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Late in the winter of 1708/9, Samuel Gerrish, a Boston bookseller, began to court Mary Sewall, the 18-year old daughter of Puritan magistrate Samuel Sewall. Judge Sewall was a conscientious father, and like many Puritan fathers believed that he had a right and duty to take an active role in his daughter's selection of a spouse. He had heard "various and uncertain reports" that young Gerrish had previously courted other women and immediately dashed off a letter to Gerrish's father demanding "the naked Truth." Only after receiving a satisfactory reply did Judge Sewall permit the courtship to continue. In August, after a whirlwind six month courtship, the couple married, but the marriage was cut tragically short 15 months later when young Mary died in childbirth. A hundred twenty-nine years later, in 1838, another couple began their courtship. Theodore Dwight Weld, a 39-year old abolitionist, wrote a letter to Angelina Grimke, the daughter of a wealthy, slaveholding South Carolina family who had turned against slavery, in which he disclosed "that for a long time you have had my whole heart." He had "no expectation and almost no hope that [his] feelings are in any degree RECIPROCATED BY YOU." Nevertheless, he asked her to reveal her true feelings. Angelina replied by acknowledging her own love for him: "I feel, my Theodore, that we are the two halves of one whole, a twain one, two bodies animated by one soul and that the Lord has given us to each other."
Like many early nineteenth
century couples, Theodore and Angelina devoted much of their courtship
to disclosing their personal faults and dissecting their reasons
for marriage. They considered romance and passion childish and unreliable
motives for marriage and instead sought a love that was more tender
and rational. Credits: |
