Learning from an 1831 Schoolbook

At the end of May, I quoted the account of Boston schoolboys demanding that a British army general preserve their sledding area from Samuel Goodrich’s schoolbook The First Book of History, for Children and Youth. Last week at the American Antiquarian Society I got my first look at a first edition of that book, printed in 1831. (The copy readable through Google Books was printed in 1849, showing its continued popularity.)

I can now confirm that:

• The same text appeared in the 1831 edition, meaning that Goodrich was the earliest author to publish this story—or at least the earliest that I’ve found.
• Edward Everett Hale, born in 1822, might well have read the story in The First Book of History rather than (as he remembered) Lydia Maria Child’s Juvenile Miscellany. (Alternatively, Child might have quoted Goodrich’s account in her magazine but not in any of her own books, where I looked.)

Once a story gets into a school textbook, we have to assume it’s everywhere within the culture that uses that textbook. The story of the sledding schoolboys’ committee was an oral tradition up to 1831, but after that the tales that Bostonians passed down were probably influenced by Goodrich’s “authoritative” account. Of course, that account had already been distorted somewhat from how the primary sources from 1775 tell the story.

In the same schoolbook Goodrich mentioned Sarah Bishop, the Connecticut recluse. I’ve written about the contrast between an 1804 account of her life and an 1839 account from The New England Gazetteer, which said she had been “cruelly treated by a British officer.” It turns out the text in the Gazetteer had already appeared in Goodrich’s 1831 schoolbook (and it reappeared in the 1849 edition). Whether Goodrich wrote it or lifted it from some other source I don’t know. But that pushes back the statement of Bishop becoming a recluse because of specific experiences during the Revolutionary War rather than having “always discovered an unusual antipathy to men.”

For more about Samuel Goodrich and his influence on American youth, as himself and under his pseudonym of Peter Parley, visit the Jamaica Plain Historical Society and the University of Pittsburgh’s library.

Sarah Bishop: finding the context

Yesterday’s posting about Sarah Bishop, the “Hermitess of West Mountain,” prompted some good questions from Boston 1775 readers. I’d noted that the earliest account of her life was published while Bishop was still living in a cave (pictured at right) near the Connecticut-New York border, and it says nothing about her suffering from British attacks during the Revolutionary War. Instead, it says, “she always discovered an unusual antipathy to men.” Thirty years after her death, however, being “cruelly treated by a British officer” or privateers became the standard explanation for Bishop’s reclusive lifestyle.

slskenyon wrote:

I think there are other possible reasons why this "contemporary" account should be "read" within its own time. I think you will be hard-pressed to find any account anywhere--even in private diary entries--of someone having experienced a rape of any kind.

And Alfred F . Young wrote in an email:

Long Island was overrun with British soldiers who had an established high level of rapes. She was (by tradition) a beautiful woman (with high expectations of landing a good catch). If she was raped and especially if she bore a child, she would have been disgraced. . . . She could have been traumatized and fled far away from the British and men (North Salem would do) and spent her life in a cave.

Al’s book Masquerade, about Deborah Sampson Gannett, discusses cases of young women using men’s clothes to flee such disgrace.

I assayed the context of the 1804 description of Bishop by looking up the word “rape” in American newspapers that year. And the first thing that search revealed was that “rape” is also a crop, part of the word “grape,” and close enough to a lot of other words and phrases (like “rope” and “escape”) to confuse the OCR program that created the digital database.

So I sampled the 900+ results—checking about 20-25% of the entries. Most were false positives, but several did refer to the violent crime.

• On 3 Jan, The Farmer’s Cabinet of Middlebury, Vermont, reported the arrest of Samuel Baker Bump for having “committed a rape on the body of a female child, of the age of four or five years, and daughter of Amos Coggswell of...Coventry.”
• The next day, the Portsmouth Weekly Wanderer described a father in Machias, Maine, setting fire to the jail to kill a young man who had “attempted rape on a young lady of 15 years of age.”
• The New York Daily Advertiser for 14 April described the conviction of a Kentuckian named Richard Tomlinson “for a rape, committed on his own niece.” That account was later picked up in the New Hampshire Gazette.
• In July, several Massachusetts newspapers reported on the capture of “the villain who committed the rape and murder on the body of Miss Sally Tolbot, of Canton.”
• The 23 Aug Otsego Herald ran what looks like a bad joke from Dublin about a “ravished fair one” and “a rape.” On 15 Nov, the same paper ran a story from North Carolina about the conviction of a man “for attempting to commit a rape on the wife of Nathaniel Morgan.”
• Finally, by looking up “ravish” I found that on 1 May The Hive of Northampton reported about the arraignment of soldier Micah Welch for “an attempt to ravish a female child under the age of nine years.”

Newspaper printers of 1804 don’t appear to have shied away from the word “rape” or mentions of that crime. There are some possible signs of printers shielding rape victims from the public eye: in the only account that names the victim, that woman is dead. However, four other articles offer enough detail for people to identify the victim (e.g., the four- or five-year-old daughter of Amos Coggswell of Coventry).

Legal authorities sometimes trod delicately by casting some rapes as attempted rapes. I’ve read that prosecutors or juries could decide on this charge because of the difficulty of proving the harsher crime and/or a wish to avoid punishing the rapist with death. Perhaps printers used the same sidestep to shield a victim from stigma. But clearly some of these newspapers said that rapes had occurred. And at least in these published accounts (we don’t know what didn’t make the newspapers), the newspapers reflect sympathy rather than disgrace for the victim.

In fact, printers seem to have been more squeamish about the word “rape” in 1839, the date of the account of Sarah Bishop that said she was “cruelly used.” Even though the U.S. had more and longer newspapers by then, the same digital database kicks out only 110 appearances of the word “rape” that year (only a few having anything to do with the crime).

So it looks like the 1804 writer could have reported that Sarah Bishop had been raped during the Revolutionary War, or hinted at some crime or mistreatment as the 1839 writer delicately did. Indeed, with many Americans in 1804 still remembering the years of warfare around New York, such an account would have cast Bishop as the victim of a shared national enemy. But the contemporary writer didn’t do so. Instead, he or she connected Bishop’s odd behavior to antipathies she had exhibited from an early age.

Perhaps the later writer had more information about Bishop, and felt comfortable hinting at it long after her death. But I think it’s also possible that writer was offering an explanation that made more sense in the context of 1839.

Sarah Bishop: cave-dwelling recluse

By way of the 11th Carnival of Bad History, of all things, I learned about Walking the Berkshires’s posting on Sarah Bishop, the Hermit of West Mountain straddling Ridgefield, Connecticut, and North Salem, New York.

Bishop was turned into a romantic figure by writers in her own time and since (including Newbery-winning novelist Scott O’Dell, in the book at right). In 1839, the New England Gazetteer reported:

She lived on Long Island at the time of the Revolutionary war. Her father’s house was burned by the British, and she was cruelly treated by a British officer. She then left society and wandered among the mountains near this part of the state: she found a kind of cave near Ridgefield, where she resided till about the time of her death, which took place in 1810.

Later accounts say Bishop was forced to serve the crew aboard a British privateer. Some websites list her among female pirates. Linda Grant DePauw’s Seafaring Women interpreted this account more realistically to present Bishop as a victim of rape and, possibly, post-traumatic stress syndrome.

But when did that explanation of her behavior arise? The Democrat of Boston published an essay about Bishop, “The Hermitess of North Salem,” on 22 Sept 1804, crediting a Poughkeepsie newspaper as the source. That article suggested a different history for her reclusiveness:

Sarah Bishop, (for this was the name of this Hermitess) is a person of about fifty years of age. About thirty years ago [i.e., 1774] she was a young lady of considerable beauty, a competent share of mental endowments, and education; She was possessed of a handsome fortune, but she was of a tender of delicate constitution, and enjoyed but a low degree of health; and could hardly be comfortable without constant recourse to medicine, and careful attendance; and added to this, she always discovered an unusual antipathy to men; and was often heard to say that she had no dread of any animal on earth but man. Disgusted with them, and consequently with the world, about twenty-three years ago [i.e., about 1781], she withdrew herself from all human society...

This early account makes no mention of wartime trauma or years on a British ship. Instead, it implies that Bishop’s “delicate constitution,” “low degree of health,” and “constant recourse to medicine” appeared before or early in the Revolutionary War—and she always showed an “unusual antipathy to men.”

Of course it’s possible that Bishop developed her “unusual antipathy” because of trauma during the war, and the Poughkeepsie writer either didn’t know about that event or chose to keep it secret. But we humans have a tendency to seek a reason for people’s mental or emotional difficulties—such as finding an event to explain why Bishop came to dread men so much. (The case of James Otis, Jr., offers another example.) But we also know that such behavior can arise from brain chemistry, not from an outside cause. So there may be more—or less—to the story of Sarah Bishop to discover.