Out on Blackwell’s Island, the Farm School—which, to Margaret’s eye, was nothing more than “a school upon a small farm”—also failed to provide any vocational training for its young charges, even though, as Margaret noted, children “have vital energy enough for many things at once, and learn more from books when their attention is quickened” by a variety of pursuits. She admired the well-ventilated dormitories and the way the school’s infants were arranged in a circle at mealtimes “like a nest full of birds” to be spoon-fed by affectionate nurses. But she worried about how the older students, who were required to leave the school at age twelve, would find work. Many of these “show[ed] by their unformed features and mechanical movements” the ill effects of having been “treated by wholesale”; they were not accorded the respect that engenders “self-respect.”
The Asylum for the Insane too, despite its location on the island’s grassy headlands and its ingenious design—two three-story neoclassical dormitory wings with a row of columns marking their separate entrances, one for women and the other for men, extended at a right angle from a central octagonal structure containing the doctors’ rooms—appeared to serve as little more than a warehouse. Here Margaret found the inmates crouching in the corners of their rooms. They had “no eye for the stranger, no heart for hope,” in stark contrast to patients in the privately run Bloomingdale, where “the shades of character and feeling were nicely kept up, decorum of manners preserved, and the insane showed in every way that they felt no violent separation betwixt them and the rest of the world, and might easily return to it.”
The Penitentiary was gloomier still—in fact “one of the gloomiest scenes that deforms this great metropolis.” There, seven hundred women, more than half the prison’s population, were incarcerated “simply as a social convenience, without regard to pure right, or a hope of reformation,” in Margaret’s view, and they lacked even a single matron. As at Sing Sing, most of the imprisoned women had been prostitutes, and “I have always felt great interest in those women, who are trampled in the mud to gratify the brute appetites of men,” Margaret wrote afterward to a friend, “and wished I might be brought, naturally, into contact with them.” She was convinced, as she told Horace Greeley, they were “women like myself, save that they are victims of wrong and misfortune.” Writing for the Tribune gave her the opportunity to test her intuition, and the chance to speak out, as she had in Woman in the Nineteenth Century, against the hypocritical laws that made a woman pay for a man’s crime. Why should women “receive the punishment due to the vices of so large a portion of the rest”?
Acute firsthand observation enlivened by “intelligent sympathy” had quickly become Margaret’s distinctive style as a critic and, increasingly, as an advocate for social reform: to read, to hear, to see what the Tribune’s many subscribers could or would not, and then to shape an instructive message from her experience, was the means she chose “to aid in the great work of mutual education,” as she summed up her ambitions as a journalist in a letter to James Freeman Clarke. To her relief, James had emerged, perhaps in an effort to make amends for his younger brother’s indifference, as the chief—sometimes, it seemed, the sole—supporter of Margaret’s new vocation among her old Boston friends. Cary might offer only slighting praise—“for those who like introductions[,] your criticisms must be of value” —and Waldo complain that the job, “made acceptable” only “by good pay” (ten dollars per week, two dollars higher than Greeley had paid his previous literary editor), was “honourable” to Margaret, but “not satisfactory to me.” But James understood Margaret best now, as he had so many years earlier, and recognized that the New-York Tribune was “an excellent organ through which to speak to the public.” Her Tribune articles, which had “more ease, grace, freedom and point to them,” he told her, were “better written than anything of yours I have read.”
It was the perfect job for Margaret, who always had an opinion on almost any subject as well as the verbal facility and the compulsion to express it. The “rich extempore writing” that Thoreau had admired in “The Great Lawsuit,” her gift of “talking with pen in hand,” enabled her to turn out three or four articles per week, more than 250 in eighteen months. The goal of “mutual education,” as well as the space constraints and frequent deadlines, forced a clarity and efficiency of expression that she had not submitted to previously. Margaret was aware that her “old friends . . . think I ought to produce something excellent”—another book—yet, as she wrote to James, she had spent all of her writing life so far in “the depths.” She expected that “an abode of some length in the shallows may do me no harm.” Like James, Margaret was already pleased with the results: in the shallows, writing about vitally important surface realities, “the sun comes full upon me.”
Her success was attributable to more than the new compression, however, or to the fluent delivery of swift perceptions for which she’d always had a talent in conversation. Margaret’s eye for the telling detail and the poignant image, developed over many years of immersion in the great Romantic novels, in Shakespeare and the classics, allowed an easy transition to the new style of literary journalism of which she promptly became a leading practitioner. Waldo Emerson was wrong to see the newspapers of the mid-1840s as cheapening their writers. In fact, the rise of the “penny press,” papers like Horace Greeley’s Tribune, which relied on subscriptions, newsstand sales, and paid advertisements rather than the financial backing of religious sects or political parties, put greater pressure on writers to provide compelling copy.
Seventy newspapers were listed in the 1845 New York City directory; the Tribune vied with the New York Sun and the New York Herald for top circulation figures in a battle that took place on the page. Unwilling to stoop to publishing lurid accounts of murder and mayhem, the stories that sold the lesser publications, Greeley nevertheless valued the human interest reporting at which Margaret instinctively excelled. The characters and incidents she’d habitually recorded in her journals, noting they might make “scenes for a drama” or “materials for romance,” now found their way into her journalism, as in the case of the little Dutch girl at Bellevue, who, Margaret wrote, “would have suggested a thousand poetical images and fictions to the mind of Victor Hugo or Sir Walter Scott.” She exhorted her readers: “Do you want to link these fictions, which have made you weep, with facts around you where your pity might be of use? Go to the Penitentiary at Blackwell’s Island.” Her readers might not go, but Margaret did, turning her fact-finding missions into emotionally charged narratives in order to “be of use.”
It took some time for Margaret to write as a New Yorker, however. The early news she delivered came from New England and betrayed a predisposition to think of Boston as a “chief mental focus to the New World,” as she wrote in her first article, a review of Waldo Emerson’s second collection of essays—which privately she had concluded were “more fine than searching.” On Thanksgiving in 1844, celebrated in early December, she applauded Massachusetts, where “the old spirit which hallowed the day still lingers, and forbids that it should be entirely devoted to play and plum-pudding.” At Christmastime, she reviewed The Liberty Bell for 1845, an anthology sold to benefit the annual Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Fair, praising “the contributions of the men of color,” in particular the work of a new writer named Frederick Douglass, only six years out of bondage. She even gave an account of the dispute among Boston’s Unitarian clergy over Theodore Parker’s radical views on the “nature of inspiration, and the facts of Bible history,” which had come to a head in late January 1845, when James Clarke granted the “excommunicated” Parker the opportunity to preach in his Church of the Disciples. The incident spawned outrage in the local press and inspired Margaret to respond from New York with “regret that, in the nineteenth century, ‘liberal Christians’ should not be liberal enough cheerfully to allow an honorable mind free course.”
But by the time of “Our City Charities,” Margaret had experienced enough of the city to b
egin addressing her readers as one among them. She had attended concerts of the New York Philharmonic Society, where she heard symphonies by Beethoven, Haydn, and Spohr “performed with a degree of perfection worthy a great metropolis”; she had walked or ridden the city’s cobblestone streets by horse-drawn omnibus, discovering the manicured parks at Washington Square and Union Place as well as the bustling commercial blocks of Nassau Street near the Tribune offices, where two dozen of Greeley’s competitors printed and hawked their wares. “There is no reason why New-York should not become a model for other States” in social reform, she concluded. “We trust that interest on this subject will not slumber,” for “there is wealth enough, intelligence, and good desire enough, and surely, need enough.”
What did it mean to be a New Yorker anyway? Between 1840 and 1850, the city’s population, already three times that of Boston, would nearly double, jumping from 300,000 to over 500,000, with most of the growth in newcomers. More than eighteen hundred ships from foreign ports reached New York Harbor each year, many of them carrying passengers with no intention of making the return trip. Margaret experienced New York’s cosmopolitan nature first through its music, which she found to be “worthy the admiration of any mind,” the highest praise she could give. Here she found an audience of “persons educated where the Fine Arts have already attained their perfection”—enough listeners who had emigrated from or traveled in Europe—and “also an influx of well-educated musicians.” Opera singers from Italy and Germany, and the great violinist Ole Bull from Norway, passed through on tour during Margaret’s first months as reviewer for the Tribune, and many more well trained if lesser virtuosi had taken up residence to staff the philharmonic and other New York orchestras.
But there were far larger numbers of poor Irish immigrants new to the city as well, whose plight Margaret took up in a series of articles on “The Irish Character,” both out of principle and because of fellow feeling. Margaret was an immigrant to New York herself, along with most everyone else she knew, lured to a city whose half-million residents had “needs enough” to fuel an urban economy unlike any other in the New World. Margaret’s old friend from Boston Lydia Maria Child was here now, writing for the weekly Broadway Journal, edited by a Virginian, Edgar Allan Poe. Waldo’s older brother William had settled on Staten Island to work as a lawyer; William Channing was in Manhattan preaching to his Society of Christian Union, and in the fall before her own arrival, Margaret’s brother-in-law Ellery Channing had left Ellen and little Greta in Concord once again to try his hand at writing for the Tribune as well—where their employer, Horace Greeley, was himself a New Hampshire man.
It was in Horace Greeley that Margaret recognized a “go-ahead, fearless adroitness” that was simply “American.” Waldo’s deprecatory assessment that Greeley was “no scholar,” but rather a “mother of men . . . an abettor,” captured the very reasons Margaret quickly warmed to the tall, unkempt newspaperman, whose thick wire-rimmed glasses, settled unsteadily on his ruddy baby face, were the only hint of erudition in a carelessly rustic ensemble that usually included an old white coat of Irish linen, heavy boots, and baggy black trousers. The “go-ahead” Greeley had traveled all the way to Cambridge the previous September to press for Margaret’s acceptance as she deliberated over his offer of a job, and his proposal that she take a room in his home on Turtle Bay, the former summer residence of New York banker Isaac Lawrence, had helped make up her mind. Margaret had already met Greeley’s wife, Mary, a sometime invalid who’d suffered numerous miscarriages and stillbirths, during one of Mary’s summer residences at Brook Farm, an enterprise that husband and wife supported as ardent “associationists.” Margaret had found Mary to be a witty conversational partner. She may even have proposed Margaret for the Tribune literary editorship, and she welcomed Margaret to the isolated Turtle Bay homestead, two miles beyond the more “thickly settled parts of New York,” where, as Margaret learned, her hostess had insisted on settling in the tumbledown waterfront mansion for the sake of their one surviving child, two-year-old Arthur, whose health was a lingering concern.
Horace and Mary Greeley were “Grahamites and Hydropaths,” according to Margaret, followers of the latest health and dietary fads, and they were temperance-minded teetotalers as well. Margaret was chided for taking “strong potations”—her daily cup of coffee or tea—and for wearing leather gloves (“Skin of a beast!” Mary Greeley would exclaim), but otherwise she enjoyed the remote residence. Maria Child described the route she took to visit her friend: exiting the Harlem omnibus at 49th Street, as Margaret had instructed, then following “a winding, zig-zag cart-track . . . as rural as you can imagine, with moss-covered rocks, scraggly bushes, and a brook that came tumbling over a little dam.” Finally, after passing through three swinging gates, Child reached the house, overgrown with vines and climbing roses, and “so old and picturesque” she could scarcely believe it had been “allowed to remain standing near New York so long.” There were gazebos “dropping to pieces,” and a “piazza” at the back of the house, “almost on the East river, with Blackwell’s Island in full view.” Margaret’s room looked out over “a little woody knoll, that runs down into the water, and boats and ships are passing her window all the time.”
Margaret simply felt that “I like living here,” where “all flows freely.” In New York City she had discovered “I don’t dislike wickedness and wretchedness”—the squalor of the more “thickly-settled parts” and the houses of reform she could see across the water on Blackwell’s Island—any more than the “pettiness and coldness” of Boston and Concord. Although the Greeleys squabbled at times—the more intellectual Mary suffered from the “ennui” Margaret had identified in Woman in the Nineteenth Century—Margaret sometimes overheard Horace and Mary singing duets in the evening, and their son, Arthur, loved to swing in the hammock on the piazza with Margaret as she read books for review. She was not missing her New England friends and planned not to visit Boston until at least July.
As they became better acquainted, both at home and in the Tribune offices, where her host-and-employer often worked late into the night, Margaret decided Horace Greeley was “in his habits, a slattern and plebeian,” but “in his heart, a nobleman.” Maybe best of all he allowed Margaret to write as she chose, never minding “what turmoil it might excite, nor what odium it might draw down on her own head.” He was the rare man who felt no challenge to his own authority from Margaret’s strong will; instead, he admired her for it. “She never asked how this would sound,” Greeley marveled, “nor whether that would do, nor what would be the effect of saying anything; but simply, ‘Is it the truth? Is it such as the public should know?’” As literary editor, Margaret was more partner than employee. Together they were “flying on the paper wings of every day,” as Margaret wrote of the news business in her New Year’s Day column at the start of 1845. Both were ever on the lookout for “the new knowledge, the new thought, the new hope” that might bring “the clear morning of a better day.” Although the willfully unrefined Greeley delighted in teasing Margaret on occasion for what he considered her “entirely inconsistent” requirement that men display an attitude of “courtesy and protection” toward women in public with a mocking cry of “LET THEM BE SEA-CAPTAINS IF THEY WILL!”—the joke itself marked the vast difference between the two patresfamilias in her life, in Concord and New York City.
16
“A human secret, like my own”
THE TREK FROM TURTLE BAY TO THE NEW-YORK TRIBUNE offices was a long one, and Margaret sometimes preferred to write at home when reviewing books. But her material was the city itself, and points beyond. Even so slight an incident as a wealthy woman’s officious treatment of an Irish boy on an East River ferry could make a column: “Prevalent Idea that Politeness is too great a Luxury to be given to the Poor.” One day William Channing took her on a tour of the notorious Five Points slum. On another, he escorted her up the Hudson to Sing Sing, where she’d been invited to address the women prisoners
, her first formal public-speaking appearance.
It was Christmas Day, among the most sorrowful of the year for the prison’s inmates. The chairman of Sing Sing’s Board of Inspectors escorted Margaret to her seat at a desk in the front of the prison chapel—should a woman stand to speak, especially on a holy day in a house of worship? But then she rose “like an inspired person before these women,” recalled her new friend Rebecca Spring, a Quaker philanthropist and supporter of William Channing’s New York Prison Association, and “spoke to them not as to criminals, but friends.” Margaret told her hundred female listeners, most of them convicted as prostitutes, they weren’t “fallen” women. “It is not so!” she exclaimed. “I know my sex better.” She proceeded to outline a program of self-reflection and mutual introspection they might pursue while at Sing Sing—like her Conversations, and in keeping with the originating ideals of the “penitentiary” movement—that would turn their “defying spirit[s]” into “better selves” and supply them with the courage to prevail in “the struggle when you leave this shelter!”
And so, most weekdays, Margaret left her own shelter at Turtle Bay, made her way past the three swinging gates and down the zigzag path to ride the Harlem line along rural Fourth Avenue into the city, entering the thicket of four- and five-story commercial and apartment blocks that began just north of Union Place at 14th Street and extended all the way south to Castle Garden and the Battery promenade. Exiting the omnibus near City Hall Park for a glimpse of greenery and municipal grandeur before ducking inside the “dismal inky” doorway of the Tribune building at the corner of Spruce and Nassau, Margaret climbed to the third-floor editorial rooms, passing the massive steam-powered cylinder presses on the first floor, quiet now after a night of whirling out the morning edition, dispensed to waiting newsboys and -girls at five A.M. Upstairs among carelessly arranged sofas and bookcases stuffed with reference texts were stationed several pine tables for reporters to use as writing desks. Margaret had her own, easily identified by the piles of books waiting for review stacked beneath it on the floor.
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