UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

The Stetson Family and the Northampton Association, 1843–47

Book Jacket: "Letters from an American Utopia" edited by C. Clark and K. W. Buckley

Edited by Christopher Clark and Kerry W. Buckley

Provides a rare look at daily life inside a nineteenth-century utopian community

In 1842, a group of radical abolitionists and social reformers established the Northampton Association of Education and Industry, a utopian community in western Massachusetts organized around a collectively owned and operated silk mill. Members sought to challenge the prevailing social attitudes of their day by creating a society in which "the rights of all are equal without distinction of sex, color or condition, sect or religion."

This volume brings together a remarkable set of seventy-five letters written by the members of the Stetson family, who belonged to the Association for almost four years. Discovered recently by a family descendant, the correspondence documents the thoughts and experiences of ordinary people struggling to uphold common ideals in challenging circumstances.

The letters re-create an extended family conversation in which news was shared, stories were told, hopes and fears expressed, and ideas discussed. We meet James Stetson, an ambivalent family patriarch with a wry sense of humor. There is Almira, his eldest child, who strove earnestly to work for her family and wrote movingly of her dreams of a career in service to her principles. And there is Dolly Witter Stetson, James's wife and the central figure in this collection, whom we first meet as she was about to give birth for the ninth time and whose relish for community life was shaped by a lively intelligence, a commitment to exploring reform ideals, and a down-to-earth view of family duties and household burdens. Also appearing in the letters are such prominent figures as the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and David Ruggles.

Comprehensive annotations by the editors guide readers through the letters, and three original essays flesh out their historical context. Christopher Clark looks at family life, marriage, and the regulation of behavior; Marjorie Senechal highlights fresh evidence the correspondence provides about silk raising and manufacture; and Paul Gaffney discusses the Association's unique status as an interracial community.

"The newly discovered Stetson letters answer a historian's prayer. What a joy to look over the family's shoulders into the everyday life of the Northampton Association! For the first time we can see Sojourner Truth as a flesh-and-blood person enmeshed in her own family and the Association's activities, not in retrospect, but, as it were, in real time."

Nell Irvin Painter, author of Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol

"A wonderful collection of letters that is very well edited and introduced. The correspondence gives us a detailed view of communal life as experienced by the ordinary middle- and working-class families who were the majority of committed communitarians. Rich in details about religion, reform, economics, and education at the Association, the letters inform us about why communitarianism appealed to abolitionist families and how they lived it. These letters are a real find."

Carl Guarneri, author of The Utopian Alternative:
Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America

Christopher Clark is professor of history at the University of Warwick. His The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts, 1780–1860, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award of the Organization of American Historians. He is also the author of The Communitarian Moment: The Radical Challenge of the Northampton Association (University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).

Kerry W. Buckley is executive director of Historic Northampton and author of Mechanical Man: John Broadus Watson and the Beginnings of Behaviorism.

American History / Utopianism / New England
288 pp., 15 illus.
$34.95s cloth, ISBN 978-1-55849-431-2
February 2004

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