The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  Relieved for her parents and no longer dreading a British invasion, Lucretia mobilized herself to make a change in her circumstances. Bergerac’s school, despite her initial hopes, had not done very well. It was time to leave. Saying goodbye to her first Philadelphia employer, she took a position with one of his competitors, a Monsieur Charles LeBrun.

  LeBrun’s establishment, a boarding school on Spruce Street that he ran with his wife, was highly regarded, for LeBrun was famous. He had translated a number of important French and Spanish works; had published a book of his own, Bienfait d’un Philosophe; and written a popular textbook on how to teach French to the young. The children who boarded with the LeBruns, boys from some of Philadelphia’s wealthiest families, studied French by LeBrun’s method, which entailed not just learning French grammar and literature, but doing basic arithmetic in the unfamiliar tongue. Nevertheless, they were also expected to master their native language, and Lucretia, whose French was still not proficient, was hired to teach English to these upper-crust youngsters. She taught them to read simple stories, like the one about a bee who so surfeited himself on nectar that he could no longer fly, and the one about the good little boy who broke his family’s best mirror but confessed to his misdeed because, as he told his father, he could not tell a lie. She built their vocabularies with hectoring homilies like “Without frugality, none can be rich,” and “Diligence, industry, and proper improvement of time are material duties of the young.” And at night, alone in the boardinghouse to which she’d moved, Mrs. Blayney’s big place on South Eighth Street, she began to think about improving on her own use of time.

  Madame LeBrun was cultivated and artistic. She knew how to sing and accompany herself on the piano. Lucretia decided to use her association with the accomplished Frenchwoman to become a more cultured person herself, and she started taking lessons from Madame LeBrun in advanced French, singing, and the piano.

  Only a small minority of American families, fewer than one in a hundred, owned a piano—an expensive instrument cost as much as a small house, while even an inexpensive one could set an average worker back a half year’s wages—and possession of a piano had become a badge of gentility. “To beautify the room by so superb an ornament,” one music teacher of the time declared, is “the only thing that distinguishes ‘decent people’ from the lower and less distinguished.” This was true whether those who owned a piano could play it or not. Being able to play conveyed even higher distinction. The woman who knew how to do so—and at the time Lucretia learned the instrument it was almost exclusively the province of females—was signaling as soon as she sat down at the keyboard that she was a well-to-do, refined person. Lucretia knew this and attended to her music lessons avidly, and in time her ability to sing and play the piano, plus the fact that she was teaching the offspring of highly placed Philadelphians, gained her entry into sophisticated circles. She was invited to cotillions, dinners, and tea parties, and introduced to men.

  But despite all her new skills, none of the men she met offered what she still desired but increasingly suspected she would never obtain—a marriage proposal. Perhaps the men were put off by her height—at five feet, ten inches tall, she towered over many men of her day—or perhaps they found her, with her independence and broad knowledge, insufficiently womanly. Years later a journalist would do so, and would brand her for all time with the condemnatory term “masculine.” In the meantime, single, she remained with the LeBruns for the next three years, years during which the war ended in victory for America, patriotism reached a new high, and a surge of interest in educating female students arose.

  Girls needed to be educated, went the thinking of the day, not because education would benefit girls, but because their being educated would benefit the country. They were vessels that could early pour into the next generation of men principles of virtue and freedom—provided they could be made to understand these. They were vehicles that could produce, as the journalist Frances Wright was shortly to put it, “a new race,” a breed of men who would see to it that America’s national character became the envy of “any nation on earth.”

  In 1817 Lucretia became an early champion of the new trend. She took the bold step of leaving the LeBruns to open a school of her own—a girls’ school. “Miss Winslow most respectfully informs her friends and the public,” she advertised in the fall of the year in Relf’s Philadelphia Gazette, that come November she would be opening a seminary on South Second Street “where YOUNG LADIES will be instructed in all the useful and ornamental branches of a polite education.”

  Lucretia’s seminary for young ladies was not the first such school. Ambitious and idealistic female instructors had been opening girls’ schools, often in their own homes, sometimes with but a single pupil or two, ever since the 1790s. But there weren’t many of these pioneers, and until the 1820s there weren’t many girls’ schools; Lucretia’s Young Ladies Seminary in Philadelphia, which antedated by several years such eventually famous female seminaries as Emma Hart Willard’s in Troy, New York and Catharine Beecher’s in Hartford, Connecticut, was among the country’s first.

  At the time she opened it, she had no access to textbooks written specifically to cater to the interests of girls. In a few years publishers would begin putting out many such works. In the meantime Lucretia contented herself with schoolbooks that, while written for boys, made an effort to include at least some material that might strike a girl’s fancy—books like John Hamilton Moore’s Young Gentleman and Young Lady’s Explanatory Monitor, which contained an essay on beauty and a critique of girlish habits like giggling and whispering, and Susanna Rowson’s An Abridgement of Universal Geography, which included observations on the status of women in countries throughout the world. Rowson was one of Lucretia’s favorite authors. Lucretia had read with tearful eyes and racing heart the writer’s Charlotte Temple, the story of a young woman who was seduced and abandoned by a handsome stranger, and she would always remember that book and allude to it in her later years.

  Still, despite her own fondness for fiction, Lucretia didn’t encourage her pupils to read novels, for the educational ethos of the day frowned upon girls’ reading made-up stories. Rather, schoolgirls were expected to apply themselves in their spare time to the kind of reading that would develop their moral fiber. In the ad for her seminary, which touted her years of teaching experience and her fine references, Lucretia promised prospective parents that at her school they might “rely on the most scrupulous attention being paid to [teaching their daughters] morals and improvement.”

  She left no record of how she taught these matters. But the handwritten notes of a schoolgirl at a comparable seminary in Litchfield, Connecticut suggest the nature of that education. “Have you rose early enough for the duties of the morning,” wrote the Litchfield girl in a list of questions she had been taught to ask herself each day. “Have you read a portion of scripture by yourself.… Have you wasted any part of holy time by idle conversation, light reading, or sloth.… Have you shown decent and respectful behaviour to those who have charge over you.… Have you torn your clothes, books, or maps. Have you wasted paper, quills, or any other articles. Have you walked out without liberty. Have you combed your hair with a fine tooth comb, and cleaned your teeth every morning.”

  Lucretia ran her school for both day and boarding students, providing the boarders with beds, linens, and meals. She didn’t do much cooking herself—she employed a cook for the tedious business of preparing meals over an open fire. But she often did the shopping. She chose plump vegetables at farmers’ stalls, selected fish from innovative dealers who brought their wares to market on sloops loaded with ice, and decided what meat to purchase by watching the city’s parades of “show” meat, farm animals decked out in garlands and bright ribbons, that were driven through the streets prior to slaughter.

  In a short while she acquired the knack of running an establishment that was more than simply a schoolhouse, and began putting by enough money to hire a few auxiliary
teachers for the school and even to spend some on herself.

  There were all sorts of new things on which to spend money—gory waxwork displays, breathtaking balloon ascensions, shocking exhibitions featuring men and women cavorting together uninhibitedly after inhaling nitrous oxide gas, as well as myriad new stores selling ever fancier and fancier goods. Around the corner from Lucretia’s school there was a particular mecca for luxury shoppers. She had only to step out of her door and walk along Second Street to see shops selling imported fruit and expensive clothing, tableware and books, all ranged, according to a writer of the day, along great stretches of pavement filled with “crowds upon crowds of buyers, sellers, and gazers.” When Lucretia had first come to Philadelphia, she had been a mere gazer. Now, only three years after her arrival, she could afford to be a buyer. But for all the good fortune of her present life, she still had a nagging unhappiness—she was a spinster, she was nearing thirty, and chances were she would never marry.

  William Chapman, the teacher and bookkeeper, had become interested in science. In this he resembled many members of his generation, for early Americans idealized science, considered it not just a prestigious but even a sublime pursuit. Moreover, situated as he was in Philadelphia, William was living in the country’s scientific capital, home to a great hospital, a renowned medical school, and numerous scientific societies. But William had a special and personal reason to be interested in science. For centuries the prevailing wisdom had held that the ailments that plagued mankind, including mental retardation, deafness, muteness, and William’s personal scourge, stammering, were God-given and therefore immutable. But, in the wake of the revolutions that had swept both America and France in the late eighteenth century, a dramatic shift in thinking had occurred, a growing conviction that the human condition was amenable to correction, not just through political change but through science. And indeed some of the once seemingly unalterable afflictions had begun to yield to the discoveries of scientists. Philippe Pinel had developed techniques for treating the insane; the Abbé Sicard had taught the deaf and dumb to communicate through sign language. William, himself able to communicate relatively normally at last, conjectured that stammerers could also be helped—if only proper techniques could be devised—and while still making his living as a bookkeeper, began to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and to learn as much as he could about blocked speech.

  Working on the problem, he developed a method for correcting stammering, and soon became convinced that it was foolproof. He told others that he’d found such a method. But he kept the details secret.

  Lucretia met William around this time. He was older than she was—forty to her thirty—and he was shorter, a good few inches shorter. But she found him intriguing—he talked passionately about his discovery and his hopes of aiding stammerers. More importantly, he found her appealing, and his interest in her enabled her to overlook his bulky body and the grimaces, a leftover from his earlier years, that occasionally wracked his features.

  The two of them had a number of things in common—an interest in education, an appreciation of the struggles that newcomers to Philadelphia faced in trying to make a place for themselves in the city, and above all a lust, that enduring American lust, for money and success. When William asked Lucretia to be his wife, she said yes, and in August 1818, happy to have found a husband after all her years of being single, she married him.

  Three

  Marriage

  1819–1828

  WILLIAM HAD TRIED OUT his method for curing stammering on a young man with serious speech hesitancy and, working with him for nearly a year, succeeded in getting him to express himself clearly. It was time, he decided soon after he married Lucretia, to test his method on other stammerers, time to teach as many as he could how they, too, could speak properly.

  He wasn’t the only person working on the problem of stammering. Throughout Europe and America physicians and pedagogues alike were experimenting with ways to alleviate or cure the difficulty, each practitioner asserting the supremacy of his own favorite technique. A few employed harsh, mutilating, and occasionally fatal methods like surgically cutting the strings of the tongue or the nerves of the cheek. Others used less drastic methods: mechanical means that entailed placing a wad of cloth under a stammerer’s tongue or encompassing the root of that organ with a tiny golden or ivory fork; rigorous diets that involved swallowing purgatives or consuming great quantities of salty foods; rhythmics that required marking the intervals between words with slight movements of the feet or strong movements of the arms. But whatever method they used, virtually all those who tried to cure stammering did so by also giving their clients breathing and vocalization exercises.

  William’s method and specific exercises are unknown. He never revealed his technique, and neither did any of those who came to him for treatment—he demanded they sign legally binding papers swearing that they would not “tell, reveal or communicate to any person or persons, either directly or indirectly, in any manner or form whatsoever, the Course of Application or any Rules thereunto belonging.” Nevertheless, William began boasting that he had found a cure for stammering—“the” cure, he called it—and he was believed. No matter that the boast should have strained credulity, that even today there is no foolproof single cure for stammering. No matter that most stammerers, some say as high a number as eighty percent, eventually are cured with or without treatment, simply by outgrowing the condition. William, rather like a self-help guru of our own day, announced himself to be a miracle worker, and the afflicted, eager to believe in miracles, flocked to him. By 1820, a year that saw the establishment in Philadelphia of two institutions, one public, one private, for teaching sign language to the deaf and dumb, William was working as both an accountant and a speech therapist, and planning to open an institution of his own, the United States Institution for the Treatment of Defective Utterance.

  That year, far from Philadelphia in the port city of Cartagena, Colombia, a man named Manuel Entrealgo was laying plans to transport his family—a wife, three sons, and two daughters—to the island of Cuba. Simón Bolívar had just been elected president of the Republic of Greater Colombia, a vast territory he had helped liberate from the rule of the Spanish crown, and Entrealgo, a royalist, preferred the idea of living in Cuba, where Spain’s King Ferdinand VII still reigned, to living in the new democratic state that Bolivar was patterning on that of the United States. In 1821 the disaffected Entrealgo succeeded in arranging passage for himself and the family, and by 1822 he was living in the city of Trinidad on Cuba’s southern coast and working there as a city surveyor. One of his sons was a thirteen-year-old, a boy named Carolino Estrada Entrealgo.

  Lino, as the boy was called, was an agile adolescent with coal-black eyes and thick wavy hair. Like many boys, he was a day-dreamer, fond of inventing scenarios in which he won fierce battles, rescued the good from the clutches of evil, enjoyed the attentions of beautiful girls. He was also fond of pretending to himself that his father was not a mere civil servant but a Spanish grandee. And when, on occasion, he behaved badly, ignored his studies, stole from his mother or sisters, he told tall tales about why he had done so, tales that invariably exonerated him.

  Lucretia had a child of her own by then, her first daughter, Mary. Eventually she would have two more daughters, little Lucretia and Abby Ann, and two sons, William Jr. and John.

  She had started her family just at the time that Americans were beginning to say that being a mother was the most important and satisfying work any woman could do. Back when she was a girl, caring for children had been just another part of a mother’s daily round of chores, a part no more or less important than boiling and baking and turning the spinning wheel. Now she kept hearing all about her that the very safety and security of the country depended on a woman’s ability to shape the character of her children. More, she began reading in literary anthologies poems and stories that idealized mothers, and encountering in bookstores a new kind of publication
, the child-rearing manual.

  Part and parcel of her time, Lucretia was deeply influenced by the new status of motherhood, but she wasn’t about to abandon her career as a teacher. She and William had bought themselves a roomy house on Pine Street. She ran her school from the house, and rather as a modern woman might do, incorporated her children into her work life, encouraging them to attend classes with her pupils and play alongside them during recreation periods.

  She was happy enough during those early years of her marriage, happy even though William, often engaged in scholarly tasks, left most of their chores to her. She was the one who cared for their children, supervised the servants, handled the bills, corresponded with the parents of prospective students and speech patients. Some people noticed, said William was passive and Lucretia the spark of their household. But she didn’t seem to mind William’s passivity. Or if she did, she didn’t show that she did. William’s first stammering patient, the one he had taught to speak properly after a year’s worth of work, became good friends with the couple, visited them regularly, and found Lucretia to be even-tempered and content. One of Lucretia’s many nieces, a young woman who came to live with the Chapmans for a few years, observed that Lucretia was always “tender” to her husband, and that the couple “seemed to enjoy an uninterrupted happiness in each other’s society.”

  They were in that society more and more, for as the 1820s advanced, William relied increasingly on Lucretia, even drafting her to assist him in the dull work of putting the stammerers through their breathing and vocalization drills.

  In 1823 Lucretia’s brother Edward returned home to Barre Plains after a three years’ absence.

  He was a broken man. Back during the War of 1812, when the state of Massachusetts had tried to indict him for counterfeiting, he’d beaten the rap. There’d been no witnesses bold enough to testify against him. There’d been none to testify against his brother Mark, either. So after the war the two of them had just continued to engage in counterfeiting, a trade that was profitable and easy because currency was not yet uniform. State banks issued their own money—bills with unique and disparate designs—and the public, unfamiliar with much of the cash that came its way, could be readily fooled about a note’s authenticity. Mark and Edward bought forged bills, hid their stash in the old stone walls that marked the Winslow property, and passed the fakes off to strangers and neighbors alike. But one day Edward had made the mistake of boasting to a neighbor about how well made his Gloucester Bank tens, twenties, and fifties were. “The bills are true,” he’d pointed out, “except for the signature of the bank’s president.” He’d also made the mistake of condemning a sheriff who’d arrested his supplier. “Here I stood to make some money,” he’d cussed, “but there must always be some damn fool in the way.” The neighbor had ratted on him, the state had come after him again, and this time he’d been convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment doing hard labor.