TheDay, CT
Jan 9 2005

Historian’s Contribution Beyond Question

By STEVEN SLOSBERG
Day Staff Columnist

This afternoon at the Shaw Mansion in New London, Nancy Steenburg
will be telling stories about the early 19th century historian and
indefatigably curious reporter, Frances Manwaring Caulkins.

Kin-keeper, perhaps, is a more gentrified synonym for her devotion.
But then, as Steenburg, a Mystic resident and assistant professor of
history at the University of Connecticut at Avery Point, allows,
intrepid snoop also works.

After all, Caulkins produced absorbingly researched and perennially
popular histories of Norwich and New London as well as some 35
handwritten books of genealogies of New London families, an
exhaustive collection of local gravestone records, compendiums of
plants she collected throughout her life, abolitionist poems,
numerous Sunday School tracts and scores upon scores of essays,
articles and obituaries for papers of the day, including The
Repository and the Star.

She was born in New London in 1795 and died in New London in 1869.
She is buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery. She never married.

Steenburg, who is to begin her talk at 2 p.m. today as part of the
New London County Historical Society’s Second Sunday programs,
offered a preview last week. A couple of Caulkins tidbits she
discussed speak, as it were, volumes.

One is whether Caulkins was illegitimate. Another suggests that in
that era of missionary fervor, Caulkins’ religious writings soared
the evangelical heights, with well over a million copies in print.

About Caulkins’ birth, Steenburg could find no documented evidence
that her mother and father ever married. Such common-law trysting
might not have been unusual. It’s also possible the parents eloped to
Rhode Island. Caulkins’ father died before she was born – when the
mother, Fanny Manwaring Caulkins, was four months pregnant. The
mother was 19 and had given birth to another child when she was 16.
Several years after Frances was born, Fanny married a shoemaker.

A portrait of Caulkins shows her to be an attractive, petite,
dark-haired woman. She was certainly possessed of forceful
personality, one that might have intimidated men. But the fact that
Caulkins didn’t marry also might be attributed to a social stigma
about her birth.

However, Steenburg countered her own speculation about the
illegitimacy, pointing out that Caulkins eventually ran schools for
young girls in Norwich and New London. Would parents of that time,
Steenburg wondered, entrust their daughters to a woman born out of
wedlock?

What’s more certifiable is Caulkins’ success as the author of Sunday
School primers for the American Tract Society.

In 1834, after emerging as a leader in local abolitionist causes,
Caulkins, possibly as a consequence of her politics, closed her
boarding school for girls in Norwich. She was secretary of the
Norwich Female Anti-Slavery Society. Resistance to the anti-slavery
movement was substantial and exacting. An abolitionist minister was
driven out of Norwich. After closing her school, Caulkins moved to
New York and began writing for the American Tract Society.

This was a religious and missionary publication society and is still
in existence, based since 1977 in Garland, Texas, and listing Billy
Graham and Jerry Falwell among its supporters.

Two `premium tracts’ written by Caulkins – `Do Your Children
Reverence the Sabbath?’ and `The Pequot of a Hundred Years’ – had a
combined printing of 1,058,000 copies, according to Caulkins’
half-brother, Henry Havens, a prominent merchant in New London.
Another of her pamphlets had a run of 950,000, including thousands of
copies in Armenian.

Caulkins returned to New London in 1842 and published her history of
Norwich, which won her honorary membership in the august and all-male
Massachusetts Historical Society. Apparently there was no Connecticut
Historical Society. She then turned to her history of New London,
wrote for local newspapers, and helped found the New London Ladies
Seamen Society to attend to the spiritual and material needs of
sailors and their families. She died in 1869.

She died, said Steenburg, questioning whether she’d done anything
worthwhile with her life. She should listen to Steenburg’s talk
today.

This is the opinion of Steven Slosberg.