“The Best Fortune We Can Give Our Children”
The death of Jesse Sr. in February 1831 reverberated for years in the larger Fletcher family. Aside from Jesse’s widow, no one felt the loss more keenly than Elijah, who had for years advised and helped support his father from the “distant country” of Virginia. Soon after hearing “the sad intelligence” of Jesse’s death, Elijah took charge of memorializing his father’s legacy, covering his numerous debts, and protecting the ancestral home and property as best he could. He also wrote his brother Calvin about what should be inscribed on their father’s gravestone, remembering that “Father was the first Justice of the Peace” in Ludlow. As one of the town’s first settlers in 1783, Jesse Fletcher Sr. was a local leader, serving as town clerk, selectman, and legislator in the 1790s. Like most proud sons, Elijah wanted the world to remember his father in the most flattering fashion: “I want Fathers [gravestone] to be a little nicer than any other in the Grave yard,” he told Calvin.1
Jesse Sr. may have been a respected local leader, but he died mired in debt. Elijah and Calvin quickly became consumed with trying to pay off that debt and protect the estate. The brothers focused their attention on their youngest brother, twenty-three-year-old Stoughton, who had been living at home in Ludlow during their father’s final years. Realizing that Stoughton “had been a faithful Boy to his Father . . . till his dying hour,” Elijah and Calvin immediately looked to him to serve as caretaker of the farm and to oversee the repayment of debts. Stoughton began selling off his father’s sheep, but doing so made only a slight dent in all the financial obligations. With a debt once estimated at $150 now grown to $250, Elijah noted, “it seems as though they never could get to the end of their debts.”2
Clearly, the Fletcher farm was a poor one that offered little incentive to anyone to take over its overseeing and protection. So Elijah made a financial proposal to Stoughton: he would pay off their father’s remaining debts himself and allow Stoughton the opportunity to make whatever profits he could by remaining on the farm. But, like so many other New England youth in this era, Stoughton had other, larger ambitions, mostly out west. “He thinks the offer I make him not a very good one,” Elijah reported. Stoughton wanted to go to school and travel. And his mother Lucy, as we have seen, was stamping her feet, insisting—even in her hour of need—that the young Stoughton leave home and make his own independent life. Even Elijah couldn’t argue with these youthful ambitions—the very ones he had acted upon with success a generation before—but he did not want the property to fall out of the family “into other hands.” Finally, the Fletcher sons settled on hiring “a good man” to carry on the work of the farm and engaged Susan Sargent, a neighboring friend who had been living with their mother, to take over the domestic responsibilities.3
Meanwhile, Stoughton weighed other, more intriguing options. Both Elijah and Calvin offered to help support him if he moved to Indianapolis, where he could go to school. Stoughton already owned property willed to him by his father worth $600 to $700, and he proposed that Elijah give him an additional $500 “clear of all the debts,” an idea that gave his brother pause. Ultimately, as Elijah wrote in a letter to Calvin, “as he is our youngest Brother, to give him a start I have concluded to do it. I pay him $100 now and when he fully makes up his mind not to return but to go into other business, I am to pay him the balance.” Elijah hoped that getting out in the world would do wonders for his younger brother; it had done so in his own youth. The difficulties of life on one’s own just might awaken Stoughton to the value of returning to safeguard the family home. “After travelling about and seeing the world,” Elijah noted, “and seeing how people live and that is not the easiest thing in the world to get property, he may return.” Fearing that Jesse Sr. may have given Stoughton the mistaken notion that he would simply be handed the farm, Elijah was seizing the moment to give his younger brother an important lesson in working hard, a lesson Elijah himself had learned. “He is young and healthy and, I am glad to find, smart and intelligent for his opportunity and I think pretty well calculated to make his own way in the world,” Elijah observed. “I have scuffled pretty hard to make and save what I have and I owed it to my own family to preserve it for them, or at least what I give away, to give to my Mother, Brothers and Sisters who are in need or distress; or if I have any thing else to give them—they are all dear equally to me—I ought to distribute equally among them.”4
After a “long and somewhat perilous journey,” Stoughton arrived in Indianapolis in October 1831 to make his own start out west, supported in part by his brother Calvin. Upon hearing the news of his safe arrival, Elijah expressed delight. “You do not appreciate him too highly,” he told Calvin. “There are few young men of better qualities. He wants what he has now, an opportunity of getting a little common education and by travelling, a little acquaintance with mankind. He ought to study writing, arithmetic, and Geography—nothing further yet awhile.”5
Calvin agreed about Stoughton’s character and prospects. In fact, he was so impressed with him that just weeks after Stoughton’s arrival in Indianapolis Calvin named the baby boy Sarah had just delivered after his brother. But Calvin’s perspective on his younger brother, like so much else, was seen through the prism of his own experiences and traits. Stoughton, Calvin told his mother, “has many new things to attract his attention—new manners & new customs of the people here have been objects of speculation and remark by him. His acquaintance with the world was very limited when he started from home but his opportunities have been & will be great to learn mankind as they really are.” Stoughton was studying geography and on his way to becoming “a good scholar . . . if he can only acquire habits of reflection & study—and get rid of many of his prejudices.” Like himself, Calvin perceived that Stoughton had “a naturally peevish temper” and “must learn patience & meekness.” If he could only control his temper, Calvin thought he “will make a man of whom we shall be proud.”6
Within months of those words, Stoughton’s youthful, ambitious spirit carried him away from his new home in Indianapolis—at least for a while—on an even greater adventure. Early in the summer of 1832 he joined several hundred other men on the northern Indiana border to fight the Black Hawk War. Some four hundred mounted riflemen headed for Chicago in early June to take revenge on a band of Native Americans led by Black Hawk, a Sauk tribal leader who, with Meskwaki and Kickapoo support, was trying to take over disputed lands stemming from a controversial 1804 treaty with the United States. When some of Black Hawk’s band killed several white people in Illinois, frontier settlers, like Stoughton Fletcher, rose up to join the fight.7
Stoughton seemed positively eager to jump into the conflict. He immediately equipped himself with a rifle, two blankets, a tomahawk, a knife, a canteen, and twenty days’ worth of provisions. According to Calvin, Stoughton spent a week “exercising himself with his rifle & horse” and could “shoot as well as the best of them.” Calvin was also quick to point out that “had my family & business permitted it, I should not have hesitated one moment to have gone myself.” Calvin’s wife Sarah, whose father was experienced in frontier conflicts, having lived on the Ohio frontier during the War of 1812, eagerly “spent the whole week preparing S.’s equipments. S. said nobody but mother would have done more for him.” At no point did Calvin fear for Stoughton’s life, reflecting, “I do not apprehend any danger that may befall S. in the field of battle as I believe peace will be made without an engagement.”8 During the short-lived conflict, Stoughton oversaw the transportation of goods from New York to where the treaty negotiations with the Potawatomi were being held on the Tippecanoe River near Fort Wayne, Indiana, about one hundred miles north of Indianapolis.
For Calvin, Stoughton’s brief but revealing tour of military duty conjured up a vision of all the valuable experience and potential for valor that any young man could hope for. By the time Stoughton returned home, Calvin predicted, his younger brother would have “seen more than any young man of my acquaintance during my whole life.” Since arriving in Indianapolis, in Calvin’s proud calculations, Stoughton had attended school for six months; fulfilled his wartime duties in Albany and Buffalo, “when the cholera was raging”; supervised the transportation of $10,000 worth of goods; and maintained a presence at two Indian treaties. Brother Stoughton, Calvin proudly noted, “had an early education” that would make him “a brave and persevering man—and as it is I look to see him do well. I shall spare no pains to make him respected and useful if he stays here.”9
After his return home from the war, Stoughton went into business, joining a mercantile firm that was closely associated with Calvin in Indianapolis. From Virginia, Elijah voiced strong support for this path, especially since his own brother Calvin would be able to watch over their brother’s progress. “His little experience in this kind of business will give his partners great advantages over him,” Elijah noted. “But if they are honest men he may not suffer . . . Your brotherly advise and counsel will be of much service to him.”10
Brotherly advice served Calvin and Elijah well throughout their lives, but especially during the next ten years or so, as they struggled with the issues of avoiding debt, navigating public life while pining for retirement, and ultimately—and most painfully—trying to raise responsible and successful children.
By the 1830s, Calvin’s legal business was growing, especially the “collecting” end of it. He invested in government lands and soon needed an assistant to keep his land books and travel the state on horseback to look after his collections.11 In January 1834 Calvin bought 1,200 acres of land in La Porte County, 150 miles north of Indianapolis, launching a long career of mostly profitable land speculation. The next month the Indiana General Assembly elected him director of the state bank. He had quickly become a wealthy and well-connected man through both his legal practice and his financial dealings.
In the spring of 1835 Calvin and his business partner Nicholas McCarty purchased over three thousand acres, which, along with other recently bought real estate, were valued at $6,500. At this time, Calvin’s debts totaled $1,000, with his legal business earning him about $2,000 per year. Despite this highly profitable financial condition, Calvin grew increasingly concerned—precisely because what was making him wealthy was likewise seducing him into close contact with his greatest fear: indebtedness: “I must decline purchasing real estate yet I deem it a profitable investment, but I cannot do it without running in debt,” he reflected in his diary.12
What drove him forward with hope and—to some degree—confidence was the rising interest in the country in internal improvements: the building of canals, roads, and railroads that would more efficiently (and profitably) link various regions of the country together for the purpose of transporting goods to markets. Calvin met with the Indiana governor in 1835 to talk about the necessity of such improvements. Several railroad sites were surveyed by the legislature, especially the extension of the Wabash Canal to the Lafayette White River Canal. “The Govr. & myself agree in this that canals are the best,” Calvin observed, “because the capital to be expended in their construction [is] to be left in the country.” In contrast, he believed railroads would take money out of the area. And, unlike canals, which would be permanently sound, railroads would wear out in a decade or two. Eventually, he and others envisioned the entire state and region connected by canals and roads. “There will not be thirty miles in the state without a water communication or railroad,” he predicted in 1835.13 On January 12, 1836, the House of Representatives passed a major internal improvements bill linking the White River and Wabash canals and the railroad lines connecting Madison, Lawrenceburg, and Lafayette. Calvin was ecstatic, commenting, “This grand project will exalt Indiana among the nations of the earth. I have a strong desire to live to see the completion of this splendid system.”14
But his early fervent hope that internal improvements would usher in an era of financial health could not dispel his gnawing fear of personal financial loss. As early as December 1835, with $40,000 to $50,000 of real estate at risk, Calvin worried about the “future sustenance for myself & family . . . I would not recommend it to any young man to run many risks in the acquisition of property.” In his annual New Year’s self-appraisal in January 1836, he noted that he had invested with McCarty between $15,000 and $20,000 in real estate, $9,000 of which Calvin had borrowed. Such risk taking, he conceded, “is very hazardous & contrary to the views I have usually entertained.” But he admitted he had been coaxed into the investments because of “the great probability of a system of internal improvements,” which had “influenced my rashness on this subject.” He concluded, however, that “the fears, the responsibility, the accumulated cares cannot be repaid by any reasonable success & that those who should ever read this account may not venture on such an experiment.” Brother Elijah, he conceded, had warned him against overindulging in such real estate investments, and so he promised himself never to fall victim to “this enthrawlment” again.15
By 1837 the speculative fever had become a contagion that endangered Calvin’s banking operations in particular. The year before, President Andrew Jackson’s Specie Circular had required all payments for public lands to be made in specie, which cramped banks like Fletcher’s that financed western land speculations. A growing financial crisis in England, meanwhile, prompted English creditors to call in their loans, and simultaneous crop failures in several regions of the United States weakened the purchasing power of American farmers. In what was referred to as the “Panic of 1837” several prominent New York banks in May of that year suspended specie payments, a step that was followed by most other banks in the country. The result was a depression that lasted until 1843, hitting most severely in the West and South and prompting a demand for stricter banking laws.16
Watching anxiously from Virginia, Elijah commiserated with Calvin not only on the southern repercussions of the Panic, but also on the dangers it posed to his brother in Indianapolis. “I fear the Whirlwind, which has laid prostrate the southern rich cotton country and the mercantile wealth of the eastern cities will not pass lightly over your northwestern country,” Elijah wrote. “These things I have been anticipating but must confess they have come upon us one year sooner than I expected, but their effects will be felt for many years.” Calvin’s decision to sell off some of his overpriced land “before the Tempest and storm came” showed “much self command,” Elijah felt, as the most difficult tasks during “times of high excitement in speculation” are to maintain one’s poise and “to know when to stop and sell enough to square accounts,” leaving people “with property but no money” owed.17
Indeed, Calvin followed Elijah’s advice (and, no doubt, his own instincts during the crisis) to immediately sell off some of his property. He sold his land in Michigan City, Indiana, to a man from Kentucky for $2,875, observing in his diary that “I owe debts & am desireous to have them paid.” He traveled to Laporte, Indiana, and noted that the town “looks like a graveyard. All the laboring class have left the country & gone West to the new lands.” On his way home from Logansport, Indiana, on “as bad a road as ever I passed,” he “met many wagons movers with families—on going out we met 50 waggons coming in & met as many on our return going out.”18 Everywhere Calvin looked, the speculative fever was subverting all financial sanity. “Every man almost in this country has abandoned his business to speculate in real estate,” he told his business partner, Nicholas McCarty. “The farmer has left his farm & omitted to put in a crop. The mechanic his shop & even the merchant his store & have vested all they had & all they could borrow in real estate.”19
Elijah likewise witnessed the restless drive of the Virginians, many of whom, including a few “men of standing and respectability,” were heading west, some of them to Indiana. As soon as they could sell their possessions in Virginia, Elijah said, they were gone. Whether such movement led to a genuine improvement in their circumstances was another matter. “Some who go may better their situations,” Elijah told Calvin, but “others may wish themselves back. For my part, I feel contented and probably shall never change my location.” Even Elijah’s wife, Maria, had caught the migration bug, with Elijah noting that she was “quite restless.” Despite the fact that Virginia was enjoying relatively prosperous times, Elijah could not ignore “the immense emigration to all parts of the Western and Southwestern country.”20
Enabling all this movement and desperate speculation, Calvin believed, were eastern capitalists. Moneylenders from the big banks, he contended, “have sold to the innocent stranger to take bad money to the lounger & rascall who had none & to one & another & all owe for the property bought. All are in the market to sell & but for the policy of the prospectors there would be crash in a day.”21 Even a few unhappy citizens in Indianapolis accused Calvin’s bank of encouraging speculation and helping certain individuals amass large fortunes at the expense of poorer classes—a charge Calvin vehemently and successfully disputed.22 By May 1837 the panic was widespread. From “a very respectable merchant of N.Y. City” Calvin learned that “there scarcely will be a solvent merchant in that city by the first of June. News has arrived that the Banks of Louisville & all the Ky. Banks have suspended.”23
As he did with many social ills, Calvin viewed the nation’s financial distress as a revealing mirror into personal weaknesses. By the spring of 1837 his own “pecuniary difficulties,” he believed, had become nearly universal. Financial worries “seem not only to approach me as an individual,” Calvin observed, “but the whole nation are to be afflicted.” For a year he could “scarcely sleep at night in consequence of the debts & responsibilities resting on [him].” And he frequently invoked God’s help in resolving his “pecuniary distress”: “I desire more controle over myself—a conquest that grace alone can obtain over a heart prone to evil greatly deceitful & entwined around the things of this world.”24
While his own indebtedness seemed controllable, Calvin continued to sound the alarm, writing in his diary, “I am in my own mind prepared for the worst.” He did not live an extravagant life, he insisted, and thus had no highly valued property to surrender to creditors. “We have no carriage no Turk[ish] Carpet nor stately mansion to part with,” he noted. “On the contrary as yet we possess nothing but the necessaries of life.” His own family, in fact, was prepared to be self-sufficient, manufacturing its own butter and making its own clothing, even if it meant putting all of his children to “daily labor.”25
* * *
Invoking the possibility of putting his own children to work in the Panic of 1837 was not something Calvin Fletcher did lightly. His near-daily agonizing over the looming financial distress pained him so deeply precisely because he saw it as a dangerous threat to the prosperity and future of his children. And because his family was growing rapidly—Calvin and Sarah had eight children by 1837, some fifteen years into their marriage—he felt immense responsibility for his household. Elijah praised him for having children so early in life. “You followed Dr. [Benjamin] Franklin’s advice of early marriage,” Elijah commented, “that you might see your children raised and provided for before you die. It is perhaps a very good rule.”26 Calvin viewed large families as offering the best test for life in a difficult world, requiring the development of traits such as compromise and getting along that were necessary for any young person who hoped to succeed. He acknowledged that most people “are opposed to having large families” but, while not unmindful of “the great responsibility” of rearing so many children, believed the bigger error lay in “those who have but few & equally disastrous expectations raised,” a situation that forced many fathers to give all their property to one heir rather than spread the resources and opportunities among all children. Moreover, raising “a numerous family together gives a fair trial of their tempers & prepares each member while in this little state where many interests are to be regarded by each, to be compromised, settled & surrendered admirably for the world—‘its losses & crosses.’” In what could easily be the watchword for Calvin Fletcher’s life, he emphasized the value, and perhaps even the necessity, of reliving life through his children, noting that “in the life of all my children I live a new life, in their several prosperity or adversity I participate. They each add a new checker to the scenes of my own life.”27
Elijah Fletcher did not place himself so directly into the emotional lives of his children, but he certainly shared his brother’s conviction that it was a father’s job (more so than a mother’s) to raise and “fit” his children, especially his sons, for a specific career and future. Elijah’s two sons, Sidney and Lucian, were very dear to him, but he was aware that in choosing the South as the place to rear his family, he was not doing them any favors. “This is a bad country in which to bring up boys,” he confided in Calvin. “I wish mine could be raised in the indigence and simplicity that you and I were. You may feel very happy that you are not in a slave state with your fine Boys, for it is a wretched country to destroy the morals of youth.”28 What made it a “wretched country” was the well-known tendency of young southern men, surrounded and served by personal slaves, to become arrogant, entitled, and beyond parental control, especially once they reached their teenage years.29 Young Lucian attended a neighborhood school, but, his father conceded, even at seven years old, he was “so wild he does not learn much.” A few years later, when fifteen-year-old Sidney was being prepared to enter Yale within a year or so, Lucian at age twelve remained incorrigible: “Lucian, I hardly know what to do with as [he] will learn nothing at school and thinks of little but his Gun and amusements,” Elijah wrote Calvin. “I have now got him writing and copying in my office, merely to learn him to write and the use of figures.” Six months later Sidney was doing quite well at Yale, while another young man from their neighborhood who had traveled to school with him—no doubt “Lucian-like” in his behavior—had already gotten into trouble and been suspended. The news prompted a revealing parental cri de coeur from Elijah: “Children hardly know what pain, such disgrace at school, gives their Parents nor what pleasure it affords them to hear of their good conduct.” Sidney and Elijah’s much younger daughters, ten-year-old Indiana and seven-year-old Betty, were doing fine, with Indiana taking music lessons on the piano and guitar and Betty attending school and “very fond of her Book.”30
Elijah’s laissez-faire attitude toward life and reluctance to intrude too closely into the development of his children left him sometimes helpless in the face of the unpredictable directions they took. “I generally keep in good spirits and preserve such equanimity of mind,” he once explained. “Sometimes I am a little dejected. I have so many positions to control and manage, I cannot always keep the machinery of my affairs in proper trim.” Like many southern planters, he believed in allowing a certain degree of willfulness to his children, especially his sons, who, after all, grew up learning the “command experience” over slaves. Such a noncoercive approach to childrearing left parents with little influence when it came to wayward sons. “I try to govern more by persuasion than force,” Elijah explained. “Yet there are some crooked sticks that will fit no situation.”31
It was not only Elijah who shared educational plans with his brother Calvin; as a student at Yale, Sidney himself offered advice to his uncle on how best to prepare his cousin, Calvin’s teenage son Cooley, for college. He recommended to Calvin that Cooley should “get skilled in reading, writing, spelling and math so that when he enters upon prep studies he can focus totally on Latin & Greek.” Sidney underscored the educational deficit under which southern boys like him had to struggle in readying themselves for college. “There are few students that come on well prepared from the South,” he wrote Calvin. “I know from my own experience that a young man can not be well prepared for a thorough course through a Northern College in a Southern school. In the South they get only a smattering of what they learn.” What afflicted most southern boys, Sidney insisted—no doubt including his own brother Lucian in that group—was laziness: “For once she has you under her power it is very hard to escape from her.”32
Like so many of the Fletchers, Sidney fully endorsed the centrality and necessity of an excellent education, especially in a democratic nation like America. “The supremacy of mind can not be doubted,” he wrote his uncle Calvin from Yale in 1838, “and in a republic this fact is tenfold manifest.” What mattered most, he believed, was that in “the present age of refinement,” the acquisition of a good education would not only command respect, but “is the only means by which public advancement may be obtained.” Ambition and self-advancement, the touchstones of the Fletcher family and the American people writ large, required intelligence and enlightenment, in part because they set a man up above the common folk. “A young man without a liberal education in enlightened society,” Sidney acknowledged, “is like a fish out of water.” Young men like Sidney, Cooley, and others had the choice of being either among “the respectable” or among “the enlightened.” The respectable man may be an honest, hard-working mechanic, Sidney noted, but “he is the slave of the opposite class.” The educated “enlightened” man “controls the other,” as he has the capacity to understand and “possess” the natural world through his ability to “account for its wonders.” In an American nation where there was no aristocracy of wealth or birth, there was indeed “an aristocracy of intelligence and refinement.” And as a young man, Sidney was convinced, this was the time to join that “aristocracy.” “Youth is the time to decorate and adorne the mind and strengthen it by study,” he contended.33
All of these sentiments Elijah no doubt found comforting, even as he agonized over the slower progress and more limited prospects of his young son Lucian. He sent Lucian to a private boarding school but determined not to send him out of Virginia for the rest of his education. “Though I do not regret sending Sidney to Yale . . . Lucian will take a somewhat shorter course of studies than Sid, so as to complete them about the same time,” he wrote Calvin. Elijah’s grand plan for all his children, daughters as well as sons, was that once they completed their studies, he would “let them travel one year in the U. States and then two years in the Eastern World before they settle down in Business.” That is, he cautioned, “if they conduct themselves well, so that I can trust them abroad. For should they turn out badly—as they may—I would soon withhold from them the means of extravagance and dissipation.”34
When Calvin sent his son Cooley back east to Philips Exeter Academy in 1839, Elijah endorsed the decision but cautioned that “our boys want vigilant watching and attention. I have to advise, persuade and scold some to them. They have such a tendency to take up romantic notions and try to assume the man while they are but Boys.” Doubtless, commanding slaves every day nurtured in boys a premature sense of superiority and manliness, a pattern of entitlement and power that few planter patriarchs could prevent from developing.35
Elijah had similar but more limited expectations for his two daughters. Cultivating refinement and intelligence in Indiana and Betty mattered greatly to him, but these goals were oriented more toward a private sort of accomplished gentility rather than a life running a plantation or becoming a professional of any sort. Religion and morality also played a more prominent role in the education of girls; thus, Elijah sent the twelve-year-old Indiana off to the Georgetown Visitation Convent Academy in 1840. When dropping her off at the nunnery, Elijah gave voice both to his tender feelings for her and to his vision of the larger social world he hoped she would make her own. That vision described at once a capacious intellectual world and a circumscribed society distinctly lacking any sort of power or practical purpose. Elijah pleaded with Indiana not to be “too upset that he didn’t come by” one last time before heading back to Virginia. “I thought it best not to do it,” he told her, “knowing how tender were your feelings and how much distressed at the thought of being separated from your Friends.” He understood that her feeling “a little Homesick” was entirely natural, but he expressed the conviction that she would come to like her “new home” and would advance quickly in her studies. “It would be far more agreeable to me to have you with us, but I know it is for your good to be away for a while,” he told her. “You have greater opportunities than you could possibly have here and you know how anxious your Brothers are that you should be a Learned and accomplished Lady. Cheer up! Do not despond.”36
Indiana Fletcher
In the relatively private, ornamental world of southern ladies, Indiana and her sister Betty, through their musical training and religious instruction, were being groomed for their anticipated roles as agreeable, cultivated helpmeets to their future husbands. Near the end of 1841, by which time Sidney had returned to Virginia to manage one of his father’s farms, and with still no clear direction for Lucian in sight, their mother, Maria, offered the most realistic and insightful assessment of the future of her children, sons and daughters alike:
When my boys were little men I thought then a great deal about their being great ones but now I am contented that they may till the earth for their daily bread. I have no doubt but they would be happier and equally as respectable. Sidney seems so perfectly happy in his present occupation I should prefer that Lucian would select the same employment, tho he is much more of a roving disposition than Sid. Indiana and Betty seem delighted with their secluded situation.37
In due course, Maria’s appraisal—in both its hopeful and its concerned tones—would play out in extreme fashion.
* * *
In Indianapolis by the mid-1830s, Calvin Fletcher presided over a large and fluid household: five sons, James Cooley, Elijah, Calvin, Miles, and Stoughton; a servant girl, seventeen-year-old Orindorio Crombaugh; a widow, Mrs. Ansel Richmond; and Mrs. Richmond’s little boy, eighteen-month-old Ansel. Like many middling and well-to-do families, Calvin not only employed servants (mostly teenage girls) to help around the house, but also took in orphans or widowed women and their children for months, even years, at a time and treated them as part of the family.
It was a family devoted to hard work and self-advancement. Early on, Calvin sent his children away to school, sometimes in the neighborhood, but more often to schools miles away where he had greater confidence in the schoolmasters. In 1834, ten-year-old Elijah was sent away to a school run by Mrs. Frances Kent in Greenwood, Indiana, ten miles south of Indianapolis. She was a preacher’s wife, a “celebrated instructress.” “Mother carried me there on horseback,” the young Elijah later remembered. “The greater part of the way the road seemed as if hewed through the dark forest.” The school was apparently the only frame building in the neighborhood. Elijah recalled being seen as a bit of a hero among his fellow students, since he came from the “far distant town of Indianapolis.” His memories of his early schooling were far from rosy, however. He recalled that one of his principal teachers, William Holliday, was a man “without the least degree of love or gratitude. A more cruel, hard hearted man I never knew, minister though he was. He fairly starved, and cowhided knowledge into his scholars on study days, and then on Saturdays impudently demanded their services in sawing his wood, digging his potatoes, &c.”38
Elijah’s older brother Cooley, eleven at the time, attended an academy some sixty miles away. Again, Sarah accompanied him to school, a deliberate plan Calvin had hatched: “I make her attend to this business so if I should happen to be called off, she will have had some experience in these matters,” he wrote his mother. “Besides should my boys do well I want their mother to have the credit in a great measure.”39 Sarah sometimes shared educational duty with Calvin, listening to the children read aloud and monitoring their composition efforts.40 While Calvin and Sarah tried to display an even-tempered demeanor at home, tempers did flare on many occasions, mostly owing to Calvin’s ongoing struggle to govern his own passions. When they fought, Calvin was quick to downplay the tension in front of the children. “Mrs. F. & myself have had a conversation,” Calvin noted, “in relation to the exhibiting a bad temper before our children. We have concluded that they have readily adopted every bad passion we have ever exhibited in their presence & that we ought at once to cease such exhibitions before them.”41
What Calvin most wanted his family to exhibit, beyond an unequivocal commitment to learning, was a consistent focus on discipline and devotional life. His boys helped their uncles Stoughton and Michael with the corn crop and regularly cut and prepared wood for the family’s fireplace. And while he wasn’t a deeply pious man, Calvin made sure his children were exposed to the moral uplift that came with regular church life. “Every Sunday when at home I go to church & if possible take my children with me,” he noted in his diary.
We have a family prayer meeting on that day at which no other but the children, my wife & self attend & what is pleasing our children do not look upon it as a burthen. Every morning we assemble ourselves in the winter at 6 & in the summer before sun rise to read & pray. This we should do in the eve but for the circumstances of our children retiring very early to bed & their mother sees that they repeat the Lords prayers & I am usually absent at my office.42
Sarah Fletcher with daughters Lucy and Maria
Calvin was equally religious about fulfilling the duty of cultivating his children’s taste for the world of ideas and learning. He often orchestrated an evening of family debate. One February evening in 1833, Calvin noted, “we had a debating society to please the children. Cooley was president . . . and took his seat upon the table in a little chair and returned his acknowledgments for the honor conferred. We proceeded then to elect other officers & then to passing laws.” One such law fined any boy who failed to secure a gate appropriately, as a couple of the Fletcher boys had recently left the bar down on a pasture gate, allowing the livestock to run out.43 Every Sunday Calvin deliberately cultivated conversation with his children, especially the oldest ones, quite often discussing lessons (or actual letters) from his own parents, his early life, and his “native country” in New England. He sat them down for conversations on subjects ranging from memory to “disobedience.” Calvin always talked with his boys about significant books, which sometimes prompted as much concern in him as it did hope. After reading the life of Paulus Aemilius to his boys, Calvin felt “very anxious” about Cooley, expressing the desire that “he should advance in his studies & not idle away his time.” As he observed in his diary, “He seems willing & even apt to learn but I fear he will not dig deep for the pure waters but will be satisfied with the first pool he comes to.”44
Such anxiety about the character and destiny of his children occasionally found expression in rather extreme measures attempting to discern the future of the family. In early January 1837, Calvin called K. E. Burhans, a prominent traveling phrenologist, to his home. Fletcher had attended Burhans’s lectures and observed with great interest his “examinations” of the heads of willing subjects. Phrenology, which had become all the rage in 1840s America, was a pseudoscience focused on measuring the human skull and the bumps on the head as a revealing window into an individual’s intellect, character, and personality. Calvin wanted Burhans to do an examination of his entire family—Sarah and his seven children. Burhans arrived at the Fletcher home on the night of January 2, and over the course of several evenings, he carefully studied and measured the heads of Fletcher’s teenage sons Cooley and Elijah, along with his younger boys, Calvin Jr., Miles, Stoughton, and Ingram. He then delivered his assessment: Elijah, Calvin’s twelve-year-old, displayed “good intellects,” Calvin reported, but, according to Burhans, “he is a little cunning, evasive.” He may become “a good scholar,” Burhans concluded, “but lacks application.” Cooley, the eldest boy, at fourteen, was “very respectable” but fell in the extreme range in terms of needing approval and love: the boy, he said, “will be fond of show &c if not checked.” Both boys showed a decent “firmness” of mind, though young Calvin Jr. was “too timid” and seemed relegated to “happy mediocrity.” All of the children, Calvin reported, were pronounced to have “respectable intellects,” with Elijah and Stoughton “calculated the best for scholars.” Most noteworthy was Burhans’s assessment of Calvin’s quiet, unassuming wife, Sarah, who struggled with low self-esteem. As Calvin noted, with surprise and joy, “Mrs. F. ranks much higher than myself in her intellectual faculties. This I always knew but she fails in Hope which deprives her of much worldly happiness & counteracts her other energies.”
No one in the family concerned Calvin more than his eldest son, Cooley. Calvin invested so much time and heart and hope in Cooley that it is sometimes painful to witness how much his paternal worry grew out of a seemingly relentless need to see the boy’s odyssey through the prism of his own childhood experiences. In the fall of 1837, Calvin and Sarah allowed the fourteen-year-old boy to take a solo trip to Urbana, Ohio, to visit his maternal grandfather and great-grandmother Olive, who, Calvin reflected, “is yet alive & in all probability C. will be the only one of my children who will ever see her.” What mattered so much to Calvin in Cooley spending time with Olive, it turned out, was the symbolic role she had played in Calvin’s youth, most notably in his celebrated act of running away from home to start his life out west: “I am under many obligations to her & especially for the loan of a shirt in the summer of 1817 when I first arrived in & near Urbana O. from N.E.,” Calvin remembered. “I had lossed & worn out all my clothes & I was so destitute that I had but one shirt. The use of one she supplied for several weeks till I fortunately obtained the pattern of one which she made for me.” For his visit Cooley left Indianapolis in a covered wagon and was given $13 for expenses. A couple of weeks later, however, Calvin learned by letter from Cooley that he had lost the money “while helping his grandfather Hill make cider” and could not get back home. Calvin was “mortified that his grandfather should be so stupid or weak as not to help him home without suffering him to write to me for money.” In the end, Calvin contacted a wealthy friend in Urbana to quickly provide funds for Cooley to come home by stagecoach.45
Even more revealing, Calvin often used key milestones in his children’s lives to prompt deep remembrance and reflection about his own early life and lessons learned and forgotten. For a man immersed in both shame (about his early poverty and ignorance) and pride (over his tenacious struggle to advance himself), recalling and reliving these critical moments in his own life and those of his children conjured up “teachable moments” about a well-lived life. To commemorate his son Elijah’s fourteenth birthday in August 1838, for example, Calvin remembered that he had been absent at the boy’s delivery—he had been attending a trial thirty miles away. And prior to that he had been visiting his father in Vermont and endured a difficult six-week journey (much of it either in a flatboat or skiff) or alone on horseback, arriving home two weeks before Elijah was born. “My prospects looked truly gloomy,” he recalled, as Sarah had taken sick a short time before the birth, “the first serious sickness that she ever experienced.”
My prospects for success in life also seemed to wane at this time. I had not learned the philosophy of life, to be greatful & content with what I had, patient persevering & self possessed as to the future. My education encouraged & increased my besetting weakness my fears which even made me the dupe of those who took a more cool & deliberate view of present & future prospects in life. Such were my awful apprehensions that I should prove a failure, that things that passed before me gave me no valuable experience . . . Oh that I could live over this portion of my life with a suitable mentor at my side.46
While he couldn’t relive “this portion” of his life, Calvin as a father committed himself to something just as powerful: he would become, in effect, his own children’s mentor, ensuring through his hard-won paternal wisdom that his children’s weaknesses and fears would be overcome and making failure—his biggest fear—much less likely. And so Calvin became extremely proactive in assessing, cajoling, guiding, and shaping the educational and occupational futures of his offspring, especially his many sons. This task began each morning. Calvin would rise at 5:00 a.m. and commence “the duties of the day.” These involved reading a chapter of Scripture, making sure to explain it to the children, and reviewing the previous day’s Bible reading. Then there were prayers and reading “by candlelight” until breakfast. In a particularly revealing moment, Calvin accompanied Cooley and Elijah one spring evening in 1839 to the academy, where several students were performing with prepared speeches. Cooley gave a brief speech, and Elijah read a composition on “Gratitude & obedience to parents & teachers.” Calvin’s notes on the evening could well have been those of a coach or teacher:
E. had good composition. Cooley spoke with taste but too tame & too low. Both have left fine opportunity to improve & I have confidence they will do so. Both have exerted themselves more the present & past year than ever before yet do not fill all their valuable time as they should. C. has suggested the propriety of spending another year at home in work & study before he takes up a regular academic course—thinks 17 or 18 will do better than 15 or 16. I am pleased with the remarks. Elijah also seems disposed to be governed by his parents counsel. If my children grow up with such views such a desire to abide by the counsel of their father & mother they can scarcely miss doing right.47
Developing an acute awareness of one’s own faults became for Calvin a touchstone for potential improvement. So he asked his fifteen-year-old son Elijah to submit to him in writing a list of his most glaring and troubling weaknesses. Elijah’s list included the concession that he was lazy, guilty of inertia, “too fond of building airy castles,” wasteful, and insufficiently vigilant against evil; furthermore, he didn’t truly cultivate his memory, inadequately controlled his passions as “they mislead me,” procrastinated, had an excessive appetite, and had developed insufficient self-esteem and ambition.48 Elijah’s list offered a litany of weaknesses and fears strikingly similar to those noted by Calvin’s own troubled soul—which may explain why Calvin reacted with such approval to Elijah’s self-searching effort.
When Calvin made plans to send three of his sons—Elijah, Calvin, and Miles—off to summer school in 1840, he did so, he claimed in a letter to the school’s superintendent, despite great “inconvenience” to the work on his farm and around the household. But it was the strategic importance to his children’s young lives of attending school that prompted his “sacrifice”: “I am aware of the importance of the present precious moments to them,” Calvin wrote. “This summer’s attendance under your care will either fix habits of Vigilance and attention, or idleness and sickly capacity to acquire knowledge which will stick through life.” Then Calvin proceeded to make specific requests and demands for each of his children that he clearly expected the school to honor. For Elijah, Calvin wanted the school to protect his delicate sensibilities and respect the internal discipline already in place for the sixteen-year-old boy: “I do not wish to have E. drove or censured. His sense of propriety, the certainty of public disgrace, and the mortification of his parents should afford abundant stimulous.” Regarding the fourteen-year-old Calvin and twelve-year-old Miles, the demands were more straightforward: “I expect attention and progress from Calvin voluntary & insured beyond anything heretofore exhibited. If I am disappointed in this please return him. As for Miles I do not fear but he will use every exertion.” But Calvin wasn’t finished. He was intent on laying down rules that would provide him as much control and information as any teacher or school official might hope for: “They will return directly home at noon and night and disobedience in this particular must deprive them of the priviledge granted. What studying they [do] must be done at School if they can not keep up with their class, they must stay at home. They can do that they assure me if not I should [not] Send them I shall expect to have an inspection of the merit roll from time to time.”49
For his oldest son, Cooley, Calvin consulted his young lawyer friend Simon Yandes for help in getting the boy into Harvard. Having recently attended Harvard, Yandes knew the school well and quickly convinced Calvin that it was a superior institution, despite the cold, off-putting demeanor of its students and faculty. “The means of education here are certainly in advance of those of any part of the Union,” he wrote Calvin. “The New Englanders take them for all in all [they] are the first people in our country. They are an inquiring, thinking, moral, industrious people. They do not fritter away their time in an everlasting round of fashionable or unfashionable social intercourse, but tend to their business. I feel sure that Cooley after he gets reconciled to their unsocial and cold manners will admire them.”50
Initially, though, Calvin sent Cooley off to Phillips Exeter Academy to groom him for entry into college and to provide him with some extended time far from home. The principal at Exeter, Gideon Soule, wrote favorably about Cooley, who, he said, had “made a pleasant impression upon his instructors & other acquaintances, by his frank & amiable deportment. He has perhaps sufficient ardour in his studies, & is making good progress.”51 But soon the optimism began to fade. When Cooley failed to write his father for several weeks, Calvin got worried (“I fear some accident has occurred”) and then learned that Cooley had gotten sick, had “bought prints & busts” that exceeded his budget, and was talking about transferring to “a western college”—an idea of which Calvin disapproved. Regarding the prints and busts, Calvin noted, “He had no right to purchase them altho the part he contributed ($1.50) was small yet the principal is what is to be guarded against.” The next day Calvin wrote an especially reproving letter to Cooley, only to be stopped by his son Elijah and his wife from sending it for fear he was being “too severe.”52
When Cooley’s grades fell from “very good” to “good” in the fall, Calvin could barely contain himself. “I feel mortified at this result but cannot help it,” he commented in his diary. “If my sons have not pride, a sense of duty a regard for their parents wishes so as to maintain a proper position at such an institution I cannot help it.” Cooley wrote his father about his falling grades, but his response fell short of an apology. Cooley seemed, according to Calvin, “happy as usual—makes a poor apology for his low standing.” When several weeks then went by without hearing from Cooley, Calvin confided to his journal that he had perhaps placed too much heart and hope in his eldest son. “I have indulged in too much anxiety in this matter,” he wrote. “I am looking forward [to] too much happiness in his success. His defeats, his reverses must be expected . . . Let me not place my heart too much on what may perish.” When Cooley’s grades improved a bit and he made an explicit apology for his “last bill of standing,” Calvin decided his boy’s problem came from “his too confiding disposition. He has expected favors without adequate labor . . . He is determined to please everybody in future & hurt no bodys feelings.”53
Meanwhile, Calvin was beginning to rethink the future for some of his other sons, especially Elijah and Calvin Jr. Increasingly he came to believe that a life devoted to agriculture—which, of course, had been his own father’s lifelong work—might be the most suitable and honorable calling for them. To Calvin, not only did successfully running a farm make practical sense, but working the soil conferred a sense of dignity that he considered essential for a man. When Elijah came home from school in May 1841, Calvin decided that working with his hands would be his son’s “first trial.” “His success in getting my corn plowed, my wheat & hay harvest in will mark his character through life,” he determined, “& I feel anxious that he should succeede that I may hold him up as an example to the rest of my children & disappoint a few of my prophesying friends that say my boys will prove failures.” Working the soil was always honorable work to Calvin Fletcher, so a young man toiling hard in the fields was destined for respectability. “I wish my sons each & all of them never to see the day while in health that they cannot do a good days work at husbandry,” he reflected.54
Which is why Cooley so troubled his father. Unlike the other boys, who were willing to engage in agriculture, Cooley strictly pursued an intellectual life. But his uneven progress at Phillips Exeter sowed mostly worry, doubt, and, ultimately, anger in Calvin. Because Cooley, like most students living away from home, both then and now, didn’t always disclose his failings and occasional excesses, Calvin fretted constantly about the boy, fearing his son had “become the creature of his own vanity.” And what concerned him most were Cooley’s unmanly character traits. “He has not moral firmness,” Calvin concluded, and “can be misled by women & cajoled by men.”55
While studying at Exeter, Cooley developed an interest in collecting artwork and doing some drawings of his own, even making some paintings for his uncle Timothy as well as two drawings of a factory he showed some members of the family. In the summer of 1841 Cooley made a trip to the homestead in Vermont, where he showed “some beautiful Landscape sketches of his” to his uncle Timothy as well as his uncle Elijah, who was visiting from Virginia. One of the sketches was of “the old Mansion” itself, which, Elijah told his brother Calvin, “I think so much of as to have it put in a Frame. You must not neglect to give your children opportunity for mental culture. For that purpose I now propose to you, if you cannot conveniently otherwise do it, appropriate the interest of the money arising from the money you owe me.”56 Calvin was deeply moved by his brother’s offer to help fund the children’s “mental culture.” But despite being “grateful to God for such a brother,” Calvin wouldn’t accept his offer, if only because he thought adversity might be a better teacher: “Poverty more frequently proves a blessing in the acquisition of education & the preparation for usefulness than property or wealth.”57
While his uncles and brothers saw promise and talent in Cooley’s budding interest in art, Calvin saw distraction and disappointment. Cooley’s plan to start a “painting school” was a future for which Calvin had “but little faith,” but he decided to let him try it. All along Cooley sensed his father’s disapproving eye and fear that his oldest boy was headed toward failure. Even Calvin correctly recognized his son’s despair over parental disapproval, noting, “He seems to feel a little despondent & states he fears that I have lost confidence in him.” As he completed his schooling at Exeter in the spring of 1842, Cooley began to wonder if he was “fitted for college,” citing “his own defects of character” and worrying that “his intellects are not equal to those of the rest of his brothers.” This perceived intellectual inferiority was one he had sensed for a long time and considered a “mortification” that he wanted his father to keep from “the rest of his brothers.” This gradual but unmistakable sense of inferiority, Calvin deduced from a letter Cooley wrote him, “had deterred him from choosing a higher destiny than farming & that he believed [his father] was conscious of these defects &c.” Cooley’s recognition of his own weaknesses sparked an odd sense of joy and recovering confidence in his father. Calvin told his eldest son that “this awakening in him I considered one of the best symptoms of his talents” and revealed that he himself at a similar age had formed a “similar” self-assessment and arrived at an opinion “as to my destiny” precisely the same as the one Cooley was now experiencing. True self-knowledge, Calvin told Cooley, “was to Know how little could be known, to see all other faults & fell our own.” If Cooley “would aspire to a higher destiny than an inferior farmer or professional man I would risk the attempt.”58
In the fall of 1842, Cooley entered Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, at which point Calvin claimed he was going to let Cooley be his own man: “I have reconciled myself to let him take care of himself. I hope it may be beneficial to him. I have not much confidence in his classical attainment—think he has not laid out but very little of his real strength in his classical studies.” His opinion did not improve once he learned a few days later that Cooley had been “instructing some young girls how to draw.” Calvin nonetheless sent him $152 to cover his expenses for a year. Despite his pledge to let Cooley find his own way, Calvin registered plenty of concern: “I do not feel such apprehensions as to his morals as I do to his firmness & ambition as a student.”59
Brown University turned out to be an appropriate place for the Fletcher boys, even if their performance did not always show it. Founded by the Baptist Church in 1764, Brown always focused on the individual student rather than on any sort of abstract learning experience. It offered a remarkably liberal, student-centered curriculum. As President Francis Wayland, the school’s leader during Cooley’s time, declared, the curriculum was arranged so that “every student might study what he chose, all that he chose, and nothing but what he chose.” Drawing students mostly from rural New England, Brown was a small place, with fewer than two hundred students in the early 1840s. All of these characteristics served its purpose, which was not only to broaden young minds but also to safeguard student morals and discipline. Like other Ivy League schools in this era, Brown was top-heavy with elaborate moral rules that were carried over from Puritan days but fitfully enforced. Despite an intricate system of fines for all manner of petty offenses, many schools had to contend with mob violence and violent disruptions—some of them direct, bitter confrontations between entitled young men and their professors. At Brown in the 1820s, students stoned President Asa Messer’s house almost nightly. Harvard had a riot over bad bread and butter in 1805; during a riot at Princeton in 1807 the faculty lost control and had to call in townspeople for help. At other schools, fist and knife fights happened with great regularity.60
President Wayland, along with his entire faculty of nine professors (three of whom were glorified tutors), regularly visited students’ rooms during study hours to make daily reports and exercise vigilance over student absences and other violations of school rules. If a student’s conduct was deemed unsatisfactory, the president would inform the student’s parents and “dismiss him without public censure or disgrace.” Wayland’s concept of college life was that of an academic family, knit together by a strict but kindly paternalism of the faculty over the mental and moral life of its students.61
Life at Brown drew the attention of Cooley’s younger brother Elijah, who was following in the same path, attending Exeter to prepare for college. In the fall of 1842 Elijah paid a surprise visit to Cooley. Upon arriving in Providence, he found a student to direct him to the college and the boardinghouse where his brother was staying. He “met C. on the stairs. [He] didn’t know me.” Elijah “stayed up in his room until he came . . . He almost cried he was so glad, and it was so unexpected. His questions came so fast that it was a long time before he could stop for answers.” Cooley showed him the campus, the statue of Roger Williams, and the old church. Then, Elijah wrote his family, “we measured. I am the tallest and the broadest. In my eyes he was the same fellow as when he left home, only more polished in his manners. He recommended to me the study of politeness.” After spending a little time with his older brother at Brown, Elijah reported to his father on what he had witnessed and learned back East: “I have seen the Yankees, and I find they are nothing more than men with heads on their shoulders. I’m not afraid of them . . . Cooley is a perfect Yankee.”62
Reflecting on the “Yankee” world of the Boston area, Elijah marveled at the eating arrangements where he had stayed, which were a sort of nineteenth-century fast-food experience: “I boarded in a victualing house,” he wrote his uncle Calvin, “where there are hundreds eating all the time and only three waiters. You may call for whatever you want, a waiter runs to a speaking tube and mentions to those below then walks to a cupboard on the other side of the house and gets it, so quick is the cooking done and so quick is it passed up into the victualing room by means of sliding cupboards.”63
Back home in Indianapolis, Calvin not only watched and fretted over Cooley and Elijah away at college, but he also struggled with the uncertain future of his next-oldest boy, seventeen-year-old Calvin Jr. Despite urging the boy to “acquire a taste for reading the Classics,” Calvin perceived Calvin Jr. as “ha[ving] none & look[ing] upon it a great hardship to study them. I have warned him of the consequences of his general apathy on the subject.”64 Calvin rightly saw that his son had a “much better business than literary turn.” The very next year, Calvin Jr. was apprenticed to work in Alfred Harrison’s mercantile store. Even still, his father worried about whether the boy would succeed. “I know it is a fearful business,” Calvin wrote Cooley, “not one out of 20, no, out of 30, who have commenced in our place succeeded. They have all proved failures. I have laid these matters before him. I have made a great sacrifise to spare him from my farm.”65
Then, as now, parental worry over a son’s future spawned a lot of sleepless nights, but dealing with disobedience was another matter. Even as he seemed to find some emotional equipoise regarding the futures of his eldest children and that of his brother Elijah, Calvin simply couldn’t hold back when any sort of apparent defiance surfaced. In June 1843, Cooley and Elijah attended the Bunker Hill celebration in Boston, part of festivities honoring the start of the American Revolution. Elijah traveled at some cost from the family homestead in Ludlow, which he had been visiting, and Cooley set aside his studies to join him for the event. Viewing this trip by his children as a “species of disobedience,” Calvin nonetheless tried to reconcile himself “to what I could not help.” But he worried about how attending such an event would both “exhaust” Cooley’s limited funds and affect the boy’s “standing” at the end of the term. He was also “much mortified” that Elijah was going, too—“but as it is I must put up with it.”66
Calvin became even more “mortified” when he learned that Elijah was not remotely regretful for having gone to the Bunker Hill festivities. “My teacher went, my classmates went, and I went,” he told his father. “I studied during my vacation and was tired out and rather unwell.” But after discussing it with his grandmother and her caretaker, Susan Sargent, in Vermont, he got total support. “It cost me about $10 beside a book that I bought for a dollar and quarter,” Elijah noted in a full-throated defense. “I saw Cooley and John Tyler, his sons, [Daniel] Webster, General Scott, and in fact all the great men of our country. Moreover, I beheld several scores of old soldiers. I saw hundreds of women, the fair population of the Athens of America. In short, I had a fine time and I don’t think I will ever regret or repent going.” Calvin responded with a severe four-page rebuke for having been influenced by others to do what he, Elijah, knew was wrong. But to the very end, Elijah denied he had been led astray: “No one persuaded me to go, but myself.”67
* * *
The independent courses that his sons often took produced in Calvin angry outbursts and harsh reprimands. But for his brother Elijah, who experienced his own painful struggles with his sons, especially Lucian, the response to wayward conduct, while unhappy, took on a more philosophical, even laissez-faire, tone. Despite his success at Yale, Sidney returned from college in the summer of 1841 determined to work on the farm rather than follow any professional career—a decision Elijah ultimately supported, although he worried that Sidney might be returning to the farm “to lie down and be a drone,” something Elijah, like Calvin, would simply not allow. “My Boys shall never spend my Estate either in idleness or dissipation,” Elijah vowed. If they did, he promised to give it away to charity. “Upon this,” he declared, “I am firmly resolved and I take every opportunity to let them know it.”68
Concerned that Sidney was squandering his talent and future on the plantation, Elijah, along with some of Sidney’s friends, coaxed him into attending medical college in Richmond the next spring. In short order, Sidney felt oddly out of place studying medicine, preferring the more honest, but less professional, toil as a farmer. “I am as much surprised at my present situation as any of my friends can be,” Sidney told his uncle Calvin, “as it’s a department for which I am by no means constituted to excel or which can afford me any gratification in practicing. In leaving Agriculture, I am transformed from a good farmer into a shabby gentleman.” Dutifully attending the lectures at the medical college might well make Sidney sufficiently knowledgeable to become “a tolerable country Doctor,” but he knew that once his courses were complete he’d be heading straight home and would in fact devote little time to medicine. When Sidney did return home, Elijah was pleased with his son’s “zeal and industry on the Plantation. He is no drone.” Sidney apparently used his medical knowledge “among the Servants” (by which he meant black slaves), though it was clear even to his father that he had no plans to become a full-time doctor. For Sidney, returning to the plantation represented an act of duty and obedience to his father, who had often told him that his “prosperity in life has been dependent on the benedictions and blessing of his [own] parents, and that a Source of his greatest satisfaction arises from the reflections of having done his duty towards them.”69 Although he became known as Dr. Fletcher, Sidney never actively practiced medicine.
Sidney returned to a family that was scattered to the four winds. Sister Indiana was ensconced at the convent in Georgetown, and Betty remained at home. Betty, though “not as good a Schollar as [Indiana] . . . possesses more talent and has the most amiable disposition ever I met,” Sidney noted. Lucian had been attending Yale and hoped to finish his education at the College of William and Mary. He was also already talking of making a trip out West, “which he certainly ought to do,” Sidney wrote. “I shall try and persuade him to go in the Spring.”70
Early on, Elijah saw promise in young Lucian, believing in the spring of 1841 that he might even make a better scholar than Sidney: “Though quite wild and headstrong as a child, he is grave, ambitious, and very studious as he is approaching to manhood.” Unlike his fretful and worried brother Calvin, Elijah found hope and optimism when he considered his children and the future they faced. “When I look about and see so many unfortunate, wild and dissipated ones, it affords me peculiar satisfaction that mine are so far moral, affectionate, and obedient,” he reflected to Calvin. “I have never been rigid with them but early taught them how to obey.” He may have been hopeful, but he wasn’t myopic. “They are still young,” he conceded, “and great changes may come over some of them yet and my present satisfaction may hereafter be turned into regret. But I will hope and pray for better things.” Even with all the unknowns and expense of educating children far from home, Elijah insisted, “A good Education is the best fortune we can give our children.”71
And Elijah made good on that conviction in his family. Having sent Sidney, and then Lucian, to Yale, he invested considerable further funds in Indiana and Betty, both of whom studied at the Catholic convent in Georgetown. After a year at the convent, “Inda” (as the family called Indiana) attended Bishop Doane’s School, a well-known female academy in Burlington, New Jersey. Established in 1837 by the Right Reverend George W. Doane, it was one of the more prominent all-girls’ academic boarding schools in the nation. And, like other girls’ schools and seminaries—which began to flourish after 1800—Doane’s School was a small, private academy run by individual proprietors or, in this case, religious orders. The girls came from exclusively white, well-to-do families and were taught a wide range of subjects—literature, history, geography, natural sciences, foreign language, and religion, as well as those subjects thought to be indispensable to female accomplishments: music, painting, and sewing.72
Quite the scholar, Indiana wrote her father a letter entirely in French as a teen. Although nineteenth-century society was a man’s world in terms of learning and power, Elijah grasped early on that Indiana would “excel either of her Brothers in Learning. She is shrewd and sensible, very ambitious and intelligent, but will not be very showy. It is not a characteristic of our Family to make much display—rather retiring and contented with a reserved self-importance.” By the summer of 1843, the family’s hopes for Lucian, in contrast, began to dim. Unlike his sisters, he was intent on displaying his “self-importance.” Returning from Yale in the summer of 1843, Lucian decided he would finish his studies at William and Mary, presumably in preparation to become a lawyer. “He is somewhat vain and pedantic,” Elijah noted, “and thinks he will make a great Lawyer. But there is no telling.” Elijah worried that “he will not be able to maintain the ground and eminence he now assumes to himself . . . it is a critical time with him.”73
Early signs of paternal regret can be traced back to correspondence from Lucian’s time at Yale. Those communications in the spring of 1842 reveal a young man quite full of himself—“He thinks he will make a mighty man,” Elijah acknowledged. “Even now [he] considers himself quite an Orator and flatters himself that [he] has a genius to thread the intricate mazes of the Law.” Maturity and time, “practice and experience,” Elijah insisted, “may show [young men] that many of these fancies are visionary, but unless they strive and hope for distinction they never will attain it.” In the fall of 1844, Lucian, as planned, intended to leave home for the West, “where he thinks of seeking his Fortune,” Elijah told Calvin. “He is not very well settled but somewhat visionary in his calculations about the Future. I am willing for him to try his luck, go among strangers and depend upon himself for a while. He will then know the better how to appreciate a home, where everything has been Plenty, Ease and Comfort.” Elijah hoped he could talk young Lucian, then twenty, into paying a visit to his uncle Calvin in Indianapolis. “You sometimes like to have a young man as an assistant in your Office,” he wrote Calvin. “If you could put Lucian to work and I could persuade him to stop with you, instead of going South, till he learned some good hard sense, it would gratify me much. Lucian is sufficiently towering—too much so for his acquired abilities.” Referring to England’s famous opposition statesman and eloquent orator, Charles James Fox, Elijah noted that Lucian had “many lofty Foxian notions and wants very much practical information. He is somewhat headstrong and thinks few know better or more than he does. I have said nothing to him about this project and will not till I hear from you.”74
After Calvin sent Lucian a detailed and demanding letter spelling out exactly how he would have to live if he moved to Indianapolis, Lucian changed course, deciding first to sail from Norfolk to New Orleans “and perhaps locate there.” Soon after his arrival in New Orleans, however, he became sick with a fever. After he recovered, he set out on his way home to Virginia, still hoping to stop by his uncle Calvin’s in Indianapolis. A few months later, though, Lucian had still not visited his uncle nor returned home to Virginia. “Lucian is now somewhere in the Mississippi,” Elijah glumly noted, presumably visiting with an uncle in the area. “What will be his ultimate destination I cannot say. He seems to want his own way and I am willing to let him have it.”75
At the same time that Elijah was worrying about Lucian’s wanderlust, Calvin revealed that his own son Elijah had withdrawn from college, signaling a level of ingratitude that both men recognized as a dangerous warning sign. In the face of his nephew’s disregard for his educational “advantages and privileges,” Elijah expressed support for Calvin’s feeling of being “compelled to deprive” the boy of further financial aid. For Elijah, Calvin’s son and Lucian’s decision to wander off the well-laid path offered a profound and instructive cautionary tale in the precarious art of raising sons: “My determination is fixed,” he told Calvin, “about the management of Boys: to be kind to them and give them every opportunity to make themselves useful citizens and an ornament to Society, if they are disposed to properly appreciate those opportunities; and if not, take the opportunities from them. Do not give them money to spend on demoralizing and destroying themselves.” If his children chose not to use that support carefully and thoughtfully, Elijah believed it was his “duty to Society” to give it instead to charity or “other needy relations who would properly value it.”76
Like Calvin, Elijah believed in the democratic distribution of family resources so that all children could enlarge their world and opportunities through education. He, like all the Fletchers, felt committed to such an egalitarian perspective, even if it meant funding “the undeserving as much as the deserving,” because “all should be equally dear to us.” However, Elijah drew the line at deliberate defiance. What if one son “wantonly and willfully perseveres to distress and make me unhappy?” he wondered. “What obligation do I owe him? Ought I not to cast him off, forget him, and not be rendered unhappy by him?” He treasured each finger on his hand, he observed, but if one “became diseased . . . and threatened the welfare of the rest of the body, I ought cheerfully to cut it off and cast it away and not grieve for it.”77
Because they so deeply valued education as a means of self-advancement and prevention of failure—in part because it had profoundly shaped their own lives—Calvin and Elijah put everything they had on the line to give their sons and daughters every advantage possible. Their heavy emotional and financial investment sometimes paid off, but, as they would painfully learn, living so much through their beloved children would also bring heartache and loss.