FOUR YOUNG WOMEN sat in Deacon Richards’s front parlor. Lydia Richards served the tea to her three guests, most likely Maria Clark, Nancy Warner, and Charity Bryant. The lively conversation among the women gathered around “the social board” erased any reservations Charity may have had about attending the gathering. Lydia and her guests had a great deal to discuss: the schools they were each teaching for the summer, the freedom of governing their own hours, the pleasures of writing. Charity discovered kindred spirits among her fellow teachers. When the meal ended, she rose to join the others on a walk through the orchard under the summer sky. For a brief moment, the pleasure that came from making new friends drove away the loneliness that so often haunted her. This perfect day shone in Charity’s memory for the next fifty years.1
If Charity did not fall in love with teaching as a job, she did fall in love with many of her fellow teachers. Several of these teachers, like herself, never acquired a husband or married late in life. Together they constituted a loose network of bookish young women who formed primary romantic relationships with each other. Their intimacies had a powerful physical dimension, evident in the women’s pleasure at having the opportunity to share a bed and embrace during overnight visits. But the intellectual dimension of their intimacies was just as powerful. Their affections for each other were wrapped up in words and writing. Charity’s ability to evoke feelings on the page enamored her to many friends. As one admiring correspondent wrote her, “to describe my feelings is impossible unless I had your pen.” Within their circle, the women created an affective world of language and ideas, taking part in an emotional repertoire far removed from the domesticated wifely and maternal love expected of early American women.2
It was no coincidence that Charity met such likeminded women through the schoolhouse. Since teachers boarded round, school districts typically sought out unmarried women for the job.3 The vanguard generation of women who flocked to teaching in the post-Revolutionary era included many who aspired to freedom, at least temporarily, from the ordinary constraints of marriage and motherhood. They came not only to earn a respectable source of independent income but also to participate in a new youth culture of intellectually ambitious and assertively unmarried women that was emerging in New England in the 1790s. Becoming teachers, they joined the likes of Sarah Pierce, founder of the first institution of higher education for girls in the United States, Connecticut’s Litchfield Female Academy, who wrote verses about her dream of building a house with her friend, Abigail Smith, and exchanged letters with Abigail’s brother Elihu, founder of an early New York City literary society and a committed bachelor, discussing her opposition to marriage.4
Charity and many other women teachers, including Pierce, may have been attracted by the schoolroom’s reputation as a place where women could form intimacies with other women. Polite literature described these relationships in platonic terms, but reform tracts, medical texts, pornography, and certain risqué novels described the schoolhouse as a place where girl students and teachers exchanged dirty stories, taught each other to masturbate, pleasured each other, and even shared dildos.5 The school was a potential sexual training ground in the imagination of the post-Revolutionary generation. Fictional accounts of notorious prostitutes featured the boarding school as the place of their corruption.6 One quasi-pornographic newspaper published in New York City in the 1840s even ran an advertisement for a girls’ boarding school in its classified section.7 The reputed erotic atmosphere within schools was not solely the fantasy of male writers. Infrequent evidence survives that when boarding-school girls or women shared beds, some kissed, caressed, and even brought each other to orgasm.8
If Charity was not aware of the schoolroom’s underground salacious reputation, she had another proximate reason to identify teaching as an opportunity to meet out-of-the-ordinary women. During her childhood, a school ten miles away was taught by Deborah Sampson, who became famous for having served cross-dressed in the American Revolution. (Sampson was in fact a distant relation by marriage, having married a man from neighboring Easton.)9 An account of Sampson’s wartime exploits, supported in part by subscriptions from the people of Bridgewater, was published in 1797, the very year that Charity entered the teaching profession.10 Sampson’s example suggested, at the least, that teaching offered refuge to nonconformists.
The promise of female companionship served as an important motivation for Charity’s decision to accept her first teaching job in Dartmouth, following the breach in her relations with her parents. Charity’s sister Anna lured her to Dartmouth by promising that “my friend Eliza,” another teacher in the district, “would make you pleased.”11 Anna knew her younger sister very well. Within weeks of Charity’s arrival in town, Eliza was sending her letters addressed to “my dear dear friend.”12 Their intimacy set a pattern. Over the next couple years, as Charity traveled to work at schools across Massachusetts, she embarked on a series of passionate friendships with her fellow teachers. After Eliza, she met Maria, Lydia, and Nancy, opening her heart to each woman in turn, searching for that moment of mutual recognition between likeminded souls, and learning too late that these intimacies came at a price.
Often, Charity’s friendships began with a spark, a bright moment of electric exchange that passed between herself and another woman. Maria Clark told Charity that “from the first moment that I had the happiness of seeing you I felt myself drawn by some powerful attraction.”13 Another time she told Charity that “I have loved [you] with the most sincere affection from the first moment the kind heavens presented you before my eyes.”14 The connection between the young women went far beyond ordinary acquaintance. Maria treated Charity as an object of singular devotion. “I know of no person living with whom I should more delight to contract an intimacy than with my lovely Ermina,” Maria wrote in her first letter to Charity, calling her new friend by a pet name taken from a widely reprinted 1772 sentimental novel, Ermina, or the Fair Recluse.15 In Maria’s eyes, Charity was as charming as that novel’s unfortunate heroine. “O tell me, my lovely girl, what endearing charm it is that binds me so close to you,” Maria gushed in a later letter.16 She answered her own question with compliments on Charity’s appearance, poetry, and character: “in you I see all that is amiable and lovely summed up into one being every way calculated to inspire my heart with love and gratitude.”17 When the friends were separated, Maria dreamed about Charity. At night, Maria wrote, “my Ermina” is “constantly before my eyes—in my nocturnal visions.” But dreams were not enough, she wanted to have Charity physically with her. “I gaze upon the visionary luster,” Maria wrote, but “I mourn the absent substance.” Waking up from dreams about Charity filled Maria with a keen sense of longing.18
A strong physical sensation passed between Charity and Lydia when they first touched on the afternoon of Lydia’s tea party. As the two clasped hands during their walk in the orchard, Charity felt that “round my heart was cast [a] silken band.”19 Lydia felt it too. In the first letter she wrote to Charity after that summer afternoon, she described her desire to again “take you by the hand and embrace you as a friend.”20 The physical intimacy between the friends intensified over the next several months. Soon Lydia was writing to Charity about her longing to sleep with her. “In the visions of the night you are present with me—and I in reality imagine myself embracing my dear friend,” Lydia wrote in November 1799, after Charity had left Plainfield for her brother’s house in nearby Cummington. Lydia begged Charity to come for a long stay in her home so the two could be together.21 Rather than “sleep alone,” Lydia wanted to be “happy in the arms of my dear friend.”22
Lydia’s physical desire for Charity is almost palpable from the early letters between the women. She and Charity found pleasure in each other’s bodies, and especially in each other’s breasts. An early acrostic poem that Charity wrote for Lydia began with praise for her physical charms; the “L” in Lydia stood for “Lovely in person.” The poem admired how Lydia’s “generous bosom glows in friendship pure as the first opening rose.” Charity conveyed a powerful erotic attraction by comparing her young friend’s new breasts to budding flowers.23 The language drew on a lesbian landscape tradition made popular in the sonnets of Anna Seward, a British poet well known in 1790s New England.24 Lydia, for her part, liked to imagine Charity tucking the letters she sent into her “bosom.”25 The pages acted as a conduit of their mutual desire.
A similar physicality permeates Eliza’s letters to Charity. Thoughts of Charity gave Eliza an “agitated bosom.”26 And Eliza wrote that Charity’s letters had the power to “awaken all my feelings.”27 Like Lydia, Eliza found that paper was not adequate to the task of expressing her feelings. She longed for intimate time together. She wanted “hours alone with you my dear,” Eliza wrote to Charity while the two both lived in Dartmouth.28 After Charity left the village, Eliza wrote of her longing to “imbrace you this moment.”29 Charity’s letters to Eliza seem to have been equally passionate. Eliza responded to one letter: “You say my dear if you dare freely to express the feeling of your heart you could rite till the day dawnd but you fear you should make work for repentance.”30 Charity’s insistence that it would take all night to express her feelings to Eliza carried an erotic charge, especially given the suggestion that acting on those desires would supply cause to repent.
Considering the intensity of their feelings, it is no surprise that Charity’s friends felt jealous of each other at times. The culture of sensibility prized devoted pairs, like Damon and Pythias, rather than widespread circles of acquaintance. Charity’s very first friend from home, Mercy Ford, offered repeated reminders of the singularity of true friendship as Charity traveled from town to town. “I had a little conversation with our folks last Sunday about friendship,” Mercy wrote to Charity when she had moved away for a teaching job. “You cannot think how ignorant they talk—I believe you would laugh to hear them—They supposed that a person was their friend that received them into their house and did not turn them out—then I have a great many friends however the subject was a very laughable one but of short duration, for I perceived their opinion was very different from mine therefore we could not agree, and it was a subject too tender to disagree upon, therefore we quit without being convinced upon either side.” Mercy chose not to press the matter with her parents, but she explained her views more fully to Charity: “if they suppose they have so many friends why are they not happy, I have but one and when I am with her I think I am so.”31 Mercy, who never married, spent her youth devoted to her one true friend, until Charity left Massachusetts for good in 1807.
While Mercy feared that Charity would be distracted by new women she met in her travels, those new friends felt jealous of the first friend Charity had at home. When Charity left Dartmouth to return to North Bridgewater, her friend Eliza wrote how she could almost imagine “the happyness you felt when you had your friend [Mercy] coming towards you.”32 The tinge of envy in Eliza’s sentiments is clear from her later mournful plea not to “forget your lonely Eliza.”33 As Charity continued moving throughout the state she made more new friends and made more old friends jealous. Maria Clark, whom Charity met in Cummington, grew jealous when Charity moved to Pelham and developed a new connection. After congratulating Charity on this new friend, Maria wrote, “I almost envy her the happiness which she enjoys.”34 Maria, like Mercy, reminded Charity that true friendship was a singular relationship. Charity agreed, but the intensity of her pleasure upon making new friendships made it hard to obey this rule.35
It may seem surprising that Charity had such freedom to form so many passionate relationships with other young women during her early twenties, but these “romantic friendships” received full sanction within the culture of sensibility, especially during the second half of the eighteenth century.36 The relationships fit well within the new middle-class culture of love-matches then redefining courtship and marriage. Sentimental novels like Ermina, read by Charity and her friends, used the device of intimate letters exchanged between same-sex friends to advance their marriage plots.37 In everyday life, parents looked to their sons’ and daughters’ intimate friendships as promising connections for introducing their children to potential spouses. Friends provided introductions to unmarried sisters and brothers, passed letters between courting couples, and helped friends to make sound judgments about potential lovers. Foolish friends might lead youth into bad marriages, but virtuous friends were instrumental in arranging good marriages. Same-sex intimacies were generally viewed as instrumental, rather than oppositional, to courtship.38
The compatibility between friendship and marriage does not mean that same-sex intimacies were always platonic. Romantic friendship created scope for a wide variety of strong feelings, including trust, pity, love, jealousy, happiness, and eros. Historical research reveals that the intimacy between female friends could extend to sex. The most overt record of lesbian life available from the period, the diary of English gentlewoman Anne Lister, shows that women looking for sexual intimacy with other women found ample opportunities within the framework of romantic friendship. Lister used a secret code derived from algebra and ancient Greek to record her orgasmic sexual encounters with a number of friends, one of whom eventually became her life partner. Romantic friendships were so popular among literate young women of Lister’s generation that it would have been strange if her sexual relationships took place outside their context. It was sensible for a young woman seeking sexual encounters with other young women to do so within a popular form of relationship marked by physical intimacy, declarations of love, and elevated sentiments.39
Charity’s world was not blind to the sexual possibilities within romantic friendships. Parents and youth knew that a “carnal act between two of the same sex,” in the words of a religious text from the era, was possible.40 Ministers, doctors, and legal authorities decried the so-called sin against nature, while many readers of sensationalistic literature took secret pleasure in imagining it. This knowledge extended to the possibility for sex between women.41 But romantic friendships did not often provoke a community’s concerns about illicit sexuality, in part because sexual feelings were not strictly coupled with romantic feelings the way they would be later in the nineteenth century. Men and women could experience and express emotional intimacy in a wide variety of relationships. In addition, sexuality figured into a lot of nonromantic relationships. The bonds of authority were just as likely to lead to illicit sexuality as were the bonds of romantic love. Society saw no more reason to link same-sex sexual behavior with romantic friendships than with the relationships between master and apprentice or teacher and student. Plenty of masters made unwanted advances on the apprentices they hired, but early Americans did not cast a suspicious eye on all employers and workers. Likewise, friends who expressed passionate love for each other were free from suspicion unless they gave reasons for concern.
Concerns arose when friendships seemed to interfere with marital futures. Young people might become so devoted to each other that they dreaded to be divided. Educated young men sometimes worried that they would not find the same communion of souls with lesser-educated women that they shared with their male peers. Young women sometimes feared marriage as a traumatic event that would draw a curtain over the friendships of their youth by restricting their time and resources.42 Most young people put those fears behind them, because they saw marriage as the central pillar of adult life. But when friends became reluctant to separate, their elders sought to intervene. Community suspicions also arose when youth behaved contrary to norms considered proper to their sex. Anne Lister, who cut her hair short, aroused the suspicions of her friends’ parents.43 Charity likewise caused concerns in the communities where she worked as a teacher, and the concerns grew the longer she remained within them. Although social sanction made it easy for her to enter into intense friendships with the women she met while teaching, something about Charity troubled onlookers as those intimacies developed. Within months of her arrival in each town where she taught, Charity became the subject of vicious gossip.
The rumors about Charity likely concerned her sexual propriety. Gossip, which played a prominent role in regulating early national society, scrutinized various aspects of men’s behavior, including their financial dealings, their treatment of subordinates, and their relations within the family. Gossip about women, however, focused with singular attention on sexual behavior.44 Because women had limited roles in the public sphere, their public reputations depended on how well they performed the modesty and chastity demanded from their sex. Women who carried on even innocent flirtations with men could acquire poor reputations, as in the example of Charity’s brother Daniel’s female friend. However, there is no indication that flirtations with men provoked the gossip about Charity. There is no record that she engaged in any flirtations with men at all.
Instead, the rumors appear to have been tied to Charity’s masculine demeanor and her relationships with other women. Far from a coquette, Charity dressed with a notable lack of adornment and avoided superficial chatter.45 Her appearance struck some who knew her as mannish. She did not wear her hair short or have her garments tailored like a man’s, as the independently wealthy Anne Lister did. Charity strove to preserve the feminine respectability that secured her teaching positions, but she still managed to convey a certain masculinity. Lydia commented more than once on Charity’s resemblance to her brother Peter, both in “countenance” and “motions.”46
Eighteenth-century culture regarded masculine women with deep suspicion. Social critics often attacked outspoken women as mannish in order to silence them. English satirists depicted American “daughters of liberty” during the Revolutionary era as mannish-looking.47 Likewise Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the early feminist text A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), was caricatured wearing a bowler hat. As one early acolyte complained, “I wish [Wollstonecraft] were better understood, and read to more purpose; but our women fear to be masculine.”48 Americans adopted Shakespeare’s insult against women who were “impudent and mannish growne” as an aphorism to rebuke those who challenged their subordination within a male-dominated culture.49 Underlying this hostility was the strong association between female masculinity and lesbianism, although eighteenth-century writers would not have used this term. Instead they might refer to sex between women as “tribadism,” another classically derived term, directed against mannish women, who supposedly used their oversized clitorises to rub against, or even penetrate, other women.50 A woman who cultivated her masculine charms could be seen as hoping to attract a female lover. Charity’s resemblance to her brother, both in the way she looked and, perhaps more significantly, in the way she held her body, aroused suspicion.
Charity’s emerging identity as a single woman tipped the scale against her. Like mannish women, spinsters were objects of derision in eighteenth-century America, especially in family-oriented New England. As Charity advanced through her early twenties without entering into courtships with men, her single status became more notable. Again, she stood at the vanguard of a tremendous shift in American culture. During the colonial period, no more than 2 or 3 percent of women remained unmarried for life, but after the Revolution an increasing number of women, like Charity, began to choose singlehood in order to preserve their autonomy. As rates of female singlehood surpassed 10 percent in the antebellum era, new suspicions about spinsters emerged, including a recognition of their affinity to lesbians. A groundbreaker for this demographic transformation, Charity experienced the full force of negative opinion leveraged against single women. She considered this bias a primary reason for leaving Massachusetts later.51
Within the context of Charity’s masculinity and single status, the intense intimacies she pursued with other women alarmed many onlookers and spurred gossip against her. Records of the specific contents of the rumors that circulated about Charity are muffled by the restraint that governed personal correspondence during the period. The belief that “gossip should never be written” ruled the honor culture of the 1790s, which regarded a person’s good name as their most valuable and fragile commodity.52 In Charity’s case, this precept was strengthened by the habitual silencing that enveloped same-sex sexuality, known commonly as “the crime which could not be named.”53 Charity’s friends avoided committing the specifics of the gossip about her to paper, exercising wise caution during an age when letters that circulated by hand were at constant risk of exposure. Charity wrote often about her sufferings from malicious tongues, but she remained just as elusive about the particulars. Interpreting the gossip requires reading the silence surrounding it as characteristic to sources concerning lesbianism.54 Considering the dangers of writing down rumors, it is remarkable that written evidence of the gossip campaign against Charity survives at all. The existence of remaining traces of the rumors can be attributed in large part to Charity’s character as a writer. Caution could not stifle her fierce urge to commit pen to paper. Probably the only relief she found from the sting of slander was through writing in self-defense.
The gossip about Charity began while she held her first teaching job in Dartmouth, in the winter of 1797. The talk became so vicious that after six months her sister Anna sent Charity back to North Bridgewater in the hope that old friends there might “counterbalance the disagreeable sensations arising from the … disagreeable circumstances.”55 Unfortunately, Charity’s removal did not stop the rumors. Even after her departure, her Dartmouth friend Eliza reported that “your friend Eliza and Sister are still the topic of conversation but I try to be both deaf and blind to all they can say and follow my own inclination feeling my self so innocent of what I am accused with.” Eliza shied away from committing the rumor’s details to the letter. She wished she could “open my whole mind to you on paper,” but regretted “how much I cannot say.”56 Although Eliza did not provide specifics, her letters made it clear that the accusations concerning her were connected to Charity. When Anna left Dartmouth several months later, Eliza wrote hopefully to Charity, “I do not expect I shall be the subject of conversation so much as I have been—now the cause is removed.”57 The gossip was more focused on Charity (and Anna by proxy) than on Eliza, who declared herself estranged from fellow villagers because she would not join their gossip. When a new family arrived in Dartmouth, Eliza comforted Charity that now “your pain will lay dormant a while” since “at present they are the subject of conversation.”58 But the gossip did not dissipate as quickly as Eliza hoped. Even a year later Eliza claimed to have no real friends in Dartmouth.59
The gossip devastated Charity. During her stay in Dartmouth, she began to write bleak, morose poems, the first that she ever saved. She adapted a published rebus on the theme of darkness.60 Another original poem juxtaposed good wishes for a friend’s birthday with dark forebodings of “rude gusts” and “threatening clouds.”61 Forced to return to North Bridgewater in 1798, Charity found little relief in her parental home. She continued to vent her misery on paper, copying out a scene from a recent play entitled “The Suicide” about a young man’s desire to kill himself because of his shame for his sexual sins.62 The scene resolved with the would-be suicide’s brother persuading him to return to the family home and ask for forgiveness, much as Anna had prompted Charity to do. Sadly, Charity’s parents were not the forgiving sort. After living at home for six months and taking care of her brother Cyrus and sister-in-law Polly during their fatal illnesses, Charity and her parents had a falling out over her refusal to take on responsibility for Cyrus and Polly’s two orphaned children. In January 1799, Charity left home again to join her brother Peter and his wife, Sally, in Cummington.
It did not take long for gossip about Charity to surface there. At first, Charity established a good reputation and received the offer of a teaching job in nearby Plainfield. She began to forge friendships with other young teachers in the vicinity. But, just as in Dartmouth, Charity soon became the subject of rumors. They may have originated in reports from back east. By late summer, the gossip had spread wide. Charity grew depressed. Some of her new friends turned a deaf ear to the talk. Maria Clark assured Charity that “the lips that would insinuate so much as a hint against my dear, ought to be sealed in everlasting silence.”63 Lydia Richards pledged never to listen to the “calumny and detraction” against Charity.64 But Nancy Warner proved less faithful.
Nancy and Charity’s falling out reveals how risky the intense emotionality of romantic friendship could be. The conflict stemmed from Nancy’s aversion to Charity’s passionate courting of her affections. Unlike Maria or Lydia, Nancy married not long after meeting Charity, and she may not have sought the deep relationships with other young women that teaching enabled. Nancy’s initial encounters with Charity were restrained. A deacon’s daughter, Nancy filled her letters to Charity with spiritual meditations. Even for a religious age, Nancy’s piety was distinctive. A minister she knew later in life described her as a “sainted” woman wholly dedicated to God’s work. Charity, who had been swept up in the wave of religious revivals that marked the beginning of the Second Great Awakening, encouraged Nancy’s letters, and soon the two were engaged in a serious exchange on the subject of faith.65 But when the women spent time together in person, their intercourse apparently did not stick to celestial matters. Regrets gnawed at Nancy after each of her visits with Charity. She felt that she should be spending their time together encouraging Charity toward spiritual rebirth, but somehow their conversations strayed from the proper course. Leaving Charity’s house one evening, Nancy rode through a frightening storm. She made it home safely but saw a message in the experience. Providence was warning her of the wickedness of her ways. “Had I according to my wish spent the evening with you and your company I fear the consequences would have been severe,” Nancy wrote to Charity.66 She had just escaped punishment.
At first, Nancy blamed herself for her and Charity’s failure to spend their time together in a godly fashion. She expressed doubts about the wisdom of writing to Charity when “I am sensible that my feelings are entirely wrong and consequently think it would be wrong to blot my paper with them.”67 But at some point Nancy shifted the blame. She began to think it was “strange” that Charity wrote to her so frequently, when her own letters were neither instructive nor elegant. She pulled back from the friendship, telling Charity that perhaps they did not deserve to spend time together if they did not use the time for religious improvement. Sensitive to slights, Charity felt hurt by this seeming rejection. Nancy tried to smooth the situation. “You have misunderstood me,” she declared, insisting that she remained Charity’s sympathetic friend. Not long later, she attempted to break off the friendship altogether. Nancy claimed her parents were responsible for the move, telling Charity that she had to “deprive myself of your company,” or “if I enjoy it sacrifice my peace and comfort at home which is a painful thought.” Worries about her parents’ disapproval, she explained, “would overbalance the pleasure of seeing you.” In a telling farewell, Nancy recommended that Charity turn her faith to God rather than feel angry that “we cannot enjoy all that our craving natures desire.”68
The gossip about Charity played an important role in Nancy’s withdrawal from the friendship. Unlike Maria and Lydia, Nancy never assured Charity of her disbelief in the public talk. Instead she chose more ambiguous expressions of comfort, such as “may the troubles that you are meeting with in this world all work together for your good.”69 Still, it came as a shock when Charity learned from mutual friends that Nancy had joined in spreading the rumors about her. The betrayal by someone who had been a friend hurt worse than the talk of strangers. To cope with this grief, Charity again turned to her pen, writing a series of linked acrostics about Nancy that gave vent to her feelings.
Charity took freedoms in verse that she never could in ordinary correspondence. The worst name she called Nancy in her letters was an “incomprehensible character.” She criticized Nancy for her instability as a friend, surely a cutting insult for a culture that idolized Damon and Pythias, but a far cry from the attacks on her own character.70 In her poems, under dictate from her muse, however, Charity made harsher rebukes. The first acrostic for Nancy, titled “Winter,” compared her former friend to the barren landscape outside:
Nature, dear Nancy, clad in mourning lies!
And every bird for gayer refuge fly’s
Nor will her robes of white here fancy charm
Cold is her breast, and pitiless her storm
Youth fly’s her presence for a shed more warm
Who now will bear a sympathizing part?
Age sure will feel the moral in his heart!
Revolving years have whiten’d o’er his head
Nights darkest glooms have laid his glories dead
Each fleeting day. He like the naked trees,
Returns a hollow sound, and whistles in the breeze.
The poem burned with anger. “Cold is her breast, and pitiless her storm,” Charity wrote in the poem’s most direct indictment. The poem inverted the lesbian landscape genre, using images of deadened “naked trees” to symbolize the ugliness of its female subject. The acrostic, which Charity and her friends had always used to flatter and compliment each other, became a medium for the most stinging lacerations. Nancy and Charity had connected over their common religious devotion. Now Charity questioned her friend’s faith. Nancy’s professions of devotion, her “robes of white,” could not disguise the inhospitable frigidity of her heart. Rather than compassionately shelter Charity through her trials, in true Christian spirit, Nancy had cast her off. But time would take its revenge, Charity hinted. As Nancy cast away her friend, so she herself was left alone. The passing of years would lay bare Nancy’s “hollow” soul.71
Charity continued on the theme of time’s revenge in her next acrostic for Nancy, titled “Spring.” Lydia had once written to Charity that “envy and malevolence shall not always triumph” and that “the innocent and the guilty shall both meet their reward.”72 Charity took strength from Lydia’s promise of celestial justice. In “Spring,” Charity compared Nancy’s youthful appeal to the short-lived flowers of spring. They charmed the eye for a spell, then wilted and fell away. Her mother’s death had long ago taught Charity about May’s false promises. Youth’s beauties soon gave way to maturity, mortality, and judgment. Nancy would be stripped of her superficial charms, and if she did not repent, she would be punished according to her true nature:
Nature is dress’d in all her gay attire
And earth again receives her wonted fire
Nurtures each plant, and all the flowers inspire
Cares fly the scene—yet still the vision says
Youth, learn a lesson while you fondly gaze
What do these scenes to thy gay mind impart
Are they not emblems of the youthfull heart
Revolving years shall strip thee of thy prime
No wreaths of flowers thy temples shall entwine
Early then learn the lesson to be good
Reason will guide thee in bright virtue’s road
Despite its caustic sentiments, “Spring” revealed a subtle softening in Charity’s feelings, as Charity extended the possibility that Nancy might change, following “virtue’s road” and the path to redemption.73
The final poem in the cycle, which Charity left untitled, offered both the most straightforward testimony to her falling out with Nancy and the most firm expression of her own will to recovery. The poem describes Charity’s grief over the conflict, her recovery from the trauma, and her determination to avoid false friends in the future:
Now sinks my soul! Fond Nature drops a tear
And mourns the loss of friendship once so dear!
No, Heav’n forbids! My soul again revives
Casts off her chains, and sinking nature lives,
Yes, even nature this hard stroke forgives!
Where is the breast whose adamantine heart
And frozen bosom no kind words impart!
Resolving still the bleeding heart to tear
No friendships ever found a mansion there;
Enthrond’ alone in hearts where kindness glows
Rejoicing still to heal the wretch’s woes!
“The loss of friendship once so dear” had plunged Charity into a deep depression. But over time her feelings recovered, and her “sinking nature revived.” Charity found a way to forgive even the “hard stroke” of Nancy’s defection. She came to recognize that Nancy had never been a true friend; no true friend would “tear” a “bleeding heart.” (This language of tearing a bleeding heart is the same that Charity used in her poem “A Child of Melancholy” to describe her father’s betrayal.) True friendship could only be found in sympathetic hearts that sought “to heal the wretch’s woes.” In the future, Charity would be more cautious about the friends she pursued. Charity’s experiences in Cummington curbed her voracious appetite for new relationships. But she did not close herself off altogether. She would not turn a “frozen bosom” or “adamantine heart” to the world, like Nancy had. She would have a heart “where kindness glows.”74
Charity would even offer to forgive Nancy a few years later. When she heard from her sister-in-law Sally that Nancy, now married, had given birth to a child, Charity wrote a poem to congratulate her former friend. “Dear N---y still my fond affections fly / To hail you happy with your infant joy.” Some simmering anger might be read into a verse of the poem that advised Nancy to teach her child “to venerate the Truth.” But overall, the poem seemed to reflect Charity’s desire to make peace and forgive past wrongs.75 Ironically, Nancy’s daughter Philena Fobes grew up to become a woman who expressed the same qualities that caused Nancy’s suspicions of Charity in the first place. A well-known Illinois educator who never married, Philena’s statue once stood on display in the Illinois State Historical Library. Memorials describe Philena as a “blue stocking with a love of learning and high academic standards.”76
The rapprochement between Nancy and Charity came after years. In the short term, the atmosphere in Cummington became so poisonous that by early 1800, Charity decided to move again. This time she went to Pelham, in the middle of the state, where her sister Anna had relocated with husband, Henry, to join their middle sister Silence and her husband, Ichabod. Among the women who gathered for tea and a walk on a glorious summer’s day the year before, only Lydia remained Charity’s constant friend. She continued writing letters after Charity left Cummington, assuring her friend that “in vain do the malevolent hurl their darts at your character.” Pained by the rumors, Lydia promised “I will maintain my sentiments of friendship amidst the boisterous ocean—This bosom shall ever shelter you, my lovely girl.” She offered to intercede with friends who heard the gossip, however difficult that task proved. Lydia’s good will, however, could not stop the new wave of gossip from destroying many of the friendships Charity had established in Cummington. Although Charity sent letters to the women she had befriended, they did not write back.77 Even Maria, who had promised in 1799 that gossip could have no effect on her feelings, stopped writing in 1800. Charity gave Lydia a letter for Maria, but Lydia could not find a way to deliver it so she “fed it to the flames according to your request.”78
Resettled in Pelham, Charity found no respite from the rumors now raging against her in Cummington. The Bryants were not the only family with branches in both towns. The frequent passage of people and letters between the villages guaranteed that opinions in one locale would travel to another. By late summer 1800, Pelham became as inhospitable as all the previous towns that Charity had inhabited since first leaving home three years before.79 The full weight of her situation pressed down upon Charity. Her only surviving sibling whose hospitality she had not exhausted, brother Bezaliel, had moved to New York State and maintained infrequent communication with the family. With nowhere left to move, Charity took to bed in deep despair.