Lineage as Capital: Genealogy in Antebellum New England

francesca morgan

N 1825, John Farmer, whom some have touted as “the I father of American genealogy,” encouraged his friend Joseph Willard to compose his own “family sketches.” Willard declined. He condemned his extended family as a “degenerate race.” “I have no inclination & feel no necessity to acknowledge kith or kin with any of them,” he explained. “Paul W[illard] is of this clan, a man who has [received] an education & is a sort of higher intelligence amongst them—but he is to me an exceedingly disagreeable man, and I hope you will not pump him in genealogy.” Farmer, who usually celebrated the un- earthing of colonial lineages, reassured Willard that he should feel no compulsion to “acknowledge kith or kin with” family members he disdained. “I did not know,” Farmer wrote, “that the descendants of so worthy an ancestor [as Major Simon Willard] had degenerated. But this need not discourage you, as it is probable they do not know their honorable descent.” If they did not, Farmer implied, those undesirable kin could eas- ily be ignored. Worthless lineages should in no way dissuade

For their help with this article, I wish to thank Sven Beckert, Nancy Isenberg, Susan J. Pearson, Linda Smith Rhoads, Charles R. Steinwedel, Karin A. Wulf, the unnamed reader for the New England Quarterly, and, for a grant in 2006–7, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium. This article also benefits from audience questions at brown-bag lunches in 2006 at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the New Hampshire Historical Society as well as at the 2007 meeting of the Society of Historians of the Early American Republic, Worcester, Mass. I also acknowledge the New Hampshire Historical Society, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society for kindly permitting me to cite and quote from materials in their collections.

The New England Quarterly, vol. LXXXIII, no. 2 (June 2010). C 2010 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. 250

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 251 Willard from constructing a genealogy of which he could be 1 proud. Farmer and Willard’s exchange reveals a good deal about the practice of genealogy in the antebellum United States. Genealogy was then emerging from the long shadow cast by the American Revolution but had yet to achieve the mass appeal it would enjoy in the twentieth century. During the American Revolution, as they threw off monarchical and aristocratic rule, Britain’s rebellious colonists effectively severed lineage from governance. Although some governments within the new United States continued to sustain one emphatically hereditary institution—slavery—Americans consigned genealogy, the 2 study of lineage, to their private lives. Fifty years after the Revolution, however, leisured white men and women in the country’s Northeast, especially in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, where pedigree and power remained particularly intertwined, began to form public institutions devoted to 3 genealogy. Some of those individuals also pursued heraldry,

1 Joseph Willard to John Farmer, 25 December 1825; Farmer to Willard, 31 December 1825,p.2,folder7,box2, John Farmer Papers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. For Farmer as “the father of American genealogy,” see Franc¸ois Weil, “John Farmer and the Making of American Genealogy,” New England Quarterly 80 (September 2007): 418 (quotation); John A. Schutz, A Noble Pursuit: The Sesquicen- tennial History of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1845–1995 (Boston: NEHGS, 1995), p. 18; New England Historical and Genealogical Register 1 (January 1847): 21 (hereafter NEHGR) (“the Father of Genealogy in New England”); “American Genealogy,” Literary World 8 (14 June 1851): 473. 2 Both the Articles of Confederation (1777), article 6, and the U.S. Constitution (1787) (article 1, section 9) specifically outlawed titles of nobility. Personal communi- cation, Sven Beckert, 20 October 2009; Karin A. Wulf, “Representing the Family to the State; or, Lineage in a New Nation” (presented at the 2006 meeting of the Orga- nization of American Historians, Washington, D.C.); Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), pp. 281–316; Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolu- tion: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), esp. pp. 129–60. Throughout the history of slavery in British North America, enslaved people, by law, inherited their slave status from their mothers. See, esp., Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), pp. 128–35; Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 161, 220–57. 3 Paul DiMaggio, “Cultural Entrepreneurship in Nineteenth-Century Boston: The Creation of an Organizational Base for High Culture in America,” Media, Culture and Society 3 (January 1982): 33–50; Peter Dobkin Hall, “What the Merchants Did with

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 252 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the study of family coats-of-arms and crests, to establish their 4 descent from English nobles. “The study of genealogy will never become a popular pur- suit,” a president of the first U.S. organization devoted to genealogy—Boston’s New England Historic Genealogical So- ciety (NEHGS), founded in 1845—emphatically pronounced 5 in 1853. In the antebellum era, genealogy’s exclusivity was in fact its allure, for genealogy affirmed contemporary class distinctions and enhanced the rightful status of elites. But as the Farmer-Willard vignette suggests, genealogy simultaneously

Their Money: Charitable and Testamentary Trusts in Massachusetts, 1780–1880,” in Entrepreneurs: The Boston Business Community, 1700–1850, ed. Conrad Edick Wright and Katheryn P. Viens (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1997), pp. 365–421; Robert F. Dalzell Jr., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987); Richard H. Abbott, Cotton and Capital: Boston Businessmen and Antislavery Reform, 1854–1868 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), esp. pp. 10–11;RonaldStory,The Forging of an Aristoc- racy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1980); P.A. M. Taylor, intro. to More Than Common Powers of Per- ception: The Diary of Elizabeth Rogers Mason Cabot, ed. Taylor (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), pp. 1–30. Antebellum genealogical activity outside of institutions was not limited to New England. A lively genealogical culture existed within the Quaker upper classes of Philadelphia at the nineteenth century’s turn. See Karin A. Wulf, “‘Of the Old Stock’: Quakerism and Transatlantic Genealogies in Colonial British America,” in The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Elizabeth Mancke and Carole Shammas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), pp. 304–20,and“Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: Documenting Culture and Connection in the Revolutionary Era,” in Milcah Martha Moore’s Book: A Commonplace Book from Revolutionary America, ed. Catherine La Courreye Blecki and Wulf (University Park: Pennsylvania State Univer- sity Press, 1997), pp. 14–19; Susan M. Stabile, Memory’s Daughters: The Material Culture of Remembrance in Eighteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), esp. pp. 1, 6–16; Gary B. Nash, First City: Philadelphia and the Forging of Historical Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), pp. 5–6, 133, 157–58, 205–9. Also see Hampton L. Carson, A History of the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1940), 1:79 and elsewhere. 4 “Heraldry,” NEHGR 1 (July 1847): 225. Heraldry has many purposes in addition to representing nobilities. However, nineteenth-century New Englanders focused specif- ically on trying to establish their descent from English families who had undergone “Visitations” by heralds during Henry VIII’s reign (1509–47) in the regime’s attempt “to better regulate the use of [family] arms.” See Erik Eckholm, “A Federal Office Where Heraldry of Yore Is Only Yesterday,” New York Times, 13 June 2006; David T. Thackery, “Back to Adam”: A Survey of Genealogy in the Western World, as Illus- trated in the Collections of the Newberry Library (Chicago: Newberry Library, 1992), pp. 13–14 (quotation). 5 William Whiting, “An Address Delivered to the Members of the New England Historic-Genealogical Society,” NEHGR 7 (April 1853): 106. Whiting was a Boston attorney.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 253 exposed the mutability of social hierarchies. Those who prac- ticed and promoted genealogy were not necessarily engaged with lineage for the same reasons as the elite whose sources they required and whose families they sought to document. This tension between proto-professional concerns and upper- class privilege is evident in the work of five New Englan- ders influential in genealogy’s newly public culture—Farmer, Charles Ewer, Lemuel Shattuck, Eliza Susan Quincy, and Electa Fidelia Jones. All stood at the margins of the social spheres to which they wished to belong. However, their abil- ity to map their seventeenth-century origins as well as their eagerness to publicize that ability afforded them a degree of social capital, capital they could then expend to facilitate re- lationships with other aficionados—individuals often wealth- 6 ier or more influential than they. Among those at the top of class hierarchies, however, even among persons clearly en- tranced by genealogy, publicly airing an interest in lineage was considered declass´ e,´ akin to boasting of one’s wealth, and smacked of the bourgeois sin of social climbing. In an era be- fore public records were widely available, genealogy was more art than science. Its significance as well as its practice was under negotiation.

“Obtaining the Desired Information” Broadly accessible public libraries and archives are a rela- 7 tively modern innovation. Because sources were widely scat- tered in early-nineteenth-century America, historical research

6 My discussion is indebted to Michel Foucault, who posits that official aristocracies’ predilections for genealogy were “transposed” to bourgeoisies. These predilections came to express bourgeois preoccupations with sexuality, the body, and the bour- geoisie’s propagation as a class. See The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, vol. 1, trans. Robert Hurley (1978; reprinted New York: Vintage Books, 1990), pp. 123–27, 135–59. I discuss lineage as social capital also in my “A Noble Pursuit? Bourgeois Amer- ica’s Uses of Lineage,” in Distinction and Identity: Bourgeois Culture in Nineteenth- Century America, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, in press). 7 The U.S. National Archives was established as late as 1932, and the Library of Congress, created in 1802, remained relatively small in the nineteenth century. Public libraries first arose in New England—the Boston Public Library dates from 1852— and spread nationally beginning in the 1870s, but they did not usually emphasize

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 254 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY was laborious and time consuming. Most antebellum geneal- ogists and historians were men above middling station, often pursuing other careers in the professions, the clergy, in pol- itics, and as businessmen. Such men benefited from formal educations and from freedom from financial pressures. Wives, other female kin, and/or servants freed the men from domestic duties and allowed them the leisure to indulge their interests. The few women who published their historical or genealogical research were single or, if married, childless; were not obliged to care for ill or elderly relatives; and were not compelled 8 to earn their own livings. Although antebellum genealogy re- quired free time, it was not solely the domain of the idle. Merchants, industrialists, and others with crowded schedules allotted time to investigate lineage when they wanted to. In early-nineteenth-century New England, colonial docu- ments were concentrated among wealthy collectors, descen- dants who had inherited the materials, restrictive private groups

the collection of sources favored by genealogical researchers. See Haynes McMullen, American Libraries before 1876 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000), pp. 37, 123, 130; Hawthorne Daniel, Public Libraries for Everyone: The Growth and Devel- opment of Library Services in the United States (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & Company, 1961), pp. 7–14; Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, pp. 152–53. 8 In addition to the two women discussed below, Caroline Frances Orne (1818–1905) of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, and Frances Mainwaring Caulkins of Connecticut (1795–1869) also remained single. On the strength of her book-length his- tories of Norwich, Connecticut (1845), and New London (1852), Caulkins became the first woman elected into membership in the invitation-only Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS); no other woman gained membership until 1966. A Boston genealogist of the 1830s, Catharine Haven Palmer (b. 1774), reported no children of her own while extensively recounting her own and her husband’s lineages. Euphemia Vale Smith (later Blake) (1817–1904), who published a book-length history of Newburyport, Massachusetts, in 1854, also reported no children. See “Cambridge Women’s Heritage Project Database,” http://www.cambridgema.gov/cwhp/bios o.html, updated 27 March 2007, accessed 19 February 2010; Louis Leonard Tucker, The Massachusetts Historical Society: A Bicentennial History, 1791–1991 (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1995), pp. 57–58; Henry P. Haven, “Miss Frances Mainwaring Caulkins,” NEHGR 23 (October 1869): 396–407; Thaddeus William Harris to Henry Bond, 22 June 1854, folder 31, subgroup 3,box9, Henry Bond Papers, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston; Catharine Palmer to John Farmer, 31 January 1831,folder1,box 4; Joseph Willard to Farmer, 10 March 1834,folder3,box5, both in Farmer Papers; W. Stewart Wallace, A Dictionary of North American Authors Deceased Before 1950 (Toronto: Ryerson Press, 1951), p. 46; Chris H., “Euphemia Vale Blake,” http://www.findagrave.com/cgibin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GSln=Blake&GScnty=2001&GRid =39151121&, updated 6 July 2009, accessed 21 August 2009.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 255 such as the invitation-only Massachusetts Historical Society, 9 and town hall and church storage areas. Access to such sources was contingent on knowing the right people—not to men- tion on the researcher’s own stature—and was often granted 10 on the basis of personal whim. Eliza Susan Quincy of Boston was able to establish kin ties between her own seventeenth- century forebear Edmund Quincy and prominent Puritan Daniel Gookin when she consulted “the Diary of C.J. Sewall.— lent to us with free permission to copy [marriage notices] by 11 Rev. Mr. Sewall of Burlington [Massachusetts] in 1836.” To perform background research for the work that would become his Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England (1829), John Farmer noted to a friend that “if we were to frame a suitable letter to [New Hampshire] Gov. [William] Plumer, he would willingly afford us his voluminous materials, to use so 12 much as would comport with our own design.” When researching early New England, genealogists and his- torians supplemented formal written sources with what they called “tradition”—family lore obtained from descendants, in oral or written form—and they used each type of source to con- 13 firm the information derived from the other. As with formal

9 Weil, “John Farmer,” pp. 425–26; Tucker, Massachusetts Historical Society, esp. pp. 23, 36–37, 265, on the MHS’s exclusivity. Regarding municipal records in Massachusetts, the state legislature (at the MHS’s behest) began in 1849 to rectify this situation by requiring municipalities to keep and safeguard records, open them to public inspection, prevent their removal, and allow copies to be made. Tucker, Massachusetts Historical Society, pp. 65–66. 10 In the preface to his history of Concord, Massachusetts, Lemuel Shattuck ex- plained that although Concord was first settled in the 1630s, all proceedings of town meetings prior to 1696, and all church proceedings prior to 1738, had been lost. He relied instead on county records, state records, “the private papers of individuals, and various other scattered fragments of traditionary, manuscript, and printed history,” as well as on an “old volume, containing an imperfect record” he had found in the town clerk’s office. See A History of Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, from its Earliest Settlement to 1832 . . . (Boston: Russell, Odiorne, and Company/Concord, Mass.: John Stacy, 1835), pp. iii–iv. 11 Gookin’s daughter Elizabeth became Edmund Quincy’s second wife. Eliza Susan Quincy to Samuel A. Drake, 22 September 1873, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, microfilm edition, 67 reels (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1977), reel 61. 12 John Farmer to John Kelly, 25 March 1825,p.2,folder1,box2, Farmer Papers. 13 Lemuel Shattuck remarked in 1835 that “Traditions . . . should be depended upon only as leading the investigator towards the truth, which, on further inquiry

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 256 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY sources, access to “tradition” depended on the status of the re- searcher and the wishes of the person conveying the informa- tion, especially when access entailed face-to-face meetings. For example, when Samuel Deane approached eighty-four-year-old Abigail Wilson in 1831 to inquire about the eighteenth-century ancestors of a friend, he could explain that he had already published a book-length history of her town, Scituate, Mas- 14 sachusetts. To remedy difficulties in accumulating source materials, his- torians and genealogists took action. The NEHGS’s first circular to its members (1845) posited that “the sources of informa- tion, by the death of elderly persons, and the destruction of records, are daily being lessened, and soon it will be impossi- 15 ble to obtain the desired information at all.” The NEHGS, the American Antiquarian Society (formed in 1812), the New Hampshire Historical Society (1823), and other historical asso- ciations established themselves as libraries and launched peri- odicals dedicated to publishing old documents as well as new findings. Historians and genealogists were convinced that hous- ing sources in such new repositories effectively protected and preserved them and that gathering them together in a lim- 16 ited number of places facilitated research. However, their

and comparison of different traditions with records, may be discovered” (History of Concord, p. iv). See also Weil, “John Farmer,” pp. 425–26. To this day, some historians make use of lore obtained from descendants of their subjects in concert with more formal sources. See Alfred F. Young, Masquerade: The Life and Times of Deborah Sampson, Continental Soldier (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004); Young includes a photograph of a twentieth-century descendant who bore some resemblance to Sampson (p. 45). 14 Samuel Deane to James Savage, 21 April 1831, 1830–1831 folder, box 1,James Savage Papers, MHS; Samuel Deane, History of Scituate, Massachusetts, from Its First Settlement to 1831 (Boston: James Loring, 1831) (with “family sketches” on pp. 211– 394). 15 Samuel G. Drake to William Jenks, circular enclosed, 4 June 1845, William Jenks Papers: Additions (1802–1879), 1845–49 folder, MHS. See also Weil, “John Farmer,” p. 415. 16 To the horror of the Boston attorney James Savage, irreplaceable historical doc- uments, including a portion of John Winthrop’s original journal, were destroyed when Savage’s office caught fire in 1825. The New Hampshire Historical Society was among many similar organizations that were attempting to raise funds for fireproof buildings. See John Farmer to John Kelly, 12 November 1825,p.3,folder7,box2, and Richard Bartlett to Farmer, 6 August 1836,folder24,box5, Farmer Papers; Richard S. Dunn,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 257 efforts also unintentionally destabilized the social distinctions that practitioners assigned to prominent colonists and that they themselves wished to embrace. To be sure, the organizations restricted access to their collections to members and others who 17 bore appropriate references. But the groups’ periodicals and other publications allowed a broader audience to view and con- sult documents, thus expanding the pool of people able to perform historical and genealogical research and thereby con- siderably diminishing the exclusivity of the endeavor. Myriad histories of individual New England towns that were published in antebellum times had a similar effect, for authors routinely 18 quoted old documents at length. In short, the practice of history and genealogy in antebellum New England was still restricted to those who had the leisure to pursue it. But it was also expanding beyond a mere gentlemanly exercise. Anyone who had the capacity and the contacts to make pointed inquiries and to place them within a context of already published materials could try his or her hand at research. As it turned out, some of those most attracted to publishing ge- nealogical findings lived at the edges of the social stratum to which they aspired to belong. The individual most responsi- ble for institutionalizing private-sector genealogy in the United States—John Farmer of Concord, New Hampshire—suffered from disabling illnesses, including tuberculosis, that ren- dered him an invalid, prevented him from marrying, and even- tually ended his life. He performed his research using the mail 19 and with the help of friends more mobile than he. Two other

intro. to The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630–1649, ed. Dunn, James Savage, and Laetitia Yeandle (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), pp. xi–xiii. 17 As of 1870, nonmembers could use the NEHGS’s library if they presented “satis- factory testimonials” to the librarian—satisfactory in the librarian’s eyes. See “By-Laws,” NEHGR 24 (April 1870): 220. 18 Weil, “John Farmer,” esp. pp. 415–18; Joseph A. Conforti, Imagining New England: Explorations of Regional Identity from the Pilgrims to the Mid–Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 193. 19 John Le Bosquet, A Memorial, With Reminiscences, Personal, Historical, and Characteristic, of John Farmer, A. M. (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1884), pp. 71, 131; Weil, “John Farmer,” pp. 420–21. Farmer and his friend John Kelly spoke about how a stagecoach driver named Clark, who delivered their missives and packages,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 258 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY zealous genealogists, Eliza Susan Quincy of Boston and Electa Fidelia Jones of Stockbridge, Massachusetts, never wed but instead devoted themselves to their families’ past rather than 20 producing children for their future. Among the five founders of the NEHGS in 1845 were two Bostonians, Charles Ewer (the group’s first president) and the legislator and historian Lemuel Shattuck (the first vice president), who were plagued by finan- cial insecurity. Farmer, Quincy, Jones, Ewer, and Shattuck all believed that their lineages, once documented and published, would do a great deal to elevate their social status.

“I Have Found One Fortune in My Ancestry” John Farmer.—At the age of nineteen, John Farmer (1789– 1838) joined the ranks of the many Americans who were pub- lishing brief genealogies of their own families, most intended 21 for those families alone. Twenty-one years later Farmer

preferred his payment or reward in “Turkey Opium” rather than Shaker Opium (both also used by doctors at the time). John Farmer to John Kelly, 25 December 1823,p.1, folder 15,box1, Farmer Papers. 20 Historians of single women have argued powerfully against portraying them as marginalized, instead associating singleness with female independence and community feeling; they have also cautioned against replicating contemporary discourses against unmarried women. Single women, especially in urban environments, may have been more numerous than contemporaries supposed. Karin A. Wulf, Not All Wives: Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 6–12, 201;Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984); Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Christine Jacobson Carter, Southern Single Blessedness: Unmarried Women in the Urban South, 1800–1865 (Urbana: Uni- versity of Illinois Press, 2006). Yet antebellum genealogists of both sexes, including those who were single, were complicit in granting marriage its dominion. 21 Handwritten record on Richardson genealogy, inscribed to Mr. Josiah S. Richardson by John Farmer (1808) (copy in New Hampshire Historical Society); A Family Register of the Descendants of Edward Farmer, of Billerica, in the Youngest Branch of His Family (Concord, N.H.: n.p., 1813); Weil, “John Farmer,” p. 419.The earliest such works published in British North America are Memoirs of Capt. Roger Clap (Boston: B. Green, 1731), and Luke Stebbins, A Genealogy of the Family of Mr. Samuel Stebbins and Mrs. Hannah Stebbins, His Wife, from the Year 1707, to the Year 1771 . . . (Hartford, Conn.: printed by E[benezer] Watson, for the use of the descendants now living, 1771); D. Brenton Simons, “New England Family Record Broadsides and Portraiture, and the Letterpress Artist of Connecticut,” in The Art of Family: Genealogical Artifacts in New England, ed. Simons and Peter Benes (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2002), pp. 91–113.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 259 broadened his horizons considerably when he published his pioneering Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England.The1829 Register was the first U.S. genealogical pub- lication not devoted to a single family only as well as an early Western example of a genealogical work aimed at an audience 22 beyond a family circle. Farmer hoped that his compendium, which listed the descendants of the prominent white settlers of the colonies of Plymouth, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire from 1620 through 1692, would spark further genealogical re- search by those of seventeenth-century descent. After the Reg- ister appeared, Farmer continued to gather information and had planned to publish a revised edition. Before he could do 23 so, however, he died. Farmer seems to have enjoyed some degree of economic comfort. He did not live with family members but instead paid a succession of women to supply his lodging, board, and 24 considerable nursing needs. How he came to provide for him- self is not revealed in surviving records. He had been born into a farming family that had long owned its land, and he was proud that he had grown up in the same Chelmsford, Massachusetts, house that had sheltered Farmers in the seventeenth

22 Weil, “John Farmer,” pp. 420–22, 428–30; Schutz, A Noble Pursuit, pp. 18, 228; Jacob B. Moore, “Memoir of John Farmer, M.A.,” NEHGR 1 (January 1847): 15– 16. The compilation of noble pedigrees in Britain began only around 1769. The first edition of Burke’s Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Peerage, Baronetage and Knightage was published in 1826—only three years before Farmer’s Register.See Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 302 (n. 40). I thank Susan J. Pearson for this reference. 23 John Farmer, A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New-England (Lancaster, Mass.: Carter, Andrews, & Co., 1829), p. v, and elsewhere. The Bosto- nians who founded the NEHGS in 1845 referred to Farmer’s work as their inspiration (NEHGR 1 [January 1847]: 21). Farmer’s friend James Savage, one-time president of the MHS, published a four-volume revision of Farmer’s Register after decades of effort (James Savage, A Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, Showing Three Generations of Those Who Came Before May 1692, on the Basis of Farmer’s “Register,” 4 vols. [Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1860–62]; see also James Savage to Sylvester Judd, 17 July 1847, 1846–47 folder, box 2, Savage Papers). 24 The women with whom he boarded are not mentioned as his kin, so I presume that money changed hands. See Biographical Sketch (probably by Thomas E. Camden, 1982), finding aid folder, Farmer Papers; Le Bosquet, A Memorial, pp. 36–37, 96, 101; Mary Clark to Isaac Spalding, 22 September 1836,folder25, and John Farmer to Mrs. Lucy Spalding, 7 December 1836,folder27,box5, Farmer Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 260 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY 25 century. However, his lack of a college education, his ear- lier years behind store counters, a brief stint in debtors’ prison at age twenty-one, and his illnesses set Farmer apart from the Harvard- and Dartmouth-educated jurists and politicians who were his closest friends and fellow researchers as well as from the seventeenth-century ministers, officeholders, and military 26 leaders whom he admired. Still, Farmer could trace his descent from long-ago “worthies” and college graduates. He showed interest in heraldry in trying to link his own and others’ ancestors to English nobility, and he encouraged others to research the seventeenth century by 27 furnishing them with tools such as the Register. These ac- tivities helped him bridge the social distance between himself and more prominent acquaintances. He corresponded with at least one ex-governor of New Hampshire, who addressed him 28 without condescension. He found his close friends among, and assembled his wider community from, individuals who

25 His father had been a “tiller of the soil” and a church deacon (Le Bosquet, A Memorial, pp. 11–12). Farmer referred in 1836 to the “old family seat of the Farmers . . . which has been in possession 163 years” (John Farmer to Miles Farmer, 15 November 1836,folder26,box5, Farmer Papers). 26 Farmer’s formal education ended when he was sixteen, although Dartmouth Col- lege later awarded him an honorary degree. He landed in debtors’ prison over an obligation (shared with two others) to Isaac Chickering of thirty-four dollars. Later in life, Farmer filled seven closely handwritten volumes with information on colonial-era graduates of Harvard College, and he compiled similar information on Dartmouth graduates (mentoring a student there in his quest for information and access to the Dartmouth library). See Le Bosquet, A Memorial, p. 17; copy of document (1810) from Amherst (N.H.) Town Library, finding aid folder; “Memoirs of the Graduates of Harvard College, 17th and 18th Centuries,” box 6, Farmer Papers; John Farmer to Cyrus Parker Bradley, 21 September 1835,folder4,box1, Cyrus Parker Bradley Pa- pers, New Hampshire Historical Society, Concord. Not until 1873 did Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley begin publishing his multivolume Biographical Sketches of Grad- uates of Harvard University. Conrad Edick Wright discusses college education as a mark of social distinction among men in eighteenth-century New England in his Revo- lutionary Generation: Harvard Men and the Consequences of Independence (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), pp. 11–29, 241 (n. 1). 27 “Worthies” in John Farmer to John Kelly, 24 July 1824,p.1,folder18,box1, Farmer Papers. Farmer’s interest in heraldry appears in his own notations on the back of Rev. William Farmer to John Farmer, 24 August 1822,p.4,folder8,box1,and John Farmer to John Kelly, 19 October 1822,p.2,folder9,box1, and William Farmer to John Farmer, 3 May 1826,folder11,box2, Farmer Papers. 28 William Plumer to John Farmer, 28 February 1823,folder10,box1,Farmer Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 261 also boasted prominent seventeenth-century ancestors and who hoped to learn more about them. He used the same creden- tials to contact strangers, creating familiarity on the basis of a shared interest in colonial lineages. Farmer performed the initial research for his Register by identifying men whose sur- names matched those of the leaders of seventeenth-century Plymouth, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire. He then wrote these individuals, most of whom he did not know, for infor- mation about their paternal ancestry, flattering them that they, along with their forebears, would be listed in his forthcoming 29 publication. Farmer’s political predilections also reflected his social ambitions. Along with friends more advantaged than he, he be- moaned the decline and fall of Federalism and the rise of early- nineteenth-century democracy. He was particularly disturbed by the ascendance of Andrew Jackson, who much to Farmer’s dismay was highly popular in his own state of New Hampshire. Farmer’s close friend Joseph Willard—an attorney, historian, and son of a Harvard president of the same name—rejoiced in 1820 that the amended Massachusetts state constitution did not allow for universal male suffrage, for such measures “are mighty pleasant sounds to some people—but death and destruction is 30 inherent in them.” Reacting to Andrew Jackson’s reelection in 1832, Farmer wailed, “The Election! the election—alas for our 31 country. Infatuation precedes destruction.” He later shared with his friend a telling anecdote about a newcomer to the New Hampshire state legislature who “had an impression that the

29 The printed circular sent by Farmer to James Savage (with Farmer filling in the name “Savage” by hand) read in part: “I shall feel greatly obliged to you to send me such information, as you may possess and can obtain respecting all persons, living and deceased, by the name of [Savage] . . . who have had a publick education, or have been distinguished as statesmen, lawyers, divines, physicians, or who have figured in the military, judicial, civil, or literary history of New-England” (John Farmer to James Savage, 16 March 1825, 1825 folder, box 1, Savage Papers; see also J. E. Worcester to Farmer, 3 April 1826,folder10,box2, Farmer Papers). Some men contacted offered information on maternal lines as well as on their paternal ancestry. See Thaddeus M. Harris to Joseph Low, 16 February 1829,folder2,box3, Farmer Papers, and also Weil, “John Farmer,” pp. 421–23. 30 Joseph Willard to John Farmer, 1 January 1821,p.3,folder5,box1,Farmer Papers. 31 Farmer to Willard, 20 November 1832,p.3,folder18,box4, Farmer Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 262 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY laws were made at the State House, but he found himself mis- taken in that they were manufactured at the Eagle Hotel! . . . 32 where the party holds their nightly cabals.” As early as 1834, Farmer espoused a potent abolitionism of the Garrisonian variety. He advocated eradicating slavery throughout the United States; emphatically rejected coloniza- tion, which would compel free blacks to migrate to Africa; and 33 denounced racial prejudice. He cheered news that acquain- tances were concealing fugitive slaves, and he helped found the New Hampshire Anti-Slavery Society, of which he was corre- 34 sponding secretary. He was well enough to attend an 1836 meeting of the society at which an enemy of the proceedings threw a “large stone” through a window. The stone almost hit the evening’s speaker, and the society’s president suffered a shard of broken glass in his eye. This stone, Farmer opined, was “intended to harm, if not to kill,” but it ultimately pro- moted the abolitionist cause in New Hampshire by serving as “the means of increasing the funds of the Society [by] one, if 35 not two, hundred dollars” in pledges. No evidence survives to suggest that Farmer drew a connec- tion between his interest in abolitionism, which seems to have stemmed primarily from his religious convictions, and his pas- 36 sion for genealogy. He did not dwell on slavery’s destruction

32 Farmer to Willard, 28 December 1832,folder19,box4, Farmer Papers. 33 Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), discusses abolitionism’s attack on racial prejudice as well as categories within abolitionism. See in the Farmer Papers: William Lloyd Garrison to John Farmer, 8 August 1835,folder16; Farmer to Joseph Willard, 19 September 1835,folder17,box5. See also Farmer to Cyrus Parker Bradley, 30 March 1837,folder4,box1, Bradley Papers (Farmer asked a student at Dartmouth for news of a “colored” student there. His presence “is a very important step in the cause of our colored brethren,” he opined). 34 John Farmer to Joseph H. Kimball, 6 September 1836,folder25,box5,Farmer Papers; “Scope and Content Note” accompanying Farmer Papers (probably by Thomas E. Camden, 1982). 35 John Farmer to Cyrus Parker Bradley, 3 June 1836, pp. 1–2,folder4,box1, Bradley Papers. Stephen Lawrence Cox, “Power, Oppression, and Liberation: New Hampshire Abolitionism and the Radical Critique of Slavery, 1825–1850” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 1980), discusses anti-abolitionism (including violence) in the state on pp. 98–121. 36 “The judgments of God seem to be visiting our guilty nation for its oppressions. Greater ones than those we have experienced are doubtless in reserve unless we repent

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 263 of families and its violations of kinship, nor on slavery’s resis- tance to the dictates of genealogy. Genealogy was then gov- erned by the concern to document marriages and births within wedlock. “[G]enealogical trees do not flourish among slaves,” 37 Frederick Douglass would later state flatly.

Eliza Susan Quincy.—In contrast to the socially ambitious Farmer, Eliza Susan Quincy (1798–1884), scion of a mon- eyed and talented Boston family, might seem to fit squarely within her social class. But Quincy was a single woman, and she sought to document and publicize the accomplishments of others, particularly those of her family, to achieve recognition for herself. In her correspondence and other writings, Quincy resembles a lion at the gate, guarding her kinsmen’s consider- able reputations. She revered her colonial forebears and glo- ried in her descent from them because those ties announced her family’s possession of forms of capital more lasting and more enviable than money. In addition to issuing “memoirs” of her mother, paternal grandfather, and first paternal ances- tor to arrive in North America, Quincy performed research or provided information for others’ histories, including Justin 38 Winsor’s multivolume Memorial History of Boston (1884).

and obey the command of Jehovah, ‘Let my people go.’ Will any among you say the colored people are not the people of Jehovah?” In opposition to a Professor Stuart, who argued that the New Testament recognized slavery, Farmer wrote, “Our pro-slavery ecclesiastics...seemtooverlooktheroyallaworthelawoflove,‘Thoushaltlove thy neighbor as thyself.’ It appears to me that this precept ‘cuts the band asunder at once.’” See John Farmer to Mrs. S. [Lucy Spalding], 28 May 1837,p.3,folder3,box 6, Farmer Papers; Farmer to Cyrus Parker Bradley, 17 June 1837,p.2,folder4,box 1, Bradley Papers, and also Le Bosquet, A Memorial, pp. 107, 116. 37 Frederick Douglass, “My Bondage and My Freedom” (1855), in Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Library of America, 1994), p. 140;CherylA.Wall,Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage, and Literary Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), p. 10. “What tangled skeins are the genealogies of slavery!” the ex-slave Harriet Jacobs reflected upon her daughter’s christening. The child’s middle name was “the surname of my father, who had himself no legal right to it; for my grandfather on the paternal side was a white gentleman” (Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself [1861; New York: Penguin Books, 2000], p. 88). 38 Eliza Susan Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Eliza S. M. Quincy (Boston: John Wilson and Son, 1861); Eliza Susan Quincy to Justin Winsor, 17 April 1880,andQuincyto

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 264 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY She also contacted other historians and genealogists, including John Farmer, to correct or supply details about the Quincy 39 family. Why Quincy never married is unclear, but it is difficult to imagine a suitor who could have measured up to her percep- tions of her kin. Although she enjoyed warm relations with both of her parents, she was especially close to her father, Josiah Quincy Jr.—a major congressional opponent of the War of 1812, a popular mayor of Boston, and a longtime president 40 of Harvard University. Quincy devoted four years of labor to her father’s history of Harvard (1840), for which she also con- 41 tributed illustrations and the index. The abolitionist Edmund Quincy, named for the family’s first ancestor to arrive in North America, and another Boston mayor, also named Josiah Quincy, were her brothers. Josiah Quincy was also the name of her paternal grandfather, a patriot pamphleteer who had died a 42 martyr in 1775 at the dawn of the Revolution. Eliza Susan Quincy’s enthusiasm for genealogy was manifest at the age of twenty-two, when she first began “to prepare a Memoir” of the grandfather she had never met “& write an account of his an- 43 cestors.” Concerned about standards, Quincy later privately

Winsor, 3 March 1881, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 63. Beverly Wilson Palmer, intro. to A Woman’s Wit and Whimsy: The 1833 Diary of Anna Cabot Lowell Quincy, ed. Palmer (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), pp. 3–4, discusses the Quincy family’s wealth and prominence. 39 Eliza Quincy to James Savage, 25 September 1835,folder17,box5,Farmer Papers. 40 Josiah Quincy served six one-year terms as Boston’s mayor (1823–29)andsix- teen years as Harvard’s president (1829–45). See Thomas H. O’Connor, The Athens of America: Boston, 1825–1845 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006), pp. 23–40; “Death of Josiah Quincy,” Boston Globe, 2 July 1864, scrapbook, vol. 1, p. 3, Quincy Family Papers, MHS. 41 Eliza Susan Quincy to Samuel A. Drake, 22 September 1873, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 61; Josiah Quincy Jr., preface to History of Harvard University, 2 vols. (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, Lee, & Co., 1860), 1:xiii–xiv. 42 Eliza Susan Quincy to George L. Gill, 12 September 1881, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 64 (on maintaining the monument marking her grandfather’s grave). Goodman, Of One Blood, pp. 98–99, 140, discusses Edmund Quincy’s abolitionism. 43 Eliza Susan Quincy to Justin Winsor, 18 November 1881, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 64. Also at a young age, Quincy exchanged warm letters with her remote relative former president John Quincy Adams (the

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 265 criticized a relative’s biography of his own famous grandfather 44 as not “well done.—there is a want of tact about it.” Quincy was keenly filiopietistic. In 1833 she helped gather three generations of Quincys at a coastal estate the family had owned since 1635 to celebrate the bicentenary of Edmund 45 and Judith Quincy’s arrival on Massachusetts shores. Well into the 1850s, she faithfully observed Forefathers’ Day (22 December), “the day consecrated on the calendar of New En- gland,” a holiday invented at the turn of the nineteenth cen- 46 tury to commemorate the Mayflower’s landing. In addition to her painstaking research on her seventeenth-century fore- bears, Quincy also attempted to establish her family’s ties to sixteenth-century English nobility by investigating shared sur- names and examining the Quincy family “arms” that had been 47 passed down through North American generations. Quincy pursued lines of maternal descent as well as paternal, and she took pride in uncovering the first names and maiden 48 surnames of women who had married her male ancestors. Tracking maternal ancestry, as well as the wives and female kin of paternal ancestors, was a difficult enterprise, and for some genealogists it presented an intriguing challenge. Colonial an- cestors and their nineteenth-century descendants inhabited a

great-grandfathers of Quincy and Adams had been half-brothers), who imparted to her a keen affection for both genealogy and heraldry of the Quincy family. Later in life, Quincy credited Adams with sparking her interest. John Quincy Adams to Eliza Susan Quincy, 9 December 1831, and Quincy to Samuel A. Drake, 19 May 1873, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reels 44 and 61. 44 Eliza Susan Quincy to George E. Ellis, 11 July 1864, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 57. Quincy was referring to Charles Francis Adams, grandson of President John Adams. 45 Quincy family proclamation, 4 September 1833, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 44. 46 Eliza Susan Quincy to Robert C. Winthrop, 22 December 1853, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 53; John Seelye, Memory’s Nation: The Place of Plymouth Rock (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), pp. 41–100. 47 Eliza Susan Quincy to Samuel A. Drake, 19 May 1873, Margaret de Quincey to Quincy, 25 October 1844, and Anna Quincy Waterston to Quincy, 14 October 1858, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reels 61, 48,and55. 48 Eliza Quincy to James Savage, 25 September 1835,folder17,box5,Farmer Papers; Quincy to Mary Quincy Gould, 2 March 1879, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 62.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 266 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY patrilineal culture. As women married, their identities trans- ferred from family to family like the furniture and other mov- able objects that often constituted their inheritance. Women who remained single were assumed to be childless, and they were represented on family trees and charts as bare stumps, just like children who had died before they were able to marry 49 and reproduce. Eliza Susan Quincy lived comfortably, to be sure. Her single- ness and childlessness, along with a retinue of servants, freed her from tasks that would otherwise have trimmed her his- 50 torical and genealogical activities. Yet like any woman living within the legal construct of coverture, she possessed a much more tenuous relationship to her family’s status than did her 51 brothers, both Harvard graduates. Coverture stripped mar- ried women of their independent legal identities and of any legal authority over their own or family property, but the con- sequent barriers to female citizenship—as well as customs gov- erning private entities—affected women regardless of marital 52 status. Eliza Susan Quincy’s papers expose an autodidact hun- gry for more education. Living in Harvard Yard a half-century before the Harvard Annex, later renamed Radcliffe College, was established in 1879, Eliza Susan and her three sisters, the “articulate” daughters of the popular president, could avail themselves only of the university’s social, not its intellectual, 53 advantages.

49 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Creating Lineages,” and Jane Cayford Nylander, “Pre- serving a Legacy,” in The Art of Family, ed. Simons and Benes, pp. 5–11, 201–21; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), pp. 108–41, esp. pp. 133–35. 50 Palmer, in A Woman’s Wit and Whimsy, p. 21, lists the family’s six servants as of 1833 (when Quincy lived with her parents). 51 “Hon. Josiah Quincy,” 4 July 1864, Boston Daily Advertiser, scrapbook, vol. 1, p. 9, Quincy Papers. 52 See, esp., Linda K. Kerber, “No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies”: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998). 53 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Introduction: Rewriting Harvard’s History,” and Sally Schrager, “Taking Up the Challenge: The Origins of Radcliffe,” in Yards and Gates: Gender in Harvard and Radcliffe History, ed. Ulrich (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), pp. 4, 88; M. A. DeWolfe Howe, The Articulate Sisters: Passages from Jour- nals and Letters of the Daughters of President Josiah Quincy of Harvard University (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), pp. 38–39. Location of president’s

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 267 Although a well-to-do girl of Quincy’s generation could ex- pect to attend one of the country’s many female academies, some families of means, including Quincy’s, considered such 54 prospects vulgar or, at best, unnecessary. Eliza Susan’s own father was so opposed to the “public education” of young women that he shuttered a girls’ high school while he was mayorofBostoninthe1820s. Except for Eliza Susan’s much- younger sister Anna, who at fifteen attended a French school in Boston for a year, the Quincy girls were educated at home 55 by their mother. Quincy’s eagerness to express her filiopietism in print sug- gests that she wanted recognition beyond what she might ex- pect from her family. She published multiple works on her 56 ancestors, including a piece in the NEHGS’s periodical. She personally subsidized reprinting her “memoir” of her Revolu- tionary grandfather, in which she bowdlerized his writings to 57 burnish his historical reputation. Even though Quincy—or, more accurately, her clan—was of Boston’s upper class, her highly public genealogical activity offered her a form of social

house in Palmer, A Woman’s Wit and Whimsy, p. 31; Harvard University, Office of the University Marshal, http://www.marshal.harvard.edu/history.html, accessed 18 February 2010. 54 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), p. 4. 55 Much of Eliza Susan Morton Quincy’s tutoring of her daughters consisted of reading aloud works by Shakespeare, Milton, and English-speaking poets of more recent times. The Quincy sons attended “public schools” before going on to Harvard. Anna Quincy (later Waterston), born 1812, was fifteen years younger than Eliza Susan, her oldest sister. See Palmer, intro. to A Woman’s Wit and Whimsy, pp. 5–6; Quincy, Memoir of Eliza S. M. Quincy, p. 101. 56 “Notes and Queries,” NEHGR 36 (July 1882): 318–19; Eliza Susan Quincy, Mem- oir of Edmund Quincy (1681–1738) of Braintree, Massachusetts Bay (Boston: Press of David Clapp & Son, 1884); also published in NEHGR 38 (April 1884): 146–56. 57 The Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy was first published in 1825, when Quincy was twenty-seven, under the name of Quincy’s father. Quincy herself published a revised and expanded version under her own name in the 1870s. She redacted her grandfather’s journals to the point that the MHS published a full version of those journals in 1916. For example, Quincy considered it beneath her grandfather’s dignity to have it known that he relished theatrical performances while visiting New York. She omitted his statement that he would attend the theater every night if he could, if staying for a month. Eliza Susan Quincy, Memoir of the Life of Josiah Quincy, Junior, of Massachusetts, by His Son, Josiah Quincy (Boston: J. Wilson and Son, 1874); Howe, Articulate Sisters, p. 45.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 268 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY capital that could compensate for her lack of education, career opportunities, and the professional respect denied to women of her status. She did not produce offshoots on the family tree, but she did, in the end, engage in acts of reproduction. Through her correspondence, publications, and contributions to others’ research, she propagated her family’s considerable reputation.

Electa Fidelia Jones.—While Quincy was issuing book-length publications on her family, Electa Fidelia Jones (b. 1805)was working on a history of her native town—Stockbridge, in west- 58 ern Massachusetts—from colonial times forward. Jones did not marry, and she looked backward, not forward, to con- struct her family of choice. She compared her “Puritan blood” to a “magnetic wire”: “it vibrates to the touch & speaks at its furthest extremity, if there is but an ear there which can 59 understand its ticking, & appreciate it.” In part, Jones’s in- tense engagement with her lineage was rooted in her religious convictions. A Sunday School teacher and captain of a “Tract District,” presumably the area in which she and those she su- pervised were to distribute Christian tracts, she hoped to prove that her direct ancestors had migrated from England during the planting of seventeenth-century towns and that they “were among those who founded that model colony [of Watertown, Massachusetts].” If she were able to establish that connec- tion, Jones believed, she would thereby be “included in that Covenant which they signed under the trees . . . binding them- selves & their posterity, ‘not only those here with us this day, but even such as shall yet be born,’ to live in fellowship with 60 God, &withone another.” Like John Farmer and Eliza Susan Quincy, Electa Jones set a value on her ancestry, which, in her opinion, reinforced

58 Electa F. Jones, Stockbridge, Past and Present; or, Records of an Old Mission Station (Springfield, Mass.: S. Bowles & Co., 1854). Modern-day library catalogs list Jones’s birthdate as 1806, but she herself indicated that she was born in 1805.Electa F. Jones to Henry Bond, 21 December 1848,p.6,folder35, subgroup 3,box9,Bond Papers. 59 Jones to Bond, 25 December 1848,p.4,folder35, subgroup 3,box9,Bond Papers. 60 Jones to Bond, 4 January 1849,p.1,folder35, subgroup 3,box9, Bond Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 269 her faith. Documented blood ties, which offered a form of social capital, were more precious than material wealth. Jones rejoiced when she discovered that she and another genealogy aficionado were fourth cousins. “When people have asked me if we were heirs to the Dudley Fortune, I have told them that I have found one fortune in my ancestry, and was going to take possession of another by claiming all the good cousins I could find—fortunes, received in a currency which would not 61 depreciate.”

Charles Ewer and Lemuel Shattuck.—For Charles Ewer (1790–1853) and Lemuel Shattuck (1793–1859), two of the five cofounders of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, genealogy was a refuge from a stormy antebellum economy. Both men had experienced financial setbacks, and their documented lineages provided the social capital that boosted their self-esteem as well as their standing vis-a-vis` their 62 peers. Ewer, the first president of the NEHGS, was well con- nected. His cousin Samuel Turell Armstrong was a governor of Massachusetts and mayor of Boston. For much of his life, however, Ewer suffered from what a sympathetic contemporary called “pecuniary embarrassments,” among them the demise of his antiquarian bookstore in 1829 and frustrations regarding 63 real estate. When he sent one of his old suits to an elderly relative in New Hampshire in 1839, Ewer sighed, “Owing to the many and great lapses which I have met with during the last ten or twelve years I have been obliged to wear my clothes

61 Jones to Bond, 15 January [1849], pp. 1–2,folder35, subgroup 3,box9, Bond Papers. Her reference to the “Dudley fortune” likely pertains to the 1822 claim by an unnamed descendant of colonial Massachusetts governor Thomas Dudley that the governor’s father had been the Duke of Leicester. Contemporary histori- ans and genealogists, including John Farmer, expressed doubt. Weil, “John Farmer,” p. 427. 62 See Scott A. Sandage’s masterful meditation Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). 63 Memorial Biographies of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, vol. 2, 1853–55 (Boston: NEHGS, 1881), pp. 116, 118, 119 (quotation from Rev. Samuel H. Riddel), 120–39; Weil, “John Farmer,” p. 432.

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64 so long that when cast off, they have not been worth much.” In the course of arranging his own papers, Ewer linked his own “lapses” with a larger one committed by his grandfather Silas Ewer. In Charles’s account, Silas, “unhappily being of an enthusiastick or sanguine temperament[,] he was so excited and wrought upon by that celebrated itinerant the Rev. Mr [George] Whitefield . . . he believed he experienced a religious change and united himself with his followers,” who convinced him that the French were going to invade Cape Cod. And so, a fearful Silas sold the family farm in Osterville, Massachusetts, in 1755, a farm that “when properly cultivated[,] was sufficient 65 for the support of his family.” In heraldry, Charles, who lived alone and never married, found an escape from his past re- grets and present difficulties as he lovingly collected materials about English nobles surnamed Ewer in an effort to prove his 66 relatedness to them. Although all four of those practitioners previously mentioned were single, antebellum genealogy was not simply the preserve of the solitary. The historian, lawmaker, and pioneering statis- tician Lemuel Shattuck was a married man and the devoted father of five daughters. The son of a New Hampshire farmer who also owned a “shoe-makers shop,” Shattuck had not had the privilege of attending college and “qualifying myself for a pro- fession.” At the age of nineteen, he told his daughters, he had 67 had “to seek when I could the means of maintenance.” Like Farmer and Quincy, Shattuck mourned his lack of a college

64 Rufus Ewer was a Revolutionary veteran. Draft of letter, Charles Ewer to Rufus Ewer, n.d. [early 1839], folder 5,box1, Charles Ewer Papers, New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston. 65 Charles Ewer, genealogical notes beginning with Silas Ewer (n.d.), pp. 1–2,folder 1,box1, Ewer Papers. 66 Folders 6–12 (on English Ewers), and Charles Ewer to John Hutchinson, 30 November 1842,folder22,box1, Ewer Papers. For the last few years of his life, Ewer lived with his two sisters (Memorial Biographies, p. 114). 67 John Shattuck, Will, 5 April 1816, Lemuel Shattuck Papers, Massachusetts His- torical Society, Boston. Shattuck intermittently attended the New Ipswich Academy in his hometown of New Ipswich, N.H., but stopped in 1812 after obtaining certification for teaching. See Lemuel Shattuck, Autobiography, part 2, 1844,p.25 (quotation), Shattuck Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 271 education. He met his future wife while hobnobbing at the 1821 Harvard commencement. When he wed Clarissa Baxter in 1825, Shattuck entered into a wealthy family of Boston mer- 68 chants. The union proved more fortuitous for him than for her, for ultimately it was only the bequest she had received from her father that kept her and her family from penury and social obscurity. Although Lemuel Shattuck would have been well within his legal rights to control his wife’s assets, in 1836 he had agreed to place his wife’s property in trust. Indeed, he himself had “execut[ed] [the] Deed of Trust” in court because a business “copartnership” he had recently entered into had gone sour. “I found that one of the partners had involved the concern so heavily in debt, as not only to endanger all its property, but also the private property of the partners.” Anticipating a threat that later legal reforms would attempt to eliminate, Shattuck sought to shield his wife’s holdings, and by extension his daughters’ 69 future inheritance, from his own creditors. Shattuck’s tactic succeeded. In 1842, the total value of Clarissa Shattuck’s inher- itance, administered as a “trust estate” by her brother as well 70 as her husband, was nearly forty-six thousand dollars. The only one of the Shattucks’ five daughters to outlive her par- ents, Miriam Stedman Shattuck (1833–1909) became a Boston “Singlewoman” active in church and clubs with no discernible need to earn a living. When she died, her bequests totaled well over one hundred forty thousand dollars, a figure that does not 71 include the value of her substantial real estate holdings.

68 Lemuel Shattuck, Autobiography, part 2, 1844, unpaginated (following p. 41), Shattuck Papers. 69 Lemuel Shattuck, The Documents and Accounts of the Trust Estate of Clarissa B. Shattuck, 1842,p.5, Shattuck Papers. The first such laws passed in Mississippi (1839) and New York (1848). By the Civil War, New York had amended its law to allow wives legal ownership of their earnings. See Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 4th ed. (Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006), pp. 190–91. 70 This figure includes the value of the Baxter family’s house (inherited by Clarissa Baxter Shattuck), the value of other real estate she owned, and her “personal property” of $25,000. The trust estate’s total value shrank by $10,000 by 1844. Documents and Accounts, p. 12. 71 She owned two houses in Boston (including the old Shattuck family home) and “real estate” in coastal Ipswich, Massachusetts. Miriam Shattuck had not attended

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 272 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Writing to his daughters about the trust, Lemuel Shattuck re- ferred to it as “an act of Justice due your mother and yourself.” But his pride in his manhood sustained severe wounds. “I had always been an independent being, and had derived my sup- port from my own earnings. I wished still to be so,” he went on. “By this act I became in some respects a dependent being, and might be obliged to look to a wife or her trustee for sup- port. This was . . . a most humiliating consideration to me, and has since been the cause of much disquietude to my mind.” Shattuck’s personal finances were in ruins. “Before executing this deed of trust [in 1836], I sold out my portion in the co- partnership concern to the other partners” at a time when the business was in debt. He estimated his own worth thereafter 72 as “from 20 to $30.00.” By the time Shattuck died in 1859, his fortune had recovered somewhat, but his assets of just over 73 five thousand dollars were a mere fraction of his wife’s. Shattuck’s lack of a college education, the shame of being fi- nancially subject to his wife and in-laws, and his own difficulties in business placed him at the margins of those communities to which he wished to belong. Indeed, his precarious economic position—with only a spouse’s wealth standing between himself and poverty—replicates many women’s experiences in the 1830s. Still, Shattuck had many options that they lacked. He ran for political office in Boston in 1837—the year after he had 74 created his daughters’ trust—and won. As a Massachusetts legislator, he was a strong advocate for collecting vital statistics,

Wellesley College, which was founded in 1875 when she was in her forties. But she willed $5,000 to the college for a scholarship fund. Miriam S. Shattuck, Will, 26 May 1909, Shattuck Papers; Lemuel Shattuck, Memorials of the Descendants of William Shattuck . . . (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1855), p. 312; Wellesley College Record, 1875–1912: A General Catalogue of Officers and Students (Wellesley, Mass.: Wellesley College, 1912), p. 234 (no mention of Miriam Shattuck). 72 Eight years later he described himself as still “[struggling] under a series of embarrassments, lapses, lawsuits, and other misfortunes” (Documents and Accounts, p. 5). 73 This figure does not include his unsettled accounts or debts. Inventory of the Estate of Lemuel Shattuck (1859), in Documents and Accounts, p. 96. 74 City of Boston to Lemuel Shattuck, Certificate of Membership to the House of Representatives, 15 November 1837, Shattuck Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 273 and he crafted the Registration Act (1842), the country’s first law to require that births, marriages, and deaths be registered 75 with a state government. He wrote and oversaw Boston’s pio- neering census of 1845, the first in the United States to record residents’ exact, rather than approximate (i.e., within a range), ages and to list individuals who had died in the past year along 76 with their causes of death. Shattuck brought these and other innovations to Washington in 1849. In his capacity as cofounder of the American Statistical Association (1839), he helped re- design the U.S. census, drafting, according to one scholar, five 77 of the six “schedules” (forms) for the pivotal 1850 census. An- other historian has attributed Shattuck’s unusual commitment to amassing data to his difficulties in performing historical research. Concerns about the well-being of his daughters, and a consequent desire to improve public health, seem to have been a more compelling motivation for his drive to record vital 78 statistics. In the end, despite his business failures, Shattuck

75 James H. Cassedy, American Medicine and Statistical Thinking, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 196–97; John A. Bolles, Second Annual Report to the Legislature Under the Act of March, 1842, Relating to the Reg- istry and Returns of Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Massachusetts (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1843). Shattuck also encouraged individuals to start compiling their own records with his Complete System of Family Registration ...(Boston:William D. Ticknor, 1841). The city of Philadelphia predated the Massachusetts law in requiring “accoucheurs” to report all births to the city starting in 1819. See James H. Cassedy, Medicine and American Growth, 1800–1860 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), p. 176. 76 Lemuel Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council Appointed to Obtain the Census of Boston for the Year 1845 ...(Boston:JohnH.Eastburn,1846), pp. 17–20, 136–76. 77 Margo J. Anderson, The American Census: A Social History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), pp. 36–39, 45; Margo J. Anderson and Stephen E. Fienberg, Who Counts? The Politics of Census-Taking in Contemporary America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1999), p. 20; Cassedy, Medicine and American Growth, p. 4; Hyman Alterman, Counting People: The Census in History (New York: Harcourt, Brace, & World, 1969), p. 221.Asof1840, Shattuck was Home Secretary of the American Statistical Association. See J. C. Spencer to Lemuel Shattuck, 29 October 1840, 1840–42 folder, box 1, Shattuck Papers. Alterman, Counting People, p. 220, describes Shattuck’s contribution to the 1850 census. 78 Cassedy, Medicine and American Growth, p. 178. In his lifetime, Shattuck suf- fered the loss of three of his five daughters as young adults or, in the case of Frances Minot Shattuck, who perished at age fifteen, as a teenager. His eldest daughter, Sarah White Shattuck (1827–63), survived him, but died before her mother did. Wills of Daniel Baxter (1860) and Sarah White Shattuck (1863), transcribed in Shattuck,

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 274 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY earned a reputation for innovation that endured long after he died.

“A Backwardness in Bringing Forward Their Own Genealogy” Despite the embarrassments he sustained, Shattuck’s choice of marriage partner and his interest in lineage helped him establish relationships with men who possessed more wealth and power than he. His contact with Peter Chardon Brooks, a merchant and “insurance magnate” said to be the richest man 79 in New England, is a case in point. Shattuck was prepar- ing a history of Concord, Massachusetts, and in 1827 he asked Brooks for source material. A busy man, Brooks returned nine closely written pages detailing lore about his colonial forebears. Brooks cautioned Shattuck, however, not to make his contribu- tion public: “you must not make it known by name, who gave you this information.—It is not of importance enough to any 80 body,—and besides I should be unwilling to have it done.” Even though the organization avidly courted him, Brooks never joined the NEHGS. After he died in 1849, the NEHGS’s peri- odical published passages from his will (listing kin, not mone- tary amounts) as well as his seventeenth-century lineage—as if 81 Brooks had actually belonged. Other celebrated magnates were similarly reluctant to have their interest in lineage publicized. The merchant-industrialists Abbott and Amos Lawrence, who in the 1820s founded the town of Lawrence, Massachusetts, and the textile factories therein, dedicated a portion of their fortunes to their penchant

Documents and Accounts, unpaginated; Selden Haynes to Lemuel Shattuck, 19 October 1850, 1850 folder, box 1, Shattuck Papers; Shattuck, Memorials of the De- scendants of William Shattuck, p. 312. 79 Hall, “What the Merchants Did with Their Money,” p. 375 (quotation); “Notices of New Publications,” NEHGR 3 (October 1849): 401–2. 80 Peter Chardon Brooks to Lemuel Shattuck, 9 August 1838,p.9 (quotation), and Brooks to Shattuck, 1 October 1827, Shattuck Papers. 81 “Notices of New Publications,” NEHGR 3 (October 1849): 401–2; Rolls of Mem- bership of the New-England Historic Genealogical Society, 1844–1891 (Cambridge, Mass.: John Wilson and Son, 1892).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 275 for collecting. Abbott Lawrence was said to have the largest per- 82 sonal library in Boston save that of minister Theodore Parker. Like others in Boston’s upper strata in the 1850s, including the Quincy family, Abbott Lawrence hired an English researcher, Horatio Gates Somerby, to investigate the family’s English provenance, hoping to document its hereditary right to bear 83 the Lawrence arms. He bequeathed his predilection for ge- nealogy and heraldry to his nephew and Amos Lawrence’s son, Amos A. Lawrence. Yet both uncle and nephew opposed having their interest in genealogy broadcast. Addressing Henry Bond, who had made an inquiry regarding his planned history of Watertown, Mas- sachusetts, Abbott Lawrence declined to have his “portrait pub- lished in your book, or any biographical notice, as I think such honors belong to the memory of the dead, rather than the living.” He reaffirmed his willingness to give Bond “any in- formation in my powers” regarding “the pedigree of my own 84 family,” but he insisted that his participation not be divulged. After more than two years of supplying genealogical informa- tion to Bond, Amos A. Lawrence ruminated in 1855, “I think all the members of the family have a backwardness in bring- ing forward their own genealogy. Coming from Mr. Somerby it might not be objectionable, or from [yourself]: but I think they [would] dislike having the appearance of furnishing their genealogical tree for publication.” He apparently shared their

82 Hall, “What the Merchants Did with Their Money,” pp. 403–4 (quotation); Dalzell, Enterprising Elite, pp. 57, 123. 83 Abbott Lawrence to Henry Bond, 23 February 1855,folder36, subgroup 3,box 9, Bond Papers; Somerby’s full name in Rolls of Membership, pp. 2, 107. At differ- ent times, Somerby reported researching, in England, the Bond, Coolidge, Livermore, Learned, Lawrence, and Saltonstall families. H. G. Somerby to Henry Bond, 19 Febru- ary 1852, and Somerby to Bond, 26 January 1855,folder50, subgroup 3,box10,Bond Papers; Eliza Susan Quincy to Samuel A. Drake, 19 May 1873, Quincy, Wendell, Holmes, and Upham Family Papers, reel 61. The Waltham, Massachusetts, business- man J. B. Bright reported owing Somerby “£71.15.4 which at present rates of exchange is over $350 and [the bill] does not include his own services” (J. B. Bright to Henry Bond, 5 March 1853,p.1,folder8, subgroup 3,box8, Bond Papers). 84 Abbott Lawrence to Henry Bond, 23 February 1855, pp. 1–2,folder36, subgroup 3,box9, Bond Papers; Henry Bond, Genealogies of the Families and Descendants of the Early Settlers of Watertown, Massachusetts . . . to which is Appended an Early History of the Town (Boston: Little, Brown, 1855).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 276 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY reticence: “We value the knowledge of our ancestors, [which] informs us that they were respectable, but we [would] not upon 85 this set up our own claim to respectability, or to antiquity.” To those at the pinnacle of New England’s class hierarchy, such an ostentatious assertion was the distasteful mark of the social arriviste. Their aversion to such an association reconfirms that 86 documented lineages, to others, represented wealth. Elites had other, unstated reasons for resisting publication of their family genealogies. Although antebellum genealogical practices tended to reinforce status distinctions, they potentially threatened two pillars of the white middle and upper classes: the marriage market for women, and definitions of sexual re- 87 spectability. The collection of birth dates was, and is, a main- stay of genealogy, as the statistical proclivities of NEHGS cofounder Lemuel Shattuck attest. But genealogists, statis- ticians, and census officers in the antebellum period oper- ated within social contexts that attempted to suppress the publication, and the consequent public revelation, of birth dates and other biographical information, especially of living people. Women’s birth dates were highly sensitive. Caroline Frances Orne of Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, was adamant that such information not be revealed, even in handwritten genealogies scrawled for her friends. “[F]or how are the young ladies ever to get married if you should go and publish them as having 88 arrived at a certain age?” she explained. Electa Jones’s sister and brother-in-law also observed the taboo. After Jones sent them a “tabular” record that she hoped “might be filled out for a sister if they did not care to do it for a stranger,”her

85 Amos A. Lawrence to Henry Bond, 1 November 1855,folder36, subgroup 3,box 9, Bond Papers. 86 My discussion of cultural dimensions of class differences owes much to Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), esp. pp. 12–14, 169–75. 87 See Gerda Lerner’s germinal “The Lady and the Mill Girl: Changes in the Status of Women in the Age of Jackson” (1969), in Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 15–30. 88 Caroline F. Orne to Henry Bond, 1 March 1855,p.11,folder42, subgroup 3, box 9, Bond Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 277 siblings informed her “that it is ‘exceedingly improper to go to any family & ask them how old they are’; ‘that is a downright insult to ask any one such a question’; it is ‘one of the things that no one else has a right to know.’” Jones speculated that her scolding proceeded from a desire to protect two unmarried female relatives who had, in her words, “lost the bloom of 89 youth.” Unlike his father, Reverend Thaddeus Mason Harris, promi- nent among New England historians, and his own son, William Thaddeus Harris, who served as an early editor of the NEHGS’s periodical, the Harvard librarian Thaddeus William Harris en- gaged only sporadically in genealogy before moving on to ento- 90 mology. In November 1845, T. W. Harris reported to another genealogy aficionado that “Some of the Boston people do not like to be enquired of, as to their family & domestic history,” 91 notably by “the officers, in taking the late census.” The Boston census of 1845 represented unprecedented precision or intru- sion, depending on one’s perspective. Census officers asked Bostonians for their ages, places of birth, marital status, “color,” occupations, the names of servants (“domestics”), whether they or family members had disabilities, whether they owned real estate, and whether there had been births, marriages, or deaths 92 in the family in the past year. A widow known to Harris was, he reported, “questioned pretty closely, & as she was pleased to think, impertinently by [the officer], as to her name, condition, age, children, do- mestics, & the like.” The unnamed woman “replied reluctantly & somewhat crustily” to her questioner. When he finished, “she began thus—Sir! you have asked me a good many questions; I shall now take the liberty to ask some in turn. What is your

89 Electa F. Jones to Henry Bond, 9 April 1849,p.3,folder35, subgroup 3,box9, Bond Papers. 90 Schutz, A Noble Pursuit, p. 19; Thaddeus William Harris to Henry Bond, 12 June 1845,folder30, subgroup 3,box8, and Harris to Bond, 17 October 1853,folder31, subgroup 3,box9, Bond Papers. 91 Harris to Bond, 5 November 1845,p.2,folder30, subgroup 3,box8,Bond Papers. 92 Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council, pp. 17–20.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 278 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY name Sir? How old are you? Have you a wife, Sir? or when do you expect to find one? How many children have you? are they all lawfully yours? &c. &c. The poor officer was astounded,” said Harris, “& made his escape from the inquisitress as fast as 93 he could.” In her retort to the census taker, the widow posed some ques- tions she did not expect to have answered. When she asked him whether all of his children were lawfully his, she insinuated that questions about age, marriage, and birth raised the distasteful subject of out-of-wedlock sex. As they collected information about birth dates, nineteenth-century genealogists risked ex- posing pre-marital sexual activity among ancestors, behavior that did not accord with descendants’ stringent ideals of moral rectitude, which dictated abstention from sex outside of mar- 94 riage for both sexes. Genealogists, who also shared those values, thus focused on aligning marriages and births to accord with contemporary 95 moral standards. It was not birth and marriage dates alone that prompted genealogists’ selectivity and creativity. Ancestors who might cause embarrassment for any number of reasons might conveniently be ignored. Electa Fidelia Jones was ob- sessed with her “Puritan blood,” but she concentrated on those precursors who shared her piety and sense of propriety. Jones’s sister had married into the Brown family, a local clan from which the sisters also descended. In 1848 Jones remarked of one Lydia Brown, who had married one Abner Carpen- ter ninety years before, that both were “so near idiocy that it

93 Thaddeus William Harris to Henry Bond, 5 November 1845, pp. 2–3,folder30, subgroup 3,box8, Bond Papers. Interestingly, the lawmakers who administered the Boston census reported more resistance from men than women when they were asked to reveal their ages. See Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council, p. 20. 94 Historians emphasize that such ideals existed amidst a multiplicity of other ideals regarding sex, not to mention sexual practices, in the nineteenth-century United States. See John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 55–167; Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002). However, the indignation expressed by the Boston widow suggests that in the staid, well-to-do circles in which genealogists moved, sex outside of marriage was decidedly condemned. 95 See my “A Noble Pursuit?”

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 279 was said at the time of their marriage that laws ought to be enacted to prevent the marriage of those so unfit to sustain the relations which they assumed.” Among their “dozen” children and their descendants, Jones reported, some were “so low in the scale of being that I do not wish to make their acquaintance so far as to ask after their name & age.” Another reason for not “seeking them out at present” was that some Carpenter de- scendants (“these miserable girls”) had managed to marry well. “I have several of the families into which they have with pro- priety married, in my Sabbath Class and Tract District.” Jones did not wish to discomfit them socially by reminding them of 96 their lineage. Although the Carpenters and their descendants shared the “Puritan blood” Jones so prized, they fell outside of her cri- teria for kinship, which involved personal bearing, whom one married, other cultural indicators of class, Protestant religious fervor, and the absence of disability (such as “near idiocy”). As she read Carpenter descendants out of her family record, Jones imagined a kinship community with her seventeenth-century ancestors—and unrelated contemporaries like her fellow New England historians and genealogists—grounded in her own val- 97 ues. “I love to go back in imagination to those old firesides,” she told a colleague, “& fancy us all children except the father &mother—...&thepilgrimgrandparents—& feel it to be a sort of Thanksgiving Day. Then I do not realize that we,”

96 Electa F. Jones to Henry Bond, 25 December 1848, pp. 3–4,folder35, subgroup 3,box9, Bond Papers. The state of Massachusetts passed laws voiding marriages between “idiots” by the 1850s. See The General Statutes of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, Revised by Commissioners Appointed under a Resolve of February 16, 1855, Amended by the Legislature, and Passed December 28, 1859 (Boston: Wright and Potter, 1860), p. 529 (pt. 2, title 7, chap. 105,sec.5). 97 I borrow this concept from Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Re- flections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1991). My thinking here is indebted to anthropologists and other critics who seek to dispense with nature-culture distinctions. See, e.g., Janet Carsten, Af- ter Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Donna Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium.FemaleMan Meets OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997); Relative Values: Reconfiguring Kinship Studies, ed. Sarah Franklin and Susan McKinnon (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 280 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY meaning herself and fellow researchers, “are not all brothers & sisters—all, at least who esteem the characters of those sires, & claim with them one Father above. Of course the more such hearth-stones we can find, the more nearly related we all seem 98 to be.” In publicizing those ancestral relationships they considered most praiseworthy, genealogists not only crafted an early Amer- ican past they could use but they exposed the plasticity of America’s class categories. Truly comprehensive approaches to family history would have resulted in unpleasant revelations, and so genealogists, along with their clients and informants, fashioned lineages that suited their sense of propriety and their definition of what was upstanding. In doing so, they demonstrated that in the United States class could be made as well as inherited and that the blood relationships that formed the basis of their investigations were not entirely immutable.

Because genealogical practices were a powerful means of af- firming contemporary class and race hierarchies, private-sector genealogy in the antebellum United States became an im- portant commodity, one that could be manipulated by the well-to-do and by those who depended on their largesse, whether delivered as cash, information, or access. Geneal- ogy and heraldry circles attracted members of old-line New England families such as the Quincys as well as contemporary kingpins of industry such as the Lawrences—old wealth and success, new wealth and success, and clans whose wealth and success were ongoing. Yet the question of whether to publicize one’s own lineage(s) and/or interest in genealogy exposed intra- class divisions within antebellum bourgeoisies between those marginalized individuals who trafficked in documented lineages to gain status and those elites who disdained such forms of social climbing.

98 Electa F. Jones to Henry Bond, 15 January [1849], p. 2,folder35, subgroup 3, box 9, Bond Papers.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 LINEAGE AS CAPITAL 281 During and after the Civil War, U.S. bourgeoisies under- 99 went an unprecedented degree of internal consolidation. In the process, the upper strata of the upper classes shed their re- luctance to reveal their attraction to lineage. For example, both Abbott Lawrence and Amos A. Lawrence joined the NEHGS, and the younger Lawrence publicly declared his enthusiasm for genealogy by purchasing a one-thousand-dollar lifetime mem- 100 bership. By the turn of the twentieth century, genealogy was widely embraced by U.S. elites. From the 1890s, organizations with hereditary requirements drew hundreds of thousands of wealthy members eager to do their part to instill patriotism and historical consciousness in the general population. Their documented colonial or Revolutionary lineages became the 101 pedestals for Daughters, Sons, and Dames. Women who joined the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) in its first year (1890–91) freely published their own names next to those of their Revolutionary ancestors to aid others’ genealogi- 102 cal research as well as to advertise their own prominence. Yet genealogical practices had exposed U.S. class relations as based on manners, common values, and other character- istics less indelible than blood. Genealogy had also exposed the fictive and highly selective nature of relationships that de- scendants conducted with forebears who were impossible to

99 Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 205–334. 100 “Quarterly Obituary,” NEHGR 9 (October 1855): 374; “Memoir of the Honorable Abbott Lawrence, LL.D.,” NEHGR 10 (October 1856): 297–303; “Life Members,” NEHGR 19 (January 1865): 94. 101 W. Fitzhugh Brundage, The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), pp. 12–54; Wallace Evan Davies, Patrio- tism on Parade: The Story of Veterans’ Organizations and Hereditary Organizations in America, 1783–1900 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1955); Stuart McConnell, “Reading the Flag: A Reconsideration of the Patriotic Cults of the 1890s,” in Bonds of Affection: Americans Define Their Patriotism, ed. John Bodnar (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 1996), pp. 102–19; Francesca Morgan, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Cecilia O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton Uni- versity Press, 1999); Woden Sorrow Teachout, “Forging Memory: Hereditary Societies, Patriotism, and the American Past, 1876–1898” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2003). 102 Mary S. Lockwood, Lineage Book of the Charter Members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, rev. ed. (Harrisburg, Pa.: Harrisburg Publishing Co., 1895).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq.2010.83.2.250 by guest on 01 October 2021 282 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY know personally. The new hereditary organizations required prospective members to produce, in addition to their lineages, signatures or other forms of approval from current members 103 to attest to the applicant’s personal acceptability. Leaders of such groups knew full well that even the most stringent ge- nealogical membership requirements could not guarantee the social composition the leaders sought for their organizations. No matter how much it appeared to be upholding class distinc- tions, genealogy troubled them, and in doing so it foreshadowed its own, later democratization.

103 Constitution and By-Laws of the Daughters of the American Revolution (Washington: National Society Daughters of the American Revolution, 1890), p. 4; National Society, U.S. Daughters of 1812, “Circular of Information,” n.d. [1930s], in scrapbook of state activities, vol. 2 (1933–36), box 34, Papers of the DAR, Michigan Society, Michigan Historical Collections, Bentley Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Membership in the Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) (formed in 1889) was open to any man older than twenty-one whose ancestor had rendered “material aid” to the Revolutionary cause, assuming the descendant was “a citizen of good re- pute.” See Nebraska Society of the SAR, Registrar’s Circular (1899), p. 2,folder6, box 1,ser.1: Correspondence, Nebraska Society of the Sons of the American Revolu- tion collection, Manuscript Division, Nebraska State Historical Society, Lincoln. The constitution of the invitation-only Colonial Dames of America (CDA) (founded 1891) reserved the right to expel anyone for conduct unbecoming a “gentlewoman” (Soci- ety of Colonial Dames of America, Colonial Dames of the State of New York, Annual Report [1924–25]: 51–52).

Francesca Morgan is Assistant Professor of History at North- eastern Illinois University in Chicago. She is the author of Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (University of North Carolina Press, 2005). Her current book project is en- titled “How Genealogy Became American, 1800–2000.” Other publications include “A Noble Pursuit? Bourgeois America’s Uses of Lineage,” in Distinction and Identity: Bour- geois Culture in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Sven Beckert and Julia Rosenbaum (Palgrave Macmillan, in press).

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