Sophia’s sketch of her mother, Eliza Peabody
There were shadows. The family’s longtime physician and friend Dr. Walter Channing, brother of the celebrated Unitarian minister William Ellery Channing, once wrote of Mrs. Peabody that “in memory I always see her smiling,” yet “her smile was always to me like the shining out of an angel’s face from behind a mask where brave struggles with heavy sorrows had left deep imprints of mortality.” Sophia and her sisters were called on throughout their lives to puzzle out and then to soothe their mother’s heavy sorrows, to vindicate her defeats with their accomplishments, to compensate for her troubled marriage with grand passions of their own. Like many American women who extolled the virtues of female domesticity during the first half century following the Revolution, Mrs. Peabody sought to “anchor” her soul on “domestic love” because it had always been elusive.
For Mrs. Peabody there were private troubles to contend with, but these were also years when men and women jockeyed for power in households throughout the thirteen states after independence was declared. During the 1780s, the decade of Eliza Peabody’s childhood, families were reunited and women took control of the home as their “sphere.” But for some women, authority in the home seemed a good deal less than the reward American men had given themselves for wartime service: the exclusive right to rule in public life. It was possible for a woman to convince herself that raising the sons of the Republic was a worthy task; and women used the ideology of “Republican Motherhood” to win new privileges, particularly the right to an education, and later the opportunity to work as teachers and reformers. But for some daughters of independence—girls who, like Eliza, grew up as the children or sisters of soldiers, who had helped run farms and businesses while the men of the family fought the war—power at home was never quite enough, and the very domestic tranquility they later espoused as wives and mothers proved hard to come by.
Mrs. Peabody once wrote to her daughter Mary, “I long for means and power ... but I wear peticoats and can never be Governor ... nor alderman, Judge or jury, senator or representative—so I may as well be quiet—content with intreating the Father of all mercies.” Yet Mrs. Peabody could never silence her longings, and she passed them on to her daughters in the form of stories about her ancestors—stories intricately entwined with the early history of the nation, told and retold until they became touchstones for the three girls who would grow into women of extraordinary energy and influence. Through her “patriotic mother,” her oldest daughter, Elizabeth, liked to say that she had been “educated by the heroic age of the country’s history.” Not a little of that heroism was her mother’s, as she struggled to overcome a family heritage of betrayal and loss.
2. Legacies
LIKE THE SMILE ON HER FACE IN SOPHIA’S DRAWING, THERE WAS A surface history, a tale of brave deeds in grander times, that Mrs. Peabody recited proudly, usually omitting the sorry ending. She even wrote a novel adapting and improving on the events of her family’s past. The novel was never published, but it remained part of the Peabody family’s treasured papers for a century after it was written, keeping alive for each new generation the stories that guided this embattled family of women through the early decades of the American Republic.
She was born Elizabeth Palmer, the third of nine children of wealthy Massachusetts colonials. The wealth came from her grandfather, General Joseph Palmer, whom she remembered from early childhood as “more like an old fashioned English country gentleman, than any one” of his time and place. The general was so beloved by all who knew him, even animals, it was said that when he was away from home his cat tried to climb onto the shoulder of the John Singleton Copley portrait of him that hung in his library.
Yet Eliza scarcely knew the luxury she might have inherited. Family life was so fractured by the time she was born that neither birth nor baptism, if there was one, was ever recorded. The month was February, but the year might have been 1776, 1777, or 1778, according to conflicting family documents. These were the war years—soon to be the dark years of the war for the Palmer family—when town records were unevenly kept.
In sunnier times, the Palmers lived in a large square house made of oak and stone, with four enormous chimneys rising up at each corner, perched on a hill above a pretty cove known as Snug Harbor in Germantown, thirteen miles south of Boston. Not quite a mansion, the house nevertheless became known as Friendship Hall in the decades at midcentury when the benevolent General Palmer oversaw “a settlement of free and independent artisans and manufacturers” who operated his chocolate mills; spermaceti, salt, and glass works; and a factory for weaving stockings. In fact, Palmer owned all of Germantown, which occupied a small peninsula jutting out into Boston Harbor at the northernmost corner of Braintree, a town that would later become famous for its native sons John Hancock and John Adams.
General Joseph Palmer, engraving from the Copley portrait
Emigrating from England in 1746, the visionary Palmer had seen fit to house his workmen and their families—most of them newly arrived from Europe as well—in several stone buildings near his factories, making the Germantown settlement a commercial version of the Puritans’ earlier “city upon a hill.” And he realized his plan nearly a century before the founding of New England’s model industrial towns at Lawrence and Lowell. Although she never lived there, Eliza would remember Friendship Hall best of all the Germantown buildings, with its polished mahogany floors and banisters, its wallpaper painted with scenes of classical ruins, its hillside planted with fruit trees leading down to Snug Harbor. There, she knew, “Grandpapa Palmer” had once entertained an emerging local aristocracy made up of Adamses, Palmers, and Quincys—the family that would produce three mayors of Boston, one of whom went on to become a president of Harvard College, and for whom this portion of Braintree was later renamed.
Women were a powerful presence at Friendship Hall gatherings as well. Palmer’s brother-in-law Richard Cranch, a fellow emigrant who was also his cousin, had married one of the three talented Smith sisters of nearby Weymouth, and settled in Braintree, where he eventually became a judge. Cranch’s bride was Mary, the oldest; the middle sister, Abigail, married John Adams; the youngest, Elizabeth, would later play a pivotal role in Eliza Palmer’s life. The Friendship Hall circle was a close-knit group of practical idealists: intellectuals with solid financial underpinnings and multiple kinship ties. Even as dissatisfaction with British rule crept into conversation, Friendship Hall seemed sure to remain a reliable sanctuary.
General Palmer raised three children in Germantown: two daughters, Polly and Elizabeth, and a son, Joseph Pearse Palmer, Eliza’s father. When young Joseph graduated from Harvard in 1771 and married Betsey Hunt, one of the famously beautiful daughters of a preacher turned distiller in Watertown, just west of Cambridge, General Palmer set him up with an importing business in Boston. Eliza’s oldest brother, the third Joseph Palmer, was born there in 1773. But her father had little enthusiasm for business ventures, preferring to be known chiefly as a man of high principles and keen intellect. And Boston in the mid-1770s was a difficult place for a man of principle to pay attention to anything besides the increasingly tense relations between New and Old England. Joseph Pearse Palmer’s ideals led him, even though he was only a first-generation American, to join the Patriot cause.
Eliza’s mother, Betsey, liked to tell about the December night in 1773 when she was home alone “sitting rocking the baby when I heard the gate and door open.” Betsey looked up, expecting to find her husband returning from a night at his club, only to find “three stout Indians” standing in her front parlor. The young mother “screamed out and would have fainted of very fright” had she not recognized her husband’s voice as one of the Indians, saying “Don’t be frightened, Betsey, it is I. We have only been making a little salt water tea.” Betsey was calmed by her husband’s words, but within days Joseph Pearse Palmer and his fellow Indians were found out and declared traitors for their part in the Boston Tea Party. In retali
ation, British soldiers looted and burned the Palmer warehouses on Boston’s Long Wharf, and the young family fled to Watertown to take refuge with Betsey’s family, the Hunts.
Both Joseph Palmers, the father then almost sixty and the son in his twenties, continued to protest British rule, first serving in the Provincial Congress and then assisting at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the first shots were fired in the Revolution, and later at Breed’s Hill. For his active role in the Congress—he was president of the body for a term and helped organize the tea boycott—for his donations of money and supplies to the Patriot army, and for his assistance in key battles, the senior Palmer was eventually made brigadier general, and his son quartermaster general. But if the Battle of Lexington marked the birth of a new nation, it also signaled the decline of the Palmer family fortune. General Palmer’s Boston warehouses had already been plundered, and after war broke out one of his ships carrying a valuable cargo of spermaceti candles from Germantown was captured by the British. As more men joined the cause, the senior Joseph Palmer was forced to close his factories for lack of workers, and he continued to spend on the Patriot cause. In the first two years of the war, Palmer contributed as much as 5,000 pounds sterling, nearly $750,000 in today’s currency.
Then came the disastrous Rhode Island campaign—or “Burlesque,” as it was later called. General Palmer proposed the surprise attack on Newport, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1777, but he never expected to serve as chief commanding officer for the invasion. In his sixties and a man of business, Palmer had largely confined his military service to mustering troops and overseeing the construction of fortifications. Still, his new superior officer, General Joseph Spencer, approved the plan and then left Palmer to lead the attack, promising him a militia of 9,000 to confront the 3,600 British and German soldiers camped near Newport.
A comedy of errors ensued. Spencer promised “boats and everything ready” in Newport, but Palmer and his troops arrived to find only a motley collection of dories and fishing vessels greatly in need of repair. The few skilled carpenters among his Patriot recruits refused to turn “artificers,” and quit rather than help with the repairs. Angered by the delay, a handful of soldiers defected and revealed Palmer’s plans to their new British officers. Mishaps followed in rapid succession: reconnaissance parties lost their way, heavy rains further delayed the attack, and then a bright moonlit sky exposed the Patriot forces to the enemy. Finally Palmer was forced to recommend a retreat. Comedy turned to tragedy when General Spencer, anxious to escape blame, ordered Palmer to face a court-martial on charges of “Neglect and Disobedience” for failing to carry out the attack as planned.
Already regretful of his own part in the botched invasion, Palmer was devastated when he learned that his honor had been called into question. He appealed to his one-time Braintree neighbor John Hancock, now president of the Continental Congress, to provide him with a copy of the charges filed against him. Hancock refused, putting the older man in the untenable position of being tried—possibly for his life—with no chance to prepare his own defense. Ultimately the case was thrown out of court, but a congressional commission then spent six months collecting testimony and studying the evidence before clearing Palmer of all charges; he remained the unofficial scapegoat for what turned out to be one of the Continental army’s more notable blunders. Palmer had appointed his son, Eliza’s father, to lead one of the Rhode Island battalions, and both men seem never to have recovered from the humiliation.
By the time the war was won, the disgrace that shadowed the Palmer men was compounded by financial losses. Like many members of the colonial gentry, the Palmers had fallen deeply into debt. With currency values fluctuating wildly, General Palmer was forced to pay off his creditors by selling his Germantown land and Friendship Hall. Within three years of the war’s end, the aging general was begging for credit from the same neighbors and friends who had once been his houseguests, and his son was suffering the first of many depressions that would ensure his continued business failures. The Revolution so crippled the Palmer men that when Eliza turned her grandfather’s hard luck into fiction in her novel, she described his downfall as the result of an outright attack by the British on Germantown and Friendship Hall. “The sun rose on a scene of havoc indescribable,” she wrote. “Every house & cabin was level with the ground. Choccolate, glass, salt, candles, were scattered along the beach and spread over the extensive grounds and pastures.... In a few hours, the friend and benefactor of all who lived near him was thus made a comparatively poor man.” Of course the truth was more complex and disturbing. The Palmers had been betrayed by their own countrymen even as they gave all they had to the Patriot cause.
It was into this period of decline that Eliza Palmer, Joseph Pearse Palmer’s third child, was born in Watertown, where her parents had fled in the wake of the Tea Party reprisals. Soon after, Eliza moved with her mother and older brother, Joe, and sister, Mary—born in 1775 during the Battle of Lexington—to a vacant workman’s cottage on General Palmer’s estate. These early war years, though marked by the frequent absences of her father and grandfather, seemed to Eliza “the spring time of existence,” she later confided in her journal. She clung to the memory of this brief interval of freedom and noblesse oblige, when she roamed the hillsides and beaches of Germantown with her brother and sister, the two small girls dressed in the best “pink frocks and red morocco shoes and white stockings” available in wartime. It was to be the only time in her life when her family’s financial adversity did not weigh on her mind.
In Germantown, Eliza was allowed to tag along to school with Mary and Joe, to a small class taught by their aunt Elizabeth Palmer in a sunny upstairs room in Friendship Hall. Eliza proved the best student of the three, and once she learned to read, she was given the run of her grandfather’s library. Many years later, Eliza recalled for her own three daughters the happy days spent stretched out on the highly polished floor of the library, poring over General Palmer’s collection of Shakespeare folios. According to family legend, Eliza read through the entire set when she was only four. Occasional visits home from her grandfather provided Eliza with the vision of domestic harmony she would try to recapture throughout her life. “We were the happiest group imaginable when collected around [my grandparents’] table to read in turn some interesting parts of the Bible, or some short catechetical lesson or little hymns,” she wrote nearly fifty years later, and “the Smiles and Caresses of the dear old people and our no less cheerful younger relatives [were] our rich reward.” Living on the fringes of Friendship Hall society, itself on tenuous ground, Eliza learned early to calculate wealth in terms of intangibles: piety, domestic affection, learning.
During the war years, the big house was filled with women: young ones not yet married, including Eliza’s aunts Polly and Elizabeth Palmer, and older ones, widowed, sick, or simply lonely, on whom the general had taken pity. A household of talented and productive women facing adversity as a unit would be another of Eliza’s lifelong ideals. In her novel, she described the group as a vigorous, self-sufficient “Sisterhood.” “We had no drones in our hive,” she wrote of these women who before the war had spent their days reading, drawing, and doing fine needlework, and now happily sewed shirts for soldiers, taught at the local school in place of a schoolmaster gone to war, raised chickens, and knitted shawls, stockings, and caps in exchange for groceries. “The highest culture and refinement,” Eliza wrote proudly, “did not prevent this admirable family from undertaking the humblest employments in order to preserve their independance.” The young Eliza could not fail to notice that the household functioned just as efficiently when the men were off at war.
Yet the stories she began to hear around this time from the women in her immediate family all spoke of a woman’s need to secure the attention of a man—as well as of the perils of failing to do so. The history of the Hunt women of Watertown, her mother’s line, was an unambiguous endorsement of education as a means of social ascension through
marriage. The men of the Hunt family were, like Eliza’s father, Joseph Pearse Palmer, Harvard-educated, but the Hunt women had been deliberately kept ignorant. Eliza’s mother, Betsey Hunt, and her sisters—dubbed the “Watertown beauties” by their brothers’ classmates at Harvard—were known for their good looks. To their father’s way of thinking, his girls needed only to acquire a few domestic skills to make themselves marriageable. Squire Hunt, as he was called by the regulars in his Watertown general store and tavern, had chosen his own wife on a summer’s walk when he passed a bevy of girls playing at rolling down a hill; he took a fancy to the “exposed shoes, stockings, and underclothes” of his future wife before he even met her. According to family legend, Hunt’s interest was not actually prurient: the girl’s undergarments were so dainty and neat that he knew he’d found himself a good housekeeper. Hunt then raised his own daughters on the maxim that it was “quite enough if they could make a shirt and a pudding.”
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