When Margaret Bayard Smith wrote the words “let this book speak for me,” she offered a potent proposition (October 1, 1804, diary). With this declaration, she claimed meaning for her writing and significance for herself. Implicitly, she was asking, not asserting, and she was proposing that “this book” was to say what she felt she could not speak. The proposition was fraught with the complications of the post-Revolutionary era in which she lived and of her ambitions, which the age inspired. She employed different writing formats, diaries, letters, publications, to voice her intellect and feelings, as she sought to authenticate her experience to herself, to her children, and to others. Her claim was ultimately historical, for she meant, like others of her generation, to convey her life and her vision of American society to posterity. At her most ambitious, the “me” spoke for the nation (Baym, American Women Writers, 1–9, 11–45, 92–103, 214–39; Ziff, Writing in the New Nation, 28–9, 144–5; Gould, Covenant and Republic, 14–16, 61–132). She offered in her writings an expansive definition of what it was to be an American. And in her silences can be found the silences in America’s history.
Margaret Bayard Smith’s life spanned the transformative period of the new nation. Born during the Revolution (1778) outside of Philadelphia, she died in Washington, DC, in 1844. Her father was Colonel Jonathan Bayard, a prominent merchant, Patriot, legislator, and jurist in Pennsylvania and New Jersey; she grew up in the midst of a well-connected network of mercantile and landed elite families of the mid-Atlantic region. She received an excellent education within the Bayard households and at the Bethlehem Moravian Female Seminary. Marrying her second cousin Samuel Harrison Smith in 1800, she moved with him to Washington, where he published the National Intelligencer, the organ of the Jefferson administration. Fascinated with politics, inspired by ideals of social improvement, Bayard Smith sought to achieve intellectual expression and self-fulfillment. In her critical engagement with the dominant establishment, she exercised power in structuring a national political culture. Nevertheless, even as an elite white woman, she experienced the limitations of the republican system in circumscribing access to America’s promise.
She matured in a period under the sway of forces unleashed by the Enlightenment and American and French Revolutions. Women, like many other groups, gathered empowerment from the ideologies of individual self-realization and independence. As Mary Wollstonecraft came to personify, though, women who enacted ideals of self-fulfillment and social liberation were doubly exposed to criticism. Intellectual women who appropriated the freedom to express their own ideas and desires ran the risk of being construed as both an “unsex’d female” (having a manly mind) and an oversexed female (consuming with lust). The intersection of reason and feeling became a crucial site in the struggle over controlling women’s will in the reaction at the end of the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century (Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 368–95; Brown, “Mary Wollstonecraft”). Bayard Smith registered the contests of the era.
During the 1790s, Margaret Bayard Smith imbibed a strain of sensibility espoused by contemporary radicals in Europe. Building on the belief that man had innate moral sentiments in sympathy with other human beings, they imagined improving society through critical judgment. Bayard was part of a heterosexual circle of young intellectuals in New York City including Margaretta Mason, Maria Nicholson, and Maria Templeton; Elihu Hubbard Smith, Charles Brockden Brown, William Dunlap, Samuel Miller, and Samuel Latham Mitchill (members of the all-male Friendly Club) (Cronin, ed., Diary of Elihu Hubbard Smith). These men and women read and discussed together Rousseau, William Godwin, Wollstonecraft, Erasmus Darwin, Coleridge, among other contemporary authors. Bayard took inspiration from the intellectual ferment and universalist ideals to which she was exposed. She absorbed Godwin’s and Wollstonecraft’s ideas of sensibility. They informed Bayard Smith’s perceptions of justice and individual freedom well into the next century.
Over the course of the eighteenth century concepts of sensibility ratified man’s natural feelings, conditioned by reflection, as the source for both social bonds and individual judgment. Containing both conservative and liberal dynamics, the culture of sensibility by the end of the century had taken on radical egalitarian implications in the Revolutionary movement and writings of people like Godwin and Wollstonecraft. They insisted on the exercise of reason in directing passions toward benevolent goals. Educable faculties were to critique human affections in relation to larger social goods, exposing established institutions and obligations, including domestic relations, to scrutiny. The equilibrium between reason and feeling proved unstable in the heated ideological debates of the 1790s. However uneasily balanced, the coordination of individual imagination and sympathy with individual improvement and a just society inspired Bayard Smith’s own actions and her judgment of the society in which she lived (Jones, Radical Sensibility, 6–18, 101–4). Her sensibility was the wellspring of creative tensions between her desires, her duties, and her social vision.
Through her writings, she sought to reconcile the conflicting impulses exerted by her aspirations and by societal strictures. In each of three different formats, diaries, letters, and print, she expressed competing sides of herself. The diaries contained representations of a divided self for her posterity’s edification. Her publications projected a public sensibility on which to model American life. Her family letters, primarily to her sisters in New Jersey, Philadelphia, and New York, were her most intensely personal revelations about herself. In her journals of the 1800s directed to her progeny, she struggled to justify herself, alternately mobilizing her conscience and her soul. Her argument with herself emanated from the ideological contests of the 1790s between conserving social cohesion and liberating human potentiality. In representing herself to her children, she crafted a version of herself as mother and wife that her own words belied. She vented her frustrations, then wrote herself into submission. The gesture of submission, however, undermined the social system to which she deferred (Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 254). Her underlying resistance revealed prescriptions of moral duty to be proscriptions of individual freedom. In her disruptive assertions, she recognized soul mates in her hired enslaved servants.
She carried over her debate concerning white women’s and blacks’ social roles and autonomous desires in her anonymous publications. Over the first four decades of the nineteenth century, in magazine articles, poetry, children’s stories, and novels she proffered an American sensibility emanating from shared feelings and reason stimulated by free social exchange. Questioning normative bonds of marriage and family, she raised the possibility of individual fulfillment and social affections grounded in a moral apprehension of liberty. Cutting across gender, status, and racial lines, her narratives of an emergent American society portrayed both elite white women’s public role and racial amalgamation. Her printed works transmitted to a public audience her historical and critical vision.
In the early 1800s she wrote out of the conflicting strains of conservative and radical sensibility to imagine a more capacious social system in the United States. Under Thomas Jefferson’s and James Madison’s presidencies, she allied with Dolley Madison and other elite women in Washington to form an expansive public culture. In their drawing rooms, they forged a continental leadership and projected a national political society. During the War of 1812, with the fears of black insurrection, the national retreat from antislavery, and the Smiths’ own purchase of blacks, Bayard Smith went silent on the wrongs of enslavement. As she began her publishing career in earnest in the first half of the 1820s, she returned to formulating an American sensibility that recognized all groups’ claims to the social goods of freedom. In the aftermath of the war and the Missouri Compromise, though, political concerns over territorial expansion and social devolution transmuted white Americans’ Revolutionary idealism of equality into nationalist expediency of differentiation. Democratic politics had the effect of cutting across class lines and domesticating women (Nelson, National Manhood, 35–8). The American Colonization Society and Indian removal both sought to consolidate national unity around the exclusion of nonwhites. Underlying these policies were fears of female independence, class solidarity, and racial amalgamation. When Bayard Smith attempted to publish her most important novel “Lucy” in 1824/5, she found that her project to articulate affinities and aspirations shared between lower-class whites and blacks, women and men, was unprintable. Her earlier silence had become the nation’s silence.
When she announced “let this book speak for me,” she was addressing her daughters, aged four months and three years, in her diary (October 1, 1804). In opening a conversation with them, she also initiated a conversation with the future. Imagining her own death, she wished to be known. She wanted to leave an impression of her experience and care. If she should die, then, “let this book speak for me my children, in these pages you may converse with your Mother; here you shall find a true history of my life, a transcript of my heart.” By implication, she could inscribe in the record the truth that was hidden from sight. Knowing that “you shall be the confidants of every thought of every feeling, of every circumstance,” would be “an irresistible inducement . . . always to adhere to the right, & avoid the wrong.” In her promise to confess “every notion” of her life, “good or bad, right or wrong,” she proposed that her writing would be a transparency of herself, revealing the conflicts within. She was admitting that she had not been living solely for her daughters and that her temptations were strong. Through her diary-keeping, she intended to transmit to a larger audience her sensibility, her thoughts and feelings, and at the same time to discipline them. As both a record and a projection of identity, such written explorations were a form of power, controlling a sense of self and shaping it for self and others. She wrote what she could not speak. In her texts, she carried on a dialogue that she wished posterity to hear (Kelley, “Designing a Past for the Present,” 315–46; Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading,” 414–19; Lockridge, On the Sources of Patriarchal Rage, 1, 69).
In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Bayard Smith published three small pieces, an essay and a poem in the Monthly Magazine, and American Review (1800) and her children’s story The Diversions of Sidney (1805). These, her first known assays in print, carried the stamp of sensibility that would mark her subsequent publications. Drawn from her personal experiences, they objectified her felt tensions between individual aspirations and societal roles. Packaged within a seeming promulgation of social prescriptions and literary conventions were projections of liberated human capacity and harmonious social relations. At the very heart of her writings were her own discontents with the lot society had cast her and her desires to transcend quotidian restraints.
All three pieces dealt with women’s passions and intellect in relation to marriage; entwined in the children’s story was the enslaved black’s potential in relation to white dominion. All three indirectly challenged the marital confines placed upon women. Her published writings, in conjunction with her diaries and letters, suggested that the ideal of affective family ties was a form of social control over autonomous impulses. The presence of enslaved blacks within the household highlighted family authority as problematic. Basing obedience on moral grounds of affection and duty shifted the basis of male claims to dominance from hierarchical rights of rulership to personal consent. Paternal authority depended on dependents’ willingness to submit. Prescriptions of the moral obligations of women, servants, and children elided the discrepancy between representations of families and practices occurring within them. Founding governance on feelings set authority on unstable footings in the new nation. If the American Revolution proved anything, it demonstrated that affections could be alienated (Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 9–12, 83, 123–54; Lewis, “The Republican Wife,” 689–721).
Before their marriage in 1800, Samuel Harrison Smith and the then Margaret Bayard carried on a three-year courtship. This was the period during which she spent time in the New York circle of young intelligentsia. Under the influence of late Enlightenment ideas discussed with her friends, Bayard expounded her goals for herself and her ideals for marriage in a series of letters to her fiancé; between 1797 and 1800. The vision elaborated by Bayard was that of a companionate relationship (Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic, 10–11). In explaining her views, she probed the heart of affectional marriage. She found at its core inequities of power. To Smith she expostulated a model of sensibility that allowed the full flowering of intellectual and emotional capacity of both partners. On the eve of her marriage to Smith, Bayard read portions of her commonplace book to three of her New York intimates, Maria Templeton, William Johnson, and Charles Brockden Brown. One of the essays read, “The Evils of Reserve in Marriage,” the men selected for publication in Brown’s new periodical, the Monthly Magazine, and American Review. Praising its “just” sentiments, her friends valued her essay for its Godwinian analysis of the requisite sensibility brought to bear on the married state (May 23, 1800 to Samuel Harrison Smith).
Interpreting her piece as an admonishment to Samuel Harrison Smith and as prescience about the future is hard to avoid. It appeared in the June issue of the Magazine. The theme was not propitious for a couple soon to be married. Its intent was to set out the recipe for felicity in marriage, in a word, “candour. All reserve, obscurity, or disguise, are productive of indifference, suspicion, or distrust.” Presented as a narrative by a widow, her monologue held her mistakes up to a younger woman as an example “of the necessity of perfect candour, and unbounded confidence in the conjugal union” (409). Although Bayard may have meant to purvey positive advice (to herself, as well as to others), this preface, and an even briefer perfunctory two-sentence conclusion, ended up as mere brackets to her cautionary tale. Her imagination expanded on a morose story concerning the dangers of withholding love and support from one’s spouse out of an excessive sensibility to the other’s reserve. If Bayard was lecturing herself, she was also prodding Smith. The husband, though “of a thoughtful disposition, and tender heart,” was distant and uncommunicative, preoccupied with his business at the center of the city far from their home on its outskirts. His silence and indifference caused the wife disappointment and distrust. And so the cycle spiraled downward. At base, the subject was the potential for disappointment and alienation in the married state when feelings were not mediated by reason.
Rather than promoting the ideal of companionate marriage, Bayard’s “Evils” achieved the reverse. It deconstructed the premises of affectional marriage and exposed the unequal power equation underlying it. Although both the wife and husband suffered hurt feelings at the hand of the other, the wife experienced total social isolation within the home, while the husband circulated in society. The lack of children signaled the barrenness of their relationship and the dysfunctionality of the companionate ideal. Finally, with a husband deceased and no children, the now widow was released from the depression of her married state. With the telling of her story to a female friend, she had resumed social intercourse and productive reflection. In publishing it, the woman entered the public arena. No longer numbed by indifference, she was free mentally and socially to engage the world.
The words candour and indifference recur throughout Bayard’s essay. Sensibility marked the route between these two states of being. It was both the source of the couple’s potential pleasure and the cause of their alienation. By sensibility she meant feeling informed by rational reflection. When well balanced, sensibility facilitated openness and empathy between people; when overstrung, it could lead to its opposite, insensibility or indifference. Though both wife and husband had sunk into insensibility, their comportments were subtly gendered. The woman lacked candour; the man was indifferent.
The theme of male indifference was one Bayard had rehearsed with Smith over the last several years. She believed “the affections of your sex & ours are very different, before I knew this difference, I suffer’d from supposed indifference, but have now discover’d nature has not given to your hearts, such quick, such minute perceptions.” The reason was that woman focused closely on everything that revolved around her heart, since “her line of life seldom distracts her attention.” Employing men’s mental faculties, the world occupied their egos, leaving their hearts underdeveloped organs to be tended by women. Men’s professional occupations allowed them to compartmentalize their affections while women’s narrow compass made them obsessively concerned with emotions (June 7, 1799; October 7, 1799; July 19, 1800).
Indifference was only part of the issue Bayard had with Smith, for what she increasingly desired was his approbation of her intellectual capacity. In May 1800, shortly before she exhibited her commonplace book to her friends, she lodged a plea with Smith for basing their marriage on intellectual companionship. Bayard was “mortified” that he seemed to forget that she was “a rational being, & have treated me as a mere girl.” She asked that he would treat her “not only as the object of love, but the object of esteem, not as your mistress, but as your friend. The last is the character of which I am ambitious.” She instructed him, “Forget that I am a woman; I wish you would remember only that I have a mind, which tho’ now idle & contracted, nay, debased by ignorance, yet is capable of activity & expansion” (May 3, 1800). Over the past year, she had moved from accepting the notion of a woman’s inferior rational faculties to embracing her full potential (October 7, 1799). Her rejection of the status quo echoed Wollstonecraft’s and proved the conservative attacks on Wollstonecraft justified. The explosive combination of passion and intellect expressed by Bayard revealed the instability underlying a sensibility that liberated both. She let him know that
I am every day less contented with the circumscribed & degraded situation to which our sex is condemned. As to the division of the duties of life, I am very well pleased; but allow us the power of discharging our share of these duties better than can now be done . . . My restless & enquiring mind, will not keep in the beaten track, but is perpetually wandering into paths untrod before. There are moments when I feel an expansion of soul, which breaks the shackles by which I am bound! I am for tearing away the dark veil of ignorance, which conceals from me the light of knowledge.
(May 3, 1800)
Vacillating between defiance and deference, in the end Bayard gave away the game. She appealed to Smith, “Oh my friend will you not give life to my better half; will you not feed a mind, hungering & thirsting after knowledge?”
Bayard admitted the gap between the companionate ideal and marital reality. The ideology served to leave men free outside the home, rendering them less responsible within it, and to proscribe women’s autonomous impulses, redirecting them inward to heart and home (Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic, 1–7, 9–10, 22, 169–70). She confessed to him and to herself that the “pictures of felicity” her imagination sketched were very “unlike those exhibited, in real life!” Her idealistic vision knocked against the bedrock of domesticity’s constraints. In the structuring of her letter, as in her essay, Bayard demonstrated the unequal relations between men and women that she had set out to argue against. She posited a companionate marriage based on intellect rather than affections, which she already recognized had put women at a disadvantage. She ended by abdicating control to Smith, for “it is you, yes my friend it is you who are to determine whether these fond hopes be ever realized. You can make me what you please – make me then your friend” (May 3, 1800). Try as she might, she failed to disentangle their relationship from the gendered hierarchies of power that had led her to rely on him. It was a concession of power that she would not live with easily. The eruptive desires expressed in this letter were uncontainable.
Her second published piece in 1800 was a poem appearing in the Monthly Magazine in November. Bayard penned “Lines By a Young Lady. Written at the Falls of Passaick, July, 1800,” on an outing with her New York friends. In this poem she loosed her passionate yearnings for transcendence. She equated nature’s force with the force of her own desires. In the poetry’s measured verse she both released and controlled her emotional and intellectual strivings. In writing and publishing it, she transmuted her personal longings into intellectual achievement. Commemorating the moment with her friends, she celebrated the riotous variety of nature and their delight in abandoning themselves to its vagaries. Their reflective mood responded to the changing landscape. As their journey progressed toward the falls, the drama of the scene and the passions evoked intensified. “The loud tumult of the water’s roar . . . yon foaming stream’s impetuous tide” carried all before it, dashing “on the rocky shore, The oak, all shatter’d, once the forest’s pride.” The bursting pressure of youth’s (woman’s) desires knocked down age, male authority, and preeminence. Unstanchable, “exhaustless flood! no interval is thine; . . . No winter’s icy bands thy course confine.” Ceaseless as nature’s course was, it was immutable while human life ebbed and eternal life beckoned.
For ages shall these roaring waters glide,These rocks succeeding ages shall remain;While a few years shall stop the purple tide,That now with ardour swells the youthful vein.
Yet rocks the ruthless hand of time shall feel;E’en Ocean’s self, in years, shall roll away:Eternity on man has stampt the sealThat gives the promise of eternal day.(399)
Writing her own ambitions on nature’s crest, Bayard’s passions found “Echo . . . from her caves.” But then she checked the flow. First, she delimited human desire within temporal bounds; then she dwarfed nature’s might in the face of a greater power. Abruptly cutting the poem off, she recalled herself with a pious reminder that man’s fate was sealed with the promise of eternity. “Lines . . . at the Falls of Passaick” surged with the pleasures of participating in nature’s scene and sharing youthful exaltation with others. The excitement of the moment and in the poem’s creation was perhaps so exquisite that Bayard had to terminate both experiences by subsuming herself to a higher moral destiny.
She felt the tensions between self-realization and self-subordination. Her writings vibrated with countervalences of individual desires and collective obligations. When oppressed by the latter, she attempted to regulate her aspirations by submitting herself to duty, God’s design, woman’s destiny. When she felt she could not control her appetites, she took refuge in the conventions of social control. At the end of the eighteenth century, the ideology of companionate marriage sought to channel disruptive passions into societally constitutive roles. For the wife it substituted a tyranny of affections for a superimposed hierarchy of authority. The ideal left male governance vulnerable to the real possibility of female withdrawal of support (Teute, “Roman Matron on the Banks of Tiber Creek,” 89–121; Barnes, States of Sympathy, 2–9, 74–8, 115–26).
By the time Bayard’s poem appeared in print in November 1800, her days of self-expansion ostensibly had ended. She had been married to Smith for about a month. A year later they had their first child, Julia Harrison Smith. Bayard Smith had already discovered what she had intuitively known before her marriage. A month before her first child was born, she recorded in her commonplace book that “in the economical cares of my family, my thoughts & time became so entirely occupied, that I gave up all mental occupation & such was the influence of habit, that reading soon lost its attractions.” She entered her loneliness and “lethargy” (October 9–13, 15, 17, 23, November 4, December 9, 1800; October 5, 1801, commonplace book).
In her diary entry of 1804, explicitly directed to her daughters, she began with a declaration of gratitude to God, yet her catalogue of life’s vagaries revealed her apprehension of temporal contingency and belied any grounds for optimism. Bayard Smith went on to review the preceding year of her life and what emerged was not altogether a happy tale. Her accounting of 1803/4 was inflected with loneliness and depression. Certainly, the dangers and illness attendant on pregnancy and childbirth had a lot to do with her despair. But the sources of her unhappiness ran deeper than anxieties over ill-health. In her letters she revealed more about her relations with her husband than she confided in her diary, meant for her daughters. Her sense of isolation derived from the disappointments of married life.
Smith’s absence over long stretches of time caused her many “melancholy hours” while she was at their farm. In the winter when Bayard Smith resided in the city with her husband, he was “always occupied”; when he was at home she found him “indifferent” from the press of business. The sense of female isolation experienced by Bayard Smith was not unique to her. What was significant was the unhappiness generated in married women in the post-Revolutionary period. The disaffection was grounded in the particular expectations and deflected opportunities of the period. Bayard Smith was notable for harnessing her ambitions to productive ends and articulating her discontents (May 8, 1803, June 19, 1803, to Smith; November 18, 1803, to Mary Ann Smith; October 26, 1804; May 25, 1806, diary; Jabour, Marriage in the Early Republic, 52–99). In her litany of life’s vicissitudes, the telling phrase “the completion of our wishes, [so?] inadequate to our expectations” stands out. Her terminology in these passages recalls her “Evils of Reserve in Marriage.” “Melancholy,” “lethargy,” “indifference,” “disappointed” “expectations” captured the effects of affections diverted and unfulfilled. Finding the emotional and intellectual companionship less than she had wanted, she turned increasingly to the one person who could give her solace: herself. In her diaries she gave her intellect life. Voicing herself to her progeny, in front of them she argued over her fate, letting them know its costs. She structured her entries as debates, averring happiness as she fought off discontent. In the process, her pen gave flight to the words and ideas she loved, sending them out to her imagined audience. She gave wing to her intellect even as she pictured it caged.
In one long argument with herself in the fall of 1806, she rebelled against “insignificant” and “wearisome . . . domestic employments . . . With difficulty” could she “submit my mind to this kind of existence.” If it were not for her “constitutional good humour & contentedness . . . this variance between my duties & inclination [would] make me quite miserable.” She claimed to have experienced an unusual “portion of placidity & cheerfulness” the preceding summer, except for “moments . . . when my mind has refused to be chained to the monotony of family bussiness & has longed to soar in the regions of intellectual existence.” Comparing woman’s circumscribed sphere to a “horse chained to the mill,” she envied “the unlimited sphere of man,” who, like “the proud courser,” leapt all barriers and had “no bounds opposed to the expansion & exercise of his powers.” In those moments, she longed “to give full scope to that active & creative power that I feel within me, to break through the wires of the little cage that confines me, to expand my wings & rise far far beyond the mere vegetating life I now lead.” She stopped: “But I am a Woman. And society says, ‘Thus far & no farther shall’st thou come.’” She went on, debating woman’s destiny back and forth, “to discharge my duties faithfully” or “to give full scope to the powers of mind.” Finally, she gave it up. She had let her imagination soar; now she had to pull it back down to earth. With resignation, she began the process of submission that revealed the proscriptive, coercive basis to the ideologies of domesticity and companionate marriage. With one final reversal, she averted her eyes from worldly aspirations, for “alas to what end are all these thoughts.” Having unburdened her soul to her children and herself, she recommitted her diary-keeping to “amuse, perhaps instruct me & you” (September 17, 1806, diary).
The anomalies produced in the cross-currents between individual autonomy and social bonds were no more starkly embodied than in enslaved African Americans. As forced servants and laborers, they provided the substructure for individuals’ economic advancement and middle-class white families’ support. Yet, the nation’s political settlement deprived them of their rights to liberty and to binding affectional ties. Bayard Smith was acutely aware of this injustice at the heart of America. Although they did not own any enslaved African Americans in their first decade in Washington, the Smiths hired free and enslaved blacks as household servants and farm hands. Her days were enmeshed with their lives; her struggles entwined with the conflicts emanating from their dual status as their own persons and the property of others. The stories of these people punctuated her diaries and letters in her first years of married life. She recorded both her tussles with them over authority and her identity with them in resistance. In the covert stories of their lives were hidden discomfiting truths about white people who controlled their destinies.
In 1805 Bayard Smith published a children’s story, The Diversions of Sidney. She addressed the book “To my youthful Readers,” and she made them the subjects of her story. The dramatis personae were Bayard Smith, her husband, her sister Maria Bayard, daughter Julia, Matty, an eight-year-old enslaved girl whom the Smiths had hired to help about the house and to look after Julia, and the Fries children from a neighboring poor tenant farmer’s family. A day in the life of Julia, who was at the time under five years old, structured the narrative. On first glance, the story presents an account of a happy family living a bucolic existence in the countryside. But signs of tension ripple the surface calm of the story, hinting at deeper disturbances beneath. Relations between black and white child, between mother and father, between parents and children are not what they seemed. The disjunctures, gaps, and silences contain a hidden story of centrifugal forces within the American family.
In the first episode, “Breakfast,” Julia welcomes home her father, come from the city to breakfast with them. Julia and her mother surprise the father with a letter in verse, ostensibly from Julia to her father, entreating him to stay with them. By having the father read it aloud in the story, Bayard Smith had her husband publicly declaim her chastisement of him for abandoning the family. The poem reveals that Smith was not spending his leisure hours at home. To entice him back, Bayard Smith/Julia promises the mother’s sexual offerings (“flowers” and kisses) and the children’s good behavior. A disordered household, which perhaps had driven Smith away, would be made receptive and welcoming if the father would return. The wife and children would resume their obedient roles, ones they apparently had not been fulfilling. With the conclusion of these verses, the father disappears from the story.
The one who is playing her role well is Matty. Beyond being Julia’s companion, Matty is her tutor and moral exemplar. The very fact of Matty’s subservience underscores her moral superiority and intelligence. In the second chapter a dialogue between Matty and Julia demonstrates Matty’s thoughtfulness and Julia’s selfishness. Julia makes impertinent demands on another servant. In the exchange that follows, Matty reproves Julia for her bad manners and inconsiderateness. The black child expostulates concern for the servant and his horse, inculcating sympathetic identity with and good treatment of creatures who are forced to do whites’ bidding. Throughout the book Matty exhibits a consideration for others’ interests that highlighted Julia’s peremptory demands. The mother never needs to reprimand the black child, as she does with Julia.
Within the frame of a happy family story, Diversions of Sidney contains a shadow narrative of broken family bonds and asocial behavior. Cloaked by her avowed intention of amusing and instructing her young readers, Bayard Smith’s counter-propositions in the book were almost cruel. Samuel Harrison Smith reads his own denunciation by his family. Matty is not just a paragon of virtue to Julia; she proves Julia’s inferiority and Bayard Smith’s disapproval of her own daughter. However good Matty is, the story stands as a reminder that she will always be in a subservient position to the white child. The most socialized and humane character in the book, Matty, is stripped of all family and personal ties. That Matty is the primary relation for Julia and the preferred child for Bayard Smith places in high relief the dissociation at work within the white family. Affections arise from natural affinities and cannot be relied on as a source of family cohesion or discipline.
The black enslaved child exemplifies individual potential and the restrictions placed upon fulfillment in the early republic. Her stance of moral authority and intellectual capacity throws into question the utility of family connections and support. White society casts her lot as depersonalized property, yet her personal accomplishments and sensibility abnegate that degrading classification. Her ambiguous status undercuts constituted lines of authority. In Bayard Smith’s version of American society, whites look to blacks for moral precepts, and enslaved black Americans render whites’ rule illegitimate.
In the period when Bayard Smith wrote and printed this children’s book, she was in the midst of a prolonged crisis over Julia’s development. Although confiding her anxiety about Julia’s backwardness in letters to her sisters, Bayard Smith glossed over the fact of Julia’s inarticulateness in both her diaries and in Diversions of Sidney. That Bayard Smith shaped a public version covering over her private dismay emphasized the discordant emotions she was experiencing in her family situation. In contrast, Matty outshone both the Smith girls in aptitude. As Bayard Smith trained her alongside Julia, the growing discrepancy became glaring. Matty became Bayard Smith’s prize pupil. In her letters, she sometimes made invidious comparisons between her own daughters and Matty. She wrote to her sister in 1807 that “Maty has a mind & disposition that were it not for the misfortune of her birth, would make her a distinguished woman. How often when some trait of sensibility or genius, displays itself; do my eyes fill with tears as I look at her & from my heart I grieve that such a mind & heart is destined to servitude!” As if applying the lessons of her own life to Matty’s, Bayard Smith observed that Matty had “such ambition to excell; such quickness of perception & such a lively imagination, that I fear calling those powers into exercise; even without reading she acquires knowledge too rapidly perhaps for her future happiness” (22 and 28 [?] 1807, to Maria Bayard).
Bayard Smith recognized the impact she had had on Matty. She “has caught many of my sentiments & feelings & has a refinement of taste that makes me tremble” for her fate in life. Nature’s scenes and beauty “have for her, a pleasure, beyond what most children feel. She is excessively fond of poetry & commits it to memory with great facility, & a fine ear for musick. Poor Slave – And art thou doomed to bondage, to labour, to penury, with a heart & mind far more richly endowed than thy master’s!” (April 1807, diary). Bayard Smith’s rhetorical ending in her diary objectified Matty’s status. As Bayard Smith scripted Matty’s plight for her audience of posterity, she shifted the equation. From an equivalence of sensibility in which mistress and enslaved shared an identity of feelings and mental faculties, Bayard Smith elevated herself into an observer whose sympathy extended pity to the object of her regard. In adopting an almost elegiac tone, she placed a distance between Matty and herself, perhaps because of guilt at her dual role of nurturer and mistress (January 6, 1806, to Mary Ann Smith; American Mother, II, 33). She was all too aware of the contradictions of power. In both her letter and diary, she juxtaposed Matty’s intellectual accomplishments with her inequivalent status.
No one knew better than Bayard Smith the frustrations of aspirations constrained by circumstances. Even as she inscribed the barriers of class and racial lines, she questioned their legitimacy, just as she resisted the boundaries enclosing families and confining women. In submitting to the duties of her station, she acknowledged them as constraints. She expected the same of enslaved blacks. In both cases, the act of submission eroded the structures of authority, rather than bolstering them. Early in her marriage, she had observed for herself “how incompatible, servile labour is with mental activity” (March 11, 1804, to Jane Bayard Kirkpatrick). She did not fail to apply the observation to those around her who were forced to labor, not only to Matty but to other enslaved blacks who worked for the Smiths.
In writing the stories of her servants Sukey and Jessy, along with Matty, into her diary, she projected their lives on to a screen for posterity – and herself – to view (May 25, 1806; July 4, [1806], diary). As she immersed herself in sympathetic feelings evoked by their plight, she also placed them at a distance (Stern, Plight of Feeling, 172–3). She objectified their sorrows in her historical record. While reflecting on the “dreadful scenes” precipitated by slavery’s injustice, she participated in the system that produced them. Bayard Smith criticized “the distance at which most masters treat their slaves . . . They never become acquainted with the dispositions or characters of this unhappy race of beings.” Unlike many slaveholders “who realy believe that their negroes are as devoid of understanding & affections as the brute creation & indeed esteem them in no other light than mere property,” she knew “how different is this from reality.” Bayard Smith’s intimacy with her hired blacks made her feel their pain, but she was also a source of their pain. Like a voyeur, she experienced their sensations without suffering their circumstances. She identified with their desires and ambitions, but she exercised restraints on their autonomy that allowed her hers.
The complicated power relations between Bayard Smith and enslaved blacks reveal the limitations of sensibility. At the juncture of self-interest and fellow feeling, Bayard Smith suspended rational criticism and shifted to sympathy. Her feelings substituted for action; they lulled her into accepting the status quo both for herself and for them. Obscuring disparities in status and capacity between people, sympathy seemed to close the gap between self and others, but it also subordinated the other as an object of dependency, pity, or contempt. Although those in a dependent state could play upon emotions to serve their own ends, affections came into service for the subjection of others, most often females to the power of men and blacks to the needs of whites. Ensnared in her own family cares, Bayard Smith sympathized with the wrongs done to enslaved blacks, but her very sympathy could distance her from them. At times, it deflected her vision, shielding her from viewing her complicity in the system of subordination; but when confronted with the harsh terms of their condition, she did not avert her gaze from the unjust inequities between her and them.
In dismissing her black housekeeper, Sukey, for what Bayard Smith deemed intractable behavior, she nevertheless believed the servant to be “a most extraordinary woman, uniting the extreems of virtue & vice.” Sukey’s humane disposition and “most superiour powers of mind” greatly impressed Bayard Smith. She recognized that under different circumstances and with a good education Sukey’s energy and ingeniousness would have led to exceptional accomplishments in whatever occupations she undertook. Bayard Smith’s valediction for Sukey was “Her soul was not the soul of a slave” (c. July 4, [1806], diary). Bayard Smith saw herself reflected in Sukey. Her assessment of Sukey’s potential and the limitations imposed upon it echoed her own feelings of constrained ambition.
As she had informed her fiancé on the eve of their marriage, she felt bound by “shackles” that her expanding soul would burst. To her sister, she confessed, “I have sometimes thought that my soul, when it was sent to seek its body here below, made some strange mistake, & that it was never design’d by its Creator, for the mansion it inhabits. Oh how hard at times, have I found it, to confine it within the narrow precincts, to which it is now circumscribed!” The record of her thoughts and sensations, “the history of my life,” was so divergent from her life’s external “circumstances & events” that the history “my biographer . . . would write, would not be my history” (October 6 and 13, 1817, to Jane B. Kirkpatrick). This alienation from whom she appeared as opposed to whom she felt herself to be was the driving force behind her writing. Articulating her sense of herself let her see into others’ inner qualities. In Sukey’s and Matty’s cases, their sensibilities resonated with her own.
In Bayard Smith’s publications of the early 1820s, her American sensibility encompassed the possibility of social affiliations and intellectual capacity outside the bounds of middle-class white familial norms. She represented her disruptive critiques of social authority indirectly, through oppositional positions or from a moral posture. In her novel describing Washington’s political life and women’s role in it, Winter in Washington, or Memoirs of the Seymour Family (1824), the protofeminist Harriet Mortimer who articulated Bayard Smith’s discontent with marital obligations was the antagonist, not the protagonist, proper wife and mother Mrs. Seymour. At the end of the novel, Bayard Smith blew up Mortimer in a steamboat accident. Her children’s book American Mother (1823) contained the story “Old Betty,” in which an old black woman’s tale of profound racial alienation and hatred was resolved through Christian redemption (Teute, “In ‘The Gloom of Evening,’” 48–58).
When she wrote her novel “Lucy” in the mid-1820s, she focused directly on the illegitimacy of patriarchal control and the intimate connections between blacks and whites. Her social realism communicated lower-class blacks’ and whites’ perspectives, unmediated. The lack of a middle-class moral frame offended her sponsors, who deemed the novel inappropriate for white female middle-class readers. “Lucy” never appeared in print. When Bayard Smith moved from sympathizing as an upper-class white woman with working-class blacks’ and whites’ aspirations to identifying their mutual interests in antagonism to race- and gender-based hierarchical authority, she eliminated the distance that objectified pity. She violated middle-class white sensibility and recorded an American sensibility that dared not speak its name, racial amalgamation (Teute, “‘A Wild and Desolate Place’”).
This censorship silenced black voices in Bayard Smith’s subsequent publications and muffled her critical appraisal of American society. Wounded by the criticism and the novel’s failure to get into print, she afterward wrote in more guarded tones on less controversial topics. Always in tension with itself, her sensibility shrank from its most expansive dimension. She did not abandon depicting family structures and a national political culture, but she refined her indirect modes for critiquing power relations in her subsequent publishing career. Knowing how to maintain family silences of her own, after the mid-1820s she kept silent about the darkest secret in the American family.
In her writings, as in her social life in Washington, Bayard Smith carried on a conversation constructing simultaneously the expansive potential of the American nation and her and other women’s roles in it (Nina Baym, American Women Writers). Because she apprehended the conflicting claims embodied in the American promise of freedom, embedded in all her works was a dialogue between social obligations and individual autonomy. Guided by a 1790s radical sensibility, Bayard Smith mapped a moral topography of the new republic. Rather than the endowment of explicit political privileges, the real power coordinates were the capacities of all individuals to exercise their reason and to experience fellow feeling. In spite of social inequalities, she recognized an equality in sensibility that legitimated for blacks and whites, women and men, the desire to achieve their own social and economic fulfillment. Her vision, like Lydia Maria Child’s, encompassed a democratically heterogeneous society (Nelson, 104–9). Bayard Smith could imagine an inclusive America.