The Doctors Blackwell
Page 2
Sugar refining might have boosted Samuel Blackwell’s status, but it was a tricky foundation on which to build. In 1828 the whole household watched the “great feathers of flame, & the volumes of sparks, rushing up into the sky” from across the narrow river Avon as Samuel’s Counterslip Refinery burned; even from that safe distance, the railings they leaned upon at the river’s edge grew warm from the conflagration. Refineries received raw sugar from the Caribbean and then boiled, filtered, granulated, and finally molded and trimmed it into smooth conical loaves; the combination of roaring boilers and combustible sugar dust meant that refineries had an alarming tendency to explode. Samuel was able to rebuild his business, but he had to downsize from airy Wilson Street to grittier lodgings attached to his new refinery.
Other disappointments followed. Samuel’s brother James, in charge of the Blackwell interests in Dublin, succumbed to violent paranoia and ran the office into the ground. (He was eventually committed to a private asylum, where he felt less threatened by the assassins he believed were trying to kill him.) A Bristol shipping firm that owed Samuel thousands of pounds went bankrupt. And in addition to these financial tremors, a larger political quake shook Bristol in the fall of 1831.
Decades later the Blackwell siblings could still recall the eerie silence of the deserted streets, followed by the roaring tumult of hundreds of angry men pelting past with torches to attack Bristol’s seats of power. The rapid rise of industrial cities had made Britain’s electoral landscape obsolete, with minimally populated and easily manipulated rural “rotten boroughs” sending members to the House of Commons while the surging populations of urban areas went unrepresented—not that workers could vote anyway, as the franchise was limited to landowners. In October, after the Second Reform Bill was defeated, the city was convulsed by three days of deadly riots. Though the Blackwells were heartily in favor of legislative reform, the violence unleashed around them was terrifying.
At this vulnerable moment, Samuel was unusually susceptible to the glowing reports he had begun to receive from friends who had emigrated to America. It was a nation founded by Dissenters, after all, where the Blackwells’ religion would not obstruct their children’s prospects. Samuel could bring his antislavery energy to a nation soaked in the blood of slaves—and in the vastness of American agricultural possibility, perhaps he could find a way to root his sugar beets in the same soil. His decision to emigrate was met with horror by his colleagues in Bristol, who offered him a generous loan in an attempt to persuade him to stay. Hannah shared their dismay. She had just given birth to Howard, her eighth living child, and she was already pregnant again.
New York, when the Blackwells disembarked from the Cosmo at last, was oddly quiet. They soon discovered that the scourge they hoped to leave behind had leaped ahead of them: the city was in the grip of its first cholera epidemic, and its wealthier residents had fled. An understanding of the mechanisms by which epidemics spread was still decades away. The death toll exceeded 3,500, out of a population of 250,000.
For all Samuel’s optimism, America was a perilous land where manners were rougher and rules less defined. Would his children and his fortunes flourish in this place full of “active dollar-getting people,” hustling along filthy streets where plain wooden buildings were only just being replaced with more substantial brick and stone? His wife and children would never match his zest for the new world. He settled his family in rented accommodations on Thompson Street, and within a few weeks Hannah delivered a healthy boy, her ninth and last child. In honor of their brave beginning, they christened him George Washington Blackwell.
There was a contingent quality to the Blackwell sojourn in New York. With the help of backers in Bristol, Samuel bought the Congress Sugar Refinery on Duane Street, one of the largest in the city. Within two years the family moved from Manhattan to Long Island, near the village of Flushing, but their enjoyment of a spacious frame house and adjoining orchard was cut short when Samuel was stricken with malaria. The blame was placed correctly on their proximity to marshland, though it would be more than half a century before the mosquito was identified as the true culprit; as its name proclaimed, malaria—“bad air”—was thought to be caused by the noxious exhalations of stagnant bogs. Malaria was so common in the young United States that illness and recovery were known as “seasoning,” a normal part of settling in. In December 1835 the Blackwells skipped back across Manhattan to Jersey City, a ferry ride across the Hudson River from Samuel’s refinery. There was a reason for every relocation, but the family’s failure to settle in one place prevented deeper engagement with any community beyond their own clan.
Elizabeth preferred solitude to socializing anyway. Her voracious reading juxtaposed Shakespeare and Pilgrim’s Progress with the independent heroines of novels by Maria Edgeworth and Madame de Staël. Books were a refuge from her own ineptitude in company. “If people will make me out such a queer being they are very welcome,” she declared, “and I shall take the liberty of caring very little about it.” The cultivation of frivolous feminine charm was beneath her, and though she often found herself on the edge of things, she doubted the center was any better. “How gay the ladies look,” she wrote of the passing crowd, “& how miserably their waists are pinched up.”
As a teenager, she hungered for recognition and despaired of achieving it. “I fear the brilliant radiance of genius is far from illuminating my soul',” she confided to her journal. When her younger brother Sam escorted her to the commencement speeches at Columbia College, she was both inspired and frustrated. “The Greek oration called up a multitude of thoughts,” she admitted, “and the melancholy reflection that the enchanting paths of literature were not for me to walk in.” Although Oberlin Collegiate Institute in Ohio had admitted the first female students to its bachelor’s degree course in 1833, it was a startling exception—and anyway Elizabeth daydreamed of claiming a place alongside the men of Columbia, not of joining other women at a tiny and obscure frontier school.
If literature and philosophy were closed to her, what paths were open? “How I do long for some end to act for,” she wrote. “To go on every day in just the same jog trot manner without any object is very wearisome.” Joining the ranks of the burgeoning temperance movement, she signed the total abstinence pledge. She also ruled out marriage. Upon reading a novel entitled The Three Eras of Woman’s Life—girl, wife, mother—she complained, “I wish some skillful pen would produce an interesting old maid’s life.” She was barely seventeen.
Elizabeth’s prickliness extended to her sisters. Stormy Anna—nearly five years older—had assumed the role of tutor to the younger children after their governess, Miss Major, became Aunt Eliza, having married Hannah’s visiting brother, Uncle Charles Lane. (He already had a wife in England, but the Blackwells, by tacit agreement, forbore from scrutinizing the decisions of “poor, foolish, kind-hearted, void-of-principle Uncle Charley!”) Anna’s new position of authority heightened the tension between herself and Elizabeth, and their sororal silent treatments could go on and on. “Just as I was getting into bed Anna sent me a most dignified & severe note of forgiveness for my past conduct,” Elizabeth recorded, “so I suppose our estrangement of more than 3 months is at an end.” Marian, though more retiring than Anna, could be just as critical of Elizabeth’s manners.
Sturdy, curious Emily was the beneficiary of her sisters’ standoffs, during which Elizabeth might take her “into partnership to her great joy.” But Emily was too young to be stimulating company, and when Anna left for a teaching position at a seminary in Vermont, Elizabeth instantly wished her back. “I wonder how Anna gets on,” she wrote. “She has hardly been out of my head once, we quite miss her active tongue.” And so it would often be with the Blackwells: they liked each other better than anyone else, and they liked each other best with a little distance. Anna’s departure marked the beginning of the family diaspora—rarely would the Blackwell siblings all be together again—but until their deaths they never stopped writing to
each other. In the early years, when money was tight and postage dear, they filled the page, then rotated it a quarter turn and filled it again, creating dense grids of cramped copperplate.
Elizabeth’s brothers Sam and Henry, between herself and Emily in age, enjoyed a livelier social life—Broadway excursions to concerts at Niblo’s Garden and a glimpse of the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng Bunker, at Peale’s Museum—but the reserved and opinionated Blackwell women spent their leisure time quietly, perhaps more quietly than they wished. On New Year’s Day, when ladies were at home to callers, twelve-year-old Sam reported that “Mamma, Anna, Marian, and Bessy sat in the parlour from about ten oclock in the morning, till night, but not one did they receive, save Uncle Charles, until about five oclock in the evening.”
Elizabeth preferred more cerebral entertainments, like a visit to the Fowler brothers, Orson and Lorenzo, who had established a thriving practice in the new and fashionable study of phrenology. Its Viennese originator, Franz Joseph Gall, believed that attitudes and aptitudes had their respective organs in the brain, sized in proportion to their strength. One had only to examine the bulges and dents of the cranium to understand deeper truths about an individual’s capacity for thirty-seven traits, including steadfastness, prudence, enterprise, humor, and both “amative,” or romantic, love, and the “philoprogenitive,” or parental, kind. Gall’s theory had its origin in his own student days, when he noted that the real geniuses among his classmates had high foreheads and protuberant eyes. Gall, naturally, shared these features.
CROSS-WRITING SAVED PAPER AND POSTAGE.
COURTESY SCHLESINGER LIBRARY, RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE, HARVARD UNIVERSITY
To enliven a frigid January afternoon, Elizabeth went with a couple of her siblings to be “phrenologized” by the Fowlers and came away intrigued in spite of herself by “the bumpy science.” In Elizabeth’s case, observed her examiner, “cautiousness” was not large; “veneration” and “imitation” were moderate; “alimentiveness,” or hunger, was good; and “ideality,” or refinement, was strong. The shape of her skull seemed to justify the misanthropic superiority she sometimes failed to conceal. “Not disposed to trifle, nor will she be trifled with,” read the report. “Others do not know how much mind you have.” It was all quite gratifying to a girl who longed for confirmation of her own excellence—except for the comment regarding her outsized region of “philoprogenitive love,” which had to be a mistake. Elizabeth’s ambitions did not include parenthood. She already had six younger siblings to look after.
Antislavery activism was the Blackwells’ primary form of social engagement, and in May 1837 every Blackwell sister except nine-year-old Ellen attended the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, a groundbreaking meeting that included free black women. Anna was an official delegate, and the proceedings were led by such luminaries as Lucretia Mott and the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, who would go on to prominence in the women’s rights movement. Early murmurs of that cause were audible at the 1837 meeting, when Angelina Grimké proposed a resolution on the imperative for women “to plead the cause of the oppressed in our land”—the implication being that women were among those oppressed. “The time has come for woman to move in that sphere which Providence has assigned her,” Grimké announced, “and no longer remain satisfied in the circumscribed limits with which corrupt custom and a perverted application of Scripture have encircled her.” The audience was by no means unanimous in its affirmation of this sentiment, and Anna, Marian, Elizabeth, and Emily walked home still discussing whether it was “very ill advised.”
Their father, continuing to live a paradox, joined in whenever he could spare time from his sugar refinery. “The spirit of Slavery blackens and curses everything here morally and politically,” Samuel Blackwell wrote, “and I fear will work like a Canker until perfect rottenness will be the end and ruin of these States.” He befriended William Lloyd Garrison and joined New York’s Committee of Vigilance, helping to protect fugitives from recapture. “A colored man came here tonight who said he was a runaway slave,” Elizabeth wrote one December night. “We gave him some money to help him on his journey.” For a solitary, bookish, uncompromisingly high-minded young woman, antislavery activism added savor to static days: access to famous figures, the thrill of moral righteousness in the face of opposition, and the risky romance of aiding fugitives in the night. There was little actual contact with the pain and peril of black lives, but Elizabeth was happier with the abstract ideal.
She chafed at the limited scope of her life. “What a dearth of incidents,” she griped in the summer of 1837. “I wish I could devise some good way of maintaining myself but the restrictions which confine my dear sex render all my aspirations useless.” A week later the accession of Princess Victoria to the British throne roused Elizabeth from her torpor. “How ardently I hope our young queen may prove worthy & capable of governing our flourishing kingdom, & may be an honour to our sex,” she wrote. A woman ascendant, and just two years older than herself! It lifted Elizabeth’s spirits and reignited her English pride. Queen Victoria sounded like a woman worth getting to know.
Meanwhile that spring, the situation in New York had grown precarious. A convergence of economic forces, exacerbated by President Andrew Jackson’s ill-advised financial policies, resulted in a panic that shuttered banks, ruined fortunes, and brought soldiers onto the streets to prevent unrest. Samuel’s bad luck continued—his refinery had burned again, and he sold out to his foreman, determined to focus his energy at last on the elusive grail of beet sugar. Napoleon’s wartime subsidies decades earlier had made France the leader in sugar beets, but American interest in the commodity had recently begun to sharpen. Land was cheap and plentiful, and domestic sugar looked like a promising investment. Samuel was no farmer, but the idea of controlling both ends of the production process, free of the taint of slavery, was powerfully attractive—a chance to do well at last, in addition to doing good.
“I hope Papa is not taking up [his] Michigan beet idea again,” Elizabeth wrote, “but his talking so much about beets & bringing home those French books for us to translate is rather suspicious.” It was hard not to draw the obvious conclusion when Samuel disappeared into the basement with Hannah’s silver saucepan to “make some experiments,” only to emerge with a burn on his face from boiling sugar. In the spring of 1838, he left Jersey City for extended explorations into Pennsylvania and Ohio—less distant than Michigan but still dauntingly remote—trying to determine where to plant his beets and his family.
In lengthy, reflective, whimsical letters, Samuel strove to convince his wife and children of the promise of the West, so vast and raw compared to New York, let alone Bristol. “Tell dear Washy,”† his father wrote, “that I have seen a ’possum . . . and squirrels jumping from tree to tree in the woods—and people making holes in trees for sugar to run out—and trees as high as church towers.” Cincinnati, more primitive even than Pittsburgh, was a “fine and flourishing place—and though I should not apply the epithet ‘glorious’ to it, there is certainly much to admire.”
In May 1838 the Blackwells left New York for Cincinnati, minus Anna and Marian, who remained in their teaching positions. The journey, via ocean steamer to Philadelphia, railway over the Alleghenies, and multiple stages of river travel, took nine days. In the squashed society of the riverboats, Elizabeth looked on as Emily and Ellen, eleven and ten respectively, were indulged by the young men aboard; Emily won consistently at checkers, to the delighted chagrin of her opponents. No one paid Elizabeth much attention, which was both a relief and also a little disappointing. “I suppose I am considered fixed,” she grumbled, “for a lady asked me while I was ablutionizing Wash, if that was my son.” She passed the time reading Pascal’s Pensées.
Perched on the riverbank and ringed with low hills, Cincinnati in 1838 was a rising city of thirty-five thousand, styling itself “Queen of the West” but more accurately known as “Porkopolis.” In a best-selling travelogue, the British writer
Fanny Trollope, mother of the more celebrated Anthony, had recently shared her appalled impressions of an unlovely frontier town where garbage disposal was entrusted to the free-range pigs. Pork was the engine of Cincinnati’s prosperity, and the streams ran red every fall with the effluent of the city’s slaughterhouses; butchering, in the era before refrigeration, was a cold-weather industry. But now it was spring. “I saw some very handsome houses & well-dressed people,” Elizabeth wrote with determined optimism after her first morning’s walk. “There seems an air of respectability & cleanliness about the place.” Perhaps her father would prosper here at last. And though Cincinnati stood on free soil, Ohio farmers commonly rented enslaved hands from across the river in Kentucky as seasonal laborers. The need for antislavery advocacy was obvious.
The Blackwells found yet another house to rent, and in the absence of Anna and Marian, Elizabeth taught her younger siblings. On Sundays, in the absence of anything resembling cultural diversion, she tried out churches, including the congregation of Lyman Beecher, a theologian renowned for his fiery Presbyterian leadership as well as, eventually, for his famous progeny. It would be another decade before Henry Ward Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Catharine Beecher became household names, but the Blackwells were immediately drawn to them. Perhaps Cincinnati wasn’t such a muddy backwater—perhaps there was scope for young women whose minds were more impressive than their wardrobes. “If we cannot show off physically, we must mentally, & eclipse them all by the charms of our understanding,” wrote Marian to Elizabeth. “I intend to come out a bel esprit, you may be a mentor ‘severe in youthful beauty’ & Anna shall dazzle them all by her refined wit sharp as a needle’s point.” Elizabeth, currently making her way through Jane Austen, wholeheartedly approved this vision of intellectual conquest.