Catherine Wistar, a Batch of Baches, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson

Accomplished as the family members have been, a discussion of the Wistars is incomplete unless one can appreciate the tangle of relationships the family has forged since coming to America.

Sarah Franklin Bache

Catherine Wistar Bache, for example, represents multiple points of social and genealogical convergence. Take a few steps back from Catherine- we start at Benjamin Franklin. Ben had a daughter, Sarah. Sarah married Richard Bache who, upon Franklin’s removal, became the nation’s second Postmaster General. Sarah Franklin and Richard Bache had a son, Dr. William Bache. He was Ben Franklin’s grandson.

Franklin’s grandson married Catherine Wistar, whose brother was Dr. Caspar Wistar, the anatomist, and whose grandfather was the Caspar Wistar who built the Wistarburgh Glass business. Put another way, Ben and Caspar “Glass” Wistar, friends and neighbors, had grandchildren who married one another.

The year after they were married, yellow fever ravaged Philadelphia. William Bache’s brother, Benjamin, died. The Baches, Wistars and Franklins were all friends with Thomas Jefferson and, at his urging, Dr. William Bache and Catherine Wistar Bache moved to Monticello, where they lived for several months, before moving into a new house in Franklin, Virginia.

Their farm did not produce well enough to support the family. They had financial difficulties. William Bache asked President Jefferson for a government appointment, which he received in 1802. He cared for sick American seamen in New Orleans. Catherine Wistar Bache and their children – among them Benjamin Franklin Bache- returned to Philadelphia. The following year, William Bache became Surveyor of the Port of Philadelphia, where the family reunited.

As Milton Rubicam observes, the “career of the Wistars and Wisters has been a continuous adventure, a story of heroic men and gracious ladies, of philanthropists and scholars, of soldiers and authors, and of men and women with strong convictions of duty to their country and their community.” We have only rolled some highlight reels here.

Map for The Virginian, by Owen Wister

We could just as easily have looked at Owen Wister, the author of The Virginian and who, some have argued, is the father of the American Western and who, said a NY Times critic, may have written “the American novel.” Owen Wister’s mother was Sarah Kemble, the daughter of the celebrated actress Fanny Kemble. At Harvard, Owen secured an interesting class reunion by becoming friends with Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Cabot Lodge.

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Margaret Fuller’s Conversations

“Very early I knew that the only object in life was to grow.” – Margaret Fuller

  

 Seminal American feminist and influential Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller was born May 23, 1810, in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts. 

Margaret Fuller

By her mid-twenties, Fuller had developed a list of friends and collaborators that reads like a Who’s Who of the United States in the early to mid nineteenth century, covering Thoreau, Emerson, Horace Greeley, and Bronson Alcott.  

Intellectually aggressive, persuasive and charismatic, Fuller’s trailblazing spirit established her among the pantheon of notable teachers, thinkers, and writers of her era. She forced Harvard University to evolve, and grant her access to the library stacks. Attuned to inequality and social injustices, Fuller relentlessly exposed and addressed aspects of culture and society in deep need of reform. Passionate in support of women’s suffrage and rights to an education, she was just as tenacious a proponent of the abolition of slavery and prison reform.  

Following her tenure replacing Elizabeth Peabody as a teacher at Boston’s Temple School, organized by Bronson Alcott, whose “controversial” pedagogical methods were steeped in the belief that all children were cable of learning well, and responded better to dialog rather than rote learning, Fuller initiated a series of philosophy workshops for women, conducted in the Socratic style.  

Fuller referred to these neo-Platonic workshops as “Conversations.” Enormously popular among educators, authors, the wives of politicians, and future luminaries of the women’s civil rights movement, the series ran for five years, during which she edited Emerson’s Transcendentalist periodical, The Dial. Her Conversations provided an unprecedented forum for women to discuss politics, morality, philosophy, and theories of social justice, topics of conversations to which women had not been previously invited as active participants.  

Margaret Fuller’s groundbreaking Feminist study, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, represents an embellished record of one of her Conversations.  

Just forty years after her birth in May 1810, Margaret Fuller drowned on June 19, 1850, with her husband and young son, following a shipwreck off the coast of Fire Island, New York.  

For Further Reading:  

Dickenson, Donna. Margaret Fuller: Writing a Woman’s Life.  

Fuller, Margaret. Woman in the Nineteenth Century.  

Von Mehren, Joan. Minerva and the Muse: A Life of Margaret Fuller.

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