CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1812

February 17, Monday: Ellen Sturgis was born in Boston, daughter of the wealthy China trader William F. Sturgis with Elizabeth Marston Davis Sturgis, daughter of a prominent Boston jurist.1 From her poem “Life a Duty”: I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty; I woke, and found that life was Duty. Was thy dream then a shadowy lie? Toil on, poor heart, unceasingly; And thou shalt find thy dream to be A truth and noonday light to thee.

Friend Stephen Wanton Gould wrote in his journal: 2nd day 17 of 2 Mo// Thos Gould called to see me, & spent Some time in the Shop — In the evening I called at Aunt M Gs a little while ————————————————————————————————————————————————————————————— RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS

NOBODY COULD GUESS WHAT WOULD HAPPEN NEXT

1. Her sister “Cary” [Caroline Sturgis Tappan] would not be born until 1819. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1840

Early in the year John Adolphus Etzler had returned from the West Indies to New-York. Undoubtedly to meet and suitably impress other reformers, he would there attend the Fourier Society of New York’s annual celebration of the French philosopher-utopist Charles Fourier’s birthday. There he would make the acquaintance of a Fourierist socialist and humanitarian, C.F. Stollmeyer, also a recent German immigrant, who was at that time readying Albert Brisbane’s THE SOCIAL DESTINY OF MAN for publication. Stollmeyer was to become not only the publisher of The New World, but also a primary disciple of Etzler. This SOCIAL DESTINY OF MAN, seconded by the writings and lectures of such men as the Reverend Dana McLean Greeley of Concord, the Reverend William Henry Channing, Horace Greeley, and Parke Godwin would stimulate the rise of several Phalansterian Associations, in the middle and western states, chiefest of which would be the “North American Phalanx” on the north shore of New Jersey. ASSOCIATION OF INDUSTRY AND EDUCATION ONEIDA COMMUNITY MODERN TIMES UNITARY HOME BROOK FARM FRUITLANDS HOPEDALE

The Reverend Adin Ballou’s “Practical Christians” began to publish a gazette, the Practical Christian, for the “promulgation of Primitive Christianity.” He would write in HISTORY OF THE HOPEDALE COMMUNITY, FROM ITS INCEPTION TO ITS VIRTUAL SUBMERGENCE IN THE HOPEDALE PARISH that this year would initiate “a decade of American history pre-eminently distinguished for the general humanitarian spirit which seemed to pervade it, as manifested in numerous and widely extended efforts to put away existing evils and better the condition of the masses of mankind; and especially for the wave of communal thought which swept over the country, awakening a very profound interest in different directions in the question of the re-organization of society; — an interest which assumed various forms as it contemplated or projected practical results.” There would be, he pointed out, a considerable number of what were known as Transcendentalists in and about Boston, who, under the leadership of the Reverend George Ripley, a Unitarian clergyman of eminence, would plan and put in operation the Roxbury Community, generally known as the “Brook Farm” Association. A company of radical reformers who had come out from the church on account of its alleged complicity with Slavery and other abominations, and hence called Come-Outers, would institute a sort of family Community near Providence, Rhode Island. Other progressives, with George W. Benson at their head, would found the Northampton Community at the present village of Florence, a suburb of Northampton. One of the debates of the 18th Century was what human nature might be, under its crust of civilization, under the varnish of culture and manners. Jean-Jacques Rousseau had an answer. Thomas Jefferson had an answer. One of the most intriguing answers was that of Charles Fourier, who was born in Besançon two years before the Shakers arrived in New York. He grew up to write twelve sturdy volumes designing a New Harmony for mankind, an experiment in radical sociology that began to run parallel to that of the Shakers. Fourierism (Horace Greeley founded the New- York Tribune to promote Fourier’s ideas) was Shakerism for intellectuals. Brook Farm was Fourierist, and such place-names as Phalanx, New Jersey, and New Harmony, Indiana, attest to the movement’s history. Except for one detail, Fourier and Mother Ann Lee were of the same mind; they both saw that humankind must return to the tribe or extended family and that it was to exist on a farm. Everyone lived in one enormous dormitory. Everyone shared all work; everyone agreed, although with constant HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN revisions and refinements, to a disciplined way of life that would be most harmonious for them, and lead to the greatest happiness. But when, of an evening, the Shakers danced or had “a union” (a conversational party), Fourier’s Harmonians had an orgy of eating, dancing, and sexual high jinks, all planned by a Philosopher of the Passions. There is a strange sense in which the Shakers’ total abstinence from the flesh and Fourier’s total indulgence serve the same purpose. Each creates a psychological medium in which frictionless cooperation reaches a maximum possibility. It is also wonderfully telling that the modern world has no place for either. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

According to the dissertation of Maurice A. Crane, “A Textual and Critical Edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance” at the University of Illinois in 1953, various scholars have fingered Zenobia as: • Mrs. Almira Barlow • Margaret Fuller • Fanny Kemble • Mrs. Sophia Willard Dana Ripley • Caroline Sturgis Tappan

while various other scholars have been fingering Mr. Hollingsworth as: • Bronson Alcott • Albert Brisbane • Elihu Burritt • Charles A. Dana • Waldo Emerson • Horace Mann, Sr. • Hawthorne’s friend and correspondent William B. Pike of the Boston Custom-house • the Reverend Orestes Augustus Brownson, or maybe • the Reverend William Henry Channing, or maybe • the Reverend Theodore Parker

Hawthorne should really have told us more than Zenobia’s nickname, and should really have awarded Hollingsworth a first name more definitive than “Mr.”? Go figure! Lest we presume that an association of this William Henry Channing with Hollingsworth is utterly void of content, let us listen, as Marianne Dwight did, to the reverend stand and deliver on the topic of “devotedness to the cause; the necessity of entire self-surrender”:1 He compared our work with … that of the crusaders.... He compared us too with the Quakers, who see God only in the inner light,... with the Methodists, who seek to be in a state of rapture in their sacred meetings, whereas we should maintain in daily life, in every deed, on all occasions, a feeling of religious fervor; with the perfectionists, who are, he says, the only sane religious people, as they believe in perfection, and their aim is one with ours. Why should we, how dare we tolerate ourselves or one another in sin?

1. Reed, Amy L., ed. LETTERS FROM BROOK FARM, 1844-1847, BY MARIANNE DWIGHT Poughkeepsie NY, 1928. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN August 16, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson to his journal:

After seeing Anna Barker I rode with Margaret Fuller to the plains. She taxed me, as often before, so now more explicitly with inhospitality of soul. She & Caroline would gladly be my friends, yet our intercourse is not friendship, but literary gossip. I count & weigh but do not love. They make no progress with me, but however often we have met, we still meet as strangers. They feel wronged in such relation, & do not wish to be catechised & criticized. I thought of my experience with several persons which resembled this: and confessed that I would not converse with the divinest person more than one week. M. insisted that it was no friendship which was so soon thus exhausted, & that I ought to know how to be silent & companionable at the same moment. She would surprise me — she would have me say & do what surprised myself. I confess to all this charge with humility unfeigned. I can better converse with George Bradford than with any other. Elizabeth Hoar & I have a beautiful relation not however quite free from the same hardness & fences.

GEORGE PARTRIDGE BRADFORD ELIZABETH SHERMAN HOAR HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN So, who was this Anna Barker? She was a Quaker girl who had converted to Unitarianism, who eventually, as the wife of the wealthy New-York banker Samuel Gray Ward, would become a Roman Catholic. As described in [her] sonnet, the unique friendship Margaret Fuller and Anna Barker possessed seems to “transcend separation.” Despite Barker’s absence, the love Fuller feels for her friend emerges in the text through the imagery of “graceful trees and gentle slopes,” images that are commonly characteristic of sentimental love poems. Fuller’s description of holding Barker, “the bright being,” illuminates the extent of Fuller’s emotional attachment to her friend, a connection so strong that “lovers” seems to be a more appropriate description of their relationship than simply “friends.” The poem evokes an image of two young lovers standing on a sandy shoreline, sharing their “heart’s power” for the “present hour,” realizing that they will later remember with “tender thoughts” and “moonlight memories” the beauty and mutual love of that evening. To carry this notion a step further, seven years after this sonnet was written, Fuller wrote the following in her journal: “that night when she [Anna] leaned on me and her eyes were such a deep violet blue, so like night, as they never were before, and we both felt such a strange mystic thrill and knew what we had never known before”. This entry is oddly reminiscent of the sonnet discussed here (e.g. “of the bright being I had held so dear, / beneath the summer sky”); it would be logical to surmise that it refers to the night detailed in the poem. Whatever else they mean, these words imply the homoerotic feelings Fuller possessed for Barker, feelings that are present, though delicately rendered, in the poem discussed here. Despite the fact that it was considered inappropriate for persons of opposite sex to display affection publicly toward each other during the nineteenth century in the United States, it was quite acceptable for persons of the same sex, especially females, to do so. Such behavior was viewed as “girlishly pure, a sign of sensibility and emotional responsiveness [...] innocent, permissible, and unthreatening.” But, a nineteenth-century best seller entitled “A Young Lady’s Friend” by Eliza Farrar, Fuller’s friend and mentor, who introduced her to Barker, states: All kissing and caressing of your female friends should be kept for your hours of privacy, and never indulged in before gentlemen. There are some reasons for this, which will readily suggest themselves, and others, which can only be known to those well acquainted with the world. This historical insight into nineteenth-century cultural norms suggests that relationships between women, such as Fuller and Barker, were likely viewed as natural and healthy relationships that probably attracted very little attention and were entirely acceptable. The fact that Fuller wrote numerous poems to women, including the seven to Barker, was considered normal behavior, despite her use of phrases such as “divinist (sic) love” when referring to Barker. Romantic or familial, she still desired to love and to be loved by anyone who shared an emotional connection with her. Gender made no difference to Fuller, who once wrote, “It is so true that a woman may be in love with a woman, and a man with a man [...]. It is regulated by the same law as that of love between HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN persons of different sexes, only it is purely intellectual and spiritual.” According to Fuller biographer Joan von Mehren, for a period of ten years, Barker “served as Margaret’s most cherished romantic love.” She goes on to say, Margaret’s poems and terms of endearment, especially in her later characterization of her love for Anna as “the same love we shall feel when we are angels,” suggest that Anna’s attraction, while based on the power of opposites (the beautiful Anna, the brilliant Margaret), was possibly sustained by Margaret’s need, as Bell Chevigny has suggested, “to resolve her sexual identity by transcending sex itself.” Fuller once wrote in her journal that love between persons of the same sex is “unprofaned by any mixture of lower instincts.” This observation can be interpreted in multiple ways, either that sexual relations between persons of the same sex is a completely spiritual experience, untainted by acts normally considered to be morally improper, or that sex is never an issue between persons of the same gender if their relationship is of a truly deep and spiritual nature. By understanding Fuller’s intellectual approach to same-sex relationships, one may surmise that Anna Barker was in all probability Fuller’s first love. It is unclear, however, whether or not Fuller and Barker ever experienced a sexually intimate relationship with one another, although several biographers believe that the possibility exists.2

2. From “‘In death thy life is found’: An Examination of the Forgotten Poetry of Margaret Fuller,” thesis by Staci E. Lewis, May 2002 HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN During a summer visit to North Reading, Timothy Flint died in the residence of his brother at Salem, Massachusetts. The cause of his death at the age of 60 was set down as a liver problem, “biliousness.”

Harmony Grove Cemetery then and now

He left with friends in Salem a manuscript entitled “Second part of Recollections of the Mississippi Valley” (meanwhile, back home in Louisiana, the slaves of the Lunenburg plantation were so contented in their enslavement that they were busily building their slavemaster’s family one of those standard white-pillared Southern mansions with a big veranda where these benevolent white people could relax and sip their mint juleps while being fanned by some little black house servant. –Hoo-hah, tell us about how to be happy!) HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN August 16th, 1840: A strain of music reminds me of a passage of the Vedas.

September: Waldo Emerson wrote Caroline “Cary” Sturgis, with the information that George Partridge Bradford was translating François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénélon “& sent me yesterday two sheets concerning Friendship.”

Toward the end of the month, after writing to Margaret Fuller that it would be “better to part now,” Emerson made a note in his journal “You would have me love you? What shall I love? Your body? The supposition disgusts you.” The next day Margaret wrote back to Waldo: “How often have I said, This light will never understand my fire. …I am no saint….” Emerson would respond to this attempt at communication with “I think I could wish it unwritten.” –And it would be all downhill from there. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN October: Waldo Emerson’s lecture of March 17th at the New-York Mercantile Library, “The Literature of the Present Age,” appeared in the 2d issue of THE DIAL: A MAGAZINE FOR LITERATURE, PHILOSOPHY, AND RELIGION, under the title “Thoughts on Modern Literature.” THE LIST OF LECTURES

A number of poems by Mrs. Ellen Sturgis Hooper appeared (anonymously) in this 2d issue — on page 187 her “The Poor Rich Man,” on page 193 “The Wood-Fire,” on page 194 “The Poet,” and on page 216 “Wayfarers.” THE DIAL, OCTOBER 1840

A poem Caroline “Cary” Sturgis titled “Life” inspired Christopher Pearse Cranch to perpetrate a piece of persiflage. Fortunately for all, this humor would go unpublished — it depicts an individual who is accessing the “Moral Influence of the Dial” in such manner as to avoid his obligations to others.

Note carefully, please, that the concerns expressed here by the cartoonist Cranch are the precise opposites of the concerns that would be expressed by Henry Thoreau in WALDEN. Thoreau would express concern not that the audience would avoid their obligations to others, but rather, under the guise of “philanthropy,” avoid their primary obligation, which is of course to themselves — the obligation to construct a personal human existence that is inspired and energetic and capable and fully functional: HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

WALDEN: Philanthropy is almost the only virtue which PEOPLE OF is sufficiently appreciated by mankind. Nay, it is greatly WALDEN overrated; and it is our selfishness which overrates it. A robust poor man, one sunny day here in Concord, praised a fellow-townsman to me, because, as he said, he was kind to the poor; meaning himself. The kind uncles and aunts of the race are more esteemed than its true spiritual fathers and mothers. I once heard a reverend lecturer on England, a man of learning and intelligence, after enumerating her scientific, literary, and political worthies, Shakspeare, Bacon, Cromwell, Milton, Newton, and others, speak next of her Christian heroes, whom, as if his profession required it of him, he elevated to a place far above all the rest, as the greatest of the great. They were Penn, Howard, and Mrs. Fry. Every one must feel the falsehood and cant of this. The last were not England’s best men and women; only, perhaps, her best philanthropists.

FREDERICK HENRY HEDGE WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE SIR FRANCIS BACON OLIVER CROMWELL JOHN MILTON ISAAC NEWTON WILLIAM PENN JOHN HOWARD ELIZABETH FRY Viewed in the above perspective, this philanthropy project, where everybody supposedly lives by taking in everybody else’s laundry, although it would ordinarily be meritorious, can readily transform itself into just another avoidance mechanism. Over-preoccupation with service to others can sometimes function for us as a mechanism of distraction, a tricky way by which we can evade this primary responsibility, our responsibility to ourselves.

CHANGE IS ETERNITY, STASIS A FIGMENT

“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project People of Walden: Ellen Sturgis Hooper HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN June 4, Friday: The Liberator.

Waldo Emerson wrote to Caroline “Cary” Sturgis about Mary Russell, Lidian’s Plymouth friend who was teaching Waldo Jr., Ellen, and the Alcott girls in an improvised schoolroom in their barn:

Mary Russell is here & Henry Thoreau, not to mention occasional fanatical flights of birds — of croaking or prophesying song.... I have quite deserted my books, & do hoe corn & wheel a wheelbarrow whole days together.

THE ALCOTT FAMILY

June 13, Sunday: The Reverend Samuel Ripley preached the final sermon in the old church of the Reverend Ezra Ripley (who had baptized little David Henry Thoreau), before it was torn down, but Thoreau was the only person from the Emerson household to attend in spite of the fact that Samuel was Waldo Emerson’s uncle and in spite of the fact that this structure had loomed large in the previous lives of the Emersons. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN October: Margaret Fuller was houseguest of the Emersons, and they had “strange, cold-warm, attractive-repelling conversations.” She would go into his library in his absence and fondle his books. Emerson and Fuller passed

notes between each other, little Wallie acting as the messenger, notes such as “there is nothing I wish more than to be able to live with you without disturbing you.” Caroline “Cary” Sturgis referred to them as “the rock and the wave.” Waldo dreamed of the world as an apple and ate it, although what if anything this dream had to do HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN with his days spent with Fuller is unknown — who can figure dreams out?

September 28, Wednesday: A federal court decided John Brown’s bankruptcy case, as the culmination of years of dicey business decisions. His creditors were awarded all but the essentials which the Brown family needed to sustain life — but this proceeding did free him. A failed surveyor, farmer, speculator, schoolteacher, tanner, and cattleman, he showed up as a wool dealer in an 1848 credit report: “his condition is questionable.” Winter 1849: “may or may not be good.” Summer 1850: “his means are equally obscure.” Still in his forties, he looked sixty to credit reporters. The agency lost him when he switched lines of work yet again, only to fail yet again. Like many another misfit who pushed a doomed venture too far, he quit when he had no other choice. Having grown whiskers for the first time, his craggy face looked still more ancient. Everyone had an opinion of this broken man. “Served him right.” Overhearing such comments, Thoreau said he felt proud even to know him and questioned why people “talk as if a man’s death were a failure, and his continued life, be it of whatever character, were a success.” The bankrupt court had restored this loser’s freedom in 1842. Now it was 1859, and no earthly court could save John Brown after his failure at Harpers Ferry. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN Waldo Emerson continued in his journal:

1 Next morning, we begun our walk at 6 /2 o’clock for the Shaker 1 Village distant 3 /2 miles. Whilst the good Sisters were getting ready our breakfast, we had a conversation with Seth Blanchard & Cloutman of the Brethren, who gave an honest account by yea & by nay of their faith & practice. They were not stupid like some whom I have seen of their society, & not worldly like others.... From the Shaker Village we came to Littleton, & thence to Acton, still in the same redundance of splendour. It was like a day of July, and from Acton we sauntered leisurely homeward to finish the nineteen miles of our second day before four in the afternoon.

After the two walkers returned to Concord, Margaret Fuller came visiting the Emerson home for two weeks.

Lidian Emerson was on opium and began to fantasize connections between Margaret and Waldo, and Margaret had to defend by pointing out that on two of the evenings Lidian supposed she spent talking to Waldo, actually she had been with Ellery Channing or Henry Thoreau while Waldo had been alone, writing in his study.

There was embarrassment at the dining table when Lidian burst into tears at an imagined slight. After the meal the two women went walking and evidently bonded somewhat, for Lidian confided to Margaret that “she has a lurking hope that Waldo’s character will alter, and that he will be capable of an intimate union.” Margaret mused on this in her journal:

I suppose the whole amount of the feeling is that women cant bear to be left out of the question. ...when Waldo’s wife, and the mother of that child that is gone [Waldo Jr.] thinks me the most privileged of women, & that EH [Elizabeth Hoar] was happy because her love [Charles (?) Emerson] was snatched away for a life long separation, & thus she can know none but ideal love: it does seem a little too insulting at first blush. – And yet they are not altogether wrong.

An entanglement arose when Ellery Channing wanted to visit his former love Caroline “Cary” Sturgis on HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN Naushon Island one last time, at her suggestion, before his new wife Ellen Fuller Channing would arrive in Concord from Boston.

Margaret Fuller had no objection and Ellery went to Naushon but then Ellen arrived early in Concord and discovered his absence and Margaret was unwilling to admit where he was — and everyone became rather upset. Margaret recorded:

If I were Waldo’s wife, or Ellery’s wife, I should acquiesce in all these relations, since they needed them. I should expect the same feeling from my husband, & I should think it little in him not to have it. I felt I should never repent of advising Ellery to go whatsoever happened. Well, he came back next day, and All’s Well that Ends Well.... Mama [Emerson’s mother Ruth Haskins Emerson] & Lidian sympathized with me almost with tears. Waldo looked radiant, & HT [Henry Thoreau] as if his tribe had won a victory. Well it was a pretty play, since it turned out no tragedy at last. Ellery told Ellen at once how it was, and she took it just as she ought.

Bronson Alcott, Henry Wright, Charles Lane, and Lane’s son William (who was about 9 years of age), embarked at Gravesend on the Leland for Boston. They brought a large library of books on mysticism to be used “in the commencement of an Institution for the nurture of men in universal freedom of action, thought, and being.” More important, Lane brought his life savings of approximately $2,000.00. Wright’s bride and infant waited in England for developments. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1844

Fall: Ellery Channing obtained a position on the staff of Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune but, before reporting for work, he spent mid-November in the Catskills, 3 days of which vacation he spent with Caroline Sturgis and

Margaret Fuller who were also in the Catskills, at Fishkill on the Hudson River. Fuller was living with Sturgis for six weeks while revising her “Great Lawsuit” paper from THE DIAL for publication as WOMAN IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. While working at the Tribune, Ellery chummed around with Giles Waldo and William Tappan,3 but declined an invitation to visit the William Emersons at their home on Staten Island.

3.This William would have been what to the rich New York abolitionists Arthur Tappan and Lewis Tappan?? HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1845

March: Henry Thoreau delivered a “Concord River” lecture and numbered his Long Book entries according to designated chapters in A WEEK ON THE CONCORD AND MERRIMACK RIVERS. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

The Reverend Samuel Ripley notified his renters the Hawthornes, who were way behind in their rent, that he wanted to move back into his home in the following spring. In ensuing months, when the Hawthornes continued to fail to pay, he would propose to them that they take on Caroline “Cary” Sturgis as a “boarder.”

When that tactic also did not work, the Reverend would simply inform the freeloaders that he was changing his plans and needed the Manse beginning that fall. This of course was untrue but indicated that he had decided that he would prefer to have his house standing empty, than have it inhabited by literary deadbeats who could not be gotten rid of and could not be influenced in any more subtle manner. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reaction to this concept –the strange conceit, that renters need to pay rent despite being fine people– would be “Our landlord has driven us out of our Paradise in Concord.”

John Jones and Mary Jane Richardson Jones relocated to Chicago, Illinois with $3.50 in cash, and rented a cottage and a small shop at 119 Dearborn Street where John might begin to establish himself as a tailor. He was HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN teaching himself to read and write and would soon be building up a large trade among the gentry of the city. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN November: Caroline “Cary” Sturgis paid a visit to the new farm home of Ellery Channing and his family in Concord and commented “I never saw a prettier external life, but pearls are hollow.” HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1846

July 4, Saturday: Ellery Channing returned to Concord and encountered his new daughter, Caroline Sturgis Channing, who had of course been named in honor of his former girlfriend Caroline “Cary” Sturgis.

Jefferson Davis left Washington DC to take up his duties as colonel in charge of the 1st Mississippi Regiment. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1847

By this point Samuel F.B. Morse had made enough money, despite his difficulty in enforcing his patents, that he was able to purchase Locust Grove, a 200-acre Italian-style villa on the banks of the Hudson River outside Poughkeepsie, and have a private telegraph line installed to his study.

This is the type of insulators that was being used initially atop the telegraph poles (front, side, and top views):

Thomas Cole’s painting “Home In The Woods,” a depiction which may help us understand a book title such HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN as WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS:

Ah, the lure of the primitive: toward the end of this year William Aspinwall Tappan married the daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant, Caroline “Cary” Sturgis, a Transcendentalist, and they went to live on a farm in the Berkshires which the family would donate in 1913 to the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the name “Tanglewood.” TAPPAN FAMILY

Harriet Bishop went from New England to St. Paul, Minnesota to open the first organized school there, in an old blacksmith’s log cabin chinked with mud. See her autobiographical FLORAL HOME; OR, FIRST YEARS OF MINNESOTA. Harriet Island in the Mississippi River would be named after this pioneer schoolmarm from HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN New England. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN December 13, Monday: A 2-story brick dining hall/town hall had been dismantled brick by brick, 40 miles above Cincinnati on the Ohio River at the former “Excelsior” Phalanx in Utopia, Ohio, and re-erected incautiously upon the very bank of the Ohio River. There was an underground limestone chamber 22 feet by 44 feet, that they would use as their church. John Otis Wattles and his wife Friend Esther Whinery Wattles were at a dance party inside this partly finished building (people were making the best of the situation because their neighboring wooden homes had been flooded) when its foundation disintegrated in the floodwaters and the south wall of the structure collapsed. The mortar of the unfinished building had been too fresh to withstand this soaking. Although there were 32 in the structure and 17 of them were crushed or drowned or succumbed to hypothermia, the Wattles family was able to escape intact.

In Washington DC, the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution adopted Secretary Joseph Henry’s Programme of Organization, a plan which consisted of 14 guiding considerations including a suggestion that their Institution should only undertake programs that could not adequately be carried out by other existing United States institutions. A key feature of the Secretary’s plan would be issuance of periodical reports on scientific progress, such as Smithsonian Contributions to Knowledge.

At the age of 28, William Aspinwall Tappan and Caroline “Cary” Sturgis got married in Boston.

That night a US Marines patrol operating outside Mazatlan surprised and defeated a group of Mexicans at Palos Prietos. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN “HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE” BEING A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN TIME (JUST AS THE PERSPECTIVE IN A PAINTING IS A VIEW FROM A PARTICULAR POINT IN SPACE), TO “LOOK AT THE COURSE OF HISTORY MORE GENERALLY” WOULD BE TO SACRIFICE PERSPECTIVE ALTOGETHER. THIS IS FANTASY-LAND, YOU’RE FOOLING YOURSELF. THERE CANNOT BE ANY SUCH THINGIE, AS SUCH A PERSPECTIVE.

Caroline Sturgis Tappan “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1857

October 13, Tuesday: Waldo Emerson wrote to Caroline “Cary” Sturgis Tappan, wife of his friend William Aspinwall Tappan, that

If I were writing to any other than you, I should render my wonted homage to the gods for my two gossips, Alcott & Henry T., whose existence I impute to America for righteousness, though they miss the fame of your praise.

TAPPAN FAMILY

An advertisement for a runaway slave appeared in the Baltimore Sun: $500 REWARD - RAND AWAYS AND HORSE THIEVES - Ran away from the subscriber, living in Baltimore county, Md., near the Granite Quarries, two NEGRO MEN, Brothers, ROSS and JOHN BEALL; the former left on the night of the 11th instant, taking with him one Chestnut Sorrell MARE, the property of his master. Ross has a dark complexion, nearly black, about 23 years of age, about five feet six or seven inches in height,4 and has a down look when spoken to. John left on the 10th instant, and also took a horse belonging to a neighbor. He is 18 years old, about five feet ten inches in height, black complexion, smiles when spoken to, showing very white teeth. I will give the above reward of $500 for the apprehension of both, or $250 for either one of them, to be secured in jail so that I might get them again. Communications addressed to LEMUEL OFFUTT Woodsock Postoffice Baltimore and Ohio Railroad In the same issue of the Baltimore Sun there was an advertisement inquiring into the whereabouts of a free black man (this could conceivably had been someone who was being kidnapped into slavery): ON THE FOURTH OF SEPTEMBER LAST, ALBERT DORSEY, aged 19 years, five feet six inches high, of well-knit frame, chestnut brown, long visage, lower lip hanging, speaks plainly, of quite and reserved manner, born free in Baltimore county, and of excellent conduct and character, was kidnapped and secretly sent from Baltimore city. All efforts by his distressed parents and friends to learn his destination or place of concealment have failed. Any information leading to a trace of him will relieve them and be most gratefully acknowledged. Address CHAS G. LYON, ESQ., Pikesville, Baltimore county., or WM. J. WARD, ESQ., Baltimore

4. In descriptions of runaway slaves, 5 feet 5 or 6 inches is the average height. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

After hearing Frederick Douglass speak Sallie Holley had become an abolitionist lecturer. On this day she wrote to Gerrit Smith informing him that she had had a buggy accident that prevented her from continuing to lecture for the Anti-Slavery Society. Smith had after the death of her father Myron Holley made her a present of $100, and in this letter she explained what she had done with his present and asked for a loan.

October 13, Tuesday: P.M. –To Poplar Hill. Maple fires are burnt out generally, and they have fairly begun to fall and look smoky in the swamps. When my eyes were resting on those smoke-like bare trees, it did not at first occur to me why the landscape was not as brilliant as a few days ago. The outside trees in the swamps lose their leaves first. The brilliancy of young oaks, especially scarlet oaks, in sprout-lands is dulled. These red maples and young scarlet oaks, etc., have been the most conspicuous and important colors, or patches of color, in the landscape. Those most brilliant days, then, so far as the autumnal tints are concerned, are over; i. e., when we may be surprised at any turn by the sight of some incredibly bright and dazzling tree or grove of trees. I noticed the first large white oaks wholly changed to a salmon-color, but not brilliant like those sproutland fires. Are very large oaks never brilliant in their tints? 5 The hickories on Poplar Hill have not lost any of their brilliancy, generally speaking. Some are quite green even. I look down into a mocker-nut, whose recesses and greater part are pure yellow, and from this you pass through a ruddy orange in the more exposed leaves to a rich crispy brown in the leaves of the extreme twigs about the clusters of round green nuts. The red of oaks, etc., is far more general now than three or four days ago, but it is also much duller, so that some maples that were a bright scarlet can now hardly be distinguished by their color from oaks, which have just turned red. The Great Fields from this hill are pale-brown, often hoary –there is not yellow enough for russet– pastures, with very large red or purple patches of blackberry vines. You can only appreciate the effect of these by a strong and peculiar intention of the eye. We ordinarily do not see what is before us, but what our prejudices presume to be there. The pitch and white pines on the north of Sleepy Hollow, i. e. north side the hill, are at the height of their change and are falling. Maybe they are later than on the south side of hills. They are at the height of their change, generally, though many needles fallen, carpeting the ground. Pinweeds are brown; how long? Some of the large ash trees, both a black and white, are quite bare of leaves already. With the red maples, then. Looking from this hill, green begins to look as rare and interesting as any color, –you may say begins to be a color by itself, –and I distinguish green streaks and patches of grass on most hillsides. See a pretty large flock of tree sparrows, very lively and tame, drifting along and pursuing each other along a bushy fence and ditch like driving snow. Two pursuing each other would curve upward like a breaker in the air and drop into the hedge again. Some white willows are very fresh and green yet. This has been the ninth of those wonderful days, and one of the warmest. I am obliged to sit with my window wide open all the evening as well as all day. It is the earlier Indian summer. Our cherry trees have now turned to mostly a red-orange color.

5.Yes. HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN

1888

October 20, Saturday: Caroline Sturgis Tappan died in Lenox, Massachusetts. TAPPAN FAMILY

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2017. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at .

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST

Prepared: November 27, 2017 HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.

Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in HDT WHAT? INDEX

CAROLINE STURGIS CAROLINE STURGIS TAPPAN the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with . Arrgh.