We Have Raised All of You: Motherhood in the South, 1750-1835

10. White Sages

136 10 . Y . White Sages i n addition to the practical skills attendant on nursing, reading, and teaching , mothers maintained a more nebulous claim on their children’s futures. Mothers were repositories of advice, dispensers of generations of wisdom that ranged from career recommendations to religious injunctions. far from being powerless captives in patriarchal southern households, women maintained a certain degree of control over their families through a less conspicuous medium . advice giving provided an ideal way for women to voice knowledge, judgment , and expectations, for it recommended rather than commanded. when South Carolina resident frances hume Pinckney sent a letter filled with advice to her son, who was studying at an academy in england, she drilled into her child the importance of her own suggestions. “Remark, my dear Boy, what i now write to you,” frances insisted in 1786. “Read it over-&-over and say all this i will most assuredly observe, as it is my Mother’s wish that i should.”1 even the distance of several thousand miles could not blunt frances’s faith in her own maternal wisdom. a female network that extended beyond the relationship between mother and child also fashioned a community of sages, women who had learned from their mothers and grandmothers and were prepared to pass that information along to the next generation. in this way, women shaped their children’s sense of right and wrong, of duty, loyalty, and justice, thus maintaining a current of power within the seemingly domesticated geography of the home. advice took many forms; mothers might urge their sons to choose the law over medicine, or their daughters to marry Mr. Jones instead of Mr. Smith. women also supported each other through mourning, offering recommendations on how to soothe grief. and in an era when life was no longer ruled by the tolling of church bells, the 137 white sages maintenance of private spirituality often fell on a mother’s shoulders. whatever situations arose, mothers could promise, “i will give you my opinion freely.”2 ƒ Z % The first concern for many maternal advice givers was ensuring that their children had a proper reverence for Providence. as young people’s education became increasingly secularized toward the end of the eighteenth century, women had to find other outlets for expressing spiritual concern, and many nineteenthcentury men and women received their first informal lessons in religion from their mothers. as conduits for faith, mothers defined their domestic scope to include their children’s very salvation. while many of these women adopted religious roles in the home because their own mothers had, others were afforded a new sense of authority from the waves of evangelicalism that swept the country during the Second Great awakening. from the 1790s to the 1840s, congregations of Methodists and Baptists popped up across the South, and they preached a message of relative inclusion. for the first time, denominations were offering substantial roles in the church for women, most of whom were both eager for new responsibilities and hungry for validation, especially in the face of an otherwise controlling patriarchy. for evangelical Christians, women became the religious and moral center of the household in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. with this heightened religious role came an expectation that women would serve as spiritual guides for their families, raising their children with the fear of God and urging unrepentant family members to turn to the light. Many religious women saw the conversion of loved ones as their most important task, and some women’s skill at raising pious youth served as a justification for more public work, from teaching children in Sunday schools to occasional preaching. dispensing religious advice, then, connected women both to the intimacy of the home and to broader waves of spiritual reform.3 a sense of faith could provide religious mothers with purpose in the best of times and comfort in the worst. when Mary alston Pringle began her maternal career on december 2, 1822, with the birth of her first child, she started copying prayers in a commonplace book. The prayers she recorded offer an account of her concerns; first came “a prayer for a woman with Child,” “a prayer, for a woman, when the time of travail draws near,” and “a thanksgiving to be said, 138 sowing good seeds by a woman, after her delivery.” By the 1830s, her anxieties had broadened; she copied, “a prayer for a son...