ABIGAIL CHASE
(1794-1882)
OF NEWTON, NEW HAMPSHIRE, AND AMESBURY
AND MERRIMAC, MASSACHUSETTS
Don W. Woodworth
Published at
Sun City, California,
July 12, 2013
 |
| Daguerrotype, American, anonymous maker, c. 1855, perhaps at Amesbury, MA. From storage location and other details, thought to be of Abigail Chase Peaslee Tucker and Johnson Tucker. |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Abigail Chase lived her first forty-six years in Newtown, Rockingham County, New Hampshire. Time and fire have cut deeply into the material evidence of her life. I am fortunate in the support I have had from people dedicated to saving family and local history.
Bill Landry, President of the Newton, NH Historical Society, and Society members have conducted searches of their holdings and provided important documents about James Peaslee, Abigail’s first husband.
Theresa E. Caswell, Director of the Gale Library at Newton, and members of the Genealogy Club at the library conducted searches of the Library’s holdings and the Internet for Chase family material.
Patricia Curran, Hampstead, NH, Town Clerk and Deputy Town Clerk
Arline M. Grant provided early transcriptions of lost Newton records that allowed me to fully identify James Peaslee among others of the same name and time.
Jaclyn Payne, Reference Librarian, Haverhill Public Library, found a press clipping that showed the railroad reached Haverhill, and thus came close to Newton, in December of 1839.
Barbara L. Kreiger of the Dartmouth College Archives gathered material that alerted me to the career and honors of Edmund Randolph Peaslee,
M.D., Abigail’s first child.
I want to recognize the members of the Tucker family whose passion to save the family’s many stories have left us a treasure -- even though they cannot be with us as we build on their gifts: my grandmother, Edith Tucker Woodworth, her sisters Maud Tucker Smith and Mabel (Belle) Tucker Heileman, her brother James Irwin Tucker, and James’ children, my correspondents in the 1980s, Dorothy (Dolly) Tucker Hart and Ted S. Tucker.
To my cousin, Olive Smith Haddock, my thanks for the loan of a daguerreotype photograph that dated from the 1850s, and that existed only in the original she held.
My sister, Ruth Woodworth Criger, located New Hampshire birth and marriage records that solved some persistent puzzles. The pedigree charts she constructed have been a valuable companion to my work
My son, Bayard Woodworth, encouraged me to publish my research on the Internet and gave technical guidance with this paper at key moments.
My daughter, Bethany Woodworth, read with a keen eye and suggested beneficial changes in the documentation.
To my dear wife, Barbara Townley, my thanks for many suggestions that made for important changes in the paper. Her encouragement, wise advice, and love are sources of great strength.
Introduction
Abigail Chase lived her eighty-seven years within three miles of the New Hampshire-Massachusetts border, reared seven children, saw them in productive lives and earning many honors. Living in the early years of a new nation and past its centennial, she was witness to the remarkable sorrows and victories that made possible the building of the United States.
Descended from Abigail are people in the Peaslee, Tucker, Smith, Heileman, Woodworth, and other allied families. She connects them to their New England roots, including Aquila Chase of Hampton and Newbury, in 1640 the first river pilot at the mouth of the Merrimac River. Further, Abigail’s first son, Edmund Randolph Peaslee, a famous surgeon, was also a teacher and scholar, and thus provided a model and standard of excellence for the following six generations who had careers in education, law, engineering and the humanities. Moreover, her youngest son and direct ancestor of many of us, was the Civil War bugler, John Calvin Tucker, whose service continues to honor and inspire the family.
Abigail Chase appears in the family records gathered in the mid-1920s by her granddaughters, Maud Tucker Smith and Edith Margaret Tucker Woodworth. She appears near the end of her life in memoirs by great-granddaughter Dorothy (“Dolly”) Tucker Hart. The present writer, Edith’s grandson and Abigail’s great-great-grandson, continues the work of keeping Abigail in our memories.
Genealogical Record
ABIGAIL6 CHASE [Daniel,5 Deacon Francis,4 Samuel,3 Ensign
Moses,2 Aquila1] was born at Newton, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, 21 December 1794,1 daughter of Daniel and Hannah (Eaton) Chase. She died at Merrimac [part of Amesbury until 1876], Massachusetts, 18 September 1882.2
She married, first, probably at Newton [but reported from Hampstead], 11 Nov 1812,3 JAMES PEASLEE, called “Esquire of Newton,” born at Newton, 20 October 1785, son of Edmond and Abagail (White) Peaslee.4 He died at Newton, 21 November 1821, age 36.5 She married, second, at Amesbury, Massachusetts, 1 April 1830, JOHNSON T. TUCKER, born at Amesbury 11 February 1800, son of Elisha Sanborn and Mehitable (Davis) Tucker. He died at Merrimac, 3 December 1874.6
The children of James and Abigail (Chase) Peaslee, born at Newton:7
i. EDMUND
RANDOLPH PEASLEE, b. 22 January 1814; d. 12 January 1878, New York, New York.
He married at Lebanon, NH, 11 July 1841, MARTHA THANKFUL KENDRICK. Two children
born in Hanover, NH (1870 Census where Edmund is recorded as Edward). B.A.,
Dartmouth, 1836, M.D., Yale, 1840, L.L.D., Dartmouth, 1859. Surgeon, professor,
author.
ii. ABAGAIL
WHITE PEASLEE, b. 7 October 1815; d. 4 October 1896. She married at Plaistow,
NH, 3 December 1834, DANIEL R. PEASLEE, born at Plaistow 20 February 1812, son
of Joab and Elizabeth (Eaton) Peaslee. Nine children (U.S. Census 1850, 1860).
[Her name, spelled “Abagail” in the 1860 Census, on her record of death, and on
the record of death of her daughter Ellen R. (Peaslee) Sawyer (3 May 1905) in New Hampshire Deaths and Burials, 1784-1949, follows the spelling of her
paternal grandmother’s name, Abagail (White) Peaslee.]
iii. DANIEL
CHASE PEASLEE, b. 10 July 1818; d. 29 June 1898. He married ANN ELIZABETH
(“LIZZIE”) HOLLAND. Eleven children born in Newton (U.S. Census for 1850, 1860,
1870). Farmer.
iv. HANNAH
CHASE PEASLEE, b. 14 June 1821, d. at Lynn, 6 July 1898. She married at
Amesbury, 28 May1842, JAMES M. NYE, a physician. Lived in Lynn, Massachusetts.
No children recorded in the Census of 1850 and 1860. [The children enumerated
in the Census of 1870, Mary J. Peaslee, 19, and Freddie C. Peaslee, 12, are the
children of her brother, Daniel Chase Peaslee, seen in iii.]
The children of Johnson and Abigail (Chase) (Peaslee) Tucker, born at Newton:
i. ADALINE
MARIE TUCKER, b. 18 December 1830; d. 18 October 1900. She married JOHN D.
FOURTIN, a blacksmith at Amesbury. Six children are noted
in family records, five confirmed by 1870 Census for Amesbury
where John D. Fourtin is indexed as John B. Fourtin.
ii. JAMES PEASLEE TUCKER, b. 14 April
1833. An apothecary by family tradition;
confirmed as “druggist” in 1870 Census
at Wakefield, MA. Not married.
iii. JOHN CALVIN TUCKER, b. 10 October 1836; d. Merrimac, MA, 7
November 1882. He married at Brentwood,
NH, 22 June 1869, MARY ANTOINETTE FELLOWS, born at Brentwood, 5 February 1845,
daughter of Stephen and Narcissa (Sinclair) Fellows. Druggist (enlistment
papers), teacher, musician, farmer. Civil War service as bugler, three years to
31 October 1864. Children: Maud (16 March 1870), Mabel (“Belle”) (1 October 1871), Jay Wilfred (30 January 1873), Edith Margaret (28 April 1875), James Irwin (“Win”) (2 February 1877), Blanche Ethel (22 January 1879).
Childhood
We wish that Abigail’s birth in the cold month of December of 1794 had been noted by a loving aunt or observant neighbor, an aunt or neighbor given to the keeping of a journal to record her growing years. No journal has been found and we are left to imagine her early life on a New England farm.
Abigail was born into a family of three, her brother Daniel and her parents, Daniel and Hannah.8 Her brother was two. He must have been surprised at her sudden appearance in his world. Her parents had built stores of food for the months of snow and harsh winds. Now the kitchen was warm, kindling and firewood always by the stove and stacked outside the door.
Abigail smiled easily. Her brother watched her and wondered at the attention she got. Within a year, she and Daniel were joined by Sarah. Then more girls appeared – Salley, Hannah, Betty and Polley -- and baby brother Moses. As the family grew, and as she grew, she found many ways to help. She could rock the cradle to put an infant sister to sleep. She could find a doll or blanket to comfort one that cried. Her mother likely taught her songs – lullabies and hymns – and games that used a bouncing ball or clapping hands. Eventually Abigail played them with the children as they grew. She knew how to find the eggs the hens had laid, how to snap beans, how to stir a batter for biscuits or cookies. She must have seen kittens and lambs born. She had watched her father harness the horses for plowing. Perhaps she had helped set the table for the men her dad hired to cut the hay. From a safe distance she must have watched the men swinging the scythes in that steady circular motion, and knew the sound the whetstones made against the metal when the men stopped to sharpen the blades in the field. She enjoyed the smell of the hay on the hot afternoon breeze.
We expect that Abigail loved the sheep, but had been alarmed at spring shearing to see them emerge thin and almost bare from the hands of the shearers. Abigail, at two and three, would have sat with her mother by the big spinning wheel as Hannah spun the wool into yarn. At four and five, she might have begun to learn needlework and practiced the stitches that she would need for fancy and for everyday. Soon, she was likely putting her letters and numbers on a sampler with a motto, her name, and the date the work was finished. It would have displayed her skill with a needle and her ability to make use of time.
As Hannah’s first daughter, Abigail had the benefit of her mother’s concern to prepare her for a woman’s life at the center of family life – feeding, clothing, and healing children and husband. Beyond this work, reading and writing were skills that a girl could get at home if her family had a schooling tradition. As part of the evening prayers, her father’s reading of verses of the Bible would have opened her eyes to books.
In 1803, when she was eight, the family had an awful loss: Abigail’s father died, and in the midst of the grieving that followed, her mother needed her help with the sisters, the brothers, the chores the family required, chores that a big girl could do. For the children -- all but one younger than Abigail -- she was their big sister, guide, and companion. To her mother, she must have become an invaluable ally. But just a year after her father’s death, her mother died, and the records do not show who in the family came forward to take the children home.
Not having found a journal that records her life, we have taken the liberty of imagining what her childhood would have been like in this family and time. (The names of the children and the parents’ early deaths in 1803 and 1804 are from historical records.) Soon enough, Abigail was a young woman who had given much of her childhood to the care of her brothers and sisters.
A Woman’s Life
Abigail’s marriage at almost 18 to James Peaslee, then 27, brought together two of southern New Hampshire’s well-established families. Both families held independent views. In the Chase family were her grandfather Deacon Francis Chase and his brother, Abner Chase, founders of the first Baptist Church in Newton in 1750 although state law required all citizens to pay the support of their local Congregational church.9 As for James, he was a Quaker at a time when the Society of Friends, much oppressed in earlier generations, had reached a position of respect and responsibility in the community. Thus the Chase and Peaslee families had long experience of making thoughtful defenses of their faiths, including the question much debated in New England as to whether salvation was a gift through God’s Grace or was to be earned through faith and good works. The concerns for the condition of one’s soul and for the central place of one’s church served to establish traditions of thought and study that carried into the lives of Abigail and James. In addition, James, while studying the law, would have read Blackstone’s commentaries on English common law under the guidance of an established lawyer and with him discussed many decisions of the New Hampshire courts, working through their closely reasoned arguments and implications. Under these influences, James and Abigail likely began their lives together with strong commitments to knowledge, to thoughtful consideration of consequences, and to religious principles to direct the family’s values. Under the influence of James’ Quaker faith, they might well have felt a heightened concern to be guided by the ideals of tolerance, peace, and justice.
A measure of security was present in Abigail’s life, despite the labor and hardship that were part of the domestic life of women in the early nineteenth century. Abigail’s husband was well acquainted with the world, a lawyer and man of property, with status and influence in Newton and the surrounding villages. Abigail was in a familiar place, supported by family, with three small children born between 1814 and 1818. In the midst of these comfortable circumstances, tragedy struck. As the story has come down to us, her younger sister, Hannah, drowned herself on the eve of her wedding day, wearing the dress made for the ceremony and the ring. She was 22. Her reason for dying remained a mystery, despite the speculation that ran through the town. Two years later, Abigail named her next child Hannah Chase Peaslee to preserve her sister’s memory.
In the villages, a belief persisted that Hannah’s death inspired “Suicide Pond,” a poem that John Greenleaf Whittier, just twelve at the time of Hannah’s death, wrote some years later when he was beginning to take the legends and landscape of New England as favored subjects. (The poem may be read in Appendix B.)10
Just three years later, in November 1821, when Abigail was 26, James died, leaving her with four children, including an infant, Hannah, five months old. James was buried in Quaker Grove Cemetery in Newton.11 At the services were people from Newton, Haverhill and Amesbury who shared with James the Society of Friends Monthly Meeting in Amesbury, the colleagues who knew him from legal circles, and townspeople who mourned the loss of a trusted friend and neighbor. For all, the loss -- in his 37th year -- of such a promising man and caring friend left a void that only time and the consolations of their faith could fill.
The Probate Court appointed a committee to appraise his property. At his death (21 November 1821), his real estate in Rockingham County was valued at $5,945.75. His personal estate, including livestock, farm implements, crops stored, and household goods, was appraised at $977.14.12 This substantial estate was Abigail’s property in a time when a married woman by law could not own real estate -- unless she was the widow of a man of property.13 Suddenly, with only the training in domestic economy and arts that every girl was given, she was thrust into the demands of a large and busy farm economy with crops and animals, seasons and markets to contend with. Without James’ knowledge and power, Abigail became responsible for the economy of her farms during the remaining nine years of the 1820s.
Abigail’s widowhood lasted until her marriage to Johnson Tucker on the first day of April, 1830. She brought Johnson, five years her junior, into a home where four children, ages nine to fifteen, had relationships and expectations already well defined. Abigail at 35 and Johnson at 30 may have faced conflicts created by his relative youth and masculine views and her maturity and self-sufficiency. If concessions were made to take advantage of the strengths of each, they were made out of deep knowledge of the life of a farm, its requirements, its joys and risks. They had a lot at stake: they were, after all, managers of valuable lands, responsible for the property that the Peaslee children would inherit at their maturity and for the land that was to be apportioned as the widow’s share. There were houses, barns, crops, livestock and hired hands to oversee. They were caring for four children -- and expecting another, their first, to be named Adaline if a girl, due in December. Brothers James and John would follow.
Abigail sent her first child, Edmund Randolph Peaslee, to two nearby schools, Hampton Academy and Atkinson Academy.14 Her wish to see her first son prepared for college and a profession were realized in 1832 when Edmund was admitted to Dartmouth College. It is likely that in late August, Johnson and Edmund gathered clothing, bedding, and books, put harness on a horse and loaded a carriage for the trip to Hanover. Later, in a letter to Johnson, his stepson addresses him as “Dear Father” and asks for help with his college costs.15
As October and November turned toward winter, life in their rural village would have followed the course dictated by the coming cold.16 The last of the crops -- potatoes, beets, squash, turnips, parsnips, salsify, carrots and cabbage -- would be in root cellars where the freeze could not reach them. Long strings of onions, garlic, and herbs hung from the beams in the kitchens. The oats and hay were in the barns to carry the horses and cows through the months of heavy snow. We expect the children had been to their favorite spots in the woods to gather the chestnuts to roast in the evening fires. Sleighs and harness had been put in good order. Great stacks of firewood stood by the door so that the boys could gather armloads for the woodboxes by the stoves and fireplaces. Young David Peaslee, perhaps missing Edmund, likely recalled the days when they shared the labor of moving wood indoors.
In the towns of the northeast corner of Massachusetts there was a rising concern over the question of slavery. In 1833 John Greenleaf Whittier, living a few miles away on the family homestead in Haverhill, wrote and published Justice and Expediency, taking, with other Quakers, the radical position that slavery should be stopped immediately.17 Whittier was appointed by leading Abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison as a delegate to the Philadelphia convention that formed the American Anti-Slavery Society.18 His work as Abolitionist poet, editor, and speaker made him a major figure in the nation’s struggle to end its legalized imprisonment of men and women kidnapped from Africa and their children born in the United States. In the towns where he lived -- Haverhill and, after 1836, Amesbury -- his presence was a reminder, often controversial, of this troubling and unfinished moral debate.
In the fall of 1833, on the night of November 13, without warning, the sky filled with brilliant light as the earth encountered a comet’s tail. A meteor storm of enormous proportions, with its millions of particles of dust, burned in the air above the villages of the Atlantic coast. Many brilliant fireballs appeared glowing in the night sky and exploded overhead.19 It went on for hours.
The papers in the cities were full of the story over the next few days. But most people could not imagine an explanation for what had occurred. The sky on fire caused the deepest misgivings, even terror. Many feared the awful lights and explosions as signs of the coming end of the world. And, because the world had survived the onslaught, some felt as one young scientist at Yale felt, that the Creator had displayed enormous destructive powers and at the same time had provided the earth the protection of the “atmospheric medium.”20
For Edmund, now a sophomore, there was opportunity to talk with scholars familiar with the history of meteor showers. To a young man curious about the natural world, the event must have opened a new appreciation for its powers. In Newton, Abigail and Johnson would have reassured the children, pointing to their survival and to God’s goodness in order to quiet their fears of the great meteor storm, a storm of such intensity and rarity that no one alive had seen anything like it.21
Edmund graduated from Dartmouth with the Bachelor of Arts degree in 1836. He taught school in nearby Lebanon for a year. Then in 1837 and 1838, he was a tutor at Dartmouth. To qualify, he was a recent graduate, well-known to the faculty, and fully qualified to meet classes and give lectures. For Edmund, this was the beginning of a noteworthy career in teaching. At the same time, he began to study medicine by traveling to patients in Hanover with two doctors, Noah Worchester and Dixi Crosby. They gave him an introduction to surgery, the work that would become the center of his career. Dr. Crosby focused his practice on the diseases of women, and, at some point, young Peaslee made the same commitment.
Abigail and Johnson kept a room ready in Newton for Edmund’s visits. On a long winter break in Dartmouth’s class schedule in 1838, Edmund was free of obligations as a tutor. He spent January in Newton where he wrote to his college roommate, Amasa Kinne, on January 16, that he had read some Latin and Greek, a volume of Moliere’s Comedies -- in French, of course -- about 250 pages of Spanish, and “translated a few of Schiller’s shorter poems” from the German, a recent addition to his linguistic accomplishments.22
He also mentioned that he had a piano in his room that provided him entertainment. He planned shortly to leave on a trip, and listed cities he would visit before his return March 2: Boston, Providence, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington.23 Edmund could look forward to traveling on new railroads behind new steam locomotives put in service in just the previous four or five years. The building of bridges and depots had marked the advance of the rails from town to town. Although the cities Edmund named were served by rail in 1838, not all the connections were in place: the trip between New York and Boston required a steamship trip across Long Island Sound from Stonington, Connecticut to South Providence.24 All in all, a great adventure, perhaps one to be envied by “friend Kinne,” then teaching school in Sanbornton, New Hampshire.
Between Edmund’s visit home in January, 1838 and June of 1840, Johnson and Abigail left Newton, moving their children across the state line to the west side of Amesbury, probably to the house built, according to family tradition, by Johnson’s father, Elisha Sanborn Tucker, about 1800. Called the old Tucker home by later generations, it was located on Titcomb Hill on the road between Amesbury and Haverhill at the intersection with Birch Meadow Road (maps, Appendix C.).25
Edmund moved to New Haven in September 1838 to work with Dr. Jonathan Knight and to take classes at the Yale Medical College. Given his extensive preparation with three doctors and his attendance at lectures at Yale Medical School, he progressed rapidly, and in 1840 Yale awarded him the MD. He began a practice in Hanover in 1841 and spent some months at hospitals in London and Berlin. On his return, he resumed his practice and was invited to give a series of lectures in 1842 at Dartmouth and in 1843 at Bowdoin. In 1842 he was appointed at Dartmouth as Professor of Anatomy and Physiology, and in 1845 accepted the same appointment at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. This meant traveling to give courses in the form of series of lectures, to consult on difficult cases, and to perform surgery at the clinics of both medical schools.26
In the summer of 1840, the census taker reached the Tucker home in Amesbury. He found Abigail’s fourth child, Hannah Chase Peaslee, then 19, at home with her three Tucker siblings, now 4, 7, and 9.27 Earlier, Hannah had been one of the first students at a private New Hampshire school, New London Academy,28 where her brother Edmund visited her in 1838 (as he mentioned in one of his letters). Since public schools were maintained only for boys, choosing to send a girl to private school required substantial expense and effort. Mothers saw their daughters’ education as an investment in the future because daughters would then be better able to school their daughters if private schools could not be found or afforded. Hannah would not be going to work herself unless she wished to be teacher or nurse, the professions available to women. She married in Amesbury in May of 1842 a physician, James M. Nye, and lived in Lynn, some 40 miles from her mother. She did not have children, but was Aunt Hannah to nieces and nephews who loved to visit once the trains made the trip an adventure.29
The 1850 census for Essex County30 shows Johnson Tucker, 50, a farmer with $3,000.00 of real estate, Abigail, 56, and the three Tucker children, Adaline, 19, James, 17, and John, 14. Also in that year, a separate census for agriculture was conducted, providing a detailed record of the individual farms.31 The Johnson T. Tucker farm in Amesbury was 40 acres and valued at $3,000.00, with 30 animals, including three “milch cows” from which 400 pounds of butter were produced in the twelve months ending in June. Crops included 200 bushels of potatoes, 3 of peas and beans, 25 tons of hay, and $100 worth of orchard products.
The growth of photography meant that by 1850 most towns had a studio and an eager following for the pictures called daguerreotypes, photographs on thin silver plates backed by copper, each in its own protective case. It was exciting to capture one’s actual look. Dapper youths sent their images to favored girls or boys and could expect another in return. Reluctant grandmothers were put in carriages by their grandchildren and taken to be recorded for posterity. A daguerreotype (taken about 1855) has come down in the family and is likely of Abigail and Johnson (Appendix D).32
By 1845, Edmund had begun to work with the microscope, then a powerful new instrument that extended his vision in a remarkable way. He was considered a pioneer in the application of the microscope in physiology and pathology,33 and was using it in his lectures and writings. By 1855, he was finishing a book on the microscopic examination of human tissue in healthy and disease states in many organs of the body. This project, meant to gather everything known on this subject including his own discoveries, was published as Human Histology in 1857 and continued as a text in medical colleges for many years.34
Abigail’s pride in her first son was well founded; she had many occasions to be reminded of his accomplishments. Edmund Randolph Peaslee, M.D., was a name widely recognized. In his first twenty professional years, he maintained an active medical and surgical practice in Hanover, continued as Professor of Anatomy, Physiology, and Surgery at Dartmouth and Bowdoin medical colleges, and in 1851 joined the faculty of the New York Medical College as Professor of Physiology, later as chair of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women. His colleagues in New York recognized him as the best in the field -- indeed, as a pioneer in abdominal and pelvic operations for women.35
In 1859, Dartmouth awarded Dr. Peaslee the honorary degree, Doctor of Laws, to honor his accomplishments and service.36
The outbreak of war in 1861 was the violent outcome of the great divisions over slavery and the economic system built on it. Within months, the Tuckers were directly involved. Their youngest son and brother, John, then 25, entered the army as a bugler in the 5th Independent Battery, Massachusetts Light Artillery, agreeing to serve from October 30, 1861 to October 31, 1864. He wrote to his father a detailed description of a day in the Army at Camp Sumner, Washington, D.C.37 He listed the calls that he gave -- “stable call,” “watering call” and “breakfast,” followed by “rool call,” -- to start the day for horses and men. He noted that the bugler on his horse held a position behind the captain, directing the movement of the cavalry with bugle calls ordered by the captain. Now, on the last day of January, 1862, he was relieved of duty because he was without a mount. His horse, a fine animal and well trained, had his leg broken by another horse during the night, and was put down by the company butcher. He wrote that he was worried about what sort of horse the Army might issue to him. A hopeful note, he had heard the war would be over in a few months.
Twice in the course of the war, he was injured. Once, a horse he was leading pulled him off his own horse onto the stones in a creek. In the years after the war, he suffered intense abdominal pain that sometimes left him bed-ridden.38 In the siege at Petersburg, Virginia, he suffered a leg wound, a musket ball’s bone-deep wound that never healed and caused him pain to the end of his life.39
Once out of the service, and after a trip to Chicago to look for work, he courted a young teacher, Mary Antoinette Fellows, from Brentwood. She was attractive, sensitive, and devout, a woman he could admire and love. They married in Brentwood, N.H., June 22, 1869. Soon after the wedding, John and Mary brought his parents to the house on Hadley Road. Here the census taker found them in 1870, listing Johnson, 70, as head of household with Abigail, 76, son John, his wife Mary, and Maud, just three months.40 Five more children would join the family before the decade was done. So Abigail and Johnson lived among six grandchildren: Maud, Mabel, Jay, Edith, James and Blanche.
The older children often recalled the house on Hadley Road. Maud wrote, “I’ll never forget those very tall (they seemed to me then) locust trees -- three of them -- and just how sweet they were and full of honey bees, and the lovely ‘August Scouts’ that grew on the apple tree near by and the mountain ash with its red berries at the north east corner of the house -- and the row of balm o’ gileads.”41 James wrote that it was “a large two-story house, probably of 8-10 rooms, white, and shabby, but with two huge locust trees standing in the front yard, north of the house. I distinctly remember lying on my back beneath those trees, looking up through masses of white blossoms and listening to the hum of a million bees.” He recalled the farm horses, Monty and Carl, the smells of the harness room in the barn, and the peach tree that children could climb to get the fruit.42 From the house, he thought later, he had been able to see the state-line marker on “Brandy Brow,” the hill to the west, standing on the southern boundary of New Hampshire. Years later, he made maps to show features of the place where he was born (Appendix C).
When Johnson died on December 3, 1874, Abigail, now almost 80 and ill, found herself dependent upon John and Mary. It was difficult for everyone, but especially for Mary, who maintained the daily life of a farm family and endured repeated pregnancies over the next five years. Life on the farm, where most needs had to be met from the land, exhausted Mary and took John’s constant effort as well. Abigail’s growing senility required Mary’s constant vigilance.43
But perhaps Abigail had moments of great clarity. It appears that at age eighty-seven and nine months she had suffered as much as she could stand. She struggled up the stairs into the attic of the family home and hanged herself.44 It was September 18, 1882. She was buried with Johnson in Merrimac in the Church Street Cemetery near the front.
We think that Mary, for some months, had been ill, exhausted and losing weight. If she had seen a doctor, he might have told her that he suspected “consumption,” that is, tuberculosis. Indeed, Mary might already have thought of this, having seen friends losing ground to tuberculosis, so common in those years. Just 37, with a house full of children, she was more and more tired, and finally bedridden. James later recalled the night the children were gathered in her room so that she might say goodby. It was October 13, 1882, less than a month since their grandmother Abigail’s death. The official report named both tuberculosis and pneumonia as causes of death.45
The family that gathered for Mary’s funeral must have been alarmed at John’s condition. We believe he was in obvious pain, as he had been often since the war, but it was getting worse. When he tried to eat, his stomach held the food, his intestines accepting it only slowly. Whether from his wartime accident with the army horses, or from some other chronic inflammation, the exit from his stomach was partially blocked.46 The remedies the doctors gave provided little relief from pain. Now he was probably thinner and weaker, unable to eat enough to sustain himself. Despite the care that family and friends must have given as the family’s losses mounted, John survived only to November 7, just 25 days after Mary’s death.47
Grandfather Stephen Fellows, the owner of a box factory in Brentwood,
N.H., called the orphans’ aunts and uncles and John’s friends from the GAR Post to Hadley Road, and there parceled out the six children to homes, including his own, in nearby towns. Each child was given a cup and saucer from the mother’s china closet.48
To preserve their close ties, the Tucker orphans, starting about 1892, circulated a Round-Robin letter for over four decades. When the bundle of six letters arrived at one’s door, the recipient took his or her well-examined letter from the bottom of the stack, read the five remaining ones written more recently by brothers and sisters, and composed a new letter of greetings and news. As the package made its rounds, each one would follow the pattern, adding a fresh letter and sending it on. By October of 1924, almost a thousand letters had been written, as shown by Maud’s letter of the 24th, numbered 992 and the only one of hers that we have found. Reunions were held in New England even when some had to travel from Oklahoma, New Orleans, or Los Angeles.
Their dedication to each other -- and to the memories of their parents -- sustained them well.
Perspectives
From family records or through the recounting of family stories, Abigail Chase Peaslee Tucker may have known her ancestry leading back five generations to immigrant ancestor Aquila Chase (called “Mariner”) of Hampton (June 1640) and Newbury (1646). He is said to be the first river pilot hired to bring ships across the bar at the mouth of the Merrimac River. He and wife Ann are now remembered for having been fined by the church for picking peas on the Sabbath.49
Major writers of Massachusetts were Abigail’s contemporaries. Her neighbor in Amesbury, family friend from her first husband’s Society of Friends’ Monthly Meeting days and distant cousin to her first four children, was John Greenleaf Whittier, an admired and prolific poet (“Snow-Bound”) and a dedicated abolitionist. Elsewhere in Massachusetts were Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature and “Self Reliance”), Henry David Thoreau (Walden and “Civil Disobedience”), Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables), and Herman Melville, (Redburn and Moby-Dick). The 1840s and 1850s were their most productive years, and a new American literature was created.
Abigail’s life bridged most of the nineteenth century, from the second US Census (1800) to the ninth (1880). In 1794, the year she was born, President Washington ordered the construction of the USS Constitution and five other frigates, the beginnings of the nation’s navy. In the 1820s and 1830s, the Erie Canal was built and enlarged, opening the Midwest to a new wave of migration and creating a way for the wealth of farm products to move to the rapidly growing city and port of New York. Abigail was a witness to the rise of industry based on coal, the coming of the railroads, and the discovery of oil. She lived during a period of great social debate and struggle: the movement to abolish slavery in the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s and the rise of the Women’s Movement in the 1850s. She was deeply troubled by the Civil War and by the risk her son John faced. Perhaps she thought of Whittier -- or sent him a warm note of appreciation -- when Abraham Lincoln ended slavery with his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation. She was witness to the moment when the nation marked its Centennial in 1876. We hope that her son John marched in the July 4th parade with the members of his post of the Grand Army of the Republic to receive his community’s applause and appreciation. Perhaps some of Abigail’s thirty-three grandchildren came to visit her.
Seven generations of descendants of Abigail Chase Peaslee Tucker have shared the nation and world that were under construction in her time.
Don W. Woodworth
Sun City, California
July 12, 2013
woodworthdw@yahoo.com
Notes:
1. Newton, New Hampshire, Vital Records (hereinafter Newton VRs) show Abigail’s birth as 21 Dec 1794, and I have used that date as most reliable because it was reported near the time of her birth. However, we see that a year-earlier date, 1793, is given in some family records on the Internet, following Merrimac VRs and the gravestone stating her age at death was “88 YRS. 9 MOS.” The 1793 date of birth and the extra year on the gravestone are the fault of an informant. We seek corrections in the genealogical posts.
2. Merrimac VRs and gravestone. The death date is reported as 1844, not 1882, in some online family trees. Merrimac was created in 1876 from the western part of Amesbury where the Tuckers lived.
3. The original record of Abigail’s first marriage is reported lost in a fire at Newton. The New Hampshire VRs office also is unable to certify the marriage at Newton or elsewhere, probably due to the fire. In the absence of the original, we rely upon a marriage record that is a recent photocopy of an old transcription presumed to be of the lost original record of the marriage, the transcription found in Hampstead, NH, and provided by Deputy Town Clerk Arline M. Grant. The same names and date are shown in “New Hampshire Marriages 1720-1920,” but without the important detail that would identify James, noted in the full transcription from Hampstead which reads: “Novemr 11th 1812 James Peaslee Jur with Abigail Chase both of Newtown.” The use of “Jur” following the name identifies Peaslee as a Jurist, that is, a practicing attorney or judge (not a “Junior” since his father is Edmond). This document, then, is a substantial proof when connected to Peaslee’s other professional title, “Esquire of Newton,” found in the burial record [notes 4 and 5 below]. Taken together, the two documents referring to the law as his profession establish the identity of this James Peaslee apart from others of the same name in this period. Moreover, by this document from Hampstead, we can confirm the date of his marriage to Abigail Chase, though not the place, which we presume to be Newton where both families were living, rather than Hampstead, some 13 miles distant, where this transcription was found.
4. The record of James’ birth (at Newton 20 Oct 1785) is a transcription from the original (reported lost to fire), the transcription made by D. Frank Battles, Clerk of Newton, for the State of New Hampshire, dated January 1906, and found in “New Hampshire Births, Early to 1900.” The first name is missing, but is confirmed for James by the 20 Oct 1785 birth date and the reported age of 36 at death in 1821 [note 5]. This transcribed record names Edmond and Abagail Peaslee as parents. (These records clear up confusion with another James Peaslee born in 1788 in Weare, NH who married Abigail Blake, 25 Nov 1813.)
5. In an email dated 20 August 2011, Bill Landry, President of the Newton Historical Society and writing as a member of the Newton Cemetery Trustees, provides a burial record showing that James Peaslee, Esquire, age 36, died 21 Nov 1821 and was buried in the Quaker Grove Cemetery on Peaslee Crossing Road in Newton. Seven Peaslee grave records, including James’s, were transcribed by an unknown hand and deposited at Hampstead, NH, a copy provided by Town Clerk Patricia Curran for this study.
6. Amesbury VRs for the marriage of Abigail and Johnson; Merrimac VRs for his death.
7. Sources for the section on children include the Newton VRs for the Peaslee children and Amesbury VRs and Merrimac VRs for the Tucker children. In addition, the Rockingham County, NH, Probate records (Dockets #10396 and #12832) name the children of James Peaslee as minors and heirs. (Appendix A has documents from both dockets.) Family records compiled by Maud Tucker Smith and Edith Tucker Woodworth in the 1920s were helpful in initiating searches.
8. Abigail’s parents, Daniel and Hannah Chase, are confirmed by Newton VRs. The names of the children and the birth order are taken from a family record at Ancestry.com that has been only partly verified. Salley and Polley have New Hampshire birth records found in digital files.
9. The local Congregational church attended by Francis and Abner Chase at Amesbury had a minister who was “unconverted,” that is, had not been reborn in the Spirit. The Chases (following Reverend George Whitefield, the British evangelist who was a leading voice in the “Great Awakening” in the colonies in the 1740s) believed the lack of a conversion made the pastor unqualified to preach. They stayed away. For failing to attend public services from 1747 to 1749, both Francis and Abner Chase were under church discipline, and were reprimanded by committees that visited them periodically. In 1750, according to a document written by Francis, a small group was formed and struggled to win converts from the established church, and by 1755 was strong enough to organize at Newton a Baptist Church with Francis Chase as Clerk. It was the first in New Hampshire [and is still active as the First Baptist Church of Newton -- Author’s note]. This account is drawn from Armitage, Thomas, A History of the Baptists, “The Baptists of North Carolina, Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont and Georgia” (no date or publisher given). (Republished in digital format by The Reformed Reader, 1999). Website: http://www.reformedreader.org/history/armitage/ch10.htm
10. When Hannah Chase died on June 18, 1819, Whittier, at twelve, had not the skill and maturity this poem required. However, he and his parents, neighbors in nearby Haverhill, would have shared the community’s sense of loss with the Chases and the Peaslees of Newtown. Moreover, he and his parents in nearby Haverhill had two personal connections to the Chases of Newton. Whittier’s father, John Whittier, and James Peaslee, Hannah’s brother-in-law through his marriage to Hannah’s sister, Abigail
Chase, would have had a close connection through the Society of Friends Monthly Meeting in Amesbury. (Whittier notes his parent’s attendance in an 1882 letter cited below in the fourth paragraph of this footnote.) Moreover, John G. Whittier and James Peaslee were third cousins descended from Joseph (2) Whittier and Ruth Barnard, the connection made when Whittier’s great-grandmother, Mary Peaslee, married Joseph (3) Whittier.
Although “Suicide Pond” was later viewed as a direct tribute to Hannah, it was written probably fifteen years later, say, after 1826 (the year of his first published poem) and probably closer to its first publication in New-England Magazine, Vol. 6 (May, 1834), 419-420. (This printing, scanned, enlarged, and arranged as a single page, is shown in Appendix B and in the website below.) Whittier’s decision to include in Stanza 7 a girl with “dark hair on her pure white brow,” and with details of her dress, ring, and necklace -- such a decision likely reflects both the grief the young boy felt at Hannah’s death and the mature man’s understanding of how the oft-repeated story might be heightened in this poem of a pond made dark and ominous by its tragic history.
The original printing of the poem on two pages, as cited in the paragraph above, may be found here, the ninth item listed: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpcoop/moahtml/title/lists/nwen_V6I5.html
Whittier’s autobiographical letter (dated “5th MO. 1882”) tells of the gift of his first book of poetry, a gift that introduced him, at 14 (thus 1821 or 1822) to Robert Burns’ Scottish poems and turned him to writing poetry. The letter may be read here:
http://www.kimopress.com/biograph.htm
In Newton, New Hampshire, where Hannah lived, and probably in nearby Haverhill and Amesbury, Massachusetts, towns where Whittier lived, a belief persisted that Hannah’s death inspired John Greenleaf Whittier to write “Suicide Pond.” Jacklyn Heffner, employed by Newton through a federal jobs program to research the town’s records, wrote ”In Memory Of” (published in a paper or magazine, marked “WWW,” probably at Newton, dated May 30, 1978), to honor the women of Newton that she found recorded in burial records. She writes, “Also in this family cemetery is Hannah Chase, AE 22, quite famous in a way, because John G. Whittier wrote a poem of her tragic death.” (She includes Stanza 8.) Her assertion might have come from hearing the account from friends and colleagues or from reading it in an earlier publication at Newton (Newton, New Hampshire, 1749 --1974, 225th Anniversary Celebration, “The Chase Cemetery,” 18-20) where the entire poem appears. It seems that most sources, oral and print, treat the poem as Whittier’s direct tribute to the historical Hannah Chase, not recognizing that perhaps fifteen years elapsed before the poem was published as a nature and landscape poem.
11. Bill Landry [note 5].
12. Probate records for the Peaslee estate in New Hampshire are cited in note 7 above. On September 10, 1834, Abigail asked Rockingham County Probate to set off her dower rights (called “thirds”) in the estate; Amos Currier, acting as guardian, asked for the partition of the remaining properties for the four minor children, one of whom, Edmund, would be 21 in a year. We include in Appendix A four documents, two with Abigail’s signature, addressing these requests. We have not been able to examine Essex County deeds. However, one property in Amesbury (in Essex County, Massachusetts) is noted in Rockingham County Probate Docket #12832, as part of the division of property, and the formal transfer would have been recorded in Essex County.
13. The denial of women’s rights to property was a central issue in the “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolution” composed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, then read, edited, and passed at the Seneca Falls Conference in 1848, a conference called to demand the rights of women in a society dominated by men. The entire document presents a rich commentary on the condition of women. The fifth and sixth complaints list two of the “repeated injuries on the part of man toward woman”: “He has made her, if married, in the eyes of the law, civilly dead,” and “He has taken from her all right in property even to the wages she earns.”
Website: http://ecssba.rutgers.edu/docs/seneca.html
14. These details of the life of Dr. Peaslee, here and following, unless otherwise noted, are from Dr. Herbert Thoms’ introduction to “Some Letters by Edmund Randolph Peaslee . . .” in Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, 17 (July 1945): 685-704. The letters, written in 1838 to close friend Amasa Kinne about their plans for medical degrees, include illuminating details of his life. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2601773/
15. This note was located by James Irwin Tucker. His son, Ted S. Tucker, provided a copy for my use in 1985.
16. The two centuries from 1650 to 1850 (called by some “The Little Ice Age”) were cold around the world due to natural variations including the tilt of the Earth and its distance from the sun. However, the summer of 1816 was exceptionally brutal due to a massive volcanic eruption in Asia in 1815. That summer and following winter -- when many lives (by one estimate, 100,000) were lost in New England, Canada, and Europe -- may be searched as “the year without a summer.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer
17. Whittier’s Justice and Expediency, Or Slavery Considered with a View to its Rightful and Effectual Remedy, Abolition (1833) is a large, documented, and well-argued paper that takes the Declaration of Independence as a statement of national ideals by which to judge (and condemn) the continuing ownership and forced labor of slaves. He demands, in the cause of justice, an immediate abolition of slavery. He recognizes that this demand will make him a pariah in his own land. Indeed, he was later assaulted in Concord and his newspaper office in Philadelphia was burned. See [note 10] Whittier, J.G., “Whittier’s Autobiography, in Letter Form,” Amesbury (5th Mo., 1882) in the second website below.
Websites: http://www.humanitiesweb.org/human.php?s=l&p=c&a=p&ID=21485&c=342
http://www.kimopress.com/biograph.htm
18. William Lloyd Garrison had earlier invited Whittier into the struggle to end
slavery. Now that a great turning point might be reached, Garrison wanted Whittier to be present as a delegate. The young poet and activist considered his participation, especially his signing of the Conference Declaration at Philadelphia, his most important act.
Website: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Greenleaf_Whittier#Abolitionist_activity
19. John S. Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice: The Very Real Threat of Comet and Asteroid Bombardment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 46.
20. Alexander C. Twining, a tutor at Yale, provided observations and comments that appeared in 1834 in American Journal of Science, quoted by John S. Lewis, Rain of Iron and Ice [note 19], 46.
21. This appraisal of the meteor shower is taken from Lewis [note 19].
22. Thoms, “Some Letters,” [note 14]. Peaslee’s passion and talent for languages are remarkable for a man of 24. Although most schools for boys gave a good beginning in Latin (and in Greek for some able students), Peaslee’s interest persisted, and he added Italian to the list he gives here, as noted by Thoms.
23. Peaslee’s letter to Kinne, p. 688 in Herbert Thoms, “Some Letters” [note 14]. He is writing on January 16, 1838, and the trip he plans will last from February 1 to March 2. His reasons for such a demanding trip in winter may be two: he may have classmates in several of these places, and he may wish to see medical schools and hospitals. To this point, we note he leaves for study in Europe in 1841, the year after he has his medical degree.
24. Since state governments chartered the corporations, rail lines were not always neatly connected. In the early years, say 1832 to 1845, steamboats, stagecoaches, and horse-drawn cars were used to complete the connections. The crossing of Long Island Sound was eventually supplanted by rail, at some cost to Stonington’s role as a transportation hub. Website:
http://www.theresident.com/2009/03/04/railroads-in-stonington/
25. Lacking reference to land records for Essex County, we take as guides two topographical maps (Appendix C) marked about 1950 by James Irwin Tucker after a visit to his sister in Plaistow, N.H. He shows “Tucker Hill” (Titcomb Hill) at the intersection of Birch Meadow Road and Route 110 on the west side of Amesbury (now Merrimac). James, a skilled surveyor and holder of engineering and law degrees, was adept in the use of maps. In family matters such as the location of the grandparents’ home, James had the help of his sister Maud, long a resident in nearby Plaistow. On the same map, the Hadley Road home is shown at the state line and marked “JIT’s birthplace.” We have visited the sites of both homes. An old house was on Titcomb Hill in 1986 -- not proved to be the one Elisha built. The site on Hadley Road has a newer house.
Note: James Irwin Tucker wrote Contracts in Engineering, an important McGraw-Hill text on contract law, published in 1910 and in editions he prepared as late as 1947, a remarkable run for a textbook. A second book, The American Road: A Non-engineering Manual for Practical Road Builders (1916), gave plain directions -- to non-engineers and civil engineers alike -- for building earthen roads, and stands as a reminder of the labors of the nation’s early road builders in a time when macadam roads were too expensive to be common and mud roads were everywhere. The need to replace rutted wagon roads with good earthen roads seldom occurs to us now. The photographs of those awful roads and the references to the horse’s limitations in hauling on uphill grades add period flavor to an expert’s text. The book, with many photographs, has been digitized by Google at this website:
http://www.archive.org/details/americanroadano00tuckgoog
26. The direct appointment of Dr. Peaslee to full professorships reflects a very different academic ranking system than the one presently used. Additionally, he is being recognized, at 27, for his degree from Yale’s Medical College, for his impressive lectures, and for his relevant accomplishments, including study in Europe.
27. U. S. Census for 1840, Amesbury [indexed incorrectly as “Amesburg” in Ancestry.com], Essex, Massachusetts, sheet 3, shows Johnson T. Tucker and family, his wife and children shown by gender and age, not names. We have not been able to examine land and probate records for the properties that Abigail or Johnson may have inherited or purchased in Essex County, but have found that one in Amesbury was counted in the 1834 distributions to Abigail and children [note 12].
Note: This 1840 Census document should be added to the archives of the Tucker and allied families. The researcher faces some difficulties caused, first, by the misspelling of the town’s name (as “Amesburg”) in the index at Ancestry.com and, second, by the Census format in 1840 in which wife and children and others living with them were grouped by age and gender categories, not by name, beside the father’s name. That this is the correct family is confirmed by seeing that each of the four children at home was indicated by a mark in the correct age column.
28. Hannah, alternatively, in 1838 might have been at New London, Connecticut, the home of Greenwich Academy, but that was a school in decline in those years, with eight boys and girls enrolled in 1839. New London Academy in New Hampshire, in contrast, enrolled 137 girls and boys over its first two quarters, including 70 from other towns,
according to its first catalog, dated Nov. 27, 1838, reported in Myra B. Lord’s 1899 History of New London, p. 300, found in this website:
http://www.archive.org/stream/historyoftownofn00lord/historyoftownofn00lord_djvu.txt
Abigail would have elected to have Hannah attend this more active and vital Academy. Moreover, Susan F. Colby, its first principal, was a strong supporter for an academic program for girls similar to and equal to that offered to boys:
http://www.colby-sawyer.edu/nhwomenscaucus/program/sponsors/susan-f-colby/
29. In 1870, the census taker found two of Daniel’s eleven children, Mary J. Peaslee, 19, and Freddie C., 12, at his sister Hannah’s house in Lynn, Massachusetts and recorded them, creating the impression they are her children.
30. U.S. Census for 1850, Amesbury, Essex, Massachusetts, sheet 40, lines 28-32.
31. “Selected U. S. Federal Census Non-Population Schedules, 1850-1880” in
Ancestry.com database. [Available by subscription or at historical societies.] Enter this title in quotes in the “Advanced” search engine under “Keyword.” Enter Johnson T. Tucker, with “lived at” as “Amesbury, Essex, Massachusetts.” Both 1850 and 1860 records for the Tucker farm will appear among the first ten items. (Many historical societies subscribe to Ancestry.com. We do not find any other digital source for these farm records; microfilm records may be found at state historical societies.)
32. Probably the daguerreotype was given for safekeeping in 1882 to Maud Tucker, Abigail’s granddaughter and the first child of Abigail’s son, John Calvin Tucker, and daughter-in-law, Mary Antoinette Fellows Tucker. It was stored with paper photographs of John and Mary and came finally to Abigail’s great-granddaughter, Olive Smith Haddock of Gilford, NH, who loaned it for this study. The combined and careful storage over three generations (and 130 years) is the basis for my conclusion that this is an image of Abigail and Johnson.
33. Fordyce Barker, Biographic Tribute [to Edmund Randolph Peaslee]: Read Before the New York Academy of Medicine, February 7th, 1878 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1878), 19. Website: http://www.archive.org/details/biographicaltri00barkgoog/
34. While Dr. Peaslee said that Human Histology (1857) was just a reworking of a French text on microscopic examination of human tissues, we believe that it was largely original and probably even exhaustive in its treatment, reflecting Peaslee’s work habits and experience. From Fordyce Barker’s Biographic Tribute [note 33], we learn that he was known for his heavy workload, his high standards, and his generosity in giving credit to others. It would be reasonable to expect this 1857 book was systematic and original, as was his later and more famous book, Ovarian Tumors: Their Pathology, Diagnosis, and Treatment (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1872). Website: http://www.archive.org/details/ovariantumorsth00peasgoog
35. Herbert Thoms in his introduction to “Some Letters” [note 14] and Fordyce Barker in his Biographical Tribute [note 33] examine the extensive and important positions Peaslee held in the medical profession and the honors he received.
36. Barbara L Krieger, Archives Assistant, Dartmouth College Library, in a letter and with documents, November 16, 1995, provided early guidance to Dr. Peaslee’s books and the honorary degree (L.L.D.) that Dartmouth awarded him in 1859. His books, monographs, and letters are in the Library’s archives.
37. John Calvin Tucker to his father, Johnson, in Amesbury, January 31, 1862 from Camp Sumner, Washington, D.C. (transcription, the original now in other hands).
38. An application for a pension on behalf of the children was made, probably at the direction of Stephen Fellows. The sum of $1,297.00 was received in recognition of John’s Civil War service (Rockingham County Probate # 3895). In support of the application, an affidavit given by John’s half-sister, Hannah C. Nye, and Sarah A. Shaw, both of Lynn, said that John had been in severe pain and too ill to leave his bed in December, 1869, was often attended by a doctor, and afterwards was unable to work for five months. (This affidavit from the National Archives was provided by Bill Hickey, a Civil War re-enactor in Braintree, Massachusetts.) John’s children believed that their father’s suffering was caused by abdominal lesions from internal injuries that occurred when the second horse’s reins, secured around their father’s waist, dragged him out of the saddle and into the streambed. At the time of the injury, John refused to be taken to the hospital, perhaps because he feared the horse he had trained and relied upon in battle would be reassigned in his absence.
39. John’s Second Lieutenant, Charles M. Fripp, later testified to the place and time of the bullet wound -- early November, 1864, at or near Petersburg, Virginia -- in an undated affidavit supporting a pension application for John’s children. He had seen John in the hospital, was shown the wound, thought it was “evidently made by a musket ball,” and said it did “not seem severe.” We note John’s term of service (three years to October 31) was close to expiration or had expired when the wound occurred, and he was discharged November 10 because the term was up. (Document provided by Bill Hickey, Braintree, Massachusetts.) James Irwin Tucker, Abigail’s grandson, recalled in memoirs that as a child he saw his father treating the wound in his leg every evening. Dorothy Tucker Hart included excerpts in her (unpublished) biography of her father, Green on Top, provided by Ted S. Tucker in 1986. This book is important for its richly detailed account of family experience and rural life in the 1870s. Hart’s memoir (retitled Tucker Family History) has been edited and circulated in digital format by Dorothy Belle Hart Christenson.
40. U. S. Census for 1870, Amesbury, Essex, Massachusetts, sheet 65, lines 35-39.
41. Maud Tucker Smith in a Round Robin letter written at Plaistow, NH, dated October 7, 1924, a copy provided by a family member, Olive Smith Haddock. The Balm of Gilead is a species of Poplar whose resinous buds could be boiled to produce a soothing substance, hence a “balm.” The tree of this name in the Bible is a smaller and evergreen Balsam, the sap of which was praised for its effect. Note: apart from the letters by James, few of the more than 900 letters (Maud’s is numbered 992) have been found, although family tradition says each writer saved his or her own letters.
42. James Irwin Tucker, “The Tuckers and New England: Genealogical (and other) Studies,” a typescript dated “about 1950,” 19. These details and the quote are among the richest of several passages to be found in letters and essays written to preserve his New England experiences. Though only five when he had to leave his home, James had many fond memories of childhood there and in Brentwood, and believed -- though he was not wholly convinced -- that he must have been able to see the marker from his room in the Hadley Road home. Among his addenda to his memoir are topographical maps, included as Appendix C.
43. Hart, Green on Top [note 39], 7. To the same point, James Irwin Tucker writes, “My grandmother Tucker (Abigail Chase Peaslee) Johnson’s wife, became senile and had to be restrained during the last few years of her life, and she was said to be a great trial to my mother, I have heard.” (“The Tuckers and New England” [note 42], 13.) The quote makes clear that he depends on someone for this information, probably his sister Maud, a witness (to age 12) to the events of daily life in the household.
44. Hart, Green on Top [note 39], 7. Abigail’s death certificate reads simply, “old age” (Merrimac VRs). For the location of the meeting with aunts and uncles, read “Hadley Road” for “Bradley Road” in early editions of this book.
45. Mary’s death certificate (Merrimac VRs) reported the cause of death as “Phthisis Pulmonalis [Tuberculosis of the lungs] and Bronch Pneumonia.”
46. A clerk’s transcription of John’s death certificate (Merrimac VRs) reported the cause of death as “Inanition inflammatory thickening of Pylonis [Pylorus].” The Pylorus is the opening of the stomach to the intestines. The condition of the Pylorus included, in the order of the terms above, exhaustion (as from lack of food and water), inflammation, and thickening of the Pylorus. In the text, I have attributed symptoms to John -- pain, weakness and loss of weight -- that would be consistent with a fatal outcome. Whether this was the same condition that made him bedridden in December and January of 1869, we cannot know, as indeed we cannot know whether the accident with the Army horses was the cause. From the information given, we conclude that an autopsy was done.
47. James Irwin Tucker, in a Round Robin letter to his brother and sisters, dated
1 January 1905 and quoted by Hart, Green on Top [note 39], at page 37, writes that he and sister Blanche, in a visit the previous Memorial Day, had seen Tucker graves of three generations: John and Mary, John’s parents, Abigail and Johnson, and his grandparents, Elisha Sanborn Tucker and Mehitable (Davis) Tucker.
48. Hart, Green on Top, [note 39], 9-10. Other keepsakes included the daguerreotype and paper photographs to Maud and a teapot to Edith.
49. Aquila Chase and Ann Wheeler Chase are immigrant ancestors who made their place in town and church history by picking peas on the Sabbath and paying a fine imposed by the church. This matter and Aquila’s assignments as river pilot for Hampton and Newbury are taken from John Carroll Chase and George Walter Chamberlain, Seven Generations of the Descendants of Aquila and Thomas Chase (Haverhill, Mass.: Record Publishing Company, 1928). Relevant excerpts are available here: http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~brookefamily/chaseaquila.htm
APPENDIX
A. DOCUMENTS: From Rockingham County Probate, showing the signatures of Abigail Peaslee (January 10, 1822) and of Abigail Tucker (September 10, 1834). Another shows the names of the four Peaslee children represented before the Court by a guardian appointed for this occasion..
B. POEM: We show “Suicide Pond” in the first version, published anonymously in April, 1834. We have taken the original text and changed its appearance by making one page from the original two and by enlarging it to make it clearer. The typeface is the original, enlarged; the type was set by hand, letter by letter, each page locked in forms, and placed in the press.
C. MAPS: Using topographical maps from the U. S. Geological Service, James Irwin Tucker, grandson of Abigail, marked the location of his birthplace (and thus Abigail’s last home with John and Mary Tucker) on [West] Hadley Road at the state line. Two maps are marked “J.I.T. born” or “J.I.T. birthplace,” each with an arrow and a square dot. Brandy Brow and “Tucker Hill” [Titcomb Hill] are shown as well.
D. DAGUERREOTYPE: believed to be Abigail and Johnson Tucker, in a photograph on a silver plate backed by copper, made about 1855 by an anonymous daguerreotypist. Here Abigail is close to 61, Johnson about 55. Loaned by Olive Smith Haddock of Gilford, NH. This important image was kept over 130 years with two paper photographs of Abigail’s and Johnson’s son, John Calvin Tucker, and his wife, Mary Antoinette Fellows Tucker, and handed down in the family of their first child, Maud Tucker Smith.
