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Helen and Sophia Thoreau, Henry David’s Amazing Sisters

Henry Thoreau wouldn’t have been Henry Thoreau without his sisters, Helen and Sophia Thoreau. Or his brother, for that matter. But John Thoreau got plenty of ink in the book A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Helen and Sophia, not so much.

Helen and Sophia played huge roles in shaping the writer, naturalist and author who influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Nelson Mandela. Helen believed in him when others thought him a kook. He and Sophia grew so close toward the end of his life that a friend called them ‘like twins.’

Sophia Thoreau’s favorite image of her brother Henry

None of the Thoreau children married, and most of them, for most of their lives, belonged to the family household in Concord, Mass., along with aunt, uncles and servants. By all accounts, they had a happy home, marred only by early death.

During Henry’s two years, two months and two days at Walden Pond, Helen and Sophia came to visit him. And he often came home to visit them.

“Without such a stable and contented home life, Thoreau could not possibly have pursued his career in the way that he did,” wrote his biographer Laura Dassow Walls.

The Yellow House

The entire Thoreau family loved nature, and Sophia Thoreau in particular shared Henry’s passion for botany. As children they hiked together around Concord, collecting rocks, lichens and plants. Henry liked to collect arrowheads.

Henry left Walden in the fall of 1847 to babysit Ralph Waldo Emerson’s children while Emerson lectured in Europe. When Emerson returned in the summer, Thoreau went back to live with his family and help with the family business – making pencils.

The Yellow House today. Image courtesy Google Maps.

In 1850, the family had a stroke of good fortune with the development of a new and lucrative use for the plumbago used to make pencils: electrotyping. The Thoreaus began selling their ground plumbago to commercial customers. That allowed them to move to the Yellow House in one of Concord’s best neighborhoods. Henry had the attic, which stretched the length of the house, and there he kept his bed, his writing desk, driftwood book shelves, manuscripts and specimens. (The house, by the way, went on the market in 2019 for $2.6 million.)

A family friend called the Thoreau house a “haven,” a place of “undisturbed orderliness,” with a sunny sitting room filled with Sophia’s plants.

“I recall the reading aloud of fresh new books, the evening games of chess and backgammon; the bright, often distinguished people who came to the house; the tea-parties and evening visits; the lyceum lectures on cold winter nights, the walks by field and river.”

Underground Railroad

The house served as a haven of another kind: a stop on the Underground Railroad.

Helen and Sophia Thoreau, like nearly all the women in Thoreau’s life, held strong anti-slavery views considered radical at the time. His mother, aunts and sisters belonged to the Concord Ladies’ Antislavery Society, one of the first in the country.

The family proudly displayed on its mantelpiece a Staffordshire figurine of Uncle Tom and Eva, the main characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Legend has it that a fugitive from slavery gave it to them as a thank you for their help.

Staffordshire figurine of Eva and Uncle Tom.

When fugitives arrived at the Thoreau household, Henry often took them to the railroad station, bought them tickets and gave them money. Sometimes he got on the train with them, either in Concord or in Fitchburg.

During his stay at Walden, Thoreau sheltered runaway slaves during the day in his cabin and escorted them to his family home at night.

Though the Underground Railroad conductors and safe houses operated in the strictest secrecy, Henry Thoreau occasionally slipped. On Oct. 1, 1851, he wrote, “Just put a fugitive slave who has taken the name of Henry Williams into the cars for Canada.” Williams may have given them the Staffordshire.

Helen Thoreau

People suspected that Helen, of all the Thoreaus, “had more sympathy in his [Henry’s] peculiar way than perhaps any other.”

Helen Thoreau

As Henry neared graduation from Harvard, he asked his mother what he should do after college. His mother, who had a biting wit, said, “You may buckle on your knapsack, dear, and seek your fortune in the world.”

Helen, the eldest, knew the remark stung. She put her arms around him and said, “No, Henry, you shall not go; you shall stay at home and live with us.”

All four Thoreau children – including Henry – worked as schoolteachers during their lives. Helen, born in 1812, did it first. Walls described her as ‘a bookish young woman – elegant, graceful, earnest, and quiet, the family’s moral lodestar… she took the outrages of social injustice most deeply to heart, dedicating herself to ending slavery in America.’

She befriended Frederick Douglass and exchanged letters with him. William Lloyd Garrison published her obituary in his abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator.

Helen had as independent a mind as her little brother. In 1842, the local First Parish and Trinitarian churches banned women from speaking against slavery. Helen, furious that the churches opened their doors to slaveholders but not to people who defended slaves, stopped going to services.

According to one story, it was Helen who brought Henry to the attention of their famous Concord neighbor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Helen showed Henry’s journal to Emerson’s sister-in-law, who then showed it to Emerson.

Helen died of the Thoreau family illness, tuberculosis, in 1849 at the age of 37.

Sophia Thoreau

For the last 13 years of his life, Sophia Thoreau was Henry’s only remaining sibling and probably his closest friend and confidante. When he saw something interesting or unusual, he told Sophia.

They were very much alike: musical, witty and intensely interested in botany. A family friend observed they both had “a certain gravity of thought and utterance.” Sophia also had an artistic temperament and created the famous frontispiece of Walden.

Henry was picky about who he spent time with. “I know of but one or two persons with whom I can afford to walk,” he said. “The wood-path and the boat are my studio, where I maintain a sacred solitude and cannot admit promiscuous company.” Sophia made the cut.

For her part, Sophia adored her older brother. “Henry’s whole life impresses me as a grand miracle,” she said after his death. “I always thought him the most upright man I ever knew and now it is a pleasure to praise him.”

The first night he spent away from home in his Walden cabin, Sophia worried so much she couldn’t sleep. The next day she brought him lunch, which he didn’t appreciate.

When they lived in the Yellow House, Sophia would play old Scottish melodies on the piano. Henry would come down from his attic and sing, and sometimes pick up his flute and play.

Protector of Henry’s Legacy

When Henry took to his bed with the tuberculosis that killed him at 44, Sophia not only cared for him but helped him edit his manuscripts. She also negotiated with publishers and made sure the Atlantic magazine printed several essays after his death.

She had to deal with about 60 volumes of his manuscripts and several thousand pages of notes. Thoreau’s early biographers didn’t believe Sophia was up to the task, and credited Emerson and Ellery Channing with helping her. Kathy Fedorko set the record straight.

Sophia Thoreau

“Sophia kept those manuscripts in meticulous order, selected an editor for her brother’s journal, and, on her own, edited four posthumous volumes of henry’s essays,” she wrote.

She also ran the family business after Henry died, rare for a woman in those days. A family friend remembers she had “a fine, gentle, sweet nature.” However, said the friend, “she possessed great firmness of character and was always on the side of justice.”

Every so often, Sophia visited the abandoned cottage near Walden Pond where her brother had lived. Once, she ate her dinner there, alone but for the mice.

Sophia Thoreau died in 1876 at the age of 56, the last of the Thoreau siblings.

With thanks to Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books by Annie Russell Marble and Little Known Sisters of Well-Known Men by Sarah Gertrude Pomeroy. Also, ”Henry’s brilliant sister”: The Pivotal Role of Sophia Thoreau in Her Brother’s Posthumous Publications by Kathy Fedorko for The New England Quarterly, Vol. 89, No. 2 (June 2016). Finally, Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls. This story was updated in 2022.

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African American Medical Students at Yale

It’s an interesting photograph: serious-looking men in hats and suits, with a couple of human skulls among them. Taken in 1895, the picture shows a mixed bag of students from the Yale School of Medicine in New Haven who would graduate in 1895, 1896, and 1897. Two of the 1895 graduates are seated in the front row with “95” painted on the soles of their shoes. In the back row are two African American medical students who would graduate in 1897. They are Arthur Leslie Howard and William Fletcher Penn.

Howard and Penn

Howard was from St. Thomas in the Caribbean and went to school at Cooke College in Antigua. Penn was born in Virginia and attended the Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University). Both men arrived at Yale in 1893 and shared an apartment on Chapel Street in New Haven.

Howard came from a wealthy West Indies family. Penn sometimes worked as a waiter, which likely contributed to his on-campus reputation as one of the “grouchiest and meanest men.”

Howard wrote his medical school thesis on the treatment of tetanus, which, in the 1890s, involved the use of lockjaw forceps to pry open a patient’s “locked” jaw and injections of antiserum to counter the lethal effects of the bacterial toxin. He graduated in 1897 and moved to the U.K. to practice and continue his medical education.

Unfortunately, Howard took ill there and died in 1904 at age 28. His Caribbean background made him an early advocate of Cuba’s independence from Spain. Had he stayed in the U.S. he might have elected to participate in the 1898 Spanish-American War as a “contract surgeon.” Many African American physicians and surgeons signed on to treat the Army’s black regiments, then known as the Buffalo soldiers.

Penn also graduated in 1897 and then moved to Atlanta, Ga. He became well known in the city and had an excellent reputation as a physician. Yet, he was denied membership in the Georgia branch of the American Medical Association. Instead, he joined the Georgia State National Medical Association (NMA), which promoted the interests of African American physicians and patients.

William F. Penn

In 1926, he moved to Alabama to become chief of surgery at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Tuskegee. He died of chronic myocarditis in 1934.

African American Medical Students at Yale

William F. Penn is often cited as the first African American medical graduate at Yale. He was not. As Daryl Daniels noted in his 1991 Yale School of Medicine thesis, “The first African-American known to have graduated from the School was Dr. Cortlandt Van Rensselaer Creed.

“Because of strong abolitionist sentiment at Yale and in New Haven during the 1850s and his family’s prominence in New Haven, Dr. Creed was able to matriculate into the School of Medicine in 1854,” wrote Daniels. “He graduated in 1857 and practiced in New Haven.”

Almost a hundred years later, in 1948, Dr. Beatrix A. McCleary became the first African-American woman to graduate from the Yale School of Medicine.

From 1879 to 1896, Yale had a three-year medical program. A fourth year was added for the incoming class of 1896. Howard and Penn entered Yale in 1893 so one might have expected them to graduate three years later in 1896. But they stayed for four years; whether out of interest or necessity is unclear.

Today, all medical schools are four-year programs and open to everyone regardless of color or sex.

With thanks to A History of Yale’s School of Medicine: Passing Torches to Others. 2008, Yale University Press, and Doctors Five: African-American Contract Surgeons in the Spanish-American War. Military Medicine, 1999;164(6):435-441.

The author of this story, Edward McSweegan is a Rhode Island microbiologist who writes about infectious diseases and history. This story updated in 2022.

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Oliver Otis Howard, The Mainer Who Founded Howard University

Gen. Oliver Otis Howard thought he was fighting the Civil War to preserve the Union, not to free any slaves.

Howard had earned the nickname of “the Christian General” for his deep, overbearing piety. His men didn’t always appreciate his hectoring them about the Ten Commandments or the evils of booze.

His moral certainty led him to great achievements and to terrible deeds. He founded Howard University, which educated 150,000 freed slaves. But he later led a massacre of women and children belonging to the Nez Perce tribe because they wouldn’t move to a reservation.

Oliver Otis Howard by Matthew Brady

But sometimes Oliver Otis Howard couldn’t rely on his moral compass. During the Civil War, he faced a puzzling dilemma: Should he disobey orders and allow a fugitive from slavery her freedom?

Oliver Otis Howard

Born in Leeds, Maine, on Nov. 8, 1830, his mother sent him away to live with relatives after his father died when he was very young. He graduated from Bowdoin College at 19, and went on to West Point. A diligent student, he ranked fourth in a class of 46.

In 1856, he was a lonely young soldier stationed in Florida, far from his wife and baby boy. Seeking comfort, he attended a Methodist prayer meeting and experienced a spiritual awakening. He felt a “new well spring within me, a joy, a peace & a trusting spirit.” He sensed God had destined him for great things.

His military career, like the rest of his life, veered from highlight to lowlight. He won the Medal of Honor for leading a charge at the Battle of Fair Oaks, which cost him his right arm. But he suffered ignominious defeats at Chancellorship and Gettysburg. His men started calling him “Uh-Oh” Howard.

Freedmen’s Bureau

After the Civil War he led the Freedmen’s Bureau, a Reconstruction program that helped former slaves. The Bureau had hundreds of agents in the South distributing food and medicine and finding jobs and schooling for the new citizens.

Howard issued an order to divide up land from confiscated plantations and give it to the people who’d worked them as slaves. But while he vacationed in Maine, President Andrew Johnson reversed his order. In the end, anyone who’d received the promised 40 acres and a mule had to give them back.

Johnson viewed Oliver Otis Howard as a fanatic, and he tried to stymie him at every turn. Howard eventually concluded southerners were still fighting the Civil War and wouldn’t change their attitudes. So he turned his energies to education, and he established a school that bears his name today – Howard University. He served as president from 1869-1874.

Howard University

Howard explained the importance of Howard University in his 1908 autobiography. In the South, white people who opposed educating black people wouldn’t permit any room or building for use as a school. From 1865-67, mobs all over the South burned schools and churches used as schools. They flogged teachers and drove them away. A number of times, they murdered them.

Howard University started on three acres in Washington, D.C. Classes began in 1867 with five students, all daughters of the school’s white founders. Though it emphasized teacher training, Howard added a law school, a medical school and a seminary under its first president.

Howard University, 1868

Eventually, black students and faculty would outnumber whites, and Howard today produces more black doctorates than any other university. Alumni include Toni Morrison, Andrew Young, Kamala Harris and Thurgood Marshall.

Founders library at Howard University

Enemies

Oliver Otis Howard’s efforts on behalf of the former slaves earned him plenty of enemies, and they got him charged with corruption in running the Freedmen’s Bureau. After years of litigation the courts exonerated him, but he nearly went bankrupt paying his lawyers. And in 1872, Congress abolished the Freedmen’s Bureau.

For his next act, he moved west to kick Indians off their land. He commanded the Department of the Columbia from Fort Vancouver in Washington Territory. His men pursued and slaughtered Nez Perce Indians who refused to move to a reservation.

Chief Joseph led the Nez Perce resistance to Howard’s campaign to remove them from their land.

In Howard’s mind, he tried to do for the Indians what he had tried to do for freed slaves. He was giving them land on which they could lead good Christian lives, only they refused. Finally corralled into a reservation in Oklahoma, many died of disease.

Oliver Otis Howard at Governors Island in 1893.

Howard finally commanded the Atlantic Military Division at Fort Columbus on Governors Island in New York before retiring in 1894 as a major general. Then in 1896 he founded Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tenn., to educate “mountain whites.”

He died in 1909 in Burlington, Vt., on Oct. 26, 1909. He lies buried in Lakeview Cemetery.

Greatly Puzzled

How did Oliver Otis Howard’s moral compass swing so wildly from educating freed slaves to slaughtering Indians?

One incident early in his career illuminates his thought process. He prided himself on following orders, and had difficulty resolving the moral dilemma that created.

Just after the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, the 30-year-old Oliver Otis Howard commanded a brigade. He and his men were garrisoned on a farm just west of Alexandria, Va.

First Battle of Bull Run

Abraham Lincoln aimed to quell the southern rebellion without touching slavery. He felt he had to, otherwise the loyal border states might also rebel. Military commanders were to return escaped slaves to their owners.

Howard was entertaining visitors from Waterville, Maine, when a picket guard brought a frightened young woman to him. He described her as “tall straight, healthful and active,” with a boy of about two years old in her arms.

He saw the woman’s terror, and reassured her. In his autobiography, he recounted the incident.

“What do you wish?” I asked. “Sir, I’m a slave woman, and this here’s my child. Let me and my child go free!”

Property?

Meanwhile, a poorly dressed, shrill, sallow white woman was ushered in. “That there woman is my slave,” she said. “I have always treated her well, and here she is. She has run off. Now, sir, you must send her back to me, for she is mine. She and the boy, they’re my property.”

I found myself under most stringent orders not to harbor any slave property. The white woman, seeing my embarrassment, became more and more excited, and soon began to use abusive language, directed partially to me, but mainly to her slave.

The woman kept pressing her child to her breast and with her large eyes filled with tears continued to look toward me, repeating: “Oh! my child, my child!”

Howard realized he had to decide the case. He turned to the white woman and said, “There’s your property, take it!” She replied, “But I can’t take it. She’s stronger than I! You must give me a guard.”

That was too much for Howard. He said, “No, no, I will not give you a guard. I will never use bayonets to drive a poor girl and child into bondage.”

Both women went away, and the young fugitive found her way to Washington, D.C., and to freedom. His guests from Maine, ardent abolitionists, chastised him for his hesitation.

What to do with enslaved people presented a quandary until another New Englander, Benjamin Butler, declared them “contraband of war.”

Read Oliver Otis Howard’s account of the incident in his autobiography here. Image of Howard University PD-US, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13705310. Founders Library By Derek E. Morton – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=74173648. This story was updated in 2023.

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Elleanor Eldridge, ‘Laboring Colored Woman,’ Wins Justice in 1838

Elleanor Eldridge was an African-American woman born free in Rhode Island because her father fought in the American Revolution.

Elleanor Eldridge, illustration

During a lifetime of hard work and thrift, she ran several successful businesses, accumulating an estate worth $4,800. In middle age, she had to defend herself in court against white people who tried to take her property from her.

An aristocratic white woman named Frances Whipple helped her win her property back with an autobiography that became a best seller.

Elleanor Eldridge

Robin Eldridge, Elleanor’s father, had been enslaved, but he fought in the American Revolution in exchange for his freedom. He had’ also been promised 200 acres of land for fighting, but only got worthless Continental money. Nevertheless, he saved enough after the war to buy a small piece of land and build a house.

Continental Army foot soldiers. On the far left is an African American soldier from the 1st Rhode Island Regiment.

Elleanor Eldridge was born in March 26, 1785, in Warwick, R.I. She had six older sisters and two older brothers. Her mother, who was part Narragansett Indian, did laundry for a family named Baker. Elleanor’s mother died when Elleanor was just 10, and she went to live as a servant with the Baker family.

Her father disapproved of Elleanor’s choice. Elleanor, however, learned skills from the Bakers that would serve her well: spinning, weaving, cheesemaking and arithmetic.

At 17, Elleanor Eldridge went to work in the dairy belonging to Capt. Benjamin Greene in Warwick Neck.

She left Greene in her mid-20s to live with her sister Lettise in Adams, Mass. There, she and her siblings wove cloth, boiled soap and took in laundry. Elleanor also cared for her brothers and sisters and their children when they fell ill. She made enough money to buy a piece of land and build a house, which she rented out for $40 a year.

Providence

Three years later, Elleanor Eldridge moved to Providence, where she went to work painting and wallpapering as well as doing laundry and housework.

Royal Taft

During the coldest winter months, she worked as a servant in private homes or boarding houses. One of her employers, Royal Taft, served as governor of Rhode Island. In her autobiography, Whipple emphasized “Elleanor has always lived with good people.”

She saved her money, and in 1822 she built a house for $1,700. She took in a tenant and continued to work hard and save. But she also borrowed money to buy several more house lots.

Providence’s Market Square, 1840s

At the age of 47, Elleanor finally had to slow down because she came down with typhus. She returned to her family in Massachusetts, and rumors spread in Providence that she died. Her lender petitioned to sell her property so he could recover $420 he loaned her. Elleanor intervened and stopped the sale.

But then the next year a cholera epidemic broke out in Providence. She left the city again to accompany a family with a sick child to Pomfret, Conn., in order to escape the disease. When Elleanor fell behind in her loan payments, the unscrupulous lender had her house seized and sold.

The Memoir

At that point, Frances Whipple stepped in to help right the wrong done to Elleanor Eldridge. Whipple came from a prominent Rhode Island family, but dedicated herself to radical causes such as women’s rights and abolitionism. She also wrote poetry and, like Elleanor, was a single woman who supported herself.

The Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge

In 1838, she anonymously published, The Memoirs of Elleanor Eldridge, which recounted the injustice done to Elleanor.

In the book, Whipple attacked the lender as racist, sexist and full of ‘willful malignity.’ She wrote that the attachment of Elleanor’s house was disproportionate to the debt and that the sale hadn’t been advertised as required by law. Finally, she argued the auctioneer sold the property worth $4,000 to the first bidder for $1,500 because Elleanor was a ‘laboring colored woman, who was then away.’

Justice for Elleanor

The book sold well. From 1838 to 1992 it went through 11 editions. It also made enough money to allow Elleanor to fight back.

As a person of color, she faced a huge challenge. At the time, for example, white men could — and did — assault black men with impunity on the streets of Providence.

Elleanor Eldridge sued the buyer, but she lost the case because the sheriff lied that he had advertised the sale.

She then hired two private detectives to find someone who actually saw the supposed advertisements. The detectives, of course, came up empty handed, and Elleanor Eldridge sued the sheriff for perjury.

The day before her case was scheduled in court, the buyer offered to sell Elleanor back her property for $2,100 and two years’ rent. Elleanor agreed to pay him that amount, but when she offered him the money he raised the price. Finally she had to buy back her property for $2,700.

Whipple recounted those developments in Elleanor’s Second Book. She wrote the books to demonstrate to ‘the colored population’ an example ‘of industry and untiring perseverance.’

The date of Elleanor Eldridge’s death is unclear. Some put it at 1845, while others believe she died during the Civil War.

In 2002, Elleanor was nominated to be memorialized by a statue in Rhode Island, one of only 35 to receive such an honor.

This story about Elleanor Eldridge was updated in 2023.

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Lewis Tappan, the Man Who Hired Abe Lincoln to Spy on Sinners

Lewis Tappan hated slavery as much as he hated people who didn’t pay their debts. In 1841, he found he could do well by doing good. He began to use his network of abolitionists throughout the country to review the creditworthiness of his customers.

Lewis Tappan

Today, Lewis Tappan is best known for financing the legal defense of the kidnapped Africans who mutinied aboard the Amistad. A former president, John Quincy Adams, successfully argued their case.

But Lewis Tappan enlisted a future president, Abraham Lincoln, along with thousands of others, to report on the character and dependability of his customers. That network of spies later evolved into the Dun & Bradstreet credit rating company.

Lewis Tappan

Born into a religious family in Northampton, Mass., in 1788, Lewis Tappan adhered to strict Puritan principles throughout his life. He opened a store in Philadelphia, then Boston, and achieved early success. He insisted on cash transactions because the Bible warned against lending money and charging interest.

Lewis then lost his fortune to bad investments in woolen and cotton mills. In 1827 he started over with his brother Arthur in the silk trade in New York.

The brothers earned a reputation as fanatical philanthropists for their support of moral crusades. They gave away Bibles, ratted out gambling halls and went into brothels to ‘pluck fallen women from roaring lions who seek to devour them.’

In 1830, Arthur and Lewis Tappan met William Lloyd Garrison. They then started financing his abolitionist activities. They helped form the American Anti-Slavery Society, which advocated the immediate abolition of slavery. The brothers also helped found Oberlin College, which admitted people of all races.

But even within the anti-slavery movement, Lewis Tappan was considered extreme. He believed intermarriage would solve America’s racial issues. And he dreamed of a copper skinned country where race would not define anyone.

Amistad

Amistad Case

When 53 Africans faced murder charges after killing their Spanish captives in 1839, Lewis Tappan called it a ‘providential occurrence.’ He believed the case might touch the heart of the nation. Tappan attended every day of the trial and hired Yale students to teach the Africans English.

He believed the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t go far enough. In a letter to Sen. Charles Sumner, he wrote, “When will the poor negro have his rights? Not, I believe, until he has a musket in one hand and a ballot in the other.”

Lewis Tappan may have been radical on racial issues, but he held conservative views about women’s issues. He and Arthur quit the Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 when the group added Lucretia Mott, Maria Weston Chapman and Lydia Marie Child to its board. They formed the American Missionary Association, which started 115 anti-slavery Congregational churches in Illinois.

After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Tappan supported the Underground Railroad.

Unpopular

The Tappan brothers’ abolitionism was not a popular choice in the textile industry. Cotton exporters feared the collapse of their business if slavery didn’t exist, and white laborers thought freed slaves would take their jobs.

By 1834, mobs attacked Lewis’ home and Arthur’s store. The brothers had to extend credit. Then came the panic of 1837, which wiped them out. Two years later, older and wiser, Arthur repaid his creditors and the business resumed.

Lewis Tappan began keeping files on their customers, with reviews of their characters and their bank balances. Other merchants began to turn to Lewis for advice.

Through his abolitionist crusade, Lewis Tappan had met anti-slavery activists throughout the country. He tapped into that network to create records of timely credit information about people. Among his correspondents: a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln and a storekeeper named Ulysses S. Grant.

By 1844, Lewis Tappan had 280 clients and offices in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore and New York. But not everyone appreciated his efforts. Some people viewed his credit information as an invasion of privacy.

In 1849, his clerk Benjamin Douglass took charge of the agency. Two years later, 2000 full-time correspondents spied on sinners. In 1858, Douglass transferred the company to his brother-in-law, Robert Graham Dun. The company merged with its rival Bradstreet in 1933 to become Dun & Bradstreet. Today it’s the world’s largest credit reporting company.

Lewis Tappan retired a rich man. After the Civil War, he founded many schools and colleges to educate freed slaves. He died in 1873.

This story last updated in 2022.

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Joseph Palmer, Fashion Criminal, Persecuted for Wearing a Beard

In 1830, Joseph Palmer wore a long, flowing beard, considered such a fashion crime then that men attacked him and local authorities threw him in jail.

For more than a century, men had considered facial hair a fashion “don’t.” Since 1720, only Jewish-American men wore beards and moustaches. And Joseph Palmer.

Joseph Palmer was born in 1789 in Notown, a village between Leominster and Fitchburg, Mass., and fought in the War of 1812.

He was described as “an honest, kindly man and good citizen, deeply religious but tolerant, a man of many intellectual interests.”

People considered him eccentric. He wouldn’t serve rum to his hired farmhands because of his belief in temperance. And at the age of 40, he decided to emulate Moses and Jesus by growing a beard.

Joseph Palmer.

Joseph Palmer, Beard Wearer

People harassed and mocked him for wearing a beard. A minister told him he looked like the devil, and he replied, “Mr. Trask, are you not mistaken in your comparison of personages? I have never seen a picture of the ruler of the sulfurous regions with much of a beard, but if I remember correctly, Jesus wore a beard not unlike mine.”

One day in May 1830, Joseph Palmer went to a Fitchburg hotel to deliver meat and cucumbers. Four men approached him with scissors and razors and tried to cut off his beard. Palmer fought back, cutting two of the men’s legs with his jackknife. For defending himself, local authorities arrested him and charged him with unprovoked assault. Judge David Brigham ordered him to pay a $10 fine, $40 in court fees and a $700 bond. Palmer chose to go to the Worcester County Jail instead.

For the first few weeks in jail, he took sick. His jailers beat him, starved him and put him in solitary confinement for months. The other prisoners tried to cut off his beard.

But Joseph Palmer managed to make life difficult for his persecutors. He wrote letters to the Worcester County sheriff complaining of his ill treatment. Once he even sent him all the food he’d been given in a day to show how little he was fed. He also sent letters to the local newspapers, which picked them up.

His case began to embarrass the county, and several delegations came to the jail to ask him to pay his fine and leave. Judge David Brigham visited him with a letter from his mother, begging him to come home. Still he refused. Finally his jailers carried him out of the jail in a chair and set him on the sidewalk.

Fruitlands

The story doesn’t quite end there. Joseph Palmer began to advocate prison reform and an end to slavery. He attended a convention of philanthropists in Boston, where he met William Lloyd Garrison, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Bronson Alcott.

Farmhouse at Fruitlands

He followed Alcott, his daughter Louisa May Alcott and 12 others in founding the utopian community Fruitlands in Harvard, Mass. No one else had any farming experience, and he kept Fruitlands going as long as it did.

When the commune broke up seven months later, Joseph Palmer bought the land and farmed it. He and his wife Nancy welcomed the hoboes, writers and reformers who came to visit over the next 20 years. Neighbors called it ‘Old Palmer’s Home for Tramps.’

Joseph Palmer died in 1873, when beards had once again become fashionable.

Gravestone of Joseph Palmer

A bas-relief of Palmer and his beard are carved into his tombstone in the Evergreen Cemetery in Leominster, Mass. The inscription reads,

Persecuted for wearing the beard.

This story was updated in 2022. Photo of Fruitlands farmhouse by By victorgrigas – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=40800910. Photo of Palmer’s grave by romana klee via Flickr, CC by SA 2.0.

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