Skip to main content

Secret Life

March 2023
1min read

Since I have been a historian for more than thirty years, with considerable research and publishing of local history to my credit, I feel qualified to inquire whether or not Jack Larkin, in “The Secret Life of a Developing Country (Ours),” was aware of one specific fact of life during those particular years, a fact that could place our ancestors’ apparent shortcomings in a different light.

Few of the smaller communities in our country had resident ministers authorized to perform marriages in the early years. Licensed clergy reached small and remote areas perhaps four times a year or less often. It was vital for a man wresting a living from new lands to have a helpmate. Women commonly became brides at a tender age, sometimes for economic reasons as families struggled for survival during the harsh times.

Couples planning marriage often began with a common-law arrangement and had a formal ceremony performed whenever the traveling preacher arrived. This might be weeks or months after they began life as husband and wife. It is not strange, therefore, that many “brides” were pregnant. Neither does it indicate exceptionally low moral standards, given the circumstances.

I trust Mr. Larkin did not deliberately aim to “expose” an early populace as more wicked than it really was. Immorality has always existed, but I strongly contest the notion that 1790-1840 folks were wantonly and uncommonly licentious.

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "February 1989"

Authored by: Alexander O. Boulton

The pilasters and pediments of an architecture perfectly suited to our eighteenth-century aristocracy flourish in today’s skyline and suburb

Authored by: Ernest Sharpe, Jr.

Thirty years ago John Howard Griffin, a white Texan, became an itinerant Southern black for four weeks. His account of the experience galvanized the nation.

Authored by: Benjamin Mcarthur

What seemed to be just another tempest in the teapot of academia has escalated into a matter of national values and politics. Who would have believed that the choice of which books Stanford University students must read would create so much tumult? And that the controversy goes back so far?

Authored by: Jack Flam

He was a society painter in the first decades of the twentieth century. And nobody painted society the way he did.

Featured Articles

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

Often thought to have been a weak President, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or political fallout.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.