ON A COLD and stormy Saturday in mid-February, Sylvia set the table in her newly expanded dining room. The wind outside blew something fierce, but the mood around the table was warm and convivial. Brother Asaph’s children Polly and Isaac Drake took their seats alongside brother Oliver’s children Nathan and Almira Drake, sister Rhoda’s children Walter and Moriah Ellsworth, sister Polly’s son Edwin Hayward, sister Desire’s daughter Amerett Soper, and brother Solomon’s daughter Arzina Drake. Altogether, Sylvia crowed in her diary, she served tea that afternoon to fourteen people “almost all Nephews + Nieces.” Five of the children spent the night with Charity and Sylvia. The next day they had pancakes.1
None of the children, all born in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, could remember a time before Charity and Sylvia lived together in their hospitable little cottage on the Hagar farm. Since their earliest recollections, their aunts’ house had been a sure place to find a good meal and a brief refuge from their own overcrowded homes. Visits from the second generation of the Drake family went a long way to make up for the absences of their often chilly parents. Some member of the Drake family visited Charity and Sylvia’s house on average at least every other day.2
They came to enjoy Aunt Charity’s wise company as much as Aunt Sylvia’s pies and cookies. The Drake children rarely acknowledged any difference in their relationships to the two women. When away from Weybridge, the nieces and nephews addressed letters jointly to their “dear aunts.”3 They viewed the women as one kindly unit. Writing to her “dear aunts” from Moira, New York, in 1845, Polly’s daughter Emma expressed gratitude to both women together for the “unveried kindness you have always shown from my birth untill now … my dear friends.”4
Although nieces and nephews descended from the Bryant family did not grow up next door to Charity and Sylvia, they treated Sylvia with the same affection that the Drakes extended to Charity. Oliver Bryant assured his “dear aunts” in 1844, “I do not know of a nephew or a niece in our family there is none but entertain the most tender regard for yourself.”5 The two women paid frequent visits to Massachusetts, typically every other year, when the second generation of the family was growing up. Sylvia, who was more approachable than Charity, found many friends among the children. Peter’s sons may have jokingly called Sylvia “Uncle Drake” in her absence, but she was always Aunt Sylvia in their hearts.6 Peter’s youngest, John Howard Bryant, born in July 1807 just days after Charity and Sylvia moved in together, addressed his letters to his “dear aunts” just as the Drake children did. So did Anna Kingman’s son Freeman, Silence Bryant’s son Oliver, and Cyrus Bryant’s son Daniel.7 “Please give a great deal of love to Aunt Sylvia,” Silence Bryant’s granddaughter Emme wrote to Charity in 1844.8 It requires a family tree to distinguish Emme from Emma and discern the bonds of biology that tied which woman to which aunt.
Making matters more confusing, several children on the Drake side bore the Bryant name. Sylvia’s brother Asaph named his fifth son Cyrus Bryant Drake for Charity’s deceased brother. Sylvia’s brother Oliver named one of his sons Cyrus and one of his daughters Charity in Charity’s honor.9 Sylvia’s nephew William Ellsworth, the son of her sister Rhoda, named his son Charles Bryant. In a letter to Asaph Drake, William Ellsworth explained that “I did not name my oldest Charity Bryant but came as near to as I could,” adding a loving message to the person in question, “aunt charity I have not forgotten you I send my best respects to you and aunt Sylvia I hope you have not forgotten me.”10 The Bryant name even continued to circulate through the fourth generation of the Drake family. Asaph Drake’s son Elijah’s daughter Sarah named her son Willis Bryant Child shortly after Charity’s death. Sarah, who knew her great-aunt Charity from birth, chose the name to memorialize her venerable relative.11
The majority of Drake children named for Charity were sons, not daughters, and Charity’s surname made a more lasting impact on the family than did her first name. Their daughters, the Drakes named for Sylvia. Asaph named a daughter Sylvia Louisa. Sylvia’s sister Desire named a daughter Sylvia Ann. Sylvia’s brother Oliver twice named a daughter Selvina.12 But there were no male adaptations—no Sylvans—among all the Sylvias. Only Charity broke the naming pattern that typically predominated in New England families—daughters named for mothers and sisters, sons for fathers and brothers.
Charity and Sylvia singled out their namesakes on both sides for special generosity, which probably explains why the prolific Oliver named four of his eighteen children for the women. Altogether, Charity and Sylvia’s nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews numbered in the hundreds. If the women could not dote equally on all these young people, they formed close connections to a remarkable number. From the 1820s onward, the women received regular correspondence and visits from more than twenty nieces, nephews, grandnieces, and grandnephews. They were especially close to Asaph Drake’s and Polly Hayward’s children in Vermont and to Silence Bryant’s children in Massachusetts. Silence, who suffered many family losses over the years, welcomed Sylvia as her “second sister.”13 It is little wonder that these siblings’ children, above all, looked to both Charity and Sylvia as beloved aunts.
A few of their relationships stand out in particular. Polly’s oldest daughter, Achsah, who had been the first person to tell Sylvia about Charity’s special charms, shared a particular intimacy with both women. Sadly, not long after Charity moved to Weybridge, Achsah began showing signs of the tubercular infection that killed so many New Englanders of the era. The women did their best to care for their witty young niece. Charity wrote to her brother Peter seeking remedies; he recommended alcornoque bark and bleeding.14 In 1817, Sylvia and Charity took Achsah on a visit to Massachusetts, at her request. Travel was often prescribed to victims of consumption, although more so for men than women.15 Charity and Sylvia had great hopes that the trip would be restorative.16 Once arrived, Achsah took pleasure in meeting Charity’s sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews, who fussed over her.17 She returned feeling better than when she left, but the trip did little to improve her health. Achsah died the following spring at the age of twenty-five. Her aunts mourned her loss to the end of their days. Charity described Achsah’s death in her brief 1844 memoir. Achsah, she wrote, had “gradually sunk under the power of that fatal Disease, Consumption, untill May 1818 when much lamented she bid her Friends a final farewell!” Charity used more words to describe Achsah’s end than the deaths of her sister Anna Kingman in 1811 (from tuberculosis), her father, Philip, in 1816 (from old age), or her brother Peter Bryant in 1820 (also from tuberculosis). Achsah’s death was the only loss on Sylvia’s side of the family that she noted at all; it still carried a sting thirty years after the fact.18
The women also had a special relationship with Charity’s godson Cyrus Bryant Drake. When his father Asaph Drake asked Charity, as godmother, to name his newborn son, Charity chose the name of her middle brother who had died in 1798. From the day of his naming, Charity contributed to the boy’s upbringing. The small gifts of clothes or treats that she made to Cyrus during his youth helped bind his affection to her, but they were really only pledges toward a more important responsibility to come. “From the first moment that it was known that I had nam’d your son to the present time,” Charity wrote to Asaph in the summer of 1829, it has often been said to me “you are going to send him to College, are you not?”
After receiving permission from his father, Charity arranged to pay for Cyrus to attend Middlebury. The cost was significant. Charity and Sylvia paid his tuition, bought his books, and sewed his clothes during his years in preparatory school prior to college, then gave him $24 a year toward college support, and continued to give him gifts of clothes and books throughout his post-collegiate studies at Andover Seminary, where he trained for the ministry.19 Cyrus was one of the only children in his generation of Drakes to attend college. Few sons on the Bryant side had this opportunity either. Even Peter’s “genius” son Cullen could not afford to attend Yale, the school of his choice, but went to lesser-priced Williams College before withdrawing early to train for a legal career.20
Cyrus never forgot his aunts’ largesse. He remained a faithful nephew, repaying the women in visits and affection. Even while he studied at Andover, he made trips back to Weybridge to spend time with his aunts, drinking tea in their parlor and reading aloud from religious books.21 He became so much his aunts’ son that Asaph renounced his own claim to paternal authority:
you must know if you have not learnt it before that I have not a son of that Name I had one once on whome my hart doted and on whome I depended on to performe manuel labor on my farme and likewise to take the care of my secular concerns that I in my infirm state of boddy and decline of life might be releived in some measure of the burden. But [I don’t say allas] I have no such son now. I hope he is not dead absconded or become Lunitic—neither have I disinherited him But by hard struggle not with Inclination nor Duty but with pecunary embarisments I have given him to A Valued friend of mine and my famileys who richly deserves Him and much more from me.
Asaph’s renunciation of Cyrus was bittersweet. He felt Cyrus’s attachment to Charity and Sylvia as a loss, yet he refused to regret that loss. His own relationship to Charity, although tense at times, had given enormous meaning to his life. He described the early years of their friendship as “not only the Happyest but the most rich and blest moments of my Life.” Now, as a result of this friendship, Cyrus received a college education and became a well-respected and wealthy minister. Asaph, who had little faith in his own salvation, credited that good fortune entirely to his adopted “sister.”22
Remarkably, Cyrus was not the only Drake whom Charity and Sylvia considered sending to college. Charity inquired about sending one of their nieces to America’s first women’s college, Mount Holyoke Academy, in 1837, the year that it was founded. They probably had in mind Sylvia Louisa, Cyrus Bryant Drake’s younger sister, as the prospective pupil. Charity and Sylvia were especially close to Sylvia Louisa. The women saw Sylvia Louisa, a smart and independent girl, as the Drake niece who bore the closest resemblance to themselves. In her 1821 will Sylvia left clothes to the four other girls named after herself, but she promised to give Sylvia Louisa fees at “some Academy or school for the purpose of instructing young ladys.”23 When Mount Holyoke opened, Sylvia Louisa was twenty-seven and single, a good candidate for college. Charity wrote to their friend the Reverend Eli Moody, who lived in a town near Mount Holyoke, asking for information about the school. The minister judged it an excellent institution and described the requisites for entering: “an acquaintance with the general principles of English grammar, a good knowledge of modern geography, History of the United States, Watts on the Mind, Colburn’s first lessons, + the whole of Adams’ New Arithmetic.” He also promised to act as a guardian to their niece while she was away from home.24
None of the young Miss Drakes did end up attending Mount Holyoke. Whether that was a result of expense, inadequate preparation, or the unfamiliarity of a college for women is unclear. Although Charity and Sylvia did not send Sylvia Louisa to college, they still earned her loyalty. Sylvia Louisa never married or left Weybridge. After Charity’s death, she proved a faithful friend to her aging aunt, accompanying her on visits to relatives, sending letters for her, and treating her with love and compassion.25 “I am glad you have such good Children,” Sylvia wrote to her brother Asaph, after Sylvia Louisa had taken her on an important errand.26 More than anyone else, Sylvia Louisa guaranteed that her aunt was comfortable in her old age.
Charity and Sylvia could not offer to send all their nieces and nephews to college, but they made many smaller gifts over the years that went a long way to securing their affections. Edwin Bryant, son of Charity’s sister Silence, wrote to his aunts recalling the joy he felt as a little boy when they gave him a new set of clothes: “Oh! how proud I was! How I exulted when permitted to wear them. The great mogul himself had not half of the genuine coxcombing that I then felt. Alas! The joy and pleasures of childhood! How they have all passed away, and made room for the sterner scenes of manhood.” Edwin closed this nostalgic letter with a request for Charity to “remember me particularly to Aunt Sylvia.”27
Perhaps Edwin, who never married but “died a bachelor,” felt an unspoken connection to his spinster aunts.28 Certainly their affections created some of the rare happy memories in a difficult childhood. The 1809 bankruptcy of his father, Ichabod Bryant, forced Edwin to leave school at age fifteen. Charity and Sylvia tried to help the family by lining up a job for Ichabod at Middlebury College, but the position fell through, and Edwin, as the oldest son, was forced to go to work to protect the interests of his six younger siblings.29 He had a peripatetic youth, working for a spell with his Uncle Bezaliel in New York State, trying his hand at business in Boston, moving to Kentucky to edit newspapers in Lexington and Louisville, and traveling before the Gold Rush to California, where he bought San Francisco real estate that later earned him a fortune.
To this quintessential modern self-made man, his aunts represented a honeyed lost world of tradition, stability, and family.30 Writing from a wearied perspective later in life, Edwin acknowledged that his aunt Sylvia was perhaps not a true aunt in the eyes of the world, but he regretted the loss of his innocence on this count. “Give my love to ‘Aunt Sylvia’ as I was wont to call her when a boy,” Edwin wrote to Charity. “I shall never forget her and your kindnesses at that period of my life.”31 Thankfully, both his aunts had already passed away when Edwin threw himself from the window of a hotel in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1869. An obituary writer opined, “he was perhaps too sensitive for this world; the cords of his soul may have been too finely attuned for the rough fingers of the demons of the storms of human life.”32 A more pithy observer commented that Edwin’s “wealth did not bring happiness”—at least not the happiness of a little boy receiving a new suit of clothes from his tailor aunts.33
Charity and Sylvia made similar gestures of generosity to many of their nieces and nephews. They brought gifts to distribute on their trips to Massachusetts. The Weybridge relations frequently received small gifts from their aunts, as did Sylvia’s brothers’ children in Bristol. In the summer of 1823, Sylvia and Charity brought “Brothers sisters Nephews + friends” in Bristol gifts amounting to nearly $7 in value. In return, the Bristol relatives treated Charity and Sylvia to “good cherry whiskey” as well as “good fish + potatoes biscuit pye + c.”34 Sylvia, who kept notes, enjoyed the meal, but in general the women did not expect to earn back the value of their gifts.
Charity and Sylvia’s reputation for generosity encouraged several nephews to apply to them for significant financial help at critical points. Polly’s son Azel, a longtime favorite whom the women had once brought with them on a visit to Massachusetts, asked for a loan of $100 in 1826 to buy a law library and enter the legal business.35 Asaph’s oldest son, Elijah, received help establishing a brick kiln from his aunts, who contributed funds they earned from the industry of their own “assiduous hands.”36 Cyrus Bryant’s orphaned spendthrift son Daniel more than once sought the support of his indulgent aunts.
The women offered advice on the matters of faith, work, and love in even greater quantities than cash. Anna Kingman’s son Freeman fondly remembered their solicitude for his spiritual welfare during his youth. “It has always been a source of pleasure,” he wrote to his “dear aunts,” to “recollect the warmth of your attachment the gentle pressing of my hand with a look of anxious solicitude for my future welfare which was generally conducive to my present pleasures.”37 Since his own mother died when he was young, and his father could be hostile to religion, Freeman appreciated having someone in the family express care about his spiritual well-being. Charity’s concerns for the children extended beyond their spiritual welfare. She often inquired into the marital prospects of nieces and nephews, expressing a longstanding interest in the world of conventional courtship that Sylvia did not always share. Charity’s nephew Oliver Bryant even accepted his aunts’ help in finding him a wife after a prolonged bachelorhood.38
Charity had the most advice to offer on the subject of her nephews’ economic futures. The women’s consistent success at earning a living through skilled labor during an era of intense economic instability provided a useful example. The scarcity of available arable land in New England, as well as the expansion of the commercial economy in the early nineteenth century, drove many in the second generation of Bryants and Drakes to seek a career in business rather than on the farm. Aunt Charity in particular seemed able to help steer them along this path. Oliver wrote to Charity asking her advice about whether he should borrow money to buy into a store.39 Charity tried to line up a job for Peter’s son John with one of her Middlebury customers. When that opportunity failed, she gave John advice on his plan to further his education at Colby College.40 She sent her niece’s husband Abiel Rankin a notice of masonry work taking place at Middlebury College to help him find steady employment.41 She also tried to line up jobs for numerous Drake nephews, working her family networks in Massachusetts to identify opportunities.42
Charity tried many times, without luck, to help the orphaned Daniel Bryant, who was raised by his grandparents. Rather than provide Daniel with an education, Philip and Hannah began to hire him out as a laborer when he was in his early teens. He complained that his step-grandmother worked him “worse than a negro had ought to been used.”43 Perhaps to make up for this misuse, Philip left Daniel half his sizeable real estate following his death in 1816.44 But loosed from the tyrannical oversight of his grandfather and grandmother, Daniel rapidly spent all his inheritance. For the rest of his life, he struggled to earn a living. Charity was diligent about keeping in touch over the years, even after other family members wrote Daniel off as a profligate. When Daniel lost title to his grandfather’s house, Charity invited him to come settle in Weybridge, but her nephew’s young wife, Lucy, had a “presentiment against the place,” so the couple remained in temporary lodgings in Massachusetts. If Charity could not help Daniel in the way she wished, she at least let him know that she loved him and worried on his account. Daniel took comfort from this knowledge, keeping up his end of the correspondence with Charity despite his general flightiness, and he never forgot in his letters to send his love to Aunt Sylvia.45
Charity and Sylvia also tried to help their nieces by training them for the tailoring trade. Wage opportunities for rural girls were expanding during the antebellum era thanks to outwork industries such as hat-making and the growth of mill towns such as Lowell. Neither hat-making nor the mills offered as much financial independence as skilled tailoring, however.46 Charity offered instruction not only in how to sew, a common skill among nineteenth-century women, but in cutting cloth, a specialized trade that distinguished tailors from less-skilled seamstresses. She sought to give these girls a means to support themselves throughout their lives.47 Edwin Hayward’s twin sister, Emma, lived with and worked for the women for much of 1821. Afterward they helped pay for her school fees.48 Asaph’s daughter Sylvia Louisa and Isaac Drake’s daughter Emmeline also both learned to sew from their aunts.49 Silence’s daughter Elizabeth came to Weybridge for a season, but homesickness cut her apprenticeship short.50
Charity tried to persuade her father to allow Daniel’s sister Zibby to live in Weybridge and learn the trade, but Philip refused to permit Zibby to leave the family home because he insisted that the young girl owed him her service in exchange for his care during her infancy. If she left, Philip and Hannah would have to hire a girl to take care of them. Zibby and Charity were both disappointed by Philip’s unfeeling refusal.51 After Philip died, Zibby refused to remain in the house and take care of her step-grandmother. Instead she hired herself out to another family.52 By the time Hannah died, ten months later, Zibby had found a different path to independence by marrying and starting a household of her own.53 She was in such a hurry to leave the Byrant homestead that many in the family believed she married down. As her uncle Peter crudely put it, “Zibbeah I hear has thrown herself away upon a DICKERMAN!”54 Charity’s cousin Vesta remarked more kindly that she hoped Zibby had made “a good bargain.”55 Unfortunately, Peter’s prejudice bore out. Zibby’s husband Benjamin Dickerman found it difficult to earn enough to support the family, giving his wife good cause to regret not learning a trade of her own as a young woman.
Of course, some nephews and nieces resented Charity and Sylvia’s interfering ways. The women were not shy from offering their opinions on the states of the children’s souls. During one trip to Massachusetts, Anna’s son Lysander Kingman stayed out in the fields while Charity and Sylvia visited the family. His cousin Elizabeth later explained to her aunts that Lysander “thought you would say something upon a subject that he did not like to hear about.”56 The matter may have been religion or it may have been work. Either way, he chose to absent himself from the routine questioning that Charity and Sylvia’s visits entailed. Though Lysander blamed his absence on work, claiming that he had to be haying during their visit, his aunts saw through the ruse.57
When Charity and Sylvia felt neglected or slighted by their nieces and nephews, they said as much. A leavening of guilt alongside their generosity helped bind the second generation close. Charity was probably overly sensitive about family rejection, which was only natural considering her difficult relationship with her father and stepmother. Up to his death in 1816, Philip sought to punish his youngest daughter for her nonconformity, even leaving her less in his will than many in the family thought she deserved.58 Rather than leave her valuable property, his main bequest was title to a chamber in his house, a slap in the face to Charity, who for almost a decade had made her own home in Vermont with Sylvia.59
A Bridgewater friend, Nabby Snell, wrote to Charity trying to put a positive spin on the will, declaring “I, should be pleas’d if it was agreeable to you, and could be for your benefit that you would take possession of your chamber and occupy it yourself with Sylvia.”60 But the notion that Charity and Sylvia would leave their beloved cottage and move back into the house with Charity’s decrepit and detested stepmother was unthinkable. Later that year when Hannah Richards Bryant lay on her own deathbed she followed her husband’s precedent and made a final gesture of rejection toward her stepdaughter by giving away the household furniture Charity had inherited.61 In the years that followed, Charity’s west chamber became more of a burden than an asset. She sought to extract a yearly rent from the unwilling family who bought the property excluding Charity’s room, but they resisted paying their absentee landlord. For years, Charity’s agents in North Bridgewater wrote letters of complaint about the difficulty of collecting the meager sum.62 Charity’s father’s disapproval haunted her for decades.
Charity never overcame the anxiety that her family did not love her. While her brother Peter was alive, she worried about his affections.63 After Peter died, Charity expressed doubt about the affections of his widow, Sally.64 And when Peter’s children grew up, she worried about their love too.65 When they and their mother moved together to Illinois in the 1830s, Charity seemed to take it personally. Despite her anxieties, Peter’s children expressed their continued affection for their sensitive aunt by writing her detailed letters from Illinois and preserving her name into the next generation. Charity’s nephew Cyrus Bryant named his daughter, born in Illinois in 1848, after her great-aunt.66
Although Charity’s choice to spend her life in the company of another woman set her apart from the family, her facility with the pen established her as an exemplar of the family tradition in the minds of the younger generations. As William Cullen Bryant increased in literary fame during the antebellum era, his many cousins and their children staked claim to a family tradition of poetic accomplishment. They admired Charity’s poetry for what it revealed about the whole family’s worth. Many of the Bryant nephews and nieces asked Charity for acrostics on their names, which they might save and pass down to descendants. Anna Kingman’s granddaughter Jane begged her aunt to write acrostics on the names of her sisters, Martha and Ellen, after their untimely deaths.67 Silence’s daughter Elizabeth sought an acrostic not only for herself, but for her husband Hiram Tavener.68
The Drakes found the prestige of the Bryant family name almost as alluring as the Bryants themselves did. Being connected to the Bryant family through Charity helped solidify the Drakes’ claims to gentility, which they had started to rebuild by becoming landowners in Vermont. It is little wonder then that the Drake nieces and nephews sought the gift of Charity’s verses with the same avidity as their Bryant cousins. Charity wrote acrostics for all of Polly’s children. She also wrote an epitaph for Polly’s granddaughter Semantha. Charity’s name appeared beneath the lines on Semantha’s gravestone, intermixing the Hayward and Bryant family names for the centuries to come.69
Both Charity and Sylvia wrote poems for Polly’s son Edwin Hayward, who was a special favorite. Sylvia wrote an acrostic on his name, which Polly had asked Charity to pick after his birth in Bridgewater in 1803. Sylvia’s lines encouraged the young man to be serious about his faith and seek salvation.70 At the time Sylvia crafted the poem, Edwin was a frequent visitor to his aunts’ home, helping out with household chores as his father once had and accepting small gifts of clothing in return.71 That his interest in the household extended beyond his aunts became clear when he married their sewing assistant, Lucy Ann Warner. Charity and Sylvia were delighted by the union and may even have engineered it. May “peace and love & every Christian grace / Adorn your lives And ever bless your Home,” Charity wrote in a poem for the couple after they married.72 A third poem, which Charity wrote for Edwin’s forty-fourth birthday, expressed more personal sentiments.
The poem began with Charity’s recollection of first holding him as a babe:
Dear Edwin forty years & four the day
Have took their flight swiftly and rolld away
Since to this world of mingld joys and strife
You & your mate were usher’d into Life
And yet it seems but yesterday or less
Since first I saw you in your infant dress
And when I first your little form caress’d
And in my arms you took your just nights rest
The opening lines conveyed the depth of the love Charity felt for Edwin as a surrogate son. When Polly placed her baby in Charity’s arms and allowed Charity the privilege of choosing his name, she gave her future sister-in-law an invaluable gift: a share in the experience of motherhood that she missed by deciding not to marry a husband.73
Motherhood defined women’s status in the early national period. A cult of motherhood emerged following the Revolution, which ascribed enormous responsibility to women as parents of the new republican generation. Mothering literature proliferated in the early nineteenth century, and in the 1820s, women began to assemble in “maternalist associations” throughout the northeast, coming together in a common cause and helping to lay the basis for a future women’s rights movement.74 Charity and Sylvia were invited to join the maternalist association in Weybridge, but on at least one occasion, they declined to attend the meeting.75 Whether this was because of work, or because they felt uneasy grouping themselves with the town’s mothers, they did not make clear.
Either way, Charity and Sylvia expressed no regrets that their life together did not provide the opportunity for motherhood. Witnessing the incredible burden that motherhood placed on their older sisters and almost every other woman they knew, Charity and Sylvia had reason to prefer the status of aunts. Bearing children could be disastrous to their friends’ and sisters’ health, causing tooth loss, fistulas, and even death. After giving birth to her first child, one friend of Charity’s developed such a terrible infection in her breasts that one ruptured and the other had to be lanced.76 Other friends and relatives suffered terribly from experiencing stillbirths or bearing sickly infants who soon died. Even when both mothers and their infants had the fortune of good health, raising children placed an enormous burden on women.
Seeking to avoid this burden, Charity’s friend Lydia waited until she was past the age of childbearing before she accepted a marriage proposal from a widowed local minister. When she reached her forties, with her parents growing old, Lydia had to be sensible about her future. She had good reason to hope that accepting a marriage proposal would add to her security without extracting the cost of bearing children. She even wrote to Charity shortly before the marriage promising that the “new connexion will [never] exclude you from this bosom!”77 But the work of caring for her stepchildren and later her step-grandchildren proved more onerous, and demoralizing, than she could ever have imagined.78 Following the marriage, her correspondence declined at once from a letter every couple of months to a letter only once or twice a year. Between December 1828 and May 1832, Lydia wrote no letters at all. When she did resume the pen, Lydia apologized that “other things so imperiously demand every moment of my time.”79 Her domestic labors were so intense that at times Lydia sank into bitter tears over her “want of power and authority, or ability, to order, or control any event or arrangement for my own pleasure.” Despite her affection for her husband, Lydia mourned over the change in her circumstances, “it is more agreeable to nature to feel a little more independent.”80
By comparison, Charity and Sylvia lived a privileged life. Their freedom from motherhood allowed them to engage in voluntary relations, rather than act as “servants” to their children (as Lydia put it). The hundreds of letters they wrote to nieces and nephews testified to the control they exercised over their own hours. Their independence elevated their roles within the family, permitting them to act as conduits of information, rather than isolating them from relations.81 To some of their young nieces, this model of family affection appeared far more appealing than conventional motherhood. If Charity had once been inspired by her own Aunt Charity’s single life, so several of her own independent-minded nieces saw a valuable lesson in her and Sylvia’s example. Grandniece Emma Rankin, for example, pledged herself never to marry, but like her aunts derive her affection from the legions of nephews and nieces that her siblings provided.
Voluntary bonds of affection also united Charity and Sylvia to many young people who were not biological relations at all, most importantly, their sewing assistants. After Charity and Sylvia expanded their house in 1819, they had the space to invite their assistants to live with them. In the course of three decades, a large number of young women resided in the house, including Lucy Ann Warner, Philomela Wood, Laura Hagar, Lucy Hurlbut, Fidelia Southard, and Belinda Brownwell. Correspondents referred to the young women who lived with Charity and Sylvia as “your girls.”82 Sylvia described these young women in her diary as family. For example, after a long sickness in the summer of 1823, she rejoiced to “take breakfast with the Family.”83 At other times, she referred to Charity leading their family in prayer, fulfilling a traditional patriarchal role.84 As head of household, Charity assumed a parental role with her apprentices that had long fallen to masters.
Some young apprentices welcomed the role of foster daughter. Philomela Wood in particular embraced Charity and Sylvia as family. She lived with the women for almost a decade, coming to join them in 1827, when she was only twenty-one, and remaining until after she married, in 1836.85 During this time, Charity and Sylvia not only taught Philomela the sewing trade, but also supported her study for several terms as a student at a school in nearby Jericho. Although she enjoyed the opportunity, Philomela felt homesick for the shop and longed for “Miss D and Miss B standing with her shears in her hands happy in each others society and in the cause of your master.”86 After school, she returned to live with the women for many years, before she married Edwon Wilcox and moved away to Bridport. Philomela addressed her first letter back to the women who had so long given her a home, “Dear Mothers.” Happy to have married, she nonetheless missed the house “where I have spent so many years of happiness, where those reside that I love.” She thanked Charity and Sylvia for all their “motherly care.”87
Several of Philomela’s fellow apprentices regarded the women with the same affection. Philena Wheelock, who came to work in 1835, wrote after her departure that “happier hours than those I have spent with you, I never expect to enjoy in this life.”88 Philena also thanked Charity and Sylvia for treating her with the “tenderness of a mother.”89 And again, like Philomela, Philena did not leave the household for good until she got married.90 Even after these surrogate daughters left their house, Charity and Sylvia continued to care for them. They wrote poems for their former assistants, sent them presents, and welcomed them back for visits.91 Motherly affection outlasted the bonds of service.
Philomela’s and Philena’s terms of maternal endearment, however, were exceptional. Most of the youth of Weybridge, whether Drakes or not, regarded Charity and Sylvia as aunts. Mothers to none, they became aunts to all the young people in the town. When a boy from Weybridge moved to North Bridgewater, a friend of Charity and Sylvia’s named Sally Field reported back that all “the boys in the shop laugh, he tells so much about Aunt Charity.” But, Sally reported, “he don’t care he has (it seemed he did not know how to express) he has a great wish for them two Lady’s … he tells how kind you are. He wants to hear from you verry much.”92 Despite having hundreds of nieces and nephews to call on their attentions, Charity and Sylvia had kindness enough to share among generations of unrelated village children.
Several village youth even named their own children for the women despite having no familial relationship to either. Constant Southworth, a minister who grew up in Weybridge, wrote to Charity and Sylvia soon after a daughter was born in 1834, to announce that he and his wife had chosen the name “Charity Jane” for the little girl.93 The name was inspired by the memory of “my frequent calls at your door in my childhood” and “the reality of your holy benevolence.”94 Charity wrote back with a better suggestion. Two months later Constant told Charity that “I can vouch for the acceptableness of your name + c in behalf of wife + all our children.”95 The girl’s new name was Charity Sylvia. Later on, Constant reported that people often told him “I think more of CSS than all my other children.” He could not deny the charge. When Constant brought his children to Charity and Sylvia’s house for a visit in 1835, they must have been deeply interested to meet the little girl who bore both their names.96 Excluded from the legal form of marriage, Charity and Sylvia never had the opportunity to adopt the same name or to give that name to their children. How gratifying then to see their names united and passed on to a future generation.