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.