III
CHARLOTTE
Mrs. Rowson's stories are pervaded by
old-fashioned sentiment, which it has been the
custom nowadays to mention as if it were a
reproach. Sentiment they unquestionably are;
but whether this be a reproach, may be left an
open question. Our own period is distinctly not
sentimental age at least in so far concerns the
expression of sentiment about which we have
grown somewhat squeamish. Human nature,
however, has not changed. The average man
and woman remain very much what their
forbears for many generations have been in their
susceptibility to emotion.
The situations Mrs. Rowson describes, the
sympathies she evokes, appeal to what is
elemental in our nature and what also eternal.
Rudimentary as to right
thinking and right acting they may be, but they
are wholesome, sane, and true all the same. As
old as the hills, we may call this sentiment, but it
will last with the hills themselves, immovable and
fundamental in all our acts and thoughts, if not in
our actual speech.
Mrs. Rowson was not gifted so much with
creative imagination as with the power to
delineate every-day human emotions. The
situations which could move her were not those
which she herself might have created, but those
which she knew to have existed in the life she
had seen. She wished always to draw some
potent moral from them, holding up for
emulation the staple virtues which keep the world
strong and make it possible for men and women
to be happy in
one another's society: She was born to be a
teacher, and a notable teacher she became in
Boston. In her books she aimed also to teach,
and in doing so adopted what we may call the
"direct
process" style in fiction, taking her scenes and
characters from real life. She began in this way
with "Victoria"; she made "Rebecca"
autobiographical, and one or two other books
partly autobiographical; and she wrote plays that
were photographic pictures of things she had,
seen. When she wrote "Charlotte" she founded a
novelette on a tragedy that had occurred in her
own day, the incidents in which she knew to be
true, and the characters persons who once had
been of flesh and blood, and at least two of whom
she herself had personally known.
"A tale of truth" Mrs. Rowson declared
"Charlotte Temple" to be, and Mr. Nason
describes it as "a simple record of events as they
happened, and as truthful as Macaulay's sketch of
Charles I." Writing of the motive of the story, Mr.
Nason says Mrs. Rowson had seen so much of
the scandalous lives of land and naval officers in
that period that she
"determined to warn her countrywomen against
their seductive
arts."
[5]
Charlotte is described by
Mr. Nason as "a young lady of great personal
beauty, and daughter of a clergyman who, it is
affirmed, was the younger son of the family of
the Earl of Derby "-that is, of the Stanley family.
Mrs. Rowson, in the story, seems to refer to this
family in such expressions as "the Earl of D-,"
and "the Countess of D-."
Mr. Nason then explains that it was
by a lieutenant in the British Army, who was
afterward a colonel, and was then in service, that
Charlotte, in 1774, was induced "to leave her home
and embark with him and his regiment for New
York, where he most cruelly abandoned her as
Mrs. Rowson faithfully and tragically relates." Mrs.
Rowson, in the Preface to "Charlotte Temple,"
printed two years after the death of the officer who
is accepted as the original of Montraville, said:
"The circumstances on which I have founded this
novel were related to me some little time since by
an old
lady
[6]
who had personally known Charlotte, tho
she concealed
the real names of the characters, and likewise the
places where the unfortunate scenes were
acted. I have thrown over the whole
slight veil of fiction, and substituted name and
places according to my own fancy . The
principal characters are now consigned to the silent
tomb: it can therefore hurt the feelings of no one."
Mrs. Rowson had ascertained who the original
characters were, and where the events took
place. When Cobbett assailed her for expressing
sentiments foreign to her heart, she said in the
course of her reply:
"I was myself personally acquainted with
Montraville, and from the most authentic sources
could now trace his history from the period of his
marriage to within a very few late years of his death-a history which would tend to prove that retribution
treads upon the heels of vice, and that, tho not always
apparent, yet even in the midst of splendor and
prosperity, conscience stings the guilty and 'puts
rankles in the vessels of their peace.'"
The year of Charlotte's arrival in New York
was the immediate eve of the Revolutionary War.
The Boston Tea Party had taken place the year
before (December 1773), and in the same month
New
York had sent back to England a ship laden with
tea, the captain of the ship being escorted out of
town with much enthusiasm. In May, 1774,
General Gage had been sent from New York to
Boston as Governor of Massachusetts; on June
the port of Boston had been closed by decree of
Parliament, and in September the, First
Continental Congress had met in Philadelphia.
In the following year actual war began (at
Lexington in April, at Bunker Hill in June), and
eight days after the battle of Bunker Hill,
George
Washington, the new commander of the
American Army, passed through New York to
enter upon his duties in Cambridge.
Here, in New York, English sentiment at that
time was extremely potent, officials owing their
places to direct appointment from London, and
the tone of society in the upper ranks being
distinctly royal. But the people as a mass were
notably patriotic-quite as much so as the people
of any other part of the Colonies. They had
amply proved their loyalty in the Stamp Act
controversy, and in the conflict which, under the
name of the Sons of Liberty, they had had with
British soldiers. Here, in fact, in 1770, had been
shed the first blood of the Revolution. The town,
when Charlotte arrived, was in a state of political
and military turmoil such as it had not known
since the Stamp Act Congress met in Federal Hall
or the Battle of Golden Hill was fought in John
Street.
New York at that time was only third in
population among cities in the Colonies,
Philadelphia and Boston both being larger. Save
for a few houses around Chatham Square, the
built-up parts did not extend north of the present
City Hall Park, then an unnamed piece of vacant
land, described in the Montrésor map of 1775 as
"the intended square or common." The only
highway that led northward from the city first
followed the line
of the Bowery, and then, near the present
Twenty-third Street, divided into Bloomingdale
and Boston Post roads. Along this highway—in
reality a great, and now an historic, thoroughfare --passed each day a varied procession of
carriages, stage coaches, farm wagons, men on
horseback, soldiers in red coats, and work-a-day
pedestrians. Near the south end of the road—that
is, near the beginning of the Bowery as it exists
today, and forming one of the houses in the
Chatham Square neighborhood-stood the cottage
to which Charlotte was taken by her betrayer, the
"small house a few miles from New
York"
[7]
described in the story. The exact place has been
identified by Henry B. Dawson, as follows:
"Below Bull's
Head
[8]
on the same side the
Bowery Lane, at a distance from the street, but
near the corner of the Pell Street
of our day (not then open), in 1767 stood a small
two-story frame building, which was the scene of the
tragedy of Charlotte Temple. A portion of the old
building, removed to the corner of Pell Street, still
remains, being occupied as a drinking-shop, under
the sign of the 'Old Tree House.'"
[9]
The house Mr. Dawson describes is plainly
shown on the "Plan of the City of New York,"
surveyed by Lieutenant Bernard Ratzen, of the
British Army, in 1767, and published with a
dedication to the governor, Sir Henry
Moore. [10]
A
part of this map, embracing the Chatham Square
neighborhood, is here reproduced. Pell Street was
subsequently laid out through land on which
stood Charlotte's
home. It is the next street below Bayard, runs
west to Mott, and is now chiefly inhabited by
Chinamen.
Mr. Dawson wrote in 1861. Since his time that
remnant of Charlotte's home has been supplanted
by a modern building, in which a drinking-shop is
still maintained, the upper floors being used as a
lodging-house of the better class for that,
neighborhood. Over the doorway one still reads
the sign, "The Old Tree, House." This corner of
the Bowery and Pell Street is the northwest
corner. Next door to Charlotte, so that "their
gardens, joined," as stated in the story, lived
Charlotte's friend, Mrs. Beauchamp. It will, be
observed that the Ratzen map shows two
buildings at that point in the Bowery.