Marmee & Louisa (3 page)

This bond was unusual in Boston and the wider society, which assigned boys and girls to separate realms. Privileged boys were trained at school to excel in the public sphere, while their sisters were prepared at home to manage a family. Sons, expected to succeed in the world, were prepared with the finest education available, while daughters were prepared to marry well, a task that required no outside education.

These different modes of education, the Mays and their peers believed, suited the genders’ inherently distinct natures. Women were considered emotional, nurturing, and intellectually inferior to men, who were all “rational, selfish, and intellectually superior,” according to the historian Eve Kornfeld.
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Middle-class boys “studied the classics, mathematics, natural science, history, and theology” and learned “an aggressive language suitable for debate,” while their female peers studied “literature, art, languages, dance, and music” so as to speak “a docile language intended to soothe and to smooth over controversy.” This cultivation at school and at home of boys’ and girls’ apparently distinct interests and talents seemed to provide “further proof of the natural gulf between the male and female worlds.”

Sam Jo and Abba May departed from this pattern. Beginning soon after Edward’s death, they were each other’s best companion and ally. Sam Jo dutifully followed the male path by attending a private academy for boys, Harvard College, and Harvard Divinity School. “My generous father,” he recalled later, “thought the best patrimony he could give his children was a good education, so we [boys] were sent to the private schools in Boston that enjoyed the highest reputation.” Unlike many of his peers, however, Sam Jo also developed in the wake of his brother’s death a passion to rectify the world’s wrongs. Among those wrongs was his clever little sister’s inability to secure an education like the one that his gender granted him. As a result, he set out to share his man’s education with Abba, who concluded in early adolescence that a girl’s education was “deficient.”
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Her brother encouraged her to read his books, improve her writing, and think for herself. By the time they were young adults, due to a series of family tragedies Abigail and Samuel Joseph were the only May siblings still living save Charles, who remained away from New England for decades to come. Abigail’s remarkable bond with Samuel Joseph contributed to her lifelong determination that women should not only be educated but also have a voice in running the world.

The setting of Abigail May’s
early life was still in many respects the town from which Paul Revere and William Dawes had ridden just a quarter century before. Dawes, in fact, was Abigail’s uncle.
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In 1800 Boston was still a “pretty country town” with fewer than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, most of them descendants of English settlers, occupying detached houses surrounded by gardens and orchards on a peninsula of roughly one square mile and several adjoining villages.
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Many Bostonians farmed. Some still shepherded their milk cows to graze on the Common, which descended to a marshy bay along the Charles River. The town had not yet begun its great nineteenth-century transformation, in which cows were banished, pastures and hills smoothed, marshes and bays filled, and brownstones built. In this “handsome” Boston of Abigail May’s youth, according to a visitor, “Town and Country seem married.”
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Growing up on the peninsula’s less populous south side, the May children could step into the sea at high tide hardly two minutes from home. Clipper ships passed to and fro. In the evening “the sea dashed
under the windows,” Abigail’s friend Lydia Maria Child recalled, and was “often sparkling with moon-beams when we went to bed.”
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To the southeast the Mays could see from their windows the town’s wharves, Gallows Bay, the mud flats of Dorchester, and the harbor islands, most prominently Castle Island with its star-shaped fortification. Looking north their view was of numerous steeples and the town’s four great hills. Atop the tallest, Beacon Hill, were the new State House, designed and built in 1798 by Charles Bulfinch, and the elegant home of the late John Hancock, the revolutionary hero and first governor. Hancock, too, was Abigail’s uncle, the late husband of her “Aunt Q,” Dorothy Quincy Hancock. During Abigail’s early years, her Aunt Q still lived in that grand mansion replete with books, paintings, silver, and mahogany furniture, where she had hosted John Adams and General Lafayette.
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The old woman often invited Abigail and her sisters in for treats. Decades later, in her great-niece Louisa’s
Old-Fashioned Girl,
Aunt Q would be immortalized as Grandma Shaw’s late aunt, Governor Hancock’s widow, with her red-velvet-lined carriage, her “great garden,” and her memories of feeding General Lafayette and his troops during the revolution.
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In fact, Aunt Q’s poignant recollections of her only son and daughter, both of whom had died early, may have enhanced her fondness for her nieces and nephews. Aunt Q, like Abigail, had been the youngest, “most petted” of her family.
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Each year on Abigail’s birthday, her aunt reminded her that October 8 was also the day on which “My Mr. Hancock” had died, seven years before Abigail was born.

A revolutionary spirit imbued Abigail’s childhood. Many Bostonians had opposed the American Revolution when it happened, but not the Mays. When Abigail was small, her father recounted for her the resolute response of his “strong” mother to a British soldier’s petty robbery.
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Passing by the May house, the soldier had reached into an open kitchen window and grabbed food from the table. “Your grandmother quickly shut the window down upon his arm and held it as in a vise,” Joseph May said. Not until a British officer arrived to arrest the offender did Madam Abigail Williams May loosen her grip on the sash. Like other Bostonians opposed to British rule, the Mays left during the Siege of Boston. They boarded with cousins in Pomfret, Connecticut, and did not return to Boston until the British evacuation in the spring of 1776. Joseph was too
young to participate in the New England portion of the Revolutionary War, but in his twenties he joined the Independent Corps of Cadets, rose through its ranks, and always desired to be called “Colonel” rather than “Mister” May.

Colonel Joseph May was proud of his heritage. His ancestors, English Puritans with Spanish, Portuguese, and Jewish forebears, arrived in Plymouth in 1640 and settled on the mainland just west of Boston, in Roxbury.
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An early-eighteenth-century May acquired a large lot on Boston’s south side along the slender neck connecting Boston to the mainland except at extreme high tide, when the town briefly became an island.
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Joseph May was the third child of the carpenter Samuel May’s second marriage, to a farmer’s daughter named Abigail Williams. Joseph grew up in “Squire May’s great house” on the neck at the corner of Orange (now Washington) and Davis streets. Joseph’s father, who left the house each morning with a tool bag over his shoulder, was a skilled architect and designer who became a “considerable” dealer in lumber, which he received at a wharf below the house.
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Joseph’s parents raised nine children, all girls except Joseph and the youngest, Sam, who did not arrive until Joseph was sixteen. A “merry, active” boy accustomed to female company, Joseph was chastised for talking in class. “Sewing being tried” as a cure “proved a failure,” so the teacher had him memorize the psalms, the music of a devout Puritan life. This led to his lifelong love of poetry and song, which he passed on to his children. Joseph’s youthful gift for singing psalms by heart “drew the attention of the neighbors,” who “would stand him up on a folded window shutter before a shop” near his house and call for him to recite “one psalm after another.”
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As his “closing achievement,” the boy would sing all 176 verses of the 119th psalm “without an error,” prompting applause. In 1770, after the Boston Massacre, Joseph’s parents left their church because its minister ridiculed the patriots’ cause.
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They soon joined Old South Church, where their son Joseph found a musical home: “He sat in the singers’ seats and sang [psalms] with them when but twelve years old.” From age nine Joseph attended Boston Latin School until the British military occupation in 1775 prompted the family’s yearlong exile in Connecticut, which ended his schooling after only a few years.

Upon his family’s return to Boston in 1776, sixteen-year-old Joseph began a career in business. He was apprenticed to Stephen Salisbury, a prosperous Worcester, Massachusetts, merchant who owned a waterfront store in Boston. Joseph spent four years working for Salisbury and his brother Samuel, whose wife, Elizabeth Sewall Salisbury, had taken in her younger sister Dorothy Quincy Sewall after their parents’ deaths. Despite Dorothy’s higher social status and her age two years his senior, Joseph May courted his employer’s charming young sister-in-law.

At twenty-one Joseph went into business for himself. He opened a store, Patten & May Company, selling flour and produce at No. 3 Long Wharf. His partner, Thomas Patten, was a distant relative who traded flour and other goods in Baltimore, Maryland, and Alexandria, Virginia.
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Patten & May prospered, enabling Joseph to pledge himself to the young lady he had admired for nearly a decade. On December 28, 1784, at King’s Chapel, the ambitious young businessman married the twenty-six-year-old “daughter of [the late merchant] Samuel Sewall, [deacon] of the Old South Church,” and his late wife, Elizabeth Quincy.
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Dorothy Quincy Sewall came from an illustrious family. She and her future children, as she would remind them, were “thrice related to the Quincys.”
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A direct descendant of the first Edmund Quincy, progenitor of the clan, Dorothy was a cousin of Abigail Adams and of numerous justices of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts, the oldest independent judiciary in the Western Hemisphere. Dorothy’s paternal grandfather, the renowned eighteenth-century pastor Joseph Sewall, whom she had known in her childhood, served Old South Church for half a century and made it “a shrine of the American cause.” Her older brother Samuel Sewall was a member of the United States Congress and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Many male cousins were judges. According to a historian, during “the 122 years from 1692 to 1814, eighty-four [years] saw some member of the Sewall family in the highest court of Massachusetts.”
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For the first fourteen years of Dorothy and Joseph May’s marriage, their family and his business grew. However, in 1798, when they had five living children and she was pregnant with Abigail’s next older sister, Elizabeth, disaster struck. Without Joseph’s knowledge, his partner had speculated on land in what is now the state of Mississippi, using Patten & May as collateral. Thomas Patten had invested $22,000 (equivalent to
$310,000 in the year 2000) in huge tracts of land sold by Georgia politicians for roughly a penny an acre in a massive fraudulent scheme known as the Yazoo land scandal.
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Public outrage across the South prompted lawsuits, which nullified the deals. Patten & May became bankrupt. To repay the huge debt he had unknowingly incurred, “Mr. May gave up everything he possessed, even offering the gold ring on his finger.”
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Following this loss, Abigail’s father experienced “a very serious and protracted illness” in which his “mental suffering was great.” By the time of Abigail’s birth in the fall of 1800, Joseph’s health was restored, but his worldview was forever changed. Conservative by nature, having courted a young relative of his well-to-do employer and determined to make money by advancing in the mercantile world, he now considered material wealth harmful to spiritual health. “The sufferings which this disaster caused revealed to him that he had become more eager for property than was creditable to his understanding or good for his heart,” his friend the Reverend Dr. Greenwood observed.
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“After some days of deep depression, [Joseph May] formed the resolution never [again] to be a rich man . . . [and] to withstand all temptations to engage again in the pursuit of wealth.” To the dismay of some of his children, “he adhered to this determination” in the future by resisting “very advantageous offers of partnership in lucrative concerns.”

Abigail knew her father only after his business failure. But her oldest siblings, like the elder sisters in
Little Women,
“could remember better times.” In the novel one sister asks another, “Don’t you wish we had the money Papa lost when we were little?”

Like the virtuous Marches invented by his granddaughter, Joseph May responded to loss by beginning again with a new emphasis on duty. “Life was not given to be all used up in the pursuit of what we leave behind us when we die,” he often told Abigail. This idealism was enabled by his fortunate choices, particularly his choice of a well-connected wife. In their privileged, insular postrevolutionary world, Dorothy May’s wealthy cousins and family friends rallied around them. The Marine Insurance Company, a firm created in 1799 by members of the Cabot and Sargent families, offered Joseph May a lifetime job as its first and only secretary. This sinecure, which he held for decades, provided a relatively modest “competence only for his family” that “never exceeded fifteen hundred dollars a year,” equivalent to $25,000
at the turn of the twenty-first century. Various kin, notably Dorothy’s younger brother Joseph Sewall, a dry-goods importer significantly more prosperous than his brother-in-law, purchased a new house for the May family.

That house, on the “sunny” spot on Federal Court into which they moved not long after Abigail’s birth, is where she was raised and later brought her daughters Anna and Louisa to visit. “Of necessity simple and without show,” the house “lacked no comforts, and was full of hospitable and kindly feeling and deed,” according to a family recollection. During Abigail’s childhood her father was “most attractive in conversation, with . . . a ready wit, giving hours of every day to reading and retaining the fruits of it for the advantage and entertainment of others, ready to participate in the occupations and amusements of those about him, and joining in their music,” singing psalms, hymns, and songs. Joseph read aloud to his children and led them in daily prayer and reading of the Bible, in the King James translation.