Two

Cape Cod and Philadelphia

1804–1818

THE FIRST TIME LUCRETIA fell in love, she was sixteen. It was up on Cape Cod, where her parents had been born and many of her aunts and uncles still lived. She herself was from Barre Plains, in an inland part of Massachusetts, but she adored the Cape, its gilded northern light, long beaches, and wild ocean that washed the very wharves of the villages and the seaside gardens of her relatives, and her parents often allowed her to spend the warm months there. The spring in question, the spring of 1804, she was visiting her aunts and uncles in Harwich when a boy named Mark Holman began courting her and telling her how comely she was.

She was comely, auburn-haired, tall, and with the erect bearing of her father, Zenas, who’d been a militia colonel in the Revolution, so pretty that Harwich had chosen her to be its Queen of the May.

As for Mark, he was bright and bold and seventeen. In the middle of the Maypole festivities, the two of them slipped off into the piney woods. They stayed there, blissfully alone, for several hours, and when they returned, there was a terrible commotion among Lucretia’s aunts and uncles. They were Winslows, descendants of the pious Edward Winslow who had helped found America’s first permanent settlement, and the Winslows were famously upstanding. Lucretia’s great-grandfather Kenelm Winslow had been the keeper of the Sabbath peace in Harwich. Her grandfather Thomas Winslow had been both a physician and a judge. Her father had been a justice of the peace, at least before he’d moved to Barre Plains and taken up land surveying. The Winslows didn’t approve of girls going off unchaperoned into the woods. But when Lucretia told the family that she and Mark were figuring to get married, she was forgiven her transgression. Her relatives gave her their blessings, and she went home to her parents and began planning her wedding.

She was grappling with whom to invite, and whether to wear the traditional wedding dress of gray or brown silk, and whether to hold the ceremony up on Cape Cod or in the local Congregational church where Zenas and her mother, Abigail, worshipped, when at summer’s end Mark changed his mind. He sent her a letter saying he didn’t want to get married after all, that instead he wanted to go to college. And he went off to Yale and left her in the lurch.

She was a figure of disgrace after that, not so different from the girl one of her neighbors in nearby Worcester had written about in a book, a girl who was so ashamed at being jilted that she went out and hanged herself. Lucretia wasn’t the type for such a desperate, depressive measure. She lived with her shame, remaining at home, in sight of the twisty road she’d imagined would carry her far away, looking after her younger siblings, and hoping that sooner or later she’d find another young man to love and marry.

But she didn’t, and finally, when she was twenty, an age well past that at which most of the girls she knew were not just already married but already mothers, she realized that, married or not, she wanted to leave Barre Plains. She also realized that if she was going to do so, she’d best have some way to support herself. Fortunately, there was newly a way. All over the fledgling country, schools were mushrooming. There weren’t enough educated men to teach the press of pupils, so unmarried women, provided they had some education, were suddenly in demand to fill the gap. Lucretia had received an education, had even shown a particular aptitude for reading and writing. She took a job as a schoolteacher. Up at the Cape.

She taught there for five years, correcting numbers and alphabet letters on the slates of a roomful of children, most of them boys, some just out of their cradles, others great gangly fifteen-year-olds. But Mark never again asked her to marry him, nor did any other young man, and in 1813, when she was twenty-five and well on her way to being a spinster, she decided to go to Philadelphia and take a teaching job there.

Philadelphia! Lucretia had been jouncing for nearly a week along log-lined corduroy roads and crudely surfaced turnpikes when, in September, she caught her first sight of the prosperous city on the Delaware. Steamboats had recently begun to ply their way down the river, and she could have boarded one in New Jersey and gone at least part of her way on the water. But it was wartime. British ships were stationed downstream. Lucretia had chosen a stagecoach company that advertised overland routes that were safe despite the war, then endured such a rattling and shaking that, at times, she’d feared she and her fellow passengers would be hurled to the bottom of their cramped carriage or tossed up against the roof so hard their skulls would be crushed. But they’d made it to Philadelphia without calamity, and now, through the carriage’s tall, leather-shaded windows, Lucretia started seeing gleaming white marble buildings; wide, regular avenues; and an extraordinary crush of people—merchants in frock coats, women in stylish high-waisted gowns, soldiers in blue and scarlet uniforms.

The vision excited her, and when the driver reined the horses to a stop, she stepped eagerly from the coach, ready to start what she was certain would be a new and better life. How could it not be? She would be living in Philadelphia, the largest, wealthiest, and most culturally vibrant city of the new American republic, and she would be teaching at a new French school, an evening school for adults. Her French was rudimentary. But she’d taught herself enough to be able to instruct beginners, and Jean Julien Bergerac, the man who had hired her, had been happy to offer her a job. Everything French, from the couture to the quadrille to the language, was in fashion now that France had allied itself with America in the war against the English. Indeed, so popular had France become that it seemed as if everyone wanted to learn the country’s language—four new French schools were due to open in Philadelphia that very autumn. Bergerac had been hard-pressed to find teachers with any French at all.

He was there to meet her. He kissed her hand, inquired after her health in heavily accented English, and told her he’d rented elegant and spacious quarters for his academy on an excellent corner, New Market Street and Stamper’s Alley. Then he accompanied her to the baggage shed to retrieve the luggage she had sent on ahead.

It wasn’t there—not her bundle of bedding, or her case of toiletries, or her trunks, the two trunks she had packed so carefully with all her dresses, cashmere shawls, and lamb’s wool petticoats and drawers. Somewhere en route, all her possessions had disappeared.

Distraught, Lucretia asked Bergerac what she should do, and he told her not to worry. He’d advertise her loss in the local papers, he said, and with luck the bags would turn up. With luck they’d not been stolen, but had merely fallen off the baggage wagon; whoever had found them would happily return them once he knew their rightful owner.

Lucretia doubted it. She had reason to distrust the honesty of her fellow men and women. But she kept this to herself and accepted Bergerac’s offer to pay for an ad for her, several ads if necessary.

A short while later, ensconced in a room on Pine Street the Frenchman had arranged for her to occupy, she unpacked the meager few things she had carried with her and made ready to start her new and better life. Her teaching duties were not due to commence for another few weeks. She would have time to prepare her lessons. Time to explore her new city. Time to get used to the idea that she would be starting her new and better life considerably poorer than she had hoped and planned.

During the next few weeks Lucretia got to know Philadelphia. She sauntered from her quiet neighborhood down to the bustling port, where the river was thick with three-masters under sail, and over to Center Square, where the waterworks were disguised by a little Greek temple, and out along Market Street, where so many wagons and horses were tied up, it looked as if some vast caravan out of Asia had just arrived. The city was astir with war activity, and nearly every day she encountered soldiers on parade or marching toward the wharves to board ships bound for battles in Canada. But civilian life was not much disrupted. On the brick-lined sidewalks, chimney sweeps and sidewalk scrubbers were still yodeling their services, and streetcorner food peddlers were touting their pepperpot soups, roasted corn, and molasses-drenched pears. Head shielded in a plumed bonnet and feet sheathed in thin-soled embroidered walking shoes, the provincial Lucretia took in the cacophony of sounds and gazed with ever-widening eyes at the city’s profusion of theaters, music schools, and professional offices—the chambers of doctors boasting that their consulting rooms were private, the chambers of dentists offering high fees for human teeth so that they could try to transplant them.

She passed luxury, three-story houses that were rumored to possess flushing toilets and bathtubs that could be filled with hot running water. She passed squalor, too, waterside streets that were ankle-deep in mud, crowded alleyways where pestilential odors wafted from overtaxed privies, and tiny yardless houses draped with so much drying laundry they resembled tents.

It was the luxury that most impressed her, the things that money could buy in Philadelphia. Fine velvet cloth and leather boots from England, perfumes and rouge from France, shawls from India, vases from China, even lion skins from Africa. You could buy just about anything in Philadelphia, and you could fill every spare moment with something interesting to do—see a circus, hear a concert, watch a great actor perform Shakespeare.

One day Lucretia went to Peale’s Museum to see the fabled mastodon skeleton that had been dug up in the mountains of New York, and one night—it was just before she started her teaching duties—she saw the town at its most glorious, its public buildings and even many of its private mansions ablaze with a brilliant fiery light. The spectacle had been arranged to honor Commodore Perry, who two weeks earlier had routed the British in the Battle of Lake Erie. No Philadelphian—no American, for that matter—had ever seen so much light, so much banishing of night’s gloom. For Lucretia and all who witnessed it, the illumination of Philadelphia was at once both sight and symbol: the future would be boundlessly bright.

On the day of the illuminations a thirty-five-year-old Englishman named William Chapman opened an office on Arch Street. The office would specialize, he announced, in arranging clients’ financial records and collecting overdue debts. A short, heavy-set man with a severe stammer, William had immigrated to the United States twelve years earlier, sailing from Bristol to Philadelphia on a vessel called the Roebuck, a three-master with a tiny crew, and undergoing numerous hardships on the voyage. The Roebuck wasn’t built to accommodate passengers—it was a cargo ship that took on voyagers only when it needed some extra ballast. William and a half-dozen other travelers had been given a place to sleep on a small wooden platform in the hold. They’d had to bring their own bedding, and even their own food—the only sustenance the captain promised to provide was bread and water from emergency supplies, should his vessel be shipwrecked. William had equipped himself with a barrel of biscuits and a few other foodstuffs, and taken turns with his fellows at cooking simple meals on a brick hearth on the deck. But a tumult always ensued around the fire, with the weak being pushed out of the way by the strong, and William, whose garbled speech made it difficult for him to assert his rights to a turn, had frequently found himself shoved aside. Still, like so many immigrants before and since, William had suffered his hardships gratefully. He had been poor in England, but was expecting to be rich in America.

After six long weeks his fortitude had been rewarded. On October 3, 1801, he’d stepped off the Roebuck’s swaying boards onto the firmness of a Philadelphia wharf and made his way into town, his feet unsteady and his arms clutched tightly around his sparse posessions—his bedding, the single box of clothing he had brought with him, and a little portable writing desk. The writing desk was his prized possession. It was through that desk that, somehow, he intended to become rich.

An educated man, he’d worked first as a schoolteacher. But because of his stammer schoolboys often taunted him. And eventually, although still listing himself on official documents as a schoolmaster, he’d begun to pursue bookkeeping, a more behind the scenes occupation.

Even that proved a struggle for him in the beginning. Although he was skilled with numbers, many people declined his services, finding his way of speaking tiresome, or worse, unintelligible. He couldn’t blame them. When he spoke, his arms would flail, his head would jerk, his lips would twist into fearsome grimaces. Some who met him even viewed his stammering as a sign that he was a man of low intelligence—“A stammering tongue signifies a weak understanding, and a wavering mind,” Americans had been warned by a prominent physician of the time. Still, William was a man of great persistence, and gradually a few merchants had placed their accounts in his care and come away impressed by his precision, orderliness, and ability to keep a closed mouth about business secrets. He was still considered, William would later write, a subject of “painful commiseration.” But even so, by the time he opened his new office, he had garnered numerous clients, enough to make him advertise proudly on the day Philadelphia was illuminated that he could provide “the most respectable references.”

He had also applied to become a citizen of America. Naturalization was in some ways a less formal process than it is now—Philadelphia’s Committee on Naturalization sometimes interviewed prospective citizens in a popular local tavern—but then as now it was a slow-moving one. Those who wanted to become Americans had to reside in the country at least five years before filing papers indicating they intended to become citizens and had subsequently to wait another three years before they could achieve that goal. William had applied in 1811. But in 1812, when the war with England broke out, he was still officially an alien, and as such, forced to register and to endure the constant suspicion that he might be a spy. Then, as the war continued, Pennsylvania offered its so-called friendly aliens the opportunity to prove their loyalty to America—they could enroll as volunteers in the militia. William promptly signed up.

In the summer of 1814, almost a year after he had opened his new office, he was called to an onerous duty. The war had been going badly. The British had captured Washington, burning many of its principal buildings. Now they were heading north toward Baltimore. Philadelphia’s officials, afraid that if Baltimore fell, the British would march on their city, mobilized the volunteers, and William and hundreds of other unlikely soldiers—shopkeepers and silversmiths, lawyers and laborers—were dispatched to encampments south of Philadelphia to help the regular army protect the imperiled metropolis.

For the next few weeks the untried soldiers engaged in fatiguing marches up steep rough hills and, guns in arms, endured interminable drills. Sometimes they hefted their weapons for eighteen hours a day, becoming so exhausted they fell asleep the moment they lay down on their straw pallets. Soon they were sleeping through the booming of the cannon that was used to awaken them, its ear-shattering sound, at first so electrifying, no longer even penetrating their dreams.

The weather, too, oppressed the men. It was a rainy autumn. “Not a stitch of dry clothing in the camp,” one soldier wrote in his diary. “Never rained harder since the flood.” Worse, food rations were short. Sometimes the men, even the regulars, received nothing but a thin, eight-inch-long slice of beef and a single loaf of bread for an entire day’s sustenance. But the situation of the volunteers was particularly desperate. One day they were given no rations at all. Nor were they fed the day after that.

On the third day the volunteers mutinied. Starving and dizzy, they gathered in the center of their camp and refused to do any further duty. After all, they shouted, the men of the regular army were being fed. Why were they being left to drill and march on empty stomachs? Were they not American soldiers, too?

The protest grew rowdy and vehement. Some volunteers merely milled about, cursing their officers and declining to form ranks, others said they were leaving and began packing their knapsacks. Their superiors tried to quell the mutiny, insisting the officers of the regular army would soon learn of the protest and send supplies. But no food wagons appeared. Instead, troops from the regular army came marching on the double toward the volunteers’ camp, their gaze forward and their muskets at a tilt. Seconds later they surrounded the volunteers and their commanding officer demanded that the mutineers lay down their arms. The volunteers panicked, sure they were about to die, for the regulars were lowering their weapons and taking aim.

At that moment a general came striding into the midst of the rebellious soldiers. He was Brigadier General Cadwalader, the man in charge of the entire encampment. He called out to the mutineers that they were behaving absurdly, that the failure to provide them with food had been merely a quartermaster’s oversight. Return to your duty, he commanded. If you return to duty, you’ll be fed.

The volunteers heard the words as if through a deluge. Their hearts were beating as loudly as thunder. Then suddenly one of them backed down and yelled, “Three cheers for Cadwalader,” and quickly others joined his capitulation. They shouted hurrahs, they clapped and cheered, and they began to fall into formation. At this the soldiers who had been aiming at them put down their weapons. The unruly volunteers were part of the army again, not mutineers, not rebels.

Perhaps it was on that frightening day, certainly it was sometime during 1814, the year he was a soldier, the year he’d had orders hurled at him and been in danger of losing limbs or even life if he stalled at indicating compliance or at least comprehension, that something altogether extraordinary happened to William. He began to speak without stammering. For the rest of his life he would revere that year, mark it as a turning point. Somehow words had stopped stumbling madly over one another in his throat, making him crow with the pain of their collision. Somehow he had taught himself to move his mouth without hawing and croaking, without twisting his lips all the way over to his ears or all the way down to his jaw, and had found himself complaining, cursing, talking, just like all the other soldiers.

Lucretia’s life also took a turn for the better in 1814. She had not been sheltered from the war. The same threat of British invasion that had driven William into soldiering had taken a toll on the civilian population. Philadelphia’s administrators had issued an edict warning the population that as soon as the enemy began marching toward the city, all citizens would be required to destroy their provisions and disable their water pumps, so that the British would be unable to get food or drink. Some people had decided not to wait for a potential invasion and its ensuing hardships. Wealthy Philadelphians packed their silver and silks into Conestoga wagons and sent them out of the city. Less affluent citizens followed suit, packing their carts with more ordinary goods, with blankets and chickens and hoarded food, then climbing aboard themselves. In the exodus, merchants suffered. Theaters went unattended. Evening schools like Lucretia’s lost students.

Lucretia didn’t flee. But like all who remained behind, she was frightened, and frequently she hurried over to Chestnut Street to join the throngs of men and women who gathered there to glean the latest war news. On the fifteenth of September, 1814, a particularly dense crowd assembled and began exchanging dire rumors, when all at once a panting horse and rider came galloping down the street. The rider reined to a stop and, too out of breath to speak, sat his horse in silence. For an awful few seconds the crowd heard nothing but his heavy breath rising and falling. Then he shouted exultantly, “The damned British have been defeated and their general killed!” Moments later the details of the battle for Baltimore spread like a warming blaze through the crowd. The British had viciously shelled the city’s Fort McHenry. They’d bombarded it for forty-eight hours. But the Americans had held out, their striped and star-spangled banner still waving victoriously over the fort as the British began to retreat. The Americans had triumphed.

For Lucretia, as for all the other Philadelphians who had stayed in the edgy city, while fear of the British didn’t altogether disappear after that feverish day, it became muted, faint, for as the fall progressed, each day brought better and better news. In New York the American navy defeated the British in the Battle of Plattsburg. In Florida General Andrew Jackson broke their alliance with the Creek Indians at the Battle of Pensacola. Lucretia also received good news of a more personal nature.

It concerned her older brothers, Mark and Edward, who were quite unlike their law-abiding ancestors. The brothers had joined a ring of counterfeiters, and a court in Worcester had learned of their activities and begun to investigate them. The good news, conveyed to Lucretia by her concerned parents, was that the court’s chief witness against Mark and Edward had disappeared. He’d been bribed to run away, the prosecuting attorney had railed, but absent that witness, the prosecutor had been forced to drop his charges.

Relieved for her parents and no longer dreading a British invasion, Lucretia mobilized herself to make a change in her circumstances. Bergerac’s school, despite her initial hopes, had not done very well. It was time to leave. Saying goodbye to her first Philadelphia employer, she took a position with one of his competitors, a Monsieur Charles LeBrun.

LeBrun’s establishment, a boarding school on Spruce Street that he ran with his wife, was highly regarded, for LeBrun was famous. He had translated a number of important French and Spanish works; had published a book of his own, Bienfait d’un Philosophe; and written a popular textbook on how to teach French to the young. The children who boarded with the LeBruns, boys from some of Philadelphia’s wealthiest families, studied French by LeBrun’s method, which entailed not just learning French grammar and literature, but doing basic arithmetic in the unfamiliar tongue. Nevertheless, they were also expected to master their native language, and Lucretia, whose French was still not proficient, was hired to teach English to these upper-crust youngsters. She taught them to read simple stories, like the one about a bee who so surfeited himself on nectar that he could no longer fly, and the one about the good little boy who broke his family’s best mirror but confessed to his misdeed because, as he told his father, he could not tell a lie. She built their vocabularies with hectoring homilies like “Without frugality, none can be rich,” and “Diligence, industry, and proper improvement of time are material duties of the young.” And at night, alone in the boardinghouse to which she’d moved, Mrs. Blayney’s big place on South Eighth Street, she began to think about improving on her own use of time.

Madame LeBrun was cultivated and artistic. She knew how to sing and accompany herself on the piano. Lucretia decided to use her association with the accomplished Frenchwoman to become a more cultured person herself, and she started taking lessons from Madame LeBrun in advanced French, singing, and the piano.

Only a small minority of American families, fewer than one in a hundred, owned a piano—an expensive instrument cost as much as a small house, while even an inexpensive one could set an average worker back a half year’s wages—and possession of a piano had become a badge of gentility. “To beautify the room by so superb an ornament,” one music teacher of the time declared, is “the only thing that distinguishes ‘decent people’ from the lower and less distinguished.” This was true whether those who owned a piano could play it or not. Being able to play conveyed even higher distinction. The woman who knew how to do so—and at the time Lucretia learned the instrument it was almost exclusively the province of females—was signaling as soon as she sat down at the keyboard that she was a well-to-do, refined person. Lucretia knew this and attended to her music lessons avidly, and in time her ability to sing and play the piano, plus the fact that she was teaching the offspring of highly placed Philadelphians, gained her entry into sophisticated circles. She was invited to cotillions, dinners, and tea parties, and introduced to men.

But despite all her new skills, none of the men she met offered what she still desired but increasingly suspected she would never obtain—a marriage proposal. Perhaps the men were put off by her height—at five feet, ten inches tall, she towered over many men of her day—or perhaps they found her, with her independence and broad knowledge, insufficiently womanly. Years later a journalist would do so, and would brand her for all time with the condemnatory term “masculine.” In the meantime, single, she remained with the LeBruns for the next three years, years during which the war ended in victory for America, patriotism reached a new high, and a surge of interest in educating female students arose.

Girls needed to be educated, went the thinking of the day, not because education would benefit girls, but because their being educated would benefit the country. They were vessels that could early pour into the next generation of men principles of virtue and freedom—provided they could be made to understand these. They were vehicles that could produce, as the journalist Frances Wright was shortly to put it, “a new race,” a breed of men who would see to it that America’s national character became the envy of “any nation on earth.”

In 1817 Lucretia became an early champion of the new trend. She took the bold step of leaving the LeBruns to open a school of her own—a girls’ school. “Miss Winslow most respectfully informs her friends and the public,” she advertised in the fall of the year in Relf’s Philadelphia Gazette, that come November she would be opening a seminary on South Second Street “where YOUNG LADIES will be instructed in all the useful and ornamental branches of a polite education.”

Lucretia’s seminary for young ladies was not the first such school. Ambitious and idealistic female instructors had been opening girls’ schools, often in their own homes, sometimes with but a single pupil or two, ever since the 1790s. But there weren’t many of these pioneers, and until the 1820s there weren’t many girls’ schools; Lucretia’s Young Ladies Seminary in Philadelphia, which antedated by several years such eventually famous female seminaries as Emma Hart Willard’s in Troy, New York and Catharine Beecher’s in Hartford, Connecticut, was among the country’s first.

At the time she opened it, she had no access to textbooks written specifically to cater to the interests of girls. In a few years publishers would begin putting out many such works. In the meantime Lucretia contented herself with schoolbooks that, while written for boys, made an effort to include at least some material that might strike a girl’s fancy—books like John Hamilton Moore’s Young Gentleman and Young Lady’s Explanatory Monitor, which contained an essay on beauty and a critique of girlish habits like giggling and whispering, and Susanna Rowson’s An Abridgement of Universal Geography, which included observations on the status of women in countries throughout the world. Rowson was one of Lucretia’s favorite authors. Lucretia had read with tearful eyes and racing heart the writer’s Charlotte Temple, the story of a young woman who was seduced and abandoned by a handsome stranger, and she would always remember that book and allude to it in her later years.

Still, despite her own fondness for fiction, Lucretia didn’t encourage her pupils to read novels, for the educational ethos of the day frowned upon girls’ reading made-up stories. Rather, schoolgirls were expected to apply themselves in their spare time to the kind of reading that would develop their moral fiber. In the ad for her seminary, which touted her years of teaching experience and her fine references, Lucretia promised prospective parents that at her school they might “rely on the most scrupulous attention being paid to [teaching their daughters] morals and improvement.”

She left no record of how she taught these matters. But the handwritten notes of a schoolgirl at a comparable seminary in Litchfield, Connecticut suggest the nature of that education. “Have you rose early enough for the duties of the morning,” wrote the Litchfield girl in a list of questions she had been taught to ask herself each day. “Have you read a portion of scripture by yourself.… Have you wasted any part of holy time by idle conversation, light reading, or sloth.… Have you shown decent and respectful behaviour to those who have charge over you.… Have you torn your clothes, books, or maps. Have you wasted paper, quills, or any other articles. Have you walked out without liberty. Have you combed your hair with a fine tooth comb, and cleaned your teeth every morning.”

Lucretia ran her school for both day and boarding students, providing the boarders with beds, linens, and meals. She didn’t do much cooking herself—she employed a cook for the tedious business of preparing meals over an open fire. But she often did the shopping. She chose plump vegetables at farmers’ stalls, selected fish from innovative dealers who brought their wares to market on sloops loaded with ice, and decided what meat to purchase by watching the city’s parades of “show” meat, farm animals decked out in garlands and bright ribbons, that were driven through the streets prior to slaughter.

In a short while she acquired the knack of running an establishment that was more than simply a schoolhouse, and began putting by enough money to hire a few auxiliary teachers for the school and even to spend some on herself.

There were all sorts of new things on which to spend money—gory waxwork displays, breathtaking balloon ascensions, shocking exhibitions featuring men and women cavorting together uninhibitedly after inhaling nitrous oxide gas, as well as myriad new stores selling ever fancier and fancier goods. Around the corner from Lucretia’s school there was a particular mecca for luxury shoppers. She had only to step out of her door and walk along Second Street to see shops selling imported fruit and expensive clothing, tableware and books, all ranged, according to a writer of the day, along great stretches of pavement filled with “crowds upon crowds of buyers, sellers, and gazers.” When Lucretia had first come to Philadelphia, she had been a mere gazer. Now, only three years after her arrival, she could afford to be a buyer. But for all the good fortune of her present life, she still had a nagging unhappiness—she was a spinster, she was nearing thirty, and chances were she would never marry.

William Chapman, the teacher and bookkeeper, had become interested in science. In this he resembled many members of his generation, for early Americans idealized science, considered it not just a prestigious but even a sublime pursuit. Moreover, situated as he was in Philadelphia, William was living in the country’s scientific capital, home to a great hospital, a renowned medical school, and numerous scientific societies. But William had a special and personal reason to be interested in science. For centuries the prevailing wisdom had held that the ailments that plagued mankind, including mental retardation, deafness, muteness, and William’s personal scourge, stammering, were God-given and therefore immutable. But, in the wake of the revolutions that had swept both America and France in the late eighteenth century, a dramatic shift in thinking had occurred, a growing conviction that the human condition was amenable to correction, not just through political change but through science. And indeed some of the once seemingly unalterable afflictions had begun to yield to the discoveries of scientists. Philippe Pinel had developed techniques for treating the insane; the Abbé Sicard had taught the deaf and dumb to communicate through sign language. William, himself able to communicate relatively normally at last, conjectured that stammerers could also be helped—if only proper techniques could be devised—and while still making his living as a bookkeeper, began to study medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and to learn as much as he could about blocked speech.

Working on the problem, he developed a method for correcting stammering, and soon became convinced that it was foolproof. He told others that he’d found such a method. But he kept the details secret.

Lucretia met William around this time. He was older than she was—forty to her thirty—and he was shorter, a good few inches shorter. But she found him intriguing—he talked passionately about his discovery and his hopes of aiding stammerers. More importantly, he found her appealing, and his interest in her enabled her to overlook his bulky body and the grimaces, a leftover from his earlier years, that occasionally wracked his features.

The two of them had a number of things in common—an interest in education, an appreciation of the struggles that newcomers to Philadelphia faced in trying to make a place for themselves in the city, and above all a lust, that enduring American lust, for money and success. When William asked Lucretia to be his wife, she said yes, and in August 1818, happy to have found a husband after all her years of being single, she married him.