The Diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841–1842: (Part 1)

In the diary of Horace C. Lee, 1841–42, a young dry goods clerk in Springfield, Massachusetts, explores both his own emerging ideals as he grows into adulthood and also the complex gender, religious, social, and economic dynamics of a midsize New England town as it develops into a city.¹ The sixteen and a half months recorded by Lee in this diary are for him a unique period of transition between childhood and adulthood. His journal therefore provides an intimate, first-person account of adolescent tensions between responsibilities to family and obligations to friends, career and recreation, and courtship and camaraderie. Scratched across the pages of the diary are the traces of his struggle to define his masculinity and independence in a period of middle-class mobility and provincial prosperity for mid-nineteenth-century New England. Since this context is crucial to his personal development, a brief overview of the historical, social, and economic environments in which Lee finds himself will set the scene.

Still caught in the whirl of its own rapid transition from quiet town to bustling city, Springfield in 1841 was an ideal place for a young man in search of opportunity. The town was founded in 1636 by a band of settlers under the leadership of William Pynchon, one of the English Puritans who had founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony just a few years earlier.² Nestled at the base of an imposing bluff on the eastern shore of the Connecticut River, the primary conduit for sharing goods, people, and information between the major towns of western New England, Springfield developed concurrently with the region throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The major economic advantage for Springfield over its peer settlements, however, came after the Revolution, when the fledgling federal government selected the town in 1794 as the site of the United States Armory.³

With the sudden flood of attention from the government and private investors, Springfield burgeoned into a regional hub for manufacturing, business, and transportation. The grounds of the armory were laid out on the bluff, fittingly renamed Armory Hill, above the commercial center of town, which ran along Main Street, parallel to the river. Most of the heavy manufacturing for the armory occurred just south of town, at a complex on the Mill River known as the Watershops; private textile mills and factories quickly sprang up along the Chicopee River to the north in Cabotville. The construction of a railroad depot at the northern end of Main Street connected Springfield first with Worcester and Boston to the east in 1839, then over the river and west with Albany in 1841, and soon with towns north and south along the Connecticut River Valley.⁴ Quite unexpectedly, Springfield had become a crossroads of the industrial revolution.

With the influx of industry, commerce, and culture came new diversity and prosperity to Springfield society. Irish immigrants followed the railroad and settled around the depot,⁵ free blacks organized a church downtown,⁶ and young men from throughout New England flocked to the city to launch their mercantile careers from clerking positions in the shops along Main Street.

Figure 1.

Map of Springfield, 1847. Courtesy of the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum, Springfield, Massachusetts.

The town developed three distinct neighborhoods: the Street, comprising the original settlement and the commercial center of the town; the Hill, a collection of fine homes clustered around the armory and downhill past the churches and lecture halls of State Street; and the Watershops, where many of the mill workers made their homes. Fierce neighborhood rivalries flourished among the young men, particularly between the new wealth of the Hill boys and the sons of the more established families on the Street.⁷ More seriously, this new socioeconomic diversity gave rise to a wide variety of beliefs and opinions that often came in conflict.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, Springfield was a hothouse of religious sentiment, with offshoot denominations sprouting up routinely every couple of years. Since the earliest days of the...