Primary source material: Bullard Collection, Old Sturbridge Village Research Library. Original spelling has been retained but in some cases, punctuation has been added for clarity.
On March 29, 1827, Lieutenant Justin Dimick married Mary Waldron at Fort Constitution in the presence of her widowed mother, some of her brothers, the officers at the Fort, and their wives. Being an officer’s wife, Fanny Sargent witnessed the ceremony, too. It’s not clear if Frances and the other children living at the Fort participated.
Dr. Sargent missed it—he was busy delivering a baby—but nine months after the wedding, he delivered the first of Mary Waldron Dimick’s fourteen babies.
***
The longstanding dispute about women’s education continued throughout the 1820s—by the end of the decade, the backdrop for this quarrel had moved well beyond rebellion and ratification of a new Constitution.
The new setting for the old argument was what we now call the Industrial Revolution. At the end of the 1820s, the point was argued by invoking the Spirit of Improvement instead of the Spirit of Liberty.
Frances J. R. Sargent was ten years old in 1827, when Portsmouth’s Unitarian minister, Nathan Parker, convinced Portsmouth’s Episcopal priest, Charles Burroughs, to give a lyceum lecture about the importance of women’s education. People who disagreed with the whole idea of female intelligence and women’s education were probably not in the audience when Burroughs declared that:
…in an age like this, when the Spirit of Improvement with its magical wand is…transforming…everything around us… [we must also be] aware that the civil condition, moral power and personal happiness of women, [depends] upon their intellectual and moral elevation…
Fanny and James Sargent didn’t need convincing. On April 2, 1827—with his wife’s wholehearted approval and the understanding that his daughter’s future happiness depended on it—Dr. Sargent drove Frances up to Mrs. Cutts’ school and paid for five brand new textbooks.
He bought her the popular and ‘much-used’ Elements of History by Joseph Emerson Worcester and Warren Colburn’s Arithmetic: being a sequel to ‘First lessons in arithmetic‘.
He also bought the Poetical Chronology of Ancient and English History: with historical and explanatory notes by Richard Valpy and David Blair’s Universal Preceptor: Being a General Grammar of Arts, Sciences, and Useful Knowledge
The fifth book, listed only as ‘Hale’ was undoubtedly the History of the United States by New Hampshire native, Salma Hale.
History of the United States from their first settlement as colonies, to the close of the war with Great Britain, in 1815 : to which is added, questions adapted to the use of schools : Hale, Salma, 1787-1866 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
The identity of the school’s headmistress, ‘Mrs. Cutts’, is unclear—but it’s certainly possible that Mary Sheafe Cutts, Olive Waldron’s sister and wife of attorney and bank president Edward Cutts, operated a school out of her home in Portsmouth.
The following year, Dr. Sargent paid for Frances to board with ‘Mrs. Sloan’ while she received instruction from ‘A. F. Lyman’. The exact location of A. F. Lyman’s school is uncertain—but it must have been somewhere close by because while Frances attended, her father occasionally rode up on horseback and treated her to a midday meal in Portsmouth before returning Frances to school and himself to Fort Constitution before dark.
***
During the winter of 1827/8—while Frances was boarding with Mrs. Sloan and studying with A. F. Lyman—the Army implemented a new, biennial ‘system of exchange’ between northern and southern regiments.
It was because of the weather.
Soldiers at northern forts had long complained that they were being paid the same wages as soldiers serving in the South—and they thought this was unfair because soldiering at northern forts was far more difficult and uncomfortable in the wintertime.
The plan was to have southern regiments trade places with northern regiments every other year—so that every soldier had the opportunity to spend wintertime in the balmy South and each was obliged to endure the northern weather, as well.
Accordingly, Captain Whiting and his Company were transferred from Fort Constitution in New Hampshire to Fort Johnston near Smithville (now Southport), North Carolina.
The new system didn’t apply to Surgeons, so the Sargent family stayed at Fort Constitution when the rest of the garrison and their families left.
Whiting’s counterpart from Fort Johnston, Major Felix Ansart, arrived at Fort Constitution with his Company and his wife, Martha, on December 5, 1827. They had no children.
Handsome, forty-something Felix Ansart had been born in Massachusetts, circa 1782. He was a first generation American and the second son of a genuine Revolutionary War hero.
(After the Revolution, Felix Ansart’s father, Louis, renounced his French citizenship, became a United States citizen and—by virtue of his U. S. government pension and the wealth inherited from his aristocratic family—raised twelve children in fine style with ‘white and colored’ servants in Dracut, Massachusetts.) [1]
For several months, Felix and Martha Ansart worked and socialized with the Sargents and the other families at the Fort.
The Ansart’s high social status—and Martha’s not-so-distant relation to the George Washington family—made them popular, semi-celebrity dinner guests among Portsmouth’s elite, including Olive Waldron and her sisters, Hannah Prescott, Ann Cushing, and Mary Cutts.
Sadly, the Ansart’s tenure together at Fort Constitution was short-lived.
Dr. Sargent was in attendance when Martha Ansart died about 7 a. m. on March 14, 1828. Frustratingly, Sargent didn’t specify her cause of death.
Major Ansart commanded Fort Constitution as a widower for the next six years. Everyone respected his grief but it escaped no one’s notice that the wealthy widower was a ‘catch’—and he was available.
***
By 1830—when Frances J. R. Sargent was twelve years old—indigenous people in the northeast and mid-Atlantic had been almost entirely marginalized—moved to reservations like Sipayik, their culture and land appropriated, generations earlier.
But, sizeable numbers of Indians remained in the southeast—Georgia, Alabama, and Florida.
Frances had learned from her American history textbooks that the Creek War of 1813-14—also known as the Red Stick War—was part of the War of 1812.
The Red Stick War resulted in the Treaty of Fort Jackson which required the Creek nation to surrender 23 million acres—half of their territory—in Georgia and central Alabama. It also required them to relocate west of the Mississippi River to an area of land in the Louisiana Purchase that the government designated as ‘Indian Country.’
Over the next twenty years, more Creek territory was ceded through further treaties, or scammed away by land speculators. It was stolen outright by squatters and lost through secret arrangements between Creek headmen and U. S. government agents.
For generations, the people that George Washington designated as ‘The Five Civilized Tribes’—Muscogee Creek, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole nations—had married European traders and later, Anglo-European colonists, African, and African-American people.
They converted to Christianity and adopted Anglo-European culture and traditions. They settled farms, established plantations, government hierarchies, and prospered in Anglo-European-style towns. They were the proprietors of successful businesses and—because slavery was still legal in the South—some had become wealthy enough to own African slaves.
Over the years of encroachment and destruction of their farms, plantations, and businesses by white squatters and land speculators, some members of the Five Civilized Nations petitioned or sued the United States government for redress and protection. Some, like William McIntosh, sold out.
Others—frustrated by the slowness of any U. S. government response—resorted to more immediate and violent means of defense.
William McIntosh | Encyclopedia of Alabama
Newspaper items and Army rumors told Frances J. R. Sargent that nearly two decades after the treaty was signed, many still refused to leave—and there had been Indian attacks on white settlements and attacks on Indian towns and farms by white people.
Her understanding of Native Americans had been shaped by her parents, her visit to Sipayik four years earlier, her history books, newspaper coverage of the ‘Indian Problem’, as well as by books and plays.
She grew up with stories like Washington Irving’s 1820 story, Philip of Pokanoket, a sympathetic and romanticized version of the life of Metacom (King Philip).
It’s possible the Sargent family read Hobomok, a Tale of Early Times aloud—this was a radical novel by local Unitarian author Lydia Maria Child about miscegenation, divorce, and colonial American prejudice.
A free ebook of Hobomok is available here: Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times – Google Play
The family almost certainly shared fireside readings of James Fennimore Cooper’s bestseller, Last of the Mohicans (1826)—and they had at least heard of Metamora; The Last of the Wampanoags (1829), a wildly popular play by John Augustus Stone, also based on the life of Metacom.
Image from page 238 of “The autobiography of Joseph Jeffer… | Flickr
Early 19th century American novels and plays like these (wittingly or unwittingly) reinforced the idea that extinction was the natural end for all indigenous people in North America—at a time when the magical disappearance of Indians would have been a welcome solution to a very thorny problem for the United States government.
***
An interactive version of this map from the Library of Congress is available here: A general map of the southern British colonies in America, comprehending North and South Carolina, Georgia, East and West Florida, with the neighboring Indian countries, from the modern surveys of Engineer de Brahm, Capt. Collet, Mouzon, & others, and from the large hydrographical survey of the coasts of East and West Florida. – Copy 1 | Library of Congress (loc.gov)
Frances and her parents were certainly aware that the conflict required a solution but they didn’t know what it was.
Gold provided the answer or, at the very least—gold prompted a decision.
Less than a year after gold was discovered in Georgia during the summer of 1829, President Andrew Jackson and Congress came to the conclusion that the most sensible way to solve the problem in the southeast was to use the Army to forcibly and physically remove indigenous people from their land and deposit them in Indian Country.
There is no clear evidence to suggest that Frances or her parents, James and Fanny Sargent, agreed or disagreed with this government policy to ‘remove Indians’.
Lack of evidence might indicate their acceptance of Jackson’s strategy. As a military family they were committed to the Commander-in-Chief. But, they were also Unitarians and therefore, dedicated to Enlightenment principles of tolerance. It is equally possible that their silence points to dissent.
Either way, the participation of the Army in this issue was going to impact the Sargent family—but not in the way you might expect.
***
(Next: Frances J. R. Sargent at the Ursuline Academy…)
***
[1] Felix Ansart’s father, Marie Louis Amand Ansart de Marisquelles (1742-1804), was born in the French town of Maresquelles to an aristocratic family. Louis Ansart joined the military and learned the art of forging cannon at the foundry owned by his uncle and military engineer Marc René Marquis de Montalembert (1714-1800). In 1776, Louis Ansart sailed to Massachusetts and became Inspector of the Foundries where he oversaw the forging of cannon for the American revolutionaries. In 1778, Ansart helped design and build defenses for the French fleet stationed in Boston Harbor. He also got married. Wounded during the Battle of Rhode Island that same year, his military career ended. After his convalescence, he gave up his titles, his French citizenship–but not, apparently, his fortune–and settled in Dracut, Massachusetts where he and his second wife (younger sister of his first wife) had twelve children.
Felix Ansart’s father, Colonel Louis Ansart (Marie Louis Amand Ansart De Marisquelles) portrait from Sarah Swan Griffin: Quaint bits of Lowell history : a few interesting stories of earlier days : Griffin, Sara Swan : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
Pigs in the Cellar 
