An Early Description of Rebecca

"What a sensible amiable girl is my Becky. She possess[es] a large share of my heart. Her sentiments would do honor to any female breast. My husband frequently speaks of her countenance as beaming mildness and sweetness."

In 1789 Shinah Simon Schuyler and her husband Nicholas visited her parents in Lancaster, PA, and her sister Miriam Gratz and her family in Philadelphia. On her return to her home in New York, Shinah wrote a letter of thanks and included these words about Miriam's daughter Rebecca, then almost eight years old. It seems to be the earliest description extant and the only one of Rebecca as a child.

(The letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, at the American Philosophical Society.)

Making a Good Death

Drew Gilpin Faust, in her book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, gives the history of the concept of "making a good death," tracing it to the late Middle Ages. I had not been aware of its roots, but having read the Gratz family letters I was already well-acquainted with the idea.

"Making a good death" necessarily meant resigning yourself to your imminent demise. This acceptance was key because your family could infer from it -- even if you could not speak -- that your conscience was clear and you were ready to meet your God. If you could speak it would be to calm and comfort your loved ones. By 1800 in America this idea permeated Protestantism and Judaism as well.

Here is Maria Fenno's description of the deathbed of John Ward Fenno, her older brother and the head of the family: "[He] called all of us, embraced us and pressed our hands and as well as he could begged that we would not be distressed. Towards evening he sank into a kind of slumber from which he never awoke but breathed his last sigh at about one o'clock in the morning, so calmly it seemed impossible."

John Ward Fenno was twenty-three years old but did what he could to convince his brothers and sisters that he loved them and was leaving them with confidence in his hopes of heaven.

A more formal description of a good death, that of Miriam Gratz, Rebecca's mother, is from her obituary by Joseph Dennie, the editor of the Port Folio: "...Always obedient to the will of heaven she saw the approach of death with serenity and meekness, and met his cold embrace without a struggle. In contemplating the steadfast virtue which supported her at that awful moment we may all find reason to exclaim, 'Let me die the death of the righteous and let my latter end be like hers'" (Port Folio, January 1809).

The Gratz sisters, particularly Rebecca, had been part of the social set around Dennie and his publication. Dennie knew Rebecca personally and had probably met her mother. As was the custom of the day, he recounted a "good death" in his obituary, but judging by everything else known about Miriam Gratz and the special emphasis Dennie placed on her last hours it is likely that she did die tranquilly.

But what happened when a person did not?

The family probably covered it over, making up last words and final farewells, and no doubt coming to believe the tale themselves over time. Because of that there are few descriptions of NOT making a good death. One survives in the Gratz correspondence because a Mrs. Morton had no family and the friend who cared for her told the story. In 1808 Sarah Gratz wrote to Rebecca:

"I never heard of a more agonizing death bed than poor Mrs. Morton exhibited. She was unconscious of approaching dissolution till almost the last moment and so entirely unprepared and unwilling to leave this world that when her sight failed and the conviction that the hand of death was on her, she uttered the most dreadful shriek and begged one more struggle should be made to save her. Even her last sigh breathed a prayer for life and the fear of death inflicted anguish on her far beyond description."

This is pretty hair-raising and not a memory anyone would want to leave. Sarah concluded, "Tis the duty of every rational being to reflect on death and so to regulate our actions as to divest it of half its terrors." The concept of a "good death" provided a script for playing one's last scene with dignity, but Sarah acknowledges that to be ready to act the part you had to prepare for it.

Note: Mrs. Morton was not a great sinner fearful of hellfire. She was a victim of tuberculosis, the "delusive" illness. As the disease reached its terminal stage, the patient, who knew very well the week before that she was seriously ill and in danger of death, lost touch with the reality of her situation. She might start talking about her plans for the next summer or trying to do tasks which were well beyond her strength. Many victims of the disease died without realizing their plight or, like Mrs. Morton, realizing it only at the very end. Tuberculosis had a special horror for families because it did not permit many of its sufferers to "make a good death."

(Maria Fenno's and Sarah Gratz's letters are both from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society.)

Family Planning: Philadelphia, circa 1800

Christians and Jews were all under the Biblical injunction to go forth and multiply, and American families were large at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Given the mortality rates for children, it is not surprising that husbands and wives wanted to produce enough offspring to assure that some would survive to support them in their old age.

Of course, the result of constant pregnancies was that women died young, worn out by child-bearing. (The maternal death rate circa 1800 in America was about one per every one hundred births; in 2006 it was about 13 in 100,000, the worst rate among the industrialized nations.) Many American women used a traditional method to help preserve their health and strength and still produce babies at regular intervals, one they probably learned from their mothers. The birth records for the children of Rebecca Gratz's grandmother, Rosa Simon, are incomplete, but a pattern may be discerned. She spaced her babies: one every two years, on average. The way a woman could do that was by breastfeeding her infants for the their first year to prevent ovulation.

The pregnancies of Rebecca's mother followed the same pattern as did those of her sisters Richea Hays and Rachel Moses, who breastfed. Only Fanny (Frances) Etting, Rebecca's eldest sister, did not breastfeed and she averaged only sixteen months between her first four children. The fifth through eighth children were spaced about two years apart; there is no information to explain this change.

Nor is there any information which explains how a declining birth rate was achieved in the United States as the nineteenth century went on, but even Rebecca came to think large families, much as she loved her own, were unwise. In 1839, she wrote after a Savannah relation by marriage had given birth to her tenth child: "I do not know whether so many responsibilities are indeed a blessing, considering how little opportunity is afforded of giving each the instruction they need, and the start in the world which even the rougher sex require."

In the depression following the Panic of 1837, Americans in the middle and upper classes saw childrearing as a lengthy educational process which also required all the worldly help that parents could muster to launch a child successfully into an adult career or marriage. Rebecca knew this all too well: two of the nieces and nephews she had raised after her sister Rachel's death had found themselves at the mercy of the hard times. Rebecca Moses was enduring a years-long engagement while her fiance Jonathan Nathan, a young lawyer in New York, tried to find a job which would give him enough income to support a wife. Horace Moses was suffering recurrent periods of unemployment: he had been involved in building railroads, but the money which was supporting the construction had all but dried up.

Both these setbacks were temporary, but the ups and downs of the business cycle in nineteenth-century America, must have created uncertainty and a desire to limit one's "hostages to fortune."

(The 2006 maternal death rate in the United States is from Amnesty International. Rebecca's letter is from the Miriam Moses Cohen Collection, No. 02639, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Fulton's Folly

In the summer of 1807, Sarah Gratz was visiting Isaac and Reyna Moses at their country home Mt. Liston, located on the east side of Manhattan Island on the North River.

She reports to Rebecca in July that a "wonderful explosion . . .drew thousands to the battery all on a rainy day." The noise, on the other side of the island from Mt. Liston, was probably caused by Robert Fulton's tests of torpedoes, one of his inventions, in New York harbor. It took three tries for a torpedo to hit the derelict boat which was the target, and the experiment was deemed less than a success.

Undeterred, Fulton turned to another of his projects, the steamboat. Sarah states that "on Wednesday next he starts a boat by steam and has promised to carry half the fashionables of New York to Albany in the course of six hours." Her words must have been based on gossip because Fulton made his trial run up to Albany on August 14, with a skeleton crew, the "fashionables" not wanting to take any unnecessary chances. The voyage took 32 hours. (Compare that to the five days of Rebecca's and Sarah's voyage up the Hudson by sailboat in 1804.) Fulton had succeeded in inventing the first commercially viable steamboat. Unfortunately, since the public had no confidence in the new invention, hardly anyone noticed. Perhaps from Mt. Liston Sarah could see the ship going up the North River, but if she did there is no record of it.

Steamboats were soon plying the Hudson on a regular basis and were very popular. In 1814 Eliza Fenno Verplanck would write of the luxuries she had enjoyed on the steamship Fulton, including a good berth, although she did complain of the lack of air in her cabin. Sloops did not disappear immediately though. Eliza wrote again in 1814 of taking a sloop downstream; sailing with the current made the older mode of travel more reliable. And using the wind and the current to power the boat must have made travel under sail much cheaper.

(Sarah's letter is in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, American Philosophical Society; Eliza's are in the Fenno-Hoffman Collection, the William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.)

What Was Wrong with Solomon Moses Anyway?

(This narrative began with "Rachel Gratz," the post of April 20, 2010.)

On June 26, 1806, Solomon Moses wrote that this day "unites me to Rachel Gratz, a Treasure,"

certainly a highly suitable sentiment for a groom. We have heard from Sarah and Rebecca, but sadly there is little of Sol's writings which survive, and I want to give him a chance to be, if only briefly, more than the object of his sisters-in-laws' disdain.

In reality though, Sol was probably one of those Rebecca wrote of in 1800 when she referred to men who had "least to boast" of in the way of superiority but were unaware of their deficiency. (See the post for April 13, 2010.) The evidence presented here is truly anecdotal: the first story indicates Sol's sense of male entitlement which leads him to voice his disapproval of Rebecca's activities, and the second, his robust narcissism. (How Sarah Gratz would have liked that term if it had been available to her!)

In 1807 Rebecca and her close friend Gertrude Ogden Meredith decided to have a formal exchange of letters on the subject of Judaism and Christianity. Solomon heard about the plan and let it be known that he disapproved. His letter, or more likely Rachel's conveying his thoughts on the matter, does not survive, but Rebecca's response suggests that Sol thought that Gertrude was trying to convert her to Christianity. Rebecca defended her friend, "Mrs. M. is a sincere religionist and approaches with awe all sacred things. The testimonials of our divine inheritance are treated by her with the reverence they are entitled to and I should think myself very unworthy of my hope [her emphasis] of future rewards were I less liberal in my sentiments towards the Christian faith whose doctrines have purified the hearts of some of our best and most beloved friends." She does Sol the courtesy of giving him a serious response where other women (Sarah, for instance) would have told him to mind his own business. Ironically, in 1822 Sol and Rachel would name their new baby daughter Gertrude after Mrs. Meredith in honor of their long friendship and in gratitude for the Merediths' having named one of their daughters Miriam after Rachel's mother.

In 1808, Harriet Fenno Rodman, Rachel's best friend, was dying of tuberculosis in New York. Rachel, five months pregnant, was in no condition to go to her, and given Rachel's emotional nature, even if she had been well, she would have been more of a burden than a help in the sickroom. Rebecca volunteered to nurse their friend and wrote nearly every day, giving in her letters to Rachel a classic description of the final stages of the disease.

When Harriet died, Rebecca wrote to her sister Sarah and, instead of to Rachel, sent a letter to Sol. She obviously thought that the two of them would decide when and how to best tell Rachel.

It didn't work out that way.

Here is Sarah's description of what happened: "Sol received his letter early in the morning and after breakfast as he was going to his store, mentioned [that Harriet had died] as he would any other piece of intelligence. Not feeling himself on this occasion, he was unconscious what a stab he was inflicting in the heart of her he loved. She shrieked and fell, and in that situation I found her apparently lifeless. We assisted her to bed and I continued with her all day." The incident had no lasting physical effects on Rachel or her baby. Although Sarah carefully includes a reference to Sol's love of Rachel, she also makes it clear that this love is not so central to his being as the narcissism which prevented him from realizing the effect her best friend's death would have on his highly emotional wife.

Two anecdotes are not very much -- and that in itself says something about Rebecca's relationship with Solomon Moses. Although she lived in the same neighborhood with Rachel and Sol throughout their married life and raised their children after Rachel's death, Rebecca would rarely so much as mention Sol in her correspondence.

(Rebecca's comment on male superiority is from a letter in the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection at the Library of Congress. The other letters quoted here are from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

Rebecca Writes to Sally

(See the post entitled "Rachel Gratz" for the beginning of this narrative thread.)

Benjamin Gratz wrote of Rebecca many decades later that she had "devoted [her] life to the service of our beloved family," and there is evidence that the unity and well-being of her family came first for her, even before her devotion to religion, good works and education. Her older sister Sally's dislike of the man whom her younger sister Rachel wanted to marry would certainly have caused a family rift if Rebecca could not have convinced Sally to hold her tongue.

Rachel's letter announcing her love for Sol Moses and asking Rebecca to intercede with Sally probably arrived on a Friday, giving Rebecca the Sabbath to contemplate her words before she could pick up her pen on Saturday night.

Rebecca begins her letter by commiserating with Sally and revealing her own distress at the marriage: "What [you have] experienced...I have conjectured from what is passing in my own [heart]." But Rebecca knows, as Sally does too, that there is no way to stop Rachel: "She loves Sol Moses -- her own hand has written it -- her own enthusiastic style most passionately declared it." The sisters will have to accept Sol graciously. Rebecca understands how hard this will be for Sally but she takes it as a given that Sally's better nature will win out: "You dislike Sol, and have so long found it difficult to disguise your opinion that I fear it will not be an easy task; however the goodness of your heart will teach you to sacrifice prejudice where the happiness of our beloved sister is concerned..."

Here Rebecca differentiates her feelings from Sally's: Sally disliked Sol before there seemed any possibility of his entering their family; Rebecca seems to have had less difficulty with him as someone in their circle but the thought of him married to her sister has disturbed her. Yet she makes a plea for him; she is sure, she says, that he loves Rachel and will try to make her happy. She adds that Sol is respected in New York and "tenderly beloved" in his family. She even echoes one of Sally's sarcastic remarks to bring her sister around, "You have often said that you believe he would make any woman happy who could love him [her emphasis] and if contrary to your expectation our sister is that woman should we not strengthen -- confirm that belief rather than cloud it with doubt and apprehension...?"

Rebecca's struggle to bolster Sol's qualities as a good brother-in-law amounts to faint praise, but she has one comfort to offer her sister.

In a postscript she says, "Revolving all that I have said I fear my letter will make you melancholy. Do not let it have that effect. I am a little given to imaginary whims, and have a curious notion that the little fairy imp Puck has been making free with his juices."

(Both sisters knew their Shakespeare. Rebecca was referring to A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Puck puts the juices of a magical flower into the eyes of the sleeping Titania, the queen of the fairies, so that she will fall in love with the first thing she sees. He then puts an ass's head on the shoulders of the buffoonish weaver Bottom and wakes Titania up. Rebecca was comparing that mismatched couple, Titania and Bottom, with her beautiful sister Rachel and Sol Moses. It is quite the most devastating criticism she would ever write about anyone and something of a revelation: who knew Rebecca had such humor and malice as well as her many, many virtues?)

Rebecca and Sally would offer only their best wishes and congratulations to the happy couple, but they would have the solace of skewering Sol to each other in private.

For more, see "What was wrong with Solomon Gratz Anyway?

(The letters quoted here are in the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society.)

Rachel's Romance

(This narrative began with the post entitled "Rachel Gratz.")

In May 1806, Solomon Moses was in Philadelphia for another prolonged stay when Rebecca, visiting the Hoffman and the Moses families in New York, received a letter from Rachel reporting that M. L. Moses, Solomon's brother, meant to propose to Rebecca at the first opportunity. Knowing that her sister had no interest in marrying him, Rachel advised avoidance. She also informed Rebecca that her information had come from Solomon who knew that M. L.'s proposal would be unwelcome. Sol's thoughtfulness had an effect; in her next letter Rachel wrote, "[He] has secured my everlasting friendship. I think him much improved in every respect."

This statement seems to have caused Rebecca no alarm. She must have been staggered by Rachel's next letter which began, after a short prelude about a sleepless night, "You my beloved Sister shall decide my future...I will give up the man my heart has chosen if you wish it." The man referred to was, of course, Solomon Moses.

After her characteristically dramatic opening, Rachel recapitulated the emotional events of the previous few weeks, saying that Sol's attentions had been of "the most delicate winning kind." As a result, she "felt...greater agitation than any other gentlemen ever occasioned me...every day has increased those feelings and I cannot myself account for this change but I have learned from my heart to love him." The evening before, he had stopped her as she was walking home with a cousin and asked her to walk with him. They were "both embarrassed," she wrote, and when Sol asked if he would ever be happy again? she didn't understand at first. Then she realized that it was she who could make him happy by becoming his wife. She had told him she looked upon his proposal with favor but that she wanted to write Rebecca and receive an answer before they told her family.

Then Rachel comes to the point of the letter. (Despite all the drama at the beginning, both Rebecca and she knew nothing was going to stop her from doing what she wanted.) Rachel was really concerned about Sally's reaction to her engagement to Solomon Moses, probably fearing that her sister's response would be so vitriolic that it would be difficult ever to forgive. She asked that Rebecca break the news since Sally "loves you so much better than she loves me."

What could Rebecca say to Sally to prevent a family rift? And how did Rebecca really feel about Sol as a brother-in-law? Even the quietest and most respectable lives (and blogs) have their cliffhangers.

For more, see "Rebecca Writes to Sally."

(The letter in which Rachel says that Sol had secured her "everlasting friendship" is in the Gratz Collection at the American Jewish Historical Society; the other two letters are from the Gratz Family Collection, Manuscript Collection No. 72, the American Philosophical Society. Thanks to to the Gilbert Stuart blog for the use of the image of the painting of Solomon Moses by Gilbert Stuart. The original is on loan at the Rosenbach Museum and Library.)

(If you would like to learn more about M. L. Moses' attempts to propose to Rebecca, see the post, "Washington Irving, Rebecca Gratz and an Unwanted Suitor," from November 17, 2009.)