Marmee & Louisa (6 page)

This tragic loss might have been expected to resolve her conflict with her father but apparently it did not. Soon after her cousin’s funeral she returned to Duxbury to continue her studies, and at the end of that year she informed her father she would return home only if he agreed to the condition that she “be allowed to refuse visiting.”
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She would no longer submit to the expectation that she receive eligible young men. “I must be permitted this winter to withdraw,” even “if I incur the epithet[s] pedantic or unsocial or misanthropic,” she resolved. Should her withdrawal arouse criticism, she would “trust that time will obliterate the fiction of opinion, and confirm the decisions of truth.”

Nineteen-year-old Abigail dreamed not of marriage but of teaching school and learning more about the world. She wished to avoid “those gay scenes where once was my delight” in order to study without distraction and to “fix my habits of attention and reflection,” she told her parents.
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“I cannot let this winter pass without much improvement in mind and habits. I feel as if I had just begun life. . . . And I am every day more convinced that there are no real enjoyments but those which philosophy dictates and religion sanctions.” Her father reminded her that a passion for intellectual achievement diverted her from a young woman’s
expected path. He must have agreed to her condition, though, because she returned to Boston at the end of 1819 to live with her parents and her sister Louisa.

At home she soon discovered that Louisa shared her interest in education. Several female friends had already started schools in their homes; teaching was one of the few careers open to affluent single women.
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Abigail and Louisa talked about teaching together, which suited Abigail, who did not feel sufficiently confident to create a school on her own. “Louisa’s capability joined with my industry shall make us independent of our relations and happy in ourselves,” unlike the model woman of their day.
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In 1821, to Abigail’s dismay, her sister Louisa accepted a marriage proposal from Samuel Greele, a Harvard graduate of 1802 and church deacon whose first wife had been their late first cousin Lydia Sewall.
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Because a married woman had even fewer employment opportunities than her unmarried peers, Louisa’s marriage would preclude any sisterly school.

Meanwhile, in March 1822, her other surviving sister, Eliza May Willis, who was twenty-three, fell ill and died of unknown causes in Portland, Maine.
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Eliza left a husband, Benjamin Willis Jr., a three-year-old son, and an infant daughter. In a letter to Eliza at the boy’s birth in 1819, Abigail had anticipated the opportunities enabled by his gender: “Soon he will be rivaling his Aunt [Abigail] in ‘amo,’ ‘amas, ‘amat.’ . . .
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And may he, like her, thirst for knowledge, but, unlike her, may he be earlier gratified and better able to receive the draught, which intoxicates weak minds, but renders strong minds stronger.” Abigail’s desire for a man’s education had not yet caused her to reject the notion that a woman’s mind is inherently weaker than a man’s. Following her sister Eliza’s death, Abigail assumed a traditional female role with her little nephew and niece, Hamilton and Elizabeth Willis, as she had with her sister Catherine’s son, by taking “care of them in their childhood a good deal,” often in her parents’ house on Federal Court. She came to see her motherless niece and nephews as almost her own progeny, referring to them in an 1829 letter to her brother as “my children.” Their care was burdensome. “My time is expired, the children are clamorous,” she added.
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“I have three motherless orphans, all suffering for that care which a
Mother
only can give. . . .”

Despite, or perhaps because of, the extensive child care that Abigail provided during her twenties to her late sisters’ offspring, she felt unmoored. “I have felt a loneliness in this world that [is] making a misanthrope of me,” she told Samuel Joseph, “in spite of everything I . . . do to overcome it.”
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Her mother, now in her early sixties, was too weak to leave her bedchamber. Abigail felt her father’s continuing disapproval, and her brother Samuel Joseph was no longer present to steady her. He gave his first sermon on Christmas Day 1820 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and was ordained in Boston eighteen months later by Dr. Channing and Dr. Freeman, founders of American Unitarianism.
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“Discover what moral evils have sprung up in the present age,” Freeman had exhorted him, “and you will exert yourself to eradicate them.”
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Samuel Joseph now preached temporarily at the First Congregational Church of Brooklyn, in Connecticut, a state that had never before hosted a Unitarian minister. In order to decide where to preach permanently, he planned to travel down the eastern seaboard to consider churches that had offered him pulpits, as far south as Richmond, Virginia.
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In anticipation of his sister Louisa’s impending marriage, he invited her to accompany him on the trip. Samuel Joseph and Louisa were away for months, leaving Abigail, in Boston with her orphaned charges, bereft.

Conscious of this, her brother sent her letters describing his and Louisa’s adventures. The churches and monuments were impressive, but nothing so impressed him as the sight of human beings in chains. Like their early loss of their brother Edward, this experience changed the trajectory of both his and Abigail’s lives.

The most memorable event of the trip occurred as he and Louisa rode in a stagecoach from Baltimore, where slavery was legal, toward the nation’s capital, the site of one of America’s largest slave markets. “We saw, standing by the road-side, a row of negro men, twenty or thirty in number,” Samuel Joseph wrote. “We soon perceived that they were all handcuffed, and that the irons about their wrists were fastened around a very heavy chain that was passed between them [and] attached to the tail of a large wagon.” Black women passed along the line “giving to each man a thick slice of coarse bread.”

Thinking the men prisoners, Samuel Joseph asked his sister Louisa, “What can they have been guilty of?” A moment later the truth “flashed
upon” his mind. “Oh, no, Louisa! They are slaves being taken to market.”

“I reckon,” a southern passenger said to him, “you and the lady are from New England.”

Indeed they were. At home the Mays had heard reports of “the abomination of slavery and the internal slave trade,” but they were not yet conscious of the reality of human bondage. “The house-slaves in our kinsmen’s families in Baltimore seemed to us like any other domestic servant” in Boston, he said. “But here the monstrous wrong stood palpably before us. I never before felt so grateful that I was not born where human beings can be bought and sold, and treated like cattle. I am ashamed of my country and my race.”

The timing of their births had shielded Abigail and her siblings from slavery’s role in their lives. Some of their ancestors’ fortunes were indeed built on the New England slave trade, which began in the 1640s. They had cousins in Georgia and Maryland who owned slaves. Even some of their Massachusetts relatives owned slaves until 1783, when the commonwealth’s highest court banned the slave trade and ordered immediate emancipation. Aunt Q’s father, Edmund Quincy, bought and sold slaves as late as the 1770s; her husband John Hancock inherited his uncle’s slaves in 1764. Hancock’s aunt Lydia at her death in 1776 freed her five slaves, several of whom stayed on as house servants to John and Dorothy Quincy Hancock.
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Many heroes of the revolution owned slaves. But in the mid-eighteenth century, when bonded white servants were so prevalent that “as much as half of colonial society [was] at any moment legally unfree, the peculiar character of lifetime, hereditary black slavery was not always as obvious as it would become in the years following the Revolution when bonded white servitude virtually disappeared,” the historian Gordon Wood explained.
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In the postrevolutionary Boston in which the Mays lived, the wealthy had servants, not slaves. Children of Abigail’s generation knew free blacks intimately, as their nursery maids. Abigail’s first cousin Samuel E. Sewall attributed his adult passion for abolition to his devotion to his black nurse, Flora, who often admonished him, “Swallow your temper.” At the age of three, when he heard someone call Flora “black,” he retorted, “She’s
not
brack, she’s b’own.”
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Samuel Joseph May remembered as a boy of seven coming to consciousness in the arms of a black
woman he did not know. Finding him bloody and unconscious after a fall, she generously carried him home.

But Abigail and her peers were not familiar with the sight of slaves in irons headed to market like cattle. The image aroused in her twenty-three-year-old brother “thoughts and feelings that a few years afterwards took shape and gave direction to the whole cause of my life.” On his return to New England he and Abigail discussed slavery in a new way. It offended them because it undercut their faith in their nation’s righteousness and justice. It was wrong.

Abigail had already impressed friends with “her prompt decisions concerning the right and wrong of things,” in the words of Lydia Maria Child.
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In 1836 Abigail called emancipation “a cause worthy [of] the best and most intelligent efforts of every enlightened American.
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 . . . Every woman with a feeling heart and thinking head is answerable to her God if she do not plead the cause of the oppressed, however limited may be her sphere.” She predicted in an 1835 letter to her friend Mary Tyler Peabody, “We shall shake hands over the victories of Abolition before long.
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 . . . The dawn is obvious in the dark horizon, depend on it, dearest Mary, we shall live to see the perfect day. Then how those mistaken patriots will exhort the hills to cover them—and the mountains to fall upon them. . . . I mean in particular those men who . . . make the cradle of liberty the coffin of freedom. What they intended for a stumbling block will prove a stepping stone to this righteous cause.”

Abigail had a complex view of her privileged past. She honored her revolutionary and Puritan ancestors—particularly Judge Samuel Sewall, who opposed slavery—but she considered the nation itself corrupt because of its foundation in slavery, which its constitution allowed. This set her apart from her father, who regarded slavery as a necessary evil that would eventually fade away. Massachusetts formally banned slavery in 1783, but Boston’s elite, including Joseph May, did not demand a halt to the national system of slave labor that contributed significantly to New England’s commercial growth. Slavery still thrived in much of the North in the 1830s, George Fredrickson wrote; American “democracy was premised on racism.”
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Most New Englanders opposed abolitionism, considering the idea radical and dangerous. Slavery was too entrenched in American commerce, they believed, to be ended abruptly. If slavery did not gradually disappear, Joseph May and his contemporaries supported
“repatriating” freed slaves to Africa. They could not countenance the notion of assimilating freed slaves into American society.

This rejection by powerful Bostonians of the antislavery movement would intensify as New England turned from its maritime economy to a new dependence on manufacturing in mill towns outside cities. By 1840, according to the historian Van Wyck Brooks, the “wheels of the cotton-factories revolved at a furious pace, and the Southern slave-drivers plied their whips to feed the Yankee mills with Southern cotton.
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 . . . The more the prosperity of New England came to depend on cotton, the closer the propertied classes drew to the Southern planters, with whom they felt obliged to ally themselves, yielding to them in all political matters.”

In regard to Abigail’s mother, there is no extant record of Dorothy Sewall May’s personal view of abolition or any public topic, as is typical of women of her time.
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It seems likely, though, that Abigail and her brother inherited from her their passion for reform. Among all the ancestors she described to them, the one who aroused her greatest pride was the repentant witch judge who more than a century earlier had called for the abolition of slavery.

In October 1823, soon after Abigail’s twenty-third birthday, her sister Louisa married Samuel Greele. Abigail experienced this union as a loss. Not only were her dreams of starting a school dashed, but now she was the only sibling left with her parents on Federal Court.

Not long afterward her brother, who was twenty-six, proposed to Lucretia Flagge Coffin, the lovely, eighteen- or nineteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant and his wife.
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Lucretia, who had been tutored at home in French, Italian, and probably German, took pride in her refined speech, manners, and appearance. She had a “complex about growing old” that kept her from ever revealing her age to her husband and children. Abigail adored Lucretia and dubbed her “Lu,” the nickname also of her sister Louisa. Samuel Joseph and Lucretia’s wedding, at King’s Chapel on June 1, 1825, troubled Abigail less than those of Catherine, Eliza, and Louisa because it seemed to entail gaining rather than losing a sister.
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Samuel Joseph and his bride returned to Brooklyn, in eastern Connecticut, where he had decided to remain. His father had advised him to take a more impressive pulpit, with an established congregation in a city,
because staying in Brooklyn would provide only “conflict, hard work, and poverty.”
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But Samuel Joseph was drawn to evangelize among farmers, bankers, and laborers in mills and factories, many of them still strict Calvinists who considered Unitarianism heresy.
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He embraced the challenge of preaching in a rural, conservative part of New England where slaves still toiled. Connecticut’s 1784 emancipation law had called only for the gradual freeing of slaves’ offspring, so the state still had slaves as late as the 1850s.
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Brooklyn, about eighty miles southwest of Boston, was not too far to prevent frequent trips home to see his parents and Abigail.