Indiana University Press Blog

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 13 A LIMINAL PLACE 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 paternal 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 15 A LIMINAL PLACE 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- 16 Slocums, Jermains, Piersons—and a Sage 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.

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