College Girl and School Ma'am in the Eighteen-Fifties

Abstract

OUT of musty attic trunks have come these fragments of letters of the eighteen-fifties from the pens of two girls at college (or more correctly, a seminary) and a school ma'am. The first one was written in July, I854, by Clara Torrey, the second in December, I856, by Rachel Higgins, both students at Mount Holyoke Seminary. The two together give us vivid impressions of life at this historic institution. Clara Torrey's letter features the Fourth of July, celebrated as a protest against the Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and shows the ferment which that measure caused even in so isolated a community as Mount Holyoke was in those days. Only a few years earlier Emily Dickinson had written from the seminary to her brother at Amherst, Won't you please to tell me when you answer my letter who the candidate for President is? I have been trying to find out ever since I came here, and have not yet succeeded. I don't know anything more about affairs in the world than if I were in a trance-by which it is apparent that not every political event penetrated the college cloisters. But opposition to slavery was by 1854 more than a political matter in New Englandit had become a crusade which swept all classes into its ranks. It was because the Kansas-Nebraska Bill represented in a very real sense the triumph of Darkness over Light that the girls turned Sem Hall into a charnel house. But seminary life had its lighter moments. The celebration in the orchard on the evening of Liberty's death though, still harping on the same theme is nevertheless on a much lighter note. Youthful spirits found vent in a political burlesque which was so funny that Miss Jessup laughed till she cried. Rachel Higgins gives us a pleasant picture of Thanksgiving with its dinner of such foods as turkeys chickens, vegatables of various kinds, mince pies pumpkin pies puddings, etc. There was