“ON THE 3RD day of July 1807,” Charity wrote in a brief 1844 memoir of her life, Sylvia Drake “consented to be my help-meet and came to be my companion in labor.”1 In thirteen well-chosen words, two stricken out, Charity, master at rebuses, disguised a radical assertion: that she and Sylvia began their lives together by uniting in a marriage.
Each word built this astounding claim. To begin, Charity averred that Sylvia had “consented” to a union between the women. For nearly a millennium, “consent” had served as the touchstone of marriage in the European tradition. Neither a minister’s presence nor a civil license was necessary if it could be proved that two people had consented to marry one another. The passage of the Hardwicke Act in England in 1753 imposed new licensing restrictions that cracked down on the problem of clandestine marriages.2 But in the United States, nineteenth-century jurists continued to affirm that couples could establish common-law marriages legitimated by mutual consent alone, rather than civil or religious authority. This right to enter into marriage by consent could even override the rules that governed who was eligible to marry. At times, courts recognized consent-based common-law marriages in which one spouse had a civil disability, such as being enslaved or underage, which excluded him or her from marrying.3 Charity and Sylvia’s connection, which defied the legal definition of marriage as the “union of a man and woman,” fell within this gray zone.4
Charity’s next words, describing Sylvia as “my help-meet,” built her claim that the women’s relationship constituted a marriage. She adopted the phrase from the passage in the book of Genesis where God creates Eve as a help-meet to Adam (2:18). In the Protestant culture of early America, help-meet served as a common synonym for wife.5 Charity’s use of the pronoun “my” before the word “help-meet” further claimed Sylvia as a wife by taking possession of her. In his influential Commentaries (1765–69), jurist William Blackstone explained that under coverture law a wife’s “very being” fell under the “protection” of her husband upon marriage; all her property, and to a large extent her body, became his. Ownership defined the relationship of husband and wife.6 Although Charity and Sylvia, like many nineteenth-century feminists, would challenge Blackstonian doctrine by insisting on an equitable distribution of property in their own union, Charity used the semantic resonance of the possessive phrase “my help-meet” to establish the marital quality of her and Sylvia’s union.
Charity followed her description of Sylvia as her help-meet with the elaboration that Sylvia “came to be my companion.” The implication that Sylvia had left a prior home to join Charity established both that she and Sylvia began cohabitating on a specific date and that they resided under Charity’s roof. These assertions contributed to the representation of the relationship as marital. Following English precedent, the early American legal scholar James Kent listed “cohabitation” as a primary evidence of common-law marriage, along with consent.7 Equally important, in New England social practice couples typically marked their married lives as beginning when they went “to housekeeping” under the husband’s roof.8 Charity’s memoir demonstrated that she and Sylvia had followed traditional practice.
Finally, by crossing out the words in labor—the only correction made to the 1844 memoir—Charity emphasized that her life with Sylvia originated in love, not in economic need. Their relationship fit the new nineteenth-century romantic definitions of marriage as a union of souls, as well as the earlier colonial understandings of marriage as a pragmatic partnership. Charity seemingly wrote the words in labor in order to strike them through and correct any misapprehension by future generations. The women worked together in order to live together, not the other way around. Sylvia’s contribution to the tailoring business provided the couple with the combined resources they required to support themselves. Their longstanding union did not evolve out of a practical work arrangement.
By 1844, when Charity penned her memoir, her marriage to Sylvia had long since acquired social force, if not legal validity, within the Weybridge area. As one local man, Hiram Hurlburt, recalled from growing up during the 1830s, everyone in town regarded the women “as if Miss Bryant and Miss Drake were married to each other.” Communal acceptance of the women’s marital relationship did not come all at once, however. It took years for the women to make their private commitment to each other public knowledge. If in the summer of 1807 Sylvia and Charity had talked openly about their relationship as a marriage, the families would have been compelled to break the lovers apart. Social sanction extended to intense attachments between women only when those relationships did not interfere with conventional family structure. Forswearing traditional marriage to live their lives together broke that fundamental agreement. So at the beginning, Charity and Sylvia needed to preserve the fiction that their futures remained undetermined.
The day before Sylvia arrived at Charity’s house in Weybridge, having “consented” to be her “help-meet,” Charity wrote home to Massachusetts delaying her return until the fall and making no mention of Sylvia.9 In her public correspondence that summer, Charity gave the impression that all her time was taken up by tailoring work and recovering her health, but in her private writings, Charity celebrated her new-formed union. An acrostic that she wrote for Sylvia in August suggested that the two women were joined in a spiritual marriage. Charity’s poem called on the heavens to bless and “protect my lovely friend” and to “attune her heart to gratitude and Love.” Grant Sylvia good health and a clear mind, Charity implored, and “espouse her cause, accept her as thine own.”10 By calling on Christ to espouse Sylvia in his role as a heavenly bridegroom, a common image in New England Puritanism, Charity herself spoke for Sylvia’s well-being.11 As Charity implored God’s blessing on Sylvia in each loving line, she espoused Sylvia’s interests as her own.
Despite her earlier promises, at summer’s end Charity felt no more ready to forsake Sylvia and depart for Massachusetts than she had felt in the spring. At the beginning of October she mailed off a flurry of letters to the people waiting back home, postponing her return yet again. She blamed the delay on ill health and good work opportunities. Charity’s brother Peter scolded her, “I consider you as a sort of runaway.” He grumbled that he “did not much like your leaving us so abruptly last winter,” but he was happy to “understand you or your services are at least in great demand.” Concerned that money woes might be preventing her return, Peter offered to pay for Charity’s passage back to the Hampshire Hills.12 Lydia also felt dissatisfied with Charity’s continuing absence. Perhaps to assuage her own guilt, Charity had suggested that Lydia was being “unconstant” and “unfaithful.” The Plainfield teacher roundly repudiated this baseless accusation and reminded Charity that she had “yielded a kind of unwilling consent to your longer stay in Weybridge.” Worried about Charity’s “decaying health,” Lydia begged her to return swiftly to Massachusetts.13
Charity did not tell either Peter or Lydia about the relationship that kept her in Vermont. She withheld the news from her brother because his household already deemed Charity suspicious on that account. She did not tell Lydia because the information would break her heart. Charity did finally mention Sylvia in her October letter to Lydia, but she wrote nothing about their intimacy, giving the impression that Sylvia, like Achsah, was just an innocent young friend. Only from acquaintances who had visited Weybridge did Lydia hear that Charity had taken on a live-in assistant to help with her sewing. “I conclude the apprentice is no other than Sylvia,” Lydia guessed with the acute sensitivity of a lover.14 Charity herself had not mentioned the arrangement.
Charity revealed her secret reason for not wanting to leave Vermont to only one person, her older sister and surrogate mother, Anna Kingman. More than anyone else in the Bryant family, Anna sympathized with her little sister, felt for the tribulations she had suffered, and wished for her future happiness. If anyone could accept the unconventional new life that Charity was attempting to build, it would be Anna. Charity’s gamble succeeded. Although Anna reported back her “disappointment” over Charity’s refusal to come home to Massachusetts, she expressed her pleasure—if a little confusion—in learning about Charity’s new friend:
You have introduced a character in your letter, my dear sister, but I am still at a loss who it can be, as you introduce her only by the name of Sylvia. But from your representations she appears to possess a degree of excellence which entitles her to a place in my heart.—your friends are mine—and whoever performs the offices of kindness toward you, does it to me also. Do be so kind as to present her my compliments and thanks.
Charity won Anna’s approval for Sylvia by describing her as a nurse of sorts. Sylvia’s willingness to perform the “offices of kindness,” or in other words to care for Charity during the bouts of ill health she frequently suffered, endeared her to Anna. At the same time, Anna knew her youngest sister well enough to understand that the relationship probably extended beyond such offices. In her response to Charity’s letter introducing Sylvia, Anna praised friendship as the “sweetest charm of life,” conveying her approval for the female intimacies around which Charity organized her life, and by extension accepting her new relationship.15
Her excuses made, Charity retired into seclusion with Sylvia for the long winter. She wrote to no one in Massachusetts during the next several months, having no wish to disturb her present idyll with thoughts of the future.16 But spring’s return in 1808 renewed the specter of the women’s separation. More than a year had passed since Charity first made the trip to Vermont with the intention to remain for a single season. She had exhausted the reasons she could offer to friends and family for her long absence, but the thought of leaving Sylvia caused Charity terrible distress. In March, Charity poured out her grief over this dilemma in a poem titled “On the Prospect of Separation”:
My Sylvia will prove kind?
That she will ne’er deceive
This heart to her inclin’d
By every gentle tie
That binds the tender heart;
O Whether could I fly,
Should she from me depart!
Where could I rest my head
But on her friendly breast.
Short of the silent Dead!
Where all the weary rest.
How could I bear to see
Her from my bosom torn
Myself departed be
And left alone to mourn
O should my adverse fate
Endure this cruel blow
My heart beneath its weight
Must sink in pain and woe
But Hope shall still preside
Within my trouble’d breast
And paint the brighter side
TO soothe my cares to rest.17
The lines echoed Charity’s August 1807 acrostic for Sylvia depicting the women’s spiritual union. The two women, in Charity’s words, were united “by every gentle tie / That binds the tender heart.” The tie that binds was then, as it is now, a common expression for marriage, and the title of a hymn frequently sung at wedding ceremonies: “Blest be the tie that binds our hearts in Christian love.”18 The hymn casts Christ in the role of a heavenly bridegroom, joined by covenant with his community of believers. By laying title to the tie that binds, Charity claimed the language of marriage for her and Sylvia’s relationship and invested their union with Christian authority.
Imagery of a spiritual marriage appealed to Charity and Sylvia, whose sex excluded them from entering a civil marriage. At the same time, Charity’s lines illuminated the physical dimensions of the women’s union by including imagery of bosom intimacy. How could Charity find ease if not on Sylvia’s friendly breast, and how could she bear for Sylvia to be torn from her “bosom”? Charity dreaded “the prospect of separation” from Sylvia’s body as much as from her soul.
Unwilling to be separated, but unable to defer her return to Massachusetts any longer, Charity arrived at the only possible solution—she would bring Sylvia back home with her. In April, the two women set off together to visit their friends and family to the south. The women’s trip to Massachusetts resembled a conventional “bridal tour,” an early American precursor to the honeymoon.19 The trip gave Charity an opportunity to introduce her help-meet to her family and to establish the women’s new identities as a fixed couple. Charity later claimed that she “returnd to Mass taking Miss D with me not knowing as I should return again to Vt.”20 At the time, however, she expressed little doubt that the visit to Massachusetts was just that and would terminate with her return to Vermont. Within a month of the women’s arrival in Massachusetts, Charity informed her sister-in-law Sally that she planned to return to Weybridge in the fall.21 Charity’s friends and family members expected as much. Observing Charity and Sylvia together revealed what Charity had found so impossible to write: the two women were inseparable.
Charity and Sylvia began their tour in Pelham, reaching Charity’s sister Anna Kingman’s house in May 1808. Charity planned the trip with careful consideration. Anna’s acceptance of Sylvia would smooth the path for her encounters with the rest of the Bryant siblings. The strategy succeeded. Observing her sister’s happiness in this new companion persuaded Anna to endorse the relationship. Before their departure Anna gave each woman a letter, which they could share with other family and friends met later on the tour. Her letter to Sylvia overflowed with praise, bolstering the inexperienced young woman’s confidence for the rest of the journey. “Language is unable to express how deeply my heart is affected by your benevolence, and how highly I appreciate your goodness!” Anna wrote. You leave behind a “name sweeter than the perfumes of Arabia, an impression of your goodness which the hand of time cannot ease.”22 Anna recognized Sylvia as a kindred soul: pious, giving, and devoted to Charity’s well-being. Grateful for Anna’s kindness, Sylvia wrote to her worried mother in Vermont, “you can hardly imagine what an agreeable instructing and entertaining woman Mrs Kingman is I take much satisfaction in her company.”23 The letter could calm any fears Mary Drake felt about her youngest daughter’s reception within the elevated circle of the Bryant family.
Anna’s letter to Charity performed an even more generous act, granting permission for Charity to pursue her new life in Vermont. “I trust it is needless to tell you how much I shall regret your absence,” she wrote to her youngest sister, but “I am confident I need be under no apprehensions concerning your welfare while so dear and faithful a friend as Miss Drake is your constant companion, and I trust you are not insensible, my dear sister, how much you owe her fidelity and attachment.”24 By naming Sylvia as Charity’s “constant companion” and adjuring Charity to “fidelity,” Anna symbolically blessed the women’s union. At Anna’s house, the private commitment Charity and Sylvia had made began to assume a public shape.
Anna executed one more important office for Charity before their visit to Pelham ended: she played host to Charity’s reunion with Lydia. Charity could not bring Sylvia to Lydia’s parents’ house in Plainfield, but she needed to meet Lydia in person to apologize for her abandonment over the past year. While Lydia waited for Charity in Plainfield, practicing “patience, resolution, prudence, &c.,” Charity had rented a home for herself in Weybridge and invited Sylvia to join her.25 While Lydia dreamed about Charity spending the evening surrounded by Polly’s children, Charity and Sylvia had been spending their nights alone together.26 While Lydia rejected a marriage proposal, Charity had asked Sylvia to be her help-meet.27 While Lydia continued dreaming of the moment when Charity would return, Charity had put down roots in the town where she would live for the rest of her life. Charity owed Lydia an explanation that could never be entrusted to paper.
Lydia arrived in Pelham in the middle of May. The reunion demolished any dreams Lydia still preserved of spending her future with Charity. She learned that Charity was lost to her as a lover; the question now was whether the two women could remain friends. After returning home to Plainfield, Lydia wrote Charity a distraught letter acknowledging the end of their romantic relationship. Although she used a string of quotations from the hymns of Isaac Watts to encode her message, the “pain and anxiety” she expressed in the letter were so palpable that Lydia urged Charity to burn the pages after she read them.28 Then Lydia put down the pen. Since Charity left Plainfield for Vermont in February 1807, Lydia had written to her every month, despite the long stretches in which she received no return of correspondence. The visit to Pelham stopped her hand. June, July, and August passed in silence.
Charity and Sylvia, meanwhile, set off for the next and perhaps most frightening stop on their journey—a visit to their birthplaces. Following Charity’s departure from North Bridgewater in early 1806, her father, Philip, did not communicate with her for two years. Finally, in March 1808 he sent a letter to Weybridge inviting his estranged daughter home for a visit. At seventy-six years of age, Philip Bryant needed to reconcile with his daughter soon if he hoped to see her in this world again. The recent death of his brother Job, Charity’s uncle, served as a grim reminder of his own mortality. At his side, he daily witnessed the sufferings of his wife, whom ill health had rendered “helpless.” His letter to Charity carried a note of urgency, “I hope you will come + see ys as soon as you can.”29 Despite his plaintive tone, it took an act of great courage for Charity to return to North Bridgewater and bring Sylvia with her. If she hoped that old age had mellowed Philip and Hannah, she was sorely disappointed. Sylvia wrote back to her own mother in Weybridge that Hannah “knocks about like a house on fire,” and she was a far cry from the “helpless” figure Philip depicted in his letter to Charity. Perhaps if he told the truth, Charity would not have come at all.30 In the end, Charity had reason to be glad she made the visit. Her father and stepmother did not issue Sylvia a welcome to the family, like Anna had, but they agreed to open the house to Charity and her companion in the future.
Other visits in Bridgewater and Easton produced positive results. Charity introduced her new lover to Mercy, who extended her “best love” to “Silvia.”31 Charity also established friendships with relatives of Sylvia who had remained in Easton.32 The 1808 tour set a precedent for return visits, establishing the women as a settled couple. Charity’s peculiar desire to spend her life in the company of another woman was easier for North Bridgewater to accept now that she lived away than it had been when she tried to make the town her home. Traditional New England communities were built around the marital household: a husband, wife, and children represented the building block of social order.33 Even in the early nineteenth century, single women were discouraged from living alone. After Mercy Ford’s mother died in 1810, Charity’s former lover found it difficult to leave her brother’s house. Although she “had an idea of giting a chamber and being alone,” she found she could not “git suited and suit others at the same time.”34 Charity escaped this bind by leaving home. Her move to Vermont relieved North Bridgewaterites of the obligation to regulate her domestic arrangements. Living in Weybridge smoothed Charity’s relations in her native place.
Their reception in North Bridgewater and Easton encouraged Charity and Sylvia to brave Cummington as well. Traveling via Pelham, the women arrived at Peter and Sally Bryant’s home on September 3, 1808. Sally’s record of the visit in her diary was predictably terse. “Charity Bryant + Miss Drake come—quite warm,” she recorded on the Saturday of their arrival. The following day, the family went to church and celebrated communion day. At the meeting, Sally had a chance to appraise Sylvia’s piety, which she considered a matter of great significance. Sylvia must have made a good impression. The visit seemed to be going well on Monday, when Sally recorded that “Charity cut me out a gown + spencer of black lutestring.” The women spent the following day at home together with the children, while Peter made a visit to Worthington. Rain kept them indoors in the afternoon, providing an opportunity to sit by the hearth and sew companionably. On Wednesday “Charity went away.”35 Sally didn’t mark Sylvia’s departure, but the visit laid the basis for a friendship between the two women. When Charity and Sylvia returned to Cummington two years later, Sally noted Sylvia’s arrival by first name.36 Afterward, her letters always directed Charity to “give my love to Sylvia.”37
During their stay in Cummington, Charity and Sylvia also visited with Lydia.38 Three months had passed since the women’s encounter in Pelham, and the long silence had allowed Lydia to recover her equanimity. Now she renewed their correspondence on a new basis of friendship. Despite an episode of sickness in her household, Lydia found time to send Charity two letters in the days after the visit and to congratulate Charity on making her relationship with Sylvia public knowledge. “Much of my love attends Sylvia,” Lydia wrote with warmth, “the world is no longer kept in ignorance.”39 A third letter swiftly followed, directed to Weybridge, blessing Sylvia as “the friend of your heart and partner of your cares. Her goodness I hope is rewarded, and kindness and friendship returned, may you long be happy in each other.”40 The language Lydia chose described Charity and Sylvia’s relationship as a type of marriage. Expressions like friend of my heart and partner of my cares served as commonplace endearments for spouses. The phrase “may you long be happy in each other” were words that a well-wisher made to the newly married.41 The benediction must have cost Lydia a few tears, but they preserved her friendship with Charity and enabled all three women to remain affectionate for the rest of their lives. Lydia, living as a single woman with her parents, ended her next letter to Charity with the dismal thought that “I must dismiss my pen and retire—but retire alone—may you, my dear, with our sister Sylvia, have undisturb’d repose.”42 Despite her palpable envy, Lydia acknowledged Sylvia as Charity’s life companion.
Before their return to Weybridge, Charity took one more important action to establish the public face of their union. She asked her brother Peter to buy a ring for her on his next trip to Boston, where he served in the state legislature.43 Rings had symbolized the bonds of matrimony in European culture since ancient times. Traditionally, only the bride received a ring.44 Charity asked Peter to purchase her a single ring valued at four dollars, the cost of a hundred bushels of coal in Weybridge.45 For a working woman like Charity, who kept her fingers busy every moment of the day just to pay for her subsistence, the expense was considerable. The ring was too valuable to be placed in the mail, so Peter held onto it until the women came for their next visit to Massachusetts.46 For, as Charity noted in the record of her life, “after tarrying six months and not being willing to part with my friend I return’d with her” to Weybridge.47 The task remained for the two women to persuade the Drake relatives, like the Bryants, that they were bound together for life.