By the time his girls were ready to marry, however, it took more than good looks and housekeeping abilities to win a marriage proposal from a man of property and high standing in the colonial cities along the North Atlantic coast. In prosperous circles, a woman’s character was judged by skills she cultivated at leisure: conversation, letter writing, fine needlework. Betsey Hunt was just fourteen when she met Joseph Pearse Palmer at a party given by Harvard men for Watertown ladies, but she was canny enough to put the encounter to good use. Likely she was flattered at first when one high-spirited youth bet another man a bottle of Madeira that he didn’t dare kiss Miss Betsey Hunt. But Joseph Palmer was affronted on Betsey’s behalf, all the more so when he saw the young man publicly embarrass Miss Hunt by successfully planting a kiss on her cheek. Palmer interceded, speaking his first words to his future wife: “What books have you read?” he asked. As Betsey later told her daughters, the conversation that followed from that question “was so wholly different from anything I had ever heard or expected, that I was quite pleased with him.”
At fourteen, Betsey Hunt had to admit that she had never read a book; she could scarcely get through an occasional issue of The Spectator. Palmer offered to remedy the problem by lending her books from his own shelves at the college, and he proposed regular tutoring sessions in composition. The young girl eagerly agreed. The first book Palmer brought Betsey Hunt was Samuel Richardson’s novel The History of Sir Charles Grandison, the tale of a supremely honorable gentleman who rescues an innocent beauty from a brutish seducer, and then wins her for himself with his kindness. Having delivered Betsey Hunt from her tormentors, the young Palmer no doubt fancied himself as a New World version of Richardson’s hero. Betsey Hunt must have seen her suitor the same way, for long before their course of study was complete, she had decided to marry the gallant, well-spoken Joseph Pearse Palmer—as soon as he asked her.
But a marriage proposal would have to wait. When General Palmer heard that his son was courting a tavern keeper’s daughter, one of eleven children, he tried to break off the match. Still, young Palmer persisted; he would not give up the pleasant task of educating Betsey Hunt. For the rest of his years at Harvard, he continued the weekly lessons, and the couple branched out from romantic novels to arithmetic, geography, and history texts, discussing them while walking or riding. Each week he left books with Betsey, which she hid away in her attic to read whenever she could escape the notice of her father and sisters. At last young Palmer decided that his fiancée had added sufficient polish to her native beauty to impress his family, and he brought her home to meet his parents and older sisters. Now Betsey, at nearly seventeen, could answer the kind of questions that had previously left her speechless. She charmed her prospective father-in-law and soon found herself celebrating her marriage to Joseph Pearse Palmer, scion of Friendship Hall and the Germantown manufacturing fortune. According to family lore, the wedding party included Paul Revere along with Palmer’s future Tea Party comrades. On their wedding day, in November 1772, the couple’s future looked eminently rosy.
By contrast, Betsey’s older sister, Eliza’s aunt Kate Hunt, fared dismally in the marriage market. She never learned to read or write, and—as Betsey later told the story to her own daughters—Kate lost her lover because of it. The young man was Elbridge Gerry, one of Joseph Pearse Palmer’s comrades in the Revolutionary cause, and afterward a key figure in the framing of the Constitution. Along with Palmer and his wife and infant son, Gerry came to board with the Hunt family in Watertown at the time of the Boston Tea Party retributions. There he was smitten by Kate’s looks and courted her for several months. When Gerry left Watertown to serve in the Provincial Congress, he wrote frequently, attempting to maintain the connection. Kate asked her younger sister, Betsey—now well versed in literary matters—to read Gerry’s letters out loud to her, but she was too proud to allow Betsey to write back for her, and too ashamed to admit her ignorance to her suitor. His letters went unanswered, and Gerry took Kate’s silence to mean that he’d been jilted. In the end, Gerry married another woman; Kate never found another lover.
Aunt Kate’s story became a cautionary tale for her niece Eliza, a spur, if she needed one, to the avid young reader. But Eliza’s Palmer aunts—her father’s sisters, Polly and Elizabeth—struggled with an opposite problem. A woman, Eliza also learned, had to be careful not to flaunt her education and to restrain the impulse toward self-assertion that seemed to come with it. Eliza would attempt to teach her own three girls this lesson too.
General Palmer gave his daughters an education equal to his son’s, and he fostered their independence of mind. Eliza was old enough to witness the results firsthand. As a child attending school and occasional dinners at Friendship Hall, Eliza knew her aunt Polly Palmer as the family’s invalid, a “trembling and feeble” woman in her early thirties, so sensitive to noise that she shut herself in a closet during thunderstorms and so easily frightened that her family treated her as a “timid infant.” But in her youth, Eliza was told, Polly—General Palmer’s first and best-loved child—had been renowned for her beauty and “literary genius,” and, above all, for her courage. The general made Polly his confidante in business, and by the time she was sixteen, Polly was making important transactions for him on her own, riding the thirteen miles to Boston through the woods alone. On errands that required her to carry money, Polly armed herself with the gun her father had taught her to use.
But this pre-Revolutionary idyll could not last. One afternoon, General Palmer returned from a hunting expedition with his neighbor Colonel Josiah Quincy, who had begun to take a romantic interest in Polly. They spotted the girl “reclining on the grass ... deeply absorbed in a book.” The general boasted to Colonel Quincy of Polly’s fearlessness and skill with her gun, prompting Quincy to lay a wager that he could find a way to frighten her. The general was so sure of his daughter’s “wondrous strength of nerve” that he consented to the prank, and stood by as Quincy crept up behind Polly and fired a gun over her head. As Eliza retold the story in her novel, Polly sprang up, then fainted, and “fell as if shot by a cannon-ball.” After a night of alternating “fits” and collapses, “her boasted nervous system was ruined forever.” Even Polly’s literary talents were wasted: for many years her hands shook too hard to hold a pen. From that day on, according to the tale told and retold in the Palmer and Peabody families, Polly Palmer stayed inside the house, venturing out only to visit Colonel Quincy to assure him “she bore no malice.”
The misfortunes of General Palmer’s talented daughters did not end here. In the wake of his financial losses in the early 1780s, Palmer moved his family out of Friendship Hall to a smaller house in Dorchester. Hoping to repeat his earlier success as a factory owner, Palmer had persuaded investors to speculate in a saltworks on Boston Neck, the narrow peninsula connecting Dorchester and Roxbury to the fist of land that was Boston proper in the days before landfill created the current Back Bay and South End. In the Dorchester house, Eliza’s aunt Elizabeth Palmer began a stormy love affair with Nathaniel Cranch, a distant cousin who had emigrated from England before the war to practice law in Boston. Eliza had first known her aunt Elizabeth as an exacting and difficult schoolteacher, easily angered by the inevitable restlessness of her small charges. Now she saw that Elizabeth Palmer was just as demanding of her suitor; the romance progressed from quarrel to quarrel over the course of several years. A final argument took place one winter night in the parlor of the Palmers’ Dorchester house in which, the family later agreed, Elizabeth had “provoked” her lover. Nathaniel Cranch walked out into the cold, and the next morning his “mangled” body was discovered washed ashore on Boston Neck, an apparent suicide.
Now it was Aunt Elizabeth’s turn to collapse into “a long and severe fever.” In Eliza’s version of the story, recorded in her novel, Aunt Elizabeth realized too late that she was to blame for all those quarrels, with “her own wilful reliance on her romantic notions of the respect due to women.” Like her o
lder sister, Polly, Elizabeth Palmer emerged from her sickbed a changed woman, her spirit broken, her “selfish sorrow ... subdued.” When General Palmer died of a stroke several years later, his saltworks never completed, leaving his two unmarried daughters with no means of support, Elizabeth married Nathaniel’s younger brother Joseph Cranch, a munitions manufacturer. She moved with him to West Point, New York, taking along her invalid sister, Polly. There Polly lived scarcely more than a year, most likely deliberately wasting away. Polly’s letters, written in a shaky hand, tell of her torment in living next to a field used for drying gunpowder, of her frustrated ambition to become a writer, and of her increasing despair and ultimate refusal to eat. Not long after Polly’s death, Joseph Cranch fell ill of liver disease and was unable to work; Elizabeth became a schoolteacher once more, no longer as a favor to a handful of young nieces and nephews, but this time for an income she desperately needed.
The examples Polly and Elizabeth Palmer set for young Eliza may have been extreme, but they were not unique. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1830, he noticed a pattern in American women’s lives that had its origins in the years leading up to the Revolution when women confronted the contradictory social imperatives of independence and domesticity. When he described the remarkable freedom of the American girl, who “has scarcely ceased to be a child when she already thinks for herself, speaks with freedom, and acts on her own impulse,” he might have been describing Polly Palmer in her youth. But, he also noted, “In America the independence of woman is irrecoverably lost in the bonds of matrimony...[which] require much abnegation on the part of woman, and a constant sacrifice of her pleasures to her duties.” Polly Palmer may have been resisting this seemingly inevitable self-sacrifice when she took to her bed, although the control over her own life she achieved as an invalid brought its own set of restrictions. Elizabeth Palmer, too, refused to accept submission in marriage until she found herself with no alternative. Neither woman, it seemed, had developed the attentiveness to male needs and demands that appeared to be as essential a survival skill as literacy.
Accounts of the Palmer sisters’ tragedies were passed down through generations of female descendants because of the deep resonance they held for these women of education and ambition. Growing up in the literary atmosphere of Friendship Hall, the precocious Eliza Palmer instinctively mistrusted her shirt-making, pudding-baking Hunt relatives and admired the superior education of her Palmer aunts and the Adams, Cranch, and Quincy women who were their friends. Indeed, as her family’s fortunes slid, Eliza came to believe that education—whether as the first step toward a teaching career or as the means of attracting a husband in the social class from which she was rapidly falling—was her only form of deliverance from poverty. But the sobering counterlessons of Polly and Elizabeth Palmer were not lost on her. Early on, Eliza learned to play down her desire for independence—what she once called “my greatest fault.” She also learned to expect that, like her Palmer aunts, she would one day have to surrender her literary ambitions and pay a price for her strivings, most likely when it came time to marry.
And there were other hard truths embedded in these stories as well. Was Polly Palmer made a permanent invalid because of her inability to withstand the single shock of a gun fired over her head by a man who had taken a romantic interest in her? Perhaps. But more significantly, the accident foreshadowed setbacks for the entire family. Polly Palmer grew up with wealth and privilege and independence; then, on the brink of womanhood, she lost it all. She saw her beloved father humiliated as he tried to aid his country. The “shot heard round the world” that liberated the American colonies dealt an internal blow to the Palmer family. Little wonder that Polly, registering her own wound, should refuse, thereafter, to go out into a world so changed. Similarly, Elizabeth Palmer’s imperious treatment of Nathaniel Cranch simply could not be supported in the years after her older sister’s collapse and her father’s reversal of fortune. She could not afford to toy with suitors. Eventually she had to marry, or find herself homeless. While her story was told in the family primarily as a lesson in proper feminine behavior, the true lesson was one in the harsh economics faced by a single woman of no means in the years following the Revolution. Her niece Eliza Palmer would learn the same lesson at a much younger age.
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About the Author
MEGAN MARSHALL is the author of The Peabody Sisters, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic, New York Times Book Review, and Slate. A recipient of Guggenheim and NEH fellowships, Marshall teaches in the MFA program at Emerson College.
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