A Melancholy Accident

Lately, there's been a lot in the news about gun control. There was a murder of several people by a disturbed person, and though some were killed by means of knives or vehicles, others were killed by means of  guns. I actually have not read any of the accounts of this event, so if I have the facts wrong, then forgive me. I am not naming names, pointing fingers or asking for anything to be done about it. As far as I am concerned it is a tragedy -- or as people in 19th century might have said, a melancholy event.

 I have  noticed people talking about the issue on social media. One person, seemingly on the side of the right to bear arms, started out by saying that she had had guns in the house when her children were growing up, but they never had access to them, and there were no incidents, and it's irresponsible people who are causing all the problems, so she is in favor of gun registration, licensing and mandatory insurance for gun owners.

What would Jean Laffite say? I don't know, but I do know that among the many other clippings in his Scrapbook was this item about a "Melancholy Accident."

"Recently a boy about 11 years of age, and a girl 7 years old, children of Mr. Henry Tryon, of Glartenbury, Conn., returned home from school.  The boy, seeing a gun standing in the corner, took it up and pointed it at his little sister. She exclaimed 'don't shoot me,' and started to run up stairs. The gun was discharged, and the contents entered her side, killing her instantly."

It is a shocking story. But what is more curious, from the point of view of today's newspapers, is the factual way the story is told, without judging the children or the parents involved, without suggesting a remedy, without saying that we should make sure that nothing like this should ever happen again by passing a law, without charging the father with negligence for leaving the gun loaded where the boy could get at it, and without taking the surviving child out of the custody of his parents. The title says it all: it was sad that it happened, but it was just a freak accident.

Here are some of the reasons people's attitude was different then:

• Children were seen as assets of their parents. The loss of a child was a loss to the parent. As such, when a child died, people felt sympathy toward bereaved parents. They did not blame them.
• Children were not seen as community assets, so neighbors did not feel that they were aggrieved by the loss of another person's child.
• Illness in the family was the financial burden of the family, so people did not feel a negligent parent threatened their financial well being.
• People did not want others judging them for misfortune that befell them, so they did not judge others.
• Children died frequently back then, and nobody thought it was society's place to try to make sure that no child should ever die.
• The idea that insurance could somehow solve all of our problems had not yet become a common trope. Nobody thought that if Mr. Henry Tryon had only had insurance, his son would not have killed his daughter. 

It's not that there was less gun violence back then, or fewer accidents or less carelessness. And it's not that life was valued less. It's that freedom was valued more. Murderers were executed, but melancholy accidents were accepted as a natural part of life.

Infant Mortality

Infant and child mortality is a big issue in Theodosia and the Pirates. The death of Gampy, Theodosia's son, is an event that casts a long shadow. It's not something she gets over. The death of a child is not something anybody gets over, no matter how well adjusted they seem.

The thing that made me think to write about this now is that I recently had a new comment on a very old hub of mine. It was an article entitled Misconceptions About Teenaged Mothers. I wrote that article long before I started writing my novel, Theodosia and the Pirates, but I have been obsessed by Theodosia Burr Alston for years, and I did mention her in the article. I mentioned both Theodosia and Laura Ingalls Wilder as examples of successful teenaged mothers who had respectable educations, good relationships with their fathers and who did not overpopulate the planet with their children, despite having a first child while yet a teenager.

I've had lots of comments on that hub over the years, but because after the Panda Google Update traffic to that site plummeted, the stream of comments dwindled down to zero for a couple of years. Then recently someone left this comment:

Your information about Laura Ingalls Wilder is really not very accurate. Her father did "interfere" in her courtship, and greatly disapproved of the age difference between her and her future husband. He made them wait until she turned 18 to marry. She did indeed have her first child at 19. While not supervising her child when she was about 3, the child managed to burn down the house- this was right after Laura had her second child, who died.
     Did the kid die because she was young? Probably not, it was a common occurrence of the time- but interesting that you would fail to mention it. Also, Rose, the child that lived (and who burned down the house) reportedly grew up to be a seriously depressed and unhappy woman, who blamed her unhappiness on her childhood of poverty and her relationship with her mother. Rose also made references to her mother not being a "grown-up" while Rose was a child, and this greatly distressed Rose.
      Read "Becoming Laura Ingalls Wilder" rather than Wikipedia for a slightly more factual accounting of her life.

I never even bothered to mention the birth and death of Laura's second child because to me it was such a common thing that a baby died shortly after birth and never had a name, so that it never even occurred to me at the time.  In the Ingalls family, all the baby boys seemed to die in infancy. The reason Ma and Pa only had girls was because when a boy was born to Caroline Ingalls, it did not survive long. Laura's baby boy died the same way. When Rose Wilder Lane gave birth in 1910 -- in a hospital -- to her one and only son, that baby died as well. 

I don't think it was Caroline's fault at all that her son died. I don't think it was Laura's fault that her only son died, and I do not think it was Rose's fault that her son died as well. The idea that any of these deaths could have anything to do with neglect is something that would only occur to a modern reader, who has no understanding of infant mortality or how prevalent it used to be.

When I was studying linguistics, some of the field workers I met said it was common for aborigines in the Amazon  not to name their child until it was three, because they didn't consider them people until they had a pretty good chance of survival. And this linking of personhood with survival rate is also a consideration when looking at statistics on life expectancy. If you include all those nameless babies who died before they even had a chance to live in the statistics, it paints a confusing picture of how long people actually lived who survived infancy and childhood. When they tell us aborigines have a life expectancy of forty, we need to ask if they included the little ones who were never named in the list of people's whose lives were averaged.

But Gampy was named. He survived infancy. He was ten when he died. He was named Aaron Burr Alston. Yet he named himself Gampy, because he loved his grandfather!

Was it Theodosia's fault that Gampy died of malaria? Of course, not. Did she blame herself? Probably. Most mothers do.

But the other thing to consider is this, that if he had been a slave child on her husband's plantation, rather than a free son of a rich owner, he probably would not have died at ten. He probably would have died within two weeks of birth, unless he happened to have the immunity to malaria built into his system

In my novel, Theodosia and the Pirates, I let the fictional character, Hattie, make that observation.

The sad thing about infant mortality is that while it kills individuals, it makes populations stronger and healthier. That is why the slaves could stand the heat in the swamps, but the South Carolina free militiamen fell like flies when mustered in the summer of 1813.

If you want to learn more about this, read Theodosia and the Pirates. I changed the timing of some of the events, but there is enough truth left in the story for it to matter. After you read the novel, you will also want to do some investigation of your own into the historical background.