Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848
A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848
A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848
Ebook613 pages8 hours

A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

In the first decades of the American republic, Mary White, a shopkeeper's wife from rural Boylston, Massachusetts, kept a diary. Woven into its record of everyday events is a remarkable tale of conflict and transformation in small-town life. Sustained by its Puritan heritage, gentry leadership, and sense of common good, Boylston had survived the upheaval of revolution and the creation of the new nation. Then, in a single generation of wrenching change,the town and tis people descended into contentious struggle. Examining the tumultuous Jacksonian era at the intimate level of family and community, Mary Babson Fuhrer brings to life the troublesome creation of a new social, political, and economic order centered on individual striving and voluntary associations in an expansive nation.

Blending family records and a rich trove of community archives, Fuhrer examines the "age of revolutions" through the lens of a rural community that was swept into the networks of an expanding and urbanizing New England region. This finely detailed history lends new depth to our understanding of a key transformative moment in American history.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 17, 2014
ISBN9781469612874
A Crisis of Community: The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815-1848
Author

Mary Babson Fuhrer

Mary Babson Fuhrer is a public historian who specializes in the social history of New England, providing research and programs for historical, humanities, and heritage associations. She lives in Littleton, Massachusetts.

Related to A Crisis of Community

Related ebooks

United States History For You

View More

Related articles

Reviews for A Crisis of Community

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    A Crisis of Community - Mary Babson Fuhrer

    A Crisis of Community

    A Crisis of Community

    The Trials and Transformation of a New England Town, 1815–1848

    Mary Babson Fuhrer

    The University of North Carolina Press

    Chapel Hill

    This book was published with the assistance of the Anniversary Endowment Fund and the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

    © 2014 The University of North Carolina Press

    All rights reserved

    Manufactured in the United States of America

    Set in Charter and Birch

    The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

    The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Fuhrer, Mary Babson.

    A crisis of community : the trials and transformation of

    a New England town, 1815–1848 / Mary Babson Fuhrer.

    pages cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-1-4696-1286-7 (hardback)

    1. Boylston (Mass.)—History—19th century. 2. Boylston (Mass.)— Social conditions—19th century. 3. Community life—Massachusetts— Boylston. 4. Social change—Massachusetts—Boylston. 5. White, Mary Avery, 1778–1860. 6. White family. I. Title.

    F74.B56F85 2014

    974.4’3—dc23     2013032613

    18 17 16 15 14 5 4 3 2 1

    IN MEMORY OF WILLIAM BABSON,

    who told me about the peepers,

    and

    IN HONOR OF HELEN BABSON,

    who told me, Don’t write so that you can be understood, but so that you cannot be misunderstood

    Contents

    Acknowledgments

    INTRODUCTION

    This Wilderness World

    ONE

    Sowing

    TWO

    A Church Disassembled

    THREE

    Economic Choice and Consequences

    FOUR

    Fields and Dreams

    FIVE

    Useful Knowledge

    SIX

    Re-Forming Community

    SEVEN

    Political Principles, Partisan Passions

    EIGHT

    The Bonds of Antislavery

    CONCLUSION

    Reaping

    APPENDIX A

    Prosopography

    APPENDIX B

    Geographic Mobility

    APPENDIX C

    Agricultural Data

    APPENDIX D

    Politics

    Notes

    Bibliography

    Index

    Illustrations

    Boylston, Massachusetts, ca. 1830 xiv

    Aaron White Sr. and Mary Avery White, tinted daguerreotype, ca. 1841 5

    The Striped Pig, sheet music cover, lithograph, 1838 165

    Aaron White Jr., date unknown 203

    Aaron White Jr.’s satirical so-called dollar, brass, ca. 1857 213

    Cradle quilt, probably Boston, 1836 231

    Acknowledgments

    My acquaintance with Mary White began fifteen years ago, when Jack Larkin introduced me to her diaries and her family’s letters. Jack and other Old Sturbridge Village people, especially Ed Hood, Tom Kelleher, Frank White, and Jeannette Robichaud, were unfailingly generous in sharing Mary’s world with me. Soon after I met Mary, I visited the folks at the Boylston Historical Society, and they became not only my greatest resource but my dear friends. It is only because of the extraordinary job Bill DuPuis, Fred Brown, Judy Haynes, and the rest of the BHS folks have done in collecting and preserving Boylston’s past that this story could be told.

    As all historians know, the best people in the world are the archivists who help us mine their collections. I am particularly grateful to the fine staffs at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Massachusetts Archives, the New England Historic and Genealogical Society, the Massachusetts State House Library, Historic New England, Boston Public Library Special Collections, University of Delaware Special Collections, Brown University’s Hay Library, and the Worcester County Registry of Deeds and Probate Records. I am also grateful to the keepers of alumni records at Harvard University, Williams College, Wheaton College, and Andover Academy.

    Local historical society archives are priceless resources in this sort of small-town research, and I am grateful to the dedicated and enthusiastic folks at the West Boylston Historical Society, New Ipswich Historical Society, Ashland Historical Society, and Northborough Historical Society. I am also grateful for the patient assistance of town clerks in Boylston, West Boylston, and Ashland; the public libraries of these towns; and the church administrators at the First Congregational Churches in Boylston and West Boylston. In addition, several individuals generously lent private resources that were very helpful: Diana Smith shared her research on Boylston anti-slavery petitions from the National Archives, Vernon Woodworth and Molly Scott Evans shared the manuscript of their ancestor Avery White, and Linda Branniff shared priceless local history resources from Aaron White Jr.’s adopted hometown.

    Several scholars have generously provided access to their research as well as their time and advice. Brian Donahue of Brandeis, who read a draft of the manuscript, has been a long-time generous resource on historical land use and ecology in Massachusetts. Phil Lampi of the American Antiquarian Society assisted me with America Votes, his extraordinary database of early national election returns. Ben Friedman of Harvard University shared his curriculum and readings on religion and economy in American history. John Brooke of Ohio State provided guidance on reconstructing and interpreting Worcester County voter affiliations. Bob Gross of the University of Connecticut has been exceptionally generous, sharing draft material on his upcoming book, The World of the Transcendentalists; references to his earlier work; and feedback on my work.

    Several associations provided research and publication assistance. Old Sturbridge Village got me started on this quest with its research fellowship. The Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities and the Bay State Historical League provided research and publication fellowships. Peter Benes and the Dublin Seminar supported the publication of two articles that formed part of the background for two chapters.

    Mark Simpson-Vos, Paula Wald, and Liz Gray of the University of North Carolina Press have been ever patient with my endless questions and generous with their guidance.

    Primary thanks go to my mentors, Jeff Bolster and Bill Harris. They guided, counseled, cheered, consoled, advised, and endlessly read wordy drafts, usually managing to tell me what it was I was trying to say, but ever so gently! They are both scholars and gentlemen, and I am proud to be able to call them my friends. I also benefited from the support and friendship of academics Jess Lepler and Lige Gould, who read drafts of this project.

    I am ever so grateful for the support and encouragement of dear friends Joanne Myers and Ellen Rothman. They made me believe I could do this. Thanks also to my Small Group, especially my cheerleaders, Earl and Ellen.

    Finally, this book is a family affair. My children, Margaret, John, and Jeffrey, transcribed diaries, entered scads of data, provided tech support, and endured endless dinner-table discussions of the other Mary. My husband, Jeff, supported my musings, read and reflected on every chapter, shared his wisdom and insights, and gave unconditional support. He asked the critical So what? questions when I rambled on, he focused my fuzzy ideas, he cheered my good ones, and when I doubted, he made me laugh! I am forever grateful.

    A Crisis of Community

    Boylston, Massachusetts, ca. 1830. Graphic design by Karen Dolimount.

    Introduction

    This Wilderness World

    When a heavy-laden ox team lumbered into Boylston in the spring of 1842, there were many who believed it was hauling 1,000 pounds of trouble. The wagon drew up in the barnyard of Capt. John Howe—possibly the most cantankerous man in this rural village—to deliver its load: a newly cast steeple bell. Howe had engineered this moment, and he was exultant. As townsmen gingerly raised the bell upon timbers to transport it to the new town hall, the clapper swung clear. The deep tone of the bell rang out resoundingly, heralding its arrival. For some in this central Massachusetts village, it was a peal of victory; for others, it tolled alarm and dismay.¹

    Bells had long ordered community in rural New England. Before the advent of household clocks and pocket watches, the meetinghouse bell marked the passage of time, sounding the noon and 9:00 P.M. hours. All who lived within the sound of the great bell heard its call to worship and town meeting. It was the bell that alerted townsfolk to their neighbor’s distress or sounded the alarm when fire threatened or danger approached. Its deep tones tolled the death of neighbors, in numbered strokes that called out the gender and age of the deceased and so announced who was no longer of this world. In times of war, the town bell was often hidden to prevent foes from seizing this symbol of communal authority. Summoning townsfolk to shared duties, joys, and griefs, the town bell was a sonorous artifact of community order.²

    Yet this bell did not signify order: it heralded strife. Captain Howe’s faction had encountered fierce resistance in its battle to bring the bell to town. The opposition protested: the town already had a bell. It hung in the steeple of the old meetinghouse on the common, and it had rung out its calls to community for years. By the mid-1820s, though, that community—like so many others across Massachusetts—had splintered, and now competing factions battled for control of building, bell, and the authority they embodied.

    Captain Howe’s party of discontents fought for more than a decade to ring that bell. Year after year, in town meeting debates that exhibited great warmth, Howe’s liberal faction put forward motions to allow their ringer to sound the hours. But their chosen man found the opposition barred his way and refuse[d] him liberty to enter the Meeting House and ring said bell.³ (Surrounding towns had similar contests; nearby Harvard voted to remove the rope from its bell to silence the strife.) Finally, Howe’s faction petitioned the town to purchase a second bell to hang in the new town hall adjacent to the meetinghouse. This was the bell that rang out in Howe’s barnyard, its discordant racket giving voice to community conflict. We can imagine folk all around town, long accustomed to the pitch and timbre of the old bell, pausing in their daily chores to note this unfamiliar sound and to reflect on what new community—or communities—it summoned.

    Dueling bells were not a welcome sound to local farm wife Mary White. She was all too aware of the uncivil contests that disturbed the peace of her little town. The years between 1815 and 1848 were a time of unremitting turmoil in many New England towns, evidence of profoundly unsettling change. In essence, rural folk wrangled over how their lately won liberty should be lived out, and they could not, would not, agree. Though Mary prayed that "these divisions soon terminate & these people be of one heart & one mind," her prayers could not knit her fractious community together again.

    The town had changed. In the short space of a generation, townsfolk had created too many battling sects, parties, societies, classes, and identities to be served by a single bell. When Captain Howe’s bell rang out in his barnyard, some heard it announcing a new declaration of individual independence: liberation from the bonds of custom, consensus, obligation, deference, and dependence that had shaped life in New England’s rural towns for generations. Others, such as Mary White, heard Howe’s bell toll the passing of common cause, shared faith, neighborly relations, and civic unity. For these, Howe’s bell rang out an alarm, for they feared that disorder, incivility, partisanism, and uncompromising self-interest threatened the very survival of the Republic of Liberty. The dueling bells of Boylston echoed on town commons across the Commonwealth.

    THIS IS A STORY about how big changes happened in a small community. We often discuss change as the product of forces that carry us along as if on a rising tide or a cresting wave. But in this tale of three decades in one rural town we can observe the process intimately, and we can see that this is at best an incomplete explanation. Powerful external influences such as the expansion of the market, advances in technology, and the rise of national political parties did indeed penetrate the Massachusetts countryside during this era, bringing unprecedented opportunities and challenges. But these exogenous forces were mediated through the choices and actions of individuals, people driven by internal motivations. People participated actively and often passionately in reshaping their lives. In the process, they adopted new ways of interacting with and thinking about their world.

    These are big claims, but we make them for a small place and a bounded period of time so that we can observe choices and consequences firsthand. The story plays out over one generation, three decades renowned for their sweeping national transformations. The setting is a small farm town in central Massachusetts where we can come to know characters personally. Boylston was a community of a mere 800 souls in 1820, an uncomplicated agrarian town. Unlike neighboring villages, the town had no great river running through it, no rushing water to power mills, no turnpike or canal to bring trade or foreigners. Yet in the span of thirty years, this unremarkable farm community was, as Mary White often said, up and doing, making choices that transformed daily life. As might be expected when some chose to break with customary behaviors and belonging, it was an uneasy, contested transition, marked by the spasms of controversy and conflict that provide our plot.

    For much of this story we are indebted to a dedicated diary keeper, farm wife Mary White, who took up her pen at her marriage in 1798 and did not lay it down again until her death sixty-two years later.⁵ Her jottings of daily chores, household happenings, neighborly visits, and divine Providences eventually filled ten leather-bound volumes with closely written scrawl (and barely a mark of punctuation). The cyclical routines of Mary’s daily life formed the stable warp of her diary record. Interwoven with that warp was an unexpected weft: unending incidents of personal, family, and social strife.

    Mary and her farmer/shopkeeper husband, Aaron, were ideally situated to bear witness to this extraordinary scene. As newlyweds, they settled in the center village of Boylston. For the next half century, they and their ten children lived, quite literally, at the crossroads of community. Their sturdy farmhouse, a one-time village tavern, stood between the meetinghouse and the burying ground; their parlor overlooked the town common. Around 1820 the prosperous couple moved up in the world, to the top of the common, to an updated Federalist mansion house at the crest of the village green. Here they expected to preside in genteel prominence over their peaceful, well-ordered village. It was not to be. Instead, Squire and Mrs. White spent the next twenty-five years fomenting, resisting, creating, and lamenting change.

    Fortunately for us the White family chronicled their times. Like their mother, the children kept journals, wrote family letters, and kept account of their material debts and spiritual trespasses. The squire, a longtime town clerk, kept town meeting minutes, while Mary recorded the notes of local women’s societies. Neighbors also kept family records; officers of civic associations documented their efforts; and dedicated townsmen cataloged their work for church and public committees. The youth kept school copybooks and created friendship books to share with their classmates and soulmates.⁶ This frenetic personal writing and the literary documenting of private and public life is itself a sign of the times.⁷ It is also the source of clues to their unsettled state. Each example reveals sometimes humorous, sometimes curious, often affecting details of troubled community and personal relationships. Assembled, they create a picture of a town convulsed. These were years, as townsfolk later remembered ruefully, when the most malignant passions of our depraved natures raged.

    As our story emerges from these sources, we see a community in flux. Change was everywhere—not just in the world around the townsfolk, but in the relationships between them and in the hearts and minds within them. At the turn of the nineteenth century, much of rural Massachusetts shared a common identity rooted in family farming, town membership, and spiritual fellowship. Over the next decades many, like the Whites, responded to a spirit of the age, in part a product of recent revolution and new beginnings that reflected both the hopes and fears of a young nation in the process of self-creation. It was a spirit of improvement, a striving to improve the opportunity, as Mary White so often urged her children. We can witness this striving reshaping the local community as people acted to convert, reform, refine, and perfect self, community, and republic. They also, however, shared a fear that should they not respond to the urgent imperative to refine and reform, the consequences—both personal and national—would be apocalyptic.⁹ Urgency to improve powered local change.

    They were to discover, however, that they differed on what made for improvement. As some worked to transform faith and farming, temperance and textbooks, politics and private schools, others resolutely resisted. Most troublesome was a generational divide, as offspring increasingly chose a future beyond the farm. There was conflict even within the hearts of individuals: youth struggled to discern their own path to self-mastery and salvation, while elders wrestled with lost security and authority. The 1830s was an especially anxious decade for the White family and their townsfolk: disaffection of the young, discord in the church, an economic crisis, divisive reforms, and partisan political turmoil left many fearing for the survival of social order. And in some ways, they were right: old patterns of relationship and habits of thought were becoming obsolete. As each strove to improve the opportunity as he or she saw fit, individuals shed their shared identity for diverse and particular goals, bringing conflict and contest wrenchingly to the fore.

    Aaron White Sr. and Mary Avery White, tinted daguerreotype, ca. 1841. Courtesy of the Boylston Historical Society.

    The story of these decades has been told before—but as a national story. These were the years of the nation’s coming-of-age, an era of revolutions that propelled the country from a traditional agrarian republic to an expansive and market-oriented democracy. Scholars have presented these changes as grand syntheses of overarching processes.¹⁰ Yet the movements, forces, and national consequences they discuss were actually taking place in a thousand particular places. When we study Boylston’s microcosm, it becomes clear that important changes emanated from within, from emerging ideas of individual potential and responsibility. Mary and her neighbors asserted an unprecedented degree of personal autonomy and individual liberty. Their actions—associating, reforming, converting, instituting, innovating—remade community by radically transforming the way individuals related to each other on a face-to-face, day-to-day basis. Within the microcosm of one rural village, with its petty disputes, family heartaches, factional squabbles, and neighborly scandals, we witness choices and actions that reveal this new world in the making. This is the story of that contentious creation.

    FOR THOSE WHO CAME OF AGE in the early nineteenth century, it must have seemed as if the world had accelerated in its motion. All was a whirl of dizzying change. For a century past, reason had been challenging custom; now, it transcended.¹¹ Between 1815 and 1848, much of the nation experienced phenomenal advances in technology, communication, transportation, and markets as well as transformative reorganization of religion, reform, education, and political enterprise. Innovations came so fast and furiously that Mary White called this new-made place a wilderness world in which she could find no abiding place.

    Worcester County in central Massachusetts experienced most of the revolutions that have defined this era, which makes it an excellent laboratory for studying change. Everyday folk across the county greatly expanded their commercial participation, evidence of the much-touted Market Revolution.¹² The market for farm products in the Worcester countryside burgeoned. Facing new opportunities—and new challenges—Massachusetts farmers altered their primary objective from family provisioning to more profit-oriented strategies that would produce cash as well as consumables.¹³ Their motivations for that shift are varied, but the consequences were dramatic for family and community relationships.

    During these same years, the Industrial Revolution took root in the rocky soil of Worcester County. The same hilly terrain that had challenged farmers produced tumbling streams to power early mills. Manufactories in towns around Boylston were soon turning out wire, nails, clocks, combs, carpet, cloth, chairs, pianos and other commodities.¹⁴ Many rural sons and daughters willingly embraced this alternative to the hot, heavy labor of tilling the soil, an alternative that included cash wages and a chance for independence from the demands of the family farm. It also introduced them to a world their elders did not know—a world of machines, of clocks and time discipline, of standardization and efficiency—a nonagrarian world.¹⁵

    The mass-produced goods from Worcester County factories changed life for the better for those who could afford them, spawning new aspirations for gentility and refinement.¹⁶ Boylston’s better sort upgraded their parlors with wallpaper, sets of painted chairs, clocks and looking glasses, carpets and curtains, and pianos from those local factories. They remodeled their houses, tidied their village centers, added fences and ornamental trees, and embraced the romantic ideal of a tamed pastoral landscape.¹⁷ For some, these new goods made work easier and leisure more enjoyable. While the middling folk aped gentry standards, more humble neighbors, once proudly independent yeomen, found themselves belittled as bumpkins.¹⁸

    The market, industrial, and consumer revolutions in antebellum Worcester County would not have been possible without extraordinary advances in the movement of people, goods, and ideas. Between 1790 and 1820, the people of Massachusetts exhibited, as one observer noted in 1839, a passion for building roads.¹⁹ At the turn of the nineteenth century, a trip from Boylston to Boston was a two-day ordeal over poor roads; by 1825, a regular stage delivered Boylstonians to the city in about six hours. Less than a decade later, locals could take the railway cars from neighboring Shrewsbury for a two-hour trip to Boston. During the same decade, the Blackstone Canal provided a water route south to Providence and the Atlantic. New routes were arteries not just for commerce; they also brought new ideas and tales of opportunity in a wider world. These dramatic improvements in transportation launched a communication revolution, as the flow of ideas liberated people from the weight of local tyrannies.²⁰

    One of those local tyrannies had been Boylston’s Federalist gentry, with their nearly exclusive access to higher education and cosmopolitan connections. As their power was diluted, the town also experienced the transformative effects of yet another innovation: the rise of popular party politics.²¹ During the 1820s and 1830s, the town evolved from a once-solid Federalist consensus to a two- and three-party town. Boylstonians debated whether this rise of parties and factions was progress toward popular democratic expression or descent into chaotic self-interest. They debated with passionate urgency, as each side advanced its own view of what liberty meant and how independence should play out in daily life. How should they deal with social distinction, with elite privilege and corporate concentrations of power? Were the Founders’ words mere rhetoric, or were they meant to give birth to a world of egalitarian self-reliance and individualism?

    Such questions engendered an era of revolutionary but contentious social idealism, as reformers debated how to perfect their society. The nation was young, and its distinctive forms of social organization and behavior were evolving. With one foot still grounded in an authoritarian past, they were poised to step into a democratic future. But which way to go? The possibilities looking forward were both exhilarating and terrifying. What would provide order in a truly free society? Rural Massachusetts had its prophets of social design. Local societies and associations sprang up to promote the improving—and regulating—benefits of reading clubs, public lectures, charitable work, and social reform.²² Some reformers envisioned an enlightened remaking of society led by the educated elite; others imagined each individual intelligently and independently making his or her own choices. Whatever their intentions, reformers’ work riled those who did not want to be reformed. It also heightened awareness of social difference among those who were not of the improving sort.

    Perhaps the most powerful agent for change in this era was not something new at all, but the revival of something ancient. The decades of 1815 to 1840 were the height of the Second Great Awakening, and the religious sentiments of some locals were most powerfully roused. Revivalism and social tumult have often gone hand-in-hand.²³ It was religion—with issues of faith and conscience that could not bear compromise—that first opened the door to dissent and discord. When Massachusetts disestablished its state church in 1833, denominations were forced to compete for members, a battle that renewed religious fervor but also sparked passionate debate and discord. Worshippers would never again, as Mary futilely prayed, be of one heart and one mind.

    And if all that were not enough, locals were worried about their children. It was not just that children were leaving home—New England youth had always been on the move toward more open land. But in earlier generations, most of those who left home did not leave the land. In the 1820s and 1830s, the youth of rural Massachusetts increasingly headed for a clerk’s desk, workshop, factory, or business establishment. Their forefathers had pursued the yeoman’s ideal, the belief that a freehold farm guaranteed their security and independence and bespoke their status as free men and worthy citizens. Their sons, however, increasingly rejected that identity. They turned to the alluring opportunities of trade, manufacturing, or professions where they could exchange their rough country clothes for white collars and clean boots, their flails and dung forks for desks and counters, their country manners for urban gentility.²⁴ Their parents’ hearts, as we will see, ached.

    THESE CHANGES FOSTERED both greater choice and greater controversy. Local conflicts grew from deeper cultural transformation shaping the new nation: a growing awareness of plural interests, an increasing challenge to the notion of a single common good, and a more determined individual pursuit of happiness. Driving all was a rising belief in each individual’s power—and responsibility—to improve his lot as he saw fit.

    In Boylston’s story, we see a people’s gradual embrace of individualism, pluralism, and ambition transforming community and personal relationships. These troubled decades did not destroy community, but they remade it.²⁵ A community of necessity and custom became a community—or communities—of choice and interest. Neighbors and townsmen had once been united in bonds of local belonging in order to survive. From the 1820s through the 1840s, Boylstonians felt empowered to choose their own social relations. Where once identity had been centered in town belonging, now people turned inward to self-reliant or intimate connections, or outward to unions with distant strangers who shared selective causes. Relations shifted from neighbors to networks, from compulsory to voluntary, from corporate to divergent. Liberty was vested in the power to choose where and how one would belong.

    The seeds of these revolutionary transformations were present in Boylston from its settlement, carried west with settlers who prized their individual English rights, nurtured by the opportunities of frontier development, and taking root during the years of revolutionary rhetoric. But they were suppressed by a powerfully traditional social order that kept a gentry elite firmly in charge, by a monolithic state church, and by the relatively isolated and locally interdependent nature of agrarian life. For decades after 1775, despite growing internal stresses, Boylston remained an orderly town, a community that continued to conceive of identity—ideally—as a facet of local belonging to a larger group. The fracture of the church opened the gates to a flood of suppressed attitudes and choices. People began to change the way they behaved. They challenged the social order and the established elites, flouted norms, formed cliques, expanded their connections to the larger world, redefined success, pursued improvements that laid bare the growing distinctions in wealth and cultural identity within town. They did so with passion and commitment, driven by faith, principles, ideals, ambition—and a yearning for security and control. They engendered pride and self-reliance, new bonds of affection and shared interests; they also engendered jealousy, resentment, competition, exclusivity, and conflict.

    If many of their battles seem familiar, it is because the issues they encountered as growing pains for the republic endure for societies that struggle to balance communitarian and individual identity. What role should religious belief play in a pluralist community? What obligations does the individual owe to community and society? What obligations does society owe its poor, sick, and dependent? How do we deal with growing inequalities in wealth? Should there be limits to privilege and power—whether vested in wealth, social status, political parties, or corporations—in a free society? In essence, how can individual ambitions and social responsibilities be reconciled? Boylston’s story is about the enduring tension between communal belonging and self-possession.

    IN THE CHAPTERS that follow we will first explore life in revolutionary and early republic Boylston and see how the pressures that would eventually topple the social order were percolating. We will then move forward in time to the tumultuous years of 1815 to 1848, when restraints gave way and the people of rural Massachusetts actively remade their world. We will see how they responded to the times, as contemporaries often called this period of dramatic social change, but also how they were energized by powerful internal energies. We will find these changes contested in Mary White’s parlor and Aaron’s barnyard, in neighbor Crossman’s shoe shop and Mr. Flagg’s hayfield, on the floor of town meeting and in the vestry of the church, wherever new behaviors clashed with old customs. Mary White might wish that her family and townsfolk be of one mind, but that bell had tolled.

    Chapter One

    Sowing

    Shortly after the Revolution, Goodwife Goodenow dreamed of buried treasure in a Boylston grove. Her townsmen, on hearing her tale, assembled a party one moonlit night. Stealing off to the grove, they invoked a spell with the aid of an open Bible, a rusty sword, the blood of a pure white dove, and a pledge of silence. Then they dug. When they hit on metal, one of the clandestine crew cried out, We’ve got it now! But his utterance, they say, broke the spell, and the pot of treasure sank from sight.¹

    It is a wonderful tale, full of magical folk belief, local shenanigans, and the power of fate to deprive us of riches. It is also part of rural New England’s rich genre of buried-treasure stories from the early republic. Perhaps these stories speak to the frustrations of rural yeomen who had dreamed of prosperity in their new nation of liberty and yet struggled with debt and shackles.² To be sure, they seem to reflect ambivalence about prosperity and security, where it comes from and how it disappears. For generations rural New Englanders had sought and found treasure by digging in the good earth, not for pots of gold but for reliable crops of corn and rye. They had fought a revolution to secure that treasure—the independence of land-owning families in self-governing towns and covenanted churches. They had been moved by expansive promises of liberty and prosperity. Now there seemed to be a new alchemy at work. Sometimes they struck gold; sometimes their riches mysteriously vanished, or worse—beguiling promises of security morphed into new forms of dependence on inscrutable external powers. Was it all smoke and mirrors? How were they to turn dreams of liberty and prosperity into reality?

    The generation that came of age following the Revolution faced numerous challenges, not the least of which was defining the liberty they had won.³ The Revolution suggested that old restraints would be thrown off: the crown would no longer appoint governors or judges, control markets, establish religion, or bestow aristocratic privilege. What would this freedom mean in day-to-day life? How would people order their world, conduct daily business, constrain evil? On the one hand, new opportunities and choices seemed possible; on the other, familiar customs and social relations still ordered daily life. For a generation, Mary White’s neighbors lived uncertainly between two worlds, one in which the shared goal of family farming bound them in collective enterprise, and one in which each embraced the freedom to pursue his or her own treasure.

    We must do some digging of our own to unearth the daily life of Mary’s townsfolk in the early years of the republic. Their world was not like ours. Settled in the first half of the eighteenth century, early Boylston was shaped by the customs and practices of its English forebears, by the rigors and reforms of Puritanism, and by the challenges of surviving life in and on a new land. Above all, it was a world where self was defined in relation to others, in terms of belonging. People understood family, church, and town not as a voluntary collection of individuals, but as a single organism, a corporate or bodily whole. The performance of any part of that body directly affected the well-being of the whole; injury to any member injured the body; disease in any part infected the rest. When the organism was well regulated, all members had their proper place and function, and authority descended from the head to the extremities.

    We will call this understanding of their world, this sense of belonging to and depending upon community as if it were a single organism, a corporate (literally, of one body) mentality. The corporate community was a creation of necessity and custom, defined by shared needs and imposed norms. It was not romantic—it circumscribed creativity, difference, and individual choice—but it did provide a meaning-giving bulwark against unpredictable fate and unfathomable Providence.

    Though early Boylstonians were conditioned to live corporately, there were other aspects of their heritage that strained against submitting to the will of the whole. Along with Protestantism, their forefathers carried to the New World animating ideas about private property, individual striving, expansive opportunity, and personal liberties.⁵ This dalliance with liberal ideas was subtly reinforced through their connections to empire: a growing transatlantic trade, an aping admiration of British gentility and distinction, and a shared, evolving debate over constituted authority.⁶

    Individualism had local roots as well. Competition was a persistent undercurrent in this family-farm culture, for each family needed to find land for growing sons. Owning private property—and always needing more—fed an acquisitiveness that strained the gears of corporate commonweal. Moreover, New England’s farm towns struggled to achieve consensus: most town histories are riddled with squabbles over the placement of meetinghouse or schoolhouse, spats over assigned church seating, and feuds over fences. No romantic pastoral havens, New England’s farm towns had always endured undercurrents of self-assertion. The experience of revolution stirred up more trouble: talk of popular authority and individual rights threatened established social order with a perfect storm of egalitarian liberalism.

    The generation of New Englanders that inherited the Revolution, then, had a tall order. They continued to embrace ideals that they only imperfectly realized and that were being increasingly challenged. They inherited a world of corporate community, yet wrestled with conflicting goals of commonweal and private interest, neighborly cooperation and competitive self-interest, consensus and free thought, deference to authority and a burly individualism. They respected their traditions, yet yearned to realize their dreams.

    For a time, though, individual pursuits were constrained in Mary’s community, as we will see, by customary need for cooperation in farming, limited markets, waning Puritan ideals, and the power of the New England town. Despite undercurrents of liberal individualism, local folk before their time of turmoil shared an identity: they belonged, and their local membership provided meaning and security, if not a pot of gold.

    WHAT WAS IT LIKE to live in a world of intense belonging? Life was experienced in and through relation to others: as sibling, cousin, neighbor, debtor, hired help, schoolmate, church communicant. One gave birth, mastered her alphabet, hayed his field, raised a barn, cleared roads after a snowstorm, sat up with a sick neighbor, drank at the tavern, confessed his sins, and was laid out for burial with those to whom one belonged. Identity itself was wrapped up in membership and belonging. Coming of age was not so much a matter of individuation—of defining the essential nature of self versus other—but of becoming a useful member of family and community, of being fully incorporated into the whole.

    This corporate belonging persisted because it worked. It fulfilled the physical and psychological needs of a relatively isolated people who had to produce most of what they needed and who had to accomplish this while living at the mercy of weather, famine, pestilence, and fate. They had to pull together to survive. Family farms efficiently organized labor and distributed resources across the dependent and independent stages of life. Neighbors redistributed goods, labor, and support in times of excess and shortfall, sickness and health, mirth and grief. The town supported its own and protected common interests against claims by outsiders. The church provided moral order and a covenant relationship to bind members in mutual discipline, as well as the emotional, psychological, and spiritual support to deal with the inexplicable.⁸ Owning a place in a farm-family household, a neighborhood community, the town, and the covenanted church provided essential safety, security, and identity.⁹

    None of these memberships was an association of choice.¹⁰ The corporate status of most rural New Englanders was determined by their birth and the location of their farmstead, by divine providence, or in some cases by the decision of the community; participation in these relationships was not voluntary. Family structure was patriarchal: children were obliged to labor for and obey their fathers until they were ready to marry and leave home.¹¹ Neighborliness—especially assisting in times of need or lending in times of scarcity—was an expected norm, and scoffers risked rough music—crude customs of public ridicule intended to humiliate norm-flouters.¹² There was but one church in town—the orthodox Congregational—which all were taxed to support. Those who wished to baptize their children or to share in communion had to submit themselves to church discipline. All men who met the requirements for town membership were warned to attend town meeting and were required to train with the militia, serve on the highway crews, turn out to clear paths and break roads after winter snows, support the schools, and share responsibility for the town’s destitute. Belonging meant that one was a member, but also a possession: each individual was properly a belonging of the community, like it or not.

    The corporate nature of this rural society did not preclude individual striving. But personal ambition was supposedly channeled to serve family, religious, and civic goals.¹³ In fact, concerted striving on the part of all family members was needed to accumulate resources for the next generation’s security.¹⁴ Mary and Aaron White urged their children to improve the opportunity, by which they meant to pursue their vocation with faithful diligence and accumulate the capital essential for family well-being. There were limits to the acceptable pursuit of profit: to a degree, the ancient moral economy—in which the community enforced fair distribution of essential resources—was still in force.¹⁵ In the 1790s, some local farmers trekked their surplus oats and rye to market; in 1797, however, tanner Simon Davis noted that Independence Day was marked with a great cry for bread, a traditional bread riot, where the hungry protested the export of essential grains to market.¹⁶

    We will consider evidence of membership in early Boylston’s families and farms, neighborhoods, congregation and town, drawing particularly on the diary records of two families: the prosperous White family of center village and the middling family of tanner and entrepreneur Simon Davis, from the western section of town.¹⁷ It is important to get to know this world, because its collapse and disintegration is revealed in the conflicted and tumultuous decades of the 1820s and 1830s.

    Farm-Family Household

    The preservation of the family—and its farm—was all.¹⁸ Kinship was the strongest social bond, as it had been with Boylstonians’ ancestors in early modern England.¹⁹ Most Worcester County couples of this era hoped to begin housekeeping in their own home, however humble, soon after marriage. But these were not merely relations of affection; along with housekeeping, almost universally, went farm keeping. The farmer and his wife were an economic partnership, with the farmer producing the raw materials that his wife turned into household necessities. To produce efficiently on their acres they needed the unpaid labor of their children, and so most rural families were large. Mary White’s eventual family of ten children was not unusual.

    Family was broadly construed. When a woman spoke of her family, she included all those who lived under her roof, over whom she was mistress and for whom she had responsibility.²⁰ Over the course of her lifetime, Mary White’s family included her children, her widowed mother, two orphaned nieces, visiting in-laws, siblings, nieces and nephews, grandchildren, live-in hired help, a poor boy who was a ward of the town, and a clerk in her husband’s store, among others. Neighborhood women lived in while tailoring a suit; men boarded while completing handiwork or teaching at the local school; children from the outer districts lodged while attending a writing, singing, or dame school in the center of town. In 1800, the average household in Boylston sheltered eight people; Mary’s often had twelve or more.²¹

    These families were elastic, expanding to include those whose help was needed—or who needed help—and shrinking as children were sent to relatives or neighbors for work or socializing. This sending out and taking in started early. When Persis Davis was unable to suckle her newborn, the infant was quickly shuttled off to his Uncle Jabez’s household, where he lived for the next six weeks. Mary White noted that her four-year-old son, my little Avery, was very glad to see her when she visited her parents in Holden, where he had been staying for several weeks in March 1805. Mary’s young sons were often absent for three or more months, staying with grandparents, aunts, and uncles; meanwhile, their place was taken by Aaron and Mary’s grown siblings, whose assistance in the house, shop, tavern, and farm was essential to a couple whose children were not old enough to work. Hardly a week passed, Mary’s son later remembered, that some one did not go to Holden [where Mary’s parents lived], from our house, or some one come from Holden to visit us.²² Such comings and goings knit extended kin together.

    Those who came to live in the White or Davis households were fully incorporated into the family. Master and mistress provided for their physical, social, and spiritual needs; in return, those who lived in were expected to submit themselves to family discipline.²³ When twenty-year-old Lucretia Collier came to work for Mary from January to August 1807, she was treated like a daughter; Mary sewed her gowns, sent her to singing school, noted her visits to neighbors and her attendance at church. To Mary, her live-in female help were more than employees: through the course of her diary she referred to these women as people who assist me, work with me, or live with me. When they later wed, moved away, or died, she remembered them as those dear to her, who had lived in my family.

    Such close bonds with extended family and non-kin were possible in part because nearly everyone incorporated into family was already familiar. If they had not themselves been known by the family from birth, they were likely known by someone the family had known from birth, hailed from nearby, and shared the experience of life on the land in central Massachusetts. These were not strangers that Mary took in, boarded and fed, schooled and nursed. As their familiarity eased their incorporation into family, the Whites’ live-in help joined the family on visits to neighbors, at social events, and in church; they, in turn, were expected to fulfill family obligations for social visiting and sitting up with the sick.

    It was on the male head of household—the patriarch—that the duty and power of family government lay. The power of fathers to regulate their family was fundamental to their understanding of proper order; town interfered with family only in cases where the father lost his ability to support his charges or failed to keep them in good order.²⁴ Establishing his own farm household secured a man’s self-mastery; it also secured his mastery over all those who depended on him.²⁵ In the journal that Aaron Jr. kept while at Harvard in 1817, he referred to his father as honored, revered, and virtuous; his greatest anxiety came at the thought of disappointing his father’s expectations. Simon Davis, on the other hand, complained in his journal that his young apprentices challenged his authority in the household

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1