Marmee & Louisa (4 page)

Dorothy shared “fully with her husband in the hospitable spirit of the house.” Even more than her husband, she was “keenly alive to all the joys and trials of her children and of their young friends.”
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In 1819, when Sam Jo’s college friend from Maine, George Barrell Emerson, was “seriously ill,” Abigail recalled, “my mother had him brought to Federal Court where he remained very sick 5 months.”
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Throughout college Emerson dined every Saturday with the Mays. “I never enjoyed music more entirely than I did then and there in the rich harmony of this exquisite family-choir,” he remembered.
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“Dear Louisa [Abigail’s sister] and S[am] J[o] made sweet music for us,” Abigail wrote to her daughters, “and the beloved presence of my mother and father and Eliza filled our house with glee, when we all joined in the chorus of the ‘Woodland Hallow’ or ‘Auld Lang Syne’ or ‘Home Sweet Home.’
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 . . . I have never seen more contentment and happiness—we had music, health, love, and good will.”

Amid the cheer were rules regarding appropriate behavior. For Abigail and her sisters, one model of female acquiescence was their Aunt Q, who lived until Abigail was nearly thirty. In 1810 Dorothy Quincy Hancock returned, after a brief second marriage in New Hampshire, to the Hancock mansion beside the State House. The property, built in 1737 by John Hancock’s superbly wealthy uncle Thomas Hancock, extended
from Mount Vernon to Joy streets. It encompassed walled gardens of flowers, rare trees, and shrubs. Aunt Q later moved to 4 Federal Street, nearer the Mays, where she regaled her nieces with stories of the War for Independence, whose first shots she had heard.

“Shall I tell you the story of the Lexington Alarm?” Aunt Q asked Abigail and her sister Eliza as the girls leaned into her cushioned chair. Late at night on April 18, 1775, twenty-six-year-old Dorothy Quincy had been trying to sleep on the second floor of the Lexington parsonage while her fiancé, John Hancock, the president of the Continental Congress, and Samuel Adams paced in the parlor below. Dorothy had been introduced to Hancock by his aunt Lydia, who raised him as the sole heir to her and her late husband’s massive estate. Aunt Lydia had recently invited Dorothy to live in the Hancock mansion. Dorothy was of good family and, according to John Singleton Copley, who painted her portrait, displayed “unusual attractions.”
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In Boston in early April 1775, General Thomas Gage had ordered British regulars to arrest Hancock and Adams for treason on account of their vocal opposition to the Stamp Act, tea tax, the British blockade of the port of Boston, and the Boston Massacre.
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King George III’s troops also sought a stock of munitions hidden in Concord, the next town. But armed members of the Lexington militia had encircled the parsonage, protecting Hancock and Adams.

Roused by the chaos, Dorothy Quincy donned her cloak and bonnet and descended to the parlor. Before dawn Paul Revere arrived. He advised Hancock and Adams to depart quickly, before British troops surrounded the house. “It was not till break of day that Mr. Hancock could be persuaded” to leave, Aunt Q recalled. “He was all the night cleaning his gun and sword, determined to go where the battle was.”

Around daybreak a British soldier, unaware of Hancock’s and Adams’s presence, knocked on the door, seeking directions to Concord. Upon his departure Dorothy and the Lexington minister stuffed valuables in the cellar and garret. Hancock, Adams, and Revere fled in Hancock’s coach, which later returned to retrieve Dorothy Quincy and Aunt Lydia. During their flight Dorothy’s first thought was of her widowed father, Judge Edmund Quincy, still in Boston, which was occupied by British troops. “I told Mr. Hancock that I wished to go to my father,” Aunt Q recalled. “He said to me, ‘No, madam, you shall not return as long as there is a
British bayonet left in Boston.’ To which I replied, ‘Recollect, Mr. Hancock, I am not under your control yet.’ ”

But she soon would be under his control, as her nieces Abigail and Eliza were well aware. On August 28 of that year, during a recess of the Second Continental Congress, she married Mr. Hancock in Fairfield, Connecticut. The couple traveled to Philadelphia, where he continued leading Congress and became the first signatory of the Declaration of Independence.

Aunt Q’s life with Mr. Hancock exemplified the model marriage of her class and time. In law and in fact, the husband controlled his wife, children, assets, and property. The virtuous femininity displayed by Dorothy Hancock in Philadelphia, where she was the only woman sharing a disorderly boardinghouse with scores of male Continental Congressmen, impressed John Adams. In a November 4, 1775, letter to his wife, Abigail Adams, John described Dorothy Hancock’s “modest decency, dignity and discretion.
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 . . . She avoids talking upon politics. . . . She is unusually silent, as a lady ought to be.” Aunt Q exemplified the conventional female role of household manager and hostess: she had no education, no career, and no public voice.

Abigail’s mother’s marital arrangement was marginally different, due to her superior connections and her choice of a mate less privileged and less educated than her male relatives. Dorothy’s lineage gave the Mays the status of “Boston Brahmins,” a people, according to Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who possessed “houses by Bulfinch, . . . ancestral portraits and Chinese porcelains, . . . humanitarianism, Unitarian faith in the march of the mind, Yankee shrewdness, and New England exclusiveness.”
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Brahmins arose, the historian George Fredrickson explained, from a “union of new wealth and old learning” caused by the “extensive intermarriage . . . of rising merchant families with other families known not for their worldly success but for their long lines of clergymen and Harvard graduates.”
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Dorothy Sewall May’s lineage did not prevent her growing feeble during Abigail’s childhood, while her confident, ebullient husband remained active into his seventies.
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Joseph May was known widely for his efforts “to relieve the needy and the sick, and minister to the dying.” In 1811 he was one of the men who founded Massachusetts General Hospital to treat the city’s poor. (Private doctors cared for the wealthy.)
Dorothy was doubtless as clever as her husband, and as eager to improve the world, but the restrictions on female behavior, exacerbated by her physical decline, prevented her passions from flowering anywhere outside the home. Years later, Abigail remembered that her mother, whose “own education had been a limited one . . . was constantly solicitous that her daughters should be educated as fit companions for man.”

Abigail’s desire was to be educated, full stop. She did not relish a marriage like her aunt’s or her mother’s. Alone among her female relatives, Abigail determined to be different. Although she adored her mother and sisters and considered women’s work essential, from childhood she longed for the experiences of her brother Sam Jo. She wished to read history and literature, to learn Latin and Greek, and to use her mind to improve the world, as he was encouraged to do. Her society did not value these goals in a girl, but her brother and mother honored her ambition and encouraged her to educate herself.

In the fall of 1810, when Abigail was ten, she received a gift of a blank journal and the suggestion that she write therein. The donor was likely her mother, a proud great-granddaughter of colonial America’s most famous diarist, Judge Samuel Sewall, whose portrait had always hung in her house.
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The toothless old man in the painting, Dorothy told her daughter, kept journals of his thoughts and experiences for more than sixty years starting in 1667, when he arrived at Harvard College. He became chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court in 1715, the year in which his grandson, Dorothy’s father, was born.

The judge was impressive in other ways, Dorothy said as she and Abigail walked in Boston’s Granary Burying Ground, where she pointed out his grave. In Salem in 1692 he sat on the court that convicted and executed twenty innocent people as witches. Alone among the eight judges of that court, Sewall realized his judgments were wrong, publicly repented for them, and devoted the rest of his life to trying to reform the world. In colonial New England, where slavery was commonplace, he composed and published America’s first abolitionist tract,
The Selling of Joseph
. Sewall also supported the right of Native Americans to be educated, Dorothy told Abigail, and promoted “the right of women.”
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In his diaries, which Dorothy’s older brother Samuel had inherited from their father, the judge gave his wife control of his money because she had “a better faculty than I at managing Affairs.
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 . . . She shall now keep
the cash; if I want I will borrow of her.” Most remarkable, according to Abigail’s mother, Sewall concluded late in life that women are fundamentally equal to men.
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This was a novel concept. Abigail knew her mother and father were not equal. Nor was she equal to her brother. Sam Jo and other boys were allowed to play freely in the garret, the garden, and the Common; girls were not. She and her sisters accompanied their brother to school for a few years, but only he was prepared for college.

When Abigail was eight or nine, Sam Jo left dame school to attend an exclusive private boys’ school, Chauncy Hall.
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The school was created by Joseph May and other fathers of teenage boys to compete with Boston Latin, established in 1635.
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For several years Sam Jo studied Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and mathematics with the Reverend Elisha Clapp at an annual cost of a hundred dollars, the equivalent of $1,500 in 2000. A “very puny” boy surrounded at home by sisters, Sam Jo had abhorred the occasional whippings he had received at the hands of previous male teachers.
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One morning in late August of 1813, when Abigail was twelve, Sam Jo left home before dawn in a stagecoach to cross the Charles River for Harvard. At fifteen, he was the fifth generation of the family to attend the college. He, his cousin and chum Samuel E. Sewall, and sixty other young men gathered on Harvard Yard before filing into University Hall, itself still under construction, to take written and oral examinations in Latin, Greek, mathematics, and the physical sciences.
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While her brother read the classics and philosophy at college, Abigail remained at home with her mother and sisters.
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Though she was determined to learn all she could, she was a sickly child: “Illness much interrupted” her home schooling.
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Later, recalling her childhood for her daughters, Abigail remembered lying sick in bed watching her mother’s and sisters’ anxious faces hovering above her. Roughly one in two children did not survive past age five. Dorothy May, who could not forget the pain of losing Edward, sometimes read to Abigail the Old Testament story of the prophet Elisha’s encounter with a dead boy:

And when Elisha was come into the house, behold, the child was dead, and laid upon his bed. He went in therefore, and shut the door upon them twain, and prayed unto the LORD. And he
went up, and lay upon the child, and put his mouth upon his mouth, and his eyes upon his eyes, and his hands upon his hands: and stretched himself upon the child; and the flesh of the child waxed warm . . . the child sneezed seven times, and the child opened his eyes. . . . And when [the child’s mother] was come in unto him, he said, Take up thy son. Then she went in, and fell at his feet, and bowed herself to the ground, and took up her son.

Abigail’s mother spoiled her, Abigail felt. “Owing to my delicate health, I was much indulged. . . . I was allowed to read a good deal, fed on nice food, and had many indulgences not given my sisters and brothers.” Perhaps as a result, “I was rather a good child, but willful.” A favorite childhood activity was reading aloud “to my mother and sisters when they were employed” with household chores. She learned to sing hymns and songs but could not play the piano because her right hand had been badly burned when she was six months old.
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Abigail rarely socialized outside her family: “I never cared much for society. Parties I disliked.” In her early teens, though, she “danced well” at Mr. Turner’s Dancing School, she confided to her journal, and had “for partners some boys who afterward became eminent Divines.”
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When Abigail was twelve her parents employed for her a private tutor. Eliza Robbins, the author of children’s textbooks, allowed “no drone or loafer near,” Abigail recalled. “She made each girl use the talents she had, to the best advantage.”

But this instruction too was insufficient to Abigail’s intellectual ambition. At fourteen she began corresponding with her brother at college about philosophy and the humanities. She read John Locke on the origin of ideas—whether ideas are innate or products of experience—and was impressed by his theory of the mind as a blank slate. “What you say relative to [the need for universal] education is certainly true,” Sam Jo wrote to her. “Nothing is of unimportance in the formation of the mind.”
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Besides guiding Abigail’s studies, he tutored schoolboys in Concord, Hingham, Nahant, and Beverly during summers and for a year after college, becoming one of the first instructors ever to employ a new device called a blackboard.
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Teaching was to be a central part of his life’s work, as it had been for countless earlier ministers, whose duties often included the education of young men.

Abigail’s much older sister Louisa, who was abroad in Canada in 1816, coached her in spelling, grammar, and writing, useful skills even for a woman. In a letter that year, Louisa exhorted her teenage sisters Eliza and Abigail, “Endeavor to accomplish a little reading every day, and at night write me what you have read.
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Give me your opinion of the Style, etc., of the book you are engaged in. . . . I feel anxious to have your minds well studied with everything useful, and as highly cultivated as any woman in the country. I do not wish to confine you to one kind of reading. . . . Devote most of your time to history and biography; blend with it poetry, the drama; and sometimes a well chosen novel will not be amiss. . . . A great deal may be gained from the Tales of Miss Edgeworth . . . [whose morals] are pure . . . [and style is] delightful.”