who lived nearby at Tuckahoe plantation. At first Lucy had seemed all "outside show," "a brilliant, careless, gay & rather heartless girl." Gradually, though, he discerned a "certain under current beneath the surface ice." Henry had been in love before. He had from his earliest recollection possessed an "ideal of a woman" he could love, and occasionally he would in the throes of a new crush fancy that the object of his desire measured up to that ideal. Time spent in her company, however, usually revealed that it was his own ideal he loved, that he had tricked himself by dressing his crush in the trappings of his perfect woman. At first he believed this was what he was feeling for Lucy. Like all the others, she would soon reveal her true self, and he would be filled with the same old "painful doubts & vacillations" that had accompanied his other crushes. But as the spring dragged on, Lucy appeared "more & more in her higher & better & hidden character" until she had actually eclipsed his ideal. Lucy taught Henry that "women might be what before I had never imagined." "I [am] not deceived," Henry confessed jubilantly. I will "elevate my love to reach the elevation of its object."
Desperate to confess his affections, Henry was devastated when Lucy spent one evening deep in conversation with a gentleman from Memphis he had never seen before. It became suddenly so apparent that Lucy loved this man, had loved him, and "was perhaps engaged to him." Henry was "miserable, utterly miserable as I had never been before." Laying awake that night, he vowed to speak to her the next evening and discover whether he had really "loved so utterly in vain." Reaching the gate at Tuckahoe, he glanced up at the moon and it "seemed to smile so sweetly" that he felt it was an "omen, an encouragement." He had since early childhood worshipped the moon, and he interpreted its smiling countenance as an acknowledgement of his devotion, "a promise of success." The interview with Lucy must have gone well. After sitting with her on her couch for hours, Henry mounted his horse with a lighter heart. He had not told Lucy of his love for her but had learned that his "fears of another were groundless."
The next morning Henry arose with the intention of confessing his love. Lucy was leaving with her family for a vacation at a local spa and he could not wait for her return. He saw her at church that morning, but she was surrounded by her parents and he could not find an opportunity to talk to her alone. Instead, he slipped her a note, explaining that he wished when she returned to speak with her about a subject close to his heart. If she did not accept this proposal she was to leave his note on her front porch; if she accepted it she was to leave a flower. Anxiously, Henry rode to Tuckahoe that afternoon to see what her answer would be. Evidently, Lucy was a level-headed girl. She had not left a flower, but a sprig of Arbor Vitae, the tree of life. "What a thrill of joy it sent to my heart," Henry confessed. "It was the beginning of a happiness which none but those who have loved and been loved can appreciate." Riding home it seemed to Henry "all nature was bright & happy." He was, he confessed, in love with all the world.
As soon as Lucy returned, Henry requested an opportunity to talk with her alone at Tuckahoe. He longed for the chance to see her and his "heart beat rapturously when" he "thought of hearing from her own lips the sweet confession which her sprig of arbor vitae" had given him. Again the interview must have gone well. They were, he said, "hours vouchsafed but once to the mortal pilgrim," and when he left Tuckahoe he had her ring on his finger, "a pledge of her love." A week later Lucy and Henry were engaged to be married.31
The afternoon before the wedding, Henry procured the marriage license and readied their luggage for the honeymoon. He waited at the stage office for Lucy's bags, but they never arrived. As evening wore on he went home and found a Tuckahoe servant waiting for him with a note. Lucy's father and brothers had strenuously objected to the marriage and had talked Lucy into calling it off. Stunned, Henry sped to Tuckahoe and confronted Lucy's father in the grove, "pacing to and fro over the wet grass" and demanding to see his fiancée. He received only a note from her-it read simply "oh, misery."
Crushed, Henry left for Memphis to cool off. While there he received a letter from Lucy-she had made up her mind. Her love, she said, was "unchanged & unchangeable," and she had resolved to throw herself upon Henry for happiness "come what might." Henry sped home with the "deep rapture" of knowing "that she would willingly endure the frowns & reproaches and even desertion of those whom she fondly loved" to be with him. What "fearful agony" she must have suffered, he thought, "when she knew that she must choose between them & me." Henry could not get over the "devotion, the true woman's heart, which characterized her conduct under those trying circumstances." Lucy's parents talked the couple out of being married immediately, but a date was set for early fall, and Henry was overjoyed.33
Two weeks before the wedding, Lucy collapsed. Henry blamed her brothers and parents for Lucy's illness; they blamed him and forbade his seeing her, claiming that it "was imprudent to excite her." Henry felt the "peculiar relative of hostility" that they entertained for him, however, and he grew bitter, hanging around outside Tuckahoe, hunting birds for the time Lucy might be up to eating them. Despite her family's admonitions, Lucy was true to Henry, sending letters to him, claiming that he was in her dreams and that if possible she loved him more than ever. She planned a day when Henry could fetch the buggy, carry her from her sick bed, and drive her slowly through the grove. When that day arrived, she was not better. Henry was allowed to come and see her, but by then she was "insensible, the film of death…gathering in her eyes." Henry could not bear to see her in that condition, and left the room, but everywhere in the house echoed "that heart rending sound as she gasped away her life." At 2 am, Lucy was laid out on the living room sofa in her bridal attire. "Her countenance," Henry wrote, "had resumed its natural appearance & was smiling & beautiful in death." He thought she seemed in a pleasant sleep. His grief had exhausted itself, his "rebellion…against Providence" had not commenced, and he spent an hour with her body, "calm and quiet." "It was," he said, "the holiest hour of my life."
Lucy's death marked a turning point for Henry, a revolution in his humble history "as important and momentous to me as [those of] 1688 to England, 1789…to France, 1776 to the U.S." Unable to enjoy Holly Springs without Lucy, Henry "sought refuge" at Princeton. He hoped to "find in the emulation and competition of a class" relief from his thoughts, a respite from mourning. However painful the last year had been, he vowed to "go on with an upward brow & a callous heart, ready to meet whatever" might confront him. His utmost hope was that the next year at Princeton would launch him upon a career. "I have suffered affliction & bereavement such as few perhaps are called to undergo," he wrote, but there are "tender ties still binding my heart." "The future," after all, "is the future."
Though only twenty-five, Henry was older than most college freshmen. While he enjoyed the company of his fellow students, and found in competition the incentive to study and discipline of mind he had always lacked, he felt alienated as well. "I am an old man as it were coming back to the employments of his youth," he noted, a man "whose life is far advanced among those just preparing to live." The perspective was one he could not shake, a feeling of always being outside looking in. He had come to Princeton to embark upon a career, and he envied fellow students who seized upon professions and threw their shoulders to the wheel. But there was also something absurd about their zeal. "With what strange alacrity & thoughtlessness men run such a race," he noted. Doubting his own worthiness to embark on such a project, he doubted equally the worthiness of the project itself. The result was a kind of paralytic self-loathing. He would spend hours in his room, "trifling away" his thoughts "upon nothing." Day dreaming and "castle building" were his "besetting temptations," and he indulged them liberally. Part of his difficulty, of course, was that he was still in mourning. Seven months had passed since Lucy's death, but Henry treated himself to long descriptions of her in his journal. Henry, though, was not merely maudlin. He had remarkable powers of self-perception and could be incredibly frank in analyzing himself. One spring night after writing of Lucy he admitted that not having her to love, he had fallen in love with his own sorrow and was loath to give it up. "The memory of her love," he noted, "is my greatest treasure."
Henry might have turned to religion in his mourning, and he tried reading the Bible at night to find some solace. But he could not shake the suspicion that prayer was a human vanity, a ludicrous "farce of uttering solemn words upon the air." Listening to the "confessions & petitions made" in church he could not help but wonder, "what is all this?" We address the Creator of the Universe "as though he were absolutely present & listening," but do we believe it? At least heathens worshipping upon a stone, he noted, have a God "sensibly present with them."
After five months at Princeton, Henry received a letter from home, proposing that he return to Holly Springs to form a law partnership with a local attorney. Henry decided to accept and went to New York to make the arrangements. His journey home was a long one, but it felt good to be back in a place he understood. "It may be weak & childish, the feeling of homesickness," he noted, "but nevertheless I acknowledge that I have ever been subject to it." After being in the north he almost enjoyed how "old & drearyed & scattered & uncomfortable" his home town was. Some associations, however, ran too strong. The stores and the streets, the people and their homes, all were "connected with thoughts of her." "Her image is ever rising up," he noted, "and ever rushing down upon that bed of death.… Thus has it been every day & every hour."
But what gradually dawned on Henry was not that Lucy's death had affected him too much, but rather too little. Like the people he saw in church all "prone & grovelling in the dust," he was going through the motions of feeling but had never grappled with the truth. Lucy's death, however much he dwelled on it, had not made him see the value of time or life, had not elevated his character or brought him closer to God. Rather he had dwelled on death because he was trying desperately to conjure some kind of emotion from a heart that had turned to stone. The truth, he believed, was that he was a mere harlequin of a man, apt to "chatter and laugh an idiot glee & stumble & roll & chatter & laugh again & hate myself & know that I am a fool." In these moments he felt like leaping "joyfully into the embrace of Death," but he did not have the heart. "My heart!" he exclaimed, "if I have one, it is a hard rock of selfishness encrusted by a thin mould of sentimental sensibility in which mushroom feelings spring up & perish in a day." "My worst enemy," he confessed to his diary, "could not have a meaner opinion of me" than I do.
Henry spent his first months back in Holly Springs living with his parents. His step-mother had prepared his old room, "improv[ing] it wonderfully & [making] it much more comfortable." But his relationship with his father became strained. Henry was prone to getting up late, not so much out of laziness, as his father seemed to think, but because, nursing an ailing heart, he preferred the solace and dark quietude of evening time. Henry would sometimes vow to change, to rise early and throw himself into the day as his father did, but every time he did so it seemed as if his father was "so ready to exact another & still another sacrifice" of his habits that he sunk back into his old routine. "He has no sympathy whatever with me," Henry noted, "no indulgence for my foibles, no pity for my weaknesses." Henry loved his father, and recognized the sacrifices he made for his family, but confessed "I do not know how to appreciate his firmness & principles, how to yield to the exaction of his character." Frustrated, Henry was too much the indulgent romantic to assume the "callous philosophical commonplace every day-ishness" which his father associated with the ideas of a man. Unable to come to an understanding, Henry moved into a boarding house.
Henry was not any more satisfied with the time he spent at work. He was supposed to be reading to pass the bar, but each time he picked up a book he lapsed into a listless apathy, his eye wandering over the page, his "mind rov[ing] hither and thither in childish" vacancy. He had no energy or ambition, he claimed, and felt no enthusiasm or hope in his new profession. Again, laziness was not the problem. When there was mindless work to be done, he could "work as industriously as any other machine." But Henry was quick to see the absurd in human enterprise; he was the kind of pessimist who could be consistently disappointed by the bad he discovered in things, even as he expected to find it there. Henry had revered the law as a boy; it had seemed like "a noble and venerable edifice…gradually built up by the successive labors of many generations of great intellects." His imagination had pondered the "forgotten laborers whose work survives them" and the "generations of inhabitants who have called [this] shelter their home." But upon entering this great edifice, he found the rooms dedicated not to ennobling the intellect but to degrading it. As he strolled on "from door to door he encountered the tokens of humbug & trickery and meanness and intrigue at every step." His ideal temple of justice was in fact "a mart where learning is sold and impunity for villainy purchased, an exhibition room of human depravity & degradation and a prostitution house where for fees, principles are distorted, precedents seduced, and ingenuity and trickery and humbugery made the pimps of the wealth which passes for success."
It seemed to Henry as he moved between the "monotonous routine of office duties during the day & lonely, sad evenings" that he did not "live in [the] actual world." Having for so long made his home in a land of melancholy reverie, he felt out of step with the people striding down the sunny streets. Henry was dissolving from their world, becoming invisible; he lived now "among the shadows" where "every thing" was "unreal & unworthy [of] interest or thought." "Events have overtaken" me, he confided to his journal, and flit through "my memory in the semblance of the changing scenes of a dream." The past held out only narcissistic pain; the future seemed but "a massive impenetrable wall, built right up in my very face." Utterly without prospects, Henry began to have presentiments-which were wishes-that he would not live long; residing in a world of shadows, he found that mortality was the only thing he could see with any clarity. The "dark tide of Death," he wrote in his journal, "sweeps every where beneath the sham & parade, the national greatness, the political existence & the intellectual march which constitute the world as it is spread out around us." "No doubt all of the untold millions who have gone before me have…gazed into [the] gloomy stream [of time]," he noted, as "bewildered, stricken, stymied & stupified as I [am] now. What a sad record then must be the book which is kept on high by He who knows all the thoughts of men [and] all the emotions of their hearts."
But of course it was not God but Henry himself who was the keeper of sad records. His diary, after all, was a transcript of his depression, a witness to his mourning, a series of bleak love-letters he sent to himself through the waystation of the dead. But the intensity of Henry's melancholy could not be sustained, however much he enjoyed it. By the first anniversary of Lucy's death, he found that "the eclipse of sorrow is passing or past." "This day brings with it no new sadness as I had supposed it would," he confessed. "My first waking thought was…'One year ago she died.' But there is no new pain which memory can inflict, no new echo which can answer those words 'she died' in my heart." Henry gave his diary partial credit for the change. It was, after all, his and Lucy's story, however sadly short, a narrative of their "love &…disappointment…right up to the closing scene." "I here dedicate" this journal, he wrote, "to the memory of the past year, here inscribe it as the tombstone which I raise over the grave of my former life.…[And so] let me take my farewell of Tuckahoe, bury the past & turn toward whatever may be my future." There was, he admitted, a "sweet, sacred joy in communing with the dead," and he would miss it sorely. "In the busy hours of the day & the quiet midnight, in solitude & in crowds" Lucy had been always in his thoughts. But now he had to bury with her "the memory of what has been," and "summon up the energy & hope & strength for the new existence" which lay before him. "Farewell Tuckahoe," he wrote, "the past, the bright, the dark, the joyful sorrowful past-farewell."
For two years, Henry had kept a diary of his innermost thoughts, his gift for writing and for self-perception providing insights into the mind of a young gentleman of the Old South as he grappled with love, death, religion, the nature of man, family, and the professions. Without this diary, nothing would be known of him. Certainly none of his contemporaries could have guessed at the tortured entries in his journal. "I seem" to the outside world "happy & cheerful & hopeful," Henry confessed to his diary, but "what a liar the seeming is." "I know well what faculties I possess," he wrote, "[I know] how I can most please & how most successfully deceive those around me. I know too then those in whose partial judgments I am capable of much, but I feel that I act the hypocrite when I encourage such opinions. I believe I can talk tolerably good nonsense, write a passably flimsy letter & beyond that am fit for nothing but a machine." In passages such as these, Henry's journal became part of his self-therapy, a place to confess the unconfessable in a world that was unsympathizing and absurd, a place to purge his despondency over his own worthless nature. Clearly he intended the diary for his eyes only. The cover page contains just two words, "my journal"; no name, no date, just a self-referential declaration of possession. "I have endeavored," he explained, "to make these pages a true transcript of my feelings." His days full of so much seeming, he filled his nights and his diary with the truth that existed beneath "the sham & parade." But in 1849, after keeping a two-year record of these brutal truths, Henry disappeared from the historical record.
Henry Craft resurfaced in 1859. Of the decade long disappearance, he says nothing. An attorney in Memphis with a new wife and new baby boy, Henry began a new diary, this time to maintain a record for his son. The ten years, though, had not made Henry any less gloomy. In the first pages of his new journal he recorded his thoughts as he watched his new home being constructed. A new husband and father, Henry could have seen the house with all the hopefulness of a man starting over with his new family, building a new life from the ground up. Instead, "a shade of sadness" stole over his thoughts. "Of what events in our history may it not be the scene. What joy and what sorrow garnered for us in the coming time may reach us there. Shall the years glide over us within those walls bringing calm content.… Shall sickness lay its hand upon us there, and death come to claim its victims one after another from our circle." "These are questions," Henry confessed, "that sometimes seem to be uttered for my ear by the bricks as they are piled upon each other, and the wood as it takes it's shape & place under the workman's hand." Typically, Henry was both sadly cynical and sadly correct. Construction of the house ran five thousand dollars over-budget, and he was nearly ruined.
Tight finances were not the only reason the house triggered such despondency-Henry Craft seems to have made a very unhappy marriage. His new wife, Ella, was an indulgently ill woman, a bundle of mysterious symptoms providing rationale for behavior that would otherwise appear selfish. Despite a "legion" of attempted remedies, nothing "seemed to help her at all," and it was hard, Henry noted, "to see her just gradually fading away without apparent disease." To cope with her affliction, Ella turned to the Bible with the sort of monomaniacal vigor of the new convert on her deathbed. Henry had hoped that Ella would be God-fearing, that she would possess the sort of "genial, cheerful, loving home religion that brightens the family circle & so much beautifies woman's character." But Ella had become a fanatic on the subject, adopting the "religion of gloom & austerity and asceticism-of fasts & vigils & penance-of constant seclusion and perpetual engagement in devotions." "If she could only learn & feel that while she is in the world she must be to some extent of the world," Henry wrote, if she could just understand "that she has other duties besides those of devotion there would be no trouble." Instead she was but a step removed "from the spirit of the hair shirt and self-flagellation," preferring the role of Christian to that of wife and mother.
Occasionally, the Crafts would attempt to make amends, and Henry would record a meek hope that they were at a new beginning for their marriage. "No doubt I have been greatly in fault," he admitted to his diary. "I must try to be satisfied…that her thoughts and affections are enjoyed by much higher & worthier objects" than myself. But always shortly after the reconciliation, the coldness returned. "I feel the estrangement between us grows day by day greater and more hopeless," he noted. "I am satisfied that it is useless to think of our being happy together again." By 1860 Ella had determined to remain almost exclusively in her own upstairs room, not coming down even to eat. Compounding such problems was the fact that Henry's mother-in-law, Mona Douglass, both disapproved of him and lived on his property, always contributing where she could to the sense that Henry was unwelcome in his own home.
Long business trips seem to have provided Henry with some relief from his failing marriage, but it was a home he had always wanted. "My nature," he admitted, "is peculiarly dependent for its happiness on affection and sympathy, and I find myself wholly cut off from them." He would in his intercourse with other men hear them talk of their homes and their families with a pang at his heart. "Others seem to be hurrying home as the benumbed man seeks the fire," he noted, "but…I would sooner be almost anywhere else than at home. Home! What a mockery to talk of my having a home!" Occasionally, Henry contemplated going into town at night and finding "the pleasures…which some men seem to enjoy," but he understood that he was "too domestic" in his habits and tastes to do such a thing. He contemplated leaving Ella, but that seemed too irresponsible. He contemplated suicide but seemed to think himself unworthy of such a grand gesture. Instead, he spent his nights at home, as alone in his room as he had been at Princeton and at Holly Springs in 1847 and '48, and confessed his soul to his journal.
Henry Craft also seems to have found some solace in opium. The hours spent over a writing desk, he claimed, had so soured his stomach that relief could only be found in laudanum. But as with Ella, the exact locus of Henry's pain is difficult to pin down. He describes it variously as "torpidity of the liver," "Protean…Dyspepsia," "spinal disease," "nervous derangement," and finally, almost admitting the insurmountable problems of diagnosis, simply "my pain." Regardless, opium was always the preferred remedy, with the explanation that he had been forced to resort to it. "I sometimes feel that my whole internal economy is deranged and diseased," he admitted, "and that I must soon experience a general breaking up. I am obliged to keep my liver going by constant dosing."
By the fourth year of his marriage to Ella, Henry had to admit that his life was a wreck, "physically, intellectually, morally, socially, and emotionally." He was not in control of anything, but rather "drifting along upon the stream of chance and accident." "My life is a failure in every point of view," he confessed. "I have not achieved even the poor success of making money. In Memphis I am cut off from all the associations and friendships, and professional ties that rendered life in Holly Springs pleasant if not successful. I have no friends here. In my profession, I am not known. I utterly abhor and loathe and detest the place, and yet I am tied down here beyond all hope of getting away." Like the bricks of his new house, the days had piled on days, the months on months, the years on years, a great temple built to unworthiness, unhappiness. We are caught in a "web of difficulty," he said, "from which extrication is improbable if not impossible."
Only one thing seems to have given Henry Craft even a modicum of joy-his son Douglass. "Today," Henry wrote typically, "I have nursed and amused Douglass a good deal." He is "my only resource. He seems to love me very much and that is very gratifying to me-all the more so perhaps because of my feeling of isolation." While at home Henry stayed close to his own room, living a life as isolated as when he was a bachelor. But occasionally Douglass would come to his room and "his 'pa pa'" would remind Henry that he was not alone. Henry had hoped that Ella would help him keep up his journal, and there are a few early entries in her hand, but she determined that diarizing smacked "too much of the sentimental" and gave it up. So Henry took up the journal, intending it not only as a place to purge his thoughts, but as a record for his son. As with all the endeavors of life that Henry found worthy, however, the journal quickly became to him absurd and self-defeating, a testament to his ongoing humiliation. "Should you ever see this Douglass," he wrote, "and feel no responsive emotion-feel no appreciation of it, thank God that you are fitter for life than your father was." And so Henry wrote a volume to his son, the sole source of his happiness, pouring out his true feelings on pages he hoped the child would never care to read. Indeed, a consistent theme of the diary is the hope that Douglass would somehow be spared his father's overtender heart. "Let him be practical," Henry urged, "common place, real, if he can & so all the more suited for the practical, common place & real which he will encounter." The language Henry uses here corresponds perfectly with that used in his first journal when describing the "common place every dayishness" of his father's male ideal. Henry's father had been a man; Henry hoped Douglass would grow to become a man. Henry was himself something tragically less. "I always thought," he wrote his sister in one of his few surviving letters, "I would have made a much better woman than a man." It is the kind of startling remark easily made the more so by quoting out-of-context. But Henry's failure to measure up to his own conception of manhood was a theme to which he constantly returned. "It is [on] the tender side of my own nature," he wrote, that "I have been most often wounded." He wanted desperately to change, to be tougher, to dwell not upon the burdens and sorrows of his past, man's past, but upon a future that was his to seize and build, as his fellow students at Princeton had seized and built. "But I am too weak and irresolute for all this," he admitted. "I have dreamed and drifted too long now to be a man.… Indeed, I feel and have always felt that I am not a man; and have no business with a man's affairs or responsibilities." "My dear boy," he wrote to Douglass, "how willingly would I see you dead rather than know that you have inherited my character; and yet how much I prize you & cling to your love no one can know."
On December 31, 1860, Henry Craft sat in his room, the house quiet, everyone else having gone to bed. Douglass began coughing and Henry took him some medicine, then returned to his journal. He had just come back from a five-day business trip, but there was no word of greeting from his wife. "I go away and come back now without a word of affection," he wrote, "as a stranger indeed, and feeling that when I go all are glad, and when I return all are sorry." This has been "the most unhappy year of my life." Though he sat at the threshold of a new year, a new beginning, the gloom of the past twelve months extended "its pall into the future." His thoughts, he said, dwelled now upon his mortality because "the things of this world [are] so unsatisfying and empty." He knew that he was ungrateful and rebellious, sinful and selfish, and that many would see in his home and family something to envy. But Henry could not summon the strength to be thankful. "I feel broken down in health-broken down in spirit-sick at heart," he confessed. But in that peculiar spirit of defiance that runs through his character, Henry somehow summoned the strength to go on, throwing down the gauntlet and challenging the new year to do its worst. Sitting alone in his room, ignored, unloved, unknown, his marriage and finances a wreck and an addiction to opium reaching an alarming level, at the close of the "most momentous year in our Country's history," and with dark clouds gathering on the political horizon, Henry Craft decided to "let the old year go with its chapter of the world's history to the great archives where that history is kept-the world's history made up of what individual men have done & been & thought & felt." "Come on new year," he demanded, "with whatever of weal and woe for me and mine thou mayst be charged; come on." Henry Craft ended his second journal with this entry, and again disappeared from the historical record.
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