of speaking, this will seem hardly possible, yet it is probably one of the reasons which led her, very early in her public career, to abandon all attempts at written speeches.
Chapter III:
Financial Crash—The Teacher
(1838-1845)
The panic; father's letters; teaching at Union Village; the home sacrificed; life at Center Falls; more Quaker discipline; teaching at New Rochelle; Miss Anthony's letters on slavery, temperance, medical practice, Van Buren, etc.; teaching at Center Falls, Cambridge and Fort Edward; proposals of marriage; removal to Rochester, N. Y.
The prosperous days of the Anthonys were drawing to a close. All manufacturing industries of the country were in a ruinous state. The unsound condition of the banks with their depreciated and fluctuating currency had created financial chaos. Overproduction of cotton goods on a credit basis, inordinate speculation, reduction of duties on importations, produced the inevitable result, and the commercial world began to totter on its foundations. The final ruin is foreshadowed in the letters of Daniel Anthony. In one to his brother September 2, 1837, he says:
I am going next week on a tour of the eastern cities and when I return shall be prepared to face the situation. My goods at present will not sell for the actual cost of manufacturing. Van Buren's message has just made its appearance. It is opposed to banks and may operate unfavorably to business, but how it can be worse I don't know.
He writes from Washington to his wife, September 11:
I arrived last evening—came in R. Road cars from Baltimore, 39 miles, in two hours, over a barren and almost uncultivated tract of country. The public buildings and one street called Pennsylvania Avenue are all that are worth mention in this place.... As a specimen of some of the big finery in the town, I will name one room in Martin's [Van Buren's] house, 90 ft. by 42, the furniture of which cost $22,000.... Our Congressmen are some like other folks, they look out first for themselves. They have spent most of this day in debating whether they shall be paid in specie.... There are Black Folks in abundance here, but they don't act as if they were even under the pressure of hard times, much less the cruelties that we hear of slaves having to bear.
From New York he writes his brother:
Such times in everything that pertains to business never were known in this land before. To-day I have passed through Pine street and have not seen one single box or bale of goods of any kind whatever. Last year at this time a person could scarcely go through the street without clambering over goods of all descriptions. A truck cart loaded with merchandise is now a rare object. A bale of goods can not be sold at any price. The countenances of all our best business men are stretched out in a perpendicular direction and when the times will let them come back into human shape not even the wisest pretend to guess. Those that are out of all speculative and ever-changing business may consider themselves in a Paradismal state.
In the spring of 1838 he writes to Guelma and Susan, at that time twenty and eighteen years of age, to know if they feel that they possibly can go alone from Philadelphia to New York, where he will join them and bring them home; but evidently they decide they can not, for Susan's journal speaks of "the happy moment when they run to the gate to meet him." On the journey he tells them that his business is ruined, they can not return to school and will have to give up their beautiful and beloved new home. In recalling those times Miss Anthony says that never in all her long life did she see such agony as her father passed through during the dreadful days which followed. All that he had accumulated in a lifetime of hard work and careful planning was swept away, and there was scarcely a spot of solid ground upon which he could plant his feet to begin the struggle once more.
In her diary, speaking of an aunt who sympathizes with them and says it will be hard to give up going with the people they have been accustomed to, Susan observes, "I do not think that losing our property will cause us ever to mingle with low company." She is now somewhat uncertain about taking up teaching permanently, fearing she will "lose the habit of using the plain language;" but May 22, 1838, she writes at Union Village, now Greenwich:
On last evening, which was First day, I again left my home to mingle with strangers, which seems to be my sad lot. Separation was rendered more trying on account of the embarrassing condition of our business affairs. I found my school small and quite disorderly. O, may my patience hold out to persevere without intermission.
In the summer of 1838 the factory, store, home and much of the furniture had to be given up to the creditors. Not an article was spared from the inventory. All the mother's wedding presents, the furniture and the silver spoons given her by her parents, the wearing apparel of the family, even the flour, tea, coffee and sugar, the children's school books, the Bible and the dictionary, were carefully noted. On this list, still in existence, are "underclothes of wife and daughters," "spectacles of Mr. and Mrs. Anthony," "pocket-knives of boys," "scraps of old iron"—and the law took all except the bare necessities. In this hour of extremity the guardian angel appeared in the person of Joshua Read, a brother of Mrs. Anthony, from Palatine Bridge, N.Y., who bid in all which the family desired to keep and restored to them their possessions, making himself their lenient creditor.
The winter of 1839 Susan attended the home school, taught by Daniel Wright, a fine scholar and remarkably successful teacher. This ended her school days, and in her journal she says: "I probably shall never go to school again, and all the advancement which I hereafter make must be by my own exertions."
In March, 1839, the family moved to Hardscrabble, a small village two miles further down the Battenkill. They went on a cold, blustering day, and one may imagine the feelings of Daniel and Lucy Anthony and their older children as they turned away from their big factory, their handsome home and the friends they had learned to love. Mrs. Anthony's heart was overflowing with sorrow, for in less than five years she had lost by death her little daughter, her father and mother, and now was swept away her home hallowed by their beloved memories.
In his prosperous days Daniel Anthony had built a satinet factory and a grist-mill at Hardscrabble and, although these were mortgaged heavily, he hoped to weather the financial storm and through them to build up again his fallen fortunes. The family were soon comfortably established in a large house which had been a hotel or tavern in the days when lumber was cut in the Green mountains and floated down the river, an immense building, sixty feet square, with wide hall and broad piazza. They did not keep a hotel, but people were in the habit of stopping here, as it was a half-way house to Troy, and they found themselves obliged to entertain a number of travelers.
Those were busy days for the family. Susan's journal contains many entries such as, "Did a large washing to-day.... Spent to-day at the spinning-wheel.... Baked 21 loaves of bread.... Wove three yards of carpet yesterday.... Got my quilt out of the frame last 5th day.... The new saw-mill has just been raised; we had 20 men to supper on 6th day, and 12 on 7th day." But there were quilting-bees and apple-parings and sleighing parties and many good times, for the elastic temperament of youth rallies quickly from grief and misfortune. Susan went to Presbyterian church one Sunday, and the gray-robed Quaker thus writes:
To see them partake of the Lord's supper, as they call it, was indeed a solemn sight, but the dress of the communicants bespeaks nothing but vanity of heart—curls, bows and artificials displayed in profusion about most of them. They say they can dress in the fashion without fixing their hearts on their costume, but surely if their hearts were not vain and worldly, their dress would not be.
The attic in this old house was finished off for a ball-room; it was said that great numbers of junk bottles had been laid under the floor to give especially nice tone
