Liberty's Birds #7: Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

 

Liberty's Birds #7: Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Becky Collis

In the introduction to her book praising Kansas's advantages Sara Robinson mentioned the wild fruit.

Paw-paws grow on trees here.

Sara herself was a somewhat wild fruit in her family tree, a family of which she was quite proud.

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Denniele Bohannon and Elsie Ridgley

Always careful to style her name Sara T.D. Robinson, she had been given two middle names. Today we might call her Sara Lawrence Robinson using her maiden name and married name but in her time women tended to drop their maiden names and use their middle initials and married names---when they weren't just Mrs. Charles Robinson.

Her D.A.R. file highlighting her revolutionary maternal grandfather Henry Dwight 

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Barbara Brackman

Sara's name honored Sara Tappan Raboteau Doolittle (1817-1881), good friend to her mother and wife  of her father's law mentor Mark Doolittle (Sara's older brother got Mark Doolittle's full name.) Sara Robinson was the main source for Blackmar's The Life of Charles Robinson, which has this to say about Sara Doolittle and Clarissa Lawrence.

Sara was raised in a circle of antislavery thinkers and activists.

When she was 18 her father Myron Lawrence declared his opposition to the annexation of slave-state Texas.

From The Liberator in 1845

Belchertown, Massachusetts, 1847

A 1960 history of their hometown tells us:

"One of the most famous people of the early town was Myron Lawrence. His home once stood where the Clapp Memorial Library now stands. Mr. Lawrence studied law in the office of Mark Doolittle in Belchertown. At the age of 27, he was a member of the Massachusetts General Court and served in the Senate for many years....His daughter Sarah (sic) Lawrence married Dr. Charles Robinson who became the first governor of the territory of Kansas. The family frowned upon this marriage because they felt Mr. Robinson would never amount to anything."

Myron died soon after Sara's rebellious marriage. Above an obituary that told us of his "great corpulency."

Sara's husband became Kansas's first state governor and she herself amounted to something as shown in a 1908 edition of Who's Who in America.

Both are given coverage in Lamb's 1903 Biographical Dictionary of the United States:

Wild Fruit in a Family Tree

by Susannah Pangelinan

Mandrakes---we call them May Apples and we

don't eat them as they are poisonous.

The Block

Petticoat Press #9: Gail's Era for Mary Abigail Dodge

Petticoat Press #9: Gail's Era for Mary Abigail Dodge by Jeanne Arnieri

Mary Abigail Dodge (1833-1896)

Mary Abigail Dodge was another rather famous woman writer during the Civil War era. Using the pen name Gail Hamilton, her features, opinions and reporting were published in the National Era before the War and the New York Tribune and Atlantic Monthly during and after.

Shy and wary of personal publicity she hid behind her nom-de-plume. She was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, the source of her professional name. When young she taught at Catherine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary. Her penname Gail, shortened from her middle name, was vaguely male/vaguely female. The teacher began sending her poetry and essays to editors who found her witty and insightful.

Gail's Era by BeckyCollis

Gamaliel Bailey (1807- 1859 )

One of those editors Gamaliel Bailey invited her at 25 to be governess for his six children in Washington City. Bailey, a physician, was a strong abolitionist who'd founded the National Era, a short-lived but influential anti-slavery paper before the Civil War, which he edited with wife Margaret Lucy Shands Bailey 1812-1888, also a professional editor and columnist. The Baileys influenced antislavery opinion in the capitol with weekly salons that gathered like-minded intellectuals to discuss the cause.

Mary Abigail must have attended these gatherings despite her shyness. She was self-conscious about her appearance as she had an injured eye (stabbed with a fork when she was 2!) and was rather reclusive in person if not in print.

Embroidered slippers worked during the war for poet John Greenleaf Whittier

After Gamaliel Bailey died in 1859 Margaret Bailey continued the newspaper for another year or two with Mary Abigail continuing to contribute, although she returned to Massachusetts to care for her mother. 

Gail's Era by Elsie Ridgley

It's difficult to find Gail Hamilton's columns before the 1870s but she also wrote many books on social topics, particularly on marriage, a strange subject for a woman who never married---a choice that did not stop her from having strong opinions.

In 1859 the National Era considered her an asset.

1872

1877

After the war her ideas grew increasingly conservative; she was opposed to women's rights, civil service reform and was an advocate of James Blaine in the 1876- 1884 presidential elections, a distant relative. Finally nominated in 1884 Blaine lost in a vicious campaign climate to Grover Cleveland.

1878, Blaine assuming the persona of Gail Hamilton

Gail's Era by Denniele Bohannon

Gail Hamilton created feuds with her publishers Ticknor and Fields and the Atlantic magazine, believing they had cheated her in royalties. She published her grievances in thinly disguised fiction: A Battle of the Books in 1870.

Gail's Era by Becky Brown

 Publisher Annie Adams Fields was sad to lose her affections:

"Mary Dodge whom we have known so well and sincerely loved has seen fit to withdraw her friendship---and without a word..." Diary entry, February 12, 1868

1878

Late-life portrait from Hamilton's Life & Letters

Mary Abigail finished a biography of James Blaine in the 1890s. She died of a series of strokes in August, 1896 and was eulogized in many newspapers such as the Kansas City Star, with their obituary below.

A remembrance in 1900

The Block

Gail's Era, BlockBase 2320

As the block was published without a name we'll call it Gail's Era.

Liberty's Birds# 6: Carols & Oaths

 

Liberty's Birds# 6: Carols & Oaths by Becky Collis

On May 21, 1856 Missourians who were furious at the Free-State settlers refusal to leave the Kansas Territory raided the town of Lawrence. They burned the newspaper office, the hotel and Sara's newly built house on the hill.

Pro-slavery sympathizers rode into Lawrence under this flag.

Sara traveling in the East, hoping to release Charles from prison, heard about the catastrophe when she was in Chicago.

Carols & Oaths by Denneile Bohannon

It seems that Sara commissioned a photograph of the ruined town

 from which this wood etching was drawn but the daguerreotype is now missing. 

Her burnt-out house was on the crest of the ridge.

Carols & Oaths by Becky Collis

I'd imagine in the months following "The Sack of Lawrence" the purple coneflowers bloomed, ripened and invited the gold finches to snack, nature's consolation.

Pale Purple Coneflowers are a Kansas native.

Botanists have pepped up the color and the showiness.

Goldfinches love the late summer seeds.

The Block

A rose and a cardinal

now a cone flower & a gold finch

Carols & Oaths by Elsie Ridgley

The conclusion of Sara's book was quite effective in inspiring more Kansas immigrants.