Huntington, Susan (Mansfield)

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HUNTINGTON, Susan (Mansfield)

Born 27 January 1791, Killingworth, Connecticut; died 4 December 1823, Boston, Massachusetts

Daughter of Achilles Mansfield; married Joshua Huntington,1809; children: six

Daughter of a minister and descended on her mother's side from the noted native American apostle John Eliot, Susan Huntington was a worthy heir to generations of Puritan sensibility. She was educated at home, at the Killingworth common school, and for a short season at a "classical school." Huntington married the junior, later senior, pastor at Old South Church, Boston; they had six children. Her husband died in 1819, and before her own death four years later, she lost two of her children.

After Huntington's death, the new pastor of Old South Church, Benjamin Wisher, wrote a biography of her, including copious quotations from her letters and from her journal, which she kept for years. Huntington published a few poems in the Boston Recorder. Little Lucy; or, The Careless Child Reformed (1820) is a book of moral instruction for children. A Short Address to Sick Persons Who Are Without Hope (n.d.) is a tract of the kind widely distributed door-to-door by devout church members and professional staff members of the tract society. These latter works are not easily available to scholars.

To the modern reader, Huntington's religion might seem morbid and negative. In a letter to her son at Andover, she wrote that young people always imagine that religion will make them unhappy; attempting to convince him to join the church, she argued that Christ is true happiness. The contents of her letters and journals, however, do not reveal a very positive point of view. She was tortured with her own sins and inadequacies, at one time crying out, "Oh, my leanness, my leanness!" She brooded on her attitudes, her thoughts, and on the danger of worldly contamination by such things as the Unitarian church and the Waverley novels of Scott. In keeping with her concentration on states of mind, there is remarkably little about action and event in her letters and journals.

In a letter to a friend, which was published in a local newspaper at the time, Huntington argued that women should not be treated as frivolous, silly persons, or they might become just that. Resting her case on the Bible, she argued that intelligent women could reason out for themselves the place of women in the home and family, if treated as reasonable adults. But treated as less, their authority in the home would be destroyed and the management of the family disrupted.

In his funeral sermon for her, preached on Romans 8:28 ("And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose"), Wisner characterized Huntington as a bright, well-educated woman who graced the important position in society to which God had called her. However, he pointed out that the joy she felt in her religion as a young girl had to be refined by suffering, and it was. The trials of her life, her morbidity of temperament, and her steadfast humility in face of these afflictions no doubt gave her a good return according to her thinking and Wisner's. But the modern Christian tends to look for a peace of mind that seems lacking in such religious thinkers.