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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- Native Americans
- Authorship
- Social Life and Networks
- Health and Illness
- Family Relations (Sedgwick Family)
- Travel and Touring, US
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- Literature and History
- Morality and Ethics
- Gender Roles
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I thank a goodly number of the tribe who happened to be congregated in my room at the moment I received it -- and I am sure if you could have seen their smiles and tears, and heard the bursts from their hearts, it would have given your benevolent spirit at least one happy moment -- -- “Miss Francis never heard my name,” said my sister Mrs Watson -- “but do tell her that I love her" -- “I would go a great way to serve that girl” said my brother Charles -- -- who if you ever know him you will inevitably love him in spite of his being a married man -- --
Now my dear Miss Francis if you think all 2 this the unholy flame of family vanity you will do us all great injustice -- No it was a a pure glow of sympathy with a heart that could feel like yours, and find such language for it’s feelings -- --
Now permit me to say a few words on the subject of your letter -- and in the first place to beg that your generous -- I should truly say -- your extravagant estimation of another does not lead you to wrong yourself -- -- Your real Indian -- cannot be impaired by being shadowed forth by a mere sketching of the imagination -- You have all the advantage which is to be derived from the force, distinctness, and definiteness of truth -- you may verify my type -- I am not sure that it is not absolute murder to destroy a
I heard through Mrs Minot the other day that you are projecting a jaunt and may take Berkshire in your way -- -- I should be grieved if I missed you, but still I hope you will go there -- If I am not at home my friends will be delighted to see you -- and you I am sure will enjoy our beautiful valley, if it is only for the sake of your favorite 3 Bryant, who has clothed our mountains and our vallies in fadeless green --
We have had some subjects of deep domestic anxiety and affliction this summer 2 -- and to recruit my mind and spirits I am here for a few days in the midst of the pleasure-seeking-world -- We go this afternoon to Lake George -- to see as a good honest lady said ‘human natur in all its beauty’ --
-- I have not been here long enough (we arrived last evening) to know what living curiosities are assembled here -- --
Joseph Bounaparte -- is in the Village -- I look forward with some pleasure to seeing him -- A Bounaparte is always worth seeing -- and an ex King who lives virtuously and amiably in a republic has an individual importance -- There are many young ladies parading the rooms with sufficient self-complacency but none that are the objects of general homage --
-- It is a fine place to dispense ideas, of as you may reasonably infer from this vacant letter -- I am ashamed to send it to you -- but more ashamed to defer longer answering yours -- which by the way in consequence of my having left NYork and it’s being afterwards forwarded by a private oppor’y did not reach me till some weeks after its date -- 4
Remember me gratefully to your Brother and Sister and beleive me
Letter
Massachusetts Historical Society
Catharine Maria Sedgwick Papers III
Wax blot and tears
Miss L. M. Francis. /Care of the Revd Mr Francis/Watertown /Massachusetts
Magawisca, a Pequot Indian, is a principal character in Sedgwick's novel, Hope Leslie (1827). Child had written to say that, after encountering Sedgwick's fictive Magawisca, she had abandoned her own novel about Pocahantas.
Probably a reference to her brother Harry's physical and mental health issues.