Worcester, June, 1859
I got home from Pennsylvania on Friday morning. Whittier was
in the same region a month before me and he said, “God might have made a more
beautiful region than Chester County — but he never did.” A beautiful rolling country,
luxuriant as Kansas and highly cultivated as Brookline; horses and cattle
pasturing in rich clover fields; hedges of hawthorn; groves of oak, walnut,
pine, and vast columnar tulip trees towering up to heaven and holding out their
innumerable cups of nectar to the gods above the clouds; picturesque great
houses of brick and stone, gabled and irregular, overgrown with honeysuckle and
wistaria, and such a race of men and women as the “Quaker settlement” in “Uncle
Tom” portrays. All farming country; no towns nearer the meeting-house than
Westchester, nine miles off, and Wilmington (Delaware) twelve. Only little old
taverns here and there, known through all the country as “The Red Lion,” “The
Anvil,” and “The Hammer and Trowel.” Only three houses in sight from the
meeting-house and twenty-five hundred vehicles collected round it on Sunday,
with probably seven thousand people on the ground.
Almost all the people in the region were Quakers, and being
dissatisfied with the conservative position held by that body on slavery and
other matters, they have gradually come out from among them and formed a Yearly
Meeting of Progressive Friends which retains little of the externals of
Quakerism and all its spirit and life. The young people have abandoned the
Quaker dress, as indeed they have done everywhere, but retain all the
simplicity, kindness, and uprightness. So noble a people in body and mind, I
never saw before. I never was in the presence of so many healthy-looking women,
or so many good faces of either sex. Their mode of living is Virginian in its
open-house hospitality; they say incidentally, “we happened to have thirty-five
people in the house last night.” . . . I stayed at three different houses
during my four days’ visit and might have stayed at thirty. I passed from house
to house as through a series of triumphal arches and yet not from any merit
supposed in myself, but simply because, as Conway wrote to them in a letter, “the
earnest man is a king at Longwood; he finds friends and sumptuous entertainment
wherever he turns. To say that they make one at home is nothing; one fears forgetfulness
of all other homes.”
* * * * * * * * * *
Do not imagine that these people are ignorant or recluse;
they have much intercourse with people, especially with Philadelphia; the young
people are well educated, and all take the “Atlantic.” One feels in cultivated
society. Aunt Nancy will like to hear that Bayard Taylor originated there and
is now building a house there; I saw his father's house; also that of John
Agnew, where his beautiful bride lived and died. I saw John Agnew himself, a
noble-looking old man, erect as an arrow. I saw the lovely Mary's
daguerreotype, and her grave. They all speak well of B. T. and praise his
simplicity, modesty, and love of home; I never had so pleasant an impression of
him, and if you will read his spirited poem of the tulip tree you can imagine a
Chester County for a background.
The little meeting-house was crowded — seven hundred or so;
the rest of the Sunday crowd was collected outside and there was speaking in
several places. I spoke on the steps. Other days the church held them all.
There were morning and afternoon sessions, and at noon we picnicked under the
trees every day. They discussed everything — Superstition, Slavery, Spiritualism,
War, Marriage, Prisons, Property, etc. — each in turn, and uniting in little “testimonies”
on them all, which will be printed. There were some other speakers from abroad
beside myself, but none of much note. No long speeches and great latitude of
remark, among the audience, commenting or rebuking in the friendliest way. “Friend,
will thee speak a little louder? What thee says may be of no great importance,
but we would like to judge for ourselves.” Or sometimes to the audience: “Have
patience, friends, this old man (the speaker) is very conscientious.” Sometimes
stray people, considerably demented, would stray in and speak; one erect old
man, oddly dressed, who began and said, “My mother was a woman”: and then a
long pause. It seemed a safe basis for argument. Of course, they all knew each
other and called by their first names. One old oddity seemed to devote himself
to keeping down the other people's excesses, and after two persons (strangers)
had yielded to too much pathos in their own remarks, he mildly suggested that
if the friends generally would get a good chest and each speaker henceforth
lock up his emotions in it and lose the key, it would be a decided gain! There
was one scene, quite pathetic, where one of the leading men announced that
after great struggles he had given up tobacco — they rejoiced over him as a
brand from the burning; it was most touching, the heartfelt gratitude which his
wife expressed.
There was one park not far from the meeting-house which I
have never seen equalled; the most English-looking place I ever saw — two
avenues of superb pines and larches, leading down to a lake with other
colonnades of deciduous trees at right angles. The house to which it belonged
was buried in shrubs and bushes and surrounded by quaint outbuildings. At
Hannah Cox's house, the most picturesque at which I stayed, there was a large
wax plant in a pot, trained over much of the side of the house: this is
seven years old and is taken in every fall and trained over the side of the
room; and the thick leaves serve as registers of visitors' names, which
have been scratched on them with a pin; some were dated 1851; I marked mine on
two, lest one should fall. . . . Every time it is changed it takes five persons
three hours to train it.
* * * * * * * * * *
I took tea one evening at the house of some singular Quaker
saints . . . with a capacity for sudden outpourings of the Spirit in public
meetings. ... In the old square house General Washington had been quartered and
the neat old Quaker mother well remembered when the Hessian prisoners were
marched through the city. The two sisters always talked together, as is usual
in such cases, and when I walked them to the evening meeting, one on each arm,
the eldest was telling a long story of her persecutions among the Orthodox Friends,
and whenever the sister interrupted, the eldest would unhook her own arm from
mine, for the purpose (as I at last discovered) of poking her sister's elbow
and thus admonishing to silence. It was done so promptly and invariably that I
was satisfied that it was the established habit of the family.
SOURCE: Mary Potter Thacher Higginson, Editor, Letters
and Journals of Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1846-1906, p. 72-77
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