A Midwife's Tale Read online

  ALSO BY LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH

  The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth

  Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750

  All God’s Critters Got a Place in the Choir (with Emma Lou Thayne)

  FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, JUNE 1991

  Copyright © 1990 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

  Maps copyright © 1990 by Karen Hansen

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1990.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ulrich, Laurel.

  A midwife’s tale : the life of Martha Ballard, based on her diary, 1785–1812 / Laurel Thatcher Ulrich.—1st Vintage Books ed. p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77298-5

  1. Ballard, Martha, 1735–1812. 2. Hallowell (Me.)—Biography. 3. Augusta (Me.)—Biography. 4. Kennebec River Valley (Me.)—Social life and customs. 5. Midwives—Maine—Hallowell—Biography. 6. Midwives—Maine—Augusta—Biography. I. Title.

  [F29.H15U47 1991]

  974. 1’6—dc20

  [B] 90-55674

  v3.1_r1

  for Gael

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps and Illustrations

  Tables and Graphs

  INTRODUCTION

  “a great sea A going”

  AUGUST 1787

  “Exceeding Dangerously ill”

  SEPTEMBER 1788

  “warpt a piece”

  OCTOBER 1789

  “Mrs Foster has sworn a Rape on a number of men”

  NOVEMBER 1792

  “Matrimonial writes”

  DECEMBER 1793

  “Birth 50. Birth 51”

  JANUARY 1796

  “find my house up in arms”

  FEBRUARY 1801

  “A Desection Performd”

  MARCH 1804

  “what a sceam had I to go at Evening”

  APRIL 1806

  “Polly Purington here”

  MAY 1809

  “Workt in my gardin”

  EPILOGUE

  Appendix:

  Medicinal Ingredients Mentioned in Martha Ballard’s Diary

  Notes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also By Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

  Maps and Illustrations

  Kennebec River Region

  Hallowell, Based on Survey by Ephraim Ballard, 1795

  New England, showing places of origin of early Hallowell settlers

  Sample Pages from Martha Ballard Diary Courtesy Maine State Library

  Hallowell, showing journey April 23-25, 1789

  Hallowell, showing medical and obstetrical cases, August 3-24, 1787

  Fort Settlement, c. 1788

  Hallowell & part of Pittston, showing the Ballard Farm, 1792

  Hallowell, showing deliveries Nov. 15-Dec. 8, 1793

  Ephraim Ballard Plan of Kennebec River Towns, 1789 Courtesy Maine State Archives

  Ephraim Ballard Plan of Hampden, 1795 Courtesy Maine State Archives

  Residences of Martha & Ephraim Ballard, 1778-1812

  Augusta Center, 1804

  Ballard Neighborhood, 1806

  Fort Western Neighborhood, 1809

  Kennebec County, showing Augusta and Malta

  Tables and Graphs

  I Lincoln County Court of General Sessions: Fornication and Paternity Actions, 1761–1799

  II Martha Moore Ballard Diary, 1785–1812: Paternity Record

  III Fornication Actions in Nathaniel Thwing “Criminal Record,” 1773–1803

  IV Summary of Delivery Data from Two Manuscript Sources

  V Comparative Maternal Mortality Rates

  VI Comparative Stillbirth Rates

  VII Martha Ballard’s Obstetrical Practice, 1785–1812

  INTRODUCTION

  “a great sea A going”

  Eight months of the year Hallowell, Maine, was a seaport. From early April to late November, ocean-going vessels sailed up the Kennebec, forty-six miles from the open Atlantic, bringing Pennsylvania flour, West Indian sugar, and English cloth and hardware, returning with shingles, clapboards, hogshead and barrel staves, white ash capstan bars, and pine boards destined for Boston or Bristol or Jamaica.1 In late autumn, ice blockaded the river, sometimes so suddenly that though a man had been expecting it for weeks, he was caught unprepared. One year, on November 25, after the last ships had sailed from the town, Jonathan Ballard pushed off from his father’s sawmill with a raft of boards destined for Long Reach on the coast. He got no farther than Bumberhook Point, three miles below, before the Kennebec closed around him. It didn’t open again until April 1.2

  Hallowell folks remembered openings and closings of the river the way people in other towns remembered earthquakes or drought. In 1785, the year of the long winter, the ice was still firm enough on April 22 to hold a sleigh bearing the body of Samuel Howard, one of the original settlers of the town, to his burying place at Fort Western. Not until May 3 did the first vessels arrive from “the westward,” bringing corn and pork to the straitened town.3 People both welcomed and feared the opening of the river. In bad years ice jams made ponds of fields and rafts of fences, backing up water in the mill creeks that cut through the steep banks on both sides. In good years, the opening water sent mill hands flying through April nights, ripping logs and securing lumber unlocked by the spring thaw. Sometimes the greatest danger was not from the river itself, though high water might pitch a man from a raft to his death before his fellows could reach him, but from the raging creeks on the shore.4

  In 1789, the river opened on April 7 in a heavy rain that took away the bridge over Ballard’s brook, made a breach in the mill dam, and washed out the underpinning of the north side of the house. “But we are yet alive & well for which we ought to be thankful,” Martha Ballard told her diary. She was fifty-four years old, a midwife. She and her family had lived at the mills since 1778, seven years after the incorporation of the town. Though she knew little of the sea, she had traveled much on the Kennebec, by water, by ice, and, during those treacherous seasons when the river was neither one nor the other, by faith.

  The year Old Lady Cony had her stroke, Martha Ballard crossed the river in a canoe on December 2, pushing through ice in several places. On December 30 of another year, summoned by a woman in labor, she walked across, almost reaching shore before breaking through to her waist at Sewall’s Eddy. She dragged herself out, mounted a neighbor’s horse, and rode dripping to the delivery. Necessity and a fickle river cultivated a kind of bravado among Hallowell folks. “People Crost the river on a Cake of ice which swong round from the Eddy East side & stopt at the point below Mr Westons,” Martha wrote on December 15 of one year. On April 1 of another she reported walking across on the ice after breakfast, adding drily in the margin of the day’s entry, “the river opened at 4 hour pm”5

  Martha Moore was born in 1735 in the small town of Oxford, near the Connecticut border in Worcester County, Massachusetts, but the real story of her life begins in Maine with the diary she kept along the Kennebec. Without the diary her biography would be little more than a succession of dates. Her birth in 1735. Her marriage to Ephraim Ballard in 1754. The births of their nine children in 1756, 1758, 1761, 1763, 1765, 1767, 1769, 1772, and 1779, and the deaths of three of them in 1769. Her own death in 1812. The American Advocate for June 9, 1812, summed up her life in one sentence: “Died in Augusta, Mrs. Martha, consort of Mr. Ephraim Ballard, aged 77 years.”6 Without the diary we would know nothing of her life after the last of her children was born, nothing of the 816 deliveries she performed between 1785 and 1812. We would not even be certain she had been a midwife.

  In the spring of 1789, Martha faced a flooding river and a rising tide of births. She attended seven deliveries in March and another seven before the end of April, twice her monthly average. On April 23 she went down the Kennebec to visit several families on the west side of the river opposite Bumberhook. This is how she told her story:

  [April 23] Clear & very Pleasant. I sett out to go to Mr Bullins. Stept out of the Canue & sunk in the mire. Came back & Changd my Cloaths. Maid another attempt & got safe there. Sett out for home. Calld at Capt Coxes & Mr Goodins. Was Calld in at Mrs Husseys. Tarried all night. A sever storm before morn.

  [April 24] A sever Storm of rain. I was Calld at 1 hour pm from Mrs Husseys by Ebenzer Hewin. Crosst the river in their Boat. A great sea A going. We got safe over then sett out for Mr Hewins. I Crost a stream on the way on fleeting Loggs & got safe over. Wonder full is the Goodness of providence. I then proseeded on my journey. Went beyond Mr Hainses & a Larg tree blew up by the roots before me which Caused my hors to spring back & my life was spared. Great & marvillous are thy sparing mercies O God. I was assisted over the fallen tree by Mr Hains. Went on. Soon Came to a stream. The Bridg was gone. Mr Hewin took the rains waded thro & led the horse. Asisted by the same allmighty power I got safe thro & arivd unhurt. Mrs Hewins safe delivd at 10 h Evn of a Daughter.

  After great deliverances came small annoyances. In the margin of that day’s narrative, she wrote,
“My Cloak was burnt while there so that it is not wareable.” In all the excitement, someone had apparently allowed the midwife’s sodden wrap to hang too near the fire. The story continued:

  [April 25] Rainy. I came from Mr Hewins to Mr Pollards. My hors mired & I fell off in the mud but blessed be God I receivd no hurt. Mr Hewins attended me to Mrs Husseys. We arivd at 11 hour morning. Mrs Norcross was in Travill. Her women were immediately Calld & Shee was Safe Delivrd at 5 hour 30 minutes Evening of a fine son. Her Husband & Mrs Delino & her Childn went on board bound for Nantucket Early this morn.

  [April 26] A very Cold morn. Snowd. I took my leav of Mrs Hussey & family. Came to Mr Herseys. He & William Howard brot me from fort Western by water. I left my patients Cleverly & found my famely well. It is the greatest freshet in this river that has been this many years.

  Reading such a story, we can easily imagine Martha as an archetypical pioneer. Indeed, the rhythms of her story echo the seventeenth-century captivity narratives that gave New England its first frontier heroines. One thinks of Mary Rowlandson crossing the Ware River in Vermont on a makeshift raft in the early spring of 1676 or of Hannah Swarton traveling into Maine “over Steep and hideous Mountains one while, and another while over Swamps and Thickets of Fallen Trees.”7 The religious language in Martha Ballard’s diary strengthens the affinity with her Puritan progenitors. Dramatizing the dangers of her journey, she both glorified God and gave meaning and dimension to her own life. Mr. Hewins led her horse and Mr. Hains walked beside her, but Providence rescued her from the violence of the spring freshet.

  “A great sea A going”—Martha knew how to suggest an entire landscape, or in this case a riverscape, in a phrase. Her description of the river crossing is part psalm, part tale.8 She understood instinctively, if not self-consciously, the importance of repetition and the uses of convention. Notice how in the April 24 passage she alternated spare, but vivid, action sentences with formulaic religious phrases:

  I Crost the stream on the way on fleeting Loggs & got safe over. Wonder full is the Goodness of providence. I then proseeded on my journey. Went beyond Mr Hainses & a Larg tree blew up by the roots before me which Caused my hors to spring back & my life was spared. Great & marvillous are thy sparing mercies O God. I was assisted over the fallen tree by Mr Hains. Went on. Soon Came to a stream. The Bridg was gone. Mr Hewin took the rains waded thro & led the horse. Asisted by the same allmighty power I got safe thro & arivd unhurt.

  Here the religious sentiments become a kind of refrain, punctuating and accentuating each stage in the narrative. Such a passage reveals a storyteller, if not a writer, at work.

  There are other passages of similar quality in the diary. Yet most of Martha’s entries are more mundane. The structure of her diary derives from two workaday forms of record-keeping, the daybook and the interleaved almanac. In eighteenth-century New England, farmers, craftsmen, shopkeepers, ship’s captains, and perhaps a very few housewives kept daybooks, running accounts of receipts and expenditures, sometimes combining economic entries with short notes on important family events and comments on work begun or completed. Other early diarists used the blank pages bound into printed almanacs to keep their own tally on the weather, adding brief entries on gardening, visits to and from neighbors, or public occurrences of both the institutional and the sensational sort. Martha Ballard did all these things.

  The extant diary, which begins in January of 1785, may have been preceded by an almanac of some sort, since she ruled the margins of her homemade booklets and numbered the days of the month and week, using a “dominical letter” for Sundays, according to the almanac form. Whatever its origins, the diary functioned as a kind of daybook. Martha recorded debts contracted and “rewards” received, and some of the time she noted numbers of yards “got out” of the loom and varieties of beans put into the ground. Her midwifery accounts are even more methodical. She carefully labeled and numbered each delivery, adding an XX to the margin when the fee was paid.

  Those few historians who have known about the diary have not known quite what to do with it. In his History of Augusta published in 1870, James W. North quoted several passages, including the one for April 24, 1789, but he pronounced most of the entries “brief and with some exceptions not of general interest.” Although Charles Elventon Nash devoted more than a third of his 600-page History of Augusta to an abridgment of the journal, carefully extracting birth records and a sample of almost everything else except unsavory medical details or anything tainted with sex, he too found much of it “trivial and unimportant … being but a repetition of what has been recited many times.” Curiously, a feminist history of midwifery published in the 1970s repeated the old dismissal: “Like many diaries of farm women, it is filled with trivia about domestic chores and pastimes.”9

  Yet it is in the very dailiness, the exhaustive, repetitious dailiness, that the real power of Martha Ballard’s book lies. To extract the river crossings without noting the cold days spent “footing” stockings, to abstract the births without recording the long autumns spent winding quills, pickling meat, and sorting cabbages, is to destroy the sinews of this earnest, steady, gentle, and courageous record. Martha sometimes slipped the folded half-sheets from which she constructed her diary into her bag when she crossed the river or waded through snow to sit out a tedious labor, and when she felt overwhelmed or enlivened by the very “trivia” the historians have dismissed, she said so, not in the soul-searching manner of a Puritan nor with the literary self-consciousness of a sentimentalist, but in a plain, matter-of-fact, and in the end unforgettable voice. For more than twenty-seven years, 9,965 days to be exact, she faithfully kept her record. Martha was not an introspective diarist, yet in this conscientious recording as much as in her occasional confessions, she revealed herself. “And now this year is come to a close,” she wrote on December 31, 1800, “and happy is it if we have made a wise improvement of the time.” For her, living was to be measured in doing. Nothing was trivial.

  Because so few New England women of her generation left writing in any form, one searches for an explanation for the diary. Though her grandmother, Hannah Learned, was able to muster a clear but labored signature on the one surviving document bearing her name, her mother, Dorothy Moore, signed with a mark.10 On the male side of the family, however, there is a record of education. Martha’s uncle Abijah Moore, who graduated from Yale in 1726, was the first college graduate from the town of Oxford. Martha’s younger brother, Jonathan Moore, was the second. Jonathan graduated from Harvard College in 1761, serving for a time as librarian of the college before accepting a call as pastor of the First Congregational Church in Rochester, Massachusetts. Throughout her life Martha Ballard corresponded with “Brother Jonathan.”11

  Although her handwriting is crude in comparison with her brother’s and less certain than that of her husband, who was a surveyor and mapmaker as well as a miller, her ability to write cursive in any form is itself evidence that someone in Oxford in the 1740s was interested in educating girls.12 Judging from the diary, that education was quite conventional. Although Martha occasionally “perrused” newspapers, she mentioned only one book other than the Bible. On June 25, 1786, a Sunday, she wrote, “I have Red in Mr Marshalls gospel mistry Mystery of Sanctification.” The book was Walter Marshall’s Gospel-Mystery of Sanctification, a work of popular piety first published in London in 1692, though reprinted many times in the eighteenth century. Her concern with the spelling of the title is intriguing; normally, she showed little interest in such matters. Obviously having the book in her hand elevated her consciousness, though it had little effect on the rest of the passage. Read remained Red.

  Martha’s choice of reading material was conservative, at least on that Sunday in 1786. She was aware of more modern forms of English literature, however. Her younger sister, Dorothy Barton, had two daughters named after characters in the novels of Samuel Richardson. Pamela and Clarissa Harlowe Barton were frequent visitors to and sometime inhabitants of the Ballard house, as was their sister Parthenia. Classical or pseudo-classical names were still rare in New England in the 1760s, though they became more popular after the Revolution. The Ballards succumbed to the same impulse and displayed an uncharacteristic bit of whimsy when they named their third daughter Triphene.13