Susan Nye was born in 1791 and spent her childhood on the family farm in Amenia, New York, near the Connecticut border in Dutchess County. Unmarried at age 24, she headed south to take a teaching position in Raleigh, North Carolina, apparently with her family's blessing. This book describes her experiences over the next 30 years, combining biography with social history from a ground-floor perspective. A resourceful historian, Kim Tolley makes imaginative use of varied sources to describe the changing circumstances of Nye's life. The result is a fluent and engaging account of the challenges facing a white woman in the ante-bellum south and some of the options at her disposal.
At the heart of this study is Susan Nye's own reflections on daily events, dutifully recorded in journals intermittently spanning decades. These observations, however fleeting, offer a glimpse of the inner life of an educated antebellum woman, and the social and economic conditions that shaped her experiences. They especially highlight the significance of religion, not only with respect to her own piety and dedication to Christian ideals, but also for the elaborate network of associations that it potentially provided. Tolley frames this as a legacy of the Second Great Awakening. The journal entries also provide insight into ante-bellum domestic life, especially after Nye married Scottish widower Adam Hutchinson in 1825, a match ill-fated almost from the start.
There are suggestive elements of economic history here too, including the evolution of teacher labor markets. Nye was unusual in her particular inter-regional migration. By Tolley's count, most teachers in ante-bellum southern academies were from the region and the vast majority were male. More women from the northeast headed west to teach, where demand for their services almost certainly was greater. Schools were more likely to be gender-segregated in the south, however, and this created opportunities for some women like Nye. And Tolley suggests that the curriculum they encountered, at least in Raleigh, was quite rigorous, although scant evidence exists regarding what the girls actually learned.
Tolley devotes much attention to Nye's adjustment to southern cultural mores, especially slavery and ill-treatment of blacks. Nye arrived before white attitudes shifted to a more violent regime of racist discipline and surveillance, but she eventually found herself adjudicating debates over the moral propriety of slavery. She desperately attempted to bridge regional divisions rendered by this issue among Presbyterians. Tolley says nothing about slaves in Dutchess County, but Nye surely encountered them before leaving, as slavery ended in New York more than a decade later. One wonders how these experiences may have affected her ability to reconcile a moral opposition to slavery with remaining in the South.
The book also provides a picture of household economic distress when Hutchinson's cotton-trading business fell victim to higher transportation costs (low rivers) and unstable markets. He soon turned volatile and temperamental, eventually becoming visibly depressed. His wife was often kept in the dark about finances, until she prevailed upon him to allow a return to teaching. She soon became the principal household breadwinner, while he drifted away from the family. Prone to violent outbursts, he was sanctioned by their Presbyterian congregation, which allowed Nye to make a break with him, though not a divorce. In the end, Hutchinson headed south in search of solace and later died in Florida, a decade after their marriage.
The death of her husband made Susan Nye Hutchinson a widow and considerably more independent, though she still relied upon assistance from friends and family to move from one situation to another. Her unmarried younger sister also was a member of the household, having joined her in 1817. After relocating in Amenia, Nye Hutchinson returned to North Carolina to resume a teaching career without the constraints of a husband or young children, eventually becoming the head of an academy. She had established a firm reputation as an educator and it apparently served her well. She saw two sons graduate from Davidson College, and her daughters married or became teachers themselves. Tolley's account effectively ends in the mid-1840s, although Nye Hutchinson lived for another 22 years. She had returned to take residence in the family farm, and although she may have taught some afterwards, it seems that she was quite comfortable in the later stages of life. Apparently her journal entries from that period dropped off considerably, or had not been saved.
In the end this is a revealing account of a life that may have been unusual for its time but also reflected prevailing attitudes and expectations for white women during a time of social and economic change. Susan Nye was able to utilize teaching to forge a life independent of her family and immediate community, in a region quite foreign in many respects, yet bound by religious and social ties that spanned the still growing nation. Kim Tolley does a fine job of weaving these disparate elements into a coherent and compelling narrative, one that intrigues as much as it informs. While many questions about the lives of antebellum women remain, this book sheds new light upon their ability to break or bend the bounds of place and convention. We need more such studies to offer additional insights into women who changed the world in innumerably personal ways.
