On Slavery's Border: Missouri's Small Slaveholding Households, 1815-1865

2. Households in the Middle Ground: Small Slaveholders’ Family Strategies

2 / Households in the Middle Ground: Small Slaveholders’ Family Strategies In the late 1850s, Martha McDonald, a Missouri school girl, meticulously copied the following words, attributed to Alexander Hamilton, into her classroom notebook, suggesting that they held deep meaning for her. How to Build a Happy Home Six things are requisite. Integrity must be the architect, tidiness the upholster. It must be warmed by affection, lighted up with cheerfulness, and industry must be the ventilator renewing the atmosphere and bringing in fresh salubrity day by day while over all as a protecting canopy and glory nothing will suffice except the blessing of God.1 Middle-class Americans of the time would have appreciated the sentiments expressed in these lines as a model for the ideal home, and Martha likely recognized them as values embraced by her own family. Martha’s account of her youth spent on Missouri’s western border paints a portrait that rivals that of any northeastern middle-class domestic haven and suggests that her parents, Silas and Sarah McDonald, heeded Hamilton’s advice and provided their children with a home befitting their status as small slaveholders and members of the merchant class. The McDonalds’ values mirrored those of their small-slaveholding peers, reflecting their focus on creating a household and farming environment that would promote their goals for their families.2 Martha McDonald France spent her childhood in a bustling St. Joseph , Missouri, household that included her parents, seven siblings, and households in the middle ground / 53 her paternal grandmother. She wrote of her mother preparing strawberries , ice cream, and cake to welcome her father home from a journey and of the flower-lined front walk of the McDonald home. Martha frequently chronicled the many times when the family played together; her father took the children swimming, hiking, hunting for rabbits, and on gooseberry-picking expeditions. Family members also attended church, school exhibitions, and public celebrations together. Martha recorded the fun shared by her younger siblings as they cavorted around the yard, and in the evenings, family members relaxed while Martha or her siblings played the guitar and piano, entertaining their many guests. The McDonalds frequently gathered together in the parlor or in their mother ’s or their grandmother’s room: “[A]ll here Father, Mother, Brothers, Sisters all who hold each other dear.” When the evening of camaraderie ended, Silas McDonald sang his little sons to sleep.3 The McDonalds also labored together on the family’s farm. Silas and his son Dan hoed the garden, and the children of both sexes helped during hay harvesting time. Martha clearly loved raking hay, partly because the “new mown hay smells so sweet,” but also because she saw it as a chance for the family to spend time together. She remembered one day in July 1856 when they labored with their father in the fields: “All of us helped him put up twenty hay-cocks after sun-down. . . . We are going to make some more this evening. We all worked till it blistered our hands.” The McDonalds owned six slaves, a man, a woman, and four children, in 1860, yet they barely registered in Martha’s description of middle-class domestic life on Missouri’s western border. Slavery was central to the McDonalds’ family life as was the case in other Missouri households, but more often than not slaves faded into the background in small slaveholders ’ accounts of their personal and family experiences.4 On the surface, the McDonalds’ expectations and concerns for their family were similar to those of many other nineteenth-century upperand middle-class Americans. Historians have argued that the domestic ideals that had emerged by midcentury were rooted in the ongoing transformation of the family that resulted from rapid economic and social change in the northeastern United States. In the urbanizing and industrializing North, middle-class men increasingly left their residences for work in the emerging marketplace, while women managed their homes and cared for their children. Women now produced fewer goods for household consumption and, therefore, refocused their energies on their roles as wives and mothers. These economic and social developments coincided with a new emphasis and celebration of women’s 54 / households in the middle ground “natural” maternal and moral attributes. Women were expected to be their children’s first teachers, educating them to be responsible republican citizens, hard workers, and stalwart Christians. Men and women were described as living...