Dorchester Illustration of the Day no. 1701
Henry A. Clapp
[Material excerpted directly from introduction to Letters to the Home Circle: The North Carolina Service of Pvt. Henry A. Clapp, Company F, Forty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia, 1862-1863. Edited by John R. Barden. Raleigh: North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, 1998. Barden gives his sources in footnotes in that publication. Letters to the Home Circle includes the text of 44 letters written by Henry Austin Clapp to members of his family back in Dorchester.]
Henry Austin Clapp was born July 17, 1841, the eldest child of John Pierce Clapp, of Dorchester, Massachusetts, and Mary Ann Bragg Clapp.
Henry passed his entrance examination to Harvard College in the summer of 1856, following in the footsteps of his great-grandfather Noah, who was graduated in the class of 1735.
Clapp appears to have been one of the college’s quiet students, progressing in his studies along a predictable and creditable path. He produced an exhibition part (or essay) titled “A Latin Dialogue from the Comedy ‘All’s Not Gold That Glitters'” (with fellow student Edmund Wetmore) in 1858, another (“Caricature in Literature”) in 1859, and a commencement presentation (“Grotius as a Man”) in 1860. Following his graduation, he was elected usher in the Boston Latin School and taught there until January of the following year. In May 1861 he began to read law in the office of David H. Mason of Boston and entered Harvard’s Dane Law School in the fall. He won the Bowdoin Prize in 1862 for a treatise titled “The Services of Modern Missionaries to Science and Knowledge.” During his second term in the law school, Clapp also served as a proctor in the college, living in the college buildings and attempting to maintain some order among the undergraduates.
On August 12, 1862, halfway through his law studies, Henry Clapp sent a letter to the officers of the Harvard Corporation, informing them that he resigned his place as proctor, having enlisted with the nine-months men in the New England Guards Regiment.
By the beginning of October, rumors of departure spread through the ranks of the Forty-fourth, although whether the intended destination was the Potomac or New Orleans or North Carolina was anybody’s guess. Northern morale had been boosted the previous month by the bruising defeat inflicted on Lee’s army at Antietam in Maryland. Was the Forty-Fourth to join McClellan’s army to wipe out the rebels in Virginia once and for all? On October 17 a soldier got a glimpse of a staff officer’s box marked “New Berne,” and orders on October 20 confirmed the fact. The Forty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteer Militia was bound for North Carolina.
Henry Clapp’s letters are not just a personal record. They give a striking depiction of life in an occupied Southern town. Since he was writing to members of his family, no doubt Clapp left out a great deal of the ugliness, filth, meanness, and vulgarity that accompanied day-to-day life in any army. Nevertheless, what is left is still true and tells a great deal (and often tells it very well) about an important era in the histories of both North Carolina and Massachusetts.
Unlike a number of his comrades, Clapp did not reenlist or take a commission after his muster out at Readville on June 18, 1863. He returned to law school at Cambridge and resumed his proctorship for a year. After working for a while in a Boston law firm, he was admitted to the bar on July 1, 1865. He practiced law until 1875, when he was appointed assistant clerk of the Supreme Judicial Court for Suffolk County, Massachusetts; his appointment was renewed regularly until 1887, when he became clerk, a post he held for the remainder of his life.
Soon after his return from North Carolina, Clapp began to contribute articles, chiefly book reviews, to the Boston Daily Advertiser. By 1868 the paper employed him as dramatic and musical critic, and he wrote articles for a number of other magazines and newspapers as well. His astute observations on Boston’s theatrical performances gained him a reputation as one of the three or four most influential American dramatic critics of the late nineteenth century. In 1885, building on the enthusiasm instilled by William Rolfe at Dorchester High School thirty years earlier, Clapp began a series of lectures on Shakespeare’s plays. He was invited to repeat his talks many times in the years that followed. A collection of his writings was published as Reminiscences of a Dramatic Critic in 1902, the same year that he became chief dramatic critic for the Boston Herald.
Henry A. Clapp died of pneumonia on February 19, 1904, at the age of sixty- two and was buried in the old North Dorchester Cemetery. Oddly enough, this son of Dorchester survived his native town by more than three decades. By the 1860s the city of Boston, which had annexed the town of Roxbury, needed all or part of Dorchester in order to complete a drainage plan for the city. The voters of Dorchester gave their approval to annexation on June 22, 1869. The town, which had been the first in New England to establish the town meeting, held its last such conclave on December 28, 1869. The annexation took effect on January 4. 1870.
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