Thomas Hardy’s 1886 novel The Mayor of Casterbridge begins with a notorious scene in which Michael Henchard, a young hay-trusser, when drunk and after an argument with his wife Susan, auctions her and his young daughter Elizabeth-Jane at a country fair. The pair are bought by a sailor for five guineas. The following day Henchard tries to find to them, but is unsuccessful. Having vowed to remain sober, Henchard becomes a prosperous hay merchant and eventually is made mayor of the Casterbridge. After eighteen years, his past returns to haunt him, eventually to ruin him.
Earlier this year I wrote a post about a nineteenth-century ancestor of mine, Thomas Pooley, who became a cause célèbre among secularists and free-thinkers when he was imprisoned for blasphemy. It has been argued that Pooley’s story helped inspire Thomas Hardy when he wrote his novel Jude the Obscure. I wrote at the time that I had another ancestor with another connection to a Hardy novel, The Mayor of Casterbridge, whose story I would have to tell. Now is the time to do so.
There is not the slightest suggestion that Thomas Hardy knew of Aaron Hill (1833-1896), my great-great-granduncle, but he knew of others like him. The selling of wives was a rarity but nevertheless existed in the first half of the nineteenth-century, as shocking as that might seem, and Hardy provides a detailed and credible account of such as sale in his novel (though it seems he only knew of them from newspaper reports rather than having experienced one himself). Aaron Hill’s case differed slightly from that of Michael Henchard – he won his wife, and her child, in a game of cards.
The Hill family were locksmiths, resident in Willenhall, Staffordshire, a town renowned for its association with the manufacture of locks and keys. It was very much a cottage industry, with many locksmith families working from outhouses to the rear of their homes. Aaron was one of the twelve children of John Hill, a locksmith, and his wife Elizabeth, and naturally became a locksmith himself.
How exactly Aaron came by his wife Susannah Tonks (1833-1869) is unclear. Stories of wife sales do occasionally appear in the newspapers of the period, but not this one, while family records are hazy, not unconnected with the sheer embarrassment of it all. The story goes that Aaron was playing a game of cards with one Thomas Hughes. He won, and Hughes was unable to pay up his debt. So he offered his wife Susannah and ‘one or two children’, instead. This Aaron accepted. Family history sources confirm that there was a marriage between Thomas Hughes and Susannah Tonks in 1850 and that there was a ‘marriage’, unsupported by any official documentation, between Aaron and Susannah in 1854.
What really happened may never be known, but it is quite likely that this was some sort of wife sale, and such sales were not uncommon. They were not, however, simply a barbaric transaction, with the women involved mere objects of sale, like cattle. Though they were often associated with demeaning rituals, most notably the wife being led by a halter to a market place, where the husband would then offer her for sale, nevertheless they were rituals. The forms represented something, and that was divorce. In his essay ‘The Sale of Wives’, E.P. Thompson describes how people, usually from the working classes, who were denied access to divorce, took the laws of matrimony into their own hands.
The majority of wife sales … were occasioned by the breakdown of marriages, and were a device to enable a public divorce and re-marriage by the exchange of a wife (not any woman) between two men. For such a device to be effective required certain conditions: the decline in the punitive invigilation over sexual conduct of the church and its courts: the assent of the community, and a measure of autonomy of plebian culture from the polite: a distanced, inattentive or tolerant civil authority.
Such conditions pertained through much of the eighteenth century (wife sales seem to have begun in the 1670s) and into part of the nineteenth century. Then a rise in community disapproval and increased actions from civil authorities led to the decline of wife sales. Certainly many newspaper reports from the early nineteenth century are accounts of the arrest of the parties involved. Hence it is no surprise that the transaction between Hill and Hughes did not make it into the newspapers – they may have wanted to keep the matter secret. Equally there may have been more to the exchange than the simple anecdote suggests – in many such ‘sales’ the woman was already living with the new husband. We do not know enough about this particular case. It appears to have been a mere brutish deal, as with The Mayor of Casterbridge. But just possibly Susannah Tonks was not a passive but a willing party to the agreement. After all – a point made by Thompson, and Hardy – she would be making herself free of a man so uncaring as to be willing to sell her. Or to consider her as a suitable prize in a game of cards.
Aaron Hill therefore took on a family, though he quickly lost part of it, since the two children of Thomas Hughes and Susannah each died aged one, George in 1853 (so he was probably not a part of the transaction between Aaron and Hughes), Phoebe in 1855. Aaron and Susannah’s first child, Job (or Jobe), was born in Willenhall in 1855, not long after Phoebe’s death. Eight other children were to follow.
Now the story takes a remarkable twist. Some of the Tonks family were converts to the Church of Latter Day Saints, formed by Joseph Smith in 1830. Mormon missionaries had been active in Britain since 1837, making tens of thousands of converts, to the point in the 1850 when there were more Mormon converts in the UK (over 30,000) than there were in the United States. Many of them sought a brighter future by emigrating. Britain was Babylon, the home of confusion and wickedness in Mormon thinking; followers had to seek out the righteous society, or Zion. Zion could be to belong to the Latter Day Saints in general, it could be America, it could be Salt Lake City in Utah, home of the Mormon faith after Brigham Young became its leader in 1847. An estimated 100,000 British Mormon converts made the journey to America during the nineteenth century, with Mormon agents efficiently chartering ships and managing the crossing. Susannah’s father Timothy had converted in 1850, his Ann two years later, followed by their several daughters (though not their sons – they had eleven children). Aaron and Susannah are said to have converted together, much to the distress to Hill’s family, none of whom shared such beliefs. His mother fretted to the end of her days over the loss of her son.
In 1863 Charles Dickens wrote an essay in the journal All the Year Round (published on 4 July 1863, later published in the collection The Uncommercial Traveller) about the British who were emigrating after their conversion to the Mormon religion. ‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake‘ was written seven years after Aaron and Susannah made the trip, but the scene he drew of their departure from London readily stands for what was experienced in 1854. Dickens came as a sceptic, having previously shared the general British public view of Mormons as ‘fanatics’ and their policy of polygamy as abhorrent, but he ended up feeling nothing but respect for the dedication and honourable nature of the hopefuls at the docks (The ‘Amazon’ was the name of the ship):
There were many worn faces bearing traces of patient poverty and hard work, and there was great steadiness of purpose and much undemonstrative self-respect among this class. A few young men were going singly. Several girls were going, two or three together. These latter I found it very difficult to refer back, in my mind, to their relinquished homes and pursuits. Perhaps they were more like country milliners, and pupil teachers rather tawdrily dressed, than any other classes of young women. I noticed, among many little ornaments worn, more than one photograph-brooch of the Princess of Wales, and also of the late Prince Consort. Some single women of from thirty to forty, whom one might suppose to be embroiderers, or straw-bonnet-makers, were obviously going out in quest of husbands, as finer ladies go to India. That they had any distinct notions of a plurality of husbands or wives, I do not believe. To suppose the family groups of whom the majority of emigrants were composed, polygamically possessed, would be to suppose an absurdity, manifest to any one who saw the fathers and mothers …
What is in store for the poor people on the shores of the Great Salt Lake, what happy delusions they are labouring under now, on what miserable blindness their eyes may be opened then, I do not pretend to say. But I went on board their ship to bear testimony against them if they deserved it, as I fully believed they would; to my great astonishment they did not deserve it; and my predispositions and tendencies must not affect me as an honest witness. I went over the Amazon’s side, feeling it impossible to deny that, so far, some remarkable influence had produced a remarkable result, which better known influences have often missed.
Aaron and Susannah (still bearing the name Tonks), with their infant son Jobe, sailed from Liverpool on the Wellfleet on 1 June 1856 and arrived in Boston on 13 July 1856. Surprisingly, they did not travel on to Utah, the usual destination for Mormon emigrants, but instead journeyed to New York, probably because one of Susannah’s sisters lived there. Hill soon found work as a locksmith. They would remain in the city for seven years, during which time Susannah bore six children: Nephi, Phoebe, Elizabeth, Eliza Jennette, Enoch and Aaron James. All bar Aaron James would die in childhood.
In 1863 the couple were joined by Susannah’s parents, Timothy and Ann, with their grand-daughter Sarah Tonks. They sailed on the first Mormon ship to leave from London, on 4 June (all previous sailings from Britain had departed from Liverpool). It was the London departure of such a ship that had attracted Charles Dickens, so they were definitely among those he saw on the London docks. The Tonks would have had an alarming introduction to American life. They arrived two days after the deadly Draft Riots took place in New York, as recreated in Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film The Gangs of New York. This occurred following the drafting by Congress of laws to draft men into the army to fight in the ongoing American Civil War. What was initially a protest against conscription turned into race riots in which Irish-American workers brutally attacked African-Americans. Unwilling to fight in the Civil War, Aaron Hill decided it was time to make the journey to Utah.
An epic journey across an emerging America now followed. The family – Aaron, Susannah, their three surviving children (Jobe, Elizabeth and Eliza Jennette), Susannah’s parents and Sarah Tonks – boarded a train and head first for Niagara before entering Canada. There they were put into box cars to protect them from Irish gunfire. They travelled west to Detroit, where they were able to ride in passenger carriages once more. Reaching St Joseph, Missouri, they boarded a river steamer and sailed on south to Omaha, Nebraska, where they joined the renowned Mormon Trail that would take the emigrants to westwards to Utah.
At Omaha the family left rail and water to be part of the wagon train, there being no railroad at this time. It was a journey into contested territory. Firstly there was contention between Mormon settlers and the federal administration, which did not look kindly on the Mormons’ religious beliefs nor their desire for self-governance. The confrontation led to the so-called Utah War of 1857, which had no battles as such and ended inconclusively. Secondly, the emigrants were heading into territory occupied by Native Americans, who saw not Zion being built but invasion of their lands and depletion of the resources on which their lives depended.
There were around 250 men, women and children in their party. Possibly they were part of the Rosel Hyde Company (the dates match), named after its leader. Aaron and Susannah’s eldest child, Jobe, was then eight years old. Forty years later he would pen an observant short memoir of their experiences:
… while playing on the river bank, my attention was suddenly attracted by a large number of white objects in the distance apparently gliding slowly along through the air . . . And when they drew near what was my surprise to see some 70 or 80 wagons with covers on drawn by from six to eight oxen on each wagon which was called a team. A man with a large whip with each team was called a teamster . . . The teamsters drove their teams one by one into a place where all the grass had been worn away by the wheels of the many wagons and feet of so many animals, for thousands of people were emigrating west each year. This place about six feet wide was called a road . . . Our company numbered I suppose in the neighborhood of 250 men, women and children … The first half of the train was lead by the first captain to the right and second half by the second captain to the left, each forming a half circle by the first two teams stopping about 16 feet apart opposite each other so as to form an opening large enough to drive loose oxen in. The next two teams would stop with their front wheels close to, yet on the outside of hind wheels of the first two wagons, and thus they would continue to form one after another till all the wagons had stopped and enclosed a round yard for the teamsters to drive their oxen in to yoke them when they would be ready to draw the wagons away. This formation was called a camp. We remained in camp about 14 days while the ship returned to St. Joseph for the luggage of the company.
While they waited two-and-a-half year-old Eliza Jennette died, having suffered along the way with “canker and diarrhea”. Then, on 11 August 1863 at 7am, a bugler played ‘Do What is Right’, and the wagon train set off.
Those strong enough would walk ahead, then wait for the rest of the train to catch up. They were advised not to travel too far, for fear of attacks by Native Americans. The emigrants journeyed alongside the Plate River, and passed the Mormon Trail landmark of Chimney Rock before leaving Nebraska and entering Wyoming. The journey was hard, with their rudimentary diet occasionally supplemented by whatever could be hunted by those men in the party with guns. Jobe recalled:
There were some antelope killed and we obtained a little fresh meat. Our provisions consisted of bacon, flour, sugar, and tea. We cooked our bacon which was very fat, and afterwards made slap jacks and cooked them in the grease which made them rise and become quite light. These, with a little fruit once in a great while, were [all] I can remember of our food.
The company arrived in Salt Lake City on 13 October 1863. The famed British explorer Richard F. Burton visited Salt Lake City a couple of years before the Hills and Tonks arrived. He gives this description of the emigrants’ reception in his book The City of the Saints, and Across the Rocky Mountains to California:
As we issued from the city, we saw the smoke-like column which announced that the emigrants were crossing the bench-land; and people were hurrying from all sides to greet and to get news of friends. Presently the carts came. All the new arrivals were in clean clothes, the men washed and shaved, and the girls, who were singing hymns, habited in Sunday dresses. The company was sunburned, but looked well and thoroughly happy, and few, except the very young and the very old, who suffer most on such journeys, troubled the wains. They marched through clouds of dust over the sandy road leading up the eastern portion of the town, accompanied by crowds, some on foot, others on horseback, and a few in traps and other “locomotive doin’s,” sulkies, and buckboards.
The arrivals were fed, the sick attended to, then homes were found and work provided for all those who needed it. However, Aaron was unable to find suitable work there, so the family moved on to Logan in the nearby Cache Valley where he was able to farm. He built a one-room log house, where they lived for a year before moving to Clarkston. Jobe recorded the difficult times that followed:
It was only a few days after our return when there came a cold rainstorm and it was followed by a sharp frost which killed all the wheat and corn and the vines of the potatoes . . . We suffered badly from cold and hunger that winter . . . The cold weather set in early and was very severe and as we, that all the inhabitants of the little town, were all alike, none having raised anything, all having been froze, therefore we were all unable to help each other.
My father was so badly discouraged that he overlooked much that he may have done to help us endure the cold snowy winter of 1865-66, but the only thrasher brought to the town by some of its people was an old worn out machine too old to run with any profit to its owners. The people stet it in one place and hauled the wheat to it . . . A widow who I afterwards lived with said if my father had managed better we would not have suffered as much as we did, for he had one stack of oats that would of thrashed at least 150 bushels which would have brought him at least 75 dollars which would have bought us all clothes and shoes, but the winter set in early and I with the other children was poorly clad, no shoes and our clothes before spring were so full of patches that we could not tell what kind of stuff they were made of.
Adversity did not bring out the best in Aaron. Jobe was frank in his estimation of his father’s qualities:
It’s often said that trials strengthen our faith, but it seemed as though it had an opposite effect upon my father, for his dealings in the course of time with Bishop Roskelly seemed to cause feelings of an unpleasant nature that my father, I’m sorry to say, did not try to have made right. During the winter of the years 1866-67 my father worked for Roskelly and I believe received only one dollar per day and that in produce that at the time was sold so high that these low wages were not enough to pay for one half of the necessaries of life for his poor family, and this may have had its effect.
Further afflictions included grasshoppers eating their crops and the threat of Native Americans, which forced them to move from Cache valley to Smithfield. The short memoirs of Jobe Hill and his brother Aaron James Hill each mention Native Americans, but without any further detail. The nearby indigenous people were the Soshone, whose homelands included the Cache Valley. Shortly before the Hills and Tonks arrived in the area, it had been the scene of the largest single incidence of genocidal killing in US history. On 29 January 1863 the US military under Colonel Patrick Edward Connor killed 250 to 350 Northwestern Soshone – men, women and children – in what is known as the Bear River Massacre. It took place just north of Logan. Remarkably, one of the few survivors of the massacre, Chief Sagwitch, would later help build a temple in Logan, then become baptised into the Church of Latter Day Saints, along with 100 of his people.
Children continued to be born to the couple: James, Annie and David. Susannah had suffered greatly during the emigration and living with a difficult man. Jobe describes her failing health in detail and with evident personal pain:
She was also troubled with softening of the brain and would go into a strange stupor and stand and look strangely around her for she would forget all that she knew and who she was and seem completely lost … In a short time Mother became so ill that she was unable to remain out of bed … In a short time it became apparent that a doctor was indispensable. One of our neighbors took his team to Logan and got a Swedish doctor and I was sent to different parts of the town in search of an interpreter which I succeeded in finding. On the following day about 8 p.m. I was given Bro. Wilber’s horse team and told to return with the doctor to his home at Logan. For a short time after the doctor had been (there) Mother seemed to improve, then she became very ill again.
About the 10th of September 1869 my dear mother delivered her last kind message to me. I was told to come in as she had something important to say especially to me, and whin I stood by the bedside she said, ‘My son, when your father comes home tell him to take yourself and all the other children down to the Endowment House in Salt Lake City and first get one of my nearest blood relations to act proxy for me and thus have me sealed to him, and then get all you children sealed to us both.’ She then told me not to forget as she was going to leave me, and this brought the tears to my eyes and I turned away as I exclaimed, ‘Why, Mother, you are not going to die and leave us,’ when she said, ‘Yes, my son, I have to go. Therefore, be a good boy. Tell your father what I have told you’. I suppose this was the saddest night any young eyes had ever seen as it seemed as though the kindest and dearest friend on earth to me was in the cold embrace of death, and the sad condition of myself and motherless little sisters and brothers seemed to loom up before my mind making me feel wretched in the extreme.
Susannah Tonks died on 15 September 1869. She was thirty-six years old. Of the eleven children she bore, six died before her, and a seventh, Elizabeth, not long after her.
My dad just loved Aaron Hill. He thought he was one of the greatest guys that ever lived. Aaron Hill had a cabin not too far from where my dad was. He used to go out in the evening time and just sit on the side of the cabin. He would sing songs to them, tell them jokes, tell them poems, and play with them. He thought that Grandpa was the greatest guy that ever lived. Now there are stories around that Aaron Hill wasn’t too good, but my dad thoroughly loved him. That’s all I can say about Aaron Hill.
After Susannah died Aaron married twice (successively rather than polygamously), first to Elizabeth Thorton, with whom he had one child, then Bertha Tobler, with whom he had two further children. He died on 7 April 1896, aged sixty-three. He fathered twelve children in all, the last of whom was born four months after Aaron’s death. What drove the man is difficult to say, but he was undoubtedly a driven man.
Of Susannah we have only the accounts of her sons Jobe and Aaron James. It is a tale of sacrifice and endurance, its backdrop an epic journey from an industrial revolution Britain still in thrall to folk customs, to an America in the process of building itself and at war with itself. Whether she found Zion, or merely Babylon transported, only she could say. If not quite a Hardy heroine by herself, Hardy could have made something of her, and her stubborn husband. She has no photograph.
Links:
- Biographical material used for this post comes primarily from accounts given on the William Leon Ransom Family Genealogy site, particularly the history of Aaron Hill and Susannah Tonks compiled by their great-granddaughter Daveen Hill Dye from a history written by Wendell H. Ransom in 1991 and from the Jobe Hill Journal written by Jobe Hill about 1904 and reprinted by James H. L. and Mary I. Lawler. Also useful is Aaron James Hill’s short memoir, Echoes from the Hills: History of Aaron James Hill, Called Trenton Jim or A.J. (n.d.), available on Ancestry.co.uk (subscription site)
- The photograph of Aaron Hill comes from the Church History Biographical Database, which has information on the lives of over 100,000 members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
- E.P. Thompson’s essay ‘Sale of Wives’ is in his his book Customs in Common (The Merlin Press, 1991). Other sources on the topic include Lawrence Stone, Road to Divorce: England 1530–1987 (Oxford University Press, 199) and Samuel Pyeatt Menefee, Wives for Sale: Aa Ethnographic Study of British Popular Divorce (Wiley & Sons, 1981). The large-scale digitisation of British regional newspapers in recent years, available via the British Newspaper Archive, has greatly expanded the number of cases now known. There is a thorough Wikipedia page on wife selling
- Charles Dickens’s essay ‘Bound for the Great Salt Lake‘ is available on The Literature Network site
- There is a good history and analysis of Dickens’ view of Mormons in Richard J. Dunn, ‘Dickens and the Mormons‘, BYU Studies, 1968. For Mormons emigrants to Utah at this period, see Fred E. Woods, ‘The Arrival of Nineteenth-Century Mormon Emigrants in Salt Lake City‘, in Scott C. Esplin and Kenneth L. Alford (eds.), Salt Lake City: The Place Which God Prepared (Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University/Deseret Book, Salt Lake City, 2011)
- On the Bear River Massacre, see Diana Hedgspeth, ‘This was the worst slaughter of Native Americans in U.S. history. Few remember it‘, The Washington Post, 26 September 2021. See also the Wikipedia article Native American People and Mormonism
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