An Acrostic for Emma Dent: Thomas J. Sappington's Courtship Poem

Thomas J. Sappington's acrostic poem to Emma Dent, written some time in the 1850s. NPS.

Many people in south St. Louis County know the Thomas J. Sappington House Museum, three miles northwest of White Haven. Fewer know that a Sappington once proposed to Emma Dent, the youngest sister of Julia Dent Grant.

Neighbours

Thomas Jefferson Sappington, born in 1832, was a nephew of the Thomas J. Sappington whose house was built in 1808. The Sappingtons and Dents were neighbours who knew each other well before the Civil War; both families had come to Missouri from the South.

The poem

Thomas and Emma courted, most likely in the 1850s, and he wrote her an undated acrostic — a poem in which the first letters of the lines spell a word. His spell "EMMA DENT":

Emblem of beauty! Sweet bud of the bower!
May thy opening bosom be wet with the shower;
May thy fragrance be lasting thy beauties abide
Around the Green wood walks of flora's gay pride
Delicate art thou, bud; and fragile thy form,
Erased are thy beauties in darkness and storm;
Nearly withered, thy leaves will a fragrance display,
Towering ever like virtue in beauties decay.
>
T.J. Sappington

Beneath it, faintly in pencil, a question tells how things turned out: "Do you remember all I told you the night you gave back the ring?"

What came after

• Emma Dent married James F. Casey on February 14, 1861. They lived in New Orleans during the Civil War, and in the 1870s President Grant appointed his brother-in-law Collector of Customs there; Casey held the post for eight years while they raised two children. All four are buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Washington, D.C.
• Thomas J. Sappington served as a lieutenant in the Union Army's 2nd Missouri Regiment. He married Helen Mary Leffingwell, who died in 1868 at 33, leaving one child; he then married Julia, and they raised three more. Thomas and Helen are buried in Sappington Cemetery in south St. Louis County, Julia at Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis.

Emma's descendants gave the poem to the park in 1999.

Sources

• National Park Service, Ulysses S. Grant National Historic Site, "Thomas J. Sappington Tries to Woo Emma Dent." https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/thomas-j-sappington-tries-to-woo-emma-dent.htm
• The original gives Sappington's second wife's surname as "Leggingwell", close to his first wife's surname, Leffingwell; as it may be a misspelling, this page gives her first name only.
• The poem (1850s) is quoted in full; the rest is rewritten in hubnx's own words.