Views of the Frontier in American History

A COMMUNITY OF LETTERS: A QUAKER WOMAN’S CORRESPONDENCE AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER, 1791-1824 A Dissertation Presented to The Graduate Faculty of The University of Akron In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements of the Degree Doctor of Philosophy Barbara Kathleen Wittman August, 2008 A COMMUNITY OF LETTERS: A QUAKER WOMAN’S CORRESPONDENCE AND THE MAKING OF THE AMERICAN FRONTIER, 1791-1824 Barbara Kathleen Wittman Dissertation Approved: Accepted: _________________________ _______________________ Advisor Department Chair Dr. T.J. Boisseau Dr. Walter Hixson _________________________ _______________________ Committee Member Dean of the College Dr. Lesley J. Gordon Dr. Ronald F. Levant _________________________ _______________________ Committee Member Dean of the Graduate School Dr. Walter Hixson Dr. George R. Newkome _________________________ _______________________ Committee Member Date Dr. Kevin Kern __________________________ Committee Member Dr. Kathryn Feltey ii ABSTRACT Quaker women resettling west of the eastern United States in the late 18th and early 19th centuries remade familial and community relationships by way of voluminous correspondence with female kin. Such correspondence in concert with the unique meaning that Quaker religiosity lent to notions of community and continuity in this period resulted in Quaker women being newly positioned within their families and communities in ways that scholars, assuming that all women experienced a decline in authority and autonomy as a consequence of their isolation in nuclear families on the frontier, have so far failed to appreciate. My research discloses the vocabulary and cultural grammar that women used to explain the transformation of life the experiences – the reframing that their affections, their motivations and their relationships underwent in light of their changed circumstances as settlers. In communities where kinship networks, religion, and a highly structured church hierarchy reinforced each other, letters provide evidence of the Quaker principle of spiritual equality that expected women, as well as men, to participate fully in the development and reform of their faith communities. Late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Quaker women inherited an empowered and authorized position within hierarchical family structure that privileged men’s public and community status supplied a way to express their concerns and proclaim their solidarity as a group from Margaret Fell (1614-1702) and her daughters who had worked to systematize the early Quaker faith and formalize the roles that women would play as spiritual equals in the church. I argue that women lessened the strain of relocation by locating their families within a web of iii connections that strengthened the integrity and the social cohesion of their communities. Perhaps even more historically significant is the extent to which the Quaker tradition of epistolary tradition was crucial to the development of a widely dispersed network that held Quaker families and communities together across geographic boundaries. Quaker Women in this period understood their letter-writing as a crucial vehicle by which they could satisfy their spiritual mission as women. Their letters document their progress in the search for a stronger personal faith and comprise a form of discipline meant to instruct others and ensure the writer’s place in family memory. The effect of their voluminous and dedicated correspondence with one another goes beyond these intensions to include a changed Quaker frontier family and community culture within which women as corresponders wielded a new and different sort of influence than they had practiced in the locales of their birth. This study is based on a collection of two hundred letters preserved by Charity Rotch, (1766-1824), a member of an elite New England Quaker family who migrated from Connecticut to the Midwest in 1811 where she and her husband, Thomas Rotch (1767-1823) lived until their deaths in 1823 and 1824. As the titular head of a farming family in Ohio, Thomas Rotch’ s commercial activities linked him formally with the wider economy of the Atlantic world in ways easily recognizable to historians. However, less recognizable has been the ways in which Charity Rotch’s relocation to the frontier and repositioning within a nuclear family context also broadened her world. Evidence drawn from letters written by and to Charity Rotch chart her active roles in the gendered spaces of the public sphere where she exercised what she believed to be her right and responsibility as a spiritual equal and as a Quaker women – that of shaping and sustaining the faith community from one generation to the next. Her ability to do so was largely a consequence of what I have termed the “community iv of letters” that she helped to forge among Quaker women across significant distances. As a strong spiritual leader and role model for women Friends everywhere her letters went, she seized opportunities to remind women of the centrality of their faith in their lives, of the need for sacrifices to keep the faith, and of their responsibility for sustaining their faith in their communities. v DEDICATION For Friends and Family, Massillon Public Library, University of Akron History Department And Frances Sorg Sauer vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This research could have never been completed without the inspiration of numerous friends and colleagues. Massillon Public Library Director, Camille Leslie and Reference Director, Sheri Brown encouraged me to utilize the library’s treasure of primary sources to situate Thomas and Charity Rotch in the history of early Ohio. Apart from brief mentions of Thomas Rotch as sheepmaster in two publications by Ohio historians in the 1990s, no accounting of the Rotches and their role in the settlement of Kendal had been attempted on any scale. It is to Camille and Sheri who have provided me with access to the collection, and Ethel Conrad, the Library’s previous director who spent over a decade archiving hundreds of letters and documents, that I owe an immeasurable debt of gratitude. In 2002, I had the good fortune to enter graduate school at University of Akron, Department of History. I would like to single out for special thanks, Professors Constance Bouchard and Walter Hixson, Drs. T.J. Boisseau, Lesley J. Gordon, Janet Klein, and Kevin Kern who provided me with moral and intellectual support, and also to Kym Rohrbach and Wade Wilcox for their attention to detail, their willingness to guide me through the university’s administrative web, and their unfailing friendship. I am also extremely grateful for financial support from the History Department in the form of the Robert W. Little Dissertation Year Fellowship that made the researching and writing of this dissertation possible. I also wish to thank my dissertation committee, Leslie J. Gordon, Walter Hixson, Kevin Kern, and Kathy Feltey for taking time out of their busy vii schedules to offer advice and support, and especially Dr. Kevin Adams who tackled the entire manuscript early in February and offered invaluable criticism. My research benefited tremendously from the technical expertise of Kat Weckbacher and Maryellen Hawthorn who solved computer and formatting emergencies, and Massillon Library genealogist, Jean Adkins who offered me expert advice and directed me to Quaker archival sources at Haverford and Swarthmore Colleges in Pennsylvania. I also owe much gratitude to Cynthia Murphy who kept up my courage, Frances Sorg Sauer who offered me friendship, support, and hospitality at her wonderful house in Florida, and Dr. Hilda Ellis Davidson of Cambridge University who I was always happy to see and honored to know. Immeasurable thanks goes to my dissertation advisor, Dr. TJ Boisseau, whose support extended well beyond that of the original project. Her graciousness of mind, friendship, and invaluable comments inform every page of this paper and made this project possible. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION……………………………………………….….……………...…...1 II. “A TRULY VALUABLE FAMILY” …..……...…………………………….......…..17 Kinship, Piety, and the Business of Marriage………………………….……..........35 Women and community in post-war Newport……………………...……….……..43 III. “RELIGION LOST ALONG THE WAY OR LEFT BEHIND” THE FEMALE EXPERIENCE OF WESTWARD MIGRATION………...………60 “The Dreaded Day has Come at Last.” Women on the overland trail.…………......63 The Female Experience of Homesteading……………………...………………….75 IV. CHARITY AND THOMAS ROTCH IN NEW BEDFORD AND HARTFORD: 1791-1810. A LIFE OF PARALLELS?. ……………………...……………….….96 “No Maps, No Roads, No Outposts: Quakers in Western Pennsylvania……….....106 V. “THEY SPOKE OF GOING TO THE OHIO”: COPING WITH AN UNCERTAIN FUTURE…………………………...………..119 Taking Up the Land………………………………….……………....……..……..128 “Changing the wilderness into a garden”: Working lives at Kendal........................140 A Final Return to New England………….……………………..…….....................169 Closing the Parentheses at Kendal: 1823.…..………………….…….........…….…178 VI. LETTERS FROM THE FRONTIER: DEFINING THE QUAKER FEMALE SELF………………………............……………………….…................182 ix VII. “NO DISTANCE CAN SEPARATE US:’ MAPPING THE RELATIONSHIPS OF QUAKER WOMEN…………….........216 VIII. CONCLUSIONS: QUAKER WOMEN, KINSHIP AND CORESPONDENCE………………………………………..…….……….262 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………….…….….….……268 APPENDICES……………………………………………………………….….……....311 APPENDIX A. GENEALOGICAL CHART OF THE RODMAN FAMILY OF NEWPORT ……………………………………………………………..….......312 APPENDIX B. GENEALOGICAL

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