In a box in a cupboard in a seaside cottage in Maine lie dozens of letters written in the second half of the nineteenth century by members of the Chauncey (Cheney) Janes Sherman family of New York City and rural western and south-central Massachusetts. The letters primarily represent correspondence to former clothing shop proprietor Cheney Sherman from his children George William Sherman, Emma Sherman and Caroline (Caddie) Sherman. Cheney’s children, born in New York City in the 1830s and 1840s and raised there as members of the petite bourgeoisie, demonstrated in their lively letters the extent to which frequent relocation from the countryside to the city and back again remained a feature of life in the industrial Northeast during the American Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Their letters also demonstrate the extent to which one’s gender determined the character of those relocation experiences.¹

The frequent movement between city and country of Sherman family members resulted, in part, from a belief that the rural landscape provided a safety valve for unemployed urban workers. Although the term safety valve is most closely associated with historian Frederick Jackson Turner and his 1893 frontier thesis, the general concept had been familiar to Americans since at least the 1840s.² The belief that superfluous urban wage earners could find success as agrarians, however, depended on the availability of inexpensive land – a scarce commodity in nineteenth-century Massachusetts. Nevertheless, some members of the extended Sherman family continued to believe in the illusory safety valve and to adhere to the Jeffersonian image of farmers as the epitome of rugged American individualism. Some family members also subscribed to pastoral notions, portraying the countryside as a wholesome alternative to the unhealthy city. To the extent that this vision of agrarian freedom, opportunity and vitality existed, however, it existed only for White male landowners. Women, persons of colour and landless White men could not achieve this agrarian ideal. And in an increasingly urban, industrial America, even those who had access to the ideal might reject it in favour of city dreams. The Sherman family letters demonstrate all these nineteenth-century American themes and developments in dramatic fashion as they moved from New York

City to various locations in Massachusetts.³

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Sherman family locations in Massachusetts

Source: Map by Sean Hollowell.

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The Shermans’ correspondence begins in the closing years of the antebellum period. While visiting his in-laws’ Conway, Massachusetts, farm home during the Fourth of July holiday in 1856, twenty-four-year-old factory machinist George William Sherman wrote home to his pregnant wife Sarah, who was apparently staying with George’s family in New York City. He reported seeing a campaign flag for Republican presidential candidate John C. Fremont on the village green, but farm work rather than national politics merited George’s most vivid commentary. He had travelled to the farm to assist his father-in-law – who had no living sons – with the summer haying. The scorching July sun was taking a toll, however, on the complexion of a man accustomed to indoor, industrial labour. Before signing off as Sarah’s “Affectionate Husband,” George closed his letter with thoughts of his mother and younger siblings, telling Sarah, “Give my love to mother & the children & tell her I’ll be so black when I get back she won’t know me.”⁴

For George, life as a farm labourer – even a temporary one – perhaps did not conform to his image of himself as a modern man in an industrial age. During a time when political debate raged over extending enslaved Black labour beyond the South to the Union’s newly admitted territories and states – a question that had indeed spurred the creation of the Republican Party and Fremont’s candidacy – George possibly viewed farm labour as inappropriate work for an ambitious White man. His statement that field labour would dramatically darken his skin perhaps acknowledged that he was performing work strongly associated with African American labourers in the political rhetoric of the day. By contrast, factory labour, which was strictly reserved for White workers at this time, beckoned George back to the city.

Following the October 1856 birth of their daughter, whom they named for George’s sister Emma, George and Sarah Sherman pursued their version of the era’s urban domestic ideal in the small manufacturing city of Springfield, Massachusetts. George’s employer, the Springfield Armory, was a national centre for innovation and development in America’s Industrial Revolution and was the country’s premier arms manufacturer. For a young man with George’s ambitions, it was undoubtedly the right place to be. Nevertheless, the young couple maintained regular contact with Sarah’s parents, Dexter and Sarah Bartlett, and periodically made the thirty-five-mile journey north by train to visit their farm at Conway. For the next two decades, in fact, the Bartletts’ farm would be a rural refuge for members of the Sherman family, and Sarah Sherman and her daughter Emma spent large portions of their summers there. During those times, Sarah wrote back to Springfield to inform George about life on her father’s farm, including the fresh cucumbers her father had picked for her or the colt he had recently sold. In contrast to George’s quest for success in industry, Dexter Bartlett was seemingly living out an older American dream as a member of Thomas Jefferson’s nation of farmers. Occasional lapses occurred in the idyllic life portrayed in letters from the farm, such as the sleighing accident that temporarily left Dexter milking cows with only one hand. Otherwise, he appeared to be living the life of the exemplary yeoman farmer.⁵

Meanwhile, back in New York, the Sherman family, like the nation itself, was coming apart at the seams. In a letter that George’s younger sister Emma Sherman White wrote from New York City on 25 June 1860, she did not express concerns about sectional strife or that year’s upcoming presidential election but focused instead on the breakdown of her parents’ marriage. Writing to George’s wife Sarah at her parents’ farm, Emma opened her letter cheerfully, telling her sister-in-law that she would like to visit Sarah at the farm and “get some flesh on” her after a recent weight loss but did not want to spend time away from her husband Johnnie, whom she adored “more than all the world.” In contrast to her own happy marriage, however, Emma reported that her parents’ union was beyond repair and that Cheney and Marion Caldwell Sherman “had agreed to separate … entirely.” As a result, Emma noted, her unemployed, fifty-three-year-old father was now “dying by inches” in New York. Family correspondence never explains the cause of Cheney’s failure as a businessman and husband, but the consequences of his downfall are clear: the former New York clothier left the city to return to the countryside of his native Brimfield, Massachusetts. Indeed, until his death nearly a quarter century later in 1884, Cheney Sherman remained in south-central Massachusetts, boarding with neighbours or relatives in exchange for farm labour and receiving gifts of clothing and sympathetic letters from his adult children.⁶

As an itinerant farm labourer, Cheney Sherman now resided at the bottom of Massachusetts’ rural socio-economic system and at the bottom of the masculinity scale. With no farm or home of his own, and separated from his wife and children, Cheney represented the antithesis of the rural masculine ideal. He was not a sturdy yeoman farmer and family provider but a boarder in other people’s homes and a labourer on other people’s land. No longer “dying by inches” as a failed businessman in New York City, he was now an aging labourer in rural exile. Unlike his daughter Emma, who had mused about gaining weight and improving her health in the wholesome countryside, Cheney found little comfort there.⁷

At the same time, George and Sarah Sherman continued their pursuit of the urban domestic ideal in Springfield, where, a month after the Civil War began, Sarah gave birth to George William Sherman, Jr., in May 1861. Unfortunately, it was a difficult birth that left both mother and baby in precarious health, and George, Jr., died in early October. Writing from New York City late that month, George’s mother Marion shared her sympathies with her son and daughter-in-law and asked after her estranged husband, encouraging George to write a long letter telling her how and what Cheney was doing in the countryside. Marion ended her letter noting that it was “hard times for some in New York,” including an uncle who had lost his business in May and friends who had volunteered to fight in the war rather than face continuing unemployment. From Marion’s perspective, Cheney had likely been wise to seek rural refuge, and she added a poignant postscript: “Remember me kindly to your father.”⁸

Urban life proved no less difficult for George, even in a small city. In the aftermath of their son’s birth and death in Springfield and Sarah’s own continuing health problems, George and Sarah now also looked to the countryside for relief. In what must have been an agonising decision for the young couple, Sarah left Springfield in November 1861 to try to recover her health at her parents’ farm. She took their daughter Emma with her, leaving George alone in Springfield as the family breadwinner. George’s letters to Sarah through the remainder of that year reveal the growing strain as he tried to balance his duties to his wife and to the Springfield Armory, which was operating around the clock to supply the Union military. Writing on 19 November, he reported, “I will be up there Thanksgiving hit or miss. Our foreman wouldn’t give me permission even under the circumstances, but I went and saw the Master Armorer & got leave ….” In an undated letter written sometime between Thanksgiving and Christmas, George voiced concern over Sarah’s persistent cough, described the Christmas presents he was sending to the farm and told his wife, “I believe Sarah that I’m thinking of you every minute in the day … I will not neglect you my dear girl for all the armory.” On 29 December, George asked whether Sarah had received the cod liver oil he had sent, and he promised to send some type of “inhaling apparatus” that would ease her troubled breathing. George also reported that he had finally stood up to his foreman, telling his superior that he “had sacrificed enough to him and the armory and should do it no longer.” Under these stressful circumstances, George perhaps now envied his yeoman father-in-law, who did not report to a supervisor and could be at Sarah’s bedside every day. In the end, however, Sarah did not regain her health at her father’s farm and died there at age twenty-six in January 1862.⁹

Several months later, as the war raged on, Emma finally informed her father of George’s recent tragedies. As writer Lillian Smith once commented, while much of men’s Civil War-era writing focused on the “group sameness” of political speeches and military battles, women’s personal writing recorded the “individual differences” in how particular families, neighbourhoods and communities experienced the war. Smith’s observations certainly hold true for the letters Emma sent to Cheney Sherman during the war. Writing from New York City to her father in the farming village of East Brimfield, Massachusetts, Emma only briefly mentioned the war news – including casualties at the recent Second Battle of Bull Run – before launching into lengthy discussion of family matters. She reported that her husband Johnnie – unemployed in the city for two months – would soon be joining the Union Navy and that her grief-stricken brother George had “broke[n] up housekeeping” in Springfield following his wife’s death. Emma noted, however, that while George had left for employment as a machinist at the Colt Armory in Hartford, Connecticut, he had placed his five-year-old daughter “little Emma” in a more stable and wholesome environment – her maternal grandparents’ Conway, Massachusetts, farm home.¹⁰

Cheney, in the meantime, continued his life of intense physical labour, and Emma’s plans for ending her father’s toil on the land came to naught. Writing from her lodgings in Harlem to her father on 5 September 1864, Emma reported that her husband Johnnie had made it through the Battle of Mobile Bay without “a scratch” and would be using a portion of the $15,000 promised him for capture of a Confederate vessel to purchase a home of their own where Cheney could come and live with his daughter and son-in-law and “not have to work much longer.” Approximately a week later, however, Emma’s husband came home to New York seriously wounded. Following the Union victory, Acting Ensign Johnnie White had been among those clearing Mobile Bay of Confederate torpedoes when one exploded. Writing to her father in East Brimfield on 10 October, Emma told him that she, Johnnie and their two-year-old daughter Carrie were in nearby Chicopee, Massachusetts, where they hoped a “change of air” might ease her husband’s suffering before a possible return to the Brooklyn Naval Hospital. The story did not have a happy ending. Writing on black-bordered stationery from the home of her brother’s in-laws at Conway, Emma mused on 16 August 1865: “Father I am very sorry that you have to work as hard in your old day’s [sic] …. How much Johnnie and I anticipated having a pleasant home so that we might have you with us. You were always connected with all our future plans but it was not to be so. [H]is death has made a sad change.”¹¹

Unlike his brother-in-law Johnnie, George Sherman enjoyed a measure of financial security during the war. He remained a civilian but nevertheless believed he was fulfilling his masculine duty to the Union cause through his work as a skilled operative in an arms factory, first in Springfield, then Hartford and later at the Starr Armory in Yonkers, New York. He continued to harbour large ambitions, writing to his father from Yonkers early in 1864 that he was working on a secret invention that would have a major impact on manufacturing – if only he could raise the money to finish the project and patent it.¹² By the end of the year, he was working at yet another weapons factory, this time in Chicopee, Massachusetts. Writing on 4 December, George lamented that his recent move had prevented him from voting in the presidential election. He assured Cheney, however, that although he had “always had been a [D]emocrat,” he would have voted for “Old Abe” [George’s emphasis] and the Union cause. George also reported that he was one of three men who inspected the monthly shipment of two thousand breech-loading carbine rifles to the U.S. Army post on New York’s Governor’s Island. He then closed his letter with an arms-related pun about General William Tecumseh Sherman’s on-going March to the Sea and the importance of weapons manufacturing to a Union victory: “The General who bears the same name with ourselves is at present the big gun [George’s emphasis] among them. He is giving the Rebels all they desire, and I hope he as well as all the rest of our soldiers will continue to do so until they are glad to come under. [I]f no lack of good arms is all that is necessary to end the war, it will not last a great while longer.”¹³

With the end of the war came an end to George’s steady munitions factory employment. From the U.S. Combination Lock Company in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1866 to the Remington Armory in Ilion, New York, in 1867 and then on the road looking for new employment in 1868, George continued to pursue a life in urban manufacturing while his young daughter remained on the farm in Conway. In a letter he wrote from New York City’s National Hotel on 17 May 1868, George congratulated his daughter Emma on having her own pet “little Bossie [George’s emphasis] calf,” noting she would never be able to enjoy such a luxury if she were with him in the big city. As he told the child, “I see [calves] often here but the poor little things are in the street, and almost scared to death, at so many [horse] teams, which they have to keep dodging about or they will get run over.”¹⁴

While George Sherman remained a city dweller following the war, his sister Emma, like her father, was living a life of hard labour in the Massachusetts countryside. While staying in western Massachusetts following her husband Johnnie’s death, Emma married a man named Clark Rice, who, like Cheney Sherman, earned his living primarily as a farm labourer. Unlike her marriage to Johnnie White, which she described in highly affectionate terms, this match was one of convenience rather than love, and subsequent letters to Cheney Sherman from both Emma and her younger sister Caddie indicate that Emma’s second husband was an undependable provider and an indifferent stepfather to Emma’s daughter Carrie. Writing from Williamsburg, Massachusetts, near the Conway home of her brother George’s in-laws, Emma reported to her father on 19 August 1869, that her husband Clark was “hard at work this summer … farming most of the time and getting out timber.” She also made reference to her own labour as the hired man’s wife, remarking that she had recently cut her fingers when the axe slipped while she was splitting kindling.¹⁵

As a farm labourer’s wife, Emma’s fate was tied to that of a man who was at the bottom of the agrarian socio-economic order. Historian Nancy Grey Osterud has noted that in the nineteenth-century Northeast, “rural women were defined through their relationships with men …. They gained access to land, the most important resource in an agricultural society, only through husbands and sons, fathers and brothers.” For Emma, who lacked access to land through her father Cheney, her brother George and her husband Clark, economic options were limited. She would never be a member of a landowning family, and, as Osterud has observed, “it was almost impossible for rural women to support themselves outside male-headed farm households.”¹⁶

Emma’s life in western Massachusetts proved difficult in multiple respects. In February 1870, when Caddie wrote to Cheney Sherman that Emma now had “a very pleasant home” on the farm that employed Clark, she apparently did not understand that the owner also expected Emma to do the women’s work of the farm: gardening, caring for poultry, doing a portion of the milking and cooking for field workers. If Clark and Emma’s house was typical of hired labour housing, its kitchen lacked a water pump and a sink with a drain. That meant that Emma spent a great deal of time fetching clean water from an outdoor source and dumping dirty water into the yard. According to a prominent physician of the era, the daily hauling in and out of water buckets could turn a rural woman into a “laboring drudge.” Although she did not describe herself as a drudge in the letter she wrote to her father on 3 July 1870, Emma admitted that work on the farm was taking a toll. Reporting that she had been “very, very busy” cooking for field hands during haying season and had been unable to engage a “hired girl” to help her, Emma confided to Cheney that she was “not very strong and never was used to such life as one has to do on a farm.”¹⁷

Dissatisfied with their life on the farm, Emma’s husband at one point moved his small family to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he laboured on the police force until the city’s hot weather and high cost of living caused him “to dissipate.” As Caddie described the “dreadful” situation in a long letter to their father, her sister’s Arkansas sojourn brought both Clark and Emma “to their senses” and made them realise “that all this western life and success was a myth.” Back in Massachusetts, Emma continued her life as a farm labourer’s wife, while Caddie worried in a letter to their father that “country life” was not good for Emma: “[It] is hard work and it begins to tell on her. [M]akes her grow old. Clark is a good enough fellow but not the one for Em I am sorry to say.” Several years later, Caddie was still expressing concern for Emma, telling Cheney that her sister found it “tough … to live and work so hard in the country” and reporting that she was the one who provided Emma’s family with all their clothing. When Emma herself wrote her father from the tiny western Massachusetts village of Florence on 27 October 1878, she was working as a seamstress, sixteen-year-old Carrie was earning $5.50 a week at the local silk mill, and Clark was once again searching for work, now hoping to rent or labour on a farm near his father-in-law Cheney.¹⁸

By the time Emma wrote to her father in October 1878, the Rices were living out the worst-case circumstances for a farm labourer’s family. Clark was between farmhand jobs, and Emma and Carrie were the ones contributing to the family coffers. Emma was working as a seamstress, which, along with domestic work, was one of the few types of wage labour available to a married woman in a rural neighbourhood. Carrie, at sixteen, was now old enough to work in one of the many textile mills that dotted the Massachusetts countryside and had been hiring single rural women since the 1820s. As Emma’s sister Caddie had correctly noted, “country life” was indeed “hard work” for the women of the Rice family.¹⁹

Urban life proved no easier. Unlike her older sister, Caddie remained a city dweller, apparently working in a series of low-paying jobs until she married Frederick B. Spooner, a man she described to her father as loving her “dearly.” Writing her father from New York City in the late 1860s, Caddie hoped her upcoming marriage would ease her financial concerns, noting, “I hate to give up my liberty but I must have a home. I cannot work always. I must get someone to take care of me.” Unfortunately, however, Caddie ended up following her loving but unlucky husband from Boston to New York City as he pursued one underpaid job after another. Her misfortunes in the city – and those of her father and sister in the countryside – left Caddie with an ambivalent attitude toward rural life. In a letter written a few years into her marriage, Caddie told her father he was too old to do farm work, “particularly now that warm weather is coming on,” but she extolled the virtues of the farm in upstate New York where she was boarding to recover her own health “in lovely country near Poughkeepsie – on very high ground – [where] they keep a great many cows and I have all the milk I want to drink.” Several months later, in the same letter in which she worried that country life was destroying her sister Emma’s health, Caddie observed that in the aftermath of the Wall Street financial panic of 1869 business was “very dull” and “money very tight” in New York City. She now told Cheney to “[c]onsider yourself fortunate Father that you are a farmer and no such care as business on your mind.” Closing another letter to her father, Caddie summarised a year in which her husband had been unemployed for six months and she had been obliged to return to her mother’s New York City home with an unspecified gynaecological ailment: “Oh, I have seen terrible trouble lots of it in one short year. [B]ut it is peculiar to our family – so I must take my share. I am only twenty two but I feel thirty – and I guess I look it.”²⁰

Like her sister Emma before her, Caddie had once hoped that she and her husband would be able to provide her father with a stable and prosperous home, but that was not to be. A decade after the letter in which Caddie despaired about her health and premature aging, Cheney was still on his own in the countryside near East Brimfield, and Caddie was still living with relatives in New York City alongside her “kind and devoted” travelling salesman husband and their two-and-a-half-year-old son Hoyt. She was also still fretting about her sister, telling Cheney, “Em’s marriage has proved very unfortunate and I am sorry for all parties.”²¹

In the meantime, Caddie’s brother George continued to avoid country life, moving from one industrial job to another in cities and towns throughout New England and the state of New York. Unable to secure a civilian position as a machinist around the time of the 1869 panic, he even did a brief stint in the U.S. Navy, where he sailed to Santo Domingo as part of President Ulysses S. Grant’s ill-fated empire-building scheme. Caddie reported to her father that the Navy had treated George “very badly indeed” before she somehow finagled his discharge, and he was “now at Hazardville Conn[ecticut] in a machine shop doing as well as usual.” She despaired, however, that her brother would ever fulfil the role of securely employed urban householder, writing her father that she wished that George “would marry some nice energetic woman – settle down – and look after his daughter – it is certainly time. [A]nd I very often lose all patience with George.” A few years later, in April 1877, George was indeed married again, but to a sickly woman whose strained relationship with his daughter Emma obliged the girl to remain in Conway as George and his second wife settled into their South Adams, Massachusetts, home, and George once again looked for industrial employment. Writing to his daughter back in Conway, George noted that outdoor “chopping and shoveling” work had recently left him with a swollen arm and wrist and had once more convinced him that farm work would never be for him. As he told his daughter, “My Wife’s relations once advised me to go to farming. What a farmer I’d make!! And how true the old saying ‘You cannot learn and [sic] old dog new tricks.’”²²

Regardless of the peacetime instability of his work as a machinist, George Sherman did not view the countryside as a safety valve for the economic challenges of urban industrial life. A farm might provide a safe haven for his motherless daughter or a healthy temporary residence for his ailing sister Caddie, but – as the experiences of Cheney Sherman and Clark Rice indicated – it might only mean hard work, low pay and lack of prestige for a landless man. If the “Wife’s relations” who urged George to take up farming were his second wife’s family, they obviously hoped he would fare better than his father and brother-in-law. If, instead, he was referring to his first wife’s relatives in his April 1877 letter, they likely hoped that George would replace his sonless father-in-law, who had died three months earlier, and take over the Bartlett family farm at Conway. For a man in the prime of life with access to his own farmland, maybe the countryside could provide a refuge from urban storms, but it was one that George adamantly rejected.²³

George Sherman spent the fifteen years between his first and second marriages residing in hotels and boarding houses as he futilely pursued urban success. While the yeoman ideal of an earlier era may have been appropriate for his father-in-law Dexter Bartlett, George firmly rejected this model of masculinity in favour of a newer one that centred on industrial know-how. Even in the face of failure, George never gave up on his adherence to this new masculinity, rejecting advice that the countryside might be an appropriate refuge for himself as well as his daughter.

Perhaps the experiences of his father Cheney and brother-in-law Clark further influenced George’s rejection of country life. Unlike Dexter Bartlett, Cheney Sherman and Clark Rice were not farm owners but farm labourers. As such, George likely saw them as examples of failed masculinity. His younger sister Caddie certainly viewed them in this way. The pitying tone of her letters to Cheney and her scornful comments about Clark indicate that she saw both men as failures. Her assessment of George, however, proved no better. As she told their father, she had given up “all patience” with her brother over his futile pursuit of success in industry and – briefly – in the U.S. Navy. By contrast, she viewed her own husband, Fred Spooner, as a good and competent man whose failure to conform to the urban masculine ideal was not the result of weak character but of unfortunate circumstances.

Unlike George, his sisters did not have the option of choosing the countryside as a place of permanent or semi-permanent refuge. Like most nineteenth-century women, their economic fates were tied to those of their husbands. As their correspondence indicates, Caddie and her sister Emma had adopted the urban middle-class notion of marriage as a companionate relationship, but they also viewed it as an economic imperative. As Caddie correctly noted in a letter to her father, a good marriage was the most acceptable means for a woman to improve her economic situation in nineteenth-century America. Caddie aspired to the domestic ideal of the urban middle class and believed she was marrying a young businessman who would sufficiently support his own household. Even when her dream was not realised and they continued to reside with relatives, Caddie’s faith in Fred Spooner never wavered. She continued to believe in the urban domestic ideal, and she and Fred apparently never considered a permanent escape to the countryside. When her health weakened, however, a short-term stay in the country – with its abundant supply of fresh air and milk – provided Caddie with the tools for recovery.

Perhaps her sister Emma’s experience dissuaded Caddie and Fred from considering permanent relocation to the countryside as an answer to their woes. Like her sister’s fate, Emma’s economic destiny was tied to that of her husband. In their loving marriages to Johnnie White and Fred Spooner, the sisters were yoked to men who managed the vagaries of urban employment as well as they could. In her marriage of last resort to farm labourer Clark Rice, Emma followed her unsteady provider from the New England countryside to the city of Little Rock, Arkansas, and back again. There, she milked cows, tended chickens, hauled countless buckets of water and performed other typical women’s work on the farms that employed her husband. To help make ends meet, she also earned money as a seamstress. As Caddie described her, Emma now resembled the farmwife drudge that reformers of the era feared selfish husbands were overloading with too many chores. Emma’s role as a hard-working farmwoman bore little resemblance to the middle-class housewife she had envisioned becoming back when she believed Johnnie White would survive the Civil War and claim his bounty on a Confederate ship.

Throughout their peripatetic existence, members of the Sherman family maintained their kinship ties by naming their children after one another and sending informative and opinionated letters to each other across the urban/rural divide. Following Cheney Sherman’s business failure, they frequently resided on the edge of poverty, which sometimes necessitated industrial employment (in a silk mill or a gun factory) and other times required labour on the land. As the Sherman family’s correspondence suggests, for White men and women in the American Northeast, one’s identity as a farm or industrial labourer – or as a rural or urban dweller – remained necessarily flexible during this period of geographic mobility, national crisis and economic change. As their correspondence also illustrates, however, the extent to which a person had agency in moving across urban/rural boundaries, and the experiences they encountered in these relocations, varied significantly according to one’s age, marital status and – especially – her or his gender.²⁴