Father was playing with some verses from Lamentations about the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple: “He putteth his mouth in the dust” (3:29) and “Depart ye; it is unclean; depart, depart” (4:15). *79 We catch wind here of the weird humor Edward ordinarily chose to suppress.
Such outbursts riveted Emily’s attention, in part because Father was the absolute embodiment of sedate public authority. In 1850, his dignity had been lampooned in a mock public program perpetrated by an unknown group of college students. Among the performances listed on the printed document are a snare drum solo by Satan and a song by the “Ambitious Young Ladies of Amherst” (including Emily for her recent “ambitious” publication of a Valentine in The Indicator?). The crowd-pleasing finale was to be a “Grand break down from the Treasurer with village accompaniment.” The idea is a pleasing one, and we cannot resist picturing the poet’s severe father in coat and neckcloth, stiff above the waist as his mad feet stir up the dust. As he dances, he mutteringly laments, “Unclean, unclean!”
Edward headed the search committee that brought in the Reverend Edward S. Dwight as candidate for minister; he won unanimous approval. Dwight had a more refined pulpit manner than his predecessor, the pungent Colton, and he made a fine first impression on George C. Shepard, who described him as “a good looking, pleasanter, social, gentlemanly man.” Unlike Phinehas Cooke, Dwight made orthodoxy palatable and up-to-date, striking everyone, even Emily, as an excellent choice. She not only shared the church’s anxiety that he might decline its offer, she resumed going to meeting, forenoon and afternoon. “He has preached wonderfully,” she wrote Austin; “how I wished you were there.”
Although Dickinson often turned to ministers for advice and comfort, Dwight was the last whose preaching she regularly sought out. For a time, she even went to church when she alone occupied the family pew, located close to the front on the right aisle. The letters describing her feelings as she walked toward this conspicuous seat show how much she abhorred the public gaze and required the mediating presence of favored intimates. Once, she made a point of arriving five minutes early so as “not to have to go in after all the people had got there.” When Vinnie was gone and Sue was missing from the nearby Cutler pew, she felt a queasy exposure to village stares: “How big and broad the aisle seemed . . . as I quaked slowly up – and reached my usual seat! In vain I sought to hide behind your feathers – Susie – feathers and Bird had flown, and there I sat, and sighed, and wondered I was scared so, for surely in the whole world was nothing I need to fear – Yet there the Phantom was.” Trying to make sense of this panic, she noted that in Sue’s absence “the world looks staringly, and I find I need more vail.” *80
By 1860 the Reverend Dwight seems to have fallen out of favor, his wife’s health was failing, and it was time to quit. In Shepard’s eyes, he had shrunk to a mere tailor’s block, “a fine little specimen of a man, with black cravat [and] black coat that sets so well.” Nothing in his sermons was ever “said amiss—& nothing to instruct or edify any one—He is a pretty nonentity!” The wrath of this listener (who taught preaching in a seminary) becomes somewhat understandable if one opens Dwight’s slender published corpus and listens to his bland, perfectly modulated, and very boring voice. A trustee of Amherst College, he found his true niche—a subordinate one: he served as recording secretary. The only praise he got in William S. Tyler’s tepid biographical sketch was for his “neatness, propriety and faithfulness” in keeping minutes.
Emily eventually lost interest in Dwight’s preaching and ceased going to meeting, but she remained a loyal friend to him and his wife. Among his leading ideas were the voluntary nature of religious instruction and the separation of church and state. Underneath, unlike Colton and Cooke and Shepard and many other evangelical preachers, the man wasn’t confrontational. One reason the poet-in-the-making favored the “pretty nonentity” was that he offered protection—helped weave the intricate “vail” behind which she could feel safe.
The Amherst and Belchertown Railroad
Although Dickinson believed in her father’s basic rightness and hoped he would prevail, she was not well informed about his many civic, business, and political engagements, which impacted her chiefly through the ongoing labor of entertaining invited clerics, judges, governors, and such. Yet she remained deeply invested in the success of his operations. Hearing that someone had praised a rival as “the finest Lawyer in Amherst,” she huffily denounced the opinion as “the apex of human impudence.”
On one intriguing question, Emily’s reaction in her early twenties to her father’s energetic antifeminism, the record is frustratingly blank. In 1853 a former teacher named Prudence W. Eastman sued her husband, a minister, for divorce on grounds of cruelty. Deposed testimony indicated he was harsh and exacting and that she was subject to “convulsive affections of her nerves.” Her mother saw bruises, heard her daughter groan behind closed doors, and confirmed that the minister had done what the suit alleged—namely, attempted “forcibly to confine her” at home and in a lunatic asylum. The wife was represented by Rufus Choate, the state’s attorney general and leading trial lawyer; the husband, by Edward Dickinson. The Springfield Republican, following the trail closely, described Edward’s defense as a “vigorous onset” that “carried the war into Africa.” Calling a number of witnesses, mainly female, to show she “was at times greatly excited, and would talk very rapidly and shed tears very profusely,” he succeeded in construing Prudence’s emotional fragility as “insanity” and turning it to her disadvantage. We know Emily was paying close attention to the Republican at the time but can only guess where her sympathies lay when the suit was dismissed.
We know a great deal, on the other hand, about her excited reaction to Edward’s two big achievements in this period—bringing a railroad to Amherst and getting elected to Congress.
After earlier failures to bring a branch line to Amherst, Edward renewed the struggle in 1850, when a railroad running north from New London reached nearby Palmer. Since branch lines rarely paid and were hard to finance, it was decided to propose a through line north from Palmer that would pass through Belchertown and Amherst and, terminating at Montague, connect with an existing line. Emily’s father, Luke Sweetser, Ithamar Conkey, and others got themselves incorporated as the Amherst and Belchertown Railroad and began raising money. The Hampshire and Franklin Express whipped up enthusiasm, the college authorized Treasurer Dickinson to buy fifty shares at $100 each (though some trustees questioned the security of the investment), and local citizens were induced to step forward and back the venture. Opposition arose, part of it from farmers who didn’t want their land sliced up, *81 but the promoters were not to be stopped.
In February 1852 a crowd of four hundred assembled in Sweetser’s Hall to hear the electrifying news: enough shares had been sold for construction to begin, and the New London, Willimantic, and Palmer Company was going to operate the line. Edward and others made speeches, a cannon was set off, and two days later his son got a note from him in which the boasting was qualified by a dry behind-the-scenes sarcasm:
You will see by the Editor’s glorification article in today’s ‘Express,’ that the Am. & Bel. r. road is “a fixed fact.” The contract is made—the workmen will be digging, in “Logtown,” next week—& we shall see those animating shantees, smoking through an old flour barrel, for a chimney, before many days. . . .
The two great eras in the history of Amherst, are
1. The founding of the College.
2. The building of the rail road.
We here “set up our Ebenezer.”
HaHa!!!
According to I Samuel 7:12, the Ebenezer, or stone of help, was erected to commemorate God’s intervention for Israel against the Philistines. In Job 39:24–25 the warhorse “swalloweth the ground . . . [and] saith among the trumpets, Ha, ha.”
In the same envelope went a crowing letter from Emily:
Every body is wide awake, every thing is stirring, the streets
are full of people talking cheeringly. . . . The men begin working next week, only think of it, Austin; why I verily believe we shall fall down and worship the first “Son of Erin” that comes, and the first sod he turns will be preserved as an emblem of the struggles and victory of our heroic fathers. Such old fellows as Col’ Smith and his wife, fold their arms complacently, and say, “well, I declare, we have got it after all” – got it, you good for nothings! and so we have, in spite of sneers and pities, and insults from all around; and we will keep it too, in spite of earth and heaven!
Here, the poet’s sympathies seem wholly enlisted on the side of her father, echoing his partisanship and mockery alike. For the moment she, too, sounds like the ha-haing warhorse.
But in summer 1853, when a crowd came up from New London to celebrate the new line’s operation, she acted like a bystander, preferring the woods to industrial progress:
Father was as usual, Chief Marshal of the day, and went marching around the town with New London at his heels like some old Roman General, upon a Triumph Day. . . . Carriages flew like sparks, hither, and thither and yon, and they all said t’was fine. I spose it was – I sat in Prof Tyler’s woods and saw the train move off, and then ran home again for fear somebody would see me, or ask me how I did.
The original idea was to build the line in two stages: first the nineteen miles from Palmer to Amherst, then the remainder to Montague. But after the first half proved a financial wash, the second was indefinitely postponed and the road remained a branch line after all. The capital outlay, $290,000, was far out of line with the level of traffic in goods and passengers. One month after the big party, Vinnie reported that Father was “mad with the whole New London company, they are very mean & impudent.” The Republican openly complained about the A&B’s unpaid printing bills, and a national credit-rating company noted in its ledgers that the stock paid no dividends and the company could raise money only by finding “sureties for its repayment.” Always a backer of local development, Edward provided much of this money, buying $8,100 worth of A&B bonds by the end of 1854. One notes, however, that, unlike the shares bought by Amherst College and others, bonds entail repayment.
In Dickinson’s well-known poem about a train, a first-person speaker enjoys observing an iron horse that insists on having its own disruptive way, swallowing ground and water and noisily complaining when squeezed by a rocky cut. Carrying no freight or passengers, as Charles Anderson noted, her train exists to enact its own powerful and mechanical will, in the process offering a spectatorial thrill. In the end, however, as Domhnall Mitchell observes, the locomotive only “seems unstoppable”:
I like to see it lap the Miles –
And lick the Valleys up –
And stop to feed itself at Tanks –
And then – prodigious step
Around a Pile of Mountains –
And supercilious peer
In Shanties – by the sides of Roads –
And then a Quarry pare
To fit its Ribs
And crawl between
Complaining all the while
In horrid – hooting stanza –
Then chase itself down Hill –
And neigh like Boanerges –
Then – punctual as a Star
Stop – docile and omnipotent
At its own stable door –
Fr383
The poem nicely represents the huge destabilizing forces of the industrial revolution, not omitting the shanties and blasted bedrock, yet the conclusion, with its safe return home, has a naive and reassuring pastoralism. The poem evokes two opposing aspects of Dickinson’s life: her sympathy with her father’s invincible push for a rail link, and her dependence on the bucolic shelter he provided. Untamable and domestic, omnipotent and docile, she and her locomotive exemplify the same paradox.
We get the more prosaic truth about Amherst’s railroad from Helen Hunt Jackson’s description of a branch line in Mercy Philbrick’s Choice. As Jackson’s train heads for the village that marks the termination of the line, the conductor tells the two remaining passengers that the company originally intended “to connect with the northern roads; but they’ve come to a stand-still for want o’ funds, an’ more’n half the time I don’t carry nobody over this last ten miles. Most o’ the people from our town go the other way, on the river road. It’s shorter, an’ some cheaper.” The actual A&B must have been a lot duller than the poem suggests. The real thrill lay elsewhere, in the attempt to harness a supreme and overpowering force. That was partly what Edward and Emily were after, in such different ways.
Constancy Without Reward
Edward’s one term in the U.S. House of Representatives basically ended his political career, transforming him into a man without a party, sidelined and frustrated. His brief entrance on the national stage had two momentous consequences for Dickinson: she met the man, as we shall see in the next chapter, whom she came to think of as “my dearest earthly friend,” and her father’s political isolation gave her a way to understand and confront her own destiny.
Not being a career politician whose livelihood depended on getting elected, Edward did not have to adjust to changing views on the bitterly divisive issues associated with slavery. That he detested the peculiar institution seems clear: in his first year at college he argued it was “manifestly unjust for one human being to hold another in bondage,” and in 1840 he defended three local blacks who had abducted an eleven-year-old black orphan girl to keep her from being sold into slavery. Yet Edward also detested abolition, believing that a federal prohibition of slavery would violate state sovereignty and undo the Constitution. As he and other conservative Whigs recognized, our founding document, a product of negotiation and compromise, did in fact legitimize slavery. What he and they could not face was that this feature represented a catastrophic original flaw.
Straddling the difficulty in the classic Whig way, Edward opposed the formation of new slave states but brooked no federal interference with state law. Following Daniel Webster, he took his stand on the Compromise of 1850, which gave the South the Fugitive Slave Law in exchange for the admission of California as a free state and some other measures. Abolitionists were furious with Webster, but Massachusetts’ old-line Whigs backed him all the way, opening themselves to the charge of compromising with principle. Henceforth, Edward found himself making common cause at times with such pro-slavery men as William C. Fowler (father of Emily Fowler). Some years later, as if to defend himself, he marked the passages in Hinton Helper’s Impending Crisis of the South that proved Webster’s hatred of slavery.
When Edward went to Baltimore in June 1852 to represent his district at the Whig national convention, he dryly wrote home that “the whole world was there, and some from other worlds” but admitted he had found “many old friends” and was enjoying himself. Emily was relieved “to have father at last, among men who sympathize with him, and know what he really is.” Home-loving as he was, Emily knew how much he required the masculine strife of politics and principle. The specter of his and others’ isolation greatly troubled her. *82
Webster’s support proved too regional to snag the nomination, and the convention chose as its presidential nominee General Winfield Scott, a southerner thought to be antislavery. Resolutely supporting his party, Edward was rewarded in September with the nomination for Massachusetts’ 10th Congressional District. But the Whigs were hopelessly divided, the northern wing splintered by a vigorous Free Soil movement, the southern wing defecting to the Democrats. Massachusetts sent a solid Whig phalanx to Congress, including the poet’s father, who won by a plurality in a December runoff, but nationwide Scott was crushed and the party fared so poorly it ceased to be a viable political force. Edward would go to the Capitol as part of an isolated remnant, with no chance of making his views prevail.
Emily apparently got word of her father’s narrow victory on December 16. The note she wrote Sue the next day seems more elated than dismayed, but her tone is so giddy it is
hard to interpret. Her opening sentences announce that she has been stunned, knocked out of her proper sphere: “I regret to inform you that at 3. oclock yesterday [when she heard the news?], my mind came to a stand, and has since then been stationary. . . . By this untoward providence a mental and moral being has been swept ruthlessly from her sphere.” Following this, she seems to be doing a series of spot riffs and impersonations, talking bigtime like a victorious male politician: “I see by the Boston papers that Giddings is up again – hope you’ll arrange with Corwin, and have the North all straight . . . have spoken for 52 cord black walnut.” Joshua Giddings and Thomas Corwin were former or present Whigs with abolition tendencies. No matter how much wood was needed for a celebratory bonfire (and Edward’s woodpile did sustain a memorable raid), fifty-two cords would obviously be excessive.
Edward left for Washington in December 1853, when Congress convened for a session lasting eight months. To mark the event, Emily took a sheet of stationery with an embossed Capitol and drew a feathered Indian, captioned “Member from 10th,” walking toward the domed hall. Adding a smoking chimney and making some rough pencil strokes to emphasize the curved top, she deftly turned Congress into a wigwam—the rounded northeastern Indian house that Democrats, beginning with Tammany Hall, had made the symbol of their party organization. Given the party’s Irish support, the drawing may also allude to shanties and barrel chimneys. Emily was saying that Congress was now a Democratic stronghold, and that the Member from 10th was walking into a fight.
She was also caricaturing her father’s small-town roughness and ferocity, something everyone agreed he would have to try to mend. When he sent out cards, Vinnie commented that “he says he dont know much about etiquet but he is trying to learn.” Still, the New Englander saw no reason to qualify his supercilious view of Washington: there was “hardly enough of mentality here to hold the place together,” he wrote Austin—“a dont-care air which renders every body callous to everything good.” Nothing could trump his allegiance to home and community. Having consented to referee a local lawsuit, he returned to Massachusetts in January and again in February to help broker a deal.
My Wars Are Laid Away in Books Page 31