Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s early letters document the intellectual development of a prolific woman writer from her childhood in the early national period through the 1813 death of her father Theodore Sedgwick, a Federalist member of Congress and Massachusetts supreme court judge. The youngest daughter in a family of seven siblings, Sedgwick practiced epistolary conventions in her early letters while introducing her lifelong theme of balancing personal and family expectations with the obligation to write. As Sedgwick reported in her later autobiography, she felt that she lacked a satisfactory formal education, but “these great deficiencies” were offset by the quality of her homelife. Her adolescent years were marked by her mother’s chronic ill health and death in 1807, her father’s remarriage in 1808, and her engagement with her siblings’ growing families throughout the period. By 1812, as a 22-year old republican woman reflecting on her social position, CMS felt the call of a “life dignified by usefulness” and compared her father’s contributions to her own potential: “You may benefit a Nation my dear Papa, & I may improve the condition of a fellow being” (1 Mar. 1812).
Letters from Sedgwick’s pre-publication adulthood demonstrate her intellectual and religious development as she grappled with events both personal and national. Her siblings became the central focus of her domestic life, and the Sedgwicks’ experiences with “the market of matrimony” (15 Aug. 1813) provide intriguing fodder for epistolary debate. Sedgwick rejected at least two marriage proposals in her twenties, one in 1812 and another in 1819. In the summer of 1821, she traveled to Niagara Falls and Montreal and began keeping a journal. As Sedgwick developed her authorial persona and worked on her first novel, her full-throated dedication to family, female relationships, and personal usefulness emerged as primary concerns. Sedgwick’s letters also become more philosophical, and her lifelong dedication to republican service and intellectual Unitarianism come into focus. Sedgwick explains her sense of vocation to her lifelong friend Eliza Cabot Follen: “my ministry must be one of watchfulness and steady devotion, and all those cares that love teaches, and can pay without being asked” (15 Nov 1822).
With her first novel A New-England Tale (1822), Sedgwick established herself as a professional writer, and she published four additional literary novels and more than 30 stories during this period. As a dedicated family woman, who also chose to be single and an author, she constructed domestic arrangements that complemented her writing career. She lived in the homes of her brothers and sisters-in-law in Stockbridge, Lenox, and New York City, deepening her relationships with her siblings as well as caring for the children and contributing to their education. Redwood, her second novel, received “much more praise and celebrity than [she] expected” (18 Oct. 1824). As her fame grew, she continued to find her spiritual home in Unitarianism, while her range of acquaintances expanded to include artists, politicians, reformers, educators, and intellectuals. Sedgwick began to travel more widely, visiting friends in Boston, Newport, and Philadelphia, and making extended trips to Washington DC and the South. As a measure of her celebrity, she was selected for inclusion in the National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans (1834), the only woman included other than Martha Washington. The period was also punctuated by “the real and bitter sorrows that cloud our life” (13 Mar. 1830), including the deaths of her sister Eliza, her childhood nurse Elizabeth Freeman, and her brother Harry.
As a member of the American literati, Sedgwick navigated transatlantic fame while experiencing personal loss at home. She pursued new avenues of benevolent activism in her life and writings. Letters from this period will be available soon.
Sedgwick’s engagement with mid-nineteenth-century reform movements informed her writings during this period. Her primary residences continued to be New York City and the Berkshires. She deepened her relationships with her niece Kate Minot and other members of the next generation of Sedgwicks. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
During the Civil War period, Sedgwick grappled with issues of national importance alongside personal losses at home. She published her last book and final story and, after a medical crisis, resigned as Director of the New York Women’s Prison Association. In her final years, she resided with Kate Minot and her family near Boston. Letters from this era will be available at a future date.
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r'22 --
Your last letter my dear Eliza breathed a spirit that made me long to put my arms around you as a mother would around a sick & restless child, and on my bosom to hush your troubled spirit to repose -- -- I have always seen you so bright, possessing as I thot the mastery of your own destiny, and controlling it with a holy energy and soaring with so firm a wing, that I didnot fear to see the bird fluttering, or to see any sign of weakness -- -- I may, & I think I have done wrong -- and that I should have given you hardy counsel, & fortified you & instead of that I have been a very woman --
I am rather inclined to beleive that the tenderest friends and those that on common occasions are quite safe & judicious cannot help us in these slippery passages -- we can only take counsel from events and from the 'small still voice' 1 and then that voice is so very still that we can scarcely hear its bidding, to heed it -- if we would -- -- --
Oh that I was worthy of being what you would have me to be,! capable of it! -- I think I have some power over those I love, but it is not by wise saws -- I must be with them, & my ministry must be one of watchfulness and steady devotion, and all those cares that love teaches, and can pay without being asked -- Eliza, I have had many friends during my pilgrimage -- many helpers by the way, but I never have had one -- I have not one, that suits me in all points like you -- -- & I could tell you why -- but perhaps I ought, for tho 2 I despise all that mean calculation that teaches reserve in love as a matter of prudence -- yet I think that in friendship -- there may be something left unsaid, --
We are, & we are probably destined to be, so little together that the pen must do a part of the work that in common cases the conduct should express --
Therefore I think myself justified in telling you again that I love you -- that I will not be constrained to measure my love by the rule & square of prudence, for I should be ungrateful to Him who has given you to me, if I put any check upon my feelings no! I know the blessing -- and I will feel it, & you shall know that I feel it -- Eliza I am not equal to you -- perhaps not in any thing, but in that way that my ambition runs I know -- I am not -- As my friend Jenny Davis says -- (of whom more anon) I have not "travelled so far as you out of an evil nature," or as you and I would say I have not gone so far as you on the heavenly road -- -- and I do not expect to overtake you -- but you will stimulate me to keep within speaking distance -- and dear Eliza tho' you have to look behind you, to see your friend you will not so eagerly press on as to forget her -- --
I do know his name
and could say as surely as Nathan said to David 'thou art the man' -- 2 and I have heard too the other rumor, which Mrs C mentioned to Susan 3 -- but I didnot feel very uneasy about it, for I trust it is an idle story -- & if not I am sure you can & will 'ask a plain question --
I think you couldnot be happy with one, who hadnot sympathy with you -- but of this you must judge and determine for yourself -- There is certainly a difference between the infidelity 3 of a serious thinking man, & that of the trifler who finds it easier to disbeleive than to investigate, or of him who breaks the yoke because it constrains him to walk in the 'strait & narrow way' 4 -- There is a difference --
but still dear Eliza it would not be right & therefore not happy for one who has taken the oath of fidelity to a good master to be a yoke-fellow with one who distrusts the authority of the Master -- -- I have no fear about you I am sure you will feel on this subject more strongly than I do -- & I am equally sure that if necessary to subdue all your other affections _____
-- Do write to me dearest Eliza oftener, it is good for you to pour your heart on paper -- and it is certainly good for me --
I came from Stockbridge on Tuesday -- and now all that made our home so busy & so happy have dispersed -- -- I will not trouble and weary you with what I have felt and suffered -- I try to look beyond all these things -- and even to put out of my thoughts my bright-eyed -- little darling who has slept in my arms and nestled so close to my heart this Summer -- -- how apt we are to forget that these bright beams which seem to repose on the waves of life while they are tranquil are
Charles & Eliz' are already looking forward to a visit from you next Summer -- -- We all went the other day from Lenox to Hancock (a shaker settlement) 5 a most enchanting ride -- and Eliz' often exclaimed to me -- "how much you and Miss Cabot will enjoy this next Summer" -- shall we dear Eliza? -- I passed 4 two days with the shakers -- They are a strange, and I will say it, tho' you will laugh at me a very interesting people -- and if I could introduce you to Sister Jenny or Sister Cassondana -- or lead you through their neat and well ordered household -- or along a grass grown road, that opens a pathway between the mountains, by the side of a little Silver stream that sings a glad song -- as it glides by -- and then if you would seat yourself and look down upon this peaceful village -- when all is as peaceful, and quite as silent as the inanimate and beautiful works of nature with which they are surrounded, -- you would as I did love to look upon them -- and go away and leave them -- Their religious notions are, except their peculiarities, rational -- and m in Sparks' first no -- & she said to me with great energy "Katy a shaker couldnot have writ it better" -- Would not Sparks be amused with the compliment? -- --
I shall stay here about ten days -- Sister F & I have had a real good time talking about you -- she sends her kindest love -- --
I am very glad to hear that you have avoided the rs Channing -- but I suppose these dreadful household toils for the meat that perisheth monoploize her time -- her heart I am sure they donot -- My love to her and to Susan, who I really feel to be as near to me as my
It is a shame to send such pot hooks to you -- send me dear soon a letter 'to look upon' in your true "Calisser aller" style -- in which you are inimitable -- -- -- One wants such comforts in Albany if ever --
Letter
Massachusetts Historical Society
Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers I
Wax blot and tears; the last short paragraph and closing are written in the right margin of page 4.
Miss Eliza L Cabot --/No 1 Mount Vernon/Boston --
1822 is written in the upper right margin of page 1.
1 Kings 19:12 (KJV).
2 Samuel 12:7 (KJV).
There are several possible identities for the women mentioned here. "Mrs C" may be Susan Higginson Channing (who was Eliza Cabot Follen's cousin and a Sedgwick correspondent), a different Channing relation, or one of Eliza's Cabot sisters-in-law; among many options, "Susan" could be Sedgwick's sister-in-law Susan Sedgwick or Eliza's sister, mentioned later in the letter.
An allusion to Matthew 7:14 (KJV).
Hancock Shaker Village is a religious community founded in the late 1780s near Pittsfield, Massachusetts.