Rebecca Gratz & 19th-Century America

Found: The Lost Portraits of Mrs. Benjamin Gratz

2012-02-04T04:44:00.000-08:00

Maria Cecil Gist Gratz (Mrs. Benjamin Gratz)

by Thomas Sully. Oil on canvas, Philadelphia, 1831.

Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library.

Gift of Maria Gratz Roberts. 2011.0023.00l.

Photograph by Douglas A. Lockhard

Last spring Judith Guston, the curator of the Rosenbach Museum & Library, asked me to write a blog post about a painting which neither of us had ever seen: a portrait, by Thomas Sully, of Maria, the wife of Rebecca's brother Benjamin Gratz.

The Museum's interest in this painting began more than 40 years ago when the Rosenbach received a bequest from Ben's granddaughter which included Sully's portrait of Ben, painted in Philadelphia in 1831. The artist's records show that he had also painted Maria at the time, but where was she? Henrietta Clay, who gave the bequest, had heard that the painting existed but had no idea where it was. This is not too surprising because the Kentucky Gratz's are a large family. Miss Clay, a descendant of Ben's second wife (Maria was his first), was in the wrong line of descent to know much about Maria.

In 1984 the Rosenbach received another Gratz bequest, this time from the widow of a descendant of Maria's. She knew the Museum was looking for Sully's painting, and she reported it had already disappeared by the time she married into the family. She gave the Rosenbach a lovely portrait of a youthful Maria, by Matthew Harris Jouett. And she included in her bequest a photo of what she termed "a crayon copy" (a pastel) of the Sully portrait, which I would eventually use in my blog post.

Years passed, and the Maria portrait never made an appearance at auction, with a dealer or in an art publication. So the Rosenbach took a shot with my blog, and it was no sure thing. The portrait could well have been in the hands of someone who did not know the sitter or the painter and would never find my post. Or the painting might turn up in another institution, no longer a possible addition for the Rosenbach.

I published the post at the beginning of June, thinking we should probably give it a year or two. I did not know that a Gratz descendant in Georgia was already acquainted with my blog and checked it from time to time. Three weeks later our curator got a call from Atlanta. Maria Gratz Roberts, a great-great-great-granddaughter of Ben and Maria, had the original Sully portrait in her parlor. It had been given to her father by his great-uncle, a grandson of Ben and Maria, no later than 1935. And although Maria Gratz Roberts had lived with the painting throughout her life, she, like us, had the romantic notion that Ben and Maria's portraits should be together again.

What's more, Ms. Roberts proposed that she GIVE the Rosenbach the Sully portrait of Maria, the pastel copy which she also owned and a chair that Ben had brought from Pennsylvania. This incredible generosity was much more than anyone could have imagined at the beginning of our search. I know from my work with the Gratz correspondence how much Rebecca Gratz and her family admired Maria Roberts' great-great-great-grandparents and their happy marriage. It is absolutely fitting that their portraits be reunited. I hope our benefactor will visit the paintings at the Museum and accept our thanks in person.

Thomas Sully's 1831 portrait of Maria will go on display to the public on Saturday, February 11th, just in time for the Rosenbach's annual Romance Tours which take place that weekend. They will be spotlighting those objects in our collections which have romantic associations -- the portraits of Ben and Maria, a love letter by John Keats, Lord Byron's marriage license and much more. Click here for information about the tours and their times.

If you would like to know more about the artist Thomas Sully, you can get an interesting perspective on his work on Feb. 15th. Carol Soltis, Associate Curator at the Center for American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, will be giving a talk at the Rosenbach on "Thomas Sully's Ladies: Real, Imagined and Literary." Click here for more information.

The Gratz Family: Federalists

2012-01-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Gratz, born in 1781, grew up with the American political system. However, she much preferred the Constitution and its ideals to the party politics which developed in its wake.

By the time Rebecca was twelve (in 1793), the first American political parties were taking shape around two founding fathers with conflicting visions of the new nation. Alexander Hamilton, President Washington's Secretary of the Treasury, saw an America which could and should take its place beside the European powers. To that end, he supported a national bank to help regulate credit, a navy to protect American shipping and a strong central government to oversee the country's development into a great nation. Thomas Jefferson, the Secretary of State, envisioned America as a wholly new entity, a nation made up of farmers and townsmen, without the large cities, banks, military and centralized government which he saw as sources of corruption. The Gratz family, like the rest of the American mercantile class, most large landowners throughout the country and virtually all of New England, was squarely in the ranks of Hamilton's Federalists. Jefferson's Democratic-Republicans (whom I refer to as Democrats because that is what the Gratz's called them and because theirs was a forerunner of the modern Democratic Party) included the Virginia planters as well as farmers and much of the urban population outside New England.

During the presidential election of 1800, the Gratz's supported Federalist John Adams. The only family member who did not was Rebecca's brother-in-law Reuben Etting in Baltimore. His support for Jefferson was rewarded after the election when the new president made him United States marshal for Maryland, the first federal appointment for an American Jew.

The rest of the family was not happy. Sarah, Rebecca's older sister who was visiting with her sister and brother-in-law in Baltimore during the campaign season, spent evenings in "argumentation" with Reuben, a pastime they both seemed to enjoy. But once the results were in, Sarah expressed her dejection to 19-year-old Rebecca: "Really the triumph of the Democrats makes me feel sad. In this State as well as in ours, they are successful. Shame. Shame. I would not show Reuben your letters for the world" [my italics].

It seems clear from Sarah's comment that Rebecca was quite a partisan herself. Yet her youthful enthusiasm did not last. A few months later, her friend Maria Fenno, railing against Thomas Jefferson (probably because of his heterodox religious views), wrote, "I cannot get reconciled, little as I am a politician, to such a president....You will laugh at me [my italics], I suppose, but I know your feelings are something like mine." Whatever party fervor Rebecca had evinced during the campaign, Maria suspected that her friend had already grown skeptical of the partisan stance.

What might have caused Rebecca to have turned away from party fervor? Perhaps the change had something to do with the political press of the time.

To be continued.

(Sarah's letter about "argumentation" and Maria's letter are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society. Sarah's post-election comments are from a letter in the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society.)

The Rebecca Gratz Blog in 2011

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

This is my second annual report (click here for the first), a little public record-keeping, which shows how a blog about an obscure historical figure fares on the internet. This year "Rebecca Gratz & 19th-Century America" received over 2300 visits, up by more than 550 from last year, not surprising since there are more posts to attract hits.

The interesting thing for me this year is that six of the top ten posts include portraits. It strikes me that having as my subject a beautiful woman who had the presence of mind to have three portraits painted -- and had an equally attractive and well-painted family -- has brought me more hits than a figure without the good looks would have garnered. If you happen upon one of the Gratz portraits on the internet, it is difficult not to want to know more. More importantly, the portraits attract those interested in 19th-century American art and the specific artists, as well as the usual researchers concerned with American history, Jewish history, women's history and genealogy.

So here are the top ten posts on the blog this year.

The Rebecca Gratz Club (Aug. '10). Although I have heard from many people who have a familial or personal link to the Club, my guess is that the popularity of this post derives from the fact that the organization's former building (now condos) has "The Rebecca Gratz Club" incised in stone on its facade. Locals and tourists taking a walk through the historic Society Hill section of Philadelphia see the name and want to know more. I would be willing to bet -- I haven't been able to pull up these data from Google Analytics-- that the Rebecca Gratz Club is the subject of more "impulse" searches on smart phones than any other topic covered by this blog.

The Rosenbach Acquires Sully Portrait of Rebecca Gratz (Nov. '10). Well, this was a news story in art and museum publications as well as in the local Philadelphia newspapers, and my blog benefited from the increased curiosity about Rebecca.

Domestic Servants in Philadelphia, 1800 (Jan. '11). In this post I was following an interest of mine which was not covered in school when I was young. It seems to be given much more attention today.

Benjamin Gratz, Rebecca's Youngest Brother (Mar. '11)

Maria Cecil Gist, Rebecca's Sister-in-Law (Mar. '11)

Rebecca's brother and sister-in-law, besides being probably the handsomest couple in the Western Hemisphere (the posts include their portraits), have historic interest of their own, at least in Kentucky where they made their home. They are also the progenitors of the Kentucky branch of the Gratz family and therefore a target for descendants' genealogical research.

The Lost Portraits of Mrs. Benjamin Gratz: Have You Seen Maria? (June '11) Another portrait, this time linked with a mystery. Who can resist?

Sully's First Portrait of Rebecca (Oct. '09).

Sully's Second Portrait of Rebecca (Feb. '10).

See above.

The Gratz Sisters and Solomon Moses (Apr. '10). This is part of a narrative thread about Rebecca's younger sister Rachel Gratz, her romance and marriage. I think this gets onto the list because of the appearance of the words "Solomon" and "Moses" in the title. People searching for Solomon Moses, Moses Solomon, Rebecca Moses, Rachel Solomon, etc., could all wind up here.

Rebecca and Mixed Marriages (Apr. '11). This post addresses a central issue of the Rebecca Gratz legend: why she refused to marry the Christian man she loved. I check in with my speculations.

Over the past two years, most of the blog's hits have come from the United States, and as of today only one state has not yet been heard from. Come on, Wyoming, there must be one Jewish person, scholar of American painting, or historian of the 19th century living there. I look forward to your appearance in my blog statistics.

"Inquiring Minds" at the Rosenbach

2011-12-22T13:00:00.000-08:00

Most visitors to the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia, where I am a docent, think of it as a house museum with galleries of changing exhibitions showcasing books, art and artifacts from its collections. But the Rosenbach also functions as a resource for researchers. A new exhibition, curated by Rosenbach registrar Karen E. Schoenewaldt, spotlights the ways in which researchers have recently delved into the collections.

Fifteen projects are represented. Here are a few:

An author of a recent Dracula novel studied the Rosenbach's notes for Dracula, composed by Bram Stoker over seven years, for characters and plot threads not used in the final version.

The assistant general manager of a local gourmet foods store is using the Rosenbach's "Mr. Allen's method of curing bacon" to reproduce a 19th-century version of the food.

A student at the Moore School of Art, who came to the Rosenbach to research Maurice Sendak and music for an art history class, ended up using his illustrations from Outside Over There as inspiration for her final fashion collection. A dress from her show is on display and is a major crowd-pleaser.

A biographer, using the Rosenbach's extensive Marianne Moore collection, discovered that Moore's interest in the philosophy of William James and the novels of his brother Henry may have had its roots in her college crush on William's daughter Peggy at Bryn Mawr.

And so on.

For each project, the exhibit provides the Rosenbach source material, a description of the research and the final work. This gives visitors unusual insight into scholarly and creative inspiration and process. For those works which cannot be fit into a glass case, there is a computer terminal-- where, for instance, you can see the fashion show mentioned above or read my blog, "Rebecca Gratz & 19th-Century America," which is among the projects covered.

The examples I have chosen highlight a Rosenbach policy: although many academics use its collections, you need not be one to gain access to them. Click here for more information about research at the Rosenbach.

The exhibition will run through March 25, 2012.

Visitors at the Hebrew Sunday School

2011-12-13T07:23:00.000-08:00

In the summer of 1840, Rebecca wrote to a niece about an occurrence at a recent session of her Sunday School. Just as school was beginning, two men entered the classroom. They said that the children outside had invited them in and asked if they might stay. Rebecca gave her permission.

As the classes ended the older of the two men stood up and asked if he might speak. He and his companion, he said, were Seventh-Day Baptists (a Protestant denomination, in general agreement with other Baptists except for the proper day for the Sabbath which they observe on Saturday).

The man told how he had been ridiculed since his youth for keeping Saturday "like the Jews." Now he "felt happy there were communities of Israelites spread over the land...he deemed it a privilege to keep their holy Sabbath [and] prayed God would bless them." His words, Rebecca wrote, impressed the children. The two men then quietly left.

(For an anecdote about a Jewish visitor to the Sunday School, click here.)

(This letter is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Papers, No. 02639, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Theater in America, circa 1800

2011-11-22T05:31:00.000-08:00

When Rebecca was a young woman, going to the theater was a popular pastime among those in her social set. The theater provided variety, with a mixture of Shakespeare, other favorites from the past and recent London hits. People went even though productions could be very uneven. Maria Fenno, Rebecca's best friend, reported to Rebecca from New York that she would be going to see King Lear, as performed by a "band of butchers," with a Cordelia "who has frequently been obliged to go to bed in the middle of a play in consequence of intoxication." On the other hand, America in 1800 had begun to attract young English actors whose stars rose much more quickly here than on the London stage. They would be the first matinee idols in the new nation.

Most of the social elite, as devotees of the English literary heritage, attended regularly. Others, like the Quakers, stayed away on principle. The middle classes generally avoided the theater, believing it to be a den of vice, and it can be argued that they were correct. Nearly every theater had its infamous third tier, the highest balcony where prostitutes displayed themselves and booked assignations. Theater owners early realized that this secondary attraction brought in a regular clientele, whose tickets provided the profit necessary to keep the dramatic arts alive in America.

The third tier was a frequent source of noise and disruption, but the prostitutes and their johns were not alone in impropriety. Wealthy young men felt entitled to exercise their wit in voices loud enough for the whole theater to hear. Rebecca's sister Rachel found their conduct disgusting on at least one occasion:

"We had several of them in our box at the theatre [who] annoyed me almost to death. Every word that [the leading actor] uttered was repeated by them with some comments."

Despite the rowdiness of the third tier and the "arrogance and affectation" (Rachel's words) of some young men, respectable men and women, safe in their theater boxes, continued to attend, and even to bring their adolescent children. In 1805 Rebecca wrote of taking 14-year-old Matilda Hoffman to see a play.

(Maria's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society. Rachel's is from the Gulian C. Verplanck Papers at the New York Historical Society, and the information about Rebecca and Matilda's theater-going is from a letter written by Rebecca in the Gratz Papers at the American Jewish Historical Society.)

Rebecca and the "Little Butlers"

2011-11-09T05:55:00.000-08:00

(This narrative thread begins here.)

When Fanny Kemble realized that her estranged husband never intended to let her see her daughters, she left the United States. During her absence, Rebecca continued to be a good friend. The two women began a correspondence which survives only in part (so far as I have been able to discover): some of Fanny's letters are among the Gratz papers at the American Philosophical Society, but Rebecca's have been lost. However, it is easy to discern the letters' most important purpose -- to provide Fanny with news of her children. In an undated letter to Rebecca, Fanny wrote, "A thousand thanks for the accounts of my girls. How right, how wise, how good, how kind you are to tell me everything that you can about them, from Fanny's French studies to Sarah's brisk bonnet."

Given the rancor between the parents, it is surprising that Pierce Butler would permit his daughters to visit a woman who was very much their mother's friend. Butler could not accuse Rebecca, as he did other of Fanny's friends, of helping to destroy his marriage; she didn't meet his wife until their relationship was all but over. And here was an instance where Rebecca's reputation as a "good woman" and the inspiration for Rebecca in Scott's Ivanhoe probably stood her in good stead.

Rebecca invited Fanny's daughters to her house, and also seems to have taken them on excursions. In 1847, she wrote her niece Miriam Cohen after a trip to a charity bazaar, "The little Butlers seem entirely delighted and I go again to see them enjoy themselves." Rebecca's pleasure in the companionship of children as well as her keen observations must have made her ideal for communicating the girls' behavior and interests to their mother. To her own relatives, Rebecca wrote of her concern for the development of the children without a mother's influence.

After Fanny's return to America in 1848, her husband permitted her to see her daughters. She wrote to Rebecca about her older girl: "Sarah's mode of speaking of you pleased me extremely, not because it was affectionate, but because it was respectful and enthusiastic and bespoke in her some appreciation of that moral dignity & beauty which I would have her respect and admire and love above all things."

The affection between Rebecca and the little Butlers may have grown out of their peculiar situation but it endured. In 1856, when the girls had reached womanhood, Rebecca reported: "I have just had a visit from my young friends the Butlers -- Sarah came to tell me of her engagement to Mr. Sandford of New York...." (The engagement was not as enduring as their friendship. In 1859 Sarah married Dr. Owen Jones Wister of Philadelphia; her son was the novelist Owen Wister.)

Even at the beginning of the Civil War, in which Pierce Butler was a vocal southern sympathizer, Rebecca continued her concern. The younger daughter, Fanny Butler, who took her

father's side, had gone with him to Georgia in February of 1861. In March Rebecca was already asking her niece in Savannah for any news of the young woman. (She and her father were fine. They returned North for the war, during which Pierce Butler was in and out of trouble for his views, and went back to Georgia after to try to renew the prosperity of the family holdings.)

(As mentioned above, Fanny's letters are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society. Rebecca's are in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Collection, No. 02639, the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I also used Malcolm Bell, Jr.'s Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family, for more information about the Butler's.)

Rebecca Meets Fanny Kemble

2011-10-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

(For the beginning of this story, see "Fanny Kemble Comes to Philadelphia.")

Charles Greville, an English friend of Fanny's, wrote of her early in her marriage: "She has discovered she has married a weak, dawdling, ignorant, violent tempered man...." His further description of her shows a woman ill-equipped to handle such a husband: "With all her prodigious talents, her fine feelings, noble sentiments, and lively imagination, she has no tact, no judgment, no discretion."

Fanny and Pierce Butler were not going to have an easy time of it, and their estrangement was further exacerbated by their disagreement over the most important moral and social issue of the day: Fanny despised slavery while Pierce, who derived his income from family holdings in the South, not only supported it but owned slaves.

For a decade after their marriage, which saw the birth of two daughters, the Butler's spent their time at either Butler Place, their estate outside Philadelphia, or in England, taking time for one long visit in 1838-39 to the Butler plantations in Georgia.

In 1844, having overspent in England on their recent stay, Butler rented out their estate for the income and the family was living in a boardinghouse in Philadelphia. But the couple was hardly united although they were under one roof. Pierce and the children were living in separate quarters from Fanny, and he was permitting her only the briefest contact with her daughters.

Their situation was made worse when in April 1843 Pierce was challenged by an irate husband and fought a duel. (Both men survived it unharmed.) Fanny seems to have been aware of some of her husband's previous infidelities but was now subjected to public humiliation.

It was later that year that Sarah Moses, the niece whom Rebecca had raised, suggested that her aunt should call on Fanny. Rebecca at first refused, feeling that since Fanny's "uncomfortable" affairs were the talk of the town, it would be "impertinent" for a stranger to seek her out.

Shortly thereafter, in January 1844, Rebecca came home to find that Fanny had left her visiting card. The two women then began the tedious exchange of cards required by etiquette and eventually met by early February. On the 6th, Rebecca wrote to her nephew-in-law Solomon Cohen that Fanny had "some noble traits of character and great talents." She also noted that Catharine Sedgwick, a popular novelist and a mutual friend of hers and Fanny's, was now in town and would be coming with Fanny for tea that Saturday.

Rebecca did not mention Fanny often in her letters, but Julia Hoffman, who was staying with the Gratz's that spring of 1845 reported to her brother George that he would have enjoyed hearing "Mrs. Butler sing some Scotch ballads which she did most beautifully without any accompaniment -- just sitting sewing by the table with us." This quiet domestic picture indicates that in the year since they had met Rebecca and Fanny had developed an intimate and relaxed friendship far removed from the formalities of visiting cards.

By this time the Butler marriage was over. Fanny was living apart from Pierce, driven away by his ill-treatment and his refusal to let her see her daughters. In September, Rebecca wrote:

"Poor Fanny Butler at last finds that she cannot longer sustain her painful & useless efforts to remain with her children, and leaves this city tomorrow....Mr. B. has found so many ways of thwarting her and rendering her miserable, that even her own sense of right now determines her to give up & depart....We shall feel her loss deeply and sorrowfully, for we love her very much, and the thought of her unhappiness is even more painful than the loss of her society. She has endeared herself to us by her noble qualities, her brilliant talents, and ardent love and practice of rare virtues...."

Although they would be separated for several years, Rebecca would continue to be a good friend to Fanny.

(Charles Greville's comments are from Major Butler's Legacy: Five Generations of a Slaveholding Family, by Malcolm Bell, Jr. Other books about Fanny Kemble consulted include Fanny Kemble's Civil Wars, by Catherine Clinton, and Fanny and Adelaide, by Ann Blainey.

Julia Hoffman's letter is in the Fenno-Hoffman Papers at the University of Michigan. The quotations from Rebecca are from letters in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Collection, No. 02639, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Fanny Kemble Comes to Philadelphia

2011-09-24T05:47:00.000-07:00

In 1829, Charles Kemble, the scion of a famous English acting dynasty, was losing money as one of the proprietors of the Covent Garden Theatre in London. His solution: send his reluctant 20-year-old daughter Frances (called Fanny) out on stage and hope she came back a star. And that's what she did.

Fanny Kemble was blessed with a natural stage presence and great expressiveness of face and voice. Despite her lack of enthusiasm for acting, audiences adored her. After two seasons in London and two tours of the provinces (all artistically and financially successful), her father brought Fanny to America in the fall of 1832.

In December of that year, Rebecca wrote her sister-in-law Maria Gratz in Kentucky about the effect the young actress had had on Gratz family life:

"While Miss Kemble is in town I spend a great many lone evenings. Hyman & Jo [two of the brothers who lived with her] go to the theatre. She is really charming. I have seen her three times and more wonderful still Jac went once." (Jac, the third brother for whom Rebecca kept house, was suffering from depression.)

In February 1833, Maria received a letter from her brother-in-law (and Rebecca's good friend) Francis Preston Blair in Washington, DC. Fanny Kemble was then on stage in the capital, and Blair wrote at length about her dramatic skills. Here is a portion of his description:

"I never saw the passions of your sex portrayed so divinely as in the acting of this fine woman [Fanny Kemble]. Her very utterance in grief is absolutely contagious. Her intonations are so natural and yet so beautiful that while one's eyes swell with tears and the throat is choked with the heart, the greatest pleasures derived and the tenderest affection is felt...."

The rest of America agreed with Gratz and Blair about the merits of Miss Kemble. Among her greatest admirers was a wealthy young Philadelphian named Pierce Butler who devoted himself to Fanny throughout her stay in America, following her from city to city and showering her with attention and flowers. In 1834, as the tour came to an end , Fanny Kemble married Butler in Philadelphia before leaving for New York for her final American performance. Her intention seems to have been to return then to England for one last season, thereby ensuring her parents' financial security. (She was, after all, the family breadwinner at this juncture.)

Rebecca Gratz, however, wrote that these plans did not work out: according to what she had heard, Butler insisted on marriage before Fanny left the country "and when married, would not consent to the separation or her continuing on the stage. Her father was angry at losing the aid of her professional talents, considered himself wronged & deceived and made the poor girl very sad...." A settlement with Charles Kemble enabled him to return home without immediate financial worries. It also left Fanny with a husband who thought he could control a diva.

To be continued here.

(Rebecca's letters are in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson; Blair's letter is reproduced in B. & M. Gratz: Merchants in Philadelphia, 1754-1798, by Vincent Byars. The portrait of Fanny Kemble, shown above, was painted in 1834 by Thomas Sully. It is at the White House, Washington, DC.)

The Grief of Benjamin Gratz

2011-09-05T07:23:00.000-07:00

By August 14, 1861, the news of Cary Gratz's death had reached Philadelphia. Elizabeth (Lizzie) Blair Lee, Cary's cousin, was staying at the time with Rebecca, and wrote to her husband:

"Aunt Becky is very much overcome by Cary's death. She says it will be a crushing blow to Uncle Ben to whom he was the dearest of all his children...."

This is not just posthumous exaggeration about how well loved the deceased was. In 1846, when Ben brought Cary east to attend prep school, Rebecca had written that the boy "retains the lovely characteristics and appearance of his childhood with many good talents and promise....His father seems to love him as the apple of his eye...."

Ben had adored his eldest son, also named Benjamin, whom he and the family saw as one destined for distinction. When the child died at age 10, the grief of both his parents was profound and enduring. Yet Ben dared to love again, and the loss of a second favorite must have cost him much.

In the first days of their grief, the family also had to contend with the horror of not knowing where Cary's body lay. His cousin Frank Blair travelled to the battle site and was able to locate Cary's remains. Bernard Gratz, Cary's older brother, went to Missouri to accompany the coffin home. It must have been with a certain amount of relief that Ben was able to bury his son in September 1861. Cary Gratz was the first Civil War soldier to be interred in Lexington Cemetery.

Rebecca tried to console Ben, "whose grief I share, but cannot measure even by that which fills my heart -- all human sympathy are but drops of comfort, in his great sorrow..." She hoped that his wife and daughters might"win from the indulgence of feelings which have so overwhelm'd him -- and I trust restore his peace....we live on, cherishing those that are taken from us, as tho they were only removed from sight -- with the hope of reunion in another world...."

In early October Lizzie Blair Lee received a letter from her sister-in-law, Frank Blair's wife. Lizzie reported to her husband on what it contained. According to her correspondent, a soldier who had participated in the Battle of Wilson's Creek visited them. The man had said he and Cary Gratz had been hit at the same time although he had sustained only a leg wound. Cary, despite his five wounds (if the official account is correct), lingered on the battlefield for six hours before dying. The soldier said he was with Cary the whole time, gave him water and made some shade for his face. There was no mention in Lizzie's account if Cary was capable during his last hours of sending a message to his family.

This story must have brought as much pain as solace to the family. In late December 1861 Rebecca wrote that Ben "writes to Horace [the nephew who lived with her] more calmly than he does to me -- I do not crave his letters."

Ben was calmer when he visited Philadelphia in April 1862. Rebecca reported to Lizzie Lee that "his countenance is unaltered by his loss. He is resigned to giving up his noble boy to his Country['s] cause -- tho he says it yet with quivering lips." This visit seems to have been good for both brother and sister: Rebecca was able to offer what comfort she could and Ben was ready to receive it.

Ben had customarily left much of the Kentucky correspondence with Rebecca to his wife, but after this visit he wrote regularly his sister, a change which gave her great joy. In June 1862 she wrote, "Your letters My beloved Brother, are the day spring of my life and make me feel young again -- through the warmth of the affection they express...."

(Elizabeth Blair Lee's letters appear in Wartime Washington, edited by Virginia Jeans Laas. Two of Rebecca's letters may be found in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson; the third, from December 1861, is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Collection, No. 02639, the Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Cary Gratz Killed in Action: August 10, 1861

2011-08-08T05:27:00.000-07:00

From the obituary in the New York Times, August 18, 1861:

"Capt. CARY GRATZ, who has been for about five years a citizen of St. Louis, is youngest son of BEN. GRATZ, of Lexington, Ky., one of the oldest and most honored citizens of that State, and intimately connected for a quarter of a century with the banking institutions of Kentucky. The family is a branch of the Philadelphia family of the same name. Capt. CARY GRATZ was first cousin of HON. F. P. BLAIR [member of the U.S. House of Representatives], and from the first outbreak of the war has been in the public service; and in his last battle he died with great gallantry. His father has hundreds of friends in this City and in Philadelphia who will be pained by his misfortune."

Cary Gratz died in the second battle of the Civil War, at Wilson's Creek, near Springfield, Missouri, on August 10, 1861. He had turned 32 the day before.

An earlier post, A Civil War Tragedy, focused on Cary and his stepbrother/cousin Jo Shelby who both fought in the battle but on opposite sides. This one and the next will deal with Cary's death and its repercussions in military and political circles as well as its aftermath for his family.

The official account of Cary's death reports that he was advancing at the head of his men (Company E), when they discovered the enemy led by an officer carrying a Union flag. Gratz drew his revolver, fired "and knocked [the Confederate officer] off his horse, but upon reaching the ground he immediately arose and rushed through his lines, at which instant Captain Gratz fired a second shot pitching him headlong out of sight. The enemy now opened fire, and Captain Gratz fell, pierced by five shots."

The first member of the family to learn of his death was probably Frank Blair, his cousin in St. Louis, who took the loss of Cary and other friends to heart. The Blair's had political clout: Frank, of course, was a Congressman, his father, Francis Preston Blair of Blair House, Washington, DC, was a founder of the Republican Party and an advisor to President Lincoln and his brother Montgomery was Postmaster General in Lincoln's Cabinet. They had used their influence to help their old friend John C. Fremont, a soldier, explorer and the first anti-slavery Republican candidate for president in 1856. He was appointed to head the Army of the West in the summer of 1861, and it was Fremont who denied reinforcements to the outnumbered Union troops at Wilson's Creek. The Blair's faith in the general was shaken and in the following weeks Fremont's rash decisions and poor organizational skills seemed to form, for many observers, a pattern of bad judgment. The Blairs lent their support to Fremont's other critics, and the general was relieved of his command in November 1861.

John Fremont -- and his formidable wife Jessie, the daughter of a United States senator, who had devoted her life to her husband's career -- were ambitious and used to controversy. The couple battled back against the Blair's, their former patrons. Rebecca Gratz wrote at the end of October 1861: "[T]he great mortification they [the Blair family] suffer, is having assisted to place [the Fremont's] in power to do so much mischief. It seems to me that our friends [the Blair's] are deficient in knowledge of human character -- like other sanguine people they act from feeling -- and misjudge those they love, who they think are as guileless as themselves...."

Fremont would be courtmartialed and later pardoned by Lincoln, but he never received another command during the Civil War. (See the comment for a correction to this last statement.) The long friendship between the Fremont's and the Blair's was over.

Concerned as Rebecca was with the Blairs' grief and their troubles with the Fremont's, her main concern was closer -- her brother Ben's reaction to the death of his son.

To be continued.

(The report of Cary Gratz's death is taken from The War of the Rebellion: a Compilation of the Official Record..., U.S. War Department, 1881. Rebecca's letter is in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson.)

Ben & Maria Choose Their Babies' Names

2011-07-21T08:10:00.000-07:00

(The discussion of Benjamin and Maria Gratz's difficulties in choosing names for their sons began here.)

Like other ethnic groups, Jews had naming traditions which arose in different regions. Despite their northern European origins, the Gratz family, like many other Jewish families in the United States at that time, seems to have followed the southern European customs. Rebecca Gratz gave this explanation of one of the family's traditions for naming babies:

"It is not customary among pious Jews to name a child after a living parent -- it does not occur in Scriptures from whence we take our customs as well as laws...." Although this tradition permitted naming for most relatives, both living and dead, it forbade the name which Maria Gratz wanted for her child, Benjamin.

Beyond that, Benjamin Gratz probably wished to follow another of his family's naming traditions: the first son would be named for the paternal grandfather, living or dead. Jewish children were given two names, a Hebrew one for use in the synagogue and an "English" version, in sound or meaning. The more important of the two in naming was the Hebrew one, but since his children would be Episcopalians, Benjamin did not have the opportunity to bestow his father's Hebrew name, Yechiel. He therefore chose Michael, his father's English name.

"Michael," a very popular in the 21st century, was not so popular with Americans in the 1820's. The only group which favored the name were the Irish, which gave it ethnic and class connotations which Maria would have found unappealing. She and Ben must have finally agreed to add as a second name "Bernard," after Michael Gratz's older brother and business partner, and to call their son by that name.

And so Maria got her way finally with her oldest son Benjamin (although the family, which had called him Gratz before, continued to use that name) and Ben was able to honor his father and uncle by naming their second son Michael Bernard.

After their first two sons, the naming seems to have gone more easily. Their third son, Henry Howard, bore two names from Maria's family. Then came Hyman Cecil, with a first name in honor of Ben's brother Hyman and a second name from Maria's side. Cary Gist, the fifth son, was given both names from the maternal family. There is no recorded name for their sixth son who lived only four days.

(Rebecca's letter is from Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson.)

Difficulties in Naming Babies

2011-06-30T17:48:00.000-07:00

Rebecca delighted in the happy marriage of her brother Benjamin and Maria Cecil Gist. After the couple's first visit to Philadelphia from their home in Kentucky, she wrote:

"[I]ndeed, Maria, separation from him [Ben] is a severe conflict -- which the conviction that he is happy, would alone reconcile me to -- and that you, dearest, make him so is a source of never failing gratitude to your sister's heart -- may you long enjoy every felicity together."

But even the happiest of couples do not agree on everything, and after their second visit to Philadelphia in 1823 with a 2-year-old and a new baby in tow, Rebecca records a serious disagreement: Maria and Ben had not yet settled on a given name for either of their two sons. In her usual diplomatic fashion, Rebecca comments on the situation:

"I like your idea of combining an agreeable association with the denomination of a child and that is the reason family names are so constantly perpetuated from one generation to another -- but then fashion and fancy are so various and our children not feeling the dignity of bearing a title down to posterity which sounded well to antedeluvean ears and in ancient tongues may not sympathize with our taste...hence the difficulty I have witnessed in other parents before you though I must confess it has continued longer with you than most others --....pray seek out from among your or our relations some well sounding as well as good name or else let the dear little fellows be the first of the Gratzes to bring a handsome name into the family for their grandchildren to carry forward."

So what was going on here? because two years is an excessive wait for a given name. If we look at what the final name choices are, it is possible to make an educated guess as to what was at the root of the problem. The older boy would shortly become officially "Benjamin Gratz," the second son "Michael Bernard Gratz," and this suggests a difference over what was an appropriate name for the first son.

If you have read Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer's study of customs brought by colonists from four different sections of Britain, you know that naming traditions can vary even within one ethnic group. But by 1820, many of the older English naming customs were weakening. The Gist's had no tradition of naming an eldest son for his father, nor was it usual among the old Virginia families from which Maria's mother came. The choice of "Benjamin" must have been Maria's own, an instance of American individualism, a token of her love for her husband, and perhaps an unconscious effort to bind him more closely to her and her child. We can be sure it was Maria's choice, and not Ben's, because it goes counter to the Gratz family's naming traditions.

To be continued.

(The quotations are from Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson.)

More about Boys' Dresses & "Breeching"

2011-06-22T07:16:00.000-07:00

In January of 2010, I posted "B oys' Dresses & 'Breeching,'" which became the single most popular entry in my Rebecca Gratz blog for that year. Its source was a letter Rebecca's sister Richea Hays had written in 1799, in which she crowed about her three-year-old son's initiation into trousers and jacket.

Now I have found a comment by Rebecca herself from many years later (1847). This time it is a great-nephew who has been breeched around the time of his third birthday. Rebecca had received a visit from her niece Miriam and her family, from Savannah, a few months previous to the letter. Miriam's son Gratz Cohen was still wearing the skirts of a baby at the time. Rebecca's response to the news that he had started wearing trousers is a mix of sentiment, good sense and sound observation:

"The infantile costume became him so well that I was unwilling to have it changed. There is so much more freedom in the motions of a child's limbs in the loose dress than when buttoned up in trousers which has neither grace nor ease, that I wonder parents do not prefer to keep them longer on -- but the [boast?] of man's prerogative is assumed with his change of dress -- and little boys fancy they are becoming men, much faster as soon as they throw off [their] frocks!"

(The letter is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Collection, No.02639, the Southern Historical Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

The Lost Portraits of Mrs. Benjamin Gratz: Have You Seen Maria?

2011-06-06T07:00:00.000-07:00

Photo of a "crayon" copy of the portrait of Mrs. Benjamin Gratz (Maria

Cecil Gist) by Thomas Sully, Philadelphia, 1831. Courtesy of the Rosenbach

Museum & Library. From the bequest of Mrs. Anderson Gratz, 1984.

Just as Rebecca Gratz was having her portrait painted by Thomas Sully in December of 1830, her brother and sister-in-law Benjamin and Maria Gratz arrived from their home in Lexington, KY, for a long visit in Philadelphia.

Sully's portrait must have been deemed successful because the family decided that he should paint portraits of Ben and Maria for the Philadelphia Gratz's. In April 1831, he produced them and, at Maria's request, then painted another portrait of Rebecca to go back to Kentucky.

Three of these four paintings reside today at the Rosenbach Museum & Library in Philadelphia:

Sully's first portrait of Rebecca, his portrait of Benjamin and his second painting of Rebecca, all given by or acquired from Gratz descendants. But no one knows what has become of Sully's portrait of Maria Cecil Gist Gratz, Ben's wife. Although a family member gave the Museum Matthew Jouett's portrait of Maria, done around the time of her marriage, it would certainly be nice to see her companion portrait by Sully beside that of her husband.

We are fortunate that among the materials which one Gratz descendant provided was the photograph, reproduced above, of a copy of the painting of Maria. This version is supposed to have been done in pastels, but the artist and date are unknown, as are its whereabouts.

We also know that Rebecca Gratz had the artist John Henry Brown make a miniature from Sully's original painting of Maria in 1844. The Rosenbach has a photograph of it in its collection, but Brown's portrait itself has also disappeared.

Although it is certainly possible that one of these likenesses might have been accidentally destroyed in the course of time, it seems unlikely that not a single one has survived. So look around, check the attic and friends' homes, visit your local museum. If you have seen one of these pictures of Maria, or own one of them, please contact Judith Guston, the curator at the Rosenbach, or me.

February 2012, update: For information on how two of these portraits were found, click here.

Civil War Letters: May 22, 1861

2011-05-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

On May 22, 1861, Rebecca wrote a thank you note to her nephew-in-law Solomon Cohen, of Savannah, an enthusiastic supporter of slavery. He had sent his condolences on the recent death of her friend and companion Julia Hoffman. Thinking of Julia's death, Rebecca begins by quoting scripture:

"'The righteous are removed from the evil to come' and thus I ponder on the destiny our unhappy country torn by evils of our own creating. How many we love may be sacrificed by the coming strife! My only comfort is that we shall love and pray for each other through all changes and chances of this life."

She was determined to preserve affectionate ties within the family, and she would succeed in this. However, her dark forbodings proved true: Cohen will lose his only son in the War; Rebecca, not only this great-nephew on the side of the South, but also a beloved nephew fighting for the Union.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Collection, No. 02639, the Southern Historical Collection, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Benjamin Gratz, Civic Leader

2011-05-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

Earlier this year, Mayor Jim Gray of Lexington, Kentucky, spoke in his inaugural speech of the "remarkable people who shaped and formed this city." One name he invoked was that of Benjamin Gratz, Rebecca Gratz's youngest brother. Although he was never the mayor of Lexington, Gratz was the sort of man any mayor would want in his locality.

During his long and active life in Kentucky (1819 to 1884) Gratz owned rope and bagging factories. He was an incorporator of the Lexington & Ohio Railroad, and its second president. He was also on the first Board of Directors of the Bank of Kentucky and a Director of the Northern Bank of Kentucky.

Besides the economic benefits of Gratz's business activities, Lexington also gained from his sense of civic responsibility. He was on the Board of Trustees of Transylvania University for 63 years, and participated in the successful effort to bring the University of Kentucky to Lexington. He sat on the Lexington Council which organized the city's first public library, was a founder of the Lexington Cemetery, and was the first president of the Kentucky Agricultural & Mechanical Association.

He was on the welcoming committees for LaFayette's visit to Lexington in 1825 and for William Henry Harrison's visit in 1840, and on the funeral and monument committees for Senator Henry Clay.

For the nation's centennial celebration in 1876, Gratz secured land for a pleasure ground for Lexington residents. Several years later, the city renamed it Gratz Park in his honor.

A description of Ben in his old age appeared in a history of the area in 1882: "Though Mr. Gratz lost his sight in 1876, he has never ceased to interest himself in the material and moral welfare of Lexington, where he has continued to reside, deeply respected by all classes of the people....The old gentleman adheres to the faith of his forefathers; takes his daily walks amid physical darkness, and has a friendly greeting for all, for all are his friends, and as he has a retentive memory and a thorough appreciation of passing events, his conversation is particularly interesting."

(The major sources for this post are the Kentucky Encyclopedia and Perrin's History of Fayette County, Kentucky.)

Rebecca & Mixed Marriages

2011-04-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Gratz gave up the man she loved for religious reasons: he was Presbyterian and she was Jewish. In a poem written in 1807, two years after Samuel Ewing proposed marriage, Rebecca recalled her happiness during their brief engagement and how it was ended when "interfering religion...called [her] home."

Ten years later in 1817, and two years before her brother Benjamin married Maria Cecil Gist, Rebecca spoke of her feelings on mixed marriages:

"I believe it is impossible to reconcile a matrimonial engagement between persons of so different a creed without requiring one or the other to yield. In all instances we have heard of in real life this has been the case and where a family of children are to be brought up it appears necessary that parents should agree on so important a subject. I have known many Jews marry Christian women whose wives have become strict conformists to the rites of our religion -- and Jewesses married to Christians who have entered the church as in the instance of my Aunt Schuyler [her mother's younger sister Shinah Simon who married Nicholas Schuyler]...."

Rebecca believed in one family, one religion, but you will note that in each of her examples it was the woman who converted. Given these facts, it would seem that the desire for a religiously unified family and her reluctance to convert were probably at the heart of her renunciation of Samuel Ewing.

When in 1819 Rebecca received a letter from her youngest brother Benjamin announcing that he would be marrying Maria Cecil Gist, a non-Jewish Kentucky woman whom he had met in Philadelphia the previous summer, it created conflicts for her. She had also met Maria, and had been drawn to her by their mutual interests and similar values. But Ben must have written that he and Maria would continue to follow their individual religious traditions, which she thought to be an unworkable plan. She wrote about her feelings to her friend Maria Fenno Hoffman:

"I hope mine is not a narrow creed. My most cherished friends and the companions of my choice have generally been worshipers of a different faith from mine and I have not loved them less on that account. But in a family connection I have always thought conformity of religious opinions essential and there fore could not approve my brother's election. In other respects Miss Gist is a woman any family might be proud to receive, and as they have resolved to blend their fate I most sincerely hope they may find the means to worship God faithfully and without offense to each other."

Rebecca also wrote to Ben, a letter which has gone missing, due, I would guess, to a little family editing. She must have voiced the same concerns to her brother. It would have been very interesting to see how she expressed herself on this occasion and what exactly she suggested, especially because Ben showed Rebecca's letter to Maria.

There cannot have been anything personally offensive to Maria in it, but Ben's fiancee may have felt betrayed by a woman she had taken to be her friend. She did not realize that important as religion was to Rebecca, family ties came first. Once Maria had married Ben, Rebecca would accept her wholeheartedly. However, the correspondence between the two new sisters-in-law began a bit awkwardly; once Maria and Ben visited Philadelphia in 1821 with their new baby the easy friendship the two women felt for each other when they first met reasserted itself. They would be the best of friends until Maria's untimely death in 1841. (Most of the letters in Letters of Rebecca Gratz are addressed to Maria.)

In 1825, Rebecca was able to write to Ben, "I love your dear Maria, and admire the forbearance which leaves unmolested the religious opinions she knows are sacred in your estimation. May you both continue to worship according to the dictates of your conscience and your orisons be equally acceptable to the throne of Grace...."

We know from the correspondence that the Gratz family of Lexington, Kentucky, observed Jewish holidays as well as Christian ones. The children were reared in Maria's Episcopalian faith, but Benjamin retained his Jewish identity throughout his life. In 1884, when he died in his 92nd year, a rabbi presided over his funeral service.

(Rebecca's letters from 1817 and 1819 are from the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society. The 1825 letter is published in Letters of Rebecca Gratz.)

The Civil War Begins

2011-04-17T17:00:00.000-07:00

As Confederate troops bombarded Fort Sumter, Rebecca was concerned with matters nearer at hand. Many years before, she had promised her dying friend Maria Fenno Hoffman to look after her children. Following the death of Maria's widower Josiah Ogden Hoffman in 1837, it was found that the family fortune was gone. The two sons were unmarried and working but did not have enough money to provide a home for their sister Julia. From that point on Julia spent her life as a guest in others' homes. Eventually she was able to summer with her brother George and his wife on their farm in central Pennsylvania, take extended visits with her cousins in Boston and Fishkill NY and have her winter home with Rebecca, where the Gratz's treated her as one of the family. In April of 1861, Julia, who had suffered from a digestive disorder for years, was seriously ill, and Rebecca had moved into the bedchamber closest to hers to better care for her.

By this time Rebecca's large household had shrunk to only one nephew, Horace Moses, and she had come to rely greatly on Julia's companionship. As she would later remark, at eighty she had taken for granted that Julia, nearly 30 years younger, would survive her. Anxiously caring for her friend, it was not until April 17, 1861, that Rebecca sat down to write her niece Miriam Cohen in Savannah "in anticipation" of future difficulties in communicating.

Miriam had married a Southerner and had lived in South Carolina and Georgia for nearly a quarter of a century, and it was obvious, from early in her marriage, that she had become an enthusiast, like her husband, for slavery and states' rights. From about 1840 on, Rebecca no longer brought up in her letters to Miriam anything on which they might disagree. And so Rebecca starts this April 1861 letter with family matters, but on the second page, she cannot stop herself from voicing her anguish:

"The horrors of civil war, separation from dear friends and multitudes of unknown troubles seem to hover over us in frightful array. It strikes me that there is no glory in such warfare -- whichever side succeeds, his brother fails. I have not yet learned to narrow my patriotism to a single section of my country. May God assist us to bring a right understanding about, without bloodshed in this unholy struggle."

Rebecca was a Unionist, but here she writes only of her anti-war feelings. So rational herself, she was at a loss to understand that anyone could prefer violence to some compromise which would keep the peace and the Union intact.

Particularly interesting is her statement about limiting her patriotism. Some historians have suggested that Americans were much more attached to their states than to the nation, and this may be true in some regions. (Early on in their correspondence, Rebecca commented that Miriam had become quite a Georgian.) Yet in about seventy years worth of letters Rebecca never refers to herself as a Pennsylvanian nor does she glory in her region's superiority or in the inferiority of other parts of the country. She always sees herself as an American.

Perhaps this was a legacy of being among the first generation to grow up as citizens of the United States. Rebecca and her contemporaries were very aware of the fact that they were part of a political and social experiment which Europeans were watching with interest and in some cases with the hope that the new nation would fail. When the government removed Native Americans from the East, although she opposed it, Rebecca felt a responsibility because she was an American. That identification was much more central to her than any political or regional connection. Sadly, by the time of the Civil War, Rebecca had few contemporaries left to watch with her as the nation stood on the brink of self-destruction and to speak out for their old ideals.

All unknowing of her own prescience, Rebecca also writes in her letter that whichever side wins, "his brother" loses. In less than four months this terrible fate would fall upon her own family at the Battle of Wilson's Creek. But before that tragedy, she had to face another grief: Julia Hoffman died on April 28, 1861.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Papers, No. 02639, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Benjamin Gratz, Rebecca's Youngest Brother

2011-04-11T17:48:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Gratz
by Thomas Sully. Oil on wood, Philadelphia, 1831. Courtesy of the Rosenbach Museum & Library. Gift

of Henrietta Gratz Clay. 1954.1937

Just a few days before Ben's fifteenth birthday (Sept. 4, 1807), Rebecca reported that he was continuing to grow in "manliness, beauty and graceful manners." "He will be a gentleman," she assured Jo, another brother.

Rebecca almost never wrote of physical beauty in her letters, as seems to have been the custom of the day. Usually, that type of praise was saved for children. It may be that she still saw her baby brother as a child, but the good looks Rebecca discerned in him are reflected in Sully's portrait of Ben at 38 (above) and his gentlemanly qualities attested to by his life.

Ben attended the University of Pennsylvania and received his bachelor's degree in 1811. In 1812, at the beginning of the war, he volunteered, but was called up only in 1814 when it seemed as though the British would attack Philadelphia after burning Washington. A second lieutenant in Capt. John Swift's company of the Washington Guards, he spent several months on active duty. Rebecca worried that camp life would be too hard for him but Ben seems to have thrived on it.

Sometime during the period 1812-1815 Ben studied law in the office of a family friend William Meredith, and in 1815 was admitted to the Philadelphia bar. He received a master's degree from the University of Pennsylvania the same year. In the summer of 1818 when he first met Maria Cecil Gist, he was preparing to go west to pursue a law suit for the partners (which included the Gratz family) of the Illinois & Wabash Company.

Rebecca, who liked to keep her family close, was alarmed by Ben's letters proclaiming his enthusiasm for the West. Perhaps even without Maria he would have settled in Kentucky. The period was a time of the greatest internal migration in American history: people in the south were flooding into Alabama and Mississippi to plant the rich land there with cotton; New Englanders, reeling from 1816, the year without a summer, were moving down into the Ohio Valley for a longer growing season. As new towns sprang up, each needed clergy, a doctor, a schoolmaster, a lawyer and businessmen. Even young men like Ben, from the eastern social elite, were attracted to the West where they felt they could make their mark.

Ben probably found a reason to go to Lexington in the autumn of 1818, and evidence from his correspondence shows that he wintered in Vincennes and was back in Lexington in the spring of 1819. He returned to Philadelphia and, in the fall of 1819, was in Lexington again, this time to stay. There is no information on when he proposed to Maria Cecil Gist, but he would not have done so unless he had the means to support a wife in Kentucky.

Somewhere along the way he attracted the interest of Col. James Morrison, one of the founders of Lexington. The Gratz family had long held land in Kentucky, and Morrison would have known them by reputation and perhaps had met some of the Gratz men. In any case, to a city father who hoped to make his town "the Athens of the West," a young man with a master's degree and legal and business experience would be a gift from heaven. Morrison probably facilitated what would be a lucrative business. He, John Bruce, a local Scottish immigrant who had experience in the manufacturing of rope, and Benjamin Gratz entered into a partnership to make rope in Lexington and provide it at a cheaper price to the West than that produced on the east coast. I assume that Ben, who would also be in charge of the business side of the endeavor, and Morrison provided most of the money to get their factory started.

The Gratz fortune is something of a mystery. The father, Michael Gratz, who had land holdings all over the country, died intestate in 1811. The three eldest brothers seem to have made an attempt to divide the lands among the siblings, but gave up just about the time Ben returned to Philadelphia in 1819: everything went into a family trust, and how it was administered is unknown by me. Ben would have been looking for some investment money when he was in Philadelphia and seems to have gotten it, but whether it came from the estate or a loan from a brother is another question mark.

In any case, the partnership was created and Maria accepted his proposal of marriage. All Ben had to do was to write to Rebecca, who seems to have been unaware of these events, to tell her that he would be settling in Lexington, Kentucky, with a non-Jewish wife.

To continue, click here.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Washington Irving Collection, Clifton Waller Library of American Literature, University of Virginia.)

Maria Cecil Gist, Rebecca's Sister-In-Law

2011-03-29T08:23:00.000-07:00

Maria Cecil Gist (detail)

by Matthew Harris Jouett. Oil on convas, Lexington, KY, 1820-25. Courtesy of Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia. Gift of Mrs. Anderson Gratz 1984.0005.

The dearest friend and most faithful correspondent of Rebecca's middle years was her non-Jewish sister-in-law in Kentucky, Maria Cecil Gist Gratz (1797-1841). Maria's acquaintance with the Gratz family began, not with Benjamin, her future husband, but with Rebecca, whom she met when she accompanied her mother and her ailing sister to Philadelphia in 1818 in search of medical assistance.

Despite the sixteen years difference in age, Rebecca did not fall into the "aunt" role which characterized her relationships with so many younger men and women. Maria's intelligence, her literary interests, her charming personality and, as their friendship progressed, the revelation that she too was a spiritual pilgrim would serve to cement a friendship between equals.

This is Rebecca's description of Maria Gist shortly after she met her (note the use of the terms "good sense" and "sensible," which were Rebecca's highest forms of praise):

"[S]he is a girl of great good sense and has a cultivated mind. Too remote from fashionable education to be accomplished in music and dancing she has bestowed more time in reading and as her family were genteel and well-bred and her education directed by a sensible woman [Maria's mother] her manners are exceedingly frank and engaging. Indeed I have rarely met with persons more calculated to attract affection...."

Socially and economically, the two were peers. Maria's father, Nathaniel Gist, a Revolutionary War veteran, received a large land grant and moved his family from Virginia to their new estate Canewood outside of Lexington, Kentucky in the 1790's. A decade after his death, his widow had married General Charles Scott who soon after become governor of Kentucky (1808-1812). Like Rebecca, Maria had grown up as part of the local elite.

The two women had just met when Maria's sister died suddenly. Rebecca offered the hospitality of the Gratz home to Maria and her mother so that they could mourn in private among people who sympathized rather than continue at the public boardinghouse where they had been staying.

If he had not been introduced to her earlier in her visit, Benjamin Gratz, Rebecca's youngest brother, made Maria's acquaintance during the two weeks she and her mother spent in the Gratz household before they returned to Kentucky. Since he was about to go west on business Mrs. Scott and Maria invited him to Canewood when he was in the area. Ben left a few weeks after Maria started her trip home. At Baltimore, he received a letter from Rebecca saying that she had heard from Maria: "She writes charmingly & sends kind messages to you" [Rebecca's emphasis]. If Ben had not already determined to visit Canewood at his earliest opportunity, this message would have certainly encouraged him to do so. Benjamin Gratz would return to Philadelphia many times in the course of his long life, but he would never live there again: his future was in Kentucky and with Maria.

(Rebecca's description of Maria is in a letter to Maria Fenno Hoffman in the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society. Her letter to Ben is published in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Philipson.)

Arcadia and History

2011-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

I just saw a new production of one of my favorites, Tom Stoppard's Arcadia, and I am still bedazzled. The play deals with order v. chaos, classicism v. romanticism, logic v. intuition, and that's just scraping the surface. Given its themes, I am not sure how it happens (Mr. Stoppard has famously written of the theater, "It's a mystery"), but in the course of the play, witty conversation, brilliant ideas, hilarity, tears and, if you're lucky, a moment of transcendence all ensue.

The play takes place in one room of an English country house, but at different times -- 1809-1812 and the present, with scenes alternating between the two periods. Much of the hilarity has to do with a modernday professor, armed with a few documents, who theorizes about events which occurred at the house when Lord Byron visited there in 1809 . The audience knows exactly what happened, and we delight in how very wrong the academic gets it.

This time around, this particular aspect of the play hit a little closer to home than ever before. Two weeks ago I presented my ideas at the Rosenbach Museum & Library about what happened when Washington Irving and Walter Scott had a chat at a Scottish country house in the late summer of 1817 (similar, isn't it?). I was explaining how Rebecca Gratz might have become the topic of conversation between the two literary men. It has long been a legend that Irving's description of her to Scott inspired the character Rebecca in Scott's novel Ivanhoe; I provided a historical context which lent more credence to the story.

Arcadia served as a reminder of how past the past is, how we will never really know. This can be a salutary reminder of the limits of "expertise," but it also casts the pursuit of knowledge as an often futile exercise. Fortunately, the play provides a response to this dilemma. In the second act a scholar and a scientist are arguing about the ridiculous triviality of each other's specialties, when another character breaks in with, "It's all trivial....It's wanting to know that makes us matter. Otherwise we're going out the way we came in."

So we want to know, but we can never know. We're doomed to failure and yet we keep trying to make sense of things, sometimes discerning patterns in history and nature, sometimes creating and imposing patterns on the same. It's a human thing, and if I cannot acquire or pass on perfect knowledge, I may still see further, though through a distorted lens, than I would have done otherwise. In this blog, I'm just letting you know what I think I've found and why I think it's true. I hope it will be of some use to you.

Beautiful Betsy Bonaparte

2011-03-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

Elizabeth (Betsy) Patterson, shown above in three views by Gilbert Stuart, was the daughter of a wealthy Baltimore businessman. In 1803 when Jerome Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon, came to the United States, he met Betsy at a ball, and despite her father's apprehensions, they were married before the end of the year by Archbishop Carroll of Baltimore.

Jerome already had celebrity status in America just by being a Bonaparte, and his beautiful bride enhanced his luster. Betsy would cultivate a celebrity of her own by wearing fashions so diaphanous they hardly hid her nakedness. (For more information about the styles of the day, see "Women's Fashions, 1800. Part 1.")

Napoleon, who had dynastic alliances planned for his relatives, was not amused by his brother's activities in America. The couple however was enjoying a honeymoon, touring a number of American cities before setting sail for France to plead with Napoleon to accept their marriage. On April 21, 1804, they rolled into Philadelphia, where they stayed for a few days across the street from the Gratz house.

A measure of the excitement they stirred: even the cool Rebecca Gratz went to the window to view their arrival. Solomon Moses, who was visiting the Gratz's, had no compunctions about gawking at the open front door. But while Rebecca was curious, she was not envious. Thinking of Mrs. Bonaparte, she wrote, "Last year she could go anywhere unnoted."

If you try to name famous women of antebellum America, you will discover not celebrated women but controversial ones: Lucretia Mott, the abolitionist; Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, feminists; Margaret Fuller, a Transcendentalist and intellectual, and of course Harriet Beecher Stowe. Only Dolley Madison achieved in the course of her long life general approbation. It is no wonder that the idea of celebrity held no allure for Rebecca.

After her initial look, Rebecca decided the Bonaparte's would just be a nuisance. She expected that "loungers" would soon appear in the street and on the sidewalks. She also noted that it was likely that the Gratz's would receive an unusual number of visitors as long as the couple was in the vicinity.

Jerome and Betsy Bonaparte sailed for France a short while after their stay in Philadelphia, but only Jerome was permitted to go ashore. Betsy went to England to give birth to a son and await her husband's return. She never saw him again. When Napoleon could not bully the Pope into annulling the marriage, he annulled it himself and married Jerome off to a German princess.

Betsy Bonaparte returned to America with her child and eventually was granted a divorce by the Maryland legislature. After the fall of Napoleon, she tried to interest the Bonapartes in granting her and her son financial support but failed completely. As an heiress herself, Betsy was not looking for money so much as recognition of her son's legitimate place in the Bonaparte family. Betsy never remarried, resumed her role in America's high society and showed that she could take care of herself: she invested her inheritance wisely, lived into her 90's and died a millionairess.

(Rebecca's letter to her sister Rachel is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society.)

Revision: The Rebecca Gratz Club

2011-03-07T10:26:00.001-08:00

I have revised my earlier post on the Rebecca Gratz Club to reflect new information I recently came across. To see the revised version, click here.

March 4, 2011: Rebecca's 230th Birthday

2011-03-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

It was the custom in Rebecca Gratz's day for family and friends to offer toasts on birthdays. So if you are lifting a glass today, kindly remember our Becky with a toast to her memory and the fine example she has set us.

Ivanhoe, Rebecca & Washington Irving at the Rosenbach

2011-02-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

At 6 p.m. on March 3, 2011, Brian Jay Jones, the award-winning biographer of Washington Irving, will be joining me at the Rosenbach Museum and Library for a speculative discussion about the origins of Sir Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe.

According to literary legend, Irving, on a visit to Scott in 1817, told him about Rebecca Gratz, and from this conversation Scott developed the character of Rebecca, the lovely Jewish maiden who is the moral center of his medieval romance Ivanhoe.

Could the legend be true? A friendship between Irving and Gratz can be documented as can Irving's visit to Scott.

Beyond that? Brian and I will be investigating the length and depth of the Irving-Rebecca friendship, the qualities which Rebecca Gratz and the fictional Rebecca had in common, Irving's personal charm and powers of description and if an American Jewish woman could have become the focus of conversation between two literary men in Scotland in the late summer of 1817.

It should be an interesting evening for Rebecca Gratz aficionados -- and, I think, a wonderful opportunity to learn about America's first man of letters, Washington Irving. (That's him, pictured above, and I ask you, don't you want to know more?)

For more information about the event, please click here.

An Insolent Servant

2011-02-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

There is an interesting fragment in a letter from Rebecca in Baltimore in 1803, helping her eldest sister Fanny Etting with a new baby (again), to her younger sister Rachel in Philadelphia:

"Peter's insolence is insufferable. I hope Brother will take means to punish him and preventing his daring to repeat it....more advisable to send him to sea or some distant place than to imprison him....[Rachel should not have to be] molested with the sight of him."

Whatever Peter did, he certainly did not touch Rachel or he would have already been in jail. His offense was verbal, perhaps a declaration of love, which would have created an extremely awkward and probably intimidating situation for a young woman of sensibility. Or the incident might have arisen from Rachel's anxieties which sometimes led her to make rather extraordinary demands on those around her. Outsiders, even the gentle, lovable Matilda Hoffman lost patience with her; she wrote that Sally Gratz, Rebecca's older sister, had been "detained here sometime longer than she expected by Rachel's having a pain in her little finger which made it quite necessary for Sally to stay with her" [the emphasis is Matilda's]. The Gratz family as a whole was very accommodating to Rachel but a servant observing this behavior over time might have been driven to make a few choice remarks about it.

Whatever the cause, Rebecca ends the subject in her letter with a judgment that it is all "insignificant" and that Rachel should "try not to think about it."

Of course, it was significant for Peter who was an indentured servant or a redemptioner. We know this because he is not simply fired, and also by the fact that his employer can send him to prison for something which wasn't necessarily a legal offense. Instead, Simon Gratz, the eldest brother who, since his father's illness, had been head of the family, would have to find other work for him. Fortunately, the Gratz's had lands and business interests away from Philadelphia. We must assume that Peter worked out his time somewhere else.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society. Matilda Hoffman's letter is quoted in Stanley Williams's Life of Washington Irving.)

A Pregnant Servant

2011-02-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

The reason this story survives is because the teenage Gratz sisters at home in 1798 developed a relationship with the family maid, who was probably about the same age.

In September of that year, Rebecca was in Baltimore helping out her eldest sister Fanny Etting who had a new baby. The rest of the Gratz family, along with their servants, had just moved to Lancaster to escape a yellow fever epidemic raging in Philadelphia. It must have been at this point that Alley, the maid, confided to Rachel, the youngest Gratz sister, that she had been seduced, abandoned and now found herself pregnant.

Rachel wrote to Rebecca about it, and we have her reply. While she is sympathetic, she accepts that the maid's fate has been settled: "Poor deluded Alley," she wrote, was a victim of "inexperience" and having "too good an opinion of a worthless wretch.... [Alley] bartered every prospect of comfort in life for wretchedness and self-reproach. I thought the principles of virtue were too deeply imprest in her bosom ever to be eradicated...had she been educated with a proper respect for virtue, she would have been an ornament to the society of which she was a

member -- but in that rank of life vice is the attendant of ignorance."

Rebecca then assures Rachel that "our honor'd parents' humanity will not abandon her to want in a strange place."

We learn a number of things about the maid and Rebecca from this. First, about Alley, we find that she was not an indentured servant: if she had been she would not have feared abandonment. Her employer would have kept her on but added a year or two to her term of service to make up for the labor lost due to her pregnancy and ensuing motherhood. If her employer thought that an unwed mother was not fit to be around his unmarried daughters, he could rent out her out as a maid to someone else.

Alley, then, was a free woman. She was most likely to have been African-American since African Americans comprised the second largest group (after indentured servants) in the pool of domestics in Philadelphia, circa 1800. But she could also have been from the poor white immigrant class. Because she was free, her condition and its difficulties usually led to a swift termination of her services. Would an employer heartlessly throw a servant out in a strange city? This fear may have been a product of Alley's anxiety, but it is reassuring to find that Rebecca was confident that the Gratz family would not consider such a thing. We have to hope that they did not send her back to plague-ridden Philadelphia, but kept her on as long as the family was in Lancaster.

This incident also tells us something about 17-year-old Rebecca Gratz. She was a rational young woman who thought that through education Alley could have gained an understanding of the dangers she faced and thereby avoided her plight. Like Alley, Rebecca suffered from inexperience. She had not yet encountered reason's nemesis: that complex of emotions which make up romantic love and sexual attraction. When she did, she would emerge with a greater sense of reason's and humans' limitations.

(Rebecca's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

Domestic Servants in Philadelphia, 1800

2011-01-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

No one in the 17th or 18th century came freely to the American colonies with the ambition to be a domestic servant or a farm hand. But as these immigrants prospered they wanted others to do this type of work for them. Almost from the beginning ships bringing Africans (to be slaves for life) and European indentured servants (to be slaves for a term of years) arrived to fill the colonists' needs.

Few during this period gave much thought to the morality of the practice. After all, their standard for right and wrong, the Bible, accepted slavery. Slaves and indentured servants were soon found throughout the colonies. An indication of their ubiquity: in 1691 the Rev. Samuel Parris's slave Tituba was among the first accused of witchcraft in Salem Village, Massachusetts.

In the 1760's three-quarters of all domestic servants in Philadelphia were slaves, the rest indentured servants with a sprinkling of free whites. Michael Gratz, Rebecca's father, had slaves as domestics and a slave chef running his kitchen in the 1770's, and her grandfather, Joseph Simon of Lancaster, PA, owned several slaves as well. But things were already changing as the Quakers waged their campaign (begun in the 1760's) against slavery. In 1780, the Pennsylvania legislature passed a law gradually abolishing it in the state.

"Slaves for a time" were still legal and by 1800 most domestics in Philadelphia were redemptioners, immigrants who were sold into servitude on their arrival to pay for their passage. "Redemptioner" is a reference to a loophole which could save them from this fate: if someone came forward to pay the passage, the new arrival could go free. Since only a few would have a relative or friend waiting for them, most became servants, usually for a term of four years.

Redemptioners were very much aware that domestic work in the United States was equated with slavery/indentured servitude. Morceau de St. Mery, a French colonial emigrant, who lived in Philadelphia in the 1790's, reported on their desire to get away from this type of work when their term was up: "Even though one of them may have long been a servant, all the other servants in the same house urge her to leave so that she won't be considered an indenture."

The redemptioners provided a relatively small pool of potential servants, all of whom would leave at the end of their term. Free African-Americans, cut off from all but the most menial jobs, were more likely to stay. Free whites were real short-termers, looking to get out as soon as possible, and free women of either race frequently left to get married.

For Miriam Gratz, Rebecca's mother, this meant teaching and reteaching -- and since the family adhered to traditional Jewish dietary laws, an enormous amount of time must have been spent in introducing non-Jewish servants to the procedures they must follow. Given the scarcity of servants suitable for a wealthy household and the time expended on them, it is no wonder that she -- and non-Jewish matrons as well -- made do with relatively few domestics. In an early letter Rebecca sends her regards to "Nellie, Nancy and Peter," the household servants. The three must have had their hands full, caring for a large establishment and the ten Gratz family members who were living at home in 1800.

There is very little in the Gratz correspondence about these servants. While Peter was a redemptioner, the two references to "Nancy" nearly ten years apart suggest that if this was the same person she was almost certainly an African-American for whom a position in a wealthy household was the best employment a woman of her race could expect. About "Nellie" we know nothing. Later servants, with one exception -- a long-term employee, barely get a mention.

Despite the small number of servants who worked for the Gratz family, and then for Rebecca, over the years, from time to time problems arose, and they will be the focus of posts A Pregnant Servant and An Insolent Servant.

(The number of slave domestics in Philadelphia is from David Brion Davis's Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Information about Michael Gratz's slaves is from The History of the Jews of Philadelphia from Colonial Times to the Age of Jackson, by Edwin Wolf 2nd and Maxwell Whiteman. Joseph Simon information is from David A. Brener's The Jews of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Moreau de St. Mery's American Journey includes his observations about indentured servants. Rebecca's letter is undated but internal evidence suggests it is from 1799. It is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society.)

Rebecca Gratz & the Nullification Crisis of 1832

2011-01-07T07:47:00.000-08:00

The Tariff of 1828 fell most heavily on the southern states. When the newly elected president, Andrew Jackson, did not move to reform or repeal the law, as expected, southern resentment grew. As an avenue to tax relief, South Carolinians developed a constitutional theory: sovereignty resided in the individual states rather than in the federal government, they argued, and therefore each state could nullify any federal law it found to be unconstitutional. The most radical of these nullifiers argued that there was no such thing as an American citizen, only state citizens.

The practical result of this interpretation would be the dismantling the United States, something the majority of Americans, looked upon with horror. Rebecca voiced these fears when she wrote, "I hope these southern Nullifiers will not break down the beautiful edifice their fathers erected to freedom...." Andrew Jackson saw nullification as treason.

In an effort to placate the nullifiers Congress passed the Tariff of 1832 which eased some of the burden and which had the support of about half of the southern states and all of the north. It was not good enough for South Carolina which in November 1832 used its new Ordinance of Nullification to nullify both the tariffs of 1828 and 1832, effective February 1, 1833. The state then began military preparations to repel federal intervention.

Rebecca's friend Washington Irving was travelling in South Carolina at this time and visited William C. Preston, an old friend and a vocal nullifier. Together they dined with the governor of the state, whom Irving had also known in his youth. In a letter to his brother Peter, Irving wrote, "It is really lamentable to see such a fine set of gallant fellows as these leading nullifiers are, so madly in the wrong."

At this point the state government was about to nullify the two tariffs, which Gov. Hamilton insisted was a "peaceable redress." As Irving was leaving, Hamilton invited him to come back soon. "Oh, yes," Irving, who had either a better grasp of reality or less reason to be hypocritical about it, replied, "I'll come with the first troops."

On Dec. 10, Andrew Jackson responded to the nullification of the tariffs by ordering naval ships to South Carolina and threatening to send in troops. A week later, Rebecca Gratz wrote to her sister-in-law in Kentucky: "Oh how I tremble lest American blood should be spilt by American hands."

In February Congress passed the bill authorizing the President to send soldiers into South Carolina and also a reform tariff, crafted to be more to the Carolinians' liking. (Jackson had rattled his saber but had also been the first to suggest the reform tariff.) At this point the nullifiers realized that they did not really want to call Jackson's bluff about military intervention, nullified their state nullification ordinance and accepted the reform tariff. The crisis was over, and for the moment everybody felt they had won.

But many Americans, like Rebecca, saw in the nullification ordeal the spectre of future civil war. Washington Irving felt that the Southerners' braggadocio-laden rhetoric during the crisis had offended those in other parts of the country who would otherwise have been sympathetic to redressing their grievances. Regionalism, already strong, was further exacerbated, and Americans in the north and west must have fearfully wondered: if the planters of South Carolina, among the wealthiest men in the country, were willing to destabilize the nation for their own gain, what would they do if they felt that slavery, the institution on which their way of life was built, might be taken from them?

(Rebecca's letter is in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Phillipson. Material about Washington Irving is from The Life and Letters of Washington Irving, edited by Pierre M. Irving. I synthesized information about the Crisis from many sources; as with Indian Removal, I have again squeezed a complex subject into the dimensions of a blog post. Fortunately, there is plenty of information about nullification in print and on the internet for those interested in learning more.)

The Rebecca Gratz Blog in 2010

2011-01-01T11:00:00.000-08:00

Although I have been writing this blog for a year and a half, I began to use Google Analytics to record statistical data about it only a year ago. This, then, is my first annual report.

A blog about an obscure 19th-century, Jewish-American woman, who lived her life doing good works and eschewing scandal, is not exactly a magnet for most internet devotees. However in 2010 it did receive nearly 1750 visits from about 1320 individuals who rang up 3280 pageviews.

About three quarters of the visits were from the United States, 75% of those from Pennsylvania and 75% of those from Philadelphia, which is what you might expect for a locally famous, minor historical figure. Surprisingly, at least to me, the blog received hits from more than 500 other towns and cities around the world, 46 other states and 59 other countries.

Here are the posts which were most visited in 2010:

Boys' Dresses and Breeching .* (Jan. '10) Who knew that this old custom was of such worldwide interest ?

Sully's First Portrait of Rebecca. (Nov. '09) This post, which contains an image of the painting, attracted those interested in Rebecca, but also those researching the artist, this specific painting and 19th-century American art.

Male Entitlement in Philadelphia, c. 1800.* (Apr.'10) I had not realized that "male entitlement" was such a hot topic.

Tall Tales about Rebecca.* (July '10) In which I described some of the biographical inaccuracies about Rebecca and considered why there were so many.

Washington Irving, Rebecca Gratz and an Unwanted Suitor. (Nov. '09) Rebecca's friendship with Irving greatly affected her life. This anecdote describes their first youthful meeting and how Irving helped her avoid a proposal. What's not to like?

The Gratz Sisters & Solomon Moses. (Apr. '10) Part of a five-post narrative about Rebecca's sister Rachel, the man she decided to marry and her sisters' reaction to her decision, it gives insight into the real Rebecca (without a pedestal) and the always complex relationships among siblings.

The Rebecca Gratz Club. (Aug. '10) I wrote this post in response to the many inquiries about the Club so I am not surprised by its rapid rise into the top ten posts of the year.

Rebecca Gratz & Baseball. (Oct. '10) This post was written after baseball historian John Thorn sent me some relevant material. Following its publication, Mr. Thorn alerted his baseball history buddies and they came en masse to read it. I am fond of this post, but without this generous help I doubt it would have climbed almost immediately into the most-visited list.

A Portrait of Washington Irving. (Nov. '09) A sort of coda to "Washington Irving, Rebecca Gratz and an Unwanted Suitor," the post includes an image of John Wesley Jarvis's luscious painting, making it of interest to students of art history as well as aficionados of Irving and Gratz.

The Indian Removal Act, Evangelicals and Rebecca Gratz. (Oct. '10) The Indian Removal Act of 1830 and the opposition to it did not warrant much ink in the history textbooks I read in school. Now it seems to be a lively research topic with interest split between the Act itself and the petition drive which was the first organized action by American women to influence politicians.

*Asterisks. Another way to look at the popularity of posts is not just by sheer numbers of visits but by the average amount of time readers spent at individual posts. The three asterisked posts in the list above had an average visit length of three minutes or more. Other posts which did not make the top ten but which were viewed at least 25 times and averaged three plus minutes were:

Sarah Gratz's Mysterious Malady. (Mar. '10) Bipolar disorder is with us today, and there must be some comfort to read about the difficulties of those who suffered from it in the past.

Rachel Gratz, Rachel's Romance, Rebecca Writes to Sally and What Was Wrong with Solomon Moses Anyway? (Apr. & May '10): These are the other four posts in the cycle about Rachel Gratz. (See The Gratz Sisters and Solomon Moses above.)

A Civil War Tragedy. (Sept. '09) The truth-is-stranger-than-fiction story of Rebecca's brother Benjamin Gratz and his family during the conflict.

Rebecca and Matilda Hoffman. (Aug. '10) This is another "tall tale" I try to correct.

An Unaccountable Wedding Fad. (July '10) Who doesn't love a wedding? But I just wish that someone with more information about the fad in question would give me their insights.

The First Waltz. (Jan.'10) Turns out that Rebecca's report of seeing the waltz danced may be the earliest eye-witness account from Philadelphia. Dance historians were interested.

Women's Charities, Philadelphia 1800. (Dec.'09) The title says it all.

Rebecca's Favorite Poem. (Sept. '10) It's a long poem which I think helps account for the fact that people spend so much time on the post.

A special thank you to the many repeat visitors from Philadelphia and Bala Cynwyd, PA; Santa Cruz, CA; Sheboygan, WI; Corvallis, OR and elsewhere. I have met several of you through email and in person and hope to correspond with others. Another big thank you to those who subscribe to or follow this blog: you are not included in the statistical reports, but I am always aware of you and delighted that you think the blog worthy of your time.

Finally, thanks to the following websites which in the past year have mentioned or provided a link to this blog: Scandalous Women; Brian Jay Jones (author of the most recent biography of Washington Irving); Jewesses with Attitude, the blogsite of the Jewish Women's Archive; the Gilbert Stuart blog; the Library of America blog "Reader's Almanac;" Books, Inq -- The Epilogue; A Momentary Taste Of Being; the (London) Sunday Times' Book News Mattters; Civil War Blog, Gratz Historical Society, Gratz, PA; Jewish Press International's Faceshuk; the American Philosophical Society on Facebook; Yesterday...and Today. I am honored.

St. Nicholas Visits the Mordecai House

2010-12-17T00:01:00.000-08:00

Last December when I wrote "Did St. Nicholas Visit the Gratz House?" my answer was, "Possibly." I was suggesting that the poem now known as "Twas the Night Before Christmas" was a major source of the American-style holiday. Published in 1823 at a time when the majority of Americans did not recognize Christmas as a religious holiday, the poem re-invented it as a dazzling festival for children. And notice that in "A Visit from St. Nicholas," there is absolutely no mention of the Nativity or even any concern about which children have been "naughty or nice;" Christmas is all about toys and sweets for everyone.

With December 25 a business day in Philadelphia and most people treating it as such, and with a lack of Christmas paraphernalia -- the public Christmas trees, lights and creches -- some American Jews probably did not see it as a threat to their way of life and permitted their children the good time it offered.

In researching Alfred Mordecai, Rebecca's nephew-in-law, for a recent post, I found another reference to Christmas. Emily Bingham, in Mordecai: An Early American Family, describes a letter from Sara Mordecai, Alfred's wife, in December of 1855 in which she "recalled to her absent husband Christmases spent together in Washington, wrapping gifts and filling their children's stockings." It seems to be a happy memory which the two shared.

This is surprising. Alfred Mordecai, although he was brought up in an observant Jewish home, was an agnostic who would not permit his sons to be circumcised. He resisted his wife's attempts to bring him closer to her faith as firmly as he deplored his sister's conversion to Christianity. Sara Mordecai, a niece of Rebecca's, upheld the religion and traditions of her ancestors. She brought up her children as Jews and in 1867 when her son Alfred Jr. married a non-Jew, she refused to attend the wedding. You would think that at least one of these two would find grounds to object to Christmas yet it seems to be a moment they enjoyed together.

To have taken pleasure in a visit from St. Nick in the 1840's when their children were small, neither Alfred nor Sara could have thought of it as part and parcel of a religious observance. But as Protestant denominations warmed to the holiday, its Christian content would become inescapable, and American Jews in the latter part of the 19th century would do some reinvention of their own with Hanukkah.

The Doctrine of Discovery, Indian Removal and the Gratz Family

2010-12-10T10:01:00.000-08:00

(I recently wrote a post, "The Indian Removal Act, Evangelicals & Rebecca Gratz," about Rebecca's opposition to the government's forced removal of Native Americans from their lands east of the Mississippi.)

It must have seemed quite a caper in 1773, in the waning days of British rule of the colonies. A group of investors, chafing under the British policy forbidding them to buy land from Native Americans west of the Alleghenies, had found a possible way around. Somehow one of their number, William Murray, had come into possession of a doctored document: the original permitted land purchases by individuals without the need of prior royal approval in India; with the removal of all references to moguls and any other words limiting it to the British possession in Asia and the retention of words like "Indians," the "revised" document might seem to an unwary official west of the mountains to give permission for private investors to purchase land from Native Americans.

The investors, mostly Pennsylvanians who included Rebecca's father Michael Gratz and her grandfather Joseph Simon, formed the Illinois Company and sent Murray west. He waved the document in front of the British commander of the region and closed a deal with Native Americans for a stupendous 43,000 square miles of land in Illinois. Now all that was needed was for the claim to be recognized by the government.

The British government instead recognized the fraud and ruled the transaction illegal. The Illinois Company then turned to the Royal Governor of Virginia, a colony which had land claims in Illinois. To encourage his interest, they created the Wabash Company and bought more lands in the region; its investors were mostly Marylanders -- and the Governor of Virginia.

Confirmation of the claims seemed imminent when in 1775 the American rebellion began in earnest and the Governor fled.

For the next 45 years the two companies would press their land claims with whatever government was in power, and all to no avail, sometimes for reasons of national interest, sometimes for reasons of partisan politics. (The colonist investors had morphed into big Federalists whom the Jeffersonian Republican Democrats saw no reason to please.)

Finally in 1817-1818, the heirs to the original investors decided on one last attempt to secure the land through the courts. Rebecca's brother Benjamin Gratz was sent West to lay the legal groundwork necessary to bring a case. Anticipation ran high among the investing families, as we see from Rebecca's letter to Ben in the West:

"The Illinois & Wabash claim, of which I have all my life heard so much, seemed like a romance. I never expected to see anything but maps & pamphlets of the subject, or that it would cost us your society, for so long a time. but since it has proceeded so far, I catch a little of the mania and frame wishes for its success at any rate hope you will not permit it to engage years of toil on an uncertain event & that after satisfying your curiosity with every thing worth visiting, you will bend your course homeward."

Her words with some minor changes could have come from Dickens' 1851 Bleak House, his novel about a lawsuit which went on for generations.

In 1823, the Illinois and Wabash Companies' case, Johnson v. M'Intosh, came before the Supreme Court. The Gratz's and the other second- and third-generation investors lost, but Native Americans lost much more. John Marshall, the first and great Chief Justice, made a mistake. As part of his ruling, he invoked the "Doctrine of Discovery," which went back to the earliest explorations of America. The doctrine awarded sovereignty to the (white European) discoverers; the discovered lost legal title to their lands.

Marshall, who did have his reasons for invoking the doctrine at this point, realized too late that it could lead to the wholesale removal of Native Americans. He tried to alter what he had done in a later opinion, but the times were against him. Cotton was the greatest wealth-producer in the country, Southerners wanted more land to grow it and the only way open to that land, as they saw it, was to get rid of the Native Americans who held it. Jacksonian Democrats supported them, and as the Supreme Court took on Jackson appointees, Marshall lost control. The new Justices liked his "Doctrine of Discovery" ruling and used it as precedent. Marshall was all too aware of what he had done and regretted his error. Fortunately, he did not live to see the high courts of Canada and Australia use his Johnson v. M'Intosh opinion to disallow their own indigenous peoples' land rights.

Rebecca Gratz probably had no knowledge that her family was implicated in any way in the removal of Native Americans. In a quote reproduced in the earlier post on this subject, she shoulders her share of the blame for the catastrophe, but I think she did that as an American citizen, not as an interested party in a law suit.

(To me a blog post is not a journal article or a book chapter; it can serve to introduce readers to a topic and lead them to more detailed information elsewhere. I have pared down this story to its essentials. If you want to read a full account, including Marshall's reasons for invoking the discovery doctrine, I suggest Lindsay G. Robertson's Conquest by Law: How the Discovery of America Dispossessed Indigenous Peoples of Their Lands, on Google Books. Rebecca's letter is in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Phillipson, also on Google Books.)

Women's Sabbath

2010-12-07T00:01:00.000-08:00

It is Hanukkah again and I still have found no mention of the holiday in the Gratz correspondence. So this may be a good time to talk about the Sabbath which I have been thinking about since a young woman who was researching Rebecca Gratz approached me for information: her professor, she said, questioned whether Jewish women in America, circa 1800, attended synagogue each week. I replied that they did, but the clearest evidence I found was from 1825 when Rebecca, reporting on the dedication of her synagogue's new building, writes that she attended on Friday evenings and Saturdays. After that, there are quite a few mentions of visits made after services (See "Rebecca Gratz's First Bar Mitzvah Party?"as an example.) But there are no straightforward statements about synagogue attendance from her youth, that is, circa 1800. Although evidence may be gleaned from the letters, it is usually in passing remarks: the Sabbath traditions were so much part of the fabric of family life there was never a need to discuss them.

One point at which there is a little more about Sabbath synagogue attendance is when Rachel was away from home. The youngest Gratz sister seems to have been a bit of a slacker in her youth in the area of religious observance. For instance, when 17-year-old Rachel went to New York in 1800 to visit their non-Jewish friends, the Fenno's, her older sister Sarah wrote to her: "Have you been to synagogue -- you know my Rachel your attention on that score will be pleasing to our inestimable Parents." And also during this stay, in a letter to Rebecca, Maria Fenno offered reassurance to the Gratz family that "Rachel has gone to synagogue." I think it is a fair conclusion that her parents expected her to attend as usual although they were worried that she would not.

The strongest evidence for the Gratz women's customary attendance at services on the Sabbath is a poignant remark of Rebecca's. Following her mother's death in September 1808, she first went to synagogue in November for the naming of Rachel's baby daughter. All her grief returned, as raw as ever, when she saw "the vacant seat which our Parent used to occupy there." She knew where her mother had always sat in the women's section because Rebecca had attended services with her on a regular basis.

The correspondence doesn't tell us about how the family spent their Sabbath, but it makes clear that one observance was strictly followed: many, many letters end with a mention that it is nearly the Sabbath and so the writer must lay down her pen, writing being forbidden after sundown on Friday. Usually in the rush to finish, there is little else said, but in one of her letters to Maria Fenno in 1802, 21-year-old Rebecca says she must stop writing because "our dear old day shall not be forsaken." The artless affection for the Sabbath in her choice of words tells us that the "dear old day" was a time she cherished each week.

(The letters concerning Rachel's trip to New York are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society. The 1808 letter is in the Gratz Collection, American Jewish Historical Society and the one from 1802 is in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, Library of Congress. The 1825 letter is reproduced in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Phillipson.)

Alfred Mordecai's Civil Wars

2010-11-30T00:01:00.000-08:00

[As promised in a previous post, "Rebecca Gratz and the Civil War," here is the first of the profiles of Gratz relatives' war experiences.]

Alfred Mordecai, (1804-1887) was a North Carolinian. His father ran a girls' boarding school in Warrenton, NC, which was considered one of the best in the South. Alfred, the only boy who attended the Mordecai School, received special tutoring and was admitted to West Point (no doubt quite a change) when he was fifteen. He graduated first in his class of 1823, and after two years as an assistant professor at the Academy and a stint building forts in Virginia, he became the assistant to Gen. Alexander Macomb in the War Office's Engineering Department in Washington.

In 1835 he was appointed to head the Frankford Arsenal in Philadelphia. Mordecai had met Sara Hays, Rebecca Gratz's niece, a few times during his Washington days and renewed the acquaintance. His father, a scholar of religion as well as a schoolmaster, had recently visited Philadelphia where he had met Rebecca; the Gratz's were ready to welcome his son. In June 1836 Alfred and Sara were married.

The marriage was not without its tensions. Mordecai, though not a slaveholder, upheld the institution and states' rights; his wife held northern (although not Abolitionist) views on slavery and the importance of the Union. While she was an observant Jew and tried to interest her husband in religion, he remained a firm agnostic despite his upbringing in an observant family. Still, in 1855 when his brother was about to marry, Alfred said he hoped the couple would be as happy as he and Sara were.

After his marriage Mordecai continued to rise in the army as an expert in ordnance, receiving assignments in recognition of his knowledge -- an inspection tour of European munitions factories and a trip to the Crimea to observe the war there. He and his family lived in Washington during most of this period, moving to Watervliet NY when Mordecai was posted to the Arsenal there in 1857.

As the Civil War approached, Major Mordecai faced an almost unbearable choice. He was a southerner by birth and would have lived there if his career had permitted it. He was also the pride of his large extended family -- a symbol of Jewish patriotism and success. Now they expected him to become one of their military heroes in the struggle against the North. But Mordecai had competing loyalties which his Southern relatives discounted. First, there was the United States Army to which he had devoted his life. Then there was his son, Alfred, Jr., at West Point as the War began, who, without any divided allegiances, would be fighting for the Union. Finally, there were Sara and his daughters, Northerners who would be forced to live in the Confederacy if he went with the South.

Both the Governor of North Carolina and Jefferson Davis, an old friend, offered Mordecai commissions as the War began. He turned them down and requested to be transferred to somewhere far away from the War -- in the West, perhaps. His request was denied, and he resigned from the United States Army; the family arrived in Philadelphia at the end of May 1861.

Mordecai's principled stand had immediate financial repercussions: he had no other income than his salary; in September 1861 his daughters opened a school on Delancey Place in Philadelphia by which they hoped to support their family. Rebecca Gratz reported at the time that Major Mordecai was "very broken-spirited" despite "the girls' noble efforts to cheer their parents."

A year later, another friend Elizabeth Blair Lee, visiting from Washington, looked in on the family and found the Major "a premature old, old man....he hangs about doing nothing not even reading and [his daughters] are working in their school for bread...." Rebecca, an ardent Unionist, was also critical: the major's "associates," she found, were those "among the disaffected [Southern sympathizers]...so I fear whatever sentiments he might have entertained in the beginning -- they are now so far implicated on the wrong side that he will find it difficult to recede -- poor Sara is victimized being the only loyal member of the household -- the subject nearest all our hearts is never discussed in their household."

The atmosphere in the Mordecai home may have been an emotional war zone, but somehow the family pulled through. Mordecai found a job teaching mathematics, then worked for a company owned by the Pennsylvania Railroad. At the end of the war, he was employed by the Imperial Mexican Railroad, which allowed him to get away from the scene of his humiliation. Mordecai liked Mexico and the many ex-Confederates who worked with him. Together they dreamed of setting up a slave state, and Alfred considered bringing his family to live there. These plans collapsed with the defeat of Maximillian, and Mordecai returned to Philadelphia and to the job he had left.

In post-war Philadelphia, Unionists and those who had been pro-South (a minority which included members of eminent local families) somehow patched up their differences. Alfred Mordecai, criticized by both sides for his decision to stay out of combat, was accepted. In 1877, when the Gratz family was concerned that the press had erroneously characterized Rebecca's relationship with Washington Irving as a romance, it was Mordecai who was delegated to write the first article about Rebecca by a family member.

In 1886, Alfred and Sara Mordecai celebrated their golden anniversary, a milestone rarely achieved in the nineteenth century. The family sent out hundreds of invitations, but only one member of Alfred Mordecai's southern family attended. His relatives had always believed that it was Sara who had prevented him from taking his place among the military leaders of the Confederacy.

(I have gleaned the information about Mordecai's life from Emily Bingham's Mordecai: An Early American Family. The quotes from Rebecca are in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by David Phillipson, accessible on Google Books. Elizabeth Blair Lee's quote is from Wartime Washington: the Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee, edited by Virginia Jeans Laas, also accessible on Google Books. Alfred Mordecai's article appeared in Philadelphia's Jewish Record.)

My History with American History

2010-11-17T05:32:00.000-08:00

Last week, the publicity attending the Rosenbach Museum & Library's acquisition of a gorgeous Thomas Sully portrait of Rebecca Gratz brought a number of people to this blog for the first time. One of them commented: "I found [your site] incredibly interesting, and I can't figure out why, because normally that period of American History is of limited interest to me."

His words took me back to a moment in my childhood when sitting at my desk in the 5th-grade, I gazed in dismay at the next section in our history book, "The Coming of the Iron Horse." I had liked American history to that point: the age of exploration, the colonies and the Revolutionary War, even the Constitution and the first years of the republic. There were stories, descriptions of the colonists' struggles and heroic Founding Fathers. But technology was not my cup of tea, and the account of America's antebellum period was full of it. The political events were even worse, as each came freighted with a name which included at least one long latinate word not in my vocabulary: the Missouri Compromise, the Tariff of Abominations, the Nullification Crisis. And all these things were described in a bright bland "Pageant of America" style.

I took American History again in the 8th and 11th grades, but to no better effect. I liked history

and continued to read it for pleasure -- English, French, Russian, medieval, classical -- but never American.

Passing quickly over college, graduate school, career and family -- by the 1990's I had found my interests in history to be focussed on women and everyday life and was ready to try a work of American history with these themes. A Midwife's Tale, by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, swept me (and practically everyone else who read it) into the world of rural Maine at the beginning of the 19th century. Ulrich had teased out (through painstaking research) a picture of the lives of the women in the area through the brief entries in the local midwife's records.

My old scholarly leanings reawakened, I decided for fun to research Rebecca Gratz, a figure I had first encountered at the Rosenbach. As a docent I knew her story and the legends which surrounded her. I wished to determine the truth of these assertions, and this goal was feasible because Rebecca, her family and friends had left more than 2000 documents which might hold the answers. I've learned a great deal about Rebecca, but reading her letters also opened up her world to me: antebellum America with its moral ambiguities, religious ferment, new technologies and political stalemates seemed not so different from the United States of the 21st century, and with Rebecca at the center, it was possible to grasp how these issues affected individual lives. Researching Rebecca's life and times has been rewarding for me, and I hope I am sharing some of that experience with those who read the blog.

I will return to Rebecca after Thanksgiving. In the meantime, I wish you a happy holiday.

(Steven Riddle's complete comments about the blog, quoted in part in the first paragraph above,

can be read on his site, "A Momentary Taste of Being.")

The Rosenbach Acquires Sully Portrait of Rebecca Gratz

2010-11-08T16:00:00.000-08:00

A little more than a year ago, I was wishing that I could see a color reproduction of Sully's first portrait of Rebecca. The painting was in private hands and had not been exhibited since the 1920's. Starting on November 9, 2010, you can view the original portrait at the Rosenbach Museum & Library which just acquired it (along with a portrait of Rebecca's brother Joseph, by George Peter Alexander Healy) from a Gratz family descendant.

Rereading what I wrote last year about the painting (based on a black-and-white reproduction), I feel that I got it right as far as I went. Now, having seen the portrait, which has an impact much beyond that of the small color reproduction above, I am prepared to go further.

In 1820, Rebecca Gratz at thirty-nine was an "old maid." We know exactly what people thought of unmarried middle-aged women from a poem Rebecca's lost love, Samuel Ewing, wrote in his youth (long before Rebecca would end up as one). In it, he describes a withered, embittered woman, filled with envy, who still practices in front of a mirror accepting the proposal which will never come. Single women were failed women who could not get a man, their empty lives filled with longing.

It was almost impossible for an unmarried woman to escape the stereotype of this slightly ridiculous and pitiful figure, but something close to miraculous happened to Rebecca at this juncture in her life: at the end of 1819 Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe was published and within a few years the story was circulating that Rebecca Gratz was the inspiration for the character of the beautiful Jewish girl Rebecca who was a universal favorite among readers.

In 1830, when Rebecca's family wanted to have her portrait painted, it almost surely was because they wished to preserve an image of the woman thought to be the original for Rebecca in Ivanhoe. Rebecca Gratz agreed to have the painting done, but it is clear she is not sitting as the inspiration for her fictional namesake. If she were, there would have been a reference to the novel -- a volume of Ivanhoe in her hand, perhaps a misty castle or a Gothic window in the background to recall the medieval setting of the novel or some "oriental" style of clothing to connote the eastern origins of her people. (At this time, anywhere east of Italy was considered "oriental.")

No, Rebecca appears as a beautiful woman, filled with vitality and dressed in the height of fashion (an anti-old-maid). Although she never chased after her identification with Rebecca in Ivanhoe, she was probably grateful for it because it caused people to remember and circulate her story. True, she was unmarried, but not because she was a failure who could not get a man: as a young woman, she had turned down the proposal of the man she loved because he was Christian. Her renunciation was seen by both her Jewish and Christian contemporaries as an act of integrity and an admirable example of filial piety. Rebecca Gratz was not simply the raw clay from whom Scott shaped his idealized heroine, she was a heroine herself, and what we see in the portrait is a woman who has overcome suffering, found fulfillment and is very much the hero of her own life.

A few years after the portrait was painted, Rebecca wrote about her niece Sarah Moses, whom she was raising (and who would eventually inherit the painting). Touched by the girl's optimism about the life awaiting her, Rebecca believed that "I...with the memory of many sorrows and disappointments may still encourage her thus far, that if she misses the favorite path to happiness [marriage] she may find another leading to content." Rebecca's life had proved to be anything but bleak and lonely and could be a positive model for other single women.

I have a lively awareness that Rebecca associates marriage with happiness and the alternative of good works with contentment, not quite the same thing. It indicates something of what it cost her to give up Samuel Ewing and suggests a reason why she did not identify with Rebecca in Ivanhoe: the fictional character suffers with surprising serenity through Ivanhoe's marriage to Rowena; Rebecca knew what it felt like to have that kind of experience -- serenity came only after a long struggle.

The newly acquired portraits of Rebecca and Joseph join a number of Gratz family portraits at the Rosenbach, including those of her father Michael Gratz, her brother Benjamin and another portrait of Rebecca, all by Thomas Sully; portraits of her sister and brother-in -law Rachel Gratz and Solomon Moses, by Gilbert Stuart; her sister-in-law Maria Cecil Gist, by Matthew Jouett; a copy of the Sully portrait of her father, by Jane Sully Darley; and a copy of a Stuart portrait of her mother, also by Jane Sully Darley. Most, but not all, are on view. If you have questions about the paintings or about museum hours and admission, use the link above to contact the Rosenbach.

(A letter from a friend asking Rebecca if she is in fact the original of the character in Ivanhoe is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society. Ewing's poem "An Old Maid" is from The Philadelphia Souvenir, edited by John Elihu Hall (1826) and is accessible on Google Books. The letter in which Rebecca writes about her niece Sarah is from Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson, and also on Google Books.)

Girls At Franklin College

2010-11-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

In "Rebecca Gratz: NOT the First Female College Student," I reported that although Richea Gratz, Rebecca's older sister, attended Franklin College in 1788, she went to a section of the college which was a high school, not an institution of higher learning. Although we cannot confer the honor of the first American Jewish female college student on either Richea or Rebecca, the story has revealed a moment in early American history when girls were allowed to follow, along side boys, an academic curriculum.

After the Revolution, Americans (that is, white men) found themselves no longer subjects of a king but citizens of a republic which required more political participation of them. Education for good citizenship became a cause for many of the founding fathers. In Pennsylvania, Benjamin Rush was particularly interested; he founded Dickinson College, in Carlisle, PA, for the youth of the western part of the state and Franklin College, in Lancaster, to help inculcate republican values in the large German-speaking population in the area and to encourage their participation in the great American experiment.

Rush also gave thought to the best kind of education for American women, and in 1787 told an audience at the first female academic high school in Philadelphia:

"The equal share that every citizen has in liberty, and the possible share he may have in the government of our country, make it necessary that our ladies should be qualified to a certain degree by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government....In particular it is incumbent upon us to make ornamental accomplishments yield to principles and knowledge in the education of our women....let the ladies of a country be educated properly and they will...form its manner and character."

Rush's ideas of "republican mothers" and female "makers of manners" gave women a role to play in building the new nation and seems to have fostered the notion of a more serious education for women, at least among some of the upper-class families in and around Philadelphia. Less than a year after Rush spoke, girls' names pop up on the roll of the new Franklin College, and we can speculate that his words played a part in this development, both because he had influence with the College and because, as a Founding Father, he had influence with the well-to-do families of the area who at other times were socially very conservative when it came to their daughters.

The new college was no doubt eager to fill as many places as it could in its first years, but many similar institutions had faced the same situation and didn't solve it by admitting girls. I think Franklin's doors were open to young women at this moment because of the double influence of Rush and Americans' consciousness that their republican experiment might require new attitudes about and expectations for women.

Richea Gratz, Margaret Coleman, Elizabeth Grubb and others lost to history attended school along with young men. It would be interesting to know which courses were open to them. Even Benjamin Rush, who championed their education in history, arithmetic, geography and composition, did not suggest they should take courses in Classics and higher mathematics which their male classmates were studying.

The Franklin College records for this period are incomplete, but the school soon returned to single-sex education. We have to assume that male applications were given preference over female ones, and girls were soon squeezed out. But in generation after generation, there were always some American women attempting to broaden and deepen the education of their sex. In the 1830's Sara Moses, Rebecca's niece, who was studying at the socially prestigious but by no means progressive French Academy in Philadelphia, learned conversational French and music, just as 18th-century girls did. But Sara also studied "French composition and criticism and Chemistry." Accomplishments were slowly giving way to knowledge.

Rebecca Gratz: NOT the First American Female College Student

2010-10-26T00:01:00.000-07:00

Of all the "Tall Tales about Rebecca," this is one of the most annoying. Unlike the deathbed scene between Rebecca and Matilda Hoffman which was the product of faulty memory, the college girl story is based on enthusiasm run amok and a disregard for easily accessible facts.

Sadly, it starts with a primary document from the era: the roll of Franklin College, Lancaster, PA, January to April, 1788. On it is very clearly written the name of Richea Gratz, Rebecca's older sister, who was at this time fourteen years old. Someone, in the first half of the twentieth century, saw this and read it as "Rebecca Gratz." Perhaps since "Richea" had virtually died out as an American girl's name, the reader thought it was a misspelling of Rebecca or a form of "Rivka," the Hebrew version of Rebecca. In any case, no one seems to have checked the Gratz family records to see if there was possibly another daughter with this name nor even taken cognizance of Rebecca's birth date: she was seven years old in 1788.

In any case, the Rebecca story was publicized and struck a chord with Jewish women who were heading off to coeducational colleges and universities. Ironically, in the scholarly literature, Richea had already been identified as the Gratz sister at Franklin -- but the truth was the story of the better-known Rebecca as the first female college student was too good to go away, and the competing versions co-existed.

Then someone noted that there were at least two other girls on the roll with Richea who could also claim the honor of first college student, so both Richea and Rebecca became the "first Jewish female college student."

But there is more. Although in its articles of incorporation, Franklin College was authorized to grant degrees, it was in its first years divided into two sections. One took students advanced enough to do college work, but the other, which Richea attended, functioned as a high school rather than a college.

So stop telling this story about Rebecca or Richea. Neither should get a "first" for going to a high school that happened to be called a college. I know it is very powerful story for women but we have gotten past the "coed" stage and now comprise the majority of college students in the United States. Franklin & Marshall College, which superseded Franklin College, has every right to be proud that the school was admitting girls in 1788, but it needs to be clearer on what exactly Franklin College was at the time.

In truth, the admission of females to a male secondary school in 1788 is astounding, and the import of this moment in history has been lost in the bogus Rebecca Gratz story. Now that we have dispensed with that myth, it's time to ask, "How did those girls get into Franklin College and why did their parents let them go to a boys' school?"

For answers, see "Girls at Franklin College."

(You can see a reproduction of the page of the Franklin College roll which contains the name "Richea Gratz" on page 14 of Franklin & Marshall College, by David Schuyler and Jane A. Bee. It is on Google Books. History of Franklin & Marshall College, by Joseph Henry Dubbs, gives an account of the college's early years. It is also on Google Books.)

Rebecca & the Proselytizers

2010-10-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

In the previous blog,"The Indian Removal Act, Evangelicals and Rebecca Gratz," I reported on some of the positive effects -- influences on the women's rights and anti-slavery movements, for instance -- of the the Second Great Awakening of the 19th century. The Evangelicals also founded institutions of higher learning, notably Oberlin College in Ohio, which was the first to admit women and African-Americans. That said, many Evangelicals deeply offended Jews with their aggressive efforts at conversion. Rebecca Gratz sometimes found herself a target of the proselytizers since she was celebrated as the inspiration for the character of Rebecca in Scott's tremendously popular novel Ivanhoe. In her correspondence she records two of these approaches; neither came from her Christian friends and associates of long standing who seem to have respected her faith.

In 1834, Rebecca reported to her sister-in-law Maria in Kentucky:

"I received a note from one of my neighbours a few days ago, requesting the loan of my bible, as she found according to hers the time was near at hand when the Jews would be gathered to their own land [millennialism, the belief in the coming Apocalypse, was one thread among many in the Second Great Awakening] --on returning it she expressed in another note her joy at finding my bible the same she used. [The King James Bible was the English-language version readily available in the United States.] She begged me not to let the light that was in me be darkness -- but daily to examine myself -- and have regard to my soul -- by studying the scriptures etc. -- and she is so earnest that I cannot help being obliged to her --thank God I have the law and the prophets and am willing to hear them."

Rebecca had acute insight into the intentions behind words and actions, and when they were good-hearted, she was patient with and forgiving of their consequences. She seems to have thought that this woman had had the essential Evangelical experience of spiritual rebirth and she wanted others to experience it as well. Rebecca honored her sincerity, but she also sensed another motivation mixed in: she thought the woman "should try to canonize herself by my conversion." The rebirth experience was becoming less important to the proselytizers than just getting a convert.

When she received an anonymous letter and pamphlet in 1842 from a women's group in Boston dedicated to the conversion of the Jews, Rebecca was not so charitable. The writer detailed a visit she had made to a synagogue in Nice, France, and ridiculed the Jewish form of worship. Rebecca was insulted by the ignorance and presumptuousness represented and thought it in "very bad taste" to be so addressed. Her fame had again made her a target for strangers.

But Rebecca was most irate at what befell her friends Jacob and Hannah Florance in 1845. The couple were bringing up an orphaned niece Sarah Marx with their own children, and in the summer of 1844 had taken the whole family on vacation to Schooley's Mountain, a fashionable watering place in northern New Jersey. There they had made the acquaintance of another Philadelphia family, the Hockton's. Capt. Hockton, the son of the family, proposed to Sarah, but the Florance's had asked his forbearance since she was only 17 and still at school. Sarah went back to school in the fall, but continued to see Hockton secretly, and the following June the two eloped.

Elopement seems romantic today, but at the time it was a scandal and extremely painful for the families involved. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the situation, parents felt terribly betrayed by their children and vulnerable to the gossip and criticism of the community. So, when Mrs. Florance got a letter from Sarah stating that she had married, the distraught woman went to the young man's mother, thinking that they could commiserate with each other. But Mrs. Hockton announced that she knew all about the secret romance, "that she had prayed in her closet that this might be the means of converting all the family to Christianity." Mrs. Florance could only reply that the Florances's faith was as fixed as Hockton's.

Rebecca was outraged. This had nothing to do with a spiritual rebirth central to Evangelicalism.

"Poor Sarah will soon be cited as a Christian convert -- probably thinks as little about religion" as her new husband's family. Rebecca knew it would be a social conversion, not a religious one, and she was infuriated at the arrogance which would carelessly break family ties. "Alas, how little the spirit of religion enters into [those] who dare trample on the rights -- the domestic peace of [their] neighbors -- steal a child -- and presume to justify the act by the profane prayer."

Here was the movement at its worst: all self-righteousness and sanctimonious justifications. In fact, Evangelicals' organized efforts to convert Jews were singularly unfruitful. Social forces rather than spiritual needs were more likely to effect the change where it took place.

Rebecca's Hebrew Sunday School Society is sometimes characterized as a defense against the Evangelical fervor, and this concern probably played a part in its creation and continued support by the Philadelphia Jewish community. Rebecca, in her correspondence, never mentions its mission as a shield against the Evangelical onslaught. For her, religious education for children was closer to being an absolute good than a tactic necessary in a particular situation.

(The story about her neighbor's attempt at conversion is from Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson. The other two stories are from letters in the Miriam Moses Cohen Collection, Southern History Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

The Indian Removal Act, Evangelicals and Rebecca Gratz

2010-10-12T00:01:00.000-07:00

My discussion of 19th-century evangelicalism began, oddly enough, with the post entitled "Rebecca Gratz and Baseball," in which I asserted that there were issues on which Rebecca and the Evangelicals, not natural allies, did see eye to eye. One such issue was the removal of Native Americans from their homes.

The Indian Removal Act of 1830 called for the exile of all Native Americans living east of the Mississippi to Oklahoma, opening up their ancestral lands to settlement by whites. Although it was passed (greed usually wins), it faced strong opposition in Congress and in the country. The leaders of this movement were Jeremiah Evarts, a missionary, and Theodore Frelinghuysen, a Senator from New Jersey. Both men were Evangelicals and their powerful speeches and writings brought many into agreement with their position. And although Evarts and Frelinghuysen would cite the plan as bad political policy, their most forceful argument was that this betrayal reached the level of a national sin.

The first dire consequences of the Act were seen when Native Americans refused to leave and troops moved in to forcibly resettle them. The Seminoles in Florida were, because of their land's defensibility, able to resist more effectively than other tribes. In 1835, the government was still trying to move them out, setting off the Second Seminole War. In February 1836, shortly after Seminoles ambushed and massacred United States troops, Rebecca wrote of the conflict:

"This is a hateful war. The poor wretches who have done such mischief as to have sealed their own doom, may rise in judgment at the Great Day against this Nation for the wrongs and outrages committed upon them in their own wilderness and wigwams, the home in which God placed them. What plea can we make to Infinite Justice for invading them in their peaceful possession. That they were savage and we civilized; that they had lands which we wanted and could cultivate, and build cities? And because they would not give all, we hunt them like beasts of prey; and they are a fearful enemy to encounter, savage demons in their revenge."

Rebecca is being ironic when she states that the Native Americans "were savage and we civilized." Like the Evangelicals Rebecca saw the removal as a national sin and the government's savage actions as the root cause of all that followed. Notice that she is not condemning "them" for this disaster; she wonders what plea we can make to God, bearing her part in the national guilt.

Also note that Rebecca has made these statements in a PRIVATE LETTER, not in a public speech or in a publication. She had a horror of being in the public eye, which was reinforced by society's dictum that women's domain was private life.

Although Rebecca was central to the nineteenth-century innovations of women's charities and Jewish religious education, she pushed the envelope where it was most yielding. Women had traditionally given aid to the poor on an individual basis and acted as their children's first teachers in academics and religion -- her work was an extension of women's traditional roles beyond the home. Rebecca did not take on roles -- as public speaker for a political cause or a social reform, for instance -- which were new to women.

The opposition to the Indian Act marked the first time women took organized action to participate in a political debate. This was possible because the Evangelicals had given women greater roles in church endeavors than had been traditional in Christianity. For the first time women were forming benevolent and missionary societies within their congregations and developing networks around the country. Catharine Beecher, Harriet Beecher Stowe's sister, grasped the potential here for political action and anonymously started a petition campaign in support of Native Americans. About 1500 women signed petitions opposing the Indian Act and sent them to Congress. Beecher's methods would be used repeatedly as women became more fully involved in the anti-slavery movement and the many other reforms (including women's rights) which would spring up. Rebecca Gratz would privately support some of these causes in her letters, but did not publicly endorse any of these movements.

(A transcript of Rebecca's letter is in the Gratz Collection at the Rosenbach Museum & Library, Philadelphia.)

Rebecca Gratz & Baseball

2010-10-05T00:01:00.000-07:00

I have enjoyed linking Rebecca Gratz to such disparate subjects as the Barbary Pirates, Charles Dickens and even St. Nicholas. I never dreamed, however, there was a (somewhat more tenuous) connection with the national pastime until baseball historian John Thorn brought to my attention an article from the American Sunday School Magazine issue of January 1830:

"Early on a Sabbath [Sunday] afternoon during the summer, the matron of the [Philadelphia Orphan Asylum] was pained to find a company of eighteen men (rope-makers) at a game of ball, in an enclosure near the building, and in view of the children. Knowing the power of such an example, she went to them -- requested them to desist a moment, till they should hear what she had to say." In essence, she told them that although she was a humble sinner herself, she must point out that their play was against God's law of keeping the Sabbath and a bad example for the children. She then asked them to come into the asylum where the children sang hymns and recited scripture for their visitors. Her language, the article states, was so civil to the visitors and so simple and affectionate to the children that many of the men, no longer interested in renewing their game, went home and returned to the asylum for services on the following Sunday.

This is the American Sunday School Society version of what happened. Thorn thinks it more likely that the men picked up their equipment and took the ferry to Camden where they could play in peace. As to the game the men were playing, 1829 is part of baseball's prehistoric era, so we cannot be sure, but the fact that there were nine men on each team strongly suggests an early version of the sport. In the illustration of the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum around 1830 shown above, you can see a ball in the air over the playground -- many of the children would have been interested in watching the rope-makers' game.

The connection with Rebecca Gratz? In 1815 she had attended an early meeting of the Philadelphia Orphan Society, became a member and was soon the secretary and one of the 24 manageresses of the new orphan asylum, positions she would hold for the rest of her active life. Besides fulfilling her duties as secretary and as manageress -- which included the disposition of children when they were old enough to leave the asylum -- she devoted untold hours at the asylum nursing the sick during epidemics and standing in when the matron was ill or absent.

Beyond that connection is a more specific one: Rebecca Gratz repeatedly told those who asked her advice about running an orphanage that having a good matron was perhaps the most essential thing, and she was most appreciative of the matron, Mrs. Hall, who appears in the story above. And indeed Mrs. Hall seems to have handled the situation with grace where she could have easily antagonized the working-class men. But knowing Rebecca's concern for the emotions and intellectual development of children (see Happy Birthday, Hebrew School), I think that the description of Mrs. Hall's language as "simple and affectionate" is key. For Rebecca a matron who kept a clean and orderly home (as Mrs. Hall did) was not enough; she would also have had to care about and understand children to rise so high in Rebecca's regard.

The baseball story also reveals one of the preoccupations of the nineteenth century: Sabbatarianism, the movement to limit all activity on Sunday's to only godly things. For adults this meant no games, no dancing, no gambling, no buying and selling, no theatre or secular concerts, etc. Children were forbidden to play with toys or participate in games or indulge in any other boisterous play. On a national level, the Sabbatarians sought to outlaw mail deliveries, store hours and public transportation on Sundays (and ultimately succeeded).

Robert Ralston, a Philadelphia merchant, a major benefactor of the Orphan Asylum and the husband of its foundress Sarah Ralston, was a leader of the Sabbatarian movement in the United States. Under these circumstances Mrs. Hall, the matron, must have grasped the importance that her charges adhere to Sabbatarian ways. Hence, the rush to the baseball field to stop the play from distracting the children.

Sabbatarianism was one of many elements in what is called the Second Great Awakening, the Evangelical upsurge which began in the 1790's and would continue into the early 20th century.

In its relation to American Jews, Evangelicalism was at its most appalling, and it is no wonder that many of those who have written about Rebecca Gratz have sometimes depicted her as a champion of her people, defending them from the Evangelical dragon.

As always, history proves more complex than we would think. For one thing, not all Evangelicals were intent on converting Jews. Rebecca worked amicably for years with Sarah Ralston and other women (in both the Female Association and the Orphan Society) who were Evangelicals. She also was in agreement with them on some issues: most famously, on the need for religious education for children.

(You can read the full article from the January 1830 American Sunday School Magazine on Google Books. The woodcut is from John Thorn's copy of History of the Orphan Asylum, in Philadelphia, with an account of the fire in which twenty-three orphans were burned (1831), which he kindly allowed me to use. If your interest in baseball's "prehistoric era" has been piqued by this post, you will be delighted to know that Thorn's new book, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game, will be published in March 2011 by Simon & Schuster.)

Rebecca's Monotheism

2010-09-28T00:01:00.000-07:00

Alexander Pope's "The Universal Prayer," Rebecca Gratz's favorite poem, provided her with some views, which if not heterodox, were not exactly traditional in western religion.

The most important of these is enunciated in the very first stanza of Pope's poem:

Father of all! In every age,

In every clime adored,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

There is in Pope's universe not one God and many false gods; for him, every "god" represents the human attempt to understand the One.

Here is Rebecca, writing in 1834:

"The sublime, beneficent holy Spirit, to which all forms are but the outward costumes in which different nations chuse [sic] to dress it -- is still the same and all who lift their souls on high in Adoration -- may walk the earth in charity with one another...."

This sounds like Pope and makes clear how Rebecca's religious toleration, one of her most attractive qualities, is tied in her belief in the One behind the many.

In 1837 Rebecca found another writer who used a clothing metaphor to explain the variety of gods worshipped on earth (and much else). Here is an excerpt from Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (The Tailor Retailored):

"Church-clothes are...the Vestures, under which men have embodied and represented for themselves the Religious Principle....They are first spun and woven, I may say so, by that wonder of wonders, Society...."

Rebecca read Sartor Resartus and sent it on to her "book buddy," Maria Gratz, her sister-in-law in Kentucky. In following letters she asked Maria what she thought of it, but sadly, if they had a discussion through the mail, the letters have not survived. I remember reading Sartor Resartus in college and being amazed that what in many ways could be termed an early Existentialist work had been written in the 1830's. Just as surprising was that although his satirical jibes had not aged well, Carlyle's prose style was still exhilarating. I would love to know what Rebecca and Maria, two spiritual pilgrims (and by no means Existentialists), made of this extraordinary work.

The second of Pope's non-traditional opinions was that God could not be Lord of Earth alone in a universe so large:

Yet not to earth's contracted span

Thy goodness let me bound.

Or think Thee Lord alone of man,

When thousand worlds are round.

This idea got Giordano Bruno burned at the stake in 1600, but by the eighteenth century it was less a scandal and more of an interesting speculation which even the Roman Catholic Alexander Pope could take up in print. There is no evidence in her writings that Rebecca believed in multiple worlds, but based on what I know about her it is possible she would have found it an intellectually stimulating topic, but of not much use in determining the best way to live her life, the focus of religion for her.

Rebecca's Favorite Poem

2010-09-21T00:01:00.001-07:00

Much of Rebecca Gratz's girlhood education in literature must have been given over to the memorization of poetry. A niece remembered that she and her sisters played a game in which Aunt Becky quoted a few lines of poetry and everyone tried to guess the poem. The same niece said that Rebecca's favorite was Alexander Pope's "The Universal Prayer," and its place in her life is revealed in a letter from the late 1850's. Rebecca at Saratoga Springs had started to write down the poem for a woman she had met there, but found she was unsure of a line in the last verse. (At 76, she was certainly allowed her senior moment.) She wrote to her nephew in Philadelphia to have the poem copied out and sent immediately. Here is the poem Rebecca thought was important enough to get right:

The Universal Prayer

Alexander Pope

Father of all! In every age,

In every clime adored,

By saint, by savage, and by sage,

Jehovah, Jove, or Lord!

Thou Great First Cause, least understood

Who all my sense confined

To know but this, that Thou art good

And that myself am blind.

Yet gave me, in this dark estate,

To see the good from ill;

And, binding Nature fast in fate,

Left free the human will.

What conscience dictates to be done,

Or warns me not to do,

This teach me more than Hell to shun,

That more than Heaven pursue.

What blessings Thy free bounty gives

Let me not cast away;

For God is paid when man receives;

To enjoy is to obey.

Yet not to earth's contracted span

Thy goodness let me bound.

Or think Thee Lord alone of man,

When thousand worlds are round.

Let not this weak, unknowing hand

Presume Thy bolts to throw,

And teach damnation round the land

On each I judge Thy foe.

If I am right, Thy grace impart

Still in the right to stay;

If I am wrong, oh teach my heart

To find that better way!

Save me alike from foolish pride,

Or impious discontent,

At aught Thy wisdom has denied,

Or aught that goodness lent.

Teach me to feel another's woe,

To right the fault I see;

That mercy I to others show,

That mercy show to me.

Mean though I am, not wholely so,

Since quickened by Thy breath;

Oh, lead me wheresoe'er I go,

Through this day's life or death.

This day be bread and peace my lot:

all else beneath the sun

Thou know'st if best bestowed or not,

And let Thy will be done!

To Thee Whose temple is of space,--

Whose altar earth, sea, skies,--

One chorus let all beings raise!

All Nature's incense rise.

Alexander Pope (1688-1744), England's greatest poet of the eighteenth century, is not much read today. Although he has not fallen in scholarly esteem, his satires are too topical to be easily accessible to modern readers and his poetic style has gone out of fashion. The heroic couplets, for which Pope was famous, and the "common meter" of this poem are a little too obvious for most twentieth- and twenty-first-century tastes.

The poetry cannot be said to be short on substance, and Pope's outlook is echoed in Rebecca's writings. Like him, she believed in a loving but unknowable God who moved "in mysterious ways" (to quote another of her favorite poets William Cowper). She was very sensitive to the power of conscience, the importance of its guidance and the hell on earth which guilt could cause.

She also saw her spiritual bond with God not dependent on right theological beliefs so much as on the way she lived her life, with mercy, kindness and toleration.

"The Universal Prayer" was a very popular poem for two hundred years, and most people who liked it were happy to overlook some of its elements which are not traditional Christian or Jewish beliefs. Rebecca did more than that; she embraced at least one of his more unorthodox views.

To be continued in "Rebecca's Monotheism."

(The niece who remembered Rebecca's mastery of poetry was Sarah Hays Mordecai. She wrote "Recollections of My Aunt, Rebecca Gratz" in 1870; it was privately published in 1893 (31 pp).

Her letter from Saratoga is undated but internal evidence puts it at 1857. It is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society.)

The Festival of Tabernacles

2010-09-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

In early November 1837, Rebecca wrote to her sister-in-law Maria Gratz in Kentucky about the Festival of Tabernacles (in Hebrew, Sukkot), the Jewish holiday of thanksgiving for the harvest which takes place in September or October each year:

"I am glad you...kept the Tabernacle celebration, in scenes so naturally appropriate to the season. For my own part I was only once under the shelter of its roof [Rebecca was ill during the festival], and partook no further of the feast spread before me than a little bread and salt tho' I enjoyed the sight of goodly fruit and wine distributed in plenty and listened to a hymn of thanksgiving...we were permitted to meet at the sanctification of this festival & view the emblems of former rejoicing. The palm and branches of goodly trees, mentioned in scripture as taken by the youths and damsels as they went out after the ingathering of the blessings of the year, to dwell in booths and rejoice before the Lord, has always had a great charm in my imagination. I like the idea of cheerful gratitude and combining religious worship with heartfelt thankfulness in scenes where they had just reaped the benefits of their labor -- and praying that God would enable them to use his gifts for their good and the benefit of the poor -- this is making religion one of our daily duties -- a habit of our lives..."

Besides giving us Rebecca's meditation on Sukkot and the place of religion in her life, this passage reveals that her brother Ben and his family observed the holiday in Kentucky. In 1819, when Ben married Maria Cecil Gist, a non-Jew, the couple decided that each would keep his/her own religion although the children would be brought up Episcopalian. Nearly twenty years into their marriage, we find what seems to be a modern and ongoing arrangement in which the family observed the Jewish holidays as well as the Christian ones. Rebecca had been initially hesitant about Ben and Maria's decision, but in 1825, she was able to write to Ben: "I love your dear Maria, and admire the forbearance which leaves unmolested the religious opinions she knows are sacred in your estimation. May you both continue to worship according to the dictates of your conscience and your orisons be equally acceptable at the throne of Grace...."

(Both letters are from Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson.)

Yom Kippur, 1861

2010-09-07T00:01:00.000-07:00

On August 10, 1861, Cary Gratz, the son of Rebecca's brother Ben, was killed at the Battle of Wilson's Creek on the side of the Union. His stepbrother and cousin, Jo Shelby, the son of Ben's second wife Ann, fought for the Confederacy in the same battle. Rebecca had known both young men since boyhood. This is an extract from a letter of Rebecca's to Ann, who was not Jewish, dated September 13:

"How I wish by sharing I could lessen My poor brother's grief!

I sympathize with you, too My dear Ann, in the anxiety which is so harassing by the uncertain accounts the papers bring of the contending Armies -- we may pray for Jo's personal safety -- tho' we cannot for the success of his arms -- Faith in Him, who in justice & in Mercy rules over the destiny of all, must give us patience! Tomorrow will be a holy day with us -- Sabbath & day of Atonement, when memorials of the dead mingle with petitions for the living -- and we endeavour to purify ourselves by devotion, confession & repentance -- you will all be remembered by me, in the house of prayer --"

(For the full letter, see Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson.)

Did the Gratz Sisters Learn Hebrew?

2010-08-31T00:01:00.000-07:00

In 1790, nineteen-year-old Fanny Gratz, Rebecca's sister, wrote to her mother from New York that she hoped "you spent the afternoon agreeably at the _____ [sic] you know where I mean. I cannot get this bad pen to make a Hebrew stroke so excuse the blank."

This is the only reference in all the family letters I have read that indicates at least one of the Gratz sisters had some instruction in Hebrew in her youth. Fanny's knowledge probably has to do with the fact that she was Michael and Miriam Gratz's oldest surviving child; often fathers, uncles and grandfathers become impatient for a boy to teach. Oldest girls learn all sorts of things that their younger sisters miss -- how to bat, where to fish and perhaps in this case how to read and write Hebrew.

The Hebrew word which Fanny could not write with her bad pen was probably "mikvah," the bath house where Jewish married women traditionally take a ritual bath, which is also called a mikvah, after menstruation and childbirth and before they resume marital relations.

Rebecca Gratz did study Hebrew as an adult, but that is a story for another post.

(Fanny's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

The Rebecca Gratz Club

2010-08-24T00:01:00.000-07:00

(This post was revised on March 7, 2011, to reflect more and more accurate information which I recently discovered.)

I have received so many queries about the Rebecca Gratz Club that I feel I should write a post on the subject. The problem is that although there are records pertaining to it at Temple University in Philadelphia, the Club is on the very periphery of my research. I do not have time to delve into the primary documents of which I am so fond.

I have looked through some secondary sources, which often contradict each other, and this is as much as I can say. Most people agree that in 1904 a group of Jewish women in Philadelphia founded a boarding house for immigrant Jewish girls working on their own in the city. Besides housing the organization provided "naturalization" services like English lessons to help the tenants adjust to America. Its location may have been on North 6th St. It may not have been called the Rebecca Gratz Club from the start, but somewhere along the way that was the name given. (Some sources use the term "Rebecca Gratz House," and I am not sure if this is a mistake or an earlier version of the name.)

In the 1920's, the Club moved to 532 Spruce St. where the words "Rebecca Gratz Club," carved into the arch over the courtyard gateway, are still visible. As immigration was being stifled by new legal restrictions in the 1920's, the Club began to accept single Jewish women born in America who were in the labor force or going to school in Philadelphia. At this time, there were many women's boarding houses in the city, most run by religious groups, to provide secure housing and to support the religious identity of their tenants. In the 1950's the popularity of women-only residences was waning, and the Rebecca Gratz Club took on a new role, as a nonsectarian half-way house for girls and women who had been under hospital care for emotional problems. In the years to come the organization would modify its services to meet new needs, offering residential care for troubled girls who could not live with their families and outpatient care for the girls' families and to teenagers in the community.

In 1976, the Club opened a treatment unit for severely disturbed adolescent girls and in 1978 it introduced a program which developed "foster care homes for adolescents who wanted to remain with their baby....By living in homes of foster parents" the girls could finish high school and learn the parenting and life skills needed to be self-sufficient.

The Club moved to Wynnewood in the early 1980's. In 1987, it merged with another organization and became known as SERV/Greater Philadelphia. In 1990 SERV became the mental health division of Tabor Children's Services, a private non-profit organization to support children and families. All that remains of the Rebecca Gratz Club is the building on Spruce with its carved name above the gate; it was sold to a developer sometime ago and has been turned into condominium.

I will editorialize here by saying that the women who founded the Club must have been themselves inspired by Rebecca Gratz's contributions to the common good, especially by her work helping Jewish women. By naming their endeavor the Rebecca Gratz Club they were announcing that they were carrying on her legacy and also using her name as an inspiration to their tenants for what a Jewish woman could achieve in America.

I am sorry this post is so meager. If anyone has more information, please leave a comment.

(The new information I have added is from Invisible Philadelphia: Community Through Voluntary Organizations, edited by Jean Barth Toll and Mildred S. Gillam. The entry for the Rebecca Gratz Club, which deals mostly with its modern incarnation as a mental health facility, is by the Executive Director during the 1980's and 90's and is much more reliable than any other secondary source I have discovered.)

Rebecca and Matilda Hoffman

2010-08-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

If you use the words "Rebecca Gratz" and "Matilda Hoffman" to search the internet you will come up with more than 300 hits (on Google), most of which will assure you that Matilda died in Rebecca's arms. This is one of those Tall Tales about Rebecca. Here is the real story:

When Rebecca's best friend Maria Fenno married Josiah Ogden Hoffman of New York, she also became the stepmother of his children by his first marriage. Matilda, born in 1791 and therefore ten years younger than Rebecca and Maria, is the one who appears most often in their correspondence.

This is because Matilda's father decided in 1804 to send her to boarding school in Philadelphia and asked Rebecca to look after her while she was there. Rebecca, who already was acquainted with Matilda and her "gentle sensibility," enthusiastically accepted the responsibility. "You may be assured," she wrote Judge Hoffman, "every attention the most affectionate sister would pay shall be proffered her." She also suggested that Matilda stay at the Gratz's for a time before starting school to "give her an opportunity of becoming acquainted with my family as I wish her to look upon us as friends and our house as a home." (Rebecca's initial excitement at being able to help a young friend would blossom into a lifelong avocation in which she played "Aunt Becky" to the children of friends and relatives visiting in Philadelphia.)

During the school terms for the next sixteen months, Rebecca's letters to Maria are full of the clothes and shoes she has purchased for Matilda (with an accounting of the expenses), outings they've been on and weekends spent at the Gratz house. In the spring of 1806, Maria wrote that Rebecca must bring Matilda home because one of her favorites, Washington Irving, was just back from Europe. Irving had studied law in Judge Hoffman's law office from 1802 to 1804 and had been a frequent visitor at their house.

Irving became again a familiar presence in the Hoffman household, resuming his role as the "fun" older brother to the siblings. His new friendship with Rebecca and her family would grow through visits in Philadelphia and New York. In the late spring of 1808, he must have seen and heard a great deal of Rebecca when she came to New York to help Maria care for her sister Harriet Fenno Rodman who was dying of tuberculosis. Rebecca nursed Harriet for more than a month at the Hoffman house which Irving visited often.

In September 1808, after Rebecca had returned to Philadelphia, Miriam Graz, her mother, died after a four-day illness. No other event in Rebecca's life would ever cause her such pain. She took to her bed in the days after, and she let her charitable work slide. An officer of the Female Association wrote her in November encouraging her to return to her secretarial duties. In December her brother Hyman voiced his continuing concern "for [her] health and spirits" to Maria Fenno Hoffman.

By this same autumn of 1808, so terrible for Rebecca, it was generally acknowledged that Washington Irving had fallen in love with Matilda Hoffman. Judge Hoffman, who liked Irving and who thought that Matilda was mature enough to contemplate marriage, offered his consent -- if Irving would settle down to a job and provide financial security for his daughter. Irving applied himself to the law and planned a life with Matilda.

In February 1809 Matilda came down with a cold which quickly turned into tuberculosis. In the surviving letters from this period, no one in the Hoffman family asks Rebecca to come nor does she suggest it. Both Maria and the Gratz's must have been extremely anxious about Rebecca's physical and emotional fragility, and Rebecca may also have realized that she was unfit for nursing yet another terminally ill loved one, the third within a year.

So, as Washington Irving himself related, Matilda was gazing at him when she died. Rebecca's absence from her bedside, however, does not mean there was not an affectionate relationship between Matilda and her. The two, a decade apart in age, were not "best friends forever" as they are usually depicted; they were more like a nurturing young aunt and a loving niece. During Matilda's illness her older sister wrote to Rebecca, "She talks much of her dear Becky...[and] said she had been very happy in her dreams for you had been with her."

After Matilda's death Rebecca sent a message to Washington Irving through Maria, hoping that it would be some consolation to him, knowing "all [Matilda] felt of earth-born attachment was his."

It is easy to see how Rebecca's nieces and great-nieces, in piecing together their aunt's life from memory, could confuse her nursing of Harriet Fenno Rodman with Matilda's very similar illness of the following year. Consciously or unconsciously, they also may have preferred the version which involved Washington Irving's fiancee because it bound Rebecca and Irving together in a way that gave greater credence to the story that his description of her to Scott was the inspiration for the character of Rebecca in Ivanhoe.

(Rebecca's letter to Judge Hoffman is in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress. The letter from Matilda's sister Ann is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society, and Rebecca's to Maria is in the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society. The letter from the officer of the Female Association is among the papers of that organization in the special collections at the Haverford College Library.)

At the Piano

2010-08-10T00:01:00.000-07:00

In 1803, Rebecca wrote a friend, "At this late day we are learning music." Since the study of a musical instrument was usually part of a girl's ornamental education, it was indeed late for the three Gratz sisters, in their twenties, to be taking it up. Perhaps Miriam Gratz did not think that her daughters had the talent and interest to warrant the expense when they were younger. As young women, the sisters might have seemed more likely to apply themselves to their study and make up in serious efforts what they lacked in talent. Everyone seems to have been fairly realistic about the outcome: Rebecca thought that the music would be "at least amusement for ourselves."

She does not say what musical instrument they were studying in this letter, but within a few months the piano is mentioned. Why the piano? They could have taken lessons in the guitar, the harp or one of the other keyboard instruments then in use.

Their choice may have had to do with the fact that a local piano maker, John Isaac Hawkins, had produced a greatly improved upright piano in 1800. With a sound more expressive than other keyboard instruments and a size and shape which fit easily into a parlor, Hawkins' piano had both musical and practical attractions.

How did the lessons go? In April 1804 Rebecca wrote to Rachel who was visiting their sister Fanny in Baltimore:

"This morning unharmonious chords of my piano out of tune and a new

sonata have sent me so out of humour with music that if it 'be the food

of love,' I would rather starve than touch a morsel more today."

Attempting a sonata six months into your study of the piano would be hard work for anyone not overly talented. Perhaps Rebecca was trying to play one of Alexander Reinagle's "Philadelphia Sonatas" for the piano, published in the city in 1800. Reinagle, an English immigrant, had been a kind of unofficial composer for President Washington's administration. He also wrote an instruction book for keyboard instruments which the Gratz sisters may have used.

In any case, this is the last mention which Rebecca makes of playing the piano. Her sister Sarah has left no record of her musical endeavors at all. This does not mean that they stopped playing, just that their playing was not worthy of mention; it was indeed something to amuse themselves. Only Rachel proved a serious student: in 1807, for instance, Sarah writes that her younger sister "is quite well this morning and at the piano as usual."

(The first letter is from the Verplanck Collection at the New York Historical Society. The others are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society.)

Finding the Gothic in America

2010-08-03T00:01:00.000-07:00

In 1798-99, Jane Austen wrote her first novel, Northanger Abbey (published in 1817). The plot concerns a young woman, Catherine Moreland, an avid reader of gothic novels, who imposes the conventions of the genre on the family at a house she visits in the country. A spoof of the popular books of the era, the novel is an indication of just how absorbing the gothic was for young women.

Gothic novels were also popular with young women in the United States, who were entranced by the romantic landscapes of castles and ancient ruins, the supernatural, murder and a heroine in danger. But unlike English aficionados, Americans had none of the medieval architecture and ruins which seemed so necessary to set the scene.

In 1808 Eliza (Mary Elizabeth) Fenno, Rebecca's friend, visited a country house in New Jersey called Mount Pleasant. Built probably during the first half of the eighteenth century, the mansion was as close to a Gothic castle as anyone was going to get in America at that time. The building no longer exists but we know it through Washington Irving's Salmagundi stories about the estate he called "Cockloft Hall" and the eccentric family who lived there. He describes the "ancient edifice" as "being so patched and repaired that it has become as full of whims and oddities as its tenants....Whenever the wind blows, the old mansion makes a most perilous groaning, and every storm makes a day's work for the carpenter....A propensity to save everything that bears the stamp of family antiquity, has accumulated an abundance of trumpery and rubbish, with which the house is incumbered from the cellar to the garret...." Irving is writing for comic effect, but since his friend Gouverneur Kemble had recently inherited Mt. Pleasant, he and his friends spent much of their leisure time there and knew it well.

The house did seem to have had something gothic about it to Eliza Fenno, and it almost immediately stirred her imagination. She wrote to Rebecca: "Though there are no trap doors or winding passages and I firmly believe there never was blood shed within the walls, my imagination converted it into one of those castles I have read of." But, she continued, a "group of beaux arrived and dissipated the ghosts." Unlike Austen's seventeen-year-old Catherine Moreland, a rural minister's daughter, Eliza Fenno was a twenty-one-year-old New Yorker who was playing with the idea of the gothic.

Nevertheless, her remarks show the longing Americans would feel for the ancient and the supernatural, neither of which was easily summoned up in the new republic. Charles Brockden Brown, America's first novelist, had already developed the American gothic in Wieland, which dealt with murder and manipulation, and other popular novelists would continue the tradition in an American setting. Poe, who had lived in England for several years as a boy, was most at ease with the castles and other props of the English gothic, but perhaps the most successful of the attempts to naturalize the genre are the novels and stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne who found an authentic American gothic in the Puritan New England of the seventeenth century.

(Eliza's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society.)

The Fire at the Masonic Hall, 1819

2010-07-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

John Lewis Krimmel, a Philadelphia artist whose work has been previously reproduced on this blog (Sleigh Bells Ring), recorded a spectacular city disaster of 1819, the destruction by fire of the Masonic Hall.

Rebecca Gratz, whose house was on the same block of Chestnut Street (between 8th and 9th Sts.) as the Hall gives her own account of the blaze:

"The weather was so fine during the months of January and February that walking was more agreeable than dancing -- and the evening appointed for the last Cotillion party -- the Masonic Hall took fire and was entirely destroyed. We were in some peril but thank God were preserved and no other building was injured. The Girls [her nieces] were already dressed for the Ball -- indeed some ladies had already arrived in the room when the fire was discovered -- you may imagine what a night of consternation it was here. Those who watched the progress of the destroying element say it exhibited a most beautiful spectacle -- the most splendid part of it involved too much anxiety to be enjoyed by us, the falling of the cupola on which the safety of our house depended and we were told it would most probably crush our back buildings, but it happened otherwise (do not think I attribute it to chance) it fell in on its own roof and the lodge alone was consumed....Seeing pretty soon that we should escape, we set about making those comfortable to whose exertion we were indebted and had the house open all night to give refreshments to the firemen. Many a merry fellow whose loquacity was assisted by a dram made enquiries for you -- some of the Niagaras [a volunteer fire company] I suppose, or your old soldiers who thought to fare better by naming you as their acquaintance."

Unfortunately, it is impossible to tell if the Gratz house is one of those pictured in Krimmel's painting, but it must have been very close to have been threatened by the collapse of the cupola. It must also have had enough grounds around it so that the fire could threaten its outbuildings, without necessarily threatening the house itself.

Rebecca's account gives us a clear idea of the way in which she saw God at work in the world. Her remark that it was not by chance that their house survived indicates that she, like most other Americans of the time, thought that His providence was responsible for such fortunate outcomes. She also felt an immediate duty to those human agents of this providence, demonstrating her gratitude through hospitality to the firemen.

However, she is rather curt about the firefighters who have asked about Ben. Despite her description of "merry" fellows, she makes it clear that the men were drunk. They probably had become so due (at least in part) to the Gratz's hospitality, but the volunteer fire companies were already acquiring a reputation as social (drinking) clubs for post-adolescent men. Over the next three decades as the nation divided (nativists vs. immigrants, Protestants vs. Catholics, whites vs. blacks) fire companies became identified with different ethnicities, political parties and religions. Fueled by alcohol and idle talk the various companies were more like rival gangs than public servants and were often involved in the riots and other disorders which plagued cities during this period. By midcentury, the city fathers must have been breathing a sigh of relief as more complex and efficient firefighting equipment was invented. The new technology required the recruitment and training of professional firefighters and led to the eventual disbandment of the volunteer companies in the 1870's.

(Rebecca's letter is in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, accessible through Google Books. For more about volunteer fire companies, see Philadelphia: A 300-Year History, edited by Russell F. Weigley, also accessible through Google Books. You can see Krimmel's painting, Conflagration of the Masonic Hall, Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1819, at the Art Institute of Chicago.)

Tall Tales about Rebecca

2010-07-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

Several generations of Jewish women in Philadelphia have been brought up on stories about Rebecca Gratz. I know because I have spoken to audiences who could cue me if I faltered in my narration. However, some of these old, beloved stories are not quite true.

The inaccuracies survive because Rebecca is not a major historical figure -- scholars have not been swarming over the Gratz papers for decades to verify or debunk every anecdote about her. In the decades following her death, the first stories to be printed were from family and friends. The newspaper and magazine writers who popularized Rebecca during these years accepted the memories as true since they had no way to verify the facts. Some of them must have suspected though that people may simply misremember events long past and that relatives may have their own agendas.

In 1929 Letters of Rebecca Gratz was published. Covering her correspondence with her family in Kentucky between 1819 and 1866, it gave readers, for the first time, Rebecca in her own words. The book demonstrated that behind the romantic stories was a woman of substance. It also inspired in 1935 the most insubstantial of biographies, Rollin G. Osterweis's Rebecca Gratz: a study in charm.

Although Osterweis would go on to a long career as a professor of history and oratory at his alma mater Yale, his book on Rebecca was the work of an enthusiast, not a scholar. He made use of the correspondence found in Letters as well as some other material which had become available, but he did not have access to most of the family papers which were still in private hands. For the many years not covered by his sources, he fell back on the old family stories -- and to fill out the book he used his imagination to create scenes and dialog.

I think that most readers realized that it was unlikely that anyone was sitting there taking notes as Rebecca and Samuel Ewing had their final painful conversation. However, Osterweis did more than put words in the mouths of his subjects. Places and dates, which readers might be more likely to assume were based on primary documents, often turn out to be as bogus as the conversations.

Other enthusiasts have taken up the subject of Rebecca in articles and histories over the years. Their most common mistake is not understanding that her opinions were private ones expressed in personal letters. Their work often gives readers the impression that she was a public figure fighting against the many social ills of the time, up on the platform beside Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Angelina Grimke. This "activist" version of Rebecca might have also been an attempt to make her seem more like the twentieth century's idea of a heroine. Ironically, it was her determination to keep to her private life which contributed to the nineteenth-century's admiration for her.

In the 1970's some anecdotes about Rebecca's life appeared in Stephen Birmingham's The Grandees: America's Sephardic Elite. Birmingham differed from other Rebecca enthusiasts in that his main interest was not in her, but in the great story he could craft around her, even if he had to fabricate much of it himself. For instance, he used an erroneous Spanish derivation for "Gratz" to shoehorn her Ashkenazic (northern European Jewish) family into a book about American Sephardim (Jews from the Mediterranean area). The problem with Birmingham is that his stories are so good as stories, people still cannot resist repeating them despite the disservice they do to Rebecca Gratz. His baroque embroideries deserve and will get a post of their own.

And then there are the simple mistakes, which, once made, are picked up and used repeatedly until everyone takes for granted they are true. For instance, somewhere along the way someone got the idea that Samuel Ewing was two years younger than Rebecca. If this were so, he would have graduated from the University of Pennsylvania at the age of nine. Since there is no mention of his being a child prodigy and since the Ewing genealogies and a family history indicate Ewing was born in 1776, it seems that he was five years older than Rebecca, in those days the appropriate age difference for courtship. A recent mistake was in Cokie Roberts' Ladies of Liberty in which Samuel Ewing was referred to throughout as Samuel Erving.

In the early 1990's a large cache of Gratz family letters and other documents became available, making possible the first real biography: Diane Ashton's Rebecca Gratz: women and Judaism in antebellum America. Ms. Ashton, unlike earlier researchers, had an embarrassment of riches from which to sculpt her biography. The Gratz material now accessible is a collection so large that I have been writing this blog for a year and have repeated very little which is in the Ashton book. This is in part due to the fact that my interests are slightly different from hers: where Ashton keeps Rebecca in the steady middle distance, I zoom in on the human interest and go to wide angle for the societal context. The difference illustrates what works in different media: linear biography for a printed book, a collage of posts on the internet to build up a picture of a person and an era.

Having brought up others' errors, it is only right that I confess my own. About three years ago I wrote a brief biography of Rebecca for a study group at the Rosenbach Museum and Library. I recently reread it and cringed -- I had made my share of false assumptions and outright mistakes of fact. My research has been a constant revision -- every time I read a new letter there is the possibility that much I think I know is going to change.

The most recent of such moments came when I read a friend's description of Sarah Gratz's illness. (See Sarah Gratz's Mysterious Malady.) Although I had been aware that Sarah had some kind of health problem from the few family letters written during the period 1812-1817, I had had no suspicion she might have bipolar disorder. I felt profound pity for her (I have read so many of her letters, that rightly or wrongly, I feel like I know her) and astonished respect for Rebecca for her devotion to her sister under the most difficult of circumstances. This period must have been one of the greatest trials of Rebecca's character and her faith and no one had known it had ever occurred.

Fortunately when I read this letter, I had not written a post about the "quiet family years, 1812-1817." I may not always be so lucky. At least with a blog I can readily correct posts in which I have erred, an option not so easy for those who have committed themselves in print. Although I have gone back and tidied up my writing from time to time, I have made no substantive changes -- yet. When I do, I will post a notice of the revision.

For my discussion of other tall tales, see Rebecca and Matilda Hoffman and Rebecca Gratz: Not the First American Female College Student.

(Letters of Rebecca Gratz is accessible on Google Books. One caution: the editor, Rabbi David Philipson, states in his introductory remarks that he has excised material which the family found too sensitive. The result is that Rebecca seems to have had a somewhat more serene life than is true.)

An Unaccountable Wedding Fad

2010-07-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

Shortly after the Fenno family moved to New York in June 1800, Harriet Fenno, Rachel Gratz's best friend, met or renewed an acquaintanceship with John Rodman, a young lawyer with literary interests. As his name started appearing regularly in letters, Rachel, who had been so desperate at the loss of her friends, made a quick trip to New York in August and was able to report that Harriet was in love. There was much suspense among the Gratz sisters which was heightened by a peculiar fad of the time (it seems to have lasted several years) for secret engagements and surprise weddings. (More accurately, these engagements were "private," known and approved by the families involved, but not formally announced and even denied to everyone else until the couple appeared as husband and wife.) Washington Irving commented on the phenomenon in 1802:

"There is nothing that seems more strange and preposterous to me than the manner in which modern marriages are conducted. The parties keep the matter as secret as if there was something disgraceful about the connexion...they sneak into matrimony as quietly as possible, and seem to pride themselves on the cunning and ingenuity they have displayed in their maneuvers."

Rachel returned to the Fenno's in November, eager to find out what was going on. Rebecca in Philadelphia had to wait for the mail, not knowing if she would be taken into the small circle who were to be told of the engagement once it was a fact. Since the Fenno's wanted Rachel to remain in New York for the wedding, Maria conveyed the good news to Rebecca, vowing her to secrecy, but permitting her to tell her mother so that Rachel might be given permission to extend her visit till the first of the year.

Meanwhile, Harriet Fenno's other friends in Philadelphia had heard rumors of a possible engagement and asked about it. Rebecca felt awkward dodging their questions, but fortunately did not have to keep them at bay for too long. Short engagements were the norm at this period. John Rodman and Harriet Fenno were married before the end of the year and Rebecca was free to announce the marriage.

(Irving's remarks appeared in The Morning Chronicle (New York City), November 20, 1802.)

Rebecca Rejects Authorship

2010-07-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

(This story from the 1830's only makes sense if you know that by that time Rebecca was famously identified with the character of the same name in Scott's novel Ivanhoe.)

Always pious, Rebecca, probably influenced by the fact that she was now the symbol of her religion in the eyes of the public, read all that she could about her faith. She probably discussed religious questions with Isaac Leeser, the scholarly young man who had become the hazzan ("reader": the man who led religious services) at Mikveh Israel, her synagogue. Since there were no rabbis in the United States at this time, Leeser's was the most authoritative opinion readily available to her.

In 1833-34, Rebecca met another young man who, like her, was interested in their religion. Solomon Cohen, from Georgetown, South Carolina, shared with her his concern about the ignorance and misrepresentation of Judaism among Christians, even among those who were well-disposed towards Jews.

After their meeting, Cohen wrote Rebecca "to offer a suggestion. Would it not be well to give to the public a work explaining our doctrine...? Such a work...would be of immense advantage in removing the mist of ignorance and prejudice which hang heavy and thick upon us and our faith--and permit me to add that I know of no one in America more admirably calculated than you are to perform this sacred task."

This may be a first in the history of world religion: a man suggesting a woman write a book on the subject of their religion. Cohen might have been driven to it by his excellent instincts for marketing. He probably was visualizing the author line on the title page as reading "by Rebecca Gratz (the Inspiration for the Character of Rebecca in Ivanhoe)".

Rebecca of course had no interest in this venture. She was rightly modest about her knowledge, and would have been distressed by any attempt to link her publicly to Scott's novel.

And yet--. It's hard not to think that if she had had more confidence in her understanding of her religion and was willing to use her celebrity in a good cause, such a book, attractive to both Jews and Christians, might have done a measure of good.

Cohen continued to look for and encourage books on Judaism in English; he would be instrumental in arranging for the publication of works by Grace Aguilar, the Anglo-Jewish author, in the United States in the 1840's. He also remained close to Rebecca, marrying Miriam Moses, one of her nieces, in 1836.

(Cohen's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society.)

Rebecca Pulls Some More Strings

2010-06-29T00:01:00.000-07:00

(See the previous post for Rebecca's first recorded effort to help someone get a job through her political connections in Washington.)

In 1839 Rebecca's nephew-in-law Solomon Cohen in Savannah asked for some help with getting his nephew Julian Myers into the Navy. She was well-placed to do so because by this time the Secretary of the Navy was her old friend James Kirke Paulding. Her inquiry brought a charming reply alluding to their "ancient friendship" and the "thousand recollections" her letter revived. However, much as he would like to please her, Paulding wrote, the complement of midshipmen from Georgia was already full. The family should ask some Georgia congressmen for letters of recommendation for their son. With those in hand Paulding would be able to give Julian his warrant whenever there was an opening among the Georgia midshipmen.

Julian was named a midshipman less than a month later. (I have no information on the circumstances surrounding this swift response.) He would make the Navy his career. At the beginning of the Civil War Capt. Myers resigned his commission and returned home to enter the Navy of the Confederate States of America. After the war, he refused to sign the oath of allegiance to the United States and remained "unreconstructed."

A later recommendation of Rebecca's had what she, a strong Unionist, would have determined to be a better outcome. All we know of it is from an 1861 letter from Lizzie Blair Lee to her husband: "I had a long letter from Aunt Becky today...Frank Etting has an army paymaster's place Father [Francis Preston Blair, Lincoln's advisor] got because Aunt asked for it -- & she evidently is highly gratified."

In this case, Rebecca had put forward a candidate who proved worthy. Frank Marx Etting, her great-nephew, would rise to be Paymaster General of the United States Army. In later life, he was much involved with civic concerns in Philadelphia, perhaps most famously for his tireless work to restore Independence Hall . He also wrote a history of the building.

(Rebecca's letter from 1839 is in the Miriam Gratz Moses Cohen Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. It is reproduced in The Jews of the United States 1790-1840, A Documentary History, edited by Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron. Some of the information about Myers' subsequent career is from their notes: the rest from his obituary in the New York Times. Elizabeth Blair Lee's letter is in Wartime Washington: The Civil War Letters of Elizabeth Blair Lee, edited by Virginia Jeans Laas, and available on Google Books.)

Rebecca Pulls Some Political Strings

2010-06-22T00:01:00.000-07:00

During Rebecca Gratz's lifetime, obtaining a federal job often began with knowing someone who knew someone who knew someone in power. A contact did not necessarily get you the job, but it opened the first door to employment.

A young man named Robert Pettit (1804-1878), a descendant of Pennsylvania governor Thomas McKean, whose family moved in the same social circles as Rebecca Gratz, approached her in 1835 for her help in furthering his prospects.

Rebecca herself was apolitical although her sympathies lay with (in consecutive order) the Federalists, the Whigs and the Republicans. Yet she did have a friend in the Washington of Andrew Jackson. Her brother Benjamin's brother-in-law Francis Preston Blair was a member of Jackson's "kitchen cabinet" and the editor of the Washington Globe. Rebecca and Blair had been warm friends since they had first met in 1820, but the bond between them had been strengthened by Rebecca's care for Blair's daughter Lizzie who had come to Philadelphia to boarding school in 1833.

In 1834, Blair had written to one of Rebecca's nephews on a business matter and ended his letter on a personal note:

"I pray you, make my best respects to your family -- to Rebecca and the rest of my Jewish relatives. I am under great obligations to them all for their favors to me and mine, especially to my daughter who is the only one of my young folks for whom I could ask the world's kindness. My boys can rough it with the roughest."

And so when Robert Pettit asked for her aid, Rebecca wrote a letter of introduction for him, asking Francis Preston Blair to see what he could do. After Pettit returned from Washington, Rebecca reported that he had been "delighted with the attentive kindness of Mr. & Mrs. Blair -- he thanked me for the most useful document he carried -- he wants an office, and Mr. B's influence will do it for him."

In fact Blair wrote a letter of introduction for Pettit to take to the Secretary of the Navy Mahlon Dickerson. It survives today and demonstrates how to handle a recommendation for someone you hardly know -- you praise the recommender:

"Mr. P. was recommended to my good offices by one of the finest women in the Republic --Miss Rebecca Gratz. She, I know, would not recommend anybody but the worthy..."

Robert Pettit entered the United States Navy on April 6, 1837; his obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1878 described him as a "retired pay director in the Navy." If Rebecca's and Blair's letters of introduction had any influence, it took about two years for them to have an effect. Perhaps these things took time; perhaps the letters were just the opening shots in a long campaign necessary to get employment.

(Blair's 1834 letter is reproduced in B. & M. Gratz, Merchants in Philadelphia 1759-1798, edited by William Vincent Byers, 1916. His letter to Dickerson is in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. Rebecca's letter quoted above is in Letters of Rebecca Gratz, edited by Rabbi David Philipson and accessible on Google Books.)

An Early Description of Rebecca

2010-06-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

"What a sensible amiable girl is my Becky. She possess[es] a large share of my heart. Her sentiments would do honor to any female breast. My husband frequently speaks of her countenance as beaming mildness and sweetness."

In 1789 Shinah Simon Schuyler and her husband Nicholas visited her parents in Lancaster, PA, and her sister Miriam Gratz and her family in Philadelphia. On her return to her home in New York, Shinah wrote a letter of thanks and included these words about Miriam's daughter Rebecca, then almost eight years old. It seems to be the earliest description extant and the only one of Rebecca as a child.

(The letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society.)

Making a Good Death

2010-06-08T00:01:00.000-07:00

Drew Gilpin Faust, in her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, gives the history of the concept of "making a good death," tracing it to the late Middle Ages. I had not been aware of its roots, but having read the Gratz family letters I was already well-acquainted with the idea.

"Making a good death" necessarily meant resigning yourself to your imminent demise. This acceptance was key because your family could infer from it -- even if you could not speak -- that your conscience was clear and you were ready to meet your God. If you could speak it would be to calm and comfort your loved ones. By 1800 in America this idea permeated Protestantism and Judaism as well.

Here is Maria Fenno's description of the deathbed of John Ward Fenno, her older brother and the head of the family: "[He] called all of us, embraced us and pressed our hands and as well as he could begged that we would not be distressed. Towards evening he sank into a kind of slumber from which he never awoke but breathed his last sigh at about one o'clock in the morning, so calmly it seemed impossible."

John Ward Fenno was twenty-three years old but did what he could to convince his brothers and sisters that he loved them and was leaving them with confidence in his hopes of heaven.

A more formal description of a good death, that of Miriam Gratz, Rebecca's mother, is from her obituary by Joseph Dennie, the editor of the Port Folio: "...Always obedient to the will of heaven she saw the approach of death with serenity and meekness, and met his cold embrace without a struggle. In contemplating the steadfast virtue which supported her at that awful moment we may all find reason to exclaim, 'Let me die the death of the righteous and let my latter end be like hers'" (Port Folio, January 1809).

The Gratz sisters, particularly Rebecca, had been part of the social set around Dennie and his publication. Dennie knew Rebecca personally and had probably met her mother. As was the custom of the day, he recounted a "good death" in his obituary, but judging by everything else known about Miriam Gratz and the special emphasis Dennie placed on her last hours it is likely that she did die tranquilly.

But what happened when a person did not?

The family probably covered it over, making up last words and final farewells, and no doubt coming to believe the tale themselves over time. Because of that there are few descriptions of NOT making a good death. One survives in the Gratz correspondence because a Mrs. Morton had no family and the friend who cared for her told the story. In 1808 Sarah Gratz wrote to Rebecca:

"I never heard of a more agonizing death bed than poor Mrs. Morton exhibited. She was unconscious of approaching dissolution till almost the last moment and so entirely unprepared and unwilling to leave this world that when her sight failed and the conviction that the hand of death was on her, she uttered the most dreadful shriek and begged one more struggle should be made to save her. Even her last sigh breathed a prayer for life and the fear of death inflicted anguish on her far beyond description."

This is pretty hair-raising and not a memory anyone would want to leave. Sarah concluded, "Tis the duty of every rational being to reflect on death and so to regulate our actions as to divest it of half its terrors." The concept of a "good death" provided a script for playing one's last scene with dignity, but Sarah acknowledges that to be ready to act the part you had to prepare by living righteously.

Note: Mrs. Morton was not a great sinner fearful of hellfire. She was a victim of tuberculosis, the "delusive" illness. As the disease reached its terminal stage, the patient, who knew very well the week before that she was seriously ill and in danger of death, lost touch with the reality of her situation. She might start talking about her plans for the next summer or trying to do tasks which were well beyond her strength. Many victims of the disease died without realizing their plight or, like Mrs. Morton, realizing it only at the very end. Tuberculosis had a special horror for families because it did not permit many of its sufferers to "make a good death."

(Maria Fenno's and Sarah Gratz's letters are both from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society.)

Family Planning: Philadelphia, circa 1800

2010-06-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

Christians and Jews were all under the Biblical injunction to go forth and multiply, and American families were large at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Given the mortality rates for children, it is not surprising that husbands and wives wanted to produce enough offspring to assure that some would survive to support them in their old age.

Of course, the result of constant pregnancies was that women died young, worn out by child-bearing. (The maternal death rate circa 1800 in America was about one per every one hundred births; in 2006 it was about 13 in 100,000, the worst rate among the industrialized nations.) Many American women used a traditional method to help preserve their health and strength and still produce babies at regular intervals, one they probably learned from their mothers. The birth records for the children of Rebecca Gratz's grandmother, Rosa Simon, are incomplete, but a pattern may be discerned. She spaced her babies: one every two years, on average. The way a woman could do that was by breastfeeding her infants for the their first year to prevent ovulation.

The pregnancies of Rebecca's mother followed the same pattern as did those of her sisters Richea Hays and Rachel Moses, who breastfed. Only Fanny (Frances) Etting, Rebecca's eldest sister, did not breastfeed and she averaged only sixteen months between her first four children. The fifth through eighth children were spaced about two years apart; there is no information to explain this change.

Nor is there any information which explains how a declining birth rate was achieved in the United States as the nineteenth century went on, but even Rebecca came to think large families, much as she loved her own, were unwise. In 1839, she wrote after a Savannah relation by marriage had given birth to her tenth child: "I do not know whether so many responsibilities are indeed a blessing, considering how little opportunity is afforded of giving each the instruction they need, and the start in the world which even the rougher sex require."

In the depression following the Panic of 1837, Americans in the middle and upper classes saw childrearing as a lengthy educational process which also required all the worldly help that parents could muster to launch a child successfully into an adult career or marriage. Rebecca knew this all too well: two of the nieces and nephews she had raised after her sister Rachel's death had found themselves at the mercy of the hard times. Rebecca Moses was enduring a years-long engagement while her fiance Jonathan Nathan, a young lawyer in New York, tried to find a job which would give him enough income to support a wife. Horace Moses was suffering recurrent periods of unemployment: he had been involved in building railroads, but the money which was supporting the construction had all but dried up.

Both these setbacks were temporary, but the ups and downs of the business cycle in nineteenth-century America, must have created uncertainty and a desire to limit one's "hostages to fortune."

(The 2006 maternal death rate in the United States is from Amnesty International. Rebecca's letter is from the Miriam Moses Cohen Collection, No. 02639, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Fulton's Folly

2010-05-25T00:01:00.000-07:00

In the summer of 1807, Sarah Gratz was visiting Isaac and Reyna Moses at their country home Mt. Liston, located on the east side of Manhattan Island on the North River.

She reports to Rebecca in July that a "wonderful explosion . . .drew thousands to the battery all on a rainy day." The noise, on the other side of the island from Mt. Liston, was probably caused by Robert Fulton's tests of torpedoes, one of his inventions, in New York harbor. It took three tries for a torpedo to hit the derelict boat which was the target, and the experiment was deemed less than a success.

Undeterred, Fulton turned to another of his projects, the steamboat. Sarah states that "on Wednesday next he starts a boat by steam and has promised to carry half the fashionables of New York to Albany in the course of six hours." Her words must have been based on gossip because Fulton made his trial run up to Albany on August 14, with a skeleton crew, the "fashionables" not wanting to take any unnecessary chances. The voyage took 32 hours. (Compare that to the five days of Rebecca's and Sarah's voyage up the Hudson by sailboat in 1804.) Fulton had succeeded in inventing the first commercially viable steamboat. Unfortunately, since the public had no confidence in the new invention, hardly anyone noticed. Perhaps from Mt. Liston Sarah could see the ship going up the North River, but if she did there is no record of it.

Steamboats were soon plying the Hudson on a regular basis and were very popular. In 1814 Eliza Fenno Verplanck would write of the luxuries she had enjoyed on the steamship Fulton, including a good berth, although she did complain of the lack of air in her cabin. Sloops did not disappear immediately though. Eliza wrote again in 1814 of taking a sloop downstream; sailing with the current made the older mode of travel more reliable. And using the wind and the current to power the boat must have made travel under sail much cheaper.

(Sarah's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society; Eliza's are in the Fenno-Hoffman Collection, the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.)

What Was Wrong with Solomon Moses Anyway?

2010-05-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

(This narrative began with "Rachel Gratz," the post of April 20, 2010.)

On June 26, 1806, Solomon Moses wrote that this day "unites me to Rachel Gratz, a Treasure,"

certainly a highly suitable sentiment for a groom. We have heard from Sarah and Rebecca, but sadly there is little of Sol's writings which survive, and I want to give him a chance to be, if only briefly, more than the object of his sisters-in-laws' disdain.

In reality though, Sol was probably one of those Rebecca wrote of in 1800 when she referred to men who had "least to boast" of in the way of superiority but were unaware of their deficiency. (See the post for April 13, 2010.) The evidence presented here is truly anecdotal: the first story indicates Sol's sense of male entitlement which leads him to voice his disapproval of Rebecca's activities, and the second, his robust narcissism. (How Sarah Gratz would have liked that term if it had been available to her!)

In 1807 Rebecca and her close friend Gertrude Ogden Meredith decided to have a formal exchange of letters on the subject of Judaism and Christianity. Solomon heard about the plan and let it be known that he disapproved. His letter, or more likely Rachel's conveying his thoughts on the matter, does not survive, but Rebecca's response suggests that Sol thought that Gertrude was trying to convert her to Christianity. Rebecca defended her friend, "Mrs. M. is a sincere religionist and approaches with awe all sacred things. The testimonials of our divine inheritance are treated by her with the reverence they are entitled to and I should think myself very unworthy of my hope [her emphasis] of future rewards were I less liberal in my sentiments towards the Christian faith whose doctrines have purified the hearts of some of our best and most beloved friends." She does Sol the courtesy of giving him a serious response where other women (Sarah, for instance) would have told him to mind his own business. Ironically, in 1822 Sol and Rachel would name their new baby daughter Gertrude after Mrs. Meredith in honor of their long friendship and in gratitude for the Merediths' having named one of their daughters Miriam after Rachel's mother.

In 1808, Harriet Fenno Rodman, Rachel's best friend, was dying of tuberculosis in New York. Rachel, five months pregnant, was in no condition to go to her, and given Rachel's emotional nature, even if she had been well, she would have been more of a burden than a help in the sickroom. Rebecca volunteered to nurse their friend and wrote nearly every day, giving in her letters to Rachel a classic description of the final stages of the disease.

When Harriet died, Rebecca wrote to her sister Sarah and, instead of to Rachel, sent a letter to Sol. She obviously thought that the two of them would decide when and how to best tell Rachel.

It didn't work out that way.

Here is Sarah's description of what happened: "Sol received his letter early in the morning and after breakfast as he was going to his store, mentioned [that Harriet had died] as he would any other piece of intelligence. Not feeling himself on this occasion, he was unconscious what a stab he was inflicting in the heart of her he loved. She shrieked and fell, and in that situation I found her apparently lifeless. We assisted her to bed and I continued with her all day." The incident had no lasting physical effects on Rachel or her baby. Although Sarah carefully includes a reference to Sol's love of Rachel, she also makes it clear that this love is not so central to his being as the narcissism which prevented him from realizing the effect her best friend's death would have on his highly emotional wife.

Two anecdotes are not very much -- and that in itself says something about Rebecca's relationship with Solomon Moses. Although she lived in the same neighborhood with Rachel and Sol throughout their married life and raised their children after Rachel's death, Rebecca would rarely so much as mention Sol in her correspondence.

(Rebecca's comment on male superiority is from a letter in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress. The other letters quoted here are from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

Rebecca Writes to Sally

2010-05-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

(See the post entitled "Rachel Gratz" for the beginning of this narrative thread.)

Benjamin Gratz wrote of Rebecca many decades later that she had "devoted [her] life to the service of our beloved family," and there is evidence that the unity and well-being of her family came first for her, even before her devotion to religion, good works and education. Her older sister Sally's dislike of the man whom her younger sister Rachel wanted to marry would certainly have caused a family rift if Rebecca could not have convinced Sally to hold her tongue.

Rachel's letter announcing her love for Sol Moses and asking Rebecca to intercede with Sally probably arrived on a Friday, giving Rebecca the Sabbath to contemplate her words before she could pick up her pen on Saturday night.

Rebecca begins her letter by commiserating with Sally and revealing her own distress at the marriage: "What [you have] experienced...I have conjectured from what is passing in my own [heart]." But Rebecca knows, as Sally does too, that there is no way to stop Rachel: "She loves Sol Moses -- her own hand has written it -- her own enthusiastic style most passionately declared it." The sisters will have to accept Sol graciously. Rebecca understands how hard this will be for Sally but she takes it as a given that Sally's better nature will win out: "You dislike Sol, and have so long found it difficult to disguise your opinion that I fear it will not be an easy task; however the goodness of your heart will teach you to sacrifice prejudice where the happiness of our beloved sister is concerned..."

Here Rebecca differentiates her feelings from Sally's: Sally disliked Sol before there seemed any possibility of his entering their family; Rebecca seems to have had less difficulty with him as someone in their circle but the thought of him married to her sister has disturbed her. Yet she makes a plea for him; she is sure, she says, that he loves Rachel and will try to make her happy. She adds that Sol is respected in New York and "tenderly beloved" in his family. She even echoes one of Sally's sarcastic remarks to bring her sister around, "You have often said that you believe he would make any woman happy who could love him [her emphasis] and if contrary to your expectation our sister is that woman should we not strengthen -- confirm that belief rather than cloud it with doubt and apprehension...?"

Rebecca's struggle to bolster Sol's qualities as a good brother-in-law amounts to faint praise, but she has one comfort to offer her sister.

In a postscript she says, "Revolving all that I have said I fear my letter will make you melancholy. Do not let it have that effect. I am a little given to imaginary whims, and have a curious notion that the little fairy imp Puck has been making free with his juices."

(Both sisters knew their Shakespeare. Rebecca was referring to A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Puck puts the juices of a magical flower into the eyes of the sleeping Titania, the queen of the fairies, so that she will fall in love with the first thing she sees. He then puts an ass's head on the shoulders of the buffoonish weaver Bottom and wakes Titania up. Rebecca was comparing that mismatched couple, Titania and Bottom, with her beautiful sister Rachel and Sol Moses. It is quite the most devastating criticism she would ever write about anyone and something of a revelation: who knew Rebecca had such humor and malice as well as her many, many virtues?)

Rebecca and Sally would offer only their best wishes and congratulations to the happy couple, but they would have the solace of skewering Sol to each other in private.

For more, see "What was wrong with Solomon Gratz Anyway?

(The letters quoted here are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

Rachel's Romance

2010-05-04T00:01:00.000-07:00

(This narrative began with the post entitled "Rachel Gratz.")

In May 1806, Solomon Moses was in Philadelphia for another prolonged stay when Rebecca, visiting the Hoffman and the Moses families in New York, received a letter from Rachel reporting that M. L. Moses, Solomon's brother, meant to propose to Rebecca at the first opportunity. Knowing that her sister had no interest in marrying him, Rachel advised avoidance. She also informed Rebecca that her information had come from Solomon who knew that M. L.'s proposal would be unwelcome. Sol's thoughtfulness had an effect; in her next letter Rachel wrote, "[He] has secured my everlasting friendship. I think him much improved in every respect."

This statement seems to have caused Rebecca no alarm. She must have been staggered by Rachel's next letter which began, after a short prelude about a sleepless night, "You my beloved Sister shall decide my future...I will give up the man my heart has chosen if you wish it." The man referred to was, of course, Solomon Moses.

After her characteristically dramatic opening, Rachel recapitulated the emotional events of the previous few weeks, saying that Sol's attentions had been of "the most delicate winning kind." As a result, she "felt...greater agitation than any other gentlemen ever occasioned me...every day has increased those feelings and I cannot myself account for this change but I have learned from my heart to love him." The evening before, he had stopped her as she was walking home with a cousin and asked her to walk with him. They were "both embarrassed," she wrote, and when Sol asked if he would ever be happy again? she didn't understand at first. Then she realized that it was she who could make him happy by becoming his wife. She had told him she looked upon his proposal with favor but that she wanted to write Rebecca and receive an answer before they told her family.

Then Rachel comes to the point of the letter. (Despite all the drama at the beginning, both Rebecca and she knew nothing was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.) Rachel was really concerned about Sally's reaction to her engagement to Solomon Moses, probably fearing that her sister's response would be so vitriolic that it would be difficult ever to forgive. She asked that Rebecca break the news since Sally "loves you so much better than she loves me."

What could Rebecca say to Sally to prevent a family rift? And how did Rebecca really feel about Sol as a brother-in-law? Even the quietest and most respectable lives (and blogs) have their cliffhangers.

For more, see "Rebecca Writes to Sally."

(The letter in which Rachel says that Sol had secured her "everlasting friendship" is in the Gratz Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society; the other two letters are from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society. Thanks to to the Gilbert Stuart blog for the use of the image of the painting of Solomon Moses by Gilbert Stuart. The original is on loan at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.)

(If you would like to learn more about M. L. Moses' attempts to propose to Rebecca, see the post, "Washington Irving, Rebecca Gratz and an Unwanted Suitor," from November 17, 2009.)

The Gratz Sisters & Solomon Moses

2010-04-27T00:01:00.000-07:00

Solomon Moses would seem to have been an ideal beau for Rachel Gratz. His parents, Isaac and Reyna Moses, had lived in Philadelphia in the 1770's and 1780's and were old friends of Michael and Miriam Gratz. Solomon himself was actively involved in business with his father in New York, was seven years older than Rachel (a five-to-ten-year age difference between husband and wife was the norm in the Gratz's social set), Jewish, not bad looking -- and yet--.

The Gratz sisters were most appreciative of the hospitality offered by Mr. and Mrs. Moses whenever they visited New York, and especially grateful for the way the Moses family had taken their friends the Fenno's under their wing immediately after Maria and her siblings had moved to the city. But the affection and respect they felt for the parents, and also for Solomon's older sister Richea Levy, did not extend to Solomon.

In the Gratz letters, as usual discreet about male admirers, not much is said about Solomon until 1804, when he came to Philadelphia for a stay of several months. Rachel was away at her sister Fanny Etting's in Baltimore, leaving Sarah (called Sally) and Rebecca to entertain him. After about two months of his presence, Rebecca wrote to Rachel that he had "not gone yet...he waits to see you." (Rebecca in the letter underlines the portion which is reproduced here in italics.) Underlining was not characteristic of Rebecca's writing style, and I interpret it to indicate that even patient, tactful Rebecca was getting tired of Sol's prolonged presence. Rachel replied, in reference to him: "You must be having a charming time of it. At least Sally must." Sally was indeed having a "charming time." She wrote that the stupidity of Sol's conversation rendered her stupid.

This seems to be the situation vis-a-vis Solomon and the Gratz sisters in 1804: Solomon was in love with Rachel and Rachel indifferent to him, at best. Meanwhile, Rebecca found him wearisome and irritable Sarah could not stand him. Matters would remain so until the spring of 1806.

For more, see "Rachel's Romance."

(Rebecca's and Sarah's letters are from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society, and Rachel's response is in the Gratz Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society. Thanks to the Gilbert Stuart blog at gilbertstuart.blogspot.com for the use of the image of the painting of Solomon Moses by Gilbert Stuart.)

Rachel Gratz

2010-04-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

Rachel was the youngest of the three Gratz sisters still at home at the beginning of the nineteenth century. With her mass of red-gold hair and hazel eyes, she was considered the beauty of the family. Visiting in New York in 1800, she was seen at the theater by a Count Germond who raved all night about her beauty and spent the next two days wangling an introduction (the acquaintance went no further). Rebecca received compliments from those who had met her, but only Rachel caused flutters from across the room.

Unlike her older sisters Sarah and Rebecca who were "sensible" women, Rachel was under the rule of what the age called "sensibility," a term which would translate today to "emotions and affections." Her disposition served to enhance her physical beauty. Playful and good-humored, Rachel knew how to have fun. In her absence her family found their world much more dull; during one of these periods, Rebecca wrote to Rachel about the conditions at home without her lively presence: "If not for the opportunity of complaining we should even want spirits to keep ourselves awake."

Rachel, however, had another side, one characterized by debilitating anxiety. In the absence of loved ones, Rachel was subject to catastrophic thinking. Imagining terrible disasters, she became depressed and unable to function. During the early years of their father's illness, Sarah and Rebecca felt that Rachel's depressed state was yet another burden on their already laden mother. Both exhorted their younger sister to make an effort, using much the same language, but Rachel reacted differently to each. She must have heard their characteristic tones of voice as she read their words and reacted poorly to the often irritable Sarah and with gratitude to gentle Rebecca. "In you I...find admonitory council and a sincere friend," Rachel wrote to Rebecca, and insisted, much to her sister's distress, on idealizing her. Sarah, witness to Rachel's adoration, commented dryly on Rebecca's "superiority in all things."

Despite her anxieties, Rachel, with her beauty and vivaciousness, must have seemed to her family destined to attract an exceptional man for her husband. Her sisters Sarah and Rebecca were to be sorely disappointed in her choice: a man that they -- and Rachel -- had made light of for five years.

For more, see "The Gratz Sisters & Solomon Moses."

(The "Count Germond" story is from Maria Fenno's letters to Rebecca in December 1800. They, like all the other letters quoted here, are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society. Thanks to http://gilbertstuart.blogspot.com for the use of the image of Rachel Gratz. The original painting by Gilbert Stuart is on loan at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia.)

Male Entitlement, c. 1800, Philadelphia

2010-04-13T00:01:00.000-07:00

During the first years of the nineteenth century, when Rebecca was beginning her charitable endeavors with the Female Association, she was part of the literary set which had formed in 1801 around the new Philadelphia periodical, the Port Folio. The Female Association brought her into contact with the matrons who had founded the organization; her social life, with the young literati of Philadelphia. There was virtually no overlap between these two groups.

However, in the Port Folio issue dated May 22, 1802, someone who calls himself "Quixote" reports that the women he knows have a lively curiosity about the Tuesday Club, an informal group of young male contributors to the periodical who were spending more time with each other than with the ladies. He presents himself as a defender of the women's interests, having suggested that the Club elect a secretary who could then provide its minutes to each meeting of the "Philadelphia Female Association." Unfortunately, he says, he was voted down, but promises to encourage the club members to spend their leisure in female company. For this he requires no reward, "and in return we will not ask, or even wish, to be admitted at the meetings of the Philadelphia Female Association."

Well, that's patronizing but not at all unusual. Misogyny has always been a theme of satire (because most satirists have been male). It would have been more remarkable if the young men of Philadelphia had written of women with respect. But it is interesting in two regards: that the first nonsectarian charity organized by women is picked out is a worthy object for male disdain, and that the only person in the Female Association who was also part of the coterie around the Port Folio was Rebecca Gratz.

This suggests that the writer was Samuel Ewing, one of the Port Folio's most prolific contributors and a man who certainly seems (based on other evidence) to have loved and admired Rebecca. Here though, he is up to something else. He chooses curiosity, a failing traditionally ascribed to women, as the problem which he seeks to allay although the women would much rather have the men's company again than receive information about their club activities. Implicit in Quixote's "helpfulness" is the message that the men are not about to make themselves more available. At the same time, he belittles the Female Association, the one interest which Samuel Ewing did not share with Rebecca and which may have been making her less available to him. The point of view here is men will do as they please; women should not allow interests which men find boring to interfere with their availability. If a woman was less than enchanted with the perspective revealed here -- hey, it was just a little light humor. Any woman who objected was likely to be labelled a prig or a bluestocking.

I am not trying to blacken Samuel Ewing's character by speculating on his authorship. Whoever wrote it shows no more arrogance than the average man of the time. The insidious and casual entitlement displayed by the author was so pervasive among men that the writer probably would have had no sense of his own bias.

Rebecca chafed under the men's prevailing attitudes. Although she rarely criticized classes of people, she wrote to a friend in 1800, "As all men claim a superiority, tis proper they should possess it and I believe those who have least to boast, are not the most sensible of their deficiency." Here it sounds as though she may be willing to consider that some men might have a claim to superiority although she knows many who do not. But in 1804, she wrote in exasperation that she had heard so much about "woman's whim" (another traditional female failing) but would "not again reject a woman's word for any lord of the creation." It doesn't sound as though she was about to cede anything to any man.

The male attitudes were hard to bear in repartee, but they were infinitely more onerous as institutionalized in law. Married women, although they may have brought wealth into their marriage, and inherited wealth afterwards, owned nothing. Everything belonged to the husband who could do with it as he wished. Many women's charities (including the Female Association) would require that their treasurer be a single woman, spinster or widow, so that a husband could not commandeer for himself the money she was holding for the organization. This rule was often honored in the breach but it was nonetheless on the books. Similarly, the children of a marriage, in the event of a divorce, were the husband's as they were seen as part of his goods and chattels. The feminist movement from the nineteenth century into the early twentieth century is usually remembered as a struggle for women's suffrage, but early on it had other very serious issues to address.

(Rebecca's letter from 1800 is in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress; the 1804 letter is in the Verplanck Collection at the New York Historical Society.)

Girls Just Want to Have Fun

2010-04-06T00:01:00.000-07:00

In the upper classes in nineteenth-century America, social relationships began with formality. Even young women in their teens were introduced to each other as "Miss [Last Name]." When two women switched to first names, it was a sign that they considered themselves friends rather than acquaintances. Most relationships never reached this level of intimacy.

Yet Sarah Gratz in an 1803 letter to Rebecca demonstrates there was also room for spontaneity. Some young ladies from Baltimore paid a morning visit to the Gratz house to report on Rebecca, who was in their hometown helping her older sister Fanny with a new baby. This type of visit was the formal call we associate with the era ("morning" here means late morning or early afternoon, before dinner, which was served at two or three in the afternoon).

Sarah and the young women must have immediately found each other amiable, and the visitors accepted an invitation to stay to dinner. Afterwards, when Sarah's Aunt Bell Cohen and her cousin Sarah Cohen came over, the whole group went upstairs for a party in Sarah's bedchamber.

Sarah does not describe the party, but I imagine it involved the young women kicking off their shoes, flopping on the bed, discussing men and fashions, trying on Sarah's bonnets and shawls and probably attempting some experiments with hair styles. In essence, the same sort of things girls have always done.

The group topped off the day by going shopping at six p.m.. On their return, they found three beaux -- the Gratz sisters' favorites, James Caldwell, Samuel Ewing and Charles Nicholas -- in the parlor. A fun day, all in all, and spontaneous fun at that.

(Sarah's letter to Rebecca is from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

Passover at the Gratz's

2010-03-29T06:10:00.000-07:00

In April 1835, Julia Hoffman, the daughter of Rebeccca's late friend Maria Fenno Hoffman, was visiting with the Gratz's. She wrote to her brother George:

"This week is Passover. It commenced on Monday evening with the Passover supper eaten as it is ordered in the bible with the bitter herbs. At that I was not present as no Christian is permitted to be there. After the first supper we had tea and then portions of the Psalms read in English. For the rest of the week all goes on as usual except that we are eating hard crackers instead of bread. They are like sea biscuits [a kind of cracker eaten by sailors] only made very thin and are really quite good. The modern Jews certainly do not suffer from hard living in this week for there are some very good dishes and cakes invented especially for it. One thing they have called Haroseth which is an intended imitation of brick and mortar and is one of the best kinds of confectionery I have ever tasted."

Rebecca Gratz's recipe for Haroset may survive; if it does turn up in a collection of documents I have just begun to read, I will present it to you before next Passover.

(For more information about Julia Hoffman, see the post dated February 2, 2010. Julia's letter is in the Fenno-Hoffman Papers at the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan.)

Rebecca Gratz on the Transportation Revolution in Antebellum America

2010-03-23T00:01:00.000-07:00

In 1848 Rebecca wrote that her brother Ben's ward Mary Boswell, in from Kentucky, had been invited to a "Fancy Ball" in New York City:

"Whether Mary will go or not, I cannot tell -- she went a few weeks ago (when her Uncle Jo had some business there) to an Opera. Since the Railroad affords such easy travelling--an 100 miles to a frolic is no such great affair -- five hours will suffice. When we had to travel in stages [by stagecoach], it took some time to make up one's mind for the journey -- and two days were necessary to complete it."

That -- in a nutshell -- describes the great revolution in land transportation which took place during the thirty years preceding the Civil War: from two days to New York by stage to five hours by train for Philadelphians. And the trains could carry freight as well.

Mary Boswell, who had studied voice, had probably gone to New York for an Italian opera, a musical form which had gained popularity with American audiences in the first half of the nineteenth century. Hearing her sing arias from Italian operas gave Rebecca a taste for another phenomenon with which she had been unfamiliar in her youth.

(The letter quoted is in The Letters of Rebecca Gratz, which is accessible through Google Books.)

Treating Sarah's Malady. Part 2

2010-03-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

(See the post dated March 2, 2010, for Part 1. Note that Sarah Gratz was called Sally by her family.)

After Sarah's blistering, Rebecca wrote to her brother Jo: "You will find our dear Sally is not better and of course little comfort [is] enjoyed by the rest of the family. She is now suffering great pain from a blister but I hope it will prove beneficial. It will at least keep her in her room a few days which must be useful as I can perceive company and exercise increase her disease."

When their youngest brother Benjamin was able to get leave to come home for Yom Kippur, Sarah created emotional havoc. After he returned to camp, Rebecca wrote to him: "We have had no more such scenes as distrest you so much . . . [the doctors] have changed Sally's medicine. They now give her some powders that will confine her to her room (not ever easy) and I have some prospect of getting a very good nurse . . ." Sedation, then, was another method physicians used to counter her symptoms temporarily.

Sarah herself added a postscript to this letter, describing, "the formidable visit of Physicians." She maintained, "I sit alone and of course quarrel with no one." She also mentioned that she had been bled and felt "more tranquil today." The third treatment of choice was bleeding which was the universal panacea, and weakened Sarah enough to quiet her for a time.

The letters of September 1814 are the only ones from the time of Sarah's illness which give any hint of the strain her disorder was having on the family. The comfortable, loving home which Rebecca associated with her mother and would certainly have wished to maintain for her brothers was impossible with Sarah jibing at her siblings constantly. Also from September is a receipt for the repair of pieces of jewelry; perhaps this is just a coincidence but Sarah's energies may have led her to destructiveness. There is no indication that she was delusional or a danger to herself or others, but it is clear that Rebecca's plan for a nurse meant that Sarah needed to be under constant watch. (We don't know if a nurse was ever employed.)

In November 1814 Rebecca reported that Sarah had "lost all the exuberance of spirits that annoyed her so much last summer . . . now more languid, her nerves are so much shaken by these extremes that every sudden change alarms me." The few letters which exist from 1815-1816 make no mention of further episodes although their number is so small that Sarah could easily have endured another attack in the months intervening.

Then at the beginning of February 1817 Rebecca wrote to her friend Maria Fenno Hoffman that Sarah was sick, her disorder characterized by "sleepless nights," a symptom she had suffered in earlier manic episodes. This time the doctor ordered that she be dieted and bled, two sure ways to weaken her. Still, not sleeping could have been due to physical problems and dieting and bleeding could have been ordered for virtually everything. The disease which was affecting her is uncertain, but the outcome was not.

Sarah Gratz died on February 20, 1817. There are no letters describing her last days. Perhaps her death was tied to her nervous disorder: an accident or a suicide. Or perhaps the treatments to weaken her manic symptoms also weakened her body so much that she was susceptible to a physical disease which killed her.

(Rebecca's letter to Jo is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society. The other three letters are in the Gratz Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society.)

Treating Sarah's Malady. Part 1

2010-03-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

(See the post dated March 2, 2010, about Sarah Gratz and bipolar disorder.)

Medicine, as practiced in antebellum America, was not very different from that of the late Middle Ages. Yet Rebecca Gratz and her family relied completely on their doctors' opinions, and often attributed their recovery to treatments which could not possibly have been responsible.

The placebo effect was probably the physicians' greatest ally, buttressed by patients' renewed confidence in medicine following a real scientific triumph: the smallpox vaccine. Most of Philadelphia's eminent doctors advised their patients to be vaccinated -- with beneficial results which went beyond the subjective. The same men ordered purging and bleeding and their patients accepted these treatments as well.

Her doctors would not have recognized Sarah Gratz's symptoms -- episodes of intense irritability and sleeplessness followed by depression -- as a specific syndrome. (What we call today "bipolar disorder" did not enter the medical literature until the mid-nineteenth century.) They would have realized, however, that it was a disease of the nerves; hence, the trips to places of natural beauty, the accepted remedy for soothing the nervous system.

During the five years of Sarah's illness, family letters referred to her condition only briefly with no hint of its nature or its treatment, except during September 1814, a time of turmoil for not only Sarah, but for the nation. Sarah was already irritable and difficult by the time she and Rebecca reached Saratoga Springs that August. When word was received that the British had burned Washington, everyone scrambled to get home quickly. Rebecca wrote that "the bustle and continual change of travelling, crowded steamboats and company increased [Sally's malady] to a very distressing degree."

Back in Philadelphia, there was no peace at home. The sisters' three younger brothers had been called up to their units and their eldest brother Simon was helping with the civilian defense of the city in the face of what everyone believed was an impending attack by the British. (It never came.) The atmosphere of fear and uncertainty did nothing to alleviate Sarah's symptoms.

Writing to her brothers at military camps outside the city, Rebecca described the methods being used to treat Sarah, all of which had one thing in common: they so debilitated her physically, her manic symptoms weakened as well.

The first of these was blistering, which, along with bleeding and purging, was one of the most frequently used weapons in the medical arsenal. To raise a blister, an irritating substance was applied, usually to the back or the arm. The medical theorists of the time posited that the body could hold only one malady at a time, and, thus, a new disorder (the blister) would drive out Sarah's nervous problem. I feel sure that some practitioners also realized that a new, intense pain would displace the patient's attention from practically anything else from which she was suffering.

(To be continued next week.)

(The quote is from an undated letter, but since it is to Benjamin Gratz at Washington Barracks, Kennett Square, it can only be from 1814. It is printed in The Letters of Rebecca Gratz which is accessible through Google Books.)

March 4: Rebecca's Gratz's 229th Birthday

2010-03-04T00:01:00.000-08:00

Sarah Gratz's Mysterious Malady

2010-03-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

Sarah (called Sally) Gratz was two years older than Rebecca and was probably closer to her than any of her other siblings. Certainly Rebecca would write that Sally was "the darling of my infant years and the sharer of every after scene of my life and the faithful sympathizer of all my cares." Both were intelligent, sensible women with literary interests and many of the same friends. Their difference: Sarah had an edge which Rebecca lacked. She did not suffer fools gladly, liked to argue and if argument was socially inappropriate would show her irritation through smirks, sighs and maybe even some muttering under her breath. (At first, I was rather taken with a young woman who could not always meet the standards of deportment of the day, but as Sarah's story unfolded I came to feel that her behavior might have been an early symptom of her malady.)

As they entered their thirties unmarried, Rebecca and Sarah must have had the consolation of each other's companionship in their role as housekeepers for their unmarried brothers. However, in 1811-12, something began to happen to Sarah and thereafter recurrent mention in the family correspondence is made of her unspecified ill health. Rebecca took her to Harper's Ferry (a considerable trip) in 1812 and to the seashore at Long Branch, New Jersey, in 1813, with the hope that the natural beauty and healthful air of these places would improve Sally's condition.

In 1813 Rebecca had originally planned to take Sally to Saratoga Springs and stop on the way to visit their Aunt Shinah near Troy, New York. Their Uncle Nicholas had been pleading with them to come because Shinah's health was deteriorating and he felt she would benefit from their company. But at the last minute the trip was cancelled -- due to Sally's ill health -- in favor of the short stay at the Jersey shore later in the season. Uncle Nicholas was hurt by his nieces' "apparent neglect," and Rebecca, probably stung by his criticism, must have determined to see her aunt as soon as it was feasible.

In August 1814, the two sisters set out for Troy and Saratoga Springs. The trip must have started with Sally in good health but quickly become a nightmare. We get some sense of its difficulties through the letters of their friend Eliza Fenno Verplanck who was supposed to meet the Gratz sisters at Troy, and go on to the spa with them. When Eliza arrived at Troy, she learned that the Rebecca and Sarah had already left for Ballston Spa, another watering place close by Saratoga; at Ballston, she found they had gone on to Saratoga. This is not characteristic behavior for Rebecca, and we finally find out what was happening, after Eliza met them at last in Saratoga Springs. In a letter to her sister, Eliza wrote:

"Sally's case I think a hopeless one, her conduct at times would warrant the belief of a possession by an evil spirit, but at other times she is sunk in dejection and you cannot but feel the strongest sympathy for her. Poor Becky has a life of suffering too, her patience and forbearance exceeds all belief; her days and nights are sacrificed to Sally's whims and her feelings are either shocked by some instance of folly or she is tormented with the fear of her [Sally's] sinking into melancholy."

It is always questionable to diagnose someone two hundred years after the fact, but it would seem most likely that Sarah suffered from bipolar disorder (old name: manic depression). Rebecca also had a nephew Gratz Etting who gave up his legal career and returned to Philadelphia to live with his parents because from time to time he became a "perfect maniac" and had to be taken into private care. This, too, is suggestive of bipolar, especially since there is often a genetic component to the disorder. If there was in fact a hereditary risk in the family, the Gratz's were fairly lucky: only Sarah and Gratz Etting seem to have suffered.

Next Week: Treating Sarah's Malady

(Rebecca's description of her relationship with Sarah is from a letter dated January 26, 1818, in the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society. Nicholas Schuyler's letter of September 1, 1813, is from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society. Eliza Fenno Verplanck's letter is in the Fenno-Hoffman Papers at the University of Michigan. The description of Gratz Etting as a "perfect maniac" is from a letter from Maria Gist Gratz [Benjamin's wife] to her mother Mrs. Charles Scott, dated January 9, 1831, and is in the Gratz Collection at the Rosenbach Museum & Library.)

Rebecca Gratz & the Civil War

2010-02-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

Thinking of her relatives and friends fighting on both sides in "this unhappy war," Rebecca wrote in 1862 that "there is scarcely a field on which some we are interested for may not bleed." She was exaggerating, but the statement reflects the depth of her anxiety.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, five of her nephews had brought home brides from the South, and three nieces had married Southerners. (Not all these individuals lived to the 1860's, but bonds of friendship had been forged with these southern families.) When the Civil War came, it was where Rebecca's relatives lived, rather than where they were from, which determined their allegiance. Gratz wives from the South, who had lived in Philadelphia for decades, supported the Unionist cause with their husbands and sons. The niece who had married a Georgian shared the Confederate enthusiasm of the men in her immediate family. In Kentucky, a border state, Rebecca's brother Benjamin was a Unionist as were three of his sons; one other son and his stepson were with the South (see my post for September 29, 2009, for the tragic results). In another border state, Missouri, a nephew, who had emigrated there in the 1840's, and his sons were Confederates. And one niece was married to a Southerner who would choose neither North nor South.

Rebecca was an ardent Unionist and was grieved by these divisions. Nevertheless, family came first, and in the years preceding the War she stuck to personal matters when writing to those whose political opinions differed from her own. The envelopes among the Gratz papers printed with "Flag of Truce" attest to her continuing efforts during the War to keep lines of communication open and ties of affection strong with her relatives in Georgia. These letters contain only family news, this time because "Flag of Truce" mail was read by censors on both sides.

Although Rebecca wished to support the Union by participating in some useful activity, her age (she was eighty at the beginning of the War) forbade any active involvement, especially in nursing at which she had excelled all her life. She reported to her niece Anna Gratz in Kentucky that she had been talking to some "Flora [sic] Nightingales," and had felt her "energies so roused that I sighed for the power of other days [that I might] help the sufferers collected in so many hospitals around and about our city."

She had to be content with offering a haven to her "honorary" niece Elizabeth Blair Lee and her little boy who arrived from Washington DC whenever the capital was threatened. Preston and Eliza Blair's daughter (see my post dated October 13, 2009), Lizzie was married to Philip Lee, a naval officer and a Unionist from the Lee family of Virginia. During one of her stays in Philadelphia, Lizzie taught Rebecca a skill useful to the war effort; she wrote to her husband: "Everyone is knitting for the soldiers. T'is the fashion -- I am a great teacher of the art. Aunt Becky even is a pupil -- she is so good, kind to your boy and your devoted Lizzie."

And so, for the most part, Rebecca's contributions would be on a very personal level, kindnesses to friends and relatives coming to Philadelphia, a regular correspondence with those far away, compassionate letters to her brother Ben and her niece Miriam Cohen when they lost sons in the War. However, Rebecca was a very well-connected woman, and she found that she could sit at home and pull strings -- to get a job for a nephew -- and, when needed, a message to President Lincoln. These two actions will each get a blog post of its own.

I also plan to write posts about the Civil War experiences of various Gratz relatives, North and South.

(Rebecca's letters quoted here are in the Henrietta Clay Collection at Transylvania University. The "flag of truce" envelopes are among the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society. Elizabeth Blair Lee's is from a volume of her letters, Wartime Washington, edited by Virginia Jeans Laas, and accessible through Google Books.)

The Three Graces

2010-02-16T00:01:00.000-08:00

In her youth, Rebecca appeared at the dancing assemblies and other social events with her sisters Sarah, two years older, and Rachel, two years younger. It is said that a stranger, seeing the trio enter the room, inquired their names, and when he was given the information from a bystander, responded that they were not the Gratz's but the Graces.

This story was reported by one niece, about sixty years later, but it was probably true many times over. At the beginning of the nineteenth century in America, the pun was the favorite form of verbal wit. When Rebecca found Washington Irving to be the most agreeable young man she had met in New York (see my post for November 17, 2009), she mentioned among his accomplishments his adeptness at punning. Another adept was Samuel Ewing, who, she reported in 1803, had visited and "made puns all evening." The leading periodicals of the day, the Port Folio, to which Ewing often contributed, and Salmagundi, written in part by Irving, often acknowledged the ubiquitous punning among the young chattering classes who formed much of their readership. Given this contemporary predilection for the pun and the ease of connecting Gratz's with Graces, somebody probably made essentially the same comment about Rebecca and her sisters every time they made an entrance.

(The source of this story is Recollections of my aunt, Rebecca Gratz, by Sarah Hays Mordecai, written in 1870 and privately published in Philadelphia in 1893 (31 pp). Rebecca's letter about Samuel Ewing's punning, dated June 29, 1803, is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

An Editorial Note

2010-02-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

For years I have used "Claire Salisbury" as my nom d'internet, but during my seven months as a blogger I have found it to be a cause of major confusion for those who know my real name. Much as I love my alias (my middle name plus the town where I was born), henceforth I will be using my real name, Susan Sklaroff, on this blog.

Rebecca's Brothers and Sisters

2010-02-09T00:01:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Gratz had eleven brothers and sisters whom I mention from time to time; here for your perusal is a quick rundown of her family:

Parents: Michael Gratz (1740-1811) and Miriam Simon Gratz (1749-1808)

The brothers and sisters in chronological order:

Solomon (1770-1774).

Frances (called Fanny)(1771-1852) m. Reuben Etting (1762 -1848): 8 children.

Simon (1773-1839) m.(?) Mary Smith (17??-18??): 8 children.

Richea (1774-1858) m. Samuel Hays (1764-1838): 10 children.

Hyman (1776-1857).

Sarah (called Sally) (1779-1817).

Rebecca (called Becky) (1781-1869).

Rachel (1783-1823) m. Solomon Moses (1774-1857): 9 children.

Joseph (called Jo) (1785-1858) -- (unknown woman): 8 children.

Jonathan (178?-178?).

Jacob (called Jac) (1789-1856) --(unknown woman): 1 child.

Benjamin (called Ben) (1792-1884) m. (1) Maria Cecil Gist (1797-1841): 6 children.
m. (2) Anna Boswell Shelby (1809-1892): 3 children; 1 stepson.

There is one questionable marriage (Simon's): Joseph's and Jacob's offspring were illegitimate.
The number of children in each case represents all the children known to have been born to the couple; many of course did not survive childhood.

Posts on the individual siblings will appear from time to time.

Happy Birthday, Hebrew School

2010-02-04T11:26:00.000-08:00

Rebecca Gratz opened the first Hebrew Sunday School on February 4, 1838, and to mark the anniversary I've been asked to write a post for the blog, "Jewesses with Attitude," at Jewish Women's Archive.

To read it go to: http://jwablog.jwa.org

Sully's Second Portrait of Rebecca

2010-02-02T00:01:00.000-08:00

Thomas Sully was still working on his first portrait of Rebecca in December 1830 when her brother Benjamin and his wife Maria arrived from Lexington KY for what would be a six-month visit. The Philadelphia family realized this would be a great opportunity to commission Sully to paint portraits of Ben, the only sibling living far from home, and his wife, who was a great favorite with her brothers- and sisters-in-law.

Ben had his portrait done in April and Maria probably about the same time. The experience and the outcome must have been good because Maria decided she wanted a portrait of Rebecca, her favorite sister-in-law and good friend, to take back to Kentucky. Rebecca complied with her wishes and sat for her portrait in May and June, 1831.

Rebecca's first portrait by Sully had been what was called a "bust," a painting which showed her from the waist up. For her second, she sat for a "head," a smaller painting like those done of Ben and Maria.

A comparison of Sully's two paintings shows the same features and coloring, but also some major differences. His first portrait is of an elegant woman of the world, one with some flesh on her bones. In the second the sophisticated woman has become angelic, and the lovely transparent collar she is wearing, which must have been an expensive item, appears, not as a symbol of luxe, but as an element which heightens the ethereal looks of the sitter.

A few years after this portrait was painted, Julia Hoffman, the daughter of Rebecca's best friend Maria Fenno Hoffman, was visiting Rebecca in Philadelphia when she wrote to one of her brothers: "Miss Gratz is in good spirits and looks quite handsomely. She is certainly one of the loveliest characters in the world. It is happiness to be with her and be loved by her and I believe we all are." To me, these words describe the image we see in this portrait.

By the way, Rebecca did love the Hoffman children. A few years later, Julia was left penniless at her father's death. Rebecca offered her a home, and Julia came to divide her time for the rest of her life between winters in Philadelphia with Rebecca and summers in the country with her brother George and his family.

(This painting is in the collection of the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia. In the autumn of 2010, it will travel to the new National Museum of American Jewish History fifteen blocks from the Rosenbach for a nice, long nineteenth-century-style visit. Julia Hoffman's letter from 1835 is the Fenno-Hoffman Papers in the Clements Library at the University of Michigan.)

Another blog post of possible interest is A Lost Portrait of Rebecca.

Rebecca Makes Use of Her Writing Skills

2010-01-26T00:01:00.000-08:00

In biographical sketches of Rebecca Gratz she is often credited as a founder and the initial secretary of the Female Association, the first nondenominational charity in Philadelphia organized by women. As I have shown in the previous post and the one dated December 1, 2009, this is an exaggeration.

However, Rebecca did become the second secretary of the Association sometime between 1804 and 1808, probably earlier rather than later in this period because Sarah Butler Mease, the first secretary, delivered her third child in four years in 1804 and was likely ready to give over some of her responsibilities outside the home at that time.

Rebecca's election as secretary was quite an achievement. Although American girls had much more freedom than their peers in Europe, they became full adults only when they married. In social matters, the matrons held sway, and married women would naturally hold the important positions in charities. Rebecca's election to the post of secretary when she was a marriageable girl in her twenties tells us that the Association was 1) so desperate to fill the post that they took a chance on a young woman or 2) that Rebecca's work for the organization and her general comportment showed her to be a viable candidate despite her age.

Either way, Rebecca benefited because she found she had a talent for her new responsibilities. She had always loved literature -- her relationship with Samuel Ewing, a published poet, was based in part on this mutual interest -- and she was at this time part of the social set which had formed around a literary periodical called the Port Folio, published in Philadelphia since 1801. Many of the young men she knew published poetry and articles in the PF -- and at least four of her women friends were also contributors. Although she wrote poetry, there is no evidence that Rebecca ever submitted anything for publication; she probably knew that her poetical efforts did not rise above the amateur.

As secretary of the Female Association, she had a chance to try her hand at a different type of writing. Her main responsibility was the minutes of the meetings which she produced with accuracy and thoroughness. But the secretary's duties also included the creation of the Annual Report which was read at the yearly public meeting of the Association. Often charities printed up these reports as pamphlets for prospective donors or published them in newspapers as advertisements.

I have not come across a single example of Rebecca's annual reports for the Female Association, but based on her extant work for later charities, I can say that she grasped the importance of the reports' public relations and promotional function. Besides a list of good works, her reports made a clear statement of the charity's mission and explained the necessity for donations at the moment at hand. In 1824, two years after she gave up her office as secretary of the Female Association, the Port Folio ran an overview of local charities, based on their yearly reports. It stated that the Association "has published its annual address, but it enters into no particulars from which any conjecture may be formed of the present situation of the society."

Obviously Rebecca's talents were not so common. When a family tragedy caused her to try to resign as secretary of the Philadelphia Orphan Society in 1823, she was deflected from her purpose, probably by those who realized how hard she would be to replace.

Rebecca had found that she could use her writing abilities in the service of a good purpose, a situation which she must have deemed very satisfactory. The office of secretary provided her with a central role in the organization and therefore the power to foster projects and help bring them to fruition. All in all, it was a congenial position for her and one she would accept again in two more of her charities.

(My assertion that Rebecca kept thorough minutes is based on information in the Crampton pamphlet, cited in my post of December 1, 2009. Ms. Crampton, writing in 1965, seems to have had more original FA material than is accessible now, and I am relying on her for accuracy. Rebecca's letter of resignation is in the collection of Philadelphia Orphan Society materials at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. The quote from the Port Folio is from its April 1824 issue.)

The Female Association

2010-01-19T00:01:00.000-08:00

In my blog post dated December 1, 2009, I provided an introduction to women's charities as well as information about the founders of the first women's nonsectarian charity in Philadelphia, the Female Association for the Relief of Women and Children in Reduced Circumstances. The women who met in October 1800 had ambitions for their charity, but they were also prudent. Male concerns about the delicacy of women working with the poor, the need for financial support from men and perhaps their own collective comfort zone combined to make the objects of their charity women and children of all social classes who were in need through no fault of their own. (Most often, they were in reduced circumstances due to the loss of their breadwinner.) Helping the respectable and deserving poor was less a cause of concern for the men in the community.

Since many of their potential clients were embarrassed by their fall into poverty, the founders of the Female Association planned to have a representative, called a manageress, in each ward of the city who could locate and be available to those in need. Each manageress would inform the Board of Directoresses about her clients and their requirements, and the Board would authorize such financial aid or goods as it deemed necessary. The founders also created a "select committee" to attend to "those persons whose peculiar circumstances prevent their situations from being publicly known" (i.e., women from the upper classes). This option meant that these women would remain anonymous in the organization's records.

To do all this, the Female Association needed a large number of active members -- about 14 manageresses throughout the city, a board of directoresses to make the decisions and officers to run the organization -- about 30 women who were willing and able to commit a significant amount of time to meetings, fundraising and social work. This may be the reason that the organization became nonsectarian -- one congregation could not provide enough women with both the time and inclination for good works.

We do not know how Rebecca became involved with the Female Association, but a pamphlet about the organization shows that she was a member from 1801, along with her mother, her sister Richea Hays and her aunt Bella Cohen. (Her sister Rachel joined in 1803.) Of the nearly one hundred women on the membership list in 1803--an annual donation of $3 was the sole requirement for members--several others were Jewish. Their full names are not always given, but it seems that another family of civic-minded women was among them: Rachel Machado Phillips, a Mrs. Levy who was probably her daughter Rachel and a Miss Levy, possibly her granddaughter Eliza. (We will meet this family again at the founding of the Female Hebrew Benevolent Society.) Another was Miss Deborah Cohen, the daughter of Jacob Cohen, the hazzan (reader) at Mikveh Israel.

In the first years of the Female Association, Rebecca Gratz was not an officer or a manageress, but she did more than pay her dues. In a pamphlet from 1803, there is mention of the soup kitchen, a new idea from Europe, which the surprisingly adventurous Association had adopted as a way of feeding the poor. A building had to be renovated to fill this function and topping the list of Female Association fundraisers for the new soup kitchen was Rebecca Gratz with $35, not an insignificant amount in those days. Rebecca's conversational powers, so admired by Samuel Ewing in his character sketch (post dated September 8, 2009), were now being used for a good purpose. Her dedication to the Female Association would be noted.

(Information for this post came from the pamphlet cited in the previous post on the Female Association, dated December 1, 2009, and two editions of another pamphlet, The Constitution of the Female Association..., dated 1801 and 1803, which may be viewed at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Also consulted (and quoted) is a book, Invisible Philadelphia: community through voluntary organizations, compiled and edited by Jean Barth Toll and Mildred S. Gillam, Atwater Kent Museum, Philadelphia, 1995.)

Boys' dresses and "Breeching"

2010-01-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

On October 5, 1799, Rebecca Gratz's sister Richea Hays wrote that her son Isaac "has got his jacket and trousers made and will next week, please God, strut like a man." She was anticipating an important moment in her son's life: his passage from babyhood to boyhood.

Babies and toddlers of both sexes wore dresses until their parents were certain that their toilet-training was successful, at which time boys received their first identifiably male garb. Isaac would be three years and three months old at the time of his "breeching," as this rite of passage was called.

Although breeching was universal in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, we have little data about the age at which it occurred for the earlier part of the period. (In the latter part of the nineteenth-century, many families commemorated their sons' first trousers with a photograph, making it possible to estimate the age of boys at their breeching.) We don't know if Isaac is early, average or late in getting his new clothes or if the time of his breeching was influenced by prevailing American customs, ethnic tradition or, since Richea was criticized by her older sister Fanny for her indulgence of her children, was simply a mother's decision.

One thing we can say about Richea: she is very proud of Isaac. Some mothers were not so happy at the end of their boys' babyhood and kept their sons in dresses long after it was necessary to do so. Cecilia Beaux's painting (above), Les Derniers Jours d'Infance (The Last Days of Infancy), painted in 1883-85, gives us an image of the closeness between mother and child which many women were reluctant to give up. Once her baby was a boy in trousers his father and brothers would take a larger role in his upbringing.

(Richea's letter to Rebecca is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

The First Waltz

2010-01-05T00:01:00.000-08:00

If you have seen any of the movie versions of Jane Austen novels, you are familiar with the type of dancing done in ballrooms in the early nineteenth-century, and although I cannot distinguish a quadrille from a cotillion, I can describe two characteristics that most of these dances had in common.

The first is the lack of physical contact between the male and female dancers. Holding hands, maybe even linking elbows, some titillating brushing against each other's arms -- and that's about it. The second is that there is a great deal of changing of partners so that dancing was a great opportunity for brief flirtation and conversation with several members of the opposite sex.

It was in the context of these dances that Rebecca saw her first waltz in 1802: hers is among the earliest reports of the dance in America. At a private ball, the musicians struck up a waltz which was already popular in France. At this time Philadelphia had a large community of French and French colonial emigres, and those at the ball eagerly took to the dance floor.

Rebecca's reaction was not positive: "The French ladies & gentlemen danced the volts [sic]. It is not a delicate or I fancy an agreeable dance." This sounds a bit priggish, but consider this: while a man might take a woman's hand or give her his arm in the course of a stroll, taking her in his arms was not a part of accepted social interactions between the sexes and reserved for the private moments of those in love. With the waltz, a young woman had to submit to a lengthy invasion of her personal space by a man whom she may never had met before. It is not surprising that Rebecca's first response would have been negative, and she was by no means alone in this. Fifteen or twenty years would have to elapse before the waltz was accepted in at least some American ballrooms. To date I have found no evidence that Rebecca ever changed her mind about the dance.

(Rebecca's remarks are from a letter to her friend Maria Fenno in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress.)

Sleigh Bells Ring

2009-12-29T00:01:00.000-08:00

An unscientific survey of the weather information in Rebecca Gratz's letters shows that Philadelphia winters were as variable in the nineteenth century as they have been in more recent years. One December she is gathering roses in her garden; in another she is housebound by rain and ice. But when snow came, and it seems to have come more frequently than in the 21st century, people of Rebecca's time had one thing that added greatly to the season's charm: travel by sleigh.

On a November evening in 1800, after a snowstorm, Rebecca's friend Maria Fenno in New York wrote that there was "no other noise but the jingling of sleighs" in the street outside her house.

Lovely as the sleigh bells were, Maria's words point up their reason for being: sleighs moved silently, the horses' hoofs muffled by the snow -- the bells alerted the unwary to their approach.

In January 1805 Eliza Fenno, Maria's little sister, recorded another evening made magical by sleigh bells. A friend of Eliza's had planned to give a dance at her house, but on the day of the event there was a heavy snowstorm, and by 8 p.m. no one had come. "We were in despair when the sound of sleigh bells coming down the lane made our hearts leap...." The sleigh brought "a cargo of beaux," and more sleighs soon followed. It was "a most delightful dance," Eliza wrote Rebecca, and the party did not break up until 3 a.m.

Another pleasure the sleigh afforded was to old people whose joints could no longer take the bouncing of carriages and wagons on the truly terrible roads which existed in most parts of the country in the early nineteenth century. A sleigh, however, could give them a smooth ride to those they could no longer visit at most times of the year -- and then whisk them home again before the snow melted.

Finally, there were sleighing parties similar to the one pictured in a detail from the painting above by John Lewis Krimmel. Here a sleigh full of merrymakers is probably making a tour of inns in the area where they can stop, warm up, drink, then go on to the next hostelry. As they are pictured here, the partiers are feeling no pain, probably noisy and a menace to other traffic. Sleighs, it seems, for all their charm, could be used recklessly.

(The letters from the Fenno sisters are from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society. I am embarrassed to confess I have misplaced the reference for the information about sleigh rides for the elderly. I will add it when I recover it, but if someone can identify it for me, I would be most appreciative. German-born John Lewis Krimmel, arrived in Philadelphia in 1809, where he painted many genre scenes set in the city and its environs until his death in 1821.)

Did St. Nicholas Visit the Gratz House?

2009-12-22T00:01:00.000-08:00

In 1841 Rebecca wrote that she had received a cheerful letter from her nephew Horace (born 1820), one of her sister Rachel's children whom she raised after their mother's death. In it Horace reminded his sister Sara (born 1817), who still lived with Rebecca, of the Christmas Eves of "bygone years when they used to busy themselves in childish philosophy upon the mysterious character of Dear Old St. Nicholas."

This sounds as though Horace and Sara might have been expecting a visit. Could this be possible? Well, maybe. The 1820's, when they were children, was a time when most people in Philadelphia hardly knew what Christmas was. Episcopalians, Roman Catholics and German Protestants had religious services on December 25, with a festive meal and (in some instances) gift-giving, but they celebrated discreetly because the vast majority of their neighbors (Quakers, Presbyterians, Methodists, Baptists, Unitarians, etc.) heartily disapproved of such popish/pagan practices. Christmas was a working day, with stores and public offices open. People went about their business.

However, on December 23, 1823, a newspaper in Troy, New York, printed an anonymous poem entitled "A Visit from St. Nicholas," which we know as "Twas the night before Christmas." The author drew on the customs and stories brought to New York by its first Dutch settlers and kept alive by the old Dutch families in the state.

One of the remarkable things about the poem is the absence of any religious or didactic content -- no mention of the Nativity nor the necessity for children to be good to merit a visit. Its main character, "St. Nicholas," the "jolly old elf," bears no resemblance to the Christian saint (just as well, since Protestants eschewed the veneration of saints as quasi-polytheism). This St. Nick is a being from a simpler era when folk beliefs in magical saints and elves were common. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, these figures could be seen as neither pagan nor superstitious (and therefore dangerous) but as charming and harmless, the stuff of stories to delight children.

The poem evokes the wonder and magic of St. Nick, but its most memorable images are a "sleigh full of toys" and that "pack full of toys" which St. Nick brings down the chimney. Although some children had formerly received presents at this time of year, all children now knew that when St. Nicholas was involved, they could expect many, much more. "Twas the Night" provided a vision of a sort of juvenile Saturnalia.

The poem was a phenomenon, reprinted in newspapers and almanacs throughout the country, filling an amorphous desire for whimsy, magic and the pleasures of childhood. The holiday soon took hold. In December 1830, Maria Gratz, Rebecca's sister-in-law, in from Kentucky (where new ways came late), reported to her mother: "Christmas is a gay time here. Thousands of persons fill the streets and shops buying presents for their children." How could any child learn about St. Nicholas and not wonder, "Will he visit me?" Rebecca Gratz was probably among the first Jewish Americans to be asked that question by beloved children, and we do not know her answer.

A visit from St. Nick would be central to the American Christmas, but it was a tradition rooted in candy and toys, not in the Incarnation. Yet its unstoppable popularity was one of the forces which led many Protestants to reinstate Christmas as a major religious holiday. In an 1839 History of Philadelphia, the author announced that since the Presbyterians and some other denominations had recently embraced it, Christmas was now generally observed in Philadelphia. He added that parents were turning to educational presents for their children -- this must have been one of the first attempts to give St. Nick's visit a more serious purpose. America, however, was already on its way to a monster consumer holiday, and if Rebecca had ever indulged Horace and Sara with a visit from St. Nick, she must have been relieved that her "children" had grown up before the holiday became more religious and still more materialistic.

(Rebecca's letter is from the Miriam Moses Cohen Collection, Southern History Collection, the University of North Carolina. The History of Philadelphia mentioned is by Daniel Bowen; its text is accessible on Google Books.)

Hanukkah Greetings!

2009-12-15T00:01:00.000-08:00

The Gratz family observed the festivals and holy days of Judaism throughout the year, and in her letters Rebecca makes many references to them. However, there is one holiday for which I have yet to find a mention -- Hanukkah. There is no reason to think that the Gratz's did not celebrate it, but its absence from their correspondence suggests its minor status in the Jewish calendar. Only in the twentieth century did Hanukkah come to prominence in America as the Jewish alternative to Christmas.

A Portrait of Miriam Gratz

2009-12-08T00:01:00.000-08:00

In 1802 Miriam Gratz, Rebecca's mother, acceded to the requests of her children that she have her portrait painted. Rebecca went with her for her first sitting and wrote to her friend Maria Fenno about the experience. From a position "behind Stewart's chair" (that would be Gilbert Stuart she's talking about) she marveled "to see a countenance so dear to my heart appear on a board which but a few minutes before was a...piece of mahogany." She was struck by the resemblance and animation she saw in the work.

Miriam Gratz died suddenly in 1808, leaving her family in profound grief. Her husband Michael had suffered from depression for years, then sustained a stroke in 1800 from which he made a very partial recovery. He was as dependent on her as any of her children. Rebecca wrote to Maria in 1809: "We have indeed shut up our greatest treasure, the portrait of our beloved Mother, but we often visit it to weep over features too deeply graven on our hearts to require even the painter's skill to preserve. When first we were deprived of this best of parents I daily visited her picture, and felt that my only consolation was to gaze on it. But one day my father went into the room and was so overcome by looking at it, that we determined to sacrifice our wishes of having it constantly before us and close the room where it hangs."

(Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Miriam Gratz is in private hands, and I have not found a photograph of it. The Rosenbach Museum and Library has a copy of the painting by Jane Cooper Sully Darley, not currently on view. To see a reproduction of the Darley version, go to the Loeb Database of Early American Jewish Portraits on the website of the American Jewish Historical Society. The first of the two letters quoted in this post is in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress; the second from the Gratz Family Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society.)

Women's Charities, Philadelphia 1800

2009-12-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Philadelphia had always been a progressive city, and by the last decade of the eighteenth century, it had produced numerous charities, some run by religious organizations, some by ethnic groups, others by professions, but all created and organized by men.

The first charity developed by women was the Female Benevolent Society at the African Church (now the African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas). A mutual aid society introduced in 1793, the organization was made up of subscribers who could call upon it for help if and when they were in need.

The second women's charity, founded by Anne Parrish, a member of the Society of Friends, and administered by the women of her Meeting, also originated during the difficult period 1793-1995 when Philadelphia suffered through two yellow fever epidemics. Shortly after its formation, the Female Society of Philadelphia for the Relief and Employment of the Poor (as the organization came to be known) received a letter from a male Friend who was concerned about the "indelicacy" of women working with the urban poor. The Secretary copied the letter into the minutes, and the group proceeded with their endeavors. In the early years of the nineteenth century, they were best known for their Hall of Industry, where they paid poor women to spin.

What is noticeable here is that these are good works attributable to outlying groups, not the women from the socially and politically prominent families who attended the Dancing Assemblies. It would not be until October of 1800 that a group of such women met in the parlor of the minister of the Second Presbyterian Church to begin their efforts for the needy. Among them were Hannah Boudinot, whose husband had been president of the Continental Congress in 1782-83; her daughter Susan Bradford, widow of an Attorney General of the United States; Sarah Butler Mease, a daughter of a signer of the Declaration; Sarah Ralston, a daughter of Mayor Matthew Clarkson whose leadership during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 fostered calm and produced effective action in the city; and Miss Sproat, probably a daughter of the Rev. Mr. James Sproat of Second Presbyterian who died ministering to the sick during the same epidemic. Although they met under the auspices of a religious congregation, these women came from families with a tradition of civic responsibility as well. In the new republic they may have seen their actions as not simply a way to live their faith, but also as their contribution to nation-building. In a republic, who better than they to see the needs of poor women and take up the task of helping those in difficult circumstances?

Nearly 40 years later, Dr. Ashbel Green in whose parlor this meeting took place would remember: "It was at that period an untried experiment for the female to attempt extending the sphere of her exertions beyond the narrow limits of her own household." Yet these women were about to found an ambitious citywide organization, the first to go beyond a single congregation and become truly nonsectarian in its membership. Among the first women to become members in the organization's first full year were a number of Jewish women including twenty-year-old Rebecca Gratz.

(The information about the earliest charities is from Bruce Dorsey's 2002 book Reforming men and women: gender in the antebellum city. Information about the founding of the Female

Association is from a pamphlet by Eleanor S. Wistar Crampton, "The Female Association of Philadelphia for the Relief of Women and Children," published in Philadelphia in 1965. I found it among the Female Association papers at Haverford College's library.)

"Take the canal boat from Pittsburgh"

2009-11-24T00:01:00.000-08:00

In 1835 Rebecca Gratz visited her brother Benjamin and his family in Lexington, Kentucky, for several months over the summer. As fall approached her brother Hyman wrote her, promising to meet her on her way home at Wheeling, West Virginia, or Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He suggested that she plan to "take the canal boat from Pittsburgh," that she would like it much better than a land journey.

Few people realize today that Pennsylvania once had a system of canals, connected in a few places by railroads, which could take travelers all the way across the state. Certainly, as Hyman suggests, the ride on a canal boat must have been much smoother than anything the roads of the era could offer.

The canals of Pennsylvania, dug (for the most part) during the building boom following the success of the Erie Canal, were soon completely superseded by railroads. A map of the state's canal system appears on the website of the Pennsylvania Canal Society.

(The letter from Hyman Gratz to Rebecca, dated Sept. 15, 1835, is found in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society.)