A Home in the West: Or, Emigration and Its Consequences

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION by Sharon E. Wood When printers at the Dubuque Express and Herald peeled the freshly inked pages of A Home in the West, or, Emigration and Its Consequences from their press, they surely never imagined it would endure to find readers in another century. The pamphlet they stitched and trimmed in 1858 was an object for immediate consumption, an emigration tract designed to recruit easterners to settle in the Upper Mississippi Valley. Priced at ten cents, it hardly seemed the stuff of literature or history. Yet even as they bundled the little books for distribution, they may have recognized that this tract was different. Written by a young schoolteacher, A Home in the West directed its persuasions at an audience of women, using the form of the domestic novel, a genre popular with women readers. What took shape under those printers’ deft hands was almost certainly the first original novel published in Iowa and probably the earliest to portray life in Iowa as well. In twenty-three pages of tiny, cramped type, it told the story of a young couple who left Connecticut for the village of Newburg, Iowa, where they found friendships and hardships and finally success. The story was conventional, but the booklet was not. Emigration tracts directed specifically at women are rare, and one in the form of a novel is unique. For readers today, A Home in the West opens a window on the concerns and experiences of women in the mid nineteenth century and offers a fresh view of the “pioneer” generations of white Americans who settled Iowa and the Midwest.· · · M. Emilia Rockwell was just twenty-two and a newcomer to Iowa when she published her novel. Born Mary Wells in Elmira, New York, she grew up along the border of western New York and Pennsylvania. Like her heroine, Annie Judson, Wells married a carpenter, and the couple emigrated to Iowa after their 1856 wedding. Norton and Mary Rockwell made their home in the Mississippi riverport village of Lansing, about ten miles south of the Minnesota border. 2 The fictional Newburg is not Lansing, nor is Annie Judson an alter ego of Mary Rockwell. Instead, Rockwell’s knowledge of Lansing and Dubuque informed her depiction of Newburg, just as her observations of the social and economic upheavals of the 1850s taught her about the concerns of women whose families were considering emigration. Historians studying the diaries and letters of westering women have found that they were often reluctant migrants, loath to leave kinfolk behind and overwhelmed by the increase in labor that women sometimes faced. But private concerns were not the only ones that might deter emigrants. The first years of Mary Rockwell’s marriage were also years of violence and upheaval in the West, and Rockwell’s novel sought to reassure readers that eastern Iowa, at least, was a peaceful and prosperous place. Hard Times and Boom Towns Although set primarily in Iowa, A Home in the West is also a novel about the disruptive effects of industrialization in the East. With her opening sentences, 3 Mary Rockwell invoked the separation of “home” from “work” created by the new economic order, and she offered the hope that women, as caretakers of the home, could temper the alienation and destructive competition of an industrial economy. Outside the Judsons’ cottage, all is storm and bluster; inside all is “peace and comfort.” Even Annie Judson’s name suggests her role. The real Ann Judson was one of the most famous women of the antebellum era. The first American woman to go as a missionary to foreign lands, Judson wrote a pious memoir, defended her husband when he was imprisoned by Burmese authorities, and died a martyr. “Annie” Judson is not called upon for such courage or such sacrifices, but she is the moral center of the novel, guiding her husband Walter’s choices and, like a missionary, bringing “refining, softening influences” to the “money-seeking, speculative” West. The values embodied by Walter and Annie Judson stand in stark contrast to those that jeopardized their peace and security in the industrial East. Rockwell wrote with nostalgia about apprenticeship, a labor system that was disappearing by the 1850s. In its ideal expression, apprenticeship bound a boy and his master together in a surrogate child-parent 4 relationship. The apprentice lived in his master’s household, cared for and taught by both...