The Thunderous No!

Wallace’s History of Canaan New Hampshire isn’t a cohesive book. Wallace wrote a lot of narrative history, and it’s in there. He also collected a lot of information about the lives of Canaan’s early residents. He thought deeply about human nature and the nature of human society. He kept a diary. But he didn’t pull it together into a book. His son did that years after his father died.

Perhaps that is why now, writing about Walllace’s book, I don’t seem to forge a path through the thing so much as wander around, always finding something interesting along the way. Usually, once something has caught my attention, I drift over to Gary Hamel’s studio and discover that he somehow has been wandering the same paths and seeing the same things.

Grandmother, Gary Hamel, 2024

This week, we reversed the process. Whatever I was going to write about will wait until next week. Gary presented me with five wonderful pieces and asked me to find them in Wallace. It wasn’t hard. It was the whole book.

The pieces Gary handed to me are painted on the last of a supply of old shingles that had once been Proctor’s shed. In the spirit of Wallace, I’m  not going to explain that. If you live in Canaan, you might know Proctor. That’s the thing with all this. The lived lives of so many generations in the same houses over the same ground accrue extra meaning. Things aren’t just what they are, they are part of someone’s else’s life often someone who is long dead.

So Gary used these meaning-encrusted shingles to paint portraits of a family who might have lived in a house sheltered by old wood. They were a generational family. We don’t live that way now, grandparents, children, and grandchildren don’t often share the same house. But in Wallace’s time, it was common. In fact, that’s how Wallace lived. Gary’s portraits are of grandparents, parents and a child. That last portrait, the child, is from a photo. That was an actual child. Gary and I marveled that this apparently actual child looks nothing like what we think of as a child.

William Allen Wallace lived at least three lives as told in his History. The first is the life of his childhood recollections. Those were the men and women who pushed and shoved, trying to make a life in a very unforgiving part of a very new country. Wallace left Canaan and thosew people behind at the age of 15. He didn’t come back until he was nearly 50. His second life, between 15 and 50 was one of writing and adventure.

His career took him to California. He was a journalist and a botanist. He wrote dispatches from the gold mines of California and from newly Mormon Utah. He moved among leaders and explorers. He had hair-raising adventures. He managed to visit Canaan occasionally, but he kept in touch with his family mostly through letters, especially, it seems, his mother and his older brother James Burns Wallace. Whether he named his son after his brother isn't clear, but they share a name.

Grandfather, Gary Hamel, 2024

In 1858, Wallace, then 43 began the transition into his third life. He went home to Canaan for Thanksgiving and fell in love. She said no, more than once. He returned to California and found he could not live without her. He made the arduous journey back to Canaan, but was pulled away again by the Civil War. In 1865, when Wallace was 50 and Mary, his beloved, 27, she finally said yes.

The account of Wallace’s years away from Canaan and his courship of Mary is written by son James and is based on material he found in his father’s diaries which he often quotes from.

The following paragraph is exactly where I began this blog. On page 560. It is when Wallace first decides to remain in Canaan. He had come for Thanksgiving. But my interest in the paragraph then was in the redemption of Jacob Trussell. This time, it’s about Wallace himself. (Paragraph breaks added)

Page 560

He stayed at home [in Canaan] until December 11, and then went to Worcester, then to Boston and Cambridge visiting friends, and on the 16th was back in Worcester, to meet W. P. Weeks and to exact a settlement with Eaton, to whom he had sold his interest in the Spy, and who had not paid him.

Spy was a prominent satirical political publication Wallace had written for extensively. It was a significant abolitionist paper.

He remained there until December 24, and then went to New York where he spent the holidays. On January 6, 1859, he was in Philadelphia and on the 12th set sail for Norfolk and Petersburg, in the interests of the Alta.

Alta is the San Francisco Newspaper Wallace wrote for in California.

He visited Richmond and Fredericksburg. On February 10 he was in Washington, where he remained until February 19, when he went to New York to see Albert Martin, his brother-in-law and a son of Eleazer Martin, off for California.

That breezed by in an instant, but let’s stop to think what it meant in 1858, to go as a journalist to the heart of the secessionist South (Richmond and Fredericksburg). Wallace was a prominent abolitionist.

On March 2 he was in Worcester and on the 17th called on Doctor Gray at Cambridge and gave him all the plants he had collected.

That would likely be Dr. Asa Gray “responsible for establishing systematic botany at Harvard and the United States.” Throughout his sojourn in the Western US, Wallace collected specimens for Dr. Gray.

He returned to Canaan and on the 14th bade good-by to his mother, intending to return to California. He got as far as the depot and came back. He had made up his mind to join the Masons and called upon Jacob Trussell, who gave him a letter to the lodge in Enfield.

And that is the exact spot at which I began this blog a number of weeks ago!

Wallace's rash decision to remain in Canaan is likely because he had fallen in love with the 20-year-old Mary Duncan Currier. She apparently did not share his enthusiasm. She refused him more than once.

Mother, Gary Hamel, 2024

The section of the Wallace history that deals with Wallace’s marriage was and wasn’t written by him. The material is taken from his diary, but when Wallace’s own voice is presented, it is in quotes. James, Wallace’s son, is the author of this section. It is the son who is presenting the story of his mother and father’s courtship. Sort of. He leaves out all the interesting details. But Wallace manages to sneak a few in anyway.

This entry from Wallace’s diary is from May, 1859. He had been living in Canaan for about six months when he wrote this.

Page 563

“Sometimes I think I am staying here too long or that I am going away too soon. I don’t know how my happiness depends upon it, yet I would not go alone, if I had the courage and confidence of a young man. There is poetry and sentiment and many imaginary pleasures in waiting; but like the redoubtable Miles Standish, I am terrified at the ghost of a ‘thundering No!’ from the lips of a pretty woman. The sensation is truly dismal, and can only be appreciated by similar unfortunates.”

The above paragraph was written by William Wallace. His reference to Miles Standish is fascinating for a few reasons.

In 1858, one year before Wallace’s diary entry, Longfellow published his epic poem The Courtship of Miles Standish. It was an instant bestseller. For some reason, in Longfellow’s day, the Pilgrims were thought to have been quite romantic. The poem sold tens of thousands of copies upon publication. For Wallace to have been referring to it a mere year after it’s publication is much the same as someone today referencing Taylor Swift song lyrics. It was pop culture!

The pop-culture reference he is making is that he is too old for Mary to love him and he is dithering about instead of taking romantic action. For those of us whose Longfellow is rusty, the poem concerns a real person, Miles Standish. He came to America on the Mayflower. His wife died during the voyage. That much is historical truth. Longfellow, over two-hundred years later, relied on folklore to imagine a love triangle involving Standish, who was an older and quite accomplished gentleman (sound at all familiar?), a young woman who had caught his fancy (Priscilla) and a shy young writer named John Alden.

Too frightened to approach Priscilla himself, Miles asks John Alden to propose to Priscilla on his behalf. Miles does not know that John Alden is also in love with Priscilla. John approaches Priscilla with Miles’s proposal, but she, intuiting his own affection for her challenges him, “Why don’t you speak for yourself, John?” In a later movie version, the line was famously rendered: “speak for yourself John Alden.”

William Wallace in that paragraph from his diary is losing hope. James Wallace continues in his own voice.

The “thundering No” had so many terrors for him that after making two attempts to leave without tempting his fate, he came back each, time, in the same state in which he had departed. He continued to linger here until the 14th of October, when he wrote,

“I shall leave the old country and go back to the old scenes that have so long had charms for me.”

My mother had refused him and he started for California. He went to Philadelphia, and returned to New York, where he met his sister Harriet and her daughter, Lilly, who took passage with him to join her husband in San Francisco. On the 28th of October, 1859, at Aspinwall he wrote:

“I had rather be at home building stone fences, digging rocks and picking up dry leaves and occasionally walking up the hill. Perhaps I might have won happiness. I shall have to travel this once more and that is the end.”

Wallace returned to California and resumed writing and exploring and playing a role in the politics of his region. But he longed for Canaan and in 1860, set out for home once again. The following is excerpted from a letter to his mother as he made his long and frustrating passage east.

Father, Gary Hamel, 2024

Page 565

…the old mother whom I love the stronger as I go down myself into the vale of years, and whose pathway it is left for me to smooth and make pleasant. I, who have never known her, the first to leave her in early boyhood, and, after her children one by one, have left her shattered frame drifting upon the rocks of old age, the last to return and give her confidence as she travels down to the foot of the hill of life and till I have greeted another and a younger in whom I feel a strong interest, and whom I wish to be near.

This time, Wallace stayed in Canaan until 1861. The Civil War began. The Alta prevailed upon Wallace to leave Canaan and become its Washington Correspondent. He went, and prefaced his first report with this:

Page 567

“You directed me to pack my valise and abandon the cheerful old home, around which a thousand pleasures have circled during the short time I was permitted to enjoy it. Every thing about that home is old and cheerful.

The old lady who worries herself about labors which she ought to resign, but which her habits will never allow her to forego; the old books, whose well-read pages are familiar to all of us; the old apple trees, from which until this year, we have always made cider; the old neighbors, who all feel an interest in each other’s business; the old graveyards where our fathers and brothers lie; and the old church, whose gospel is now preached out, and closed up.

But doubtless our Christian people will not permit so great a means of salvation to fall by the wayside, and after I am gone their hearts will become softened, and the old fires will be again rekindled — oh, there are a thousand associations clinging like ivy around the old home, that fill me with regrets to leave. But this is a world of eternal changes; we are always having to say good-by to some friend.

I had flattered myself that my travels were over, that weariness and fatigue were for somebody else and I should henceforth enjoy a euthanasia of happy reflections under the shade of my own trees, clearing the rocks from my fields, and watching the growths of my pigs and garden. The old longings to be in wild and strange places would occasionally come over me powerfully but they would soon be checked by my pleasant surroundings.”

He remained in Washington until the end of the Civil War, in April 1865. Wallace was fifty. Again in the voice of James Wallace, (italics added)

Child, Gary Hamel, 2024

Page 569

In April he returned home and the Alta wished him to live in Washington and be their correspondent, but in June he returned to Canaan and did not again take up the pen as war correspondent of the Alta. On January 8, 1865, he married Mary Duncan Currier and settled down to peace and quiet on the old place, writing for various papers and magazines, picking stone and building wall. In 1870 he began to collect historical matter for the town history which he kept up all his life. Nothing can better illustrate his life from this time than his own writing.

And with this, our telling folds in on itself. Wallace’s son recounted his father’s decision to write the book he, the son, was in the process of finishing.

The generational home that Gary’s images most evoke for me is not simply the Wallace home, which stood across Roberts Road from the Meeting House. It burned in 1893. Mary was injured in the fire trying to rescue a trunk. She died of her injuries. James Wallace was then just 27.

The notes that his father created trying to understand the world of his childhood became the book that his son compiled trying, I imagine, to understand the world of his father. The book houses all those generations and all those tales.