Was Elijah Blaisdell Completely Irredeemable?
- Alisa Kline
- Oct 4, 2024
- 7 min read
This installment of the blog is about Elijah Blaisdell. Born in 1782, he was the first son of Daniel Blaisdell, who is the closest thing to a founding father that Canaan produced. Wallace makes it very clear in his History that he had nothing but respect for father Daniel and nothing but disdain for his eldest son Elijah.
We have run into Elijah Blaisdell a few times already in this blog. He was a cruel school master when Wallace was a child. We ran into him last week as Elijah the rabble-rouser who whipped up anti-abolitionist sentiments at the August 11, 1834 town meeting. In writing about that meeting, Wallace relies on various sources who described Elijah in derogatory terms, saying he “does not win confidence in his assertions for his bitterness,” and describing his speaking as “mobocratic vituperation.”
So, having already encountered Elijah, we know that perhaps he wasn’t particularly good with children and he might not have been his best self during the Noyes years. Many people caught up in that whirlwind later regretted their actions. Even Jacob Trussell, the moving force behind Elijah’s hot air, repaired his relationship with the community.
Not so much Elijah. Wallace sums up Elijah’s life in the chapter on lawyers.
Page 320
But with all his long years and his opportunities for usefulness, he left no memorial of services by which a succeeding generation will recall his name as a benefactor.
Wallace, in reflecting upon the life of Elijah Blaisdell, found nothing at all worthwhile.
There are people in Wallace’s History that reappear throughout the text. I imagine we will visit with many of them before I am done with this project. But I don’t think anyone comes in for as much vilification as does Elijah Blaisdell. Wallace trashes him all over the book.
Wallace had more to say in his chapter on lawyers. Italics and paragraph breaks added:
Page 318
[Elijah] was made a Mason in Mount Moriah Lodge in 1814, and he soon became upon all occasions the rival and antagonist of his brother Pettingill. In their temperaments, these two men were much alike, arbitrary and overbearing, impatient of restraint, not scrupulous of the rights and feelings of others, and in the innumerable suits which they promoted, were always pitted against each other.
At the time of these events, the legal system was almost a private affair. If you felt someone violated your rights, stole from you, or whatever, you hired a lawyer and sued them. They hired a lawyer and defended themselves. The judge, or Magistrate, who adjudicated was often a well-respected town elder. Wallace is saying that Elijah and Pettingill promoted “innumerable suits” in which they were “always pitted against each other.” In other words, they dragged people into legal proceedings so they, the lawyers, could profit.
Their language to each other was far from polite, and a stranger would suppose them to be bitterly hostile, but when the time arrived for making up bills of costs, they would come readily together to divide the spoils in great seeming friendliness.
Elijah’s contentious capacity for creating legal proceedings was noted also by N.P. Rogers who, in a letter to George Kimball, encourages his protege to keep trying to succeed as a lawyer because:
Page 17
You have no better enemies except poor Elijah (Blaisdell), and his enmity is as good as a milch cow to you in Canaan.
I think Rogers’ point was that Elijah was so litigious, requiring the other side to also hire a lawyer, that he was a veritable milk cow, producing a steady stream of revenue.
In the chapter Old Families, the Blaisdell family gets twelve pages of text, the most of any family except the Wallaces themselves. Almost all of it is about Daniel, and almost all of it is reverential. Only one of Daniel Blaisdell’s nine sons gets anything but a mention. That would be Elijah. Wallace goes out of his way to make sure everyone knew what an asshole that man was.
This is how Wallace finishes his section on the Blaisdell family. (The long line between two paragraphs is in the original. I can’t remember seeing that device anywhere else in the book. I have added paragraph breaks.)
Page 512
In his day the old judge [Daniel Blaisdell] was a great power in politics, and he had the faculty of keeping his party in office nearly all his life. He never thrust himself forward for office, nor would he allow more than one of his [nine] boys to be in office at the same time.
This policy made him strong. He did not use his political influence to keep his family in office. In this respect he understood human nature better than some of the leaders in later years. The people respected his advice because they knew him to be unselfish.
______
It was more than eighty years ago, — just before March election.
This event could not have taken place 80 years before Wallace was writing. Wallace wrote in the 1870s, 80s and 90s. Elijah didn’t become a lawyer until 1812, and Wallace's father didn’t open his store, which factors into the tale in a moment, before 1817 (when the Wallace family arrived in Canaan.) Wallace himself died in 1893 at the age of 77. I’m dwelling on this because in his introduction, Wallace claims to have witnessed many things as a child curled up on the floor of his father’s store. The story that follows is so full of detail that either Wallace must have witnessed it or people who did must have been telling the story for years. Given the drama, perhaps some embellishment occurred.
There had been a sly caucus at Cobb’s tavern in which Wesley Burpee, Daniel Pattee, William Campbell, with a few others figured, and Elijah Blaisdell had been nominated for representative. It was intended for a surprise and only such as were friendly to Elijah were present.
Old Bill Wood and Levi Wilson had been there after their daily rum; going home about sunset, the judge [Daniel Blaisdell] hailed them for “the news up to the street.”
“O, nothin’ much.” replies Uncle Bill, “only we had a caukis, and sot up ‘Lijah for representative.”
“What!” thundered the old judge,‘Lige Blaisdell for rep! impossible! But who’s done it? He ‘aint fit for it, more’n my old hoss, and I tell you he shan’t have it.”
And he didn’t get it.
The judge mounted his old horse and rode up to Wallace’s store [this is the store of our author's father], where a crowd had begun to gather. He dismounted, and after saluting them, inquired if anything of importance had transpired. They confirmed his first intelligence with more particulars.
Then he smoothed his brow and replied:
“Men, this will never do; because I was fit to hold office, it don’t follow that all the Blaisdells are fit for it, and I ought to be pretty well acquainted with them all. And then the way this nomination was made is unfair. A man that plays tricks even in politics, is unworthy of your votes. We must get together, Saturday night at this store and talk it all over, and depend upon it we’ll have a good man nominated.”
The other Blaisdells stayed at home that year.
That Saturday night was memorable in the annals of Canaan Street. There was a large gathering and they drank rum freely; everybody did, except this matter-of-fact old judge [Daniel Blaisdell?].
Asahel Jones, who belonged to the other party [that would be the Democratic party], appeared among them. He was accused of being a spy and he was ordered to prepare for instant death.
Wallace had before this made it abundantly clear that Daniel Blaisdell was an ardent Republican.
They secured him, placed a rope about his neck and shoulders and drew him up to a beam in the store, several times letting him down hard. Asahel was badly hurt and worse frightened, and begged hard for a reprieve.
Finally he was permitted to start for home. He went over the hill, ‘round the pond, crying “Murder! help!” On the road the cold air began to freeze the rum out of his skin and he was sorely chilled. He grew mad as he thought how he had been assaulted and battered by those fellows on the Street, no better than he.
Next morning he presented himself before his friend, Elijah Blaisdell, and complained of his assailants, three of whom were arrested and made to pay $20 for the wicked sport they had enjoyed.
That is more or less where Wallace ends his text on the Blaisdell family.
Presenting this story, of his own father speaking against him, is one of the cruelest cuts in the book. I do not know anything more about Elijah Blaisdell than what William Wallace thought of him. Perhaps Wallace wrote out of pent-up animosity from his childhood. But there's also that photo. And it is sometimes true that your character is written right across your face.
Throughout this post are works by Gary Hamel. Each week, I go to Gary’s studio to bring him a printed copy of the prior week’s blog post and to discuss what works might be in the next. This time, Gary showed me the four works that accompany this post (other than Elijah, which is not part of the series).
Gary makes much use of old photographs and the bits and bobs their era left behind. His work seems always to be asking, who were you? This is much the same question I ask of the characters in Wallace's History.
In this series, Gary has painted faces from old photographs, but rather than adding markers and artifacts of their era, rather than even allowing their clothing to fix them in time, he has removed these things. Other than perhaps hairstyles, nothing reveals when the person might have lived. Faces that seem strange in strange attire, can look quite normal stripped of signifiers. The paintings that resulted from Gary's experiment seem both particular and general. These faces could be modern, ancient or not yet born. They are simply human.
I see in Gary’s work what I see in Wallace’s book. An inquiry into the universal nature of humanity.
I usually size Gary's work to occupy the full width of the column of text. But these faces were so intense that they overwhelmed everything else. Rather than asking a question, they were shouting for attention. So I made them smaller and set them within the text. But if you would like to see them full size, you can click on them and they will expand.
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