SEVEN
Correspondence gave husbands, wives, lovers, and friends a toehold in this mobile society when revolution disrupted traditional social bonds. Men and women alike, in revolutionary France as in newly independent America, relied on letters for the companionship of spouses called to serve in distant lands they imagined only through letters. The letters of French diplomat Louis Otto courting the young Philadelphian Nancy Shippen; of Ruth Barlow from Connecticut and her husband Joel Barlow posted in France and Algiers; of Thomas Short, Jefferson’s secretary in Paris, and the duchesse de la Rochefoucauld; and of the quintessential transatlantic couple, América Francès de Crèvecoeur and Louis Otto, to the contrary reveal the commonalities as letters shrank the distances separating lovers and spouses.
Revolutionary virtue was in the air and gender a favorite topic of revolutionary travelers writing letters home. Diplomatic postings and commercial ventures required long absences generating voluminous correspondence, often across the Atlantic. Husbands, wives, and lovers professed their devotion and friendship to those left behind in the sentimental terms of novels as they decried the distance that their letters were meant to bridge. In correspondence intertwining private sentiments and public affairs, itinerant spouses and lovers described revolutionary leaders they met in salons and heard speak in parliaments, speculated on business opportunities, and documented the trials of daily lives and intimate relationships, sometimes strained and other times emboldened by revolution.
Letters exchanged across the Atlantic reminded recipients of Wollstonecraft’s counsel in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman that husbands and wives share responsibilities at home and beyond. Family correspondence not only described the challenges of everyday life apart during the revolutions, it guided futures to be lived together. Like the novelists, these husbands, wives, and lovers envisioned a domesticity not confined to the home that was often quite different from the lives they had left behind before the revolutions. Most thought that future was within their reach.
Correspondence was limited for the most part in the late eighteenth century not only to the literate but to the elite with the time to sit at a writing table with a quill pen and ink set, and with the funds to post or to receive letters.1 Regular letter writing allowed physically separated family members to exert control over their family networks and commercial infrastructure.2 In their letters, correspondents worked out their politics in private. Generally just the well placed saved their letters for posterity. Others of lesser means sent letters occasionally, but few have survived.
Letters were typically written on folded sheets of paper. Postage was charged to the recipient by the page, so to spare expense, correspondents usually wrote addresses on the outside sheet rather than on separate envelopes. The pages were sealed with hot wax to lessen the chance, especially in wartime, that they would be opened en route by probing authorities. So unreliable was the post that correspondents often numbered their letters to alert their recipients if one went missing. Even when correspondence arrived safely, letter writers despaired at the time it took their news to wend its way to the intended recipient, especially across the Atlantic. “Is it possible, Sir, that my letter of the 27th June did not reach your hands before December! I cannot tell what became of it all that time & where are now four or five others I wrote since?” the comtesse de Damas complained from northern France to her friend St. John de Crèvecoeur in New York.3
In a revolutionary world without an international postal system, letters were frequently entrusted to travelers known to be heading in the general direction of the recipient. Some were carried as merchandise on cargo ships across the Atlantic, lodged amid the textiles, wood, and coffee. When letters reached port, the sender had to organize connections on land. A monthly “packet” boat service devoted specifically to the transport of mail cut the transit time between New York and England from eight to four weeks in the middle of the eighteenth century. The newly appointed American chargé d’affaires in Paris, William Short, insisted that members of the American legation use the nascent national postal service rather than relying on acquaintances who might lose letters or forget to deliver them. Correspondence from America to France was to be sent in care of the French consul at New York who would put it aboard the monthly French packet ship. Letters sent from Virginia took roughly two months to reach him in Paris by that route.
If a letter arrived at its destination, it was often read aloud to assembled family members and friends. Letters were not necessarily private affairs in the eighteenth century.4 American poet, businessman, and diplomat Joel Barlow purposefully left his diplomatic letters open so that his wife Ruth could read them herself before she delivered them to their designated recipient. Some writers explicitly asked recipients to share their letters, adding asides intended for various acquaintances. Others urged discretion. The duchesse de la Rochefoucauld asked her lover, William Short, not to write to her too often while she was in Paris; she received her letters there in the salon surrounded by curious company, sometimes including her husband. The German-born French diplomat Louis Otto similarly advised the young Nancy Shippen, whom he was courting, about the “indelicacy” of displaying romantic correspondence to her family that he intended for her alone.5
Despite the expense and time required for correspondence to travel, husbands and wives who were separated frequently complained of neglect at the hands of their absent spouses. From Paris, the recently arrived Joel Barlow despaired that he had not yet heard from his wife, Ruth, back in Connecticut. After a six-month silence, he moaned: “I really thought you dead and wished myself so.”6 Their letters document the expectations of intimate friendship.
Correspondents, especially wives, had manuals to guide them in the art of letter writing at the end of the eighteenth century. They were instructed: “Write freely, but not hastily; let your Words drop from your Pen, as they would from your Tongue when speaking deliberately on a Subject of which you are Master, and to a Person with whom you are intimate.”7 These manuals modeled this language of the heart. Conventions guided the flow of feelings, often expressed as physical sensations. The studied eloquence expressed in phrases of sensibility was reminiscent of the epistolary novels letter writers were reading.8 Reflecting on their own social relationships, the correspondents echoed philosophers such as John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Francis Hutcheson in their depictions of affectionate companionate marriages.9
Living among families constituted differently from the customs the correspondents had always assumed only magnified the separation. The travel that disrupted these letter-writing families caused diplomats, merchants, and philosophers to see their own relationships anew. It transformed families traveling between America and France, even if writers rarely discussed “politics” in their letters subject to inspection by others. Their letters worked out politics, within the family and beyond it, over the decades of revolution.10
Nancy Shippen: “Doom’d to be the wife of a tyrant”
Two newly arrived French diplomats riding through Connecticut in the autumn of 1779 chanced upon a pair of young women weaving willow baskets alone in a shaded glen. “On their heads were straw hats decorated with wild flowers and ribbons, bouquets of cornflowers were on their bosoms. … Our imaginations were transported into the vales of Arcady,” the French emissary François, marquis de Barbé-Marbois, wrote home, enraptured.11 Young American women rode unescorted, and, he soon discovered, innocently “bundled” in bed with young men, even French travelers.12
Barbé-Marbois and Louis Guillaume Otto had accompanied Anne César de la Luzerne on a diplomatic mission to America. Barbé-Marbois, who would go on to serve as the ill-fated intendant of revolutionary Saint-Domingue, was thirty-four years old. Otto, born in 1754 into a distinguished German Protestant diplomatic family, had just finished legal studies at Strasbourg. Sailing with the French diplomats to America in 1779 aboard the Sensible were John Adams and his son John Quincy. The senior diplomats Luzerne and Adams enjoyed the comfort of two cabins on board, while Barbé-Marbois, Otto, and the younger Adams slung their hammocks in quarters at the back of the ship.
After a voyage discussing religion and American women, reportedly the favorite topics of John Adams, the French diplomats were received in Boston harbor with a thirteen-gun salute. The French Alliance of 1778 had given Americans reason to welcome the French. Congress discussed at length the proper etiquette for receiving them in Philadelphia, debating even the number of horses to pull the carriage.
Otto and Barbé-Marbois explored the East Coast before settling into diplomatic life. Regions that just one hundred years earlier were “savage and almost deserted,” Barbé-Marbois wrote, “today are peopled, fertile, and covered with orchards.”13 Impressed by the diligence of hardworking Americans, Otto and Barbé-Marbois were surprised to see senators returning from the market, fish and vegetables tucked under their arm. Reflecting on the connection of virtue and revolutionary politics, Barbé-Marbois wondered in a letter to a friend whether their French acquaintances, “people who have porters, stewards, butlers, and covered carriages with springs, would have offered the same resistance to despotism” as the revolutionary Americans.14 In contrast, these independent farmers and landowners were poised to be virtuous citizens, or so the French travelers assumed. Barbé-Marbois and Otto’s enthusiasm for American egalitarianism waned somewhat when they found themselves sitting next to their coach driver on the rough-hewn benches of a village inn. They missed the social distinctions of Old Regime Europe that consigned common laborers to separate tables.
Settled in Philadelphia, de la Luzerne, assisted by Otto and Barbé-Marbois, lived up to the French reputation for gracious diplomacy. The men attentively paid court to the daughters of important Philadelphia families, from whom they claimed to learn a great deal about politics in the new republic. “You could not make an afternoon’s visit to a whig or tory family in the city, without being sure to meet with this political ‘General’ or one of his ‘Aides de Camp,’” the marquis de Chastellux, a French general, remarked of the diplomatic trio in his memoirs.15 An American visitor to Philadelphia wrote her sister-in-law that although the French minister was a domestic man himself, he “sacrifices his time to the policy of the French Court,” hosting “a Ball or a Concert every week and his house full to dinner every day.”16 The first summer, in addition to entertaining smaller soirees for the Philadelphia elite, the French delegation opened the gates of the Chestnut Street mansion to Philadelphians of all ranks for a festival to celebrate the birth of the French dauphin in Versailles. The next morning, Barbé-Marbois was horrified to discover that a goat, a sheep, and several cows wandered in and “took possession” of the garden, eating the leaves off his fruit trees and magnolias and uprooting the creeping vines and saplings he had planted along the winding paths.17
Fifteen-year-old Nancy Shippen, daughter of Dr. William Shippen, chief physician of the flying camp of the Continental Army, caught the twenty-four-year-old Otto’s eye at one of the French diplomats’ earliest functions.18 She had just graduated from Mistress Rogers’s School for Young Ladies in Trenton, New Jersey, where she practiced her needlework, making a pair of cuffs for George Washington. Nancy returned home an accomplished harpsichord player, in addition to having perfected her marking stitches, her tambour work, her letter writing, her penmanship, and her French. Such an education, American republicans were convinced, would make “our women virtuous and respectable; our men brave and honest, and honourable—and the American people in general anEXAMPLE OF HONOUR AND VIRTUE to the rest of the World.”19 Nancy had learned “to be industrious,” which her mother explained, “makes so great a part of a female,” and had improved “in humility, patience & love.” When her mother reminded Nancy that “much depends on you being improved,” she had marriage in mind, although probably not to a Frenchman.20 Her cousin Peggy had just married Benedict Arnold and come into possession of one of the grandest houses in Philadelphia.
In 1781, four regiments of Rochambeau’s army, hair done in queues and grenadier hats topped by plumes, marched into Philadelphia, en route from Newport, Rhode Island, to Yorktown, Virginia. Their route took them through swamps, into skirmishes with British Loyalists, and across rivers without bridges. They rested for two days in Philadelphia, their visit arranged by the French legation of Barbé-Marbois and Otto. The marquis de Lafayette noted that much of his time in Philadelphia was taken up by teas, walks, dinner parties, and balls with dances named “the success of the campaign,” “the defeat of Burgoyne,” and “Clinton’s retreat.” The French officers spent their last afternoon at the Shippen house, where they were pleasantly surprised that unmarried women danced with the officers while their mothers nonchalantly chatted in the next room. Nancy Shippen sang and played harpsichord, accompanied by Louis Otto on the harp and Lafayette’s brother-in-law the vicomte de Noailles on violin.
Otto took to walking past the Shippens’ elegant three-story red brick Georgian house on Fourth Street every day. Nancy suggested a rendezvous with him at the corner of her garden, but guided by his French manners and concerned for her reputation, he rejected “your contrivance of the corner.” He could not countenance this American freedom and reported her forwardness to her mother. He proposed “a more proper time to make confidences” in the company of her parents.21 He began visiting regularly on Tuesdays and Saturdays, when the couple played harpsichord together.
In between visits, Otto sent her poems; she replied with verses of her own. Part in fun, but also in the interest of discretion, because, as another of Shippen’s suitors reminded her, even in America, “illiberal custom prevents a correspondence between the sexes,” Otto signed his flirtatious letters “John-Wait-Too-Long,” “Lewis Scriblerius,” and “Mr Reciprocity,” and dated them from “Patience island in Elysium” and “In the Other World.”22 Although the French diplomat complained of struggling to write in English, “a language that is not my own,” he seemed to have no difficulty expressing his sentiments.23 He asked Shippen to read his true feelings “in my Eyes, in my whole conduct—or if it is possible—read them in your heart.”24 After he left her house, he rhapsodized in fluent English, “Your image is entirely present to me, all my thoughts are so entirely directed towards you that I see or feel nothing in the world but you.”25 In this language of sentiment, as practiced on both sides of the Atlantic, he was fluent.
Otto soon encountered a rival, Lieutenant-Colonel Henry Beekman Livingston, a distinguished veteran of the Continental Army and an heir of the wealthy Livingston family of New York. At first, Livingston visited only on Mondays, but soon he was coming every afternoon. Sometimes, Livingston and Otto appeared at Shippen’s door at the same time. Livingston sent Shippen letters, but they lacked the grace of the sensitive French diplomat. The wealthy New Yorker tried to speak the language of the heart, but it did not come naturally. At 3:30 one morning, for example, he “scrawled a few lines,” noting, “the writing, which at Best [is] Bad, is now worse, from the Dimness of a Lonesome Taper, emblematical of your Lovers Situation with this Difference that it Burns at one End, I all over.”26 The awkwardness of his phrasing must have struck Shippen’s ears as labored.
Whether or not Shippen had encouraged Livingston, one of the most eligible and experienced bachelors in the colonies, she confided her concern about his increasingly relentless attention in a letter to Otto. The French diplomat replied in the persona of “Milady Old-fashion,” an apt characterization of his view of their cultural differences, and chided Nancy Shippen for her part in encouraging her other suitor. He accused her of leading Livingston on “only in order to gratify your vanity” without considering “the consequence of your Behavior.” He reminded her that even in America “a young lady who is first introduced in the world ought to act with greatest precaution.” Milady Old-fashion acknowledged that Nancy found herself now “in a great perplexity how to disintegrate yourself” from the relationship with Livingston. Rather than openly scorn the unwanted suitor, Milady advised Nancy Shippen to be disagreeable and contradictory. Surely in America, as in France, that strategy would cause Livingston to lose interest and move along.27
Dr. Shippen, Nancy’s father, observed in a letter to Tommy, her younger brother away at school, that “Nancy is much puzzled between Otto & Livingston. She loves the first and only esteems the last.” Dr. Shippen, however, had come to favor Livingston over Otto as the surer financial prospect. Livingston would not have to wait to make his way in the world before marrying, as would Otto. “A Bird in the hand is worth 2 in a bush,” Dr. Shippen reasoned, and besides, he concluded, “they are both sensible.”28 Her father consequently limited Otto’s visits to the house to twice weekly. At the same time, Mrs. Shippen, leaning the other way, wrote directly to Otto to encourage his courtship.
Otto openly avowed his sentiments in his next letter, hoping to oust his rival. “I shall tell you so often how much I love you that you will be forced to answer: and I too, I love you, my dear Friend! No harmony in the world could equal these words flowing from your Lipps.’”29 When Nancy Shippen did not reply to his letter, he left Philadelphia, expecting that his absence would force her to declare her affection. His ploy succeeded, and in March 1781, Nancy apparently agreed to marry him.
Dr. Shippen responded to the news by banning Louis Otto from the Shippen house for four days. Otto tolerated the enforced separation at first. “I made today a very pleasant discovery in our parlour,” he wrote. “I can see two of your windows and one chimney. … I assure you never was a chimney so interesting for me.”30 He dropped off his recently composed “Strasbourg Menuet” on her doorstep with a note signed “Mr. Runaway.” The subsequent days passed more slowly. “Was it a dream, my dear Nancy? Or did I really hear you pronounce that heavenly yes?” he pressed.31 He was “so unhappy” he moaned, beseeching her to “forgive me, dear friend, I was never less master of my feelings.” After she accused him of misinterpreting their relationship, he asked how he could possibly “misunderstand you? I should as well misunderstand my own feelings. I have studied your conduct since I have the pleasure of knowing you, nothing escaped my watchful eye. Lovers are quick sighted.”32 He was sure that she favored him and convinced that in America, lovers, not their parents, made the decision to marry. It was, in fact, more complicated than that, and not as different from France as he assumed.
Passing by the Shippen house the next evening, through their parlor window Otto saw Henry Livingston holding Nancy Shippen’s hands. Horrified, he wrote, “You seem’d to be very happy yourself and this unhappy Discoverie mad[e] me for one moment, the most miserable creature in the world.”33 Shippen confirmed Otto’s fears: Livingston had proposed to her and she had accepted. Otto was stunned. Why, he wondered, “in this free Country, a Lady of Sixteen years who is handsome enough to find as many admirers, and who had all the advantages of a good education must be married in a hurry and given up to a man whom she dislikes?” Had he, the perceptive French diplomat, misunderstood the unspoken rules of American courtship? “By the polite attention of your parents, your candour, your pleasing behaviour and your complaisance in listening to my broken language,” he had thought she favored him. After all, he had been allowed to spend “allmost every Evening alone in your Company,” a sure signal of Nancy Shippen’s affection and her parents’ intentions. He would not have expected her “to refuse an advantageous Establishment for my sake,” but he reminded her that “being myself of a Family worthy to be Connected with any one in the Continent and in such circumstances as to be entitled in a few years to an honorable appointment,” he too would be an eligible partner in marriage. He blamed the influence of wealth. “Your P … knows that my Fortune cannot be compared with that of [Livingston] and … therefore he prefers him.”34 That was the stark American reality: money. Otto was not alone in noting its power in the New World.
FIGURE 7.1
Nancy Shippen Livingston from a miniature attributed to Benjamin Trott. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Natalie Brooks Sears Shippen and William Brush Shippen
“I am yours forever, though perhaps you will never be mine,” Otto added on the last tear-stained page of his letter.35 Rather than acting as “common souls” who “know only the transition from love to indifference,” he asked her to “be my friend as you was before and let me believe that I occupy always a part of your heart as much as religion and decency will allow you.” For his part, he promised her “a thousand times that I will adore you for ever and that shall be my only comfort in a life that will grow painful by the remembrance of my disappointment.”36 Dr. Shippen prevented them from meeting on the eve of the wedding, fearing the power of Otto’s words. They continued to correspond.
On the occasion of her marriage, Dr. Shippen reminded his daughter of her new obligations as a wife, adding that her family’s happiness depended on her. His advice echoed that of the father in The History of Emily Montague, an epistolary novel written in 1769 by the Canadian author Frances Brooke. The fictitious father cites Madame de Maintenon, the devout companion of Louis XIV, who told her daughter how to preserve affection within a marriage, acknowledging that “the caprice, the inconstancy, the injustice of men, makes the task of women in marriage infinitely difficult.”37 That advice would prove prophetic for Nancy Shippen Livingston.
As Henry Livingston’s wife, Nancy moved to the two hundred–acre Livingston Manor, which extended fifteen miles along the North River in New York. There she was expected to adapt to the routines of her new husband and his family. Nancy’s brother Tom, surprised to receive no letter from the newlyweds, wrote her, painting for “myself the most pleasing scenes. I shall with pleasure view my dear sister at one time walking or fishing with her dear husband on the banks of the Hudson, at another conversing with him about domestic or foreign affairs, playing with him at Draughts or Chess.”38 Nancy Shippen Livingston was soon pregnant, but her husband refused to allow her to visit her parents. She begged them, in increasingly desperate letters, to come help her in New York. She finally got her way, and the baby, named after Livingston’s mother, was born in Philadelphia.
Nancy Shippen Livingston’s life bore little resemblance to the images of postrevolutionary or republican American marriage of a husband and wife united in friendship as depicted by European diplomats or imagined by her brother. Instead, her letters home would have provided source material for a novel by Mary Wollstonecraft or Isabelle de Charrière. After two years of disguised references and whispers, Nancy Shippen Livingston learned from her mother-in-law of Livingston’s plans to install his illegitimate children, of whom there were apparently several, in their household to be raised alongside their daughter.
At the same time, still jealous of Otto, Henry Livingston accused his wife of infidelity. Nancy Shippen, an avid reader of novels, cast her husband as the rake in her letters to her family. In her journal, she gave family members fictional names, as if they were all characters in the novel that was her life. Imagining the trials of her own married life in the sentimental terms of novels such as Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther, Nancy Shippen Livingston attempted to negotiate a way to survive in her husband’s world on the banks of the North River, far from her own friends and family. Finally, in 1783, she returned to her parents.
Until the day Henry Livingston’s threats of legal action forced her to send the baby to the Livingston estate to be raised by his mother, Nancy Shippen Livingston’s life back in Philadelphia centered on “sweet Peggy,” her infant daughter.39 Thereafter, she languished as a married woman without a husband, a child, or a household. She had nothing to do, no role to play, she confided to her new friend, Eliza Livingston, a distant relation of her husband. If her husband, a known rake, fit the bill as the “Estated ruffian” of a Henry Fielding novel, then it followed in her mind that she was the virtuous female in distress, the wronged wife.40 Although she ached after her daughter, Nancy Shippen Livingston was so convinced that her husband would make her miserable at home in New York with his taunts of infidelity that she chose to endure solitude in Philadelphia.
Mrs. Livingston assured her daughter-in-law that she would not release her granddaughter from her care to live with Henry Livingston, no matter how fervent his assurances of good behavior. She could never “permit a child of one of the first families in the United States to be in a family without a white woman in it,” the older woman wrote.41 Some of the illegitimate children who drove Nancy Shippen Livingston from New York seem to have been the offspring of her husband’s relations with the domestic help on the Livingston estate. Deprived of her daughter, Nancy Shippen Livingston lamented in letter after letter: “My distress is greater than I can express. … I feel that she is close twisted with the fibres of my heart.”42 During the rare intervals that Peggy was entrusted to her own mother’s care, Nancy Shippen Livingston was forced to spirit her daughter from one safe house to another to evade her husband.43 Peggy could not be sent to school out of fear of abduction, so Mrs. Livingston, “determined to spare no cost to make her an accomplished woman,” hired tutors for her in French and music, and guided her correspondence.44 Nancy Shippen Livingston taught her daughter practical housekeeping skills when they were together. Apart, she instructed Peggy “to make a daily exercise of writing to me; it will improve you & make me as happy as I can be without you.”45 She closely monitored her daughter’s penmanship, spelling, and epistolary style, all deemed critical components of a young woman’s education.
Otto returned to Philadelphia from France in August 1785, now the French chargé d’affaires. “Now must I be wretched in the reflection of what I have lost. O! Had I waited till the obstacles were remov’d that stood in my Father’s way, then had I been compleatly happy,” Nancy Shippen Livingston confided in her journal. Instead, she was “a wretched slave—doom’d to be the wife of a tyrant I hate but from whom, thank God, I am separate.”46 Nancy Shippen Livingston countered the reality of her disastrous marriage with visions of Louis Otto, whom she imagined as her friend in an affectionate marriage. She blamed her father for arranging the marriage to Livingston, the wealthier suitor, but it appears from her correspondence that she had freely acquiesced in what was presented to her as a choice.
Nancy Shippen Livingston did follow her father’s advice about propriety and the behavior of married women and stayed away from the French legation on Carpenter Street.47 In their clandestine correspondence, however, Nancy Shippen Livingston and Louis Otto avowed their friendship for each other. “I am constantly checked by the apprehension of saying too much or too little—too much for you to read, too little for my feelings,” he wrote her in the style of his earliest letters.48 She refrained from inviting Otto in for tea when he passed by her parlor window, noting that “prudence forbids it” and “it wou’d displease my husband.”49 The farther her husband strayed from accepted standards of behavior, the more Nancy Shippen Livingston was intent to prove her virtue. At times, she chafed against her father’s strictures, asking her journal, “When will the time come, that I can be free and uncontroul’d?”50
In her journal, Nancy Shippen Livingston quoted the passages her father had copied from Frances Brooke’s novel for her wedding. She echoed Brooke’s comment that Madame de Maintenon “must be allowed to have known the heart of man—tho’ I cannot agree with her that women were only born to suffer & obey.”51 Abigail Adams drew on the same passage in her letter to her husband, John, “to remember the ladies” when the Continental Congress drew up their “new Code of Laws.” Neither of them accepted that women were born just to obey their husbands. “That we are generally tyrannical, I am obliged to own,” Brooke’s male protagonist acknowledges, but he adds, “such of us as know how to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master, for the more tender and endearing one of friend.” That was the problem. Legally, husbands had power over their wives, who were obligated to submit. And yet, Brooke explained, and Nancy Shippen Livingston copied in her journal, “Equality is the soul of friendship: marriage, to give delight must join two minds, not devote a slave to the will of an imperious lord.”52 Equality and submission proved difficult to reconcile. Her marriage was so far from her sense of this ideal of equal friendship that she endured separation from her daughter and society rather than live with her tyrannical, adulterous husband. A wife in the new republic, she yearned for an ideal she could not attain.
Nancy Shippen Livingston “was very much affected” by a story she heard “of a young lady who was sacrificed to the avarice & ambition of her parents to a man she hated & her death was the natural consequence of her misery.” She read into the anecdote parallels to her own life. It did not matter that she named her parents Lord and Lady Worthy in her journal, nor that she had encouraged Livingston’s courtship. In her journal, she reflected on the tale of the sacrifice, composing a self-portrait. “She had a soul form’d for friendship—she found it not at home, her elegance of mind prevented her seeking it abroad.” In the end, as Nancy Shippen Livingston worried would be her own fate, “she died a melancholy victim to the Tyranny of her friends & the tenderness of her heart.”53
In 1789, Nancy Shippen Livingston wrote her uncle inquiring about the possibility of divorce. Despite the intervention of well-placed relatives, a private bill in the New York legislature, and her mother-in-law’s advice that she petition as a “femme sole” from Philadelphia, she could not overcome the obstacles erected by one of the wealthiest men in New York. Her husband cited Otto’s earlier courtship as evidence of her infidelity. The revolution that established a people’s right to separate from tyrants was of little help to Nancy Shippen Livingston in her marriage. Denied recourse through the legal system, the wronged wife depended on friends to console her in her struggles. Two years later, her husband sued her for divorce on the grounds of desertion. He won his case. In postrevolutionary America, republicanism presumed harmony, but not gender equality.
While Nancy Shippen Livingston fought Henry Livingston in the courts, her closest friend, Eliza Livingston, confided in a letter to her that she had taken up correspondence with Louis Otto. Their marriage in 1787 gave Otto entrée into the homes of the leading public figures in New York. Ever aware of the American social hierarchy based on wealth, the French diplomat related that the views of his new social circle “carry much weight in public deliberations.”54 An American visitor to the home of the newlyweds reported that they lived “in the style of a nobleman. His servants and attendants were numerous.”55
Within the year, Eliza Livingston Otto died in childbirth.56 St. John de Crèvecoeur was a pallbearer at her funeral, alongside diplomats from the United Provinces, Spain, and Britain. “Every former prospect of happiness being at once vanished, I am wandering thro this world,” Otto wrote Nancy Shippen Livingston. Like her, he lamented, “I was born for the peaceable enjoyment of domestic Life.”57 Both of them imagined the different course their lives might have taken had she not submitted, as she explained it, to her father’s wishes. Would that Nancy Shippen and Louis Otto had contracted the marriage of friends so idealized in revolutionary America. Instead, Nancy Shippen Livingston ended up estranged from her parents, whom she increasingly held responsible for her ill-fated marriage. Her daughter chose to join her when she turned sixteen and could legally leave her grandmother’s house, but by then Nancy Shippen Livingston was completely overcome with melancholy. Both turned to religion, and mother and daughter malingered together, estranged from society.58
“More philosophy than you can imagine”: Ruth and Joel Barlow
“Virtuous wife, Charming friend!” Joel Barlow wrote his wife, Ruth, “Since your tenderness convinced you to give in to my desire that you join me in Europe and share my misfortunes, you have deserved my homage, my recognition, and my eternal love.” The Connecticut poet and veteran of the American War for Independence–turned–European businessman and French revolutionary, Joel Barlow assured his wife, friend, and confidante, who trailed behind on his diplomatic and commercial adventures, “You are in truth, a world for me, the goodness who is my fortune, the comfort for all my unhappiness that gives sweetness to my life.”59 By return mail Ruth sent him political advice and discussed the practical details of daily life in his absence. Calling him the “most estimable of friends & most beloved of husbands,” she countered the argument that marriages “loose the ardour of love & that we grow old and indifferent that love is lost in friendship.”60 She avowed, “My love & tenderness for you is even greater than on our marriage day.”61Each protested formulaically in letters that “words are not sufficient to express my feelings,” but their correspondence overflowed with sentiment.62 Here perhaps was the ideal of friendship in marriage for which Nancy Shippen Livingston yearned. Love for them was friendship, at least when they were apart.
At the beginning of their relationship, during their courtship, Joel was the more prolific letter writer. A schoolteacher in New Haven, a career considered appropriate for a Yale graduate without family connections, he soon quit and signed on as chaplain to the third Massachusetts Brigade, a position that left more time for reading, writing, and pursuing young women. One of them was the daughter of his landlord, the blacksmith Michael Baldwin. Baldwin promptly sent Ruth away to discourage the attentions of the young man without secure economic prospects. American fathers might not be tyrants, but few had relinquished control over their daughters’ marriage prospects. Economic prospects loomed large in their calculations.
Joel pleaded with Ruth to “come home,” but also corresponded with Elizabeth Whitman, a poet residing in Hartford. While Ruth ignored Joel’s entreaties, Elizabeth sent back long, soulful letters, asking: “What shall I say to all the tender things it [your last letter] contains but that my heart beats in delightful unison to every tender sentiment?”63 She proposed a correspondence “in which all disguises are thrown off.”64 Joel seems to have lost interest in “Betsy” as he pursued the more elusive Ruth. “I read your letters and contemplate your perfections till I have grown sick of myself and despair of any merit myself unless it can be perceived from my connection with you,” he wrote Ruth, admitting, as her father suspected, “I have done nothing worth mentioning since you left me. I have wrote letters and read letters and I have read yours a dozen times. I live with your Brother and do nothing.”65 Occasionally, she responded.
In 1781, Joel and Ruth were secretly engaged. Neither consulted family. Joel left New Haven to spend the winter with the army “at a frozen distance from the dearest object under heaven,” and advised her to “be resigned” to the separation.66 He announced their marriage to Ruth’s father a year later. Countering her father’s potential objections to the fait accompli, he reasoned in language befitting the new republic: “To take a daughter from any family upon the principle of mutual affection is a right always given by the God of nature wherever he has given that affection.” Besides, he assured Mr. Baldwin, “My affairs are now in a good situation.”67 Mr. Baldwin would have preferred a husband with more stable financial prospects for his daughter, but Ruth and Joel had decided that in America, young women could freely choose their own companions, and young men did not require inheritances to earn their way.
The couple settled in Hartford, and Joel started writing poetry. All was well, it seems, until he traveled to Philadelphia and Ruth failed to write him during his three-week absence. In retaliation, Joel wrote her facetiously of a Quaker girl with black eyes and ten thousand pounds who was tempting him “to cancel all former obligations.”68 Ruth did not write him when she traveled either, and he threatened to go find another wife so “you need not be at the trouble of ever returning.”69 At the end of another chiding letter to his absent wife he mentioned that he had moved house while she was away. Their letters as husband and wife had not changed significantly from the pursuit of a partner in courtship. With humor, each tried to guide the other toward a future life together that they imagined, but struggled in this era of dislocation to realize.
In May 1788, Joel Barlow, enticed by the prospects of a career in European business, agreed to represent the Scioto Associates’ Ohio land scheme in Paris.70 On his first transatlantic voyage, he complained in his long letters to Ruth of the bad food, omnipresent fleas, and the seasickness he suffered in the wretched, dark cabin on the filthy packet ship. From Paris, he wrote of celebrating the fourth of July with Thomas Jefferson, composing brochures to encourage French emigration to Ohio, studying French, attending the opera, and discussing revolutionary politics.
As documented by his and others’ correspondence, American diplomats and businessmen moved easily in aristocratic circles in Paris, often centering around Jefferson’s house. Barlow was careful to assure his wife that although friends “conceive me to be rioting in the luxuries of Europe, I should be infinitely more happy to be locked in a prison in America, where I might hear the cheering voice of my Ruthy thro the grate.”71 His letters to his wife continued to echo the prose of courtship, but the backdrop was now the French, not the American, Revolution. He would be no less involved in the second than in the first.
Barlow sent a packet of letters to his wife with the first group of Scioto settlers, who sailed to America in January 1789. He was full of enthusiasm for the settlement, unlike Louis Otto, who, upon hearing rumors about the emigration of twelve thousand Frenchmen and women to the swampy lowlands at the mouth of the Great Kanawha River, chided his countrymen for abandoning their revolutionary homeland.72 Otto need not have worried about the exodus. The first Scioto settlers were so disheartened by the threats of starvation in the Ohio wilderness and scalping at the hands of the Indians that their letters to France discouraged further emigration, and the Scioto scheme crumbled.73 Rather than elaborate on the failure of the scheme, Barlow simply informed his wife: “The sudden and glorious revolution has prevented my completing the business.” His interests had clearly turned to politics in France. He promised to recount in letters all that had “passed under my eye” so that she could share the triumphs of this second revolution.74
Once it was clear to Joel that he would stay, he entreated Ruth to join him in Europe. “There is no more difficulty in it than in going from Hartford to New Haven,” he assured her, adding, “the difficulties have been principally in imagination.” To calm her fears, perhaps inspired by his own accounts of the ocean voyage, he reasoned, “Many wives have done the same thing.”75 He urged Ruth to get advice from Abigail Adams on what to bring and suggested that she hire a good maid. Ruth finally sailed to London, where she was greeted not by her husband as planned, but by yet another letter, this time informing her that he had been detained in Paris for at least a week. She waited a month.
By the time Joel finally made his way to London, Ruth was out of sorts, tired of being “pent up in a narrow dirty street surrounded with high houses.” She was especially annoyed at having to appear at all hours in public, always well dressed and with no time to call her own. “No person can have an idea of extravagance & luxury, folly, wickedness & wretchedness without coming to Europe,” she complained in letters to her “dear friends” at home in Greenfield, “that dear delightful village” she had left behind.76 Her husband might be happy conversing with aristocrats and attending political assemblies, but she missed her life in Connecticut.
The publication of two works, his poem “The Conspiracy of Kings” and his essay “Advice to the privileged Orders,” and his translation of Brissot’s New Travels in America in March 1792 won Joel Barlow a following in London radical circles. Rather than stay in London, Joel soon abandoned Ruth again to travel on diplomatic business, this time on behalf of the French. He sent her details of treaty negotiations and passed along advice, instructing her to avoid card games—especially debilitating for sedentary women—and to take daily exercise, “running or jumping in the garden.” He explained, “It’s your friend who advises it, your husband who commands it.”77
In November 1792, Joel Barlow, who had entrusted his proposals for a new French constitution to Thomas Paine to deliver to the French National Convention, decided to go to Paris himself to extend fraternal greetings to the revolutionary citizens of France. Acknowledging the “intense light” that “blazed forth from the heart of the American Republic,” Barlow looked to “the French Revolution, shining with all the intensity of the sun at its zenith,” to reveal “the practical results of that philosophy whose principles had been sown in the dark.”78 His address received a standing ovation. He wrote his wife, “It is really no small gratification to me to have seen two complete revolutions in favor of liberty.”79 Thomas Jefferson congratulated Joel Barlow on his “endeavors to bring the transatlantic world into the world of reason,” but Ruth Barlow, stuck in London, took a different tack. She warned her husband, “You did wrong in going to Paris.”80 Their British friends now shunned her as the wife of a radical. She warned him to reply through a Mr. Leavenworth, as all mail between them would now be opened by British authorities. She was also tired of the separation, and added for good measure that her health had suffered because of his rash political adventures in France. She pointed to the tears that stained the page, but concluded with the formulaic “I would always wish you to act from your judgment & feelings without paying the least regard to mine.”81 Clearly that was not the case.
In March 1793, Joel Barlow sent his wife a passport so that she could join him in France. He addressed his letter to “Mrs. Brownlow” and sent it through a chain of emissaries, including John Paul Jones’s sister. Ruth Barlow was apprehensive. Joel Barlow had witnessed the execution of his ally Brissot and been called to testify before the Revolutionary Tribunal about his friendship with the Venezuelan general Francisco Miranda. Besides, his business dealings had all failed. The Barlows lived frugally at the Palais Royal Hotel, up four flights of stairs that wound through a casino. Late one night in December 1793, Thomas Paine appeared at their door with police agents. Paine was under arrest and designated Barlow to accompany the agents back to search Paine’s house. There, Barlow convinced them that the papers strewn around were of no consequence. In fact, they were the first half of Paine’s just completed Age of Reason; Barlow published the important work for Paine.
In the spring of 1794, in need of funds, the Barlows moved to Altona, a city administered by the Danish monarchy, to engage in shipping and to escape the French Terror. A trading center on the Elbe near Hamburg, Altona had long been home to refugees, but never so many as during the French Revolution, when four thousand foreigners took up residence in the prosperous Danish port. The Barlows refused to socialize with the aristocratic French émigrés who had fled revolutionary France, but found a whole community of revolutionary sympathizers with whom to dine and converse. St. John de Crèvecoeur was there with his son Ally, as was Mary Wollstonecraft. Looking back, Barlow reminisced that he had been truly happy those two years with his “beloved at my side, she who had always refreshed and soothed me.”82 They re-created their American household in relative calm in the midst of revolutionary Europe.
In January 1796, Joel Barlow left his wife behind again, this time on diplomatic mission to Algiers to negotiate a peace treaty with the three Barbary states and to obtain the release of Americans captured by the Barbary pirates.83 From a Spanish inn en route he wrote his wife, “The pigs disputed my right to come inside, knowing that I was to sleep with them.” Eventually, “they let me climb to a little open room where I could enjoy their odor mixed with that of the kitchen and the stable.”84 From Alicante, he sailed for Algiers, which he reported “is doubtless, in all respects, the most detestable place one can imagine.” Narrow alleyways passed for streets, houses were poorly built, and the people were hostile.85 Although the dey threatened to throw the American delegation out of Algiers and to declare war on the United States, Joel Barlow was more worried by the lack of correspondence from his wife. Finally, twenty-nine letters arrived, bundled together in a packet. He was temporarily relieved.
Then came the plague. Expecting to succumb, Joel Barlow sent what he thought would be his last letter to his wife. He wrote to inform her she had lost “a life which I know you value more than you do your own. I say I know this, because I have long been taught, from our perfect sympathy of affection, to judge your heart by mine.” Throughout their marriage, as often apart as together, he had relied on “the energy of your virtues, which gave me consolation and even happiness.” He reflected on “our various struggles and disappointments while trying to obtain a moderate competency for the quiet enjoyment of which we used to call the remainder of our lives.”86 Barlow recovered and promised his shaken wife in Paris, “This absence has contributed to my reformation. I will return to you a new man.” He vowed not to leave her again. “My first and constant care will be to make my wife perfectly happy.”87 She assumed that meant returning at last to Connecticut.
In their letters at least, theirs was a marriage of friends. Both spouses complained of neglect in sentimental terms, but at the same time each carried on individually, as Ruth Barlow affirmed, “with perhaps more philosophy than you can imagine.”88 Apart, like other traveling American merchants, poets, and diplomats, the Barlows kept before them a model of their lives together. A 1789 issue of the Massachusetts Magazine described the ideal citizen of the republic as a good husband who treated “his wife with delicacy as a woman, with tenderness as a friend.”89 Virtuous, wise, patient, and capable husbands and wives in the new republic expected to live in “heaven on earth,” their house a “paradise.”90 From the Barlows’ letters, it seems that American families offered rooted republican couples a haven in revolutionary times, or that was, at least, what mobile revolutionaries, whose letters often went missing in the erratic post, imagined and hoped to re-create when they returned.
Joel and Ruth Barlow each complained that he or she wrote more letters than the other returned. A typical letter from Ruth opened: “Cher Amie, I wrote you a long letter this week, yet I am scribbling again. This is my eighth letter. I have had but five from you.”91 Joel answered: “If someone asked me what I do in Marseille, I will say, I write letters to my wife, that’s all I’m doing.”92 He claimed that correspondence was his solace in his life away from her. In language reminiscent of the most sentimental of novels, he cajoled his wife, whom he blamed for the lapse in correspondence: “Once you start writing, I can’t believe that you won’t write all the time. It is such a pleasure. It is the time when I pour my soul onto the paper for you to swallow, that your image is before me, opening my letter. I can hear you reading it. I can see the glimmers of pleasure in your face, the tears of joy even, and sometimes the gay smiles excited by the words that have no value other than that they come from the hand of your friend.”93 Nineteen days later, when he still had received no letters, he was to the end of his patience. “If only I knew you were happy, I would be tranquil. But how could I know that when you don’t tell me.”94 The silence between letters seemed “eternal.”95 Even if reason told him that she was probably healthy and happy, he complained, as did other corresponding spouses: “Love did not reason, tenderness always wanted to worry about the fate of its object.”96 To get back at her, he threatened to conceal the details of his life from her, as she did from him. By 1796, they were writing each other in French, “a gentler language” than “that barbarous language,” English.97 All the while, in both languages, they negotiated the relations of power in their marriage.
“Eight of your charming letters” arrived in Algiers, Joel Barlow, ever the exacting recipient, noted, but “there is no 45 nor 39.” He suspected, “you lovely creature, you never wrote them. You misnumber very often. I know by the dates.”98 She complained in turn that her weak eyes made it difficult to write and sometimes friends stayed so late that she was too exhausted to sit at her writing desk before bed; besides, she explained, “I write you so often that I have to keep repeating the same sentiments and anecdotes.”99She recited for her husband her daily schedule, rising in the morning at nine, eating breakfast and reading newspapers until eleven or twelve, riding or walking until two, taking a French lesson and studying until four, then spending half an hour dressing for dinner and having company in or going out to seek company after dinner. That had become her routine, on her own away from home, an American wife in revolutionary Europe. Joel and Ruth were still negotiating in 1800.
Ruth Barlow showed her husband’s letters, full of terms of sentimental endearment, to her friend in Paris, Mary Wollstonecraft. In a letter to her sister, Wollstonecraft complained, “I was almost disgusted with the tender passages which afforded her so much satisfaction, because they were turned so prettily that they looked more like the cold ingenuity of the head than the warm overflowings of the heart.” As much as she liked Ruth Barlow, Wollstonecraft objected to her sentimentality. The American wife was “a little warped by romance,” it seemed to Wollstonecraft.100 Still, Wollstonecraft contentedly imagined the Barlows enjoying “the peaceable shades of America” after all the “alarms” of life apart in Europe.101
“Required by the institutions in the midst of which we live”: William Short and the Duchesse de la Rochefoucauld
In the interval between the American and French revolutions, another American diplomat, the Virginian William Short, followed his “adoptive father” Thomas Jefferson across the Atlantic to Paris to serve as his secretary. Young and single, Short lodged with a family in Saint Germain to improve his French and, Jefferson suspected, to pursue the daughter of the house. Only after Jefferson was appointed to succeed Benjamin Franklin as minister to France was Short awarded an official diplomatic position. Then he moved with the rest of the American legation to the Hôtel de Langeac, an elegant three-story building surrounded by vast formal gardens on the corner of the Champs Élysées and the rue de Berri.
The center of American social life in Paris, the residence afforded Jefferson space to grow corn from Cherokee country. Frequent French visitors included neighbors: the duc de la Rochefoucauld, a fervent supporter of the American Revolution, and the marquis de Condorcet, a philosopher and secretary of the French Academy of Sciences. Although stimulated by the intellectual life of the French capital, in his letters to friends at home Jefferson expressed his distaste for the aristocratic society of Parisian salons. “Intrigues of love occupy the younger, and those of ambition, the elder part of the great,” he complained to Anne Bingham of Philadelphia. “Conjugal love having no existence among them, domestic happiness, of which that is the basis, is utterly unknown.”102In his correspondence, Jefferson perpetuated the stereotypical contrast of the bored, aristocratic French mistresses indulging in political intrigue with hardworking American housewives who “fill every moment with a healthy and useful activity.”103 Bingham rose to the defense of French women, who, “you must confess … are more accomplished and understand the intercourse of society better than any other country.”104 To Jefferson’s mind, that public voice was not advantageous to women or society. Be wary of the “the voluptuary dress and habits of the European women,” Jefferson advised young Americans in Europe, warning them to eschew romantic attachments abroad and return home to “the chaste affections and simplicity of American girls” to marry.105
Soon fluent in French and known for his “happy and ever-obliging” nature, Short was invited to these fashionable Paris salons that Jefferson disdained. In the summer of 1785, the duchesse de la Rochefoucauld d’Enville and her son, Louis Alexandre, called “the pearl of all dukes” by Crèvecoeur and a friend of Benjamin Franklin and Lafayette, invited the surviving Enlightenment philosophers and French veterans of the American War of Independence to their thousand-acre estate, la Roche Guyon.106 Thomas Jefferson, his former Virginia neighbor and Tuscan native Filippo Mazzei, and William Short traveled the forty miles from Paris together. Once there, Short ignored the other guests, including the marquis de Condorcet, the chemist Antoine Laurent Lavoisier, and the marquis de Lafayette, passing the afternoon instead in the company of the duc de la Rochefoucauld’s wife. Twenty years her husband’s junior, Alexandrine Charlotte Sophie de Rohan-Chabot, known as Rosalie, shared a philosophical interest in reform with her husband and her mother-in-law, who also happened to be her grandmother. She seems to have had more in common with Short.
Back in Paris, where the Liancourt and Rochefoucauld families owned adjoining houses on the Left Bank of the Seine, Short took to dining alone with the younger duchesse de la Rochefoucauld after the theater and accompanying her to the salons of Paris. Rumors of Short’s new romantic interest reached friends in America, but they assumed that he was courting Jefferson’s daughter Martha. None suspected he was seeing a married duchess. Jefferson, who knew better, encouraged Short to travel abroad with two friends, one of them Nancy Shippen’s younger brother, Thomas, presumably to forget an affair that Jefferson found inappropriate. Short left, but he soon returned to Rosalie.
In the summer of 1789, Short and the other Americans in Paris circulated freely among the French revolutionaries. Lafayette brought friends to Jefferson’s table to discuss the transmittal of revolution across the Atlantic and the writing of a French declaration of rights. Even the king’s own cousin founded the Boston Club to debate the ideals of the philosophes. Jefferson traveled daily to Versailles to monitor meetings of the Estates General. He appreciated the courage of the commoners in demanding an equal voice with the privileged orders in June 1789.107
In September 1789, Jefferson returned to America with his daughters, leaving Short as the chargé d’affaires. Always homesick for America while in Paris, Jefferson brought back to Virginia his French steward, macaroni, figs, vinegar, a harpsichord, cases of wine, carriages, anchovies, and a waffle iron. He counseled Short, who seemed to be enjoying life in Paris with the duchess, that “a young man indeed may do without marriage in a great city” for some time, but it would not endure. Only marriage to an American would produce “durable happiness.”108 Short assured friends that he would come home to Virginia to earn his fortune and find a suitable wife once Jefferson returned to Paris.109 Jefferson never came back to France, so Short stayed in Paris. He grew increasingly disenchanted with the endless debates and disorganization of the French revolutionaries, especially the Jacobins, as his ties to the duchess deepened.
The duchess remembered the summer of 1791, with frequent visits from Short to her estate, as an American idyll. The two lovers spent afternoons picnicking in a meadow or strolling together across the hillsides. They gardened and raked hay in the July sun on her estate. They canoed on a millpond on the Seine and passed long evenings together, “when our hearts swelled with the tender outpourings that are the charm of love.”110 She must have known, though, that theirs could not be understood as a typical courtship in the new American republic. She was already married and an aristocrat.
Friends of the duchess among the French revolutionaries looked to the civil institution of marriage to transform their society. Affectionate bonds between a husband and wife freely chosen would form the foundation of their unified republic, too.111 The duchesse de la Rochefoucauld probably harbored few illusions about fulfilling her duties as a wife on either side of the Atlantic. As would become clear to Short, her aristocratic code of conduct differed as dramatically from the domestic expectations of the Americans he would have overheard gossiping about her in Short’s Parisian circle as they did from French revolutionaries advocating divorce.
Short found himself in a no-man’s-land between the American code as articulated by Jefferson, his adopted father, and the duchess, his lover. Short refused to abide by the unspoken French expectation of discretion and visited the duchess at La Roche even when her husband was home. In vain, she entreated her American lover to “put yourself in my place.” He enjoyed greater liberty as a man and as an American in France. “With no family nor entourage in this country, you do not understand what one owes to duty here,” she chided him.112 She regretted deeply the need for subterfuge and secrecy “required by the institutions in the midst of which we live,” but she expected that as an accomplished diplomat, he would realize the importance of adhering to the traditional morality of the French aristocracy, rather than acting the brash American.113
The question of discretion was made moot when Short’s diplomatic posting in Paris came to an abrupt end. He had hoped to succeed Jefferson as American minister in Paris. That appointment went to the aristocratic Gouverneur Morris. Short was named minister resident at The Hague in 1792 and sent from there on mission to Madrid. Distance increased the necessity for correspondence between Short and the duchess, especially as negotiations in Madrid dragged on for three years. The duchess informed Short that her grandmother and other relatives were impressed by his thoughtful letters and sent “a thousand compliments.”114 She did warn Short to address his letters clearly to “madame” so the postman did not accidentally hand them to her husband. That had happened once, and she was relieved that it was one of his less passionate letters.
The duchess reported to Short on the meetings of the National Assembly she attended. By 1791, she had begun to question whether the philosophes who assumed men were basically good were not mistaken in their assessment of human nature, or at least of the French. She was not the first to have doubts about the French as revolutionaries. Still, the duke and duchess de la Rochefoucauld assumed they would be safe from the revolution forty miles outside of Paris at La Roche. As liberal nobles who had openly supported the revolution, they expected their aristocratic lives to continue unaffected. In letters to Short she described her daily routine: she rose at nine, read Short’s letters and the newspapers, and got out of bed at ten. Dressing and breakfast took another two hours. She walked in the gardens, lunched at three, and retired to her “island” to read and write letters in privacy. Dinner was served at ten. The next day, the routine began again, starting with the mail.
The violence of August 1792 drove the duchess, her husband, and her grandmother into hiding for a month in an old Norman spa in Forges. Returning in September to La Roche, they were recognized by a passing army officer, who decided to transport the duke back to Paris to be charged with treason. A crowd gathered. They pelted the aristocrat with rocks before soldiers armed with sabers hacked him to death. His grief-stricken wife and mother returned to the chateau to news that the duchess’s brother, one of the king’s guards, had been killed in the September Massacre in Paris. After reading his lover’s letters, Short railed in his correspondence with America against “the despotism of the multitude.”115 Jefferson urged Short to moderate his criticism of the Jacobins, reminding him from America: “The Liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest!”116 Personal circumstances had convinced Short otherwise. He was less concerned about “the Liberty of the whole earth” than with the safety of the duchess.
Short did not wait long after de la Rochefoucauld’s death to ask the duchess, now a widow, to marry him. She refused, citing the need to care for her grandmother. As perplexed by the cultural differences as Otto had been at Nancy Shippen’s choice of Livingston, Short returned to his post in Madrid. Long intervals separated their letters, but rather than blaming each other’s negligence, as the Barlows did, Short and the duchess assumed the letters had been delayed or gone missing en route. They sent several copies of each letter by different routes in the hope that one might make it to its destination. Gouverneur Morris, at home himself in the society of French women, let them stash their love letters in the American diplomatic pouch, but his successor, James Monroe, refused.117 “What a cruel situation we suffer when the greatest happiness we can hope for is the hope that we will receive at uncertain intervals a few words cautiously written and regularly scrutinized by the officers of the postal service of the different countries through which our letters pass,” the duchess wrote Short.118 How tragic it was, she lamented, that her greatest happiness during the whole day was to “pick up the sheet of paper, and to cover it with black scribbles! And at the same time, how extraordinary that it is possible to find such a strong attraction in such an otherwise insipid occupation, that it is enough of a diversion to soothe the pain inseparable from the parting of two people who are so dear to each other.”119 Tied to him now only by correspondence, the duchess who had refused the offer of marriage did not “know whether to rejoice or feel afflicted that I have come to know you.”120 Both had learned the language of sentimental correspondence.
Short dreamed of “finishing our days” in America but wrote Jefferson that he feared “the future partner of my life” would not be “happy and contented … in your neighborhood.”121 Released at last from his diplomatic post in Madrid, a persistent Short traveled to La Roche to propose again to the duchess. She again refused. After her grandmother died, Short asked the duchess one last time to marry him, but she still declined. She seemed to know she could not be happy as an American wife. Short finally traveled back to America alone. Without any political connections other than Jefferson, who told him that he had been too long away to represent American interests abroad, Short had no diplomatic future in Europe. An aristocrat, the duchesse was not willing to settle into the domestic contentment of an American wife as it had been so often described to the French. Unable to reconcile their two cultures, the aristocratic French of the Old Regime and the diplomatic American of the new republic, Short and the duchess went separate ways.
“Thoroughly trained in all household arts”: América Francès de Crèvecoeur, an American in Revolutionary Europe
Born to a family with powerful connections on both sides of the Atlantic, América Francès de Crèvecoeur, St. John de Crèvecoeur’s eighteen-year-old daughter, attended a ball given in New York for President Washington by the French minister, the comte de Moustier. Louis Otto, Nancy Shippen Livingston’s former suitor and a recent widower, met her there. The couple was married in 1790 at Saint Peter’s Church in New York. Thomas Jefferson served as principal witness. A diplomat in attendance pictured them as the model transatlantic revolutionary couple, one French, the other American, together embodying the contentment of a marriage of friends settled into domestic calm in the midst of revolution. They may have seen themselves that way, too.
América Francès, known as Fanny, was the oldest child of Michel Jean de Crèvecoeur, the French aristocrat who had transformed himself into J. Hector St. John, a humble American farmer. In 1780, Crèvecoeur had left his daughter behind on their farm in upstate New York with her mother and younger brother while he returned to Europe with his oldest son, allegedly to secure their inheritance. Although no letters from his family arrived for him in France, he dispatched letters by every possible conveyance to New York, or so he claimed. He even entrusted letters in 1781 to five young Americans to carry back across the Atlantic. The sailors had recently been released from prison in Britain, and he had rescued them on the French coast. He addressed his letters to his family via the governor, the sheriff, and Gustave Fellowes, the father of one of the young American sailors.
Crèvecoeur still had received no news when he returned to America as French consul in November 1783. On landing in New York, he finally heard that Indians had raided his family’s farm and killed his wife. He did not know the fate of his children. Only later did he learn that, spurred by Crèvecoeur’s desperate letters carried by his sons, Gustave Fellowes had tracked down América Francès and her younger brother. Finding them huddled together in the snowdrifts of upstate New York, Fellowes took them by sleigh to his home to Boston. Fellowes had sent a letter in December 1781 to Crèvecoeur in France, informing him of the rescue of his children, but it never found him and was returned to New York in 1784. One of Crèvecoeur’s friends happened to find Fellowes’s letter among the papers at the post office left behind by the British. That led Crèvecoeur to Fellowes and his children.
As narrated by Crèvecoeur, it was a story worthy of a sentimental novel.122 “Cruel death had taken their mother;—the misfortunes of war had driven their father to Europe;—the flames of Savages had reduced their paternal house to cinders;—the subsistence that he had left them was destroyed;—and then [Fellowes] came to their aid,—he took them under his roof, & placed them among his own … all because five Americans had escaped their imprisonment in England.”123 Four feet of snow prevented Crèvecoeur’s immediate departure for Boston. The evening that Crèvecoeur finally arrived at the Fellowes home, neighbors gathered to dance in celebration to the accompaniment of violins. “To this image of domestic happiness, must be joined those of order, of economy, of cleanliness and of industry,” Crèvecoeur wrote of the Fellowes household, adding for the benefit of European readers, “this happiness was to be found in almost every American house.”124 What a contrast to the salon-centered lives of the French aristocracy, such as the comtesse de Houdetot, Rousseau’s muse, whose company he had recently enjoyed.
A nineteen-page poem, “The Sassafras and the Vine,” preserved in a packet of Crèvecoeur’s family papers, celebrated, in the most sentimental terms, the father’s “sweet love … thou blooming source of ev’ry heartfelt joy” for his daughter. The stable paternal tree supported the vine faithfully through its tender years.
Look here my child—he with complacence said,
See how this tree the feeble vine doth aid
So have I cherish’d, so supported thee
And thus dependent was thy life on me.125
The daughter clung to the love of the father long after he had died. This poetic image, attributed by archivists to América Francès, so different from the reality of her own youth, fit Crèvecoeur’s view of his unfaltering love for his children in the American wilderness. One of Crèvecoeur’s most faithful correspondents, Marie Louise Aglaé Andrault de Langeron, the comtesse de Damas, responded from France: “I am not sure if I need to rein my imagination to fit the bounds of truth, but it shows to me your American families as little Paradises where no ambition, jealousy, anger, nor any rash passion was allowed to enter. These American families are inhabited by all that is kind & pure in human souls, enlivened by education & good breeding. How far from it are our own polite countries.”126 She subscribed to her correspondent’s idyllic representation of family life in the New World, a family life she aspired to emulate as an aristocrat in revolutionary France.127
Crèvecoeur sent his sons to Paris to be educated, but Fanny stayed behind with the Fellowes family in Boston, where she was “thoroughly trained in all household arts and brought to an understanding of every culinary possibility.”128 Together with Abigail Fellowes, she practiced harp and spinet daily, and assisted the kitchen staff in making bread, dressing chickens, and cooking omelettes. She learned to sew, knit, and mend clothes. Hers was an education in keeping with the image held by the comtesse de Damas of American home-centered, domestic self-sufficiency.
In a “Melancolik letter dated July 11th,” Crèvecoeur disturbed the idyllic imagination of the comtesse de Damas with a “dreadful account of miss fanny’s illness & dangerous situation.” The countess, visiting the comtesse de Houdetot when the letter arrived, replied that she lacked the “words to express the painful sensations I felt on reading it.” Fortunately, her hostess had received a second letter in the same bundle with news “of your dear child’s recovery.”129 Fanny had gone to stay with a family in Connecticut. A mutual friend noted that as she recovered in Connecticut, outings on horseback “could not help but have a good effect on her temperament and character,” although he worried that Fanny still experienced the world as if it were just “a magic lantern” passing before her eyes.”130 It is not clear from friends’ letters whether her detachment from the world around her was the result of an illness or of an accident. Health was such a preoccupation of correspondence focused so intently on individual experience that it is difficult to distinguish the debilitating from the passing.
In the same letter, the countess congratulated Crèvecoeur on “the event you seem to foresee.” She hoped it would afford Fanny “all the joys that attend virtuous unions.” In marriage, she envisioned Fanny as “a mother of children as dutiful, prudent, and industrious as herself. O happy, thrice happy your country where people are to chuse for themselves, to consult their hearts & call of their affections, & in the most solemn act of their life, can hope for the greatest & purest felicity.”131 Crèvecoeur’s letters describing his family and his journal would have done much to create that impression of blissful courtships and unions of individuals freely chosen. It accorded well with the European view of a simple rustic life.
After their marriage, Louis and Fanny Otto traveled to France, arriving in 1792, just in time to learn that the French government had recalled its diplomats. Otto managed to secure a new position as chief of the first division at the Office of Foreign Affairs under François Deforgues, who was arrested in April 1794. Otto, taken into custody in July, was freed three weeks later, only to be arrested a second time and taken to Luxembourg prison. Freed a second time, he returned to the small Paris apartment he shared with Fanny, their one-year-old daughter, Sophie, his father-in-law, and a boarder. Crèvecoeur led a retired life for fear of arrest, but he did visit his imprisoned friend Thomas Paine. Joining their circle was Joel Barlow, whose Scioto scheme Crèvecoeur had supported. Barlow served as their postal link, forwarding Crèvecoeur’s letters from Paris to one of his sons, then in America. Crèvecoeur also served as a conduit for the active Franco-American exchange, supplying books to Benjamin Franklin and translating French documents for George Washington. The world of American expatriates in Paris was tightly knit.
In 1796, to escape the threat of ever-changing politics and menacing crowds in Paris, Louis Otto and his father-in-law bought a small estate at Lesches, near Meaux, north of Paris. There, together with one of Fanny’s brothers, they devoted themselves to cultivating the land. Fanny took charge of the poultry yard, while Otto’s mother tended the orchard. With no agricultural experience, Otto looked to Crèvecoeur for advice on the rotation of crops, lumbering, and growing vegetables.132 Louis and Fanny Otto edited a translation of Crèvecoeur’s Travels in Pennsylvania in 1800. It was as if they were living out Voltaire’s aphorism from Candide to “cultivate your garden.” Or, rather, they had translated an American life onto the edges of the French Revolution.
In 1798, the Abbé Sieyès, newly appointed as ambassador to Berlin, disrupted their rural idyll, inviting Louis Otto to serve as his first secretary. Fanny Otto was devastated by her husband’s absence. Now she was the wife awaiting letters “with great impatience,” eager for “news of all that is dear to me.” How strange it was that one sheet of paper could make her so happy, she confided in a letter addressed to her husband, echoing the Barlows, Short, and the duchess. When her husband’s first letter, eleven days en route from Berlin, finally arrived, she claimed to have read it eight times through, kissed it a thousand times; she promised to be more patient, to endure his absence as would a true heroine.133 She asked her husband to calculate the intervals carefully between his letters, so that she would not watch for them in vain. After Louis Otto protested in his next letter that he had been days without a letter from her, she asked indignantly how her husband could imagine her capable of not writing, knowing how important their correspondence was to both of them.134 The problem was obviously the post.
Fanny Otto pleaded with her husband to write to her more often than she wrote him, rather than just responding to her letters. “You write so well!” she cajoled. “You paint with so much energy and truth the sentiments of your heart, that mine takes from them new forces to support the pains attached to my situation.”135 Otto had extensive experience. He responded by sending her two letters in one week, and she rejoiced: “Do I need to tell you how happy that made me, how gay? … All is laughter, all smiles at me. I find pleasure everywhere.”136
Fanny complained in her increasingly desperate letters that she could not be happy without her husband at home. “My reason is too weak to quell these painful sentiments that agitate me without ceasing and that my heart pleases itself to nourish.”137 She protested her husband’s injunction that she refrain from writing when she was unhappy. “How can I do that” with you away, she asked. “I would then not write you at all, because I am always sad waiting for your news. … My heart is anxious.”138 As their year apart passed, she seemed to grow more “tranquil.” She promised her husband to “be more reasonable in the future.”139 She hoped “to be worthy of you in conducting myself as a reasonable being” and blushed, “thinking of my past weakness.”140 She asked him to share her feelings, but not to blame her for her sensibility.
Louis Otto served his wife as a model of reason, but also of sentiment. She thought they commingled in the ideal man, as in the ideal woman. In this, she echoed French revolutionary orators such as Jacques-Pierre Brissot and Charles-François Oudet, who believed that affectionate marriage nourished virtue and kindness.141 Louis Otto responded to one particularly emotional letter from his wife that if only they had loved each other less, “she would be more reasonable, and he less tormented.”142 Still, his situation was so different from hers, she argued, because he could lose himself in his diplomatic obligations. Her daily preoccupations on the farm were limited to hiring a chambermaid, looking for her parents’ wedding certificate, and coping with the harvests. Her life centered on her husband and he was away, reachable only through correspondence. Her brother Ally, who worried about her, wrote Otto: “Your poor vine needs her sassafras nearby to breathe—she vegetates far from him. We give her our ceaseless attention and caresses to sustain her, but cannot replace the soul of her life.”143 He reported that Fanny was often feverish with worry. She relied on the sociability of her marriage even more because he was away, while business and politics filled his daily life abroad. Like Nancy Shippen, she could not contemplate a life without the daily presence of a husband.
FIGURE 7.2
Letter from América Francès Saint John de Crèvecoeur Otto to her husband Louis Otto, Lesches, 20 Vendemaire, An 7 (11 October 1798). She complains that it has been five days since she has heard from “her good friend,” and she is worried. She reflects on her happiness on receiving a letter and knowing that she is loved. Acquisitions Extraordinaires 135, Archives des Affaires Étrangères, Corneuve. With permission from the Ministere des Affaires Étrangères
Why would he make his wife “miserable when both could be happy,” one of Fanny’s friends asked Louis Otto? The solution seemed so obvious to Fanny’s friend. They should live together in their home, rather than relying on letters in this revolutionary era when the post often went missing. She apologized for being so bold, “but that is how we women reason,” she explained, blaming men’s “reason” for the isolation that made her American friend so miserable. Instead of asking Fanny to join him in Berlin, “you think of this, you think of that, you reflect, you compare, you believe one thing is good and another would be better,” and are incapable of acting.144 The friend, meanwhile, advised Fanny to trust her own reason and not defer to her husband. Finally, Fanny Otto did move to Berlin, at the invitation of her husband.
In 1800, the Ottos were dispatched to London and then to Munich, where Louis again played a role in treaty negotiations. Otto wrote his mother from Munich that their home was tastefully furnished and that Fanny “devotes herself tirelessly to the care of the household.”145 The couple enjoyed walks in the countryside, especially through the English gardens on the edge of the city, and every two days attended the theater, where they had a loge. Fanny had a horse. Their daughter Sophie learned German readily, Fanny Otto wrote her mother-in-law. Sophie could already speak French, English, and Italian, knew Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, and read Shakespeare and Schiller. She loved dance and horseback riding. A visiting diplomat noted that the way to get into good graces of Otto was to compliment his wife, “of whom he is strongly enamored,” and to admire the talents of his daughter in music and public speaking.146 The Otto household in Munich seemed to friends to be a model of what cultured Europeans believed to be American domesticity.
In a letter to Fanny, Louis Otto acknowledged that his reason united with his sentiments to persuade him to renounce “the ambition to plunge back into the whirlwind of political affairs in France.”147 He carried on, discussing the new cook and what varieties of wheat to sow. An Austrian visitor commented that Louis Otto, a diplomat of the Old Regime, had taken on the habits “of a man who has spent lots of time in America and in England and savors his domestic life with its comfortable and simple manner, its republican principles, and the calm of reasoning.”148 Although they were not often apart in their later years, when they were, Louis Otto addressed his letters full of politics to his wife, “Ma bonne amie” or “Ma bonne Fanny.” He called her “the best of wives and the most loved.”149
In 1812, Sophie married one of Louis Philippe’s ministers, Pelet de la Lozère, whom she met at a diplomatic reception in Paris, and they settled in France. Her nineteenth-century biographer cited her “refined distinction” as evidence of the diplomatic circles in which she had been raised. At home in elite society, she was known for the noble simplicity of her household. She combined, it seems, “the imagination, initiative, and will” of her mother and the diplomatic skills and conscience of her father, leading her to a life of religious devotion.150 Hers, unlike Peggy Livingston’s, would be lived within a family.
At home, together again, without the need for correspondence, the private lives of her parents disappeared from the historical record.151 With her husband at her side, Fanny’s letters were addressed to friends and family, some in France and more in America. They described the couple’s walks in the country and their patronage of the opera. At long last, after the revolutions, they had created a transatlantic family that Short and the duchess could not even imagine.
Revolutionary “Companions”
Louis Otto complained in 1785 of the naïveté of the revolutionary Americans who believed fervently “that they can make the entire universe enjoy what they call the rights of humanity.”152 Away from Europe, in their primeval forests on their own side of the Atlantic, Americans seemed to be convinced that they could create a republic to accord with man’s true nature. That included reshaping the family. Correspondence between husbands and wives, lovers and friends, not only recorded that transformation but contributed to it. Where better to effect reform that would change the world than within the family?
In the decade between the American and French revolutions, European travelers filled correspondence to friends in Europe with stories of the companionship of husbands and wives observed in the brick houses of the new American republic. The progress of the French Revolution did little to undermine the stereotypical contrast between rustic Americans and aristocratic French frequenters of salons. American diplomats and merchants who chose aristocrats, not artisans, as their friends in Paris persistently sent home letters expressing their indignation at the affairs of the French, whose marriages so little resembled their own. Americans in Paris like the Barlows saw the relationship of William Short and the duchesse de la Rochefoucauld as typical of the corrupt French ways that they imagined had been little disturbed by the Revolution. Jefferson obviously did, too. He was happy when Short returned to America without the duchess, even if he never married.
Rosalie’s cousin, the duc de la Rochefoucauld Liancourt, a delegate to the Estates General in 1789, toured North America from 1795 to 1799. Like Barbé-Marbois and Otto before him, the duke remarked upon the freedom of unmarried American women who left their homes without an escort, which “to French manners would appear disorderly.” These “natural” and independent young Americans, he observed, “enjoy the same degree of liberty which married women do in France, and which married women here do not take.” American women loved their husbands, he scoffed, simply “because they have not considered that they can do otherwise.”153 The duc did not notice disappointed wives such as Nancy Shippen Livingston, who regretted their free but poorly considered decisions.
These travelers also did not notice revolutionary changes in French families. French revolutionaries assigned republican marriage the task of transforming French citizens. The marriage of América Francès de Crèvecoeur to Louis Otto was typical on both sides of the revolutionary Atlantic, where public virtue nurtured by private relationships was seen to be the antidote to the aristocratic cabals of the Old Regime. Although the travel journals had highlighted differences separating the rustic domesticity of the Americans and the court-centered etiquette of the French, correspondence between husbands and wives suggests more similarity than contrast in the revolutionary changes.
The language of sensibility, whether expressed in English or in French, reflected transitional, not transformed, societies. Individuals were negotiating their places not only within their families but in the revolutionary community in formation for more than a decade. Their correspondence suggests that little was set or certain in their lives. Neither of the revolutions, not the French or the American, had remade the family. Instead, letters exchanged between revolutionary partners reveal the contested possibilities of that transformation in progress. In the midst of the chaos of a decade of war, the correspondents all staked a claim on peace and the tranquility of a home.