Authors: Eve LaPlante
Bronson felt despair and anger, too. “My thrill of Hope proved a pang of grief,” he wrote in his journal.
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The baby boy was “a Joy in a Winding Sheet” that seemed, mysteriously, “a true son of its mother.” In his own attempt to pinpoint the cause of the stillbirth, Bronson wrote, “So a mother, in a fit of rage, poisons the fountain at which her child draws sustenance, and he dies, slain by her choler.
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. . . Beware. . . . It is of the family of demons, insane, rabid.” Abigail was to blame for the baby’s death, he believed. Her response to this does not survive.
It fell to Bronson to carry the tiny swaddled body to the May crypt at King’s Chapel, where it would join the bodies of Abigail’s mother, sisters, and brother. Joseph May, now in his late seventies, asked to accompany his son-in-law to the burial vault to deposit the remains of a boy
who, had he lived, would surely have been of the sixth generation of Abigail’s family to attend Harvard.
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In the family tomb the two men lingered to view the remains of Colonel May’s second wife, Mary Ann, who had died two months earlier, at fifty-one.
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About a week later Bronson decided to leave for the country on his own. “I go forth from the city in faith,” he told Abigail.
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“I distrust this” plan, she replied. “I see not whence shall come the bread for me and the little ones.”
“Neither do I see with eyes of sense, but I know that a purpose like mine must yield bread for the hungry and clothe the naked, and I wait not for the arithmetic of this matter.” He justified his withdrawal from the role of provider because of the greater role he saw for himself, as a philosopher. “Plato held that the philosopher might withdraw from the state . . . and the like freedom was clearly intimated . . . in Christ’s teaching also.”
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On April 29 Bronson went to Concord for a visit with Emerson, the sole person under whose “ministry [he] could sit.”
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For her part, Abigail found solace in the company of her friend Lydia Maria Child, who came to stay with her after the stillbirth. She and Lydia had met fifteen years earlier at a gathering at the May house.
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Close in age, they were both the youngest daughter of a feeble mother in a large, patriotic family. Both adored an older brother who went to Harvard and became a Unitarian minister. “Denied the education lavished on” her brother, according to a biographer, Lydia Maria Child taught herself and “became an early feminist—being in this way too like Abigail.
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But unlike Abigail, Lydia Maria Child had a public career. Her first novel,
Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times,
featured an interracial Anglo–Native American couple. She published it at age twenty-two, in 1824, when “authorship was still almost entirely the prerogative of an educated male élite.”
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No woman “could expect to be regarded as a
lady
after she had written a book,” Child was told, so she used a pseudonym, “an American.”
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Her next success was a children’s magazine she founded in 1826. In the 1830s she wrote popular books of practical, domestic advice for women—
The Mother’s Book, The Frugal Housewife,
and
The Family Nurse—
all based on the notion “It is better to give than to receive.” Child was unhappily married to the improvident lawyer and writer David Lee Child, whom she had to support. Her worldview, like Abigail’s, combined orthodox Puritan values with liberal Unitarianism, and she too was drawn to abolition
and women’s rights. “In toiling for the freedom of others,” she explained, “we shall find our own.”
As Abigail struggled to recover from the stillbirth and to care for her three little girls, the members of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society divided over the question of whether to include women. Many abolitionists believed the movement should be “gentlemen only”—no female members, speakers, agents, or participation in the antislavery association—while Samuel Joseph May and Garrison disagreed. Earlier that year, at a packed convention in Boston that Abigail had urged Bronson to attend, the men of the Massachusetts society battled over the “woman question.” Amid the meeting’s noise and chaos, Bronson rose from his bench, not to take a side on the issue at hand, but to make a memorable statement. “You are all wrong, blind, and carnal,” he said to the bickering abolitionists, whose attention he now had.
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“I am as pure and as wise as was Jesus Christ,” he went on. “The reason is, I eat nothing but pure vegetables. The rest of the world eats animal flesh, and that is just what
you
are: cattle, sheep, fowl, and swine.”
A Wesleyan minister from western New York named Luther Lee broke the stunned silence. “The speaker told us that we are just what we eat,” he offered. “He also told us he eats nothing but vegetables. Does it not follow, by parity of reason, that he is a potato, a turnip, a pumpkin, or a squash?” The house erupted in cheers. There is no record of when Abigail or Louisa, who was only six, learned of this statement by Bronson, as recalled by the Reverend Lee, or of any comment by either of them on its content.
In the vote on the “woman question” that followed the rowdy debate, Garrison and May’s side won. In response, the “gentlemen only” group seceded from the Massachusetts society and joined instead the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society, which explicitly excluded “women and non-resistants” such as Garrison and May. In an unprecedented move Garrison and May asked Lydia Maria Child and Maria Weston Chapman, the leaders of the women’s society, to join the Massachusetts society’s committee to draft its resolutions. Samuel Joseph encouraged the women’s involvement in part, he confided to Garrison, because “I like to preach from their texts.”
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Although he was now a strong advocate for the women’s cause, it had taken Abigail’s brother years to embrace the notion that women could
break from their traditional role. Even as he had encouraged his sister’s private education and welcomed women as members of antislavery societies, he had held to the Pauline view: women should have no public role as speakers, property owners, leaders, or professionals. Not until a day in March 1838, when he heard a young white woman recount in public her experience growing up with house slaves, did Samuel Joseph begin to question that social norm.
On that late winter day, the lobby and grand staircase of the Massachusetts State House were packed “with people of both sexes, ‘black spirits and white,’ to hear a lady from S. Carolina . . . declaim upon the subject of abolition,” a Boston newspaper reported on March 9, 1838.
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“For a female, she exhibited considerable talent as an orator. She appeared not at all abashed in exhibiting herself in a position so unsuited to her sex, totally disregarding the doctrine of St. Paul, who says, ‘Is it not a shame for a woman to speak in public?’ She belabored the slaveholders. . . . Her address occupied about two hours and a half in the delivery, when she gave out. She, however, intimated that after taking breath for one day, she should like to continue.”
The “lady from S. Carolina” was thirty-two-year-old Angelina Grimké, making a speaking tour of the east coast with her older sister Sarah.
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The Grimké sisters, abolitionists who had been raised on a southern plantation with personal slaves, challenged not only the institution of slavery but also the ideas of men and women occupying separate spheres, and of “female subordination” to men. “The time has come for woman to move into that sphere which Providence has assigned her, and no longer remain satisfied in the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her.” A woman should not be “a second hand agent,” Grimké told the Boston crowd, which included the Reverend May. “Whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do.” She continued, “It is not the cause of the slave only that we plead, but the cause of woman as a moral, responsible being.”
With the Grimkés, as with Garrison, Samuel Joseph instinctively felt a kinship. As he spoke with them, word of the southerner’s speech spread through the city, and a riot erupted outside the State House. Without delay Samuel Joseph invited the Grimkés to stay with his family in South Scituate. During that week, at close quarters with Angelina
and Sarah Grimké, Samuel Joseph came to understand how Abigail and other women could conflate their own plight with that of slaves. “It was a miserable prejudice,” he concluded, “that would forbid women to speak or act in public. . . . I could not believe that God gave [women] such talents as they evinced” but kept them “buried in a napkin.”
Feeling that the scales had been removed from his eyes, Samuel Joseph asked the Grimkés to speak at his church and in neighboring parishes. This alienated many of his congregants and also his wife, Lucretia, who could not abide the idea of a woman preaching. Still, Samuel Joseph persisted in this new cause so close to Abigail’s heart. In the late 1830s, when every other minister in Massachusetts signed a petition stating that women’s participation in public affairs “threatens the female character with widespread and permanent injury,” according to a historian, the Reverend May refused, becoming “one of the country’s first feminists.”
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Meanwhile, Abigail’s husband, who
had returned from Concord in time to begin a spring semester, concluded his teaching career. At 6 Beach Street in Boston on June 22, 1839, Bronson closed his last school for the last time. The class he had taught at home for about a year had dwindled to three students. “My labours are not appreciated,” he felt.
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He never taught schoolchildren again.
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Not long after the Grimkés left South Scituate, the Mays hosted Abigail and her daughters there, as they had for several summers. The six-year-old cousins, Charlotte and Louisa, and eight-year-old Anna spent July and August swimming in the North River, climbing trees, and romping in the woods. Louisa loved “the Book of Nature,” her father observed when he visited.
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She and her sisters were “unwilling to pass their time within doors, or fix their thoughts on formal lessons. I spend an hour or more in the morning . . . with them [inside], but to small profit. Their thoughts are on the distant hill, the winding river, the orchard, meadow, or grove.”
Decades later Louisa recalled, “Active exercise was my delight from the time when [I was] a child of six. . . . I always thought I must have been a deer or a horse in some former state, because it was such a joy to run. No boy could be my friend till I had beaten him in a race, and no girl if she refused to climb trees, leap fences, and be a tomboy.” In adulthood
she attributed this early sense of her own freedom to “my wise mother,” who, “anxious to give me a strong body to support a lively brain, turned me loose in the country and let me run wild, learning of Nature what no books can teach.” Later, as a teenager, Louisa could walk twenty miles in five hours. “I remember running over the hills just at dawn one summer morning, and pausing to rest in the silent woods, saw, through an arch of trees, the sun rise over river, hill, and wide green meadows as I never saw it before.
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Something born of the lovely hour, a happy mood, and the unfolding aspirations of a child’s soul seemed to bring me very near to God; and in the rush of that morning hour I always felt that I ‘got religion,’ as the phrase goes. A new and vital sense of His presence, tender and sustaining as a father’s arms, came to me then, never to change.”
Samuel Joseph, Louisa’s beloved uncle Sam, now in his early forties with three children, seemed to Louisa a pillar of strength and kindness. He was never difficult and cranky like other men. Like a character she created years later in a novel, he was “a quiet, studious man . . . busy with his . . . small parish . . . [and] rich in . . . attributes . . . [that] attracted to him many admirable persons, as naturally as sweet herbs draw bees.”
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His wife was gentle and sophisticated. Their home was always noisy with antislavery talk and visitors “black, white & grey,” as her aunt Lu liked to say.
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Uncle Sam led prohibitionist parades of hundreds of children—his “Cold Water Brigade,” as he called them—along Main Street carrying silk banners and chanting, “So here we pledge perpetual hate! To all that can intoxicate!” and “Cold water is the drink for me!” At a public “Execution of King Alcohol” on the town green, Uncle Sam wielded the ax.
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According to a local newspaper, “Every rum-seller in South Scituate capitulated before the Reverend May’s moral weapons.” Best of all, in Louisa’s opinion, with Uncle Sam and Aunt Lu there was always enough to eat.
While his wife and children were ensconced in South Scituate, Bronson spent part of the summer touring eastern Massachusetts and offering conversations on “Self-Culture” to paying adults.
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The venture was unprofitable. Pressed to produce income, Bronson considered a return to peddling.
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One night he dreamed he was a peddler again, engaging strangers in impromptu conversations. When he mentioned this to Abigail, she and her relatives urged him against peddling, which seemed undignified and had never provided him with a solid living.
Before Louisa’s seventh birthday on November 29, 1839, the Alcotts were reunited again in Boston at the Beach Street house. Around this time, according to Bronson’s journal, he conveyed to Louisa that she, alone among his daughters, was noisy and misbehaved. His gift to Louisa on their shared birthday that year was a note that read in part:
You feel your CONSCIENCE, and have no real pleasure unless you obey it. It asks you always to BE GOOD. . . . How kindly it bears with you all the while! . . . How it smiles upon you, and makes you Glad when you Resolve to Obey it! How terrible its Punishments! It is GOD trying in your SOUL to keep you always Good.