Sarah Jane

Ames Family Historical Collection – Series 7 Sara Jane Daniels Ames, 1828-1861                 By Edwin L. Wolff, April 2006     Sarah Jane Daniels, was born in 1828 in Barnstead, NH into an impoverished small-town family.  Her short life was filled with religious zeal, a thirst for knowledge that led her from Christian fundamentalism to Unitarianism, and a deep sense of duty overlain with guilt, especially toward her invalid mother.  For her last seven years, there were long periods of illness and almost constant pain, debilitation, and nausea.  Her faithfulness, despite it all, was close to saintly.      She was the first wife Charles Gordon Ames, whom she met at a prayer meeting and to whom she was married in Dover NH in 1849, at the age of 21.  In their ten-year marriage, she first accompanied him to a seminary in Ohio; and then, in 1852, to St. Anthony Falls, Minnesota Territory, where they recruited a small congregation of Free Will Baptists.  She created a school for the little children, made a home for her family, bore a son (Charles Wilberforce Ames), and began her long battle with illness that ended in death at the age of 31, in Bloomington, Illinois.     In 1858, while her husband was near the end of his three-years-long spiritual crisis, she journeyed east to visit her ailing mother in North Wolfeboro, NH.  While there, she visited Boston and heard sermons by Transcendentalist-Unitarians like Starr King, James F. Clark, and Theodore Parker, and read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, and William Ellery Channing.  When her husband joined her in January, 1859, she introduced him to her new-found Unitarian friends; these contacts resulted in his being engaged to give several sermons to Unitarian congregations.  Thus Sara Jane played an important role in his becoming a Unitarian.     Earlier, in 1856, Sara Jane and Charles had adopted Serena Huntley, then 14, whose mother had died four years earlier.  Her father had died when she was in infancy, and her stepfather, who had remarried, could not support all his children.  She joined the Ames family and, by act of the territorial legislature, was renamed Serena Maria Ames.  “I went home that day,” she later wrote.       Serena became Sara Jane’s closest friend.  While Sara Jane was in the East tending to her mother and suffering heavy bouts of loneliness, ill health and despair, it was to Serena that she wrote and from whom she heard most frequently.  (Some excerpts from Sara Jane’s letters to Serana appear on the next page.)     When the Ameses accepted the invitation of a group of liberal thinkers to organize a congregation in Bloomington, Illinois in the fall of 1859, Sara Jane was again ill and in pain.  The following summer, she escaped the heat of central Illinois by visiting Serena and Serena’s new husband, George Wright, in Minneapolis. In the summer of 1861, Sara Jane, even sicker, again visited Serena and George.  While there, Charles, in deep denial about how desperately sick she was, wrote her that he was considering enlisting as a chaplain in an Illinois regiment of the Union Army.   (He was not chosen.)  After a month in Minnesota, Sara Jane returned to Bloomington, where she died in September.          Before she died, Sara Jane made her doctor promise to have an autopsy to determine the cause of her illness, which she believed had never been truly diagnosed.  The autopsy revealed a severely diseased pancreas; the failure of that organ to send alkaline enzymes to offset the acidity of gastric juices had been the cause of her long suffering and death.  Today, this condition may well have been successfully treated. Quotes From Sara Jane’s Letters written in St. Anthony Falls, 1852-56     “We are very happy in our new abode.... I succeeded well in my Sunday school, and at the urgent request of a number of parents, I commence a private school one week from Tuesday.... I have but little time to write, as I have a good deal of sewing to do and a boarder to take care of....”     “I have a girl with me now who works for her board and studies.  I could get along well enough alone if it were not for washing & ironing, but after such work as that, or scrubbing floors, my back trembles, my food distresses me, and I do not get over it for some time.....”     Writing to her mother in North Wolfeboro NH:  “Mother, dear Mother, do not grieve for my absence.  Whenever we feel that our work is done here, I hope to return and make a home for you.  And if we come back, we shall leave you no more....  If we meet no more on earth we will still hope to meet among the blessed in glory....”      “My health is very good, else I could not work as I do....  Perhaps I worked a little too hard Saturday. I rose at four, scrubbed on the kitchen floor until daylight, cooked all day, washed the floor again at night, ironed some clothes for Willie after dark, got ready to sit down for the first time at seven o’clock, then sewed on a dress to finish my day’s work till half past nine.  I feel the effect of it some.” From Sara Jane’s Many Letters from New England, 1858, to her Adopted Daughter, Serena     (From Boston)  “I have not ceased to regret that I did not get here last week...[when] I could have seen and heard Wendell Phillips, Garrison, Dr. Channing, etc....   I propose to go to Wolfeboro (where her mother was residing) this week, or first of next, to stay I do not know how long.  I dread it very much but it is a duty....”     (From  North Wolfeboro NH)  “Last night after I left writing, my heart overflowed with quiet joy....  Blessed be our God for these [family] relationships, and it  is not after all so much that as kindred spirits, the relation we sustain, making us acquainted with each other’s souls.  Death cannot dissolve our love....”     “I am getting tired of my books, and my ever restless brain asks something more, or else somebody to talk them over with....I do want to talk to somebody desperately.... This is dangerous and forbidden ground....  I awake in the nights to take care of Mother, and if it is past midnight, I think another day is safely past....without daring to think of those to follow....”     “...in all these four months of wandering [since leaving Minnesota] I have been blessed abundantly.  Rich and varied have been my joys....  Sometimes it seems I have accomplished little or nothing, but I remember a saying of Emerson to my comfort, ‘We do not know today whether we are  busy or idle....we have afterwards discovered that much was  accomplished’....”     “I have lived more from within than ever before, having not--during the summer or since--been so situated as to have anybody with whom to communicate that which was most in  my soul. Do I see a beautiful landscape?  I enjoy it in silence....”     “Mother feels badly because I am writing.  Even if she cannot talk to me, she does not like to have me write....  I must please her and do all in my power to bless her weary hours....”     “I have discovered a serious defect in my own character and am trying to correct it.   My being is merged in others.... I do not sufficiently feel my individuality....  God help me.  I will struggle upward....” END

 

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