Hannah Callender Samson: Her Diary & Her Quilt: 2

 

I finished Hannah Callender Sansom's diary and read the editorial analysis. 

I was quite confused as to some of their assumptions.

The problem may lie in the basic structure of the editing. Klepp and Wulf's title is The Diary of Hannah Callender Sansom: Sense and Sensibility in the Age of the American Revolution. Hannah born in 1737, died in 1801. While she did live through the Revolutionary War there are two issues I see here as far as time and context in reference to the title and to the structure of the analysis.

1) The diary has no entries written during the American Revolution of 1776 to 1783. If Hannah recorded her days during those trying times the pages have not survived. Accounts before the war cover January, 1758 to November, 1774. The journal records an almost 20-year period when she was a contented subject of George III who became King when she was about 23 and then four years after the war as her children grew up. 

2) Sense and Sensibility alludes to Jane Austen's English novel published in 1813 when Hannah had been dead for a dozen years. The novel's sixteen-year-old heroine Marianne Dashwood would have had very little in common with Hannah, a generation or two older and of a different culture in a different country in the 1790s when the novel's events take place.

Reading the diary entries and then the editors' interpretive comments reveals to me an anachronistic disparity between what Hannah wrote and how her sensibilities have been interpreted.

An early Philadelphia Quaker Meeting house

We must begin with her husband Samuel Sansom II, her next-door neighbor in Philadelphia who was a year or two younger. The pair had much in common as well-to-do and apparently pious Quakers. Their fathers were in trade: Retailers, wholesalers and shippers of English goods (and in the Callenders' case enslaved people) with the Sansoms thought to be wealthier family. Samy, as Hannah called him when they were young (she seems to have had many friends named Samuel all nicknamed Samy), grew up to manage a prosperous retail store. 

Sammy Sansom apparently was not

moved to speak at Quaker meetings.

He described himself in his only surviving letter as diffident, averse to speaking in public---perhaps a shy man but one who had no trouble carrying on the family's retail business successfully.

Fashionable Europeans in 1764 with 

an open fronted gown showing a fancy petticoat.

Hannah spent her days before her marriage sewing alone and with family like Caty Smith and friends such as Betsy Moode and Betsy Sandwith, primarily occupied with leisurely fancy work such as embroidering pictures and gift pocketbooks and quilting, but also plain sewing of clothing. 

"Morn: Put in a blue Calimanco quilt for Betsey Lovet." September 1760. Again, probably clothing.

As far as housework --- she recorded a considerable amount of ironing for a wealthy woman with servants. Twice a week, First and Fourth Days in Quaker accounting (Sundays & Wednesdays) she attended Quaker meetings where she often recorded the names of those moved to speak to the congregation. She sometimes went 3 times a day.

Quaker Meeting, detail anonymous painting from 1790

In the evenings she and friends, both men and women, drank tea and talked, read to each other and kept up with neighborhood and city events. In July, 1759, for example, Henry Drinker and Sammy Sansom came over in the evening. Reading between the lines---we don't want to do too much of this---but she seems at first to have been interested in Henry Drinker who eventually married her good friend Elizabeth Sandwith. He may have upset her by telling her of his interest in Betsy one evening that month as the next day she recorded a rare event: "Suffered a great deal from my temper."

A 1797 quilting soiree in Europe

Henry's friend Sammy continued to call. The next month he "supped" with them talking of his intended voyage to England. He seems to have had no trouble with "discourse" at the Callender table. Sammy's English adventure was terminated when the ship sprung a leak at sea. On his safe return he ate "some water melon with us" before she and Caty "run together calico for a bed quilt, which is to be quilted by Caty and I." The women spent a good deal of August working on the bedcovering and Sammy set out again for England with Henry.            

Colonial Williamsburg Collection

Tea at a tilt-top table, mid-century England.

A year later (after a six-month gap in the diary) Sammy was again part of her social life. After attending meeting in August, 1760, "Sammy Sansom came home with me." She was ill that month but Sammy called a few times in a two-week period. They announced their intentions at Meeting (a rather rigorous Quaker prenuptial vetting) and married in the spring, moving to a house they'd been fitting up.

Sammy outlived his wife by over 20 years dying in his 80s in 1824. He never remarried. Hannah's short entries over the years seem to record a pleasant, "agreeable" life together with their four surviving children (a young daughter died after a smallpox inoculation.) Hannah never complained of her husband's meanness (either temperamentally or financially) or any money anxieties. She spent a good deal of social time with his parents noting that with Mrs. Sansom she had two "Mame's" (pronounced Mommy to match her frequent references to her Daddy?) Numerous entries during their marriage read like this:

After a visit to Burlington: "Sammy returned in the evening, all well."

"3 o'clock Sammy returned from Burlington, spent the evening at home very agreably, worked a bunch of stalks in my second Cushin."

"At mames [Callender] running a pair of Stockings, afternoon there again, with Sammy, & we staid the evening."

"Morn Sammy, [daughter] Sally & myself took an airing.

Quakers taking an airing, detail of

a painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

If anyone was temperamental it was occasionally Hannah who was sorry enough about this rather rare behavior.

The editors in a short description of their book have this to say:

"While this arranged marriage made financial and social sense, her father's plans failed to consider the emerging goals of sensibility, including free choice and emotional fulfillment in marriage. Hannah Callender Sansom's struggle to become reconciled to an unhappy marriage is related in frank terms both through daily entries and in certain silences in the record."

Open-front skirts of the last half of the 18th-century. Hannah

quilted several fancy petticoats for herself and others.

Arranged? Sammy courted Hannah for years. Her father may have favored the uniting of two mercantile families but if she'd been opposed wouldn't she have discouraged Sammy from calling once she perceived his interest in her? Unhappy----"certain silences in the record." These people were Quakers. It's the 1760s.  Effusive passion was not going to replace: "Spent the evening at home very agreeably."

Her mother hated him? After Hannah's father died in 1763 mother Katherine Smith Callender (1711-1789), who may have disliked Philadelphia if she had strong feelings about anything in her domestic life, moved back to Burlington, New Jersey, the smaller community where she'd been raised and where many relatives remained. 

Schoolgirl map of the Delaware River. Philadelphia is situated where the

 Schuylkill River meets the Delaware on the left.

Sammy seems to have traveled frequently to Burlington, possibly picking up his mother-in-law for Philadelphia visits, delivering Hannah to see her (particularly when her Mame was ill) and perhaps checking on family there. Do remember that women could not travel alone---even in groups---so cooperative men were required to take time to chaperone and ferry them for the sake of appearances.

Burlington's Quaker Meeting House built in 1783

a few years before Hannah's "Mame" Katherine Callender died.

Sammy has been further slandered by interpretation of references in a young Quaker woman's accounts. Anna Rawle (ca. 1757-1828), was the daughter of a friend. As the editors phrase it:

"Sammy apparently had too little to do during the Revolution as well. Early in February, 1781, he began hanging around twenty-three year old Anna Rawle, insisting she meet with him for hours every day in order to learn French....She soon tired of his constant attention, writing to her mother...'I have said a great deal about taking up his time and proposed ....to go seldomer." 

Anna then continued to meet with Sammy and wife Hannah. These "transparent" references have now become so distorted that Mary Ellen Snodgrass in her 2017 book American Colonial Women and Their Art tells us he and Anna had an illicit dalliance.

See Anna Rawle Clifford's diary in the Rebecca Shoemaker Papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

One more post tomorrow.