Grief Debate

"A Very Peculiar Sorrow": Attitudes Toward Infant Death in the Urban Northeast, 1800-1860

Author(s): Sylvia D. Hoffert

Source: American Quarterly , Winter, 1987, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter, 1987), pp. 601-616

Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2713127

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"A VERY PECULIAR SORROW": ATTITUDES TOWARD INFANT DEATH IN

THE URBAN NORTHEAST, 1800-1860

SYLVIA D. HOFFERT

St. Louis Country Day School

St. Louis, Missouri

ONE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL FACTS OF ANTEBELLUM AMERICAN FAMILY LIFE WAS

that, in places such as New York City, as many as one-quarter of all children born

in a single year were expected to die before their first birthday. Middle- and upper-

class parents living in the towns and cities of New England and the Middle Atlantic

states were fairly realistic about their chances of losing a child in infancy.2 Of his first

child born in 1803, John Pierce wrote to his father-in-law, "Often I think when doting

upon her, how uncertain is her continuance."3 Thirty-nine years later Pierce received

a letter from one of his own daughters, who expressed the same kind of tentativeness

about the survival of his grandchild: "I do wish you could all see the darling, & if

she lives & all is well, I intend you shall see her next spring."4

No matter how resigned parents were to the possibility that their babies might die,

they were seldom able to defend themselves adequately against the emotional pain

that inevitably accompanied the loss of an infant. Parents mourned deeply when their

babies died.5 "Days have passed since my sweet babe has lain in the silent ground,"

wrote Christiana Cowell. "I go about my domestic duties in moaning, sighing over

the melancholy void that death has made." Everything around her reminded her of

her lost child. "There sits her empty cradle," she continued, "no more to lull the weary

pain of my darling babe. I shall never see her sleeping there again. Her clothes, the

little chair, the toys all bring to my heart a pang of yearning sorrow. "6 Fathers were

no less sensitive to the death of an infant. Two months after the death of his daughter,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted in his journal, "I feel very sad to-day. I miss

very much my dear little Fanny. An inappeasable longing to see her comes over me

at times, which I can hardly control."7 Nehemiah Adams summed up such feelings

when he asked, "do you not think that the death of a dear little child is a very peculiar

sorrow? It seems to me that I have seen people in more anguish under the loss of

little children than in any other affliction." 8

In their private attempts to cope both emotionally and intellectually with their

"affliction," parents in the first half of the nineteenth century began working through

the grieving process by performing funereal rituals and preserving memories of their

This article is based on a chapter of Sylvia D. Hoffert's forthcoming book now entitled Private Matters. American Attitudes Toward Childbearing and Infant Nurture in the Urban North, 1800-1860 (? 1988 by the Trustees of the University of Illinois).

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602 American Quarterly

dead children. The symptoms of grief penned in their diaries and letters are similar to

those exhibited by their twentieth-century counterparts. Yet, nineteenth-century parents

in mourning were much less likely to express directly feelings of guilt or to demand

an explanation for their loss. Although parents placed great value on children's lives,

they were also resigned to the possibility of imminent infant death and to the realiza-

tion that there was little or nothing they could do to prevent it. They used the loss

of infants as an occasion for demonstrating their willingness to submit to the will

of God and found comfort in the belief that their children had gone to join Him in

heaven.

Public response was somewhat different. Although literary discussion of infant death

in fiction and poems published during the 1840s and 1850s was designed to offer solace

to bereaved parents by confirming the belief that their children had preceded them

to heaven,9 it is also characterized by an effort to explain God's reasons for calling

babies back to their heavenly home. In the process of providing such an explanation,

popular authors offered a new strategy for dealing with infant death which suggested

that the presence of infants in the household and their subsequent demise helped to

redeem other members of the family and to assure their permanent reunion in paradise.

This argument helped to create a new basis for redefining the role of young children

in the family.

* * *

By offering the opportunity to do one last thing for a deceased child, mourning

rituals provided a good deal of satisfaction to parents experiencing the first stages

of the grieving process. Mary Wilder White would allow no one else to perform the

service of preparing for burial the body of her six-month-old daughter in 1808.10

Sometimes husband and wife performed this ritual together. When their infant died

in 1832, Lavius Hyde brought his wife water to bathe their "little lump of cherished

clay." Despite her sadness and the trembling of her hands, she found comfort in prepar-

ing the body to be wrapped in its shroud as it lay in her arms." Bereaved parents also did what they could to preserve the memories of their children.

William Lloyd Garrison had daguerreotypes taken of the corpse of his baby daughter

before she was buried. 12 Some commissioned poor, young artists to make life-size,

life-like portraits from their children's corpses. 13 Fanny Longfellow lovingly cut off

some of her daughter's hair.'4

Others were concerned that siblings have the chance to say goodbye to the infant

either shortly before or shortly after death. The Hydes awakened their children so

that they might "witness the dying moments of their little brother." 15 Yet Elizabeth

Ellery Sedgwick, particularly concerned that her other children not be left with a

"disagreeable impression," waited until the body of her baby was properly prepared

before she allowed the children to see it. Before she brought her children to see the

body, she placed the infant in his cradle and made sure that it was in its usual place

in the room so that it would appear as if the baby was only sleeping. She wished to

avoid "in this way the images of loneliness and darkness so painful and revolting to

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Attitudes Toward Infant Death 603

young minds." Although her little daughter Lizzie kept running up to the cradle

and exclaiming, "How beautiful he is! How still! How sweet he sleeps!", Sedgwick

felt sure that the child realized that her brother was dead. She encouraged Lizzie to

speak of her brother as if he was still alive, she said, in order to preserve his

memory. 16

Having memories of a dead child proved important because it forced those in

mourning to accept death and allowed them to focus their grief. 17 Without memories,

death could never seem quite real to the one who had suffered the loss, as the case

of Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher demonstrates. In 1848 Whitcher almost died after

the stillbirth of a daughter. Her labor was so difficult and the state of her health so

precarious after delivery that she had no real memories of having borne a child. The

body of the infant was buried well before she was fully aware of what had happened.

A year later the Whitchers moved from Elmira to Whitesboro, New York. Once they

were settled, they had their baby's body exhumed in order to move it. During the pro-

cess the coffin was placed on the porch of their house and opened. Although hesitant,

Miriam Whitcher felt compelled to look at the corpse. After doing so, she wrote her

husband (who was away at the time) about the experience. She found the body lying

exactly as it was placed at first, with a cotton pillow under the head & the little hands

crossed, & the gown smoothed down & drawn over the feet. It did not appear to have

fallen away at all. We thought at first there was a cloth laid over the face, but John

took hold of it softly to raise it up & found that it was a thin coat of white mould.

We could see all the little features distinctly through it.

She was "surprised that it was so well preserved" and "had expected only to see a

little heap of corruption with no form to it. The dress and the cotton under the head

looked as white as they did when it was first buried. There was no change excepting

the mould on the face." It was difficult for her to believe that the body was really

that of her child because her "impressions of its birth" were "so dreamlike and strange. "

Seeing the corpse, however, made the death of her baby real to her and she felt

satisfied. 18

However important memories were to bereaved parents, they did not shield them

from having to work through the grieving process. Each in his or her own way had

to deal with sleeplessness, yearning, depression, preoccupation with images of the child,

dreams about the baby, changes in attitudes toward other children in the family, shame,

and feelings of vulnerability-all normal symptoms of grief. 19 Many parents suffered in relative silence, mentioning their feelings only when they felt overwhelmed by them

or when they felt it necessary to inform friends and relatives of their loss. Isolated

comments written in diaries and letters during the year or so following the death of

a child testified to the depth and persistence of their feelings of loss and desolation.

Lucy Lovell wrote, "A year has passed away since our dear little ones were taken from

us. Our hearts still bleed.... as time rolls away, we feel our loss more instead of

less. ,,20

Occasionally, however, parents took the time to describe their mourning in explicit

detail. The journals and letters of Fanny and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, for

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604 American Quarterly

example, provide a graphic description of their grief following the death of their

seventeen-month-old daughter in September 1848. Complete despair almost over-

whelmed Fanny on the day of the funeral: "Struggled almost in vain with the terrible

hunger of the heart to hold her once more. Every room, every object recalls her, and

the house is desolation." Henry was somewhat more in control on that day. "Our

little child was buried to-day," he wrote. "From her nursery, down the front stairs,

through my study and into the library, she was borne in the arms of her old nurse.

And thence, after the prayer, through the long halls to her coffin and her grave." For

a long time that day, Henry sat alone with his daughter in the library finding comfort

in sight of her body surrounded by unopened roses.

On the day after the funeral, as Henry tried to escape his grief by burying himself

in his work, Fanny could think only of her remaining children:

Cannot keep despairing now of the other children, and thinking how they will look

when dead. Their gleeful voices agonize me. Charles told Nurse Blake "Sissy was up

in the sky," and when I told him yesterday, he said, "Oh, I want to go too." When

Death first enters a house, he throws so long a shadow-it seems to touch every one.

Henry was also concerned about his feelings toward his remaining children. "It

sometimes seems to me," he wrote four days after the funeral, "as if this blow had

paralyzed my affection for my other children. Can this be so? No, it is but benumbed

for a moment." Fanny was utterly distracted by visions of her daughter during the

next few weeks: "In the garden I see only her merry steps and little hands grasping

the flowers with glee and shouting 'Pretty,' and then I see her with them in her cold

hands." She imagined her baby's "little white bonnet" at her side day and night and

frequently believed that she heard "a cry in the nursery" and would listen intently

thinking that the child was still there. Although by November she was beginning to

resign herself to her loss, periodically she recognized how vulnerable she was and would

"devour my children's faces as if looking my last upon them, and shrink with cowardly

terror from the possible future." Months later she reported in her journal: "Dreamed

my darling Fanny was restored to me; sitting quietly by my side, she said she had been

in heaven." The grief that Fanny Longfellow suffered as a result of the loss of her

namesake was modified but not removed by the birth of another daughter in November

1850. She felt that the birth of a girl was an answer to her prayers but tempered her

joy with the realization that she could easily lose this baby too.2'

Fanny and Henry Longfellow were able to carry on with their lives after the death

of little Fanny. Occasionally, however, the stress associated with grief was perceived

to pose a real threat to a mourner's physical or mental health. Jane Harris remembered

that she was so overcome with grief after the death of her baby that she could not

carry out her domestic responsibilities and began to fear that she was losing her

mind.22 Susan Huntington expressed real concern about the ability of a friend to

survive the death, within a period of four or five weeks, of five children.23 Fanny

Longfellow was similarly concerned even before she suffered the loss of her own

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Attitudes Toward Infant Death 605

daughter. Referring to a bereaved friend, she wrote, "Such a blow must soon sever,

I should think, the mother's slender hold upon life."24

The depth of the grief suffered by mothers like Longfellow and Harris testified to

the degree to which they were both socially and psychologically dependent upon their

babies. For many urban middle- and upper-class women in the early nineteenth century

whose identities were increasingly prescribed by their domestic function, nurturing

children provided a major focus for their lives. They and their husbands were much

more inclined than their colonial forebears to attempt to limit the size of their

families.25 Bearing fewer children allowed them the time and the energy to conduct

their childcare activities in a more deliberate manner. Moreover, the ideology of the

American Revolution had endowed women with the responsibility of producing the

kind of sober, thrifty, morally upright, politically astute citizens that were considered

necessary to perpetuate the republic. 26 Babies provided women with a social identity

and a time-consuming vocation. Babies also provided mothers with a depository for

their love and were therefore the recipients of considerable emotional investment. Mary

Lee had reason to write that after the death of her baby, her "occupation was

gone."27 Nehemiah Adams's wife felt much the same way. As she sat with her

husband discussing her feelings about the death of their baby, she said, "I hardly know

what to do with myself; it seems as though I had nothing to do."28 The death of their

babies deprived middle- and upper-class mothers, already stripped of any significant

role as economic producers, of one of their most demanding and respected domestic

functions, especially if there were no other children in the house. When a baby died,

its mother suffered a double loss.

* * *

Despite the fact that parents in the early nineteenth century were willing to invest

considerable time, energy, and affection in their children, they did not express anger

over the deaths of infants. They asked for no explanation, tended to accept the death

of their children as the result of some incomprehensible plan devised by an inscrutable

God, and found comfort in the conviction that their children had gone to heaven and

were probably better off there. In 1807 Peggy Dow noted sadly in her diary that she

had lost her baby daughter but reassured herself that the child's "happy spirit" had

"landed on the peaceful shore of blest eternity. ,29 She took comfort in the thought

that her daughter had escaped some of the more unpleasant aspects of earthly life,

confiding: "I often felt a pleasure of the sweetest kind in contemplating that my child

had escaped all the vanities and dangers of this treacherous and uncertain world, for

the never-fading glories of paradise."30 Similarly, Mehetable Goddard convinced

herself after the death of her four-month-old son that she would not "wish to recall

him" for "it remains for us to be thankful that his spirit is removed pure from a world

of sin and sorrow. "3'

The belief that infants automatically went to heaven when they died was a rather

dramatic departure from the earlier, less optimistic view that infants were depraved

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606 American Quarterly

at birth and were as likely as not to be destined for hell as for heaven. There is some

reason to wonder, however, whether even those who had been ideologically commit-

ted to the doctrine of infant depravity in the abstract were in fact able to apply it

to children in their own families. 32 Of a grandchild, dead at eighteen months, Anne

Bradstreet wrote in 1665, "Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate,/ Or sigh

thy dayes so soon were terminate;/ Sith thou art setled in an Everlasting state."

Mourning the death of two grandchildren four years later, Bradstreet wrote of one

that her heart was cheered at the thought that the child was with its "Savior ... in

endless bliss" and of the other that he would remain "among the blest in endless

joyes."33 Even among the most prominent of seventeeth-century Puritans there ap-

pears to have been a difference between intellectual assertion and emotional acceptance.

Cotton Mather, like Bradstreet theologically committed to the concept of infant

depravity, was unwilling to accept the possibility that his own child, who had died

soon after birth in 1693 without benefit of baptism, would go any place but

Heaven.34 What a latter-day Calvinist despairingly said of parents in the early nine-

teenth century could just as easily have been applied to those who lived one-hundred-

and-fifty years before. "The truth is," he wrote, "the parent cannot, or will not, believe

that his child, his offspring, his darling, is naturally dead in trespasses and sins; that

his nature is corrupt. " 35

There was a difference, however. Because of their Calvinist heritage, seventeenth-

century parents in New England could not escape nagging doubt about the eternal

fate of infants. By the nineteenth century, many parents did not have to resolve any

conflict between religious belief and personal desire for assurance that their children

would spend eternity in God's kingdom.

The demise of the doctrine of infant depravity had been slow and tortuous. Notions

about the condition of the infant soul were influenced by the ideas of the Enlighten-

ment and a softening of Calvinist doctrine. In his Essay on Human Understanding

(1690), John Locke suggested that children were not born with innate characteristics.

And as early as 1740 John Taylor, one of the first theologians to challenge seriously

the notion that infants might be damned, denied that guilt could be transferred from

generation to generation and concluded that babies were born in a state of moral

neutrality. During the last half of the eighteenth century, Charles Chauncy of Boston

began suggesting that a child's morally neutral state would only give way to redemp-

tion or damnation when the child gained the maturity to act as a moral agent. For

the next thirty years liberal theologians debated the relative moral state of children

and attempted to determine the point at which they could be held accountable for

their actionS.36

It is not surprising then to find that in the early nineteenth century even those

ministers with a conservative bent, who tried to resist change and continued to hold

firmly to the belief that infants were born in sin and in need of redemption, were

less and less willing to deny parents the comforting thought that babies went to heaven

when they died. An entry in the diary of Sarah Ripley Stearns gives us a clue to how

at least one such minister handled this problem from the pulpit. Stearns was a devout

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Attitudes Toward Infant Death 607

woman who attended church regularly. Four months pregnant in April 1813, she sat

listening intently to her minister deliver a sermon on infant depravity based on the

text, "Behold I was shapen in iniquity." "Mr. P., " as Stearns called him in her diary,

rejected the idea that children were born innocent on the grounds that only the doc-

trine of infant depravity had any basis in Scripture. Mr. P. was unwilling, however,

to insist that unregenerate infants were damned. On that issue, wrote Stearns, "he

pretended not to be decided." Nevertheless, he offered those in his congregation reason

to hope that their children might go to heaven. "The sovereign arm of mercy," he

assured them, "can reach them with infinite ease by means unknown to us-we may

charitably hope they are received into glory and dwell with the Father."37 Caught

between his desire to maintain the doctrinal integrity of traditional ideas about infant

depravity and the need to defer to the sensibilities of the parents in his congregation,

Mr. P. felt compelled to hedge.

The Second Great Awakening provided another arena in which to continue the debate

over the spiritual condition of infants. Certainly among the early evangelicals, the

sinfulness of even very young children was taken for grated. Yet as the century pro-

gressed and the evangelical movement fragmented, its adherents were unable to maintain

a coherent position on major theological issues such as the innate depravity of in-

fants, thus leaving the door open for clergymen like Horace Bushnell to argue that

if properly nurtured by Christian parents, an evangelical child could "grow up a Chris-

tian, and never know himself as being otherwise."38

The long debate over the moral state of infants laid the groundwork for the belief

that babies could provide the means for achieving grace and guaranteeing a place in

heaven for every member of the family. Symptomatic of the willingness of literate

Americans to accept this idea is the degree to which they adopted romantic notions

about the nature of children. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, William

Wordsworth wrote with real conviction, "Heaven lies about us in our infancy." In

his ode on "Intimations of Immortality" the British poet suggested, among other things,

that when babies were born they brought with them a kind of pristine purity that

distinguished them from other mortals.39 Americans were so receptive to Words-

worth's rhetoric that by the 1840s his phrase had become something of a cliche. Testi-

fying to her conviction that belief in the innate innocence of infants was universally

held to be true, Sarah Josepha Hale quoted the phrase in her January 1844 editorial

in Godey's.40 Following the birth of her second child, Mary Pierce Poor wrote that

she wished she could have kept her first child "as perfect as she was at fifteen months."

Nevertheless, she wrote, to watch a child change in behavior, to watch her become

"capricious and fretful and less obedient" must be viewed as inevitable. "She must,

like all the rest of us. " Poor continued, "pass through 'trial and self-discipline' before

she can return to the Heaven that was around her in her infancy." 41 Like Hale and

Poor, S. F Clapp freely used Wordsworth's phrase in a poem called "Infancy" published

in the Christian Examiner and Theological Review in 1854. Describing infants as having

been born in the "fair season of sweet innocence" with "souls of spotless white,"

she wrote, "Heaven itself doth seem to lie/ About blest infancy. ",42

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608 American Quarterly

Between 1800 and 1860 many people, having come to the conclusion that babies

were born innocent and remained so for an indetermined period of time, were no longer

deeply troubled by the idea that infants might be denied a place in heaven.43

Historians Mary P. Ryan and Philip Greven have argued that belief in infant purity

was closely associated with a change in childrearing tactics that gave greater respon-

sibilities to mothers for the socialization of children and emphasized bending rather

than breaking a child's will. 44 From their point of view, infant children were passive recipients of new socialization techniques. Yet belief in infant innocence also provided

the basis for allowing a young child to take an active role in family life. It prepared

parents emotionally and intellectually to accept the idea that babies performed a useful

function within the family and that God's purpose for removing infants to heaven

was not arbitrary but a part of a divine plan which could serve as the basis for preserving

the unity of the family.

* * *

Between the late 1830s and the Civil War, novelists and authors whose stories and

poems appeared in ladies' magazines and liberal religious periodicals intended for

popular consumption exploited the belief in infant innocence in order to confirm

parents' hopes that their children did indeed go to heaven when they died and that

they were undoubtedly better off there. In T. S. Arthur's The Mother, Anna Hartley

grieved for her dead child but admitted to her husband that she found consolation

in the belief that the baby was "now safe in her heavenly home. " 45The fictional Amy

in E. L. Follen's Sketches of Married Life was sustained by the thought that her child

had been received into heaven.46 An article in Godey's entitled "The Empty Cradle"

described the feelings of a grief-stricken mother: "She feels that heaven was the only

atmosphere where her precious flower could unfold without spot or blemish, and she

would not recall the lost."47

In order to drive the point home, some authors exaggerated the idea that babies

were better off dying before their souls were contaminated by earthly influences. One

poet warned, "Whilst on thy infant innocence I gaze / . . . 'Twere wise to wish thee-

pure and faultless-dead."48 Another described a mother who, as she sat watching

her infant sleep, began to worry about his inevitable loss of innocence: "She breathed

a mental prayer, / that rather now-e'en though so dear, / that now, while undefiled

/ Pure as when heaven bestowed the gift, / It would recall her child." Her prayer

was heard. A few days later the child died, "Secure from future ill," and went to

heaven.49

In a short story depicting infant death, a mother, obsessed with preserving her child's

innocence and purity, prayed that God might protect him. She sensed a voice saying

to her, "Daughter, go in peace, thy petition is heard, and thy request granted. " The

mother, dissatisfied with Divine assurance, again petitioned God to save her baby from

pain and disappointment. In response to her prayer, a spirit appeared to her saying,

"I alone can save your son from the evils you fear will fall upon him. In this world

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Attitudes Toward Infant Death 609

it is impossible but that he should be exposed to sorrow, and all the evils incident

to human life. " He offered to transport the child to "a brighter country, where sorrow

never enters; where naught but peace, harmony, and happiness dwell." The mother

agreed that her child should be taken there, and the infant died.50 In another story

a mother prayed that her child would not die. But falling asleep she dreamed that

the infant spoke to her, saying "Dearest mother, why would you keep me here? The

world is full of sin and trouble; would you keep me till this heart is unfit to join the

happy throng that are now ready and willing to receive me? My father, with outstretched

arms is calling me home. Dear mother, unsay that cruel prayer and let me go." The

mother complied and the child died. She never regretted her decision.5'

A reversal of this theme appeared in Godey's under the title, "The Child and the

Angels. " In this story a sleeping baby, being tended by both its mother and its guardian

angel, awoke from a nap in extreme pain. Frightened, the mother pleaded with God

to spare her child. He granted her wish. But as the infant matured and grew out of

its sinless state, the mother came to regret that she had asked God to preserve its

life. 52

In their portrayal of the self-sacrificing mother, the authors of these stories and

poems testified to the degree to which people had come to recognize the separation

of spheres and the increasing influence of mothers over the spiritual state and eternal

future of their children. They suggested that mothers could act as God's agents of

redemption. These mothers did not merely submit to the deaths of their babies, but

chose (or in the case of the last example, did not choose) to give their children up

in order to preserve their infant purity and save their souls. At the same time, however,

by portraying mothers as willing to give up their children, popular authors also

suggested that mother love and ambivalence toward the maternal role were not mutually

exclusive. While these authors confirmed maternal love and the importance of a

mother's role in children's moral nurture, they reminded their readers that whatever

the influence of mothers over infants, it could not guarantee the salvation of a child

who grew to adulthood. Overwhelmed by their responsibilities and aware of the

limitations of their influence, these fictional mothers gave up before they had even

begun because they were terrified by the possibility that they might not be up to the

job and that their children would be condemned because of their own inadequacies.

For them, grief for lost children was nothing compared to living with guilt for having

failed them. Not being a mother was better than being a bad one.

Such stories were, however, exceptional. More often authors of popular prose and

poetry extended the belief in infant innocence in such a way as to propose that infants,

not mothers, were redemptive agents. Between 1840 and 1860, these authors used

sentimental rhetoric to suggest that living infants established a direct connection

between earthly mortals and the spiritual world and acted to enhance the moral

sensibilities of those around them. They assured parents that children who died in

infancy were preparing a place in heaven for family members who had been receptive

to their purifying influence and that in death they would once more be reunited as

a family.

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610 A merican Quarterly

One of the ways that writers did this was to employ the image of angels as a metaphor

to dramatize the idea that babies remained close to heaven and were surrounded with

an aura of purity after birth. A poem appearing in the Christian Observer described

infants as "ye tiny angels of my house." 53 Another poet spoke of an infant as "an

angel visitant from heaven."54 In an 1844 editorial, Hale argued that "a blessed

doctrine, in the maternal creed," held that "angelic beings" surrounded infants in

order to "guard with peculiar tenderness and care the opening buds of human life."55

Novelists used the same metaphor when referring to infants. Elizbeth Oakes Smith

wrote in The Newsboy that "children are nearest heaven . .. the angels come wherever

the child is."56 T. S. Arthur developed the image in his books. In The Wife, for

example, he pictured Anna Hartley as saying to her husband, " 'When our babe is

in my arms, and especially when it lies at my bosom, it seems as if angels were near

me.' " " 'And angels are near you,' " replied her husband. " 'Angels love innocence,

and especially infants, that are forms of innocence. They are present with them, and

the mother shares the blessed company.' "57

Ordinary people, already convinced that babies were pure and innocent, employed the

metaphor to refer to their own children. In 1842 a friend assured Mary Pierce Poor "that

celestial angels who stand in the immediate presence of God, watch over infants. " Com-

forted by that thought, Poor hoped that "their benign influence may in some measure

extend to the parents of our little one and enable us to become in spirit like a little

child, that our hearts may be fitted for the reception of the kingdom of Heaven."58

While they remained innocent, metaphorically surrounded by angels, babies could

provide a direct link between heaven and earth. Children, argued Hale in Godey's

in 1851, stand nearer to heaven than adults.59 Infants are a "link of life eternal,

reaching from earth to heaven," wrote another.60 According to popular authors, a

baby also acted as a "messenger of peace and love" sent to earth to purify the worldly

and prepare them to take their own place in heaven. "He came," wrote poet James

H. Perkins of a baby, "an herald from above / Pure from his God he came to them,

/ Teaching new duties, deeper love." 61 Harriet Beecher Stowe pictured infants ex-

plicitly as a surrogate for the great Redeemer. In the form of a baby, she wrote, the

"gentle teacher still remains to us. By every hearth and fireside, Jesus still sets the

little child in the midst of us" to "awaken a mother from worldliness and egotism

to a world of new and higher feeling!"62 Babies described in this way served as

emissaries from Heaven, like Jesus, sent to earth to purify the worldly.

The baby Grace in T. S. Arthur's The Angel of the Household played a role similar

to that described by Stowe and the others. Arthur's story was intended to demonstrate

the redemptive influence of an innocent infant and her guardian angels on Jacob and

Mary Harding and their willful, defiant, and rebellious children. One evening after

a particularly heated domestic quarrel, the Hardings found a baby that had been left

at their cottage door. The presence of this child, whom they called Grace, had a pro-

found effect on every member of the family. The sight of the child called forth all

of the long-forgotten nurturing instincts of Mary. Even the ill-tempered Jacob fell

under the infant's spell, feeling himself "within the circle of some strange power that

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Attitudes Toward Infant Death 611

stilled the waves of passion in his heart." The influence of celestial and infant purity

helped every member of the family modify his behavior. The Hardings' son became

more honest and self-controlled, and their other children became more polite and

affectionate. 63

* * *

Infants could play an important role in rescuing the souls of others, it seemed.

Children, argued Hale in Godey's, save us from our own sin.64 "How many spirits

have been purified and upborne by the presence of infant innocence?" asked S. D.

Robbins.65 Lydia Sigourney described the influence of a baby on a mother in these

terms: "The feeble hand of the babe that she nourished, led her through more pro-

found depths of humility, to higher aspirations of faith . . . guiding her to a higher

seat among the 'just made perfect.' ,66 By serving as messengers from God, as

sources of inspiration, babies could lead those around them through the first step

in the redemptive process-purification.

If purification could be achieved through the agency of living infants, salvation

could be assured through the agency of dying ones. In their writings popular authors

suggested that this was the reason why children died in infancy. Lydia Sigourney claimed

that "the glorified spirit of the infant is a star to guide the mother to its own blissful

clime."67 R. C. Waterston wrote that when a baby dies, "it throws a degree of sanc-

tity around those who remain. They are not simply connected with this world, but

with another. . . This idea makes every child a monitor pointing to the spiritual

world."68 This image was similar to the one used by Fanny Longfellow when she sad-

ly noted, "I feel as if my lost darling were drawing me to her-as I controlled her

before birth so does she me now."69 T. S. Arthur described a mother whose two

children in heaven provided "invisible cords" that drew her "soul upwards. "70 S. D.

Robbins, a minister writing in the Monthly Religious Magazine, claimed that infants

and children brought others close to God and gave them "a new bond to heaven....

We are indebted to them all," he continued, "for the heaven they prepare us to reach

when they go away." 71 Dying babies had an important role to play on earth. By

directing the attention of family members toward heaven, they helped to redeem the

souls of others and in that way guarantee the reunification of the family in heaven.

The death of a child carried with it the promise of redemption for every member of

the family.

Popular writers assured parents that their children would wait for them in heaven

and that the death of one member of the family was but a temporary absence, not

an eternal separation. A writer for the Ladies' Garland deprecated excessive grief ex-

pressed over the loss of a child on the grounds that parents should find comfort in

the conviction that they and their children would be reunited in heaven. 72 T. S. Arthur

pictured James Hartley comforting his bereaved wife with the words, "she cannot return

to us, but we will go to her. Our real home is not here."73 Another author wrote of

the comfort offered by the angel of death who appeared before an anxious and fearful

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612 American Quarterly

mother intending to transport her infant into the arms of God. He assured her that

her separation from the child would be of a temporary nature and that he would return

soon to convey her to "the same blissful shore."74

The belief that death did not mean permanent separation from their children was

a great comfort to grieving mothers. Lucy Lovell wrote after the death of two of her

children: "We are left childless.... But if Earth is losing, I trust heaven is increasing

its attractions. We feel that, though taken from us, our children still live, and that

in a peculiar and most endearing relation, they are united to us, and we may yet call

them ours." Lovell added that she and her husband hoped their children were redeemed,

"and that we shall one day stand before the throne with the children God has given

us."75 Peggy Dow had similar hopes for the future. Writing of her dead daughter,

she hoped that "when life should end, I should meet her to part no more!"76

Popular authors did not consciously set out to create an infant-as-redeemer ideology

in order to comfort bereaved parents. Through the use of romantic rhetoric, they merely

expanded upon a belief in infant innocence that had been thrashed out by generations

of theologians and that was by this time widely accepted by their contemporaries.

By stressing the purifying influence of living babies and the redemptive influence of

dying ones, they were able to provide an explanation for the seemingly meaningless

deaths of small children. They provided parents with reason to believe that their

children's lives, however short, had some purpose, performed some valuable service.

Mourning the loss of a beloved child, parents could find comfort in the thoughts that

their children were happy in paradise, that there was some justification for the grief

they were experiencing, and that when their family was reunited in heaven, they would

be rewarded for suffering.

Besides offering comfort to parents and an explanation for infant death, the ideas

of popular authors also suggested an alternative to traditional methods of preserving

a sense of family unity. Among the middle and upper classes in the urban environ-

ment of the early nineteenth century, the workplace was often separated from the

home and fathers were likely to spend less time with their families. Some social critics

were so concerned about this situation that they were beginning to charge that middle-

class husbands were abdicating their paternal responsibilities, that they were becoming

"almost strangers to their own children."77 As middle-class men accepted more and

more responsibility for the economic support of their families, the assumption that

their wives and children would significantly contribute to the family income declined.

Children, while regarded as a source of pride and pleasure, became temporary economic

liabilities whose need for food, clothing, shelter, and education placed a drain on the

economic resources of their families.

Depicting infants as redeeming agents was a way of accommodating these changes

by measuring their value in moral and spiritual rather than economic terms. Viewed

in this way, babies became a part of the sacred rather than the profane world and

performed a unique service for the family and society. Innocent and pure like T. S.

Arthur's Grace, their presence in the household could help to modify the strains that

the modern world placed on family members. Babies could awaken moral sensibilities

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Attitudes Toward Infant Death 613

in others and serve as a reminder of the need to preserve and perpetuate traditional

ethical values. By acting as purifying influences in this world, by preparing the way

to heaven for others, the lives and deaths of infants established a spiritual basis for

family unity. This basis could assure that the separation caused by their deaths was

only temporary and that the family would live together in eternity.

NOTES

1. Samuel L. Mitchell, "Abstracts From the Bills of Mortality Kept in the City of New-York, During

1807 and 1808," Medical Repository 13 (Feb., March, April 1810): 336. It is difficult to determine

the mortality rate for infant children in the first half of the nineteenth century. Contemporary estimates

usually compared the death of children under the age of one to all those who were dying in the same

year rather than comparing them to all those who were born in the same year. See Ansel W. Ives,

"Review of Ticknor's Philosophy of Living," Literary and Theological Review 3 (June 1836): 285n;

Charles A. Lee, "Medical Statistics; Comprising a Series of Calculations and Tables, Showing Mortality

in New York, and Its Immediate Causes, During a Period of Sixteen Years," American Journal of

the Medical Sciences 19 (Nov. 1836): 46; Andrew Combe, Treatise on the Physiological and Moral

Management of Infancy (Boston, 1846), 24. The most that can be said about this matter is that doctors

were concerned about what they viewed as a high infant mortality rate. Modern studies are not much

more helpful. They usually provide information on the mortality of children aged five and under. See

Maris Vinovskis, "Mortality Rates and Trends in Massachusetts Before 1830," Journal of Economic

History 32 (March 1972): 195-201; Richard Alan Meckel, "The Awful Responsibility of Motherhood:

American Health Reform and the Prevention of Infant and Child Mortality Before 1913," diss. Brandeis

Univ. 1982, 238-39.

2. The use of the term middle class is problematic in the sense that it is both descriptive and imprecise.

The men and women whose ideas about infant death are used in this study enjoyed varying degrees

of material comfort. Some of them were members of upper-class families and enjoyed secure social and economic positions. Most came from somewhere in the middle class. The occupations of the men

as doctors, ministers, teachers, merchants, reformers, or journalists allowed them and their wives to

think of themselves as a cut above the ordinary. Their social status tended to reflect a consistent mental

attitude rather than a specific or secure economic position. They thought of themselves as middle

class-sometimes because of their economic position and sometimes despite it. For discussions of the middle class in the nineteenth century, see Peter Gay, The Education of the Senses (New York, 1984), 17-44; Stuart M. Blumin, "The Hypothesis of Middle-Class Formation in Nineteenth-Century America:

A Critique and Some Proposals," American Historical Review 90 (April 1985): 299-338.

3. John Pierce to Benjamin Tappan, 14 Aug. 1803, Box 1, Folder 8, Poor Family Collection (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College, Cambridge, Mass.).

4. Mary Pierce Poor to John and Lucy Pierce, 26 Nov. 1842, Box 6, Folder 89, Poor Family Collection.

5. Indifference rather than bereavement appears to have been the typical response to the death of infants well into the eighteenth century. See Philippe Aries, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History

of Family Life, trans. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962), 38-39; Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family (New York, 1975), 169-75.

6. Christiana B. Cowell, Life and Writings of Mrs. Christiana B. Cowell, Consort of Rev. D. B. Cowell, Who Died in Lebanon, Maine, Oct. 8, 1862, Aged 41 Years (Biddleford, Maine, 1872), 140.

7. Samuel Longfellow, ed., The Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow With Extracts From His Journals

and Correspondence, 3 vols. (Boston, 1891), 2: 136.

8. Nehemiah Adams, Agnes and the Little Key; Or, Bereaved Parents Instructed and Comforted (Boston, 1857), 30.

9. Saccharine and sentimental, bereavement literature during this period also served a number of

other functions. In her discussion of the domestication of death, Ann Douglas suggests that it provid- ed its authors an opportunity to make a place for themselves as arbiters of American social values. See Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York, 1977), 240-72. According to

James Farrell, the sentimentalization of death in the early nineteenth century also allowed people to avoid facing the terrors of death's finality. See James J. Farrell, Inventing the American Way of Death, 1830-1929 (Philadelphia, 1980), 34.

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614 American Quarterly

10. Mary Wilder Tileston, ed., Memorials of Mary Wilder White: A Century Ago in New England

(Boston, 1903), 327. 11. Abigail and Lavius Hyde to Mr. and Mrs. Asahel I. Bradley, 28 March 1832, Box 1, Folder 4,

Bradley-Hyde Collection, Schlesinger Library.

12. Walter Merrill, ed., The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison: No Union With Slave-Holders,

1841-1849 (Cambridge, 1973), 556.

13. According to Phoebe Lloyd this practice was particularly popular from 1830 to 1860. Phoebe

Lloyd, "Posthumous Mourning Portraiture, " in A Time to Mourn: Expressions of Grief in Nineteenth

Century America, ed. Martha V. Pike and Janice Gray Armstrong (Stony Brook, N. Y., 1980), 85. For further discussion of posthumous mourning portraits, see Phoebe Lloyd, "A Young Boy in His

First and Last Suit," Minneapolis Institute of Arts Bulletin 64 (1978-80): 104-11.

14. Edward Wagenknecht, ed., Mrs. Longfellow: Selected Letters and Journals of Fanny Appleton

Longfellow (1817-1861) (New York, 1956), 142.

15. Hyde to Bradley, 28 March 1832, Box 1, Folder 4, Bradley-Hyde Collection. 16. Elizabeth Ellery Sedgwick Journal, 1827, Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

17. This view is consistent with that first proposed by Freud in 1915 and discussed in Richard Schulz, The Psychology of Death, Dying, and Bereavement (Reading, Mass., 1978), 137.

18. Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher to William Whitcher, 25 May 1849, Frances Miriam Berry Whitcher

Letters, New-York Historical Society, New York.

19. Erich Lindemann, "Symptomatology and Management of Acute Grief, " in Death and Identity,

ed. Robert Fulton (New York, 1965), 187-89. For more recent discussions of the symptoms of grief, see John Bowlby, Attachment and Loss, 3 vols. (New York, 1969-73), 3: 122-24; Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York, 1969), 142, 149, 159; Schulz, Psychology of Death, 142-48.

20. Malcolm R. Lovell, Two Quaker Sisters: From the Original Diaries of Elizabeth Buffum Chace

and Lucy Buffum Lovell (New York, 1937), 109. 21. Wagenknecht, Mrs. Longfellow, 142-43, 145, 147, 175; Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry

Wadsworth Longfellow, 130.

22. Jane Harris to Mary Harris, 1 June 1828, Mary Harris Letters, George B. Harris Papers, Historical

Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

23. Benjamin B. Wisner, ed., Memoirs of the Late Mrs. Susan Huntington, of Boston, Mass. (Boston,

1826), 117.

24. Wagenknecht, Mrs. Longfellow, 126. 25. Yasukichi Yasuba, Birth Rates of the White Population in the United States, 1800-1860: An

Economic Study (Baltimore, 1962), 19, 69; Wilson H. Grabill, Clyde V. Kiser, and Pascal K. Whelpton,

The Fertility of American Women (New York, 1958), 14, 16.

26. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel

Hill, 1980), 227-31, 283; Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (Boston, 1980), 247-49.

27. Frances Rollins Morse, ed., Henry and Mary Lee: Letters and Journals with Other Family Letters,

1802-1860 (Boston, 1926), 103.

28. Adams, Agnes, 31.

29. Peggy Dow, Vicissitudes; Or the Journey of Life (Philadelphia, 1816), 611. For similar comments,

see Harris to Harris, 29 Jan. 1828, Mary Harris Letters; Sally Hughes to George Hughes, 23 Aug. 1847, Folder 6, 8 July 1848, Folder 7, Maxcy-Markoe-Hughes Collection, Historical Society of

Pennsylvania; Wagenknecht, Mrs. Longfellow, 143; A friend to Jeannie McCall, n.d. [1840s or early 1850s], McCall Section, Cadwallader Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Lester Frank Ward,

Young Ward's Diary, ed. Bernhard J. Stein (New York, 1935), 202; Sarah Connell Ayer, Diary of Sarah

Connell Ayer (Portland, Maine, 1910), 209; Merrill, Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 556.

30. Dow, Vicissitudes, 612. 31. Mehetable May Dawes Goddard to Ann Goddard, 7 March 1826, Box 1, Folder 16, May-Goddard

Collection, Schlesinger Library. For similar comments, see also Mary Rodman Fisher Fox Diary, 30 Jan. 1853, Box 13, Folder 30, Logan-Fisher-Fox Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; Cowell, Life and Writings, 141; Wagenknecht, Mrs. Longfellow, 143.

32. Peter Gregg Slater, Children in the New England Mind: In Death and In Life (Hamden, Conn., 1977), 39-41.

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Attitudes Toward Infant Death 615

33. Anne Bradstreet, The Complete Works of Anne Bradstreet, ed. Joseph R. McElrath and

Allan P. Robb (Boston, 1981), 187, 188.

34. Philip Greven, The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Child-rearing, Religipus Experience,

and the Self in Early America (New York, 1977), 30.

35. "On the Education of Children," Panoplist and Missionary Magazine 10 (Sept. 1814): 394.

36. For a more detailed discussion of this change in doctrine, see Slater, Children, 26-32, 52-88;

H. Shelton Smith, Changing Conceptions of Original Sin: A Study in American Theology Since 1750

(New York, 1955).

37. Sarah Ripley Stearns Diary, 25 April 1813, Stearns Collection, Schlesinger Library. 38. Robert W. Lynn and Elliott Wright, The Big Little School: Sunday Child of American Pro-

testantism (New York, 1971), 44; William G. McLoughlin, ed., The American Evangelicals, 1800-1900.

An Anthology (New York, 1968), 5, 26; Horace Bushnell, Christian Nurture (New Haven, 1967), 4.

39. William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality From Recollections of Early Childhood, "

The Complete Poetical Works of William Wordsworth (Boston, 1904), 354. For a discussion of this poem and its influence on nineteenth-century thought in England and America, see Barbara Garlitz, "The Immortality Ode: Its Cultural Progeny," Studies in English Literature 6 (Autumn 1966): 639-49.

It should be noted that Wordsworth was not the first to make this suggestion. In his poem "The Retreate,"

Henry Vaughan, a seventeenth-century mystic, wrote of infants in similar terms. "Happy those early

dayes! when I / Shin'd in my Angell-infancy. " French Fogel, ed., The Complete Poetry of Henry Vaughan

(New York, 1969), 169.

40. "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book 28 (Jan. 1844): 53.

41. Mary Pierce Poor to Feroline Pierce Fox, 13 July 1844, Box 12, Folder 168, Poor Family Papers.

42. S. F. Clapp, "Infancy," Christian Examiner and Theological Review 56 (Jan. 1854): 129-30.

43. Slater, Children, 90.

44. Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge, 1981), 232; Greven, Protestant Temperament, 157-70.

45. T. S. Arthur, The Mother (Philadelphia, 1846), 126.

46. E. L. Follen, Sketches of Married Life (Boston, 1838), 289. See also, T. S. Arthur, Married and Single; Or Marriage and Celibacy Contrasted in a Series of Domestic Pictures (New York, 1845), 53.

47. "The Empty Cradle, " Godey's Lady's Book 34 (Jan. 1847): 12. See also, D. W. Belisle, "A Mother's

Grief," ibid., 36 (June 1848): 349; Arthur, Married and Single, 49. 48. "Lines to an Infant Child," Godey's Lady's Book 3 (Sept. 1831): 145.

49. Ella, "A Mother's Prayer," The Friend 10 (Nov. 12, 1836): 44.

50. "The Mother's Prayer: A Sketch," Lady's Pearl 1 (Sept. 1840): 84-85. 51. M. J. Shrouds, "The Young Mother's Dream," Ladies' Repository 14 (July 1854): 302-03. 52. M. A. E., "The Child and the Angels," Godey's Lady's Book 39 (Sept. 1849): 173. 53. "The Angels in the House," Christian Observer (May 8, 1856): 76.

54. Helen Bruce, "Our Little Sleeper," Ladies' Wreath 9 [1855]: 167.

55. "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book 28 (Jan. 1844): 53; see also, "The Guardian Angels,"

U. S. Catholic Magazine 3 (Oct. 1844): 660. 56. Elizabeth Oakes Smith, The Newsboy (New York, 1854), 163. 57. T. S. Arthur, "The Wife: A Story for My Young Countrywomen, " in Three Eras of a Woman's

Life. The Maiden, Wife, and Mother (Philadelphia, 1848), 158. See also T. S. Arthur, The Angel of the Household (Philadelphia, 1854), 25.

58. Poor to Fox, 4 Dec. 1842, Box 12, Folder 167, Poor Family Papers. For a similar comment, see Samuel Longfellow, Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 2: 130.

59. "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book 43 (Nov. 1851): 310.

60. Spencer W. Cone, "A Curious Question," newspaper clipping in Julia Ann Hartness Lay Diary, 1855-57, New York Public Library, New York. See also, "Infancy," Ladies' Wreath 1 (1847): 145; S.

D. Robbins, "Childhood's Mission," Monthly Religious Magazine 4 (Feb. 1847): 64.

61. "Infancy," 145; James H. Perkins, "On the Death of a Young Child," Godey's Lady's Book 32 (June 1846): 251. See also, Seba Smith, "The Ministry of Childhood," Ladies Companion and Literary

Expositor 10 (April 1839): 269. 62. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "A Little Child Shall Lead Them," Christian Parlor Book 7 (1851): 248-49. 63. Arthur, Angel in the Household.

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616 A merican Quarterly

64. "Editor's Table," Godey's Lady's Book 43 (Nov. 1851): 310.

65. Robbins, "Childhood's Mission," 64.

66. L. H. Sigourney, Letters to Mothers (New York, 1840), 25. See also, R. C. Waterston, Thoughts

on Moral and Spiritual Culture (Boston, 1842), 26-27.

67. Sigourney, Letters, 262.

68. Waterston, Thoughts, 289. See also, Frances S. Osgood, "The Child and Its Angel-Playmate,"

Ladies Companion and Literary Expositor 17 (July 1842): 157.

69. Wagenknecht, Mrs. Longfellow, 144.

70. T. S. Arthur, The Mother's Rule; or, the Right Way and the Wrong Way (Rochester, 1856), 215.

71. Robbins, "Childhood's Mission," 64, 66. See also, "The Infant's Mission," Christian Parlor

Magazine 1 (Oct. 1844): 179.

72. B. B. H., "Death of the Young," Ladies' Garland 6 (June 1846): 283.

73. Arthur, Mother, 126.

74. "An Angel's Visit, " Christian Parlor Book 7 (1851): 349. See also, "The Cherub Brothers, " Ladies'

Wreath 2 (1848-49): 84-85.

75. Lovell, Two Quaker Sisters, 76.

76. Dow, Vicissitudes, 612. See also, Fox Diary, 30 Jan. 1853, Box 13, Folder 30, Logan-Fisher-Fox

Papers; Hughes to Hughes, 23 Aug. 1847, Folder 6, Maxcy-Markoe-Hughes Collection.

77. Bushnell, Christian Nurture, xxxviii. For similar observations, see Arthur, Mother, 18; Samuel

K. Jennings, The Married Lady's Companion, or Poor Man's Friend (New York, 1808), 163; "Parental

Duty," Christian Observer (Dec. 9, 1854): 193.

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