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One Sunday evening there came up a dreadful thunder-storm. As the thunders crashed and rattled, the frightened women, with Mrs. Bryson at their head, rushed into Edwin's room. He went to the window, raised it, took his sword and waved it out. When the electric flashes broke, it looked as if the lightnings were dancing on the point of his sword. The women fled out of his room with even greater terror than they had come into it, and he laughed heartily to see them scamper.
Gallagher was present at an interview of Mrs. Bryson and her daughter with Mr. Forrest in 1869, the first time they had met for forty-six years. Although the daughter, Mrs. Kemp, was but a little girl when they parted, he recognized her at the first glance. They spent a long time in unrestrained enjoyment, talking over the events of the old times as if they were things that had occurred but a few days previously. Mrs. Bryson exclaimed, "Oh, Edwin Forrest, I can scarcely realize it when I look at you and think what a beautiful boy you were when we last met, and now see you such a great, heavy man, and getting into age, too!"
At the end of the winter, Collins and Jones found their enterprise a pecuniary failure. They incontinently shut up the theatre and turned the whole company out to shift for themselves as best they could. These poor children of Thespis were in a pitiful plight. Without money, without employment or prospects, what could they do? About a dozen of them, including Forrest, Mrs. Riddle, and her two daughters, determined to extemporize a vagrant company, travel into the country, and try their fortune from town to town. Their action was as prompt as their pluck was good and their means small. With a couple of rickety wagons and two dreadfully thin old horses, they started off for Hamilton, most of them on foot. It is interesting to contemplate the little band of strolling players as they thus set out on their adventures. On their journey they scrutinized many a passing itinerant unlike themselves, laughed and sang in jovial liberty, while the birds sang around them by day and the stars twinkled over their heads by night. If there were hardships in it, tough and scanty fare, rude conditions, weary trudges, harsh treatment, wretched patronage, there were also in it rich experiences of life at first hand, a rough relish, a free existence in the
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open air, and all the traditional associations linking them to the strollers of other times and lands, wandering minstrels, beggars, apprentices, gypsies, and those travelling groups of actors who used to perform in the yards of inns or the halls of baronial castles, and a specimen of whom found a so much better than lenten entertainment from the hands of Hamlet at Elsinore.
After performing at Hamilton for eight or ten nights, in the second story of a venerable barn, with more applause than profit, they went to Lebanon. An interesting reminiscence of this time is given by the following fac-simile of a note afterwards redeemed by its signer, and found carefully preserved among his papers at his death:
Hamilton August 6th 1823
Due Wm. Cooper or order one
dollar & fifty cents for Value Recd
August 6th 1823—
Edwin Forrest
They met little encouragement at Lebanon, and proceeded to Dayton, where they had still poorer success. In fact, their funds and their hopes gave out together, and they agreed to disperse. Forrest had not one cent in his pocket. He started on foot for Cincinnati, a distance of about forty miles. Journeying along on the bank of the Big Miami River, he spied a canoe on the other shore. How much easier it would be to float than to walk! He stripped, plunged, and swam. As soon as he was near enough to see that the boat was chained and locked, the owner of it appeared and pointed a gun at him. He made back
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ward strokes to his clothes, and resumed his plod. It was evening when he reached Cincinnati, pretty well fagged out. Some of his acquaintances met him in the street, said an amateur club were that night to play the farce of Miss in her Teens across the river at Newport, that one of the fellows was drunk, and asked him if he would fill the vacancy. He consented to do it for five dollars. They agreed to give that price, and he went and did it. The excessive fatigue probably made it the hardest-earned, as it was the sorest-needed, five dollars he ever received. It nearly exhausted the proceeds of the performance.
In a short time the scattered strollers rejoined their forces at Louisville to try one more experiment. They succeeded moderately well. But Archibald Woodruff, keeper of the Globe Inn in Cincinnati, had fitted up a hasty and cheap structure adjoining his tavern, and christened it the Globe Theatre. He invited the Louisville company to come and open it. They did so on the evening of June 2d, 1823, with Douglas, Forrest as Norval. June 4th they gave the play of The Iron Chest, Forrest as Sir Edward Mortimer, Mrs. Riddle as Lady Helen. On subsequent nights he sustained among other characters those of George Barnwell, Octavian in The Mountaineers, Jaffier in Venice Preserved, and Richard the Third, besides several parts in low comedy.
But perhaps the most surprising fact connected with this portion of his career is that he was the first actor who ever represented on the stage the Southern plantation negro with all his peculiarities of dress, gait, accent, dialect, and manners. This he did ten years before T. D. Rice, usually denominated the originator of the Ethiopian drama, made his début at the Bowery in the character of Jim Crow. Rice deserves his fame, for, though preceded first by Forrest, and then in a more systematic fashion by George W. Dixon, he was the man who really popularized the burnt-cork and burlesque minstrelsy and made it the institution it became.
The fortunes of the Globe were in such a state that the establishment was on the point of breaking up, when Sol Smith hired it for one night. He brought out three pieces, the comedy of Modern Fashions, a farce entitled The Tailor in Distress, and the pantomime of Don Quixote. He agreed to pay each performer
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two dollars. For this sum Forrest acted a dandy in the first play, a negro in the second, and Sancho Panza in the third. The Tailor in Distress was a light affair, composed by Sol Smith, turning on local matters well known and very ludicrous. The part of Ruban, the negro, assigned to Forrest, was full of songs, dances, and fun. He was a servant, and his wife, who had nothing to say, was to appear with him as a help to set off his performance. He blacked himself up and rigged his costume quite to his content, when it occurred to his thought that no one had been got for the part of his black wife. He applied to the women of the theatre, but not one of them was willing to black herself for the occasion. He recollected his old African washerwoman, who lived in a shanty close by. He hurried thither and knocked and went in. Dinah cried, "Wha, bress me! who am dis? Gosh-a-massy, who be you? Whose chile am you?" He answered, in a negro voice, "Wha, Dinah, duzzent you know Sambo?" "What Sambo?" she answered. "No, I duzzent know nothin' about you. Who is you?" "Heaw! heaw! You duzzent know me! Now, don't you petend you am ign'rant ob dis chile." "Well, I say I be, and want to know who you am!" Time was pressing, and he said, in simple earnest, "Dinah, I am Mr. Forrest, from the theatre. I am all blacked and dressed to play the part of a negro, and I must have a black wife to go on the stage with me. I want you to do it." The astonished and incredulous washerwoman responded, "De debbil you does!" Sharply examining her visitor, she recognized him. "Reely, now, it be de fac'. You am Mass' Forrest. But what a funny nigger you am! You nigger all ober!" "Yes, Dinah, but hurry along, or we shall be late." "Well, I duzzent care; I goes along wid you anyhow." So they hastened arm-in-arm to the theatre, and got there just in time. The appearance of the darkies was greeted with loud applause, and when Ruban began to let out the regular cuffy, as he always could in the most irresistible way, with wide and suddenly breaking inflections of voice, breathing guffaw, and convulsive double-shuffle, the enthusiasm of the audience reached the highest pitch. The play was repeated several nights to crowds.
The Distressed Tailor referred to a well-known representative of that profession, named Platt Evans, who was a very curious and original character. He was interviewed by Mr. Gallagher
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in 1869, who found him a hale, active man of over eighty, and still fond of his joke. Old Platt said, "The farce was a da-da-da-dam good thing; on-on-only the character of me wa-was not true, as he stu-stu-stu-stuttered, and I do-don't stu-stu-stutter!" He said he made a suit of clothes for Forrest in 1823, and that once when he was in the store a fellow accused him of being stuffed. Forrest took off his coat and vest, and, striking his breast, exclaimed, "No, there is no padding here. It is all honest, and I mean it always shall be!"
It was now the end of July. The theatre was shut, the actors adrift and penniless. It was a hard time for them. Mrs. Riddle and her two daughters lived for awhile in Newport in a little dilapidated cottage, and Forrest spent part of his time with them. Invited to a party on one occasion, he was in want of a clean shirt and collar. Mrs. Riddle took a collar and a handkerchief of her own, washed and ironed them, pinned the collar on, tied a piece of ribbon around his neck, fastened the handkerchief over the bosom of his dingy shirt, and sent him smilingly off to the festivity, where his disguise was probably little suspected. Young, full of healthy blood, with a fiery imagination, it took but little to make him happy in those days. And yet, poor, ill clad, unemployed, with only a few chance friends, at a distance from mother and home, it took but little to make him very unhappy.
For several weeks he obtained almost his sole food from the corn-fields of General Taylor across the river in Newport. He used to break off an armful of ears, take them to his old negro washerwoman, and get her to boil them for him. Sometimes he made a fire under some stones out in the field, roasted the corn and ate it without salt. It was a Spartan dinner; but, fortunately, he had a Spartan appetite.
During this period he one day rowed over the river to Covington and climbed a sightly eminence there wooded with a growth of oaks. He sat down under a huge tree, pulled from his pocket his well-worn copy of Shakspeare, and began to read. He had on a somewhat ragged coat and a dilapidated pair of stage-boots whose gilding contrasted with the rusty remainder of his costume. He was no little depressed that day with loneliness and thinking of his destitute condition and precarious outlook. He fell upon this passage in King Henry IV.:
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"O God! that one might read the book of Fate,
And see the revolution of the times
Make mountains level, and the continent,
Weary of solid firmness, melt itself
Into the sea! and, other times, to see
The beachy girdle of the ocean
Too wide for Neptune's hips; how chances mock,
And changes fill the cup of alteration
With divers liquors! O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth—viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue—
Would shut the book, and sit him down and die."
Edwin felt melancholy enough as he laid the volume on his knee, and his head sank on his bosom in painful musing. After a long time, breaking from his reverie, he looked up. There stood, erect before him, a stout grape-vine. Apparently its tendrils had been torn from the oak by whose side it grew, and finding itself cast off, alone, deprived of its sustaining protection, it had rallied upon its own roots, spread and deepened them, and now held itself bravely up in solitary independence, as if it were not a vine but a tree. The moral lesson electrified him. He took new heart, with the feeling that it would be shameful for him to succumb when even a poor plant could thus conquer. Twenty years afterwards, with a grateful memory of the incident, he bought that whole woodland region, of some sixty acres, and named it Forrest Hill. He owned it at the day of his death.
After another brief trial of the theatre at Lexington, late in the autumn, Collins and Jones grew discouraged, gave up their business, and released Forrest from his contract with them. James H. Caldwell, an extremely good light comedian, and for many years proprietor and manager of the theatre in New Orleans, wrote to him opportunely, offering him an engagement for the ensuing season at a salary of eighteen dollars a week. It is said that Caldwell was led to make this proposition from his remembrance of having once seen the youth make an original point of great power in the part of Richard the Third. It was in the tent scene. All previous actors had been wont to awake from the dream in a state of extreme affright, and either sit on the side of the couch or stand near it. Forrest sprang from his reclining posture, rushed forward to the foot-lights, and there fell upon his knees, with his whole frame trembling, his face blanched with
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terror, his sword grasped by the hilt in one hand and with the point in the floor, the sword itself so shaking that it could be heard all over the house. The intense realism with which this was done made it sensational in an extraordinary degree.
When Forrest had accepted the proposal from Caldwell, the thought of the long, long journey and the time that must elapse before he should see his mother again gave him a homesick feeling. He shrank from his engagement. Learning that his acquaintance Sol Smith was then in Lexington collecting a troupe to play in Cincinnati, he called on him and urgently begged to be employed. He said he had rather serve under him for ten dollars a week than under a stranger for eighteen. He was steadily refused. He went over to a circus which then chanced to be there, and hired himself out for a year. Smith says he heard of this with great mortification, and immediately called at the circus. There, he adds, sure enough, was Ned in all his glory, surrounded by riders, tumblers, and grooms. He was slightly abashed at first, but, putting a good face on the affair, said, as he had been refused an engagement at ten dollars a week by his old friend, he had agreed with these boys for twelve. To convince Smith of his ability to sustain his new line of business, he turned a couple of flip-flaps on the spot. Smith took Edwin to his lodgings, and by dint of argument and persuasion succeeding in getting him to abandon the profession of clown and fulfil his promise to Caldwell.
He accordingly went to Louisville and took passage on a steamboat down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers to New Orleans. On the trip he made the acquaintance of Winfield Scott and of John Howard Payne. The celebrated general and the gifted author of Sweet Home seem both to have been strongly attracted to the young actor. They held many long conversations with him, and brought out, from their ample stores of experience in the field and on the boards, anecdotes, principles, criticism, and advice, which were not only highly entertaining to him at the time but lastingly instructive and useful. He always accounted his meeting with these two men as a particular piece of good fortune. It betokens that he was at that period of his life an ingenuous and docile spirit, however impulsive and wild still attracting the sympathy and appropriating from the experience of his elders.
