Past is Present

And now for some concluding thoughts from Jeanne McDougall about her encounter with Hannah Weld.  If you’ve missed the previous two posts about Hannah and her mother Mary, click here to get caught up.

What can you say after experiencing such an extraordinary epistle?  My reading for the day came to a full stop;  any day in life where you learn something new, or make a friend, is a good day.  This had been both.

February 21, 1799 wasn’t the only day in her life that Hannah Weld wrote a letter, or her only letter in the AAS collection – there are three, as well as a letter from daughter Hermione to daughter Mary.  Awareness of the Weld women should only become greater thanks to the recent acquisition of Hannah’s portrait by AAS.  Ashley Cataldo, working at the desk that afternoon, offered to show me, and I eagerly waited for the image to materialize on the computer screen.

There are fewer than a thousand words in Hannah’s February letter from so long ago to allow a comparison of the scribal portrait to the one in oil.  I don’t know how to make a qualitative statement about how many words a picture paints, but what the image reveals tends to confirm what the text suggests.

The profile gazing purposefully toward some unknown point in the distance belonged to a woman prosperous enough to be neatly clothed and well-fed, though not so “well” as to appear unhealthy or suggest extravagance, a woman who enjoyed oysters and a good laugh, shared apples and anecdotes, and lived her life in the midst of company, alive to danger, and loving her children.  Her bright eyes reveal curiosity, intellect, even wit – and something else, for the lines encircling them came from a lifetime of smiling, a subtle smile captured by the artist and still playing about her lips two centuries after the original went to sleep, not unlike that other smile so admired in the Louvre.

Had we never had the ability to know Hannah by anything more than this image, we could not have helped but feel a warmth, even a kinship.  But we have so much more, because she took the time to tell us.

I love Hannah Weld.  And I’m glad her letters survived, to tell me why.

If you would like to contact Jeanne directly with any questions or comments about her posts, she can be reached at jmcdouga@usc.edu.

Jeanne Eller McDougall is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Southern California, writing a dissertation entitled, “‘Fit to be sung in Streets:’  the mobilizing power of political song in pre-revolutionary British Colonial North America, 1750-1776.”  She is a USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Fellow and a Michael J. Connell Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library for 2011-2012.

Last week, AAS reader Jeanne McDougall introduced us to the Weld family.  Today, she continues exploring the mother and daughter pair, and examines their relationship and personalities through Hannah’s letter.

During the closing days of February 1799, Hannah would have had every reason to wish her daughter back home with her in Boston rather than far-off, rural Worcester, enduring the final weeks of a rugged winter during the worrisome early days of a pregnancy that would produce, on July 6, Mary Rebecca Thomas, the elder Isaiah’s first surviving grandchild.

“I think my Dear you are remarkable well for the time (but) I hope you will take care to keep your Self so,” counseled Grandma Hannah.  She may have had an informant in the household:  “I am pleasd to find thay wont let you have your way in every thing,” such as “wasing dishes rubing furnitur or some such notability.”  An active woman herself, Hannah acknowledged that her daughter would “long to be at work but, it wont do,” for “it is early times with you (and) you must take Great Care of your Self – gitt well and Strong then you may work as much as you please.”  She further warned Mary to “take care of damp (chills) or Cold watter for in those things there is great danger,” and obviously knew the expectant mom well enough to know she “would always have her own way (a chip off the old block?).”  “Danger” appears twice in the letter, a reminder of how many children in this period did not survive – as indeed, Mary’s first child, also a daughter, had been stillborn almost exactly a year earlier.

These cautions were but a prelude to the real purpose of the letter:  providing Mary with a means of enjoying the company of her Boston family in a way once characterized as “vicarious,” and which we might call “virtual,” accessible to us today through the manuscript media of the period.

If you’re lucky, such a letter emerges from an archival folder expressing itself in sensory terms, affording the reader the giddy pleasure of actually seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling, even tasting the moment.  Hannah was that sort of writer.  I grieved that this particular conversation didn’t involve music, my area of interest.  But never mind.

“I don’t wonder you turned off your dog,” Hannah exclaimed, adding, “I never could nor never would lett one touch me,” because “I once had one brought me to try” but “as soon as I felt his Cold Nose and ruf Tongue I hove him down to the floor in a moment (and) never Lett him touch me again.”  Now before getting your petticoats in a bunch, keep in mind that while such seeming callousness might shock us today,  the maintenance of animals in a producer society was somewhat more practical, and far less fetishized, than in our pet-rich environment.  But it’s the way Hannah expressed herself that invites the reader into her sitting room – you can see the hapless canine, feel his tongue, and perhaps even wish to comfort him after he’d been “hoved” to the floor like so much ballast.  You have officially stepped through the looking glass.

But the rabbit holes continue to present themselves.  “I receved a Lettr from (Betsy) by the Deacon,” Hannah continued, likely referring to yet another absent daughter, Elizabeth.  “She had a feteuging time of it,” and “was very Sick at reding in the Sleagh like her Sister.”  Having spent a lifetime coping with motion sickness, even when so much as an elevator makes too many stops, it never occurred to me that reading in an eighteenth-century sleigh might have been potentially as upsetting as doing so in an automobile.  Another cross-century resonance.

There were more to come.  In my own childhood on the lower Chesapeake Bay, where no one ever explains to a toddler upon eating her first raw oyster that the creature is still living (otherwise, you couldn’t safely eat it), I completely related to the discourse on shellfish.  “I well tell you what says the Deacon,” Hannah confided.  Quoth he:  “‘I had about as (lief) take a live Frog in my mouth as a raw Oyster!’”  His audience roared:  “I thought thay would dy with Laughing,” recalled Hannah, “& am Sure I cant refrain from smiling every time I think of it.”  Neither can I.

Hannah’s one regret was that her “tenderly belovd children” could not spend more evenings together, where times could be “very Drole.”  She lived for the letters that were “all the Earthly Comfort I injoy or ever expect to while in this Vale of Tears;”  she wanted nothing more than to hear that “my children are well and happy … the Suport of my Life.”  And to that end, Mary, when it comes to rearranging the furniture, knock it off.

The feeling was clearly mutual.  Hannah thanked her daughter not only for the comfort of her letters, but for the small kindness of a gift of apples which had “aroved” from the country, at a time of year when a city cellar might be somewhat bare.  A thoughty-thing, “for which,” said her grateful mother, “you have our thanks.”  Happily, the apple she bore had not fallen far from the tree, and she would live just long enough to see yet another apple share her name, when Mary and Isaiah Jr. welcomed sixth daughter Hannah Weld Thomas in 1803, eleven months before Grandma Hannah’s death on September 14, 1804.

Check back next week for Jeanne’s concluding thoughts.

Jeanne Eller McDougall is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Southern California, writing a dissertation entitled, “‘Fit to be sung in Streets:’  the mobilizing power of political song in pre-revolutionary British Colonial North America, 1750-1776.”  She is a USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Fellow and a Michael J. Connell Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library for 2011-2012.

Over the winter, AAS reader Jeanne McDougall spent some time with our Isaiah Thomas manuscript collection.  While searching through the correspondence, she stumbled upon a letter from Hannah Weld to her daughter Mary Weld, who married Isaiah Thomas Jr.  Below, Jeanne describes her encounter with Hannah and Mary.  Jeanne’s experience certainly demonstrates the serendipitous nature of manuscript research!

Jeanne McDougall’s post will be featured in three parts.  Stayed tuned the next two Mondays to read the continuing saga!

Part I

I love Hannah Weld. Here’s why.

Not surprisingly, for those of us working on the late colonial/early Republic periods, the vast majority of paper we push was first pushed by men.  We know so much more today about the lives of women in the early Republic, thanks to recent generations of scholarship that have famously given us good wives and nasty wenches, tale-telling midwives and Republican mothers. And when you find one amid the columns of calculations and mountains of man-talk, you pause.

That’s what happened when I reached Box 1, folder 9 of the Thomas family collection.  The letter on the desk wasn’t handsome or imposing, but small and unassuming, nor the handwriting florid and expansive, but tiny, even cramped, as if to conserve the precious paper, yet revealing a boundless warmth from its salutation, “My Belovd Child,” to its signature, “Your affectnate parent Hannah Weld.”

I wasn’t even supposed to meet Hannah, as my search period ends at 1794.  But Hannah could not have written to her married daughter in Worcester, Massachusetts on “February the 21^st 1788,” as the letter indicates, because Isaiah Thomas Jr. didn’t marry Mary Weld until May 4, 1797, at the Hollis Street Church in Boston.  A physical impossibility.  Perhaps in haste, or a moment of absent-mindedness, Hannah misdated her letter, and for reasons that would eventually become clear, it may be that she wrote “88” when she intended “99.”  But however it happened, in an irony of the sort that often occurs in archival work, without that numerical error more than two centuries ago, we might never have met.

It would be easy to dismiss Hannah Church Weld’s late-winter missive of motherly advice on the basis of what we would call its lack of literacy – the erratic spelling, the frequent disregard of elementary grammar, the relentless absence of punctuation.  That would be a mistake.  At age 55 or 66, depending on the correct date of the letter, Boston-born Hannah would presumably have been able to read well enough to understand her Bible, and written sufficiently well to run a household including her successful Boston merchant husband and seven children.  But coming from a prominent Boston family with a lineage dating back, through her father’s mother, Martha Burton Church, to the Mayflower, and patrilineally to the first generation at Plymouth Colony, she may have been able to do quite a bit more.  Younger brother Benjamin received the best education available to a young man of his time, graduating from Boston Latin School and Harvard College, and continuing his medical training in London before being the first man named the equivalent of surgeon general in the U.S. Army, a career that ended with his dramatic 1775 conviction, at the dawn of the American Revolution, of having passed information to General Gage.

Hannah’s connections to the world of printing and publication also predate her daughter’s marriage to the scion of the Thomas family.  Her sister Alice married John Fleeming, one of the publishers of the loyalist newspaper the Boston Chronicle, in 1770, the same year the paper ceased operations after its offices had been attacked by an angry readership the previous October.  Hannah’s second cousin, the Rev. Ezra Waldo Weld, joined Isaiah Thomas Sr.’s publishing network in 1788, founding with him the Hampshire Gazette, and her daughter Hermione, Mary’s younger sister, married Thomas’ Boston business partner, Ebenezer Andrews, in 1791, several years before the families were further united through the marriage of two more of their children, Mary and Isaiah Jr.

Nor was Hannah the first author in her family.  Brother Benjamin kept a commonplace book while at Harvard, honing the satiric and rhetorical skills that would make him “one of the most feared political propagandists on the Revolutionary scene,” one for whom Paul Revere and fellow Whigs harbored suspicions but nevertheless “courted;” during those same college years, he also produced  “a landmark poem in colonial American literature” entitled “The Choice,” inspired by the 1700 John Pomfret poem of the same name yet transcending the original in a way that helped “define those poetic qualities which may be labeled ‘American’ … eager to satisfy the poetic demands of the mother country, but … equally eager to assert its own individuality.”  And even long before her own generation, Hannah’s great-grandfather, the Benjamin Church who captured  Metacomet, the native leader known to the Puritans as “King Philip” in the war that bore the same name, chronicled that event in his 1716 publication, Entertaining Passages Relating to Philip’s War.

So writing was in Hannah’s genes, as she composed entertaining passages of her own during the first generation of republican grandmotherhood, passages made possible for one of her sex by her birth into a world of privilege, and which must stand in for so many other women who were denied, by so many reasons so distressingly familiar to anyone who considers the excluded, the means to tell us stories of their own.

Whatever education had been available to her, and whatever discipline she could have developed from it, Hannah had a method of her own.  “Misspelled” words are done so consistently.  The regular lack of apostrophes for contractions, or the more commonly dropped “e’s” from “-ed,” could suggest a deliberate decision.  And if Hannah chose to use the archaic “j” interchangeably with “I,” then perhaps it was a question of tone or style, rather than literacy.  Whatever the explanations, this letter is the work of a literate person, in all but the most literal sense of the word.

Next week, Jeanne will provide some excerpts from the letter, and explore Hannah and Mary’s relationship.

Jeanne Eller McDougall is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Southern California, writing a dissertation entitled, “‘Fit to be sung in Streets:’  the mobilizing power of political song in pre-revolutionary British Colonial North America, 1750-1776.”  She is a USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute Fellow and a Michael J. Connell Foundation Fellow at the Huntington Library for 2011-2012.