The Linda Wolfe Collection

by Linda Wolfe

  They’d put him to work breaking rock. That’s what had broken him. He’d gotten as weak as his aging parents. Unable to do any labor anymore. That’s why they’d let him go free. That, and the letter his parents wrote to the governor, begging to see their son “in the land of the living, and enjoy his society, in the few remaining days there may be allotted to us to continue in this world of trouble and anxiety.”

  He’d been pardoned, and he’d gotten down on his knees—he did a lot of that in the jailhouse—and thanked God for His mercy and promised never to pass counterfeit again. And he didn’t. Which was more than he could say for Mark. Mark refused to change his ways. Counterfeit was his career. He’d go on trading in false bills till the day they locked him up.

  For Lucretia, having black sheep like Edward and Mark in the family was a trial, something for her and William to keep hidden from their friends and discuss only in private, for more and more they were moving in the most elevated and respectable circles of Philadelphia life. Among their friends were such dignitaries as William White, the bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church; James Taylor, the pastor of the Unitarian church; William Tilghman, chief justice of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court; and Joseph Hopkinson, a member of the United States Congress. With these friends and others they participated in the ever more sophisticated life of the city, enjoyed plays at the striking new Chestnut Street theater, receptions for prize-winning inventors and mechanics at the Franklin Institute, and—the city’s latest rage—elegant suppers devoted exclusively to scientific conversation. Women were welcome at some of these science soirees. A Scottish visitor to Philadelphia described attending one at which a woman familiar with the components of the atmosphere anticipated the approach of a period when oxygen would supersede champagne, and young gentlemen and ladies would hob and nob in gas, thus allowing “the vulgar term drunk [to] give place to inflated.” But women were generally not invited to the most prestigious scientific suppers of all, those of the Wistar Society. Still, William may have attended some, for Tilghman and Hopkinson were aware of his scientific work and, being members of the society, were entitled to bring guests.

  Americans of the day were highly proper—“there is no country in which scandal, even amongst the fashionable circles, is so rare as in the United States,” a German traveler observed—and Philadelphia, in the view of many foreign visitors, was particularly stuffy. The visitor from Scotland derided it as a place where the very atmosphere was pervaded by a spirit of quietism. Charles Dickens complained that after he walked about the town for an hour or two, its monotony made him feel as if he was metamorphosing into a Quaker: “The collar of my coat appeared to stiffen, and the brim of my hat to expand.… My hair shrunk into a sleek short crop, my hands folded themselves upon my breast of their own calm accord.”

  In such a city, and with friends like theirs, scandal was the last thing Lucretia and William wanted associated with their names.

  In 1824 an old hero of the War of 1812, Andrew Jackson, ran for president of the United States but was narrowly defeated. On Cuba, young Lino Entrealgo turned fifteen. He had received minimal schooling—his handwriting was a scribble, a miserable scrawl, and would remain so throughout his life. Yet he had a certain brilliance. He could converse on all manner of subjects, even with his elders, and entertain his friends with stories of his own devising about pirates and princesses, shipwrecks and hurricanes, vivid accounts he filled with grisly details. He was musical, too, could play the guitar and sing mournful love songs.

  The wealthier boys of his town, many with far less talent than he possessed, were continuing their education, going off to Havana to study at the university there. For Lino there were no such opportunities. His family was poor; he was expected to start working. Manuel Entrealgo pulled strings, called in favors, and got his son a job as a policeman.

  Lino began his duties, but in a short while, unpleasant rumors about him began circulating. He was taking advantage of his position, people whispered. He was stopping the countryfolk on their way into town to sell their plátanos and calabazas at the market and demanding they give him money for the privilege. If they didn’t voluntarily fork over some coins, he lay in wait for them when they made their way home and, in the cane-redolent twilight, roughed them up and robbed them.

  William Chapman had a rival, a woman in New York. Her name was Jane Leigh, she had been treating speech problems since the early 1820s, and in 1825 she opened a clinic for stammerers on Manhattan’s lower Broadway. Like William, she claimed to have discovered the single and only efficacious cure for stammering. But unlike William, she promised an exceedingly swift cure, one she contended she could effect in a few short days.

  Across the country, Jane Leigh’s promise caused consternation among practitioners of stammering therapy, for they generally made their money by treating clients for a long period of time, insisting that without lengthy treatment a patient, even if apparently cured, might have a relapse. In Philadelphia, Lucretia took the matter in hand. She changed William’s treatment, made what the Philadelphia Gazette would eventually term a splendid “discovery,” a way of helping stammerers in weeks rather than months.

  Still, shortening the length of treatment didn’t put an end to the threat posed by Leigh. For one thing, the New York woman began franchising her cure, establishing clinics in Baltimore, Boston, Charleston, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, even Philadelphia, a development that incensed the Chapmans and prompted William to open a branch of his clinic in New York, just a few blocks from Leigh’s. For another thing, in 1826 Leigh published a book, Facts in Relation to Mrs. Leigh’s System of Curing Stammering, and Other Impediments of Speech.

  The book didn’t say what her technique was. Leigh was as secretive about her methods as William was about his. Nevertheless she had no qualms about stating that her undescribed system was the only reliable cure for stammering. Worse, she insisted that anyone other than herself who claimed to be able to alleviate stammering was an impostor, a charlatan, or a quack. “We are perfectly satisfied that no other person in the country possesses the effectual cure for stammering, but Mrs. Leigh and her accredited agents,” she wrote. “Attempts have been made by persons in several places to palm upon the community a mode of cure which has no resemblance whatever to Mrs. Leigh’s system. A very considerable number of individuals … have spent their time and money fruitlessly with such pretenders.”

  These were fighting words, and late the same year Lucretia and William took Leigh on by publishing a book of their own, one that took pains to position them as the most experienced people in the field. “Mr. and Mrs. Chapman respectfully inform the people of the United States,” the work begins, “that they have conducted an Institution for upwards of NINE YEARS” and that theirs “is the first institution of the kind that has been established in the United States.”

  The book was a joint effort. Lucretia was given credit for her role in streamlining William’s treatment, but he was termed “the inventor” and the “Original Discoverer” of a “secret” revealed to him by “an all-wise Providence.”

  Bearing almost the same name as William’s clinic, the work was entitled The United States Institution for the Treatment of Cases of Defective Utterance. It listed the many types of speech impediments the institution treated, among them “Partial Speechlessness, Stuttering, Stammering, Hesitancy, Weakness of Voice … Lisping.” And it contained some highly personal information about William, including the fact that he had once endured such intransigent speech problems that people found him “irksome” to listen to and worse to watch, for both his face and body underwent “violent contortions.” But the bulk of the book consisted of glowing encomiums from patients, not the least of which was a letter to a physician written by a man convinced that William was a genius. “That numerous instances of cures have been effected by Mr. Chapman cannot longer be questioned,” wrote the ardent admirer. “If a great and important discovery demands a tribute of admiration and a pledge of gratitude; if th
e archives of benevolence shall have deposited within them that which should be the boast of the present, as no doubt it will be the glory of succeeding ages, where will the name of WILLIAM CHAPMAN stand when nations shall fix the seal of immortality upon the authors of those discoveries the superlative benefits of which shall continue to be felt through the rounds of time?”

  The boast of the present. The glory of succeeding ages. The seal of immortality. For William Chapman, the immigrant who had come to America with only a single box of clothing, a roll of bedding, and a portable writing desk, these were heady words indeed. In a short while, even though he had taken courses in medicine for merely two years, he would begin referring to himself as Dr. Chapman.

  The same year the book was published the Chapmans started to look for a home outside Philadelphia. The Pine Street house had become too modest for their growing status. Besides, Philadelphia itself—increasingly a center of manufacturing—no longer appealed to them. Mills and factories were spewing fiber dust and chemicals into the once pure air, and rough-looking immigrants, most of them recent arrivals from Ireland, looking for industrial jobs, were crowding the streets. Sometimes fights erupted between the new immigrants and the already established workers. Sometimes rumors that the immigrants were spreading disease erupted. The Chapmans had come to think of Philadelphia as unwholesome. They wanted a place in the countryside, something airy and healthful.

  They found precisely what they were looking for in the small Bucks County town of Andalusia, on the northern outskirts of Philadelphia. The town, located amid pristine farmlands and virgin woods, had taken its exotic name from a large estate in the region that had been dubbed Andalusia by its first owner, a Philadelphia importer-exporter who traded in sherry from the Spanish province of Andalusia. He and a few other well-to-do city dwellers, hoping to escape Philadelphia’s torrid summer heat and periodic yellow fever epidemics, had started buying land and building summer houses up the Delaware back in the 1790s. By the time the Chapmans went househunting, Andalusia had attracted a number of professional people as well as a few highly successful merchants and bankers, including Nicholas Biddle, president of America’s most important moneylending institution, the Second Bank of the United States. But its chief occupants were farmers, men and women of British, Irish, and Dutch descent, some of whom worked as tenant farmers on the properties of the affluent, others who farmed for themselves, growing crops and grazing livestock on their own, smaller tracts of land. Across the road from the place the Chapmans found was the property of one such farmer, a gruff-spoken man named Benjamin Boutcher, who raised poultry with the help of his wife and nine children and, to supplement his income, repaired and made wagon wheels.

  The Chapmans knew that many of their neighbors would be unsophisticated country folk like the Boutchers. But they trusted that eventually they’d make friends comparable to the ones they’d had in Philadelphia.

  As to shopping, they realized they wouldn’t be able to buy much in Andalusia. The town proper consisted of a handful of mills, taverns, and general stores. To satisfy any but their most basic needs they’d have to go to Bristol, where once a week there was a country market, or else make a trip down to Philadelphia. But the city was only thirteen miles away, and thirteen miles, a daunting distance just a few years before, was no longer a formidable commute. Steamboats were frothing up the Delaware constantly now, and a wharf had been built just a mile from the center of Andalusia. There was also the Bristol Turnpike, a smooth and level toll road that passed right through town. They’d be able to get into Philadelphia relatively quickly and easily.

  They could even get to the New York clinic relatively quickly and easily. A Philadelphia-to-New York mail coach stopped in Andalusia every afternoon about five o’clock.

  Contemplating the move, the Chapmans considered maintaining their New York and Philadelphia clinics. But they decided to close them both and consolidate their teaching efforts in Andalusia, for the house they had found was perfect for a large institution.

  It was a grand house, a three-story stone mansion with a slate-tiled mansard roof, tall French windows, an imposing front staircase, and a big rambling porch. It had commodious parlors, a large cellar kitchen, and numerous bedrooms, enough to sleep everyone comfortably: the family, Lucretia’s pupils, and William’s speech-impaired clients—they were coming to him from as far away as Europe now. The house also had four acres of land.

  After the move Lucretia changed the name of her school to the Andalusia Boarding School for Young Ladies and enlarged her curriculum, offering classes in ancient and modern history, in biography and mythology, even in botany and chemistry, subjects that were newly becoming acceptable for girls to study. She also constructed a recreation area. Experts were advising that females, just as much as males, needed to engage in sports if they were to be healthy, and recommending that girls do archery, toss quoits, and play out-of-doors at vigorous games like blindman’s buff and shuttlecock. Lucretia fenced in a whole acre of her land for athletics. Then, inspired by all the acreage still remaining, she began keeping cows so that she could serve her pupils fresh milk.

  Soon she was advertising the school in newspapers and on handbills. She would take day as well as boarding students, she advised the public. Tuition for day scholars would be twenty dollars a year, with the use of globes, pens, and ink thrown in free; tuition plus room, board, and laundry, a hundred and twenty dollars a year; piano and French lessons could be had for an additional fifty dollars a year; dance instruction, for forty. Further, she advertised, she would pay careful attention to her pupils’ health and conduct and would encourage academic excellence by giving weekly tests in every subject of her broad curriculum, rewarding the girl who scored highest with a silver medal. Not only that, but the child who won the medal could display it on her school dress for an entire week.

  Her ads attracted parents, and before long the Andalusia Boarding School for Young Ladies began flourishing.

  But although Lucretia and William had closed their other schools, they had not given up their Philadelphia property. Instead, they’d hired a manager to run the Pine Street building as a boardinghouse. This was to prove an unlucky decision. A year after the move to Andalusia, the police raided the boardinghouse. Some of its residents were involved in criminal activities, the police asserted, and they arrested several men who were subsequently convicted of counterfeiting.

  Later in Lucretia’s life people would gossip about this episode, say that the schoolmistress herself must have been involved with the counterfeiters, for after all, didn’t she have brothers who had pursued that unsavory occupation? But no evidence that she was involved was ever produced, and despite the incident she became known in Andalusia as an exceedingly upright woman. Neighbors noted that she insisted on family prayers twice a day, parents that she paid keen attention to her students’ acquisition of moral principles. The pastor of the church she joined—the All Saints Episcopal Church in nearby Hulmeville—told one and all that the youngsters in her care were exceptionally well-versed in the catechism.

  The pastor had ample opportunity to discover this, for Lucretia and those in her care frequently attended his church, a pre-Revolution structure built of fieldstone and embellished with a high-pitched roof, tiny bell tower, and miniature flying buttresses. Lucretia, her tall figure matured now and stately, would come bustling in on her long legs, a cluster of clean-scrubbed girls swathed in Sunday best in her wake. She would seat them in the straight-backed pews, keep them from fidgeting, and encourage them to lift their high-pitched voices in the hymns. She herself would sing the hymns exquisitely, her well-trained voice soaring melodically to the eaves of the little church.

  William only rarely came to church. He had begun to believe in his own reputation, to imagine himself as the boast of the present and a scientist who would be hailed even by future generations, and he preferred to stay at home and ensure his stature by furthering his studies. He had also become hard of hearing and very obst
inate.

  Increasingly, Lucretia found him trying. During the daytime he did almost nothing around their place, just left everything to her and sat all day long in his study. At times he didn’t even do her the courtesy of coming to dinner when he was called. She and the children would wait for him, the food growing cold on the sideboard, and when she remonstrated with him, he would tell her he couldn’t interrupt his work just because she said it was time to eat.

  He wasn’t around much in the evenings, either. He went to bed early, leaving her to sit alone in the drafty parlor, preparing menus, correcting tests, and doing the school accounts, and sometime after the move to Andalusia, whether because she felt overworked or because she felt dissatisfied with her life’s lot in general, she ceased being the acquiescent, grateful wife she had been in the first years of her marriage. She began to pick on William, who was growing ever more overweight and sluggish, demanding he help out with domestic chores. He should make his own bed, she said. He should put in the potatoes. These complaints she voiced publicly, as if no longer able to hide not just from herself but from others her irritation with the famed “inventor” and “original discoverer.”