Margaret Fuller (89 page)

Women were a powerful presence at Friendship Hall gatherings as well. Palmer’s brother-in-law Richard Cranch, a fellow emigrant who was also his cousin, had married one of the three talented Smith sisters of nearby Weymouth, and settled in Braintree, where he eventually became a judge. Cranch’s bride was Mary, the oldest; the middle sister, Abigail, married John Adams; the youngest, Elizabeth, would later play a pivotal role in Eliza Palmer’s life. The Friendship Hall circle was a close-knit group of practical idealists: intellectuals with solid financial underpinnings and multiple kinship ties. Even as dissatisfaction with British rule crept into conversation, Friendship Hall seemed sure to remain a reliable sanctuary.

General Palmer raised three children in Germantown: two daughters, Polly and Elizabeth, and a son, Joseph Pearse Palmer, Eliza’s father. When young Joseph graduated from Harvard in 1771 and married Betsey Hunt, one of the famously beautiful daughters of a preacher turned distiller in Watertown, just west of Cambridge, General Palmer set him up with an importing business in Boston. Eliza’s oldest brother, the third Joseph Palmer, was born there in 1773. But her father had little enthusiasm for business ventures, preferring to be known chiefly as a man of high principles and keen intellect. And Boston in the mid-1770s was a difficult place for a man of principle to pay attention to anything besides the increasingly tense relations between New and Old England. Joseph Pearse Palmer’s ideals led him, even though he was only a first-generation American, to join the Patriot cause.

Eliza’s mother, Betsey, liked to tell about the December night in 1773 when she was home alone “sitting rocking the baby when I heard the gate and door open.” Betsey looked up, expecting to find her husband returning from a night at his club, only to find “three stout Indians” standing in her front parlor. The young mother “screamed out and would have fainted of very fright” had she not recognized her husband’s voice as one of the Indians, saying “Don’t be frightened, Betsey, it is I. We have only been making a little salt water tea.” Betsey was calmed by her husband’s words, but within days Joseph Pearse Palmer and his fellow Indians were found out and declared traitors for their part in the Boston Tea Party. In retaliation, British soldiers looted and burned the Palmer warehouses on Boston’s Long Wharf, and the young family fled to Watertown to take refuge with Betsey’s family, the Hunts.

Both Joseph Palmers, the father then almost sixty and the son in his twenties, continued to protest British rule, first serving in the Provincial Congress and then assisting at the Battles of Lexington and Concord, where the first shots were fired in the Revolution, and later at Breed’s Hill. For his active role in the Congress—he was president of the body for a term and helped organize the tea boycott—for his donations of money and supplies to the Patriot army, and for his assistance in key battles, the senior Palmer was eventually made brigadier general, and his son quartermaster general. But if the Battle of Lexington marked the birth of a new nation, it also signaled the decline of the Palmer family fortune. General Palmer’s Boston warehouses had already been plundered, and after war broke out one of his ships carrying a valuable cargo of spermaceti candles from Germantown was captured by the British. As more men joined the cause, the senior Joseph Palmer was forced to close his factories for lack of workers, and he continued to spend on the Patriot cause. In the first two years of the war, Palmer contributed as much as 5,000 pounds sterling, nearly $750,000 in today’s currency.

Then came the disastrous Rhode Island campaign—or “Burlesque,” as it was later called. General Palmer proposed the surprise attack on Newport, Rhode Island, in the fall of 1777, but he never expected to serve as chief commanding officer for the invasion. In his sixties and a man of business, Palmer had largely confined his military service to mustering troops and overseeing the construction of fortifications. Still, his new superior officer, General Joseph Spencer, approved the plan and then left Palmer to lead the attack, promising him a militia of 9,000 to confront the 3,600 British and German soldiers camped near Newport.

A comedy of errors ensued. Spencer promised “boats and everything ready” in Newport, but Palmer and his troops arrived to find only a motley collection of dories and fishing vessels greatly in need of repair. The few skilled carpenters among his Patriot recruits refused to turn “artificers,” and quit rather than help with the repairs. Angered by the delay, a handful of soldiers defected and revealed Palmer’s plans to their new British officers. Mishaps followed in rapid succession: reconnaissance parties lost their way, heavy rains further delayed the attack, and then a bright moonlit sky exposed the Patriot forces to the enemy. Finally Palmer was forced to recommend a retreat. Comedy turned to tragedy when General Spencer, anxious to escape blame, ordered Palmer to face a court-martial on charges of “Neglect and Disobedience” for failing to carry out the attack as planned.

Already regretful of his own part in the botched invasion, Palmer was devastated when he learned that his honor had been called into question. He appealed to his one-time Braintree neighbor John Hancock, now president of the Continental Congress, to provide him with a copy of the charges filed against him. Hancock refused, putting the older man in the untenable position of being tried—possibly for his life—with no chance to prepare his own defense. Ultimately the case was thrown out of court, but a congressional commission then spent six months collecting testimony and studying the evidence before clearing Palmer of all charges; he remained the unofficial scapegoat for what turned out to be one of the Continental army’s more notable blunders. Palmer had appointed his son, Eliza’s father, to lead one of the Rhode Island battalions, and both men seem never to have recovered from the humiliation.

By the time the war was won, the disgrace that shadowed the Palmer men was compounded by financial losses. Like many members of the colonial gentry, the Palmers had fallen deeply into debt. With currency values fluctuating wildly, General Palmer was forced to pay off his creditors by selling his Germantown land and Friendship Hall. Within three years of the war’s end, the aging general was begging for credit from the same neighbors and friends who had once been his houseguests, and his son was suffering the first of many depressions that would ensure his continued business failures. The Revolution so crippled the Palmer men that when Eliza turned her grandfather’s hard luck into fiction in her novel, she described his downfall as the result of an outright attack by the British on Germantown and Friendship Hall. “The sun rose on a scene of havoc indescribable,” she wrote. “Every house & cabin was level with the ground. Choccolate, glass, salt, candles, were scattered along the beach and spread over the extensive grounds and pastures.... In a few hours, the friend and benefactor of all who lived near him was thus made a comparatively poor man.” Of course the truth was more complex and disturbing. The Palmers had been betrayed by their own countrymen even as they gave all they had to the Patriot cause.

It was into this period of decline that Eliza Palmer, Joseph Pearse Palmer’s third child, was born in Watertown, where her parents had fled in the wake of the Tea Party reprisals. Soon after, Eliza moved with her mother and older brother, Joe, and sister, Mary—born in 1775 during the Battle of Lexington—to a vacant workman’s cottage on General Palmer’s estate. These early war years, though marked by the frequent absences of her father and grandfather, seemed to Eliza “the spring time of existence,” she later confided in her journal. She clung to the memory of this brief interval of freedom and noblesse oblige, when she roamed the hillsides and beaches of Germantown with her brother and sister, the two small girls dressed in the best “pink frocks and red morocco shoes and white stockings” available in wartime. It was to be the only time in her life when her family’s financial adversity did not weigh on her mind.

In Germantown, Eliza was allowed to tag along to school with Mary and Joe, to a small class taught by their aunt Elizabeth Palmer in a sunny upstairs room in Friendship Hall. Eliza proved the best student of the three, and once she learned to read, she was given the run of her grandfather’s library. Many years later, Eliza recalled for her own three daughters the happy days spent stretched out on the highly polished floor of the library, poring over General Palmer’s collection of Shakespeare folios. According to family legend, Eliza read through the entire set when she was only four. Occasional visits home from her grandfather provided Eliza with the vision of domestic harmony she would try to recapture throughout her life. “We were the happiest group imaginable when collected around [my grandparents’] table to read in turn some interesting parts of the Bible, or some short catechetical lesson or little hymns,” she wrote nearly fifty years later, and “the Smiles and Caresses of the dear old people and our no less cheerful younger relatives [were] our rich reward.” Living on the fringes of Friendship Hall society, itself on tenuous ground, Eliza learned early to calculate wealth in terms of intangibles: piety, domestic affection, learning.

During the war years, the big house was filled with women: young ones not yet married, including Eliza’s aunts Polly and Elizabeth Palmer, and older ones, widowed, sick, or simply lonely, on whom the general had taken pity. A household of talented and productive women facing adversity as a unit would be another of Eliza’s lifelong ideals. In her novel, she described the group as a vigorous, self-sufficient “Sisterhood.” “We had no drones in our hive,” she wrote of these women who before the war had spent their days reading, drawing, and doing fine needlework, and now happily sewed shirts for soldiers, taught at the local school in place of a schoolmaster gone to war, raised chickens, and knitted shawls, stockings, and caps in exchange for groceries. “The highest culture and refinement,” Eliza wrote proudly, “did not prevent this admirable family from undertaking the humblest employments in order to preserve their independance.” The young Eliza could not fail to notice that the household functioned just as efficiently when the men were off at war.

Yet the stories she began to hear around this time from the women in her immediate family all spoke of a woman’s need to secure the attention of a man—as well as of the perils of failing to do so. The history of the Hunt women of Watertown, her mother’s line, was an unambiguous endorsement of education as a means of social ascension through marriage. The men of the Hunt family were, like Eliza’s father, Joseph Pearse Palmer, Harvard-educated, but the Hunt women had been deliberately kept ignorant. Eliza’s mother, Betsey Hunt, and her sisters—dubbed the “Watertown beauties” by their brothers’ classmates at Harvard—were known for their good looks. To their father’s way of thinking, his girls needed only to acquire a few domestic skills to make themselves marriageable. Squire Hunt, as he was called by the regulars in his Watertown general store and tavern, had chosen his own wife on a summer’s walk when he passed a bevy of girls playing at rolling down a hill; he took a fancy to the “exposed shoes, stockings, and underclothes” of his future wife before he even met her. According to family legend, Hunt’s interest was not actually prurient: the girl’s undergarments were so dainty and neat that he knew he’d found himself a good housekeeper. Hunt then raised his own daughters on the maxim that it was “quite enough if they could make a shirt and a pudding.”

By the time his girls were ready to marry, however, it took more than good looks and housekeeping abilities to win a marriage proposal from a man of property and high standing in the colonial cities along the North Atlantic coast. In prosperous circles, a woman’s character was judged by skills she cultivated at leisure: conversation, letter writing, fine needlework. Betsey Hunt was just fourteen when she met Joseph Pearse Palmer at a party given by Harvard men for Watertown ladies, but she was canny enough to put the encounter to good use. Likely she was flattered at first when one high-spirited youth bet another man a bottle of Madeira that he didn’t dare kiss Miss Betsey Hunt. But Joseph Palmer was affronted on Betsey’s behalf, all the more so when he saw the young man publicly embarrass Miss Hunt by successfully planting a kiss on her cheek. Palmer interceded, speaking his first words to his future wife: “What books have you read?” he asked. As Betsey later told her daughters, the conversation that followed from that question “was so wholly different from anything I had ever heard or expected, that I was quite pleased with him.”

At fourteen, Betsey Hunt had to admit that she had never read a book; she could scarcely get through an occasional issue of
The Spectator.
Palmer offered to remedy the problem by lending her books from his own shelves at the college, and he proposed regular tutoring sessions in composition. The young girl eagerly agreed. The first book Palmer brought Betsey Hunt was Samuel Richardson’s novel
The History of Sir Charles Grandison,
the tale of a supremely honorable gentleman who rescues an innocent beauty from a brutish seducer, and then wins her for himself with his kindness. Having delivered Betsey Hunt from her tormentors, the young Palmer no doubt fancied himself as a New World version of Richardson’s hero. Betsey Hunt must have seen her suitor the same way, for long before their course of study was complete, she had decided to marry the gallant, well-spoken Joseph Pearse Palmer—as soon as he asked her.

But a marriage proposal would have to wait. When General Palmer heard that his son was courting a tavern keeper’s daughter, one of eleven children, he tried to break off the match. Still, young Palmer persisted; he would not give up the pleasant task of educating Betsey Hunt. For the rest of his years at Harvard, he continued the weekly lessons, and the couple branched out from romantic novels to arithmetic, geography, and history texts, discussing them while walking or riding. Each week he left books with Betsey, which she hid away in her attic to read whenever she could escape the notice of her father and sisters. At last young Palmer decided that his fiancée had added sufficient polish to her native beauty to impress his family, and he brought her home to meet his parents and older sisters. Now Betsey, at nearly seventeen, could answer the kind of questions that had previously left her speechless. She charmed her prospective father-in-law and soon found herself celebrating her marriage to Joseph Pearse Palmer, scion of Friendship Hall and the Germantown manufacturing fortune. According to family lore, the wedding party included Paul Revere along with Palmer’s future Tea Party comrades. On their wedding day, in November 1772, the couple’s future looked eminently rosy.