by Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

I was recently encoding the guide to the William Minot III papers, a collection processed back in 2007 by another MHS archivist, when a unfamiliar name caught my eye: Dr. Gertrude Van Pelt. A female physician in the late 19th century understandably piqued my curiosity. Little did I expect what I would find.

Gertrude Wyckoff Van Pelt (1856-1947), originally from New Jersey, was a physician with degrees from Holyoke College, Cornell University, and the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia. She interned at Boston’s Women’s Hospital and studied medicine in Paris and Vienna. Her papers form part of this particular collection because her sister married William Minot III, a Boston lawyer.

But today I’d like to tell you about Van Pelt’s decades-long work in the Theosophical movement.

Theosophy, founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875, is defined at the website of the Theosophical Society in America as “a body of knowledge that tells us about our place in the universe and why the world is the way it is.” Blavatsky called it “the ancient Wisdom-Religion,” a search for eternal truths and universal brotherhood.

Van Pelt joined the Theosophical Society in Boston in 1893 and soon became a prominent figure in the movement. She published articles, delivered speeches, and, in 1900, was recruited by Theosophist leader Katherine Tingley to relocate to Lomaland, a Theosophical enclave on the Point Loma peninsula of San Diego. There Van Pelt served in Tingley’s cabinet and as superintendent of the Raja Yoga School and Lotus Home. She remained a Theosophist until her death in 1947 at the age of 91.

I found literally hundreds of references to Van Pelt in old newspapers, but most of them center around one incident. In November 1902, Van Pelt brought eleven Cuban children into the country via New York to study at the Raja Yoga School. It was not her first trip for this purpose, but this time the group was stopped, interrogated, and detained at Ellis Island for over a month. American officials weren’t concerned about potential trafficking or the implications of imperialism and racial paternalism. No, they feared these “possible objectionable aliens” might become public charges.

The incident became a media firestorm, as historian Jacqueline D. Antonovich explains in her excellent Ph.D. dissertation. The takes came fast and furious; most newspaper articles cast doubt on the motives and teachings of the Theosophists. Meanwhile, Albert G. Spalding—a former professional baseball player, founder of the Spalding sporting goods company, and fellow member of the Theosophical Society—visited Van Pelt at Ellis Island and wrote his version of what happened.

In the end, the children were cleared to stay in the country and taken on to Lomaland. I love this picture of Van Pelt and the children.

Unfortunately, Van Pelt’s letters in the William Minot III papers predate her move to Point Loma in 1900 and don’t really discuss her Theosophical work. The Garrison family papers contain the only first-hand account of Lomaland that I could find in the MHS collections. Anna Percy lived there at the same time as Van Pelt and described it in great detail in correspondence to her family; one letter is 20 pages long.

Van Pelt’s correspondence does, however, include interesting remarks on her medical studies in Europe and on the artwork of her companion Susan Mary Norton (1855-1922). And the letters she wrote to her 15-year-old niece Katharine (later the wife Henry Morse Channing) are very endearing.

To investigate MHS holdings related to any of these individuals and/or subjects, search our online catalog ABIGAIL or the MHS website.

by Nate Grosjean, Visitor Services Coordinator

Finding myself at something of a perpetual loss for words these days, I decided to visit the MHS reference room in search of some new (rather, quite old) words to liven up my vocabulary. Fortunately for me, the library has a number of works pertaining to American slang terms, colloquialisms, and dialects.

My favorite, John Russell Bartlett’s Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 3^rd ed., is a curious and complicated document. Published in 1860, just one year before the start of the Civil War, it draws together a wide range of phrases and expressions, from the botanical to the political to the whimsically unusual. Prior to its publication, Bartlett served for three years as “Commissioner on the Mexican Boundary,” a position which exposed him to the linguistic frontiers of south/western states like Texas, New Mexico, and California.

To illustrate his definitions, Bartlett included excerpts from a variety of sources from American literature, journalism, and print culture. Reading through this dictionary, one gets a sense of the many ways and spheres in which language developed: the project of creating a distinctly American language was entwined with the project of creating a distinctly American artistic and literary identity. Readers also get a hearty helping of intrigue, humor, and drama, and Bartlett’s best entries always include a story. Here are just a few!

“Acknowledge the corn. An expression of recent origin, which has now become very common. It means to confess or acknowledge a charge or imputation.”

Per the Pittsburgh Com. Advertiser, a man with two flatboats traveled to New Orleans “to try his fortune” selling corn and potatoes. Once there, he decided to go gambling (a beloved 19th-century vice), and lost spectacularly. Having no more money, he bet away his flatboats of corn and potatoes; only later did he learn that the flatboat of corn had sunk in the river. When his creditor arrived the next day to claim his winnings, the man craftily replied: “Stranger, I acknowledge the corn—take ‘em; but the potatoes you can’t have, by thunder!”

“Patent Safe Game or Operation. A system of trickery practised in our large cities on verdant gentlemen from the country.”

Citing Scientific American, Bartlett devotes almost two full pages to the explanation of this scheme. Three collaborators pose as a kind friend of the victim, the designer of a safe, and a cop. Their elaborate plot to rob their “Sucker” involves a small safe with a hidden compartment, a rigged gamble, a phony check, a chase sequence, and, of course, ample skullduggery. Sound complicated? It sure is! Read the full story at this link, complete with dramatic dialogue.

I’ll end with a selection of sounds from the dictionary. Onomatopoeia has a way of speaking for itself…

“Caswash! Dash! splash! The noise made by a body falling into the water. See cachunk.”

“Cachunk! A word like thump! describing the sound produced by the fall of a heavy body. Also written kerchunk! A number of fanciful onomatopoetic words of this sort are used in the South and West … These words are of recent origin.”

“Cawhalux! Whop! The noise made by a box on the ear.”

“Keslosh! Keswosh! Kewosh! Plash! Splash! The noise produced by a body falling flat into the water.”

“Kesouse! Souse! The noise made by a body falling from a small height into the water.”

“Keswollop! Flop! The noise made by a violent fall to the ground.”

Further Reading:

John Russell Bartlett. Dictionary of Americanisms: A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 3^rd edition. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1860.

Historical Note on the John Russell Bartlett Papers, Rhode Island Historical Society, Manuscripts Division.

Mitford M. Mathews, A Dictionary of Americanisms On Historical Principles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.

Eric Partridge, ed. Paul Beale, A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, 8^th ed. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

By Meg Szydlik, Visitor Services Coordinator

Content warning: use of 19-century terminology to describe individuals with disabilities.

I’ve written before on Dorothea Dix’s writings regarding those she referred to as the “insane” here in Massachusetts. Since she was a very prolific writer and advocate in the 19^th century, I was curious what else the MHS had of hers. When exploring the MHS library catalog, Abigail, I found that we held three additional addresses to state legislatures—New York, Pennsylvania, and Tennessee, out of the twelve total she wrote.

Curious if they were similar to her statement to the Massachusetts legislature, I examined their contents. And while each address was related to a different state and focused on slightly different arguments, her message of humanization and care is consistent throughout the four speeches. Her legacy in driving the creation of asylums and hospitals for disabled people, ultimately, is mixed, but her intentions are clear. She pulled no punches, saying that “God forgive me (if it was sinful,) the vehement indignation that rose towards the inhabitants of a city and county, who could suffer such abominations as these to exist;— towards all official persons holding direct or indirect responsibility, who could permit these brutalizing conditions of the most helpless of human beings.”

In her Memorial: To the Legislature of Massachusetts, Dix devoted a lot of time to the slow and careful unveiling of the ways the state, counties, and cities had failed the “insane” and the “idiots” (her terms, using the technical language of the 19th century). And there were many. She tracked the brutalization and cruelty exerted against people deemed insane, a thread that continued in her other texts as well, though none so intensely as in her statement to the Massachusetts legislature. The descriptions of cages, chains, beatings, and intentional isolation were meant to horrify and therefore motivate the different legislatures to make monumental policy changes. She called on the Massachusetts legislature to “commit to [the legislature] this sacred cause. Your action upon this subject will affect the present and future condition of hundreds of thousands.” This call-to-action rang across the states and even rings into today.

Her arguments were effective, particularly when it came to her calls for states and counties to open hospitals and asylums to care for disabled people, and they were heeded in state after state. Her position was certainly logical, since the primary institutions previously used for this purpose were jails and almshouses. She repeatedly argued that a hospital would allow those whose insanity was “curable”—and thus could be made into something palatable—to recover and become productive members of society.

It is interesting to read these arguments in favor of insane asylums and mental hospitals with the knowledge of what these institutions ultimately became. Her statements about almshouses in New York that “language is feeble to represent them, and the mind shudders with disgust and horror in the act of recalling the state of the unfortunate insane there incarcerated,” could also be said of many mental hospitals. Even the Metropolitan State Hospital here in Massachusetts has a long, ugly history of abuse, covered here by WBUR. Hospitals are just as dependent as other institutions on the ethics of those in charge, and, as Dix wrote, “if public institutions are not guarded from such shameful abuses, I do not know why they should not be fully exposed; what people are not careful to prevent, they must not be too delicate to hear declared.”

Well-meaning advocates, like Dorothea Dix, who do not actually involve the people who are having the experience, frequently have impacts they do not intend. “Nothing about us without us” remains a salient point, even today. I am confident that Dix would be truly horrified at the results of her advocacy for hospitals. Insane asylums being a regular feature in the horror genre does not come from nowhere, after all, and reports that come out of psych hospitals and other care institutions even today can feel uncomfortably similar to what Dix was trying to avoid. Studying Dix brings to mind things like the Disability Day of Mourning, which honors disabled people killed by their caretakers. The tragedy is that disabled people are still abused in many ways and ableism is alive and well. However, there has been a lot of incremental progress towards disabled people taking the agency so long denied to them, from laws like the Americans With Disabilities Act to more public knowledge and acceptance of mental illness and neurodivergence. I certainly hope we continue to move in that direction.

By Anne Boylan, Library Assistant

“Parents died when he was 5 ys old. Was bound out. No education of any consequence. Can read but not write. Born in Boston & has lived there and in vicinity most of his life. Work’d at Brickmaking, teaming, &c. &c. Never married. Says he has always work’d hard. First ofence. Been here 2 months. Sentence 9 months.

“Says he has drink’d too freely & that has brot him here. Stole 3 pints of Rum. Wept very freely. Says he can now see his folly and hopes this confinement will be a warning to him. Appears very well.”

So prison chaplain Jared Curtis described Edward Butler, a 27-year-old inmate at the Massachusetts State Prison in Charlestown, on April 1, 1829. This description and other brief biographical sketches of nineteenth-century incarcerated men fill the Jared Curtis notebooks, 1829-1831, which provide a tantalizingly limited but invaluable view into the lives of populations so frequently excluded from the historical record, such as incarcerated people and, in many cases, the poor, the illiterate, and people of color.

Jared Curtis also recorded these sketches at a particularly pivotal moment in the history of the carceral system. As Philip F. Gura wrote in Buried from the World: Inside the Massachusetts State Prison, 1829–1831, the 1820s saw a shift in the goal of prisons away from punishment and toward reform of the incarcerated. This is not to say that prisons necessarily became kinder or gentler places; this so-called reform was achieved through hard work and extreme isolation, thought to provide the incarcerated person with the proper environment for contemplation and to instill the discipline presumed to have been lacking in their upbringing. While previously, corporal punishment served as both the means and the end of prison, the hard labor and social isolation now became not punishment, but personal improvement. The method, pioneered at Auburn Prison in New York and referred to as “the Auburn system,” prohibited:

“the writing or receiving of letters, even from immediate family. Prisoners could not speak to anyone in prison, even to officers . . . ‘except for purposes of instruction, or to ask for orders and make necessary reports.’” (Gura).

Silent often for the entirety of the day, isolated in their cells at night, prevented even from looking too long at other prisoners, inmates at the Massachusetts State Prison truly were, per Gura’s title, “buried from the world.”

This new emphasis on reform and penance meant that a new marker of success had to be considered to gauge its success: the inmate’s state of mind. Unlike corporal punishment, which exists solely in the physical realm, repentance is internal and can only be intuited and guessed at through outward behavior. Curtis was especially interested in the states of mind of the men whose stories he sketched. He emphasized the sensibility of inmates—not their rationality, as we now use the word to imply—but its contemporaneous meaning, signifying the prisoners’ abilities to understand and be impacted by deep emotion. Curtis felt optimistic about the prospects of Edward Butler, who “[w]ept very freely,” clearly able to access and perform a deep well of emotion under Curtis’s observation. Curtis seemed kindly disposed toward his ability to “see his folly”; his entry hints at an optimism toward Butler’s prospects for rehabilitation.

However, about W[illia]m Smith, 29, Curtis felt very differently: “Says he has stolen some before but not much. Appears frank but has not much feeling. Says he got along well here & intends to behave himself when he gets out. His chance, I think, a very poor one.” Curtis’s poor prognosis for Smith’s moral rehabilitation sits directly adjacent to his observation that he “has not much feeling,” implicitly linking Smith’s ability to feel emotion to his presumed ability to leave criminality behind. These and similar entries raise questions about Curtis’s beliefs in the prospects of his charges that echo forward into the present: can anyone empirically judge another’s moral fiber from their outward demonstrations of emotions? What other factors might cloud or impact that judgement? Who can be trusted to hold the power to determine who exhibits enough emotion, and emotion of the correct type, to demonstrate moral character?

Curtis’s notebooks are a rich vein, giving insight not only into the lives of a population otherwise largely forgotten by the official historical record, but also into the rhetorics of sentiment and penance that laid the nineteenth-century foundations for our present-day ideas around criminality, recidivism, and reform. The notebooks would be a fascinating study for those interested in the history of criminal justice and incarceration, religious instruction, and the lives of various underclasses. If you want to view the Jared Curtis notebooks, plan your visit and make an appointment to do so on the MHS website.

by Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist

In my last post for the Beehive, I wrote about the European revolutions of 1848. I’d like to follow up today by focusing on one particular revolutionary, Lajos Kossuth of Hungary.

Lajos (often anglicized Louis) Kossuth served as leader of the Hungarian revolutionary government from 1848 to 1849. I wanted to write about Kossuth because his name appears frequently in manuscript collections here at the MHS, and I was intrigued. I’ve run across him in the Channing family papers, Caroline Wells Healey Dall papers, Joseph H. Hayward papers, Theodore Parker papers, Perry-Clarke additions, Catharine Maria Sedgwick papers, and many others. Several of our autograph collections include his signature.

The MHS also holds a number of books and pamphlets about Kossuth, including Authentic Life of His Excellency Louis Kossuth, Governor of Hungary (1851); Daniel Webster’s Sketch of the Life of Louis Kossuth, Governor of Hungary (1851); Kossuth in New England (1852); and White, Red, Black: Sketches of American Society in the United States During the Visit of Their Guests (1853). We have engravings of Kossuth and even three brass gaming tokens stamped with his name and likeness. He was clearly a phenomenon.

I won’t attempt the difficult task of summarizing the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 here, but I would like to discuss Kossuth’s popularity in the US, and Massachusetts in particular. Although the revolution failed, many Americans admired and sympathized with Kossuth.

He visited the US between December 1851 and July 1852 to raise money for Hungarian independence from the Austrian Empire and to advocate for American intervention against Russia, Austria’s ally. He was feted everywhere he went. Newspaper articles filled with breathless exclamation points tracked his every move. Enterprising hatters even started selling “Kossuth hats.”

His itinerary included a meeting with President Millard Fillmore at the White House. He also addressed a joint session of Congress, only the second foreigner to do so after the Marquis de Lafayette 28 years before.

Kossuth arrived in Boston on 27 April 1852, coincidentally his 50th birthday. His enthusiastic welcome by Bostonians is described in Kossuth in New England: “On the whole route to Roxbury line, the windows were full of ladies, who waved their welcome with their handkerchiefs, and the streets were literally crammed with people.” (p. 68) Buildings were draped with the Hungarian, American, and other flags, and banners compared Kossuth to George Washington.

By all accounts, Kossuth was a skilled and fascinating orator, and people flocked to hear his speeches. Author Catharine Maria Sedgwick heard one and later wrote to her niece, “I never had so profound an impression from the presence of any human being.” Lawyer Tracy P. Cheever gushed in his diary, “I rejoice in the privilege of having heard one of the greatest Orators and Patriots (as I suppose) of modern days!”

Of course, admiration for the Hungarian revolutionary was not universal. In the pages of The Liberator and elsewhere, abolitionists repeatedly and vociferously criticized Kossuth for his silence and hypocrisy on slavery, even after he witnessed it first-hand in the southeastern states. This issue became a dark cloud over his otherwise celebrated visit and may have contributed to his abrupt and unobtrusive departure from the country.

In the end, Kossuth left the US with donations and well wishes from supporters, but Americans had no appetite at that time for involvement in foreign conflicts.

Lajos Kossuth died in Italy in 1894 at the age of 91. He is buried in Budapest.

by Susan Martin, Senior Processing Archivist 

“Reflections on the past year 1848 – The past year has been a most wonderful one, full of import[an]t & stirring events – big with the fate of Empires and Nations; never has the civilized world been so shaken. There have been overturnings and uprooting[s] of political systems, such as no other Era in the worlds history ever witnessed in so brief a space. – The whole civilized world is in motion, the people claim rights, and the despots of the world tremble, and will have finally to yield.”

Thus begins Robert Waterston’s 1849 diary, one of our collections here at the MHS.

In 1848, a year that has been called the “Spring” or “Springtime” of nations, a wave of revolutions had swept across Europe, including (but not limited to) France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Denmark, and Poland. Other significant events of the year included the discovery of gold in California, the publication of The Communist Manifesto, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the Seneca Falls women’s rights convention, and the ongoing famine in Ireland.

Although Waterston’s diary begins with this summary of 1848, most of its entries date from several months later, September to December 1849. However, many of the revolutions that had started the previous year were still going strong.

Waterston, a prosperous merchant in Boston and an immigrant from Scotland, had personal and professional ties to Europe. On the whole, he was optimistic about the future of the continent, writing that “progress must be, as it always has been, slow, but these upheavings of nations give promise that a better day is approaching.”

He got his news from letters and newspapers carried across the Atlantic Ocean on ships. A typical diary entry reads: “The Niagara arrived at Halifax on Wedy morng […] The most import[an]t news she brings is…” He wrote often and at length about developments in Europe and his hope for the end of “despotic power” everywhere. He was a pacifist and apparently acquainted with some participants in the International Peace Congress of 1849, including Elihu Burritt.

But Waterston also wrote about several local events that clearly affected him. The first was the shipwreck on 7 October of the St. John, a brig carrying refugees from the Irish famine that went down off Cohasset, Massachusetts, killing 99 people. “What an awful scene it must have been,” Waterston lamented.

Another tragedy he discussed was the disappearance and death by apparent suicide of a young man named Leonard M. Knight, a clerk in his counting room. Knight was reported missing on 30 October and found nearly three weeks later floating in the Charles River.

And the year ended with a bang; on 1 December, Waterston heard, “to my utter astonishment,” about the arrest of Harvard professor John White Webster for the murder and dismemberment of George Parkman. Bostonians were “struck with horror,” and Waterston described the fallout of the arrest over the next several days.

The diary of Robert Waterston is a fascinating snapshot of a tumultuous time, both in Boston and around the world. It’s my favorite kind of diary, covering topics both big and small, full of details about his daily life and personal reflections, as well as reactions to world affairs. If you’re interested in doing research at the MHS on a particular time period or event, you can search our catalog for the subject “Diaries,” which are cataloged by year.

For the story of how Robert Waterston helped another Scottish immigrant, Walter Cran, see this previous post.