(SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
MARCHÉSA D’OSSOLI
US’S 1ST FOREIGN WAR CORRESPONDENT
[PER EDGAR ALLAN POE,
HUMANITY WAS ONCE UPON A TIME DIVIDED INTO
“MEN, WOMEN, AND MARGARET FULLER”]
AS A COMPARISON PARTITION, CONSIDER “MAN, WOMAN, AND NABISCO”
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
1808
The French army occupied Rome, and invaded Spain seizing Barcelona and Madrid. Joseph Bonaparte, who had been King of Naples, became King of Spain, and General Joachim Murat, began to rule in Naples in his stead (he would hold that job until 1815). There were widespread uprisings in Spain, and British troops landed in Portugal. Henry Crabb Robinson, sent by the Times of London to report on the Peninsular War, became the 1st war correspondent (Margaret Fuller, 1st female war correspondent, wasn’t yet born).
#1 Male
#1 Female
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
1810
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May 23, Wednesday: Sarah Fuller was born in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts.
King Solomon II was deposed as the Kingdom of Imeret’i (in Georgia) was annexed by Russia.
Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal:
4th day 23 of 5 Mo// The mind again refreshed with the Springs of Life. This eveng in looking forward to Y Meeting while setting at home with my dear H, my feelings were quite raised to a lively sensibility that I seldom have. I rememberd some favord seasons, at that time & as from present apperiences We shall be more at liberty to enjoy the company of our friends than the last. There seem’d something encourageing in the prospect, but how will be cannot tell, sickness or other disappointments may assail us & all our promised enjoyment be frustrated, but be that as it may I hope we shall be favord with the Life of Religion
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RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
1. At age 10 she would be given permission to assume her mother’s name, Margaret.
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
1815
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Sarah Fuller (Margaret Fuller), age 6, was reading the classics under the tutelage of her father Timothy Fuller.
THE LONDON THEATRE. A COLLECTION OF THE MOST CELEBRATED DRAMATIC PIECES. CORRECTLY GIVEN, FROM COPIES USE IN THE THEATRES, BY THOMAS DIDBIN, OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE. / (VOLUME III: CATO. A TRAGEDY. BY JOSEPH ADDISON, ESQ. CORRECTLY GIVEN, FROM COPIES USED IN THE THEATRES, BY THOMAS DIDBIN, AUTHOR OF SEVERAL DRAMATIC PIECES: AND
PROMPTER OF THE THEATRE ROYAL, DRURY LANE)(London: Printed at the Chiswick Press, by C. Whittingham; for Whittingham and Arliss, Paternoster Row, 1815)
2. The Honorable Timothy Fuller had been born on July 11, 1778 in Chilmark, Massachusetts, a son of the Reverend Timothy Fuller, the initial settled minister of Princeton, Massachusetts. He had received a classical education at Harvard College and graduated in 1801 with 2d honors. He had become a lawyer and during this period was serving in the Massachusetts State Senate as a DemocraticRepublican. In 1809 he had gotten married with Margaret Crane. The Honorable Timothy Fuller and Margaret Crane Fuller would produce 8 children before his suddenly, intestate, and insolvent death of cholera in Groton, Massachusetts on October 1, 1835: — The 1st daughter Sarah Margaret Fuller was born at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts on May 23, 1810; got married (or something) with Giovanni, Marchese Ossoli, and bore one child, Angelo Philip Ossoli, at Rieti, Italy on September 5, 1848; parents and child drowned on July 19, 1850; — Julia Adelaide Fuller, died in childhood — The 1st son Eugene Fuller was born at Cambridge on May 14, 1815, graduated from Harvard College (just barely) in 1834; got married with a widow of New Orleans Mrs. Anna Eliza Rotta, and drowned on June 21, 1859 — The 2d son William Henry Fuller never went to college but applied himself to mercantile pursuits in New Orleans and then in Cincinnati, and later resided in Cambridge, Massachusetts, getting married with Frances Elizabeth Hastings on February 28, 1840 (her mother was a Hammond, a niece of Mrs. Craigie of Craigie House, Cambridge); resided at Cambridge and died in New-York during December 1878 (his wife survived him, dying on May 13, 1885) — Ellen Kilshaw Fuller was born on August 7, 1820, got married with Ellery Channing II on September 24, 1841, and died on September 22, 1856 — Reverend Arthur Buckminster Fuller, born August 10, 1822, graduated from Harvard College, 1843; got married with, 1st on September 18, 1850, Elizabeth Godfrey Davenport, of Mendon, Massachusetts, who died March 4,1856; got married with, 2d, on September 28, 1859, Emma Lucilla Reeves of Wayland, Massachusetts
— Richard Frederick Fuller
— James Lloyds Fuller, died unmarried on July 7, 1891 — Edward Brecks Fuller, died in childhood
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
1816
Opening of the Boston Infant School. At the city’s 7 public schools there were 2,365 pupils 836 of whom were female.
At the age of 6 Sarah Fuller (Margaret Fuller) began home study of Latin.
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
1818
Sarah Fuller, age 8, was reading William Shakespeare under the tutelage of her father Timothy Fuller. At age 8 or 9 she would encounter the play Romeo and Juliet and would be deeply moved. As an adult she would
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write “At eight or nine years old the passions are not infrequently felt in their full shock.”
MARGARET FULLER
3. At age 10 she would ask to assume her mother’s name, Margaret.
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
1819
December: Sarah Fuller, age 10, wrote a letter to her father requesting that she be named Sarah Margaret Fuller (and be addressed as Margaret rather than as Sarah).
MARGARET FULLER
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
1821
August 11, Saturday: In The Middlesex Gazette an article signed “S” recounted the convenient local legend “–the oldest people telle [sic] me that they heard it in their youth–” that Henry Thoreau would reference in Draft F of “The Ponds.”
WALDEN: Some have been puzzled to tell how the shore became so regularly paved. My townsmen have all heard the tradition, the oldest people tell me that they heard it in their youth, that anciently the Indians were holding a pow-wow upon a hill here, which rose as high into the heavens as the pond now sinks deep into the earth, and they used much profanity, as the story goes, though this vice is one of which the Indians were never guilty, and while they were thus engaged the hill shook and suddenly sank, and only one old squaw, named Walden, escaped, and from her the pond was named.
A deep and clear body of isolated water such as Walden Pond must have seemed quite mysterious before the development of the geological theory of ice ages, and before the development of an account of how buried masses of ice often linger at the edge of a retreating glacier and gradually melt over centuries or dozens of centuries, to leave precisely such deep water-filled holes. Alas, however, a people with a “forgotten” history of genocide, such as these white Concordians, are ever in dire need of some fanciful account by which their record can precisely be reversed and the people they victimized be portrayed as aggressors while the guilty (or themselves, descendants of the guilty parties and inheritors of the loot the guilt and the shame of genocide) can be allowed to posture as innocent prisoners being tortured and burned alive by barbarous savages. Barbarous savages whom these white Christians trapped in their peaceable villages in the snow of that winter of 1676- 1677, and roped together at the neck, and marched onto the Deer Island concentration camp in Boston Harbor
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and destroyed by starvation and exposure. Note that in this 1821 news item the existence of Walden Pond has become a fanciful proof that it is God, not white Concordians, who destroys strange peoples who interfere with the legitimate agendas of white Concordians. This article is not a “news story” at all, but rather it is a fantasy by which white people, as inheritors of desperate deeds, have discovered a way to add to the original affect of the viciousness and greed of their parents the affect of outrage of a surviving victim and thus mobilize, in the service of their own lives, the force of a shame which might otherwise forestall them from further such acts of desperation.
4.The scenario is rather a familiar one –although its deeps have never adequately been fathomed– at least we have been able to observe this legitimation-myth as it repeated itself in Minnesota during our race war and then in Germany before and during World War II. Margaret Fuller, not one easy to deceive, described it as “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.”
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
Walden Pond
This pond, in the southerly part of town, has something singular, both in its appearance and in the tradition concerning it. It is said that the place which now contains a body of water, was once a high hill — that on this hill the Indians assembled at certain seasons to celebrate their religious festivals, and at other times to burn and torture prisoners taken in the wars with the early settlers of the country; it was on a meeting of numerous chiefs and tribes for the latter purpose, that this celebrated hill disappeared in the midst of their barbarous rejoicings, and sunk with all its savage inhabitants upon it. And on account of the remarkable depth of the water, which has never been fathomed, it was supposed to have continued to sink to such an amazing depth, that the bottom dropped out one day. This much for tradition — We do not vouch for the truth of the story, still there is enough that is singular about this pond, to warrant a stranger in going a little distance to view it; its banks are very bold, and decorated on all sides with evergreens and other forest trees — its waters are pure — no weeds or grass grow on its borders, no stream runs into it, or issues from it, and it is found to be highest in the driest time. In this deep water many pike and pickerell have been taken, weighing from one to five pounds, and it is confidently asserted, that others have been seen which would probably weigh from ten to twenty pounds; this sort never have been taken.
Some of your readers, it is hoped, will give a more particular description of this singular pond.
Perhaps father John Thoreau, or someone else who regularly read the gazettes, clipped this vicious article when it was printed and passed it on to Henry in 1853/1854 while he was writing the history of the pond. Perhaps it was passed on with the suggestion that Thoreau be the one to realize the last sentence, “give a more particular description of this singular pond” — give a description of this singular pond that will particularly and effectively remove it forever from the list of geographical landforms available for use by white people as legitimators of genocide.
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
We may remember that indeed there was a “high hill” near Concord, upon which a “barbarous” event had taken place. However, this barbarous event was not the torture and slaughter of innocent white people by savage red people, but was, instead, the murder of Native American women and children by white Concordians. For which, you must refer to the events of 1676.
Walden
Mount Misery
According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966), in the course of this year:
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY
Chapter 1 (1817-1823) -Downing gives a cursory account of the Thoreau and Dunbar heritage and more fully traces the nature and movement of the Thoreau family in the first five years of Henry’s life.
Thoreau’s father, John, while intellectual, “lived quietly, peacefully and contentedly in the shadow of his wife,” Mrs. Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, who was dynamic and outspoken with a strong love for nature and compassion for the downtrodden.
••••
1st Helen -quiet, retiring, eventually a teacher. 2nd John Jr. -“his father turned inside out,” personable, interested in ornithology, also taught. 3rd Henry (born July 12,1817) -speculative but not noticeably precocious. 4th Sophia -independent, talkative, ultimately took over father’s business and edited Henry’s posthumous publications.
The Thoreau’s constantly struggled with debt, and in 1818 John Sr. gave up his farm outside Concord and moved into town. Later the same year he moved his family to Chelmsford where he opened a shop which soon failed and sent him packing to Boston to teach school.
(Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)
In 1836, in John Warner Barber’s CONNECTICUT HISTORICAL COLLECTIONS: CONTAINING A GENERAL COLLECTION OF INTERESTING FACTS, TRADITIONS BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES, ANECDOTES, ETC., RELATING TO THE HISTORY AND ANTIQUITIES OF EVERY TOWN IN CONNECTICUT, WITH GEOGRAPHICAL DESCRIPTIONS
(Durrie & Peck and J.W. Barber), in regard to Lake Quinebaug (Nell Alexander’s Lake) in Killingly,
- (SARAH) MARGARET FULLER
- THE MARCHESA D’OSSOLI
Connecticut:
In ancient times, when the red men of this quarter had long enjoyed prosperity, that is, when they had found plenty of game in the woods, and fish in the ponds and rivers, they at length fixed a time for a general powwow, a sort of festival for eating, drinking, smoking, singing and dancing. The spot chosen for this purpose was a sandy hill, or mountain, covered with tall pines, occupying the situation where the lake now lies. The powwow lasted four days in succession, and was to continue longer had not the Great Spirit, enraged at the licentiousness which prevailed there, resolved to punish them. Accordingly, while the red people in immense numbers were capering about upon the summit of the mountain, it suddenly “gave way” beneath them, and sunk to a great depth, when the water from below rushed up and covered them all except one good old squaw, who occupied one of the peaks, which now bears the name of Loon's Island. Whether the tradition is entitled to credit or not we will do it justice by affirming that in a clear day, when there is no wind and the surface of the lake is smooth, the huge trunks and leafless branches of gigantic pines may be occasionally seen in the deepest part of the water, some of them reaching almost to the surface, in such huge and fantastic forms as to cause the beholder to startle!
