Marmee & Louisa (7 page)

Despite his idealism, Samuel Joseph’s progressive opinions soon aroused suspicion in Connecticut. An early follower of Noah Worcester, founder of the fledgling American peace movement, whom he’d met during divinity school, Samuel Joseph formed a Brooklyn Peace Society and gave sermons advocating disarmament. He considered capital punishment “judicial murder” and declined to preach at an 1826 execution. He could not serve as chaplain of a regiment because, he said, his only prayer would be “that they might beat their swords into plowshares and learn war no more.”
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Perhaps more shocking to his neighbors, the Reverend May preached the virtues of temperance.
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He and Lucretia agreed to “total abstinence from intoxicating drinks.”
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They requested that their house in Brooklyn be built “without the customary hospitable kegs of rum, thereby audaciously violating precedent.”
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He founded the Brooklyn temperance society, which sponsored parades of a “Cold Water Brigade” to encourage the drinking of water. Temperance, now seen as “the most popular reform movement of the antebellum period,” was a sincere response by settled Americans to the growing problem of rampant drunkenness among men. In 1830 an American man drank on average the equivalent of a quarter bottle of whiskey every day.
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Alcohol consumption increased with the anxiety and powerlessness experienced by a “growing sea of workers who no longer lived under their employer’s roofs.”
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Most activists for temperance and prohibition were women. Like the early peace movement, temperance was at odds with social norms. In promoting these causes, Samuel Joseph dared to defy his father, but the defiance of a May son, unlike that of a daughter, did not confound the old man.

In Boston a few weeks after Samuel Joseph and Lucretia’s wedding, Aunt Q, now in her late seventies, sat on a balcony to watch the Marquis de Lafayette lead a parade to the Bunker Hill monument to honor the Revolutionary War dead. Nearly a half century before, she and Mr. Hancock had hosted the general, and in October 1781 it had been Lafayette who arrived at their house with news of the British surrender at Yorktown. The general’s host now was Aunt Q’s nephew and Abigail’s cousin Josiah Quincy III, who had been a Federalist senator, congressman, and judge before becoming Boston’s mayor. As Mayor Quincy escorted General Lafayette along streets crowded with people and festooned with French and American flags, “the keen-eyed old soldier” spied Madam Hancock. Although “time had wrought many changes in her piquant face and figure, he instantly recognized her and, with the inborn courtesy of a Frenchman, directed his conveyance to stop in front of the place where she sat, and rising, with his hand placed over his heart, made a graceful obeisance which was gracefully returned.”
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His eyes apparently glistened with tears, prompting Aunt Q to “burst into tears” and proclaim, “I have lived long enough.”

This scene, as it was later recounted by Abigail to Louisa, appears in
An Old-Fashioned Girl
. Grandma Shaw, who is described as having been a girl during the French general’s 1825 visit, recalls that “by and by the general, escorted by the mayor, drove up” to her aunt’s house on Federal Street.
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“Dear me, I see him now! A little old man in nankeen trousers and vest, a long blue coat and ruffled shirt, leaning on his cane. . . . Lafayette bowed . . . to the governor’s widow, and kissed her hand. . . . The last thing I remember was hanging out of the window with a flock of girls watching the carriage roll away while the crowd cheered as if they were mad . . . ‘Hurrah for Lafayette and Mayor Quincy! Hurrah for Madam Hancock and the pretty girls! Hurrah for Colonel May!’ ” Louisa neither repeated nor explained the novel’s reference to her actual grandfather.

The autumn after Lafayette’s tour, it was not the ancient Aunt Q who died but Abigail’s beloved mother, at age sixty-six, on October 31, 1825. This was another devastating blow to Abigail. In recent years, as her siblings had married and moved away or died, she had grown closer to the woman who seemed at times her closest companion and best confidante.
With her mother she could share the dreams of studying, teaching, and writing that perplexed her father. In her journal she paid tribute to her late mother: “She loved the doing of a good action better than describing it.
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She never said great things, but she has done ten thousand generous ones.”

Abigail could not have doubted, if the thought even occurred to her, that her mother’s life would leave little or no mark on the world. Dorothy Sewall May—of whom there are no extant portraits or journals or letters, although the latter two likely existed—was buried at King’s Chapel in early November 1825 with three of her twelve children present: Abigail, Samuel Joseph, and Louisa. Her son Charles had not yet returned from sea, and all the rest of her children were dead.

Without her mother, Abigail felt lonelier than ever. The house that once bustled with her siblings and friends was empty except for her father and servants. Her dislike of socializing isolated her from peers. The present seemed gloomy; the future did not beckon.

A few months after her mother died, her sixty-five-year-old father, still “tall and personable,” informed her that he had proposed marriage to Mary Ann Atkinson Cary, the widow of a King’s Chapel assistant minister.
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Madam Cary accepted his proposal, which in itself was not uncommon; many privileged widowers and a few widows married again.

But the proposal distressed Abigail. Madam Cary was thirty-nine, more than a quarter century younger than Joseph May, younger than two of his children, and only thirteen years older than Abigail herself.
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His action seemed hasty and ill-advised, especially as Dorothy had so recently died. How could a man who so worshipped duty so fail in his duty to his late wife? “My father has been very busy in conjugating the verb to love,” Abigail wrote to a cousin, “and I assure you he declines its moods and tenses inimitably.”
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As headstrong as his youngest daughter, Colonel May married Madam Cary on October 12, 1826, not quite a year after Abigail’s mother’s death. As the new Madam May moved into Abigail’s house, Abigail fled. She traveled by stagecoach several hours south to live with Samuel Joseph and Lucretia, who had rented a house in Brooklyn, Connecticut, while awaiting construction of their new house.
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Abigail reveled in the company of her brother and sister-in-law. With them, as with her mother, she could indulge her fantasy of a future of writing or teaching.
Unlike the vast majority of her female peers, who were already married, Abigail devoted her twenties to exploring her role as an individual in the world. In the context of her era, she was behaving like a man.

It was her status as a woman, though, that placed Abigail in the bedchamber on June 27, 1827, when Lucretia May gave birth to her and Samuel Joseph’s first child. They named the baby Joseph, after his paternal grandfather. Abigail and Lucretia grew even closer as they shared the care of the infant and the house, while Samuel Joseph was often away, preaching to other congregations and raising funds for reform.
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One of his missions was to improve Connecticut’s notoriously poor common (public) schools, which well-to-do residents mostly avoided by educating their children privately. Unable to avert his eyes from a problem, the Reverend May leapt into action. He formed a society to raise money for a statewide convention on public education.
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In early 1827 he wrote letters seeking speakers, advice, and support. One of the teachers he contacted was a young man from Wolcott, Connecticut, known for his unconventional teaching methods. He unscrewed the fixed desks and chairs in his classroom, decorated it with greens, and asked his students questions rather than filling them with answers, as was the norm. In the spring Samuel Joseph invited A. Bronson Alcott to come to Brooklyn to discuss rejuvenating the common schools.

On the July afternoon that Mr. Alcott knocked on the parsonage door, Samuel Joseph was not at home and Lucretia must have been occupied upstairs with their new baby, because Abigail opened the door. Before her stood a tall young man with a long face, piercing blue eyes, and disheveled blond hair. He introduced himself and said he was calling on Mr. May. She welcomed him into the parlor and introduced herself as the younger sister of the minister, who would return soon. Until then she could entertain her brother’s guest.

As Mr. Alcott described his classroom in Cheshire, Connecticut, Abigail was struck by his volubility, intelligence, and charm. Especially striking was his tranquility, a remarkable calm that she and many others found alluring. Hearing “the grand diapason of his rich words,” another acquaintance observed, was “like going to Heaven on a swing.”
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Abigail had never before observed in a man such a delightful mix of traits—personal serenity blended with verbal and intellectual intensity.

Before long she felt sufficiently bold to relate some of her own ideas about teaching. She believed that children should be allowed to “think and reason” and be “active in themselves,” rather than “treated like machines . . .
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to be acted upon.” Her particular interest was the education of girls. The deficiencies of her education exemplified a wider problem: “Women are not educated up to their abilities.”
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She hoped to promote female education in order to enhance women’s “moral health and intellectual growth. . . . Let us be taught to think, to act, to teach.”

Impressed, Bronson noted that his eminent host’s lively younger sister was unmarried. There is no extant portrait of Abigail from this period, but later photographs suggest that at twenty-six she was lithe and handsome, with long chestnut hair.
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She had a quick mind, a forthright manner, and dark, deep-set eyes that seemed to take in everything. Bronson, who had never been on intimate terms with a Boston Brahmin, felt drawn to what he called the “May character.
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This family,” he explained the following year, “is distinguished for their urbanity, and benevolence, their native manners and nobleness of souls, moral purity and general beneficences.”

This “young lady apparently near [my] age,” whose culture and early life were so remote from his, enthralled him.
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His first impression, reported in his journal, was of “an interesting woman [I] had often portrayed in [my] imagination. . . . In her [I] thought [I] saw its reality. There was nothing of artifice, or affectation of manners” about Abigail. “All was openness, simplicity,” intelligence, and traditionally feminine virtues: “sympathy, piety, exemplified in the tenderness of the eye, in the beauty of the moral countenance, in the joyousness of domestic performance,” and “refined and elevated conversation. . . . How could [I] but be in love with [these virtues’] possessor? We conversed on a variety of subjects. She had thought for herself. Her sentiments were also [mine]. Her purposes were like [mine]—the instruction of the young. Everything seemed to favor the commencement of an acquaintance of a pure and sentimental kind.”

Abigail knew little of her admirer’s background. She was unaware that he was literally a self-made man.
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“Mr. Alcott,” the eldest son of an unschooled couple named Alcox on a hardscrabble farm in a region of Connecticut known for “extreme” Calvinistic theology, had been baptized
Amos Bronson Alcox.
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His early dislike of rote learning prompted him at age thirteen to leave school and read at home among seven younger brothers and sisters. At seventeen he traveled to Virginia and the Carolinas to peddle scissors, puzzles, and trinkets from a cart. Southern planters welcomed the placid Yankee youth into their homes, impressing him with their manners and wealth. He could not make peddling profitable, though; all he accumulated was debt. He returned home “disgraced” and “disgusted” with himself.
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To elude creditors, perhaps, he re-created himself as a new man, A. Bronson Alcott. Sensing a call to teach, he visited district schools in hopes of understanding the profession. Schools in several rural towns, including his hometown, hired him, but in each post parents objected to his novel methods and eccentric manner, and he was asked to leave. “Those who in modern times attempt in education anything different from the old established modes are by many regarded as . . . dangerous” anarchists, he had observed in his journal in September 1826. “How knoweth this man more than others?” his critics seemed to him to be saying.
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“Who is he? What is his parentage?
Learn and look, for out of Galilee cometh no Prophet.
Hath he ever been the inmate of a University? . . . Hath he ever taught in our privileged seminaries or Churches?
Where then hath he these things?
” At the time he wrote that account, the year before his encounter with Abigail May, the twenty-six-year-old teacher owed six hundred dollars, triple his annual salary.

To Abigail he seemed, while “not an Educated man,” to have skillfully taught himself. He spoke with eloquence of literature and philosophy. He expressed passion for the work of the Swiss educational philosopher Johann Pestalozzi, whose letters Abigail read and admired.
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Bronson’s “modesty” and “earnest desire to promote better advantages for the young” charmed her, as did his determination that the “large fund of one million” dollars—equal to eighteen million dollars in 2000—that the state had provided for education “be used for higher ends” such as raising teacher salaries to “secure better teaching.”
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In the middle of the young couple’s conversation Mr. May arrived, concluding their pleasurable intercourse and commencing a similar encounter of his own. Later, after supper and several hours of conversation with Bronson, Samuel Joseph took his sister aside and said, “He is a born sage and saint . . . radical in all matters of reform . . .
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I have never been so immediately taken possession of by any man I have ever met.”