MARY DRAKE GAVE birth in a house that was not her own, or not for long. It was the last day of October in the year 1784. It had been a fine fall so far, but even a pleasant October in Massachusetts carries a chill.1 Mary’s good health fitted her to hold her new daughter close and shield her from any drafts that filtered in from outside. Unfortunately, Sylvia would receive no further inheritance than the warmth of her mother’s love and an affectionate family circle. Like the Bryants, the Drakes were swept up by the winds of war. In one key regard they were set down rather easier—all the members of the family survived; still, the Revolution took a high toll. The financial chaos of the period bankrupted the family and left them homeless.
Mary’s husband, Thomas Drake II, was a good patriot. He served on the wartime Committee of Correspondence and Inspection in their town of Easton, on Bridgewater’s western border, and also enlisted for repeated brief stints in the local militia.2 He spent December 1776 in Rhode Island, guarding against British landings; another five days in August 1778, doing the same; and finally three months in late summer 1780 reinforcing the Continental Army. He survived these enlistments unscathed. As a local historian of Easton put it, the military experience of many men in the town was “limited to frequent trainings and an occasional march to Rhode Island on an ‘alarm.’ Some of them never saw a Redcoat.” Thomas Drake fit that description to a tee. In a great military tradition of the ages, he spent a good deal of time marching around, battling mosquitoes and boredom.3
His luck extended to the next generation. Sylvia Drake was the youngest of eight siblings. With birthdates beginning seven years after those of the Bryant children, her brothers were just a bit too young to fight in the war. Isaac, the oldest brother, born in March 1765, was only sixteen when the Battle of Yorktown effectively ended the Revolution. By the time he turned eighteen, the Treaty of Paris had been signed. Sylvia’s next oldest brother, Oliver, was born in July 1767 and remained a child throughout the war years. Many Drake cousins and uncles joined the fight, marching alongside Thomas to the shores of Rhode Island. But Sylvia’s siblings stayed home and passed the war years in physical safety.
The postwar years dealt the Drake family a more treacherous hand. Along with thousands of their countrymen, the Drakes were hit hard when Massachusetts entered a severe depression during the mid-1780s. The severity of this nationwide economic crisis compared in scale to the Great Depression of the 1930s. At the time, many politicians blamed small landholders for their own suffering, accusing farmers of overindulging in luxury goods and acquiring too much debt. The end of the war had reopened trade between America and Europe, and Massachusetts stores were crowded with European imports. Merchants filled the newspapers with advertisements for sumptuous goods, such as pink satin cloaks trimmed with fur and lace, silver-plated shoe and knee buckles, black silk gloves, velvet caps, bolts of Irish linen, squirrel muffs and tippets, wine glasses, brass candlesticks, pianofortes, German flutes, harpsichords, Japann’d teapots, genteel fans, Turkish figs, and leather-bound multivolume book editions. The appeal of these items after years of sacrifice and penury must have been powerful.4
Yet frugal Massachusetts farmers, who learned during two decades of boycotts against England to embrace thrift as a virtue, frequently resisted the allure of such temptations. Many families continued to make do in the mid-1780s with homespun and other domestic manufactures. These ordinary people blamed the economic crisis on wealthy investors who manipulated the state government in order to enrich themselves. Under the influence of securities traders, the Massachusetts state legislature passed a requisition bill in 1785 that forced ordinary farmers to pay high taxes in order to fund the interest on state debts that had been issued during the war years. Initially used to pay ordinary soldiers and farmers for their labor and goods, these securities had suffered deflation and were purchased by speculators at an extreme discount. After the war, the speculators pressured the state government to pay interest on the face value of the deflated securities. To make the full payments to bondholders the state had to raise high taxes on ordinary people, and to compound that injustice, the state demanded that the people pay their taxes in specie (silver and gold) rather than use the deflated securities as currency. By 1786, Massachusetts taxation rates were four or five times higher than they had been under British rule. According to ordinary farmers, this outrageous taxation was the cause of the state’s financial distress.5
Whoever was to blame, Easton was hit particularly hard by the depression of the 1780s. Not a wealthy town to begin with, the Revolution had reduced Easton residents to meager circumstances. In 1775, an influx of propertyless refugees from British-occupied Boston drained the town’s resources. Throughout the war years, an epidemic of thievery plagued Easton, and impoverished neighbors took each other to court over the loss of even minor property. When the depression of the 1780s hit, the people of Easton became desperate. The town soon developed a bad reputation among its neighbors. A gang of horse-thieves made their headquarters in the village, stealing from area homes and shops and then fencing the goods in Canada. The local constabulary took part in the scheme. Most of the town did not turn to larceny but simply suffered in penury.6
At that time, the Drakes lived in the poorest and most isolated part of Easton, along its southeastern border with West Bridgewater. Separated by a large “cranberry meadow” from the wealthier northern reaches of the town and by the enormous Hockomock Swamp from communities to the south, the family lived in an insular settlement with their near neighbors, most of whom were relatives.7 Unfortunately, Sylvia’s father could not hold on to even this marginal property. Before the Revolution, a tax valuation put Thomas Drake II’s annual worth at only £. 3, well below average for the town of Easton. Thomas’s small property could support only one cow, and he grew just three bushels of grain per year. These assets placed him at the very bottom of what was then called the “middling” ranks, a status defined by a head of household’s possession of land or skills that earned him a competence, or freedom from wage labor under a master.8 By contrast, Charity’s father’s farm was twice the size, with an annual worth of £. 6, pasturage to raise two cows, and a yearly grain yield of thirty-one bushels; her well-established grandfather, Abiel Howard, owned real estate with an annual worth of £. 25, pasture to feed twelve cows, and fields capable of producing 132 bushels of grain per year. At the outset of his professional life in 1771, Philip Bryant had good reason to expect his wealth to improve over time and his place in the middling ranks to be secured. Thomas Drake, on the other hand, stood at great risk of losing his purchase altogether.9
Thomas Drake was not to blame for his meager landholdings. He faced a common dilemma among New England families with many children. Both the Drakes and the Manleys, Sylvia’s mother’s kin, were original founders of Easton in the 1690s, and both families had produced a great number of children over the previous eight decades.10 As the generations multiplied, each subdivided their property among their heirs into smaller and smaller parcels until the inheritors were left without sufficient land to make a living. At the time of the Revolution, this dynamic reached a critical point not only in Easton but also in villages across New England, launching a generation of migration to the west.11
Thomas started his adult life with only two small plots, and as his own family grew he recognized that he could not support very many mouths from those parcels. After his fourth child was born, he decided to sell his eastern inheritance and buy a larger tract in the less-expensive west. The plan was good, but the timing turned out to be poor. Thomas sold his land during the Revolution for currency that swiftly lost its value, leaving him without land or capital. He tried to stay solvent. He looked for wage labor, but the wrecked economy made it difficult for him to find paid work, and the high tax rate made it impossible to extricate himself from debt. The year that Sylvia was born, 1784, marked a low point in the condition of the people of Easton. Debt cases flooded the Court of Common Pleas. Many Drakes and Manleys were among the plaintiffs and defendants. Sylvia’s father Thomas won a judgment of £. 8 in default from a fellow townsman, but it is unlikely that he collected any money from the debtor. Lawsuits could not redeem the family’s circumstances.12
The death of Sylvia’s grandfather, Thomas Drake senior, in 1788 brought a better opportunity for the family to regain their place. Thomas II served as the executor of the estate, but his father did not leave much to be sold or divided. The inventory of Thomas senior’s household reads in sharp contrast to the list of luxuries advertised in the newspapers. When Sylvia’s grandfather died he left behind no wine glasses or silver candlesticks, only six wooden dishes, one old pewter plate, and a pewter porringer. Instead of pink silk and satin, he left two old flannel shirts and two linen shirts. Instead of a Japann’d teapot, there was an “old iron kittle.” The probate record reveals a standard of living far rougher than the genteel fantasy peddled by the newspapers. And the thirty acres of land Thomas Drake Sr. owned were sold off to settle the estate’s accounts.13
If the Drake family had reached this impasse a couple decades later, they might have joined the great migration of landless New Englanders into early nineteenth-century factories. But New England’s first successful cotton mill did not open until 1793, and mill work did not create many jobs until the nineteenth century.14 When the Drakes went bankrupt they followed a more traditional pattern of survival: the family split up. The older children were sent to work for relatives. Nineteen-year-old Isaac went to his Uncle Joseph, seventeen-year-old Oliver went to Nathaniel Manley in Bridgewater, and ten-year-old Asaph went to Benjamin Hayward, also in Bridgewater. It seems likely that Thomas Drake II also left the family to seek work, judging from the lack of younger siblings who followed Sylvia.
What happened to Sylvia and her sisters is less clear. Fourteen-year-old Rhoda and twelve-year-old Polly were likely put out to work as domestic servants in the households of neighbors or family. Even New England families with adequate resources frequently hired their daughters out to other homes during their adolescent years. Domestic work gave daughters the housekeeping experience they would need as wives, the opportunity to accumulate resources for starting their own households after marriage, and an escape from generational conflict with their parents. An infant like Sylvia, however, could not have been separated from her mother. Sylvia, her nearest sister, Desire, and her mother, Mary, probably lived together in the homes of family members for the next several years.15
Sylvia’s extreme youth at the moment of the family’s dissolution protected her from being sent away. But Sylvia also suffered for being the youngest in the family. Unlike her older siblings, Sylvia could never clearly remember the days when her family lived all together. Instead of memories, she substituted a halcyon fantasy of togetherness, establishing a standard that ordinary life could hardly attain. An acrostic poem that Sylvia later wrote for her sister Polly—one of the few nonreligious compositions she ever penned—described the family’s dispersal as an exile from Eden.
Sister + friend the child of my mother
I often reflect on my infantile days
Surrounded by Parents by sister + brother
Taught by their kindness + won by their praise
Endear’d was this family band to each other
Reluctant we parted delighted we met
Parents + children + sisters and brother
O sweet were the hours no painfull regret
Love sat on the features, while each strove to smother
Lifes parting pang, as they left their dear home
Years past away, they remembered each other.
How sweet was the thout that they no more should roam
Unable to remember the ordinary daily conflicts that no doubt arose when the family lived together, Sylvia believed that her brothers and sisters should always be close, and she grew upset when, as adults, tensions arose among them.16
Sylvia’s older siblings may not have looked with the same honeyed gaze on their early years, but they shared her desire to keep the family together. After bankruptcy split the young family, the Drakes sought whatever opportunities they could to rejoin each other. Eventually, Sylvia’s intrepid middle brother Asaph found a new place for the family to take root. Born a month after the battles of Lexington and Concord, Asaph lived and breathed the “spirit of’75.” Independent-minded, entrepreneurial, and self-sufficient, Asaph personified the charter generation of Americans who shaped the new republic. Nearly a century later, when Asaph was a devout old man, he confessed to being “a very unfaithful boy” who was “always building castles in the air.”17 But his childhood inconstancy had less to do with weakness of spirit than with the age of man. Asaph personified the restless spirit that made the post-Revolutionary era a period of profound transformation in the United States.18
Like many boys of his generation, Asaph felt little obligation to remain with masters who did not suit him. The apprenticeship system in North America had never been as restrictive as its European counterpart. Young children, and even infants, entered into contracts to exchange their labor for room, board, and training, until they turned twenty-one, but they frequently broke those contracts. Court records from the eighteenth century are filled with disputes between masters and apprentices. Sometimes masters regained the services of errant young workers through the courts. But after the Revolution masters found it increasingly difficult to keep any hold on their apprentices. All the political talk of rights and liberties filled boys with ideas, and made public and legal opinion unsympathetic to the claims of masters. In fact, even the word master fell out of favor after the Revolution for being too servile. The new generation of Americans started to call their employers bosses instead, a Dutch word that did not carry the same subordinate connotations.19
Asaph was the sort of ungovernable youth who gave all apprentices in the post-Revolutionary era a bad name. When he was ten he left his first place, working on Benjamin Hayward’s farm, before a year was out because he did not like it. He returned to stay with his parents until he turned thirteen, when he and his older brother Oliver went to work for Barnabas Howard at his tavern in North Bridgewater. The boys were paid only a dollar a month at the tavern. Two years later, both boys left because of the terrible conditions.
According to the 1790 federal census, the Drake family was reunited for a short spell. The census taker recorded eight residents in Thomas Drake’s household, including four males below the age of sixteen and three females altogether (most likely Mary, Desire, and Sylvia).20 But the situation did not last. In 1790 more than one-third of Easton’s population was officially “warned out” of town, a strategy that early American municipalities used to avoid responsibility for providing relief to the poor.21 Warned-out families were not always forced to leave town, but they had received notice that they could expect no support from local authorities. Propertyless and bankrupted, the Drake family may have been among those warned out in 1790. The reunited parents and siblings soon dispersed again.
At age fifteen, Asaph apprenticed himself to Eliphalet Leonard, a well-respected Bridgewater blacksmith. From early childhood, Asaph had wanted to apprentice as a smith, but this career required a lot of physical strength, and a boy could not begin training until he reached a certain size and demonstrated a strong build. Finally, Asaph had reached sufficient maturity to join Leonard’s shop. In a previous age, Asaph would have remained for at least five years at Leonard’s. He was happy in this full household and developed close friendships with the other apprentices. But the Revolution’s disruptions, while bankrupting the older generation, had unleashed the ambitions of the younger. Disliking his master’s governance, Asaph and two other apprentices ran away in the middle of the night and headed for the new state of Vermont, where they had heard there was a great deal of iron ore (and thus smithing opportunities). Asaph asked his father not to follow them; at age seventeen he was ready to declare his emancipation. “I had by this act broken my self loose and [flung] my self upon the wide world with out an individual to protect provide or care for me,” Asaph later reflected.22
Asaph’s choice proved decisive for his family. As he journeyed through New England, Asaph encountered multiple opportunities for work. Tired of being a “cringeing submissive servant,” he turned down an offer of a new blacksmithing apprenticeship near Worcester, Massachusetts. In Swanzey, New Hampshire, he signed on to join a “troop of young men” who were going to build a forge in the wilds of Vermont. After being on the road for several months, he arrived in January 1793 in Weybridge, a new settlement in Addison County, on the far western border of the state, squeezed between the Green Mountains and Lake Champlain.23 Although an initial wave of settlers had arrived in the town during the 1760s, they were chased out by Indian raids during the Revolution, and a new wave of settlers did not arrive until the mid-1780s.24
In Weybridge, Asaph found an opportunity to escape from the condition of servitude that had confined him since age ten. After two years of work building a grist mill on Otter Creek, which ran through Weybridge, Asaph saved enough money to buy his first fifty acres of land.25 In another canny decision, he began courting the daughter of the mill’s owner, David Belding. On December 15, 1796, twenty-one-year-old Asaph married twenty-six-year-old Louisa Belding; their first son, Elijah Graves Drake, was born seven-and-a-half months later. The marriage was not always happy, and Asaph often found fault with his wife. But the match was very advantageous to the poor young man. His father-in-law, David Belding, was the town clerk of Weybridge, and in 1797, at age twenty-two, Asaph was named as a town proprietor, joining the public body responsible for approving land claims in the village, a profitable as well as respectable appointment.26
After becoming a proprietor, Asaph summoned his parents and siblings to come join him in Weybridge. His father, Thomas, once a constable and now a bankrupt, saw a chance to restore the family fortunes in Vermont.27 Accompanied by one of Asaph’s brothers, Thomas set out in January 1798 with a team of horses to make the two-hundred-and-fifty-mile journey to Vermont while the sleighing was good. But barely thirty miles north tragedy struck. In Charlestown, Massachusetts, Thomas suddenly sickened and died. His son brought his body back home to Easton. Thomas Drake II was buried in the town of his birth, leaving his sons and daughters to restore the family’s shattered fortunes. The following year, fifteen-year-old Sylvia and her widowed mother, Mary, finally joined Asaph’s household in Weybridge.28
The contrast to Easton could hardly have been more profound. Easton may have been disreputable in the late eighteenth century, but it had been settled for over a century and its proximity to Boston and Providence conferred a level of sophistication that would not soon be found in Vermont. Standing on a hill overlooking Easton in the late 1790s, a spectator saw miles of farms, forests of steeples, and the furnaces of industry. The new mills of Pawtucket were less than twenty miles south. If Sylvia could have beaten a path through the thick trees and undergrowth to clamber to the top of Weybridge’s Snake Mountain soon after her arrival, she would have seen a very different landscape—just a single rough-cut road along Otter Creek leading to a few scattered farms carved out of the woods. The natural landscape, of round and jagged mountain tops, dark forested hillsides, and green valley floor leading to magnificent Lake Champlain, may have been sublime. But man-made impressions on the landscape were few and far between.29 The town had a population of fewer than five hundred. The new settlement was more than a little rough around the edges. The townspeople had little time for religion, education, or culture. Settling a new area meant clearing trees, building houses, and constructing mills. Weybridge did not even have a separate church building until 1802.
The abundance of land on the frontier created an opportunity for a young man to advance from runaway apprentice to town father in five years. It also held plentiful opportunities for a young woman to become a wife. In towns like Weybridge, couples often married young and had large families. But, as Louisa Belding learned every time her husband Asaph picked at her faults, marriage did not offer women the same release from “cringeing submissive” servitude that it brought to men. Through her older brother’s initiative, Sylvia regained the family togetherness that the Revolution and its consequences had so long disrupted. But she lost the new opportunities that were opening for women at the century’s close in the longest-settled villages of New England. Gazing from the top of Snake Mountain, it was hard for a young woman to find a path to independence in the wilds of Weybridge.