Such moments, however terrible, marked moments of excitement in a life of numbing routine. Eventually, the sameness of Bronson’s surroundings and the idleness of his condition became unacceptable. His plan of escape was only half-baked when he put it into practice. He had, it seems, a vague understanding that schoolmasters from the northern states were wanted in the South. He had few qualifications, but, he must have reasoned, no fewer than his likely competitors. A month and a half shy of his nineteenth birthday, he traveled to New Haven and boarded the sloop Three Sisters for Norfolk, Virginia.
Upon arriving, he soon discovered that he had been misinformed; there was no teaching work available. He resorted to a fallback plan, becoming one of the throng of Yankee peddlers who wandered the country, selling all manner of small items to whoever would buy them. The Yankee peddler was a common sight from Cape Cod to Lake Erie, from Canada to Kentucky. It was common for young New England men to spend the winter traveling the upper South on trading expeditions, and return in the spring with the fruits of their industry and enterprise.34 Literally thousands of these young men, most of them barely out of their teens, loaded wagons with combs, clocks, tinware, and other Yankee notions, selling them rapidly, and often at high profits.35
For his part, Bronson found the business instantly absorbing. He got off to a promising start by purchasing a stock of almanacs for three pennies each and promptly selling them for three times that amount. During the next five years, he made a total of five peddling trips to Virginia and the Carolinas, sometimes alone and sometimes in the company of various relatives. Laden with an assortment of soaps, jewelry, thimbles, scissors, playing cards, and almost every other thing imaginable, he walked along country roads and found shelter in friendly cottages and houses. Years later, he recalled how he had slogged through the Dismal Swamp at night in foul weather, picking his way through muddy pools and fallen cypresses, discerning his path with the help of lightning flashes.36 In his haphazard wanderings, he got to know a fairly large piece of the country.
Bronson got to know himself as well. He took particular pleasure when his wanderings took him to the homes of the tidewater gentry, who sometimes repaid him in something more valuable than money: the opportunity to sample the graces and good manners of a class he had never known before. Near the age of eighty, he looked back on these times and averred that an observing peddler “cannot well fail of becoming more of a gentleman and make a fuller acquaintance of human nature by his calling…. A boy of genius disguised as a peddler has advantages denied to the courtier, even, of learning the laws of etiquette and civility.”37 When possible, he persuaded the people he visited to open not only their parlors to him but also their libraries. Indeed, it later seemed to him that he might have fared better in his business if he had not neglected it for “intellectual pleasures.” By his own later admission, Bronson was too bashful and unlettered to take full advantage of the social opportunities that came his way through his contact with the worldly, cultivated families who welcomed him. Nevertheless, their influence enabled him to shed some of his awkwardness and to return home “a better behaved if not a wiser youth,” imbued with the beginnings of a more gracious manner. For the first time, he was, he wrote, “disposed to meet people, [my] elders at least, respectfully.”38 Years later, an English acquaintance declared that Alcott possessed the courtly manners of “a very great peer.”39
During this time, too, he made his first acquaintance with slavery, on very close terms. He sometimes slept in the cabins of slaves and awoke to find himself in the midst of their daily lives. In later years, he was destined to become a dedicated abolitionist—a proud friend of William Lloyd Garrison and a staunch admirer of John Brown. However, Alcott’s experiences as a peddler did not immediately awaken him to the cause of freedom. Indeed, when he first heard Garrison speak, he found the latter’s condemnations overly sweeping. No doubt mindful of his former hosts among the First Families of Virginia, whom he was prepared to forgive a great deal, Bronson criticized Garrison for his “want of discrimination…between the slave-holder who keeps his slaves from motives of expediency and the one whose principles are in favor of slavery.”40
For a man of the spirit, Bronson was acquiring a taste for finer things, and in his first whiff of refinement he began to look on his beginnings with a mild hint of superiority and scorn. In January 1820, while on one of these adventures with his younger brother Chatfield, Bronson wrote his parents his earliest surviving letter, boasting of turning a thirty-three percent profit on his wares. Reading this letter, one is struck immediately by the artificiality of Bronson’s tone. He writes of his pleasure in having learned that his parents are “in circumstances affluent enough to preclude the idea of complaining.” He laces his first paragraph with words like “perusal,” “dissimulation,” and “felicitated,” always seeking the elaborate word to do the work of a simpler one. It is not so much a letter as a performance. Bronson was either trying to win his parents’ compliments or to lord his self-taught erudition over them. Likely enough, he was trying to do a little of both. He wanted to sound like anything but the son of a subsistence farmer.
Filled with the hubris of his initial successes, Bronson saw himself as the possible economic savior of his ill-financed family. He assured his mother and father that the reason he had left home had been “To make their cares, and burdens less, and try to help them some.”41 It was his chief delight, he told them, to earn them all he could, and he considered it almost a sure bet that his efforts would have them out of debt by his twenty-first birthday. His first two trips to the South went part of the way to fulfilling this promise, netting the family a respectable profit of $180.
Nevertheless, there was something about the peddling life that did not quite fit with Bronson’s character. Despite his promise to his parents that he could make his business as respectable as any other, he was surely aware that the idea of a virtuous peddler would have struck most people as an oxymoron. Yale president Timothy Dwight worried that men engaged in peddlers’ work would almost invariably fall into dishonesty. He reasoned that the commanding aim of such a tradesman would be to make a good bargain, and self-interest would lead him to think of every gainful bargain as a good one.42 Moreover, the authority Alcott trusted more than any other, The Pilgrim’s Progress, counseled that the marketplace was evil, perhaps inherently so. One of the most memorable scenes in Bunyan’s work is the passage of Christian and his friend Faithful through the town of Vanity. The town maintains a Fair that is a paradise of venal merchants, where not only “Pleasures and Delights of all sorts” but also blood, bodies, and souls are for sale.43 The patrons of the Fair denounce the pilgrims as fools and are unable to comprehend their language. The moral purity of the two visitors so fiercely clashes with the depravity of the inhabitants of Vanity that the latter take them prisoner and, after a hypocritical trial, burn Faithful at the stake. Viewing his career in the light of Bunyan’s allegory must have caused Bronson to wonder whether he had forsaken the path of the pilgrim, simply to become a movable Vanity Fair. In March 1823, he wrote to his cousin William that, during his travels, he had overheard a troublesomely apt saying: “Peddling is a hard place to serve God, but a capital one to serve Mammon.” Bronson now wished for the grace to amend his ways.44
The peddling life began to hold still less charm for him as his business fortunes turned for the worse. His third trip was the last one to turn a profit, and his earnings did not survive the trip home. Passing through New York on the way to Wolcott, Bronson came face-to-face with temptation. His seducer took the form of an immaculate black suit, a white cravat, and an amethystine pin. It wasn’t a fair fight. Bronson returned home in sartorial glory but with his money squandered. He made two more sorties into the peddling trade, and they nearly ruined him. Although he apparently had some gifts as a salesman, he was less sagacious as a buyer. Joseph T. Allyn, the Norfolk trader from whom Bronson became accustomed to buying his stock, discovered that he could sell his goods to Alc
ott for considerably more than they were worth. By the time the naive young peddler realized that the shrewd fancy-goods dealer had made a “gudgeon” of him, he had become more deeply obliged to Allyn than he could manage. In 1822, Allyn took possession of Bronson’s horse, wagon, and remaining merchandise in partial satisfaction of the young man’s debt. Alcott’s father, whom Bronson had grandly promised to free from debt “before…I am twenty-one,” had to cover $270 of Bronson’s debt to Allyn.45 By 1823, the year of his last peddling excursion, Bronson owed his father $600. At twenty-three, he had had enough of the life of a salesman.
However, the next turn in his path showed him work for which he was much better suited. In the fall of 1823, he first took up the job of schoolmaster. He cannot have done so with a view to financial or social advancement, for schoolmasters in rural Connecticut generally enjoyed no more comfort or prestige than Washington Irving’s Ichabod Crane. Almost immediately, however, Alcott found something in teaching that resonated deeply within him. He embraced and never abandoned the idea that educating the young was the greatest work that a person could undertake. Alcott argued that the work of teaching children was better even than preaching, since there was still time to imbue the youthful heart and mind with a reverence for goodness. “The minister has long preached,” Alcott complained, “and what has he accomplished? Ask our penitentiaries…our almshouses…. Look into the individual life and behold the shifts of trade, of avarice, of petty prejudice, bickering, quarrels, spites.” He was unwilling to waste his efforts on people whose habits were fixed. “Early education,” he was sure, “was the enduring power.”46
As he turned to teaching, he had more in his mind than reforming the characters of his pupils. At a certain point—no one seems to agree as to exactly when or to what extent—Bronson became familiar with the educational theories of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi. A native of Zurich who derived deep inspiration from Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Pestalozzi believed in the innate intelligence of human beings. He contended that the best education sought to bring these latent powers to the surface, instead of cramming information into the student. Pestalozzi deplored the then-common assumption that harsh discipline achieved the best results in the classroom. Emphasizing that education must be social as well as intellectual, he maintained that the ideal classroom should replicate the nurturing atmosphere of a loving family.
Lacking the expertise in languages that would have made Pestalozzi’s original work available to him, Alcott made extensive use of a series of English pamphlets based on Pestalozzi’s doctrines, titled Hints to Parents. The anonymous Hints not only urged the very type of gentle, conversational method that Alcott adopted in his own teaching, but it also counseled the importance of making the educational environment as similar as possible to a tranquil, well-managed home. Hints emphasized from its very first pages “the invaluable opportunities afforded in the DOMESTIC CIRCLE for fostering the infant mind.” It advocated “making schools more nearly resemble the paternal abode: thus rendering them more perfect representations of parental education, instruction, superintendence, and society.” Although each of the Hints to Parents pamphlets focused on a particular area of education—arithmetic, language, geometric form, and so on—each began and ended with a stirring exhortation, urging parents to spare no effort in the pursuit of virtue, both in their children and in themselves. Like The Pilgrim’s Progress, the pamphlets urged parents to deafen themselves to the judgments of a corrupt and vanity-ridden world. Of parents in general, Hints advised, “No consideration of earthly interest, no fear of human censure, no thirst for human applause, neither dread of singularity nor weak complaisance, must have power to slacken their zeal.” Furthermore, it counseled that the pathway to the intellect led primarily through personal interaction and appeals to the feelings: “A child’s mind must be awakened by its instructor’s mind, not by its instructor’s book—life must act upon life—the heart is the seat of life.”47
Armed with such principles, Alcott ventured to find out whether Pestalozzian theory could be made to work in rural Connecticut. Establishing a school in the town of Cheshire, he pursued the hypothesis that children would be best served if their schoolmaster tried to make them happy and comfortable and encouraged them to reason independently. He decorated the dreary classrooms with flowers and pine boughs. He got rid of long tables with hard benches and replaced them with individual desks that he built with his own hands. He somehow scrounged the money to purchase a school library of over a hundred volumes at his own expense. He made up games for the children and sometimes joined in himself.48 His classrooms became places of music and art. Rejecting the usages that had “rendered the school room…a place of suffering, confinement, and hatred,” Alcott made little use of corporal punishment. He governed his students not by threats but by conversation, appealing to their feelings and sense of justice. He established a classroom court, in which, under his supervision, the children reviewed each other’s violations of the school’s disciplinary code. The educational experience became both highly orderly and extremely inviting. Eager for more instruction, students often visited Alcott’s home in the evenings to read and play with him. One day when Alcott was absent from the school, the students competently conducted business by themselves.49
Hopeful and confident, Bronson Alcott posed for this pencil sketch as a young man.
To assist in the development of his own mind, he began to keep a journal of his thoughts and observations. The first entry was dated July 3, 1826, the day before John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died. Alcott continued his journals as long as he could use a pen. From its earliest entries, his journal conveyed his restless spirit and his utter impatience with orthodoxy. He privately lamented, “To dare to think, to think for oneself, is denominated pride and arrogance. And millions of minds are in this state of slavery and tyranny.” He knew of only one escape from this bondage: “Rebel!…Let others grumble; dare to be singular. Let others direct; follow Reason.”50
Distrustful of Alcott’s singularity and his iconoclastic definition of reason, the parents of Cheshire were not long in starting to grumble. They neither understood nor trusted his methods. Although one visiting educator proclaimed Alcott’s Cheshire school “the best common school in the state—probably in the United States,” local opinion turned against him.51 A local clergyman spoke out against Alcott’s moral opinions, and the schoolmaster soon discovered that parents cared nothing for his educational theories. They wanted only practice, and his practices were beyond their willingness to comprehend. He closed his school and retreated to Spindle Hill.
Decisive moments in Bronson Alcott’s life tended to come when, just as the promise of one venture began to fade as one constituent group lost confidence in him, his reputation suddenly reached the ears of another, more idealistic audience that was prepared to give him a new opportunity. Such was the case in May 1827, when his cousin William sent a report of his accomplishments in Cheshire to Samuel May, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, now leading the Unitarian church in Brooklyn, Connecticut. May was a man of distinguished lineage in an era when lineage counted a great deal. The son of a prominent Boston merchant, Colonel Joseph May, Samuel was descended on his mother’s side from the Sewalls and Quincys. His great-aunt Dorothy was the widow of John Hancock. To his great credit, Samuel May himself cared far less about a person’s origins, his own included, than he cared about what one might do for humankind. If he benefited socially from his maternal connections, he appeared to draw strength of character from his father’s side. Perhaps descended from Portuguese Jews who had fled the Inquisition, the Mays were known for their intelligence and fighting spirit, qualities that Samuel often turned to his advantage in support of worthy causes. Speaking of conditions that he had gratefully avoided in his own life, May once asserted, “No one shall be compelled by the poverty of his parents to live in darkness and sin.”52 He was dedicated to making that pronouncement a reality, working avidly not only for the reform of education but als
o for abolition, the improvement of prisons, and other forms of social welfare. Learning of Alcott’s work in Cheshire, May wanted to meet the schoolmaster. As he later put it, “I at once felt assured the man must be a genius, and that I must know him more intimately.”53 An invitation was promptly sent, and Bronson accepted.
The greatest surprise came immediately after Bronson came to the Mays’ front door. Samuel was out of the house, and his wife was upstairs, recovering from a difficult childbirth. So it was that, when the door came open, it did not reveal the minister, but the dark-eyed, expressive face of his sister Abigail. She was a tall, dark-haired woman with abundant physical energy and a large frame, which her aristocratic family and her attendance at dancing school had taught her to carry with becoming grace. She never used her full name of Abigail, preferring the informality of Abby or Abba. At twenty-six, she had already passed the age at which most women of her time and station were married. Bronson eventually learned that there had once been a fiancé, a first cousin named Samuel May Frothingham, but he had suddenly died of a now-forgotten cause.
Perhaps more than ill fortune had helped to keep Abba single. Throughout her life, she had a forthrightness and a sharp tongue that might have discouraged a fainthearted suitor. In addition, as an infant she had been severely burned on her face and right hand. The extent of the lasting scars and physical impairment that resulted cannot be known. However, biographer Madelon Bedell has suggested that Abba’s hand was permanently disfigured in some way that harmed appearance more than function.54 In any event, it is not fanciful to suppose that the loss of her fiancé, coupled with self-consciousness about her appearance—or a dearth of suitors because of her scars—had a deflating effect on her romantic expectations.
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