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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dFeb'
y1827 --
2020-11-28
If the reputation of my affection for you and yours depended in the least on the quantity or quality of my letters to you -- I should as a poor yankey said in a less dignified case, ‘agree to give out’ -- What did you think of my not writing one word by your Brother 1? -- what of my Brother Robert not calling to see him? -- No evil I am sure -- But it requires explanation for our own sakes -- not for his -- We met him at Mrs Balestier’s Thursday Eve'g -- -- he told me he should leave the City on Sunday -- I meant to have spoken to him again but before I had an opportunity he had left the room -- and I knew not where he staid -- -- and between then & Sunday Robert really had not a leisure moment to find out and pay his respects to him -- This may seem incredible, but truly R has scarcely sat down in our house since I came from Boston -- He comes to the door -- peeps in & gives us a brotherly greeting and is off -- Harry’s absence left all the business of the office, and the horrid greek war, on his shoulders -- Dearest Eliza -- all this pother is not because I am afraid you are touchy -- I know you are the last person in the world 'qui mal y pense' 2 -- but I could not bear that you should think for a moment that my heart didnot warm to any one who had your blood in their his veins -- -- When your Brother entered Mrs B’s parlor -- H Revere was sitting by -- she announced him to me -- I made a very unparlorlike exclamation, & she laughed at great ugly woman she is -- I would have given him a welcome that would have made him and everybody else laugh 2 for I saw he was your Brother -- you were stamped with the same
I am glad my dear friend that you have told me all your troubles, tho I cannot bear that that sweet home should be overcast with a single cloud -- but if troubles must needs come why dear Eliza I must bear part of the burden -- -- It seems to me as strange that you should be perplexed and troubled over accounts as if I were to see Sappho grubbing weeds up from a kitchen garden -- when your life is written I hope they will put
I should feel as bad as Susan did about your giving up the house for a year -- as bad I mean in proportion -- still it seems to me it would be the easiest & most efficient mode of avoiding all your present embarrassments -- -- rs Fletcher’s life 4 for you -- If it is not edifying it will be amusing -- an alternative that I wish every book offered -- -- Your plan of enlarging your family may not prove unpleasant -- Objects of kindness and self-sacrifice are, to the good, always opportunities of virtue -- I shall feel anxious about you till I know how you have arranged the matter, and as soon as you have I trust you will let me know -- --
You have heard from Mrs Minot how 3 mercifully we have been carried through our recent trial about Harry’s eyes -- He seems to have no doubt of the final favorable result, though at present it is impossible to decide -- The operation was much less than we apprehended -- The fearful preparations for the Surgeon are so startling to the imagination -- the arrangement of the tables to lay out a living man upon! &c &c -- Oh it made my blood curdle -- -- He has been confined to his room but three days -- today he was down, the
Why have you all been so quiet about Mary Piccard’s engagement? -- Do give her my best love and congratulations -- congratulations should, I think, be offered too to church and state, for, it seems to me, there never was an union more propitious to both -- -- H Ware looks too happy to preach with his usual unction -- -- You know you must cut the ties to Earth before the balloon will soar -- -- Sometimes I think the catholic notion was the true one & the priest should only be the husband and parent of his Church, and not have what my friends, the Shakers call natural children? -- What think you Eliza? -- -- It is in vain though -- the heart will be tied to something -- -- It is a useless strife against it 4
Dear Eliza my card case is beautiful -- and if you and Susan could have seen how tickled I was with it you would have been rewarded for all your till to get out of winter quarters --
I wish you would give my love to Mary and thank her for her tragi-comic note -- I will thank her & her M. D. as she fancifully calls him, not to make me the subject of their cracks -- -- I am not a patient for their skill! -- I do not mean any allusions to their usual modus operandi -- Heaven forefend! but I do not wish to be made a cats-paw to prolong Marys tete-a-tetes with her M. D -- --
Have you heard of your friend the Revd Gannett’s popularity here? -- -- If you really should take r G will be called here -- -- To be serious he preached delightfully -- and even I began to see his visage in his mind -- some r C -- others next to H W -- and a few are mortally disaffected -- and first in the minority is your friend Mary Corey -- -- -- He had more freedom of manner here than in his own pulpit and more graces of elocution -- -- It seems to me that he is highly gifted, and is destined to high distinction --
Letter
Massachusetts Historical Society
Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers I
No address, no signature, no closing; letter ends abruptly at the bottom of page 4.
1827 is written in the upper right corner of page 1.
Eliza Cabot Follen had three brothers; without further information, we cannot identify the specific brother mentioned here.
Qui mal y pense means, roughly, who thinks badly about it.
Possibly an allusion to Percy Bysshe Shelley's 1814 poem "To Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley."
Probably The Life of Mrs. Mary Fletcher: Consort and Relict of the Rev. John Fletcher (1820), by Henry Moore.
Sir Toby Belch is a character from Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (c 1601).
Moses Primrose is a character in The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), a novel by Oliver Goldsmith.