The highly influential Quaker theologian Elias Hicks, aged 81, died on February 27, 1830. Throughout the rest of the century, his devotees among the public, as well as among Friends, earnestly strove in many ways to resurrect his image. There is clearly some irony in this. Antebellum Friends’ “plainness” tradition prohibited the display of any such “graven images.” Rather than the lavish oil portraits favored by their contemporaries, it would appear that Friends, at most, tolerated silhouettes as simple and stark as the shadows cast by a flickering whale-oil lamp.
The actual situation was more nuanced than that. Granted, the sins of “graven images” were propounded seven times in the book which became something of a Hicksite bible (if you will), The Quaker. However, as Anne Verplank has written, “The section on plainness in the 1797 Rules of Discipline of the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting is typical in tone and content and in not mentioning portraiture.” Moreover, Elias’s own cousin Edward Hicks blatantly, albeit with a Quaker sense of guilt, broke the unwritten taboo by including the graven images of both William Penn and Elias Hicks in his Peaceable Kingdom for 1828.
Nevertheless, it’s likely that Old Elias’s grave remained unmarked, since the Discipline clearly identified gravestones as “inconsistent with the Plainness of our principles and practices,” and New York Hicksites did not countenance tombstones until 1848. Therefore, when “resurrectionist” Samuel E Clement [birth and death dates unknown] led JHI Browere [1790–1834] and son to Hicks’s grave in the spring of 1830, they would have been able to identify it only by a mound of freshly-turned earth.
Following Peaceable Kingdom, the next attempt at Elias Hicks iconography was orchestrated by Samuel E Clement, Brooklyn’s postmaster and the publisher of the Long Island Patriot, and by the ambitious, prosperous, and litigious, merchant Aaron Leggett [1792—1860]. The profound contradictions between contemporary news accounts of their legal dispute with Browere over the resulting death mask make it difficult to determine who originated the infamous scheme.
Walt Whitman remembered Samuel E Clement as a “good fellow:” an “eccentric, hawk-nosed Quaker and Southerner (he often boasted of his Southern blood).” Clement was one of Elias Hicks’s many “ardent admirers” among “the world’s people.” Likely as a reward for loyalty to President Jackson, he was appointed postmaster, handling the village of Brooklyn’s mail from the Patriot publishing office. Clement was
very tall, (six feet, two), very thin, with a slow and peculiar gait in walking, long-tailed blue coat with gilt buttons, and on his head in summer an enormous broad-brimmed, low-crowned leghorn hat. Imagine him promenading the streets (then lanes, with trees,) of Brooklyn or riding out in his skeleton sulkey. He always kept a horse, generally a pretty fast one; to his country subscribers out in Bushwick, New Lots, Flatlands, &c., carrying round his papers himself.
In The Old Merchants of New York City, Alfred Joseph Scoville quipped, “Never lived such a joker as Aaron Leggett… If I was to pen all I know about Aaron Leggett, it would take a year.” Leggett’s family ran a dry goods emporium in the bustling antebellum Quaker district along Manhattan’s Pearl Street. More crucially, the Leggetts also helped establish the city’s gas lighting infrastructure.
The plan hatched by Leggett, or more probably, Clement, relied upon the craftsmanship of sculptor John Henri Isaac Browere [1792—1834]. By 1828, he had created life masks of John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, DeWitt Clinton, Henry Clay, Valentine Mott, Edwin Forrest, Philip Hone, Dolly Madison, Francis Wright, and Gilbert Stuart — among quite a number of other figures less recognized today. His desire to open his own national sculpture gallery, however, was stymied by a fear of “having the collection pirated.” In the winter of 1830, Browere was feeling unappreciated, even bruised by the ostracism of his colleagues, who seem to have considered making a life mask inferior to sculpting by hand. The various reportage of what happened next remains fundamentally abstruse and contradictory.
According to the New York Courier & Enquirer’s report of the Leggett-Browere lawsuit, it was during this time that Browere received a startling proposal from Friend Leggett: the artist would fashion a mask of Elias Hicks, after exhuming the moldering preacher’s body. For those who yearned to possess an enduring reminder of the beloved, controversial minister, casting busts from such a mask was the only recourse. While living, the strong-minded Hicks could never have been persuaded to submit to an oil portrait, much less a life mask. However, in other reports of the same trial, the death mask and busts were said to be originally commissioned by Clement.
One fact that is plain is that within a fortnight after Hicks’s demise, Browere and son proceeded to Jericho and unearthed the body, guided by Clement. Probably this could have only been accomplished under the wan illumination of a lantern on a dark night in early March. One can only imagine the nocturnal sounds, the eruption of stench from the pried-open crypt, and the sad changes written across the icy face by weeks of decay, and frozen maggots and carrion beetles. Somehow, Browere managed to apply his unique skills to the grisly operation. The resurrectionists reinterred the disturbed corpse and absconded, probably under the cover of darkness, with their prize. When Hicks’s family learned of the desecration, they investigated and found crumbs of plaster of Paris in Elias’s hair. This fact was later used to debunk a rumor spread by Clement’s enemies that the resurrectionists decapitated the corpse in order to take the impression.
According to the Nantucket Inquirer’s account of Isaac Pierce’s testimony, the cast was brought to his house, where Clement and Browere signed articles of partnership. The Courier & Enquirer, on the other hand, reported that Samuel C Mott witnessed the agreement on March 15, but it described the contract as an arrangement between Leggett and Browere. The New York Evening Post story claimed that Browere turned to the famous attorney Aaron Burr to draw up a contract for the production of nine copies of a Hicks bust for a price of $1000, and the original cast for $100, within a deadline of three months. The contract also specified a metal mold to be cast and turned over to Leggett. For an additional fee, Browere would then use the mold to make 500 more busts. In the Evening Post’s scenario, Leggett refused to sign off on the agreement until Browere displayed a model as proof that he could produce the items in question.
Turning again now to Clement, the Inquirer seems to have suggested that once he obtained the first bust for display to customers, he hoped to profit either by obtaining orders for copies or by selling tickets to an exhibition. The business proposition may have been ill-considered. Browere’s characteristic paranoia resurfaced, however, over the fear that his work might somehow be copied. He would not allow a public exhibition, but offered to take a bust to Philadelphia, presumably for more private inspection by Friends. Clement would not agree to this, saying that “if Browere had not sufficient confidence in him, they had better dissolve the partnership.” As already mentioned, the news clippings are highly oblique and confusing, but apparently Isaac Pierce bought Samuel E Clement’s share of the project for $150, and in December, sold this to Aaron Leggett. But Pierce must have not bought out Clement’s entire participation, because in Februrary of 1831, Clement allegedly sold 12 busts to Aaron Leggett. Clement told the jury that although he had sold his interest in the speculation, he still considered himself a partner in full, and entitled to sell the busts to Leggett for $60 apiece. The logic behind this reasoning remains unclear. According to the Evening Post, Leggett sued Browere for possession of the Hicks busts, claiming his ownership was established by a “conveyance from Pierce and Clement.” The defense forced Clement to admit that he had never given to Browere any of the money he had received.
Browere had been, at the time, behind on his rent and “in great distress.” His landlord had appealed to Leggett to recover $120 in unpaid rent, and Leggett wrote him back, asking that he “destrain,” or confiscate, his tenant’s busts for sale at auction. On another occasion Leggett had advanced the landlord $28 in hopes he would steal the heads. Neither of these measures succeeded. While Browere was employing the death mask to sculpt busts, he had surely ruminated over the simple fact these Friends had tempted him not only to risk outraging pious society, but to incur serious criminal, as well as civil, liability. According to Gregory P Wilson, Leggett must have panicked over the possibility that Browere would destroy the busts. Leggett began to insist that the heads were only worth $60 apiece, and convinced the police to surround Browere’s home with their guns drawn, confiscating the disputed artworks in a legal manuever called “replevin.” Browere tried to persuade his neighbors to thwart the seizure, calling Leggett a seducer, a scoundrel, and an oppressor of the poor.
When the inevitable lawsuit over the grave-robbing scandal followed, oddly enough, it was not prosecuted by the teeming, powerful Hicks clan. It remained confined to a breach of contract between artist and patron. The Courier & Enquirer and Evening Post reported that three copies of the busts were exhibited, and, given varied testimony from artists acting as witnesses, the jury was asked to assign a value to them. The plaintiff, Leggett, was dismayed to see the court finding for defendant Browere, who was awarded the fairly large sum of $225, although it’s quite possible he deserved much more.
Browere’s daughter told the judge that the original mold had been destroyed. On June 1, the Star stated that Browere had also destroyed all the busts. This, too, is consistent with the simplistic legend endlessly parroted in Walt Whitman biographies. However, Browere must have tricked both the court and the press. Friends Special Collections at Swarthmore actually came into possession of the death mask — provenance unknown. The contemporary newspaper clippings in their Elias Hicks archive have informed the writing of this essay (although not their transcript of E Weeks’s amateur speech, which was much later based purely on dubious hearsay).
On May 28, 1831, Clement informed the New York Evening Post that the entire enterprise had been guided by “the advice” and with “the co-operation” of some of Elias Hicks’s “most intimate friends.” Clement protested the “purity” of his purposes, having taken “honorable steps to preserve the image of his friend, after death.” The Long Island Star did not hesitate to reaffirm the morality of the incident:
We are quite unwilling that our neighbor Clement [sic] should be thus persecuted for what little good he does! Considering his effort in obtaining that bust a laudable one, we take the liberty to say so; and if he is destined to suffer, in his office or reputation, we trust it will be on some more real and tangible grounds than those exhibited in [James Watson Webb’s hostile] Courier and Enquirer.
Although we have Whitman himself to thank for permanently muddling his own biography, it appears that the boy actually began to work as the Patriot’s printers’ devil in the summer of 1831: after the Hicks fiasco and during the lawsuit. Recalling Clement, “I used occasionally to go out riding with the boss,” the elderly Whitman wrote, “who was very kind to us boys…” In any event, while the wealthy Leggett got off with a trivial debt, the middleman of the whole affair, Clement, took the full brunt of the backlash that year, losing his newspaper, his postmaster job, and even his Masonic membership.
Loco-foco “Resurrectionists”
Long Islanders were still captivated by the gothic tale of the death mask in 1838, when the centrist Democratic organ The New Era reported/editorialized on the Queens County Democratic-Republican Party convention — a bitterly quarrelsome big tent for radical, moderate, and conservative voters. Hicks’s grandson, Elias Hicks II [1815—1853], was elected as its candidate for the New York State Assembly. The New Era piece ridiculed the socialist loco-focos who assumed Hicks would champion their agrarian, populist policies. The Whigs who published the Long Island Star were delighted to witness such conflict within the opposing party. Following the grave-robbing theme already introduced by the New Era, the Star’s propagandist called the Democrats “resurrectionists,” taunting the popular dread of the grave-robbers who exhumed corpses for medical dissection.
Resurrections in Arts and Letters
We turn now for a brief glance at Elisa Seaman Leggett [1815—1900], an abolitionist, suffragist, and civic reformer, and an important Hicksite resurrectionist in quite a different sense from Aaron Leggett or Elias II. Many Leggetts inhabited the greater environs around Elias Hicks’s home in Jericho, but any relationship between her husband Augustus W and Aaron remains to be determined. Letters between one Thomas Leggett and Elias Hicks discussing theological questions figured prominently in histories of the Hicksite Schism; again the exact family relations have not been determined. Her own family ties, however, are clear: Elisa’s famous father, Dr Valentine Seaman, had a cousin named Jemima who became Elias Hicks’s wife.
Manhattanite Elisa (sometimes spelled “Eliza”) spent her girlhood summers among her father’s Quaker relatives on Long Island — in particular with William Hicks, who ran a lumber mill and kept a store in Roslyn. The Hicks family lived on a beautiful estate which they finally sold to the celebrated poet and publisher of the New York Evening Post, William Cullen Bryant.
Young Elisa Seaman, a beauty in the stamp of Olivia de Havilland, married Augustus Wright Leggett. He was not a member of any Meeting, but cultivated connections to Friends, particularly those near his home in the Quaker district around Pearl Street. Elisa was disowned by the Orthodox New York Yearly Meeting for ‘marrying out,’ but in 1843, she became a member of Westbury Monthly Meeting (Hicksite). The Leggetts made their home, “Hillside,” near her Quaker relatives and adjacent to Bryant’s “Cedarmere.” In the early ‘Fifties, Augustus published a newspaper called the Roslyn Plaindealer, but in 1852, he moved the family to Michigan, finally settling in Detroit, where he became Collector of Customs. “Their home in Detroit was a center for progressive people...” Joann P Krieg wrote, “and Sojourner Truth is mentioned as a guest at the time of one of Mrs Leggett’s letters to Whitman.”
Elisa Seaman Leggett’s historic role as a Hicksite “resurrectionist,” if you will, is directly related to her deep devotion to Walt Whitman. In 1882, Mrs Leggett wrote him:
I have listened to his preaching so often when a child, and sat with my mother at social gatherings where he was the centre, and every one so pleased and stirred by his conversation. I hear that you contemplate writing or speaking about him, and I wondered whether you had a picture of him. As I am the owner of two, I send you one.
Walt’s journal for June 8, 1882 records his reply to Mrs Leggett, thanking her for “the print of EH.” This etching by Peter Maverick was based upon a Henry Inman painting. Whitman kept it, to eventually illustrate his profoundly defective literary sketch of Hicks in his memoir November Boughs. On Thursday, July 19, 1888, when he was broken down and gravely ill, he told Horace Traubel
I knew the habitats of Hicks so well — my grand-parents knew him personally so well — the shore up there, Jericho, the whole tone of the life of the time and place-all so familiar to me[.] I have got to look upon myself as sort of chosen to do a job as the Hicksite historian. I have seemed, to myself at least, to be particularly equipped for doing just this thing and doing it as it should be done — have felt that no one else living is exactly so well appointed for it. ... Now it threatens to go up in smoke! ... it will be a life or death struggle. [Emphasis mine]
Indeed, Whitman struggled through pain and great debility to complete the essay, “Notes (As They Are) Founded on Elias Hicks,” and published the disorganized and abortive essay in 1888. Although Whitman finally alluded to the foundational point — that Hicks had taught him to “follow the inward Deity-planted law of the emotional soul” rather than any “outside doctrine of creeds, Bibles, legislative enactments, conventionalities, or even decorums” — he never found a way to discuss hysterical warnings from Hicks’s Orthodox critics Anna Braithwaite, Ann Jones, and Elisha Bates that this Perfectionist theology could be misconstrued to sanction sexual immorality. (Apparently, Orthodox Friends did not appreciate Hicks’s explicit advice: “Mind thy own business.”)
The only thing to add, for the sake of completeness, is that there were two more artistic resurrections of Hicks. Whitman commissioned an amateur bust from the Unitarian minister Sidney H Morse. The accomplished sculptor William Ordway Partridge also produced a handsome idealized bust shown in the frontispiece of Bliss Forbush’s Elias Hicks, Quaker Liberal.
Elias Hicks after Life
In conclusion, the enormous esteem accorded to Friend Elias by the Long Island Leggetts was sufficient to instigate Clement’s and Leggett’s outrageous attempt to exhume his body for a death mask. Later, it would prompt Elisa Seaman Leggett to donate her etching of Hicks to posterity by gifting it to Walt Whitman for November Boughs. It is not too far-fetched to assert that ever since Whitman’s 1888 book, anyone with an abiding interest in Elias Hicks invariably finds both his image and his memory resurrected in this effort by Elisa and Walt. Given the scant size of the Quaker movement after 1900 and the global reach of Whitman’s perennial readership, it’s even safe to say that more people get their Quakerism from Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose than from any other source.
Elias Hicks, et al The Quaker, Being a Series of Sermons by Members of the Society of Friends, Marcus Tullius Cicero Gould, transcriber (Philadelphia: privately published, 1828).
Anne Verplanck “The Silhouette and Quaker Identity in Early National Philadelphia” Winterthur Portfolio, vol 43, no 1 (Spring 2009), 48.
Ernest Goldstein Edward Hicks’ The Peaceable Kingdom (Champaign, IL: Garrard, 1982), 35. Walt Whitman recalled that at around the same time, there was also “a good portrait of Hicks, painted by Henry Inman, (that wonderful likeness, we can see it now!)” Walt Whitman Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, vol 2 Emory Hollway, ed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, & Co, 1921), 3-4. Given the strictness with which plainness could be enforced by elders, scholars have never explained how Friends could display versions of Hicks’s paintings in their homes.
Bill Richardson “Quaker Burial Grounds: Plainness Texts from Community and Family in Dutchess County, New York” Material Culture, vol 25, no 1 (Spring 1993), 39-40.
The term “resurrectionist” was being used to describe the grave-robbers who provided corpses to medical schools. The death mask incident took place only twelve years after the appearance of Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein.
Whitman and Leggett were both life-long bachelors with close ties to Elias Hicks. Samuel E Clement’s family status is unclear; there is vague genealogical evidence that he may have married late in life.
“Busts of Elias Hicks” Long-Island Star June 1, 1831.
Walt Whitman “Printing Office — Old Brooklyn” Complete Prose Works (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1892), 15.
Whitman “Printing Office.” Whitman also recalled that Clement was a “protege” of Coe S Downing, the owner of a popular tavern and livery stable that catered to Friends. As Henry Reed Stiles put it, “Upon the stoop under this gigantic sign-board, with its curious medley of island names, Downing could be seen, at almost every hour of the day, comfortably seated in a chair adapted to his especial use; for he was as big as his sign, a Daniel Lambert of a man, to whom quiescence was far easier than locomotion. But, if any one had imagined that ‘mine host’s’ intellect partook of the heaviness of his frame, they would have done him a serious injustice. He was vivacious, kindly hearted, intelligent and shrewd. He was originally a Quaker, from Jerusalem (where he was ultimately buried), and, therefore, naturally succeeded to much of the island patronage and stage business of old Ben. Smith’s tavern, after that worthy's decease.” Henry Reed Stiles A History of Brooklyn vol 2 (privately published, 1867).
Joseph Alfred Scoville The Old Merchants of New York City (New York: John W. Lovell Co., 1885). Originally published in 1863 under a pseudonym.
Aaron Leggett pursued a precedent-making lawsuit against the Mexican government for violation of an 1831 commercial treaty. In one of these court cases, the defense found a witness willing to claim that Leggett sometimes drank enough alcohol to cause “oblivion of the mind,” rendering him “quarrelsome and abusive.” In 1848, when the influential case was settled, Leggett was awarded slightly less than $100,000 for the “outrages.” He used some of his winnings to purchase “Mount Zephyr,” a large portion of George Washington’s farm in Mount Vernon, Virginia, and in addition, invested at least $60,000 to renovate the neglected farm. But he committed a Hicksite’s “mortal sin,” so to speak: overextending himself to debt. He moved back to New York as an old man before he could sell off his mansion, sixteen hundred acres of farmland, nine hundred Merino sheep, and thirty-five cattle. This account is based upon an amateur history by the Mount Zephyr Citizens Association, posted to RootsWeb, and extensive research by Gregory P Wilson. https://wc.rootsweb.com/trees/129537/I745/aaron-leggett/individual Accessed November 10, 2o22. Gregrory P Wilson Jonathan Roberts : The Civil War’s Quaker Scout and Sheriff (CreateSpace, 2014), 69-72.
Samuel Leggett was the president of the New York Gaslight Company.
Young Browere had studied under a miniature-painter named Archibald Robertson, who founded the prestigious Columbia Academy — the same school attended by the brilliant portraitist Henry Inman. Browere eventually developed a new technique to make life-masks. Based purely upon his subsequent attempts at painting, his mentor Robertson certified him an artistic genius. In July of 1825, Browere’s breakthrough occurred when the city of New York asked Browere to create a life-mask of the visiting Revolutionary War hero, the Marquis de Lafayette.
Browere was discouraged by the scant interest shown in his accomplishments, particularly in financial terms, and by the “jealous enmity” of colleagues who scorned the life-mask approach to portraiture as unoriginal, deliberately excluding him from exhibition. In July of 1829 — the summer before making the Elias Hicks death mask — Browere wrote to the National Academy of Design:
With chagrin I have viewed the sinister and aristocratical proceedings of the National Academy, and the ill results that must eventually follow its longer continuance, and therefore have publicly deprecated its wickedness.
Browere died suddenly of cholera a few years later. On his deathbed he demanded that his most important busts should be hidden away for the next forty years — a telling indication of his emotional volatility. None of them resurfaced until the 1876 Centennial celebration, when some were exhibited in Philadelphia. Unfortunately, they were not displayed on the great fairgrounds, and hardly attracted attention. Browere was survived by his wife and eight children. His eldest son, Alburtis Browere, became an esteemed painter of American scenes in his own right. Charles Henry Hart Browere’s Life Masks of Great Americans (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899).
“Busts of Elias Hicks (Superior Court, before His Honor Judge Hoffman”) New York Courier & Enquirer, May 1831. Courtesy Quaker Collections, Swarthmore University.
“Busts of Elias Hicks. Superior Court” Nantucket Inquirer June 4, 1831. Courtesy Quaker Collections, Swarthmore University.
Alexandria Gazette February 17, 1832, 2. Courtesy Quaker Collections, Swarthmore University.
Isaac Pierce [December 14, 1780 — July 6, 1860] was the son of James Pierce and Martha Leggett Pierce. Isaac married Amy Underhill in 1844. “Monthly Meeting Extracted From Chappaqua, N.Y., Quaker Records” http://dunhamwilcox.net/ny/chappaqua_deaths5.htm
Isaac Pierce would have been related to Aaron Leggett by virtue of his mother’s maiden name. By 1845, Pierce was an ardent abolitionist, debating, for instance, in a convention at Boston’s Marlboro Chapel. Anti-Slavery Bugle, August 15, 1845.
https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83035487/1845-08-15/ed-1/seq-2/
Nantucket Inquirer. Pierce claimed to have had “no interest in the matter,” but also admitted to purchasing Clement’s share of the partnership for $150.
Samuel C Mott is listed alongside more famous Quaker members of the Public School Society of New York. William HS Wood Friends of the City of New York in the Nineteenth Century (privately printed, 1904).
Courier & Enquirer.
“Busts of Elias Hicks” New York Evening Post May 25, 1831, 2. Courtesy Quaker Collections, Swarthmore University.
Nantucket Inquirer.
Evening Post.
Nantucket Inquirer.
Wilson.
Courier & Enquirer.
New York City Court of General Sessions, February 17, 1831. Cited in an Excel spreadsheet online at “Riot Acts: a History of Extralegal Violence” https://www.riotacts.org/about/Data.xlsx Accessed Nov 25, 2022.
Courier & Enquirer. Evening Post.
Courier & Enquirer.
Courier & Enquirer.
Courier & Enquirer.
“Typed account of the making of the Elias Hicks death mask. From E Weeks address.” Hicks Family Papers at Swarthmore Special Collections https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/repositories/7/resources/2585/collection_organization Accessed Nov 10, 2022.
Samuel E Clement [Letter to the Editor] New York Evening Post May 28, 1831, 2. Courtesy Quaker Collections, Swarthmore University.
Long-Island Star.
Whitman “Printing Office.” Jerome Loving pointed out, “From time to time, Clement allowed the young Whitman to print juvenile features in the Patriot, constituting, though now lost, the poet’s earliest published writings.” Jerome Loving Walt Whitman: the Song of Himself (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 31-2.
Clement was fired from the Patriot in November of 1831. David S Reynolds Walt Whitman’s America (New York: Knopf, 1995), 44. He resigned as postmaster the next month. Henry Reed Stiles A History of the City of Brooklyn, vol 2 (privately published, 1869), 235-6. Clement’s most belligerent adversary, Whig newspaperman James Watson Webb, had been calling for his dismissal from the Post Office since June. (Long Island Star.) The next year, the Grand Lodge of New York reported that Clement had been expelled from the Hohenliden Lodge for conduct unbecoming a Mason. Proceedings of the Grand Lodge of Free and Accepted Masons of the State of New York Grand Lodge of the State of New York, 1832. Appendix B. Legend has it that Clement, the erstwhile Democrat, ended up in Camden, New Jersey, as editor of its Whig newspaper. Reynolds, 45. “[F]or nearly six months previous to leaving Brooklyn,” wrote Clement, “my health so constantly declined, that I was almost half the time unable to attend close[ly] to business… my [financial] affairs became embarrassed…” Rochester Antimasonic Inquirer, April 17, 1832.
The motley Democratic-Republican Party coalition represented the very beginnings of the modern Democratic Party. Sean Wilentz The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: WW Norton & Company, 2005), 100.
In May, 1852, at the young age of thirty-two, Elias Hicks II was elected President of the Chamber of Commerce, “an honor sought for and prized for nearly a century by the most honored merchants of this commercial city.” But his health deteriorated: “His physical strength, for which he had been distinguished in early youth, rapidly deserted him, and he sunk quickly under the insidious attacks of consumption.” After he died on January 9, 1835, his body was buried alongside his ancestors in Jericho. Portrait Gallery of the Chamber of Commerce of the State of New-York (New York Chamber of Commerce, 1890). Perhaps this is a place to stress, in general terms, the underappreciated enormity of tuberculosis’s sway over the course of history.
“Queens County — Elias Hicks” New Era October 1831, as cited by the Long-Island Star, October 11, 1838, 2.
Elias Hicks Letters of Elias Hicks (New York: Isaac T Hopper, 1834).
During the 1790s, Dr Valentine Seaman became an important figure in New York’s yellow fever epidemic, and studied smallpox vaccination in England under its originator, Dr Edward Jenner.
Joann P Krieg “Walt Whitman’s Long Island Friend: Elisa Seaman Leggett” Long Island Historical Journal vol 9 (Spring 1997), 223–33. https://ir.stonybrook.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11401/60283/i002.pdf?sequence=1 Accessed November 12, 2022.
Walt Whitman Specimen Days (Philadelphia: Rees Welsh & Co, 1882–1883), 162.
“Thursday, July 19, 1888” Walt Whitman, Horace Traubel With Walt Whitman in Camden, vol 2.
Anna Braithwaite A Letter from Anna Braithwaite to Elias Hicks, etc. (Philadelphia: Printed for the Reader, 1825). Samuel Macpherson Janney An Examination of the Causes which Led to the Separation of the Religious Society of Friends in America, in 1827-28 (Philadelphia: T. Ellwood Zell, 1868), 250. Elisha Bates “Summary of Elias Hicks’s Doctrines,” The Friend, Jan 1831, 245.
Bliss Forbush Elias Hicks, Quaker Liberal (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956).