Marmee & Louisa (10 page)

Until the Civil War, in fact, abolitionists met “strong resistance from nearly all established, conservative Northern interests.”
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Most New Englanders followed Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, “who, with his eye for the ‘good in everything,’ found something good in slavery: he had visited a plantation in Louisiana, and he was happy to report that the quarters of the slaves were neat and clean and the beds were furnished with mosquito-nets.
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This was reassuring,” Van Wyck Brooks wrote, “to Christian souls who counted on the slaves for their bread.” Even Abigail’s husband, who had seen slavery firsthand on his peddling trips south, had no moral qualms about it.
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According to the biographer John Matteson, Bronson Alcott left “no indication that he found anything intolerable or outrageous about slavery in Virginia in the 1820s.”
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The space Garrison found for his October 15 address was Julien Hall, at the corner of Atkinson (now Congress) and Milk streets, which had recently hosted a temperance meeting and the exhibition of a boa constrictor and an anaconda swallowing mice.
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Samuel Joseph, who was visiting from Connecticut, and their cousin Samuel E. Sewall—now a Harvard-educated lawyer with a “serious, quiet manner [and] piercing, beautiful eyes,” according to an acquaintance—invited Bronson to join them in the all-male audience for Garrison’s lecture, “The Genius of Emancipation.”
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On Friday evening the three men left Abigail, who was four months pregnant, at the Alcotts’ boardinghouse, where she eagerly awaited their reports.

Abigail’s husband, brother, and cousin were already seated in Julien Hall—opposite the house in which she had been born—when the young Garrison arose, “modestly but with an air of calm determination,” to begin his address, Samuel Joseph reported later. Slavery is a “stronghold of the devil” that must be stopped, Garrison proclaimed.
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Every slave in America should be freed, incorporated into American society, and granted all the rights guaranteed in the Constitution, he demanded. He gave legal, moral, economic, social, and political reasons for abolition, and pleaded with his audience to help “save our country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery is bringing upon us.”

Bronson was not won over. In his journal he summarized Garrison’s lecture as “a statement of facts concerning the cruelty with which many slave-holders had treated their slaves at the South. . . . There is sometimes a want of discrimination, perhaps, between the slave-holder who keeps
his slaves from motives of expediency and the one whose principles are in favor of slavery.”
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According to historian Sarah Elbert, Bronson had “slept in slave quarters and sold goods to slave owners on his peddling trips.
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 . . . Like many early nineteenth-century citizens of enlightenment, he expected slavery to die a natural death. Having observed what he considered cordial, even friendly, relationships between masters and slaves, he did not remark on the actual deprivations of slave life.”

By contrast, Samuel Joseph turned to his companions the moment Garrison finished. “Come, we ought to help him,” he said. “Let us go and give him our hands.” He strode to the front of the hall. “Mr. Garrison, I am prepared to embrace you. I am sure you are called to a great work and I mean to help you.” Many years later he recalled, “That night my soul was baptized in his spirit, and ever since I have been a disciple and fellow-laborer of William Lloyd Garrison.”
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Samuel E. Sewall also shook Garrison’s hand and offered his help. Sewall and May, who had been Harvard roommates for three years, were the first men of Boston to support Garrison’s movement. Samuel Joseph May became one of Garrison’s closest friends. In the words of the abolitionist Frederick Douglass many years later, “Never . . . was one man . . . more devotedly attached to another than is Mr. May to Mr. Garrison.”
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Samuel Joseph May’s first glimpse of the “peculiar situation,” outside Washington, D.C., in 1821, had been quite different from Bronson’s. On first meeting Garrison, the young minister now determined to devote himself to the speaker’s cause. “Never before was I so affected by the speech of any man,” Samuel Joseph told Abigail. She had heard him say this only once before, after his first encounter with her husband. “Garrison is a prophet,” Samuel Joseph felt.
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“He will shake our nation to its centre, but he will shake slavery out of it.”

As they left Julien Hall, Samuel Joseph continued talking with Garrison. Someone may have mentioned that May’s sister awaited them, because the four men walked to the Alcotts’ boardinghouse. Abigail greeted Garrison and talked with him until midnight. “Although [she] lacked the formal education and civic opportunities afforded a male citizen of her class,” according to Sarah Elbert, “she was of one mind and heart with her brother” in matters of reform.
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She, like her brother and cousin, was drawn to the young crusader and determined to help his cause.

As a woman, Abigail empathized with slaves. Middle- and upper-class white women often “identified consciously or unconsciously with other excluded groups,” the historian Carolyn Karcher wrote. Women too were excluded “from the benefits that American democracy conferred on their male peers. . . .
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In the 1830s an awareness of being ‘bound with’ black slaves would propel a significant number of American women into the abolitionist movement.” One of Abigail’s peers, the writer and teacher Margaret Fuller, observed a few years later, “It may well be an Anti-Slavery party that pleads for woman, if we consider merely that she does not hold property on equal terms with men; so that, if a husband died without making a will, the wife, instead of taking at once his place as head of the family, inherits only a part of his fortune, often brought him by herself, as if she were a child, or ward only, not an equal partner.”
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In Providence, Rhode Island, a few years later, a woman approached Samuel Joseph after he gave an antislavery speech. She said, “I doubt whether you see how much of your description of the helplessness of slaves applies equally to all women.” The abolitionist Sarah Grimké felt that men “made slaves of the creatures whom God designed to be their companions.”
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According to Lydia Maria Child, “Little can be done for the slave while this prejudice [against women] blocks up the way.”
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The morning after Garrison’s speech, Samuel Joseph walked briskly to Garrison’s boardinghouse, where Garrison showed the minister letters he had received from noted New Englanders attacking his cause. Immediate emancipation was “misguided,” the Reverend Dr. Henry Ward Beecher, of Connecticut, wrote to him.
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Former president John Quincy Adams, another cousin of the Mays, compared abolition to “pouring oil into a smoking crater.”
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Even the renowned Reverend Dr. William Ellery Channing, one of Samuel Joseph’s former teachers, criticized the movement for its lack of “calm.”

Not long afterward, May approached Channing, who had been raised in the slave-trading region of Newport, Rhode Island, and had lived on a slave plantation in Virginia.
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Channing was troubled by aspects of slavery he had just seen in the West Indies, he told May, but he could not countenance Garrison’s vulgar tactics and violent language.

“If this is so, Sir, it is your fault,” Samuel Joseph responded, looking into his mentor’s eyes. “You have held your peace and the stones have cried out. If we, who are obscure men, silly women, babes in knowledge,
commit these errors, why do not such men as yourself speak and show us the right way? . . . You, more perhaps than any man, might have so raised the voice of remonstrance that it should have been heard throughout the length and breadth of the land. . . . Why, sir, have you not taken this matter in hand yourself?”

Channing replied, “Brother May, I acknowledge the justice of your reproof. I have been silent too long.”

Samuel Joseph seized every subsequent opportunity to speak out against slavery. Two days after meeting Garrison, he was scheduled to preach at New South Church, known as Church Green, located below his father’s garden, at the corner of Summer and Bedford streets. On Sunday morning he strode to the octagonal church designed by Charles Bulfinch. Samuel Joseph greeted old friends, heard the service begin, and walked to the pulpit. “I have heard something extraordinary,” he said: a lecture by a man with eyes “so anointed that he could see that outrages perpetrated upon Africans are wrongs done to our common humanity,” and ears “so completely unstopped of ‘prejudice against color’ that the cries of enslaved black men and black women sound to him as if they come from brothers and sisters.” Shuffles and grunts in the congregation indicated unease. “I have been prompted to speak thus,” Samuel Joseph continued, “by the words I have heard during the past week from a young man . . .
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William Lloyd Garrison, [who] is, I believe, called of God to do a greater work for the good of our country than has been done by anyone since the Revolution. I advise, I exhort, I entreat—would that I could
compel
—you to go and hear him!” Should slavery not be stopped, he warned, “the very foundations of the Republic must be broken up!”

It is not clear if Abigail or any other May was present at Church Green, but the next morning a business associate approached Joseph May on the street. “I hear your son went crazy at Church Green yesterday,” he said.
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“I cannot tell you how much I pity you.” This alarmed Colonel May. Everyone he knew considered advocates of immediate abolition to be atheists, infidels, even criminals.
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Most northerners feared that abruptly ending slavery would offend southern businessmen, split the country, and lead to war. Samuel Joseph “repudiated his social class,” the historian Donald Yacovone wrote, by joining Garrison “in forging the American antislavery crusade.” Radical abolitionism made Samuel Joseph “an outcast to the Brahmins who dominated Boston society,
jeopardized his career as a Unitarian minister, and outraged family and friends.” His stepmother, who was “constitutionally conservative,” Samuel Joseph observed, and “opposed to my espousal of the Anti-Slavery cause,” was astonished by one of his predictions that she recorded in her diary for 1830: “Our son, S. J. May, says that, in ten years from this time, the Anti-Slavery cause must be triumphant.”
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Like Abigail, Samuel Joseph was deeply religious—a believer in God and in the immortality of the human soul—but not “constitutionally conservative.” This was a rare mix of traits in their time and place, and one reason that, as Yacovone wrote, “few members of New England’s social and economic élite followed May” and his sister “into a life of social protest.”
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Undeterred, Samuel Joseph returned to his Connecticut pulpit to repeat the sermon he had given in Boston. Over the next year he met frequently with Garrison and Sewall to plan an antislavery society. He helped Garrison start an abolitionist newspaper, the
Liberator,
in early 1831. Garrison settled on the northern slope of Beacon Hill among Boston’s free blacks near the 1806 African Meeting House.
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There on December 16, 1831, amid a bitter storm of wind and rain, May, Sewall, Garrison, and several other men founded America’s first antislavery society, the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Samuel Joseph became an agent of the society, speaking at halls and churches throughout New England.

Abigail felt as passionately as her brother about the evils of slavery, but she was not present at any of these meetings. No woman was. Nor did any of the men consider inviting women. It was not proper for a woman to speak in public. Women had been excluded from public meetings since America’s earliest European settlements.
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It was a custom that arose from the Bible, a foundation of early American law. St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians (14:34–35), admonishes women to be silent in church and wives to seek guidance from their husbands. “I permit not a woman to teach, neither to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence,” 1 Timothy 2:12 states. Abigail could no more assist in reforming her society than she could ascend a pulpit to preach.

Now almost six months pregnant, she spent the weeks after Garrison’s momentous lecture preparing to move to Philadelphia. In early December she and Bronson boarded a stagecoach with their belongings. Each night they stayed at an inn, and each morning a new horse was
hitched to the coach. They moved into a boardinghouse in Germantown, a village seven miles north of Philadelphia founded in the late seventeenth century by Quakers and Mennonite German immigrants. In 1688—twelve years before Abigail’s ancestor Judge Samuel Sewall published his abolitionist tract—several Germantown Quakers had sent their ruling Society of Friends a two-page petition condemning slavery. But the society ignored the petition and suppressed its message.

In their boardinghouse in Germantown on March 16, 1831, not quite ten months after her wedding, Abigail gave birth to her and Bronson’s first child, a healthy girl. Bronson felt joy. “The emotions produced [in me] by the first sounds of the infant’s cry make it seem that I am, indeed, a father.”
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They named the baby Anna Bronson Alcott after his adored mother, Anna, and himself. Abigail, exhausted but happy, turned to the tasks of nursing and nurturing a newborn. The baby, she wrote to her brother, “is in good health, perfectly quiet, and is a true May for eating and sleeping.
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 . . . She has given love to life, and life to love.”

Anna was nine days old when her father began writing “an Historical account of the Development of the Intellect and Moral Conduct of my little girl, from birth, to be continued as her mind and heart make progress.” He aimed to create a “history of one human mind” from infancy “narrated by the parent until the child should be able to assume the work himself, and carried onward through all the vicissitudes of life to its close.”
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Bronson would initiate such a journal for three of his children, a paternal project that was an unusual variation on a common enough New England theme. Puritans used journals to record their observations of the world in the hope of perceiving and understanding God’s will; Bronson began his children’s journals in an effort to perceive and understand the developing human mind. Freed by his gender from the work of caring for the children, he looked to them as experimental subjects in his effort to develop a new educational philosophy. Before Anna’s first birthday her father’s observations of her led him to a grandiose theory of mind in which “the human soul has had a primordial experience in the infinite Spirit.” Abigail left no comment on her husband’s research on their children. Despite her fascination with education and children, she was not of a philosophical bent. Philosophy, moreover, did not feed a family.