SIBLINGS

In the large households of early America virtually everyone had siblings, and they must have mattered a great deal, but this has not promoted the study of siblicity by family historians or scholars of the history of childhood. Lateral functional, affective, and power relations have been neglected in family narratives organized around the rise, dominance, and erosion of "patriarchal" systems of household government. Formidable problems of evidence help to explain this neglect, but the price paid in distorted understandings of the evolution of the American social structure may be considerable.

Everywhere historians look between 1750 and 1830, brothers and sisters are found shaping each others' lives and fortunes. Jane Martin was orphaned near Philadelphia in 1747. Her siblings scattered through a network of foster families, but for five decades—as a disowned Friend, the separated wife of a Loyalist refugee, and a single mother and businesswoman—her life oscillated around that of her brother John. The emergence of Joseph Brant (1742–1807), the Mohawk warrior, as a leader of Iroquois resistance to colonial expansion was mediated by his sister, Mary, the wife of a British imperial official. Throughout his life, Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) considered his younger sister, Jane Mecom, to be one of his closest allies. Charles Wollstonecraft was sent to America in 1792 by his English sister, Mary (1759–1797), to become a farmer. He remained her "favourite" sibling, although his subsequent career as a soldier in an army raised for the Quasi-War against revolutionary France might not have gratified her radical political sensibilities if she had lived long enough to know about it. In New England seaports like Salem, during the generation after independence and before the emergence of institutional merchant banking, strategic marriages between sets of siblings in merchant families provided capital and guarded against legal liability for members of small firms engaged in international commerce.

Anecdotal cases, alas, do not bodies of knowledge make, and most generalizations about sibling relations are based on little more. What systematic study has been done has paid more attention to southern societies than to northern ones, despite the wealth of demographic and genealogical data in the latter regions. There are hints that the practice of "putting out" northern children for socialization or apprenticeship purposes disrupted intragenerational ties, while the prevalence of orphanages and blended households intensified fraternal-sororal bonds in the South. Some scholars assume that there was an inherently oppositional tension between sibling and patriarchal dynamics. Relatively equal power among sibling cohorts, it is thought, allowed their members to interact in less deferential ways than those required between parents—especially fathers—and children, or husbands and wives, possibly helping to soften or even subvert long-standing imbalances of gendered power among adults.

Scholars may mistake snapshot data samples from particular times or places for evidence of either enduring structures or meaningful trends. Sibling dynamics under some circumstances may have facilitated the reproduction and intergenerational transmission of familial power structures that scholars call patriarchal, but under others undermined them. The absence of mature household heads or young adult men from farms and shops caused by the Revolution—or by post-Revolutionary efforts to settle the trans-Appalachian frontier—may have begun processes of change by which the authoritarian family types experienced by Cotton Mather (1663–1728) and Abigail Adams (1744–1818) evolved into the more companionate ones familiar to the generations of Noah Webster (1758–1843) or Mary Todd Lincoln (1818–1882). These conjectures, speculations, and "may have beens," while hardly congenial to the sensibilities of encyclopedic curiosity, show the need for historical attention to this subject. When stronger generalizations are found, it will be in studies that begin with cohorts of children being socialized in nuclear hearths, rather than with adult siblings already operating in their own separate worlds. The latter actors may generate more accessible and articulate evidence, but the former harbor the secrets of siblicity.

See alsoDomestic Life .

bibliography

Atkins, Annette. We Grew Up Together: Brothers and Sisters in Nineteenth-Century America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001.

Glover, Lorri. All Our Relations: Blood Ties and Emotional Bonds among the Early South Carolina Gentry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Wayne Bodle