Chivers: Love, Joy, and Grief

Thomas Holley Chivers knew about love, joy, and grief. The Georgian poet had experienced a troubled life but took great joy in his family, including his parents and siblings, as well as his children. His children, however, all died young, and his first marriage proved disastrous. By October 10, 1839, he knew enough about love, joy, and grief to write a poem appropriately called "The Poetry of Love, Joy, and Grief":

To hang upon his breast by day.
   To lie close by his side by night;
To heed whatever he may say,
   And do it with as fond delight;
To make each thought of him thy sigh,
   To love him more than God above,
And think that he can never die—
   This is the Poetry of Love.

To think him, absent, by thy side-
   Whatever he may do is right;
To love him as when first his bride,
   And think each one thy bridal night;
To live through life unchanged in years.
   With love that time cannot destroy,
And have each thought expressed in tears—
   This is the Poetry of Joy.

To sit down by his dying bed,
   To count each pulse—to feel each pain—
To love him after he is dead,
   And nevermore to smile again;
To love him after as before—
   To find his grave thy sole relief—.
And weep for him forever more—
   This is the Poetry of Grief. 

The poem, written in the perspective of a woman, may also have been a somewhat passive-aggressive reference to his first wife, who had left him not long after their marriage. Or, perhaps, it was more referential to his second wife, who he had married not long before writing the poem. The theme of death or dying was fairly typical for Chivers's poetry. "The Poetry of Love, Joy, and Grief" was included in his self-published collection The Lost Pleiad in 1845.

Birth of Forceythe Willson: faint, white fire

It seemed prophetic that the boy born in Little Genesee, New York, on April 10, 1837 would some day become a poet when he was named Byron. The poetic name notwithstanding, he went by his middle and last name as an adult, Forceythe Willson. He was born in a log cabin in what was then a rural area in far western New York. Soon, however, the Willson family sailed downriver into Kentucky before settling in Indiana. The eight Willson children (including future Kentucky governor Augustus Willson) were orphans by 1859, however, and each received a sizable inheritance.

Forceythe Willson attempted to study at Antioch College in Ohio and at Harvard in Massachusetts. He was unable, however, due to the onset of tuberculosis, which physicians said was immediately terminal. He survived longer than expected, however, and returned to his family in New Albany, Indiana. He married Elizabeth Conwell Smith (herself a poet) and contributed to a journal across the Ohio River in Louisville, Kentucky. He also wrote poetry, advocated for the Union cause during the Civil War, and dabbled in spiritualism and clairvoyance before finally dying in 1867.

Willson published his only book of poems the year before his death during a temporary sojourn living in Massachusetts. One of Willson's most famous poems, the lengthy "The Old Sergeant," was praised by notable people including Abraham Lincoln, John James Piatt, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Willson's poem "Mystic Thought" (which he listed as with the musical term "Arpeggio") shows his unusual use of form as well as his interest in spiritualism:

There came a Mystic Thought to me;
    If any soul should ask me, "Whence?"
I can but say, I could not see,
    Nor hear nor feel, in any sense.
As the glory of the rising moon
Is duplicated in the lagoon,
Or gleams on the old tower and its spire,
Till the cross becomes a cross of fire, —
So that strange Thought, serene and lone,
Rose on my dark soul, and it shone!

Shouldst ask me, if an Angel brought
This strange, this sweet and secret Thought?
I could but say, I do not know!
It came as comes the guiding glow
From Heaven's high shrines; or as the snow
On the dark hill-tops; or as bloom
    The intimations of a God
In every violet of the tomb,
    And every pansy of the sod.

It came, unbidden, — as it went, —
A wingéd, wandering Sentiment,
That for a moment fanned my lyre
With passing wings, of faint, white fire:
Five finger-tips were touched to mine,
Most lightly: and a drop of wine,
Or dew, fell on my lips. At last,
A breath, — a seeming kiss —
                                               it passed!

Birth of Lucas: tribute of love from me

When Daniel Bedinger Lucas was born there on March 16, 1836, the town of Charles Town was part of Virginia; today it is part of West Virginia, which legally separated into its own state during the Civil War. During that conflict, Lucas, a lawyer who studied at the University of Virginia as well as what was then called Washington College, sided forcefully with the Confederacy, a loyalty he often celebrated through his poetry. During the war, he attempted to rescue a friend who was to be executed as a spy, John Yates Beall. Lucas was unsuccessful and was unable to return to Virginia and instead hid out in Canada.

Upon his return to his family home, Rion Hall, where he was born, his home state had become West Virginia and he was barred from practicing law until he finally offered his oath to the Union in 1870. It was said that Lucas got his poetic sensibility, at least in part, from the picturesque surroundings of rural western Virginia where he was born and grew up. If that is the case, perhaps no better poem can be included her than his "My Heart is in the Mountains":

Right nobly flows the River James
   From Richmond to the Sea,
And many a hallowed mem'ry claims,
   And tribute of love from me;
But Western Tempe farther on—
   Mother of limestone fountains!
My heart goes back with the setting sun—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

There where the fringe-tree nods his plume,
   Beneath the white pine's shade—
There where the laurel drops his bloom
   O'er many a wild cascade—
There where the eagle seeks his nest—
   Mother of limestone fountains!
List to an exile's prayer for rest—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

The wide expanse of the boundless sea
   Is a sight to stir the soul,
And there is a breadth of majesty
   In the Western prairie's roll—
But give me the heights that milk the clouds,
   And gather the dew in fountains!
Give me the peaks, with their misty shrouds—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

There's something blank in the landscape here
   And tame in the water's flow—
I pine for a mountain atmosphere,
   And a crag in the sunset's glow!
King of the Hills! Blue Ridge that I love!
   Feed still the Vale with fountains,
From rock and dale, and mountain-cove—
   My heart, my heart is in the Mountains!

Lydia Sigourney and the Cherokee Nation

The Cherokee Phoenix and Indian Advocate has been recognized as the first newspaper published by a Native American tribe and the first to report news in a tribal language. Its first issue was published in northern Georgia in early 1828. In the next decade, the Cherokee Nation would relocate to present-day Oklahoma thanks to Indian Removal Act, commonly called the Trail of Tears.

But the newspaper also published each article in English translation and attracted more white readers than Native American readers. It also attracted white contributors, including Connecticut poet Lydia Sigourney, who published her poem "The Cherokee Mother" in the March 12, 1831 issue.

Ye bid us hence.—These vales are dear,
To infant hope, to patriot pride,
These streamlets tuneful to our ear,
Where our light shallops peaceful glide.

Beneath yon consecrated mounds
Our fathers' treasur'd ashes rest,
Our hands have till'd these corn-clad ground,
Our children's birth these home have blest,

Here, on our souls a Saviour's love
First beam'd with renovating ray,
Why should we from these haunts remove?
But still you warn us hence away.

Child, ask not where! I cannot tell,
Save where wide wastes uncultur'd spread,
Where unknown waters fiercely roll,
And savage monsters howling tread;

Where no blest Church with hallow'd train,
Nor hymns of praise, nor voice of prayer,
Like angels soothe the wanderer's pain;
Ask me no more. I know not where.

Go seek thy Sire. The anguish charm
That shades his brow like frowning wrath,
Divide the burden from his arm,
And gird him for his pilgrim-path.

Come, moaning babe! Thy mother's arms
Shall bear thee on our weary course,
Shall be thy shield from midnight harms,
And baleful dews, and tempests hoarse.

Sigourney was clearly writing in opposition to the Indian Removal Act ("Why should we from these haunts remove?"). However, rather than writing in a political tone, she appeals to the emotions, representing the mother figure as loyal to her family and, perhaps most importantly, as a Christian. To this mother and her child, the "wide wastes" to which they are being removal has "no blest Church" and no hymns nor prayer. Sigourney apparently never republished her poem "The Cherokee Mother" in her various collected works. Even so, the poem was certainly not her only attempt at educating the public about the Native Americans. In 1822, for example, she published a sympathetic epic poem called Traits of the Aborigines of America.

Further, Sigourney, who once said she "never wrote for fame," was one of several prominent women who urged other women to write to Congress in opposition of the Indian Removal Act. Despite a flood of responses, the bill passed in a close vote in the House of Representatives, 102 to 97, and President Andrew Jackson signed it into law.

Guest post: Salt! Salt!: The Death of Edward Vernon Sparhawk

1837 wasn't a good year for Edward Vernon Sparhawk. He had likely contracted tuberculosis while caring for his wife, Julia, who lost a long, painful battle with the disease the previous summer. Writing as "Pertinax Placid" in the May 1835 issue of The Southern Literary Messenger — the first of three issues he edited before Edgar Allan Poe took over in August — Sparhawk addressed his young son and foretold an untimely end:

The dreaming pauses 'midst thy play, as if of sudden thought,
The speaking glances of thine eye, when with hope and gladness fraught—
These tell a tale of after times, when I no more shall guide
The wand'rings of thy youthful feet, or lead thee by my side—
When the fondness of a father's love thou never more canst know,
And I shall in an early grave sleep tranquilly and low.

Virginia Capitol, c. 1831

In June, a robber bludgeoned Sparhawk from behind as he walked home from work. The assailant broke both his jaws and left him unconscious, in exchange for a few coins and a pen knife. A frail man to begin with, by winter Sparhawk was no longer strong enough to continue his job as a reporter at the state Capitol in Richmond.

Still, the year had bright spots. In July, Sparhawk purchased and became editor of the Petersburg, Virginia, Intelligencer. Then, in August, his marriage to Eloise Warrell relieved any fear that when his disease took its final turn, there would be no one to take care of his children. By the start of 1838, he was well enough to go back to work. He arrived at the House of Delegates on the morning of January 6, where his colleagues noticed his mood was much improved.

Crossing the grounds of the Capitol after the House had adjourned, Sparhawk was stricken and called out for help. Passers by rushed to catch him as he crumpled to the ground. He cried for "Salt! Salt!", but any relief for the hemorrhage arrived too late. His body was carried to his mother-in-law's house, and he was buried the next day at Shockoe Hill.

An accomplished poet, prose writer, reporter, printer, editor, and a persistent instigator, Edward Vernon Sparhawk died a week shy of his 37th birthday. In a life marked with tragedies, he strived to be the person neither his father nor brother had the chance to become. Years earlier, coping with his brother's death at sea, he summarized the human journey:

So o'er the ocean of life as we're sailing,
    Wild waves our peace annoy;
Seeming, each blast of the tempest prevailing,
    Hope in our breast to destroy:
The calm of tranquility, softly returning,
    Quells the storms of the breast;
The rainbow of hope, in our bosom still burning,
    Points to eternal rest.

*Chris Hoffman is writing the first full biography of Edward Vernon Sparhawk. A member of the Boston Biographers Group, Chris lives with his wife, their cat, and their dog, and can be found on Twitter @xprhoff.

Birth of Butterworth: the snow will fall

Hezekiah Butterworth was born in Warren, Rhode Island on December 22, 1839. He went on to become a prolific writer of poetry, history and biography (though much of the details he used were somewhat fanciful) and, particularly, of lengthy travel sketches in a series called "Zig-Zag." As a contributor to periodicals, he was associated with the Youth's Companion, the Knickerbocker, and St. Nicholas. He occasionally presented public lectures as well and advocated for children's literature as a separate genre from adult writing. Much of his work reflects his religious beliefs. Among his many books was Poems for Christmas, Easter, and New Year's (1885). Included in that collection is the poem "Light-Hearted Amid the Snow":

The snow-flakes fell on her golden hair
    As she hied from her home away,
And bright to her as the April air
    Was the shadowy Christmas day.

Yes, fair as the daisied fields were the skies,
    For her heart was glad and warm,
And it changed the world to a paradise,
    And to blossoming air the storm.

Laugh on, laugh on, O Maiden fair,
    Laugh on in the stormy while you may;
The snow will fall on your golden hair
    On another Christmas day.

The snow of years will fall on your hair,
    May the Christmas hope still glow,
And you will be then as free from care,
    And light-hearted amid the snow.

*For more on Hezekiah Butterworth, visit www.hezekiahbutterworth.com.

Constance Latimer: perfect contentment

Emma C. Embury, then a popular magazine contributor, intended to write a short novella to help raise funds for the establishment of a school for the blind in Brooklyn, New York. She didn't think her efforts were good enough, however, so she opted to write a full-length collection which would raise funds after the school was already established. In her preface, dated December 18, 1837, she apologized for the delay but made it clear her aim was not fame for herself but money for the institution:

It is now published to aid the funds of one of the most valuable institutions ever founded; and though the author's ability be far from equalling her will, she can only hope that, by thus contributing her mite, she may induce others to give of their abundance.

The book, Constance Latimer; or, The Blind Girl, with Other Tales, appeared in early 1838. On its title page, its dedication page, and in its preface, Embury made it clear it was written for the benefit of the New-York Institution for the Instruction of the Blind.

The title character of Embury's story, Constance Latimer, is herself blind. She lost her vision as a young child due to scarlet fever after seeing her brother's body when the same disease killed him. It was the last scene she ever saw. Despite her physical limitations, however, Constance is spiritually pure. The image of a perfectly moral and beautiful girl, happy with her life (even when a friend regains her lost eyesight), was an image Embury wanted to cultivate to arouse sympathy. The character's father is a wealthy man who inherited the family business — and noting his wealth is important as the book was publishing during the Panic of 1837 and that Embury solicited funds for the Brooklyn school specifically from wealthy families. Constance seems to have an enhanced emotional awareness to make up for her lack of vision, and she ultimately represents a perfect, unchallenging figure of antebellum femininity.

Her father, however, comes down with an illness and sacrifices the family fortune. He travels to England to protect what assets he can, leaving his wife and daughter behind. To raise enough income for them to survive, Constance becomes a music teacher at the Brooklyn School for the Blind. Her father could not be more proud:

Once more contentment smiled upon the longtried family. Adversity had awakened the noble feelings which had slumbered in the hearts of all, and the voice of prosperity could not again lull them to sleep. To a mind filled with knowledge, and a heart pure as the dream of infancy, Constance now added a consciousness of mental power, a reliance on her own resources, and a piety which taught her that the shorn lamb, which had been sheltered from the pelting of the pitiless storm, would find the wind of future years tempered by the same benevolent hand. Her days are still gliding on so calmly, that she scarcely feels their current; and though the silver blossoms of the grave are strewn upon the temples of her parents, she still wears the garland of youth upon her sunny brow. The absence of all tumultuous passions has preserved the childlike purity of her countenance; and if ever perfect contentment dwelt in the breast of mortal, her home may be found in the heart of the blind Constance Latimer.

Birth of Elizabeth Akers Allen

Elizabeth Anne Chase was born on October 9, 1832, in small town called Strong, Maine. Her mother died when she was young and her father moved the family to Farmington, Maine. It was there that young Elizabeth began writing poetry as a teenager under the pseudonym Florence Percy. Her most famous poem, "Rock Me To Sleep, Mother," was published under that name in 1859. One editor claimed the poem had been set to music at least 30 times by the turn of the century. She had married Marshall Taylor, but the marriage ended in divorce within a few years. With him she had at least one daughter, who later became an editor in California under the name Florence Percy.

Traveling in Rome, she met the sculptor Benjamin Paul Akers, also from Maine. It was in Italy that she wrote her most famous poem and sent it to be published in the Saturday Evening Post. Her absence from the country during its publication caused some confusion over its authorship; at least one other claimed to have written the poem. In 1860, she and Akers were married, though he died within a year. She later married a New Yorker named E. M. Allen in 1865.

Elizabeth Akers Allen published several books of poetry and was frequently included in prominent literary magazines of the day, including the Atlantic Monthly. One critic noted her poems were popular because they are "full of tender feeling, without any tinge of morbidness." Indeed, most of her work features an uplifting moral message, triumphant faith, and domestic tranquility. Her poem "O Cricket, Hush!" (c. 1891) alludes to the belief that a chirping cricket signifies the coming of winter:

O cricket! hush your boding song!
   I know the truth it makes so plain;
You say that autumn dies ere long,
And soon the winter's wrath and wrong
   Will chill the pallid world again.

O mournful winds of midnight, cease
   To breathe your low, prophetic sigh;
Too clearly for my spirit's peace
I see the mellow days decrease,
   And feel December drawing nigh.

Fall silently, October rain,
   Nor take that wailing undertone,
Nor beat so loudly on the pane
The sad, monotonous refrain
   Which tells me summer-time has flown.

Be charier of your golden days,
   O goldenest month of all the throng!
Oh, pour less lavishly your rays!
Hoard carefully your purple haze,
   So haply it may last more long!

Spendthrift October, art thou wise,
   Who wastest, in thy plenteous prime,
More beauty on the earth and skies,
More hue and glow, than would suffice
   To brighten all the winter-time?

Yes, better autumn all delight,
   And then a winter all unblest,
Than months of mingled dark and bright,
Of faded tints and pallid light,
   Imperfect dreams and broken rest.

Ah, better if our life could know
   One wholly happy, perfect year,
One time of cloudless joy and glow,
And then its days of rayless woe,
   Than this commingled hope and fear;

This doubt and dread which naught consoles,
   Which mark our brows ere manhood's prime;
The dread uncertainty that rolls
Like chariot-wheels across our souls,
   And makes us old before our time.

So pour your light, October skies!
   O fairest skies which ever are!
Put on, O earth, your bravest dyes,
And smile, although the cricket cries,
   And winter threatens from afar!

Very: something dangerous in his air

In the summer of 1838, Jones Very had surprised a group of Harvard students he was teaching when he shouted to them, "Flee to the mountains, for the end of all things is at hand!" Fired from his job, he was sent back to his native Salem, Massachusetts for rest and relaxation to combat what others thought was a nervous collapse.

Instead, Very became more and more convinced he was a prophet and went door to door in Salem in an attempt to find recruits for this belief. On September 16, 1838, he went to his neighbor Elizabeth Palmer Peabody who, like him, was an early member of the Transcendentalist movement. To Peabody, Very quoted from the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 24, before offering his own interpretation of the text. As Peabody later recalled,

He looked much flushed and his eyes very brilliant and unwinking. It struck me at once that there was something unnatural—and dangerous in his air—As soon as we were within the parlor door he laid his hand on my head—and said "I come to baptize you with the Holy Ghost and with Fire"—and then he prayed—I cannot remember his words but they were thrilling—and as I stood under his hand, I trembled to the centre.

Peabody said she tried to stay quiet and allow Very to have this experience. When he was finished, he sat down and the two sat quietly for a moment. He then asked how she felt. "I feel no change," she admitted. "But you will," he said, before revealing himself as the Second Coming of Christ. She was moved by his connection with "Absolute Spirit" but was nervous about his "frenzy." When Very repeated the incident with the local minister, he was institutionalized for insanity. Peabody, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others, meanwhile, were concerned for the young man's health but were somewhat awed by his profound thoughts on the human spirit and its relationship with the deity. Emerson particularly encouraged Very's writings, including essays on Shakespeare and a huge number of sonnets — written, Very claimed, with the Holy Spirit. His poem "Worship":

There is no worship now: the idol stands
Within the Spirit's holy resting-place I
Millions before it bend with upraised hands,
And with their gifts God's purer shrine disgrace.
The prophet walks unhonored 'mid the crowd
That to the idol's temple daily throng;
His voice unheard above their voices loud,
His strength too feeble 'gainst the torrent strong;
But there are bounds that ocean's rage can stay
When wave on wave leaps madly to the shore:
And Boo'n the prophet's word shall men obey,
And hushed to peace the billows cease to roar;
For He who spake — and warring winds kept peace,
Commands again — and man's wild passions cease.

Hentz: where the joyous throng

Though born in Massachusetts and later a resident of North Carolina and Ohio, Caroline Lee Hentz would become best associated with Alabama as a novelist. She lived in Florence for about eight years with her family before moving to Tuscaloosa in 1843. They later moved to Georgia and, later still, to Florida. Her time in Florence was relatively quiet and out of the public eye; as one earlier biographer of her noted, this period only saw a few "fugitive poems, hurriedly written as occasion called for or suggested them." One such work was her poem "O, Come With Me," which Hentz noted was written in Florence on July 2, 1837. It was published in the February 1838 issue of the Lady's Book:

Oh! come with me to the stately halls,
Where fashion her airy votaries calls—
Thine eye would scorn such rural bowers,
Couldst thou gaze on luxury's glittering towers,
And thy hand would scatter the flowers we wear
To gather the gems that are glowing there.

Away, if thou wilt, but not for me,
Those heartless scenes—I had rather be
The humblest of the maids who dwell
On the sun-bright slope, or the shady dell,
Than one who has made her cold, bright home
In marble hall, or ancestral dome.
Oh! follow me, where the joyous throng,


To music's strains, are gliding along—
Let us there our useless garlands spread,
They will not fade 'neath so light a tread—
Time never will leave a print of care
On hearts so light, or brows so fair.

I may not go. The serpent leaves
Its track o'er the blossom that luxury weaves—
And thorns are rankling beneath the lig
That gilds like a glory, the brow of night—
The lamps are dim where those gay forms flit,
To yon lamp that nature's God has lit.

And is it so? Does the secret thorn
Lurk 'mid the scenes that such gems adorn?
Does the heart immersed in the joys of earth,
Though covered with smiles, feel an aching dearth?
Does the soul, that immortal cravings fill,
Still I sigh when the notes of the banquet thrill!

'Tis-Nature speaks through those saddening tones—
Thy inmost spirit her triumph owns.
Then come to her altar—with incense come—
Bring the soul's pure vows, and the heart's young bloom.
They are God's own temples—the fields and bowers—
Their curtains, the skies—their garlands, the flowers.

Adieu to the pomp and the splendour of Art—
Thou hast touched the living springs of the heart,
The rock is broken—the waters gleam,
The rays of truth on its pure waves beam,
The flower returns to its native wild—
Receive oh! Nature, thy erring child. 

Wilde: All I have seen, and all I see

Though born in Ireland, Richard Henry Wilde embraced his adoptive country of the United States. He served a handful of terms in the U.S. House of Representatives from Georgia, though he lost a re-election campaign in 1835. Three months later, he was on board a ship traveling to Europe, hoping to alleviate an illness and recover from his arduous public service. The trip would mark the beginning of a transition from politician to literary man; it was at sea on June 1, 1835, that he wrote "A Farewell to America," a poem praising the country he was temporarily leaving:

Farewell! my more than fatherland!
   Home of my heart and friends, adieu!
Lingering beside some foreign strand,
   How oft shall I remember you!
How often, o'er the waters blue,
   Send back a sigh to those I leave,
The loving and beloved few,
   Who grieve for me,—for whom I grieve!

We part!—no matter how we part,
   There are some thoughts we utter not,
Deep treasured in our inmost heart,
   Never reveal'd, and ne'er forgot!
Why murmur at the common lot?
   We part!—I speak not of the pain,—
But when shall I each lovely spot
   And each loved face behold again?

It must be months,—it may be years,—
   It may—but no!—I will not fill
Fond hearts with gloom,—fond eyes with tears,
   "Curious to shape uncertain ill."
Though humble,—few and far,—yet, still
   Those hearts and eyes are ever dear;
Theirs is the love no time can chill,
   The truth no chance or change can sear!

All I have seen, and all I see,
   Only endears them more and more;
Friends cool, hopes fade, and hours flee,
   Affection lives when all is o'er!
Farewell, my more than native shore!
   I do not seek or hope to find,
Roam where I will, what I deplore
   To leave with them and thee behind!

Grandpa, what wounded you?

Hannah Flagg Gould's father Benjamin was a veteran of the American Revolution and, as such, it is perhaps not surprising that many of her poems patriotically reflect on that conflict. One such verse, "The Scar of Lexington," commemorates that skirmish in Massachusetts on April 19, 1775. The poem, which apparently dates to 1830, is framed as a young boy asking his grandfather, a veteran, of his experience (and the origins of his scar):

With cherub smile the prattling boy,
   Who on the veteran's breast reclines,
Has thrown aside his favourite toy,
   And round his tender finger twines
Those scatter'd locks, that with the flight
Of fourscore years are snowy white;
And, as a scar arrests his view,
He cries, "Grandpa, what wounded you?"

"My child, 'tis five-and-fifty years
   This very day, this very hour,
Since from a scene of blood and tears,
   Where valour fell by hostile power,
I saw retire the setting sun
Behind the hills of Lexington;
While pale and lifeless on the plain
My brothers lay, for freedom slain!

"And ere that fight, the first that spoke
   In thunder to our land, was o'er,
Amid the clouds of fire and smoke
   I felt my garments wet with gore!
'Tis since that dread and wild affray,
That trying, dark, eventful day,
From this calm April eve so far,
I wear upon my cheek the scar.

"When thou to manhood shalt be grown,
   And I am gone in dust to sleep,
May freedom's rights be still thine own,
   And thou and thine in quiet reap
The unblighted product of the toil
In which my blood bedew'd the soil.
And while those fruits thou shalt enjoy,
Bethink thee of this scar, my boy.

"But, should thy country's voice be heard
   To bid her children fly to arms,
Gird on thy grandsire's trusty sword;
   And, undismay'd by war's alarms,
Remember, on the battle-field,
I made the hand of God my shield:
And be thou spared, like me, to tell
What bore thee up, while others fell."

Like the grandfather in the poem, Benjamin Gould fought with the Massachusetts militia and was wounded on Lexington Green on April 19, 1775. Hannah Gould published several books of poetry, including her first in 1832. She wrote at least three other poems focused on Lexington ("Lexington's Dead," "The Battle of Lexington," and "Liberty: An Ode for the Celebration fo the Battle of Lexington") as well as a prose essay on the "Lexington Elm." Miss Gould never married and lived a relatively retired life in Newburyport, Massachusetts, though she was known as a kind and social hostess.

Ruggles: upon the power of the PRESS

The final installment of David Ruggles's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of New York and Elsewhere in Behalf of the Press was included in the February 17, 1835 issue of The Emancipator. The essay, which was published in installments spread out over a month and four days, urged fellow free African Americans to support the press — even if they could not read. As he wrote, "Every paper that is circulated by your means goes forth as an Ambassador to settle the all important question of Liberty and Slavery."

Ruggles, who identified himself in his byline as "a man of color," believed that even free blacks were "but a short remove from that of two millions of our race who are pining in their bloody chains." The press was a weapon, he wrote, used to fight in the "midst of a moral revolution." In a different analogy, he calls the press an engine and urges blacks to help roll "the car of freedom" and not become "a clog to its wheels." Lest his readers not understand his point, he writes (capitals are original): "OURS is the cause of freedom — OUR CAUSE is sacred; its success depends upon the power of the PRESS under God." Ruggles used language that was sure to incite passion, emphasized further by typographical tricks like capital letters and well-placed italics. The government, reminds Ruggles, "proclaims all men are free and equal."

'Tis proclaimed throughout the world, the "Land of Liberty!" wherever the star spangled banner waves, or the national pennon floats on high; there proudly soars the eagle of liberty, announcing to every land, that America is the birth place of freedom. Why then shall we be slaves and lie down in supineness, with our arms folded, singing the song of degradation? I answer, because we are not united in sustaining the press.

Ruggles himself was a printer and bookstore owner and, as such, knew the potential influence of the printed word. Born free in Connecticut to free parents, he moved to New York as a teenager and became involved with anti-slavery publications like The Liberator in addition to The Emancipator. Among his many works for the abolitionist cause was an essay calling attention to white women that white men were taking black women as mistresses. He worked with the Underground Railroad where he hid a young fugitive slave known as Frederick Douglass. Ruggles's efforts earned many enemies, including a few that set fire to his business. He particularly attempted to stump those who attempted to retrieve escaped slaves. His work "so exasperated the slave hunters," William Lloyd Garrison recalled years later, that "they spared no pains to get him out of the way by foul means, and many and remarkable were his escapes as they hunted him as though he were an outlaw."

Forten: We are thy sisters

As part African American, Sarah Louisa Forten advocated for the abolition of slavery through several poems which she contributed to The Liberator. She used the simple pseudonym "Ada" when she published her "An Appeal to Women" in the February 1, 1834 issue of that newspaper. The poem plays off the 19th-century notion that women were particularly important as a moral compass for society and that all women were sisters, regardless of race:

Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour
Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power
Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian's part,
That well befits a lovely woman's heart!
Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great;
Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate;
Our "skins may differ," but from thee we claim
A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

We are thy sisters, Oh, woman, woman in thy brightest hour
Of conscious worth, of pride, of conscious power
Oh, nobly dare to act a Christian's part,
That well befits a lovely woman's heart!
Dare to be good, as thou canst dare be great;
Despise the taunts of envy, scorn and hate;
Our "skins may differ," but from thee we claim
A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

We are thy sisters, – God has truly said,
That of one blood, the nations he has made.
Oh, Christian woman, in a Christian land,
Canst thou unblushing read this great command?
Suffer the wrongs which wring our inmost heart
To draw one throb of pity on thy part;
Our "skins may differ," but from thee we claim
A sister's privilege, in a sister's name.

Oh, woman! – though upon thy fairer brow
The hues of roses and of lilies grow—
These soon must wither in their kindred earth,
From whence the fair and dark have equal birth.
Let a bright halo o'er thy virtues shed
A lustre, that shall live when thou art dead;
Let coming ages learn to bless thy name
Upon the altar of immortal fame.

Missouri and Iowa: Anointed with pure honey

A boundary dispute between Missouri and Iowa led to a war — at least, according to a poet named John I. Campbell. In 1839, the respective governors of each state — Governor Robert Lucas of the Iowa Territory and Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri — each cited different maps to delineate the end of one state and the beginning of the other. When a Missouri sheriff attempted to collect taxes in that area, Iowa officials arrested him. Public meetings were held as tension mounted. Then, a Missourian cut down three bee trees that Iowa officials claimed was theirs; a subsequent trial ruled against him and fined him $1.50 ("three bits"). Militia soldiers from both sides were sent to the area in question and threats were offered.

The ridiculousness of the situation, and the mounting animosity that culminated in, of all things, tree-cutting, inspired Campbell to write his poem "The Honey War," published on December 26, 1839 in the Whig and Advertiser in Palmyra, Missouri The satirical poem is sung to the tune of "Yankee Doodle":

Ye freemen of the happy land
   Which flows with milk and honey,
Arise! To arms! Your ponies mount!
   Regard not blood nor money.
Old Governor Lucas, tiger-like
   Is prowling 'round our borders.
But Governor Boggs is wide awake —
   Just listening to his orders.

Three bee trees stand about the line
   Between our State and Lucas.
Be ready all those trees to fall,
   And bring things to a focus.
We'll show old Lucas how to brag,
   And seize our precious honey!
He also claims, I understand,
   Of us three-bits of money.

The dog who barks will seldom bite,
   Then let him rave and sputter;
How impudent must be the wight
   Who can such vain words utter.
But he will learn before he's done,
   Missouri is not Michigan.
Our bee-trees stand on our own land,
   Our honey then we'll bring in.

Conventions, boys, now let us hold,
   Our honey trade demands it;
Likewise the three-bits, all in gold,
   We all misunderstand it.
Now in conventions let us meet,
   In peace this thing to settle,
Let not the tiger's war-like words
   Now raise too high our mettle.

Why shed our brother's blood in haste,
   Because "big men" require it?
Be not in haste our blood to waste,
   No prudent men desire it.
But let a real cause arise
   To call us into battle,
We're ready then, both boys and men,
   To show the true blue metal.

Now, if the Governors want to fight,
   Just let them meet in person.
For Governor Bogg can Lucas flog,
   And teach their brag a lesson.
And let the victor cut the trees,
   And have three bits of money,
And wear a crown from town to town,
   Anointed with pure honey.

And then no widow will be made,
   No orphans unprotected,
Old Lucas will be nicely flogg'd,
   And from our line ejected.
Our honey trade will then be placed
   Upon a solid basis,
And Governor Boggs, where 'er he goes,
   Will meet with smiling faces.

It is said that Missouri spent over $20,000 in public funds to address the issue before the Supreme Court made its decision in 1849. Campbell's poem was credited for diffusing at least some of the tension in the absurd tragicomedy.

*Some of the information for this post was found in A History of Missouri: Volume II, 1820 to 1860 by Perry McCandless (2000).

Parents of Stedman: angel of my infancy

It was due to illness that Major E. Burke Stedman (pictured at right) took to the sea, under the advisement from doctors that tropical air would restore his health. He traveled alone, leaving his family at home in Hartford, Connecticut; his wife had a newborn child, and their son Edmund Clarence Stedman was only two years old, and all agreed it would be too perilous to accompany Major Stedman. "Don't let my dear little Clarence forget his father," he wrote on November 17, 1835, in the last letter to his wife Elizabeth Clementine (pictured below), "let him look at my portrait and he may not."

The patriarch of the Stedman family never returned. He died aboard the Emily two weeks after his last letter en route to Santa Cruz and he was buried at sea. It took four weeks before the family heard of his death. Without him, they packed up their belongings and moved from Hartford to Plainfield, New Jersey to live on the farm of his maternal grandfather. His Puritanically pious grandfather attended to his earliest education, teaching him to read using the family Bible. By the time he was six, he was precocious and already flowing with poetry. On more than one occasion, his mother reported, he refused to go to bed and responded to the request, "Let me alone, please, the poetry is coming." Sure enough, the boy grew up to be an influential man of letters.

At Cedar Creek, the young Stedman was crowded by family, including several cousins. His father's family, however, wanted the Stedman children back in Connecticut. His paternal grandfather even promised a substantial inheritance if Mrs. Stedman complied. She initially refused, despite her financial distress, and attempted to earn extra money by contributing to magazines like Godey's and Graham's. Eventually, she gave up the effort, and the young boy was taken in by his father's brother. Even so, Stedman always had a preference to his mother, who died when he was in his 30s. To her, he wrote the sonnet "A Mother's Picture":

She seemed an angel to our infant eyes!
Once, when the glorifying moon revealed
Her who at evening by our pillow kneeled, —
Soft-voiced and golden-haired, from holy skies
Flown to her loves on wings of Paradise, —
We looked to see the pinions half concealed.
The Tuscan vines and olives will not yield
Her back to me, who loved her in this wise,
And since have little known her, but have grown
To see another mother, tenderly
Watch over sleeping children of my own.
Perchance the years have changed her: yet alone
This picture lingers; still she seems to me
The fair young angel of my infancy.

I have learn'd too much of woe and wrong

Elizabeth Margaret Chandler had a difficult life from the beginning. Her mother died only two days after her birth and her father, unable to care for the child, sent her off to live with her grandmother. He died only a few years later. Raised in Philadelphia, Chandler was a devout Quaker who became a published writer at age 16.

The grandmother who raised her died in 1827. In 1830, Chandler moved to Tecumseh, Michigan. She died there four years later on November 2, 1834 after long bouts of ill health. She was 26 years old. Throughout her tragic and short life, she insisted that slavery was a moral wrong that had to be abolished quickly. Much of her writing (mostly poems, but also essays) focused on freeing enslaved people. After her death, her works were collected and published, with profits donated to the abolitionist cause. Chandler noted that her own life was fine compared to the plight of slaves, as she says in her poem "Reminiscence":

Away and away to memory's land!
To seize the past with a daring hand,
And bear it back from oblivion's bowers,
To brighten again this dull world of ours.

There's many a walk beneath summer skies,
Starry and blue as some earthly eyes;
There's many an eve by the winter's hearth,
Sparkling all over with friendship and mirth.

There's many a ramble through wood and glen,
Away from the sight and the haunts of men;
There's climbing of rocks, and gathering flowers,
And watching the stream through summer showers

There's many an hour that quickly went,
In the boughs of the old hill grape-vine spent;
There's many a ride, and many a walk,
And many a theme of friendly talk.

How freshly comes to the spirit back,
The merry light of its early track!—
But let it pass, for around my brow
Far deeper thoughts are gathering now.

I have learn'd too much of woe and wrong,
Of hearts all crush'd by oppression strong,
To deem the earth, as in other days,
A fairy theme for a poet's lays.

How may I linger within the bowers,
Bedight with memory's fairy flowers,
While woman's cry, as she drains the cup
Of her bitter lot, to the sky goes up?

How may I joy in my better fate,
While her heart is bleeding and desolate?—
Or give my thoughts to their blissful dreams,
While no bright ray on her darkness gleams?

Birth of Berryhill: settled down in a wilderness

Though he was born in Pickens County, Alabama on October 22, 1832, Samuel Newton Berryhill is best remembered as a Mississippi poet. He moved to Webster Country in that state before the age of two. By the time he was a teenager, polio left him disabled and he spent the rest of his life in a wheel chair.

Berryhill's condition did not slow him down. An ambitious self-taught learner, he became adept in Latin, German, French, mathematics, and the law. He worked as a lawyer for a time but he was also an editor and published his first and only book, Backwoods Poems in 1878. The book, though self-published, was popular enough that he became known locally as "The Backwoods Poet." As might be assumed from such a nickname, his poems were infused with a deep appreciation and interest in nature. He explains in his preface:

The little book here presented embraces the rhymes and poems written by me in a period of thirty years, beginning with my boyhood... It is not through affectation that I have given my book the title it bears. I chose this title in my boyhood, when I first conceived the design of publishing, some day, a book of poems. Nor is the title inappropriate. While I was yet an infant, my father, with his family, settled down in a wilderness, where I grew up...

Much of his work also has a strong Southern bias. Writing in the era of Reconstruction, Berryhill deeply supported the "Old South" and suggested they were oppressed by Northerners (he went so far as saying that Northern poets like Longfellow, Bryant, and Whittier "curse the South in song" in the poem "The South's Response"). From his poem "The South of the North":

Give us the Union that our fathers made
    In the purer days of long ago,
When revolution's red, right arm had laid
    Old England's rampant lion low.

Ah! "there were giants in those days" of old —
    Giants in nerve, and mind, and heart —
Men who would scorn for fame or gold
    To play the demagogue's base part.

They stood together in the bloody fight;
    And when their noble work was done,
None did dispute his brother's equal right
    In all their common toil had won.

The humblest and the greatest in the land
    Were of the self-same rights possessed;
And the feeblest member in the shining band
    Of States, was peer unto the rest.

How, then, shall we be asked to yield
    The equal rights our sires possessed —
The rights they earned upon the battle-field,
    And left to us — a rich bequest!

Give us our cherished father's Union, then —
    'Tis all we ask when you oppress;
And by the memory of those noble men
    We never will submit with less!

*I am heavily indebted to the substantial entry on Berryhill by Michael P. Clark in James B. Lloyd's Lives of Mississippi Authors, 1817-1967 (2009).

Birth of Rebecca Harrington Smith

Born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh) as Rebecca Harrington Smith on September 20, 1831, she often published under the name Kate Harrington. Her life and career brought her to Ohio and Kentucky before settling in Iowa. There, she published her most well-known book, a novel titled Emma Bartlett (1856), which one critic called "the first [book] of a purely literary character" published in Iowa.

Subtitled "Prejudice and Fanaticism," the book was meant as a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin published a few years earlier. Credited "by an American Lady" and copyrighted to R. H. Smith, the book was dedicated to "the True Upholders of the Constitution." Smith argued in her preface that "there is neither reason, religion nor justice in crushing the white man, in order to liberate the blacks" from a situation that could not have been prevented.  In nearly 500 pages, Smith complicates the "prejudice" against blacks as well as the "fanaticism" of abolitionists. In one scene, for example, the title character Emma Bartlett asks her father what he thinks of slavery:

"It would take more time than I can spare, to-night, to tell you, dear. I have always looked upon it as a great necessary evil; one that cannot be swept from our land at once, and never will, while compulsory means are resorted to. I have seen too much of Southern life to believe my brethren there will be forced to submit."

One scene features a character denying that there were many cruel slaveholders like Stowe's character Simon Legree ("But are such individuals confined to the South?"). Smith intended the work to expose the hypocrisy of Know-Nothingism (an anti-intellectual, radically patriotic group which expressed a stance against foreigners and certain religious groups) and abolitionism. Smith lived until 1917. Throughout her long life, she published several other books, collections of short stories and poems, and even textbooks.

There was no club in the strict sense

It all began on September 8, 1836, in Cambridge, Massachusetts: Four men — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederic Henry Hedge, George Putnam, and George Ripley — discussed the formation of a new club which would meet officially for the first time 11 days later. It was initially known as "Hedge's Club," because they met only when Hedge could make the trip all the way from Maine to Massachusetts; it soon came to be known as the "Transcendental Club."

The beginnings of transcendentalism were rooted in this meeting (as well as Emerson's essay "Nature" published in the same month). Hedge himself admitted, "there was no club in the strict sense... only occasional meetings of like-minded men and women." Their like-mindedness, however, was equally questionable. These men and women gathered to discuss important issues of the day as well as more metaphysical or theological questions. The four original meeting participants each played their own role:
Emerson became the figurehead of the group and a sort of spokesperson. He became well-known as a public lecturer, traveling around the country promoting his ideas (and his questions). Though not all became followers of the philosophy, Emerson would count hundreds in attendance at his public readings. He also assisted in the creation of The Dial, the official journal of the movement.

Frederic Henry Hedge (who only occasionally used a "k" in his first name and is pictured above) used his scholarship and knowledge of German writings to influence the group's thinking. A graduate of Harvard Divinity School (like Emerson), he feared the slow development of American theology but joined the movement because he felt "there was a promise in the air of a new era of intellectual life." Even so, he drifted away from the group by the end of the 1840s, and refused to contribute to the The Dial for fearing of being associated with them in print.

George Ripley, who hosted the group's first official meeting, took their philosophical ideas and put them into practice as the founder of the communal living experiment Brook Farm. He also edited a collection of translations called Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature meant to show the breadth of interest in the group. After Brook Farm's dissolution, he led a more mundane life as a quiet literary critic in New York.

George Putnam, a Unitarian minister in Roxbury, Massachusetts, did not last long as a Transcendentalist. In fact, nearly a half a century later, Hedge dismissed him in a letter outlining the group's origins as someone "who so soon withdrew from the connection that 'tis not worth the while to mention his name."

What's most important about understanding Transcendentalism (an admittedly nebulous concept and movement) is that it began as a theological group — not as a literary movement. Most of its members were or had been religious leaders or religious thinkers (though there were exceptions).