By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

For this Thanksgiving Day, I scoured our catalog for material related to the holiday that hasn’t been covered on the Beehive before, but nothing grabbed my attention. It occurred to me that I might write something about gratitude in general, but all I turned up were printed sermons on the subject and personal correspondence thanking people for gifts. However, keyword searching led me, serendipitously, to abolitionist Thankful Southwick, so I thought I’d use this Thanksgiving Day to introduce you to this remarkable woman.

Now, the name Thankful is nothing new to archivists and historians in New England. We see a lot of these “virtue names,” mostly given to girls. Faith, Hope, and Charity are all very well, but my least favorites are definitely Silence and Submit.

Thankful was born in 1792 in Portland, Me., the third daughter of Samuel Fothergill Hussey and Thankful (Purinton) Hussey. (You couldn’t make these names up! One author calls Thankful Hussey a “quite unreasonable but none the less interesting name.”) Samuel was a prosperous merchant in Portland, and the elder Thankful was a well-known Quaker minister. Both were heavily involved in anti-slavery work. Legend has it that Samuel helped freedom seekers escaping on ships from the West Indies to get to Canada.

In 1818, the younger Thankful married Joseph Southwick, a tanner. The couple had three daughters in quick succession, Abigail, Sarah, and Anna. In 1834, the family moved to South Peabody (now Danvers), then to Boston in 1835.

The 1830s were a time of exponential growth in the abolitionist movement, and the Southwicks were in the thick of it. Joseph was one of the original subscribers to William Lloyd Garrison’s fiery Liberator, as well as a founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, serving alternately as president and vice-president for its first 15 years.

Thankful, not to be outdone, was herself a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, president of the society several times in the 1840s, and a proponent of women’s rights. All three of her daughters became anti-slavery activists, including Sarah Hussey Southwick, who got involved in the movement at the age of 13. The Southwick home was also part of the Underground Railroad.

Thankful was a participant or an eyewitness at several notorious incidents during the antebellum period, including the attack on William Lloyd Garrison by a Boston mob in 1835. She was also present at what’s been called the “Baltimore Slave Case” or the “Abolition Riot” of 1836.

The case began when Eliza Small and Polly Ann Bates, two Black women, arrived in Boston on a ship from Baltimore. Although they may have carried documents proving their status as free women, they were nevertheless captured by agents of enslavers to be returned to the South under the Fugitive Slave Act. The case was heard in court two days later. Apparently after a prearranged signal, the crowd surged up and bustled the two women out past their captors and to safety. You can read a detailed description of this fascinating incident here.

The rescue of Small and Bates was enacted almost entirely by Black men and women, whose quick thinking and literal solidarity won the day. Playing crucial roles were Samuel H. Adams and Samuel Snowden, both African American men, and an African American woman who physically restrained the deputy sheriff. Thankful was also in the courtroom and probably helped to plan the action. Lydia Maria Child, in her obituary of Thankful, included this anecdote from that day:

The agent of the slaveholders standing near Mrs. Southwick, and gazing with astonishment at the empty space, where an instant before the slaves stood, she turned her large gray eyes upon him and said, “Thy prey hath escaped thee.”

Thankful (Hussey) Southwick died in 1867. She was so well-known at the time of her death that none other than William Lloyd Garrison delivered her eulogy. Frederick Douglass would call Thankful and Joseph “two of the noblest people I ever knew.” She had lived long enough to see the end of the Civil War and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the first of the Reconstruction Amendments. However, she would undoubtedly agree that the struggle for true equality was and still is far from over.

The pictures in this post are reproduced from the MHS’s fully digitized collection of portraits of American abolitionists, which includes photographs of some of Thankful’s other relatives. The MHS also holds a copy of Sarah H. Southwick’s Reminiscences of Early Anti-Slavery Days, privately printed in 1893, and a manuscript volume of correspondence of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1834-1838.

By Heather Wilson, MHS Library Assistant

You never know what you’re going to find in the archives! While digging into a collection of papers belonging to Edmund Munroe, a 19th century merchant, on the behalf of a long-distance researcher, I came across his 1794 mathematics example book from his boyhood days. (The schoolmaster asked practice questions that struck my eyes as somewhat forceful. One such question for subtraction stated, “A man was born in the year 1709. I demand his age in the year 1767.”)

After looking at one late 18th century schoolbook, I became eager to see more. Happily, the MHS has quite a few! I read through Sally Parkman’s 1787-1788 floral-covered cyphering book (her teacher asked similar questions Edmund’s asked him, but in a less demanding style); her 1795 French exercises, which I was helpless to read; and, her (undated) penmanship book in which she copied rather humorous templates for letters to various imagined acquaintances and relations.  In a 1799 penmanship book, Ann Sprague of Boston, MA, practiced cursive letters and copied poems. An 1832 alphabet practice book I read surely belonged to a toddler – in pencil, little Eleanor Davis wrote slanting lower-case ‘l’s, backwards ‘j’s, and  ‘o’s of varying roundness. The book was kept “for her dear father” and was less than three pages long. Surely, Eleanor had more engaging activities to occupy her time!

The Heath Family Papers contain multiple generations of girls’ penmanship and copybooks. Elizabeth Heath Howe’s (b. 1769) penmanship books proved to be the most individual of the bunch. One page also held an unexpected surprise—and had me scrambling to brush up on my Revolutionary War knowledge.

As a child, Elizabeth Heath Howe, then known as “Betsey,” attended the Brookline School. In 1781-1782 she kept a penmanship and copybook. The cover of her book is plain—the faded, splotched, brown paper does not even bear a title, or her name. Inside, however, Betsey’s personality shines through. At the bottom of each page, after copying lines, Betsey saved space for doodles. She always wrote her name, sometimes her school and the date, and then she added her flair.

On 3 July, twelve-year-old Betsey copied lines of “The living know that they must die” and then got to doodling, adding merry faces into two of her swirling lines.

On 9 August, she added squiggly lines, flashes of red ink amongst the black, and her school and the date crammed inside of a heart.

My favorite was when she misspelled her own name. On 19 October, Betsey was so engaged in doodling, she had to add a (^) for the “T” in her name. On the opposite side of the page, she didn’t even notice the missing “S”.

The doodling, however, was not the only unexpected find within Betsey’s book. On each page, above the doodles, Betsey copied down an aphorism, often one that rhymed. Many gave general advice on how to live a good life—according to the values of wealthy, white Anglo-Americans (“Every moment spend unto some useful end”; “Money makes some men mad many merry but few sad”), while also reflecting on mortality (“He that would die well must live well”). Others focused on youth (“In days of youth mind the truth”; “Monuments of learning are the most durable”), and some strike me as clearly gendered (“A handsome face is a letter of recommendation”; “Politeness consists in being easy yourself and making others so”). A few are easily recognizable today (“Necessity is the Mother of Invention”; “Virtue is its own reward.”)

The lines Betsey copied on 26 October 1781, however, were different. “Liberty, peace & plenty to the united states of America,” she wrote. The previous day’s lines had included the book’s only explicit Biblical reference (“Uriahs beautiful wife made King David seek his life”) and then the next day took on a distinctly patriotic tone. This was the only entry from her entire school year that was not a piece of wisdom, or advice. But, why?

On October 19, 1781, in Yorktown, VA, British General Charles Cornwallis surrendered to Gen. George Washington. American and French forces had surrounded British troops in the port town since early in the month, and the siege had cut off the British army from supplies of food and ammunition. Cornwallis agreed to Washington’s Articles of Capitulation, and British troops marched out of Yorktown that very day.

The Revolutionary War did not come to an official end until almost two years later, when the Treaty of Paris was signed on 3 September 1783. The surrender at Yorktown, however, ended any hopes the British had for winning the war. Although historians agree Americans did not fully appreciate the significance of Yorktown at the time, the surrender was widely celebrated.

With the time it took news to travel, it seems many Americans in the northeast first learned about the surrender around 25 October 1781. A search in ABIGAIL, our online catalog, for the subject “Yorktown (Va.)—History—Siege, 1781” sheds some light on this. A sheet printed by John Carter in Providence is titled, “Providence, October 25, 1781. Three o’clock, P.M. [microform]: this moment an express arrived. . . announcing the important intelligence of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis and his army, an account of which was print this morning at Newport. . .”  Another, “Colonel Tilgham, aid de camp to His Excellency George Washington, having brought official acounts [sic] of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis” was printed in Philadelphia dated 24 October 1781.

Thus, it seems likely, that Betsey Heath and her classmates copied “Liberty, peace & plenty to the united states of America” into their books just as many people throughout New England were learning about the surrender at Yorktown. They may not have known the war was over, but they—through their teacher—knew it was a day worthy of commemoration.

Looking to do some of your own hands-on research on girls’ education, the Revolutionary War, or any other topic of interest? The MHS is open to researchers on an appointment-only basis. Please read about our Covid-19 resources here and fill out this form to make a research appointment.

For more on the surrender at Yorktown and the end of the Revolutionary War, see:

• Library of Congress: “Surrender at Yorktown”
• Library of Congress: “Revolutionary War: Groping Toward Peace, 1781-1783”

By Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

I recently stumbled on a fascinating document in the collections of the MHS that I’d never seen before, and once I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down. It’s a twelve-page family history, written neatly in thick pencil, called “A True Story of happenings of The life of John B. Ireland And Others of his folks From 1800 or earlier to 1889 and The Present Time, 1933 As written by his Grand Daughter Mrs. Mary J. Newhall Breed.”

Mary Breed wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style, recounting events out of order, often circling back and repeating herself, which makes reading this manuscript feel like sitting on a front porch listening to her talk. Some of the details are sketchy, but her family’s story is moving and at times tragic. I’ll do my best to summarize it here.

Mary J. Newhall was born in Lynn, Mass. on 27 February 1869, the daughter of Sarah Agnes (Ireland) Newhall and William George Newhall. William worked variously as a fisherman, as a field hand, and in the spice mills of West Lynn. He died in 1881, leaving Sarah with three children to bring up. Mary left school at 15 or 16 (she’s inconsistent on this detail) to work at the Lynn shoe factories and support her mother, whose health was bad. When her mother died in 1905, Mary kept house for her younger brother George until his death in 1927. Five years later, at the age of 63, she met and married Mayo Ramsdell Breed.

Mary had apparently lived all her life in Lynn, but her family’s ties to Boston went back generations. In her narrative, she mentions her great-grandfather, a street lamplighter; her grandfather John, a blacksmith and wheelwright; and she describes incidents in both her mother’s and her father’s lives and those of her in-laws.

I was particularly struck, though, by the story of her grandmother Nancy, which sounds like the plot of a BBC period drama, albeit told in Mary’s inimitable voice. Here is the relevant section (I’ve added paragraph breaks):

At the age of seven, my grandmother was bound out to a woman who kept a Sailor Boarding House near the old South Church in Boston. […] Nancy Jennins was one of five children who was brought over from England on the Sailing Vessel. Her Father followed the Sea as a Ship Rigger fixing the sails. She remembered when her mother left her with the Woman to keep her until she was 18 years of age. And she saw her mother go away with her little Brothers and Sisters, and she never saw her mother again.

Then one day the big Ship came into Boston Harbor. And little Nancy went to see her father, as she had done before when his Ship came in. But that last time she saw her father way up in the rigging fixing the sails and as she looked up she saw her father fall from the place where he had been at work into the water, she saw the sailors bring her father onto the shore dead. She ran home and cried. So she had nobody to love and care for her.

The Mistress of the Sailor Boarding House was not kind to Nancy. She made her work hard in the kitchen where she learned to cook everything. The Sailors were mostly bad men they carried swords and pistals [sic] in their belts, and she said some of them were kind to her, and they would give her presents, and some of the sailors were cross and wicked, she was afraid of them, but she had to wait on them or get a beating.

One day, Nancy was working in the kitchen and overheard her mistress, as Mary calls her, tell a neighbor that the following day was Nancy’s eighteenth birthday—in other words, the day she was a legal adult and free from her indenture. The mistress confided to the neighbor that she was keeping this fact from Nancy because she didn’t want to lose such a good servant.

Apparently Nancy didn’t know her birthday, or perhaps hadn’t understood that she was free to leave at eighteen. So she rose early the next morning, packed up everything she owned, and walked out of the house. Her mistress tried to stop her, but “Nancy told her that she was going to get work and take care of herself.”

She took a job as a cook for a family in Boston, as this was “the only work that she ever learned.” She married an Englishman named Barrily, who died in a shipwreck. She married again (I think this was Mr. Jennins), but was abandoned by this second husband after two or three years. And if all that wasn’t enough…

She had a pretty little baby boy by him, she carried him around in a covered basket, he was so little. […] But Nancy had to go to work and earn her living. So one day A Minister came along and he saw the baby boy. So he told Nancy how that his wife had a baby boy, and it died. He asked her if she would let him adopt the baby for his wife so she gave her consent to let the baby go and have a good home. The Minister and his wife were so pleased with the baby that they loved him and gave him everything a boy could wish for. But the boy only lived to be thirteen years of age he was all ways delecate [sic] and they felt badly to loose [sic] the little fellow.

Sometime in the 1830s, while working as a cook at the Relay House in Nahant, Nancy met the eponymous John Bemis Ireland, who became her third husband.

He rode to Lynn and Nahant on a white horse with a tall hat on, as men wore those days, to get her good dinners, that she used to cook. He liked her cooking so one day he asked her to marry him. She did.

John’s first wife had died, and he had five school-aged children. It’s a little unclear in Mary’s telling, but it seems that John lied to Nancy and told her his children were dead. Well, she married him and became “a good stepmother” to them. She and John would have one daughter together, Sarah Agnes, Mary’s mother.

I’ll pick up Mary’s story again here at the Beehive, so stay tuned!