CONFINED TO HER bed, where she had remained since the birth of her daughter Charity a month before, thirty-nine-year-old Silence Bryant lay dying. The weight that disease brought to bear on her chest was compounded by the pressing considerations of the spiritual fate awaiting her and the temporal fate awaiting her children. Silence’s strict Congregationalist faith directed that she prepare her soul to meet her maker, but that blessed reunion would leave her children motherless. The survival of her sickly infant hung tenuously. Outside the rectangular windows of the colonial house, the fields of North Bridgewater, Massachusetts, were green with early summer grass. Inside, a gaunt-faced woman, grown old before her time, succumbed to consumption. The infant daughter she left behind never knew her mother and never ceased mourning her death.1
Silence’s life ended amid a scene of destruction. Beyond the sickroom walls, the nation entered the third year of a terrible war for independence. At the front, Washington’s continental army pursued Hessian soldiers across central New Jersey, leaving the wool-clad corpses of mercenaries scattered along the roadsides.2 Off the coast of New York, captured American sailors lay dying from disease and malnutrition on British prison ships.3 Close to home, in Massachusetts, a smallpox plague raged through private homes, sweeping away whole families.4 Silence’s death was only one among thousands in June 1777, hardly worthy of notice outside the family circle. Her death was not even the first within the family since the war began.
Signal guns from Lexington and Concord were heard in North Bridgewater, twenty miles south, within hours of the Revolution’s opening battles on April 19, 1775. That afternoon, several of Charity’s uncles marched north with the minutemen.5 They led the way in a parade of local citizens who volunteered to fight throughout the eight-year war. The Bryants’ fourteen-year-old neighbor Hezekiah Packard volunteered two months later when the cannon shots from the Battle of Bunker Hill echoed through the village.6 North Bridgewater men played a critical role in the Battle of Dorchester Heights, the following March, which enabled the patriots to recapture Boston.7 A month later, Silence’s oldest son, Oliver, volunteered for Captain Elisha Mitchell’s Plymouth County company of the Massachusetts militia.
Oliver’s enlistment period was probably shorter than a year, since the patriots were still wary of creating a permanent army at that early stage in the war. But he did not live to finish his term. Exactly how Oliver died is uncertain. Charity was in error when, many decades later, she told her nephew John that her oldest brother had died in June 1776, two months after his enlistment.8 The State Library of Massachusetts holds a rations receipt made to Oliver Bryant dated August 9, 1776, in a camp “near New York.”9 This places him in proximity to the Battle of Long Island, which makes sense since Bryant served in Col. Simeon Cary’s regiment that fought there.10 According to a family genealogy he died in the battle, but his gravestone records his death date as August 24, three days beforehand.11 A camp disease may have taken his life before the fighting broke out.
Silence was already in a weakened state when she heard the news. The birth of Oliver eighteen years before had been the first in a nonstop sequence of pregnancies and parturitions that absorbed her entire adult life. Five months’ pregnant when she married Philip Bryant at the age of nineteen, she gave birth to Oliver in March 1758.12 Ruth and a twin who died followed in 1760. Another son may have been born in 1761 and died in infancy. More surviving children were born in 1763, 1765, 1767, 1769, 1771, and 1774.13 At some point in this history, Silence developed consumption. The wasting disease caused severe respiratory distress, fever, exhaustion, and weight loss. Silence was harrowed and spent when, pregnant once again, word of Oliver’s death reached her. A bleak season followed, while Silence struggled through the grief of losing her oldest son, the ravages of a terminal illness, and the needs of a household of young children plus one more on the way.
Her difficulties were compounded by the closely concurrent deaths of her parents and her mother-in-law, which deprived Silence of both practical and emotional support when she needed it most. Her father and mother, Abiel and Silence Howard, figured largely in their daughter’s and grandchildren’s lives. Abiel played an instrumental role in orchestrating Silence’s marriage to Philip Bryant, who had come to live with the Howard family in order to train as a doctor under Abiel’s guidance. In a story common to the eighteenth century, the apprentice fell in love with the master’s daughter—or at least made her pregnant. The match, if precipitous, seems to have been welcome. As Silence and Philip’s family swiftly grew in the years that followed, the children frequently visited their grandparents who lived nearby. Abiel lent his grandchildren books from his extensive library and encouraged their love of poetry; Silence, a pious woman, nurtured the grandchildren’s faith.14 Silence Howard’s death in August 1775 and Abiel Howard’s death in January 1777 seem to have come as a surprise. Abiel died intestate, prompting the court to appoint Philip Bryant to administer his estate.15 Philip’s own mother, Ruth Staples Bryant, died two months later, increasing the family’s grief.16
The deaths of so many beloved relations so close in proximity struck a terrible blow to Silence. When spring arrived in North Bridgewater in 1777, the rejuvenation in the fields hardly reflected the spirit within the Bryant household. By the time of Charity’s birth, on May 22, 1777, consumption had reduced Silence to a shadow of her former self. It came as no surprise when she passed away a month later. Silence is only a ghost in the records of Charity’s life, legible in her absence, which so strongly defined Charity’s sense of self. Charity believed her mother’s death destined her to become a “child of melancholy,” as she titled an 1800 poem recounting her origins. In Charity’s retelling, there is no backdrop of war or disease. Her mother’s death is a singular irony, intruding on a pastoral scene, bringing grave consequences to her unfortunate daughter:
As the sun rising pleasant in May
Seems to promise new life to the lawn
Even such was my youth’s early day
And as fair and serene was its dawn;
But clouds have o’ershadow’d the scene
And tempests continue to blow,
While to think on the days that have been
But serves to embitter my woe.
And say, was I wrong for to dream
That fortune upon me would shine?
When friends to me smiling did seem
And the tend’rest of Mothers was mine
But Heaven too soon of its boon
While I am left poor, and alone
By remembrance to double my pain.17
Despite Charity’s complaint, it is unlikely that she had any “remembrance” to double her pain. Her description of Silence as “the tend’rest of Mothers” is so formulaic as to be almost empty, although Charity did have the memories of her older siblings to draw on when she chose the word tender. Her sister Anna Kingman, who was six when their mother died, used the same word to describe Silence in a poem she wrote in 1800 that recounted Charity’s infancy. In Anna’s words, Charity had been deprived of a “Mother’s tender anguish.” Silence’s death left the baby with “no Mother’s care no fond maternal love / No Mother’s rising hope or boding sigh.”18 Silence appears in Anna’s words, like in Charity’s, as a broken promise of love. Of course, Anna remembered their mother dimly if at all.
No other description of Silence has survived to support Charity’s and Anna’s poetic renderings. A gravestone bearing her name and the words “wife of Dr. Philip Bryant” stands in an old cemetery in North Bridgewater (renamed Brockton more than a century ago). As a prominent medical man, Philip earned biographical entries in books of local history and an epitaph on his gravestone. But Silence Bryant, like so many women of her generation, was never memorialized. In death she stayed true to her name.19
The one word in Silence’s own voice that she left behind was the name she chose for her infant daughter. She called the girl after her youngest sister, Charity Howard. By choosing this single sister as a namesake Silence pointed her daughter to a model of womanhood that differed significantly from her own.20 Charity Howard, who alone among her sisters never married, earned a reputation during her life as an accomplished seamstress. A set of decorative bed drapes that she stitched before Silence’s death, from silk she dyed herself, are so expertly embroidered that portions of the work have been preserved by two different museums.21 Charity Howard survived her married sisters by many decades, living well into her eighties.22 She became for her niece an example of both the creative rewards that might derive from a single life and the financial vulnerabilities that long-lived “spinsters” faced.
Whatever dreams Silence held for her daughter’s future, there was good cause to worry whether Charity would survive to fulfill them. She was a very sickly baby. The infants of tubercular mothers are often born small and are sometimes infected by the disease. Charity’s chances for survival worsened after Silence’s death, when she lost the opportunity to nurse. There is no evidence that she was nursed by a surrogate. Her father did hire a caretaker for Charity named Grace Hayward, but she was an unmarried woman in her forties who would not have been able to breastfeed.23 Instead, she likely fed Charity on a pap mixed of flour, water, cow’s milk, and bread, which would have distressed her immature digestive system. Long after Silence’s death, Charity’s survival remained uncertain. Even decades later, her infant suffering haunted her older sister Anna’s memory:
You drew in trouble with your earliest breath,
And liv’d the long expected prey of Death!
For wasting sickness nipt your infant bloom
And mark’d you out a victim for the tomb.24
One stroke of luck saved Charity from following her mother to an early grave. Grace Hayward came to love her charge. In later writings, Charity celebrated Grace as a “generous” woman of “kind compassions” who “nursed my helpless infancy” and whose “affection, by me, can never be forgotten.”25 She looked after Charity, both body and soul. Grace’s dedication to nourishing the struggling infant, to easing her discomfort when she cried, and to protecting her from the “unwholesome winds” that doctors of the era blamed for disease restored Charity’s physical health from the assault of the “wasting sickness” that had taken her mother’s life.26 The “affection” with which she performed her duties also nurtured Charity’s heart.
Unfortunately, Grace could not be a constant presence throughout Charity’s childhood. Philip Bryant remarried when Charity was two, and his new wife, Hannah Richards Bryant, who was notoriously frugal and unsympathetic to her stepchildren, dismissed Charity’s nurse when she got the chance. Still, Grace remained in the Bridgewater area, and she stayed close to the girl whose infancy she had watched over. She returned to work for the family at times when sickness required, which was unfortunately frequent, and she became known to the other siblings in the family as Aunt Grace, but Charity regarded her as an “ever-kind mother.”27
The affectionate indulgence of Charity’s numerous older brothers and sisters also helped to soften the blow of her early orphanhood. The Bryant siblings were close-knit, united by their common love of poetry and their common dislike for their stepmother. Charity, as the baby, was cosseted by her big brothers and sisters. But this intimacy came at a cost. The Bryants were an unlucky family, shadowed by early death. From watching her older siblings, Charity came to expect death’s imminent grip on her own shoulder.
Charity was six when her oldest sister Ruth died from the same wasting disease that had killed their mother, who probably infected her. Consumption frequently passed between family members living in close quarters, devastating entire households. Ruth’s sickly appearance was guaranteed to terrify a child Charity’s age. The skeletal bodies of consumption victims, and their symptomatic bleeding from the mouth, appeared monstrous to many adults (there are even scholars who connect consumption to myths about vampires). Ruth’s presence in the home during Charity’s early years acted as a warning to the sickly child of that painful end that possibly awaited her.28
Ruth’s death released Charity from witnessing a terrifying spectacle of suffering, but it cost her sister a great potential ally. Ruth was an extraordinary young woman. When the battles of Lexington and Concord shook the village soon after her fifteenth birthday, she embraced the cause of American independence with a passion. Unable to shoulder a gun like her uncles and older brother, Ruth instead picked up her pen and began writing poems in support of the war. The poems made her family proud—the only surviving copy of her work is copied out in the hand of middle brother Peter. Ruth’s voice was valorous, brave, and dedicated. She had an unusual fascination with warfare for a female poet, especially for an unmarried girl. Sometimes her verses assumed the identity of a valiant soldier. These poems, among the first that Charity read, set an example of the risks an unconventional young woman could take on the page.29
Although Ruth’s death deprived her youngest sister of her stewardship, Charity fortunately found another protector within the family circle. Her sister Anna was only six years older than Charity, but like many older siblings in difficult conditions, she became her baby sister’s caretaker. Anna was “lovely.”30 Gentle, kind, and nurturing, she shied away from conflict, having “as great an aversion to strife as ever any body had.”31 And she loved Charity without judgment or restraint, more than she loved any of her other brothers or sisters. Her “partiality,” she explained, was owing to the “peculiarness of [Charity’s] situation.”32 Deeply compassionate, Anna’s soul ached for her unfortunate sister who, she commiserated in a poem, had been unlucky from the beginning:
To be wretched you were surely born
The sport of fortune + of fools the scorn
For all your days in one sad tenor run,
And pass in sorrow as they first begun.33
As a little girl, Charity counted on Anna to console her in the face of sorrow. Anna became another mother to her little sister, willing to provide the nurturing that Grace, during her absences from the household, could not and that their stepmother, Hannah, despite her presence, would not. Anna, in Charity’s words, acted
Kind as a sister, and thy feeling heart
In all my cares has borne a mother’s part
No grief’s distress’d me but thy generous soul
Gave all her powers my bosom to console34
Requiring from Anna “all her powers” of consolation betrayed a certain selfishness on Charity’s part. Anna too suffered through the grief of early orphanhood, the premature loss of beloved siblings, and the entrance of an unsympathetic adult into the family home. But during childhood, Anna and Charity set a pattern of protector and protected that lasted into adulthood. Anna indulged Charity in a sense of distinctive misfortune that was not entirely accurate.
The losses in the Bryant family did not distinguish Charity or her surviving siblings from many other youths of the era. High mortality rates in the late eighteenth century caused many of those born during the 1770s and 1780s to share Charity’s experience of early orphanhood. In fact, orphanhood can be seen as the archetypal experience of the era. In declaring independence, the colonies enacted metaphorical matricide against Mother Britain and patricide against King George. The Revolution overturned colonial patterns of life and unleashed a series of profound economic, religious, and social transformations. A whole cohort came of age culturally as well as biologically orphaned, forced to find their own way in a new world. This experience, it has been argued, inspired the individualist cast to early national American society.35 Charity’s sense of distinctiveness ironically likened her to many in her generation. It helps explain how she became willing to behave in a manner that challenged traditional expectations. Like the individualistic men of her generation who threw off the old habits of deference to pursue their own self-interest, Charity felt enabled to break from the past and pursue a life more radically dissimilar from her mother’s, or even her aunt’s, than Silence Bryant could ever have imagined.
And yet Charity remained defined by her family background. Charity took no joy in recollecting her childhood, but she would not have traded her family for another. A person’s family explained who she was. When a young boy named Hiram Hurlburt Jr. stepped into Charity and Sylvia’s shop in the fall of 1835, Charity pointed a finger at him and announced, “Your mother was a Bullard, she came from Athol, Mass.”36 That genealogy defined the boy in her eyes. Likewise, the fact that she was a Bryant meant a great deal to Charity and to the people she knew. The family had a cultured reputation that generated respect within New England society. Long after Charity left Massachusetts, she kept careful tabs on the family. And when her nieces and nephews had questions about their family history, they turned to Aunt Charity for answers. Responding to their inquiries was as likely to cause her consternation as give her pleasure. When her nephew John asked for a catalog of the birth and death dates of his grandparents, uncles, and aunts, Charity obligingly replied to his request, but she morosely proclaimed “of almost all it is said that they are dead!”37 She was proud to be a Bryant, but recalling her family history brought her grief.