A (Not So) Good Death: Bringing Stephen Home
Stephen Foster’s health seems to have declined during the latter part of 1863. John Tasker Howard notes that Stephen was suffering from a recurring “ague,” which may have actually been tuberculosis that the composer contracted many years earlier. Evelyn Foster Morneweck recounts how Stephen was an “inveterate smoker” as well as a drinker which, coupled with his poor diet, would have aggravated his respiratory issues and his overall health. On January 10, 1864 Stephen, who was living at the New England Hotel at 15 Bowery and Bayard Street (Fig. 1), was apparently so weakened by his illness as well as a severe burn on his leg that he allegedly fell upon a washbowl, which shattered and cut a deep gouge in his neck. [i]
There is much debate on the subject of this “accident” by historians and biographers. Morrison Foster’s account of events and those of Stephen’s other family members do not match George Cooper’s, which seem the most reliable as he actually saw Stephen directly after the incident. These inconsistencies involve the presence of the smashed crockery, a question of Stephen being nude at the time of the incident, whether or not there was a dialogue between a maid and Stephen prior to the event, and questions regarding the differentiation between a “cut” and “gash” in Stephen’s throat. JoAnne O’Connell mentions that John Tasker Howard “appeared so overwhelmed by the conflicting stories that he decided to let Henry Foster, Morrison Foster, and George Cooper relay the facts [of Stephen’s “accident”] in their own words rather than try to make one standard story from the whole mess.” She remarks how Evelyn Foster Morneweck (though sticking close to Morrison’s story) further confused the issue by throwing in her own details, and that biographer Ken Emerson has even added his own subtle twists. O’Connell states that Stephen’s brothers’ accounts of the events are based on hearsay, and could only have come from Cooper. Finally, she goes as far as to argue that the “cut” (as Cooper calls it) in Stephen’s throat was the result of a suicide attempt, which seems more likely than the broken washbowl story. In Cooper’s statement, there is no mention of the washbowl, suggesting that Stephen’s wound was perhaps self-inflicted. Cooper stated that he received a message which informed him that Stephen had had an accident. When Cooper found Stephen, he was: [ii]
—lying on the floor in the hall, blood oozing
from a cut in his throat and suffering horribly . . .
[Foster] begged for a drink [of rum], but before I
could get it for him, the doctor who had been sent
for arrived and forbade it. He started to sew up the
gash in Steve’s throat, and I was horrified to observe
that he was using black thread . . . We put his clothes
on him and took him to the hospital. All the time we
were caring for him, he seemed terribly weak and his
eyelids kept fluttering.
Cooper and the doctor brought Stephen to Bellevue Hospital (Fig. 2), today the oldest public institution of its kind in the U.S. It must have been a long and painful journey from the Five Points—several blocks south of Bellevue—jostled by horse-drawn transportation over rutted winter roads. George Cooper recalled that when he returned to Bellevue to visit Stephen, the songwriter said that “nothing had been done for him, and he couldn’t eat the food they brought him.” When Cooper returned the following day, the hospital staffed informed him that “his friend was dead.” Stephen Foster died at 2:30pm on January 13, 1864. [iii]
Stephen’s body was removed from the Bellevue morgue (which also served as morgue for the City of New York) by an undertaker named Winterbottom and taken to his place of business on Broome Street. Soon after, Jane, Henry, and Morrison Foster (whom Cooper had informed by telegram – Fig. 3) arrived. Cooper wrote that “when Mrs. Foster entered the room where Steve’s body was lying, she fell on her knees before it, and remained for a long time.” Stephen was placed in an iron coffin (Fig. 4). These “air-tight” caskets were pioneered by Providence businessman Almond Dunbar Fisk, who was granted a patent for his “metallic burying case” in 1848. Iron coffins were popular from the 1840s into the early 1860s, when embalming had yet to be invented (this would occur during the Civil War). They preserved bodies longer, allowing them to be transported long distances to be viewed and buried by family members not present at the death, and who sought to give the dead a proper home burial. In 2018, PBS aired a documentary based on an African American woman buried in one of Fisk’s cases which was discovered by construction workers in New York in 2011.The remains, though mostly skeletal, were remarkably intact for the length of burial—approximately 160 years. There is no mention of Stephen being transferred to another casket for burial, thus the one he was placed in by Winterbottom is the one in which he rests today—perhaps in a similar state of preservation as the woman. [iv]
Along with Stephen’s remains, his family collected a small number of personal possessions from Bellevue. The first two lines below list the inventory of items which accompanied Stephen to the hospital; the last two are the receipt for payment made to Bellevue by Morrison for Stephen’s care (Fig. 5):
Ward 11, Stephen Foster, Died January 13.
Coat, pants, vest, hat, shoes, overcoat, January 10, 1864.
Recd. of Mr. Foster ten shillings charge for
Stephen C. Foster while in Hospital, Jany. 16, 1864.
Wm. E. White, Warden, Bellevue Hospital
In the pocket of one of these garments was also a wallet containing .38 in coins and wartime scrip, and a scrap of paper on which the phrase “Dear friends and gentle hearts”—perhaps the title or lyrics for a new song, or a suicide note?—was written in pencil Figs. 6 and 7). [v]
Is it possible to determine Stephen’s mental state in New York through his songs of the period? Several, such as “None Shall Weep a Tear for Me,” and “Why Have My Loved Ones Gone?” express feelings of despair and hopelessness. Many are themed around mothers: “Bury Me in the Morning, Mother,” “Oh! Tell Me of My Mother,” “Farewell Mother Dear,” “Farewell Sweet Mother,” “A Dream of My Mother and My Home,” and “Slumber My Darling.” The titles and lyrics of these songs suggest that Stephen felt dislocated from his family in Pittsburgh—the dead perhaps more than the living—and that he longed to rejoin them. Indeed, he wrote a number of religious-themed songs during these years as well, including “The Bright Hills of Glory,” which features a narrator hoping to soon join departed loved ones in a heavenly paradise. According to Morrison, Stephen was particularly attached to his mother, Eliza Clayland Foster, who died in 1855:
[Stephen’s] love for his mother amounted to adoration.
She was to him an angelic creature. There is not one
reference to mother in the homely words in which he
clothed his ballads but came direct from his heart and
symbolized his own feelings.
One verse from “Oh! Tell Me of My Mother” seems to conflate Stephen’s personal feelings of loneliness (“Does she know I’m here alone”) and despair during his last years with a longing for his departed mother:
I've been dreaming all about her,
And awoke with tearful eyes:
She was bending o'er my pillow
In a deep and earnest prayer,
And her voice was like the breathing
Of the soft summer air.
Is the world so full of pain
That she will not come again,
Like a sunbeam on the rain?
Oh! tell me of my mother!
Does she know I'm here alone
While my early friends have gone
And my dearest memories flow?
In another from “None Shall Weep a Tear for Me” (Fig. 8) the narrator laments his life coming to a close, with none to mourn him:
My life is like the autumn leaf
That trembles in the moons pale ray;
Its hold is frail, its date is brief,
Tis restless soon to pass away;
Yet when that leaf shall fall and fade
The parent tree will mourn its shade
The winds bewail the leafless tree,
But none shall weep a tear for me
The latter is especially interesting, as it mentions that the “autumn leaf” will have a “parent tree” to “mourn” it with shade, but that the protagonist will have no parent (Eliza) to mourn his (Stephen’s) death. [vi]
And yet, like home, motherly love and a Christian afterlife were central themes in Victorian daily life. Countless songs, pictures, poems, and pieces of literature were written about them, and were sometimes compiled in the same source. One example of this is the 1883 volume Golden Thoughts on Mother, Home, and Heaven (Fig. 9)—a collection of verse, engravings, lyrics, and stories based on the concept of the Cult of Domesticity and the Victorian belief that mother, home, and heaven were the foundational triad of morality and Christian divinity. “The Mother is the fountain-head of the Home. The home is the fountain-head of society and of the Christ Church. And no influences in the universe contribute so much toward guiding immortal souls Heavenward as Home and the Mother,” writes the Reverend Theodore L. Cuyler in the introduction to this volume. Stephen’s songs about mothers echo these popular sentiments. In both “Bury Me in the Morning, Mother” (Fig. 10) and “The Bright Hills of Glory” (Fig. 11) mother, home, and heaven are fused in separate verses. In “Bury Me in the Morning, Mother,” Stephen writes: “You must promise to come to me, mother/When life and hope shall fade/For there's room for you in the home, mother/That's far from the greenwood shade [heaven].” In “The Bright Hills of Glory,” the trio is exemplified less explicitly but no less conspicuously in “loved ones,” “mansions,” and “bright hills of glory”:
Oh! what visions of beauty
Will burst on my sight;
As I enter the mansions
Of heavenly delight;
How the loved ones will greet me
From life's troubled story,
And will welcome me home
To the bright hills of glory!
It is reasonable to conclude that the sentiments about mothers in these songs were, as Morrison claims, influenced by Stephen’s love for his own mother. However, like his songs about home, they were crafted with the intention of reaching a mass market audience, and should not be interpreted exclusively as evidence of Foster’s personal feelings. [vii]
Stephen’s funeral was held on January 21 at Trinity Church on 6th Street in Pittsburgh—the same church in which he had been baptized. Henry Kleber, Stephen’s former teacher, was in charge of the music, and sang an air called “Joseph and His Brethren.” The Pittsburgh newspaper Daily Commercial reported that the service was well-attended, and that many followed the remains after the funeral to Allegheny Cemetery. At the cemetery gate the funeral cortege was met by the Citizen’s Brass Band which performed Stephen’s songs “Come Where My Love Lies Dreaming” (Fig. 12) and “Old Folks at Home” as his body was lowered into the grave. [viii]
In bringing Stephen home for burial, his family was attempting to provide him in part with something he had been denied in his death—a notion central to Victorian culture known as the “Good Death.” The concept of a Good Death has Christian roots in late-Medieval and early-modern England, where the ars moriendi (literally the “art of dying”) instructed people how to “die well,” courageously and virtuously since their souls were supposedly subject to instant divine judgment at the time of death. For Victorians, a good Christian death took place at home, preferably in one’s own bed, with the dying giving a farewell to each family member separately. Time would be allowed after for the “completion of temporal and spiritual business.” The person dying would ideally be “conscious and lucid” until the end came, so that he or she could beg forgiveness for sins. All pain and suffering needed to be met with fortitude, which was the final test of fitness for the dying’s worthiness of heavenly admittance. However the Civil War, with its hundreds of thousands of men dying alone on battlefields far from home, made a Good Death impossible for many in the 1860s. Death was supposed to be a domestic occurrence; the prospect of perishing away from home was distressing not just for the men themselves then, but for their families. [ix]
Hospitals presented a similar crisis for those seeking a Good Death, as they were viewed as places where the indigent, the marginalized poor, and “non-respectable citizens” went to die. If you were injured or ill in the mid to late-nineteenth century, hospitals were not the preferred destinations to receive care. They did not offer any medical advantages beyond what one could receive at home (the traditional place for recuperation). Furthermore, at home the ailing were not at risk of sepsis, otherwise known as “hospitalism.” In fact, even when home care was not available, the sick or injured poor still shunned the idea of being brought to the hospital. One patient in a Boston facility described a night in which she passed listening to “wailing and crying” and the “death agonies” of her fellow patients. Another recounted how his doctors visited him incessantly—not out of concern for their patient, but in regard to him as a case study of a certain disease or ailment. Stories such as this exemplify why the sick or dying preferred home over hospital when it came to care. [x]
Stephen Foster’s dying alone—perhaps as the result of a suicide attempt—in Bellevue Hospital, without the chance to say goodbye to friends and loved ones, was not what the Victorians considered a Good Death. It is ironic that Stephen, whether a deep lover of home or merely a constant writer about it, was effectively “homeless” in the Victorian sense during much of the New York period. By bringing his body back to Pittsburgh his family provided him with the closest proxy: a “homecoming”—the opportunity to be honored posthumously by his colleagues and admirers for his musical contributions, and to be laid to rest beside his mother, father, and siblings less than a mile from his place of birth, the White Cottage.