CAROLINE LEE HENTZ'S LONG JOURNEY

Alabama Heritage, Winter 2005 by Beidler, Philip D

During her stay in Alabama, Caroline Lee Hentz became one of the Deep South's most prolific, popular, and profitable antebellum authors, whose novels would secure her a place in history. And she managed to do it all despite the best efforts of a chronically jealous husband. By PHILIP D. BEIDLER

IN 1834 CAROLINE LEE WHITING HENTZ, a native of Lancaster, Massachusetts, arrived in the Deep South state of Alabama, where she would spend the next fourteen years of her life. A birthright New Englander, on her mother's side she was a Danforth. On her father's, she could trace six generations back to the Rev. Samuel Whiting, one of the early sttlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Her credentials as a daughter of the Glorious Republic were impeccable as well; her father fought in the American Revolution, then in 1808 returned to the service of the new nation as a colonel. Born June 1, 1800, Hentz herself was just the age of the new century. And now she was living out some of the most important new territorial developments of the early national era-not the least of which was the runaway expansion of the cotton and slave kingdom rising out of the region previously known as the Old Southwest.

The place of her arrival was Florence, Alabama, a flourishing planter town on the Tennessee River in the state's northwest corner. Notably picturesque, Florence was well established by the standards of a raw frontier territory that had achieved statehood a mere fifteen years earlier. The occasion of that arrival was the latest in a series of moves by her husband, an itinerant French-born schoolmaster named Nicholas Marcellus Hentz. They had met and married in 1824 while he was a faculty member at Round Hill Academy, a school for boys in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1826 the couple moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Nicholas had managed to gain appointment as a professor of modern languages at the state university. Then, harkening to what seemed to be grander, more independent prospects offered at the era's epicenter of frontier expansion, he successively superintended girls' schools in Covington, Kentucky, from 1830 to 1832, and in Cincinnati, Ohio, from 1832 to 1834. Now, in 1834, Nicholas Hentz had embarked on yet another such enterprise at Florence called Locust Dell Academy.

The Hentzes would spend nine years in Florence-their longest time in one place during their married lives, it would turn out. They would move five more times before it was all over: in 1843 to Tuscaloosa; then to Tuskegee; then again to Columbus, Georgia; and shortly thereafter to St. Andrews, Florida, and finally to nearby Marianna just south of the Florida-Georgia border. Along the way, Caroline Lee Hentz labored faithfully as her husband's professional helpmate in his various projects as a frontier pedagogue and educator-teaching classes, taking in boarders, and even growing crops in the field for the communal larder. She also gave birth to four children and reared and educated three. Most importantly for our purposes, she also managed to become one of the Deep South's most prolific and best-known antebellum writers, with a large popular and literary output including three early plays, eight novels, and nine volumes' worth of collected stories, not to mention occasional essays and poems. And with the exception of the plays, virtually all of it was written during her Alabama sojourn.

All such general summary, however, barely begins to tell the story of Caroline Lee Hentz's long journey. To put it in words frequently evoked in nineteenth-century women's writing such as her own, Hentz's life was full of suffering, want, self-denial, isolation, distraction, and imposition. Indeed, it is a wonder how she managed any of it at all. In the household dimension alone, anecdotes abound of her writing for the odd half-hour amidst cooking, cleaning, and child-rearing chores, in an atmosphere of domestic pandemonium. How, one asks, could a wife, mother, and striving literary artist have borne for so long such erratic itinerancy with her husband and their traveling brood-attending his moods, his angers, and his constantly shifting schemes of educational entrepreneurship? And that was just the tip of what must have been an iceberg of material and spiritual impoverishment.

The key word here for Caroline, particularly in her relationship with Nicholas, surely had to be suffering. Not simply as in "long-suffering," in the traditional argot of unhappy marriages, but rather suffering, period. For itinerant, it turns out, was only one of several adjectives that would be used to describe her husband. Irascible was another. Impecunious and improvident-or, as one biographer phrased it more kindly, "unprosperous"-were invariably on the list of invocations as well. Putting it all back together, one has to believe that Nicholas Hentz was in some deep and irreparable way mentally troubled. He exhibited endless bouts of optimism and industry, punctuated by abandonment of projects and flight. The immediate cause of removal from a given location was nearly always, at least to Nicholas's mind, some kind of quarrel or local enmity. In several documented cases, it was a pathological jealousy arising out of attentions paid by other men to his wife. It is easy to imagine such resentment in the spousal arena as well, as Nicholas's decline into poor health was matched by Caroline's ascendancy as a major literary figure. Amid rapidly rising acclaim for his wife's public accomplishments, Nicholas could look back in mounting anger over a history of serial failure. Chronic envy and excuse-making; quickness to take offense, real or imagined; resentment and anger over what he saw as ignored or unappreciated genius-the case of Edgar Allan Poe comes to mind here, both in life and art.