Sophia

My war torn little sister, Sophia returned to Maine in the winter of 1868 with a story to tell, though it took her some months to tell it. Mercy told me not to pry, so I did not. I waited.

She had not lost her smile, nor that ludicrous sense of humor she claimed as her own, but I knew she carried pain tied to the marriage she had made with Richard Realf—the poet-soldier she had wed just after the war. Louisa had kept us informed for a time, then suddenly his name went unspoken.

After some weeks in Maine, Sophia began to walk with a lighter step, as if being around family and salt air had revived her. She confided only that she had suffered from brain fever. One morning she told the girls that at Furnessville the marsh blackbirds cried from the wet ground behind the dunes, and that even now she heard them here.

And so, it was after the arrival of the marsh birds that the story tumbled out of Sophia one evening when all the house grew quiet aside from her and me. We were sitting in the warm kitchen, drinking tea and sharing the last piece of pumpkin pie that Mercy had made with the last pumpkin in the cellar.^⁠[1]

When Lincoln called for troops, many of Sophia’s students and neighbors enlisted at Chicago, some forty miles west of Furnessville. Concerned for the welfare of these men and boys, she wrote them so that when the mail reached them, they would have, now and then, a letter from home. Those in the 88^th Regiment, served with Richard Realf and Sophie began exchanging letters with him as well.

Realf was much more than a soldier, she said and began a recitation.

“Day in, day out, through the long campaign,

I march in my place in the ranks;

And whether it shine or whether it rain

My good sword cheerily clanks;

It clanks and clangs in a lordly way,

Like the ring of an armed heel:

And this is the song which day by day

It sings with its lips of steel:

“Oh, friend from whom, a hundred times,

I have felt the steadfast grip

Of the all-renouncing love that climbs

The heights of fellowship,

Are you tired with treading the weary miles,

Are you faint with your bleeding limbs?

Do you hunger back for the olden smiles,

And the sound of the olden hymns?^⁠[2]

Realf was a poet, she explained although I already knew it. His poems and prose had been published throughout the war, but I did not know that Realf first sent them to Sophia before they found their way into literary publications and newspapers. I also knew that before the war Richard Realf had been with John Brown in Kansas.

Sophia told me her story quietly. She and Richard had married at our sister’s home in Furnessville in the first days of June 1865, just as the war was ending and his old regiment was being mustered out. He went back to Nashville almost at once, but returned before the Fourth of July and stood with the family at a lakeshore gathering, where he gave a brief address. He came and went between Furnessville and Washington, full of plans, full of causes—still the poet-soldier she had known through letters and war. He was given a commission with the 50th Regiment, United States Colored Troops and went South.

Then came the darker months. His letters grew brief and troubled.

He wrote from Newbern, then Vicksburg. “I was to be sent for when matters became somewhat settled, but it soon became evident that the troops would be mustered out soon, and it was thought best for me to await his return to the West,” she explained and added that she wished she had obeyed her own instincts, rather than his advice or that of friends.

“His letters during the winter were affectionate and full of plans for our future—said that he was learning to be economical and was saving his means to begin life with me when he returned. The last letter I received from him was dated February 24, 1866, at Vicksburg, Mississippi and stated that he should be with me in two or three weeks. After five or six weeks had passed without news from him, inquiries were made, but nothing definite was learned. I thought for a while that death had separated us.

I suffered much during that anxious spring and summer, but before friends and relatives I was outwardly cheerful—even gay. I put myself heartily into every work for the good of our community, acted as superintendent for the school, and oversaw the building of a new schoolhouse. But notwithstanding my efforts to lose my trouble in work, it wore upon me.”

Sophia told me that it wasn’t until autumn that she discovered that Richard was alive and living at the Oneida Community in New York.

I had heard much of John Noyes’ community of course. A man did not need to be a scholar to know that the country was full of new notions in those years. There were Shakers who would not marry at all, Fourierites who thought labor and property might be arranged by better mathematics, spiritualists talking with the dead, free-thinkers, reformers of diet, dress, schooling, religion, and everything else under heaven. Some of it was earnest. Some of it was foolish. Most of it was both.

The Oneida people called themselves Perfectionists, and held that a soul might be made free from sin in this life. From that they carried their doctrine farther than most decent people could follow, saying that marriage itself was a kind of ownership, and that among the perfected there need be no husband and wife as the rest of us understood those words. They did not call it licentiousness. They dressed it in Scripture, discipline, and holy language. But to outsiders it meant plainly enough that they had set aside ordinary marriage.

Sophia wrote to Richard there, but John Noyes informed her that Richard had not remained with them, and sent her copies of Realf’s correspondence. Through these letters she discovered that Richard left Vicksburg and went directly to New York City, not home as he had promised. To Noyes, Richard never mentioned Sophia at all, no mention of their marriage, and no mention of having ever entered any marital relation.

I understood at once why the wound cut so deep. It was not only that Realf had failed to come home. It was not only that he had gone north and left her waiting in Indiana, sick with worry and trust. It was that he had gone into the company of people who made a doctrine out of disavowing marriage, and in giving an account of his life to Mr. Noyes had erased Sophia.

A man may be confused. He may be weak. He may even be tempted beyond his strength. But to leave a woman waiting for him, and then speak of his life as though she had never stood beside him—that is another thing.

Sophia did not rage when she told it. That was not her way. She said only that after reading those letters, she determined that if domestic ties were burdensome to him, he should never be troubled by her. He might seek her if he chose, but she would never go to him.

NOTES

¹ While it is not known whether Sophia ever told this story directly to her brother Edward Graves in such a setting, Sophia did tell the story to Richard J. Hinton, Richard Realf’s biographer, and to Richard’s sister, Elizabeth Realf Whapum. See: I Was His Wife, the Story of Sophia Emery Graves Realf

² Excerpt from The Sword, by Richard Realf