Marmee & Louisa (12 page)

Several months before this heated public exchange, Miss Crandall, a young Quaker schoolteacher from Rhode Island, had announced that her home-based school, in which she taught English grammar, history, geography, philosophy, chemistry, French, drawing, painting, and music to white girls, was open also to “young ladies and little Misses of color.”
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Inflamed by this announcement, neighbors smashed her windows, smeared excrement on her door, and contaminated her well. Most of her white students withdrew from the school. Shops refused to sell her goods. Residents of rural Connecticut, like most Bostonians, rejected biracial education, mixed marriage (“miscegenation”), and racial equality.
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Canterbury’s town meeting soon voted to stop Crandall on the grounds that “once open, this door and New England will become the Liberia of America.”
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The Reverend May, who lived and worked a few miles up the road in Brooklyn, encouraged Crandall to continue teaching but, in order to defend the principles of racial equality and universal education, to restrict her school to Negro girls. Early in 1833 free black families from along the eastern seaboard responded to her advertisement in the
Liberator
by sending their daughters to live and study with Miss Crandall. She reopened her school in April with twenty female students “of color.”
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Immediately, to prevent “amalgamation of the two races,” the Connecticut legislature enacted a Black Law forbidding the education of Negroes from outside Connecticut except in free public schools.
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Local authorities arrested and imprisoned Crandall for breaking this law. Samuel Joseph May came to her defense, arranged for her release from the county jail, where she had spent a night, and made his nearby parish the center of her legal strategy. At public events, where her gender prevented her from speaking, he was her representative.

At her August 1833 trial in the courthouse in Brooklyn, the county seat, chief prosecutor Andrew Judson argued that Negroes were neither citizens nor entitled to legal protection or educational privileges. The
jury split. At her second trial Crandall was convicted, an outcome that May and Garrison welcomed because they hoped to appeal her case to the Supreme Court of the United States. May had warned Judson: “I will dispute every step you take, from the lowest court in Canterbury up to the highest court of the United States.”
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While Crandall’s conviction was soon thrown out on a technicality, the violence against her and her allies continued. In 1834 locals smashed her windows, dumped manure on her lawn, set fire to her house, and burned a cross they had placed on the Mays’ front lawn.
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Fearing for her students’ lives, Crandall sent them all home in September 1834 and moved west.
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But her point had been made. Her case raised the crucial question, Samuel Joseph observed, of “whether the people in any part of our land will recognize and generously protect the inalienable rights of man without distinction of color.” According to the historian Russel Nye, the Crandall case “furnished the clearest example of the issues involved in the question of Negro education” because it “clearly defined . . . the popular fear of racial equality and racial amalgamation.” Nye added, “The schools figuring in the greatest disturbances in the North were those which, in defiance of local prejudice, accepted both white and Negro pupils.”
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An academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, inspired by Crandall, admitted fourteen Negro students in 1834. The local town meeting responded by voting to restrain “the Abolitionists,” and three hundred men with one hundred oxen dragged the school building from its foundation.

The Crandall case brought Samuel Joseph to national attention and “propelled him to the forefront of the antislavery movement.”
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Later that year Lydia Maria Child, an author and abolitionist who was one of Abigail’s closest friends, published
An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans,
which examined the history, effects, and economics of slavery and racial discrimination and concluded with a call for immediate emancipation. The book cost Child her reputation as the country’s most popular woman writer.
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But she, like the Mays, was compelled to join Garrison. On meeting him, she said, “A new stimulus seized my whole being and carried me whithersoever it would. I could not do otherwise, so help me God.” She dedicated
An Appeal
to Samuel Joseph “for his earnest and disinterested efforts in an unpopular but most righteous cause.”

The Crandall case forever changed Samuel Joseph, much as his father’s business failure had forever changed him. “I felt ashamed of Canterbury, ashamed of Connecticut, ashamed of my country, ashamed of my color,” Samuel Joseph recalled.
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His advocacy of racial desegregation alienated many of his parishioners and eventually propelled him to leave his pulpit and become a full-time antislavery agent. “If it had not been for Miss Prudence Crandall,” his daughter, Charlotte, observed later, “he probably would have passed his life” quietly in Brooklyn, Connecticut.
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Samuel Joseph’s public recognition may have aroused envy in his brother-in-law. “The minister has long preached, and what has he accomplished?” Bronson wondered in his journal during the Crandall controversy.
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“Look into our civil and political institutions, our religious periodicals, our schoolrooms, our churches; count the various societies whose object is the suppression of some mighty vice which is preying on the heart of society—intemperance, war, slavery, oppressive governments. . . . And when this mighty catalogue has been filled out, then is the answer at hand of what the minister, with all his boasted authority, has done? He has done little because he has not known how. He has preached; but . . . failed. Early education is the enduring power.” Bronson felt his own efforts to reform the world through the minds of infants were worthier than his brother-in-law’s public advocacy of antislavery, temperance, and equal rights.

Abigail responded differently to her brother’s growing fame. In addition to nursing Louisa, running after two-year-old Anna, and caring for her slightly older boarders, she was inspired to read and think even more about antislavery. “I am informing myself as fast as possible,” she wrote to Samuel Joseph. “I have been reading for dear life, past numbers of the
Liberator,
and
Emancipator
and some English publications.”
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As for attending meetings, “I will not engage very much in anything apart from my children while they are so young. But I can read and think and talk.”
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In a Philadelphia schoolroom in early December 1833, less than two weeks after Louisa’s first birthday, Abigail gathered with other white and black women to found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. The society’s stated goal was to “to elevate the people of color from their present degraded situation to the full enjoyment of their rights.”
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Meanwhile, in Boston, her friend Lydia Maria Child was a founder of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. While some men, including Abigail’s
brother and his ally Garrison, supported women’s societies, many male abolitionists did not, and it would not be long before the men would split over this issue. Samuel Joseph was with Abigail at the women’s first gathering in Philadelphia, where, a few days earlier, on December 4, he had been among the male founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society. This first nationwide antislavery society aimed to realize the preamble of the Declaration of Independence by guaranteeing all citizens their “inalienable rights” to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” According to Nye, slavery forced “a growing realization of the need for establishing the meaning of the guarantees of liberty written into the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.”
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Years later Samuel Joseph regretted “the mortifying fact, that we
men
were then so blind, so obtuse, that we did not recognize those women as members of our [American Anti-Slavery Society] Convention, and [did not] insist upon their subscribing their names to our ‘Declaration of Sentiments and Purposes,’ ” which called for immediate abolition or “disunion,” the severing of the bond between slave states and free states.
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A more intimate disunion existed in the Alcott family. Abigail, who disliked living apart from her husband, was still depressed and sometimes angry at him. On weekends, when he visited her and the babies in Germantown, she complained that he was “unkind, indifferent, [and] improvident.”
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He could not do otherwise, he replied, because he was by nature “disinclined from making much of outward success. . . . I cling too closely to the
ideal
to take necessary advantage of the practical.
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 . . . I live in Idea.” Unfortunately, he explained, “I am an Idea without hands. I find no body for my thought amidst the materials of this age.” Privately, he resigned himself to this situation: “Complain not then, my genius,” he thought to himself. “Thou shalt know thyself in fit time, and do thy deed before the ages.” He conceded he was a negligent husband and father. “My wife and children suffer from this neglect.
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 . . . I may not sympathize . . . in the deprivations to which this course subjects them.” To pursue his life’s goal of “find[ing] the truths of my own nature,” however, “sacrifices must be made.”

Perhaps, but the sacrifices were all Abigail’s. Having conceived another child late in 1833, she moved with Anna and Louisa into a Germantown boardinghouse to await the baby’s birth the following spring. Bronson visited his family on weekends, “unwilling to live with his family,
[yet] unwilling to forsake them.” Cynthia Barton described this as “an unorthodox arrangement, particularly because it was instigated by a man who believed, before his time, that a father should play an active role in the care and upbringing of his children.”
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Meanwhile, Bronson moved upstairs in his boardinghouse to a desirable top-floor room, feeling “blessed at last with my one little window fronting the City Library and the Athenaeum, with a bed, a trunk for my clothes, a wash-stand, two chairs, and my books.
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On these,” he vowed, “I am to feed and content myself during the summer.” Seven miles away, Abigail would have to “feed and content” three-year-old Anna; Louisa, who was seventeen months old; and herself, near the end of another pregnancy.

At the boardinghouse on May 19, 1834, Abigail suffered a miscarriage.
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She seemed near death to her landlady, who eventually, at Abigail’s urging, called a doctor, and Abigail pulled through. To her brother Samuel Joseph, who seemed to her “good enough for heaven and great enough for earth,” she wrote not long afterward, “My health is far from good.” Two days later Bronson learned of the miscarriage and closed his school for a few days to visit his ailing wife.

During periods of depression Abigail often found comfort in a leather-bound Bible her mother had given her, in which both of them had inscribed their names. Solace came from a favorite hymn that Abigail had sung with her father and now sang with her girls:

God of the ocean, earth, and sky!

In thy bright presence we rejoice;

We feel thee, see thee ever nigh;

We ever hear thy gracious voice. . . .

God on the lonely hills we meet;

God in the valley and the grove;

While birds and whispering winds repeat

That God is there,—that God is Love! . . .

“God is love,” she murmured to her babies when they seemed scared or sad. God is love, she knew, but where was He?

Bronson, whose latest attempt to start a school had come to nothing, concluded that Philadelphia was not ready for him and his ideas. Unlike
Abigail, he longed to return to her hometown. Boston “is the place for me,” he had told his mother on the day of Louisa’s birth. “There is no city in this country in which there is more mental and philanthropic activity than Boston.”
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One of Abigail’s Germantown friends, Mary Ann Donaldson, wrote, “I cannot bear to think of their leaving us to go so far . . . I look upon Mrs. Alcott as a ‘bright, particular star’ in our hemisphere & shall never cease to regret her removal from it.
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I do not believe Mr. A[lcott] will succeed any where.” Presumably, Donaldson was one of those to whom Abigail “was clearly suggesting that she wanted a separation from Bronson.”
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In the summer of 1834, when Louisa was twenty months old, family friends again came to the Alcotts’ aid. The Reverend Channing found Bronson another possible job in Boston. It was to create a school there, aided by the skillful Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, a woman of thirty who had more than a decade of experience teaching in Massachusetts and Maine. In August the Alcott family took a steamer to Boston so Bronson could consider the offer.

Abigail set up temporary housekeeping in a boardinghouse on Morton Street in the North End and tried to encourage Bronson to accept the job. All her life she had been taught that a husband’s obligation is to provide for his family, while his wife supports him at home. She now had the toddlers Anna and Louisa “very much to myself, leaving them for an hour or two with my girl,” a servant likely provided by Colonel May, to “go into the parlor for quiet or social purposes, or for a walk, and after they go to bed I occupy the parlor.”
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She informed her brother on September 1, “Mr. Alcott has now gone [back] to Philadelphia [and] will probably pass a day with you [in Connecticut] on his return. He has determined to remain in Boston. He has taken [rented] rooms at the Masonic temple”—a building at the corner of Tremont Street and Temple Place—“and has about 31 children engaged to
begin
with, and Miss Peabody as his assistant.
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His prospects were never more flattering, but I try to suppress all emotion but that of hope, for I have
always
been woefully disappointed in my expectations, and I mean this time to keep on the safe side.” A week later he had four more students. “Everybody I see seems pleased and excited” about the new school, she exulted.
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“I hope this will be enduring as well as brilliant. Everybody has their ups and downs. This I believe is to be our
up,
turn.” She knew she idealized
her husband and risked being his “enthusiast,” for which Samuel Joseph or Lucretia had apparently teased her. But she believed, she wrote to them, that “there will be a great educational regeneration” and “my husband is to be the Messiah to announce to the world a new revelation.”
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