Born in New London, Connecticut, in 1795 to a widowed, impoverished, teen-aged mother, Frances Manwaring Caulkins grew up in the household of a farmer who worked as a tanner and shoe-maker. She had scant opportunity for a formal education, and often struggled to support herself, but she used self-education and self-improvement linked with her strong desire to make something of her life to rise above the limitations of her background and upbringing. She succeeded in supporting herself, her siblings, and her widowed mother for fourteen years as a teacher. She not only participated in voluntary associations; she initiated them. She published dozens of poems, numerous newspaper articles, and at least a dozen popular religious tracts. Her most notable achievements were two critically acclaimed histories of Norwich and New London, histories so carefully researched that they are still of value to modern historians.
Caulkins’s formal education, beyond reading and writing, did not begin until she was eleven, by which time she had read The Iliad and The Odyssey in English translation and had begun to study Latin. She had also already read many of the English writers of the 17th and 18th centuries. A few years later, Caulkins was able to study at an academy in Norwich under the direction of two rather extraordinary Norwich teenagers, Lydia Huntley and Nancy Hyde. Both girls had suffered through the education prescribed for genteel young women, and they were determined to provide a different kind of education for young women in their school. They opened their school in Norwich in the fall of 1811. Frances was one of their students, remaining there through the spring of 1812. Though the school did offer the traditional fine arts, Huntley and Hyde were more interested in the challenging academic curriculum they themselves had longed for. They provided daily lessons in ancient and modern geography and in natural and moral philosophy. Students studied history four days each week, and all the girls kept daily journals in which they wrote regular compositions on a wide range of topics. Some of the girls also wrote poetry in their journals; this may be where Caulkins developed her poetic interests and talents. Grammar, logic, arithmetic, and penmanship took precedence over Bible reading, prayer, recitation, and spelling. Hyde was clear about the school’s educational goals, writing: “Usefulness should be the result of education.” Caulkins valued her time with Huntley and Hyde, later writing that they taught her to love learning for its own sake and to treat her work as a pleasure.
When Nancy Hyde died in 1816, Huntley raised money to publish a collection of Hyde’s writings, including prose, poetry, and journal entries. Working both as editor and publisher of the book, Huntley asked Frances to write a memorial to Hyde. “Lines to the Memory of Miss Nancy Maria Hyde,” was a maudlin poem, typical of much poetry in that era. A former neighbor of Nancy Hyde’s read the tribute that Frances had written and sent Frances a letter in which he encouraged her to keep writing, because her skill had made Hyde “bloom again.”
Any aspirations to be a writer had to be put on hold when Caulkins’s stepfather, Philomen Haven, died in 1819 leaving his widow with three children under the age of 12 and no source of income. Frances supported her mother, half-siblings, and her elder sister Pamela for the next fourteen years by operating young ladies’ schools in Norwich, then New London, then Norwich again. She closed the last school rather abruptly in 1834, although it had been doing well. Possibly this was partly out of fear that her anti-slavery activities would lead to action against her school. These activities included a poem entitled “An Original Hymn to be Sung on the Fourth of July, 1834,” that castigated Northern society, Norwich industrialists, and thus Norwich citizens as well, for celebrating their own birthright of freedom and liberty on the Fourth of July because America had built its freedom on the oppression of enslaved blacks.
After taking a year to travel, Caulkins moved to New York City to live with a family of cousins whose mother had died. While there, Caulkins became a prolific writer for the American Tract Society. The Society printed over one million copies of the second tract that she wrote, a pious piece she titled The Pequot of One Hundred Years. Many of her tracts had press runs of several hundred thousand copies, and the Society translated a number of them into foreign languages for the use of its missionaries abroad.
In 1842 Caulkins moved back to New London, taking up residence in the home of her half-brother Henry Haven, helping to care for his children and her aging mother. Perhaps the most important reason that Caulkins moved back to Connecticut was that Haven was in a position to provide her with the security she craved and the leisure to continue her writing. No longer faced with the need to write religious tracts to support herself, Caulkins was able to turn her attention to writing the history of her native towns. She had been meticulously compiling historical and genealogical information for years, to the point where by 1845 she was able to publish her History of Norwich, Connecticut: From its Possession by the Indians to the Year 1845. A greatly expanded edition was published in 1874.
The book was a great success, and Caulkins became known in wider circles than Eastern Connecticut. In 1849 she was elected corresponding member of the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Society’s first female member, and only one until 1966.
Caulkins’s second history, The History of New London, Connecticut, From the First Survey of the Coast, to 1852, was published in 1852. It is still the best reference for pre-Civil War New London. An update to 1860 was added in later printings.
As if she were not busy enough, in 1845 Caulkins, along with her sister-in-law and the wife of her brother’s business partner, initiated the New London Ladies’ Seamen’s Friend Society. She served as the secretary of the organization from its founding until her death in 1869, recording the wide-ranging projects of the Society, demonstrating the ability of “mere” women to alleviate the suffering of honest mariners and to distinguish between the honest supplicants and the humbugs.
Toward the end of her life, Caulkins apparently came to believe that she had accomplished little of note. She collected articles that praised mothers as the “uncrowned queens” of society and seemed to ascribe to Lydia (Huntley) Sigourney’s opinion that only married women with children would leave a lasting legacy, noted and recorded by their families. In his funeral memorial to Frances, half-brother Henry detailed her triumphs but noted that she had died feeling she was a failure. Little did Frances Caulkins know that her lively and vivid histories would live long after the memories of her friends and families had faded.
Nancy Steenburg
