Chapter One
A Good Child, but Willful
On Wednesday, October 8, 1800, in a large frame house on Milk Street overlooking Boston Harbor, Dorothy Sewall May delivered her fourth living daughter, whom she named Abigail, after her husbandâs mother.19 â[I was] a sickly child, nursed by a sickly mother,â Abigail recalled, linked from the start to her own âMarmee.â
Dorothy Sewall Mayâs âmost striking traitâ was âher affectionate disposition,â according to Abigail.22 âShe adored her husband and children.â20 This natural tendency was intensified because Dorothy had been orphaned at twelve when her father died of a stroke, a year after the death of her forty-year-old mother.21 Thereafter Dorothy had lived with her eldest sister, Elizabeth Sewall Salisbury. Elizabethâs husband, Samuel, was a merchant whose apprentice, Joseph May, Dorothy married in 1784.
By the time of Abigailâs birth sixteen years later, the Mays had three boysâages twelve, five, and threeâand four girls: thirteen-year-old Catherine; Louisa, who was eleven; two-year-old Elizabeth, whom they called Eliza; and the new baby. Dorothy had no formal education and her husband had abandoned Boston Latin School in his early teens to work for Dorothyâs brother-in-law. Nevertheless, she determined to send their boys at age five to dame, or maâam, schools run by women and then to âman schoolsâ to prepare for Harvard College, from which her brother, father, grandfathers, and great-grandfathers had graduated. As for her daughters, Dorothy encouraged them to follow a year or two of dame school with reading, singing, and sewing at home, where she provided tutors in dancing and music. The girls could read freely, for the Mays had house servants and a library stocked with the classic historians, philosophical works of Priestley and Paley, and the poetry of Pope, Addison, and Shakespeare.23
The year after Abigailâs birth, the family moved three blocks south to a âplain but comfortableâ wood house with a large garden and orchards at No. 1 Federal Court, a âsunny and cheerful spotâ off Federal Street that is less than a block from South Station in modern Boston.24 Around that time, Abigailâs frail, forty-three-year-old mother suffered a miscarriage that ended her thirteenth and final pregnancy.
At midday on Thursday, April 29, 1802, when Abigail was eighteen months old, her six-year-old brother Edward arrived home from maâam school âfull of gleeâ and eager to play, according to her four-year-old brother, Samuel Joseph, who was known in the family as Sam Jo. The brothers were close, Sam Jo said later: âWe slept together, ate together, and he taught me all the sports. I every day awaited his returnâ from school.
Following the familyâs midday meal, the two boys ran out to the garden, leaving their sisters inside with their mother. Edward climbed to the roof of a barn and pretended to be a chimney sweep. Minutes later, having concluded his sweeping, he prepared to descend from the barn by stepping onto the post of an old wooden chair.25 The chair post splintered beneath him, a broken spindle pierced his side, and he dropped to the ground. Screams from servants alerted Dorothy, who raced from the house, carried her six-year-old inside, and called for a bath. Servants rushed to the well and the stove. Not until Dorothy removed Edwardâs shirt did anyone see the fatal wound.
Dorothy fainted, Sam Jo recalled, and all around the dying boy was âconfusion and dismay.â Servants ran to summon the doctor and Joseph May, who raced home from his marine insurance office near Long Wharf. Amid the chaos Edwardâs body was cleaned, dressed, and laid out in the best room.
âSome strange awful change had come over my beloved Edward,â Sam Jo said. âEyes shut, body cold,â he gave âno replies to the tender things said to himâ and took âno notice of all that was being done to him.â But Sam Jo would not abandon his brotherâs body. He begged his parents to let him sleep with Edward one last time. That night in bed he kissed his brotherâs âcold cheek and lips, pulled open his eyelids, begged him to speak to me, and cried myself to sleep because he would not.â
The next morning the children watched their father place Edward into his coffin âin order that it might be laid away in the ground.â The parents and older sisters continually assured the younger children that âEdward is still living; he has become an angel and gone to heaven.â
Throngs of relatives and friends and Joseph Mayâs colleagues in shipping and insurance attended the funeral. James Freeman, Americaâs first Unitarian preacher and one of Josephâs closest friends, performed the funeral service at home. Pallbearers carried the little coffin out to a carriage. Black-clad mourners followed the carriage on foot up the hill to the burial ground beside Kingâs Chapel, where Joseph was warden and coauthor of the new hymnal. Young men bore the coffin into the burying ground beside the stone church, while Sam Jo pleaded to see what they were doing to his brother.
His uncle Samuel May, his fatherâs younger brother, carried the boy into the graveyard and down the steps to the family burial vault. From the safety of his uncleâs arms Sam Jo surveyed the coffins of his brother Edward, his other deceased siblings, and his paternal grandfather, who had died in 1794. âOur kind uncle,â Sam Jo said later, âopened one of the coffins and let me see how decayed the body had become.â Uncle Sam allowed him to kiss his brother one last time. âEdwardâs body is going to decay and become like the dust of the earth,â his uncle reassured him, while âhis soul has gone to live in heaven with God and Christ and the angels.â
Over the years Sam Jo would recount this experience for Abigail, who was too young to recall the details. The night after the funeral, alone in bed for the first time without his brother, Sam Jo had a vivid dream. The ceiling of his room seemed to open, revealing a bright light. From âthe midst of it came our lost brother, attended by a troop of little angels. He lay by me as he used to do, his head on my arm,â and said, âHow happy I am in heaven.â
This dream recurred nightly until âby degreesâ Sam Joâs grief abated. âBut I have never forgotten my almost twin brotherâ and the âheavenly visionâ that provided âthe deepest religious impression that my soul ever received.â That vision, he told Abigail, motivated him to devote his life to God.
Edwardâs death caused other revolutions. Joseph and Dorothy May, who had lost five babies, were devastated. Dorothy drew even closer to her two surviving sons and four daughters. Meanwhile, their oldest son, Charles, an indifferent scholar, determined in his teens to go to sea. Charlesâs departure when Abigail was small reduced the siblings at home to four girls and a single boy. This fundamental May quintet, as described decades later by Abigail to her daughters, would become a model for Little Womenâs central characters, the four âMarchâ sisters who share their remarkable Marmee with âLaurie,â the privileged boy next door.
Edwardâs death forged an unexpected bond between little Abigail and her sole brother at home. A year after Edwardâs death, when Sam Jo began attending school, two-and-a-half-year-old Abba, as she was known in the family, begged him to take her along. He and their sisters persuaded their parents to allow Abba to join them at school.26 By the time she was four she was learning to read and write under the tutelage of her seven-year-old brother, who delighted in walking his âdarling little sisterâ up the cobbled road from home to Mrs.27 Walcuttâs Dame School on High Street.
This bond was unusual in Boston and the wider society, which assigned boys and girls to separate realms. Privileged boys were trained at school to excel in the public sphere, while their sisters were prepared at home to manage a family. Sons, expected to succeed in the world, were prepared with the finest education available, while daughters were prepared to marry well, a task that required no outside education.
These different modes of education, the Mays and their peers believed, suited the gendersâ inherently distinct natures. Women were considered emotional, nurturing, and intellectually inferior to men, who were all ârational, selfish, and intellectually superior,â according to the historian Eve Kornfeld.28 Middle-class boys âstudied the classics, mathematics, natural science, history, and theologyâ and learned âan aggressive language suitable for debate,â while their female peers studied âliterature, art, languages, dance, and musicâ so as to speak âa docile language intended to soothe and to smooth over controversy.â This cultivation at school and at home of boysâ and girlsâ apparently distinct interests and talents seemed to provide âfurther proof of the natural gulf between the male and female worlds.â
Sam Jo and Abba May departed from this pattern. Beginning soon after Edwardâs death, they were each otherâs best companion and ally. Sam Jo dutifully followed the male path by attending a private academy for boys, Harvard College, and Harvard Divinity School. âMy generous father,â he recalled later, âthought the best patrimony he could give his children was a good education, so we [boys] were sent to the private schools in Boston that enjoyed the highest reputation.â Unlike many of his peers, however, Sam Jo also developed in the wake of his brotherâs death a passion to rectify the worldâs wrongs. Among those wrongs was his clever little sisterâs inability to secure an education like the one that his gender granted him. As a result, he set out to share his manâs education with Abba, who concluded in early adolescence that a girlâs education was âdeficient.â29 Her brother encouraged her to read his books, improve her writing, and think for herself. By the time they were young adults, due to a series of family tragedies Abigail and Samuel Joseph were the only May siblings still living save Charles, who remained away from New England for decades to come. Abigailâs remarkable bond with Samuel Joseph contributed to her lifelong determination that women should not only be educated but also have a voice in running the world.
The setting of Abigail Mayâs early life was still in many respects the town from which Paul Revere and William Dawes had ridden just a quarter century before. Dawes, in fact, was Abigailâs uncle.30 In 1800 Boston was still a âpretty country townâ with fewer than twenty-five thousand inhabitants, most of them descendants of English settlers, occupying detached houses surrounded by gardens and orchards on a peninsula of roughly one square mile and several adjoining villages.31 Many Bostonians farmed. Some still shepherded their milk cows to graze on the Common, which descended to a marshy bay along the Charles River. The town had not yet begun its great nineteenth-century transformation, in which cows were banished, pastures and hills smoothed, marshes and bays filled, and brownstones built. In this âhandsomeâ Boston of Abigail Mayâs youth, according to a visitor, âTown and Country seem married.â32
Growing up on the peninsulaâs less populous south side, the May children could step into the sea at high tide hardly two minutes from home. Clipper ships passed to and fro. In the evening âthe sea dashed under the windows,â Abigailâs friend Lydia Maria Child recalled, and was âoften sparkling with moon-beams when we went to bed.â33 To the southeast the Mays could see from their windows the townâs wharves, Gallows Bay, the mud flats of Dorchester, and the harbor islands, most prominently Castle Island with its star-shaped fortification. Looking north their view was of numerous steeples and the townâs four great hills. Atop the tallest, Beacon Hill, were the new State House, designed and built in 1798 by Charles Bulfinch, and the elegant home of the late John Hancock, the revolutionary hero and first governor. Hancock, too, was Abigailâs uncle, the late husband of her âAunt Q,â Dorothy Quincy Hancock. During Abigailâs early years, her Aunt Q still lived in that grand mansion replete with books, paintings, silver, and mahogany furniture, where she had hosted John Adams and General Lafayette.34 The old woman often invited Abigail and her sisters in for treats. Decades later, in her great-niece Louisaâs Old-Fashioned Girl, Aunt Q would be immortalized as Grandma Shawâs late aunt, Governor Hancockâs widow, with her red-velvet-lined carriage, her âgreat garden,â and her memories of feeding General Lafayette and his troops during the revolution.35 In fact, Aunt Qâs poignant recollections of her only son and daughter, both of whom had died early, may have enhanced her fondness for her nieces and nephews. Aunt Q, like Abigail, had been the youngest, âmost pettedâ of her family.36 Each year on Abigailâs birthday, her aunt reminded her that October 8 was also the day on which âMy Mr. Hancockâ had died, seven years before Abigail was born.
A revolutionary spirit imbued Abigailâs childhood. Many Bostonians had opposed the American Revolution when it happened, but not the Mays. When Abigail was small, her father recounted for her the resolute response of his âstrongâ mother to a British soldierâs petty robbery.37 Passing by the May house, the soldier had reached into an open kitchen window and grabbed food from the table. âYour grandmother quickly shut the window down upon his arm and held it as in a vise,â Joseph May said. Not until a British officer arrived to arrest the offender did Madam Abigail Williams May loosen her grip on the sash. Like other Bostonians opposed to British rule, the Mays left during the Siege of Boston. They boarded with cousins in Pomfret, Connecticut, and did not return to Boston until the British evacuation in the spring of 1776. Joseph was ...