Margaret Fuller, Wandering Pilgrim

1. Her Father’s House

8 “no natural childhood” dismissed from his pastorate in the spring of 1776. Timothy Sr. then took his family to the antiwar village of Chilmark on Martha’s Vineyard, where he preached in the Congregational church. Stalwart and independent minded, he also brought a suit against the town of Princeton to recover his salary. Having lost his suit, Fuller proudly paid both court costs and legal fees, which “malignant” townspeople had predicted would crush him. On his return to Princeton, his former parishioners, who seemed to like him “better as a politician” than as a preacher, elected him to represent Princeton at the state convention called to ratify the U.S. Constitution. True to his contrary nature, however, Fuller refused to vote in favor of the document , arguing in part that he could not ratify a text that recognized slavery. At his home, located on seven hundred acres embracing Mount Wachusett, Timothy Sr. farmed; he also homeschooled all of his children—“the great object of his ambition ” being, according to one of his grandsons, to prepare his five sons for Harvard .3 Margaret’s father, Timothy (Timo), was the fourth of the fractious Rev. Fuller’s ten surviving children, all of whom, like their father, were intellectually gifted, steel willed, and opinionated. The five sons became lawyers who were hardworking , ambitious, and politically active. They were also, according to Fuller family friend and biographer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, energetic and combative to the point of being overbearing and crass. Henry, the third son, was said during jury trials to have shot “shafts of raillery and sarcasm” that entertained jurors while riling and alienating his opponents. Self-assertive, public spirited, and proud, Henry’s puritanically rigid eldest brother Timothy embodied eighteenth-century Enlightenment values. Determinedly self-reliant, he insisted that both he and his children exhibit moral righteousness and serve the community.4 Little did these abrasive but brilliant brothers imagine that one of them, Timothy , would father a daughter in whom many of their best as well as some of their less admirable traits—such as Henry’s tendency toward sarcasm—would be concentrated , a daughter whose intellect and accomplishments would in time tower over their own. 1SHer Father’s House A strict Unitarian, Margaret’s father routinely took his young family to church on Sunday and read aloud with them from the Bible in the parlor. A respected member of the political establishment, in his youth he had been rebellious. As stubborn and independent minded as his father and determined to obtain a level of material comfort denied him when young as the son of a poor country minister and farmer, the junior Timothy worked hard so that he could graduate from Harvard with highest honors. An inherited perversity of temperament, however, prevented this: while at Harvard, this fiercely competitive scholar and Phi Beta Kappa mem- ber organized a student protest against new college regulations. For this the faculty denied him the right to graduate with first honors, giving him second-place honors instead, a demotion that “chagrined” him. Similarly, as a young adult set on social and business success in nineteenth-century Boston, Timothy stubbornly remained a Republican—“or, as men,” according to Higginson, “were beginning to say, a Democrat”—amid Federalists and an ardent abolitionist (like his father) at a time when Massachusetts merchants favored trade with the South.1 The high-toned Timothy was an eccentric whose life was riddled with contradictions . Though stern and rigid, he passionately loved music and forced his tonedeaf daughter to learn to sing and play the piano. In letters he wrote his wife from Washington, he would say on one page how he “could not suppress” his “aversion to the things of the world” while elaborating on another on the loveliness of Mrs. Madison’s or Mrs. Adams’s dress. An advocate of human rights, he preached women’s rights and wrote his wife in January 1820 that he was “so well pleased” with Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman that he intended to buy her a copy, a curious offer given he had written her just days earlier that Wollstonecraft ’s “conduct with [Gilbert] Imlay, of America, whom she loved so ardently & would not marry, but had a child by him . . . must completely discountenance her ‘Rights of Woman,’ which no woman dares to read, but she should be charged with libertinism.” Likewise, though Timothy supported female education and independence of mind, he had a need to dominate the...