Dear Jean P.S. Part Seven of 10
June 4, 2020
Who built this country? Here’s a glimpse of a few immigrants with plans, not easy
reading ahead. Mix ideals, passion, power, personality, and fortunes, let’s see
who sinks, who swims. Warning: no religion allowed.
“Dear
Jean,” four fiction letters elsewhere on blog, and “Dear Jean P.S.,”
nonfiction, Karen Chadwick’s Tribute to:
David Dale, A Life by David J. McLaren, Stenlake Publisher,
Ayrshire, Scotland, 2015, a truly beautiful new book rich with photos, docs,
maps, all supporting Dr. McLaren’s extensive research on David Dale, 1739-1806.
Dale was one of the first “Captains of Industry” at the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution with his new cotton yarn mill in New Lanark, Scotland beginning in
1786. I found this book fascinating for a few reasons, here’s one.
In 1799, Dale’s oldest
daughter, Anne Caroline, married Robert Owen. RO married into a pot of money.
In 1825, RO purchased a town from a departing Lutheran cult in the new state of
Indiana and renamed it New Harmony. RO took his passion for social engineering,
six of his well-educated adult children, were joined by other dreamers, and
attempted to create an intellectual communal experiment that failed two years
later. RO could talk the talk; he couldn’t walk the walk. In spite of this
expensive failure, RO became world famous for his radical ideas of how to shape
good humans. To this day, there is a “Robert Owen Society” in Japan, for
instance.
Flash forward to 1995 and my
new job in New Harmony as private secretary to Jane Blaffer Owen, JBO. She
married Kenneth Dale Owen, KDO, in 1941 and I worked for her when she was in
her 80s. She brought great wealth to the marriage as her Blaffer/Texas roots
were in Humble Oil and Texaco Oil, which morphed to Exxon. KDO was a descendant
of David Dale and Robert Owen, through Richard Dale Owen. Elsewhere on this
blog is their genealogy record. Wealth from the Dale/Owen legacy had evaporated
by KDO’s time. Young Jane Blaffer appreciated that this suitor was not from the
lazy wealthy class she grew up with and she was impressed that he had worked
his way through college. That credential and his notable name sealed the deal.
This wing of the Owen family
continued with the tradition of honoring David Dale. Kenneth and Jane gave the
Dale name as middle name to two of their daughters. The Blaffer wealth saved an
interesting portion of American history as Jane Blaffer Owen poured herself
into the restoration and renovation of New Harmony for over 70 years. I helped.
Dear Jean P.S. Part Seven of 10
June 4, 2020
A
Powerful Woman Gone Bad, Francis Wright
Don’t get me going about Fanny
Wright, YIKES! She was a Scot, however, both parents of means died when she was
3 years old in 1798 and she got passed on to grandfather in England and his
young adult daughter became wicked cruel guardian — Auntie from Hell — of the
wealthy little girl. Fanny became — I barely know how to say this — smart,
wild, rich, stupid, independent except for her younger sister Camilla’s care of
Fanny once they were reunited as young adults, foolish, extremely
well-connected with the most famous men of the times, ideas too big for
reality, the first woman in the USA to give public speeches and soon thousands
would come to hear what she had to say, and passionate to a serious fault.
Fanny’s life caved in as she most
likely had increasingly serious bi-polar health problems that were yet to be
understood by doctors. Here’s a connection cred she used: Frenchman and
principal military hero in the US Revolutionary war, Marquis de Lafayette, was
a close and powerful friend to young adult Fanny. He was extremely wealthy,
extremely connected, and became a trusted confidant. He was also famous for
liking young women, and historians don’t know exactly what their friendship
really meant. His family kept a very close eye on them when they were visiting,
that’s well documented. Whatever went on there, it did open the door for Fanny
to be welcome at Thomas Jefferson’s table when she was in Philadelphia. She emigrated
to the new country, USA, in 1818.
Here's a fashion statement Fanny
started — a drawing of her, standing near her horse, shows that she was a tall
woman, elbow comfortably resting on saddle horn — and oh, what is she wearing?
Pants? Yes! She traveled very often by horse, and rode as men did, not the
ladylike side saddle thing. She was one of the first women anywhere to travel
alone, without male companion aka “guardian.” She also traveled often with
married men, that was also a major cultural no-no.
Fanny had heard RO talk up his
dream for New Harmony. This started a long and mostly fruitful collaboration
with some of the Owen family. She put much work into writing for the newspaper,
New Harmony Gazette, a project she
and Robert Dale Owen shared for years. RO and RDO became quite devoted to her
foolish dream of another social engineering experiment to “help” American
slaves. Did she research what she was about to spend a lot of money on? No. She
let her grand dream carry the idea and it crashed like the dud it was.
Fanny was so persuasive she talked
her way into the group across the Wabash, the English Prairie dreamers who were
struggling to survive. Fanny convinced them to help with her dream. George and
Eliza Flower disrupted their lives several times to accommodate Fanny’s urgent
dream, and the stress contributed to two expensive failures.
Following on the Dear Jean letters,
you understand that ideas like Slave Trade Abolition were becoming very
persuasive in Great Britain. Dale and others worked for years to stop the crime
of taking people out of Africa and selling them like they were horses. Fanny
heard such ideas and became a devoted abolitionist. When she was able to
control her ample inheritance, she moved to the USA. She developed a compelling
idea of gathering slaves on property she purchased in Tennessee and teaching
them how to navigate the culture as free people. In 1825, this was a strange
idea.
The British/American values
surrounding African slaves were a part of the weave, it was just how things
played out through over 200 hundred years of the Americas development. We know
that the first boat of Africans about to be slaves arrived in the British colonies
in North America in 1619. Keep in mind, it wasn’t just the British colonies in
North America that wanted slaves, it was also the multi-Europeans being Dutch,
French, Spanish, Portuguese, etc., who controlled West Indies — Cuba, Jamaica,
Aruba, Bahamas, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, etc., and entities in
Central and South America, also. Abolition voices like Fanny’s, the Owen
family, Maclure, Flower family, all opposed to the slave trade and slavery,
unfortunately only created more passion on the other side of that issue. Most
early Americans either approved slavery, and/or owned slaves, or looked the
other way.
The passion for Abolition was much
more intense in Great Britain, not so much in early USA. One 1770s English
Quaker said it this way, “Those colonists, they wave the sword of freedom with
one hand and hold the slave driver’s whip in the other hand.” As you’ve
understood from the Dear Jean letters, Slave Trade Abolition was a decidedly
separate issue from ending slavery. Some passionate Slave Trade Abolitionists
could easily see how to shut that down, stop the slavers bringing the Africans.
A much more difficult problem was how to end slavery, and some considered the
problem not only unsolvable, but the callous ones whispered that there’s no
need to bring Africans to the New World, as slaves make more slaves. Very
likely as the USA came to be, in 1783, there were approximately 4 million
slaves throughout the Americas. Yes, a slave woman having a child meant a
property to sell. In 1825, Fanny had an idea.
On Andrew Jackson’s advice, Fanny
bought a large chunk of land, 320 acres, near a small trading post in Memphis,
Tennessee, and called it Nashoba. FYI, that’s all Memphis was then, a small
trading post on the Mississippi River. It was five miles from the “Indian
line,” meaning an official designation of the boundary of the USA.
Fanny spread the word that she
would take slaves and teach them how to be free Americans. Soon a slaveholder
heard of her idea and offered to sell his slaves to Fanny. She bought them, and
it did not go well. The slaves, a mother and several daughters, were rather
unique, rather difficult, rather uninterested in Fanny’s ideas of how to be a
civic American. Between their lack of cooperation, the area neighbors who were
mostly slave approving or indifferent to it and hostile to Fanny’s plan, the
land not suitable for money making crops like cotton, the lack of proper
management for housing, buildings, and food production, and Fanny’s inability
to manage what she had started, it all collapsed within five years. Fanny’s
sister, Camilla, tried to keep Nashoba going, still it failed. Camilla married
a man who was unable to function as manager, George and Eliza Flower departed
very soon, Fanny was seldom there, and Nashoba ended. Fanny took the slaves she
owned to New Orleans and shipped them to recently independent Haiti where they
were finally really free.
Fanny turned her attention to
women’s rights, yet her own life started to unravel. And I do mean unravel, her
life became a nightmare, check out Fanny Wright, Rebel in America by
Celia Morris. Chapter 8 on, you won’t be able to stop reading. We learn that
sometimes money doesn’t make problems go away, it attracts trouble.
One of many terrible things that
happened to Fanny in her later years, her jerk husband burned all her
writing, yep, up in smoke. Did Fanny meet with Frederick Douglass, Sojourner
Truth, Harriet Tubman or any of the other African Americans risking their lives
to bring justice for escaping slaves? Who knows? Start a fire, that will
diminish some creds. I ponder this: did Nashoba serve as an Underground
Railroad stop? Fanny and her compatriots surely were sympathetic to that cause,
yet Morris has nothing to say about this in her biography of Fanny. Did New
Harmony or Albion offer safe haven for escaping slaves? Curious.
Ready for another radical concept?
Fanny, Robert Dale Owen, and others sympathetic had this serious concern:
traditional marriage legalities enslaved women and men. One example, normal for
the time was this: if a woman owned property and then married, her property
became his, and she became his property. Really. As the Wright/Owen “fair
marriage” idea gained public attention, it was twisted to a scare tactic that
those people were promoting “free love.” That erroneous assumption gained
popular attention and eroded solidarity with the Wright/Owen supporters. Those
focused on discrediting any change in marriage law spread lies that Fanny was
having sex with her slaves at Nashoba. It was a harsh time for anyone with some
power, some public voice, to step out of cultural protocol. In fact, these
fresh thinkers were exploring a better legal contract of marriage. Young as it
was, nevertheless, American culture had its limits and the Owen/Wright thinkers
pushed the limits often.
Unfortunately, a few years on, Fanny faced a
nightmare as an unwed pregnant woman, and decided it was just too harsh to give
her future child a label of “illegitimate” and married the jerk with
conventional marriage legalities. The jerk had worked for years in the New
Harmony School of Industry and over time the school funder, William Maclure,
and the administrator, Marie Fretageot, came to have a low opinion of the
difficult guy. Spoiler alert: he married money, wife and child became his
property.
Earn
Big Money, Give It Away William Maclure
As fascinating as Fanny Wright was,
William Maclure was more interesting. Allow me to introduce him. I’ve chatted
him up more thoroughly earlier, as a reminder here’s one of his creds: William
Maclure is The Father of American Geology. Self-taught! Need more to pique your
interest? He was always welcome at
Thomas Jefferson’s table in Philadelphia and he was a major personality in the
development of New Harmony. He had serious passions and strong ideas of how to
create a best society, too. And he was rich.
The man knew how to make money.
How, I don’t know. Most likely import/export textiles, maybe sugar, molasses,
rum, and/or cotton, his father had done such business on a small scale. He
wasn’t the right age to profit hugely from first big money that flowed from the
colonies, tobacco money. The Tobacco Lords were the first in British history to
make big — and I do mean BIG — money rather than inherit it. By 1766, tobacco
wealth was starting to evaporate as the colonists didn’t understand agriculture
much yet, and growing same crop on same land year after year after year was an
increasingly bad idea. The demand for tobacco was strong as smoking was a mark
of sophistication among European men, but reliably getting the product was
becoming a problem by the 1770s. Habit? What habit?
Maclure was a Scot, grew up near
Glasgow, had some significant family problems and changed his name from James
McClure to William Maclure, that was highly unusual for the times, 1770s.
Somehow, someway, Maclure became wealthy enough to retire from commerce in his
30s, and spent the rest of his life giving his money to causes and people he
wished to support. Maclure was also completely done with religion. When Maclure
met RO, they quickly respected each other. Perhaps that was a mistake, as they
had many tough problems and legal suits between their dreams and goals.
Gratitude to author Leonard Warren for his most interesting book, Maclure
of New Harmony.
Maclure never married, there was
never any rumor of him ever being with a woman, or being with a man, either.
Yes, same-sex relationships were never talked about anyway then, so who knows?
We do know that he had long lasting friendships with many people, financially
supported many struggling scientists and educators, yet no record of any
personal relationships remain to know Maclure as we might wish. He was never a
parent, either. He did have a long and solid friendship with Marie Duclos Fretageot,
a Frenchwoman, educator, and manager to Maclure’s New Harmony work. As far as
any historian knows, the most they ever did was hold hands on rare occasions.
Her letters to him always hint at her hope for more, yet Maclure was able to
keep her loyalty without advancing the relationship. Maclure fully supported
her until she died. She worked for years to educate young people in New Harmony
according to Owen and Maclure’s ideas, keeping goal of best ways to have best
citizens. Their School of Industry did not continue with raising young children
apart from parents yet did provide free education to all who wished to
participate. It was this part of RO’s dream and entirely financed by Maclure
that did continue for seven years in New Harmony. Fretageot and a few other
teachers under her direction were the ones actually doing the work and it
couldn’t have been a smooth and easy life for her among the chaos of New
Harmony. She gets my applause, as this aspect of social and educational
organization was a galvanizing credential for this tiny town on the fringe of
civilization. I partied in her residence often, too.
One of Maclure’s lasting
contributions to New Harmony is the Working Men’s Institute, a library! It is
still operating, in fact is the oldest continuously operated public library in
the state of Indiana, https://workingmensinstitute.org/.
Maclure made great effort to
see New Harmony become a respected community even as RO’s dream crumbled. This
contribution, a new large attractive building and stocked with many books for
working men to read for no charge was radical. (Yah, sorry about the
working women - I hope they were welcome – sure are now!). Maclure’s generosity
mattered. It was the exciting scientists and other thinkers who did come to New
Harmony to live and work, supported entirely by Maclure, that helped the small
town have gravitas. One, a scientist, Thomas Say, is recognized as the founder
of descriptive entomology. His intelligent wife, Lucy Sistare Say, was the
artist to depict her husband’s work in beautiful detail. He’s buried on the
grounds of the Maclure/Owen property in New Harmony.
When Maclure and RO cut their deal,
Maclure was offered the biggest home in New Harmony for his residence, the
former grand home of the Harmonist leader. The house became known, to this day,
as the “Maclure” and I partied there very frequently. Another fact: Maclure was
a frequent visitor to New Harmony but did not take up permanent residence. A
few years later, he arranged for two of his siblings from Scotland to live in
New Harmony, these being a brother and sister, both of whom Maclure had little
to do with ever in his life, yet he felt compelled to give them shelter and
did. Turns out Maclure’s sister was really into religion and her
presence in town was problematic. The brother was difficult in other ways and
later died in a mental institution in Kentucky. But they were connected with
the famous Maclure, so town folks were compelled to attempt to respect them.
When Maclure died in 1840 while in Mexico, his sister and brother made a mess
of Maclure’s holding in New Harmony. More un-harmony.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * *
To be continued
* * * * * * * * * * * * *
Citations
and Bibliography
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Other web sources include:
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