Abstract
Recollecting tales to her children of the years she had spent growing up in New Hartford must have been somewhat bittersweet for Sarah. She had moved far from her childhood home when marrying Ben, in the process threatening relationships with her Northern kin that she held dear. Bereft of the immediacy of her parent’s guidance and her sisters’ comfort Sarah’s feelings of loneliness and isolation were compounded on her initial arrival at Clifton Grove. As the years passed and she successfully acculturated into her role as a Southern wife and mother Sarah depended less on her parent’s counsel. Yet the determination to preserve her New Hartford kin as part of a family history, which her children and grandchildren could impart to their descendants, meant treasured memories of Sarah’s New Hartford years were often recollected and formed part of a rich tapestry of her life, providing meaning and understanding for both herself and future generations.
I long to see you once more in the old home, but fear I may never more know that pleasure I cannot cease to love it, & regard as holy the associations clustering around it — the children tease me often to tell them of my childhood & youth — the incidents seem so bright to them in comparison with the monotony of these pine woods.1
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Notes
For further reading see Varon, “Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too,” 502–03; M. P. Ryan (1990) Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880. (Baltimore and London: John Hopkins University Press), 136–7;
H. L. Watson (1990) Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America. (New York, Hill and Wang), 219–20;
L. F. Kohl (1989) The Politics of Individualism: Politics and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), quote from 72; Taylor, Cavalier and Yankee, 115–40.
Although the historical record does not indicate whether Lucinda Huntington died in childbirth or of postpartum complication she did pass away the same year her daughter was born. As Anya Jabour underlines in her work on young women in the old South, “In an age before reliable contraception, married women could expect to bear numerous children in rapid succession,” and this posed a significant danger to women’s health and life expectancy across the United States in the nineteenth century. See A. Jabour (2007) Scarlett’s Sisters: Young Women in the Old South. (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press), 136. Repeated childbearing, parturition and post-parturition care, coupled with inferior medical knowledge repeatedly put pregnant women’s lives at risk. Sally McMillen has argued that “Difficulties in parturition proved to be a major cause of death during women’s most vital years, and maternal mortality rates of women between twenty and forty years old were invariably high.” Although in general the South experienced higher maternal mortality rates than the North, the state of New York had the highest percentage of deaths from childbirth in 1850, at 312.
See S. G. McMillen (1990) Motherhood in the Old South: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Infant Rearing. (Baton Rouge, LA, and London: Louisiana State University Press), 80–1 and Appendix One, Table III, “White Women Who Died in Childbirth.”
For further reading concerning the emphasis on the private nuclear family and the moral bond between mothers and children in antebellum America, see R. H. Bloch (2003) Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture 1650— 1800. (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press), Chapter 3, “Revaluing Motherhood. American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother, 1785–1815”;
N. M. Theriot (1996) Mothers and Daughters in Nineteenth-Century America: The Bio-Social Construction of Femininity. (Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press), Chapter 1, “‘Imperial Motherhood’ and Its Material Roots”;
S. Coontz (1988) The Social Origins of Private Life: A History of American Families. (New York and London: Verso);
N. S. Dye and D. B. Smith (1986) “Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750— 1920,” Journal of American History, 73:2, 329–53;
J. Lewis (1983) The Pursuit of Happiness: Family and Values in Jefferson’s Virginia. (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press);
J. Fliegelman (1982) Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800. (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press); Ryan, Cradle of the Middle-Class;
C. N. Degler (1980) At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press).
W. Chauncey Fowler (1866) History of Durham, Connecticut, From the First Land Grant in 1622 to 1866. (Durham, CT), sourced at Google Books, http://books.google.com/books?id=NkcBAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false (July 20, 2011).
F. Trollope (1832) Domestic Manners of the Americans, quote drawn from Chapter 5, sourced at Project Gutenberg, release date, November 30, 2003, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/10345/pg10345.html (November 22, 2011).
For further reading, see R. J. Carwadine (1993) Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America. (New Haven, NJ, and London: Yale University Press); Kohl The Politics of Individualism, 72–74;
D. W. Howe (1979) The Political Culture of the American Whigs. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press).
C. D. Hemphill (2011) Siblings: Brothers & Sisters in American History. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press), 205.
W. R. Coates (1924) A History of Cuyahoga County and the City of Cleveland. Chicago and New York: The American Historical Society, sourced at Online Biographies, s.v. Fayette Brown, http://www.onlinebiographies.info/oh/cuya/ brown-f.htm (August 12, 2011); The Huntington Family in America: A Genealogical Memoir of the Known Descendants o f Simon Huntington from 1633 to 1915, Including Those Who Have Retained the Family Name, and Many Bearing Other Surnames, s.v. Fayette Brown, http://www.ebooksread.com/authors-eng/huntington-family-association/the-huntington-family-in-america--a-genealogical-memoir-of-the-known-descendant-tnu/page-53-the-huntington-family-in-america--a-genealogical-memoir-of-the-known-descendant-tnu. shtml (August 15, 2010).
For further reading, see Lystra, Searching the Heart; S. Mintz and S. Kellogg (1988) Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life. New York: Free Press; Rothman, Hands and Hearts: Lewis, The Pursuit of Happiness; Fliegalman, Prodigals and Pilgrims; Degler, At Odds.
P. Bardaglio (1995) Reconstructing the Household: Families, Sex, and Law in the Nineteenth Century South. (Chapel Hill, NC, and London: University of North Carolina Press), xii.
3 February 1855, SFHW Letters, fol. 5, 1844–55. For further reading on enslaved women’s bodily objectification in the antebellum South and the development of their own selfhood see S. M. Fett (2006) “Consciousness and Calling: African American Midwives at work in the Antebellum South” in E. E. Baptist and S. M. H. Camp, eds, New Studies in the History of American Slavery. (Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press);
J. L. Morgan (2006) “Some Could Suckle over their Shoulder: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology,” in E. E. Baptist and S. M. H. Camp, eds, New Studies in the History of American Slavery. (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press);
M. J. Schwartz (2006) Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press);
J. L. Morgan (2004) Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in New World Slavery. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press); Camp, Closer to Freedom; Baptist “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’”
W. King (1996) “Suffer with them Till Death: Slave Women and their Children in Nineteenth Century America,” in D. B. Gaspar and D. C. Hine, eds, More than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press).
For further reading on enslaved women as a nurse to white children and the historiographical debates structuring this issue, particularly in relation to enslaved women as wet-nurses, see V. L. Kennedy (2009) Born Southern: Childbirth, Motherhood, and Social Networks in the Old South. (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press);
W. A. Dunaway (2003) The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. (New York and Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), 134–41;
K. C. Barton (1997) “‘Good Cooks and Washers’: Slave Hiring, Domestic Labor, and the Market in Bourbon County, Kentucky,” Journal of American History, 84:2, 436–60; McMillen, Motherhood in the Old South, esp. Chapter 5. “So Sweet an Office: Maternal Breast-Feeding”; Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household, Chapter 3, “Between Big House and Slave Community”;
S. McMillen (1985) “Sacred Duty: Breast-Feeding Patterns among Middle- and Upper-Class Women in the Antebellum South,” Journal of Southern History, 51:3, 333–56.
D. S. Smith (1985) “Child Naming Practices, Kinship Ties, and Change in Family Attitudes in Hingham, Massachusetts,” Journal of Social History, 18:4, 541–66, 542; Censer, North Carolina Planters, 33.
For a discussion of this image and the historiographical debates around the term, see Fox Genovese, Within the Plantation Household; Clinton, The Plantation Mistress; Oakes, The Ruling Race, pp. 201–204; M. P. Johnson (1980) “Planters and Patriarchy: Charleston, 1800–1860,” Journal of Southern History, 46:1, 45–72;
E. Genovese (1969) The World the Slaveholders Made: Two Essays in Interpretation. (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press).
S. G. McMillen (1994) “Antebellum Southern Fathers and the Health Care of Children,” Journal of Southern History, 60:3, 513–32, 514.
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© 2013 Rebecca J. Fraser
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Fraser, R.J. (2013). Familial Relations: North and South. In: Gender, Race and Family in Nineteenth Century America. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137291851_4
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