The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  But she didn’t, and finally, when she was twenty, an age well past that at which most of the girls she knew were not just already married but already mothers, she realized that, married or not, she wanted to leave Barre Plains. She also realized that if she was going to do so, she’d best have some way to support herself. Fortunately, there was newly a way. All over the fledgling country, schools were mushrooming. There weren’t enough educated men to teach the press of pupils, so unmarried women, provided they had some education, were suddenly in demand to fill the gap. Lucretia had received an education, had even shown a particular aptitude for reading and writing. She took a job as a schoolteacher. Up at the Cape.

  She taught there for five years, correcting numbers and alphabet letters on the slates of a roomful of children, most of them boys, some just out of their cradles, others great gangly fifteen-year-olds. But Mark never again asked her to marry him, nor did any other young man, and in 1813, when she was twenty-five and well on her way to being a spinster, she decided to go to Philadelphia and take a teaching job there.

  Philadelphia! Lucretia had been jouncing for nearly a week along log-lined corduroy roads and crudely surfaced turnpikes when, in September, she caught her first sight of the prosperous city on the Delaware. Steamboats had recently begun to ply their way down the river, and she could have boarded one in New Jersey and gone at least part of her way on the water. But it was wartime. British ships were stationed downstream. Lucretia had chosen a stagecoach company that advertised overland routes that were safe despite the war, then endured such a rattling and shaking that, at times, she’d feared she and her fellow passengers would be hurled to the bottom of their cramped carriage or tossed up against the roof so hard their skulls would be crushed. But they’d made it to Philadelphia without calamity, and now, through the carriage’s tall, leather-shaded windows, Lucretia started seeing gleaming white marble buildings; wide, regular avenues; and an extraordinary crush of people—merchants in frock coats, women in stylish high-waisted gowns, soldiers in blue and scarlet uniforms.

  The vision excited her, and when the driver reined the horses to a stop, she stepped eagerly from the coach, ready to start what she was certain would be a new and better life. How could it not be? She would be living in Philadelphia, the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally vibrant city of the new American republic, and she would be teaching at a new French school, an evening school for adults. Her French was rudimentary. But she’d taught herself enough to be able to instruct beginners, and Jean Julien Bergerac, the man who had hired her, had been happy to offer her a job. Everything French, from the couture to the quadrille to the language, was in fashion now that France had allied itself with America in the war against the English. Indeed, so popular had France become that it seemed as if everyone wanted to learn the country’s language—four new French schools were due to open in Philadelphia that very autumn. Bergerac had been hard-pressed to find teachers with any French at all.

  He was there to meet her. He kissed her hand, inquired after her health in heavily accented English, and told her he’d rented elegant and spacious quarters for his academy on an excellent corner, New Market Street and Stamper’s Alley. Then he accompanied her to the baggage shed to retrieve the luggage she had sent on ahead.

  It wasn’t there—not her bundle of bedding, or her case of toiletries, or her trunks, the two trunks she had packed so carefully with all her dresses, cashmere shawls, and lamb’s wool petticoats and drawers. Somewhere en route, all her possessions had disappeared.

  Distraught, Lucretia asked Bergerac what she should do, and he told her not to worry. He’d advertise her loss in the local papers, he said, and with luck the bags would turn up. With luck they’d not been stolen, but had merely fallen off the baggage wagon; whoever had found them would happily return them once he knew their rightful owner.

  Lucretia doubted it. She had reason to distrust the honesty of her fellow men and women. But she kept this to herself and accepted Bergerac’s offer to pay for an ad for her, several ads if necessary.

  A short while later, ensconced in a room on Pine Street the Frenchman had arranged for her to occupy, she unpacked the meager few things she had carried with her and made ready to start her new and better life. Her teaching duties were not due to commence for another few weeks. She would have time to prepare her lessons. Time to explore her new city. Time to get used to the idea that she would be starting her new and better life considerably poorer than she had hoped and planned.

  During the next few weeks Lucretia got to know Philadelphia. She sauntered from her quiet neighborhood down to the bustling port, where the river was thick with three-masters under sail, and over to Center Square, where the waterworks were disguised by a little Greek temple, and out along Market Street, where so many wagons and horses were tied up, it looked as if some vast caravan out of Asia had just arrived. The city was astir with war activity, and nearly every day she encountered soldiers on parade or marching toward the wharves to board ships bound for battles in Canada. But civilian life was not much disrupted. On the brick-lined sidewalks, chimney sweeps and sidewalk scrubbers were still yodeling their services, and streetcorner food peddlers were touting their pepperpot soups, roasted corn, and molasses-drenched pears. Head shielded in a plumed bonnet and feet sheathed in thin-soled embroidered walking shoes, the provincial Lucretia took in the cacophony of sounds and gazed with ever-widening eyes at the city’s profusion of theaters, music schools, and professional offices—the chambers of doctors boasting that their consulting rooms were private, the chambers of dentists offering high fees for human teeth so that they could try to transplant them.

  She passed luxury, three-story houses that were rumored to possess flushing toilets and bathtubs that could be filled with hot running water. She passed squalor, too, waterside streets that were ankle-deep in mud, crowded alleyways where pestilential odors wafted from overtaxed privies, and tiny yardless houses draped with so much drying laundry they resembled tents.

  It was the luxury that most impressed her, the things that money could buy in Philadelphia. Fine velvet cloth and leather boots from England, perfumes and rouge from France, shawls from India, vases from China, even lion skins from Africa. You could buy just about anything in Philadelphia, and you could fill every spare moment with something interesting to do—see a circus, hear a concert, watch a great actor perform Shakespeare.

  One day Lucretia went to Peale’s Museum to see the fabled mastodon skeleton that had been dug up in the mountains of New York, and one night—it was just before she started her teaching duties—she saw the town at its most glorious, its public buildings and even many of its private mansions ablaze with a brilliant fiery light. The spectacle had been arranged to honor Commodore Perry, who two weeks earlier had routed the British in the Battle of Lake Erie. No Philadelphian—no American, for that matter—had ever seen so much light, so much banishing of night’s gloom. For Lucretia and all who witnessed it, the illumination of Philadelphia was at once both sight and symbol: the future would be boundlessly bright.

  On the day of the illuminations a thirty-five-year-old Englishman named William Chapman opened an office on Arch Street. The office would specialize, he announced, in arranging clients’ financial records and collecting overdue debts. A short, heavy-set man with a severe stammer, William had immigrated to the United States twelve years earlier, sailing from Bristol to Philadelphia on a vessel called the Roebuck, a three-master with a tiny crew, and undergoing numerous hardships on the voyage. The Roebuck wasn’t built to accommodate passengers—it was a cargo ship that took on voyagers only when it needed some extra ballast. William and a half-dozen other travelers had been given a place to sleep on a small wooden platform in the hold. They’d had to bring their own bedding, and even their own food—the only sustenance the captain promised to provide was bread and water from emergency supplies, should his vessel be shipwrecked. William had equipped himself with a barrel of biscuits and a few other foodstuffs,
and taken turns with his fellows at cooking simple meals on a brick hearth on the deck. But a tumult always ensued around the fire, with the weak being pushed out of the way by the strong, and William, whose garbled speech made it difficult for him to assert his rights to a turn, had frequently found himself shoved aside. Still, like so many immigrants before and since, William had suffered his hardships gratefully. He had been poor in England, but was expecting to be rich in America.

  After six long weeks his fortitude had been rewarded. On October 3, 1801, he’d stepped off the Roebuck’s swaying boards onto the firmness of a Philadelphia wharf and made his way into town, his feet unsteady and his arms clutched tightly around his sparse posessions—his bedding, the single box of clothing he had brought with him, and a little portable writing desk. The writing desk was his prized possession. It was through that desk that, somehow, he intended to become rich.

  An educated man, he’d worked first as a schoolteacher. But because of his stammer schoolboys often taunted him. And eventually, although still listing himself on official documents as a schoolmaster, he’d begun to pursue bookkeeping, a more behind the scenes occupation.

  Even that proved a struggle for him in the beginning. Although he was skilled with numbers, many people declined his services, finding his way of speaking tiresome, or worse, unintelligible. He couldn’t blame them. When he spoke, his arms would flail, his head would jerk, his lips would twist into fearsome grimaces. Some who met him even viewed his stammering as a sign that he was a man of low intelligence—“A stammering tongue signifies a weak understanding, and a wavering mind,” Americans had been warned by a prominent physician of the time. Still, William was a man of great persistence, and gradually a few merchants had placed their accounts in his care and come away impressed by his precision, orderliness, and ability to keep a closed mouth about business secrets. He was still considered, William would later write, a subject of “painful commiseration.” But even so, by the time he opened his new office, he had garnered numerous clients, enough to make him advertise proudly on the day Philadelphia was illuminated that he could provide “the most respectable references.”

  He had also applied to become a citizen of America. Naturalization was in some ways a less formal process than it is now—Philadelphia’s Committee on Naturalization sometimes interviewed prospective citizens in a popular local tavern—but then as now it was a slow-moving one. Those who wanted to become Americans had to reside in the country at least five years before filing papers indicating they intended to become citizens and had subsequently to wait another three years before they could achieve that goal. William had applied in 1811. But in 1812, when the war with England broke out, he was still officially an alien, and as such, forced to register and to endure the constant suspicion that he might be a spy. Then, as the war continued, Pennsylvania offered its so-called friendly aliens the opportunity to prove their loyalty to America—they could enroll as volunteers in the militia. William promptly signed up.

  In the summer of 1814, almost a year after he had opened his new office, he was called to an onerous duty. The war had been going badly. The British had captured Washington, burning many of its principal buildings. Now they were heading north toward Baltimore. Philadelphia’s officials, afraid that if Baltimore fell, the British would march on their city, mobilized the volunteers, and William and hundreds of other unlikely soldiers—shopkeepers and silversmiths, lawyers and laborers—were dispatched to encampments south of Philadelphia to help the regular army protect the imperiled metropolis.

  For the next few weeks the untried soldiers engaged in fatiguing marches up steep rough hills and, guns in arms, endured interminable drills. Sometimes they hefted their weapons for eighteen hours a day, becoming so exhausted they fell asleep the moment they lay down on their straw pallets. Soon they were sleeping through the booming of the cannon that was used to awaken them, its ear-shattering sound, at first so electrifying, no longer even penetrating their dreams.

  The weather, too, oppressed the men. It was a rainy autumn. “Not a stitch of dry clothing in the camp,” one soldier wrote in his diary. “Never rained harder since the flood.” Worse, food rations were short. Sometimes the men, even the regulars, received nothing but a thin, eight-inch-long slice of beef and a single loaf of bread for an entire day’s sustenance. But the situation of the volunteers was particularly desperate. One day they were given no rations at all. Nor were they fed the day after that.

  On the third day the volunteers mutinied. Starving and dizzy, they gathered in the center of their camp and refused to do any further duty. After all, they shouted, the men of the regular army were being fed. Why were they being left to drill and march on empty stomachs? Were they not American soldiers, too?

  The protest grew rowdy and vehement. Some volunteers merely milled about, cursing their officers and declining to form ranks, others said they were leaving and began packing their knapsacks. Their superiors tried to quell the mutiny, insisting the officers of the regular army would soon learn of the protest and send supplies. But no food wagons appeared. Instead, troops from the regular army came marching on the double toward the volunteers’ camp, their gaze forward and their muskets at a tilt. Seconds later they surrounded the volunteers and their commanding officer demanded that the mutineers lay down their arms. The volunteers panicked, sure they were about to die, for the regulars were lowering their weapons and taking aim.

  At that moment a general came striding into the midst of the rebellious soldiers. He was Brigadier General Cadwalader, the man in charge of the entire encampment. He called out to the mutineers that they were behaving absurdly, that the failure to provide them with food had been merely a quartermaster’s oversight. Return to your duty, he commanded. If you return to duty, you’ll be fed.

  The volunteers heard the words as if through a deluge. Their hearts were beating as loudly as thunder. Then suddenly one of them backed down and yelled, “Three cheers for Cadwalader,” and quickly others joined his capitulation. They shouted hurrahs, they clapped and cheered, and they began to fall into formation. At this the soldiers who had been aiming at them put down their weapons. The unruly volunteers were part of the army again, not mutineers, not rebels.

  Perhaps it was on that frightening day, certainly it was sometime during 1814, the year he was a soldier, the year he’d had orders hurled at him and been in danger of losing limbs or even life if he stalled at indicating compliance or at least comprehension, that something altogether extraordinary happened to William. He began to speak without stammering. For the rest of his life he would revere that year, mark it as a turning point. Somehow words had stopped stumbling madly over one another in his throat, making him crow with the pain of their collision. Somehow he had taught himself to move his mouth without hawing and croaking, without twisting his lips all the way over to his ears or all the way down to his jaw, and had found himself complaining, cursing, talking, just like all the other soldiers.

  Lucretia’s life also took a turn for the better in 1814. She had not been sheltered from the war. The same threat of British invasion that had driven William into soldiering had taken a toll on the civilian population. Philadelphia’s administrators had issued an edict warning the population that as soon as the enemy began marching toward the city, all citizens would be required to destroy their provisions and disable their water pumps, so that the British would be unable to get food or drink. Some people had decided not to wait for a potential invasion and its ensuing hardships. Wealthy Philadelphians packed their silver and silks into Conestoga wagons and sent them out of the city. Less affluent citizens followed suit, packing their carts with more ordinary goods, with blankets and chickens and hoarded food, then climbing aboard themselves. In the exodus, merchants suffered. Theaters went unattended. Evening schools like Lucretia’s lost students.

  Lucretia didn’t flee. But like all who remained behind, she was frightened, and frequently she hurried over to Chestnut Street to join the throngs of men an
d women who gathered there to glean the latest war news. On the fifteenth of September, 1814, a particularly dense crowd assembled and began exchanging dire rumors, when all at once a panting horse and rider came galloping down the street. The rider reined to a stop and, too out of breath to speak, sat his horse in silence. For an awful few seconds the crowd heard nothing but his heavy breath rising and falling. Then he shouted exultantly, “The damned British have been defeated and their general killed!” Moments later the details of the battle for Baltimore spread like a warming blaze through the crowd. The British had viciously shelled the city’s Fort McHenry. They’d bombarded it for forty-eight hours. But the Americans had held out, their striped and star-spangled banner still waving victoriously over the fort as the British began to retreat. The Americans had triumphed.

  For Lucretia, as for all the other Philadelphians who had stayed in the edgy city, while fear of the British didn’t altogether disappear after that feverish day, it became muted, faint, for as the fall progressed, each day brought better and better news. In New York the American navy defeated the British in the Battle of Plattsburg. In Florida General Andrew Jackson broke their alliance with the Creek Indians at the Battle of Pensacola. Lucretia also received good news of a more personal nature.

  It concerned her older brothers, Mark and Edward, who were quite unlike their law-abiding ancestors. The brothers had joined a ring of counterfeiters, and a court in Worcester had learned of their activities and begun to investigate them. The good news, conveyed to Lucretia by her concerned parents, was that the court’s chief witness against Mark and Edward had disappeared. He’d been bribed to run away, the prosecuting attorney had railed, but absent that witness, the prosecutor had been forced to drop his charges.