Portraits of American women

Front matter

Qass.

Book.

COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT

Preface

This book might almost be called "Portraits of New England Women," since, with the exception of Miss Willard, all of the subjects studied in it were born in New England. As I had devoted a good many years to distinguished representatives of other parts of the country, I felt at liberty to confine my researches for a brief period to souls nearer home. In the study of women it is especially difficult to obtain satisfactory material, and material affecting the lives of New England women was most readily accessible to me. At the same time, of the seven New England characters here portrayed, at least three, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Margaret Fuller Ossoli, and Louisa May Alcott, are so thoroughly identified with the country at large that one hardly thinks of their birthplace. Abigail Adams, Mary Lyon, and Emily Dickinson are known to a great number of their countrywomen and Sarah Alden Ripley ought to be so. I hope, moreover, to follow this series with another, embracing prominent women of other sections.

I am under deep obligation to various persons for assistance in my work. Mrs. Ripley's grandchildren have kindly supplied me with numerous letters, without which it would have been impossible to make an adequate study of her. Miss Charlotte A. Hedge has lent me letters of Margaret Fuller to Dr. F. H. Hedge, and the Boston Public Library has placed its valuable Ossoli manuscripts at my disposal. Mount Holyoke College has enabled me to make use of a most interesting collection of reminiscences of Mary Lyon. Mr.

X PREFACE

C. K. Bolton has allowed me to examine the correspondence of Frances Willard with his mother, Mrs. Sarah Knowles Bolton. And Mr. McGregor Jenkins has lent me letters and has more especially furnished me with significant personal memories of Emily Dickinson. To all these collaborators I am very grateful.

Gamaliel Bradford

Contents

I. Abigail Adams i

II. Sarah Alden Ripley 33

III. Mary Lyon 65

II

But Mrs. Adams lived in a tremendous time. In her early married years her husband's political duties left her alone to do both her work and his in the midst of difficulty and danger. Later she was called upon to stand by his side through great crises of statesmanship and to give him counsel in triumph and comfort in defeat. She performed all these functions nobly, and to do it required something more than the usual feminine contributions to domestic felicity. She had a woman's heart, a woman's nerves, a woman's tenderness; but little indeed of what a man requires to make his way in life was lacking to her.

She had a high and fine intelligence. Elaborate education she had not, nor any woman in that day. She herself complains that she was not sent to school, that ill health prevented any systematic mental training, that reading and writing and the simplest arithmetic, with a few accomplishments, were all that was thought necessary for her or any of her sex. In later life she bewailed this state of things and urged that a wide and rational spiritual culture was as necessary and as suitable for women as for men.

But we all know that education does not make intelligence and that natural intelligence can supply almost everything that education gives to either man or woman. After all, schooling is but an inadequate and apologetic substitute for brains. Brains Mrs. Adams had, and needed no substitute. From her childhood her keen and active wit was working, observing, acquiring, rejecting, laying by for future use. She was always a wide reader, — read and quoted Shakespeare and Pope and the eighteenth-century poets and essayists. Her acuteness and independence of judgment are well shown in this comment on the Drama of Moliere: "I send with this the first volume of Moliere and should be glad of your opinion of them. I cannot be brought to like them. It seems to me to be a general want of spirit, at the close of every one I have felt disappointed. There are no characters but what appear unfinished and he seems to have ridiculed vice without engaging us to virtue; and though he sometimes makes us laugh, yet 't is a smile of indignation. . . . Moliere is said to have been an honest man, but sure he has not copied from his own heart. Though he has drawn many pictures of real life, yet all pictures of life are not to be exhibited upon the stage." ^^ Above all, she read the classics, of course in translation; even writers minor or less known, like Polybius. Plutarch she nourished her heart on, and when she signed her letters to her husband, "Portia," it was partly an eighteenth-century affectation, but much more that the iron of old Roman virtue had entered into the very substance of her soul.

Also, her intelligence reached far beyond books. She had that penetrating, analytical instinct which plucks wisdom from the actions and motives of men and which especially lays the foundation of such wisdom in a close, dispassionate study of the observer's own heart. " You know I make some pretensions to physiognomy,"^^ she writes. The pretensions were justified. She saw many faces in her life and read them attentively, curiously, and always with profit.

But the finest testimony to Mrs. Adams's intelligence is the letters addressed to her by her husband and her son. Both were men of wide and deep reflection. Both touched perpetually the gravest problems of statesmanship and of human conduct generally. Both discussed these problems with wife and mother as they would have discussed them together, or with the wisest men of their time. Would this have been possible with any but a mind of the broadest grasp and keenest power of comprehension?

And the intelligence was progressive as well as vigorous. Mrs. Adams's energetic protest to her husband against the legal and political subjection of women in that day has been often quoted and justly praised, — it is as dignified as it is energetic: "That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute," ^^ and she urges such an adjustment of law as may check that tyranny. In religious matters there is the same broad, sober common-sense. Mrs. Adams had been brought up in the strictest New England Calvinism, and always retained the intense earnestness of that creed and its disposition to try all things by the standard of conscience. But bigotry and intellectual cowardice were alike abhorrent to her, and she had no inclination to judge others harshly. "True, genuine religion is calm in its inquiries, deliberate in its resolves, and steady in its conduct." ^^ And besides common-sense she infused into her piety something of that sunshine which was the sorest need of Calvinism and for want of which it perished: "I am one of those who are willing to rejoice always. My disposition and habits are not of the gloomy kind. I believe that ' to enjoy is to obey.' " ^^

But vigorous and clear as Mrs. Adams's mind was in the abstract, its energy showed still more in practical matters, as was natural and necessary with the life she lived. We have seen that she could be perfectly contented with simple home surroundings and regular pursuits. But she wanted neither sloth nor lethargy. "Confinement does not suit me or my family," ^^ she wrote to her granddaughter. And again: "Man was made for action, and for bustle, too, I believe. I am quite out of conceit with calms." ^^ She had her share of furious housewifery, and no sooner gets on shipboard than she sets to work with "scrapers, mops, brushes, infusions of vinegar, etc.,"^^ to produce the neatness and order which she maintained daily at home without such appeal to violent measures.

And her domestic economy went far beyond mops and brushes. During her husband's long and necessary absences, she undertook not only the ordinary duties of wife and mother, but the general management of farms and property, and performed these functions most efficiently, as is shown by the commendation which she receives from her loving partner quite as frequently as advice. She makes purchases and sales, she hires help, she garners crops. Through it all she carries her own burden and avoids, so far as possible, filling her letters with complaints. "I know the weight of public cares lie so heavy upon you that I have been loath to mention your own private ones." ^*

In dealing with that greatest and ever-present and insoluble problem of married and all other life, money, Mrs. Adams herself asserts that she was thrifty and prudent. So do all the rest of us, all man and womankind. But in this case I think we may believe the statement. There was certainly no niggardliness. The husband was too large for petty cheese-paring. "You know I never get or save anything by cozening or classmating," '"^ he writes, and his wife was like him. She maintained a sober decency and propriety in her own expenditure, and through all the cramped revolutionary time, when dollars were even rarer than hope, she always kept and used the means of relieving those whose straits were worse than her own. But she understood thoroughly both the theory of economy and its practice. Few professional students would have analyzed financial conditions more keenly than she does in the long letter written to her husband at an early stage of the war.^® And the practical strain shows in her simple statement: "I have studied, and do study, every method of economy in my power; otherwise a mint of money would not support a family." ^^

Certainly, without any intention of boasting, she herself, in her later years, sums up her usefulness to husband and children when she is explaining to her sister the multiplicity of care that seems to hang around her as thickly in age as it did in youth: "You know, my dear sister, if there be bread enough, and to spare, unless a prudent attention manage that sufficiency, the fruits of diligence will be scattered by the hand of dissipation. No man ever prospered in the world without the consent and cooperation of his wife." ^^

As she had patience to endure want and privation, so she had courage to meet danger. When those she loves are in peril, her heart feels "like a heart of lead."^® But for herself, sensitive as her nerves may be, there is a strain of heroism which swells and hardens at the touch of emergency. The anticipation of evils makes her doubt a little. "If danger comes near my dwelling, I suppose I shall shudder."^'' But when her husband writes to her, " In case of real danger, of which you cannot fail to have previous intimations, fly to the woods with our children," ^^ we know, we see, that she would have had perfect presence of mind either to fly, or to remain, as the wisest courage might dictate. "I am not suddenly elated or depressed, " ^^ she says ; and again, " I am not apt to be intimidated." ^^ Though she was far from given to self-commendation, she declares solemnly that if the men are not able to perform their duty to their country, the enemy will find the women to be a veritable race of Amazons. Nay, she even goes forth as a spectator and enjoys one of the most fierce, intense excitements known to man, the vision of a field of battle. " I have just returned from Penn's hill, where I have been sitting to hear the amazing roar of cannon, and from whence I could see every shell which was thrown. The sound, I think, is one of the grandest in nature, and is of the true species of the sublime." ^^

Do not, however, set this lady down as one who would have taken a bloodthirsty delight in bull-fights or the prize ring. If she hearkened with a thrill of awed pleasure to the booming of cannon, it was because they were fired in defense of her country and of liberty. She knew well what her friends and fellow citizens were fighting for, and if she took a passionate interest in the struggle, it was because her whole heart and hopes were fixed upon the end of it. Her husband's letters to her contain much lucid statement and analysis of the methods and aims of the Revolution, and hers are scarcely behind his in clear understanding and intensity of purpose.

She thought much, and thought with broad intelligence on general political questions, liked to talk of them, liked to write of them. "Well, you tell H. she must not write politics; now it is just as natural for me to fall upon them as to breathe." ^^ She has no illusions about democracy, or about human nature, — speaks at times even with cynical insight of its failures and defects. The lamentable inconsistencies of statesmanship are not hidden from her. How many who were fighting for American freedom at that day had the courage to cry out that it was absurd for men who kept slaves to take up arms and fight battles in the name of liberty? Mrs. Adams had that courage.^^

Yet, in spite of the selfishness of politicians and the inadequacy of human ideals, this wise and energetic woman never faltered for a moment in her devotion to the cause of her country, never wavered in her hope. The warmth and the glory of her enthusiasm must have been a splendid comfort to her husband and to all who knew her. Her passion does, indeed, occasionally degenerate into bitterness against her enemies. Alas, we do not need recent examples to show us that this is too easy with even the wisest and the noblest. " Those who do not scruple to bring poverty, misery, slavery, and death upon thousands will not hesitate at the most diabolical crimes," she writes ; " and this is Britain." ^^ But she has the same noble scorn for folly and meanness on her own side. "If our army is in ever so critical a state, I wish to know it. . . . If all America is to be ruined and undone by a pack of cowards and knaves, I wish to know it. Pitiable is the lot of their commander." ^^ And her words of counsel, of confidence, of inspiration, are never wanting. Her young brother-in-law longs to enter the army. She pleads and reasons with his doubting mother to make her permit it. Her husband is involved in an endless tangle of difficulty and danger. She would not have him shun an hour of it. ".You cannot be, I know, nor do I wish to see you, an inactive spectator; but if the sword be drawn, I bid adieu to all domestic felicity, and look forward to that country where there are neither wars nor rumors of war, in a firm belief, that through the mercy of its King we shall both rejoice there together." ^^ Nor does she urge others to sacrifices which she is unwilling to make herself. Foreign luxuries? Let them go. Plain milk makes as good a breakfast as sugared coffee. Not one of the comforts to which she has been accustomed but she will cheerfully renounce. If the men are taken from the fields, the women will do the work for them. She herself doubts her strength for digging potatoes, but she can gather corn and husk it. What she can do, she will do, that her children and her children's children may be free.

Ill

Mrs. Adams's interesting combination of a true woman's gentleness and sensibility with the masculine qualities called for by her time is best studied, as some of the preceding quotations indicate, in her relation to her husband. To understand this relation fully, it is necessary to have some idea of his very marked and peculiar character. He was, then, a man of broad intellectual power, of keen insight into political and moral problems, of energetic and self-sacrificing patriotism. He commanded the respect of all men by his dignity, his courage, his sincerity of speech and action, his entire honesty. But men did not love him; for he had not tact; he had not social charm; he bristled with egotism, and, like many egotists, he was morbidly sensitive and showed it. I do not know any one quotation that much better depicts the man than the following: "I have a very tender, feeling heart. This country knows not, and never can know, the torments I have endured for its sake. I am glad it never can know, for it would give more pain to the benevolent and humane than I could wish even the wicked and malicious to feel.'"^^ Try to imagine Washington saying that.

Also, John Adams was a man who found fault with everything, and therefore naturally he found fault with his wife. Even his praise too often savors of patronage and his advice is apt to carry a strong taint of criticism. Occasionally he flings out in undisguised displeasure. Though she was the last person to complain of her health, he cannot resist a sarcasm about it : " My wife has been sick all winter, frequently at the point of death, in her own opinion." '^^ Her indiscretion in money matters, though at a time when discretion was almost impossible, provokes him to sharp reproof. " How could you be so imprudent ? You must be frugal, I assure you."®^ But the best is the incident of the young coach horses, driven imprudently to church and causing a most indecorous disturbance there. Mrs. Adams was not present herself, but she authorized the proceeding, and the husband notes, in hot wrath, "I scolded at the coachman first, and afterwards at his mistress, and I will scold again and again; it is my duty."^^ Perhaps a husband to whom scolding is a duty is even worse than one to whom it is a pleasure.

Nevertheless, this husband, who could scold and be imperious and even tyrannical, like others, adored and reverenced and obeyed his wife, like others. How pretty are his compliments to her wit and intelligence, though he veils them under sarcasm. Of a certain acquaintance he says: "In large and mixed companies she is totally silent, as a lady ought to be. But whether her eyes are so penetrating, and her attention so quick to the words, looks, gestures, sentiments, etc., of the company, as yours would be, saucy as you are this way, I won't say."^* And there is no trace of sarcasm in the ample admission to his son that in all the vicissitudes of fortune his wife had been his help and comfort, while without her he could not have endured and survived. In a letter written to his granddaughter the same enthusiasm appears, even more nobly. He compares his wife to the heroic Lady Russell, who stood by her husband's side in times equally troublous. " This lady," he says, "was more beautiful than Lady Russell, had a brighter genius, more information, a more refined taste, and [was] at least her equal in the virtues of the heart." '^

An extensive correspondence, covering many years, reveals to us fully Mrs. Adams's relations with this companion of her long life, reveals her love and anxiety and devotion and enthusiasm for the man to whom she early gave her whole heart and from whom she never withdrew it for a moment. As he rises in the world, becomes a guide and a leader, a prominent citizen, a great historical figure, she accompanies him in spirit always, with watchful care, with fruitful caution, with delicate suggestion. She sighs over the necessities of state which part her from him. She slights, as we all do, great gifts of fortune that we have, and deplores those that are denied her. She hoped to have married a man, not a title, she says. A humble, private station with a husband would have been sweeter than grandeur without one. Yet we know well enough that she would not have had him lose an inch of fortune for her comfort, and never woman developed more fully the grace and ease and dignity which great station requires than did she. The letter she wrote him on the day of his inauguration as president has been often cited and deserves citation. It is a noble letter. "My feelings are not those of pride or ostentation, upon the occasion. They are solemnized by a sense of the obligations, the important trusts, and numerous duties connected with it. That you may be enabled to discharge them with honor to yourself, with justice and impartiality to your country, and with satisfaction to this great people, shall be the daily prayer of your A. A." ^® And as she was perfectly adapted to share her husband's greatness, so she accepted with equal composure and dignity his comparative failure and downfall. She did not seek honors and glories, she says, and she is quite content to part from them. A peaceful life at Quincy, with the man she loves, is all she ever asked for, and nothing can be more delightful than to have it given back to her. We know how much of sincerity there is in such declarations and how much of creditable and fine mendacity. In Mrs. Adams they were probably as sincere as they ever are. She was a sincere woman. But though she was perfectly ready to accept her husband's defeat, she could not quite forgive those who, in her opinion, had conspired against him and betrayed him. Toward such political enemies her language is not wholly free from a certain ungracious, if pardonable, acerbity. Thus, she says of one who should have been beneath her contempt, "I hear that Duane has got hold of my letter to Niles, and spits forth vulgar abuse at me . . . but the low sarcasms of these people affect me no more at this day than the idle wind."^^

Even in regard to Jefferson her animosity was long a-dying. In early days she had known him well and admired and loved him. Then the fierce political contest which made him her husband's successor parted them. Between the two men the feud was soon forgotten, and the long correspondence of their old age, crowned by their deaths on the same anniversary of American independence, is one of the striking traditions of our history. But Mrs. Adams forgave more slowly than her husband. When Jefferson, who had always admired her and who spoke of her as " one of the most estimable characters on earth," ^^ finally made a direct appeal to their former affection, she answered him with courtesy, but with a clear, vigorous, burning logic that showed how deep and unhealed the old wound was: Jefferson's conduct, she says, she "considered as a personal injury." Then she ends, as a Christian should : "I bear no malice. I cherish no enmity. I would not retaliate if it was in my power." "^ But nobody is left in a moment's doubt as to what she felt.

Through all these accidents and floods of fortune it is easy to observe how great at once and how unobtrusive was Mrs. Adams's influence over her husband. She never dreamed of any vulgar domination, or desired it. She knew well the limits of her activity and his and respected them. Her advice, when given at all, was given discreetly, tentatively, and, without being in any way enforced, was left with time to prove its value. Time did prove its value, and in consequence the recipient of it came to look for more and to depend upon it more than he knew, perhaps more than even she herself knew.

Yet in all that concerned their personal relations, as indeed in all that concerned human nature, her knowledge was far finer and more delicate than his. It was just this exquisite comprehension of his character and temperament that made her counsel of such constant utility. To be sure, her means of information were greater, as well as her faculty of insight. He had little reserve, with her at any rate, spoke out his needs and hopes and discouragements, made plain his strength and weakness, unrolled his heart like a scroll before her searching and tender scrutiny. This she could not do. She felt more than he those mighty, subtle barriers which seal the tongue and make it incapable of uttering what it yearns to utter. In one of her letters occurs this simple statement which says so much : " My pen is always freer than my tongue. I have written many things to you that I suppose I never could have talked." ^° Yet even her pen is tongue-tied in comparison with his. Therefore it is evident that much of her is beyond his divination, while she sees clear into every corner of his heart, understands v^^hat affection there is, what power there is, what weakness there is, understands just exactly the weight and significance there is in those scoldings delivered again and again from a sense of duty. Must we add that she saw all this partly from finer vision and partly from greater eagerness, while he saw not only all he was fitted, but also all that he desired, to see?

For she was a woman, and her love was her whole soul; and it is a delight, after all these strayings in masculine by-paths, to return to the woman in her. She writes long letters on great matters, domestic difficulties, foreign levies, questions of policy, questions of state; but always in some brief sentence there is the heart of the letter and the heart of the woman. It is annoying sometimes to stiff, starched John. " I shall have vexations enough, as usual," he writes. " You will have anxiety and tenderness enough, as usual. Pray strive not to have too much." ®^ When there is prospect of their letters being captured by the British and printed, his comment is, that they would both be made to appear very ridiculous.®^

Ridiculous ! What does she care for being ridiculous ?

This is the man she worships and she wants him. At the very suggestion of his being ill, ten thousand horrors seize upon her imagination, and she says so. All he writes of state matters is very well. She is glad to hear it, hungers for it. But she hungers far more for those little tokens of tenderness which he has no time for giving. "Could you, after a thousand fears and anxieties, long expectation and painful suspense, be satisfied with my telling you that I was well, that I wished you were with me, that my daughter sent her duty, that I had ordered some articles for you, which I hoped would arrive, etc., etc.? By Heaven, if you could, you have changed hearts with some frozen Laplander, or made a voyage to a region that has chilled every drop of your blood." ^^ Love her, oh, yes, she knows he loves her, after his fashion, but why does n't he say so, after her fashion? "Every expression of tenderness is a cordial to my heart." ^* " I want some sentimental effusions of the heart." ^* The language is the language of Addison, but the want is the want of Eve forever. It murmurs through these letters of war and business like a touch of birdsong on a field of battle.

Then, when we Have got it thoroughly into our heads that this was a woman and a lover, we can end with her own splendid answer — appropriate at this day as it was at that — when she was asked how she bore having Mr. Adams absent for three years in his country's service. ''If I had known, sir, that Mr. Adams could have effected what he has done, I would not only have submitted to the absence I have endured, painful as it has been, but I would not have opposed it, even though three years more should be added to the number (which Heaven avert!). I feel a pleasure in being able to sacrifice myi selfish passions to the general good, and in imitating the example which has taught me to consider myself and family but as the small dust of the balance, when compared with the great community."^®

II

Sarah Alden Bradford

Born in Boston, July 31, 1793.

Married Rev. Samuel Ripley, 1818.

Lived in Waltham, Massachusetts, 18 18-1846.

Lived in Concord, Massachusetts, from 1846

until her death.

Husband died, November 24, 1847.

Died in Concord, July 26, 1867.

SARAH ALDEX RIPLEY

II

I

Few American women of to-day know of Mrs. Samuel Ripley, but a sentence from Senator Hoar's "Autobiography " will give her a favorable introduction : " She was one of the most wonderful scholars of her time, or indeed of any time. President Everett said she could fill any professor's chair at Harvard." To this we may add the testimony of Professor Child, whose authority no one will question : " The most learned woman I have ever known, the most diversely learned perhaps of her time, and not inferior in this respect, I venture to say, to any woman of any age."

It seems worth while to hear a little more about her, does it not?

From her childhood she had a passion for books and study. Every available minute was snatched for them, and some that were not available. " I never go to Boston or anywhere else, my passion for reading increasing inversely with time," she writes when little more than a child. In the early years of the nineteenth century,