BEACON HILL: A Local Poem, Historic and Descriptive. Book I
M[orton], S[arah Wentworth].

Boston: Printed by Manning & Loring for the Author, 1797. Only edition. 4to, ix, <10>-56pp; unprinted bluish-gray laid wrappers (sewn). Wrappers detached, lacking spine and with minor chipping; small tear to rear cover taped. At the title page is written in a contemporary hand, “By / Mrs. Sarah W. Morton.” Generally fresh and sound. Fine. Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton (1759-1848), poet and author, was born into an affluent, established New England family. Though little is known of her education, her writings attest to her learning. She grew up in Braintree near where John and Abigail Adams lived as did John Hancock and his family. It was lively intellectual milieu and Sarah and Abigail Adams became lifelong friends. As a young woman, she started writing poetry and circulating it in manuscript among her friends. With marriage in 1781 to Perez Morton, a Harvard graduate and a figure in Boston politics, Sarah focused her energies on her family and her five children who appeared in rapid succession. The couple occupied the Apthorp House, her ancestral home, in Boston and became leading lights in Boston society. Assured, intelligent, and attractive, husband and wife seemed charmed. This charmed life was shattered in 1788 when it became public that Sarah's sister Frances had borne Perez' child. Frances committed suicide. (A neighbor, William Hill Brown, used the scandal as the basis of his 1789 novel, THE POWER OF SYMPATHY, generally considered the first American novel and, oddly enough, attributed to Mrs. Morton for many years). Yet Sarah refused to allow this tragedy to destroy her family. She began to submit poetry to the MASSACHUSETTS MAGAZINE using the pen name "Constantia" and later "Philenia". The elegant, elegiac tone of the verse attracted praise with colleagues dubbing her the "Sappho of America". She published her first major poem, OUABI: or the Virtues of Nature in 1790, an Indian tale that forecast her focus on American themes. Jacqueline Hornstein, in AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS, emphasizes the poet "wrote verse about the new nation's ideological issues. Her best works in this vein [in which she includes BEACON HILL] demonstrate a well-developed social and moral conscience, independent thought, and notable poetic scope". The ambitious BEACON HILL appeared seven years later. In it she gives an epic aura to Boston's role in the Revolutionary War and then enlarges her theme to the thirteen colonies: "... from the snowy District of the Maine / To where red Georgia spreads her parching, plain, / In one fix'd union, with one soul inspired". The poem declares "Assert your rights, which self-supported rise, / Free as the air, and boundless as the skies". She envisions the American example of "Equal Freedom" gradually, "like the sun [will] this genial globe entwine". As an early abolitionist Morton also points to the evil of slavery in her description of Georgia where "Afric feel thee on her ravaged plain, / And stay they step, and stop thy hand in vain". Morton expands upon this line in a note in which she writes "Georgia for a long time after its first settlement opposed the importation of African slaves; but finally, influenced by the bad example of the neighboring colonies, she fell into the pernicious traffic, and the lands are now generally cultivated by that unhappy people". BEACON HILL sounds themes of individual liberty and responsibility, of patriotic ardor and social protest, and portrays not only a new nation, but a new national identity. AMERICAN WOMEN WRITERS, Vol. 3, pp. 230-232. CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, Vol. 1, pp. 596, 607, and 627. NAW, Volume II, pp. 586-587. (Item ID: 14829)

$5,500.00