My Wars Are Laid Away in Books

by Alfred Habegger

  The go-for-broke zealotry of Emily Dickinson’s grandfather fed into her life in complex and intimate ways. She too, working under desperate conditions, became a creator ex nihilo, though only in the privacy and protection of her home—the same home he had built, wagered, and lost. And she worked for different ends. So far from trying to save the world, one of the things Dickinson didn’t do was teach, in this differing from almost all other nineteenth-century English and American writers of consequence.

  Yale vs. Amherst Collegiate Charity Institution

  To follow Edward Dickinson, the poet’s father, through his college years and early professional training is to see how Samuel’s fortitude and determination perpetuated themselves in a different form.

  When Edward left for Yale in fall 1819, he found a larger and more stimulating world than anything his hometown had to offer. Defining the basic goals of education as “expanding [the mind’s] powers, and storing it with knowledge,” Yale’s president clearly saw that the chief thing was to “throw the student upon the resources of his own mind.” Essays and declamations were frequently assigned, and there were well-established student debating societies, which, in addition to sponsoring a good deal of speechifying, had well-stocked libraries. A more orthodox and socially conservative school than Harvard, Yale required every student from outside New Haven to be under the guardianship of a “patron.” Any student who denied the divine authority of the Bible was threatened with expulsion. Anyone caught attending a “comedy or tragedy” was subject to a fine, and there were dozens of other proscriptions. Still, as far as Edward was concerned, all this implied surveillance was neither unfamiliar nor oppressive, and he soon informed his father he was “please[d]” by “the Government of College.” What pleased him most, however, judging by the many letters he received from fellow students and never threw away (some addressed to “Friend Dick”), was the companionship of talented young men his age.

  But Friend Dick had only a single term before the Squire required him to sell his furniture and return home. Since the new college was not yet in operation, that meant going back to Amherst Academy. At first Samuel tried to pretend the school offered as good an education as Yale and would be “equally beneficial,” but before long the truth came out: he was swamped by “bills of this quarter.” One of the ways the young man coped with this humiliating comedown was to try to keep up with the freshman class at Yale, or so one judges from a requested progress-report sent him by a former roommate.

  Fortunately, Squire Dickinson’s fortunes rebounded and Edward was able to return to Yale for the regular summer term. It was then that New Haven and its college were overwhelmed by an historic revival. The evangelist Asahel Nettleton arrived on August 5 and, staying till December, preached and prayed and otherwise assisted at private gatherings. The student body became quiet and serious and anxiously flocked to the meetings, which became so crowded, one participant noted, “that hundreds go away from the conference rooms, not being able to get in.” Remarkably, as the long vacation came and went and Edward’s sophomore year got under way, the religious feeling grew instead of being dispersed. There were more meetings, more conversions, more exhortations of the impenitent by their regenerated classmates. In Edward’s first term, the entry to his room in Middle College had been in frequent uproar. Now “you could pass through no entry . . . without overhearing the low, earnest, supplicating voice of prayer.” The popular senior-class “ringleader” experienced a dramatic conversion that became the subject of a tract, and the divinity school received its founding impetus. Some of Edward’s acquaintances and classmates were changed for life, but his friends Osmyn Baker of Amherst and George Ashmun of Springfield held out, and so did he. His mother was not the only family member who pleaded with him. “If, Edward,” his father wrote, “I could hear that you were among the number, who had embraced the Savior, how joyful the news! Pray for a new heart.” *5

  As Edward’s sophomore year ended, he received the dismaying news that he would have to drop out of Yale a second time and return to Amherst, whose tiny college was about to go into operation. The reason his father gave was the same as before: “necessity—inability to supply the money necessary at N. H.” This time he softened the blow by allowing his son to “take a room in the College building, and have no connection with home except boarding.” Although the boy didn’t have to sell his furniture, the implied return to New Haven didn’t materialize until he had spent his full junior year at Amherst Collegiate Charity Institution, as the new school was infelicitously known.

  A year after Edward graduated, his debating society at Yale, Brothers in Unity, decided that Amherst’s Charity Institution “would not be beneficial to the cause of science and literature.” Judging from the letters Friend Dick received in fall 1821, he not only shared this disdain for the tiny, pinched school his father had helped invent, but regarded New Haven’s larger, freer, and more arrogant college as his proper intellectual home. Osmyn Baker commiserated with him for having “to leave an institution where you may choose your associates and friends from 300, and enter one where that number is reduced to 50, and those chiefly of principles and habits of life very different from your own.”

  Edward’s next-younger brother, William, a staunch ally and a shrewd, original, and bellicose character, *6 took an even dimmer view of the transfer from Yale. Afraid that Edward would be persuaded to finish his education at home, William urged him not to let “the trustees of the Institution triumph over your best judgement.” The more he thought about it the angrier he grew:

  I cannot leave this subject I know how it is exactly. . . . It is just like this. Im Mad to think of it. in the 1st Place Col Graves comes in good morning Mr Dickinson. Very fine morning Sir . . . Well sir have you been to the institution this morning Sir I think you had better conclude to enter here. . . . A has given so much and B. [has given] ground for the President House and C. is going to SUBSCRIBE. . . . Mr D. you had better stop Here by the time you finish there will be a vacancy for you to set up Law Oh yes says Papa he may have my office as soon as he gets through. Well says Col Graves that is fine indeed you cant have nothing better than that. . . . I [Graves speaking] had better start for Indiana to day there’s a man there that’ll give $3.75

  This fascinating passage dramatizes a basic issue the poet’s father had to resolve in one way or another: what to do about the invasive zealotry that threatened to overwhelm him?

  Although Edward was already well on the way toward becoming the stoically responsible man who did so much to shape the poet’s life, his feelings sometimes broke out in odd performances. In early November, the discouraged collegian committed the one known public disgrace of his life. It began in the room of an academy student, where he and some other lads had a late oyster supper and a quantity of “cherry-rum and gin.” At midnight they moved their party to the grounds of the Institution (still basically a construction site), where they “behaved in a very indecent and riotous manner, and made great disturbance . . . till one o’clock or later.” Their mistake was to wake up a young professor of Greek and Latin, Joseph Estabrook, something of a dandy and not much liked. As a former Yale roommate pictured the scene, probably drawing on Edward’s own account, Estabrook rushed outside and “expose[d] his nakedness to the rude night winds of winter, for the purpose of prowling among the devotees of . . . an innocent conviviality.” Whatever the punishment was, one guesses from another friend’s commiserating tone that Edward took it with scornful dignity: “I know not whether I ought to congratulate you or condole with you on the recent distinguished marks of attention which you have received from the faculty of Amherst Collegiate Charity Institution. Perhaps the greatest honour which that body can confer, is that of punishment.” The episode brings out as nothing else the gap that had temporarily opened between the young man and his paternal legacy.

  The final humiliation occurred when Edward returned to Yale for his senior year and, failing to secure a college room, took private lodgi
ngs with three freshmen for fall term. A warning he got from Baker hints at his grim response to this arrangement: “There is danger that your disposition will receive a tinge of sourness and discontent which will endure.” But the indignity passed, and for his last two terms Edward shared a senior room with George Ashmun, the friend from Springfield who later became a prominent Whig and then Republican. Ashmun’s letters suggest he must have been a profane and amusing companion.

  Academically, Edward remained an average student, and even though he now matched his best previous grade, receiving a 2.4 in May 1823, was far from qualifying for top honors. Samuel, former Latin salutatorian, had communicated to his son the hope that he would earn “a respectable place among your classmates,” *7 but when the prize Commencement speeches were announced, Edward got the last one on the list, joining seven others in a “Dialogue.” The many college essays he kept substantiate the impression he was not some sort of genius.

  Surviving a Blackness of Darkness

  In the three years between graduation and the beginning of his courtship, Edward prepared for his career by reading law with his father, assisting in his practice, and in 1825–1826 attending the nearby Northampton School of Law. This was a trying period for the young man, whose struggle to enter the world was jinxed by his father’s growing troubles. What we see crystallizing is a certain kind of uncommunicative hardness, a principled severity based on determination and the shock of seeing what goes wrong when the man of the house proves an inadequate protector.

  Soon after Edward’s final return from New Haven to Amherst, an ominous trend showed up in his father’s recorded real estate transactions. In November of that year he mortgaged several properties to Oliver Smith of Hadley, a brother-in-law, for $2,000. Two months later he gave the Massachusetts Hospital Life Insurance Company additional mortgages worth $3,000. Four months after that, in exchange for $6,000, he gave Smith mortgages on a long list of properties including the Dickinson Homestead, now doubly encumbered. That was in May 1825. In August he sold his long-lived father’s East Street farm fifteen days after his death, the money coming once again from his brother-in-law Smith, whose own foundations were now trembling. In January, acting together, the Squire and Smith made a questionable deal with their widowed sister-in-law, Lucinda Dickinson, and her underage children, assigning them several previously mortgaged properties in exchange for $5,000.

  There is no doubt as to the basic meaning of these and other mortgages and sales: Samuel was trying to make interest payments and meet other debts by pledging and repledging all his capital. At the time Massachusetts (which still imprisoned for debt) did not have a modern insolvency or bankruptcy law establishing a procedure for giving fair and equal treatment to creditors, terminating hopeless debt, and starting over. Quite simply, there was no way out for Edward’s father, who had to continue borrowing larger and larger amounts, in the process corroding the fortunes of his relatives Oliver Smith and Lucinda Dickinson.

  The effect on Edward was to deepen the silent and stoical elements of his character. Again and again, as houses and commercial buildings and large acreages of farmland were exchanged for a few more months’ breathing space, he was present at the transactional moment, affixing his name as legal witness. Although he left no direct record of his response to such events, his basic mood is easily surmised from a sympathetic letter sent to him by Baker: “I know well enough what a blackness of darkness that is which envelopes a young man in your situation.”

  A further complication was that the Squire not only expanded his public activities but forcefully enlisted his son’s support, at times giving him an inside lesson on how things got done. Writing home from Boston at the moment when Austin Dickinson, the college’s lobbyist, was working to procure a charter from the legislature, Samuel commanded that “Master Dickinson’s business must be done & I must know it, at least by thursday’s mail—get security if possible—if not attach enough to secure it—the Auditors are very uneasy.”

  The effort succeeded, but on other occasions Edward risked being caught up in inflammatory and futile undertakings. The minister of Amherst’s First Church, the Reverend Daniel A. Clark, was a learned but rough and forceful preacher who deeply offended the parish’s wealthier members. (George Shepard, a professor at a seminary, recalled with admiration how certain passages in Clark’s sermons “would come suddenly like a great rasp across the audience.”) In an ill-considered attempt to preserve peace, Samuel pressed formal charges against him at a church meeting in December 1823 but then, leaving for Boston, failed to perform the impartial investigation that was required. When Edward was asked to do so in his place, taking depositions from Clark’s former congregation in Connecticut, he declined, citing his “extreme youth and entire inexperience” and his fear of “receiving an injury to my reputation, at the very outset of my career.” Prevailed on anyway, partly because “the charges were brought in my father’s name,” he never felt “more unpleasantly” than when entering the Connecticut stage on what would be his first big professional challenge. Edward didn’t care for the minister, but as his account of his investigation shows, he did his best to remain impartial while collecting and sifting a sorry tangle of allegations (among other things, Clark was accused of having “pulled out the nails” from a house he occupied). In the end, when a council of ministers unanimously exonerated the man of Samuel’s charges, Edward emerged unscathed, with a reputation for prudence and fair dealing.

  Two months after Clark’s acquittal and at the worst possible time for his own fortunes, Samuel cosigned a $3,600 guardianship bond for Hezekiah Wright Strong, his old ally in founding the academy and college. The result was that the Squire was apparently “obliged to furnish the money,” sued Strong for restitution, and was awarded $3,800 in August 1824. Strong, however, not only avoided paying up but snagged the Amherst postmastership that Samuel coveted for himself. Outraged at his debtor’s coup, Samuel whipped off a letter of protest to the postmaster general that disclosed Strong’s shaky finances and presented his own superior qualifications. Postmasterships paid well, and presently the Squire tried to get the job for Edward. Failing again, bitter and vindictive, he sued to have Strong removed from the guardianship of his own children, the grounds being that he was likely to appropriate for himself the funds reserved for their upbringing.

  This was the other side of the principled tenacity the Squire had displayed in founding Amherst College. Some men might be chastened by financial distress, reducing their activities and acting with less precipitation, but he seems to have flung his nets wider and wider. In later years his descendants, his last daughter, Elizabeth, in particular, venerated him as one of the righteous in Israel, one who risked and lost everything for Amherst College—a family myth largely accepted by twentieth-century biographers. What was forgotten was that Samuel jeopardized his in-laws’ wealth along with his own and recklessly intervened in others’ affairs. Carried away by an exaggerated sense of his public mandate, he left a legacy of shame and hardship as well as pride.

  Coping with this legacy in the years before his courtship and marriage helped make Edward Dickinson the husband and father he was. William and his other three brothers left Amherst to go into business elsewhere, but Edward came back, and although he looked for openings for an attorney in other towns, he took over from his unreliable father without leaving a single expression of exasperation. Unlike William, who was “Mad” to think of the pressures at home and turned them into an amusing drama, Edward learned the lessons of silence, honorable self-control, firm-jawed leadership, and the necessity of preserving family dignity. He had observed from close up a father’s disaster, and after being repeatedly bruised by it, gained an unshakable belief in the priority of family security and the importance of buckling on all the armor of fortitude and determination. In this way, the poet’s father came into possession of the loaded gun he would then pass down to his daughter.

  There was a definite military quality in Edward—a sense
of discipline, of readiness for combat, of standing at attention for life. In 1853, showing off the recently opened Amherst and Belchertown Railroad, he seemed to his daughter to be “marching around the town . . . like some old Roman General upon a Triumph Day.” In his old age she reported that in going for kindling he “steps like Cromwell.” It was in 1824 that Edward received his commission as ensign in his state’s militia. Quickly promoted to major, he acquired the sword, sash, and plume that were part of the correct parade regalia and began writing “Maj. Dickinson” above the masthead of newspapers he considered worth saving. He was an earnest participant in musters and encampments, and was soon convinced by the slack discipline that militia officers should be “instructed by Graduates from West Point.” That he backed such a reform (extreme for a believer in states’ rights) shows how much he believed in order and general uprightness, and in the basic ideal of the citizen-soldier. As he said in a training-day speech, “It is a distinctive trait in the character of our Government, that the citizen & soldier are combined—that we have rights & possessions as citizens, which, as soldiers, we must defend.” This fervently held view, nicely dovetailing with the young man’s armored stoicism, had lasting consequences for his treatment of his wife and daughters, whose sex disqualified them from citizenship.

  Early in 1826 Major Dickinson had “Camp duty” in the town of Monson, some twenty miles southeast of Amherst, in the course of which he sought a formal order to arrest a lieutenant colonel absent without leave and court-martial him under the articles of war. One evening, accompanied by a friend and fellow officer, he attended a chemical lecture given by the principal of Monson Academy. Chemistry was one of the sciences then in fashion, and it was both instructive and amusing to observe what happened when a fellow listener “took the Gas.” But Major Dickinson was less interested in the demonstrations up front than in the young woman sitting next to him. Her name was Emily Norcross, she was attractive, pleasant, and not overly talkative, and she posed an emphatic challenge to the masculine authority he now possessed.