Ann Emerson Porter ( a second cousin of Ralph Waldo Emerson) was an American writer active 1860-1880. She was a founder of private schools in Springfield Vermont, and in Ohio. I stumbled across a novella she serialized for the Vermont Record and Farmer newspaper in 1867 called Jessie Varian’s Secret; or, the First and Last Love of ‘Captain Thunderbolt.’ This story employed as a source Michael Martin’s 1821 published confession to highway robbery and the 1847 publication of a pamphlet claiming that Dr. John Wilson of Brattleboro had been “Captain Thunderbolt.”
It contains many elements associated with “dime novels,” i.e. cheaply produced, mass-marketed works of fiction. Such works were typified by adventurous or sensational scenes, stilted dialogue, improbable coincidences, and heavy-handed morality. Porter’s story features two romances: one between an innkeeper’s niece, Jessie, and the son of a wealthy New York patroon family; and the second between a reformed highwayman and the daughter of a retired sea captain. The two women are cousins. Jessie encounters the highwayman at her inn before he has forsaken his criminality. He treats her kindly, eases the final days of the inn’s old slave, and later saves Jessie’s life. Years afterward, once he has rehabilitated and surfaces as a Vermont schoolmaster, he marries Jessie’s cousin Ruth. Jessie comes to visit her cousin and recognizes the robber but decides not to divulge his past.
Porter also fits in an allusion to racial injustice in the depiction of the elderly enslaved man, Caesar. Though Porter wrote her story two years after the conclusion of the Civil War, she evoked the social consciousness of Harriet Beecher Stowe by inserting this character. Caesar suffered from a decades-long trauma after nearly being hanged in the “Great Negro Plot” of 1841, in which dozens of African Americans were arrested and executed on suspicions of planning to set fires in New York City as prelude to a revolt. His son was one of the victims who was burned alive. Though the addition of the character Caesar and plantation dialect might seem awkward and condescending to modern readers, Porter can be commended for exposing this historical wrong.
Without knowing the background of the rest of the story, or of Ann E. Porter’s life, modern readers will also find this formulaic melodrama predictable and uninteresting. With a bit of context, though, it becomes much more intriguing. Porter took a story based on a piece of Vermont folklore and changed the popular characterization of the man who was the subject of the legend. Moreover, she had a personal connection to that man. Finally, Porter made the focus of her story the ethical choice made by a young woman, a character Porter fabricated for that purpose, having no relation to the original legend. Porter did so purposefully, empowering her character with the ability to make her own moral decisions. This was a theme that guided Porter’s own life and vocation. Ann Emerson Porter can accurately be counted as a proto-feminist.
I have transcribed and published this work in book form for the first time. Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0F6LP4PG4/
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