Margaret Fuller

by Megan Marshall

  Beginning with the first overnight train ride from New York City to Albany through a “dripping” rain, during which Margaret was awoken frequently by the conversation of fellow passengers or her own fragments of dreams, the journey would retain an “effect of phantasmagoria” that never quite dissipated. Cary Sturgis traveled with the party as far as Niagara, only to turn back after a week at the falls, claiming indifference to them and any sights farther west—she had “known it all before” through travel books. But on returning to Concord, her recollected impressions apparently became more vivid. A giddy Waldo Emerson noted in his journal that Cary arrived “with eyes full” of Niagara, “dreaming by day & night of canoes, & lightning, & deer-parks, & silver waves.”

  On the riverbank overlooking the falls, Margaret had also struggled to “woo the mighty meaning of the scene,” to determine “the Americanisms of the spectacle.” But the thundering torrent resisted her efforts to ascribe meaning. Rather than respond to the great wall of water, the rising mists and churning rapids, with the expected wonderment—female tourists were known to burst into tears, their hands turn icy in shock—Margaret found the “continual stress of sight and sound” oppressive, “so much water in all ways and forms.” There was “no escape from the weight of a perpetual creation,” no escape, whether “awake or asleep,” from “this rushing round you and through you.”

  As with Cary, it took moving on—in Margaret’s case westward—to recognize that these confounding first impressions were the “Americanisms” she sought. The West itself was a “perpetual creation,” its young cities doubling or tripling in population every year, its prairie lands sprouting sod huts, log cabins, and the occasional elegant frame house. As Margaret reached Buffalo and then Chicago, traveling in company with “hordes” of immigrants from as far away as Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia, who “crowd[ed] the landings” and swarmed the decks of riverboats, the sense of a great force “rushing round you and through you” would not abate. The nation’s “life-blood rushes from east to west, and back again from west to east,” she would write in Summer on the Lakes, in 1843.

  Another vision from Niagara would haunt her as well, more specter than spectacle: the sight of an eagle taken captive and chained “for a plaything.” Rude tourists taunted the pinioned bird with “vulgar” language, verbal “thrusts and blows” that, with “his head averted,” the silent creature “ignored.” In words recalling her translation from Goethe’s “Eagles and Doves”—the “inly-mourning bird” who had “lost the power to soar”—Margaret imagined that the Niagara eagle “listened to the voice of the cataract” and heard “congenial powers flow[ing] free,” feeling “consoled, though his own wing was broken.” The eagle’s struggle in Goethe’s verse to resign ambition was a lesson Margaret also read in the extravagant futility of the falls themselves: “the conspiring waters rushing against the rocky ledge to overthrow it at one mad plunge, till, like topping ambition, o’erleaping themselves, they fall on t’other side, expanding into foam ere they reach the deep channel where they creep submissively away.”

  But the captive eagle at Niagara, heckled by curiosity seekers, symbolized something more American than a figure in a German lyric, and more tragic than frustrated ambition: the broken race of Indians, the nation’s harassed and abused “aboriginal population,” in the phrase Waldo Emerson had used in an 1838 letter to President Van Buren protesting the infamous Cherokee removal by “sham treaty,” the exodus that came to be known as the Trail of Tears, warning that “the last howl and wailing of these tormented villages and tribes shall afflict the ear of the world.” Waldo knew firsthand only the itinerant Penobscot bands who camped each fall on the Concord River to sell baskets, Indians long disconnected from their “aboriginal” way of life—not the Cherokee of Georgia whose fate he protested, nor the Chippewa and Ottawa peoples of Michigan and Wisconsin whom Margaret would soon meet on her travels, only recently ousted from their homelands by more sham treaties to make room for the “hordes” of immigrant homesteaders. In his letter, Waldo had argued that surely these “savage” tribes would prove their “worth and civility” if “duly cared for”: all the Indian needed to “redeem” himself from the “doom of eternal inferiority” was an education in “the arts and customs of the Caucasian race.” Margaret would see more—the “worth and civility” of Indian culture itself, the compelling beauty of Indian “arts and customs”—and ultimately hope for less, observing at close range the eagle pinioned.

  At every turn she found these strands intertwined—creation and destruction, creation out of destruction. Margaret had looked forward to viewing stands of virgin forest in the Michigan woods, but when the ferry docked at the Manitou Islands to refuel, she found instead crews of Indians at work chopping down “real old monarch trees” to “glut the steamboat” and feed its fires. She was horrified by the Indians’ role, perforce, in defacing their wilderness. The “rudeness of conquest” necessary to support “the needs of the day” was “scarce less wanton than that of warlike invasion.” Who could possibly “make amends to nature for the present violation of her majestic charms?”

  For two weeks in Chicago, Margaret walked the sandy shores of Lake Michigan or kept to her boarding house, reading books on the Indians, while the Clarkes enjoyed their family reunion. The city of nearly eight thousand seemed to Margaret to have been founded solely “for business and for nothing else,” yet there was an integrity to the Chicagoans’ single-minded pursuit of “material realities.” The women, she noticed, “do not ape fashions, talk jargon or burn out life as a tallow candle for a tawdry show.” Here James Clarke’s younger brothers Abraham and William had opened a drugstore, now firmly established after eight years in operation, a feat that would have been virtually impossible, she knew, in the congested shopping districts of Cambridge and Boston.

  Margaret was on the alert too for employment opportunities for her brother Arthur, soon to receive his degree from Harvard. Arthur planned to become a minister, and founding a western school of his own, Margaret thought, would turn a better profit than filling a mere schoolmaster’s post back east, the usual next step for a would-be divinity scholar with no family money. Although she had initially been repelled to hear the homesteaders she encountered on the docks “talking not of what they should do, but of what they should get in the new scene,” when Margaret thought of her brothers struggling to make their way in cramped New England she began to warm to the expansive “new scene.” Later that summer she would write from Milwaukee to her brother Richard, offering consolation after he’d been passed over for an essay prize in his third year at Harvard: “I say that the award of Cambridge is no test of what the world’s will be.”

  The two-week excursion she took by covered wagon, led now by thirty-one-year-old William Clarke, with Sarah Clarke and her mother, Rebecca, riding along, to seek out Uncle William Fuller, seventy miles northwest through the Rock River Valley to Oregon, Illinois, almost persuaded Margaret to make the move herself. It was mid-June when they set out on a meandering course through prairie grasses studded with wildflowers and the occasional “oak shaded knoll,” ideal for picnicking. To Margaret there seemed “room enough to wander on forever” in this “country [where] it is as pleasant to stop as to go on, to lose your way as to find it.” Accustomed to moving from house to house since childhood and reliant on lengthy stays as a guest in her friends’ homes, Margaret was reconciled to her vagrant existence as “one of the band who know not where to lay their heads.” But now, as the group stopped for lodging along their way at a series of farmhouses selected in advance by William Clarke, it seemed to Margaret that there was no “pleasant or natural mode of life except travelling.” She proudly counted herself a Yankee “born to rove.”

  William Clarke himself provided much of the satisfaction of this journey. The two slipped into an easy intimacy, sharing the driver’s bench as William regaled Margaret with “every anecdote of the country whether of man or deer” and Margaret responded
with her impressions of the prairie’s “blissful seclusion.” As James’s brother, William was familiar to her, yet his western life had given him a jocular confidence that James lacked—“we do not see such people in the east,” Margaret wrote later. William “drove admirably, with a coolness and self-possession in all little difficulties”: “He knows his path as a man, and follows it with the gay spirit of a boy.” During the years of their most intense friendship, James had never quite managed to be either—and, in any case, he was married now. William was not.

  If, by the end of her summer on the lakes, Margaret would dismiss westerners as “so all life and no thought,” it would also be on account of William; as the party circled back toward Chicago, the younger man began to clam up in the face of her ardor. But on the trail to Oregon, Illinois, all seemed hopeful. Margaret felt, she wrote to her brother Richard, “overpaid for coming here.” She envisioned settling on a farm with him in the Rock River Valley—in June a fresh green canyon with fertile plains extending on either side—after his graduation from Harvard. Farm labor would be “a twentieth part” what it had been in Groton, she guessed, recalling the long days in the fields that had worn down, possibly even killed, their father, and “would pay twenty times as much.” The siblings would “have our books and our pens, and a little boat on the river,” and find themselves “at least as happy as fate permits mortals to be.” She had begun to sound like a handbill advertising the benefits of western migration.

  Margaret’s health improved with the “free careless life” in the open air. She didn’t even mind stretching out for sleep one night on the supper table in the barroom of a boarding house from which its “drinking visiters” had been “ejected” for the sake of the traveling women, who took over the parlor couches as well. She spent the Fourth of July, 1843, with her uncle William, who promised to help select a parcel of land in nearby Belvidere suitable for Arthur’s school. The townspeople of Oregon, Illinois, put on a homespun celebration with ice cream and fireworks, but what made Margaret think afterward, “I had never felt so happy I was born in America,” wasn’t the “puffs of Ameriky” from the orator and fife-and-drum band. Instead it was the morning hike up a bluff overlooking the Rock River, where she found open pastures “decked with great bunches of a scarlet variety of the milkweed, like cut coral, and all starred with a mysterious-looking dark flower, whose cup rose lonely on a tall stem.” The purple flower claimed Margaret’s imagination: “My companions disliked, I liked it.” Her habit of personifying flowers caused her to fancy that the blossom sprang “from the blood of the Indians, as the hyacinth did from that of Apollo’s darling.”

  Everywhere she was alert to the plight of the Indians. Her delight in the landscape deepened her understanding of their loss, and she collected anecdotes from the Yankee newcomers she stayed with to use later in her book. Her uncle’s family had dug into a grassy mound on their property to discover three corpses “seated in the Indian fashion.” In her letter to Richard, she told of a homesteader finding “the body of an Indian woman, in a canoe, elevated on high poles, with all her ornaments on.” Another settler told Margaret of looking up one day to see a tall Indian “standing at gaze,” arms folded, on a knoll above his house, surveying the land until, catching sight of the white farmer, he “gave a wild, snorting sound of indignation and pain, and strode away.” Margaret wondered how the Indian could “forbear to shoot the white man where he stands.” Rather than express “compassion” or “remorse,” the homesteaders complained bitterly about the occasional return of Indians to hunt game the newcomers considered rightfully theirs. Sensitive herself to slights from the “white man,” Margaret heard in her informants’ callous recitals “the aversion of the injurer for him he has degraded.”

  After William Clarke had seen them safely back to Chicago, with Margaret’s feelings for him rekindled by a last intimate conversation, spurring her to ponder, as she wrote to James, whether his younger brother was “most engaging as a companion, or most to be loved as a man,” the women set off on their own into Michigan and Wisconsin. There, encounters with Indians became more frequent. Margaret was drawn to such sights as a statuesque “Roman figure” of an Indian draped in a red blanket, “sullenly observing” his fellows dancing for handouts in front of the taverns in Milwaukee, his expression implying “he felt it was no use to strive or resist”; and a “beautiful looking, wild-eyed boy, perfectly naked, except a large gold bracelet on one arm” at an Indian encampment near Silver Lake. But Margaret engaged directly with the women: a girl who explained to her the “medicinal virtues” of wildflowers, another who expertly ferried the party across the Kishwaukee River. At Silver Lake, where Sarah Clarke took out her sketchbook to render the scene, an Indian woman of “sweet melancholy eye” welcomed the Yankee women to take shelter in her tent during a sudden violent thunderstorm. It was here that Margaret began to observe the “worth and civility” of America’s true first families: their consideration and tact amid living conditions radically different from any she had known, a “delicacy of manners” from which “the educated white man, proud of his superior civilization, might learn a useful lesson.”

  Later, traveling alone to Mackinac Island while Sarah and Rebecca Clarke recuperated from summer colds, Margaret witnessed the gathering of the Chippewa and Ottawa tribes—several thousand displaced Indians—to receive the fifth of twenty annual payments, primarily in tobacco, blankets, and other provisions, guaranteed under the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters governing the sale of their lands. The natural beauty of the island, a heavily wooded American Capri with its own fabled arched rock, could not compete with the human drama. Fleets of canoes arrived from all over the Great Lakes; a city of wigwams rose on the beach, illuminated by campfires at night; sonorous Indian flutes penetrated the humid air. During the day, Margaret walked the sun-baked shore, stopping to demonstrate her collapsible parasol to curious Indians, conversing in improvised sign language, kneeling one morning to join the women in pounding their breakfast cornmeal.

  None of this gave Margaret any more hope for the Indian peoples or their land. By the end of her tour, she knew that if she returned to the West another year, she would not find the same “fair rich EARTH”; the “vast flowery plains” would be “broken up for tillage,” the “real old monarch trees” gone forever, “converted into logs and boards.” She considered it an unalterable fact that within twenty years, or maybe just ten, the Yankee “mode of cultivation” would “obliterate the natural expression of the country.” She had been fortunate to catch a fleeting glimpse of “the harmony of the first design” —primeval nature—which the Indians, the region’s “rightful lords,” had preserved since before the era of the Egyptian and Greek myths Margaret had taught in her Conversations. The West was, or had been until recently, “new, boundless, limitless.” Here, as in Eden, she would write later in Summer on the Lakes, there was “neither wall nor road.” The only “gain from the Fall” was “a wagon to ride in”— the wagon, also, of the “omnivorous traveler,” the “white settler [who] pursues the Indian, and is victor in the chase.”

  Frontier wives did not fare well either, Margaret observed. They had followed their husbands west “for affection’s sake,” only to find “a great deal to war with” in their “new lot.” Their “unfitness” for farm life was evident in fatigue and melancholy, the result of strenuous labor and an absence of “resources” for pleasure: “they have not learnt to ride, to drive, to row, alone.” Margaret could only hope that the homesteaders’ daughters might gain an education in “the language of nature,” allowing “the little girls [to] grow up strong, resolute, able” like those “students of the soil,” the Indian girls who could tell the secrets of western wildflowers.

  Pressing farther on to Sault Sainte Marie, Margaret hired two Indian “canoe-men in pink calico shirts” to shoot the famous rapids that ran between Lakes Superior and Huron, an experience that, like her confrontation with Niagara, left her disappointed. Seated on a woven mat i
n the middle of the canoe, Margaret hoped for at least “one gasp of terror and delight, some sensation entirely new to me.” But the rapids were so swift and the canoe men so expert at fending off jagged rocks that “I found myself in smooth water, before I had time to feel anything but the buoyant pleasure” of the four-minute ride. Not even “the silliest person” could have been frightened. Better was the trip by ferry back to Mackinac in the company of the frontiersmen she so often reviled. The lone woman traveler in the company, Margaret let herself be entertained by their “sportsman stories”: “How pleasant it was to sit and hear rough men tell pieces out of their own common lives, in place of the frippery talk of some fine circle . . . Free blew the wind, and boldly flowed the stream.”

  And then, to her surprise, she was greeted at the landing by Sarah Clarke: “such childish joy I felt, to see . . . the face of one whom I called friend.”

  Looking back on her early thirties, Margaret would realize that “I have given almost all my young energies to personal relations.” The time had not been wasted. Out of her sometimes thwarted desire for connection had emerged the Conversations, The Dial—the enterprise that had so often seemed a matter of “writ[ing] constantly to our friends in print” —and, most important, “The Great Lawsuit,” Margaret’s critique of “personal relations” among men and women, with its demand that “every arbitrary barrier” to women’s progress “be thrown down,” its prediction that the liberation of “many incarcerated souls,” both female and male, would bring “an era of freedom . . . and new revelations” when “new individualities shall be developed in the actual world.” Derived in large part from private observation and buttressed with historical and literary examples, the essay would prove to be The Dial’s most enduring contribution to American thought. But the time had come to “look abroad into the wide circle” for new mentors and friends, new subjects and ambitions.