The Peabody sisters of Massachusetts -- Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Mary Peabody Mann, and Sophia Peabody Hawthorne -- were icons of their time: educated women, education pioneers, reformers and Massachusetts religious liberals. Each played a role in the cultural, religious and philosophical Transcendentalist movement.
Their mother, Elizabeth or Eliza Palmer, was a strong influence in their lives. In the generation after the Revolutionary War, especially in Massachusetts (which had approximately one quarter of the U.S. population at the time), one role that women took quite seriously was as the educators of the next generation: Republican Motherhood. These women helped lay the groundwork, through their own example and, for some, through educating their daughters, for another generation of women who took on different challenges than they did, broadening their scope to more public roles in education, reform, and professions.
Eliza Palmer's Story
Her family had long roots in Boston. Eliza's parents, Joseph Pearse Palmer and Elizabeth Hunt, met while he was a student at Harvard. She was then fourteen, and he encouraged her cultural and intellectual development. When he graduated in 1771, the couple eloped and then moved to Boston, where he managed warehouses on the harbor for his father and owned some himself. He became one of the participants in the Boston Tea Party of 1773. When the British troops destroyed warehouses and their contents in revenge, he moved his wife and growing family to his wife's home town of Watertown. He also participated in the Battle of Lexington (1775).
Joseph Pearse Palmer and his father, Joseph Palmer, both fought with the Continental Army, the elder as a General and the younger as an aide to his father and as a Quartermaster General. During the war, Elizabeth moved with daughters Mary and Eliza to her parents' home in Germantown; Eliza later remembered this time as one of relative calm and happiness for them.
General Palmer, the father, had gone into debt to support the Revolution, and when he could not recover, the holder of the note, John Hancock, foreclosed. Joseph Pearce Palmer was also impoverished by the war, and tried running a store, a boardinghouse, and traveling to work in the lumber business.
Betrayal?
While her husband was away, Elizabeth operated the boardinghouse. A boarder with the family, Royall Tyler, a future Chief Justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and a playwright, had been engaged to a daughter of John and Abigail Adams, an engagement broken off by her parents because of concern about his character. When the family could not pay some creditors, he paid the debt, probably keeping them from prison. He eventually married Mary, Eliza's sister.
Later, Eliza anonymously published a story, "Seduction," which was a thinly-disguised story (with some confirmation from other family members) about Royall Tyler's friendship with her father, seduction of her mother, Elizabeth, in his absence, and then Tyler's courtship of and elopement with Eliza's sister, Mary. Two younger sisters, Sophia and Catherine, had family secrets around their true parentage: Sophia was born at a time when Joseph was unlikely to have been the father, as he was traveling, and Catherine's parentage was mysterious: it was rumored that neither Joseph nor Elizabeth were her real parents. (Catherine's son founded Putnam and Sons, an American publishing house.)
Eliza was also horrified that, when Tyler first married her sister Mary, he would do so only as an extra-legal "private" marriage, in order to keep the news from his family. He did not acknowledge Mary publicly as his wife nor take her home to his family in Vermont until she was pregnant with their second child.
Independence
After Joseph died in a construction accident, and Tyler briefly returned to live with the family, leaving Mary and their children in Vermont, Eliza went to live with her father's aunt, Mary Cranch, in Quincy. There, she tried to gain some financial independence. After a brief time as a shopgirl and then an outbreak of yellow fever, Eliza went to work for another distant relative, Elizabeth Shaw Peabody, who was also the sister of Abigail Adams, and was married to Stephen Peabody, a minister and school administrator in New Hampshire. Eliza helped out at home, and though she was drawn to tutoring student boarders, the family discouraged that activity.
She was also drawn to one of the academy's instructors, a distant relative of Stephen's named Nathaniel Peabody (born 1774). Because he was the son of a farmer, Elizabeth and Stephen Peabody discouraged his relationship with their relative, Eliza Palmer -- though Eliza was working as household help, the Peabodys thought him below her social position.
Both Eliza and Nathaniel accepted positions at a school in Andover, Massachusetts, and they married in 1802. In 1804, they moved to Billerica.
