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What the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges in New England Said in 1972

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In 1972, undergraduates at the Yale Daily News published The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, an entertaining but blatantly sexist description of what it was really like to attend several hundred colleges.

The Yale newspaper continues to publish an annual Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, one far more anodyne and less offensive than its earliest version. Imagine such a publication today describing Trinity College coeds as “unattractive.”

That first Insider’s Guide actually contained the sentence, “One [Trinity] history professor explained, ‘These girls don’t have to worry about being molested. Their faces are their chaperones’.” Really.

Many schools were going coed at the time, and women and minorities clamored for fair treatment. And yet it apparently didn’t occur to the editors of The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges that they might offend female readers with comments like, “The young ladies are especially warm and are reportedly easily convinced of the virtues of losing their virtue.”

Colleges in the early 1970s were loosening their rules in the midst of the sexual revolution. And campuses all over the country were reeling from the unrest of the late 1960s and early 1970s.

So the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges found an audience for answers to such questions as “Do students smoke pot?” “How hard is it to get a date?” “Do the dorms have curfews?”

insider's guide to the colleges yale

Yale campus

Insider’s Guide to the Colleges

Tufts, which had gone coed, could be better than Williams or Wesleyan for men because, “There is something discouraging about the wild-eyed, hangdog look students develop at those isolated, all-male institutions,” the Insider’s Guide reported.

Bennington College won praise for its relaxed parietals. About the only rule it had was to ban lighted candles in dormitories.

Back then, people considered Bennington expensive at $5,000 a year for tuition, and you could go to UMass for $1,000 if you lived in state.

Sports didn’t get much attention at UConn.

And something else has changed since then. The Insider’s Guide described “the perennial middle class,” with rising expectations and hopes. It turned out to be not so perennial, after all.

Below are excerpts from the guide about New England colleges.

Amherst College

1250 men.

Amherst men tend to be strapping, athletic, handsome, friendly, preppy types of guys. They study hard but not too much, and they owe much of their image to the prep-school students – a third of the student body. The college held frequent lectures, rock-and-roll concerts, dances and mixers that the students from three nearby colleges attend.

“Another advantage we should mention is the active drug trade in the area – if you’re interested in that sort of thing,” wrote the Insider’s Guide.

Bates

650 men, 550 women.

The authors lumped Bates with small, out-of-the-way liberal arts colleges that had a good reputation. Bates was ‘superintellectual’ with no social life. Lewiston, Maine, was a hole, and the dull campus ‘unceasingly Georgian.’ The male-female ratio at Bates, provided ‘virtually unparalleleld social boredom.’ (But not for the female students, presumably. There were 650 men, 550 women.)

The school won praise for its many academic offerings and Robert Chute, a poet and scientist on the faculty. The administration, though, was characterized as autocrats who won’t retire ungracefully resist change and make everyone else uncomfortable.

Bennington

61 men, 500 women.

Bennngton, wrote the Yalies, was a peculiar place where both pot-smoking and touch football were on the rise. But whether a student would enjoy Vermont’s rural beauty depended on the ability to endure mud – and the near-constant bombardment of music and dance. For the Bennington girl of limited patience, the authors recommended a car – or a jet.

The unstructured college had no grades and no traditional organizations, though the students took their studies seriously. The Insider’s Guide included an anecdote about a ‘coed’ (male student) caught by a female student emerging from the shower naked. She smiled, said “hi” and walked past.

Boston College

4772 men, 1780 women.

Any school in or near Boston got a thumbs up from the authors because of the lively cultural offerings and preponderance of students. They simply described Boston College as Catholic, a university and located in Boston, actually Chestnut Hill. “But 25 cents and 20 minutes on the MTA will get you to Boston,” they note.

Boston University

6,070 men, 8,582 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges called Boston University a typical big urban university. Hungry hordes of Harvard and MIT men are the bane of a BU man’s existence, noted the authors. The school has strong offerings in political science and fine arts. It’s so big, you can take many course offerings, including an African language. But you can be as forgotten as an MTA schedule.

Bowdoin

947 men, 96 women.

“The premier reform this past year was the welcome arrival to the Maine wilderness of 100 bright-eyed damsels,” reported the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Bowdoin attracted intelligent, affluent middle-class types. Ten percent of its students were black as a result of a massive student recruiting program begun by the mostly white class of 1965. Additionally, Bowdoin had considerable academic strengths, strong fraternities and an overemphasis on sports – “albeit out of proportion to any actual quality on the part of the teams.”

Bowdoin

Brandeis

1,100 men, 1,100 women.

Brandeis in 1972 was a New York Times kind of place. High-scoring Jewish kids from New York and Boston apply to Brandeis, along with one Ivy, usually Columbia. A confrontation took place in 1969, when African-American students occupied the communications building in a demand for Afro-American studies. The president gave the students amnesty and tried to reconcile with them. The Yale students called him, ‘an extreme in-vogue liberal.’

Brown

2,800 men, 1,150 women.

Brown had just merged with Pembroke, and Brown men held some antipathy toward the former Pembrokers. The men resented their academic success, and preferred to date women from other schools on weekends, the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges reported.

“The problem with the coeducational experience is those women actually want to learn things,” wrote the Yale students. And yet, they concluded, the Brown experience is far from oppressive.

Main Green at Brown

Central Connecticut State College (now University)

3,417 men, 3,275 women.

What is now Central Connecticut State University was then described as, ‘a hodgepodge of new programs, archaic majors and overcrowded classes.’ CCSC experienced growing pains as it planned to double in size, resulting in, ‘an irritating mixture of the academic and practical. Experiencing growing pains as it planned to double in size.

Clark

958 men, 716 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the College reported that Clark’s fastidious admissions department had done a unique job in picking extremely individualistic people. It praised the school for its psychology and geography departments, and cited the Heinz Werner Institute as one of the finest research centers for developmental and comparative psychology. Clark, the guide concluded, offered a top education and a social wasteland.

Colby

837 men, 697 women.

The Insider’s Guide had no love for Colby, described as having apathetic students, a dissatisfied faculty and not much to do in Maine.  The college also still gave preferential treatment to alumni offspring.

Connecticut College

359 men, 1175 women.

Recently shed of its ‘for Women’ name, Connecticut College competed with seven sister schools for students because of its outstanding faculty. And it did it despite lacking the luster of Vassar, the notoriety of Sarah Lawrence or the location of Radcliffe. Doris Day girl-next-door predominated on campus, but the problem is Connecticut College isn’t really next to anything. It cannot escape New London, the guide concluded.

University of Connecticut

7,863 men, 5,159 women.

One student summed up the school in five words. “I like UConn. It’s fun.” It was a typical huge state university, though hugely ridden with strife. One-third of the students left every year for academic reasons. Sports, the Insider’s Guide reported, were ‘little heard of.’

Dartmouth

3500 men.

Dartmouth had earned a reputation as an animal school, full of men who can’t control themselves when they get within a certain distance of woman. One freshman class was said to have more than 100 high school football captains, the guide reported.

But the authors acknowledged change at Dartmouth. Students devoted a recent Green Key weekend to workshops on Kent State, Cambodia and the Black Panthers. Almost as an afterthought, they add Dartmouth offered a superb education with an especially good math department.

East campus, Dartmouth

University of Hartford

1807 men, 1440 women.

U-Har was steeped in the finest traditions of suburbia and the American dream, wrote the Insider’s Guide. Located in the wealthy suburb of West Hartford, it stood among three excellent golf courses. The campus had a bourgeois air, but the student quality was improving and so were the academic departments. Plus, noted the guide, “You can have a good-as-hell time.”

Harvard

4,700 men.

The Yale authors offered four advantages to Harvard: interesting and diverse undergraduates, Boston location, prestige and a fair education without working too hard. Among the disadvantages: graduate students often taught undergraduates. Plus Harvard students tend to be obnoxious big shots. The campus was divided into wonks, jocks and preppies, so it was easy to wash out socially.

Another drawback: Though swarming with girls, Harvard ordered all girls out of the rooms at midnight.

“You can get better higher learning elsewhere,” the authors snarkily concluded.

Holy Cross

2,400 men.

Holy Cross has not wavered in its intent of educating concerned Christian gentlemen, wrote the guide. The school’s social life disappointed, but promised to improve soon with the introduction of coeds in 1973.

University of Maine at Orono

4,025 men, 3,000 women.

Though it offered a course in meat cutting, UMO ranked among the better state universities. And the gap between rules and reality bordered on the unbelievable. Liquor was forbidden on campus, but the ban was observed as well as the speed limit on the Maine Turnpike, noted the guide.

The students enjoyed skiing, and drinking ranked as the most popular activity on campus. In many ways, though, Orono was a relic from another age, when jocks score well and ROTC remained untarnished. Spanky and Our Gang was the last group to play there, and the political and cultural revolution had only begun to penetrate the Maine woods.

Hannibal Hamlin Hall at UMO

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

3,825 men, 250 female.

MIT, a science school, was one of the finest in the country. It had its drawbacks, though. Once girls found you out as a Tech Tool, they won’t look your way. But ‘across a short span of aqueous filth known as the Charles River lies the City of Boston,’ report the authors of the Insider’s Guide. The Boston-Cambridge metropolis included 52 girls’ schools, however, making a 5-to-1 ratio in favor of the men.

At a time when authorities tried to weed out radicals from college campuses, MIT gave refuge to Noam Chomsky. Someone calculated Chomsky cost the school $1 million in government contracts and alumni giving. “We think it’s a credit to the school that they keep him on,” wrote the clearly left-leaning authors of the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges.

Massachusetts State College System

500-4,300 students.

Massachusetts’ state colleges offered a refuge from the modern world, wrote the Yale students. Their seven campuses were sound, secluded, white and straight. As state colleges went, Mass State ranked among the best of the lot. It was good academically, and highly competent in the training of teachers. Campus rules, though, rated ‘puritanical.’

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

8581 m, 6505 f

UMass-Amherst actually boasted lower acceptance rates than Harvard or Yale. Nonetheless, the Yale students dismissed UMass’s average student as ‘boorish, not very intelligent and not very interesting.’ However, some students living off campus were doing ‘amazing things.’ The guide described those amazing things as ‘writing poetry, painting and smoking dope.’

Middlebury

1,000 men, 700 women.

The Insider’s Guide described Middlebury as ‘clean, conventional, self-satisfied.’ Surrounded by cows and farmland, the academically demanding school put students under intense pressure. Middlebury was also famous for its foreign language and literature programs.

The Emma Willard House at Middlebury.

Mount Holyoke

1,750 women.

Mount Holyoke deliberately placed itself in South Hadley, Mass., far from the corrupting influence of uncensored literature, alcohol and men. All that changed, and the school was replacing the ‘creative but frustrated Emily Dickinson image’ with something more progressive, the guide reported. Despite a remarkable offering of student activities, ‘a flock of females in full flight’ might trample someone standing by the bus stop at the main gate on a Friday afternoon.

University of New Hampshire

5,163 men, 3,672 women.

Back in the early 1970s, the conservative Legislature and apartheid-supporting Manchester Union-Leader harbored much hostility toward students and universities, the guide reported. The school had the highest out-of-state tuition in the country and steep in-state tuition. It also had a lousy location, as Durham had no discotheques.

UNH had some pluses: a pretty campus and an excellent philosophy department under Peter Sylvester. Students generally came in the ‘apple-cheeked farm’ type.

college-pranks-thompson-hall

Thompson Hall at UNH

Northeastern

9,400 men, 4,600 women.

Northeastern, reported the guide, was large, mediocre and sometimes troubled. But it was also on the way up. The co-op program launched some students into journalism, television and Wall Street, along with ‘palatable’ jobs for many others. On the downside: a location in a high-cost, low-quality, unsafe neighborhood.

Radcliffe

1250 women.

“Many Cliffies are as hip as they are huggable,” the Insider’s Guide reported. However, the old image of Radcliffe as a polite, restrained school for wealthy women hadn’t entirely disappeared.

Moreover, Radcliffe girls were aggressive, and Tillie-from-the-sticks would have had a hard time of it. The school also had a larger proportion of rugged, gutsy, infighting radicals than Harvard.

University of Rhode Island

5,907 men, 4,338 women.

URI fit the description of the state U in every respect, according to the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges. Except, perhaps, that it was a ‘surprisingly dull place aided by gifted administration.’

The book praised President Werner Baum for refusing to turn over a list of guest speakers and their fees to the attorney general. He wanted to search for subsidies of radicals and take away the school’s tax-exempt status. On the other hand, the administration enforced curfew, parietals and a ban on liquor at fraternities. URI also got low marks for its location in Kingston, which had little more than cow pastures, farmland and a pizza place.

URI Quadrangle

Simmons

1475 women.

Simmons tries to train women professionally while giving them a liberal arts background. It had recruited more black and underprivileged students than any other women’s college. The students got very involved in the issues of the day, just not on campus. Located in Boston, they will never lack for dates.

Smith

50 men, 2,450 women.

Smithies, wrote the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges, are “prim, pretty, young, innocent, apple-cheeked, bubbling and dull.” The admissions office prefers girls who more resemble Mary Poppins than Scarlett O’Hara, they noted. Smith offers bookish seclusion, once considered the ideal women’s education. But now, they wrote, people think education is about “people, experiences, excitement and initiation.”

Trinity

1060 men, 530 women.

Trinity, noted the Yale newsmen, had a chip on its shoulder because it got left out of the Little Three Ivies — Amherst, Wesleyan and Williams. So it made up for it in social prestige. Trinity decided to give each man a bedroom, a living room and a bedroom for his valet. Times had changed by 1972, however. Trinity was trying to diversify its student body, which it held to rigorous admission standards.

Tufts/Jackson

2,400 men, 1,100 women.

Tufts got high marks for location and student body mixture. Described as a “good school,” it had proximity to Boston where something cool and something groovy was always going on.

Wellesley

1750 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges described Wellesley as almost a cartoon of the Ideal Respectable Yet Academically Worthwhile School for Young Ladies. It described many of the girls as Junior League liberals — idealistic, but they don’t do anything about it. The college had topflight offerings in English, history, the arts and languages, but showed weakness in science and math.

Wellesley College

Wesleyan

1200 men, 200 women.

Though Middletown, Conn., offered nothing but boredom, half the students at Wesleyan had cars. The school had the highest percentage of black students in the country – nearly 15 percent – outside of historically black colleges. Though occasionally too liberal for older alumni, Wesleyan then was “one of the most exciting academic centers” in the United States.

Wheaton

1200 women.

The Insider’s Guide to the Colleges had no love for Wheaton, which it described as a suitcase school that offered a solid liberal arts education with little pressure. Norton, Conn., however, was a difficult handicap to overcome.

Williams

1200 men, 325 women.

Williams offered a topnotch education, and would give Yale or Harvard a run for their money if it were bigger. The administration considered teaching more important than research, and prominent political scientist James MacGregor Burns taught there. Williams’ rural location was a drawback, however. Williams students’ parents supposedly sent their sons to college in the fall with a briar pipe and three-piece woolen underwear. Then they could count the days until spring thaw.

Yale

4,000 men, 1,000 women.

You would be correct in assuming the writers from the Yale Daily News would brag on their school. They noted that Yale was the hardest college to get into. They attributed that, in part, to the school’s sensitive and liberal administration which had quelled unrest during a three-week strike related to a Black Panther trial nearby. Its upper-middle-class students longed to fill the shoes of such public servants as Cyrus Vance, William F. Buckley, Jr., or Sargent Shriver. (Certainly Law School students Bill and Hillary Clinton did.)

Old campus of Yale University

They described Yale as a cross between Princeton and Harvard. It had the best English department in the world, the best French department outside of France and outstanding history, political science and biology departments.  As far as social life went, Yale had a large “hippie-radical-drug-freak contingent” and “a monarchist party known as the Party of the Right.”

Images: Smith College campus By MonsieurNapoléon – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=64894359; Yale, By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33181529. Yale campus Yale campus By Namkota – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50507969.. Wellesley College By Grom – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6424795. Brown’s Main Green By Chris Rycroft – https://www.flickr.com/photos/193316968@N06/51768485409/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113810038. URI quadrangle By Wasted Time R – en:Image:URIQuad.jpg, Copyrighted free use, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=891529. Thompson Hall Thompson Hall at UNH By AcrossTheAtlantic – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63031225.. University of Maine CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1405898.  The Willard House in Middlebury By PenelopeIsMe – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4363690. Bowdoin By Polarbear 11 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14571061.

This story about the Insider’s Guide to the Colleges was updated in 2023.

 

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Black Cake, A Christmas Treat Emily Dickinson Loved To Bake

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If something called a black cake sounds like a perfect Christmas sweet from a famously reclusive poet prone to black moods – well, it is.

Emily Dickinson not only wrote stunning poetry, she was a terrific baker. She baked for her family, and often sent cakes and breads to her friends along with odd little notes.

Critic R.P. Blackmur wrote in 1937 “[S]he was a private poet who wrote as indefatigably as some women cook or knit.”

You can turn that around: She was a private cook who baked as indefatigably as she wrote. And one of the things she baked was a black cake.

dickinson-portrait

Retouched daguerrotype of Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born into a prominent Amherst, Mass., family on Dec. 10, 1830. Her father, Edward Dickinson, was a trustee of Amherst College; her mother, Emily Norcross, was a homebody who spent decades of her life bedridden with chronic illnesses.

Emily had two siblings, brother Austin and sister Lavinia. They grew up in a large home in Amherst, where she lived all her life. When Austin married one of Emily’s friends, Edward Dickinson built a house for them next to the family homestead.

Emily attended the Amherst Academy for seven years, and went to Mount Holyoke (then Mary Lyon‘s Mount Holyoke Female Seminary). Whether troubled by depression, ill health or homesickness, she only lasted there for 10 months. Austin brought her home.

She then helped managed the household, handling the kitchen chores and caring for her mother while Lavinia did the marketing and housekeeping. Neither sister married, and Emily became more and more reclusive.

When she reached her 30s, she pretty much stayed in the house all the time. Lavinia later said their mother needed constant attention, which Emily provided.

That doesn’t explain why she gave some neighborhood children gingerbread by lowering a basket of it out a second-floor window. Or spoke to visitors through doors. Maybe she developed agoraphobia. Or maybe she just wanted to write her poems without the distraction of the outside world.

The Black Cake

One of the delicacies Emily Dickinson baked was a black cake. It started out in England as a fruitcake or plum cake, cakes made with dried or fresh fruit. As Bruce Kraig explains in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America, English women in the early 1800s began to make their plum cakes darker. They did it with treacle, a syrup made during the refining of sugar.

The so-called black cake spread to the British colony of Jamaica, where it got darker and boozier.

American women began to make it too. In 1832, Lydia Maria Child wrote a cookbook recommending using molasses (also made from the sugar-refining process, but whether treacle is molasses is a debate we won’t enter here).

Lydia Maria Child

“A little molasses makes it dark colored, which is desirable,” wrote Child. (Click here for the recipe.) She didn’t call it black cake, though. She called it wedding cake and iced it. Princess Diana and Prince Charles served a tiered fruitcake at their wedding that lasted quite a long time. An auction house put a piece up for sale in 2018 for $1,200.

In the Caribbean, black cake has more to do with Christmas than weddings. For some, Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a slice of black cake. It takes a year, say some, to make a proper black cake, and burnt sugar creates the distinctive black color.

It has rum in it, too. According to Wikipedia, “It is possible to become intoxicated from consumption of an excessive amount of rum cake.”

Baking the Black Cake

Emily Dickinson learned to bake bread at the age of 14. She wrote to a friend, “I am going to learn to make bread to-morrow. So you may imagine me with my sleeves rolled up, mixing flour, milk, salaratus, etc., with a great deal of grace. I advise you if you don’t know how to make the staff of life to learn with dispatch.”

She developed into an accomplished baker as well as a poet. She wrote some of her poems on kitchen paper and even wrote one on the back of a recipe for coconut cake.

And she loved to do it. Her kitchen in Amherst was her favorite room, with pale green walls illuminated by the sunlight that streamed through the yellow windowsills.

dickinson-home

The Dickinson home.

Her father would only eat bread she baked, which she did every day. Emily’s rye-and-Indian bread took second prize at the 1856 Amherst Agricultural Fair.

In 1883, when she had reached her early fifties, she sent her recipe for black cake with a bouquet of flowers to Nellie Sweetser.

In June of 1884, she collapsed in the kitchen with an apparent nervous breakdown.

“I was making a loaf of cake…when I saw a great darkness coming and knew no more until late at night,” she wrote. Her health continued to suffer, and she died on May 15, 1886 of Bright’s disease.

The Belle of Amherst

In 1976, William Luce’s play about Emily Dickinson, The Belle of Amherst, opened on Broadway. Julie Harris, who starred in it, won a Tony for her performance.

In the play, “Emily Dickinson” recites the actual recipe for a black cake: “two pounds of flour, two pounds of sugar, two pounds of butter, nineteen eggs, five pounds of raisins, one and a half pounds of currants, one and a half pounds of citron, one half pint of brandy — I never use Father’s best — one half-pint of molasses, two nutmegs, five teaspoons of cloves, mace and cinnamon, and — oh, yes, two teaspoons of soda, and one and a half teaspoons of salt.”

Remember, 19th-century bakers used to do a lot of baking all at once.

Then “Emily” goes on to tell the audience to beat the butter and sugar together, add the 19 eggs one at a time without beating. Beat again, adding the brandy alternately with the flour, soda, spices and salt, which have all been sifted together. Then add molasses. Take the raisins and citrons and gently sprinkle into the batter. Bake for three hours if you use cake pans, six or seven if you use a milk pan.

You can get a more modern (smaller) version of the recipe here, but don’t plan to serve it until next Christmas.

 *  *  *

 

The Christmas holiday actually began in ancient Rome — and so did Italian cookies. The New England Historical Society’s new book, 24 Historic Italian Christmas Cookie Recipes, tells you how to make those delicious treats. It also bring you the history of the Italian immigrants who brought them to New England. Available now on Amazon; just click here.

 

With thanks to Carol Dommermuth-Costa · Emily Dickinson Singular Poet. This story was updated in 2021.

 

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Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass

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He rose from slavery in the South to international prominence as a writer, orator and anti-slavery activist. Frederick Douglass didn’t spend a day in school and only learned to read by a stroke of luck. That’s just one of the amazing facts about Frederick Douglass.

He was born in 1818 to a white father he never identified and to a black mother he barely knew.

Douglass escaped from slavery as a 20-year-old with the help of a free African-American, Anna Murray, whom he married as soon as he escaped.

After only a few years of freedom, abolitionists discovered the articulate young fugitive slave. But Frederick Douglass was far more than an abolitionist exhibit of a survivor of slavery. As an orator, he enraptured his audiences; as a polemicist, he caught the attention of presidents; and as a public intellectual, he influenced the debate about slavery, war, equality and opportunity.

Here then are seven fascinating facts about Frederick Douglass.

frederick-douglass

Frederick Douglass

1. Why New Bedford

Frederick Douglass moved to New Bedford in 1838 to get a job as a caulker, a trade he had learned as a slave in Baltimore.

When he escaped slavery and arrived in New York City, his rescuer, David Ruggles, advised him to go to New Bedford because he could get a job on the waterfront there. He could also fit into the large African-American community, which included both free blacks and fugitive slaves. He arrived penniless and with a new wife. Eventually he began to speak out against slavery at local abolitionist meetings.

William Lloyd Garrison, leader of the American Anti-Slavery Society, heard him speak and decided to put him on the broader abolitionist circuit.

By the time Frederick Douglass left New Bedford, he was a rising star on the abolitionist lecture circuit, traveling as far as Michigan to speak against slavery.

He never did get a job as a caulker, though. White workers on the waterfront refused to work with him, so he had to earn a meager living doing common labor like hauling barrels of whale oil.

frederick-douglass-johnsons

Nathan and Mary Johnson houses, where Frederick and Anna Douglass first stayed in New Bedford.

2. Columbian Orator

Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln learned how to give speeches from the same book.

Published in 1797, the Columbian Orator sold 200,000 copies and went through 23 printings until 1860. The author, Caleb Bingham, was a radical egalitarian who believed the young United States needed educated citizens. He published the book to promote a dignified, classical style of speaking without any aristocratic pretensions.

Abraham Lincoln studied it as a young politician during a cold winter in Illinois. The Columbian Orator also influenced Ralph Waldo Emerson and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Frederick Douglass bought the book as a 13-year-old slave living and working in Fells Point, Baltimore.

His mistress taught him to read, which was unusual (and forbidden). The boy made friends with a gang of white boys in Baltimore, and they showed him their schoolbook, the Columbian Orator. The book captivated him, and he spent 50 cents to buy it with money he earned polishing boots. “Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book,” he said.

The full name of the book: Columbian Orator, Containing a Variety of Original and Selected Pieces, Together with Rules, Calculated to Improve Youth and Others in the Ornamental and Useful Art of Eloquence.

3. A Little-Known Fact About Frederick Douglass

One of the little-known facts about Frederick Douglass was that he took his name from a Scottish hero in a Sir Walter Scott poem.

Born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, he changed his name to Stanley, then Johnson, to evade capture when he fled Maryland.

But when he arrived in New Bedford, he and his wife Anna stayed with Nathan and Mary Johnson, black abolitionists. Nathan Johnson told him there were already too many Johnsons in New Bedford. He gave his houseguest the name ‘Douglass’ after the hero of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, The Lady of the Lake.

Frederick Douglass described what happened in one of his three autobiographies:

…unwilling to have another of his own name added to the community in this unauthorised way, after I spent a night and a day at his house, gave me my present name. He had been reading Lady of the Lake, and was pleased to regard me as a suitable person to wear this, one of Scotland’s many famous names.

In the poem, James Douglas feuded with King James V of Scotland, whom he had formerly mentored, and was himself a fugitive. He came from a line of aristocrats known as the black Douglases because of an ancestor’s dark complexion and ferocity on the battlefield.

Douglass later went on the abolitionist lecture circuit in Scotland, a country he loved. While there, he met a surviving relative of Sir Walter Scott.

4. Frederick Douglass Says No to John Brown

Three-and-a-half weeks before John Brown made his famous raid on Harper’s Ferry, Frederick Douglass met with him in a stone quarry across the Virginia line in Pennsylvania. Brown, disguised as a fisherman, urged Douglass to join him in the attack.

Up until then Frederick Douglass encouraged and supported Brown, but he couldn’t go along with his plan to seize the federal armory. He tried to talk him out of the suicide mission.

After the attack failed disastrously, word got out that Douglass met with Brown just before the raid. The governor of Virginia ordered Frederick Douglass arrested, but he fled to Canada and then to Britain.

5. A Career Highlight With Abraham Lincoln

After the Civil War, Frederick Douglass criticized President Abraham Lincoln for his weak Reconstruction plan and failure to give black people the vote. Lincoln invited Douglass to visit him at the White House.

During their meeting – their second – the two men had a long and frank discussion while Connecticut Gov. William Buckingham waited at the door. Lincoln’s secretary interrupted Lincoln twice to tell him the governor waited for him, and Lincoln waved him off. He said, “I want to have a long talk with my friend Frederick Douglass.”

Douglass often retold that story.

6. Jim Crow in Lynn

He moved to Lynn, Mass., in 1841, after his involvement in one of the most famous Jim Crow incidents in history. Still living in New Bedford, he had taken the train from Boston for a speaking engagement in Newburyport, Mass. He boarded the train in Lynn and sat with three white abolitionists.

Then the conductor grabbed him by the collar and demanded he move to the Jim Crow car. Douglass said he would if the conductor gave him a reason. Other passengers began to chant, “Give him a reason.”

The conductor finally replied, “Because you are black.” The passengers surrounded the conductor, but soon a half dozen company thugs arrived and began to beat Frederick Douglass. He clung to his seat, but they pulled it up by the bolts and threw him and the seat out of the railcar and onto the ground. They threw his luggage after him as well.

The outrage shown by the people of Lynn helped persuaded him to move to the city, which had a large abolitionist community. He and his growing family lived in a small frame house on Union Street.

His wife helped support them by working as a shoebinder, a common occupation then in Lynn.  He wrote his first autobiography (he wrote three) in Lynn, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass.

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Anna Murray Douglass

7. White Women

His friendships with white abolitionist women provoked severe criticism. In 1847, he caused a scandal when he traveled by steamboat down the Hudson River to an abolitionist meeting. Newspapers discovered he slept in a stateroom next to Lydia or Lucretia Mott (it isn’t clear which). He finally had to explain that he had two choices: to sleep on the deck in the cold because black men couldn’t buy cabins, or to have Miss Mott book an adjoining room.

Later, he developed close relationships – possibly romantic – with British abolitionist Julia Griffiths and German radical Ottilie Assing. Both women spent time living in the Douglass household, inspiring speculation and rumor.

But it was his marriage to white abolitionist Helen Pitts that caused a real firestorm of criticism. A descendant of John and Priscilla Alden, she graduated from Mount Holyoke College in 1859. In her 40s when they met, Douglass hired her as a clerk and married her two years after Anna died.

Fast and furious came the denunciations. “The Venerable Colored Orator Takes a White Wife” screamed one headline. A Washington, D.C., newspaper called it a ‘national calamity.’ Many in the black community called him a traitor to his race.

To the criticism, Frederick Douglass replied, “This proves I am impartial. My first wife was the color of my mother and the second, the color of my father.”

frederick-douglass-helen-pitts

One of the most surprising facts about Frederick Douglass is that he married a white woman. Here he is with his wife Helen Pitts (seated); her sister, Eva Pitts, is standing.

End Notes to Fact About Frederick Douglass


Seven Fascinating Facts About Frederick Douglass owes much to Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom by David W. Blight. This story was updated in 2023.

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Frederick Tuckerman, the Man Who Would Be Emily Dickinson

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If Frederick Tuckerman had been born a woman, you might think he was Emily Dickinson’s twin.

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Frederick Tuckerman

Like Emily, Frederick Tuckerman came from a well-to-do, public-spirited, intellectual family. He became a recluse in western Massachusetts, as did Emily. Frederick attended college (Harvard) only briefly, as did she (Mount Holyoke), and he wrote poetry. Like Emily, he published only a few of his many poems during his lifetime.

Unlike Emily, he didn’t have an adulterous neighbor who published his poetry posthumously and made him famous.

Frederick Tuckerman

He was born Feb. 4, 1821 in Boston (Emily, Dec. 10, 1830) into the illustrious Tuckerman family. His brother Samuel Parkman Tuckerman composed sacred music for the Episcopal Church. His cousin Henry Theodore Tuckerman was a well-known critic and essayist.

Another brother, Edward Tuckerman, taught botany at Amherst College. He spent decades collecting lichens in the White Mountains, and Tuckerman Ravine is named for him. He and his wife also befriended the Dickinson family, and letters from Emily to Edward’s wife Sarah survive.

Frederick Tuckerman went to Harvard in 1841, but eye problems sent him home. He then returned to Harvard Law, graduated and gained entry to the Suffolk Bar. He found the law distasteful, though, and spent the rest of his time studying literature, botany and astronomy.

Bird’s-eye view of Greenfield, 1917

In 1847, then only in his mid-twenties, Frederick Tuckerman moved to Greenfield, Mass., just 20 miles north of Emily Dickinson’s home in Amherst. He married the gentle Hannah Lucinda Jones that same year.

Frederick Tuckerman spent his days walking the countryside around Greenfield and nights gazing at stars through a telescope. He made herbariums and read English literature, which he loved.

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Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Unlike Emily Dickinson, though, he traveled. In 1851 he went to England and met and befriended Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Tennyson invited him to come back and stay with him, which he did three years later.

Final Retreat

In 1857, Hannah died while giving birth to their third child. Frederick deeply mourned her loss and turned further inward. He wrote poem after poem to work out his guilt and his grief. One sonnet begins,

I leave the town; I climb the mountain-side, / Striving from stumps and stones to wring relief; / And in the senseless anger of my grief, / I rave and weep; I roar to the unmoved skies; / But the wild tempest carries away my cries!

Hawthorne

Three years after his wife died, Frederick Tuckerman self-published his one and only book of poetry, called Poems. He then sent copies to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They replied politely. Only Hawthorne seemed to appreciate his work.

nathaniel-hawthorne

Nathaniel Hawthorne

(Emily Dickinson, too, had poems published during her lifetime, though probably without her authorization.)

Frederick Tuckerman spent the rest of his life in dignified privacy, dying at the age of 52 on May 9, 1873.

Emily died May 15, 1886 at age 56. Her late brother’s mistress, Mabel Loomis Todd, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, published her poems to wide acclaim.

Higginson, by the way, had attended Harvard with Frederick Tuckerman. As an old man, Higginson recalled Tuckerman, ‘as a refined and gentlemanly fellow, but I did not then know him as a poet.’

Rediscovery

Poets Seat Tower

It would take decades for Frederick Tuckerman to win acclaim for his poetry.

In 1909, a wealthy poet named Louis How put together an anthology of American poems that included two sonnets by Tuckerman. Though the anthology never went to press, an article about it caught the attention of the poet and scholar Witter Bynner. He got in touch with Tuckerman’s grandchild, obtained a cache of his poems and published a new anthology of them in 1931. Another critic, N. Scott Momaday, brought out an edition of Tuckerman’s poetry in 1965.

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Poets Seat Tower plaque

However, a different kind of homage to Frederick Tuckerman took shape in 1912. Then, a sandstone observation tower called Poets Seat Tower was built in Greenfield to commemorate the spot loved by poets, especially Tuckerman.

Tuckerman’s biographer Eugene England noted another similarity between Frederick Tuckerman and Emily Dickinson:

Allen Tate’s comment on Emily Dickinson can be adapted to Tuckerman. All pity for his starved life is misdirected; his life was one of the richest and deepest ever lived on this continent.

Images: Plaque By Jerry Dougherty – http://public.fotki.com/GCDOUGHERTY/miscellaneous/massachusetts/greenfield-ma/greenfieldpoetsseat-1.html, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7119511. This story was updated in 2022.

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River Gods of the Connecticut River Valley Create A World of Their Own

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During the 150 years before the American Revolution, a series of aristocrats known as the River Gods ruled the Connecticut River Valley.

Their domain had its own economy and culture, which eventually resembled England more than settlements to the east or the west. The River Gods owned vast farms and shipyards, traded with the West Indies and fed the coastal cities with their produce and meat.

They supported a large class of artisans who fed their thirst for status by building large houses with elaborate doorways. The craftsmen filled the River Gods’ houses with fine furniture, paintings, textiles and ceramics. When they died, elaborate headstones marked their graves to show their prominence in life.

John Adams, on a visit to Middletown, Conn., in 1771, rhapsodized about Connecticut River Valley. “When I first opened into the Town which was upon the Top of a Hill, there opened before me the most beautiful Prospect of the River, and the intervals and Improvements on each Side of it,” he wrote.  “…[A]nd on the right Hand is a fine level Tract of Land as rich as the Soil of Egypt.”

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View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas ColeView from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow (1836) by Thomas Cole

The River Gods

Many of the River Gods already had standing and wealth when they arrived in the Connecticut River Valley. William Pynchon, the first of the River Gods, came to Massachusetts in 1630 as a prominent member of John Winthrop’s party. He owned a plantation in Roxbury, Mass., originally ‘Rocksbury’ because of the stony soil.

Pynchon didn’t like farming among rocks, so in 1636 he moved west and founded Springfield on the boulder-free meadows on the Connecticut River banks.

He started a naming trend that described the grassy meadows that attracted more settlers: Enfield, Bloomfield, Longmeadow, Hatfield and Greenfield.

Pynchon probably heard about the River Valley’s fertile open lands from Edward Winslow of Plimoth Plantation. Indians had come to Plimoth and Boston in 1631 to hype the Connecticut River to the Puritans. The Indians wanted to trade with the English settlers, and they viewed the English as potential allies against the Pequots.

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Edward Winslow

Intrigued, Edward Winslow visited in 1632 to check out the Indians’ claims, and wrote a report about the Valley.

Other families followed William Pynchon to the lower part of the Connecticut River. When the new settlers divided up land, they did it according to status and wealth. The wealthiest 10 percent along the Connecticut River got between 30 and 40 percent of the land. The poorest 50 percent got 10 to 20 percent of the land. (By today’s standards, that level of equality is remarkable).

Prosperity

Agriculture flourished in the red sandstone-based soil, unique to New England. The River Gods produced more than enough for themselves, so they sold the surplus to Boston at a high profit. They came to dominate local business and politics, ran the local militias and chose the ministers.

Pynchon, for example, owned a quarter of the land, a grist mill and the town’s store. He chose the town’s minister, traded furs and shipped surplus produce and livestock down the river. He and his son ran what became Hampshire County like a colony within a colony.

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William Pynchon

In addition to the Pynchons, the River Gods who came to dominate the Massachusetts river towns in Hampshire County included Ashleys, Dwights, Partridges, Porters and Williamses. Some of the more prominent River Gods in Massachusetts:

  • Oliver Partridge, born in Hatfield (1712-1792). Military commander, congressman and patriot.
  • Timothy (1752-1817) and Theodore Dwight (1764-1846). Both born in Northampton. Timothy IV was a minister, author and president of Yale. Theodore was a journalist, editor of the Hartford Mirror and the New York Daily Advertiser.
  • Ephraim Williams, Jr., born in Newton (1715-1755). Later moved to Stockbridge. Soldier and benefactor of Williams College.

Springfield originally belonged to Connecticut, but Pynchon managed to move it to Massachusetts after a dispute with Connecticut’s leaders. In his absence, River Gods in Connecticut emerged as families of merchants and ministers that intermarried. They included Allyns, Chesters, Hamlins, Pitkins, Talcotts, Welleses and Wolcotts. A few of the best known Connecticut River Gods:

  • Oliver Wolcott (1726-1797), born in Windsor, signer of the Declaration of Independence, congressman, governor and general under George Washington.
  • Joseph Talcott (1669-1741), born in Hartford,  governor of the Connecticut Colony.
  • Thomas Welles (1594-1660), born in England, moved to Wethersfield, governor, deputy governor, treasurer and secretary of the Connecticut Colony.

Peace

Wars between the French and Indians limited the settlement of Connecticut River towns in parts of Massachusetts, Vermont, New Hampshire and even in Connecticut.

Between 1675 and 1678, for example, King Philip’s War wiped out Deerfield and Northfield in Massachusetts, and Suffield and Simsbury in Connecticut. After that, Indians frequently raided many of the surviving Massachusetts river towns.

It wasn’t until the French and Indian wars ended in 1763 that settlers established towns in New Hampshire and Vermont.

Once they did, the towns grew quickly.

The Industrial Revolution was underway, and waterpower became an important reason to settle. The River Gods prospered from the Caribbean trade and shipbuilding. In fact, Connecticut River shipyards built more than 4,000 vessels in the 19th century.

The farmers began to specialize. Wethersfield, Conn., for example, specialized in onions.   Hadley, Hatfield and Deerfield concentrated on livestock. The River Gods of Glastonbury, Hartford and Windsor grew tobacco. And Enfield, Suffield, Longmeadow and Northampton grew so much wheat they earned the designation of New England’s first wheat belt.

More Like England

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Lady Williams and Child, by Ralph Earl, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By 1771, the road from Windsor, Conn., to Hartford was settled like one continuous street, noted John Adams. A traveler named Samuel Davis wrote in 1789 that the churches in Suffield had steeples, unlike the ones between the coast and the Connecticut River. He noted the larger houses – the ones belonging to the River Gods – had been painted.

After the American Revolution, travelers noted the valley resembled England more than any other part of the country.

But the River Gods created their own unique culture, filling their houses with clocks and paintings, richly hung beds, upholstered chairs, mirrors and silver. They hired artisans to produce elaborate doorways, vine-and-leaf carved chests (known as Hadley chests), decorated board chests, baroque-style iron door latches and portraits in the style of Ralph Earl.

The River Gods, though, didn’t take on an identity the way the Boston Brahmins did. Part of that had to do with the political division of the Connecticut River Valley. To the south, the boundary between Connecticut and Massachusetts divided the River Gods. To the north, the river itself divided New Hampshire and Vermont.

A Common Character?

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Timothy Dwight, one of the Massachusetts River Gods

In 1806, Yale president Timothy Dwight visited the Connecticut River Valley on horseback. “The inhabitants of this valley … possess a common character, and in all the different states resemble each other more than their fellow citizens who live on the coast resemble them,” he wrote.

At the time, however, the local culture was on the wane, wrote William Hosley, Jr., in his introduction to The Great River, Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, published in 1985 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of the settlement of the Connecticut River Valley.

“Regional culture may have been more apparent in its decline than while it flourished,” wrote Hosley.

Images: Dwight House By Historic-Deerfield – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17941799

With thanks to The Great River, Art & Society of the Connecticut Valley, published by the Wadsworth Athenaeum. This story was updated in 2023.

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The Land Rush that Started the Hartford Riot of 1722

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In 1721, the Connecticut General Assembly ordered Jeremiah Fitch to begin paying rent to John Clark for land he lived on near Coventry, Conn. Or to leave. Fitch, however, felt he didn’t need to pay rent because he already owned the land. And with that he set the stage for the Hartford riot of 1722.

hartford riot of 1722

The Ox-Bow by Thomas Cole

Give Me Land

By the 1720s, Connecticut was running out of open land desirable for farming. Hartford and New Haven had plenty of people, and the state experienced a population explosion.

For many decades, Connecticut didn’t have too many people, but too few. As that changed, land grew more valuable and settlers looked for areas away from the population centers to start farms.

The appeal of Eastern Connecticut near the Rhode Island border began growing. With good farm land, it had few settlers. But who owned it?

The state had claimed ownership, though it had trouble enforcing the claim. The Mohegan Indians claimed to own it. Though Indians had “sold” land to early colonizers, the tribe insisted the sale only represented their allegiance to the new English government. Though that placed the land under English jurisdiction, the actual right to live on the land stayed with the Mohegans. Unless, of course, they chose to sell it.

Map of Pioneer Hartford

This set up conflict between the proponents of state rights and native rights. Caught between these two sides were those people who bought property from the Mohegans, only to be told that they didn’t own it at all. In Canterbury, some lamented that to buy a piece of land settlers had to pay for it over and over again.

James Fitch

None of the ownership issues slowed land speculator James Fitch from aggressively selling and leasing farms in the area, based upon his claims that he had obtained the land by virtue of its sale by the Mohegan Tribe.

Into the early 1700s Fitch was held somewhat in check by the government, run by the powerful Winthrop family. But Fitch still amassed a fortune (and paid a fortune in legal bills) from land speculation.

By 1722, the area of eastern Connecticut was awash with disputed land that had multiple ownership claims. In 1721 the legislature had made its fateful order that Jeremiah Fitch’s claim to his land was invalid. (Jeremiah was a distant cousin of James Fitch.) It ruled he must vacate the property, declaring John Clark owned it by virtue of a government grant. Fitch refused to leave, and Sheriff James Whiting arrested and jailed him in Hartford.

The Hartford Riot

Seeing that Fitch’s future was their own if they didn’t act, his supporters from the towns east of Hartford crossed the Connecticut River and went to the Hartford jail. They declared their intentions, broke down the door and released Fitch (along with other prisoners).

All in all it was a remarkably civil riot. Sheriff John Whiting caught up with the rioters as they boarded a boat to cross the Connecticut and return home. As the ferryman was loading his boat with the rioters, Whiting struck one man, John Smith, with his cane. Smith cautioned the sheriff: “Colonel, don’t strike hard. If you do, I’ll turn on you.” With that, the ferry departed with the rioters.

For the next several months a state of lawlessness pervaded Eastern Connecticut as the sheriff attempted to bring justice and arrest the rioters. The Assembly had given sheriffs greater authority and made it a crime for more than three people to congregate without government approval. Yet the native rights mob ran the countryside.

Branded

The native rights protesters repeatedly ran off the sheriff and grand jury members who attempted to come into the towns east of Hartford. The dispute then culminated in an armed standoff in March of 1723 at the church in Coventry. A party of sheriff’s deputies faced off against Jeremiah Fitch’s son and others.

In May of 1723 the major players in the native rights movement had finally been rounded up for trial over their part in the riot and its aftermath. More than 10 men were eventually convicted. They received punishments that ranged from fines of 10 shillings and a stern lecture to being branded on the forehead with the letter “B.”

With that, the native rights protests largely ended and the government began to assert its ownership rights over the lands of Eastern Connecticut. Jeremiah Fitch, meanwhile, was convicted of no crimes related to the riot. He had not participated in the break-in at the jail as he was already locked inside it.


Thanks to Unrest in the “Land of Steady Habits”: The Hartford Riot of 1722, James M. Poteet and A Complete History of Connecticut by By Benjamin Trumbull. Illustration: View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm—The Oxbow, Thomas Cole (Metropolitan Museum of Art). Map of Pioneer Hartford Goldie, J. & Goldie, R. (1927) Map of pioneer Hartford: founded , incorporated 1784, showing early landmarks and the locations of historical events. [S.l.: s.n] [Map] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007630431/.

This story last updated in 2022.

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