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The Other Alexander Hamilton Visits Newport, 1744

In 1744, Dr. Alexander Hamilton took a long trip to New England for his health. Given the rigors of travel in those days, it may have been a poor choice.

Old Colony House, visited by Alexander Hamilton

Alexander Hamilton was a Scottish doctor who immigrated to Annapolis, Md., where he practiced medicine. In 1744, he had yet to marry, and he included sharp observations about women in a diary of his travels. Newport, R.I., he noticed, was as ‘remarkable for pretty women as Albany is for ugly ones.’

He published his lively and opinionated travel diary in a book, a rare account of colonial American life between 1730 and 1745. He was especially impressed by a colonial womanizer who showed him the trophies he collected from the ladies.

Alexander Hamilton Takes Off

Alexander Hamilton left Annapolis on May 30, and traveled by boat and horseback with his African-American slave, Dromo, and occasional traveling companions.

They journeyed through Delaware, Philadelphia, New Jersey, New York City, up the Hudson to Albany and then back down. Hamilton and Dromo then ferried from Long Island to New London and Stonington in Connecticut and on to Rhode Island. They spent a night in Kingstown, R.I., at a public house run by a man named Case – ‘a talkative, prating man,’ according to Hamilton.

On July 16, Alexander Hamilton recorded in his Itinerarium his visit to Newport, R.I. Some of the things he describes still stand: the White Horse Tavern, the Old Colony House (which he calls the Town-House) and Trinity Church (which he calls the Church of England).

Alexander Hamilton wrote that they set off from Case’s tavern in Kingstowne, R.I., at 6:30 am on Monday, July 16. On the ferry ride, he noticed an island called Dutch Island because the Dutch had once settled it.

As they stepped into the ferry boat some stones lay in her bottom, which made it hard for the horses to get in. Alexander Hamilton wrote,

Dromo desired the skipper to “trow away his stones, de horse be better ballast.” “No,” says the fellow, “I cannot part with my stones yet; they will serve for a good use at another time.”

Newport, 1744

‘Portrait of a Woman’ by Robert Feke

Alexander Hamilton described Newport as a ‘pleasant, open spot of land, being an entire garden of farms,’ about 13 miles long and five miles wide.

The town itself then consisted of one straight, narrow street, with several lanes going from it on both sides.

Hamilton listed one large Market House, the Town House (‘a handsome brick edifice’), two Presbyterian meetings, one large Quaker meeting, one Anabaptist, and one Church of England, with a fine organ and a clock on the steeple.

Hamilton then went down to see the fort, a square brick and fort building on an island in the harbor.

“This place is famous for privateering,” wrote Alexander Hamilton. “They had about this time brought in several prizes, among which was a large Spanish snow near 200 tons burden, which I saw in the harbor, with her bowsprit shot off.”

Women

Alexander Hamilton had an eye for the ladies. In Newport, he wrote, ‘This town is as remarkable for pretty women as Albany is for ugly ones, many of whom one may see sitting in the shops in passing along the street.’

He had lunch at the White Horse Tavern, and in the afternoon his friend Dr. Moffatt showed him around town. Moffatt was probably Dr. Thomas Moffat, a Loyalist whose house was destroyed by rioters in 1765.

Moffatt then took Hamilton to see the painter Robert Feke and look at his work. Today the Redwood Library and Athenaeum exhibits one of his portraits.

Alexander Hamilton described Feke as, ‘the most extraordinary genius ever I knew,’ because he captured likenesses without taking any lessons.

Feke looked exactly like a painter, wrote Hamilton, ‘having a long pale face, sharp nose, large eyes,– with which he looked upon you steadfastly, –long curled black hair, a delicate white hand, and long fingers.’

Cabinet of Curiosities

Trinity Church

Alexander Hamilton enjoyed society, and had entrée to the elite circles wherever he “traveled.

That evening he and Moffatt spent an agreeable visit with Dr. Keith, ‘another countryman and acquaintance’ and Dr. Brett, ‘a very facetious old man.’

“I soon found that Keith passed for a man of great gallantry here, being frequently visited by the young ladies in town, who are generally very airy and frolicsome,” wrote Hamilton. “He showed me a drawer full of the trophies of the fair, which he called his cabinet of curiosities. They consisted of torn fans, fragments of gloves, shims, snuff-boxes, girdles, apron strings, laced shoes and shoe-heels, pin-cushions, hussifs, and a deal of others such trumpery.”

Alexander Hamilton wrote that he spent the night at Dr. Moffatt’s, thinking, no doubt, about Dr. Keith’s cabinet of curiosities.

Photos of buildings courtesy Library of Congress. Portrait courtesy Brooklyn Museum, 43.229_SL1.jpg. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. “SusannahBoutineau” by Robert Feke ( – Nova Scotia Museum. Licensed under Public domain via Wikimedia Commons. This story bout the other Alexander Hamilton was updated in 2021.

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Gregarious Grace Coolidge, Who Filled in the Silences

Grace Coolidge burst out laughing when she glanced through a boardinghouse window and spotted her future husband shaving in long underwear and a hat. Their relationship – and his political career – would be marked by her ebullience, which filled in his silences.

Grace Coolidge, official White House portrait

Decades after his death, it was revealed Calvin Coolidge’s silences resulted from intense social anxiety throughout his life. Grace made up for it, becoming one of the most popular First Ladies in history.

The American public followed her fashion choices at weekly photo ops. They read about the Coolidge menagerie in the White House, enjoyed her exploits on the hiking trail and joined in her enthusiasm for the national pastime.

When her 16-year-old son died suddenly, they sent her thousands of letters of sympathy.

‘I am going to be married to you’

Grace Coolidge was born Jan. 3, 1879, in Burlington, Vt., the only child of Andrew Goodhue, a steamboat inspector and mechanical engineer, and Lemira Barrett Goodhue.

She graduated from the University of Vermont at Burlington and taught deaf students at the Clarke Institute for the Deaf in Northampton, Mass., for three years before her marriage.

She was actually involved with someone else when she first dated the dour young attorney who’d just moved to Northampton. They went to a Republican rally.

Calvin and Grace Coolidge, about 1918

He proposed by stating, “I am going to be married to you.”

She agreed, but her mother didn’t. They were married on Oct. 4, 1905, over her mother’s vehement objections, during a plain ceremony in her childhood home.

Politics

The Coolidges initially lived in a Northampton hotel. When it went out of business, they bought linens from the hotel and used them even in the White House, despite the hotel monogram.

In 1906 they rented half of a duplex they’d live in for two decades.

During the early years of their marriage, Grace Coolidge raised their two sons, John and Calvin, Jr., in Northampton while Calvin pursued his political career in Boston. He did spend two years in Northampton as mayor, from 1910-11, but most of the time from 1907 to 1921 he lived in a dollar-and-a-half room in Boston and came home on weekends.

Grace’s quiet life was interrupted in 1921, when her husband became vice president of the United States. She was abruptly shoved into the spotlight, and Cal quickly recognized how much her gregariousness helped him.

He set limits on her, though. He wouldn’t let her wear pants, drive a car or ride in an airplane. When a comment appeared in a newspaper about the jodhpurs she wore while horseback riding, he told her “…you will get along at this job fully as well if you do not try anything new.”

The White House Brings Grief

John Coolidge, 1924

Early in the morning of Aug. 3, 1923, the Coolidges were vacationing at his family home in Plymouth Notch, Vt., when they received word that President Harding had suddenly collapsed and died. Grace lit a kerosene lamp and watched while her father-in-law, a notary, administered the oath of office to her husband.

During their stay in the White House, the animal-loving Coolidges kept a menagerie: dogs, cats, birds and even a raccoon named Rebecca. Grace held weekly photo ops, and the public avidly followed her: She went to the movies and concerts, wore the latest fashions and campaigned for the Red Cross and the Clarke School for the Deaf. She hiked, swam and listened to sports on the radio when she wasn’t attending games. If she couldn’t get a football game on her crystal radio she went to the White House telegraph room for scores.

You can watch a video of Grace Coolidge with Helen Keller here and in her first talkie newsreel here.

Grief

In July 1924 her 16-year-old son Calvin died when a blister developed into blood poisoning. On the five-year anniversary of his death, Grace Coolidge published an original poem, ‘The Open Door,’ in Good Housekeeping magazine. It began,

Calvin Coolidge, Jr.

You, my son,
Have shown me God.
Your kiss upon my cheek
Has made me feel the gentle touch
Of Him who leads us on.

For most of the 1924 presidential campaign, she and her husband were in mourning. Grace became a rabid baseball fan at about that time, frequently attending Washington Senators games. Later in life she had a season pass to Red Sox games. She sat near the dugout and chatted with the players. In 1948 she sent a quarter and a Post cereal box top to get a genuine Red Barber baseball guide. She got a letter from Red in return (and the guide).

By 1928 President Coolidge’s health was deteriorating, and he decided not to seek reelection. They moved back to the two-family home they rented before moving to Washington. Finally, to protect themselves from sightseers, they bought a large home on the Connecticut River with a gate.

Calvin Coolidge died of a heart attack on Jan. 5, 1933. Grace Coolidge lived as an active widow for the next 25 years. She often attended Red Sox games at Fenway Park, supported her favorite charities and toured Europe in a car, which she drove herself. She also flew in planes.

Grace Coolidge died July 8, 1957 in Northampton, Mass. She is buried next to her husband in Plymouth, Vt.

With thanks to the National First Ladies’ Library. This story was updated in 2022.

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Crystal Eastman Keeps Her Name, Doesn’t Do Housework

Crystal Eastman wanted to change the world for women and to change the way women lived in the world. For that, she was called “the most dangerous woman in America.” That has changed to “the most neglected political leader in America” because of her pioneering legislation and the permanent political organization she formed.

A suffragette, magazine editor and lawyer, she inspired her fans and vexed her critics. In November of 1916, she managed it once again, this time when the papers reported on her second marriage. “Miss Crystal Eastman, radical feminist, suffrage leader and birth control advocate, wants to be known by her maiden name.”

The story aimed to shock. But she went one better in 1923, when she published a confessional article in a magazine: Marriage Under Two Roofs. It described how she and her husband decided to live in separate residences. “…it has given us the one serene and happy period of all our married life,” she wrote.

Crystal Eastman

Crystal Eastman from a 1910 newspaper

She was born in Marlborough, Mass., on June 25, 1881, to two Congregationalist ministers, Samuel and Annis Eastman. Her mother was one of the first women ordained in the United States. Crystal had a younger brother, Max Eastman, who would work with her on radical causes. The family soon relocated to Canandaigua, N.Y., in the Burned-Over District, a hotbed of reform and religious fervor.

By 1916, Crystal Eastman had earned a law degree from New York University, a master’s in sociology from Columbia and a B.A. from Vassar. Shortly after school, she worked on an investigation of labor conditions in Pittsburgh. From there she went on to agitate for safe workplaces and medical care for workers injured on the job.

She helped write New York state’s workers compensation laws, the first in the nation. Then she went to work in President Wilson’s administration investigating workplace safety.

She abhorred the general condition of women in the country, both in the workplace and in the home. But her feminism had a very practical strain, and she saw the suffrage movement as just the start of progress for women.

Perhaps most controversially, she saw a woman’s need to control whether and how many children she had as critical to gaining equality.

Crystal Eastman, Socialist

In the age of industrialization and worker exploitation, Eastman saw socialism as the solution. As a rabble-rousing speaker addressing both socialist and feminist themes, as well as her staunch opposition to World War I, she was well-received at gatherings of activists and by the general public.

Virtually no account of Eastman’s activities fails to mention her beauty and vitality. At nearly six feet tall, she stood out in any gathering. Though consumed by serious issues, she also enjoyed the arts, music and theater. And she loved to laugh.

At the same time, Eastman had no interest in managing a home, and had little use for housekeeping skills. She despised the idea that women should rely on men. And she believed – probably an idea inherited from her mother – that women should compete directly with men in the workplace. The idea of male superiority, she argued, was a myth. If allowed to compete, she believed, women would do just fine.

Post-Suffrage

Her ideas delighted audiences. But once woman won the right to vote in 1920, the divisions within the women’s movement grew more pronounced. Eastman, who had co-founded the precursor to the ACLU, wanted the National Women’s Party to embrace a wide range of issues. Those included equal pay, equal treatment under the law and reproductive rights.

Other elements of the movement, however, had not signed on for change so radical. They wanted the vote, and they got it with the 19th Amendment. Eastman viewed universal suffrage as a starting point. She made that point in a speech, “Now We Can Begin.” In it, she argued for women’s economic independence — and for men to share in the housework.

“No woman who allows husband and children to absorb her whole time and interest is safe from disaster,” she said.

Eastman’s outspoken socialism caused a problem for some leaders in the post-suffrage women’s movement. Others found her unconventional views on sexual liberation for women to be off-putting. They wanted a lower profile for her.

Eastman then joined up with the group that authored the first Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution in 1923 – the same one resurrected and defeated in the 1970s.

Downhill

Professionally, Eastman’s life took a difficult turn. From 1918 to 1921, she and her now more-famous brother Max published the Liberator, a progressive magazine. She served as its managing editor until the two sold it. After that, she found it harder to get work because of her support for communism.

Her first, brief marriage ended in divorce.

Her second husband, pacifist Walter Fuller, had come to America to avoid World War I. He moved to England to work as an editor, and Eastman shuttled between the U.S. and the UK. Her heart belonged to America, but her family’s best hopes for financial support lay in Britain.

The year 1927 found Eastman and her husband contemplating a return to the United States. She traveled first, and word soon followed that Walter had died – victim of a stroke. Eastman, who had suffered from shaky health for years, then died on July 8, 1928 of nephritis. Friends rallied to raise her two children, Jeffrey and Annis.

Her obituary from the Nation magazine reminded people of her impact. “When she spoke to people—whether it was to a small committee or a swarming crowd—hearts beat faster. She was for thousands a symbol of what the free woman might be.”

This story was updated in 2022.

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The 54th Massachusetts Regiment Waits 18 Months To Get Paid

Exactly one year after the 54th Massachusetts Regiment marched through Boston Common in a blaze of glory, Pvt. Francis H. Fletcher wrote bitterly that the African-American soldiers did not get paid.

Detail from the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial by Augustus Saint-Gaudens.

When they were recruited, the black soldiers were promised the same pay as white soldiers received. That meant $13 a month, clothing and rations. But the War Department paid them only $10, and took $3 out for clothing.

Equal Pay or No Pay

The soldiers decided if they could not receive equal pay, they would accept no pay. For 18 months they fought without receiving any wages, while their impoverished families suffered. Appeals were made to the Secretary of War and to President Lincoln for justice. They came from the governors of Vermont and Massachusetts, from the soldiers, from abolitionists and from the commander of the 54th Massachusetts, Col. Robert Gould Shaw.

The injustice rarely left their minds. During the February 1864 Battle of Olustee in Baker County, Fla., the 54th Massachusetts protected the retreat of Union troops. The men of the 54th shouted as they advanced, “Massachusetts and seven dollars a month!”

Francis Fletcher Writes

In June 1864, Congress passed a bill granting the 54th Massachusetts Regiment full pay retroactive to the date of their enlistment. As the bill made its way through the House and the Senate, Francis H. Fletcher wrote to his friend Jacob Safford in Ipswich, Mass. Fletcher, a 23-year-old clerk from Salem, Mass., had enlisted on Feb. 13, 1863. He did not feel forgiveness when he picked up his pen in Morris Island, S.C.

Hd Qrs Post of Morris Island S.C.
May 28th, 1864

Mr. Jacob C. Safford
Dear Sir:

I have received your letter bearing date May 8th….

You take a far more liberal view of things than you could in my situation. Just one year ago to day our regt was received in Boston with almost an ovation, and at 5 P. M. it will be one year since we were safely on board transport clear of Battery Wharf and bound to this Department: in that one year no man of our regiment has received a cent of monthly pay all through the glaring perfidy of the U.S. Gov’t.

I cannot any more condemn nor recite our wrongs, but console myself that One who is able has said vengeance is mine and I will repay.

All the misery and degradation suffered in our regiment by its members’ families is not atoned for by the passage of the bill for equal pay.

Remember me to your sister and and family and believe me

Yours Truly,

Francis H. Fletcher

The 54th Massachusetts

Francis Fletcher and the men of the 54th Massachusetts finally got paid in September 1864. He won a promotion to sergeant — the highest position open to black soldiers. He then mustered out after the war ended, on Aug. 20, 1865.

On Memorial Day in 1897, the Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw and the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth Regiment. Considered one of Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ finest work, it sits on the corner of Boston Common across from the Statehouse.

Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, praised the 54th Regiment in words inscribed on the back of the memorial. They read, in part:

The Black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union Cause. Served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops. Faced threatened enslavement if captured. Were brave in action. Patient under heavy and dangerous labors.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Sylvester Graham, Health Food Nut, Makes Butchers and Bakers Go Crackers

Sylvester Graham was such a severe critic of meat and refined flour that he provoked a near-riot in 1837 among Boston’s bakers and butchers.

Sylvester Graham

Graham believed in whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables. He urged his followers to drink cold water, to bathe often and to eat meals at exactly the same time every day. He also advocated cheerfulness at meals, open windows, daily tooth brushing, sleeping on very hard mattresses and sex only for procreation, never just for fun.

Sylvester Graham attracted a huge following, but he had his critics. Some thought him a nut. Butchers and bakers thought him threat enough to attack him at his hotel in Boston.

No Sex, Please

Sylvester Graham was born in Suffield, Connecticut, on July 5, 1794, from a long line of physicians and ministers. He was the 17^th child of the 72-year-old Rev. John Graham, who died soon after his birth. Unsurprisingly, his mother couldn’t cope with the large family and was in and out of hospitals. So Sylvester was raised by a series of relatives.

He was ordained in 1826 as a Presbyterian minister after a brief stint at Amherst College. Then he preached in New Jersey for a while.

He ultimately turned to dietary reform after suffering a long illness. He designed his health regime to curb the human sex drive, which he believed depleted the body.

In 1829 he invented the graham cracker, made with unsifted whole wheat flour. It bears little resemblance to today’s commercial brand, made with refined bleached flour, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated oils and artificial flavor. Graham would have abhorred those ingredients.

He also invented high-fiber graham bread and graham flour, a departure from the commercial white bread and chemical additives popular during the Industrial Revolution.

Nabisco liked the idea

Sylvestr Graham advocated a Spartan lifestyle because he feared the weakening of traditional institutions and the ensuing disorder – within himself as well as the world at large. A friend once explained Graham didn’t always adhere to his own Grahamite principles.

Many others did, for Graham also invented the health food fad. His graham flour sold widely, and Graham boardinghouses sprang up to save lost carnivores. He published his lectures, which also sold well. Schools like Oberlin College and Catherine Beecher’s Hartford Female Seminary put students on his diet until they rebelled.

Sylvester Graham also influenced Horace Greeley, Bronson Alcott and John Harvey Kellogg, who gave us breakfast cereal.

Dr. Bran

Some dismissed Graham. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him the ‘poet of bran and pumpkins.’ A Northampton, Mass., newspaper referred to him as “Dr. Bran, the philosopher of sawdust pudding.”

In 1837, he published his Treatise on Bread: and Bread-Making in which he advocated high-fiber, chemical-free bread. The treatise complained about ‘almost a total and universal carelessness about bread.’ He wrote that thousands of people ‘eat the most miserable trash that can be imagined, and never seem to think that they can have anything better.’

Today it’s Sylvester’s

No wonder the bakers got angry. The butchers weren’t happy either with his vegetarian crusade. When Graham in 1837 lectured on his food theories in Boston, the butchers and bakers marched on the hotel where he spoke. Grahamites on the roof of the hotel dispersed the angry men by dropping bags of lime on them.

The Grahamite fad eventually died down. Graham had claimed his Grahamite lifestyle could help people live to 100. That claim, however, was undermined by his own death at the age of 57.

Sylvester Graham died Sept. 11, 1851 in Northampton, Mass., after receiving opium enemas on his doctor’s orders.

His home in Northampton is now Sylvester’s Restaurant, which serves gluten-free bread.

This story about Sylvester Graham was updated in 2023.

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Sarah Bagley Avenges the New England Mill Girls

A powerful Massachusetts politician in 1845 learned the hard way not to mess with the mill girls – and especially not with Sarah Bagley.

Sarah Bagley

To the mill girls of antebellum New England, Sarah Bagley stood taller than the reform leaders of the day. She meant more to them than Horace Mann, Susan B. Anthony, Dorothea Dix, or Sojourner Truth.

She was one of the earliest and most important advocates of working women’s rights. Like another Lowell native – Jack Kerouac, a century later – Sarah Bagley refused to be stuck in a second-class life.

But newspaper editor and state Rep. William Schouler viewed Sarah Bagley as a greedy troublemaker. The two adversaries confronted each other at the Massachusetts State House. Too late did Schouler didn’t realize how formidable an opponent he faced.

Sarah Bagley

Sarah Bagley was born on a farm in Candia, N.H.,, sometime in April 1805 or 1806. After her family fell on hard times, she moved to Lowell, Mass., in 1835 to work in the Hamilton Mills. She was 28, older than most of the mill girls.

Her conflict with newspaper editor and politician William Schouler began with her involvement with the Lowell Offering.

In the early days of the great textile mills in Lowell, mill girls got decent wages. However, they worked long hours and were supervised closely.

french-canadian-textile-workers-lowell-mill

Lowell textile mills

When they did have free time, the mill girls took advantage of Lowell’s many cultural offerings: libraries, concerts, improvement circles and lectures. One mill girl came from Maine to work in Lowell just so she could have access to books.

Lowell Offering

A local clergyman started the monthly publication called the Lowell Offering in 1840 to publish poems and fiction by the culture-crazy mill girls. By then, working conditions in the mills were deteriorating. So Sarah Bagley wrote a story for the Offering called Pleasures of Factory Life. Those pleasures, she wrote, resembled angels’ visits: ‘Few and far between.’

In October 1842, state Rep. William Schouler bought the Offering. He was also the editor of the Lowell Courier, a friend to the factory owners. The Offering stopped publishing Sarah Bagley’s criticisms.

In November 1842, the Hamilton Mills management tried to force the mill girls to work two looms instead of one. They walked off the job, and management fired and blacklisted them.

There was a depression on, and a thousand textile workers left Lowell between 1842 and 1844. They were fed up with wage cuts and heavier workloads. By 1844, conditions had improved so that male workers received raises. Women did not.

In December 1844, Sarah Bagley met with five other women at the Anti-Slavery Hall in Lowell to organize the Lowell Labor Female Reform Association. They defied the prevailing belief that women who organized were reprehensible, and they fought for safer workplaces and the 10-hour day. the women elected Sarah president, and she persuaded the group to buy a small, militant labor publication, The Voice of Industry.

The Lowell Labor Female Reform Association quickly grew to 600 members. It had Massachusetts branches in Waltham and Fall River, and New Hampshire branches in Manchester, Dover and Nashua.

The Whip of Necessity

Sarah Bagley led the mill girls in a petition drive for safer working conditions and shorter hours. She wrote – and spoke – for the cause with power. Typical of her rhetoric was this:

Is anyone such a fool as to suppose that out of six thousand girls in Lowell, sixty would be there if they could help it? Whenever I raise the point that it is immoral to shut us up in a room twelve hours a day in the most monotonous and tedious employment I am told that we have come to the mills voluntarily and we can leave when we will. Voluntarily! … the whip which brings us to Lowell is necessity. We must have money; a father’s debts are to be paid, an aged mother to be supported, a brother’s ambition to be aided and so the factories are supplied. Is this to act from free will? Is this freedom? To my mind it is slavery.

The mill girls’ petitions, with 2,139 signatures, led to one of the earliest legislative hearings on factory conditions. But to the dismay of the mill girls, Rep. William Schouler chaired the committee.

Schouler may have tried to intimidate the mill girls by insisting they testify before the committee – something women had never done before.

Cringing Servility

Mill girls

The mill girls, undaunted, told the committee of too-short meal breaks and dangerous air polluted by cotton dust and smoke from oil lamps. The committee took their testimony, visited the mills and talked to the mill agents. The committee finally concluded ‘the remedy is not with us.’ The remedy was in ‘a less love for money, and a more ardent love for social happiness and intellectual superiority.’

The furious mill girls accused the committee of ‘cringing servility to corporate monopolies.’ They passed a resolution:

That the Female Labor Reform Association deeply deplore the lack of independence, honesty and humanity in the committee to whom were referred sundry petitions relative to the hours of labor. – especially in the chairman of that committee; and as he is merely a corporation machine, or tool, we will use our best endeavors to keep him in the “city of spindles,” where he belongs, and not to trouble Boston folks with him.

The fall election was coming up, and the mill girls made good on their threat. They worked hard to discredit Schouler. When the results came in, Schouler had lost. The mill girls thanked the voters for ‘consigning William Schouler to the obscurity he so justly deserves.’ Schouler then took his wrath out on Sarah Bagley in the pages of the Courier.

More petitions resulted in more hearings, but no action from the Legislature. But public pressure was so great on the mill owners they finally shortened the workday in 1847 by 30 minutes to 13 hours. In 1853, the workday was shortened to 11 hours. By 1874, the 10-hour workday was the law in New England.

Another First

By then, Sarah Bagley had gotten a job in Lowell as a telegrapher, probably the first in the United States. In 1847 she moved to Springfield, Mass., as a telegrapher. She was devastated to find out she earned three-quarters of what men earned. That year she also published a book, Biography of Self-Taught Men.

She returned to Lowell, worked briefly in the Hamilton Mills and continued to speak about reform – women’s rights, prison reform, health care and working conditions. Then she fades from the historical record. According to some accounts, at 45 she married widower James Durro or Durnough, a homeopathic physician. Sarah took up homeopathy, caring primarily for women and children. The couple moved to Brooklyn and manufactured homeopathic medicines. James Durro died in 1871. The date and circumstances of Sarah Bagley’s death are unclear.

With thanks to The Belles of New England: The Women of the Textile Mills and the Families Whose Wealth They Wove by William Moran. This story about Sarah Bagley was updated in 2022.

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Newer Posts

Older Posts

health

The Other Alexander Hamilton Visits Newport, 1744

Alexander Hamilton Takes Off

Newport, 1744

Women

Cabinet of Curiosities

Gregarious Grace Coolidge, Who Filled in the Silences

‘I am going to be married to you’

Politics

The White House Brings Grief

Grief

Crystal Eastman Keeps Her Name, Doesn’t Do Housework

Crystal Eastman

Crystal Eastman, Socialist

Post-Suffrage

Downhill

The 54th Massachusetts Regiment Waits 18 Months To Get Paid

Equal Pay or No Pay

Francis Fletcher Writes

The 54th Massachusetts

Sylvester Graham, Health Food Nut, Makes Butchers and Bakers Go Crackers

No Sex, Please

Dr. Bran

Sarah Bagley Avenges the New England Mill Girls

Sarah Bagley

Lowell Offering

The Whip of Necessity

Cringing Servility

Another First

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