Marmee & Louisa (5 page)

Meanwhile, their eighteen-year-old brother had to decide on a career. In choosing the ministry, he followed the path laid out by his maternal great-grandfather, the Reverend Joseph Sewall. More significantly, preaching provided a pulpit from which to improve the world, to do for others what he had always done for Abigail. Then a slender young man of average height with a sweet temper, dark hair, glistening hazel eyes, and “a beaming face” that, according to acquaintances, radiated “kindness and cheer,” Samuel Joseph “had but to perceive a social wrong to go about righting it.”
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All his life he had a gift for acting upon his passion for radical causes without ever seeming self-righteous or strident. A “very happy, joyous child,” by his own account, he had been “rather a favorite among” his “many friends.”
⁷⁹
Mr. May, as he was known as an adult, seemed to be, like Mr. March in
Little Women,
“a minister by nature as by grace.”
⁸⁰

His and Abigail’s desire for reform arose not only from their Christian faith but also from their Puritan ancestors, who founded America with the hope of creating a purer society. The Mays and their peers abandoned Puritan doctrine but maintained the Puritan view of religion as central to the community and the individual. Anyone seen driving out of Boston “on Sunday, either in the morning or in the afternoon, would have lost credit.”
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Dorothy and Joseph May had “a deep interest in religious thought and inquiry.”
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Twice each Sunday they attended services at King’s Chapel, where Abigail’s early “love of sacred music was intensified . . . by the grand harmonies of the organ and my father’s fine bass voice.” The Mays had switched to King’s Chapel from Old
South after the American Revolution because they preferred its minister, James Freeman, who rejected the Creed, the Trinity, the liturgy in the Book of Common Prayer, and the prehuman existence of Jesus Christ. They were early Unitarians, a liberal sect of Protestantism only a few decades old. The Puritans’ Congregational Church, founded on John Calvin’s theology, had taught that God is all-powerful, humanity is depraved, and individuals are predestined for salvation or damnation. Unitarians rejected these beliefs, praying instead to a kindly God who promotes the welfare of humans, each one virtuous and worthy of salvation. They believed humans could make themselves perfect. “I must reverence human nature,” the Reverend Dr. William Ellery Channing, who mentored the young Sam Jo, wrote. “I cannot but pity the man who recognizes nothing godlike in his own nature.”
⁸³

In many ways, though, Unitarians still experienced the world as Puritans.
⁸⁴
Abigail and her siblings inherited from their parents and ancestors a commitment to morality and the belief that more was expected of them than of others. Their progressive politics were a liberal, rational extension of the Puritan impulse toward salvation. Boston Brahmins were a model people, they felt, and theirs should be a model city. They had, in addition to Dr. Channing’s sermons on the “perfectibility of human nature,” according to Abigail’s contemporary Edward Everett Hale, the Unitarian “Dr. Joseph Tuckerman determined that the gospel of Jesus Christ should work its miracles among all sorts and conditions of men; they had a system of public education which they meant to press to its very best; and they had all the money which was needed for anything good.
⁸⁵
These men subscribed their money with the greatest promptness for any enterprise which promised the elevation of human society.” Convinced that “if people only knew what was right they would do what was right,” Joseph May and his peers founded the Massachusetts General Hospital, its “annex for the insane,” and institutions to train the deaf and the blind—much as their seventeenth-century ancestors had established Boston Latin and Harvard College.

Harvard Divinity School, which Samuel Joseph May entered in 1818 when Abigail was seventeen, was the ideal training ground for a Unitarian divine. Founded only two years earlier, the divinity school was dominated by professors of theology who rejected orthodox Calvinism in favor of “Liberal Christianity,” which “
dictated
nothing, except personal
purity and righteousness . . . [and] fidelity to our highest sense of the true and the right,” as Samuel Joseph recalled later.
⁸⁶
He studied the Bible, Scottish Common Sense philosophy, and John Locke. When he came home in 1820 with his doctorate, he handed his father the final receipt for his Harvard education, at just under two hundred dollars a year. Joseph May folded the receipt with “an emphatic pressure of his hand” and said, “My son, I am rejoiced that you have gotten through, and that I have been able to afford you the advantages you have enjoyed.
⁸⁷
If you have been faithful, you have now been possessed of an education that will enable you to go anywhere.”

Joseph May advised his son, “Stand up among your fellow-men, and by serving them in one department of usefulness or another, make yourself worthy of a comfortable livelihood, if no more.” He added a warning: “If you have not improved your advantages, or should be hereafter slothful, I thank God that I have not property to leave you that will hold you up in a place among men, where you will not deserve to stand.”

Abigail never heard such a message from her father. It never occurred to him to secure for her any formal schooling. Her husband, not she, needed an education. Her duty, her father explained when she was ten and “inexperienced in the ways of the world,” was to be good and therefore happy, quoting the old maxim, “To be good is to be happy.”
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Goodness in a woman entailed “attention, kindness, gentleness, good nature, and a desire to please,” which would “procure friends [and] diffuse pleasure all around.” She should demonstrate “industry, patience, perseverance, fidelity . . . moral virtue, piety, and resignation.” Nowhere in Joseph May’s list for Abigail were his admonitions to a son: Stand up among your fellow men . . . Improve your advantages . . . Go anywhere . . .

Soon after Abigail’s seventeenth birthday her father advised her to marry a first cousin, Samuel May Frothingham, the twenty-eight-year-old son of Joseph May’s closest sister, Martha, and her husband, a prosperous Portland, Maine, judge named John Frothingham. Joseph May believed that his nephew, who lived and worked in Boston, would be a good match for his youngest daughter. It was not uncommon for first cousins to marry, sometimes to maintain family fortunes, but even Abigail’s ancestor the repentant witch judge had questioned the lawfulness of the custom.
⁸⁹

Abigail liked her cousin, but she had never considered marrying him. Nor had she seriously considered marrying anyone. She felt that marriage might not suit her. She knew of no woman whose marriage she wished to emulate, although two of her three older sisters had married—Catherine in 1808, when she was twenty-one, and Eliza, at age seventeen, in 1817. Catherine had died, probably in childbirth, in 1815. She had left a husband and a five-year-old son, Charles Windship, for whom Abigail sometimes cared.
⁹⁰

Bending to paternal pressure, Abigail consented to her cousin’s frequent visits. Soon after her eighteenth birthday, she and Samuel May Frothingham were, she told her daughters later, “virtually betrothed.”
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But she continued to doubt the wisdom of the union. Years of watching her mother’s poor health and stifled passions prompted in Abigail a desire to avoid a commitment based on duty. Marriage should be based on love, she felt, not obedience. It should make one happy. Her conception of marriage exemplified a broad social change throughout the Western world. Only around 1800 did people begin to adopt the “radical new idea” of marrying based on love rather than on economic or social factors, and allowing young adults “to choose their marriage partners on the basis of love.”
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It is also possible that Abigail resisted the idea of marrying within her family. “Marry her cousin!” a young woman exclaims in a story that Louisa wrote decades later: “That has been the bane of our family in times past.
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Being too proud to mate elsewhere, we have kept to ourselves till idiots and lunatics begin to appear.” It would be better to choose “the freshest, sturdiest flower . . . to transplant into our exhausted soil.”

“I do not love my dear cousin,” Abigail finally told her parents. Therefore, he could not make her happy, and she could not marry him.

Abigail’s mother accepted her decision not to marry her cousin, but her more conventional father could not. “To be good is to be happy,” he reminded his willful daughter. Samuel Frothingham was worthy and capable of supporting her, so she should marry him. Abigail and her father battled quietly over the matter for months. To defuse the conflict, Samuel Joseph suggested she leave home for a year to study on the South Shore with his friend John Allyn, a Harvard-educated minister, and his schoolteacher sister, Abby. Samuel Joseph thought Abigail would benefit not only from time apart from her father but also from the Allyns’
attentions. Confident in her brother’s judgment, Abigail traveled thirty miles to the coastal town of Duxbury to live and study with the Allyns.

For most of that year eighteen-year-old Abigail learned Latin, French, geometry, astronomy, chemistry, botany, American and world history, moral philosophy, and natural theology under the “most valuable” supervision of Abby Allyn.
⁹⁴
In imitation of her brother and his classmates, she “read History” in a manner “very enterprising,” she reported, “making notes of many” scholarly books, with an emphasis on the Scottish Enlightenment. Among the books she studied were David Hume’s
History of England,
Edward Gibbon’s six-volume
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
the just-published
View of the State of Europe During the Middle Ages
by Henry Hallam, William Robertson’s
History of Charles V,
Oliver Goldsmith’s four-volume
History of England,
Charles Rollin’s
Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians,
and
The Golden Sayings
of Pythagoras.
⁹⁵
She “did not love study,” she observed, “but books were always attractive.”

Her brother sent her bundles of books and suggested she read one article from the
Rambler Journal
each morning “until you can remember the train of thought and the leading ideas.”
⁹⁶
Lest her zeal cause her excessive exertion, he advised caution. “Do not be alarmed by the number of Books which it is desirable you should read; nor be induced to read with too great rapidity. . . . Haste in reading is a great waste of
mind
as well as
time
: of mind because it weakens the power of observation; of time because nothing is in fact accomplished.” Finally, “Do not think that all knowledge is to be obtained from books, and that you are . . . only learning when sitting in your little chamber. Let your mind be constantly employed upon something. . . . Indulge your curiosity.”

Looking to the future, Abigail could envision herself as a teacher, like her brother and Miss Allyn. While her brother’s path to the ministry was closed to her, Miss Allyn proved to be “a model worthy of imitation.
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By her character I form my own, and the very improbability of being like her incites me to constant exertion. . . . I may yet earn my bread by the knowledge this year has afforded me and spend . . . [my] life in teaching a school.”
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Abigail loved to write, too, and was praised for her “flowing, full pen.”
⁹⁹
In her heart of hearts, writing—which she called her “old passion”—was what she wished to do.
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Although still nominally engaged to her cousin, Abigail felt no strong tie to Boston, except to her sisters and mother, whose health continued to decline. More and more Abigail felt the tug of scholarly and professional pursuits. That year she set herself the goal of translating portions of the Gospel of John from the Latin Vulgate into English, as she had seen her brother do at Harvard. “If I should not succeed I should be mortified to have you know it,” she confessed to her parents. “I wish my pride was subdued as regards this.” Nonetheless, working two hours every Sunday for several months, she accomplished the task she had set for herself.

An ambitious young woman, Abigail did not want to be thought inferior to a man. In fact, she said, “I am not willing to be found incapable of anything.”
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Chapter Two

Drawing Toward Some Ideal Friend

I
n early August 1819 at the Allyn house in Duxbury, Abigail received a letter with shocking news. Suddenly and unexpectedly, Samuel May Frothingham was dead. She took the stagecoach to Boston to join her family in mourning her dear cousin.