Royall Tyler and What “Dissipation” Meant

So what do I have against Royall Tyler, the young lawyer who said such flattering things about Abigail and John Adams while he courted their daughter in 1782? (This was the younger son of the canny Boston politician Royall Tyler. Picture at right courtesy of NNDB.com.) Why do I say that John’s first, unfavorable response to news of the young suitor, when he wrote to Abigail, “I dont like your Word ‘Dissipation’ at all. I dont know what it means, it may mean every Thing,” was probably wise?

The younger Tyler (1757-1826) received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard in the exciting year of 1776, and then stayed around Cambridge for a while to earn a master’s. During this time he studied law under Francis Dana, who showed up in the John Adams miniseries as minister to Russia (and as such boss of young John Quincy Adams), and Benjamin Hichborn, who didn’t show up on T.V. as the young lawyer who was captured carrying some letters that embarrassed John Adams.

The painter John Trumbull later wrote:

At this period, 1777-8, a club was formed in Boston of young men fresh from college, among whose members were Rufus King, Christopher Gore, William Eustis, Royal Tyler, Thomas Dawes, Aaron Dexter, &c. &c.,—men who in after life became distinguished. The club generally met in my room, regaled themselves with a cup of tea instead of wine, and discussed subjects of literature, politics and war.

Tyler probably drank more than tea during these years. In 1777 he and King were accused of “profanity, noises and breaking windows in Cambridge.” To the university disciplinary committee he declared, “What do I care for a little paltry Degree which may be bought at any time for twenty shillings”?

In 1779 a twenty-three-year-old Harvard housekeeper named Katherine Morse gave birth to an illegitimate child she named Royall. He was long but unofficially identified as Tyler’s child.

Tyler inherited a fairly large fortune and spent about half of it before moving to Braintree to establish himself as a lawyer in early 1782. That was when he began courting the Adams family. His practice did well, and he bought a farm. He secured John and Abigail’s blessing to marry their daughter, Nabby, when the family returned from Europe—and then he neglected her while she was away. Nabby broke off the relationship, as I described yesterday.

Tyler then moved to Boston. In Braintree, he had first lived in the house of Richard and Mary Cranch; Mary was Abigail Adams’s older sister. In Boston, he moved in with another family he’d met in Braintree, the Palmers. Joseph Pearse Palmer was a nephew of Richard Cranch and son of Joseph Palmer, an important Massachusetts official at the start of the war. However, the family had suffered financial difficulties. Joseph P. Palmer was away from home seeking work, and his wife Elizabeth was renting out rooms.

“Family tradition” is often unreliable, especially when it puts the family in a more favorable light than any documentation suggests. However, traditions among Palmer descendants say that Tyler was the father of at least one daughter by Elizabeth Palmer while her husband was out of town. Tyler apparently also had sexual relations of some kind with the Palmers’ daughter Mary, born in 1775. One theory even suggests that Elizabeth’s youngest daughter, born in 1791, was actually Mary’s daughter by Tyler.

By then, Tyler had written The Contrast, the first significant American play. He had also established himself as an attorney in Vermont, settling there in 1790 and eventually becoming chief justice. He would continue to write for the public throughout most of his life, publishing political satires, travel essays, and the popular novel The Algerine Captive in 1797.

According to Mary Palmer’s memoirs, published in Grandmother Tyler’s Book (1925), she and Royall Tyler secretly married in Framingham in May 1794. She gave birth in December, eight months later. As she saw it, “it was ordered by Providence that my first-born, Royall, should compel his father to acknowledge the state of affairs before he meant to do so.” However, it wasn’t until February 1796 that Royall Tyler finally arrived at the Palmer family home to take Mary and the baby to Vermont with him. Even if there had actually been a secret marriage before the birth, that doesn’t reflect well on Tyler.

Other branches of the Palmer family spoke less well of the man than his wife Mary did. In 1833, her sister Elizabeth Peabody published an essay in the Christian Examiner describing an unnamed villain:

a polished man of literary eminence, [known] to enter the sanctuary of sleeping innocence, of absolute childhood, for the basest purpose. . . . He seduced the woman, whose children he would have corrupted, caused the self-murder of a wife and mother, and afterwards married the daughter of that victim.

Five years later Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his notebook of plans for “A political or other satire” in which “the incident of Judge Tyler as related by E—— might be introduced.” Hawthorne’s informant was his future sister-in-law Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, daughter of Elizabeth Peabody. The book Hawthorne planned became The House of Seven Gables, and Royall Tyler was supposedly the inspiration for Judge Jaffrey Pyncheon.

Revolutionary parenting advice: cold baths & bare feet

Josiah Quincy, future mayor of Boston and president of Harvard College, was born in Boston in 1772. After his father, the fiery cross-eyed lawyer of the same name, left town on a last-ditch political mission to Britain in late 1774, Josiah's mother took him to his grandparents' home in Braintree. There she set up what seems like an odd ritual:

Mrs. Quincy caused her son, when not more than three years old, to be taken from his warm bed, in winter as well as summer, and carried down to a cellar-kitchen, and there dipped three times in a tub of water cold from the pump. She also brought him up in utter indifference to wet feet,—usually the terror of anxious mammas,—in which he used to say that he sat more than half the time during his boyhood, and without suffering any ill consequences.

One child who didn't share Quincy's equanimity about cold feet was Mary Palmer, born in 1775. During the war her family also moved to Braintree, closer to her grandparents, and she remembered similar experiences: “My parents, especially my mother,...began that winter by letting us all run out upon the first snow and ice without shoes or stockings, intending to make us hardy and proof against the cold.” The Palmers weren't kids playing barefoot on a warm or even a cool day, like the young reenactor pictured above, at Hartwell Tavern in Minute Man National Historical Park.

Nor was the Palmer family poor at that time. Like young Josiah, Mary and her siblings were raised in the upper crust of Braintree society. Abigail Quincy and Elizabeth and John Palmer were all loving parents, trying to give their offspring the best possible upbringing. And who offered the finest advice of the day? Both Josiah and Mary reported that their mothers were following John Locke (1632-1704).

We think of Locke as a political philosopher whose ideas of natural rights and men coming together to form governments inspired the Declaration of Independence. But in pre-Revolutionary Boston he was apparently just as respected for his advice on raising and educating children in Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1692). Locke's stature as a parenting expert was not hurt by the fact that he was a lifelong bachelor who never had children of his own. He came by his opinions through tutoring other people's sons and through reading.

In particular, Locke was impressed by what classical historians wrote about the Scythians:

The first thing to be taken care of, is, that children be not too warmly clad or cover'd, winter or summer. The face when we are born, is no less tender than any other part of the body. 'Tis use alone hardens it, and makes it more able to endure the cold. And therefore the Scythian philosopher gave a very significant answer to the Athenian, who wonder'd how he could go naked in frost and snow. How, said the Scythian, can you endure your face expos'd to the sharp winter air? My face is us'd to it, said the Athenian. Think me all face, reply'd the Scythian. Our bodies will endure any thing, that from the beginning they are accustom'd to.

Those lightly-clad Scythians lived around the Black Sea. Climatic and topographical differences didn't deter Locke from cajoling parents:

Give me leave therefore to advise you not to fence too carefully against the cold of this our climate. There are those in England, who wear the same clothes winter and summer, and that without any inconvenience, or more sense of cold than others find. But if the mother will needs have an allowance for frost and snow, for fear of harm, and the father, for fear of censure, be sure let not his winter clothing be too warm: And amongst other things, remember, that when nature has so well covered his head with hair, and strengthen'd it with a year or two's age, that he can run about by day without a cap, it is best that by night a child should also lie without one; there being nothing that more exposes to headaches, colds, catarrhs, coughs, and several other diseases, than keeping the head warm.

Locke went on at greatest length about the value of cold, wet feet:

I will also advise his feet to be wash'd every day in cold water, and to have his shoes so thin, that they might leak and let in water, whenever he comes near it. Here, I fear I shall have the mistress and maids too against me. One will think it too filthy, and the other perhaps too much pains, to make clean his stockings. But yet truth will have it, that his health is much more worth than all such considerations, and ten times as much more. And he that considers how mischievous and mortal a thing taking wet in the feet is, to those who have been bred nicely, will wish he had, with the poor people's children, gone bare-foot, who, by that means, come to be so reconcil'd by custom to wet in their feet, that they take no more cold or harm by it, than if they were wet in their hands. And what is it, I pray, that makes this great difference between the hands and the feet in others, but only custom? I doubt not, but if a man from his cradle had been always us'd to go bare-foot, whilst his hands were constantly wrapt up in warm mittins, and cover'd with hand-shoes, as the Dutch call gloves; I doubt not, I say, but such a custom would make taking wet in his hands as dangerous to him, as now taking wet in their feet is to great many others. The way to prevent this, is, to have his shoes made so as to leak water, and his feet wash'd constantly every day in cold water. It is recommendable for its cleanliness; but that which I aim at in it, is health; and therefore I limit it not precisely to any time of the day. I have known it us'd every night with very good success, and that all the winter, without the omitting it so much as one night in extreme cold weather; when thick ice cover'd the water, the child bathed his legs and feet in it, though he was of an age not big enough to rub and wipe them himself, and when he began this custom was puling and very tender. But the great end being to harden those parts by a frequent and familiar use of cold water, and thereby to prevent the mischiefs that usually attend accidental taking wet in the feet in those who are bred otherwise, I think it may be left to the prudence and convenience of the parents, to chuse either night or morning. The time I deem indifferent, so the thing be effectually done.

How common was it for Lockean parents to subject their children to cold baths and wet shoes? As I wrote above, the Quincy and Palmer families both lived in Braintree, and raised their children about the same time. Abigail and John Adams were part of the same set, related by marriage and friendship to both Quincys and Palmers. But I haven't found John Quincy Adams writing about childhood wet feet and cold baths the same way. Perhaps he escaped this treatment by being raised a few years earlier. Perhaps Abigail and John were less anxious than their neighbors about following the latest parenting trends.

Mary Palmer: young "city lady" in the country

This blog seems to have developed a small following among local knitters, so I looked for some handwork stories to share. This installment also has more than its share of unabashed gossip.

At the start of the Revolution in 1775, newborn Mary Palmer’s family was near the top of Patriot society. Her paternal grandfather was one of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress’s leaders: Braintree manufacturer and militia general Joseph Palmer. For a time her father, Joseph Pearse Palmer, was commissary for the provincial troops. After the war, however, the family fell on hard times. They blamed John Hancock for collecting debts when they had sunk all their cash into Continental scrip and a salt-making enterprise, but it’s clear that psychological depression was also involved. Mary later wrote, “my beloved father’s spirits sank, he seemed totally discouraged.”

Her maternal grandparents let Joseph P. Palmer farm some of their land in Framingham for half the crops. Mary recalled how she and her sisters adjusted from town life to farm life in the 1780s:

We learned to spin, borrowing wheels of our good-natured neighbors, who seemed pleased to teach the city ladies their craft. We learned, while we lived there, to spin flax, on a little foot wheel, and wool, tow and cotton, on a large wheel. . . . a plump rosy faced girl whose name was Zerniah Price…taught us how to card wool, cotton and tow, and how to hatchel flax, some of which we raised upon the farm; and my mother would change work with Zerniah’s mother and other women, knitting and sewing for them while they would weave cotton and flax into cloth which we would get dressed into fustian at the mill.

Eventually Joseph P. Palmer left his family to work in northern New England. After various indignities, Mary ended up marrying author Royall Tyler. What indignities? It seems clear that Royall got Mary pregnant and put off marrying her until months after she gave birth. And researchers now believe that he had earlier impregnated her mother, and perhaps tried to seduce one of her sisters. The Tyler family settled on a farm in Brattleboro in 1796; Royall would eventually become chief justice of Vermont while Mary published one of America’s first parenting books.

Earlier I quoted Royall’s deliberately quaint description of a spinning bee. Here’s Mary on the work of organizing textile production on the Vermont farm:

All this time my dairy and spinning wheels were busily attended...by myself, with the assistance of one and at times two girls. Our sheep furnished wool, and we raised flax. I spun all the thread I used for years, whitening some, and coloring some, and some keeping flax color. I hired a girl to spin that I wanted wove, and the tow also, with which we made cloth for sheets and common table linen.

Later Mary convinced Royall to buy her a loom for her women to weave on. She also sent some blankets “to have them fulled at the mill and dressed,” but “the clothier…fulled it so much” that she was “sadly disappointed.” The system back in Framingham seemed to work better.

These quotations are from Grandmother Tyler’s Book, a compilation of Mary Tyler’s and her mother’s memoirs edited by descendants Frederick Tupper and Helen Tyler Brown. The evidence of Royall Tyler's sexual behavior is discussed in Bruce A. Ronda's Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Megan Marshall's The Peabody Sisters.