Tag Archives: Salem Suffrage Saturday

A Feminine Focus

The Reverend William Bentley’s Diary is justly famous as a detailed source of much of Federal-era Salem’s history, but I think that three memoirs written by Salem women deserve a bit more storied reputation as sources: Marianne C.D. Silsbee’s Half Century in Salem (1886), Eleanor Putnam’s (the pseudonym of Harriet Bates) Old Salem (1886), and Caroline Howard King’s When I Lived in Salem 1822-1866 (1937). Of these three reminiscences, I find myself returning to Silsbee’s Half Century again and again, so I thought I would feature her on my third Salem Suffrage Saturday post. She is of the next generation, and in a much more enviable position, than the Hawthorne sisters of last week’s post: I think she was also a working woman (like all women!), but by choice rather than necessity.

20200123_123500

20200114_111232

20200114_111551_20200120094207958A Half Century in Salem, and two photographs of Marianne Cabot Devereux Silsbee from her 1861 photographic album at the Phillips Library in Rowley (PHA 58): the first dated 1851 and the second 1861.

Marianne Cabot Devereux was born in Salem in 1812 to Eliza Dodge Devereux and Humphrey Devereux: I believe that her father, who had been captured by the British during the War of 1812 and imprisoned on Bermuda, was not present at her birth. Upon his release and return, Humphrey eventually moved his family into a Chestnut Street mansion, but Marianne’s early life was spent elsewhere: I’m not sure exactly where her childhood residence was, but she remembered spending a lot of time at her maternal grandmother’s house on Front Street. Around the time that the Devereux family moved to Chestnut Street, Humphrey commissioned a pair of portraits of himself and his wife by Gilbert Stuart: I was thrilled to discover the latter in the collection of the Rehoboth Antiquarian Society, but I could only find a heliotype copy of Mr. Devereux’s portrait in the The Pickering Genealogy. 

Screenshot_20200122-183152_Chrome

Silsbee Humphrey Devereux Pickering Genaology Vol 1 (2)

Mrs. Devereux looks rosy-cheeked in her Stuart portrait, which apparently pleased her very much (her dress apparently was not as pleasing, so the artist Chester Harding later repainted the ruff and drapery) but she was in fact an invalid, and died eleven years after this portrait, when Marianne was sixteen. I’m on the precipice on the dreaded psycho-history here, but I think that Marianne’s reverence for older women, so apparent in A Half Century as well as other works, might stem from her mother’s illness and death. I’m on stronger ground stating that the early years covered in A Half Century were based on her mother’s letters to Marianne, rather than her own reminiscences. So you kind of get a double feminine focus in this text, which dwells on food, shops, schools, entertainments, dress, homes—the life of women, or should I say relatively wealthy women—as well as “external” events: Lafayette’s visit in 1824, when the first steamship line commenced trips to Boston. The book is much more focused on personalities than events however, and women really pop out: the honorable Elizabeth Sanders (who will definitely be the subject of a later post), the charming Mrs. Remond, who catered all the meals at her beloved Hamilton Hall.

20200123_123624

20200123_124954

pixlr_20200123223721287

Marianne Cabot Devereux Silsbee expressed herself a bit more publicly, but she was a traditional woman of her time, focused on her family and friends. She married Nathaniel Silsbee Jr., son of a U.S. Senator and later two-term Mayor of Salem in 1829 and moved into the Silsbee mansion on the Common (now undergoing a major renovation and expansion). They had five children, two of whom, George and her namesake Marianne, died in childhood. The Silsbees left Salem for Boston in 1862 when he became Treasurer of Harvard, and there was another move to Milton following his retirement. Throughout this time she wrote poems and reminiscences, some published, some not. Her first publication, Memory and Hope, a compilation of mourning poems edited and introduced by her, was issued anonymously in 1851 (one can understand her interest in this topic given the early deaths of two children), and thereafter there are published children’s rhymes, a handwritten journal of poetry entitled My Grandmother’s Mirror, A New England Idyll (a reference to her maternal Dodge grandmother, who was a Pickering), a book about the Boston Ladies Club, and finally A Half Century in Salem. 

essex-county-kimball (2)

Silsbee M and H

20200121_111833The Silsbee Mansion on Salem Common in 1884, George H. Walker; Memory and Hope (1851); Title page of My Grandmother’s Mirror (Essex County Collection, Phillips Library, E S585.3 1878).

Much of her writings dwell on home life, social life, all the little things that surround one’s daily existence: one poem in My Grandmother’s Mirror creates a scene in the old Pickering house, while another is written from the perspective of a woman who dwelt within the border, of the town of peace and order, Our pleasant little Salem, on the margins of the sea surrounded by her children and children’s children. Yet Mrs. Silsbee was also an active and engaged woman: a mayor’s wife who carried on a long personal correspondence with abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and whose personal photograph album compiled in 1861 contains as many photographs of soldiers and politicians as it does her own children and grandchildren. Most of the men in uniform are her own family, including her older brother, George H. Devereux, former adjutant general of Massachusetts, and his soon-to be heroic sons, Arthur F. Devereux, commander of the Salem Light Infantry and later the Massachusetts 19th at Gettysburg, and John F., a Captain in the 11th Massachusetts Infantry, as it was perhaps impossible to separate the private and public spheres at this particular time. Several photographs of President Lincoln are included, but also an image of what I can only presume to be the family cat! When it was over, once can hardly blame Marianne Silsbee for desiring to look back to a dimmer, and thus more pleasant past.

20200121_111912

20200114_111328

The private and the public: Mrs. Silsbee’s poetry and President Lincoln in her photograph album: Phillips Library E S585.3 (1878) and PHA 58 (1861).


The Hustling Hathorne Sisters

I wanted to start my Salem Suffrage Saturday posts with a focus on two lesser-known members of one of Salem’s most conspicuous families: the Ha(w)thornes. Generally we hear about either the Witch Trial Judge, John Hathorne, of the seventeenth century or the famed author (who added the w) of the nineteenth, but I’m going to look at two women who lived in between these towering figures: Mary (1742-1802) and Sarah (1750-1804) Hathorne. Nathaniel had multiple familial connections to the Salem Witch Trials on his paternal side: besides the infamous judge, both of his great uncles married granddaughters of Philip English, who was accused in 1692 along with his wife Mary but managed to flee to New York. Captain William Hawthorne married Mary Touzel, the daughter of Philip’s and Mary’s daughter Susannah Touzel, in 1741 and they had seven children, among them Mary and Sarah. I do believe that the girls and their siblings grew up in—and likely resided later—in what is generally referred to as the Benjamin Marston House on the corner of Cambridge and Essex Streets, which was passed down to their parents by Philip English: this was a very old house with a “modern” addition grafted onto the front in their time, when it was generally referred to as the Hathorne House.

benjamin-marston-house-salem-massachusetts (4)_LIThe Marston/Hathorne House on Essex & Cambridge Streets, drawn by John Robinson in 1870, just before its demolition.

I don’t think their father made much money: the fact that both they—and their Hathorne-Touzel cousins—are living and working in this old “mansion house” over much of their lives gives one that impression, as does the fact that their mother, Mrs. Mary Hathorne, kept by all accounts a well-stocked shop. As neither Mary or Sarah married, they had to fend for themselves to a certain extent–albeit in the midst of family, connections, and what remained of the English inheritance. I’m starting my year of Salem women by looking at Mary and Sarah because they were working women: the hardest nut to crack. It’s really hard to get a window into the lives of women in general before the twentieth century, but single working women are particularly elusive though much more representative of the population at large than many of their more well-documented peers. Generally there has to be some conspicuous event, some legal procedure, something that happens to them—to give us insights. I was able to learn something about the life—or should I say death—of a Salem mill girl much later in the nineteenth century only because she suffered a severe workplace injury. But there are some Salem sources which can illuminate a bit of the working lives of Mary and Sarah Hathorne at the turn of the nineteenth century: a conspicuous “eulogy” by the every-chatty Reverend William Bentley following the death of the former, and an account book of the latter, preserved in the collection of the PEM’s Phillips Library.

Bentley Hathorne (1)

20200114_110044Entry for March 25, 1802 in the Reverend William Bentley’s Diary; Phillips Library MS 1577.

I am sure you can understand why I could not ignore that Bentley statement! Wow–a lot to unpack there. Bentley has a lot to say about everyone, of course,  but he devoted quite a bit of space to Miss Hathorne (and her mother as well). The $40,000—which is repeated by others, including Sidney Perley. I don’t know how to verify, but there are other contemporary statements attesting to Mary (often referred to as Molly) Hathorne’s wealth, enterprise, crudeness, intemperance, and lack of femininity. I’d like to know more about the precise nature of conducting business as a “pedestrian trader”, but we have evidence of Mary’s shop (at the corner of Cambridge and Essex, of course) and considerable property investment via outstanding mortgages. From the deed research that I’ve engaged in, I know that real estate was a popular enterprise for those Salem women who had the means and the opportunity in the nineteenth century; apparently the eighteenth as well. Dr. Bentley informs us that Mary’s mother (also named Mary) who died at the venerable age of 80 three years after her daughter acquired property in peddling from Salem in the neighboring towns, by a parsimony almost unexampled among us and was also characterized by the family “intemperance”.

Hathorne Salem_Gazette_1799-03-12_[1]

Hathorne Mortgages2_LI (2)Salem Gazette.

I wish I could get inside the “shop of Miss Mary Hathorne” to gain some insights into her business as a “pedestrian trader”, but so far, no luck. However, her younger sister Sarah did leave us an account book which sheds some light on the nature of her more feminine occupation: that of a seamstress. The day book, covering transactions from 1794-96, is literally covered in computations—not an inch of paper is wasted, inside or outside. Within we can see all of Sarah’s suppliers and the materials she purchased for her work: a lot of cotton and buckram, linen, silk, gauze, cambric, calico, chintz, baize, flannel, “nancain” (nankeen). We see some familiar Salem names with whom she is doing business: Bott, Symonds, even a man named “Samuel Mackentier”! Of course I’d like to see more details about her commissions and the general management of her business, but I love this inventory of eighteenth-century fabrics—and her apparent preoccupation to get the numbers right.

20200114_110054

20200114_105148

20200114_105551

20200114_105817

20200114_105739Pages from Sarah Hathorne’s Day Book, Phillips Library MS 1577

Sadly there are no portraits of these two: unlike the Hathorne males in their line and the well-heeled merchant’s wives of their time. European artists had been interested in anonymous working women for some time, however, so I’m including two of my favorite portraits of a shopkeeper and a seamstress, just because they are period-perfect, and the anonymous shopkeeper’s small smile reminds me of Molly Hathorne’s characterization.

British School; The Woman Shopkeeper

Wybrand_Hendriks_-_Interieur_met_naaiende_vrouwAnonymous, A Woman Shopkeeper, c. 1790-1810, Glasgow Museums; Wybrand Hendricks, Interior with Woman, c. 1800-1810, Rijksmuseum Twenthe.


%d