One

Slocums, Jermains, Piersons—and a Sage

Among the hundreds of purchases Olivia Sage made whenPress she inher- ited the fortune of her financier husband in 1906 was an investment in image and self-representation that has gone unnoticed by scholars. Along with the donations to schools and hospitals, missions and colleges, she commissioned a family history, the best that money could buy and one befitting a person who was about to become a benefactor of national stature. She employed HenryUniversity Whittemore of Brooklyn, “Genealogist and Compiler of Family and Other Histories,” and Mary F. Tillinghast, a New York artist (one of many women artists to enjoy her patronage), and dispatched them to England and France to research the genealogy of her family and that of her late husband. Their labors resulted in a large Indianaillustrated volume bound in pale green leather with gold figuring. His- tory of the Sage and Slocum Families of England and America, Including the Allied Families of Montague, Wanton, Brown, Josselyn, Standish, Doty, Carver, Jermain or Germain, Pierson, Howell (1908), features the liberty- loving Myles Standish, the French-sounding Huguenot Jermain clan (or was it Jourdain?), the pious Josselyns, and the learned Piersons. Having commissioned the research and writing of the book and paid for its pub- lication, she wrote “A Gift of Mrs. Russell Sage” inside each one and distributed them widely to libraries and friends.1 Whittemore’s History testifies as much to the anxieties as to the gen- uine aristocratic connections of its patron. True, family history had always

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interested her and she longed to know more about her ancestors, but equally strong was her desire to position herself in history and in her own time. As Mrs. Russell Sage, Olivia had suffered the insecurities of the outsider excluded from the homes of New York’s elite because of her husband’s eccentric and frugal ways. While Whittemore’s compendium of genealogy, history, and myth contains many of the basic facts about her family and her life, it also attests to her ambition to unite Sage and Slocum families to the nation’s racial past and to its destiny. For a biog- rapher, it is both misleading and indispensable.2 Also revealing is a small autobiographical sketch which Olivia wrote when she was in her sixties for the alumnae directory of her school, Emma Willard and Her Pupils, or Fifty Years of Troy Female Seminary, 1822–1872 (1898).3 Written in the third person, it portrays her early years as idyl- lic yet claims a sense of serious purpose as well: “Through a happy child- hood she grew, as a flower reaches to the light, full of the ecstacy of existence, but with a tender conscientiousness that foreshadowed an earnest womanhood.” As proof, she recalled that as a young girl she had written in her diary this couplet announcing the theme of a philanthropic life: Press Count that day lost whose low, descending sun Views from thy hand no worthy action done.4

Biographies often give more coherence to a life than it had in the living, and so do autobiographies. They impose what one scholar has called “a false integrationUniversity of the subject,” unifying a life story marked by discontinuity and contradiction.5 The account in Emma Willard and Her Pupils is an example of this. It depicts a benevolent life that is seam- less and consistent—as continuous as the imperceptible opening of a Indianaflower, the simile disarming in its evocation of the natural. The biogra- pher discovers that Sage’s life was both more paradoxical and more inter- esting. We begin, as Olivia Sage would have liked us to begin, with the Puritans.

Puritans West When the American Republic was barely a generation old, the west- ward migration of Puritan New Englanders resumed after decades of war and political upheaval. Among the families who left the villages of the Connecticut River Valley and the seaports of Long Island and migrated to western Massachusetts and upstate New York were the grandparents of Margaret Olivia Slocum and Russell Sage, whose intertwined lives

14 Slocums, Jermains, Piersons—and a Sage

are the subject of this book. William Brown Slocum, Olivia’s paternal grandfather, was the youngest of four children born to a Quaker family in Middletown, Rhode Island, in 1770. He married Olivia Josselyn of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, in April 1793, and together they traveled 150 miles to Rensselaer County, New York. Slocum became a substan- tial farmer and dealer in livestock, rose in local and state politics, and was elected to the State Assembly in 1820. The flattering Whittemore states, “His contemporaries and co-workers were the Clintons, the Van Rensselaers, the Livingstons, and other men of that stamp, who laid the foundation of our commercial prosperity through wise legislation and public addresses.”6 There is an oil portrait of Olivia Josselyn Slocum, Olivia Sage’s pater- nal grandmother (see fig. 1.1). It shows a woman whose gaze is severe, her dress simple. Her grave inscription reads, “Hers was a piety deep in its veins, and holy and most benignant in its influence.” A verse of her poetry, embroidered as a sampler by her twelve-year-old daughter Lucy Josselyn Slocum in 1824, attests to the triumph of evangelical culture after the American Revolution: Press Let piety, celestial guest With wisdom flourish in my breast; And virtue, lovely, heavenly, fair, Hold an unrivaled impress there. Let living faith and love divine, Possess this youthful heart of mine; That when my flesh returnsUniversity to dust, My soul will triumph with the just.7

Olivia’s maternal grandmother, Margaret Pierson of Bridgehamp- ton, Long Island, was a granddaughter of Josiah Pierson and a great- Indianagranddaughter of Colonel Henry Pierson, who, Olivia liked to remind people, was a founder of New York’s common school system. Margaret Pierson married John Jordan, a native of Westchester County, New York, in 1781. Jordan’s parents had moved to Nova Scotia at the outbreak of the Revolution, but the son renounced both their Toryism and their name, serving in the Westchester militia and taking the name Jermain when he moved to Sag Harbor, then a major port on the eastern tip of Long Island.8 In the War of 1812, John Jermain commanded the fort at Sag Harbor and was promoted to major. He prospered through invest- ments in real estate and acquired interests in several ships. He had a large warehouse and dealt in hides and rum, part of the complicated network of Atlantic trading that brought enslaved Africans to the Americas, sugar

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Press

University Figure 1.1. Olivia Josselyn Slocum, Olivia’s paternal grandmother. She married William Brown Slocum in 1793. Henry Whittemore, History of the Sage and Slocum Families of England and America (New York: Published by Mrs. Rus- Indianasell Sage, 1908).

and rum to New England, and timber, furs, and fish to Europe. He also owned a fulling mill for finishing cloth and a store. It was said that his cellar could store a thousand barrels of rums (see fig. 1.2).9 The Jermains also owned slaves, their existence casually acknowl- edged in family stories told long afterward. Olivia later recounted how Rev. Lyman Beecher would arrive on horseback to visit her Grandmother Jermain’s house. Pastor of the neighboring parish of East Hampton and the most influential Protestant of his generation, Beecher sometimes had more mundane things on his mind than theology. As Olivia recounted, after greeting the Jermains, “[H]e would say, ‘Now bring me some oys-

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ters, for I am cold and hungry.’ They were brought from the cellar by slaves, for then New York had not abolished slavery. Just imagine how jolly those feastings must have been.”10 Later, her grandmother’s Sag Harbor household, with its old-fashioned Sabbath observance, would provide Olivia with a model of a traditional Christian home. Her enthusiasm for the cause of Sabbath observance was rekindled when she recalled her grandmother’s “old-time habit of putting away her work at six o’clock on Saturday and not resuming it until six o’clock Monday morning.” And she nostalgically celebrated the “thrifty habits of the Pierson ancestors,” which seemed to cast approval on her own frugal household arrangements.11

Margaret Pierson Jermain and Joseph Slocum The Jermains had nine children, several of whom died in infancy. The oldest surviving son, Sylvanus Pierson Jermain, moved to Albany in 1802 at the age of eighteen and became a prominent banker and business- man. This was Olivia’s Uncle Sylvanus. His sister Margaret Pierson Jer- main, Olivia’s mother and the youngest daughter, was born inPress 1804. She attended school in Sag Harbor, where her schoolbooks can still be seen at the public library donated by her daughter almost a century later and named by her the John Jermain Memorial Library.12 Olivia’s father, Joseph Slocum, also one of nine children, was born in 1800 in Schaghticoke Township, Rensselaer County, New York, the fourth child of William BrownUniversity Slocum and Olivia Josselyn Slocum.13 A Syracuse newspaper of 1897 recounts an American tale of restless ambition. Joseph Slocum left the farm where he had grown up “to strike out in life for himself and journeyed to Cincinnati and thence to New Orleans to seek his fortune.” But he contracted yellow fever and returned Indianahome to Rensselaer county in broken health. When he recovered, he set out for the west again on horseback until he found “what he regarded as a most promising and remarkable business opening at Syracuse, by reason of the building of the Erie canal and the Onondaga salt springs,” and there he settled.14 Joseph Slocum had arrived in a boomtown. The salt springs that had first attracted people to Syracuse had become the nucleus of a small town, and the Erie Canal spurred the town’s growth even more. A boosterish city directory of 1852 proclaimed, “In less than a quarter of a century a city has sprung from a loathsome swamp!”15 The years between 1815 and the Civil War saw rapid economic devel- opment. First river steamboats, then canals, and finally the railroads

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Press

University

Figure 1.2. Major John Jermain, Olivia’s maternal grandfather, a wealthy Sag Harbor merchant and land owner. Henry Whittemore, History of the Sage and Slocum Families of England and America (New IndianaYork: Published by Mrs. Russell Sage, 1908).

linked regions and created regional and then national markets. The rev- olution in transportation hastened regional specialization, with the Northwest producing grain and flour, the Northeast providing manu- factures and capital, and the South yielding staple crops of cotton, tobac- co, rice, and sugar—with unfree labor.16 Nowhere was the economic development more striking than in the northern tier of states, where the opening of the Erie Canal in October 1825 led to the rapid devel-

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opment of commerce along the whole corridor between western New York State and the port of New York. By 1836, the canal was transporting grain and produce from the western part of the state to the eastern seaboard. New York became the major port of the Northeast, a trans- shipment point for wheat and corn from the West and an entry point for imports. Tonnage from western states over the Erie Canal to New York was 54,219 in 1836. Ten years later, it had reached over 500,000 tons, and by 1860 almost 2 million.17 East-west railroads further increased the flow of trade, especially after the Erie and Pennsylvania Canals linked the eastern seaboard with the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River sys- tem.18 As commerce increased, so did migration into the Mohawk Val- ley and so also did the volume of land sales in upstate New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Joseph and Margaret Slocum and their daughter Olivia were part of this migration.

Elisha Sage and Prudence Risley Sage And so were Elisha and Prudence Risley Sage and their children. The Sage family had left Middletown, Connecticut, where Sages Presswere a dime a dozen, and pushed West like hundreds of others.19 By 1816 they had reached Oneida, New York. It was a year of freakish weather—three feet of snow fell in June, and ice lay thick on the crops. Elisha Sage and his pregnant wife Prudence Risley Sage made the journey with their six sons. By August, they were in Verona near Oneida, about 100 miles west of Albany, when Russell,University their seventh son, was born. 20 The Sages never resumed their westward trek. Because the Erie Canal was not yet completed, good land could be bought for twenty-five cents an acre; soon it would fetch five dollars. Elisha Sage bought some acreage and began to farm. The place was called Durhamville. Nearby, the Erie Canal Indianawas being dug.21 Much later, when Russell Sage was about to enter Congress as a Whig, he was asked to supply an account of his career for a biographical dic- tionary of members. He obliged with four pages, written in a small, neat, sloping hand and with fluency of expression that reflects well on the self-educated farm boy. This is the only autobiographical account we have of the financier’s early years.22 Russell Sage described a rural child- hood of hard work and ambition. He lived at home in Durhamville, attending what he described as “a common country school and part of the time only during the winter months, my parents being unable to give me any better advantages.” At the age of twelve, he left the family farm

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Press

Figure 1.3.UniversityMargaret Pierson Jermain Slocum, Olivia’s mother, as a young married woman. Courtesy Florence Slocum Wilson. Indiana and made his way to Troy, where he worked as an errand boy and then clerk in the grocery store of his oldest brother, Henry. He proudly recalled his efforts to improve himself: “I availed myself of all the leisure I could get, without neglect of duty, to read, to attend miscellaneous lectures and debating societies until I was eighteen years of age.”23 Thirty miles to the West, Joseph Slocum was in at the beginning of the history of Syracuse. A section of the Erie Canal opened on Octo- ber 8, 1823, and the first packet boat, the Montezuma, soon arrived at Syracuse, and with it boom times.24 For twenty years, the canal domi- nated the economy; the railroad would not arrive until 1840 and the telegraph for another thirty years. Joseph Slocum acquired one of the

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first lines of boats for use on the canal. With a warehouse and several stores on the south bank near the Warren Street bridge, he began to make money, acquiring businesses and land in and around Syracuse.25 Meanwhile, in the summer of 1823, he met and fell in love with Margaret Pierson Jermain, and they were married at Cambridge, New York, near the New York–Vermont border on May 4, 1825. Three and a half years later, on the eighth of September 1828, Margaret Olivia was born. The little girl must have taken a great dislike to her given name for she never used Margaret, always preferring Olivia. On June 24, 1833, her younger brother Joseph Jermain Slocum (who was called Jermain)26 was born.27 Margaret and Joseph Slocum would have no other children. Letters written by Olivia and reminiscences of her by others suggest a high-spirited child. She was bright, vocal, and confident; her brother, more plodding, was a less-accomplished student than his sister. Yet the quick retort that made Olivia a good student in the schoolroom was labeled impertinence when it was relayed back to her mother. “Both my mother and father were very much afraid of spoiling me,” she admitted.28 With her father often absent on business or on his travels, Olivia looked to her mother as the most important person in her life.Press In rem- iniscences told years later, she recounted several stories, all of them involving the mother-daughter relationship. She described her mother as “a perfect housekeeper” and a “perfect gentlewoman” who could also “read and write and spell beautifully” and who was “much given to hos- pitality, and gifted with a peculiarly sweet and generous nature.”29 She recounted tales about her apprenticeshipUniversity in the household skills of sewing a shirt and knitting a stocking. “Mother would call me in from my play... and make me sit down to knit a stocking. I learned to turn the heel and narrow the foot, and I had to do six rows at a time before I could go. I had to finish that stocking. And I have now a piece of patch-work that IndianaI made when I was four years old.”30 Other stories told of childhood scrapes incurred thoughtlessly in an attempt to have fun or to avoid chores. In each of these, the mother is portrayed as the source of moral authority, “most kind and self-sacrificing” but “very strict,” whose sur- veillance discovers and punishes childish misbehavior. “I must have been a very active child when I was small, and a great romp. I know I used to jump rope, and I remember climbing on a fence and falling and leaving about half my skirt there. It caught as I was getting down....I can remember my mother threatening me with bed-ticking dresses...ifI was not more careful with my clothes (see fig. 1.3).”31 Socialization included learning about the boundaries of family and community. She learned invidious distinctions of class and race: snob-

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bery coexisted easily with piety, enforcement was pitiless, and there was no appeal. “I remember distinctly that one time my mother had told me that if I played with certain girls she would whip me,” Olivia recalled. On one occasion she tried to escape this prohibition, squeezing through a hole in the fence to play with a forbidden girl. “I remember the girl coming for me I remember just how she looked, and I thought of what my mother had said, and that now she would punish me.” Sure enough, a whipping followed. (It is fascinating to speculate about this “forbid- den girl”—was it religion or perhaps skin color that made her an unde- sirable playmate?)32 Lessons about inclusion and exclusion taught at home were rein- forced at church. Olivia grew to maturity in a church whose members defined themselves as sons and daughters of New England, as indeed many were.33 But the congregation also contained “others.” A meeting of the Presbyterian Society on July 9, 1832, discussed the reception of “strangers” and resolved that the trustees should “give instructions where the colored population should sit.”34 Later in life, when immense wealth gave Olivia the power to help anyone in any way, African Amer- ican institutions and causes remained at the margins ofPress her vast phi- lanthropy, and she still felt that she was better than other people, set apart from them by education as well as by birth. Like other Americans, Syracusans were joiners who improvised the necessary educational, charitable, and welfare associations in the absence of government provision.35 The First Presbyterian Church of Syracuse began in December 1824University with twenty-six members—nine men and sev- enteen women. The building was completed in the summer of 1825 and dedicated in January 1826, and Rev. John Watson Adams was ordained and installed as pastor. By 1846 there were over 400 members.36 Mar- garet Slocum joined in April 1840, “by examination.” Olivia grew up Indianain this church under the much-admired Rev. Adams. She was baptized on July 7, 1843, as she approached her fifteenth birthday, together with her ten-year-old brother.37 Antislavery caused an early schism among Syracuse Protestants, di- viding both the Presbyterian and Methodist congregations. Opponents of slavery in Onondaga County assembled to form an antislavery soci- ety in 1835, and in 1837 abolitionist members of the First Presbyterian Church withdrew to form the First Congregational Church of Syracuse, which became a center of antislavery agitation in the region. Among the visiting speakers were William Lloyd Garrison, Stephen Douglas, Isaac F. Hooper, Samuel R. Ward, Horace Mann, and Susan B. Anthony.38 Without its abolitionist members, First Presbyterian was a conservative

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church, opposed to reform enthusiasm. The exception was temperance enthusiasm, which swept across upstate New York with the Second Great Awakening. Joseph Slocum appears as one of the signers of an 1836 announcement of the formation of the County Temperance Society “on the principle of total abstinence.” He had been raised a Quaker, but now he joined his wife’s church. He seems to have shown little interest in organized religion, however.39 In 1837, when Olivia was nine, the prosperity of the region sud- denly collapsed and her father’s fortunes with it. Tonnage on the Erie Canal fell precipitously in one year and thousands of families were ruined.40 Joseph Slocum’s fate is recorded in a small notice in the Onon- daga Standard of March 30, 1836, where one William Barker respect- fully informs the public:

that he [Barker] has taken the Ware House formerly occupied by Joseph Slocum in the village of Syracuse, where he will give his personal atten- tion to the Storage and Forewarding of property committed to his care, and hopes by industry and perseverance, to merit a share of public patronage.41 Press

After losing the warehouse and the commission business, Joseph Slocum tried to get back on his feet. A few months later, the same newspaper announced that he had “formed a connection with Mr. N. Jewett (late of New York) under the firm of ‘Slocum and Jewett’” and that he intended to continue theUniversity dry goods, grocery, and crockery business at his same store.42 Some accounts blamed Joseph’s losses on his kindly nature. “Generous and sympathetic to a fault,” Joseph Slocum endorsed notes for friends and when they went under he was forced to pay up, according to one version.43 But an angry letter from Joseph Slocum’s Indianabrother-in-law John H. Groesbeck (the husband of his older sister Mary) blames Slocum’s own poor judgment. A well-to-do Cincinnati mer- chant, Groesbeck poured scorn on Slocum’s harebrained schemes. He particularly condemned the latest business fiasco in which Slocum had purchased a quantity of wheat and shipped it to New Orleans, hoping to turn a profit. When it did not sell there, he sent it on to Antigua, and there the whole scheme collapsed. Groesbeck lost money in the affair—apparently it was not the first time he regretted lending money to Joseph Slocum. Nothing you try ever works, he told his brother-in- law, and no one is to blame but yourself. I owe you nothing, he con- cluded angrily. “I have never had a transaction with you that I did not loose [sic] by.”44

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A long, detailed sheriff ’s notice in the Western State Gazette dated August 6, 1841, tells what happened next. It states, “By virtue of sev- eral executions, to me directed and delivered, against Joseph Slocum, I have seized and taken the following pieces and parcels of land.” There follows a detailed listing of Slocum property to be put up for auction— two town lots, farm lots, and other acreage altogether amounting to almost 500 acres.45 When her father was ruined Olivia was just twelve. One small businessman who was hardly affected by the panic of 1837 was Russell Sage. Aged twenty-one, Sage had already accumulated a siz- able amount of money through a combination of careful management and imaginative entrepreneurship. When asked later in life about his boyhood, he responded, “I don’t suppose I ever had any.”

It was nothing but work. After I went into my brother’s store, I real- ized that I was lacking in education and I determined to spend a part of my small earnings in attending night school. Of the $4.00 wages I got on the first of every month, I paid $1.50 to my teacher. I soon learned book-keeping, and the more intricate problems in arithmetic. I managed to borrow some books on history and read all the papers I could get my hands on, I had no time for anything else.Press46

The self-educated Russell Sage was as frugal as he was industrious. Across the street were two vacant lots which he made up his mind to acquire. By saving every penny from his earnings and by some astute horse trad- ing he saved $200 and purchased the lots. Russell Sage was on his way.47 The grocery clerk continuedUniversity to supplement his salary with some trad- ing on the side. In 1835, at the age of nineteen, he took a boatload of horses from Albany to New York City, sold them on a commission basis, and returned, having cleared $700. He then went into the grocery busi- ness in Troy with his older brother Elisha (1812–1874), establishing the Indianafirm E. M. and R. Sage. Not only had Russell Sage survived the panic, but by the end of 1837 he had made enough money to buy out his brother’s interest for $25,000.48 Sage now joined forces with a wealthy wholesale commission merchant and banker, John Wilcox Bates, whose business involved shipping grain and horses and managing warehouses. Sage’s interests now extended north along Lake Champlain and back toward New York City.49 In 1841, at the age of twenty-five, Russell Sage married Maria Winne, the daughter of Moses Winne, a wealthy Troy lumber inspector and alder- man. She was just eighteen and had recently been a student at Troy Female Seminary. Sage was now ready to move into politics.50 He was elected alderman in 1843 and reelected for the next seven successive

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years. He also became county treasurer in 1844 and held that office until 1851. In 1848, he headed the New York delegation to the Whig con- vention.51

“Endeavor to forget the bitterness of your disappointment” Joseph Slocum had neither Sage’s luck nor his business sense, but he was a gifted mechanic who by the 1840s had made a name for himself as an inventor and promoter of improved agricultural machinery and whose inventions drew interest at agricultural fairs. One fair held in 1845 featured his new tanning apparatus and a new kind of carriage wheel (with “two hubs, screwing together”). On display also was a model of a new cotton press, “the invention of Mr. Slocum of Syracuse, N.Y.,” which could press ten or twenty bales at once. For the rest of his life, Slocum would try without success to turn his engineering and inventive talents to commercial use.52 For men like this, there was opportunity in Russia, a country embarking on a period of rapid economic development. Details are sketchy, but sometime after his losses of 1836–1837 Joseph SlocumPress made his first trip to Russia, returning with orders from the Russian govern- ment for plows and other kinds of agricultural implements. He made several subsequent visits to Russia and Switzerland and for a while took a job as a demonstrator with an American reaper company in Moscow.53 One of his plows “was placed in the Russian National Museum as an object of great interest.”University54 Some correspondence documents Joseph Slocum’s preparations for a second trip to Russia in 1844. He applied to Washington for official sponsorship or a title, such as government advi- sor on agricultural improvement. He obtained letters of introduction from Daniel Webster to friends in Berlin and Paris.55 He failed to get Indianaofficial Washington backing, however, and his brother-in-law J. H. Groes- beck refused even to try to exert some influence in the capital.56 But Slocum was successful in obtaining a letter to Secretary of War William Marcy introducing him as “on his way to Russia, whither he has been invited under the patronage of the Emperor to aid with the advance- ment of agriculture,” and obtaining an introduction to the U.S. chargé d’affaires in Stockholm, stating that “Mr. Slocum is on his way to Rus- sia to establish a manufactory for Agricultural implements.”57 Joseph Slocum set sail in the spring of 1846. He was in London by May, where he made inquiries about another moneymaking scheme, an ice-importing business. He would set up a store in London for import- ing “ice, butter, cheese, lard, Norway salmon, etc.” from Russia or Swe-

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den. The idea received little encouragement from his business partner, however. The latter warned, “I confess to you I regard this project in its present stage as a project, merely—an experiment—or a speculation.”58 After a summer spent in St. Petersburg, Joseph Slocum returned via England. In the English North Country port of Hull in the fall of 1846, he received a letter from his Russian contact, a P. Chihaihef. “Some of your ingenious farm implements have been tried at the farm school with a good deal of success,” Mr. Chihaihef informed him. “They will have some of them cast.” He asked Slocum to send the design of the reaping machine so that his machinist could copy it.59 But the rest of the letter was discouraging. Expect nothing more from me, Chihaihef warned Slocum, not even a letter of recommendation. His letters of introduc- tion could not be returned, his machinery would be copied, and noth- ing else could be expected; in short, he advised Slocum to give up “and endeavor to forget the bitterness of your disappointment.”60 Subsequent contacts show Chihaihef writing to request plans for the improved reap- ing machine so that his own mechanic could copy it. Slocum then applied to the firm of Curtis, Rose and Co., Machinists of Geneva, New York, in November 1846 for a description and drawing of a PressHussey’s reaper and a machine for hulling rice and buckwheat, to send to “a friend in Russia.”61 By the spring of 1847, Slocum was back in New Orleans, trying, as he explained in a letter to his long-suffering wife, “to buy something in this market that would make a profit in New York.” He had developed a new kind of cotton press,University but several weeks went by as he tried unsuc- cessfully to find a buyer.62

“They could no longer keep silent” IndianaFor white women of the antebellum period, who were distanced both from the market and from formal politics, voluntary associations and churches were sites for public activity outside the household.63 Religious women such as Margaret Slocum played an important part in the life of the community. When her minister Rev. Adams called for women to nurse the sick, Margaret Slocum was one of those who volunteered. As a church historian explained, “There were no nurses except those trained by their own experience, and as the unhealthful conditions of the swampy village caused much sickness,...friends and neighbors, and even strangers, were called upon to assist in caring for the ailing.”64 The “History of the Ladies’ Aid Society” included in the seventy-fifth anniversary history of the First Presbyterian Church (1899) claims far

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more than an auxiliary role for the churchwomen; indeed, its author, Mrs. Frances Wright Marlette, pointed out that the church owed its very existence to a meeting “brought about and attended only by women.”65 Subsequently, the account continues, “The Ladies Were the Managers and the Gentlemen were a Committee.”66 Historian Gerda Lerner’s shrewd comment is appropriate here: the infrastructure is initially cre- ated and maintained through the voluntary association of women, “who then proceed to institution-building.” The new institutions become busi- nesses or public institutions, and “they are then headed by a man and led by corporate trustees, usually also men.”

Once institutions have reached that stage, they are noted as “exist- ing” by historians. Thus, the community-sustaining initiative of women remains outside of history, while that of men is noticed and therefore validated.67

Churchwomen’s contributions were financial as well as spiritual, this account insists, and Syracuse church histories record that their work cre- ated value.68 There were sales of fancywork whose proceeds helped pay the minister’s salary, fetes organized to raise money, and even a bazaarPress where ladies of the church dressed up in the costumes of other lands.69 The his- tories name the institutions for charity, reform, and education founded and sustained by the voluntary labor of churchwomen: the Orphans Asy- lum, the Syracuse Home Association, the Temperance Society, the Res- cue Mission. Syracuse had a Foreign Missionary Association and a Female Benevolent Society as earlyUniversity as 1828.70 Women’s fund-raising work even helped make possible the founding of new churches.71 Scholars have noticed an assertive tone in the recorded minutes of missionary societies, as if these societies provoked discussion of women’s Indianarights and wrongs in general, and not only those on foreign shores. Syra- cuse churchwomen seemed to find a voice as they gathered to discuss the plight of “heathen” women. As Mrs. Nathan Cobb explained in her report to the First Presbyterian Church,

the eloquent, pathetic words of a returned missionary, describing the utter hopelessness of the long, living death, suffered by women of high caste in the Zenana homes of India, so stirred the hearts of certain women in our church, that they could no longer keep silent.72

Churchwoman Mrs. Nathan Cobb anticipated the carping of crit- ics. “Do you suppose the getting together of a few women once a month is going to do anything for those millions of heathen women away off

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there? It is like dipping up the ocean by the spoonful,” she wrote. But she dismissed such negative thoughts: “Thoreau once said, ‘Cape Cod was anchored to the heavens by myriad little cables of beach grass,’ and may we not say, our women’s magnificent Missionary Boards are anchored to God’s promises by myriad little cables of auxiliaries?”73 By calling the whole world their household, churchwomen enlarged their responsibilities in the public arena beyond the home and church and challenged the fiction of the home as a place apart from the mar- ket.74 They gathered in the missionary society and the benevolent asso- ciation to discuss the terrible burdens borne by heathen women of the east, a burden that resembled in some ways their own—for who did not know an American wife or mother bent under the despotism of a drunken or violent husband? Foreign mission work defined women’s work as work for other women in faraway lands and assigned women a worldwide sphere of influence.75 Olivia was socialized into a gender system that assigned white women a “sphere of usefulness,” a term that seemed to offer only vague limits on what an active female benevolence could imagine. The term was elastic enough to justify whatever women wanted toPress do, so long as they did it in the name of their religion, their sex, their communities, or the nation. For example, within the church, raising and handling money, organizing and running associations, and making useful and orna- mental items for sale were all within women’s sphere of usefulness. More- over, the claim that women were moral superiors to men underlay these activities and authorizedUniversity their action to control social behaviors that threatened their communities, especially drinking and vice.76 This was the female world in which Olivia grew up, a society of busy, benevolent wives and matrons whose public work, in the words of historian Nancy Hewitt, “implicitly challenged the tenets of domesticity and submission” Indianaof the ideology of true womanhood.77 Later, as Mrs. Russell Sage, she would donate millions of dollars to these female reform organizations at home and abroad.

“The best schools of that place and time” Olivia’s formal education began in Syracuse. Before this, she received her education at home, mainly from her mother, whom she described as “always a very earnest and purposeful woman.”78 Whittemore referred to Margaret Slocum as “a woman of fine intellectual gifts,” and there is some evidence that as a young woman living in Sag Harbor, Olivia’s mother was acquainted with Margaret Fuller.79 Both Olivia’s parents are

28 Slocums, Jermains, Piersons—and a Sage

described in several sources as learned, and the family valued the mem- ory of their ancestors Abraham Pierson, first rector of Yale University, and educator Henry Pierson.80 In the handwritten response to the Troy Female Seminary alumnae survey of 1893, Olivia gave her own version of her early education. The brief account survives along with hundreds of others in the archives of the Emma Willard School, Troy, New York. It states, “Went to the best schools of that place and time, always loving study for its own sake and early mastering the elementary studies and arithmetic, studying Rhetoric, Astronomy, etc.”81 Her account was embellished for publication:

She enjoyed in childhood and early youth the advantages of the best private schools of Syracuse, always loving study for its own sake, and readily mastering the elementary branches, so that at twelve years of age she found pleasure in Rhetoric, and pastime in the brilliant mar- vels of Astronomy.82

But “the best private schools in Syracuse” were the ones the boys went to, such as the Syracuse Academy her brother Jermain attendedPress with his friend Andrew Dickson White, the son of another Syracuse Pres- byterian family and later president of Cornell. After the academy closed down, aspiring parents sent their sons to the Syracuse Classical High School, where a pupil wrote in 1849 that the patrons of the school were in an uproar because “the teachers’ exercise is to use the rawhide daily.” He added, “What the resultUniversity will be I cannot say [since] almost every one of the scholars have [sic] had experience of something besides ‘moral suasion.’”83 Olivia later claimed that her Syracuse teachers had prepared her well for the intellectual challenge of Troy Female Seminary. “Did I study Indianabotany at the Emma Willard School? No, I had finished botany, rheto- ric, and many other studies before I went there.”84 What else had she learned by the time she turned eighteen? The big lessons were hard to put into words; they involved dissonance and discomfort—the contin- uous worries about money, for example, contrasted with the grandiose stories of family history. Her father’s swings of fortune were hard to square with his status as head of the family, its breadwinner and political rep- resentative. From her parents—the absent father, the anxious, control- ling mother—she learned about the unequal political power of men and women. Hard times taught a lesson in life’s vicissitudes. They revealed that the mother she admired was a dependent, perhaps even a victim. Powerless as her husband was swept along by economic currents and as

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he dashed from one hopeful scheme to the next, Margaret Pierson Jer- main Slocum became the first exemplar for Olivia of the legal and polit- ical disabilities of a married woman in the nineteenth century. There would be an even more dramatic demonstration of this in the years that followed.85 All the while, Olivia’s understanding of self and community was mediated by the church. She was the product of an evangelical Protes- tant upbringing that bred a strong sense of duty. If she were to develop an understanding of the possibilities for change, it would be from within conservative religion, not in opposition to it. Scholars have described American women of the postrevolutionary generation as meekly reen- tering the patriarchal household of the evangelical church.86 At seven- teen, Olivia still had to leave her father’s house. Her eighteenth birthday approached, but her parents had no money to spare for the further edu- cation of a bright daughter. If she were to attend one of the newly estab- lished female academies there would be fees to pay and the money would have to be borrowed. Fortunately, affluent Slocum relatives would pro- vide the necessary funds. And at Troy Female Seminary, Olivia would meet and fall in love with a quite different model of womanhoodPress from the ineffectual one her mother had offered in her first seventeen years of life. University Indiana

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