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FRIEND ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE
1803
Friends Arnold Buffum and Sarah Gould were wed. In Smithfield and Fall River, Rhode Island, this Quaker couple would produce ten children seven of whom would survive, and like their parents be actively involved in the antislavery movement. The daughters Elizabeth, Lydia, Rebecca, and Lucy would become writers. Elizabeth in particular would be prolific under her married name Elizabeth Buffum Chace, championing causes such as women’s suffrage, temperance and working conditions in the New England mills. Elizabeth also would produce a daughter who would become an author, Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman (refer to VIRTUOUS LIVES — FOUR QUAKER SISTERS REMEMBER FAMILY LIFE, ABOLITIONISM, AND WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE, by Lucille Salitan and Eve Lewis Perera. NY: Continuum Publishing Company, 370 Lexington Avenue). FEMINISM HDT WHAT? INDEX
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“It is simply crazy that there should ever have come into being a world with such a sin in it, in which a man is set apart because of his color — the superficial fact about a human being. Who could want such a world? For an American fighting for his love of country, that the last hope of earth should from its beginning have swallowed slavery, is an irony so withering, a justice so intimate in its rebuke of pride, as to measure only with God.” — Stanley Cavell, MUST WE MEAN WHAT WE SAY? 1976, page 141
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1806
Elizabeth Buffum Chace was born as Elizabeth Buffum in a Quaker family of Smithfield, Rhode Island.
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1822
Friend Elizabeth Buffum, daughter of Friends Arnold Buffum and Rebecca Gould Buffum, is stated in documents as during this year to have been attending the Friends Boarding School on College Hill on the East Side in Providence, Rhode Island. There is, however, an apparent discrepancy on the record, for she was said to be eighteen years of age when she attended the school, and since she was born in 1806, she would not be eighteen until 1824.) MOSES BROWN ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1824
After having attended village schools, Friend Elizabeth Buffum Chace (then known of course as Friend Elizabeth Buffum) boarded for one year at the Quakers’ Yearly Meeting Boarding School, the establishment which is now known as the “Moses Brown” School on College Hill on the East Side of Providence, Rhode Island. Friend Abby Kelley was during the same year attending this Friends School.
(There is, however, an apparent discrepancy on the record. Elizabeth Buffum was stated to be eighteen years of age when she attended the Friends school in Providence, which would put her year of attendance as 1824 since she was born in 1806, and yet other documents put her year of attendance as 1822.)
Note that these two Quaker scholars, being girls, would have been in “Girls School,” a facility held distinct not only in reports and catalogues but also by means of gender segregation of classrooms, and gender segregation of walks, and gender segregation of groves and playgrounds and dining areas (over and above rigid racial segregation that was making certain that Rhode Island’s black and red populations would remain forever entirely in the dark).
In this year superintendents Friends Matthew Purinton and Betsy Purinton of Salem, Massachusetts departed and were replaced by Friends Enoch Breed and Lydia Breed. Superintendents.
1819-1824. Purinton, Matthew and Betsy. 1824-1835. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1829-1835. Gould, Stephen Wanton and Gould, Han- nah, Asst. Supts. 1835-1836. Davis, Seth and Mary. 1837. Breed, Enoch and Lydia. 1838-1839. Rathbun, Rowland and Alice. 1840-1844. Wing, Allen and Olive. 1845-1846. Thompson, Olney and Lydia. 1847. Congdon, Jarvia and Lydia. 1847-1852. Cornell, Silas and Sarah M.
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1825
The Buffum family relocated to Fall River (this city would be in Rhode Island rather than in Massachusetts until the Civil War) where Elizabeth would get married with Samuel Chace, an employee at his family’s prosperous cotton mill.1 ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE
1. Evidently by this point the following had already happened as described in Elizabeth C. Stevens’s ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE AND LILLIE CHACE WYMAN: A CENTURY OF ABOLITIONIST, SUFFRAGIST, AND WORKERS’ RIGHTS ACTIVISM (McFarland. 2003): “Chace’s own father, Arnold Buffum, was apparently disowned by the Smithfield (Rhode Island) monthly meeting for his radical abolitionist labors although he ‘remonstrated’ against the action and proved the allegations against him to be false.”
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While teaching at Friends School in Lynn, Friend Abby Kelley met Friend James N. Buffum, father of her classmate, Friend Elizabeth Buffum Chace from Friends Yearly Meeting School in Providence, Rhode Island, and Friend Buffum and Friend William Bassett, two leading abolitionists in Lynn, introduced Abby to the growing number of state and local anti-slavery societies that were beginning since the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Abby joined the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Lynn and began distributing petitions door-to-door, sewing and selling fancy articles at the fairs to raise money for the American Anti-Slavery Society. During her school breaks Abby was visiting Boston and Worcester to attend meetings of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, meetings which women attended but at which they were expected not to speak. RELIGIOUS SOCIETY OF FRIENDS
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1835
Elizabeth Buffum Chace and her sisters founded the Fall River Anti-Slavery Society, trekking door-to-door collecting signatures on petitions calling for the immediate freeing of slaves; for the following decade, until 1845, she and her husband would hide fugitive slaves in their home at the corner of Hunt Street and Broad Street in Central Falls, operating as a station on the Underground Railroad.
After much soul-searching, Chace, who lost a series of five children to illness, would leave her Quaker monthly meeting over its refusal to take a tougher stand against slavery.
(She would eventually be brought to the opinion that “the prejudice against color, throughout New England, was even stronger than the pro-slavery spirit.”)
Here are the Rhode Islanders believed to have been active in the Underground Railroad:
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Newport: Jethro and Anne Mitchell (related to Maria Mitchell of Nantucket? –Jethro was born on January 27, 1784 on Nantucket Island) Providence: Robert Adams Friend Arnold Buffum William Buffum Samuel B. Chace and Mrs. Elizabeth Buffum Chace Daniel Mitchell of Foster and Pawtucket (related to Maria Mitchell of Nantucket? –her father’s name was William Mitchell) Captain Jonathan Walker UNDERGROUND RAILROAD
1836
Abby Kelley took a teaching job at the Religious Society of Friends school in Lynn, between Boston and 1 Salem. At that time the fee for teaching an older child was usually about a shilling or 12 /2 cents and teaching usually brought in an income of about $200.00 per year, or perhaps rather less than that for a female teacher.
There Friend Abby would meet Friend James N. Buffum, father of her classmate, Friend Elizabeth Buffum Chase from the Yearly Meeting School in Providence, Rhode Island, and Friend Buffum and Friend William Bassett, two leading abolitionists in Lynn, would introduce Abby to the growing number of state and local anti- slavery societies that were beginning since the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. Abby would join the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Lynn and begin distributing petitions door-to-door, sewing and selling fancy articles at the fairs to raise money for the cause. During her school breaks she would be visiting Boston and Worcester to attend meetings of that Society, meetings which women attended but at which there was an expectation that there would be no attempts to speak.
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1843
June 1 (Pentecost Thursday): Joseph Smith, Jr. “got married with” Elvira Anie Cowles.
Go East, 46-year-old black woman, go East: Isabella2 experienced a command to “go east” and testify, adopted the monicker Sojourner Truth, and departed New-York with but an hour’s notice, with two York shillings in her pocket, carrying her worldly belongings in a pillowcase, to move on foot through Long Island and Connecticut, testifying to whatever audiences she was able to attract. –It is the life of a wandering evangelist, is mine. In the course of attending Millerite meetings to testify, she would accommodate to a number of the apocalyptic tenets of that group.
2. Isabella Bomefree van Wagenen, “Bomefree” being the name of her first husband which by virtue of enslavement she had been denied, and “van Wagenen” being the name of the white family which she assumed and used for a number of years. (“Wagener” was a consistent misspelling perpetrated by the printer of the first version of her NARRATIVE in 1850.)
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As Louisa May Alcott has reported in later life, on this same day quite another journey was taking place:
On the first day of June, 1843, a large wagon, drawn by a small horse and containing a motley load, went lumbering over certain New England hills, with the pleasing accompaniments of wind, rain and hail. A serene man with a serene child upon his knee was driving, or rather being driven, for the small horse had it all his own way. Behind a small boy, embracing a bust of Socrates, was an energetic looking woman, with a benevolent brow, satirical mouth and eyes full of hope and courage. A baby reposed upon her lap, a mirror leaned against her knee, a basket of provisions danced about her feet, and she struggled with a large, unruly umbrella, with which she tried to cover every one but herself. Twilight began to fall, and the rain came down in a despondent drizzle, but the calm man gazed as tranquilly into the fog as if he beheld a radiant bow of promise spanning the gray sky.
The Consociate Family of Bronson Alcott was on its way from Concord to “Fruitlands” on Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, in the district then known politely as “Still River North” and impolitely as “Hog Street,” with its prospect of Wachusett and Mount Monadnock and its prospect of “ideals without feet or
hands” (an apt phrase said to have been created by Waldo Emerson,3 who himself, if anyone ever metaphorically lacked them, metaphorically lacked feet and hands and other essential body parts), ideals such as “a family in harmony with the primitive instincts of man.” In her fictional account of the journey, Louisa May Alcott invented an additional child and placed it on her father’s knee, obviously where she would have wanted to be, and made it a “serene” child, what she never was but longed to be. The bust of Socrates actually rode between the father Bronson, who was holding the reins, and Charles Lane, on the wagon’s bench. There was no room in this wagon for William Lane or for Anna Alcott, who for all 14 miles of the journey had to
3. But we may note that in Bronson Alcott’s journal for Week 45 in November 1837, Alcott had himself termed himself “an Idea without hands.”
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walk alongside it.
At this point the Association of Industry and Education had 113 members, a large proportion of whom were children:
COMMUNITARIANISM Membership
April 1842 41 May 1842 65 End of 1842 83 June 1843 113 Winter 1844 120 Spring 1845 120
Having had enough after less than two months of attempting to teach almost entirely without teaching supplies and without adequate classroom space, Sophia Foord threatened to resign as teacher at the Association. (Promises would be made that would keep her teaching while efforts were made to convert a barn into classrooms, but the problem eventually would be resolved by the need of the community to use its children as a cheap source of incessant factory labor. After Miss Foord left Northampton, she became tutor to the children of the Chase family (Elizabeth Buffum Chace) of Valley Falls, Rhode Island; “she taught botany; she walked with the children over the fields … and made her pupils observe the geographical features of the pond and its banks, and carefully taught them to estimate distances by sight.”)
Railroad service to Concord began. Preliminary earthmoving crews, and then crossties and rails crews, had reached Concord at the rate of 33 feet per day, filling in Walden Pond’s south-west arm to give it its present
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shape. 1,000 Irishmen were earning $0.50 or $0.60 for bonebreaking 16-hour days of labor. Waldo Emerson was elated because he much preferred riding in the railroad coach to riding in the stage coach which offered a “ludicrous pathetic tragical picture” (his comment from April 15, 1834; I don’t know whether he meant that he felt that he presented a ludicrous pathetic tragical appearance while riding on the stage coach or that the view from the stage coach window presented him with a ludicrous pathetic tragical perspective). He found, however, that when a philosopher rides the railroad “Ideal Philosophy takes place at once” as “men & trees & barns whiz by you as fast as the leaves of a dictionary” and this helps in grasping the real impermanence of matter: “hitherto esteemed symbols of stability do absolutely dance by you” and we experience “the sensations of a swallow who skims by trees & bushes with about the same speed” (June 10, 1834). By this time, with the railroad actually in Concord, Emerson had decided that “Machinery & Transcendentalism agree well.”4
“[The railroad will] only encourage the common people to move about needlessly.” — Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington
4. EMERSON’S JOURNALS AND MISCELLANEOUS NOTEBOOKS 4: 277, 4:296, 8:397.
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1851
During this decade the Chaces would move to Valley Falls, where Elizabeth Buffum Chace would be giving birth to five more children to replace the five she had to this point lost to illness –bearing her last infant indeed at the ripe age of 46– while keeping the anti-slavery crusade alive.
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1860
January 24, Tuesday: The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson spoke in Concord in opposition to Henry Thoreau’s “prejudice for Adamhood.”
After the lecture, the Reverend Higginson and Thoreau, and Bronson Alcott and Anna Maria Whiting, walked home with Waldo Emerson to continue the discussion. Higginson’s emphasis was on the making of a contrast between a state of barbarism and a state of civilization, but Thoreau’s was on the use of the figure of the Indian to provide needed continuity between the human of civilization and the idea of nature. It was disjunctors vs conjunctors that night. Bronson Alcott’s record of the conversation amounts to the following: “My wife accompanies me to the Lyceum this evening, and we hear Higginson lecture on Barbarism and Civilization. He defends civilization against Thoreau’s prejudice for Adamhood, and celebrates its advantages — of health chiefly, among the rest. After the lecture Thoreau and I go to Emerson’s and talk further on it. Anna Whiting is there. I ask if civilization is not the ascendency of sentiment over brute force, the sway of ideas over animalism, of mind over matter. The more animated the brain, the higher is the man or creature on the scale of intelligence. The barbarian has no society; this begins in sympathy, the perception and sentiment of personality binding the general in one. Thoreau defends the Indian from the doctrine of being lost or
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exterminated, and thinks he holds a place between civilized man and nature, and must hold it. I say that he goes along with the woods and the beasts, who retreat before and are superseded by man and the planting of orchards and gardens. The savage succumbs to the superiority of the white man. No civilized man as yet, nor refined nations, for all are brute largely still. Man’s victory over nature and himself is to overcome! the brute beast in him.”
Elizabeth Buffum Chace wrote in a letter that “Last night, Wendell Phillips lectured at Lonsdale, & he came here, and we carried him up, and then he returned with us, and spent the night. We had a nice time. He told us about his visit to North Elba, when he went with the body of John Brown; relating many little incidents which were not published in the papers.”
January 24: 2 P.M.—To Tarbell, river, via railroad. Thermometer 46. Sky thinly overcast, growing thicker at last as if it would rain. Wind northwest. See a large flock of lesser redpolls, eating the seeds of the birch (and perhaps alder [Vide the 29th]) in Dennis Swamp by railroad. They are distinct enough from the goldfinch, their note more shelly and general as they fly, and they are whiter, without the black wings, beside that some have the crimson head or head and breast. They alight on the birches, then swarm on the snow beneath, busily picking up the seed in the copse. The Assabet is open above Derby’s Bridge as far as I go or see, probably to the factory, and I know not how far below Derby’s. It opens up here sooner than below the Assabet Bath to its mouth. The blue vervain stands stiffly and abundant in one place, with much rather large brown seed in it. It is in good condition.
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Scare a shrike from an apple tree. He flies low over the meadow, somewhat like a woodpecker, and alights near the top twig of another apple tree. See a hawk sail over meadow and woods; not a hen-hawk; possibly a marsh hawk. A grasshopper on the snow. The droppings of a skunk left on a rock, perhaps at the beginning of winter, were full of grasshoppers’ legs. As I stand at the south end of J.P.B.’s moraine, I watch six tree sparrows, which come from the wood and alight and feed on the ground, which is there bare. They are only two or three rods from me, and are incessantly picking and eating an abundance of the fine grass (short-cropped pasture grass) on that knoll, as a hen or goose does. I see the stubble an inch or two long in their bills, and how they stuff it down. Perhaps they select chiefly the green parts. So they vary their fare and there is no danger of their starving. These six hopped round for five minutes over a space a rod square before I put them to flight, and then I noticed, in a space only some four feet square in that rod, at least eighteen droppings (white at one end, the rest more slate-colored). So wonderfully active are they in their movements, both external and internal. They do not suffer for want of a good digestion, surely. NO doubt they eat some earth or gravel too. So do partridges eat a great deal. These birds, though they have bright brown and huff backs, hop about amid the little inequalities of the pasture almost unnoticed, such is their color and so humble are they. Solomon thus describes the return of Spring (Song of Solomon, ii, 10-12):— “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away. “For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone; “The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.”
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1862
August 19, Tuesday: A group of 61 whites including Dr. John Luman Wakefield arrived at the relative safety of Hutchinson, Minnesota. Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley was appointed to lead a volunteer white militia group.
Elizabeth Buffum Chace wrote in a letter that “Gen. Hunter has disbanded his Negro regiment. How strange that such blindness prevails. That white men must go by hundreds of thousands ... but the colored man must be saved! ...the country will ere long be inhabited by women and children and negroes. Oh! how I long to hear the right word spoken, that of Universal Freedom which would so soon put an end to this War! When will it come?”
1865
December: In a reaction against the compromising tactics adopted by the American Peace Society during the civil war, a Universal Peace Union was launched in Boston, planned by the Reverend Adin Ballou, Henry C. Wright, Friend Alfred Henry Love, Friend Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Buffum Chace, and William Lloyd Garrison. This group favored amending the US Constitution to remove the power to make war. THE QUAKER PEACE TESTIMONY
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1873
While in Rome, Elizabeth Buffum Chace purchased from the sculptor Edmonia Lewis a marble copy, 17 inches by 8 inches by 6 inches, of a bust of the young Octavian.
Samuel Wilberforce fell from his horse, striking his head, and died. Thomas Henry Huxley commented rather unsympathetically that the Bishop’s brains had finally made contact with reality.
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1876
Publication, in Providence, of Thomas B. Stockwell’s A HISTORY OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IN RHODE ISLAND FROM 1636 TO 1876.
The Yearly Meeting School in Providence received a payment of $28,000 for land taken from the Moses Brown farm by the city in the widening of Hope Street and the creation of Lloyd Avenue between Hope Street and Arlington Avenue. However, at the same time the Rhode Island legislature voided the tax-exempt status that had always been in effect for the school. Tax bills would quickly be piling up, reaching about $4,000, and to pay these taxes, the school would begin to sell off outlying plots of the Moses Brown farm. (It is very much an open question, whether such disposal of trust property was in accordance with the original bequest, or was an utterly unlawful raid on the endowment and a violation of their standing as a society incorporated in Rhode Island by legislative charter. At any rate, the tax-exempt standing of the school would be restored by legislative act early in 1893.) By this point about half the students were not from Quaker families, with about one out of every five of the students who were Quakers coming to the school from outside New England. The board and tuition rate that was being charged of members of the New England Yearly Meeting was $100, while Quakers from outside New England were being charged $190, scholars only one of whose parents was a Quaker were being charged $190, and non-Quakers were being charged $300.
In this year of our nation’s Reconstruction effort, Elizabeth Buffum Chace resigned from the Providence, Rhode Island Woman’s Club — over its refusal to admit a black schoolteacher.5
5. For those of you who haven’t checked a map recently: Rhode Island is not part of the Deep South, but a northern state, indeed if you look at your atlas with a magnifying glass, you will find it is part of New England. Rhode Island had already gotten rid of its slaves, some time before the Civil War. –But, some things don’t change much, do they? In her “My Anti-Slavery Reminiscences,” Elizabeth Buffum Chace had recorded an event from before the Civil War, in the town in which she lived, Valley Falls, Rhode Island, in which some “very respectable young colored women” had caused a ruckus by attending a meeting of the abolitionists. Get this, not a meeting of the Women’s Club, but a meeting of the abolitionists! The prospect that these women of color might attempt to join the local abolitionist society “raised such a storm among some of its leading members, that for a time, it threatened the dissolution of the Society.” These black abolitionists had eventually been admitted as members, Chace recollected, but had never in her opinion been accepted as equals by some of the other, white abolitionists. (From incidents such as this, you can get my drift, when I make one of my more indecent accusations, that as a first-order approximation — what the white American abolitionists had been seeking to abolish in the antebellum years had been, not slavery, but black Americans.)
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1882
An illustration purporting to be from a balloon’s point of view, a panoramic view of Narragansett Bay, was published by J.G. Thompson of Providence, Rhode Island:
In Providence, a Woman’s Suffrage Association of Rhode Island (Elizabeth Buffum Chace, president, Mrs. M.J. Channing, corresponding secretary) was holding regular monthly meetings at its offices in the Hoppin Homestead Building at 283 Westminster Street. At these meetings papers were being read and discussed, after which usually there would be an informal tea. FEMINISM
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1887
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was one of two representatives of color at the annual congress of the Association for the Advancement of Women in New-York (Frances Ellen Watkins Harper also attended).
Rhode Island made itself the 1st eastern state to vote on a woman’s suffrage referendum — but voted down this amendment to the state Constitution. Elizabeth Buffum Chace, in bed recovering from surgery, pointedly inquired of a friend:
“Well, what shall we do next?”
The United States Supreme Court struck down the law that had enfranchised women in the Washington Territory. Meanwhile, the United States Congress denied the right to vote to the women of Utah. Meanwhile, however, the women of Kansas won the right to vote, but only in municipal elections. FEMINISM
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1891
Elizabeth Buffum Chace. ANTI-SLAVERY REMINISCENCES. Central Falls, Rhode Island: E.L. Freeman & Son — state printers, 1891.
1899
Elizabeth Buffum Chace died at the age of 93.
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: December 4, 2013
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GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, someone has requested that we pull it out of the hat of a pirate who has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (as above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture (this is data mining). To respond to such a request for information we merely push a button.
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Commonly, the first output of the algorithm has obvious deficiencies and we need to go back into the modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and recompile the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
First come first serve. There is no charge. Place requests with
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