It was a question that occurred to many as the shadow of apocalypse wavered across the complacent materialism of the age.
Today human life is frequently interpreted as a search for identity. The existential questions which so often lie beneath the surface of thought have been brought up for intense and troubled examination. Who am I? Why am I? Is it possible to live authentically in a world that exists on the edge of nothingness? Is there an “I” separable from the accidents of heredity, the limitations of environment, the common doom of mortality?
In the years of her young widowhood Mrs. Glover appears to have been groping for a valid answer to these questions. Torn between being a daughter and a mother, a girl with an unfulfilled craving for happiness and a general without an army, a commission, or even a cause, she seemed in a sense adrift in the human scene. This is reflected in several letters she wrote in the early months of 1848.
In one to her brother George, who had been away from home for some months and was at that time ill, she wrote:
Oh! if I could be near you when you suffer, I might prove by acts what it is no use to talk about; but this has never been and perhaps never will be my chance yet Geo. my heart has its own secrets, and sometimes they are unfriendly to my eyes in solitude. But what’s the use for me to weep? . . . Fate has always denied me an opportunity to fulfill my nature, and never but in one instance did I enjoy the luxury of sorrow relieved by effort; and that was when day and night I watched alone by the couch of death—and Oh! when I think thereon I love to weep . . . but enough—forgive me!57
Later on, in the same letter, she rallied her naturally cheerful spirits to tell of an evening when William Sleeper, the young principal of the Woodman Sanbornton Academy, and one Luther Bean had come around with her friend Martha Rand, who eighteen months later would marry George, to get a Christmas box ready for him. As she ● ● ●
57 Mary Baker Glover to George Sullivan Baker, 22 January 1848, 1919.001.0008, LMC. The written date on this letter looks more like 1846 than 1848, but internal evidence supports the later date.