Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674498631, 9780674187559

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Prodigal Puritan A Life of Delia Bacon

Prodigal Puritan A Life of Delia Bacon By V I V I A N C. HOPKINS

THE BELKNAP PRESS of HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, Massachusetts 1

9 5 9

© '959> h the President and Fellows of Harvard College Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London

* Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 59-10317 Printed in the United States of America

FOR R I C H A R D

Preface D e l i a Bacon startled the world in 1856 with the pronouncement that Shakespeare did not write the Plays attributed to him. Repercussions of this bombshell are still vibrating in our time, and Miss Bacon is chiefly remembered as the originator of the Baconian theory. Since her strange theory was bound up with a nervous imbalance, with roots sunk deep in her past, and since her brilliant mind retreated into a world of fancy during the last two years, it might seem that her biography should be a study in abnormality. Yet, neither the scorn leveled at her theory by its detractors, nor the pity which admirers have lavished on her memory, is what Delia Bacon demanded of the world. Respect for ability and a chance to get on with her work were all she asked — and in her day, by her own efforts, she was accorded both. A fair biography must do no less than suggest high aims as well as misses, originality as well as eccentricity, the morning as well as the midnight mood. "The greatest American yet born," was Ignatius Donnelly's claim for Delia Bacon in 1889. Without quite sharing Donnelly's enthusiasm, one must, after studying the record of Delia's life, accord her love and honor, albeit of a different sort from Donnelly's. I first became acquainted with Delia Bacon through Emerson, whose interest in her was a high recommendation. The biography by her nephew, Theodore Bacon, which described her friendships with Carlyle and Hawthorne, showed that Emerson was not the only great man who went out of his way to help Miss Bacon. That nineteenth-century shocker, Catherine Beecher's Truth Stranger than Fiction, of quite another order from Theodore Bacon's biography, was at once fascinating and perplexing. Delia as the heroine of a cause célèbre did not seem the same person as the protégée of distinguished literary men; but I discovered that connections did exist between the mind eager for knowledge and the woman in love. The richest source of all for understanding Delia Bacon's complex character was her own papers. The astonishing revelation of vii

Preface these manuscripts is the number of cultural and intellectual crosscurrents which mingle with the stream of her life (1811-1859). The springhead is her parents' Puritan faith and their Westward pioneering. Puritanism, especially as represented by her brother Leonard, pastor of New Haven's First Church, supplied the raison d'être of her existence, until she challenged Connecticut orthodoxy in 1847. But even before that eventful year, stimulating friendships opened her mind to vistas other than that of the Connecticut Valley: the gay cosmopolitanism of John and Charles King; Benjamin Silliman, Senior's ideal of pure science; Samuel Morse's love of art and invention; John Lord's "Beacon Lights" of history; and the glittering spell cast by Ellen Tree on the stage of New York City. Later, in New Orleans, she was exposed to the Southern expansionism of Edmund Pendleton Gaines, and in Boston, to Rufus Choate's Northern Whiggism. Neither of these attitudes moved her so profoundly as Transcendentalism, especially as it glowed in the person of Ralph Waldo Emerson. During her public lectures in New York City, George Putnam brought her in touch with the publishing world, and Charles Butler gave her a glimpse of empire-building. In England she confronted the tough-minded scholarship and British conservatism of Thomas Carlyle, and, finally, was saved from despair by Nathaniel Hawthorne's romantic chivalry. In the history of woman's emancipation, Delia Bacon holds a unique place. No woman of her time was driven by a more inordinate ambition; yet the spur to fame had its checks in humility, wit, and a deep respect for contemporary mores. Such causes as the vote or the Bloomer costume were beneath her notice — what she worked for was woman's right to know. Unlike many of her female contemporaries, she held stubbornly aloof from committees, "Associations," organizations of all sorts; Henry Thoreau was not more insistent than she on cutting an individual trail through the American intellectual forest. Never a sycophant, she learned to sue for favors rather than demand rights, from men who held the keys to power. She developed an increasing astuteness in making one success serve another; she played New Haven against Boston, Boston against New York, London against Stratford, and England against America. Delia Bacon was in her element on the lecture platform, esviii

Preface pecially in her Historical Lessons in Boston and New York. Like her predecessor Margaret Fuller, Delia was a born speaker, but a writer only through effort and acquired skill. Her fiction and criticism, she would be the first to admit, do not match the eloquence which an audience could spark into flame. On the lecture platform as well as in informal classes, Delia came into her own. Regrettably, most of the power, expressiveness, and humor of these lectures has vanished into thin air; we can only guess at their quality from newspaper reports, friends' testimony, and the few fragments that survive in her letters. Yet Delia made a significant if strange achievement as a writer. Her early stories successfully invoke the atmosphere of early America. And her book, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded, however tortured in expression, shows a strong intellectual grasp of Shakespeare's dramatic form and Bacon's philosophical ideas. If she was not quite the interpreter that Bacon looked for from "foreign nations and next ages," he — as well as Shakespeare — would certainly admit that Miss Bacon was, in her own way, "a Delian diver." Delia had a real gift for friendship; her own estimate of a hundred intimates, on leaving for England, was not far from the mark. She experienced betrayal, in friendship as well as in love, but such associates as Eliza Farrar remained constant, as though bound by hoops of steel. She was fortunate in having a number of wealthy friends, in whose homes she could enjoy the comfort that her own earnings did not supply. As an adopted child in the home of Thomas Scott Williams, Delia early fell in love with the pleasant graces, which the Puritan in her recognized as a snare and a delusion. It became her practice to follow a relaxing vacation visit by a period of selfdenial and intense intellectual concentration. And, from the beginning of her London years, she resolutely turned her back, not merely on luxury, but also on companionship, in a single-minded, ascetic devotion to her own special brand of scholarship. The whole life of Delia Bacon is neither a tragedy nor a comedy of errors; it has, rather, the tone and temper of those Chronicle Histories which she admired so much: the triumphant scenes, the moments of gaiety, and the cohesion of the protagonist's own firm, unyielding purpose. ix

Preface The most delightful phase of the four years spent on this biographical research is the expression of gratitude to those who have helped the work along. A sabbatical leave from the N e w York State College for Teachers, Albany, and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, during 1956-57, granted for the larger study of Francis Bacon's influence on American thought, also gave opportunity to complete the investigation of material relating to Delia Bacon. A Summer Fellowship from the Research Foundation of the State University of N e w York in 1958 provided further aid. It has been easy to awaken interest in Delia Bacon's career. Members of the Bacon family, scholars, librarians, and antiquarians have shown a generous readiness to assist. T o Perry Miller I owe the imaginative perception of Delia Bacon's charm, and the implications of her story, which supplied the spark for this book. I was greatly assisted in the early stages of work by the late Saxe Commins, whose keen editorial pen reduced mass to reasonable form, and whose sense of irony played a contrapuntal theme on the romance and tragedy of Delia's life. Through the magnanimity of Leonard B. Bacon's descendants, I have been granted the privilege of access to the rich heritage of Delia Bacon's own manuscripts. I wish to thank Mr. and Mrs. Leonard Lee Bacon, David Bacon, and Mrs. Lawrence T . Hallett, with a special recognition of David Bacon's interest in the biography, as well as for photostats of letters in his possession from Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell to Theodore Bacon. T o Emma Swift, of the Rochester Public Library, I owe assistance in locating the Delia Bacon manuscripts. J. Robert Murray, of the Security Trust Company, Rochester, N e w York, opened to me the facilities of the bank during my work on the manuscripts. Elizabeth B. Greene and Margaret Corwin have graciously given me permission to quote from the large and important collection of Leonard Bacon manuscripts in the Yale University Library. Alfred H. T . Bacon has given me encouragement and useful information about West Rock, N e w Haven. I am indebted to Mrs. Ziegler Sargent and the late Ziegler Sargent for showing me the David Bacon portrait, for giving me a plan of the Leonard Bacon house lot, and for inspiring, sympathetic interest. χ

Preface T o Norman Pearson I owe a threefold debt: for generosity in opening to me his collection of Hawthorne letters, for information about Yale and New Haven, and for a critical reading of the manuscript. T o the kindness of the Reverend Dr. David Nelson Beach, pastor of The First Church, New Haven, and to the Reverend Mr. J . Edward Newton, pastor emeritus of the Westville Congregational Church, I owe the privilege of using the records of the New Haven West Association concerning Alexander MacWhorter's ecclesiastical trial. The Reverend Mr. James F. English, General Superintendent of the Connecticut Conference of Congregational Christian Churches, made available for my use the records of other Connecticut Associations, and also taught me something about Congregational Church history. I have found gracious hospitality in all departments of the Yale University Library that I have visited. I thank Robert F. Metzdorf, Curator of manuscripts, for permission to quote from the Leonard Bacon collection, the Blake collection, the letters and diary of Delia Ellsworth Williams, letters of Delia Bacon to James Gates Percival and Denison Olmsted, and the Personal Notices of Benjamin Silliman, Senior. Special gratitude is acknowledged to Edith L. Healey, of the Divinity School Library; to Zara Jones Powers, for assistance with the Historical Manuscripts collections, as well as for facts drawn from her encyclopaedic knowledge of New Haven genealogy; to Barbara Simison, for guiding me to the Delia Williams manuscripts; and to Marjorie Wynne, of the Rare Book Room, for many courtesies. I am indebted to Caroline Rollins of the Yale University Art Gallery for information about the Copley portrait of Alexander MacWhorter. My gleanings in New Haven history have been enriched by the portraits, engravings, and street plans in the New Haven Historical Society, which Ralph Thomas made available to me. Mrs. George Pierce Baker has given me significant information about Delia Bacon, and Malcolm C. Munson, Superintendent of the Grove Street Cemetery, has assisted my research on the Bacon family plots. For the Hartford background, I owe thanks to the Connecticut State Library for information about the Hartford Female Seminary, letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the will of Henrietta Blake xi

Preface MacWhorter. Contemporary prints and paintings in the Connecticut Historical Society have been illuminating. In the Hartford Public Library and the First Church of Hartford I have gained useful material on Joel Hawes and Thomas Scott Williams. Dr. John Donnelly, of the Institute of Living (formerly the Hartford Retreat), arranged a guided tour of the buildings and grounds. This was particularly helpful, since the main building, still in use, is the one in which Delia Bacon spent the last year and a half of her life. Material on the Boston and Cambridge years was chiefly provided by the Harvard College Library. Here it is a pleasure to acknowledge the help of Robert H. Haines; and of William H. Jackson and Carolyn Jakeman of the Houghton Library, for manuscripts in the George W . Curtis and the Elizabeth Peabody papers. To Stephen T. Riley, of the Massachusetts Historical Society, I am indebted for a letter of Delia Bacon to Caroline Dall, and for letters of Ralph W . Emerson to Mrs. Dall. In re-creating New York City a century ago, I have been assisted by Geraldine Beard and Louis H. Fox, who made available the rich resources of the New York Historical Society's library and gallery; especially helpful were reviews of Delia's public lectures, in The New York Herald, and articles in the rare New York Day Book, edited by Delia's brother David Bacon. The staff of the New York Public Library, notably John D. Gordan, of the Berg Collection, Rutherford Rogers, of the Reference Department, and Lewis Stark, of the Reserve Collection, have been unfailingly helpful. Dr. Theodore F. Jones, Curator of the New York University Collection, University Heights Library, has given me permission to quote from manuscripts in the Charles Butler Letter Books. The portrayal of the Brattleboro scene, where the drama of Delia Bacon's romance with Alexander MacWhorter reached its climax, has been assisted by Mrs. Beatrice Pierce, of the Brattleboro Public Library, on the subject of Dr. Robert Wesselhoeft's Water Cure; by the firemen of Brattleboro, who operate on the site which once housed the Water Cure; and by Jason E. Bushneil of Vernon, Vermont, whose Yankee Museum is a treasure house of Brattleboro history. Mason Tolman and the staff of the New York State Library, Albany, have shown me patient and continuing kindness; Edna L. Jacobsen has been especially helpful with the Theodore Bacon xii

Preface manuscripts, which contain valuable references to the reception of Theodore's biography of his aunt. I am indebted to Louis B. Wright and Dorothy Mason, of the Folger Library, for material on Holy Trinity Church, Stratfordon-Avon; and for letters from Delia Bacon to George Putnam and to the firm of Phillips, Sampson. F. B. Adams has generously opened to me the extensive Bacon collection of the Pierpont Morgan Library. George A. Schwegmann, of the Library of Congress, circulated my request for information about manuscripts. To Clifford K. Shipton, of the American Antiquarian Society, I owe access to the rare issue of the Saturday Courier, which contains Delia Bacon's prize-winning story, "Love's Martyr." Marguerite V. Daggett, of the Queens Borough Public Library, has sent me helpful data on the history of Jamaica, Long Island. Clara Parker has contributed facts about Maria Mitchell from the Nantucket Public Library. To Flora B. Ludington, of the Mt. Holyoke College Library, I owe a copy of Catherine Beecher's circular letter addressed to the Reverend Mr. Jeremiah Day and the Reverend Mr. Theodore Woolsey; and to Audubon R. Davis, of the New Jersey Historical Society, information about the MacWhorter family. Elizabeth Baughman, of the Chicago Historical Society, has contributed a copy of Sarah Henshaw's article on Delia Bacon; and Margaret Gleason, of the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, has found material on the Baconian theory in the Midwest. However impossible it is to recognize all the assistance I have had from scholars of American and Renaissance culture, a few significant debts must be mentioned: to Leon Edel, for instruction in the theory and practice of biography; to B. Bernard Cohen, for suggestions about Hawthorne's position on the Baconian theory; to Oscar Cargill and Robert Spiller, who have helped to locate obscure references; to L. Virginia Holland, for research on Maria Mitchell; to Commander Martin Pares, of the Francis Bacon Society, London, one of the few Baconian scholars who has examined Delia's contribution to criticism; and to R. W. Gibson, of Blackwell's, Oxford, who has guided me through the maze of Baconian bibliography. Aside from the general assistance and encouragement freely given by my colleagues and students at the New York State College for Teachers, Albany, I am especially indebted for the solution xiii

Preface of some specific scholarly problems to Arthur N . Collins, Mary G. Goggin, Harry W . Hastings, Ruth E. Hutchins, Marvin J. Pryor, Roy Newton, and Edith O. Wallace. I have been fortunate in finding research assistants possessed of zeal and ingenuity as well as conscientiousness: Jeannette Fellheimer, Helen James, Jean Morris Boomsliter, Caroline Smith Rittenhouse, and Estelle Smith. Some scenes in Delia Bacon's life cry out for dramatic treatment. I have, therefore, shown Delia confronting directly each successive element of her destiny: the love affair with Alexander MacWhorter and the subsequent trial, the appearances on the Boston and New York lecture platforms, the meetings with Charles Butler, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But for each one of these scenes there is evidence, in manuscripts, books, or newspaper articles. While the notes are schematic rather than complete, they will indicate to the curious reader the sources from which these scenes are drawn. The debt to printed sources is recognized in the notes and bibliography; but some significant books deserve mention here. T o Houghton Mifflin Company I owe permission to quote from Theodore Bacon, Delia Bacon, A Biographical Sketch (1888); to Yale University Press, permission to quote from Theodore Davenport Bacon, Leonard Bacon, A Statesman in the Church ( 1931 ) ; to Randall Stewart, and Yale University Press, permission to quote from Randall Stewart, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1948); to Ralph L. Rusk, Edward W. Forbes, for the Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association, and Columbia University Press, permission to quote relevant passages in The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (1939); to James Wesley Silver and the Louisiana State University Press, permission to quote from James Wesley Silver, Edmund Pendleton Gaines, Frontier General (1949). Finally, I am grateful to friends and members of my family who have responded sympathetically to the pathos of Delia Bacon's story and the significance of her achievement — above all, to my brother Richard, who has read the manuscript with a lawyer's eye. Vivian C. Hopkins Troy, New York February 1959 xiv

Contents CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety ι A Career is Launched 29 The Trial 71

CHAPTER FOUR

The Lecture Platform 131

CHAPTER FIVE

London and Stratford 173

CHAPTER SIX

EPILOGUE

Decline and Death 245 The Fables of the New Philosophy

BIBLIOGRAPHY

303

NOTES

308

INDEX

349

Illustrations following

p. 112

The New Haven Green. Courtesy New Haven the Old Print Shop, New York City.

Colony

Historical

Letter from Delia Bacon to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brooklyn, 1853. Reproduced from a negative photostat. Author's Apology

and Claim. Reproduced

The Nave, Holy Trinity Bradford, England.

Church,

from a negative

Stratford-on-Avon.

Shakespeare's Monument and Grave, Holy Trinity Courtesy Walter Scott, Bradford, England.

Society

N.Y.,

and

April

photostat.

Courtesy

Church,

Walter

Scott,

Stratford-on-Avon.

Portrait of Delia Bacon, 1853. Reproduced from Theodore Bacon, Delia Bacon, A Biographical Sketch (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin and Co., ¡888).

Prodigal Puritan A Life of Delia Bacon

CHAPTER

ONE

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety "I write the Wonders of the Christian Religion, flying from the Depravations of Europe, to the American Strand." Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana. ι O η the morning of September 2, 1818, seven-year-old Delia Bacon met the first crisis of her life. Her widowed mother, Alicft Parks Bacon, kissed Delia good-by, and the child stood on the porch of the Thomas Scott Williams home in Hartford, watching until the wagon loaded with the Bacon household goods, on its way to the Western turnpike, was out of sight. Mrs. Bacon, with her children Susan, Julia, David and Francis, was setting out for Livonia in Western N e w York, the home of her uncle, Samuel Parks. Besides their furniture and sixty dollars lent by her brother-in-law, Uncle Dr. Leonard, the family carried some millinery supplies. The oldest daughter, fourteen-year-old Susan, knew how to make hats; and Mrs. Bacon hoped to maintain life by means of Susan's skill and their combined efforts. 1 In tears, Delia turned to her foster mother, Delia Ellsworth Williams, who took the child in her arms in a rare demonstration of affection. The child's shoulders were bony, Mrs. Williams thought; she must have nourishing food. She might not be a beauty — but the blue-gray eyes, even though clouded by tears, were expressive, and gold lights shone in the soft brown hair. A childhood friend of Alice Parks Bacon, the tall, reserved Mrs. Williams was attracted to her namesake, from the time that ι

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon the Bacon family came back to Hartford from Tallmadge, Ohio, in 1812; and during the illness of the father, David Bacon, she had been particularly kind. She had invited the child into her home partly out of a sense of duty to Mrs. Bacon, and partly because of admiration, tinged with envy, for the Bacons' assured piety (the Williamses attended Joel Hawes' First Church, but neither had seen the "light" that would admit them as members). Like other sensible Hartfordians (including David Bacon's brother, Dr. Leonard), Mrs. Williams had nothing but scorn for the harebrained Tallmadge colonization project which ruined the Reverend Mr. Bacon and threw his family upon others for their support.2 She did not undertake the responsibility of little Delia's care without earnest consultation with her husband. A daughter of Oliver Ellsworth, Chief Justice of the United States, Delia Williams came from a distinguished family; and her position was secured by her marriage to Thomas Scott Williams in 1813. A skillful lawyer and statesman, Mr. Williams insisted that his wife be free to accompany him on trips; and, when he was at home, to take her place in the city's social life with the Trumbulls, Wadsworths, Terrys, and Days. As the couple had no children, they invited Mrs. Wilhams' nieces to stay with them from time to time for a winter's schooling, but they were unwilling to stand in loco parentis. If Frances Wood or Elmira Ellsworth got out of hand, Mrs. Wilhams promptly sent the child home.3 Delia Bacon's residence, they decided, was to be on the same terms; Mrs. Williams agreed to keep her only for a year.4 But the foster mother, touched by something extraordinary in the child's personality, told herself that it might be longer. Lively, quick and affectionate, the little girl responded to joy as well as sorrow with an almost frightening intensity. She was proud and quick-tempered, also; but Mrs. Williams felt that she could do more than the harrassed Mrs. Bacon to correct these faults. With certain cautious reservations, Delia Wilhams was now "Aunt" and guardian to Delia Bacon. As Mrs. Wilhams did not feel that Delia was yet ready for school, the child had plenty of time to explore the city of Hartford on her daily walks. She sighed over the beautiful dresses in Eliphalet Terry's general merchandise window, the exotic hats 2

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety trimmed with ribbon and peacock feathers in Sarah Weeks' millinery shop, and the lozenges and peppermints in the confectioner's showcase. Best of all she liked to walk down Ferry Street to the wharf, where every Hartford store had its own dock. A salty, sea-fragrant smell of fish always clung there; and this, with the musty reek of tobacco and rum, the city's trading staples since the Revolution, made up its distinctive odor. She watched freightladen scows as they passed under the great bridge that spanned the Connecticut, putting up topmasts and settling topsails to float up the river with a favoring wind. Kimberley and Brace, wholesale hardware, had a special fascination because they loaded their cargo on ships that sailed direct to the West Indies. Without being aware of how many manufactures the city was engaged in — everything from tin, copper and printing presses to carriages and shoes — or of how much prosperity came from the banking and pioneer insurance businesses, Delia absorbed a sense of bustling, humming activity. When the stage from Boston whirled up to the door of Ripley's Coffee House, she watched the fashionably dressed ladies alight, assisted by the gentlemen, and sweep down the walk into the tavern. The Albany stage, which left in the morning, three times a week, interested her even more. Was it possible that some day she might ride on that stage and visit her family in faraway N e w York State? In the fall of 1818, to this child who was not quite an orphan, but who felt like one, N e w York seemed as remote as the West Indies. It was easier to bear the pangs of separation from her family when she thought of her older brother Leonard in N e w Haven, only forty miles away. On this eldest son, now, at sixteen, a junior at Yale, were staked all the Bacons' hopes of success; before the father died, he entrusted the whole family to Leonard's care. The Connecticut Female Society and the Female Society of N e w Haven were paying for his Yale expenses, and promised to see him through theological school as well. Leonard had a way with women; on his summer vacation in Fairfield, Mrs. Roger Sherman and her friends were so charmed by the needy lad that they showered him with shirts, cravats and stockings.5 Leonard surprised his sister on November 9, when he acted as Mrs. Williams' escort on her return from N e w Haven. Thomas 3

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon Scott Williams was beginning his second year in the House of Representatives, and Mrs. Williams had ridden with him in the chaise as far as New Haven.6 Delia, who had spent the days of her foster mother's absence in crowded quarters at Uncle Dr. Leonard's, was happy to get back to her own room in the Williams home. The added pleasure of seeing Leonard ("Bubby Lenny," as young David called him) was almost too much to bear. When she had recovered from the shock of delight, she enjoyed showing him off to her housemate, Elmira Williams. As he talked that evening after tea, Delia devoured every detail of the short, stocky figure, the deep-set blue eyes, sandy hair, and the hatchetshaped head so like their father's. This brother destined for the ministry did not talk of Divine matters as much as she expected. He told of reading and writing poetry, of The Talebearer, a literary magazine that he was planning with Theodore Woolsey and A. C. Twining, to provide readings for their literary society, the Brothers-in-Unity, and he admitted to enjoying midnight snacks of sweet potatoes and ale. This was exciting, but also humiliating to the little sister who could neither read nor write. She must persuade Aunt Williams to send her to school, soon. She longed to see New Haven, which sounded to her like the mecca of culture. Leonard, also lonely for his family, enjoyed this chance to see Delia, who was lucky, he thought, to have such a good home. Disappointed in missing Alice Parks Bacon before she left Hartford, he was glad now to be able to read to Mrs. Williams and Delia a recent letter from Mrs. Bacon. The Livonia venture, she reported, did not work out; but she was now happily settled in East Bloomfield, where kind friends still remembered her as the bride who spent the winter among them on the first westward journey with her missionary husband in 1801. Rent was only $2.50 a month, she had her own cow and chickens, with promise of a garden in the spring, and — most important for a missionary's widow — there was a godly Connecticut minister, the Reverend Mr. Steele.7 Mrs. Williams, too, was reassured by Leonard's visit; not only his pleasing manners and easy conversation, but his good sense 4

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety made her feel more ready to accept the responsibility for his sister Delia.

What was the child's heritage? Both Alice and David Bacon came from old Connecticut families. Alice, the daughter of Elijah and Anna Beaumont Parks, was born in 1783; she and her brother Beaumont were orphans in the care of their grandparents when Alice met David in Lebanon, Connecticut.8 David Bacon was born in 1771, the third son and fifth child of Joseph Bacon and Abigail Holmes (cousin of Abiel Holmes, the father of Oliver Wendell), and a descendant of Michael Bacon, who emigrated from England in 1633. David studied theology with the Reverend Mr. John Sherman of Mansfield, the Reverend Mr. Levi Hart, of Preston, and the Reverend Mr. Zebulon Ely, of Lebanon, Connecticut. On December 24, 1800, Alice and David were married in Lebanon by Alice's pastor and David's teacher, the Reverend Mr. Ely, who gave the dedicated pair his special blessing. In mid-February, 1801 they set out for Detroit, accompanied by Alice's younger brother Beaumont. Inspired by Jonathan Edwards' Life of David Brainerd, David had the true missionary zeal. A t the outpost of Detroit in 1802 their first child Leonard was born, and was at once consecrated to Christ. For two more years, at the remote Arbre Croche in the Mackinac Straits, David and Alice struggled against Catholic opposition, indifference of the French and English traders, Indian drunkenness — and always, a desperate lack of money. Nor was the tough Calvinism, which David insisted on preaching, a successful competitor with the fair promises offered the Indians by Moravian and Catholic missionaries. In July, 1804, just after the birth of the second child, Susan, David received a summons from the Missionary Board of Connecticut to return home for a settlement of his accounts. Leaving his family at Hudson, Ohio, David, shaking with malaria, set out on foot for Hartford, where, on his arrival in December, he was entirely exonerated. Reappointed as missionary to the community at Hudson, David became increasingly critical of the haphazard settlement of 5

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon the Western lands, and firmly determined to try his own hand at a new method. In 1806, without laying down a single dollar, he persuaded the proprietors of the Connecticut lands to give him title to twenty square miles of the Ohio Territory, "No. 2 in the Tenth Range." David was to be both minister and proprietor, and the community, with church, academy — and, eventually, a college — would, he was convinced, become a model for other Western settlements, a New Connecticut in the unplowed country. Julia was born at Hudson in 1807, while David was ferverishly at work surveying the virgin land of Tallmadge and getting a log cabin built for his family. By 1810, when Alice was born, thirty families had joined the Bacons, and there were twenty-five church members. But ever since Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807 stopped the flow of ready cash, money was a problem. David was harried for payment on the original unfunded investment by the proprietors, Benjamin Tallmadge and Roger Newberry, and accused of fraud by the settlers who came west at his invitation. Yet, for a time, these obstacles only strengthened his optimism. T o his brother, Dr. Leonard, David explained this trait, in 1810: "That persevering sanguinity which you expected would (and which may yet) ruin me is what hath saved me." With irony, he called this "hopeful flaw" "David's ruining foible which makes it so dangerous for his friends to offer him any assistance." 9 He made two frantic trips eastward to get further extension on credit; during the long months of his absence, Alice somehow kept the family together.10 On February 2, 1811, when Delia was born, the situation in the log cabin home was desperate; but the parents' hopes were high for this fifth child. They named her Delia for Alice's girlhood friend, Delia Ellsworth, and Salter for a lawyer friend of David's in Mansfield, Connecticut.11 Perhaps they also hoped that some of the sanctity of the Reverend Dr. Richard Salter, honored in the religious revivals of Mansfield, might descend to their child. In May, 1812, David Bacon left Tallmadge bankrupt, broken in body and spirit, and sustained only by his trust in God. 12 When David brought his family home to Hartford and the temporary protection of his brother, Dr. Leonard, practical townspeople felt a grim satisfaction in seeing their prophecy of failure confirmed. 6

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety Yet they had to admire David's brave persistence in going about the state as an itinerant pastor and teacher, selling Scott's Family Bible and his own edition of Defoe's Family Instructor, and taking whatever business opportunities that came his way. T w o more sons were born in Hartford: David in 1813, Francis in 1816. When little Francis was severly burned, David took this opportunity to "improve" the dear little sufferer's accident: "O that he and the rest of our children might, in a spiritual sense, be plucked as a brand from the burning." He was winding up his business preparatory to returning home, "to be in a way to live with my dear Family if the Lord will." 1 3 When he reached home, at the end of January, he was so ill with "marasmus" (a wasting away of the body) that he could only collapse to await the end. Young Leonard never forgot what his father impressed upon him in his last days: that the boy should look after the little family and achieve spiritual power through the ministry. On August 29, 1817, David Bacon died, leaving nothing to his wife and seven children but love, hope, and an unquenchable faith.14 But David's dream for an ideal Western settlement was not in vain, even though it was fulfilled by other hands. Even before his death he was consoled by letters from some Tallmadge parishioners who regretted their harsh treatment of him.15 Tallmadge (today a suburb of Akron) grew to prosperity and culture along the very lines, material and spiritual, that David Bacon laid out; and, in a sense, Western Reserve University, which first opened its doors in 1826 in the Tallmadge Academy, realized his desire for a Yale in New Connecticut.16 Of those who paid tribute to David Bacon, pioneer, the most eloquent was his daughter Delia. Having left Tallmadge at the age of one, Delia did not remember the wilderness. But from family stories and her imagination, she later re-created the experience. In an unpublished manuscript on Walter Raleigh, she compared the religious impulse that drove the Bacons westward to the Protestant zeal that sent Raleigh to the New World. She admitted the physical trials but ignored the failure, keeping the focus on her parents' idealism. They pushed European culture into the forest, she said, "going deeper and deeper with the little household burthens that the tomahawk and the scalping-knife must soon en7

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon circle, going deeper and deeper into its old savage heart, and breaking it at last with those soft rings of patient virtues and heroic faith and love. It was that which was working still, when in its fiercest heart — in the valley of the old Indian 'River of Beauty,' where the mission hut had pursued the tomahawk, and the 'Great Trail' from the Northern lakes to the Southern gulf went by the door, and wild Indian faces looked in on the young mother, and wolves howled lullabies, the streets and squares of the town were pencilled and the college was dotted on that trail, and the wild old forest echoed with Sabbath hymns and sweet old English nursery songs, and the children of the N e w World awoke and found a new world there, old as from everlasting." 17 Delia's sympathy with her father's extravagant dream was a part of her inheritance from David Bacon; she, too, would gain support for projects beyond the scope of the average imagination. From David the child also acquired a keen mind, biting wit, stubborn tenacity, and persistent optimism. W h e n Delia's usual gay spirits gave way to discouragement, she reflected Alice Bacon's habit of looking on the dark side; but she also inherited her mother's practical sense. From both parents she got a willingness to work, and a sensitive pride; perhaps the Bacon ego was touchier than the Parks', but neither bore insults easily nor fools gladly. Yet both Alice and David humbled themselves before God; and it was this Puritan faith, the mainspring of their lives, that God tries his elect but always deals justly with them, which constituted the parents' richest gift to their child Delia. 2

Delia was settling happily into the formally regulated routine of the Williams household. She and Elmira had to make their own beds and do their daily sewing stint, which Aunt Williams considered all-important, particularly for Delia, who must develop a useful trade so that she could help her mother. The girls competed earnestly in knitting a pair of garters for Uncle Williams. As there was help in the kitchen, they were expected to stay out of the cook's way, and forbidden to ask for between-meal snacks. Elmira, a gentle child, readily accepted Delia's leadership. Much of the time they were free to run outdoors. On rainy days they 8

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety dressed the one doll that they shared between them, in party clothes or in mourning, according to their mood; or they sat scribbling beside Aunt Williams while she wrote voluminous letters to her sister, Frances Wood. 1 8 When Mrs. Williams wrote to Mrs. Bacon in Bloomfield, Delia added loving messages for her mother, and was delighted when Aunt Williams would let her send something to her little brothers — lozenges, or a knife and fork for David, or a picture for Francis. Both girls began to absorb their foster mother's interest in dress and the pleasant graces. Sometimes Uncle Williams took them on carriage rides to Wethersfield and Windsor. The Williams family Thanksgiving, with an enormous turkey, chestnut dressing, oysters from the Sound, and all the fixings, was Delia's initiation into the celebration that, in Puritan experience, most nearly approached an orgy. There was more food on the table than the child had ever seen in her life. Williamses and Ellsworths gathered in festive mood at Thomas Scott's home, and even the children were given a sip of holiday wine. During the fall of 1818, Delia attended the public school; but not until April, 1819, when she and Elmira were sent to the private school of Harriet Parsons, did she get the chance to begin the education she so earnestly desired. Even then, progress was slow; Miss Parsons had only fifteen scholars, but in September, 1819, Delia was still unable to write. Nor would Mrs. Williams allow lessons to take the place of sewing, which she considered the child's most likely means of support. In mid-September, Delia and Elmira stood in the front window of the Williams home, watching in horrified fascination while the great white house across the street burned to the ground. The next day, when Delia received a modest package of gifts from her mother, Mrs. Williams was pleased to see her share the presents with Elmira. A few minutes later she found the child sobbing in her room. Delia begged Mrs. Williams to let her make a visit to Bloomfield; she would do without food on the way, if only she might be allowed to go. Touched by the child's grief, Mrs. Williams also felt a twinge of jealousy over Delia's passionate longing for her real mother. But she promised, if Delia did a good job on the shirt she was making, she might have six cents to go 9

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon toward buying a book for Mrs. Bacon; and Mrs. Williams reported to Bloomfield that the shirt was well done — all but the ruffle and buttonholes.19 These despondent moments grew rarer as Delia began to feel more at home with Aunt and Uncle Williams. In November, 1819, Frances Wood took Elmira Williams' place as her housemate. When Miss Parsons' school was not in session, Aunt Williams heard the girls' lessons, and had Mr. Parsons or Mr. Salter quiz them on geography in the evenings. Uncle Dr. Leonard, who kept a watchful eye on his niece, wrote to Mrs. Bacon in April, 1820, that Delia was healthy, tall, and thriving "like a pig in clover." 20 Early in 1821, an event occurred which elevated Delia Bacon from the position of a needy ward in an adopted home to an heiress of uncontained beauty and power. This was a religious revival, which first struck Hartford in the fall of 1820, and, like a time bomb with a slowly burning fuse, burst into flame in February, 1821. Such conflagrations occurred periodically in N e w England and N e w York during the early years of the nineteenth century; a spark of religious feeling would shoot up in one church, spread through the town, and move like prairie fire through neighboring places. Congregational pastors watched anxiously for these reawakenings of piety; and, when a flame caught, they applied the bellows of persuasion to keep it burning. Always necessary to maintain a numerous and devout congregation, revivals were urgently required now, when heretical Unitarianism was breaking down the confines of the orthodox in Cambridge and Boston. In this battle to preserve the faith, Lyman Beecher was the St. Paul, zealously pushing Dr. Nathaniel W . Taylor's "liberal" theology throughout Connecticut. The first week in February, the harried Joel Hawes of Hartford's First Church sent an urgent plea for Dr. Beecher's help. The story is that the messenger reached Litchfield in the middle of the night, and roused the doctor from a sound sleep. Partly dressed, he strode about with one boot on, shouting: "Wife! Wife! Revival in Hartford, and I am sent f o r ! " And Dr. Beecher descended on Hartford like a torch in full blaze.21 As for Delia, she had looked on Center Church, from the be10

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety ginning of her stay in Hartford, as her spiritual home. The pale blue ceiling, bright white pillars and softly cushioned pews seemed to her a foretaste of Heaven. Now, swept along by the fervor of the awakened church members, the child listened with a new fascination to the Reverend Mr. Hawes' portrayal of Hell fire and of the bliss that only repentant sinners might enjoy. Her parents' early lessons came back to her with fresh force. Conscious that regeneration would link her to the absent members of her family as nothing else could, Delia began to ponder on the state of her soul. Her faults of pride, irritability and hardness of heart she knew only too well, from Aunt Williams' reminders. Could she overcome these sins? And might she enter into a state of blessedness — if possible, before Aunt Thacher's children, who were also impressed? Basking in the light of her foster mother's aroused attention, Delia became a little smug as she revealed to her "unsaved" Aunt signs of her initiation into grace. For help on this thorny but intriguing problem she turned, not to Aunt Williams, but to her own family. Inspired by reading the evangelistic book of Philip Doddridge, The Rise and Progress of Religion in the Soul, Delia enjoyed an ecstatic revelation. This, together with her doubts, she poured out, with a reckless disregard of punctuation, in a letter to her mother on March 8, 1821: "O my dear Mother I hope you will forgive me if I freely tell the whole of my feelings I think I have reason to say that God hath wrought a marvelous change within me I rejoice but I rejoice with fear and trembling. . . . I abused the Spirit of God and justly might he have forever forsaken me but I was again awakened to see my danger but how shall I tell you my dear mother that I again forsook the Holy Spirit but God was pleased to awaken me out of my awful slumber of stupidity and then I saw what I never saw before I do not think I could have lived an hour if I had not immediately received comfort Christ did then indeed appear to me chief among ten thousand and altogether lovely I thought I should never be unhappy again but little did 1 then know of the sorrows of the christian I assure you that I have had many dark hours since that time. It is a precious season at Hartford we now see the stubbornhearted sinner bowing down 11

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon at the foot of the cross in humble submission we now see the vile transgressor . . . crying for mercy . . . I hope that this is the beginning of the shower. I hope that you will pray for me and commend me into the hands of God my Saviour." 22 This letter, however rhetorical, reveals a tormented soul in the grip of an intense and genuine experience. Reading it in Bloomfield, Alice Parks Bacon was deeply moved. That evening she dug out of her trunk an old clipping from The Connecticut Evangelical Magazine, with the precious "Letter from a Young Woman to her Pastor," Alice Parks' confession of faith to the Reverend Mr. Ely on March ι, 18oo.23 Zebulon Ely thought it so remarkable a statement of despair over sin, and joy in the saving grace that followed, that he insisted on having it printed. Tenderly the widow recalled that it was this letter, under the signature "Your inexperienced Eliza," which aroused David Bacon's interest in the writer.24 Comparing Delia's letter with her own, Mrs. Bacon could see that her daughter was less secure; but she was seventeen at the time of writing, while Delia was only ten. It certainly looked as if the child's feet were set on the proper road. What a consolation it would be, if the child she could not take with her might enter so early into the communion of the faithful! Eagerly, Mrs. Bacon devoured Dr. Leonard's report, written March 22, on Delia's "wonderfully impressed" mind, and his news of the whole revival. Himself among the "hopeful" subjects, Dr. Leonard could not quite bring himself to enter in at the gate. From his skeptical standpoint, the doctor could not resist jibing at the way the fire was spreading from the two Congregational churches to the Episcopal and the Baptist, with the Methodists gathering in non-churchgoers "from the highways and hedges." "At these devotional Exercises," he wrote, "you might see the Brick [First Church] as crowded as on the day of Election — the influence of the spirit has been so general and so powerful as totally to change the face of Society. The levity which she usually wears has been exchanged for solemnity — so that the great body of the People retire from public worship as mourners from the cemetery of the dead." 25 Mrs. Bacon begged Leonard, who was beginning his second year at Andover Theological Seminary, to counsel Delia on her 12

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety spiritual state. N o less anxious than his mother to see his young sister sitting at the feet of Jesus, Leonard felt a little envious that she had such early prospects of salvation (although destined for the ministry from birth, he did not declare his faith until he was sixteen).26 Andover followed Jonathan Edwards' strict interpretation of Calvinism, in teaching that no man was fit for church membership who was not first deeply convinced of sin, repentant, and conscious of saving grace. The fiery Moses Stuart, who left N e w Haven's First Church to become Professor of Hebrew at Andover, did not go so far as Nathaniel W . Taylor, his N e w Haven successor, in an uncompromising view of original sin. But Stuart agreed with Taylor that revivals were desperately needed to make their demanding theology prevail. From his vacation talks with Dr. Beecher, Leonard also learned that these "serious" times provided a legitimate release for emotions ordinarily repressed in the Connecticut Valley community. But Beecher warned the young man to watch for signs of hectic emotionalism; the great Edwards' failure to appreciate this danger caused his downfall, after the Great Awakening was over. If the mind was not convinced, one might vanquish the foe of unbelief, only to fall prey to the more subtle enemy of enthusiasm. Leonard tried to keep all these delicate matters in his mind during the July vacation, when he visited Hartford and spent hours walking and talking with Delia. A tyro in the probings of a convert's heart, Leonard welcomed this opportunity for experiment; but his very inexperience made him distrust his judgment. Delia, pleased that her perilous situation interested her brother, told him sorrowfully that she had given up her hopes. As the evangelistic excitement died down in the city, her own pulse began to beat at a dull, normal rate. Up to a certain point, Leonard found this a good sign; a shade of despair was better than overweening confidence. What troubled him was that his sister no longer seemed to care very much whether she was saved or not.27 In November, 1821, Mrs. Bacon made her long deferred visit to Hartford, and Delia expanded in childlike happiness over this reunion with the mother whom she had not seen for more than three years. After Mrs. Bacon left, on November twenty-third, 13

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon the grief-stricken child began a diary to record her sad spiritual state: " I am now a poor thoughtless sinner — alas how changed the scene from what it was a year ago, the curtains drawn aside and my real character appears — I then thought I was an heir of glory, I was deceiving myself with a false hope, I am now traveling to perdition as fast as possible O that the Lord would have mercy on me and snatch me from the burning — Oh how I have grieved his Holy Spirit to depart from me, may I fly to Jesus while there is mercy and take refuge under his banner which is love. "Tuesday — I am one day nearer to eternity than when I wrote last and I fear one day nearer to endless woe — how have I despised and rejected that dear Redeemer who came into this sinful world to die for sinners — how little do I realize the meaning of eternity — oh that I could be a christian — I have tried everything but I cannot become one of myself, I find that I must rely on Jesus alone for salvation, I have committed many sins this day, I have dishonoured my saviour and treated him with neglect, I have prayed but I fear I have not prayed with the Spirit." 28 However much Delia's soul might rely on "Jesus alone," her common sense told her to avail herself of human aid. On December 18, 1821, she confided to Leonard her loss of spiritual security, showing an ability to reason about her torment with a power beyond that of the average child. Since Leonard was in a state of grace and she was not, should he not offer up prayers in her behalf? With hell-fire crackling in her ears, she turned in terror to Leonard, who was close to Christ.29 T w o months later another troubled mind, that of Delia's pastor, sought advice from young Leonard Bacon. Deeply moved though Joel Hawes was by Delia's situation, he could not make the child, as Jonathan Edwards did Phoebe Bartlett, a test case in the matter of spiritual regeneration. The relation between Phoebe and the great Edwards was at once deeper and stranger than that between Hawes and Delia: the "interesting" physical tremors that shook little Phoebe's body were not vouchsafed to Delia, whose experience, however intense, was confined to the mind and the emotions. If Phoebe considered Edwards a personification of the Deity, Delia looked on Joel Hawes merely as a respected pastor. 14

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety N o r did Hawes have Edwards' or Lyman Beecher's skill in fathoming the secrets of a disturbed soul. While the 1820-21 revival was gratifying, with its thousand new members in the whole Hartford North Consociation, and a hundred and thirty-eight converts to the First Church alone, it disturbed Hawes because it forced him to take a stand on original sin. When he first came to Hartford in 1818, he felt more sure of his theological ground. He denounced the brief covenant of First Church (in force for a century and a quarter), as "Arminianism in ten lines"; and his frightened parishioners agreed to a new, many-articled confession which Hawes considered orthodox. In February, 1822, disturbed and unsettled, he wrote to thank Leonard Bacon for some helpful abstracts on the question of infant damnation, but longed for leisure to ponder the whole issue on Andover's "consecrate hill." Unable to accept Taylor's "liberal" position that everybody is damned from birth, he was taking refuge in the common-sense view that all moral agents (those above five years of age) are responsible for their sins.30 This softening of dogma made no difference in the problem which Delia, now eleven, must solve for herself. And, in the uneasy relation between Mrs. Williams and her foster daughter, rapidly approaching a crisis, Joel Hawes was powerless. As Delia's hope of salvation waned, she slid back morally in a way that shocked Mrs. Williams. This child who promised to be one of God's elect now showed a new and more terrible fault — lying! In April, 1822, Mrs. Williams wrote Mrs. Bacon that she could no longer keep Delia in Hartford. 31 When Mrs. Bacon received this distressing news, she was almost forced to write Mrs. Williams that there was no home in Bloomfield for the child to come to. Unable to pay even her modest rent, she was about to be evicted from the East Bloomfield house when Mrs. Hall, a friend in West Bloomfield, offered half of her house for the winter, rent free. Situated on the green, near the church and the academy, the new home seemed to Mrs. Bacon a heaven-sent refuge from disaster. She wrote at once, asking Mrs. Williams to send Delia to her by the earliest opportunity. Although Mrs. Bacon could look at her children's faults with a merciless eye, she rose to defend them

15

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon when others complained. The city's temptations, Alice Bacon decided, were to blame for Delia's erring ways. Oh, for another wilderness in which to rear her children! Providence would somehow provide the bread for one more child, and Mrs. Bacon determined that she would retrain this daughter in the way that she should go. 32 On May 10, Delia left the Williams home in the care of Mrs. Bissel, who was traveling westward. The parting with her foster mother was in sorrow rather than anger; but Delia felt deeply disgraced. A year ago rich spiritual and material opportunities were within her grasp — now, rejected by her foster parents, she set out for the unknown land of N e w York State, a prodigal child of no country. Much as she had longed for her absent family, she was chagrined that she must now meet them under a cloud. There were still further lessons in humility. When she arrived in Bloomfield, fresh from the comfort of the Williams ménage, Delia could not suppress her shock at the bare floors, poor furniture and scanty meals in the Bacon cottage. She spoke out bluntly. This was no way to live. And Mrs. Bacon, tried beyond endurance, wailed that, for all Mrs. Williams' training, Delia with a broom in her hand was the awkwardest thing she had ever seen.33 Yet Delia was happy to be once again with her own family, where she felt she belonged. Alice and David were in school during the day, but at night she shared their lessons around the family table, and they had time for a game before evening prayers. Julia was at home, in poor health, and Delia became very fond of this gentle, sweet sister, four years older than herself. She and nine-year-old David quarreled most because they were most alike — both brilliant, quick-tempered, absorbed in their own concerns. T o six-year-old Francis, Delia felt like a mother. Alice became her favorite sister; she and Delia slept together, and after they had gone to bed, Delia poured out to Alice her hopes and dreams for the future. Delia was in awe of her older sister Susan, and of her fiancé, Dr. Lewis Hodges, a widower with one son, who practiced medicine and had his hand in several business enterprises. Their marriage in June, shortly after Delia's arrival, was the first real break in the family circle since David Bacon's death. 16

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety On July 4 Delia had her first experience with tragedy. In the morning, the Bacon children went off to a Fourth-of-July picnic, where they had a gay time drinking lemonade, eating sandwiches, and listening to the band. On their way home Francis ran out into the street after his ball, and the speeding stage crushed him under its wheels. For a long time Delia saw in dreams the limp little body, carried home in a neighbor's arms, and heard hei mother's sobs when the sorrowful party reached the Bacon threshold. Delia listened and assented to her mother's prayerful attempts to "improve" the occasion of Francis' death,34 but the fatal accident raised a question in her youthful mind about God's overarching Providence. B y the next year Delia was submitting to her mother's discipline and doing a satisfactory job of housework, but she was getting no schooling, except for the hasty instruction that Mrs. Bacon imparted in the intervals of daily chores. Her eager mind, thirsty for knowledge, seized upon two letters from Leonard to her brother David. These were her first intimation that there was a world of literature, apart from sermons and religious verse. In the first letter (February 28, 1823) Leonard flaunted his superior knowledge, citing the famous Francis Bacon motto: "Knowledge is power," and urged the importance of wisdom combined with piety. "You know, I hope, who Lord Bacon was," Leonard wrote, condescendingly. Delia did not know — but she proceeded to find out. The second letter (June 30, 1823) discussed David's desire to read Shakespeare by himself, which was causing Mrs. Bacon some anxiety. Sometime, Leonard wrote, he hoped to read Shakespeare with his brother; meanwhile he supposed that it would not hurt the lad to read one or two of the best plays — say, Macbeth and Julius Caesar.35 David's later interest in these authors shows that he took Leonard's advice to heart; but Leonard's casual advice had a far greater impact on his twelve-year-old sister. Without knowing it, Leonard dropped into Delia's mind the seeds of that passionate interest in the two great writers who were to dominate the last ten years of her life. On September 30, 1824, Leonard Bacon was ordained as evangelist to the North Consociation of Hartford. In January, 1825, he got the call from Center Church, N e w Haven, and on March 9

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Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon he preached his first sermon. Soon afterwards his engagement to Lucy Johnson, of Johnstown, N e w York, was announced. N o t only Leonard's success, but the greater advancement of her sisters and her brother David over her own progress aroused Delia's determination to improve her situation. Susan was happily married, Alice was teaching, Julia had spent the winter in Hartford with the Thacher cousins and Uncle Dr. Leonard, and David was enjoying the education which she so ardently desired. In March, 1825, Delia sent a desperate plea to Mrs. Williams to take her back. Mrs. Williams replied graciously that she had often said she would like to give Delia the advantage of a year's schooling.36 If Delia's desire for improvement was really earnest, Aunt and Uncle Williams would be happy to take her into their family for a year. From his first payment by the Center Church, Leonard Bacon sent his mother seventy dollars, so that she could send Delia off to Hartford. Here was Delia's chance to redeem her shameful departure from Hartford three years before. She determined to seize every opportunity in this blessed year to improve her mind and save her soul. And here, in this return to the home of her wealthy Hartford patrons, after the Bloomfield interlude, lies the pattern for Delia Bacon's life, in which she would take refuge with her family in periods of stress, then emerge again into the larger world, assisted by friends whose money or culture could help her fulfill the ambition which drove her headlong through life. 3 When in April, 1825, Delia Bacon entered the door of the Williams' new home at 14 Prospect Street, she felt that she was stepping from the wilderness into the Promised Land. After three years in the poor Bloomfield cottage, this home seemed the essence of luxury. Uncle and Aunt Williams welcomed her warmly, all past differences forgotten. She returned with delight to services at Center Church, whose beauty brought the Puritan religion home to her heart in a way that the crude Bloomfield meeting house could not. Joel Hawes gladly took back to his bosom this strayed lamb whose strivings 18

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety for grace had so moved him four years before. Delia spent many an evening hour in a continued anxious examination of her soul. Next in importance to Center Church was the school kept by Catherine and Mary Beecher at the corner of Kinsley and Main, "at the sign of the White Horses" over Sheldon and Colton's harness store. Here some thirty girls, daughters of Hartford's best families, gathered to absorb the Beecher girls' inspired teaching. The ambitious fourteen-year-old Delia, tensely conscious that she had only one year in which to prepare for her life's work, determined to become the best scholar in the school. Delia's first sight of Catherine Beecher convinced her that here was a superior being. Miss Beecher's tall, ungainly figure towered above the child, and her sharp eyes seemed to pierce every hidden thought. But Catherine smiled as she gave this new child her first instructions; her brisk cordiality won Delia's confidence immediately. When Delia learned from her schoolmates of Miss Beecher's blasted romance, her young heart responded to the tragedy with a tremor of pity and admiration. In the spring of 1822, Catherine's gifted fiancé Alexander Metcalf Fisher, a Yale professor with a promising career before him, was drowned in a shipwreck off the Irish coast. The story, told in hushed tones, went on to explain that Miss Beecher, tormented by grief and anxiety for Fisher's soul, quite lost her religious trust. Even her father Lyman Beecher could not bring his daughter back to God. It was the great Nathaniel W . Taylor, who had the finest mind and the most persuasive eloquence of all the preachers in Connecticut, who finally pulled Catherine out of the abyss. The girls considered Miss Beecher a dedicated spinster, and themselves the richer for her sacrifice. Catherine herself enjoyed playing this martyred role, especially at the end of the long school day, during which she and her sister Mary taught thirteen classes in eight- and fifteen-minute shifts, in one large schoolroom. But this was only part of the story. Catherine was a born teacher who loved young people, and the classroom was her natural element. Her school, now two years old, was prospering. In the spring of 1823, she was ready for action. When Thomas Day and Joel Hawes urged her to open a girls' school, to replace 19

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon the one that Lydia Huntley closed in 1819, on her marriage to Charles Sigourney, Catherine had all the spur she needed. Stung by her father's warning that it would not do to put half a heart into the venture, Catherine poured all her newly kindled energy into the ambitious enterprise. Her official apprenticeship was served in Miss Pierce's school in Litchfield, but her real tuition in human nature began earlier, after her mother's death, with the care of the younger brothers and sisters in the noisy, happy, argumentative Beecher household. Now, when she would let down her guard and enjoy a romp with her "young ladies" at recess, they saw their dignified teacher as an older, sisterly comrade. Although Catherine drilled her first group of fifteen girls on the essentials — Geography, Grammar, and Rhetoric — she aimed from the beginning at "a higher and more extended knowledge of science and literature." By 1824, under community pressure, the curriculum was expanded to include "all the branches" (some of which were being taught in men's colleges): Grammar, Geography, Rhetoric, Philosophy, Chemistry, Ancient and Modern History, Arithmetic, Algebra, Geometry, Moral Philosophy, Natural Theology, and Latin.®7 With tuition at $6 a quarter, and extra fees for Music and Drawing, Catherine's school was solvent, but not yet prosperous enough to admit hiring more teachers. Like many another overworked American teacher of this period, Catherine found a boon in the Lancastrian system, by which students took over some instruction. The method was never more curiously employed than in the class on Theology, which Catherine, still feeling insecure in her own belief, turned over to her sister Harriet. Four months younger than Delia, Harriet was set to work on Butler's Analogy, which she memorized in large chunks, and confidently repeated to her classmates. (The year before Delia came to the school, Catherine secured her younger sister as a student teacher by means of an ingenious "board and room trade": Harriet stayed in Isaac Bull's hall bedroom, while the Bulls' daughter took Harriet's place in Litchfield and attended Miss Pierce's school.) Edward Beecher helped Catherine keep one jump ahead of her students in Latin; but Arithmetic she had to struggle with alone. Her girls made affectionate jokes about Miss Beecher's uncertainty in multiplication. (Catherine later capitalized on her diffi20

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety culties with mathematics by writing a successful textbook, Arithmetic Simplified.) Her strong subjects were Literature, History and Composition. The girls looked forward to the times when Miss Beecher read poetry and stories aloud, and her classes in Composition were alive with the interchange of ideas. T o Delia Bacon, the long list of subjects that she must prepare each day at first seemed overwhelming. Lacking any formal education for the past three years, she was far behind the rest of her class in everything. But the school's atmosphere so excited this culture-hungry child that she never once thought of the work as drudgery. Miss Beecher stressed independence of thought rather than mastery of facts — and this meant that one who was just beginning a study could speak up, and be heard. Catherine's students learned to think out a subject in their own minds, differ from the textbook, and defend their own position. The correlations that Miss Beecher devised between geography and science, history and literature, suggested to Delia's awakening mind the unity and significance of knowledge. As Delia studied history, Hartford's landmarks began to take on a new meaning. They brought the past down into the present, speaking eloquently of the liberty and righteousness which, to this sensitive child, were the core of the Puritan tradition. Standing on the Main Street Green beside the exquisitely proportioned State House, built by Bulfinch, Delia could envision the beginning of American democracy in the text of the town's founder Thomas Hooker's sermon, May 31, 1638: "The foundation of authority is laid in the free consent of the people." (She did not yet realize how strict were the limits of this freedom, nor how swiftly the theocracy moved to punish individual dissent.) The spirit of Hooker, and of the "teacher" Samuel Stone came alive for her as, in the old Burying Ground of First Church, she trod the honored bones and reverently studied the gravestones of Hartford's founders. Stone acted as chaplain to the Connecticut troops in May, 1637, when with Hooker's blessing they went forth to defeat the Pequods in a "righteous" war. At the same time that Delia was admiring the courage of those Puritans who slaughtered the Pequods, she was composing a speech on "The Cause of the Indian," for the next school exhibition, resolving that it should 21

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon excel her first oration, " A Plea for the African." 38 N o less adroitly than some of her elders and betters, the child praised her ancestors for their courage in destroying the Indians, but passionately urged her contemporaries to save the remnant. The history that clung to Hartford even attached itself to the trees lining the shady streets. As Delia touched the corrugated bark of the Charter Oak, on the estate of Samuel Willys, she sensed a direct contact with the legend of history. Within the hollow of this tough old tree Captain Daniel Wadsworth hid the Connecticut charter, on that memorable evening in 1687 when "Providence" saved Hartford from the tyranny of Sir Edmund Andros. During the leaders' conference with the despised Andros, the candles were suddenly extinguished, giving Captain Daniel just time enough to spirit the Charter out of the meeting. The other great tree, the Washington Elm, in front of the Main Street home of Colonel Jeremiah Wadsworth, commemorated the conference of General Washington with his staff at the time that Arnold's treachery was discovered. When Mr. and Mrs. Williams took Delia to call at the Wadsworths', the child's enjoyment of gracious hospitality was heightened by a sense that the house was veritably a living fabric of history. Only the year before, Colonel Jeremiah and his sisters entertained Lafayette in this home, on his triumphal tour of 1824; this seemed to bring the victorious Revolution almost within the child's grasp. While buildings, gravestones and trees enriched the child's sense of the past, there were other scenes that satisfied her love of natural beauty. Dr. E. W . Bull's garden on High Street, for instance, with its many varieties of roses, pond lilies, hydrangeas, and domestic and foreign fruits. Or Daniel Wadsworth's estate on Talcott Mountain, nine miles from town, where the Williamses sometimes took Delia on an afternoon's drive. This elaborate villa, lake, and wide view of the Farmington and Connecticut Rivers had a magnificence that dazzled the child. But for Delia Bacon, the most fascinating home in Hartford was the large, white-pillared mansion of Charles Sigourney, set in the midst of a green grove (overlooking what is now Bushnell Park), where school children were allowed to roam freely. Here Lydia Huntley Sigourney, known as "the sweet singer of Hart22

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety ford," entertained lavishly. When Delia was invited there to tea with a select group of Miss Beecher's girls, she saw in Mrs. Sigourney the gifted, feminine, gracious figure that she would like to become. With an imaginative feeling for historic scenes and an amazing facility in all forms of verse, Mrs. Sigourney was one of the best advertisers Hartford ever had. From the Charter Oak to the Hartford Retreat for insane persons (founded in 1824), there was no place of note in the city which was not blessed by her easy, ecstatic touch. As Delia listened to Mrs. Sigourney's melodious voice, reading her poetry to an admiring audience, the child determined that some day she too would try to follow Mrs. Sigourney's lead, and bring the past to life in a new and enchanting form. Delia was not aware that some people in Hartford regarded Mrs. Sigourney's blaze of glory as a dimmer light than that cast on the city by the post-Revolutionary wits, John Trumbull, Joel Barlow, and Timothy Dwight. Hartfordians sent their sons to Yale for culture, but pridefully reminded Noah Webster, after he moved to New Haven, that his great Dictionary was begun in a lodging on their Main Street, upstairs over Fenn's furniture store. They consoled themselves with flourishing literary activity of a minor sort: the verse of the Reverend Mr. Carlos Wilcox, pastor of the North Church, the name that Samuel G. Goodrich was making for himself, as "Peter Parley," and the novels of New England life written by John Brace, friend of the Beechers. They revered Emma Willard not only as a pioneer in education but as the author of a pious hymn, "Rocked in the cradle of the deep." Besides Mrs. Sigourney, living model of literary excellence, Delia discovered in this momentous year a fictional character that touched her heart even more deeply. This was the heroine of Mme. de Staël's Corinne, priestess-poet of Rome, honored in the Capitol for her outstanding gifts — perhaps not greater than Mrs. Sigourney, but more appealing because of her tragic fate.39 The girls at Miss Beecher's passed the novel about from hand to hand, stole time from their lessons to read it, and slept with the book under their pillows. The whirlwind love affair of Corinne and the brilliant, enigmatic English Oswald kept the girls poised in anxious anticipation. They held their breath in awe of the heroine's poetic 23

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon genius, and shed real tears over her tragic end. Could the climate of New England, they wondered, ever realize such open-air triumphs as Corinne's Italian fiestas? Could passion flower in Hartford as it did in Rome? (Some of the pleasure in eating this forbidden fruit was lost when the girls discovered that Miss Beecher had not only read the book, but was quite willing to discuss it with them.) Long after the other girls had forgotten Corinne, its inspiration continued to burn in two sensitive minds, those of Delia Bacon and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Already infected with the disease of literary ambition, both girls tried on the role of priestesspoet to see if it would fit. Did they have genius? they asked themselves. And was it true, as Mme. de Staël supposed, that a woman of genius could not expect to enjoy a happy married life? The test came, with the prize that Miss Beecher awarded each year to the best student in Composition. Acutely conscious of her shortcomings in other subjects, Delia felt that in this, her native element, she must achieve excellence. When the hour of judgment arrived, however, Catherine edited Delia's work mercilessly, and awarded the prize — to Harriet. It was no consolation to Delia that an earlier work of Harriet's, a five-act verse drama, Cleon, had received a similar going-over, and taught Harriet the sort of thing that "sister" wanted. Delia confided her bitter disappointment to her schoolmates, some of whom sympathized with her. Before Catherine realized what was happening, she had a school rebellion on her hands. For one day the wills of teacher and pupil were locked in bitter combat; then Delia gave in, admitted her fault, and was forgiven.40 But long after the event Delia smarted under this humiliation. Catherine also learned from the experience; from that day onward she made it school policy to award no honors or punishments, but to appeal solely to the girls' affection for their parents and the duty owed to God. 41 Puzzled and hurt by what she still felt was rank injustice, Delia pondered on the problem. Could this be a deliberate stroke of Providence, designed to humble her pride? For answer, she turned again to consider the state of her soul. In December, Miss Beecher urged her "children in Christ" to make their profession of religion in a body. Delia demurred; Leonard, she said, was afraid that her hopes were false. Miss Beecher and Mr. Hawes 24

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety both reminded her that hope might wane with delay. Fervently exalted, but still unsure, Delia wrote to Leonard on December 2 2 : " I can rejoice in him who appears in the presence of God for me as my Advocate and Friend. I think I can trust in him who magnified the law which I have broken and gave himself a ransom for my sins. And though in myself I am wholly guilty and undone clothed in the pure righteousness of Christ I can come before my holy God and plead the merits of his love. Mercy is my only plea free unbounded mercy my only hope of pardon." 42 Impressed by his sister's earnestness, Leonard still advised her to wait a little longer; but after two months, he decided that she was ready. In February, 1826, Delia made her profession of faith and was received into the communion of the First Church of Hartford. Thomas Scott and Delia Williams looked on with a mingling of pride and envy as their protégée was welcomed into the fold. 43 In April Catherine, Harriet and Mary Beecher, following Delia's lead, were added to the fellowship of First Church.44 Once the solemn step was taken, Delia stopped scrutinizing her "hopes," and rested secure in the conviction that she was really saved. Even after she left Hartford, she continued to regard herself as a member of Center Church and Dr. Hawes as her pastor. With her spiritual state assured, Delia turned her attention to her work in the world. The year of living on Mrs. Williams' bounty would be over on April 12, the end of Miss Beecher's spring term; she must find a position by that time. Uncle Doctor Bacon helped Mrs. Bacon and Leonard explore prospects for a boarding school which Delia and Julia could carry on together. Throughout N e w England young people no better prepared than these two girls were making a good living in this way. N o such possibility turned up, and Delia feared that she would have to return jobless to Bloomfield. Delia was on the verge of despair when in March the kindly Mrs. Eliphalet Terry found her a place in a pleasant little private school in the north part of town. The profits would be small, but the child would get experience. On March 22 Delia wrote happily to Leonard that she could begin her school as soon as she left Miss Beecher's.45 She was delighted that she could at last, at fifteen, 25

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon support herself by her own exertions and cease to be a burden on her family and friends. She did not find her first teaching job easy; she had constantly to remind herself of the advantages of self-support. Mrs. Williams was still kind, but did not invite the young girl back to her home. On a hot August night in 1826, Delia got up out of bed and began to write to her sister Alice in Bloomfield. Her imagination threw a rosy retrospective light over the time when the family were all together in their small cottage. Delia could see their future family hearth, again lighted by hope and love. She envied Alice, close to their sister Susan and her sons, while Delia was with strangers who did not love or care for her. She feared that she must miss even the brief joy of the New Haven Commencement. As she had confided her plans to Alice when they were cuddled up together before going to sleep, so she now poured out her heart to this kind sister: "The Poets and Novelists may tell of friendship that is stronger than the ties of nature — I know of none. I have formed many acquaintances and some tender friendships since I have been in Hartford. There are a few sweet girls that I love, and that I know love me, but I have found no substitute for that tender and much loved one who used to share every sorrow and joy and who could sympathize with those delicate feelings of the heart which are regarded by few. You are just the friend I would have chosen had I no sister and now that there is that strong tie between us how ardent and unwearied should be our love." In this letter Delia enclosed a poem that she had written for Alice Cogswell's Commonplace Book. Alice's "Book" belied its title; the autographs were inscribed not merely in praise of the young girl's personal charm, but also of the educational achievement made by this deaf-mute, with the help of talented teachers, in bursting through the prison walls which enclosed her from childhood. It was the gifted, patient Thomas Gallaudet who first taught the inarticulate child to spell "hat." Lydia Huntley took up Alice's education from that point, and helped Gallaudet establish in Hartford in 1817 the American Institute for the Deaf and Dumb, the first institution of its kind in the country. In Lydia Sigourney's Scenes from My Native Land appears Alice Cogs26

Pioneering, Patronage and Piety well's own poignant poem, "Prayers for the Deaf and Dumb," 46 her expression of sympathy for those not yet released from a soundless, isolated world. Delia's tribute, however derivative of Byron, Shelley, and Felicia Hemans, is a genuinely imaginative projection into a mind that heard no sounds but could create "unheard melodies." In sending the poem to Alice Bacon, Delia also hoped that her sister, of the same name, would take the poem as an oblique compliment to herself: T o Alice Whence came that gleam of thought so bright, Like the lightning streak on a cloud of night, T o the soul of fancy dear? W h o murmured spells of poetry, With wild and startling extacy, T o an unlistening ear? From thy mute lips the soul of thought N e w breathed its melody untaught, Whence came the charm to thee? Unknown its wide harmonious range Its songs of melody. Oh it was fancy's sacred fire. It was her wild and hidden lyre That trembled in the soul, From voiceless lips it may not swell, But to other harps, its strains may well Their warbling beauty roll. And sweet to thee the swelling thought. And sweet the note with fancy fraught, That sweeps along the wire. Then let the silent spell be thine, Since thy bright spirit's thoughts, but twine One rich harmonious lyre. 47

Poetry andt dreams of a reunited family were sustenance for the spirit, but a young girl with her way to make must first consider practical matters near at hand. One Sunday in the fall of 1826 Delia set out on foot for Julia's school in Wethersfield to deliver a letter from their mother. She found Julia convalescent 27

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon after a week's illness and worried about her unpaid school bills. Delia had dismissed her school, and together they pondered plans for the future. Delia's small profits, they decided, would buy their winter's dresses; and perhaps Uncle Leonard would pay their stage fare to whatever Connecticut town would welcome two young, eager, inexperienced teachers. Julia promised to follow wherever Delia would lead — and Delia's wings were poised for flight.

28

CHAPTER

TWO

A Career is Launched "O strangers, may we go to your city and country, or may we not, and shall we bring with us our poetry — what is your will about these matters?" Plato, The Laws ι O η the afternoon of April 15, 1828, an excited passenger rode behind John Alsop King's spirited horses, on a twelve-mile jaunt from Brooklyn to Jamaica, Long Island. Delia Bacon was filled with a sense of high adventure. The air blew in fresh and sweet from the Sound, and the first green of the apple trees melted into a soft haze as King let the horses out to show what they could do on an open stretch. Delia was to stay at the Kings' farm while she carried out an important errand: to find a house in Jamaica that would be suitable for a boarding school. The week before, at their school in Amboy, N e w Jersey, she and Julia were surprised by a visit from Charles King, John Alsop's brother, and Dr. Lewis Eigenbrodt, principal of the Jamaica Academy. When these gentlemen proposed that the Bacon girls open a boarding school in Jamaica, under their sponsorship, Delia was astonished. She recovered herself quickly, and, while the visitors walked out before tea, drew up a plan of study that at once gained their respect. Was the plan too ambitious? Dr. Eigenbrodt wondered. Jamaica's young ladies, he said, needed time for the lighter accomplishments of music and art. Perhaps, Charles King suggested, they might make it a family venture, with their older sister Alice to teach Drawing and their mother to supervise the boarding establishment. N o w , after days of fervent discussion and 29

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon urgent letters about the project to her family and friends, Delia was embarked on the visit of inspection.1 John King slowed the horses down and took a careful look at Miss Delia, who was absorbed in the landscape. Charles' only reservation, in his flattering report of the Bacon girls, was their youth, combined with the curious fact that Delia, although four years younger than Julia, was obviously the leader. Certainly now, with her blue-gray eyes alight and soft waves of brown hair escaping from her bonnet, Miss Delia did not look more than her seventeen years. Yet the girl had dignity, as well as youthful charm. Like other public-spirited men in these years when girls' education was still rudimentary, and most advanced academies were open only to boys, John King was willing to support a private "finishing" school to provide some kind of education for his daughters. But no sooner was a young lady successfully installed in the schoolroom, it seemed, than some jackanapes carried her off to the altar. This could happen to the Bacon girls, King realized; yet he loved to take a sporting chance. Furthermore, his practiced eye, noting the worn places in Delia's green silk coat, told him that Miss Bacon needed the job. A t the farm Delia felt at home immediately with Mary Ray King, who reminded her of Leonard's wife Lucy. She tried to say the proper things about King's new herd of Durham cattle, which the gentleman farmer proudly showed off to his visitor. From what she knew of John King's history, Delia wondered how he could be so content on his Jamaica farm, improving the Long Island apples and potatoes, and enjoying fox hunting, horse racing, and testing wine at county fairs. As the young sons of Rufus King, John and Charles knew all the great founding fathers as visitors at their father's house. When in 1796 Rufus King represented the new Federation of the United States at the Court of St. James, the boys went along. A t Harrow they were schooled in English society and classical culture, and in Paris, at the École Polytèchnique, they studied physical science and the new Napoleonic "democracy." Except for four years as a Whig member of the State Assembly, and secretarial duties for his father on Rufus' second mission to Britain, John King had stayed aloof from politics. He explained to Delia that his brother Charles was still interested in 30

A Career is Launched Jamaica, but spent most of his time in New York, working in the banking business of his father-in-law, Archibald Gracie, and pushing his own undertaking, The New York American. To Delia, the King brothers, with their picturesque nicknames ("Beau Brummel" and "Charles the Pink") represented a new type of gentleman: able, cosmopolitan, ready to serve, but also insistent that life provide a margin of fun. She was delighted to have such eminent men for her sponsors. Compared to them, her first backers — George Robinson of Southington, Eliphalet Terry, and Thomas Scott Williams of Hartford — although they were Connecticut's best, seemed like dim lights. Decidedly, Delia felt, she was coming up in the world. On her account, the Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Mr. Crane, was invited to dinner. A friend of the Bacons' minister in Amboy, the Reverend Mr. Wilson, it was Mr. Crane who recommended the Bacon girls to the Jamaica trustees. Delia was already prepared to like him, and was especially pleased when he told her of the signs of seriousness in his church. Urged by Crane, she regaled the dinner table with the latest news about the disgraceful squabble in the Amboy Presbyterian Church, although it was a difficult story to tell, just at this point, because it concerned her own school also. The former minister, Dr. Andrews, was denounced by the Presbytery and ordered to leave town. When the Reverend Mr. Wilson arrived to take over, Dr. Andrews locked the church, holed in at the parsonage, and forced the new incumbent to preach where and how he could. The Reverend Mr. Chapman, Episcopal rector, pounced on the divided Presbyterian camp and carried off some disaffected members to his "respectable" fold. The Bacon sisters resisted Mr. Chapman's blandishments; not only did they continue to attend young Mr. Wilson's services, but they made friends with him, as a fellow boarder. When Mr. Chapman learned of Delia's remark that the Episcopalians were proud, haughty and HighChurch, he set his devoted parishioners to work on undermining the girls' school.2 In telling this part of the story, Delia had to tread softly, for she knew that the Kings belonged to the Episcopal Church, and she must not offend them. The concern which she did feel, at first, about starting a new venture under the aegis of the very sect that caused trouble in Amboy, was already allayed 31

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon by the Kings' liberal views and their ready acceptance of the recommendation given the Bacon girls by their grateful ally, Mr. Wilson. She was glad to conclude her tale with the pleasant bit of information that Dr. Andrews was at last ready to leave Amboy. Delia herself was more than ready to leave — how eager, she did not tell the Jamaica trustees. The previous September (1827) she got off the New York ferry boat at Amboy, confident that she and Julia would take Amboy by storm. The first disappointment was finding the Academy building, which they expected to use, already occupied by a newly organized Military School. But Mr. Bowers, the principal, graciously opened up a room for them and offered his professors in Music and Drawing for the Bacons' students. Slyly, he suggested that the boys in the building would be an added inducement to young ladies who sought an education in all the branches. The fifteen girls, ranging from six to eighteen, set to work enthusiastically on Miss Bacon's ambitious course of study: Geography, Grammar, Arithmetic, History, Rhetoric, and Astronomy. They were a wild group, keeping their teachers constantly on guard, but they really wanted to learn.3 Culturally, the town was far superior to Southington, Connecticut, the scene of the girls' first experiment in family school keeping. Nine months of Southington's "selfish, contracted farmers, an age behind the rest of the world in civilization," Delia said, were enough for her.4 In Amboy she might jibe at the family pride of the Scotch residents, who kept alive the spirit of the MacGregor clan and diligently scanned family trees for the coveted connection with Mary Stuart; but there were plenty of people in town as eager as Delia to talk about ideas. Such a friend was Mr. Dwight, editor of The New York Advertiser, whose conversation brought the metropolis very close. Seizing the chance to learn French, Delia enjoyed the ease with which she began to command the language. Her intimacy with Miss Bruen, daughter of a New York alderman, was the greatest delight of the Amboy year; the palatial Bruen home, where Delia spent vacations, made the Williams' house in Hartford look small.5 But as early as November Delia was dismayed when she balanced expenses — especially for fuel — against school fees; instead of the $6 quarterly tuition they expected, they were receiving from 32

A Career is Launched $3 to $5. In December, she was forced to borrow from Leonard to tide them over to the end of the quarter. Julia, ill with a bilious fever from December to February, was in bed three weeks and out of school six. She thought she would die, and bewailed her misspent life. Delia not only carried on the school alone, but sustained Julia by her secure faith that a Providence which had seen them through other trials would somehow help them in this crisis. B y spring, the hopes which town residents held out for summer scholars began to fade. Clearly it was time for the Bacon girls to move — and if at the same time they could tell the people of Amboy that they were accepting a superior position, so much the better for the Bacon pride. The next day after her arrival in Jamaica Mr. King drove Delia about town with Dr. Eigenbrodt and Dr. Nathan Shelton, the town's physician, to look at houses. In the double house that Dr. Shelton would rent for $250 a year, Delia saw the boarding school of her dreams. The schoolroom would be on one side, with rooms for the boarders upstairs. The trustees would furnish the schoolroom, and the resident students would supply their own cots, bedding, and silver spoons. On the dwelling side of the house, Delia envisioned a handsome stair-carpet, a mahogany table and piano in the parlor, and the dining room suitably appointed. Upstairs she saw " M a " and Julia in the front room, herself and Alice in the back bedroom.6 This would be such a home as the Bacons had never before enjoyed. Thrilled by the idea that she might be the means of reuniting her scattered family, Delia conjured up a picture of the future family hearth, reunited by hope and love. Pressed by the trustees for an immediate decision, Delia hesitated, for a very important reason: she had no idea where she would get the money for furniture and rent. She lay awake all night, pondering the chances for success. As for her ability to manage the school, she had no doubt whatever. Her self-confidence was hard won, based on two years of teaching in which she learned the difficult lessons of pedagogy on her own, with no experienced guide at hand. The cocksure fifteen-year-old, who left Miss Beecher's thinking she knew everything, and sailed with airy ease into the Southington school, was quickly humbled. Even the ignorant, she discovered that first year, can ask ingenious questions; determined 33

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon to know more answers, she spent her evening hours reading Latin and plodding through Historiae Sacrae at the rate of two pages a day. When she reproved the Misses Hart in the Southington school, they left abruptly — and their teacher realized the unpleasant truth that enforcing discipline in a private school can be expensive.7 Besides the teacher's own skill, Delia knew that a necessary ingredient for success was advertising. She learned this early, from Catherine Beecher, a mistress of the art; but, until she had some experience, modesty kept her from pushing herself.8 Now for the first time she felt that she could make strong claims, and substantiate them. A high-sounding prospectus would help; but much more significant was the sponsorship by leading men in the community. As she anxiously balanced assets against liabilities, she decided that her Jamaica sponsors were her strong card. With the Kings and the scholarly Dr. Eigenbrodt behind her, she felt that she could not fail. Somehow or other, from Hartford or Amboy friends, she would get the necessary $300 to furnish the house. She quite agreed with the trustees that the added prestige of a boarding department was worth the financial risk. The next morning she told John King that she and Julia would accept the position; and all the way back to Amboy she scribbled notes about the probable cost of chairs, crockery and carpets. During the next two weeks Delia suffered one of the bitterest disappointments of her life. Her brother-in-law Dr. Hodges, Uncle Dr. Leonard, Mrs. Eliphalet Terry and Aunt Williams not only refused to lend money, but all denounced the boarding school as a project of the most extravagant folly. It was David Bacon all over again, the Hartford relatives and friends exclaimed in horror.9 In response to his sisters' desperate entreaty, Leonard visited Amboy and Jamaica at the end of April. He, too, perceived the daring of the venture, but he felt confident of Delia's ability and was impressed by the Kings' interest. However straitened his own circumstances (his small salary barely covered the support of his wife and baby daughter), he had helped his sisters before, and did not intend to desert them now. When Leonard suggested that the trustees give $100 toward furniture, the amount to be repaid from the school's proceeds, John King agreed.10 Leonard sent some furniture from New Haven; the girls spent their "rest" hours hemming 34

A Career is Launched sheets and towels; and on Monday, May 12, they moved into their new home. Delia was embarrassed when the trustees gallantly insisted on helping to place their modest furniture, but she laughed when Dr. Eigenbrodt and Dr. Shelton seriously pondered the laying of their slightly used green-and-white parlor carpet, and Mr. King got down on his knees to show the learned gentlemen how a piece could be cut off the length to fill out the width. With the carpet down and the room settled, their landlord, Dr. Shelton, complimented the girls on their excellent taste. Delia and Julia walked happily about their domain, admiring their two mahogany tables, and the dark green parlor chairs, with gilt flowers and white buttons, which they had painted themselves. Upstairs they had managed three yellow dressing tables, with the indispensable looking glasses. There was no piano, the stair carpeting reached only to the second flight, and their sole heirloom was six of their mother's silver spoons — but the whole effect was so elegant that Julia termed it "The Castle of Delia." 1 1 Two days after the girls moved in, on May 14, they began their school with twenty-seven young ladies. The number was soon increased to forty-seven, more students than they had ever taught. The work was exciting, but wearing, especially for the fragile Julia. When Alice Parks Bacon arrived to take charge of the house the first week in June, the trustees as well as the girls were relieved. Nancy, the maid, did most of the heavy work for twenty shillings (twenty-five dollars) a month, under Mrs. Bacon's direction. Rosy tints appeared in Mrs. Bacon's saturnine view of life; she felt useful in promoting the girls' success, and elated by the prospects of a revival in Mr. Crane's church.12 At the end of June the "graceful" accomplishments were secured when sister Alice began the teaching of drawing. By July the girls could see the prospect of paying $50 on their debts by the end of the summer quarter, and of being free from debt by late fall. John King had personally lent them $150, and told them not to hurry about paying it. The number of day scholars increased, but there was only one boarder, the daughter of Dr. Bartlett, editor of the New York Albion. On Monday, August 4, tragedy struck. On that day sister Alice 35

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon c?me down with malarial fever, and on Friday Delia fainted in the schoolroom. On Sunday, August 10, Julia wrote to tell Leonard that David must come at once to help her with the school. Mrs. Bacon, terrified, feared that she would lose both girls, and tried to trust in Dr. Shelton as well as in the Divine Physician. On Wednesday the thirteenth, worn out with nursing, Julia frantically summoned both her brothers. "Delia," she wrote, "has lost her reason. I asked her this morning if she would like to see brother. She said Yes." i a When David arrived to help nurse the girls, kindly neighbors assisted, and the minister, Mr. Crane, called, the tension eased. But Delia was desperately ill. For eight days and nights she writhed in agony — her tongue swollen with fever, her throat burning. Her ear was infected, and painful swellings on her face grew so large that they had to be lanced. She thought she would die, and called out piteously for her beloved Leonard to come to her bedside. Mrs. Bacon was distracted as Julia lay in one room, groaning and begging for help, while Delia, at the point of death, claimed all her attention. As the malaria became epidemic, watchers who had helped the Bacons were needed in their own families. When, on August 25, Dr. Shelton called in the celebrated Dr. Hosack of N e w York for consultation, Mrs. Bacon wrote to Leonard: "Poor girl I fear we must lose her. God of mercy support us. Come to us if you can and as speedily as possible." 14 A t the end of August, Alice, Julia, and David were convalescing. But Delia had another relapse, and the saga of distress went on through the fall. On September 20, Dr. Eigenbrodt died of the fever, and his wife, who took over the Academy, was less sympathetic than her husband with the Bacons' school. In the fall Julia went to Amboy to convalesce, and Delia to N e w Haven. After their return in October both girls still had intermittent fevers, and the responsibility for reopening the school in November fell on Alice's shoulders. Their only boarder fled the plague scene, giving the final blow to any hope of profit from that department. There were still thirty scholars, and John King continued to help the girls. Alarmed by the amount of their accumulated grocery bills, however, Delia and Julia had to tell their mother that they could no longer support her. 15

36

A Career is Launched For another year and a half the girls struggled on with their school. In February, 1830, Delia told the trustees that she and Julia must give it up at the end of the spring term. The trustees urged Delia to reconsider. Not only were they satisfied with the girls' teaching, but they felt an uneasy responsibility for the school's financial failure. 16 They had insisted on the boarding department as a condition of the enterprise, and the Bacons never got from under the initial burden of debt for rent and furniture. And, as loyal citizens of Jamaica, the trustees could not admit what they really knew: that the town's marshes bred the disease that struck the girls down in their first months of teaching. Dr. Shelton, alarmed by Delia's decision, countered by proposing to seize the furniture and sell it at auction to satisfy his bill for rent; and, as soon as the girls began to make money elsewhere, he would expect payment of his medical bill. In terror, Delia consulted their principal creditor, Mr. Herriman, who listened sympathetically, and proposed a private sale that would not carry the disgrace of a public auction.17 Mr. Herriman finally arranged this business, apportioning to each creditor his share of the pitiful total of $130.59." Later on Leonard Bacon managed to pay the balance of his sisters' debt. On February 23, touched by Leonard's encouraging letter, Delia confided to this dear brother her despondent feeling: "Our letters must still be what they have always been, a tale of blasted hopes, realized fears and unlooked-for sorrows." 19 Her deepest regret was the shattering of the long cherished dream that she might rebuild the family home; but actually, the real disaster of the Jamaica venture was the injury to her own health; her previously rugged constitution was never to recover from the nearly fatal attack of malarial fever. When on April 30, 1830, Delia left Jamaica with Julia for their brother's home in N e w Haven, she could not fight down the tears as she contrasted this sad departure with the first delighted visit two years before, when she saw the town through the enthusiastic eyes of John Alsop King. But, however bitter the failure, it was again spring; and Delia, frail as she was, still had the resilience of youth and a terrific determination. A t nineteen, she could count four years of teaching experience a decided asset. On the carriage 37

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon ride to N e w York, she and Julia excitedly discussed prospects for a school in Western N e w York — perhaps Rochester, or Canadaigua, or Geneva — where, if a good situation could be found, some admiring Jamaica students promised to follow them. Julia teased Delia about her Jamaica beau. Was he serious? Yes, Delia was afraid he was. Would Delia marry him? Of course not, Delia replied with a toss of her head. She would admit only that his attentions were pleasant; no young girl wanted to become a hopeless old maid. I But something more exciting than love or a new school was buoying up Delia's hopes. Leonard, who knew the state of his sister's purse, would be surprised to discover that Delia was not quite emptyhanded. In her luggage was the precious manuscript of Tales of the Puritans. Unquenched by Catherine Beecher's harsh criticism, Delia's passionate desire to write persisted. Usually the school day left her too exhausted to put pen to paper, but her mind was bursting with ideas for stories, and she snatched what time she could, to express what she called "these truant feelings, these longings for something nobler and lovelier." 20 During the Southington and Amboy years she considered writing a luxury, an indulgence of the spirit. In Jamaica she got her first real encouragement, when friends, impressed by her imagination, told her that some people made money by writing stories. Delia went to work with furious energy — and the result, three hundred closely written manuscript pages, lay in the canvas bag at her feet, ready for Leonard's inspection. If these tales would pay her debts, Delia would be satisfied. But perhaps also — there was that wistful hope — they might bring fame as well. 2

When spring came around again, Delia experienced the heady delight of holding in her hands her first published book. Tales of the Puritans, a slender quarto of three hundred pages, was issued on April 8, 1831, by A. H. Maltby, N e w Haven printer and bookseller, and Leonard Bacon's friend. Delia could not bring herself to put her name on the title page; but when the secret leaked out, she gratefully drank in her friends' flattering praise. A t last

38

A Career is Launched the schoolmarm had become an author; and the long humbled Bacon pride savored the moment of triumph. The scene of the book is colonial N e w England, when the fire of the Puritan faith burned strong and pure, and the settlers stood ready to meet hardships, disease, and marauding Indians. Into these three stories, "The Regicides," "The Fair Pilgrim," and "The Castine," Delia poured all her youthful romanticism, feeling for the Puritan heritage, and sense for the N e w England asmosphere. Delia's first manuscript had a broader canvas, including two more tales: one dealt with traditions of the Allegany Indians, derived from recent discoveries in a Western cave; the other was a tale of the Lenni Lenape at the time of Jamestown's settlement.21 But these two stories were excised by Leonard's severe editorial pen, and their manuscripts are now lost. The most successful story is the first, "The Regicides," for here Delia was using N e w Haven's familiar streets, the Green, and East and West Rock, which she had come to know and love on visits to her brother's home.22 Townspeople were proud of the shelter they gave to three of the judges who had sentenced Charles I, and who fled the punitive wrath of Charles II in 1660. This was one occasion when the N e w Haven Colony surpassed Massachusetts Bay by defending liberty in defiance of the King's orders. They named streets after Edmund Whalley, his son-in-law John Goffe, and John Dixwell, and claimed these fugitives for their own, as "The N e w Haven Regicides." Delia's imagination was fired by the small stone markers behind Center Church, inscribed " E . W . " and " W . G . , " which Ezra Stiles believed commemorated the graves of Whalley and Goffe. Whalley and Goffe eluded His Majesty's deputies, Kirk and Kellond, in Massachusetts Bay, and took shelter in March, 1661, with the Reverend Mr. John Davenport in N e w Haven. T o Delia, the story of these two judges was the very breath of historical romance. The Cave halfway up rugged West Rock, where they hid out from May 15 to June 1 1 , was as fine a place of concealment as Sir Walter Scott ever found in the Highlands.23 Many times Delia had stood on the Rock's summit, looking down at the panorama of N e w Haven and the sparkling waters of the Sound. The walled-in chamber of the Reverend Mr. Samuel Rus39

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon sel's home at Hadley, long believed to be the sixteen-year refuge of these Regicides, she had not seen, but she was able to suggest its horror, which was made to order for the Gothic taste of the period. In contrast to these grisly settings are some attractive, realistic pictures of children sliding down hill in the winter twilight, and the comfortable "keeping room" of Governor Leete's home in Guilford, with its blazing fire, simple furniture and ample food. With the characters of Isabella Goffe and her daughter, the supposed orphan Alice Weiland, Delia let her imagination loose. Actually Isabella remained in England, where she eventually persuaded Charles II to pardon her husband and father; but Delia brought her to the Cave at West Rock, where she could be seen at dawn and sunset in a white gown. Credulous N e w Haven residents named her the "Lady of the Mist," and some said that a witch had taken over the Rock and would soon descend on the town. Through the eyes of young Henry Davenport, the pastor's son, Delia shows the weird power of Isabella's ghostly figure over a vivid imagination; and through Henry's curiosity, the author gradually reveals the true heroism of this woman thought to be in league with the devil. Young Henry dupes the judges' pursuers, by the simple ruse of leading them to East instead of West Rock; and fifteen years later, betrothed to Alice Weiland, he gallantly postpones his ministerial career to fetch Isabella back from England. In Alice Weiland Delia created the self she would like to be. Like her creator, Alice was proud, romantic and passionate; and, like Delia in the Williams household, an "orphan" in a strange home. But the author lavished on her heroine irresistible loveliness, the "elegant" accomplishments of drawing and music which Delia never attained, a devoted lover, and a mother far more beautiful and strange than Alice Parks Bacon. An occasional salting of humor seasons the melodrama of "The Regicides," while the chase and pursuit keep up suspense until the final reunion of Isabella with her daughter Alice, and the marriage of Alice and Henry. "The Fair Pilgrim" has a slighter theme — the flight of the Lady Arbella Johnson, daughter of the Earl of Lincoln, from her wealthy English home to the pioneer settlement in Salem led by Sir Richard Saltonstall and John Endicott. 24 Delia had seen no castles; the closest she had come to them in real life was Miss 40

A Career is Launched Bruen's palatial home in Amboy. But, like Poe, she enjoyed creating a dream world that she did not see every day, giving her heroine what she had never possessed — luxurious furnishings, gleaming jewels, rich dresses — and a Marquis for a lover. At the same time she could maintain a high moral tone by having her Lady Eveline sacrifice all this delightful wordliness for the religious quest. For the report of these pilgrims' first New England Sabbath, Delia drew on family stories about the first Bacon service in the log cabin at Tallmadge. The author's earnest piety makes this convincing: "They could now fearlessly worship the Father of spirits, in spirit and in truth; and as the voice of prayer rose to heaven, from the depths of the solemn forest, with no voice to chide, and no ear to hear but the ear of a forgiving God, as the rocks and vales which till now had listened only to the hymn of the morning stars, echoed with the loud sweet song of praise, and their souls drank freely of that well of living water . . . they felt that they had not vainly abandoned all." 25 Lady Eveline was indeed Delia's New England nun, a martyr to the faith of her fathers; she lived only two years after she arrived in Salem. But Delia makes a concession to the romantic tradition by a final death-bed reunion between Eveline, her sister and brother — and the loyal, grief-stricken Marquis. In the last tale, "Castine," Delia ventured on another unfamiliar territory, and essayed a more complicated plot.26 During the French and Indian wars in the early eighteenth century, the French Baron Castine, enemy of the Puritans, made his fortress on the Penobscot a rallying point for Catholic priests and Saco and Mohican Indians, from which he sent out forays against the English settlers in Northern Maine.27 Delia was both fascinated and repelled by accounts of the Baron's personality, wealth, and influence. The Baron was said to have six Indian wives. The author treats the theme of miscegenation delicately, through the dark, half-Indian Antoinette, the Baron's daughter, who magnanimously rescues her opposite type, the blonde Lucy Everett. The conflict between the Catholic and Puritan religions is dramatized with remarkable objectivity. The Reverend Mr. Everett's intolerance of the Catholic faith, as well as the bigotry of the Baron and Father Ralle, are shown up without mercy. Everett's daughter Lucy is 4'

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon more tolerant. She insists that young Louis is not bad, even though he is a Catholic; she responds to the beauty of the Catholic mass, and discovers that the infidel Antoinette has a truly kind heart.28 But Lucy is not required to make the supreme religious sacrifice in marrying Louis; fortunately his early years among the Albigenses have made their mark, and he is ready to accept the Puritan faith of his bride. Of the three stories, "Castine" makes the fullest use of romantic machinery. The brave heroine saves the hero's life; in return, Louis tells Lucy of the impending attack, so that she is able to save the settlement. Coincidence is stretched to lead Lucy into the Baron's fastness; the miniature of her father's cousin, which Lucy offers the Baron as ransom, shocks him — it is the picture of the Lucy McGregor whom he long ago led astray. Yet the fact that Lucy and young Louis are second cousins is no bar to their union. Delia's Indians like Cooper's, are based chiefly on literary sources; but her recollection of family tales about Sigenog, the Indian brave who lived with her parents at Mackinac, helped to make her "good" Indian Alaska a convincing figure.29 Out of the author's fancy emerge some brightly tinted pictures, evoking the desired sense of mystery: the night scene in the forest about the campfire, where the savages cease their chants and listen spellbound to Lucy's Puritan hymn; the Baron's forbidding fortress, rising sheer above the river; and the evening canoe ride of Louis and Lucy, where sentimental convention passes into genuine feeling handled with delicacy. Lucy's capture by the Indians is full of suspense: "They had already crossed the garden and Lucy leaned a moment over the gate to undo the fastening, when the loud and fearful war whoop arrested her purpose. The clouds rolled away from the moon, and she saw that they were surrounded with a fierce circle of waving tomahawks. All that they could do for life was done, and Lucy leaned against the pickets, to watch the coming up of her foe. At that moment a fainting, like death, came over her, the forms of the savage warriors faded from her eye, and insensibility succeeded to the long excitement of organized feeling." 30 Delia's avowed purpose in this volume was to imitate John Neal's romantic re-creation of American history; and indeed the 42

A Career is Launched motto of "The Regicides" — " W e dig no lands for tyrants but their graves" — could serve equally well for such a violently patriotic work as Neal's Battle of Niagara, where the eagles really scream. But in contrast to the bold strokes of the tempestuous Neal, who signed himself, appropriately, "Jehu O'Cataract," Delia's touch is restrained. Her free play of sentiment, which halts at the edge of bathos, might be termed a feminine version of Cooper's treatment in The Spy and The Last of the Mohicans. Delia reassures scholarly readers by citing her sources in the Appendix; Ezra Stiles' History of the Judges, Samuel Willard's History of America, and Cotton Mather's Magnolia;31 yet she frankly admits that in the second and third stories especially she gave her imagination free rein. The volume is suffused with reverence for the Puritan heritage; the beauty of its worship and the fostering ground it provided for liberty. But Delia anticipates Hawthorne in perceiving flaws in the Puritan armor: the belief in daemonic possession, and the unreasoning dread of the Catholic faith. However strong the historical framework, Tales of the Puritans is dominantly a work of the heart rather than the head, with sentiment kept always in the foreground. In line with the sentimental tradition, but also revealing of the twenty-year-old author's own mood, is the compulsion felt by two of her heroines to oppose their families in pursuing a course dictated by their inmost desires. Despite some artificial passages where the author's invention fails, Tales of the Puritans shows a vigorous refashioning of the past, a fresh use of personal experience, and ability to tell a story. When Delia was marketing her Tales, she ran head on to the problem of copyright, as vexing to her as it was to Emerson, Cooper, Hawthorne, or Melville. Edward Cooke, Hartford bookseller and brother of her friend Julia Cooke, who tried to place the book with a N e w York publisher and also offered to print it himself, advised her to keep the copyright in her own name; he thought that in this way she might make $500 from it.32 But, as Delia could supply no capital and Maltby offered to publish at his own risk, she could do no less than assign the copyright to him. With no money for advertising, the book was neglected by the critical reviews. Gradually the golden hope of profit faded away. On December 12, 1831, in reply to a query from Leonard about 4î

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon her achievements and prospects, Delia wrote from Susan's Bloomfield home, assessing the whole enterprise. H o w she wished that she could knock on her brother's study door and talk to him, instead of confining her thoughts to paper! Leonard had not said directly that her book was a failure, but Delia read between the lines — and disagreed. That she was no richer in money, she admitted, but she reminded her brother of the encouraging compliments made by people whom she considered disinterested literary judges. "I mean," she wrote, "considering it as written without any experience, without knowledge of the subjects of which it treated, with scarcely a book to refer to beyond the works made use of in school, if with all these faults, the book could be tolerated at all, I consider the experiment a successful one and that with greater facilities, with some experience, and two years more added to my stock of thought, and moreover with the advantages of an anonymous authorship and a N e w York publisher, I might be able to produce something which would prove generally acceptable." At what seemed like a long distance from N e w Haven, Delia strove to make her brother see her point of view. She still considered Leonard the best critic she knew, and valued his praise above anyone else's; but she refused to be cowed by his fear that her writing would never pay. Aware of the prejudice against female authorship, she was appraising the market as well as herself. If pursued in a "sly" sort of way, she believed that writing should reflect no more discredit on the family than Susan's former trade of millinery. T h e truth was that Delia, still admiring her brother, was beginning to pull away from the guiding strings that he tried to hold on her talent. In this same letter, she explained why she had given up the history of Liberia, the African colony established by the American Colonization Society, in which Leonard was deeply interested. The year before, she had begun a study of the Society's reports, under Leonard's encouragement and Mr. Maltby's promise to publish it as a gaily illustrated work for the general reader as well as the Sunday School student. While the heroism of Prince Abdullah and Jehudi Ashmun, the N e w Haven emissary who became a martyr to the cause, appealed to Delia's love of freedom, 44

A Career is Launched she lost interest in the work; Ralph Gurley's proposal to do a history of the Society put the final quietus on this job. But she was still willing to listen to Leonard's suggestions. His recent proposal, that she do a series of Old Testament biographies for Sunday Schools, caught her imagination. What ages should she write for? She could see the most important eras of Jewish history up to Moses portrayed in the lives of Adam, Noah, Abraham and Joseph. "The life of each," she wrote excitedly, "contains much to interest the heart and imagination of a child." She could see the Creation as well as the Fall embodied in Adam's life, and the murder of Abel as "an incident recurring in his family." She was already plunging into research of Judaea's scenery, on the lookout for local color. But fiction too, she insisted to Leonard on December 12, may have dignity: "I mean the fiction only as the drapery to something better — truth — that system of truth whose influence is always an ennobling one." 33 As for her intellectual development for the past six months, Delia admitted to frivolity during the spring and summer. After the publication of her book, she made a pleasant visit to her friend Miss Bruen in Amboy. At the end of April she and Julia took the boat from N e w York to Albany. Only deck space was available on the westward canal packet from Albany to Urica, but the girls, gallantly protected by some interested gentlemen, spent a delightful moonlight night on board. The stage trip from Utica to Bloomfield took thirty-six hours to cover 140 miles of muddy spring roads, with the coach tossing its passengers into the air while it moved barely two miles an hour horizontally. Attentive young men appeared in Bloomfield also, and Delia spent the summer as the guest of a fashionable Philadelphia couple at their home in Richmond, N e w York. Like Wharton's Lily Bart, Delia was discovering that the life of a nonpaying guest is not her own. She had a spacious room and the use of a large library, but she was beginning to be known as a brilliant talker, and was constantly in demand for parties and visits. During the summer she studied only human nature. But since her return to Bloomfield, she had followed for two months a systematic plan of reading and writing, patiently trying to fill in the gaps in her education. 45

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon "My main object for the present," she wrote, "is to improve myself, to cultivate to as high a degree of perfection as may be, all my intellectual faculties, and thus to become more capable of benefiting others." She was studying Mathematics, Vegetable Physiology, Political Economy, the Elements of Ideology — and making one last desperate effort to conquer Latin. All these courses, staples of the college curriculum but not yet available to women, Delia was laboriously digging out for herself. At the same time she sought to enrich her imagination by reading classic poetry, and to discipline it by conning the judicial criticism of The North Atlantic Review. A daemonic drive was impelling Delia to make up for her summer's frivolity, and bring herself as fast as possible abreast of the culture of her time. Finally, she tried to answer her brother's warning (a shaft that really hit home) that she must not become so inflated by literary pride as to consider the steadier trade of schoolteaching beneath her. No school was then available, she told Leonard, but the truth was that she had not tried very hard to find one. Therefore she must write, as her only means of winning bread and clothing. At the moment she was counting on "a few pages" which she was preparing for a Philadelphia periodical.34 Her self-confidence was triumphantly vindicated. On December 31, 1831, Delia was awarded a prize of $100 by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier for a story, "Love's Martyr." Her hopes of success soared. Had she known that on this occasion she had vanquished a more celebrated author, Edgar Allan Poe, she might never have come down to earth. Curiously, "Love's Martyr" is redolent of the Poe atmosphere, with its sensuous appeal, foreshadowing dreams, violence and death-in-beauty. (The Courier later reprinted the rejected "Metzengerstein," as well as other Poe stories, while Delia's name never reappeared in the magazine; but this did not detract from the moment of victory.) To a young lady who had never seen more than ten dollars at one time, this prize was fulfillment beyond her most extravagant visions. The story appeared on the front page of the Saturday Courier, January 7, 1832, with the heading "Prize Tale," and an inscription from Thomas Moore's "Lalla Rookh" to set the tone: 46

A Career is Launched He knew his own betrothed bride — She who would rather die for him Than live to gain the world beside. The plot concerns the murder of Jane McCrea by Indians attached to the army of General Burgoyne at Fort Edward in July, 1776. The episode was well known in Revolutionary history; and Delia may have read Lydia Sigourney's version of it in A Sketch of Connecticut Forty Years Since (1824). The leading figures of Mrs. Sigourney's tale were the Indian Maurice, who tomahawked Jane to save her from capture, and Father Paul, the fanatical Jesuit who rescued Maurice from death at the price of the Indian's lifelong penance.35 Delia centers her story on the heroine Jane, whom she names Helen Gray. As in Tales of the Furitans, Delia makes some changes in the historical account to mold it into a sentimental romance. According to history, Jane was waiting in Fort Edward at the home of Mrs. O'Niel, a T o r y sympathizer, for the British to capture the Fort so that she might be reunited with her lover, Lieutenant David Jones, an American Loyalist. Jane's brother, an ardent Whig, had ordered his sister to join him in Albany; and, after several refusals, Jane prepared to leave on the rescue boat. That very morning marauding Indians carried off Mrs. O'Niel and Jane McCrea. Jane, in terror, offered the savages a large reward to take her to the British camp. As the Indians paused by the Hemlock Spring to quarrel over the money, one of them killed and tomahawked Jane. The report, circulated among the British, that the lieutenant had sent the Indians for Jane, was steadfastly denied by the lieutenant himself. Yet, tradition says, Lieutenant Jones brooded over Jane's scalp, with its long silken tresses, as a precious relic, and lived out a long, melancholy, single life in Canada. Jane's martyrdom greatly assisted the lagging Patriot cause; and many Americans, including the Green Mountain boys, were moved by anger at her sacrifice to join the Army. Washington Irving, in The Life of Washington, later made a serious effort to disentangle fact from fiction in the many accounts of the incident.36 Delia's version is that Helen Gray did indeed go with the Indians in obedience to her lover's command. Thus the theme of "all for love" is established. Helen Gray is obliged to withstand a more 47

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon direct opposition than a brother's letters — she must wrench herself away from mother, brother and sisters, who leave her in their own home, with the protection of one servant, to her chosen fate. Separation from her family is the first penalty she pays for seeking her lover. Mrs. Gray also reminds her that marriage to a T o r y means treachery to her country, but the theme of patriotism is played down so that romantic love may take the stage. " A y , " Helen says, as she buries her face in the jasmine by her bedroom window, "Everard Maitland shall learn this day, there is power in the depths of a loving heart he never dreamed of." â7 As in "The Regicides," the author uses fiction to present the charm and high romance which she had not experienced in life. Not poverty and slow disease, but passion and sudden death in the beautiful glen near the Hemlock Spring represent her dream world. Of her heroine, Delia says: "Helen Gray was one of those rare beings, that now and then cross the pathways of earth, like young wanderers from the regions of romance, invested with all those bright attributes that the common experience of life teaches us to look for in the world of fancy." Like Alice Weiland of "The Regicides," Helen has not merely physical beauty, but "an intellectual charm, a kind of spiritual loveliness," without which, Delia felt, a lady could not be a heroine. Her hero also is elevated from the rank of lieutenant to colonel, and given the romantic name of Everard Maitland. When he built his beautiful home in the American wilds before the War, the English Maitland became the cynosure of all female eyes — "a star in the sky." Everard's scorn of Helen when he believes her faithless, and his melting love when he clasps her in his arms with her dying kisses on his lips, qualify him as an ideal lover in the sentimental romance. B y reporting the slaying scene, Delia spares her readers the revulsion of this horrible spectacle, and allows Helen to linger on, unscalped, until Everard's arrival. As a story, "Love's Martyr" demonstrates Delia Bacon's skill in writing according to a popular formula of the day. And it brings out some themes which curiously foreshadow events in the author's own life. Maitland's madness and Helen's resistance to family opposition are elements which reappear in a different guise in Delia's history. Delia would learn, painfully, how Helen Gray felt when 48

A Career is Launched Mrs. Gray, frantically trying to keep her from elopement, appealed to Helen's sense of delicacy: "How think you a cold, impartial world will read it? Surely Helen Gray is not the proud, highminded maiden I had deemed her, if the dignity and honour of her fair name, are held thus lightly." "Love's Martyr" is not only a successful venture in sentimental fiction; it is prophecy as well. 3

"I have an excellent system in my head," Delia wrote to Leonard in February, 1833, "That only needs to be carried into practice to turn out in the community, a class of minds, not very common to say the least, in the female portion of the learned world." 38 In the rugged surroundings of Edwardsville, on Black Lake in New York's St. Lawrence County, where Delia was spending a month with her friend Miss Edwards, she laid aside her manuscripts and put her mind to work on the problem of women's education. The previous winter's teaching in Penn Yan Seminary added to her experience, but also convinced her that she wanted to run her own show. With Leonard's encouragement, she at last felt ready to venture into the cultural atmosphere of New Haven. When Leonard accepted the pastorate of the First Church, he saw New Haven not only as a quiet city, enriched by the Yale community, but also as a halfway house between Boston and New York, offering easy access to the new ideas of the metropolises and a chance to exert influence on them. Delia also liked the idea of escaping from the New York area without going too far away. Although she knew from her New York and New Jersey experience that good Episcopalians and Unitarians did exist, there was a sense of safety in the Congregational community of Yale, where the faith of her fathers reigned supreme, and her brother was on his way to becoming a great church leader. Leonard's wife Lucy agreed to let Delia have the sittingroom for her class, although she wished that her sister-in-law would find some settled position, or marry into a home of her own. But, having had one or another of her husband's family in the house since her marriage, Lucy admitted that Delia was the one who fitted most easily into the crowded parsonage. Six-year-old Rebecca, five-year-old Benjy, and three-year-old Leonard all àdored Delia, 49

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon and the harassed Lucy was grateful when Aunt De'l put aside her high literary vocation to play with the children or put them to sleep with bedtime stories. When, through Leonard's close friendship with Dr. Nathaniel W . Taylor, head of Yale's theological department, Delia won the Taylors' support, she did not have to worry about filling her class. Dr. Taylor was amused, but also flattered, to hear of the sermons directed by the Edwardsville pastor at Miss Bacon, outspoken advocate of the Taylor "heresy." His kindly wife, Rebecca, who wanted the best possible education for her daughters, was convinced that Miss Bacon was heaven-sent to provide it. Mrs. Taylor helped to advertise the class informally to the professors' families; and in return, the Taylor daughters, Mary, Rebecca, Susan and Harriet, were given free tuition. Of all his children, Dr. Taylor considered that Rebecca had a mind most like his own; and it was Rebecca (later Mrs. Walter Hatch) who responded most eagerly to Delia's teaching. Susan Forbes (later Mrs. Benjamin Silliman, Junior), Lizzie Atwater, and Jeremiah Day's daughter Elizabeth (later Mrs. Thomas Thacher) passed from Miss Dutton's teaching of Mathematics and the Aeneid at the Grove Hall School to the "finishing" atmosphere of Delia's class. The daughters of Thomas Day came from Hartford. Elizabeth Day (who later married Nathan Parks Seymour and went to live in David Bacon's old home at Hudson, Ohio) was an enthusiastic auditor.39 On the spring morning in 1833 when the twenty-two-year-old Delia prepared to meet her first New Haven class, she was filled with confidence. From the parsonage windows on Church Street, she could look across to the wide expanse of the upward-sloping, elm-shaded Green, and see her brother's church, called "Center" because of its dominating position over Trinity Episcopal on the right and the United Congregational on the left. When Dr. Taylor's devoted parishioners erected Center Church, they promised to build a spire that would reach the heavens; and now Delia, as well as Nathaniel and his successor Leonard, saw that spire as an invitation to excel. No less stimulating were the brick buildings of the Yale campus, above the Green and facing College Street. Delia vowed to give her girls at least an introduction to the knowledge which the boys were getting at Yale. 50

A Career is Launched Delia was indeed launching a genuine educational experiment, both in method and content. She made it attractive, first, by calling it a "class," not a school. Freedom was the keynote: no rules, no written examinations, no textbooks. But freedom did not imply laziness. With only the morning given to lecture and recitation, the girls were expected to spend several hours a day in independent reading, and encouraged to explore a subject to its furthest limits. Even though much of the subject matter was on a secondary level, the girls' reports and the informal discussion, under Delia's skillful guidance, followed the method of the present graduate seminar. Another innovation, comparable to modern courses in the Humanities, was the use of History as a means of unifying other studies. Here Delia extended and intensified Catherine Beecher's Hartford approach. Greek Literature, Art, Science and Philosophy, for example, were subsumed under the political and social history of Athens and Sparta. As Delia's own scholarship advanced, she led her students along with her. Some of the Grove Hall School graduates were already familiar with Dugald Stewart and the common sense philosophy of Reid and Brown; Delia plunged them into Cousin and Coleridge, whose work was not yet a part of the Yale or Harvard curriculum. More and more fascinated by Shakespeare, she made his Plays a central part of the girls' study. When she read Hamlet and Julius Caesar aloud, she swept her listeners along with her on a tide of dramatic enthusiasm.40 That first spring she adopted a method used by her competitor, Dr. Ethan Allen Andrews, at his Young Ladies' Institute (founded in 1830). This was picking the brains of well-known lecturers, with whom Yale was well supplied, by inviting them to address the students on their favorite subject.41 Professor Sheppard of Yale spoke on conchology, a topic well calculated to conduct the young ladies through a pleasant path into the mysteries of science.42 Thus Delia Bacon anticipated Radcliffe's wiles in "annexing" Harvard — carefully followed up the visitor's lectures by a quiz section. Daring, zest and enjoyment — these were the qualities of Delia's teaching, and her students responded with delight to this gifted, refined woman, whose knowledge, they felt, was unbounded. Like Catherine Beecher, Delia controlled her students by her magnetic 51

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon personality; but, in contrast to the emotional ardor which Catherine often inspired, Delia's pupils felt an intellectual admiration. With her main emphasis the training of the girls' minds, Delia did not shirk responsibility for their manners. She organized pleasant evening parties to which young men were invited, and the Yale boys jumped at the chance to meet New Haven's beauties at Miss Bacon's soirées. At the same time that her class was enriching the intellectual life of New Haven, Delia herself made the most of her opportunities to learn from the Yale professors. From Benjamin Silliman, Senior, she caught an enthusiasm for science and for Francis Bacon as the founder of induction. It was the elder Silliman's insistence on the importance of Chemistry, Physics, and Geology, which gave these subjects an increasing dignity in the Yale curriculum. Leonard Bacon, who considered Silliman's courses of little importance while he was in college, later said that he never saw a pebble by the roadside without thinking of the ocean which had formed it, and of the geological ages through which it had passed.43 When Silliman founded the pioneer American Journal of Science and Arts in 1818, he invoked for the publication the blessing of Francis Bacon, to foster the "fruit" of practical invention and the "light" of pure science. Ten years earlier, Leonard's casual mention of "knowledge as power" aroused Delia's interest in Bacon; 44 now Silliman showed her his significance in the long march of scientific thought. Spurred by the scientist's powerful voice and piercing dark eyes, as he talked of chemistry and geology in her brother's study, Delia determined to learn more about the seventeenth-century thinker who set in motion the course of modern scientific inquiry. And she would be safe in following Silliman's enthusiasm, for the great man's piety was never disturbed one jot by his scientific studies; if anything, geology strengthened his faith 45 — most consoling to a young woman who sought to cling to the rock of Congregationalism. Delia was gratified by his interest in her class. Always a mediator between town and gown and a member of every committee for New Haven's improvement, the elder Silliman was more than ready to encourage Miss Bacon's service to the town's culture. Thus stimulated, Delia struggled bravely through the seas of scientific thought. Later, as she became increasingly

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A Career is Launched absorbed in literature and history, she contented herself with the broad outlines of scientific theory; but at this time she worried over specific points — her excited mind burned to know all the answers.48 Despite the success of her New Haven class, by the winter of 1835 Delia was again restless. New York City, with its rich offerings of lectures, concerts and art exhibitions, held out an irresistible lure. There was the center of the magazine trade: Nathaniel Willis' and Gaylord Clark's Knickerbocker, Charles Hoffman's and Park Benjamin's American Monthly, and William Snowden's Ladies' Companion. Besides these monthlies, Willis' weekly Mirror was flourishing, and the nine daily papers also printed some poems and stories. In the business of book publishing, New York was hurrying to catch up with Boston and Philadelphia; the great house of Harper was pouring out a million volumes a year, while four smaller firms and a dozen booksellers added to the annual production of printed books. For Delia, whose literary ambition burned with an unquenched flame, New York seemed the place to go. The Bruens and the Littlefields, whom she had visited on vacations, now encouraged her to try her class in their city. Leonard objected; his sister was doing well enough in New Haven, he thought, and New York was dangerous territory for a young woman alone. At last Delia won Leonard's reluctant consent, and in January, 1836, she settled into a comfortable front room at Mrs. Hunter's, at 769 Broadway. The city was just recovering from the terrible holocaust of December 16, 1835, when the area of a quarter mile was laid waste, from Wall Street to Coenties Slip, including more than six hundred buildings and a twenty-million-dollar loss of property. Among the deeds of heroism, Delia heard about her old friend Charles King, who crossed the East River in an open boat, bringing back powder to blow up buildings in the fire's path; and about Eliphalet Terry, who drove down in a sleigh, over the frozen roads, to assure his New York clients that the Hartford Fire Insurance Company would pay off their share of the losses. The merchants got busy at once, clearing out the rubble, rebuilding, and selling off lots even before the ashes were cool. This courage in meeting disaster inspired Delia, who had her 53

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon own problems to solve. She had intended to advertise widely, give the course on a large scale, and show Leonard; but poor health restrained her. An attack of "tic douloureux," a painful spasm of the facial nerve, confined her to the house for three weeks while she was planning the course, and she had to be satisfied with a modest beginning. Dr. Thomas Skinner, pastor of the Presbyterian Mercer Street church, lived across the street, and sent his daughter to Delia's class, but did not help her to advertise. "Between ourselves," she reported to Leonard, "I don't think much of the Presbyterians." She found the Unitarian minister, Orville Dewey, more helpful. But her airy, pleasant room delighted her; Augur's Apollo stood in one corner, and she borrowed some pictures from Samuel Morse to keep the naked god in countenance. She enjoyed her landlady, Mrs. Hunter, a clergyman's widow; and at the dinner table she listened avidly to reports on General Scott's court-martial from Captain Hitchcock, recently appointed governor to Liberia.47 Delia began her class, now dignified by the name of "Historical Lessons," at Mrs. Hunter's on February first. From that time until the late spring they met twice a week, on Mondays and Thursdays, from eleven till one, with a fee of $20 for the course. Among her dozen pupils were Miss Skinner, Miss Howell of Canandaigua, Orville Dewey's oldest daughter, and two Miss Tappans who came in from Brooklyn; two married women, Mrs. Alderman Bruen and Mrs. Dr. Kissam, joined the young ladies. Delia was strengthening history as the unifying element of her study, with art and literature considered in relation to the culture of each period. Her independence of New Haven was still not complete; despite the resources of such libraries as Columbia College and the New York Society, she had to borrow Chaucer, Ellis' Specimens, and Schlegel's History of Literature from the Yale Library. But it was a pleasure to inform Leonard that the New York venture, which he considered so risky, was really afloat. The young ladies' response was enthusiastic, and the course yielded enough money to keep Delia over the summer.48 In the meantime Delia's family was having both good and bad fortune. In November, 1832, Alice was married to the Reverend Mr. Ε. H. Walker, and happily went to housekeeping in Dansville, New York. But in September, 1834, the whole family grieved with 54

A Career is Launched Susan over the death of her husband, Dr. Hodges. Especially Alice Parks Bacon, who had lived with Susan for several years, saw her daughter's four fatherless children and lean financial prospects as a bitter duplication of her own fate. For Delia, the loss was less severe; but it closed off another avenue of refuge, and brought home again the lesson of human mortality. In July, 1836, Delia attended the wedding of Julia Bacon to J. L. Woodruff, a farmer, speculator in real estate, and dabbler in various business enterprises. Concerned for the fragile Julia, her teaching companion for five years, Delia felt that it was a good match. Although Mr. Woodruff had left school early to devote himself to business, he seemed intelligent and refined. Delia the romantic was pleased that he had a right to an English title (that of Lord Cornbury), while Delia the democrat was gratified that he had waived the claim. Even more glamorous to the impecunious Bacons was the fact that Woodruff had already made what Canandaigua, village of Nabobs, considered an independent fortune.49 Julia's new home began to take the place of Susan's as a shelter for Mrs. Bacon and a vacation resort for Delia. Back in New York in the fall, Delia had several long talks with her brother David before he set out in November, 1836, to take the position Leonard had got for him as physician to the African colony of Liberia. Infected by Leonard's enthusiasm for this project of the American Colonization Society, David was hoping that Liberia would give him the chance for service and happiness which he found missing in America.50 His editorship of the pro-Clay organ, The Journal of Freedom, his study of medicine, and his brief period of teaching at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where he had an unhappy love affair, all contributed to his feeling of disillusion. Witty, energetic, idealistic and impatient, David had much in common with Delia. Neither could help the other financially (both turned to Leonard when they were broke) but intellectually and emotionally they were sympathetic, sharing an enthusiasm for science and literature, and always reaching farther than they could grasp. The fact that they were now the only unmarried members of the family drew them still closer together (although for David, twenty-three, and for Delia, twenty-five, there was still hope). With Mrs. Bacon wailing that her son might 55

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon as well be dead and buried as in the wilds of Africa, David needed all of Delia's encouragement as he embarked. Her own plans for the winter's course in N e w York, Delia decided, must be no less ambitious than David's. In December she printed a hundred copies of her Prospectus, with the hearty sponsorship of old and new friends. Orville Dewey and Mrs. Ogden Edwards introduced her to the Unitarian literati, and Dr. Benjamin Onderdonk, bishop of the Episcopal diocese and founder of the N e w York Book Club, cordially sponsored her plan. Her disappointment in the Skinners deepened; the matter-of-fact Mrs. Skinner threw cold water on the project, and Dr. Skinner would do no more than allow Delia to use his name as a reference. 51 Thus Delia's theological preference shifted from Presbyterians, the logical supporters of a Congregationalist in N e w York, to Episcopalians and Unitarians. Aside from Orville Dewey, her most active friend at this time was the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse. T o Delia, Morse was the reincarnation of Renaissance man, who persisted in translating his ideals into action. His latest activity was politics; in 1836, under the banner of Native America, he was a defeated candidate for Mayor of N e w York. Even as a Yale undergraduate Morse showed versatility; he was stimulated by Silliman's and Day's lectures on electricity, and he acquired a minor fame by his exquisite miniatures in ivory (the portrait of Nathaniel W . Taylor became a family treasure). After four years of study with Washington Allston, and successful exhibits at London's Royal Academy, Morse returned to Boston in 1815 to open the studio that he hoped would revive the splendor of Italy's fifteenth century. Finding aesthetic Boston unresponsive to his grand schemes, Morse moved to N e w York, where in 1826 he was founder and first President of the National Academy of Design, a pioneer in exhibiting the work of native American artists. After three more years of study in Europe, where he became a friend of Fenimore Cooper and Horatio Greenough, Morse returned to N e w York. On the homeward voyage on the Sully, in 1832, the idea of the telegraph was conceived. His professorship of painting and sculpture in the University of the City of N e w York (now N e w York University) yielded prestige and enjoyment, but not much money; Morse had

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A Career is Launched to collect his own fees, which barely covered the rent of his studio in Washington Square. Delia was fascinated by Morse's experiments with a cipher, which he considered a necessary adjunct to the telegraph, to secure secrecy in transmitting messages of state. Did Delia know that Francis Bacon had invented such a secret code, for diplomatic use? Morse asked. No, she did not — but her imagination was stimulated by this interesting link between a great seventeenthcentury figure and her neighbor in New York. In Morse's artistic and inventive genius, as well as in his warm social nature, Delia saw exactly the glamor that she wanted for a visiting lecturer in the History of Architecture. Too busy to lecture for her that season, Morse promised to do it the next year. Enthusiastic about her plan, he aroused the interest of Charles King, who promised his support, although he could not grant her the lecture room she wanted in the university. Delia also tried to get James Gates Percival, the eccentric New Haven poet and geologist, to lecture in literature, and the elder Richard Henry Dana, editor of The North American Review, to give talks on criticism. She failed to secure these lecturers, but she was gratified by Mr. Dana's friendly note, giving some hints about procedure and wishing her success.52 The second year of Delia's New York class did not satisfy her high expectations. Perhaps her plan was too ambitious: to charge $100 for the season from January to May. Money was very tight, and prices were soaring; in February, 1837, an angry mob stormed Hart's flour store and dumped the barrels out in the street. Even before the banks suspended specie payments on May 10, merchants were borrowing money wherever they could find it. Philip Hone describes the spring of '37 as "the most gloomy period which New York has ever known." 53 By the end of February Delia's class had so dwindled that she gave it up. Certainly the financial situation affected Delia's class; but the real reason why she abandoned it was that she was again absorbed in writing, and felt that she must finish a great new project that consumed her mind and imagination. Delia the Puritan, stimulated by the theatrical activity of the metropolis, was writing a play! Furthermore, she was planning to submit it to no less a personage than Edward Simpson of the Park Theatre. 57

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon This theatre was named for its location, on the south side of City Hall Park, but its local nickname was The Old Drury. By 1837 Simpson had made it the leading New York theatre, in competition with the new Franklin, the Richmond Hill, the summer performances on the outdoor stages of Niblo's and Vauxhall, and the formidable rival of J. W . Wallack's National Theatre (the old Bowery). New Yorkers, fond of the Greek column, considered the plain front of the Park ugly; but on the night of a performance, when the two- and four-wheel hansom cabs rolled up to the door under the flaring gas street lamps, they felt as if they were entering an enchanted palace. Through a long lobby they proceeded to the auditorium, built in the shape of a lyre, with a large pit and gallery, and three tiers of boxes. Between the acts they drank coffee in the elaborate salon on the second floor. The stage was thirty-eight feet wide and seventy feet deep, with a whole wing at the rear, on Theatre Alley, for a green room and dressing rooms. (In the summer of '38 the interior was redecorated in white and gold, with an act drop reproducing Harlowe's painting of Mrs. Siddons and her brothers in the trial of Queen Catherine.) Simpson knew the taste of his audience; he built his reputation on English stars, but encouraged such natives as Edwin Forrest and Charlotte Cushman. He presented a seasoned diet of Shakespeare, Sheridan, and Bulwer, alternating from comedy to tragedy to the favorite melodrama. Life did not always flow tranquilly at the Park; in May, 1836, the English singers Mr. and Mrs. Woods were hissed from the stage by a mob inspired by James Webb of The Courier and Enquirer; but even in the panic year of 1837, Simpson filled his house. One of the favorite English stars was Ellen Tree (later Mrs. Charles Kean), who made her début as Rosalind at the Park in December, 1836. As skillful in comedy as in tragedy, Miss Tree charmed audiences with her portrayal of Shakespeare's heroines: Beatrice, Rosalind, and Viola; some admirers, following the curious taste of the day, liked her best in the male rôle of Ion, foundling of Argos. She managed to infuse life even into such melodramas as Knowles' The Wrecker's Daughter and Bulwer's The Duchess of Vallière. If she had less fire than Fanny Kemble, her acting was more natural. Of medium height, she took command of the stage

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A Career is Launched by her expressive voice, flashing dark eyes, and graceful, quickmoving hands and feet. She was praised for clear diction and unusual power of interpreting the playwright's message. Among others, Philip Hone paid tribute to her mind and charm, and averred that she was "wholly uncontaminated by the theatre." 54 N e w Yorkers did not miss the chance to compliment her by a pun: we have had a Grove, a Forrest and Woods; now at last we have a Tree. Delia met Ellen Tree during her winter season at the Park in 1837. Not only did Delia win the actress' friendship, but also interested her in the play she was writing. Aware of the importance of the "star" system, Delia consciously built her play around the delicate, sensitive personality of Miss Tree. When she left in February for a Southern tour, Ellen promised to play the principal part.55 Before this great stroke could be brought off, Delia must finish the play and submit it to Mr. Simpson. In February she spent a few weeks with Mrs. Littlefield, but realized, more poignantly than ever before, that she could not write while under social obligations to her hostess. In March she persuaded Mrs. Townsend to give her a room at 21 Broadway for two months at a reduced rate during the slack season, and buckled down to finish her play by the time of Miss Tree's return in April. Another important task remained: to convince Leonard that the drama was a respectable field for a devout young lady, sister of a clergyman. On March 7, 1837, Delia brought all her eloquence to bear in explaining this to her brother: "If the play has any effect at all, it will be an elevating one. The object of it is to display a grand and awful truth not in the abstract but in a form better fitted to strike the common mind — the living breathing reality. The very illustration is true in all its details. It is but reviving the fading past, breathing into one long forgotten day the breath of its own life again and showing it with all its terror and anguish and nobleness of heart to the careless beings of these happy times." Delia drove home her point with a personal appeal to Leonard: "If I can get it introduced into so bad a place as the Theatre I should count it as great a triumph as if they should tear down the 59

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon green room and the stage and put up a pulpit and send for you to preach to them." 56 When Delia wrote this, she was in the middle of the fourth act and expected to have the play finished in three weeks. But nervous headaches kept her from steady work, and she decided that she must stay in N e w York for the summer to complete the job. She moved back to 769 Broadway, where Mrs. Hunter offered her the same inducement of cheap board that Mrs. Townsend had given in the spring. Keeping her eye on the market, Delia saw that the publishing trade was suffering from the after-effects of the panic, while the theatres were still crowded. An added inducement appeared in the prizes offered for new plays; Willis had just received $ 1,000 for a drama of Italian background, Bianca Visconti.51 If Nathaniel Willis could be so richly rewarded for exploiting the European scene, why should not Delia Bacon be paid for her play, which was rooted in American history? "But nevertheless," Delia wrote to Leonard on August 16, " I should be sorry to do anything unbecoming a lady or a Christian, even for the sake of a thousand dollars." 58 She hastened to assure Leonard that the frivolous pursuit of dramatic writing did not prevent her from studying Greek, which she found easier than Latin; she could now read the Testament easily, and was progressing with Xenophon. And she promised to resume her class the next winter; if not in N e w York, then elsewhere. With all her skill in assaying the market, and courage in venturing into a dangerous field, Delia was the victim of her own abnormal sensitivity. When a N e w York friend expressed doubt that her play would succeed on the stage, she relinquished, in one despondent moment, the work of months. Instead of submitting the precious manuscript to Miss Tree or Mr. Simpson, she put it away in a drawer and tried to forget the whole thing. A t last, in June, 1838, she sent the finished manuscript to Leonard, and went north to Keeseville, N e w York, where she spent the summer with her friends Oliver Keese and his sister. During her first weeks in the North country, Delia was completely exhausted; but as the chilly climate began to thaw, she was delighted with the situation: the Adirondacks on one side, the Green Mountains on the other, and Canada only forty miles away. 60

A Career is Launched The Keeses took her to Montreal in July, where she saw the Earl of Durham arrive in pomp from Quebec; they crossed Lake Champlain to Vermont, and learned the story of the recent rebellion from Dr. Nelson, one of the ringleaders. General Macomb, hero of Champlain, got on the boat at an obscure landing place, and they saw the future Earl of Eustace, Sir Hugh Clinton, and other English noblemen. At Burlington they visited Ethan Allen's daughter and saw Mrs. Hitchcock, mother of Delia's fellow boarder in N e w York, who was now Major Hitchcock. In these romantic surroundings, seeing people who had helped shape the events of her own time, Delia felt her imagination spring into new life. With the diversion of such trips, she was contented in the quiet North country. She thought that she could live simply in some such beautiful place for the next few years, devoting herself to study, writing, and exercise. The desire to make her mark in the world still drove her on; but there were times now when she wondered if she would live long enough.59 In September, 1838, she went to visit Julia at Canandaigua. She enjoyed caring for Julia's baby. As the child lay quiet in her arms, Delia thought this a better occupation than housework for tired nerves, calling as it did on the mind and heart as well as the muscles. However far she traveled from N e w Haven, Delia could not get away from the tie that bound her to Leonard; she depended on his help, she worried about what he would think. N o w Leonard added an extra strain to their relationship. Lucy, he wrote, would have to spend the winter in the South for her health. Would Delia come and keep house for him? Unfortunately, Leonard prefixed his request with an open reproof of Delia's hobnobbing with N e w York's socialites. It would do her good, he said, to study "unfashionable human nature" at the parsonage. Delia replied, tartly, that all summer she had been doing precisely the sort of humble work which he recommended. "Please to remember," she wrote, "that I was born in a log house and have already been favored with far better opportunities for becoming versed in the human nature that milks cows and makes butter and churns than my city brother." 60 Delia suggested that Leonard send for their mother instead. Beneath this curt refusal was the wound she suffered from Leon61

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon ard's failure to return her manuscript, which he had kept for three months. When he did return it, in December, his slashing comments cut deep. As a drama, he said, the work was essentially defective: lacking in unity, weak in character and incident; only the fine poetic sentiment redeemed it from mediocrity. For some time Delia could not bear to look at the play. Reading it under Leonard's criticism cost her a struggle, which, she told her brother, "if you do not happen to be the author of a condemned Tragedy, you can never hope to appreciate." But again, as in differing from Leonard's judgment of Tales of the Puritans, the author asserted her independence. Maybe there was not the essence of drama in it; but she was convinced that there was the essence of something. Let the poetic sentiment and description, which Leonard prized, carry the play: "All I ask of my characters is, that they shall serve as a decent string for my sentiments, that they shall not commit any egregious mistakes, nor betray any marks of unsuccessful design." She refused to add a new focus: "I cannot help fancying there is one there already if anybody will take the pains to get it." By omitting some "Oh's" and "Ah's" and commonplace expressions, by giving it a more modest label than "A Tragedy" — say, "Dialogues of a Day" or " A Fragment of Old Times," she determined to save for publication the great effort she had poured into the work. She would do it on her own, without Leonard's help.61 In July, 1839, Samuel Colman of New York at last issued The Bride of Fort Edward, as A Dialogue. Delia's Preface asserts the work's dignity. She seeks not merely to present a piece of history, but to show the incident "in its relation to the abstract truth it embodies — as exhibiting a law in the relation of the human mind to its Invisible protector — the apparent sacrifice of the individual to the grand movements of the race." 62 The plot is the same as that of "Love's Martyr," the murder of Jane McCrea, but spread on a larger canvas, portraying the issues behind the Revolution and the leading figures in the New York campaign. T w o student soldiers, longing to return to quiet study in acaÓ2

A Career is Launched demie halls, demonstrate by their death the tragic waste of intellect by war. However stilted their talk, one of them speaks eloquently in praise of man's developing dignity through history, expressing the theme which was later to dominate Delia's book on Shakespeare: "Who knows but that the book of History may show us at last on its long-marred page — Man himself — no longer the partial and deformed developments of his nature, which each successive age hath left as if in mockery of its ideal — but, man himself, the creature of thought — the high, calm, majestic being, that of old stood unshrinking beneath his Maker's gaze. Even, as first he woke amid the gardens of the East, in this far Western clime at last he shall shine again — a perfect thing." 63 The dialogue, which alternates between verse and prose, rings with Shakespearean echoes. Henry Gray's scorn of his sister's mad decision recalls such witty scoffers as Biron and Benedick: "Of all the mad pranks of your novel ladies, this caps the chief. You have outdone them, Helen; I'll give you credit for it, you have outdone them all. "Why, you'll be chronicled — there's nothing on record like it, that ever I heard of; I am well-read in romances too. We'll have a new love-ballad made and get it to tune, under the head of 'Love and Murder.' " 6 4 The encounter between this brother, Captain Henry, and Helen's lover, Everard Maitland, over her corpse, is a recreation of the meeting between Laertes and Hamlet at Ophelia's grave. The deliberations of the American generals, Arnold and Schuyler, and the British, Burgoyne and André, resemble the planning scenes of French and English leaders in Henry the Fifth. The common soldiers' discussions concerning the purpose of the war is a vivid reproduction, with a Yankee accent, of similar debates in Henry the Fifth between Williams and Bates. Disillusionment with the cause is nostalgically expressed by the fifth soldier: "What was the Stamp Act to us, or all the acts beyond the sea that were ever acted, so long as they left us our golden fields, our Sabbath days, the quiet of the summer evening door, and the merry winter hearth." The fourth soldier answers this, simply but effectively: "It was not the money, Will The wrong it was." 05 63

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon Maxwell Anderson's treatment of a similar scene in Valley Forge has more dramatic power, but no deeper insight than Delia's into the hearts of men. After Helen's death, the soldiers speak the final line of the play, which shows the impetus given by the historical Jane's martyrdom to the Revolutionary cause: "No — no. Away with pardon! T o the death! Freedom for ever!" 66 In scene, The Bride improves upon "Love's Martyr" by its realistic presentation of Fort Edward's actual surroundings — the Hudson, the mountains, the fields ripening for the harvest. Thus does the homesick Fifth Soldier remember his farm: "I would rather be letting down the bars in the old meadow just now, or hawing with my team down the brake; with my children by my side to pick the ripe blackberries for our morning meal, than standing here in these rags with a gun on my shoulder." 67 As it stands, The Bride of Fort Edward vindicates Leonard Bacon's criticism of its dramatic deficiency; it is a less successful example of drama than "Love's Martyr" is of the sentimental romance. The "Dialogue" suffers from its author's attempt to re-tap a vein already mined. Yet, with a concentration of the longdrawn-out action, and more direct confrontation, it could very well have succeeded on the nineteenth-century stage. The death scene is precisely fitted to the contemporaneous taste, at the same time that the larger theme, of liberty fed by sacrifice, is more deeply pondered than was usual in our early theatre. The play has value in giving insight into Delia's growing intellectual zeal, struggling for mastery over sentiment, and for the adroit adaptation of Shakespeare. It was appropriate that the Saturday Courier, which had given "Love's Martyr" a prize, should review The Bride (August 3, 1839). The reviewer considered this an important and significant portion of revolutionary history: "It is said to be the production of a young lady of New Haven; and as the effort of a very young writer, it is certainly creditable. There is a good moral throughout, a vein of pure, pious sentiment pervading it, which will be agreeable to all. And last, though not least, there is imbedded deeply in this little work a philosophy good and pure, which justifies the hope that the young and unassuming 64

A Career is Launched author is yet to present us with other and more solid and nobler intellectual achievements." 68 It was a strange coincidence that Edgar Allan Poe, the defeated contestant f o r the Courier prize, should mention Delia's dramatic fashioning of her prize story in The Democratic Review. A l though Poe found the "poem" as a whole "nothing worth," he picked out "some richly imaginative thoughts, skillfully expressed": And I can hear the click of that old gate, As once again, amid the chirping yard, I see the summer rooms open and dark, and H o w calm the night moves on! and yet, In the dark morrow that behind those hills Lies sleeping now, who knows what horror lurks? 69 H o w e v e r widely separated the views of Poe and Leonard Bacon, they were at one in finding the charm of The Bride in its poetic description. T h e book was published at Samuel Colman's expense. In March, 1840, Colman rendered an accounting to the author: a deficit of $82.66 on the sale of 692 out of 1500 copies. 70 Since Tales of the Puritans was anonymous, The Bride was Delia's first acknowledged book; and this sales record compares favorably with that of the first publication b y such giants of the period as Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau. Furthermore, Colman's offer to share the loss and the remainder copies with the author was generous f o r that time. But Delia, w h o had hoped to establish her fame and fortune b y the book, was deeply discouraged. In J u l y , 1840, Delia said good-by to the great metropolis whose ramparts she had failed to storm. She resolved to come back, when she had gained strength and experience, and make N e w Yorkers listen to her, as a lecturer or a writer — perhaps as both. She would miss the noise of omnibuses clattering over the cobblestones, the beautiful view of the harbor f r o m Battery Park where the riding ships gave a sense of far horizons, the lectures, the concerts, and the many cordial friends. But her task f o r the next year was to recover her health; and this she hoped to accomplish in the quiet of Julia's home in Canandaigua.

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Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon 4 In the fall of 1841 Delia reopened her class in her brother's N e w Haven home. Leonard's invitation was cordial, and Delia believed that the N e w Haven climate would be good for her. A gay social time in Hartford in September lifted her spirits. She talked with her friends Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe about a book she planned to write; the Beecher girls told her that they had already blocked out a similar plan, but that they would be glad to relinquish it in her favor. 71 As Delia plunged into work, the family watched her anxiously, for she was still far from well. In July the periodic headaches had developed a new phase: in the course of an attack, the headache would suddenly cease, the pulse grow faint, and Delia would become cold, almost unconscious. The doctor diagnosed it as heart disease, but assured her that it was not organic.72 Mrs. Bacon was distressed that medicine seemed not to help at all; she feared that Delia's fine constitution was broken down, and that this beloved daughter would never be well. Leonard had lost his infant son, James Hillhouse, in October, 1840, and Julia's baby boy died in May, 1841 ; the Bacons seemed to be living in death's shadow. But Delia improved with activity (the headaches were doubtless psychosomatic as well as physical), and her class was an immediate and growing success. She was considered the finest reader in N e w Haven, and the students were excited to know that they would survey with Miss Bacon the whole history of the world, from the Creation right down to the present time. Henrietta Blake, daughter of the powerful merchant Eli Whitney Blake, chose Delia's class in preference to Dr. Andrews', under her mother's urging: "Mother says if anyone knows what's good for them they will go to Miss Bacon." When Sarah Adams went home, improved by this instruction, Hattie commented smugly: " I think one can hardly help it at Miss Bacon's." 7a B y the summer of 1842 Delia's class was doing well enough to warrant a move away from Leonard's roof to independent lodgings at Miss Lines' boarding house. Here in the fall she met a fellow boarder, John Lord, a rugged N e w Hampshire man, thirty-two years old, graduate of Dartmouth and Andover Theological Semi66

A Career is Launched nary. Formerly a lecturer for the American Peace Society, and a minister whose orthodoxy was questioned both by Congregationalists and Presbyterians, Lord was now embarked on the precarious career of independent lecturing. His first talks to N e w Haven audiences, abysmal failures, took the wind out of his sails. But both Leonard and Delia Bacon saw possibilities in this speaker; he was beginning to develop his plan (later published in The Beacon Lights of History) of projecting a historical period through a significant figure who molded and reflected his time. With the Bacons to help him arrange his material and show him how to address an audience (and to urge their friends to attend) Lord quickly caught on. He was to achieve a widespread popular reputation in America and England; but he never forgot that the Yale community really launched him on the sea of success.74 T o John Lord, N e w Haven was a paradise, and the big cold rooms at Miss Lines' the happiest lodging he had ever known. 75 A t first Delia thought John crude and sadly in want of polish; while John considered Miss Bacon proud and over-satirical. But, as they grew better acquainted, they talked over their future plans for writing and lecturing, each heartening the other. What Lord first criticized as egotism he now saw as the normal pride of a truly high intelligence; and the caustic wit, he realized, usually erupted when its owner was suffering from a sick headache. He was solicitous of Delia's health, and dazzled by her achievement. The Great Women of history who attracted Lord were those who combined femininity with brains — Mme. Récamiér, Héloise, and Hannah More — and in Delia Bacon he saw the flesh and blood realization of his ideal. Completely overcome by Delia's brilliance and charm, Lord proposed. Not wise enough in the ways of the world to see the proposal coming, Delia could only meet it head on. She really felt the traditional Victorian surprise at this proposal of marriage. Even though her early criticism had softened to friendly respect, she did not love John Lord, and her only recourse was a blunt refusal.76 Yet in the winter of 1843 he gave his historical lectures, as promised, to Miss Bacon's class as well as to the Yale boys; 7 7 and Delia's students, aware of his romantic attachment,78 followed the lectures with rapt interest. For some time Lord persisted in his attentions; he wrote Delia several letters from England, 67

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon pouring out his impressions of the country, thanking her for her kindness, happily recalling the "proud hours" when she honored him with her friendship, and begging her to write to him.79 Even after Lord's marriage in 1846, to an Englishwoman, Mary Porter, the wound still festered; and Delia was to suffer from the retaliation of this suitor's hurt pride.80 Early in December, 1842, Delia and her mother were on their way to N e w Haven from Canandaigua when the tragic news reached them in Albany of the death of Julia's two children: Frank, a little over four years, Mary, five years and five months. Alice Bacon hastened back to Canandaigua; but Delia, much as she loved Julia and the children, was bound by the demands of her teaching to go on to N e w Haven. The week after the funeral Delia snatched a few days for a hurried visit to Canandaigua to comfort Julia, so dearly loved and so harshly treated by Providence. B y 1844 Delia was sufficiently prosperous to be able to move her quarters from Miss Lines' to the newly built Tontine Hotel, on Church Street opposite the Green. Her spacious bedroom and sitting room in the elegant, fashionable Tontine were indeed a step up — but she was still under the protection (and the restriction) of her brother Leonard. The parsonage had been picked up and moved, piece by piece, a block and a half down Church Street, and the Tontine was erected on the site where Leonard's house formerly stood. Even at the Tontine, Delia had the sense of her brother striding back and forth in his downstairs study, and the children calling softly from their bedrooms just beyond her door. Delia's method of teaching Shakespeare engraved itself on the memory of one of her pupils, Sarah Edwards Henshaw (later Mrs. Ebenezer Hunt). Sarah recalled one season in which Miss Bacon concentrated on Hamlet as the key to Shakespeare and the Elizabethan era. Even though Sarah Henshaw found it hard to convey the "peculiar flavor," the "aroma" of Delia's teaching, she could still recall it, years later. Concentrating on a small portion of the text, reading and rereading, commenting on knotty passages, Delia trained her students to listen (only the teacher held a book). "Her style of reading," Sarah says, "was of a kind never to be forgotten. It was not in the least theatrical, or oratorical, or recitation-like, and yet no reader . . . ever made a more abiding impres68

A Career is Launched sion on the imagination and the memory. H e r voice was sweet, melodious and flexible, of a low pitch, and of a peculiar lingering quality and penetrating power — it was of itself an elucidation of the text." 8 1 From her reading, Ophelia's pathos and Hamlet's tragic destiny came through to the students. W h e n she read Francisco's speech, " 'Tis bitter cold,/ A n d I am sick at heart," 82 Sarah felt that her tone made these words "the keynote of a bitter tragedy." Although Miss Bacon placed due value on critical notes, she was less interested in etymology than in the mores of the time, the laws of dramatic composition, and the contrast between the classic and the modern drama. Doubtless under the influence of Coleridge, she considered each play as an organic whole, no word of which could be spared. "She seemed to saturate herself with the play," Sarah said, "to call into imaginative consciousness the loves, hopes, fears, ambition, disappointment, and despair of the characters, and under this intense realization to divine . . . the meaning of the play — 'its unity,' as she said — its motif. For that 'unity,' that motif, she made unremitting and earnest search. She found it b y a process of judgment, of searching and comparing, of weighing and balancing, of induction and intuition, of reasoning and insight." Delia spoke to her students of having seen Shakespeare's Plays on the stage, but, like Charles Lamb, she found these always a disappointment. "It is impossible to put Shakespeare on the stage in a w a y to satisfy one's expectations," she would say. "Nothing can equal the imagination." 83 During the winter of 1844 Delia extended her class to married ladies. T h e group reached the impressive number of one hundred, and included such social leaders as Mrs. Skinner, Mrs. Church, and Mrs. Dana. 84 Some of the meetings were held in the Brothers' Society Room at Yale, and the grateful ladies presented statues of Diana and Apollo as appropriately chaste decorations for a meeting-place of college boys. 85 Although Delia's N e w Haven teaching was informally conducted, and interrupted from time to time because of her health, it was a real contribution to the cultural life of the city. She was a lively, stimulating, imaginative teacher. H e r lecturing to mature women was a forerunner of today's women's clubs, and 69

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon her uniting of art and literature under the head of history anticipates modern teaching in the Humanities. In July, 1844, Delia visited Leonard and Lucy in Saratoga, where Lucy was trying the Spa waters, in one final desperate attempt to cure the tuberculosis that was gradually wasting her strength. During the last months of Lucy's illness, Delia helped to nurse her sister-in-law, and gave the younger Bacon children whatever time she could spare from her teaching duties. In October Mrs. Means, Lucy's sister, reported from Groton a carriage accident in which she and the four younger children were shaken up, and Delia wrote regretfully about the damage to little Frank's teeth — but hoped that this providential escape would remind the lad of the other world from which we are so slightly separated.86 This other world became shatteringly real to Leonard and his family when at the end of November, 1844, the beloved wife and mother L u c y died. On this grievous occasion Delia stood close to Leonard and his children. T o o fond of her older brother ever to approve entirely of his wife, Delia had come over the years to appreciate her sister-in-law's qualities. And Lucy was grateful for Delia's help — even though on her deathbed Lucy made her sister Mrs. Means promise to take little Lucy into her Groton home, fearing that in N e w Haven the child would grow up to be as proud as the Aunt Delia she adored.87 N o r was there any question of Delia's taking over the care of Leonard's household. This task fell on the shoulders of seventeenyear-old Rebecca, who became her father's housekeeper and mother to six younger brothers. Only occasionally, when Rebecca went off for a much needed vacation, did Delia assume the responsibility of managing the parsonage. Delia now had an assured place in the social and cultural life of N e w Haven. She had many friends, she was widely admired, and, by earning her own living, she enjoyed an independence not granted to many women in her time. Perhaps this should have been enough. But her thirst for fame was still unslaked; she longed to write a great book that would startle the world, make Leonard proud, and establish her name forever. And Delia Bacon was a woman, with a woman's dreams of romance and happiness still unsatisfied. 70

CHAPTER

THREE

The Trial "Adah and Zillah, Hear my voice; Wives of Lamech, Listen to my words; For a man have I slain For wounding me; Yea, a young man For smiting me." (Genesis 4, 23) " H e shall crush thy head and thou shalt wound his heel." (Genesis 3, 15) Cited in Alexander MacWhorter, Yahveh Christ, or the Memorial Name.

ι D e l i a was thirty-four years old when at last she fell in love. In the spring of 1845, at the close of her winter class, she shut herself up in her rooms at the Tontine and threw all her energy into the study of Shakespeare. As she dug into the history of the English Renaissance, she began to see the Flays in a new perspective, which she believed might revolutionize Shakespearian criticism. Mrs. Professor Fitch, her fellow boarder, protested that this unnatural seclusion would never do. Delia must get out and walk on the Green, where the air was fresh and the elm trees leafing out; and she must come down to the dining room for meals. Delia gave in. Having gone down to dinner, she agreed that

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Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon it was pleasant to chat with the other boarders. At the far end of the table she noticed a dark-haired, black-eyed young man watching her attentively, straining to catch her words. However used to brushing off this kind of admiration, she felt a strange compulsion in the young man's gaze. When her friend Mrs. Forbes called, with the exciting news that the young man, Alexander MacWhorter, a graduate of Yale's theological department, wanted to meet her, Delia was happy. Her pleasure turned to dismay at Mrs. Forbes' proposal that her nephew Robert be allowed to introduce this classmate of his. She could hardly accept an introduction from the reprobate Robert Forbes, whose disgraceful reputation had forced her to exclude him from the soirées she held for her girls; neither could she offend Mrs. Forbes by explaining her reasons. "I will write to Mr. MacWhorter myself," she told her friend. The next morning Delia dispatched a brief note: "Miss Bacon will be happy to see Mr. MacWhorter at her rooms at the Tontine Hotel, this evening or at any time that may be convenient to him." 1 When, that evening, Alexander MacWhorter presented himself at the door of Delia's sitting room, she quickly put the young man at his ease. Accustomed to flattering attention, she found him the most eager listener she had ever had. Soon he was winning her sympathy by the story of his parents' early death. Could Miss Bacon appreciate how much an orphan with no sisters for confidantes longed for the advice of an understanding woman friend? Such a relationship was all he needed to make New Haven the most delightful city in America for him. How much Yale had taught him! Dr. Taylor's lectures, he said, had made him understand the place of man's evil heart in God's wonderful scheme of Providence.2 The young man ran on to talk of Dr. Taylor's kindness to him — the highest recommendation he could offer, to Delia who supported the "new" theology as ardently as did her brother, and revered Nathaniel W . Taylor as a saint of the church. But, Alexander admitted, he had disregarded Dr. Taylor's advice that he seek a pastorate at once. He was staying on in New Haven as a graduate licentiate, in order to carry on the linguistic research begun with Professor Josiah 72

The Trial Gibbs, whose exacting course in Greek and Hebrew inspired him even more than Taylor's theological lectures. This also won Delia's sympathy; she had no hope of ever studying Hebrew, and she knew just enough Greek to respect this young man's mastery of it. Furthermore, all N e w Haven honored Gibbs not only as a scholar, but as a humanitarian who performed the almost insuperable task of interpreting for the pathetic Amistad captives in 1839. With the favor of Taylor and Gibbs, Delia was more than ready to accept Alexander as a friend. Shyly, he told her that he was able to do graduate study because, unlike most theological students, he had a modest fortune.3 He hastened to reassure her that his family was one of culture as well as substance. Would Miss Bacon forgive him for not being a native N e w Englander, and for hailing from a town as far south as Newark, N e w Jersey? Delia laughed, and told him of her many happy visits with the Bruens in Amboy. His father, he said, had been a successful lawyer. Modestly, Alexander confided to his new friend that before his father died,4 he expressed the hope that his son's career would be as remarkable as his grandfather's. That Alexander MacWhorter (great-grandfather of the Yale student) received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from Yale in 1776, while he was serving with Washington's army at Trenton. Long-time pastor in Newark and leader of the Presbyterian Church in America, Dr. MacWhorter helped to spread missions throughout this country and abroad. Alexander promised to show Delia the Copley portraits of this distinguished ancestor and his lovely wife. 5 When he left, he begged Delia to let him see her again. That night Delia dreamed of Corinne, the heroine of her school days. Rescued from drowning, Corinne lay on the beach gasping for life until Oswald's kisses revived her. But Oswald had the penetrating dark eyes of Alexander MacWhorter! As spring passed into summer, Alexander's visits became habitual. Delia was used to pouring out her ideas of history and literature, with such passion that her listeners responded with tense interest, but her own heart was walled in by pride, until Alexander MacWhorter appeared. With his intellect, his magnetism, and sometimes with his mockery, he gradually penetrated her reserve. He did not subdue her pride, but he made inroads into it. 73

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon For two months Delia happily accepted this new friendship, refusing to call it by any other name. She found it delightful to have an escort always ready to take her to church, to a lecture, or for an afternoon stroll. The streets of N e w Haven took on a fresh charm, as she walked with Alexander under the elms. They climbed the path that wound around the red sandstone of West Rock, and, as they rested at the summit, looking down at their beloved city, Delia regaled her admirer with the story of the Regicides. T o no one but herself would she admit that Alexander's hand, touching her arm, made her spine tingle, that her heart jumped at the sound of his voice, and that she cherished the memory of every outing with him. W h e n they read poetry together: her favorites, Milton, Wordsworth, and Shelley, and the recent volumes that he brought as gifts, exciting new ideas came to her. T o Alexander, who said that her reading made him appreciate for the first time the roll and sweep of English verse, Delia admitted that the familiar lines had a new poignance as she shared them with him. So deep was her growing trust that she confided to him the bold theory of Shakepeare's Plays, which she had discussed with no one else — not even Leonard. Perhaps this son of a Stratford butcher had not written the Plays at all. Alexander was intrigued. Then who did write them? Delia was investigating several possibilities, among them Sir Walter Raleigh, the brilliant historian and patron of poets, and Francis Bacon, the greatest mind of the seventeenth century. She was now seeking historical proof of this daring guess, which had come to her in a flash of inspiration. Alexander was the more ready to listen, perhaps because he too was tracking down a new approach to Biblical criticism. He hoped to prove that "Yahveh," the Hebrew name for God, appeared later in Old Testament history than the name "Elohim," and that the future tense implied in "Yahveh" foreshadowed the coming of Christ, thus making one continuous Revelation from the Old to the N e w Testament. 6 The sense that they were both explorers, that each might shake the scholarly world, bound the pair together, apart from the rest of mundane society. They were determined to be objective, not to distort the evidence to prove their case. Together they pondered the meaning of language: Alexander, from the point of view of Greek and Hebrew roots, and Delia, from an understanding of 74

The Trial Bacon's Idol of the Marketplace, with its warning against the misuse of words. Although they admitted that words must express emotion as well as thought, they agreed that a cloud of fancy could sometimes obscure the facts, and they were at one in defining the scholar's whole mission as the distinction of the false from the true.7 Soon Delia was forced to subject her growing intimacy with Alexander to this disinterested analysis. She heard that the world was gossiping: Mr. MacWhorter was ten years younger than Miss Bacon, it was said, and obviously Miss Bacon had her eye on the MacWhorter fortune. Smarting, Delia told herself that it was Alexander's mind and personality which attracted her. But with rigorous honesty she faced up to the small grain of truth in the gossip. Puritan though she was, her taste for the pleasant graces, acquired as a child when she lived with the Williamses, was strengthened by her mature friendships with the Bruens, the Edwardses, the Littlefields, and the Keeses. Besides, the romantic literary tradition of the day fostered the notion that a great woman deserved a man of substance as well as charm: De Staël's Oswald and Delia's own hero, Everard Maitland, were rich men. However hurt by the town talk, Delia was not ready to give Alexander up. She temporized by telling him that his calls were becoming too frequent; he countered by urging his loneliness, a plea which her own struggle in a hostile universe rendered irresistible; it was easy for her to relent. In August, 1845, when her mother visited N e w Haven, Delia poured out the whole story and begged for advice. Was he interested? Alice Parks Bacon demanded. Yes, he seemed to be, deeply interested — and, Delia admitted, the color bright in her cheeks, she was interested in Mr. MacWhorter, despite the difference in their ages. But she knew it was high time for him to declare his intentions; and this he had not done. "Break with the young man at once," was Alice Bacon's stern advice.8 Delia tried to follow her mother's instructions. Leaving for a visit at Julia's in Geneva, she wrote to Alexander, who was at Saratoga, forbidding him to follow her. His reply was less than satisfactory. " I have loved you purely, fervently," he wrote, and 75

Prodigai Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon promised to love her in life, in death, and beyond the grave — yet he spoke of this love as that of a brother. Again Delia wrote to end the affair. But as soon as she was back in N e w Haven, Alexander called again, denied receiving Delia's letter, and begged to go on as they had before. A t this point Delia became blunt with the young man: "You cannot be my brother." " M y dear Miss Bacon," Alexander asked, "is there not another relation possible?" Delia did not answer, but in his presence she could not remain aloof, and they were soon back on their former footing. 9 However absorbed in love, she could not afford to neglect her own prospects. In October, 1845, Delia screwed up her courage and made another foray into the N e w York publishing mart. The firm she chose was Wiley and Putnam, a five-year-old partnership of two young, ambitious men, John Wiley and George P. Putnam, who were giving the Harpers some competition (they had already contracted for Hawthorne's Mosses and Margaret Fuller's Papers on Literature and Art, which were to appear the next season). George Putnam, a bright, self-educated Maine fellow, cousin of the Salem Peabodys, was in England, opening up the market for American writing, working for an international copyright law, and getting permission to publish Carlyle's Works. His own American Facts, written to explain his country to English readers, was just off the press. John Wiley, who took care of the N e w York office, listened with interest to Delia's plan for a new approach to Shakespeare. He would make no promises, but, he said, the book sounded like a good prospect for the firm's new Library of American Authors. 10 Delia returned to N e w Haven in exultation, and straightway sought out Leonard. Might she stay in his home that winter, free of class duties, to write her manuscript? "Get on with it," Leonard replied, shortly. 11 That fall David was also taking temporary refuge in the parsonage. Disgusted with Liberia after his three-and-a-half-year stay, David returned to N e w York, where in 1843 he brought out at his own risk three pamphlets, called Wanderings on the Seas and Shores of Africa. Here the experimental African community, in which 76

The Trial Leonard had so ardently believed as the gradual, humane way to abolish slavery, and for which he had tirelessly written and spoken ever since its founding, was exposed as a horror of fraud, poverty, and miscegenation. Forced by David's flamboyantly displayed evidence to admit that the cherished project was a sham and a failure, Leonard was nevertheless broken-hearted over his brother's ruthless, muckraking attack, which did not even spare the agent, Jehudi Ashmun, who was idolized by his N e w Haven friends and whose funeral oration Leonard had preached in 1828. But David's disillusionment with the Colonization Society did not extend to its most illustrious sponsor, Henry Clay. David plunged into active support of Clay as the Whig candidate for President in 1844, gaining favor with the dying party by his explosive address, "Progressive Democracy." This speech sought to persuade young laborers and white-collar workers in N e w York City and upstate that the Whig party was the truly democratic faction, Jackson and his rabble actually the party of special privilege, and Clay a saint in Whig's clothing. With Clay defeated, David turned his attention to saving the Whig remnant in the city. Delia was much impressed by the speech her brother was working on that fall, entitled The Mystery of Iniquity: A Passage of the Secret History of American Politics, illustrated by a view of Metropolitan Society. Hardly an item of the N e w York City political scene escaped David's hawking eye: the whole election machinery, including gambling on the outcome, buying votes, fraud in computing returns; religious prejudice; and the enormous graft of Tammany from the construction of the Croton Reservoir. Delia was aghast at her brother's picture of corruption in the city that she thought of as the center of American culture, but she urged David to continue his crusade. His effort to clean up the metropolis seemed to her almost as noble as her own project of setting the world right as to the authorship of the greatest plays in English literature. Both David and Delia anxiously watched the mails from Tallmadge, Ohio, where Leonard was trying to collect some money from old claims on his father's estate. H o w wonderful if he should bring back enough money to subsidize their enterprises! But when Leonard returned to N e w Haven, he had the sad news that he could 77

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon squeeze out of the estate only a modest competency for their mother. Actually he brought back something else from his journey: a heart loosed from mourning and stirred by love for a beautiful woman. On the eastward trip he served as escort to the frail, ethereal Catherine Terry, daughter of Nathaniel Terry, Hartford banker and congressman. Up to now, despite hints from his parishioners that he should marry again, Leonard had found his heart still with his first wife. Once more deeply moved, he could not decide whether his new feeling was a blessing or a curse. Common sense told him that he could not expect the delicate Catherine to take charge of his big family, and chivalry warned him that her money was only another obstacle. He said nothing to his family about the conflicting emotions that were tearing him apart. Delia wondered at his short temper. She knew that Leonard disapproved of Alexander, but she was chagrined to have him show it so openly as he did one evening. Coming home from a late meeting and finding Delia and her suitor alone in the parlor, he pointedly banged the doors and shutters as he closed up the house for the night. Alexander left hastily, and Delia wrote him a note the next day forbidding him to visit her. He replied with such abject apology that she relented, risking Leonard's displeasure rather than lose the only oases in a long, difficult winter of lonely study. She worked hour after hour in her room, in spite of severe neuralgic headaches, not made more bearable by young Leonard's and Theodore's activities. They played ball beneath her windows, and Leonard was absorbed in arranging hymn tunes on the piano. He especially liked his father's Pilgrim Hymn, and Delia thought she would scream if she heard "Oh God beneath thy guiding hand" one more time. Only when Alexander arrived of an evening to take her off to a lecture, or when the family left the couple alone in the parlor, did Delia enjoy a sense of happy relaxation. Even though this year of study was her own choice, Delia missed the stimulus of teaching, and felt grateful to Benjamin Siili— man, who tried to satisfy the thirst for culture which Delia had stimulated among the local ladies, by inviting some young girls and matrons to attend his Chemistry lectures. Rebecca Bacon, who attended with Hattie Blake, Livy Day, and Lizzie Sherman, was more interested in the boys' behavior than in Silliman's demonstra78

The Trial tions, and observed that when the young men felt prankish, the experiments easily evaporated into laughing gas. 12 Nevertheless, in this modest way, Professor Silliman opened the first crack in Yale's defenses against coeducation. Delia was even more gratified by her brother's share in helping Yale to emerge from a college to a university. As a member of the Corporation at the August 1846 Commencement meetings, Leonard approved the addition of a Law School and a Graduate department of Science; at the same time, he magnanimously gave up his place on the Corporation (with some regret for the lost power) to make room for his cousin Jeremiah Day, the retiring President. 13 In September, 1846, Delia decided that she must get away from N e w Haven. Her headaches were becoming intensely painful — whether from too serious studying, as Dr. Ives said, or from Leonard's critical attitude — or from worry about Alexander, who, attentive as ever, had not yet declared himself. Friends in Hartford and N e w Haven were talking of the amazing results that Dr. Wesselhoeft had achieved with patients at the Brattleboro Water Cure. That the doctor was forced by political troubles to emigrate from Germany to America made him a hero, in Delia's eyes. Surely here was the man to restore her health. Counting her money carefully, Delia estimated that she had enough for a few weeks at the Cure; and perhaps, she could complete the Shakespeare manuscript in her leisure hours. A t least the peaceful country surroundings would help her decide what to do about Alexander, who was disturbing her days and troubling her dreams at night. A t Brattleboro she was surprised to be met by her old friends Catherine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had been there since early summer. Veterans of the Cure, they welcomed Delia warmly, and hastened to initiate the neophyte. Harriet shivered dramatically as she described Dr. Wesselhoeft's packings to Delia, but insisted that the Spartan treatment was effective, if she could stand the first week. 14 The doctor's ten-hour-a-day régime kept his patients busy, but part of the treatment was walks, with rest periods on shady seats under the trees, giving ample time for confidences. Delia was surprised to sense her old literary rivalry with Harriet coming to the surface after twenty years; if Delia's reputation was greater than Harriet's, Mrs. Stowe, squeezing time from a busy 79

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon married life to write magazine stories, was making more money. But with Catherine, who listened admiringly to Delia's plans for classes in Boston and for taking young ladies abroad, there was no rivalry. If Catherine was a little envious of Delia's success in teaching, she was rapturous on hearing of Wiley and Putnam's tentative offer to publish her book. "Oh, you are like Corinne!" she exclaimed.15 Delia blushed with pleasure; and, of course, recognized the implied warning: that love and marriage could only get in the way of Delia's career, which promised real distinction. A yet more subtle hint lurked under the surface: surely no daughter of N e w England would involve herself in such an irregular liaison as that which entangled Oswald and Corinne. After two weeks at the Cure, Delia felt much better, and in mid-September she went back to N e w Haven to attend a wedding. Alexander was not among the guests, and Delia tried to tell herself that she was glad. The festivities over, while waiting on the parsonage steps for Leonard to fetch a carriage, Delia made an attractive figure in the warm sunlight of the September afternoon. Her brown hair was softly coiled under a new bonnet, her blue-gray eyes thoughtful, and one small hand rested on the porch rail. As a carriage drew up, she started with surprise — it was not her brother, but Alexander who jumped out and hurried up the steps, his face alight with pleasure. "Miss Bacon! I did not know you were in town! May I take you somewhere?" " M y brother has gone for a carriage," Delia explained in embarrassment. " I am returning to Brattleboro." "What luck! I am on my way to Springfield, where I am to preach for Mr. Porter tomorrow. Do ride with me to the cars, and we can chat all the way to Springfield." Leaving her no time to protest, Alexander picked up her boxes and settled her in the carriage. A t the livery stable, Leonard was annoyed when Delia explained her change in plans, and turned his back without saying good-bye. 16 But her brother's disapproval was quickly forgotten in this chance for an uninterrupted talk with Alexander. He was as charming as ever, and the ride in the train 80

The Trial passed swiftly. Delighted no doubt with her account of the Brattleboro countryside, Alexander said that he would like to try the Cure himself. At Springfield they found that there would be a wait for the up-country train. "Dear Miss Bacon," urged the ambiguous Alexander, "do let me wait and accompany you to Brattleboro. It is so late for you to make the journey alone." "But what will the Porters think?" Delia protested. "They are expecting you." "I can send them a message," Alexander reassured her, "and besides, I can come back on the very next train." This was the moment perhaps for Delia to be firm, and bid her admirer farewell. But the hour was late, she was tired, and the prospect of a few more hours in Alexander's company was too pleasant to forego. Before she could argue further, the Brattleboro cars wheezed into the station, and they were both aboard. Leaving Delia at Mrs. Hollister's, Alexander insisted that she had not prepared him for the charm of this quiet village surrounded by water and mountains. Surely she would not forbid him to return. (He missed his preaching engagement in Springfield; the Reverend Mr. Noah Porter readily forgave him, but his wife, Mary Taylor Porter, raised her eyebrows at her former teacher's impropriety in causing this breach of professional etiquette.) When in a few days Alexander joined Delia at Mrs. Hollister's boarding house, the Beecher girls were shocked. Delia had planned to move in with the sisters, but there was no further mention of this scheme.17 If for Catherine the name of Alexander recalled her beloved Alexander Fisher, there was nothing in Mr. MacWhorter's behavior to reinforce this memory. Delia sensed Catherine's anxiety one day when she and Alexander were seated under a tree, so absorbed in conversation that they did not notice Miss Beecher's tall, lumbering figure until she was upon them. Catherine made a feeble joke about interrupting a lovers' tryst, to which neither of them replied. And Harriet Beecher Stowe's bright black eyes were busy ferreting out the romance, noticing how constant and devoted a companion Alexander was; she called him "Delia's shadow." One 81

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon evening at the Hollisters' Harriet chatted gaily about the trials of Calvin Stowe, left to watch over their brood in Cincinnati while Harriet luxuriated at the Water Cure. When Catherine complimented Mr. MacWhorter on his sermon in Mr. Clapp's pulpit the Sunday before, Harriet, with a sidelong glance at Delia, repeated a remark which she had overheard at the dinner table in her boarding house. A lady had said that the husband of one of the patients preached that day.18 Was it possible, Delia wondered, that Harriet was jealous? Apparently she was happy in her marriage to Calvin Stowe, but one need only to have seen the short, stumpy, bald widower to know that he came as far short of the ideal Oswald as Alexander's graceful figure resembled him. Had Delia known Calvin better, she might have been even more suspicious. There were Calvin's seasons of weak despair, which aroused only scorn in a Beecher heart. And there was Harriet's letter, written barely a month before her marriage, to her friend Elizabeth Lyman, sighing: "I feel that I am in for it, and must go through if I die for it." 19 But at first Delia did not worry about her friends' watchfulness. The Water Cure and Alexander's companionship filled her days to the brim. After a gradual initiation, by the beginning of October she was running the full course of the hydropathic treatment. A t five o'clock in the morning, while still in bed, she was packed in wet sheets. Next came the morning wave-bath by the woolen mill on Whetstone Brook, with its frigid shock that chilled you to the marrow. On frosty mornings her faith wavered, but after the six o'clock walk, she was ready to join Alexander for the stark breakfast of mush, brown bread and milk that Dr. Wesselhoeft insisted on. The prescribed morning and afternoon walks were taken with Alexander, who added the charm of a quick, glancing wit, unfailing courtesy, and apparently entire devotion to the beautiful autumn countryside. There was the short stroll to Prospect Hill burying ground at the south, from which you could look down on the little cluster of houses and mills along Whetstone Brook, and Main Street rising up the hill, its meetinghouse spires slim and straight. Or you could take the Broad-Brook Walk, sometimes called the Seven-Mile Circle, starting from the Fort Dummer monument and the torrential Chase Cascade, climbing up the narrow path beside noisy Broad 82

The Trial Brook to Guilford through a steep pass, dotted with pines, which patients who had been abroad compared to the Alps. After midday dinner, the only substantial meal of the regime, Delia would go off to her sitz-bath, warm and luxurious as contrasted with the cold morning plunge. Sometimes guests came for tea; sometimes she was invited out, with Alexander. But often there were long hours when the family tactfully left the couple alone in the parlor to read aloud or to write, sharing their Biblical and Shakespeare problems. In this free atmosphere, Delia savored to the full the chance to interchange ideas with Alexander. She had enjoyed intellectual friendship with a good many men: some older than herself; others, like Samuel Morse and John Lord, her contemporaries; but Alexander was the first to stir her heart as well as her mind. Her last daily chore was a cold footbath; many an evening she fell asleep sitting in her chair, wakened at last by gradually chilling toes, to throw herself into bed for a glorious hydropathic sleep. She began to gain weight, she felt entirely healthy, and happier than she had ever been in her life Alexander laughed to see his "frail" sweetheart spring up over rocks and dash down precipices. "You will force me to take the Cure too," he told her. "Here I am panting for breath, and you seem as fresh as when we started." Delia would never forget the long walk they took one late afternoon in October, with the sun bright, the air very still and the few clouds almost motionless in the sky. They strolled up Main Street to the Common and paused for a view of Chesterfield Mountain, on the New Hampshire side of the river, with its forest of blazing maples against the light green of beeches and the blackgreen pines, and gray stretches of bare rock sloping steeply toward the Connecticut. Walking on to the Retreat grounds, they paused to look at the red brick of the building's façade, the infant maples dotting the lawns, gardeners digging potatoes in the fields, and a few patients sitting about on benches. In the glow of her own happiness, Delia suddenly felt the contrasting pathos in the situation of these mental patients. How sad it was, she told Alexander, that they must be separated from their families. What stresses of life, she wondered, made their minds give way? In no mood for such melancholy reflections, Alexander told her that the Retreat was 83

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon pleasant and well organized, advised her not to bother her prettyhead with these unfortunates, and urged her on past the grounds. They sat down to rest in an open space above West River, where the panorama of water, sky and mountains was spread before them. The cliff where they sat rose a sheer hundred feet from the wide river, black except where a slight breeze blew ruffled circles. Little islands dotted the surface, a single fisherman dropped his line near the opposite shore, occasionally a carriage rattled over the bridge to their right where the West joined the Connecticut, and far off, thin streams of light blue smoke puffed upward against the deep blue of the surrounding mountains. Suddenly Alexander turned and took her in his arms. "Delia, Delia, surely you must know that I want you to be my wife." She could not believe that she had waited so long and anxiously for this moment; it seemed so natural when it came. Her body trembled in response to his touch. She felt a sharp stab of pain, then an ecstatic sense of release. One leaf from a maple tree fell on her hair, and Alexander brushed it away as he caressed her. Gradually the actual world came back into focus. They sat for a long time on the river bank, discussing future plans, and walked back through the dusk as if they were floating through space. The Hollisters noticed at tea time how happy they both looked.20 From that moment Delia became entirely Alexander's. Earlier, when she wrote "Love's Martyr" and The Bride of Fort Edward, her reticent imagination dared to visualize sexual experience only in the moment of death. Now, with her defenses lowered, she felt the ecstacy of actual love. The privacy of their boarding house gave opportunity for further intimacies. But they agreed that it was best to wait until Alexander had secured a pastorate, before they would marry. With her love, he assured her, he was willing to venture anything; he would no longer cling to the sheltered world of New Haven. And of course she must continue her literary work, of which he was so proud. In mid-October, Delia conferred with Dr. Wesselhoeft. Did he think she would be ready to carry on her course of lessons in Hartford, scheduled to start on November first? The doctor was evasive; she was indeed better, but not yet at that critical notch in 84

The Trial the upward climb to health that would make it safe for her to leave. Delia reflected that the approaching crisis concerned not only her health, but a more important matter — her relations with Alexander. For a favorable outcome to both, she decided that she must stay on. On Sunday, October 21, Delia wrote to Leonard, telling him how much she wanted to be in N e w Haven that day to hear his inaugural sermon for President Theodore Dwight Woolsey. She highly approved of her brother's subject, the importance of scientific knowledge in Christian revelation, designed to answer the attacks made by Dr. Taylor and the theological faculty on Woolsey's lack of ministerial experience. She tried to reassure Leonard about her friendship with Alexander: "As he is very fond of walking and has nothing to do just now but to accompany me, I am very happy to avail myself of his brotherly assistance in my hydropathic scrambles." But she wrote the letter with a gold pen given her by her fiancé, and hinted at an approaching crisis in her personal life: " I am interested and anxious too with regard to another affair, destined to come off about this time." 2 1 Early in November Dr. Wesselhoeft promoted Delia to "the big douche" — a shower bath with water pumped out under tremendous pressure, which made the patient feel that a steady torrent of rocks was pounding down on the body. The first time Delia tried it, she feared that every bone would be broken. But, the pounding over, she felt exhilarated to a high pitch of excitement, and sought out Alexander. "Come," she urged. " I feel as though I could spin like a top up hill and down — it's as if I were made of feathers. Let us walk up Chesterfield Mountain." "Do you really want to?" asked the poor man, who had had no such exhilaration. " Y o u were afraid of the rattlesnakes the last time — and you know that everyone has been talking of seeing a wolf up there." " I know," Delia replied, undaunted. " A stage driver saw it, and a clergyman too. But I can't think of anything else grand enough to do. I feel so strong this morning that I could take the wolf by the throat, myself." 85

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon Alexander gave in. Instead of taking the gradual marked path, they scrambled straight up, catching hold of bushes and leaping from ledge to ledge, Alexander gallantly in the lead, offering his hand to pull Delia up. They paused halfway to look down on the Connecticut winding through the valley, the flatboats laden with lumber moving slowly downstream, the railroad tracks stretched alongside, and the covered bridges leading from the mainland to the small island in the middle of Little River. They were nearly to the summit when they heard a shrill cry. "It's the wolf!" Delia exclaimed, clutching Alexander's arm. "It can't be," Alexander protested. "Please wait here — I will go and see." But Delia insisted, "We must go down at once." The animal — whatever it was — screamed again, and Delia was off, dashing down the rocks, with Alexander behind, shouting frightened warnings. She plunged down the steep slope without stopping for footholds, as she had often imagined herself doing in dreams. Sick in bed the next day from the excitement, Delia felt disappointed in Alexander. And yet, she reminded herself, she urged him on the wild expedition, which changed so suddenly from amorousness to panic, and her own courage certainly failed. What more had she really expected him to do? Dr. Wesselhoeft merely laughed about the mishap: "You must try it again. Perhaps next time you will catch the wolf." 22 This incident, with others, weakened Delia's faith in her lover. Even in the idyllic, aphrodisiac surroundings of Brattleboro's "magic mountains," she realized, the practical world was present; her friends Catherine and Harriet, and Alexander's classmate, Huntington Clapp, were its representatives. And it was the intervention of these friends that brought out the flaws in the relationship between Delia and Alexander. Delia became aware of the Reverend Mr. Clapp's disapproval, and of Alexander's sensitiveness to his friend's opinion, one afternoon when a whole party went off in carriages on a chestnut hunt. Alexander behaved so coolly to her that she deserted him and rode back in the carriage with the Beecher girls. Yet, as inexplicably 86

The Trial as the fictional Oswald whom he resembled, Alexander was his usual ardent self the next day, and Delia forgave him. In the meantime, the two sets of friends were putting their heads together. Where Harriet Beecher Stowe was satisfied merely to gloat with a storyteller's delight over a romance of real life developing before her eyes, Catherine the executive could not keep her hands off. Miss Beecher saw that Delia was happy as never before; but if marriage was not to be the next step, she determined to separate the pair at once. Without consulting Delia, she sought out Mr. Clapp to discuss the matter. Mr. Clapp, unimpressed by Miss Bacon's brilliance, simply felt that she was too old for his friend, and that Alexander could do better. When he scoffed at the idea that Alexander's intentions were serious, Catherine begged him, as a minister of the gospel, to persuade his classmate to break off the ambiguous affair. Actually the pleading was unnecessary; Mr. Clapp himself was already at work on the problem. But Catherine did not relax her own efforts. Early in November, on the point of leaving Brattleboro for Hartford and New Haven, Catherine wrote to Delia, asking for a frank statement of the relation between her and Alexander, but Delia, uncertain how to reply, left the note unanswered. In fact, face to face with her lover's strange behavior, she felt obliged to break the engagement, but she could not extinguish the fire of her love, and she kept hoping that Alexander might again become as devoted as before. The next evening Catherine called at Mrs. Hollister's, drew Delia aside, and asked in a stage whisper: "What shall I say to your friends when they ask me about this?" "Say what you please," Delia replied. "Must I — my dear Delia, I hope that I must not say — that it is a Platonic flirtation? " Delia blushed at this plainspeaking. All women of culture were aware of the severe censure visited on this kind of dallying, which Eliza Farrar had recently outlined in her handbook of behavior, The Young Lady's Friend. Concealing flirtation under the lofty name of Platonic love, Mrs. Farrar averred, was a despicable dodge 87

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon to which no lady would resort. Delia, who had read Plato as well as Mrs. Farrar, felt the full force of Catherine's insult. "Say what you please," she told her friend, and turned away. 23 From this shaky evidence, Catherine built up her story of an engagement between Delia Bacon and Alexander MacWhorter. Delia left Brattleboro at the end of November, physically improved but emotionally agonized. Surely Alexander would soon renew their engagement and ask her to make it public; in the meantime, she must begin her Hartford lectures, already postponed a month. In New Haven she was dismayed to learn that Catherine had told everybody that she and Alexander were engaged, but she was horrified when she heard that Alexander's friends were denying it on his authority. Her confusion deepened when a note arrived from him, containing his usual expression of fervent friendship. T o her friends and to Leonard, who asked her pointblank if she was engaged, she could only be silent. The day after she reached Hartford, at the beginning of December, she had another cordial letter from Alexander, written from New York. She answered, urging him not to return to New Haven for a time, and sent his New York address to Leonard, so that an interview might be arranged. Reluctant, but resigned, she put the whole matter into Leonard's hands, and threw herself into her work, which needed plenty of attention. In arranging her course of Historical Lessons, Delia discovered that Catherine's gossip had not only hurt her personal reputation, but had also damaged the prospects for her course. From Miss Beecher the Hartford ladies got the impression that Miss Bacon was not interested in giving a course at all. In the first discouraging days Delia considered giving up and proceeding to Boston, her next goal; but she decided to hold her ground. It would not look well to appear in Boston with a record of failure behind her; this course in her old home town would dust off the intellectual cobwebs accumulated at Brattleboro — and furthermore, she needed money at once. When Thomas Gallaudet warned Delia not to expect an audience of more than twenty ladies, she took the bold position that she would not consider fewer than a hundred suitable representation, that she had come because she was invited, but that she was perfectly indifferent to the outcome. Her audac88

The Trial ity won out, Dr. Hawes gave his endorsement, and soon between fifty and sixty ladies were registered. T o her surprise, Delia found the women of frivolous Hartford quite as enthusiastic as those of intellectual N e w Haven. T w o students were so eager to help that they offered themselves as amanuenses: Sarah Stuart, daughter of Andover's brilliant Moses Stuart, came in the morning, and Maria Watkinson in the afternoon. With these industrious girls to write down her ideas as she poured them out, she was amazed to see page after page pile up, with few corrections needed. The most devoted of her students was Catherine Terry, who offered herself as private secretary, though Delia was unaware that this kindness was prompted by Miss Terry's growing interest in Leonard Bacon. A t the first lecture, Mrs. Sigourney not only brought her daughter, but sat at Delia's right hand, introducing the ladies as they came in, and when Colonel Wadsworth's nieces and grandnieces arrived, success was assured. Delia met with kindness on all sides. She was comfortably established in the old Henry Ellsworth house at 19 Prospect Street, now the home of Alfred Smith, who allowed his housekeeper Mrs. Jeffrey to take a few boarders. For $3 a week, Delia not only had access to Mr. Smith's fine library, but also the exclusive use of a bathing room, in which she could practice the Wesselhoeft showers and sitz-baths. Colonel Wadsworth sent over a pitcher of cistern water every morning, as pure as any from the Brattleboro springs, and took her sleigh riding, assuring his passenger that if the horses should run away, the hitch was so arranged that the sleigh would be left behind. The truth was that the Colonel drove at such a slow pace that Delia was bored. Although the Smith house was directly across the street from Thomas Scott Williams', Delia saw little of her "Uncle." In 1840 her foster mother Delia Williams died; and Miss Bacon did not know Thomas' second wife, Martha Coit. In order to preserve her still imperfect health for her work, she accepted very few of the invitations she received from students and the friendly Bacon and Thacher cousins. Despite her precautions, an attack of influenza so weakened her that she fainted one evening at the close of a lecture. But on the whole she felt recovered from the bitter 89

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon disappointment in Alexander, and was again on the way to success. On December 30, Delia wrote to Leonard, regretting that she could not be with him for N e w Year's Day. Little Eddie, whom she considered her baby, would have to wait a while for the iced cake she had promised him.24 The next day Leonard surprised her by a visit, made expressly to report on his chance encounter with Alexander on the street in N e w Haven. Bluntly, Leonard had demanded whether Mr. MacWhorter's intentions toward his sister were honorable. Alexander asked him what intentions he meant. "If you do not know what intentions I mean," Leonard said angrily, "it would be of no use to tell you; but I can tell you this: it would not be well for you to pay such attentions to any other lady, unless they do mean something." 25 T o his sister, Leonard denounced Alexander roundly: the man was two-thirds villain and the other third fool. Delia must never write to him again. In terror, his sister consented, and Leonard expressed his relief to their mother: "That acquaintance of hers whose assiduity has been for a year or two past so annoying to some of us, has been got rid of. The thing had come to such a pass that I took it in hand myself. I trust we shall hear no more of it." 26 But Delia heard more when in January her cousin Thomas Thacher visited Hartford. The story that Alexander had handed around her correspondence to be read by his friends, Thomas said, was still believed in N e w Haven. Officially Professor of Classics at Yale, Thomas was also an unofficial dean, and had his finger on the pulse of student gossip. However concerned for the reputation of Yale, which was involved when a resident graduate's conduct was called in question, Thomas cared more deeply about the family's good name, and was genuinely solicitous for his cousin Delia. If Leonard had been direct, Thomas was violent: Delia must get back her letters from this man. When she assured him she had broken off the acquaintance, he was delighted. Touched by his concern, Delia told him the story of Brattleboro. "Mr. MacWhorter has offered himself to me," she said. " I am very glad to hear it," Thomas replied. " I am glad to hear it for his sake. I think much better of him for it." 27 But two days later, on a short visit to N e w Haven, Delia was 90

The Trial deeply distressed when Thomas called, to report Alexander's flat denial of her story. Copying the letter she had already written to Alexander, she added stronger demands than in the original draft, for the return of her letters. She then showed both letters to her cousin, feeling that he deserved her complete confidence. Later, it was only Thomas' knowledge of this revised draft that exonerated Delia from the charge of forgery, made on the basis of the letter's two versions. Gathering up what remained of her pride, Delia assured Mr. MacWhorter that the love he had inspired in her was now dead. His conduct, she told him, revealed something new in human nature: "such utter moral worthlessness as I could by no struggle of imagination conceive of." For the first time she threatened Alexander with retaliation from her brothers. The gold pen, which she had treasured as a token of his affection, and the manuscripts of his Ethical and Theological Essays, she returned forthwith. "I should be sorry to have you believe," she wrote, "that I would preserve any memorial, however slight, of an acquaintance which will always be to me the most disagreeable recollection of my life." 28 The young man's reply, forwarded to Hartford by Leonard, did not enclose her letters, but repeated his earlier insistence of good faith, and urged that she, who really knew him, did not need others' reports of his character. This letter, which sounded like the Alexander who won her love, relieved Delia's sore heart. But the solemn warnings of her brother and cousin, whose concern she knew was genuine, had sunk deep. She could not trust herself to see him again, but, regretting her harshness, she wrote him a brief note of farewell.29 On February 8, 1847, Delia reported this exchange of notes to Leonard. In Hartford, forty miles from New Haven, busy with historical study, she was able to look at Alexander objectively, and yet ironically, as "the most remarkable character that I can remember to have met with in ancient or modern times." 30 But it was one thing to breathe the pure air of scholarship in Hartford; it was quite another to return to New Haven and be choked again by the miasma of gossip. N o sooner had Delia arrived at her brother's, late in February, than Thomas Thacher 9i

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon was on hand to reprove her for writing again to Alexander. Some of the insinuations made by Alexander's friends, he said, were too disgraceful to be repeated; he would give Delia only the bare outline. Alexander had received her first note to him in the presence of some men friends (Robert Forbes among them) and passed it around with a laugh. They had promptly interpreted it as a request for an assignation. Added to that was Alexander's recent story in his own defense, that Delia had proposed to him. Delia was aghast. Instead of avoiding involvement with the racy Robert Forbes, she had supplied fuel for his revenge. Clearly, Thomas said, her most virulent enemies, Robert and his cousin Jane Fitch, had been at work. Stung by Delia's disapproval of him, Robert had told Jane the story of her "invitation" note to Alexander. Jane, jealous of Delia, spread Robert's report with some embroidery of her own, and enlisted the support of her uncle, Eleazar Fitch, Professor of Divinity and Homilectics in Yale's Theological Department. Did Thomas confront Jane with Delia's counterstatement, that Alexander had proposed at Brattleboro, and that, since his return to New Haven, he denied showing any of Delia's letters to others? Delia asked. Yes, Thomas replied, but to no purpose, for Jane had already received from New York Robert's confirmation of her tale. Not only had he seen Delia's letters, but he had Alexander's word that there was not a "thimbleful" of sentiment in the affair, and never had been. This latest report was enough for Delia. Her confidence in Alexander at last completely destroyed, she was for the first time really frightened for her own reputation. She determined to tell her side of the story, and rally friends to her defense. She made one last desperate effort to get back her letters. In her final letter to Alexander, she reproached him for his deceit: he had assured her that her letters were read only by himself — yet her enemies were telling all New Haven what was in them. When she first became acquainted with him, she feared that he misinterpreted Dr. Taylor's "new" theology as a mere utilization of means to ends. Overlooked in the first flush of friendship, this was now brought out into the open: "I know the capacity for adaptation which characterizes your great theological principle: you may have esteemed it a pious act, 92

The Trial to allay my anxiety, by concealing the truth from me. Be this as it may, nothing now will satisfy me that the correspondence is not still in existence." 3 1 The idealistic Delia did not yet appreciate how strategic was the position to which Alexander MacWhorter had retired on his return from Brattleboro. Persuaded by his wife, Dr. Taylor agreed to take the young man in as a boarder, in the hope that under his own roof he could awaken the licentiate's slumbering zeal. The Taylor home at 48 Temple Street was crowded that year by the addition of the Porter family (Noah had left Springfield to take on the Professorship of Moral Philosophy at Yale), but Alexander was an easy guest. Not only did he charm the refined Rebecca Taylor, but Mary Porter also, who won her husband to Mr. MacWhorter's cause. One evening in March at teatime, Mrs. Taylor persuaded Alexander to tell her husband the story he had already confided to her, of his friendship with Delia Bacon and her misunderstanding of his intentions. After listening to the young man's account, Dr. Taylor was inclined to believe it, and decided that this was the kind of situation in which the truth, even if it could be discovered, might be very embarrassing. He would appeal to his friend Leonard Bacon at once, to clamp the lid on the simmering scandal. Immediately after tea Dr. Taylor put on his hat and set out down Wall Street towards the parsonage, his purpose firm in his mind. Disappointed at first to find Dr. Bacon out, Dr. Taylor was so warmly welcomed by Delia that he stepped into the parlor and sat down. And why, he asked himself, should he not first talk the matter over with the lady? When he broached the subject, Delia began at once to open up her heart, delighted with the chance to tell this respected family friend the truth about her relation to Alexander. T o her horror, she found the learned doctor reluctant to listen to her recital, and adamant in his defense of Mr. MacWhorter. Dr. Taylor insisted that it was to Miss Bacon's advantage, as well as the best interests of MacWhorter, N e w Haven, Yale and the Congregational Church of Connecticut, to hush the matter up. As Delia was struggling to control her tears, the front door slammed. 93

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon "That will be your brother coming in," Dr. Taylor said. "I will talk to him for a few minutes in the study." 32 For Delia, the whole disgraceful business that followed began with Dr. Taylor's call on that March evening. Two days later the charming, soft-voiced Mrs. Taylor added her plea, that Delia's reputation could only be further injured by an investigation. Delia wept, but remained convinced that her honor could be saved only by an irrefutable demonstration that Alexander's stories were false. She begged Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was visiting in New Haven, to tell Mrs. Taylor the true story. Harriet did call at the Wall Street home, when Mrs. Taylor was out. But when Mary Porter returned the call and asked for an interview, Mrs. Stowe refused to see her — because, she said, she had not the honor of that lady's acquaintance. Harriet got out of town before she could become further involved.33 T o defend her position against the leading theologian of Yale required high courage; but Delia took on this task when she wrote to Dr. Taylor, hoping to achieve by the eloquence of her pen what she had failed to accomplish face to face. Surely he must see that it was now too late to keep the affair secret. She reminded him of how well she had fulfilled his trust in her as the teacher of his daughters. To her, with a professional reputation to maintain, Alexander's unjust charges were as damaging as an accusation of stealing or drunkenness would be against Dr. Taylor. Yet she was obliged to listen to this libel, in her brother's home, from the lips of a man whom she had deeply revered. "There is no lady of my acquaintance," she wrote, "against whom such a charge would seem credible." Quite naturally, Delia the student of Shakespeare identified herself with the libeled heroine Desdemona. Recalling Desdemona's conversation with Emilia about adultery, she exclaimed to Dr. Taylor: "Nay, I do not think there is any such woman! " The strange history of the past two years, she said, she had expected to carry to her grave in silence. Now she felt that the secret was taken from her keeping by God Himself, enemy of falsehood. The crisis she was facing, despite its terrors, lifted a weight from her heart. "No!" she wrote. "I shall not shrink from this investigation!" 94

The Trial But, with her purpose unshaken, and her hurt pride lashing out at Dr. Taylor, Delia could not help recalling to her correspondent the love which flowered at Brattleboro between her and Alexander. Hoping to touch a latent chord of chivalry in the learned doctor's heart, she wrote of Alexander's daily, hourly devotion, his proofs of sincerity, his declarations of love which "language could not utter" nor death change. Her active mind, striving to understand the contrast between his present conduct and his former ardor, hit upon insanity as an explanation. "A suspicion flashes on me which I shall not utter," she wrote, "yet would to God it were true!" 34 Leonard Bacon sprang to his sister's defense. He despised Alexander, and was infuriated by Dr. Taylor's championship of what seemed a wrong and unjust cause. Dr. Bacon and Dr. Taylor exchanged angry letters. Leonard declared his intention of bringing charges against Mr. MacWhorter in the New Haven West Association, determined that this villain who sought to destroy his sister must be punished by losing his license to preach. This, Dr. Bacon realized, would be no simple accomplishment. On his own, MacWhorter would have been a feeble adversary; backed by Dr. Taylor, he became formidable.35 Dr. Taylor was only hardened in his determination to prevent Leonard from bringing official charges against MacWhorter. He saw the Congregational Church of Connecticut as a model of God's moral government, with himself as God's vicegerent, a just but severe ruler, at the head. In his lectures he applied the utilitarian principle of "the greatest good for the greatest number" to God's church on earth. If a burning house threatened an entire town's welfare, that house must be pulled down, regardless of its owner's protests.36 Delia Bacon was just such a burning house, and she must be pulled down. If he felt a twinge of pity for that small, sobbing figure, as he left her on the evening of his decisive call, and a deeper pang at the rupture in the friendly relations of the Bacon and Taylor families, he suppressed these emotions, which must not be permitted to interfere with the sovereign powers of church government. Duty, Dr. Taylor maintained, transcended human considerations. The impending clash between the head of Yale's Theological 95

Prodigal Puritan: A Life of Delia Bacon Department and the pastor of the First Church reverberated through N e w Haven. N o matter who won, the struggle of these titans would, at least, provide a spectacle of scandal in high places and a safe and pleasurable sensation of disrespect for the respectable. The long friendship between the two men and their families sharpened the conflict. When in 1825 Leonard Bacon was called to succeed Dr. Taylor in the pastorate of the First Church, he found his predecessor always available to mount his old pulpit when a revival was in the air. In return, Leonard defended Dr. Taylor's "new" theology against the fierce attacks launched on it during the twenties and thirties in the General Association; without this aid, Taylor would not have been able to flay his enemies into submission. Between them Taylor and Bacon maintained a kind of exchange professorship and pastorate; Dr. Bacon lectured to Yale students on his favorite subject of Church History, and Yale Commencements were held in the First Church. During Lucy Bacon's illness and after her death, Mrs. Taylor helped to ease the tension in the crowded parsonage; she frequently invited one of Leonard's boys to stay with her for a week or two, and was always doing some kindness for her namesake, Rebecca Bacon. This alliance of years' standing was not easily broken. It had, indeed, been strained the previous fall by a disagreement over Woolsey's appointment as President of Yale. The success of that appointment now gave a slight edge in the struggle to Leonard Bacon, Woolsey's defender; but this advantage Leonard did not wish to press. Delia was frightened when she saw how seriously her brother's position in the church and community was threatened. Leonard himself was concerned, at first, that he might lose his pastorate, and even offered to release Catherine Terry from a connection which might embarrass her.37 But Catherine refused to desert him, and the leaders of First Church remained loyal, realizing that it was Leonard Bacon who had brought the world to N e w Haven. If Dr. Taylor was a greater theologian, Dr. Bacon was a stouter gladiator in the causes of the church. Not only in the Connecticut Associations, but in the Presbyterian General Associations in N e w York and Philadelphia, the American Tract Society, the Ameri96

The Trial can Board of Foreign Missions and the American Temperance Society, Leonard had demonstrated his power. As a contributor to The Christian Spectator and a founder of The Ne . .

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