The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic, and: “Circumstances are destiny”: An Antebellum Woman’s Struggle to Define Sphere (review)

On the surface, these paired books appear to have little in common. Timothy Kenslea examines marriage and courtship among the descendants of Federalist scion Theodore Sedgwick of western Massachusetts, drawing on their voluminous, multigenerational correspondence to reveal the heart-wrenching story of mating and marrying in a period when the ideals and expectations of married life were undergoing extraordinary transformation. Tina Stewart Brakebill, by contrast, focuses on the singular struggles of Celestia Rice Colby, a frustrated and unhappy farm woman from the Western Reserve of Ohio from 1827 to 1900. Yet the Sedgwick children’s romantic yearning for companionship and mutual affection from their spouses would have drawn a knowing and bitter laugh from Colby, whose marriage in 1848 was lifeless and unsatisfying virtually from the start. The heady years of the early national period nurtured great expectations for a post-Revolutionary shift from patriarchal families to more companionate and egalitarian ones, but the interior lives exposed by Kenslea and Brakebill show that, like so many revolutionary hopes, this was often a dream deferred. Despite the significant differences between the subjects and themes under analysis—a large, well-to-do New England family’s conception of marriage and a midwestern rural farm wife’s frustrated ambitions—both authors strive to fulfill the central goal of good microhistory: to draw from singular lives “an allegory for broader issues affecting the culture as a whole.”¹ Kenslea’s engaging and richly researched The Sedgwicks in Love and Brakebill’s narrow and awkwardly presented “Circumstances are destiny” both struggle with this charge. In the process, they highlight the enduring promises and perils of microhistorical and biographical approaches.

Kenslea advances a clear and focused argument from the outset: After the American Revolution, “within some limits, young people were expected to choose [their partners] on the basis of affection” (36). This point echoes a larger body of scholarship about the decline of patriarchal family patterns and the rise of the romantic ideal advanced by Carole Shammas, Jan Lewis, Anya Jabour, and others. Yet Kenslea makes it clear that especially in affluent families, parents stubbornly maintained the colonial pattern of exerting power and influence over their children’s marital decisions. In the case of Eliza and Frances Sedgwick, their father valued “men of business, men with sound material prospects” (41) over their own romantic choices and went out of his way to select alternative candidates who met these criteria for his daughters. They both yielded, though not without a fight. Despite its ostensible success, Père Sedgwick’s manipulation revealed just how out of step he was with early republic culture, a culture that lauded romantic feeling and love as natural, and that considered “the calculations of the head” (44) as unnatural and corrupt. The turbulent boom-and-bust cycles of the economy of the early nineteenth century proved just how disastrous choosing class interests over individual affection could be. Frances’s husband Ebenezer Watson, selected specifically for his supposed financial prowess, went broke and failed in several speculative business ventures. Watson violently abused his wife throughout the marriage, with the Sedgwick clan nearly powerless to stop it. It is impossible to know whether Frances’s life would have turned out differently if she had been able to marry the man of her choice, but it is hard to imagine it turning out worse. The experience of witnessing this horror-show marriage certainly influenced the other Sedgwick children to be more cautious and independent in their romantic lives, resulting in male descendants with several broken engagements and the youngest and most famous child, Catherine Maria Sedgwick, choosing not...