In his recent call for a constitutional amendment banning homosexual marriage, President Bush declared to the American people that “the union of a man and woman is the most enduring human institution, . . . honored and encouraged in all cultures and by every religious faith.” He warned that “marriage cannot be severed from its cultural, religious and natural roots” without dire social consequences, and he placed much of the blame for the current threat on “activist judges.” Without a constitutional amendment, “every state would be forced to recognize any relationship that judges in Boston . . . choose to call a marriage.” The president’s supporters have echoed his sentiments in countless op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, upholding the sanctity of marriage and its unchanging traditions in the face of challenges by gay-marriage advocates.

The outcry against gay marriage rests on the assumption that marriage is a “natural” institution rooted in timeless religious and cultural practices. But President Bush and his supporters have got their history wrong, at least with respect to religion, government, and marriage in Massachusetts. The Puritan colonists who founded Massachusetts might not have welcomed same-sex households, but they were not afraid to use the power of government to redefine marriage. And they surely would have agreed with today’s gay-marriage advocates that the state and its concern for fairness, not the church and its concern for sanctity, should govern the social rules for joining two people in perpetual union.

The English Puritans who founded Massachusetts in 1630 formed a society as committed to religion as any in history. But for them, marriage was a civil union, a contract, not a sacred rite. In early Massachusetts, weddings were performed by civil magistrates rather than clergymen. They took place in private homes, not in church buildings. No one wore white or walked down the aisle. Even later, when it became customary for ministers to preside at weddings (still held in private homes), the clergy’s authority was granted by the state, not the church.

 

Massachusetts’ founders insisted on civil unions, not as a reluctant compromise with the state, but as a direct outgrowth of their religious beliefs. Puritans were dissenters from the Church of England, which like the Catholic Church treated marriage as a sacrament. In England, the king was “defender of the faith,” bishops sat in the House of Lords, and the Church of England had legal authority over all religious matters, including marriage. Puritans strongly opposed this system. They wanted to adhere strictly to the Bible in shaping their forms of worship, but as they read it, the New Testament offered no precedent for bishops, ecclesiastical courts, and royal control over religion. What’s more, they held that the Bible sanctioned only baptism and communion as sacraments, since these were the only sacraments that Jesus took part in himself.

Marriage remained important to Puritans (it was often used as a metaphor for the divine love between believers and God), but they wanted to remove it from the realm of sacred authority, leaving only the sacraments under church control. This radical change was impossible to achieve in England, where the unified church and state used its power to persecute dissenters. But when they migrated to Massachusetts, the Puritan founders were free to shape their new society according to their beliefs. As a result, Massachusetts had no bishops, no ecclesiastical courts. The state regulated all aspects of the marriage process, from “publishing the banns”–an announcement of the intent to marry that was an early predecessor to the marriage license–to the marriage ceremony, the giving of dowries, property and inheritance rights, and in rare cases, divorce.

Early Boston’s Puritans would not have sanctioned gay marriage, because they would not have had the conceptual categories to make sense of the idea. They condemned and occasionally punished homosexual behavior as a sin, a deviation from the procreative function of sexuality. But in this light, homosexual behavior was not categorically different in their eyes from other forms of sexual transgression, from premarital sex to masturbation. Sexual behavior was something a person did, an action of the moment, not a form of identity or a defining characteristic of a person’s nature. Race, by contrast, was a category that New England’s Puritans often did regard as a form of identity, a defining characteristic that separated Europeans from Africans or Native Americans. In this respect, they were no different from most people of that era. And yet Puritans like Samuel Sewall, a judge on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court and author of the first antislavery pamphlet in America, abhorred the laws barring interracial marriage. He fought to grant legal recognition to the marriages of slaves and free people of color. Sewall stands at the beginning of a proud tradition in which Massachusetts judges used the court’s power to decide cases in favor of equal rights for all. In Sewall’s view, all people “are the Sons and Daughters of the First Adam, the Brethren and Sisters of the Last Adam, and the Offspring of God; They ought to be treated with a Respect agreeable.”

Massachusetts history reminds us that what we commonly call marriage today was initially, and quite deliberately, constructed as a form of civil union. Although marriage was a fundamental aspect of these highly religious people’s lives and the foundational element of their social order, its regulation was separate from the church. The Puritan founders understood marriage as a social institution that needed adjustment according to changing circumstances, and they left the state to do this important work.

In every region of colonial North America, devout believers fought over how to define true religion, and where to draw the line between church and state. In some of the smaller and initially more homogeneous colonies like Massachusetts and Connecticut, religious uniformity was enforced by the state. But taken collectively, no single religion in colonial America ever had the power to decide for everyone, everywhere, what was sacred. As a practical matter, the traditional practice of state-enforced religious uniformity proved to be unworkable in the new American republic. It was this de facto diversity that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution enshrined in federal law.

Different religious communities have long maintained different standards governing who can marry, whether interfaith marriages are permissible, what the obligations of marriage entail, and when or if divorces can be granted. We should not forget that the English Reformation began in 1529 with a conflict between Henry VIII and Pope Clement VII over whether Henry’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon could be annulled. Henry said yes, Clement said no, and in that dispute a new religious tradition, with new ways of defining the relationship between church and state, was born. The idea of legalized homosexual marriage is no doubt innovative. Some religious traditions reject it, while others support it. But the same was true of past adjustments to the legal definition of marriage, such as the recognition of interracial marriage. The traditions pioneered by Boston judges–a legacy that removed marriage from church control–have made these legal adjustments to social changes possible. A policy wherein all marriages are considered as civil unions would be consistent with America’s strongest traditions regarding civil liberties, equal rights, the separation of church and state, and the freedom of religion.

Further Reading:

On the history of marriage in the North American colonies and the United States, see Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, 2000); Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, 2002); Ann Marie Plane, Colonial Intimacies: Indian Marriage in Early New England (Ithaca, 2000); Roger S. Thompson, Sex in Middlesex: Popular Mores in a Massachusetts County, 1649-1699 (Amherst, 1986); and the Amici Curiae Brief of the Professors of the History of Marriage, Families, and the Law, filed in the case of Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, 798 N.E. 2d 941 (2003).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 4.3 (April, 2004).

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Mark Peterson, who teaches history at the University of Iowa, is at work on a book about the history of Boston in the Atlantic World.

On June 2, 1833, her sixteenth wedding anniversary, Jane Minot Sedgwick opened a blank book and began journaling: “I have now been a widow seventeen months—my only remaining interest in life now is to watch over the characters of my children & aid their development.” Devastated by her husband Henry’s illness and death, she was gripped by the fear that the extensive caregiving she had provided her husband had caused her to neglect, and thus permanently damage, her children’s characters. She spent the next two decades chronicling her dedication to parenting theory and practice. Contemporary parenting manuals emphasized the importance of cultivating good character in children so they could resist and even avoid the temptations of the world, but Sedgwick articulated a vision of life-long parenting that went far beyond this. She aimed to cultivate mental and emotional “strength” in her children so they would be prepared to handle life’s unavoidable trials and sorrows. “[L]ife must be full of rough places,” challenging to rich and poor alike, but Jane hoped to raise children who might endure them, succeeding where she and their father had failed.

In any American bookstore, you’ll find abundant parenting literature that claims to define, through its advice, the shape, duration, and purpose of parenthood. These books have their antecedents in the parenting manuals and advice columns that flooded America in the early years of the nineteenth century, written by doctors, ministers, and middle-class women who claimed expertise. They argued that the rapid social changes of the early republic would lead to chaos in the absence of people of good character. Having the requisite good character allowed young people to marry well, socialize agreeably, form trustworthy business arrangements, and resist temptation in the dangerous world of Jacksonian capitalism. This parenting literature presented a new, intentional approach to childrearing that promised to facilitate safe, stable mobility for individuals and society, and assured parents–especially mothers–that with attention, care, and devotion, they could mold their children.

But Jane Minot Sedgwick was not a member of the rising middle class, anxious for her children to advance in the world. She wasn’t a farm wife facing the prospect of sending her son off to the city or her daughters off to the factory town without a supportive kin network. Thanks to an inheritance, she did not have to grapple with the difficult financial choices that other widows faced. She could–and did–choose to remain unmarried for the rest of her life. Yet Sedgwick’s journal reveals the ways in which antebellum parenting literature can obscure the struggles and goals of parenting that cut across class lines. Her journal is full of the anxiety, frustration, and grief of a woman traumatized by her husband’s reckless financial behavior, struggles with mental illness, and early death. It is dominated by the fear that she had failed her children in their crucial early years, and chronicles her attempts to right that wrong. Its usefulness as a source is not diminished by Sedgwick’s failure to write every day. Instead, in regularly taking stock of her children’s progress as the seasons changed, on holidays, and at her wedding anniversary, Sedgwick left behind a parenting journal that is both deeply and consistently reflective. Stretching from 1833 to 1853, well into the adult lives of her children, Sedgwick’s journal reminds us that this new intentional parenting could be a life-long process. Finally, its specific duration illuminates both the heady American faith in the perfectibility of the individual and the subsequent erosion of that faith, a central ideological shift in American thought manifested in the private anxieties of a widow raising four small children alone.

 

Jane Minot started her married life well-positioned to reign over the sort of happy family that domestic novels celebrated. The daughter of a prominent Boston family, she married Henry Dwight (Harry) Sedgwick, the third son of Federalist politician and judge Theodore Sedgwick, on June 3, 1817. They made their home in New York, where Harry practiced law. Their home was marked by loss when their first child, George, born in 1818, died a few weeks before Sedgwick gave birth to their second in the winter of 1821, a daughter they named Jane. Frances (Fanny) followed in 1822, then Henry (Hal) in 1824, and Louisa in 1826. It was then, with a house full of young and healthy children, that the Sedgwick family harmony began to dissolve. Harry increasingly alternated between stretches of deep depression and periods in which he had boundless energy and limitless faith in himself. As his sister Catharine noted: “He is continually making contracts on the most magnificent scale–he thinks the powers of his mind unbounded.” These magnificent yet reckless decisions nearly ruined the family’s finances, and he sent his wife and four children to live in his native Stockbridge. Noting his poor eyesight and agitated mental state, his wife and siblings urged him to step away from his work, but he refused, further animated by “the sense of injustice he feels from continual opposition.”

By the fall of 1828, his sister Catharine believed he “ought imme’y to be separated from his friends & put under restraint.” Sedgwick resisted, her husband having begged her in his calmer moments not to place him in the hands of a “mad Doctor.” When his condition failed to improve, she relented, consenting to his hospitalization only to see his mental and physical condition drastically deteriorate during months of treatment at McLean Asylum and the Hartford Retreat for the Insane. Bringing her husband home for good in 1830, she devoted herself to his care–reading to him, walking with him, and consoling him when he was awakened by nightmares of the asylum. He fell into a coma in the fall of 1831 and died a few days after Christmas. Through it all, Sedgwick’s in-laws noted with approval and pride, “her fortitude endures.”

Antebellum women were told to aspire to being both perfect wives and perfect mothers. Sedgwick’s devotion to her husband during his illness had required sacrificing one goal to serve the other. When Harry had been under a doctor’s care, his wife often traveled to visit him, leaving her children in the care of in-laws. When Harry had come home, much as his children seemed to settle him and make him happy, Sedgwick had struggled to care for her ailing husband and manage her four young children at the same time, so she often sent the children to stay with family for weeks and even months at a time. Harry’s needs, she confessed to her brother-in-law Charles, “are so boundless that I must retrench somewhere.”

In the wake of her husband’s death, Sedgwick began her journal in 1833 by considering her failure to be both a wife and a mother to those who had depended on her: “. . . what a double responsibility falls upon me as a parent . . . I can never hope to fulfil all the duties that devolve upon me . . . my mind has so long been accustomed to attend only to him that I have been invisible to other cares—I have no longer an apology for neglecting anything which relates to the [care] of my children.” Before Harry’s illness, she wanted her children to have “warm & yet gentle character[s].” After his death, she wanted them to develop the personal strength necessary to endure life’s inevitable trials. Harry’s illness and death left her with the sole responsibility of parenting her children to adulthood and a new vision for what that adulthood must look like. She would try to raise Jane, Fanny, Hal, and Louisa to be stronger than their parents had been.

 

In order to track her children’s characters and “aid in their development,” Sedgwick began her journal with a frank assessment of each child’s current character. Little Jane, at twelve, “had the interior of a woman, a good deal of sense & discernment,” but little “practical usefulness” or regard for others. Ten-year-old Fanny was much the opposite: “affectionate but timid in her disposition” and deeply attached to her mother. Hal, “a lovely looking boy” of eight, was full of what his mother termed “spirit,” though spoiled and with an “inveterate propensity for fun.” Louisa, at six, was “less conspicuous than the other children,” but her mother felt she had “the sweetest disposition of the whole four” and “good common sense.”

Initially, she sought to catch her children up as quickly as possible, and her approach reflects much of what we see in the advice literature of the time. She sought good educational opportunities for her children whenever possible. She sent Jane to Boston for schooling soon after her husband’s death, and sent Hal to live with his Aunt Elizabeth and Uncle Charles in Lenox “for the benefit of Mr. Parker’s instruction in Latin.” Fanny and Louisa both went to Aunt Elizabeth’s school, and then to Mr. Parker’s with their brother, before he departed for Harvard. When her daughters were at home in Stockbridge, Sedgwick employed young women to teach them drawing and piano. She did not completely abandon the education of her children to teachers, as cautioned against by parenting literature, but rather gave her daughters chores at home to reinforce their lessons and make them industrious. The constant parade of visitors to whom the children were exposed–Channings and Follens, Harriet Martineau, Fanny Kemble, and Horace Mann–testify to Sedgwick’s commitment to learning by example, a central tenet of contemporary parenting advice.

Over the course of the journal, distinct visions of male and female adulthood emerged, antebellum gender roles abstracted through the prism of Sedgwick’s own suffering. In her efforts to mold her children into the adults she believed they needed to be, we see anxieties and worries about childrearing deeper and more fundamental than what contemporary advice literature addressed. Sedgwick was concerned, for instance, that Hal remained more interested in fun than work, a fairly common concern at the time. Parenting literature advised parents to curb greedy and impulsive behavior in children, often warning them of the dangers that would face their children–and their sons in particular–in young adulthood: alcohol, tobacco, sex, and gambling. Sedgwick showed little concern over her son’s fondness for tobacco, and none at all over his fondness for alcohol, a fondness that she and her daughters shared. Instead, her writing reflects her specific fear that Hal might take after his father, whose impulsive tendencies, to her mind, led him to make risky and disastrous financial decisions, and rendered him incapable of reflection and improvement in the face of failure, which ultimately trapped him in a deepening mental and emotional instability that claimed his life. Raising her son to avoid greed, temptation, and impulsive behavior was not simply a matter of saving his reputation, or even his soul; it was a matter of saving his mind and ultimately his life, and simply teaching him to avoid drinking and gambling was insufficient. If Hal could display true fortitude in the face of life’s trials, enduring them and learning from them in ways his father had failed to do, indulging in a glass or three of wine with dinner posed little danger.

Her experiences with her husband and fears for her son also shaped how she assessed her daughters’ characters and planned for their futures. Sedgwick worried that her daughter Jane–strong and independent–lacked warmth, and that Fanny–warm and sympathetic–lacked strength. Before their marriage, Harry had promised his fiancée he would never take financial risks, but he had, and ultimately left his widow to carry on alone. As a result, Sedgwick sought to raise her three daughters to have the fortitude to endure the suffering and the warmth to endure the pain that resulted from the poor choices of the men who ultimately controlled their fortunes. Status and financial security had not been enough to dissuade her husband from making risky decisions, nor had they been enough to shield her from the painful effects of his failures. In light of this, Sedgwick believed her daughters needed to develop strength their mother believed that she herself lacked.

 

Given the depth of her fear for her children’s futures, it is perhaps unsurprising that she was often pessimistic about their progress, especially that of her daughters. She consistently lamented young Jane’s willfulness, Fanny’s clinginess, and Louisa’s lack of industry. Hal received slightly more praise, as his longer formal schooling provided his mother with external evaluation from his teachers and professors. In general, though, Sedgwick continued to see in her children the worrisome flaws she had identified early in life, and expressed her frustration both at the persistence of these flaws and her inability correct them.

Even rarer than Sedgwick’s praise for her children was praise for herself. She believed her children’s moral failings to be her fault, and she took herself to task for not knowing how to change them: “Of all my trials but one–the impossibility of influencing my children as I wish is by far the greatest.” Over and over, she catalogued her failures and errors: “I have not been in all respects a judicious mother,” “I have not taught them self-denial,” “perhaps I expect too much at once.”

Authors of parenting advice like Jane’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Sedgwick insisted that if a mother was sufficiently self-sacrificing and devoted to her children, “[s]he can create in them any taste, form in them almost any habits of occupation…can bend them almost at will.” This was a gift that every mother had, if she would embrace it: “she was born to train the sons and daughters of men for this world, and for the world to come.” In the privacy of her journal, Jane Sedgwick admitted that others “held in less estimation in society” –those for whom parenting manuals were purportedly written–seemed to have more of this “gift” than she did, but nowhere in the first ten years of her journal did she seriously question the central tenets of these manuals: that human character, especially when young, was moldable and perfectible, and that mothers had the ability and obligation to mold and perfect. Reflecting on earlier journal entries in which she expressed “discouraging views” of her children, Sedgwick was wracked with guilt over her own failings. This, in turn, prompted entries in which she endeavored to “bear testimony” to the progress in her children’s characters. Even then, she noted intellectual and social progress, but never the strength of character she believed she should have been able to cultivate.

Only one entry each year was consistently positive–Sedgwick’s Thanksgiving Day record of gratitude for “a healthy family competence”–but even that tradition was short-lived. Following the suicide of their cousin Charlie and the death of their Uncle Robert in the spring and summer, Jane, Fanny, and Louisa all fell ill with typhoid fever in the fall of 1841. The older two recovered, but Louisa died on October 13th, just a few weeks before her fifteenth birthday. Relatives praised Fanny and Jane, who were pensive and calm in the wake of their sister’s death. One aunt singled out Hal, who was “grave, but has more elasticity than any of them,” though his mother privately recorded seeing his “agony over the dead body of his sister & [hearing] his bitter lamentations.”

To her sister-in-law Catharine, Jane was “the ultimate model of strength in suffering” in the wake of her daughter’s death: “calm, submissive, & thoughtful for others.” In the privacy of her journal, however, Sedgwick expressed the depth of her grief and regret in the weeks following her Louisa’s death, beginning by copying over Dickens’ description of Little Nell’s death. Then, in November 1841, in the longest single entry in her journals, she memorialized her daughter, beginning with the circumstances of her birth: “Louisa was born during a most troubled season of my married life–just after her father’s great controversy which commenced his insanity…I was too much agitated by her father’s troubles to be able to nurse my child and I was so fortunate as to have her infancy most carefully watched over by the excellent Mammy Royce…her father’s disease increasing as she grew older, I was obliged to leave her very much to the care of Miss Speakman.”

Contemporary parenting experts argued that breastfeeding was vital to familial bonding–here, Sedgwick pointed to her failure to provide, and it seems, blamed her early neglect for her daughter’s fate. Moreover, these experts believed parental involvement more broadly was most vital in the early years of life, when children were most plastic; Elizabeth Sedgwick believed a mother’s “training of the immortal spirit” of her child must begin “[a]s soon as it is capable of comprehension,” and Reverend John S. C. Abbot argued in his 1844 work The Mother at Home that “the first six or seven years decide the character” that will follow a child to adulthood. Yet as a result of her father’s illness, Louisa had received the least maternal attention of any of Sedgwick’s children.

Sedgwick noted that, even with this early deprivation, her daughter’s “moral qualities . . . marked her individuality.” Every example she produced highlighted Louisa’s willingness to help others who were burdened with grief and illness, and her ability to do so without sacrificing other important obligations or her calm, optimistic disposition. Despite her own perceived failures as a parent, Sedgwick believed Louisa had embodied that much hoped-for strength of character that her parents had lacked. Even as she mourned her “sweet devoted child,” Sedgwick looked to the effects of Louisa’s death on her siblings: “if I could certainly feel that this dreadful affliction is to improve the mixture of my remaining children my sorrow would not be too despairing in its character.”

After a two year gap, Sedgwick resumed her journal after settling into New York apartments for the winter of 1843. She had come to New York solely for the sake of her children: to watch over Harry in his young professional life, to be near a doctor for Fanny, who had inherited her father’s eye problems, and to provide “the variety & excitement of a City life to check [young Jane’s] constitutional melancholy.” Yet she privately wondered whether her job as a parent was over: “I have no longer any direct control over them, neither have I much influence… my work in life is pretty much through . . . I have failed in my power to influence their minds.” Despite feeling this “sense of uselessness,” however, she could not stop trying to shape her children’s characters.

 

In these years, Sedgwick turned to religion, hoping her children might experience “regeneration” through the sermons of Henry Whitney Bellows or William Henry Channing. To her frustration, it seemed clear that they listened attentively yet “made no personal application of it.” She was most concerned about her son’s moral compass. While he was “governed by principle,” she desperately hoped he would “manifest a religious sentiment,” which she believed would be “the only security for the preservation of his present virtues.” But what could she do? Could she actually make them change?

Much as Hal’s adult flaws mirrored his childhood (and his father’s) troubles, Jane and Fanny were but more mature versions of their childhood selves. “Jane,” her mother noted, “has led rather an eccentric course from her love of independence & her desire to obtain useful occupation,” but had improved slightly in her “consideration for others.” Her strength and independence had increased, but some warmth had crept in. Fanny remained affectionate but timid, but had endured great suffering as a result of her eyes. Her mother proudly recorded that “she has exhibited great courage & fortitude” in the face of such hardship.

With her children grown, Jane Minot Sedgwick wondered not only whether they were still moldable, but also the extent to which they ever had been. In 1834, in her early widowhood, she viewed her children as “much too undisciplined for their age” and attributed this to her failure to be a mother to them while her husband was ill: “I presume I have made a mistake in the early management of them.” In 1844, three years after Louisa’s death, Sedgwick still wondered if there was a “deeper anguish than the feeling of utter inability to guide yr own offspring in what seems to you the essential paths for their virtue & happiness,” confessing in her journal: “this sentiment is so strong with me that I almost regret being a mother.” Yet she now recognized that Louisa, the child most deprived of parental attention in her formative years, had developed the exact character her mother desired. As a result, Sedgwick began to believe that the difficulties in guiding her older children were not due to a lack of effort to mold them, but because “the mould in which they are formed is different from mine,” and from their youngest sister’s.

Sedgwick’s evolving ideas about her children’s natures and her ability to shape them reflected an emerging American skepticism of the perfectibility of the individual and society at large, and an increasing emphasis on the determining power of innate characteristics. This shift in thinking allowed Sedgwick to take a new approach to parenting, one in which she considered not what was objectively “best,” but rather what was best for each individual child. Despite her concern over their fundamental natures, she hoped that “there may yet be elements in their characters which may result in something better than I anticipate.” When her daughter Jane was determined to venture south to work as a teacher, Sedgwick supported her when few others did; she likewise later supported Jane’s conversion to Catholicism. Further, she sent Jane and Hal to Europe together for six months with no other chaperones. She disliked the idea of foreign travel, but recognized her children were different than she was. She also consented to Fanny’s marriage with Alexander Watts, a beau “whose virtues are his only possession[.]” Though worried her daughter’s own virtues would be tested by this marriage, Sedgwick believed she had made the right decision “for [her] child’s happiness.” Though Sedgwick still emphasized the importance of strength, she accepted that strength might manifest itself differently in her children.

In December 1850, Fanny was struck by “derangement,” and Sedgwick expressed her deepest fears that history would repeat itself: “Am I called to go through the same agonies with my child which I endured for her father?” Sedgwick’s only consolation was the belief that her life of suffering had “deadened [her] sensibilities,” which might help her remain strong. Yet where she and her husband had failed twenty years earlier, she and her daughter persevered. Fanny emerged from her “mental malady,” seen through her illness by her mother. Sedgwick proudly recorded that she had both attended a family wedding and visited the “excellent city infirmary” at Five Points during her daughter’s illness, correctly balancing her social and familial obligations. Despite Sedgwick’s belief that she had failed to strengthen Fanny’s weak character in childhood, her daughter had endured this trial, and Sedgwick herself had parented her through it with the strength of character she felt she had lacked twenty-five years earlier.

In May 1851, Sedgwick noted that her children were all happy and “upright.” Given the “rough places” they had passed through, this was all she could have hoped for. In February 1853, she picked up the pen for the last time: “I must note a record of my dear little grandson… He is now 13 months old.” What had prompted this note? Her daughter Fanny was still an invalid, and “her heart [will] probably never be light again, but the smiles of her lovely boy give her a pure joy.” Jane Sedgwick believed that parenthood was about raising children to endure life’s trials, and her perceived failure at the task at itself seemed like a trial she herself could not endure. Yet in observing her own child become a parent, Sedgwick closed her journal by acknowledging that parenthood could also be the joy that eased life’s inescapable suffering.

 

Further Reading

All direct quotes come from Jane Sedgwick’s journals, the letters of Catharine Maria Sedgwick, and the letters of Louisa Davis Minot, which can be found in the Sedgwick Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, or from Elizabeth Sedgwick, “A Plea For Children” American Ladies’ Magazine, February 1835. The classic examination of the antebellum emphasis on character is Karen Halttunen’s Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven, 1982). For a recent exploration of nineteenth-century parenting literature, see Emily Casey’s 2011 dissertation “The Mightiest Influence on Earth: Americans’ Emerging Conception of Parenthood, 1820-1880.” On motherhood and female childrearing, see Ruth H. Bloch, “American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785-1815,” Feminist Studies 4:2 (June 1978): 100-126; Richard A. Meckel, “Educating a Ministry of Mothers: Evangelical Maternal Associations, 1815-1860,” Journal of the Early Republic 2:4 (Winter 1982): 403-423; and Lee Chambers-Schiller, “‘Woman Is Born to Love’: The Maiden Aunt as Maternal Figure in Ante-Bellum Literature,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 10:1 (1988): 34-43; Nora Doyle, “‘The Highest Pleasure of Which Woman’s Nature Is Capable’: Breast-Feeding and the Sentimental Maternal Ideal in America, 1750-1860,” The Journal of American History 97:4 (March 2011): 958-973; and Paula Fass, The End of American Childhood: A History of Parenting from Life on the Frontier to the Managed Child (Princeton, 2016). On maternal grief, see Sylvia D. Hoffert “‘A Very Peculiar Sorrow’: Attitudes Toward Infant Death in the Urban Northeast, 1800-1860,” American Quarterly 39:4 (Winter, 1987): 601-616 and Lucia McMahon, “‘So Truly Afflicting and Distressing to Me His Sorrowing Mother’: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 32:1 (Spring 2012): 27-60.

 

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Jackie Penny at the American Antiquarian Society for her help finding and reproducing the images in this piece. Thanks also to Allison Horrocks for her thoughts on early drafts, Amy Sopcak-Joseph for our discussions of women and “fortitude,” and William Black for fixing one stubborn sentence.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

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Erin Bartram is an independent scholar; she completed her PhD at the University of Connecticut in 2015. She is working on a book project on the possibilities and limitations of female self-culture in nineteenth-century America. Her work has appeared in U.S. Catholic Historian, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. She is a regular contributor to the blog Teaching U.S. History, and writes on history, pedagogy, and higher education on at www.erinbartram.com. You can find her on Twitter @erin_bartram.

 

Borderlands are fuzzy, slippery, ambiguous places. Whether imagined as a geographic region straddling an international border, “the contested boundaries between colonial domains,” or simply zones of intercultural contact where state or imperial power is weak, borderlands are spaces where social boundaries are unstable and social conventions appear more flexible. Cooperation and accommodation characterize the borderlands as much as conflict and violence. Historians often point to centuries of racial mixture to help explain the cultural fluidity and hybridization that prevail in the borderlands.

Tales of liaisons that transgressed racial boundaries (beginning with the relationship between Hernán Cortés and Malíntzin Tenépal) are so common in histories of the Southwestern borderlands that they function as a kind of creation story for the region and its peoples. Here, men exchanged women—as captives or wives—to establish, bolster, or consolidate economic and social relationships. Indigenous women not only provided sexual companionship and domestic labor, but also served critical roles as translators, guides, and cultural mediators in colonial encounters between Europeans and native peoples. Whether consensual or coerced, mixed unions figured prominently in the borderlands economy and culture.

We have imagined intimate unions between local women and immigrant men as a time-honored frontier practice that continued through the nineteenth century because it served a strategic purpose: establishing economic and social ties that bound newcomers to local elites in a mutually advantageous relationship. We have assumed that these marital connections helped elite borderland families solidify their social status and class position and provided a measure of security in a rapidly changing political and economic landscape after the U.S. conquest of northern Mexico. For immigrant men, marriage to local women provided access to land ownership and trade networks, as well as entrée into the political and social world of the landed gentry. Many scholars have maintained that these marital alliances—and the offspring they produced—also provided an opportunity for cultural exchange, which not only facilitated acculturation and assimilation, but also helped mute ethnic hostility and reduce violence (a similar story is told about mixed marriages in many other parts of North America).

According to the standard narrative, the social fluidity that promoted intermarriage didn’t last forever. As Anglo-Americans consolidated their power in the borderlands and U.S. officials gradually imposed control over the border itself, mixed unions declined dramatically. What was permissible—or even celebrated—in an earlier period, was no longer tenable after national identities and racial lines hardened in the wake of the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s and Great Depression. Or so the story goes.

 

 

Most examinations of interracial intimacy in the borderlands are told from the perspective of men. By that, I mean that the questions that drive these narratives tend to privilege the male (and the white) experience with mixed unions. How many immigrant men intermarried and why? What about local women (besides biology) made them appealing marriage partners to newcomers? How did changing rates of intermarriage reflect shifts in power relations between different ethnic groups in the Southwest? What broader social or economic purpose did the strategic exchange of women by men serve? Questions like these promote analyses of intermarriage that can often be reduced to stories of fathers betrothing daughters to immigrant white men and the benefits for patriarch and groom that ensue.

The male-centered approach is a practical one from the historian’s perspective. Anglo-American men are much easier to identify, locate, and trace through the historical record. Anomalous names like Bent, Carson, and Maxwell shine like a beacon through the sea of Bacas, Lopezes, and Romeros when you are scrolling through microfilm copies of marriage registers and court records. In addition to being highly visible, they are also a small and therefore methodologically manageable group. What is more, once the common law doctrine of coverture (which held that a woman’s legal identity and property rights were subsumed under that of her husband upon marriage) was extended over the region after the U.S. war with Mexico, husbands enjoyed a civic identity—and thus, a presence in the historical record—that was denied to their wives.

It is exceedingly difficult to trace women, but particularly non-elite women of color, through the sources that are available. Few left manuscript collections. Fewer still have had their stories preserved by pioneer organizations and heritage societies. Many who do appear in the record are identified by nothing more than their first name or their relationship to the head of the household in which they lived. How, then, do we place women at the center of our examinations of intermarriage without merely highlighting the experiences of a handful of exceptional women who possessed enough wealth, or status, or notoriety that the details of their lives have been preserved? How can we get at the experience of intermarriage as lived by women in the Southwestern borderlands?

If we wish to explore intermarriage through the perspective of women of color more broadly, our starting point can’t be the actions of immigrant men. Instead, we must begin by uncovering the general practices of the local population. This approach requires a fine-grained examination of a particular locality over a broad period of time.

I chose Las Vegas, New Mexico, as the site of my investigation. Las Vegas is about sixty miles east of Santa Fe, and was established by the Mexican government in 1835 to shield communities farther south from raids by Plains Indians. As the new port of entry into Mexico, the town quickly became an important site on the Santa Fe-Chihuahua trial. Just over a decade after the town’s founding, General Stephen Watts Kearny first claimed possession of New Mexico on behalf of the United States from a rooftop overlooking the plaza in Las Vegas. The construction of Fort Union less than thirty miles to the northeast in 1851 was a boon to the local economy, but paled in comparison to the arrival of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad in 1879 and that company’s decision to make Las Vegas a division center.

I turned to the manuscript census returns for a comprehensive view of domestic arrangements, family structure, and residential patterns practiced by the population at large. All of the statistics that follow are derived from a line-by-line analysis of the population schedules of each of the extant decennial censuses between 1850 and 1900 (most of the 1890 census was lost in a fire). I recorded demographic information—including age, sex, marital status, and “race”—for every resident of Las Vegas who was fifteen years old or older when the census was taken. In this essay, I refer to native New Mexicans of Hispanic or mestizo descent as “nuevomexicanos” (a self-referent in common use during the period) and I follow the contemporary convention of using “Anglo” as a convenient shorthand for nineteenth-century European and American immigrants to New Mexico and their descendants. The term thus includes Irish, Jewish, French Canadian, Italian, Eastern and Southern European peoples, as well as Anglo-Saxons.

Census records are not without limitations. They are likely to undercount the population. They are prone to human error and distortion. Enumerators were at times unreliable, and occasionally (as we will see) simply made up their own categories. The information that enumerators were instructed to collect changed over time, making comparisons across census years a challenge in some cases. And translating census data into socially constructed categories like race can be tricky, particularly during a time when the definitions of the racial categories being applied were changing. Nevertheless, census returns provide a snapshot of the population at a particular moment in time. As a human inventory of each household in a community, they reveal informal relationships that escape (or evade) church sanction and civil ceremony. Of all the available sources, census returns provide the most complete picture of mixed marriage and cohabitation in this relatively small outpost in the Southwestern borderlands during the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Among their many directives, enumerators were instructed to record the color of each individual they encountered. In 1850 and 1860, they were given three options in this regard: white, black, and mulatto. These categories left J.D. Robinson, the enumerator of the first federal census of Las Vegas, unsatisfied. He chose to leave the race column blank for all but a few individuals: one man he recorded as black, two children he listed as mulatto, and six people he identified as Indians—a category of his own choosing, rather than one prescribed by the census. Why he chose not to mark nuevomexicanos or Anglos by race is unclear. Perhaps he saw their whiteness as so patently obvious it required no comment. If so, he would have been rather exceptional given the racist vitriol that had so recently rationalized and justified the United States’ conquest of the region.

Census enumerators had a wider array of racial categories from which to choose in the 1870 and 1880 censuses. Officials could now designate individuals as Chinese or Indian, in addition to white, black, and mulatto. This trend was reversed in 1900, when the heading “color or race” replaced the expanding list of categories that appeared on previous forms.

These shifting labels made little difference in Las Vegas. Except for the anomalous behavior of J.D. Robinson in 1850, all other census enumerators recorded nuevomexicanos and Anglos alike as “white.” I relied on surname and place of birth to distinguish between the two groups through the 1870 census—an imperfect method of cataloging race, but an effective scheme for sorting out local residents and newcomers. Differentiating between nuevomexicanos and Anglos became easier with the inclusion in 1880 of the place of birth of each individual’s father and mother, and the additions in 1900 of immigration date, number of years in the United States, and naturalization status.

The 1880 census also made it easier to identify married couples. That was the first year officials recorded marital status (options included single, married, or widowed/divorced). More significantly, it was also the first year enumerators identified the relationship of each individual in a home to the head of household. Familial relationships can only be inferred before the addition of these specific categories. Still, enumerators were instructed to document residents of each household in a particular order: head of household, his wife, children from oldest to youngest, extended family members, boarders, and servants. Most officials followed these instructions consistently prior to 1880, so by exercising some caution it is possible to reliably infer familial relationships throughout the period. In this manner, I identified 3,155 likely marriages or informal unions in Las Vegas during the second half of the nineteenth century.

Census material can only tell us so much, however. While we can glean an impression of domestic life and gather a great deal of important demographic data from census returns, most women appear identified only by their first names and their relationship to the head of household. Consequently, examining intermarriage through the eyes of nuevamexicanas is primarily a statistical exercise—although it is an eminently useful one. Still, evidence of the experiences of these women is difficult to find in the pages of the census records.

Looking at mixed unions from the perspective of Anglo men gives the impression that interracial relationships were remarkably common in Las Vegas until the arrival of the railroad brought increasing numbers of Anglo women to the territory. In 1850, for example, seventy-nine percent of the Anglo men who were living with women in Las Vegas were married to (or cohabitating with) women of color. That number remained high (seventy percent in 1860 and seventy-four percent in 1870) until 1880, when the number plummeted: only fourteen percent of white men were intermarried. In 1900, the intermarriage rate for married Anglo men had declined even further, to just seven percent. These statistical trends conform to our general understanding of intermarriage on the frontier—in early periods of contact, immigrant men form unions (both formal and informal) with local women with great frequency. Once women from their own group arrive in the region, however, the frequency (and appeal) of intermarriage declines precipitously.

If we shift our point of view from the perspective of Anglo men to that of the local population, however, we see a much different trajectory. Rather than a boom followed by a dramatic decline in the late nineteenth century, the numbers of intermarriages are remarkably low and stable when viewed through the eyes of the much larger nuevomexicano community. Mixed unions consistently represented only a small fraction of overall marriages in Las Vegas. At no time between 1850 and 1900 did exogamous unions of any kind exceed ten percent of the total number of marriages. The figures are even more striking for Anglo-nuevomexicano unions specifically. Only three percent of marriages and informal unions in Las Vegas during the second half of the nineteenth century were between nuevomexicanos and Anglos.

The distance between seventy-four percent and three percent is dramatic to say the least. We can attribute part of the problem to lies, damn lies, and statistics. The numbers are bloated to begin with, not simply because they focus on Anglo men. Those studies of mixed unions that make claims about high percentages of intermarriage do so because they consider how many married men chose to intermarry. If we use the total number of Anglo men (rather than the number of married Anglo men) as the baseline, the rate is much more modest. Take, for example, the figures from the census with the highest percentage of intermarriage. In 1850, seventy-nine percent ofmarried Anglo men were intermarried, but seventy-five percent of the Anglo men in Las Vegas remained single. If we begin with the total number of Anglo men (seventy-five), we find that only twenty percent of them (fifteen) formed mixed unions. Why this was the case is difficult to say. Did seventy-five percent of the Anglo men in Las Vegas find single life to be more appealing than a mixed marriage? Or were seventy-five percent of the Anglo men in Las Vegas unable to convince any woman to accept a marriage proposal?

In any case, the actual number of intermarriages remained low throughout the nineteenth century. Census records reveal only forty unions between Anglo men and nuevamexicanas from 1850 to 1870 combined. The fact that only twenty-five Anglo women were enumerated in Las Vegas during the same period lays bare the reality of the marriage market for Anglo men: those choosing to marry were much more likely to marry a woman of color than another Anglo. And while some chose to do so, the vast majority of Anglo men in Las Vegas remained single throughout much of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Without question, the marriage market was different for nuevamexicanas than it was for Anglo men. Yet, the figures suggest that nuevamexicanas had an overwhelming preference for marrying within their community, as many also made the choice to remain single rather than marry outside their group. From the perspective of nuevamexicanas living in Las Vegas, Anglo men were not much more appealing marriage partners than Mexicans, African-Americans, or Indians.

The rarity of mixed marriage in nineteenth-century Las Vegas is revealed by simply inverting the lens through which we view it. By shifting our angle of vision from the experiences of Anglo men to that of local women, the implicit question that drives many studies of intermarriage is turned on its head. From the perspective of nuevamexicanas, the question is not why were there so many mixed unions, but why were there so few?

Population figures provide a partial answer. Prior to 1880, the adult population of Las Vegas was overwhelmingly nuevomexicano. Only after the arrival of the railroad did non-nuevomexicanos constitute even a tenth of the population. With such a small pool of non-nuevomexicano men, it is not surprising that few nuevamexicanas intermarried.

The sex ratio was a factor as well. While Anglo men outnumbered Anglo women by more than ten to one in 1850 and still by just over three to one in 1880, the sex ratio in the total population was much more equal. Again, this points to the small size of the Anglo community in Las Vegas during much of the period. It does not explain, however, why fifty to seventy-five percent of Anglo men chose not to marry when between thirty-six and forty percent of nuevamexicanas over the age of fifteen remained single.

The two groups shared much in common that should have promoted intermarriage. As a number of scholars have demonstrated, the gender and marriage systems operating in Spanish/Mexican and Anglo societies were fairly compatible. First and foremost, both were patriarchal and Christian. Each society also prized female virginity before marriage and demanded fidelity afterward. Likewise, they shared a double standard of sexual behavior, requiring sexual purity in women while rewarding sexual prowess in men. This double standard of sexual behavior was also racialized; both societies esteemed whiteness and sought to protect the purity of white women, while condoning or even encouraging the sexual exploitation of women of color by white men. In this fashion, both groups professed an aversion to racial mixture despite well-documented histories of its practice.

Spanish colonial society recognized a wide variety of mixed race peoples, but also maintained a stringent hierarchy between them. The racial system included not only españoles(Spaniards) and indios (Indians), but also people identified asmestizos (Spanish and Indian), mulatos (Spanish and African),castizos (Spanish and mestizo), castas (racial mixture), color quebrado (literally, “broken color”), and genízaros(Hispanicized Indians). One’s racial classification was determined not only by ancestry or phenotype, but also by occupation or class, and could change over time according to one’s circumstances.

Race and legitimacy were intertwined in colonial New Mexico, as many associated mixed unions with illegitimacy and illicit sex. Consequently, many marriages—particularly among the elite—were arranged, in order to ensure matches with someone of equal status to preserve family honor. Simply put, the state’s acknowledgment of mixed race people did not alter the association of racial mixture with dishonor. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, New Mexicans increasingly moved away from the nuanced racial hierarchy in place during the colonial period toward a more rigid racialization of two categories: Spanish and Indian.

In the years preceding the U.S. War with Mexico, Americans’ understanding of race and racial difference also hardened. The idea that the world was made up of distinct races, each with their own innate traits and separate origins, was commonplace by the 1840s. The inherent and unchanging characteristics of each race determined their position in society and the world. Thus, the natural order preordained that some races would rule over others. In the hierarchy of superior and inferior races, Anglo Saxons occupied the highest rung and, alone among races, had the capacity for self-government.

Mexicans, which included nuevomexicanos in the eyes of Anglos, were relegated to one of the lowest positions in the racial hierarchy. The mixed-blood progeny of Indians and Europeans, Mexicans were particularly debased because they were a “mongrelized” race. Neither purely European nor purely Indian, Mexicans were simultaneously semi-barbarous and semi-civilized. They retained none of the virtues that their Spanish fathers may have possessed when they arrived in the New World, and retained only the negative attributes of their indigenous mothers. These notions did little to encourage Anglos and nuevomexicanos to join together in the bonds of matrimony.

The two groups could agree, however, on the need to protect white women from the ravages of racial amalgamation with a third, more dangerous group: black men. Nuevomexicanos and Anglos in the territorial assembly (all men, of course) came together in 1857 to pass a miscegenation statute forbidding marriages between “any negro or mulatto” and “any woman of the white race.” Ministers who performed such marriage ceremonies would be fined, and white women who violated the law were subject to the same punishment as their black partners. The law was gender specific, preventing only the pairing of black men and white women. Designed to control the sexual behavior of women, the statute reflected and reinforced the racialized double standard of sexual behavior the two groups shared.

The miscegenation law does not explain why so few nuevamexicanas intermarried, however. It was repealed in less than a decade, and the men who passed it were not concerned with marriages between Anglos and nuevomexicanos in the first place. Both groups were legally white, after all. Who was socially white or was recognized as an honorable match was a different matter, and that was, perhaps, all that mattered in the end.

Unions between Anglo men and nuevamexicanas did not challenge either the Spanish colonial order or the prevailing social mores that were being imposed after the U.S. conquest. Yet they were remarkably rare. No more than three percent of nuevamexicanas were partnered with Anglo men at any point between 1850 and 1900. The rate of intermarriage did not ebb and flow with the changing demographic tide; it remained unwaveringly low.

Few people were willing to transgress social boundaries by marrying outside their group. Those who did were cultural outliers rather than agents of assimilation. If intermarriage could, in fact, mute ethnic hostility, there were simply too few mixed unions in Las Vegas to make much of a difference. Mixed marriages provided neither a cultural bridge nor economic security; intermarriage between Anglos and nuevamexicanas was neither central to colonialism nor a common strategy of accommodation. These notions simply fall apart when we place local women at the center of our analysis. Mixed marriages were rare, messy, and marginal. Our familiar narratives of racial and social fluidity in borderlands regions, it seems, are more imagined than real.

Racial boundaries in this borderland were not particularly fluid or blurry or permeable. The nineteenth century was not some golden era of racial accord, accommodation, and goodwill that would be permanently ruptured by the Mexican Revolution. Racial boundaries were firm, rigid, and durable in the New Mexico borderlands. Nevertheless, the infrequency of mixed unions in Las Vegas during the latter half of the nineteenth century was not the result of state prohibitions of intermarriage. Instead, it was the product of sharp racial boundaries constructed and maintained by the people themselves—by nuevomexicanos as well as Anglos—in their everyday lives and without the need for state intervention.

Further Reading:

For the definition of borderlands as “the contested boundaries between colonial domains,” see Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, “From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in between in North American History,”American Historical Review 104: 3 (1999): 814-41. On the economic and cultural significance of the captive exchange, see James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002). For social and cultural histories of marriage and conquest in New Mexico, see, for example, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500-1846 (Palo Alto, Calif., 1991); Darlis A. Miller, “Cross-Cultural Marriages in the Southwest: The New Mexico Experience, 1846-1900,” in New Mexico Women: Intercultural Perspectives, edited by Joan M. Jensen and Darlis A. Miller (Albuquerque, 1986); Deena J. González, Refusing the Favor: The Spanish-Mexican Women of Santa Fe, 1820-1880 (New York, 1999); and Amanda Taylor-Montoya, “‘Under the Same Glorious Flag’: Land, Race, and Legitimacy in Territorial New Mexico” (PhD Diss., University of Oklahoma, 2009). On the racialization of nuevomexicanos after the U.S. war with Mexico, see especially Laura E. Gómez, Manifest Destinies: The Making of the Mexican American Race (New York, 2007).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 13.3 (Spring, 2013).

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Amanda Taylor-Montoya is an independent scholar living in southern New Mexico.

 

 

In the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection at the University of Alabama, leather and cloth-bound photograph albums from the 1860s and 1870s line the dark wooden shelves, some dozen in all, small and large, cloth and leather, embossed and plain. At first glance the photographs they contain, called cartes de visites, all seem remarkably similar: pieces of card stock about 2.5 inches wide and 4 inches tall, mounted with albumen images of stiffly posed men and women, hair glossed back, faces anonymously blank. Many of these figures are in fact anonymous, or nearly so, identified only by a scrawled pencil inscription—Aunt Maria, Uncle Paul—or perhaps a line of description on their hidden flip sides. A closer inspection, though, reveals some intriguing narratives: images of young men in uniform next to miniaturized reproductions of popular paintings of pets; a portrait of Napoleon across from a Civil War general; a striking cartoon of Lincoln and Washington in mutual embrace. Though the Williams Collection also owns a rare two-volume edition of Alexander Gardner’s famous Sketchbook of the War, it is in these more modest albums that the domestic narrative of the 1860s and 1870s is written. 

 

Nineteenth-century viewers were just as likely to envision the war through the more personalized lens of the family album as through the battlefield photographs by professionals such as Alexander Gardner and Matthew Brady, which have taken the more prominent place in the historical record. The carte de visite album, which became commercially available just as the country headed into war, was an important means for a domestic middle-class audience to contend with and record their experiences of the Civil War. Literary historian Ellen Gruber Garvey’s assertion that scrapbooks “open a window into the lives and thoughts of people who did not respond to the world with their own writing” is equally true of the carte de visite album. These leather- or cloth-bound albums, accessible to a range of budgets, allowed collectors to arrange small photographs in a personalized mix that often juxtaposed commercially reproduced images of artworks and celebrities alongside the more intimate studio portraits of friends and family members. During the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, this eclectic mix of the public and private included prominent political figures and wartime generals.

Although these albums were common in Northern and Southern middle-class homes, they can be difficult to interpret for historians and family members alike. Identifying the person—or people—who put the albums together can be challenging, as can tracking down information about the sitters. The albums themselves, with their thin and fragile paper pages, are an obstacle rather than an aide to interpretation. Removing the photographs to read the inscriptions on the back cannot easily be done without damaging the paper sleeves. These difficulties often leave key historical questions, such as the precise dating of the albums and the stories behind the images, unanswered. 

 

Interpretive challenges aside, many of these albums can nevertheless offer insights into how ordinary Americans from both the North and the South experienced the Civil War. One of the fascinating aspects of these works is the way that they anticipate social media like Facebook and Twitter by mixing personal and popular photographs. Yet unlike these open-form twenty-first-century media, the book structure of carte de visite albums encouraged a compiler to present his or her story with a thought-out beginning, middle, and end. An excellent example of such a narrative arc is the Perley E. Collings Album, a tan embossed leather album kept after the Civil War by a former infantryman. As this volume shows, the micro-history of carte de visite albums, although sometimes all too open to interpretation, can tell us captivating stories that go beyond the history of photography into topics such as the significance of popular art images to daily life, the relationship between the domestic and the battlefield, and the continuing impact of the Civil War on the lives of post-war Americans. 

Compilations such as the Collings Album were created with the aim not just of recording personal histories, but also of inspiring general interest. In his book Reading American Photographs, historian Alan Trachtenberg writes that the commercial reproduction of well-known battlefield and camp photographs as cartes de visites, and carte de visite series such as Brady’s Album Gallery “permitted their owners to assemble sequences on their own” as “private panoramas” in personal image albums, creating their own narratives and captions for views of the war. In the case of family albums, such personalization went one step further, as compilers mixed portraits of family members with political and sentimental prints. Like so many nineteenth-century documents that to modern viewers can seem like intensely private things—letters, diaries, scrapbooks—family photograph albums were intended for both private and public consumption. Although recording a personal history, they were placed openly in parlors, inviting friends and acquaintances to browse their pages.

 

 

Albums, in fact, were designed specifically to blend the private and public spheres. When bound albums with framed slots to accommodate cartes de visites entered the American market in 1861, Harper’s Weekly called them “galleries of friendship and fame.” Compilers who failed to include this aspect of “fame” in their collections risked falling short of the album’s end goal of public entertainment. For instance, in 1872, a Baltimore trade publication, The Photographer’s Friend, printed an opinion piece criticizing a fictionalized album-keeper, “Miss Domestic,” for arranging an album only with personal photographs, which, like photographs of the family vacation, were guaranteed to bore visitors. In contrast, “Miss Enterprise” successfully entertained guests with an album containing images with more popular appeal, such as pictures of Niagara Falls, American presidents, European royalty, and celebrities such as P.T. Barnum. In other words, the album’s ostensible purpose was to contain and preserve personal images of family members, but in order for it to have entertainment value, it also had to include more general-interest photographs. For Americans in the Civil War and post-war years, such images of general interest most often included prominent participants in the conflict.

 

Several Civil War-era albums in the Williams Collection show this blending of public and private, but none more clearly than the Collings album. Inscribed on its cover page with the name and home state of its compiler, an infantryman in “Company C. 14^th New Hampshire Volunteers,” or the 14^th New Hampshire Volunteer Infantry, as well as 1867, the year of its completion, this album provides more information on its origin than most. But like many carte de visite albums during this era, the Collings album freely mixes the personal portraits that were exchanged between family members and friends with the commercial photographs of popular prints and celebrities that were for sale at photographers’ studios. The resulting juxtaposition of images encourages a personal interpretation of the political and a political interpretation of the personal.

This juxtaposition of the political and the personal is apparent from the first pages of the album. The generic commercial printing of the title page (“The Photographer Album, New York”) is bordered by Collings’ pen inscription of his name and infantry number, announcing a political affiliation and personal identity that continues into the first three pages of the album, with his prominent placement of six major Union figures including Winfield Scott, Ambrose Burnside, and Benjamin Butler. These images are immediately followed by two photographs of popular paintings by Sir Edwin Landseer, “High Life” and “Low Life,” first exhibited as companion works in 1831. The former of these shows the profile of an elegant deerhound in a comfortable interior setting, leaning against the seat of an upholstered chair. The latter shows a frontal view of a stockier terrier in the doorway of a workshop. The dogs function as stand-ins for their absent owners, the one presumably an aristocratic gentleman, the other likely a butcher. In the context of the Civil War images that open the album, one could read this dichotomy as speaking to a caricatured contrast between North and South: the self-made working man on the one hand, and the degenerate aristocrat of the slave economy on the other. Of course, the Landseer prints were popular, precisely the kind of “images of fame” that album-keepers were instructed to include to entertain their audiences, so a reading that sees the war in these cartes is only one of many possible interpretations.

 

But even taking this caution into account, the placement and juxtaposition of the images in the Collings album and other albums like it suggest certain interpretations over others. Collings’ placement of political and domestic images alongside one another seems to underline the ways that the political became personal and sentimental during this period, a tendency confirmed by the arrangement of the carte print “Washington & Lincoln (Apotheosis)” near the middle of the album. This popular image, several versions of which circulated after 1865, is a reproduction of an anonymous painting that depicts Washington reaching down to place a laurel wreath on Lincoln’s head as the two embrace in a landscape of clouds; in some versions, angels look down upon them. Printed after his assassination, the image paints Lincoln as a martyr, and associates his memory with the more generally accepted and historically distant glory of Washington. 

The Lincoln-Washington carte de visite shares a page with a hand-colored photograph of another popular print—an image of a woman with books tucked underneath her arm—and is next to two similar, commercial prints of sentimentalized young women with faraway gazes. Reminiscent of the images that appeared in “books of beauty” in the first half of the nineteenth century, these generic, aestheticized images provide what to us might seem an unexpectedly apolitical backdrop for the Lincoln print. They emphasize the soft focus and the distant gaze in the eyes of both presidents, placing the former president firmly in the context of sentimentality and abstracted idealization rather than more specific political or topical events. Lincoln, Collings’ arrangement stresses, has already moved by this point in the late 1860s to the status of an abstracted ideal, an object of domestic admiration.

 

 

This carefully curated back and forth between the personal and the political continues throughout the rest of the album. The next several pages, for instance, show carte de visite portraits of women captioned as family members or friends, interspersed with illustrations of horses. The pages that follow include images of sentimental paintings of domestic and rural scenes, prominently featuring children, horses, and in two cases, crosses. The crosses—generalized images of Christian piety, but also, of course, death—suggest the place that the war has in these scenes of pastoral life. The horses could also be seen as playing such a double role. On the one hand, they are stock sentimental figures, pictures included among family portraits to interest friends or acquaintances who might page through the album. But their number and repetition—six in all in the course of the volume—seem to speak to their broader significance for the former infantryman who compiled the album. Some of the animals point implicitly to the battlefields on which they played a significant role: one horse, bridled and blanketed, could be an illustrated detail from a battlefield scene. Another, fed a handful of hay by a small child and titled “Confidence,” is a clear agent of a rural domestic education. These images, moving back and forth between the public and the private, the political and the domestic, underline the deeply personal place that the war held in the lives of Americans. By placing generic commercial reproductions in a familial context, compilers like Collings were able to make them speak in the language of an individual.

 

This movement back and forth between the public and the private recurs in striking ways throughout the album, and is perhaps most apparent in a series of commercial portraits that follow only a few pages later. The first set, two hand-colored photographs of popular illustrations, present the conjunction between the domestic and the political explicitly. Titled “Young America,” they depict small children, a girl and a boy, as soldiers, with epaulets, rucksacks, swords, and rifles, directly conflating the domestic and political.  A few pages later, the compiler has placed a carte of a woman in moccasins and a leather dress aiming a rifle in the slot to the left of a reproduction of Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch of the Glen, the 1851 painting of a stag that was one of the most reproduced artworks of the nineteenth century. The conjunction of the (Native American) hunter—actually, the actress Marie Zoe, who posed in costume for many popular cartes—and the hunted on this page confirms the care that went into the arrangement of these images. And in light of the other more explicitly political scenes, the hunter’s cocked rifle also seems to allude to the battlefield. Shortly thereafter follows the Lincoln-Washington image, and then a similar juxtaposition of the sentimental and the political on a page containing three sentimental drawing-room illustrations of women alongside of “Emancipation,” a print of a triumphant Columbia surrounded by freed slaves.

 

 

 

If we pull back from an analysis of the relationship between individual images, we can also see a clear narrative progression in the album’s overview. The volume begins with a series of public Civil War notables, moves through images that are both domestic and battle-oriented, and then culminates in the war’s end, as seen through the cartes of “Lincoln & Washington (Apotheosis)” and “Emancipation.” The compiler has followed these images with a carte of Thomas Nast’s famous 1864 political cartoon “Compromise with the South” to reinforce this general progression. As the Unionist’s grim imagination of what George McClellan’s political platform might promise (as well as the image whose widespread reproduction aided in Lincoln’s re-election) this print, like the earlier two, marks the approach of war’s end. Taken together, these closely grouped images of apotheosis, emancipation, and re-election signal the war’s imminent conclusion in Collings’ curated world.

 

 

The pictures that follow mark the hardship and hope of the early Reconstruction period. A hand-colored image titled “Past, Present, and Future” shows a grandfather, mother, and two children in reflective poses, the grandfather with downcast eyes. In the context of the album’s Civil War imagery, this commercial print of a family group without a father figure seems to suggest the emotional impact of the Civil War dead. On the next page, two sentimental portraits of children point to the material straits of such absences during Reconstruction. The first, from J.P. Soule’s drawing “A Cold Morning,” shows two young children, a boy and a girl, huddled together, while the next, “Homeless,” from a painting by G.G. Fish, is a yet more literal image, showing two barefoot girls with pensive expressions in a rural setting. On the next page, Collings has counter-balanced the bleak tone of these cartes with pictures of uplift: the first, “Innocence,” depicts a woman caressing a lamb, a symbol of peace; the next, “Making Up,” shows a young boy and girl in an embrace that suggests a mutual resolution, a counterpoint perhaps to Nast’s “Compromise with the South” that imagines a reconciliation between North and South.

Finally, just before the cartes of Andrew Johnson and Benjamin Butler that conclude the album, Collings has placed the only two images of himself. The first is a carte of a clean-shaven young man, dated 1865, and the next a tintype of a sober, bearded man from 1868. The two photographs considered side by side mark an evolution, a transition from soldier to civilian life, from a slightly dazed youth to a composed, well-groomed man capable of narrating his experience of the war as a series of personal and political images. Appearing as they do at the end of the album, these before and after shots can be read compellingly as records of another progression, not of the war, but of the soldier’s return to domestic life through the creation of the very photograph album that the reader has just perused. 

 

 

These final images suggest some of the ways that these curated albums differ from the contemporary social media to which they are often compared. While both the historical and the contemporary media allow users to present themselves through images of friends, family, political figures, and celebrities, the carte de visite album encouraged an arranged narrative of an individual’s experience, with a designated introduction and conclusion. While the confines of the album’s content are dictated by the somewhat arbitrary outlines of the commercial manufacturer, these confines nonetheless impose an organization. Some users chose to ignore this structure, but others were guided by it, as P.E. Collings’ album shows. His decision to conclude the album with his own images suggests an understanding of the arc of history as defining the arc of personal lives, marking experiences in ways that the camera and the illustrated image could collaborate in documenting.

Further Reading

Ellen Gruber Garvey, Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Renaissance (Oxford, 2012).

Lara Perry, “The Carte de Visite in the 1860s and the Serial Dynamic of Photographic Likeness,” Art History 35.4 (2012): 728-749.

Elizabeth Siegel, Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century American Photograph Albums (New Haven and London, 2010).

Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Matthew Brady to Walker Evans (New York, 1990).

 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

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Christa Holm Vogelius (@christavogelius) is assistant professor of American Studies at the University of Copenhagen, where she teaches courses on nineteenth-century literature, visual culture, and archival studies. She has also been a CLIR postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alabama, where she worked on digital exhibits in the A.S. Williams III Americana Collection. She is completing a book project on the intersection between nineteenth-century American art description, gender, and literary nationalism.

 

 

As Tera Hunter points out in concluding her meticulously researched, eloquent and accessible book, who can (and cannot) legally marry in any society has always been subject to state sanction via the right to enter wedlock and wider issues of legal citizenship. For example, only in the twenty-first century have same-sex couples been able to marry on the same footing as heterosexual ones. But as well as sexual affiliation, race and ethnicity have shaped the contours of state policies on wedlock, largely because of the exclusionary ethnic barriers to legal citizenship in the United States. Hunter explores these contentious issues through the prism of black marriages over the course of the nineteenth century. This chronological spread is one of this impressive book’s strengths. Only by tracking wedlock through slavery, the Civil War, emancipation, Reconstruction, and then the era of Jim Crow segregation, can we fully understand how the nature of black marriage changed over time. In addition to her chronological breadth, Hunter also engages with a range of perspectives on nineteenth-century black marriage. She includes the views of enslaved and formerly enslaved people themselves, notwithstanding the methodological challenges posed by a limited source base. She explores a large amount of legal evidence and official policies related to marriage at both the federal and state level. As such, Hunter successfully integrates disparate historiographical strands of social, political and legal history. This is a real achievement in itself.

The introduction sets out the book’s main themes. Marriage under slavery ultimately depended upon the will of slaveholders, but despite the association of wedlock with liberation in the emancipation era, new forms of subjugation via marriage developed in the late nineteenth century. Rather than presenting a positive story of change over time, Hunter argues the opposite—matrimony went from being a source of empowerment to one of containment. Thereafter the chapters follow a broadly chronological format, but her structure also cleverly weaves different perspectives and themes into each chapter—some focus more on the social history of African Americans, others on legislative debates about black marriage by the white men working in state and federal government. However, the chapter titles, taken from primary evidence, are unclear and give little indication about what the overall focus of each chapter might be.

Chapter one considers the nature of enslaved marriage. Although not sanctioned by law, slaves entered a number of different intimate relationships, including the more casual “taking up” with another and entering trial marriages. Some lived with their spouses while others lived on different plantations. Fluidity was important for these relationships because white slaveholders separated couples, sexually violated enslaved women, and occasionally forced intimate relationships between enslaved people. Chapter two takes a different angle on the same era, considering the various legal barriers to enslaved marriage. Hunter traces the origins of these legal debates in the colonial era and explains that by antebellum times, decisions about slaves’ intimate relationships were ultimately left to individual slaveholders. Thus, slave marriage became tautological—neither prohibited nor legally possible but a recognized custom. In her third chapter, Hunter shifts thematic focus again—this time to consider the marriages of free people of color, focusing mostly on the South. Over time it became harder for these people to gain their freedom, but also to marry enslaved people or each other. Nevertheless, marriage was a tool by which free black people sought to control their own lives, sometimes through “nominal” or “voluntary” forms of enslavement.

The Civil War was a watershed moment in African American marriage, since only with freedom could people legally wed. In her fourth chapter Hunter provides detailed evidence about how and why those formerly enslaved people legitimized their unions with federal officials. She argues the conflict complicated family formations yet further—some were broken by war and some were unexpectedly reunited by it. Hunter concurs with the views of other historians that the federal government expected a “breadwinner ideal” within Union camps, and she notes that the move to legal marriage created new gendered hierarchies for women. Chapter five switches perspective again to policymakers’ debates over black marriage in this era. Unsurprisingly, arguments about these marriages could be contradictory. Hunter includes a lot of evidence here, even if her conclusions—that legislators privileged freedmen over freedwomen—are not highly original but rather supportive of the views of others.

The final three chapters explore African American marriage after emancipation, with the sixth focusing on the Reconstruction era. Here, Hunter again stresses the fluidity of freedpeople’s intimate relationships, arguing that they existed on a continuum ranging from more informal patterns of “taking up” through legal marriage itself. Importantly, such flexible and adaptable family formations were not simply a legacy of slavery, but rather a response to wider power structures and gendered norms. Chapter seven reaches similar conclusions, showing how the Freedmen’s Bureau helped to establish a structure for legal marriage, albeit one dependent on a breadwinner ideal that African Americans were both unfamiliar with and found impossible due to racial discrimination, the emergence of sharecropping, and the necessity of women’s paid laboring. These chapters contain a wealth of evidence, including, for example, some very detailed analysis of individual family trees, and the debates and legislative measures of individual states about black marriage. Longer-term trends in marriage patterns are traced in chapter eight and the epilogue, which also compare black and white marriage rates. Ultimately, economic and emotional needs, along with demographic patterns, have shaped African American wedlock in various ways, and black marriage remained complicated and fluid by the century’s end. Moreover, for women, marriage could often be a double-edged sword.

Although this book is already broad in terms of its chronology and the way in which it covers the marriages of those both enslaved and free, more weight might have been given to the lives of African Americans in the North, who receive rather scant attention here. The book would also have benefited from the occasional point of comparison with other groups of people with contentious relationships to legal marriage—for example, Native Americans or Asian immigrants. Finally, and understandably considering available evidence, Hunter’s book explores only heterosexual relationships so is heteronormative in scope. Nevertheless, since Hunter argues that black marriages were both fluid and diverse, it is a shame not to see more discussion on how same-sex intimate relationships might have taken place.

Some of the book covers well-trodden ground, for example in the historiographical section of the introduction, and at certain points in the individual chapters where Hunter moves away from the more immediate focus on intimate relationships to instead track broader economic and social changes. There are sometimes poignant images dotted throughout the book, which concludes with an important and passionate polemic about the relationship between economic inequality and declining rates of African American marriage. Sadly, Hunter argues, marriage is now a privilege of affluence rather than a strategy for survival. It is an aspiration (309). This timely piece of work reminds us that the rights we sometimes take for granted have not always been available to all.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 18.1 (Winter, 2018).

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Emily West is professor of American history at the University of Reading, England. She is the author of books on enslaved people’s spousal relationships, free people of color in the antebellum South, and the lives of enslaved women.

Or, the feeling Philip Vickers Fithian

Can Presbyterians fall in love? Okay, everyone falls in love, but when people think of Presbyterians they normally conjure up images of stoic Protestants whose kids eat oatmeal and memorize the Westminster Confession of Faith. Reverend Maclean, the Montana minister and father figure played by Tom Skerritt in A River Runs Through It, comes to mind. Presbyterians don’t “fall” in love—they rationally, and with good sense, ease themselves into it.

This was my image of Presbyterians until I read the correspondence of Philip Vickers Fithian. Most early American historians know Philip Vickers Fithian. He was the uptight young Presbyterian who served a year (1773-1774) as a tutor at Nomini Hall, the Virginia plantation of Robert Carter, and wrote a magnificently detailed diary about his experience. For most of us, Fithian is valued for his skills as an observer. His journal offers one of our best glimpses into plantation life in the Old Dominion on the eve of the American Revolution.

But despite Fithian’s ubiquitous presence in the indexes and footnotes of contemporary works of Virginia scholarship, most of us know little more about him than the very barest facts: He was born in 1747 in the southern New Jersey town of Greenwich. He was the eldest son of Presbyterian farmers but left the agricultural life in 1770 to attend the College of New Jersey at Princeton. After college he worked for a year on Carter’s plantation and was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry. In 1776 he headed off to New York to serve as a chaplain with a New Jersey militia unit in the American War for Independence.

Such chronicling—the stuff of encyclopedia entries and biographical dictionaries—only scratches the surface of Philip’s life. It fails to acknowledge the inner man, the prolific writer who used words—letters and diary entries mostly—to make peace with the ideas that warred for his soul. Philip was a man of passion raised in a Presbyterian world of order. He came of age at a time when Presbyterians were rejecting the pious enthusiasm of the Great Awakening for a common-sense view of Christianity. And while Philip was clearly a student of this newer rational and moderate Protestantism, he remained unquestionably Presbyterian. For he was a man stretched between worlds: one of cautious belief, another of passion and sentiment; one of rational learning, another of devotion and deep emotion. His struggle to bring these worlds together is seen most clearly not in his well-known observations of plantation life but in his letters to the woman he loved—Elizabeth Beatty.

Philip first met Elizabeth “Betsy” Beatty in the spring of 1770 when she visited the southern New Jersey town of Deerfield to attend her sister Mary’s wedding to Enoch Green, the local Presbyterian minister. It may not have been love at first site, but it was close. Philip was enrolled in Green’s preparatory academy, and Betsy was the daughter of Charles Beatty, the minister of the Presbyterian church of Neshaminy, Pennsylvania, and one of the colonies’ most respected clergymen.

Betsy was a new face in Deerfield, a fact that made her especially enchanting to the town’s young men. Philip had spent enough time with Betsy while she was visiting to begin a friendly correspondence with her. In his first letter, written shortly after she returned to Neshaminy, Philip wrote, “You can scarcely conceive . . . how melancholy, Spiritless, & forsaken you left Several when you left Deerfield!” He hoped for a prominent place “in this gloomy Row of the disappointed.” Since Betsy had departed Deerfield he could not “walk nor read, nor talk, nor ride, nor sleep, nor live, with any Stomach!” The “transient golden Minutes” they had spent together, he added, “only fully persuaded me how much real Happiness may be had in your Society.” Philip was smitten.

Betsy did not reply to this letter, and Philip’s obsession waned as he headed off to college in the fall of 1770. While he was there Philip had more than one opportunity to see Betsy again. He joined fellow classmates on weekend excursions to visit Charles Beatty’s church at Neshaminy, and it was during these visits that he made his first serious attempts to court Betsy. Though Philip and Betsy would spend much time together over the course of the next several years, the establishment of a correspondence was equally important to the development of their relationship. Betsy had given Philip permission to write her, a clear sign that she approved of his desire to move the friendship forward. By February 1772 he was signing his letters with the name “Philander” (“loving Friend”), an obvious indicator of his affection for his new correspondent.

Though much of Philip and Betsy’s courtship was conducted through letters, the exchange of sentiments usually flowed in only one direction. Perhaps Betsy did not like to write. Perhaps she preferred more intimate encounters or feared the lack of privacy inherent in letter writing. Or perhaps she did not want to encourage her suitor with a reply. Whatever the case, women generally did not write as much as men, especially when it came to love and courtship letters. In other words, Betsy may simply have been following the conventions of her day.

By summer 1772 Philip’s visits to Neshaminy became more frequent and his letters became more sentimental. He now began to address Betsy as “Laura” (a probable reference to Petrarch’s devotion to Laura), a name of affection that he would use for the rest of his life, and he now felt comfortable sharing the daydreams that distracted him from his studies at Princeton. “I lead you by the Hand in a cool bright Evening, & once more, in that lovely garden oh! in that pleasant, pleasant Garden, hold Conversation in Rapture with you!

 

One of the many turning points in the relationship occurred following the death of Betsy’s father in September 1772. Charles Beatty had died prematurely during a fund-raising visit to Barbados on behalf of the College of New Jersey. Philip’s sympathy for Betsy was authentic. He had lost his parents seven months earlier to an unknown disease, and now Betsy’s mourning excited in him “a fresh & feeling sense of the same Pain, which had not yet Subsided, when on a sudden it was renewed & increased by Sympathy with you.” Using Calvinist language that would have been consoling to the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, Philip tried to comfort Betsy. “It hath pleasured Heaven, whose work we ought to view & reverence, to make you & I & our families orphans! The ways of Providence are indeed mysterious & the Design is to us unknown.” He connected on a deep level with Betsy during this season of sorrow. Her mother had died in 1768 when she was a teenager, and now she, like Philip, was without parents. This shared experience brought the couple closer together. Ten days later, while she visited Philip at Princeton’s graduation, Betsy gave him, in his words, “an expressive & visible Token, or Pledge, of . . . real Friendship.” Though the nature of the pledge is unclear, Philip was pleased by it.

Things seemed to be going well between Philip and Betsy as the summer of 1772 gave way to autumn. Betsy continued to make regular trips to Deerfield to visit her sister, and Philip, who had recently completed his studies at the College of New Jersey and had moved back home, embarked on the occasional visit to Princeton to see friends. There would, in other words, be ample opportunity to sustain the courtship. However, somewhere along the way things went terribly wrong. Philip, it appears, mistook Betsy’s September 1772 pledge of friendship for something much more. In the months after his college graduation he began to come on strong—a bit too strong for Betsy. His letters were now full of romantic gestures and flowery disclosures of his sentiments. In December, while visiting Princeton, Philip proposed marriage (Betsy was in Deerfield at the time) in a passion-filled letter that he would later describe as a “wild and incoherent epistle.” He told Betsy that he would be back in Deerfield the following day and encouraged her to “consult with your own Heart” so that they could discuss his offer. He would then ask her for “a full and conclusive Answer.”

Philip was making demands, but he knew Betsy was the one in control. We do not know the details of what happened on December 3, 1772, but the Deerfield meeting did not go well for Philip. Betsy rejected his proposal. Twelve days later he sounded like a man who had been scorned. He sent Betsy a long poem, which included the lines, “Why does my Heart these raging Tortures feel/Whose Force I cannot from the World conceal?” Philip was left to pick up the pieces.

 

By the end of the month the gossip mill was churning in this rural world of Greenwich and Deerfield, and Philip thought he now understood the reason for Betsy’s decision. According to what Philip had heard, Betsy did not take his proposal seriously because of his reputation for gallantry. Betsy had heard a rumor that she was not the first or only woman to whom Philip had proposed marriage. We cannot be sure if this accusation was true, but in Philip’s defense, there is no evidence of a marriage proposal to another woman in any of his extant writings. He seems to have been justified when he wrote to defend himself and his reputation. On the other hand, Philip was no stranger to the company of young Presbyterian ladies. He had been accused of gallantry before and would be accused of it again. Yet, he insisted that his proposal to Betsy “was the first & only one, of the like Nature that I ever made.” Somewhere along the way Betsy had received some false information.

The rumors were nonetheless terribly embarrassing for a Presbyterian gentleman who was expected to be above such small capitulations to passion. Philip realized that his reputation would only be salvaged once he ended his relationship with Betsy. He thus announced his intention to “renounce, abjure & annul every Tie, Band, Engagement, or Penalty” between them. This young Presbyterian had learned a valuable lesson. His affections had been too strong and irrational. As one of his Princeton teachers, the theologian and moral philosopher John Witherspoon, had taught, enlightened men were, above all else, rational beings. If a society were to be virtuous and refined, the passions had to be regulated. Failures of self-control reflected failures of reason, and for most Presbyterians of Philip’s generation, failures of reason were also moral failures.

Of course love conquers all, so they say, including arch reason. And Philip could not forget Betsy—even if he had wanted to. She continued to appear in Deerfield, and Philip, who was then living and studying with Green in preparation for his Presbyterian ministerial licensing exam, could not help but see her. Not surprisingly he found Betsy acting “cold” and “indifferent.” Unable to bear the awkward meetings, he decided to resort to the pen once again.

In his first letter in three months, Philip confessed that his marriage proposal of the previous December had been poorly timed and was the result of “over-anxious Desire,” but he admitted that Betsy’s current indifference toward him was stirring his passions into a “strange Commotion.” Philip remained persistent, refusing to take Betsy’s coldness as a sign of rejection. Still, a feeling of desperation overcame him, and he ended up pleading with Betsy to take him back, telling her that he was “in the fullest sense” her “Slave.”

 

Philip continued with the letters and poetry but to no avail. He pulled out all the stops to get his “dear Laura” back, writing, “Why does my silly Bosom rise/And vent its grief with fruitless sighs?/Shall I sit whining over my pain/And die for one I can’t obtain?/Have I been kept so long at School/To die of Love, as dies the Fool . . . ” This kind of romantic poetry exposes the tensions Philip was feeling. His schooling at Princeton had taught him to guard his passions, but his love for Betsy seemed uncontrollable.

By late spring 1773 Betsy had returned to Pennsylvania, and Philip had immersed himself in his studies. He did not write to her again until August. The occasion for renewing his correspondence was a trip he had made to Princeton to discuss a job opportunity on Carter’s Virginia plantation. During his stay he took a familiar ride into the country to see Betsy’s brothers in Neshaminy. Betsy was also there, and Philip had the occasion to drink tea with her and engage in “some fine Conversation.” Days later Philip wrote to her about the momentous decision he had before him regarding his tutoring opportunity in Virginia. Though Philip would remain with the Carters for only one year, at this stage the ultimate length of his stay was uncertain. In the event that the move would be permanent, he would have to know where he stood with Betsy. How would she respond to his decision to go to Virginia—a place far removed from the Presbyterian orbit in which she traveled?

Judging from Philip’s behavior over the coming months, her response was as he would have wanted, but in a fashion typical of dueling lovers, Philip nonetheless chose to leave for Virginia. Even with Betsy’s renewed affection, the two could not commit to each other. After arriving in Virginia, Philip wrote that had Betsy been “less uncertain of her future Purpose” he would never have left Deerfield.

Philip corresponded with many of his friends during his stay in Virginia, but no one received more letters than Betsy. His epistles from Virginia were not overly passionate, but we know that privately he continued to find it difficult to exercise restraint. “In Spite of all my strongest opposing efforts,” he wrote, “my thoughts dwell on that Vixen Laura. I strive to refuse them admission, or harbour them in my heart, yet like hidden fire they introduce themselves, & seize, & overcome me when perhaps I am pursuing some amusing or useful Study.” Though he was enjoying his time with the Carter family and learning a great deal about Virginia, he could not help “reflecting on my situation last winter, which was near the lovely Laura for whom I cannot but have the truest, and warmest esteem possible! If Heaven shall preserve my life, in some future time, I may again enjoy her good society.”

 

During his stay with the Carters, Philip had multiple opportunities to meet and court the daughters of some of Virginia’s most prominent planters. Matchmaking was a popular social practice in plantation Virginia, and the Carters were constantly trying to find their new tutor a suitable marriage partner in the hopes that he would take up permanent residence in the Northern Neck. Philip delighted in his chance to meet these young ladies, but he also made it clear in both his public declarations and private writings that his heart belonged to Betsy. He remained so devoted to her that the Carter boys, who were notorious for their infatuations with the girls in the neighborhood, wondered whether their tutor ever thought about the opposite sex. “Yes, Harry, & Bob,” Philip responded in his diary, “Fithian is vulnerable by Cupid’s Arrows—I assure you, Boys, he is, Not by the Girls of Westmoreland—O my dear Laura, I would not injure your friendly Spirit; So long as I breathe Heavens vital air I am unconditionally & wholly Yours.”

As Philip became more assured that Betsy was interested in hearing from him, his correspondence grew more florid.

Perhaps it is not coincidental that this change of tone corresponded with changes in Philip’s reading habits. While in Virginia, he had time to digest some of the era’s most popular fiction, particularly that of Laurence Sterne. Philip had started reading Sterne’s Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1773), composed as a series of love letters between Yorick, an Anglican minister (a pseudonym for Sterne), and Eliza Draper, a young married woman with whom Sterne had carried on a three-month affair. The letters are so laden with passion and maudlin sentiment that it is hard not to think—as some modern scholars have—that Sterne was simply parodying the social conventions of his age. Any irony, however, seems to have escaped the Presbyterian Fithian. His letters are exemplars of the form and style caricatured by Sterne. Of course it may have been especially difficult for Philip to detect Sterne’s irony since his plight paralleled so closely that of Yorick. Both were infatuated with women named Eliza; both were ministers; both found themselves living at great distance from the object of their affections; and both faced the daunting obstacle of keeping passion’s fire aflame with nothing more than paper and quill pen.

Further intertwining his life with Sterne’s art, Philip began copying passages from Sterne in his letters, simply replacing the name “Eliza” with that of “Laura.” Sterne toasted Eliza at his elaborate dinner parties, and Philip toasted Betsy before similar events on the Carter plantation. Sterne encouraged Eliza to begin the practice of rereading his letters to her in India and then, when time permitted, to put them in chronological order as a means of remembering him during their period of separation. Philip did not ask Betsy to do the same with his letters (he wondered if she even saved them), nor could Philip sort the correspondence he received from Betsy since he had only, at the most, two letters. What he could do, however, was organize the copies of the letters he had sent. In May 1774 he wrote her what he called a “chronological” letter cataloging the theme of every piece of correspondence he had sent since they first became acquainted four years earlier.

By modeling his correspondence on Sterne’s letters to Eliza, Philip was fashioning himself as a man of feeling. By the second half of the eighteenth century, Enlightenment rationalism was under attack from a culture of sensibility that celebrated a new kind of gentleman. This new man was no longer asked to govern himself by the dictates of reason alone but was invited to express his emotions in public and private, even to his female friends and correspondents. A real gentleman was thus able to communicate his affections for the opposite sex in much the same way that Sterne had done with Eliza and, to some extent, the way Philip was doing in his letters to Betsy. The culture of sensibility offered Philip a language that, unlike the Presbyterian rationalism in which he was raised and educated, did not condemn his passionate side.

As many warned, and as Philip no doubt knew, the culture of sensibility, with its emphasis on feeling and emotion, could turn destructive. Passions detached from an equally strong rational faculty could undermine the rational foundation of social order. While it is understandable that Philip would have found a kindred spirit in Yorick, he thus could not allow himself—as Yorick was in danger of doing—to become enslaved by his passions. The moral philosophers who advocated sentimental behavior as a means of sustaining a virtuous society made sure to stress that such affections needed always to be held in check by reason. The man of feeling was not an emotional enthusiast but instead pursued a “moderated sensibility.” For Philip, this was easier said than done.

Sentimental fiction and the passions it could elicit from readers such as Philip were also dangerous from the perspective of Philip’s religion. Laurence Sterne was not the kind of author Presbyterian ministers normally turned to when they wanted to teach their parishioners about courtship and marriage. John Witherspoon, Philip’s Princeton mentor, believed that writers like Sterne promoted ideas about the opposite sex that were “impossible to gratify.” Such literature relegated the God-given institution of marriage to the “scoffs of the libertines.” Philip’s letters suggest that he never quite forgot Dr. Witherspoon’s lessons. However much he may have identified with Yorick, he never let his passions get the better of him. In this sense, he remained the true Presbyterian.

Joy and tragedy characterized the rest of Philip and Betsy’s Presbyterian love affair. Upon his return from Virginia, Philip was licensed as a Presbyterian minister. The Philadelphia presbytery sent him to the Susquehanna and Shenandoah River valleys as an itinerant missionary to the Scots-Irish settlers in these regions. But before he left he had managed to win Betsy’s heart. Whatever reservations she may have once had about pursuing a relationship with Philip had all but disappeared. As he prepared to head west, he paused for a heartfelt and emotional good-bye with the woman he loved. Betsy wept during the course of their conversation; her tears, Philip wrote, “drowned me in melancholy Rapture.” As she held Philip’s hand, he sat in a “mournful Posture by her Side.”

 

Philip left for the backcountry with marriage on his mind. He and Betsy had had their share of difficult moments together, but their relationship now appeared to be secure. During a break in his itinerant tour, on October 27, 1775, the couple wed at the Deerfield Presbyterian Church. Whatever kind of honeymoon the newlyweds enjoyed was short lived. Philip needed to finish his missionary tour.

In May 1776, after returning to Greenwich, Philip was assigned to preach before his home congregation, the Greenwich Presbyterian Church. He and Betsy probably settled down in the local farm house in which he had been born and raised. But whatever wedded bliss they shared would not last long, for these were revolutionary times, and Philip, like most Presbyterians of his age, was a patriot.

Only a few weeks into his preaching stint at Greenwich, duty called once again. By mid-July 1776 Philip was serving as a chaplain to a regiment of New Jersey militia stationed in New York City. He would soon find himself in the midst of the Battle of Brooklyn, preaching weekly sermons to the troops and ministering to their physical and spiritual needs. Through it all he kept in close contact with Betsy, reporting on the events of the war, instructing her on business matters, and reaffirming his love for her. After the Battle of Harlem Heights, with Philip’s regiment stationed near Mount Washington, New York, dysentery entered the camp. Philip would become one of its victims. On September 19, he wrote Betsy about his return to Greenwich and his hopes for their renewed life together. He ended the epistle with a prayer: “Peace & God’s Blessing be with my Betsey, my dear Wife, forever may you be happy.” It was the last letter Philip Vickers Fithian would ever write.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 8.2 (January, 2008).

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John Fea teaches American history at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa. He is the author of The Way of Improvement Leads Home: Philip Vickers Fithian and the Rural Enlightenment in Early America (2008).