Gossip Question II ... Abby Grace?!

[Tricia]

Okay ...

I've got to ask as I don't know much about Captain Keogh. Who is this Abby Grace chick? Was she the girl who supposedly had his child or was that Nettie in New York? Was AG an in-the-shadows character, or something more blatant?

How old was she and do we have any physical descriptions or extant photos of the girl?

Gossip away, Tupperware Queens--and Kings ....
--t.

[elisabeth]

Abby Grace was entirely respectable and above-board, as far as one can tell. Keogh's almost pathological discretion prevented him naming her even when writing to his brother, but historians have tracked her down convincingly via the few clues he did give: (1) that she was buried in a vault in Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, and (2) that bad things always happened to him in June: "this month has never passed since I left home without something very unpleasant occurring to me", he wrote in June 1869.

Who she was: Abby Grace Clary, the widow of a strikingly unpleasant Civil War 2nd Cavalry officer named Robert Emmett Clary Jr. Clary Senior was a fairly splendid chap, a Colonel and Brevet Brigadier General; but his son was a hopeless drunk and brawler, and underwent court-martial after court-martial. He finally died in December 1864.

Clary Jr. was in and around many of the same engagements as Keogh, so it's possible that their paths had crossed. But it's more likely that Keogh will have met Abby Grace when he was stationed in Tennessee on Reconstruction duty. After her husband's death, Abby Grace lived with her father-in-law's family -- and Col. Clary was Chief Quartermaster in Memphis at the time. Keogh, being on Stoneman's staff, would no doubt have gone everywhere and met everyone. Since the awful Clary Jr. had served under Buford, Keogh might even have deliberately sought out his widow to pay his condolences. However it came about, he was smitten. This was the "dear creature" on whom rested all his "hopes of future earthly happiness". He clearly hoped to marry her. Whether she returned his affection or not isn't known, but nothing in the little he says carries any suggestion of a hopeless or unrequited love; it's fair to assume his courtship was prospering. Hard to imagine the father-in-law wouldn't have approved, either. Then, suddenly, in June 1866, when Keogh was away from Memphis for a few days on court-martial duty, Abby Grace was struck down by what was diagnosed as "gastrofever" -- possibly appendicitis -- and died on June 17th. Poor Keogh ...

No-one's found any photos, though there must surely be some somewhere. She was a couple of years older than Keogh, which never seemed to bother him (I think Josephine Buel was, as well); and as a suffering widow, who'd no doubt been a maltreated wife, she'd have brought out all his knight-in-shining-armour tendencies. His "dear creature" words suggest someone sweet-natured and good, and no doubt she was pretty too ... Perhaps one day a photo will surface!

[Melani]

I haven't been able to find a photo of Robert Clary, Jr., online, but one must exist, because Brian Pohanka said he resembled Keogh. There is a picture of Clary, Sr. online, but as an older guy.

Re: "Nettie"--I think you mean Nelly Martin, daughter of the Throop-Martin family, in whose family plot Keogh is buried, at his own request. Her sister Evy married Andrew Alexander, and another sister, Emily, married Emory Upton, two of Keogh's best buddies. He was on his way to take part in Upton's wedding when he broke his leg in Boston. The Martin family seems to have pretty much adopted Keogh, and he certainly would have felt at home there--he came from a family of 12 siblings, and the Martins had 11 kids, if I'm not mistaken. He visited them pretty often, and there is a tradition in both families that he and Nelly were engaged, but no hard evidence that I know of. I personally think that Nelly may have fostered that impression after his death--she's the one that put flowers on his grave for 50 years, and never married. I think maybe she was more interested in Keogh than he was in her, though they were certainly friends. Possibly she figured that her two sisters got a soldier each, so the third one was for her. Keogh at one point wrote to his brother than he "might often have married for money, but never gave it a second thought." I personally think he was referring to Nelly, who probably would have married him in a hot minute.

I have never heard that she had his kid, though Elisabeth and I speculated about it last year. There is a photo in the symposium book of Nelly holding a baby, but I contacted the Gene Autry Museum, where it came from, and they said it's probably Upton Alexander, her nephew. It would have been pretty hard for Nelly to have had his kid and hidden it, and it would have to have been born around June of 1876--we worked that out based on the timing of his last leave, though the record shows he spent that in Louisville. If it had been earlier, it's hard to imagine that he wouldn't have married her.

[elisabeth]

What got us going about the photograph is that the baby bears a remarkable resemblance to Keogh (minus the beard and moustache, of course!): same eyes, same mouth, same shape of face. And that Nelly sent this photo to Keogh's sister Margaret, which seems a faintly odd thing to do if it was just any baby. Of course the two spinster ladies' correspondence might have taken a turn by then towards "do tell me about your family -- any nephews and nieces?" or whatever, which could account for it ... But there's another curious circumstance as well. In the 1880 census for Auburn, the Martin household appears to contain an unexplained four-year-old girl, Violet Blair Martin.

Now the "4" could be a mistranscription of "24" or something, as there's an adult sister named Violet Blair Martin; she was in fact 21 at the time, but a "2" and a "1" written close together could possibly look like a four. She married General Wilber Elliott Wilder, at what date I don't know. If she was still single in 1880, chances are that this is her, and that a mistranscription is the answer. But if not ... well, Keogh's last probable visit to Willowbrook (given that, as Melani says, his last leave was spent in Louisville) would seem to have been in October 1874, on his return from Ireland. A child conceived then could have been born in June or July 1875. The census was taken in June 1880, and recorded ages as they stood on the day of the census -- so a child even just a day or two short of her fifth birthday would still have been recorded as being four years old.

It's a stretch, but an attractive thought ... It would be like Nelly, one feels, to keep stoically quiet about it and "not worry" Keogh, preparing perhaps to break it to him gently on his next visit. (However much she wanted him, she wouldn't have wanted him via blackmail alone.) It would have been fairly difficult for Nelly to keep it from public knowledge, but these things were more readily managed in upper-class families than in many others; a long visit to some other branch of the family in some out-of-the-way part of the country was the usual expedient. And with a family as respected as the Martins, the "engagement" story could have been enough in any case; "engagement" = "betrothal", and "betrothal" was pretty much as binding and as legitimising as marriage in some circles. So it's not totally impossible ...

Of course the engagement story may have been concocted only after Keogh's death, as an explanation for Nelly's extremely active part in organising Keogh's reburial. Keogh appears to have named her father as his next of kin, as it was to him that the official telegram announcing Keogh's death was sent -- but it was Nelly who nagged the army unmercifully about the exhumation, organised the funeral, and, it seems, designed the monument. For an unmarried lady to do this for a man to whom she was not engaged would have raised many eyebrows. The story was certainly stuck to; as late as the 1930s, Nelly's younger brother Edward Sanford Martin told Luce about the engagement (while bizarrely swearing him to secrecy on the subject). Maybe we'll never know the truth of it unless more correspondence comes to light. But Keogh's last letter to Nelly doesn't read like that of an affianced lover, for sure. For those unfamiliar with it, it goes like this:
"We leave on Monday on an Indian expedition & if I ever return I will go on and see you all. I have requested to be packed up and shipped to Auburn in case I am killed, and I desire to be buried there. God bless you all, remember if I should die -- you may believe that I loved you and every member of your family -- it was a second home to me."

Nothing is straightforward about LBH ... least of all, the Keogh story!

[Melani]

We have also speculated that Keogh may have been strongly considering asking Nelly to marry him--in the letter Elisabeth quoted he was planning to visit Willowbrook, and he had applied for leave in October of 1876. Unfortunately, he was on permanent leave by then. But our thinking was that he wasn't getting any younger, he'd spent the last 16 years of his life in one army or another, he wasn't getting promoted at any great rate (nor anyone else at that time), and here's this very pleasant and well-off family, all of whom he's extremely fond of, and a not unattractive young lady who would probably marry him in a heartbeat. Elisabeth thought he might have considered going into law--Barnitz dabbled in it after his retirement. And Keogh had spent countless hours on court-martial boards. And Indian fighting could be frustrating, and Western duty when not fighting, downright boring.

Or maybe he had already spoken to Nelly, but not made it offical yet, and was planning to do so in October.

Or maybe Nelly sort of went over the deep end when he died, and manufactured it. Elisabeth found an article in the Auburn paper, describing how a delivery boy was frightened by what turned out to be Keogh's dress uniform, displayed on a rack in the hallway. That seems a little strange, even for Victorians. Nelly told him it had belonged to a very brave man.

Or maybe that's all crazy, and Keogh just wasn't going to be domesticated by anybody. But somehow I doubt that; he certainly was fond of ladies, and there were many advantages to being a married officer. I would really like to find out more about Josephine Buel--I mean, after all, he was carrying her picture, not Nelly's--unless he had more than one, but only one was recovered...

Things like this keep me up at night. Come on, all you novelists...nobody's done Keogh right since Margaret Leighton in Comanche of the Seventh, and that's a kid's book!

[Tricia]

Melani--

I twisted that book room at North Platte from one side to another, upside down and back ... and I still couldn't land me a copy of Comanche of the Seventh! I wonder if there's anybody out there in Custerland who'd let me borrow it ... when I'm done with my rewrites?

Arrrgghhh ... what a wasted trip.
--t.

[Melani]

Tricia--I just checked bookfinder.com--there are 118 copies available, ranging in price from $4.50 to $166.00 (which of course is ridiculous!). I'd spend $8-$10, if I were you, to get a copy in decent shape.

[elisabeth]

I've got a copy on order (paid all of £3.48 for it, plus shipping) -- it should arrive any day now. Will cheerfully lend it to you once I've read it!

One other thing about Keogh's possible intentions. In Edgerly's July 4th letter to Gracie, he says Keogh intended to give him a letter to her asking her to buy "some cretonne and other things for his quarters". Sounds like nest-building?

It could be that by the summer of '76 he'd finally decided to settle for Nelly. Josephine had remarried in December '75 (fed up with waiting for him to make his mind up?) so she was no longer an option; and the Martins had -- I think -- already begun to fall on hard times, so he no longer had to worry about being seen as a fortune-hunter if he married into the family. I also get the feeling -- no proof, just a feeling* -- that he might have quarrelled with his brother Tom on his last trip home (or more likely vice versa, Tom being a quarrelsome sort), which would put him all the more in need of a surrogate family. So it's not impossible that he planned to pop the question on his October leave ...

*Based only on two things: (1) he comes back from Ireland a month before he strictly needs to, and (2) his will is to go to his sister Margaret, and so is the bulk of his insurance payout -- no mention of any other member of the family. Oh, and a third: there's a letter in the Notre Dame archives from Keogh to Archbishop Purcell, dated August 8th 1874 if I remember correctly, where he gives his address as Clifden (his inherited estate). It's possibly reading too much into things ... but you'd think that if all were well between him and his brother, he'd be staying at his brother's house?

[Scout]

Break a leg...It's only a $1.99

www.alibris.com/search/search.cfm

[Scout]

I still have my copy of "Comanche" by David Appel which appeared in 1951 and gives a rather nice portrayal of Keogh.

[Melani]

Haven't seen that one, Scout, though I know of it--I guess I'd better get it.

[Melani]

elisabeth said:

... but you'd think that if all were well between him and his brother, he'd be staying at his brother's house?

Or maybe he was helping Margaret move in. It seems natural that he would select her as the recipient of the place, since she was unmarried, and Myles was always worrying about helping Tom support what Elisabeth once called "the millions of sisters." I think by then several of them were safely married--don't know who was left single besides Margaret.

[Scout]

I've been checking on where Ms. Abby is buried here in Memphis...have had no luck as of yet but will eventually run it down. I'll post a picture when I do.

[Melani]

Oak Hill Cemetery

[Tricia]

melani said:

Oak Hill Cemetery

ROAD TRIP!!