1985-Walker-Rachel R Grant
Rachel R. Grant: The Continuing Legacy of the Feminine Ideal
Walker, Ronald W., “Rachel R. Grant: The Continuing Legacy of the Feminine Ideal,” in Supporting Saints: Life Stories of Nineteenth-Century Mormons (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 1985), 17–42.
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Rachel Ridgway Ivins was born at Hornerstown, New Jersey, 7 March 1821, the sixth of eight children. She would have few memories of her parents. Caleb, her father, evidently involved himself in the family’s expansive business concerns which included Hornerstown’s distillery, country store, and grist and saw mills. Due to apparent sunstroke exposure, he died when Rachel was six. To compound the tragedy, Edith Ridgway Ivins, her mother, described by her contemporaries as a “lovely, spirited woman, liked by all,” died just four years later.[1]
The orphan was subsequently raised by a succession of her close-knit relatives. For several years she remained at Hornerstown with Caleb Sr., her indulgent grandfather. However, she found the stringent household of her married cousins Joshua and Theodosia Wright at Trenton more to her liking. The Wrights’ home, which was set off by gardens complete with statuary and wildlife, represented no diminution in her lifestyle. Moreover, much to Rachel’s delight, the house was run by cousin Theodosia with precision, industry and regularity. Under the older woman’s demanding, six-year tutelage, teenage Rachel learned both personal discipline and the domestic arts. An able student, she returned to Monmouth County when she was about eighteen as a housekeeper for Richard Ridgway, her widower uncle.[2]
She must have marveled at the religious changes in her neighborhood. Like upstate New York’s earlier and more famous “Burned-Over” district, central New Jersey experienced wave after wave of religious excitement during the first half of the nineteenth century, with the newfangled and despised Mormons competing with the more established Methodists, Baptists, and Presbyterians. By the late 1830s, a cadre of some of Mormonism’s ablest missionaries, including Jedediah Grant, Erastus Snow, Benjamin Winchester, Wilford Woodruff, and Orson and Parley Pratt had founded a half-dozen Latter-day Saint congregations in central New Jersey, several with their own unpretentious chapels.[3]
Rachel’s kin played a major role in this activity. Young Israel Ivins was the first LDS convert from Monmouth County. Merchants Charles and James Ivins soon followed. Parley Pratt described the latter as a “very wealthy man” and enrolled him, along with himself, as a committee of two to reissue the Book of Mormon in the East. But no conversion was as telling upon Rachel as that of her older sister, Anna Lowrie Ivins. Optimistic and stoical, Anna was her alter ego and would remain so to the end of her life.[4]
Little is known of the sociology of conversion and less of its psychology, but Rachel, despite her initial belief that the Mormon preachers were “the false prophets the Bible speaks of,” seemed ideally prepared to accept the new religion. She always had been “religiously inclined, but not of the long-faced variety” and had enjoyed reading the Bible. Yet in a century which cultivated such things, she was a young lady without strong ties to a visible religious establishment. For generations her progenitors had been practicing Quakers, but by the nineteenth century this commitment had begun to wane; Rachel herself bridled at the Friend’s prohibition against song. While at the straitlaced Wrights’, who banned music from their home, she would retreat to a small grove of trees where she would sing as she sewed for her dolls. This penchant for music may have contributed to her conversion at sixteen to the more musically inclined Baptists, though her commitment failed to go very deep. She later claimed to have “never learned anything from them.”[5]
When Anna and a friend from Trenton told her that Erastus Snow and Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet, would preach at the “Ridge” above Hornerstown, she concluded after some hesitation to go. Though she found Joseph to be a “fine, noble looking man . . . so neat,” she was by her own account “prejudiced” and thus paid little heed to his message. Only politeness to her Trenton friend persuaded her to return the following day, Sunday, to hear Joseph Smith once more. Thereupon she returned to her room and pled for the Lord’s forgiveness for deliberately listening to false doctrine on the Sabbath. But Joseph Smith’s preaching planted a seed which continued to grow. “I attended some more meetings,” she recalled, “and commenced reading the Book of Mormon [so enthralled she began reading one evening and did not stop until almost daybreak], Voice of Warning, and other works” and was soon convinced that they were true. “A new light seemed to break in upon me, the scriptures were plainer to my mind, and the light of the everlasting Gospel began to illumine my soul.” When a Baptist minister’s funeral sermon consigned an unbaptized youth to hell she noted with favor the contrast of Orson Hyde’s discourse on the innocence and salvation of young children.[6]
Rachel’s interest was neither isolated nor unique. “Hundreds attended the [Mormon] meetings,” a local historian wrote of Joseph Smith’s preaching foray, and he “sealed [in baptism] a large number.” The drama of the moment was heightened when the Prophet anointed a lame and opiated boy, promised him freedom from both his pain and crutches, and saw the results as promised. Alarmed at the rising Mormon tide, the old-line clergy used stern methods to put down the new faith. Rachel’s Baptist minister admonished her that if she continued attending the Mormon meetings, she could retain neither her pew nor her fellowship in the congregation. “This seemed to settle the question with me,” Rachel remembered “I soon handed in my name [to the Mormons] for baptism and rendered willing obedience.”[7]
“Oh, what joy filled my being!” she exclaimed. Her conversion opened a floodgate of suppressed emotions which brought her Quaker relatives to the point of despair: (“When she was a Baptist, she was better, but now she is full of levity—singing all the time.”) She delighted in the words of Joseph Smith and those of another dynamic young preacher, Jedediah Grant, and became completely enmeshed in the Saints’ close-knit society. In addition to the Ivinses, of whom probably a dozen joined the new faith, many of her neighbors also were baptized. “What good times we had then,” she proclaimed years later.[8]
Nevertheless, Rachel wanted to settle in Nauvoo, Illinois, the hub of Mormon activity during the early 1840s. Already Charles and James Ivins had reconnoitered the area and returned with plans to move their families there. Driven by “the spirit of gathering,” Rachel along with several of her Ivins relatives ventured to the Mormon capital in the spring of 1842.[9]
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Notwithstanding these remarkable experiences, Rachel left Nauvoo in late 1844 bewildered and emotionally scarred. As her son later revealed, “When plural marriage was first taught, my mother left the church on account of it.” She returned to New Jersey, ailing physically as well as spiritually and planning never to mingle with the Saints again. She would be gone almost ten years.[10]
III
In Victorian symbolism, a dried white rose had an unmistakable meaning: better be ravaged by time and death than to lose one’s virtue. While Mormon leaders insisted that their plural marriage was heaven-sent and honorable, Rachel, like most women of her generation, initially rejected the practice. She was, in fact, the quintessence of the nineteenth century’s prevailing feminine ideal. Where and how she absorbed these values can only be suggested. Her first school was an eighteen-by-twenty-four-foot affair with a ceiling hardly high enough for an adult to stand, but nothing is known about what really counts—her teachers, primers, and curricula. She continued her formal studies while living in Trenton. Schools for young women in the area, like the Young Ladies’ Seminary at Border-town, emphasized as their most important duty “the forming of a sound and virtuous character.” Rachel was schooled in the heart, not necessarily the mind. She also assimilated the ideal image of womanhood by reading popular religious literature and almost certainly women’s magazines and gift annuals—the common purveyors of the reigning feminine ideal.[11]
Following her Nauvoo experience and her return to the East, Rachel first ran the old Hornerstown household. When her brother Augustus married, she transferred her talents successively to the homes of her sisters Anna, Edith Ann, and particularly Sarah. Very much in her natural element, Rachel became a devoted spinster-aunt. She sang to her nieces and nephews the melodies of her own youth, sewed their clothing, and did more for them, according to their hard-pressed mothers, than they themselves could do. There were also times of inspiration. When consumptive Sarah lay discouraged because of her daily fevers and chills, she asked Rachel to pray and sing several Mormon hymns. When Rachel rendered, “Oh, Then Arise and Be Baptized,” Sarah found the unexpected strength to sing with her and, remembering the hymn’s message, requested LDS baptism. Thereupon Sarah’s fainting spells ended.[12]
The New Jersey branches which previously had yielded LDS converts so bounteously still had some members. Sam Brannan recruited some of the New Jersey Saints to join the Brooklyn’s 1846 voyage to California. Two years later Elder William Appleby returned from the West to revive the local flocks and, incidentally, to administer to Rachel for her periodic bronchitis. But this activity was a pale imitation of the excitement which had once burned through the region. Seeking to integrate Mormonism more fully with their daily lives, Anna Ivins, her husband-cousin Israel, and several other members of the Ivins family still loyal to the new faith decided in 1853 to join a large company of New Jersey Saints gathering to Utah.[13]
The request forced Rachel into a final weighing of Mormonism and plural marriage. For a time after Nauvoo she had compartmentalized the two. Even in her early distress about polygamy, she had refused to listen to William Smith, Joseph’s schismatic brother, when he had come to the Ivinses’ Hornerstown home preaching “another Gospel.” When possible she continued her outward LDS activity. But for at least several years she struggled with plural marriage, until at some point through prayerful self-searching she found she could accept the doctrine. Although anti-Mormon family members warned that the westward journey would endanger her health and offered a lifetime annuity if she would stay, Rachel turned her face once again to the Mormon promised land, and this time she did not look back.[14]
She prepared carefully. Anticipating frontier scarcity, she filled a chest with bedding, wool and calico piece goods, and a practical wardrobe of bonnets, gloves, and dresses. Other members of the emigrating party, all relatively prosperous, were equally well stocked. By their preparations they were in fact saying good-by to their life in the East.[15]
The emigrants traveled comfortably. Rachel had the familiar society of several of her Ivins relations, including her cousins Theodore McKean and Anthony Ivins as well as Anna and Israel. Leaving Toms River on 5 April 1853, the party—comprising “a large number of persons from Toms River and other places in the state”—made its way to Philadelphia, boarded the train to Pittsburgh, and then floated on river steamers via Saint Louis to Kansas City. After visiting sites of interest in Jackson County, they purchased mule and wagon outfits (remembered as “one of the best equipments that ever came to Utah in the early fifties”) and began the trek west.[16]
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Notes
- ↑ Luther Prentice Allen, The Genealogy and History of the Shreve Family, 210, as quoted in Frances Bennett Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way: The Life of Rachel Ivins Grant, My Great-Grandmother,” 1, typescript, 1952, Church Archives.
- ↑ Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 2; Rachel Ridgway Grant [hereafter RRG] to HJG, 18 December 1904, Box 176, fd. 22, HJG Papers; and Lucy Grant Cannon, “Recollections of Rachel Ivins Grant” Relief Society Magazine 25 (May 1938): 295–96.
- ↑ The Mormon invasion and success in central New Jersey is an Important but untold story of early LDS proselyting. The Mormon chapels must have been among the earliest built by Church members anywhere. William Sharp, “The Latter-day Saints or ‘Mormons’ in New Jersey,” typescript of a memorandum prepared in 1897, Church Archives, 3; Edwin Salter, History of Monmouth and Ocean Counties (Bayonne, NJ: E. Gardner and Son, 1890), 253; and Franklin Ellis, The History of Monmouth County, New Jersey (Cottonport, LA.: Polyanthos, 1974), 633. Later in the 1840s, LDS converts apparently founded a small fishing village on the New Jersey coast which they named “Nauvoo,” Stanley B. Kimball, “‘Nauvoo’ Found in Seven States,” Ensign, Apr. 1973, 23.
- ↑ Anthony W. Ivins, Diary, vol. 1, 3, Utah State Historical Society, Salt Lake City, Utah; Kimball S. Erdman, Israel Ivins: A Biography (n.p., 1969), 3, Church Archives; Parley P. Pratt to Joseph Smith, Jr., 22 November 1839, Joseph Smith papers, Church Archives. At the Mormon Church conference held in Philadelphia, 13 January 1840, Ivins suggested and Joseph Smith agreed that the Book of Mormon should be printed instead in the West, Philadelphia Church Records 1840–1854 microfilm, Church Archives.
- ↑ RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” unpublished memorandum, HJG Papers, Box 177, fd 19; RRG, “Minutes of a Meeting of the General Boards of the Young Men and Young Women MIA,” 11 June 1902, in LC 35:324; Woman’s Exponent 31 (1 and 15 December 1902): 53. For women and nineteenth-century religion see Barbara Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion: 1800–1860,” in Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women, eds. Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (New York: Harper & Row/Harper Colophon Books, 1974), 137–57; and Mary P. Ryan, “A Woman’s Awakening: Evangelical Religion and the Families of Utica, New York, 1800–1840,” American Quarterly 30 (Winter 1978): 602–23.
- ↑ RRG, “How I Became A ‘Mormon,’” 1; and RRG, “Joseph Smith, the Prophet,” Young Woman’s Journal 16 (Dec. 1905): 550–551.
- ↑ Sharp, “The Latter-day Saints or ‘Mormons’ in New Jersey,” 1–2; Salter, History of Monmouth and Ocean Counties, 253; RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon’” 1–2.
- ↑ RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 1–2; RRG, “Minutes of a Meeting of the General Boards”; and Relief Society Minute Book 1875, Thirteenth Ward, 1 April 1875, 10, Church Archives. In addition to the Ivinses, the Appleby, Applegate, Brown, Bennett, Curtis, Doremus, Horner, Implay, McKean, Robbins, Sill, Stoddard, Woodward, Wright, and Wychoff families mixed together without social distinction in their central New Jersey branches.
- ↑ Erastus Snow, Journal, typescript, vol. 2, 25, Church Archives; and RRG, “How I Became a ‘Mormon,’” 2. Snow, who visited his New Jersey flock in late 1841, declared, “I found them strong in the faith, many having of late been added to them and several families, I found about ready to move to Nauvoo,” Journal 2:28.
- ↑ HJG to Heber M. Wells, 28 April 1904, and HJG to E. S. Tainter, 25 August 1926, LC 38:590 and 64:611; and HJG and Anthony W. Ivins, “Remarks at a Birthday Dinner for Heber J. Grant,” transcript in HJG Typed Diary, 22 November 1924, 314–15, HJG Papers.
- ↑ Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 151, 153; and Ellis, History of Monmouth County, 639. The school described here was probably Rachel’s, for John Horner, as cited in Ellis, recalled attending his early grammar studies with her.
- ↑ Cannon, “A Few Memories of Grandma Grant,” 181; and RRG, untitled and undated memorandum, HJG Papers, Box 147, folder 9.
- ↑ William Appleby Journal, 17 November 1845, 26 October and 1 November 1848, Church Archives.
- ↑ RRG, untitled and undated memorandum, HJG Papers, Box 147, folder 9; and Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 8.
- ↑ Jeppson, “With Joy Wend Your Way,” 9; and [Toms River] New Jersey Courier, 9 November 1934.
- ↑ Sharp, “The Latter-day Saints or ‘Mormons’ in New Jersey,” 2–3; Theodore McKean, “Autobiography,” unpublished draft, 2, Church Archives; and [Toms River] New Jersey Courier, 9 November 1934.
