Author: Thayer, Caroline Matilda
Biography:
THAYER, Caroline Matilda (1785-1844: ancestry.com)
Born in Watertown MA, she was a descendant of General Joseph Warren who died in the Battle of Bunker's Hill and the daughter of Capt. William Warren and his wife Rebecca ("Robey") Hathaway. She was converted to Methodism at 19, became a schoolteacher, and wrote a rather daring novel, The Gamesters, or Ruins of Innocence (1805, reprinted 1806 in London as Conrade, or, The Gamesters). In 1809 she married a widower, Dr. James Thayer of Rehoboth MA. While he initially set up his medical practice in Rehoboth and she opened a school, the family soon after moved to upper New York State where, under unclear circumstances, her husband and three babies died. (A son survived to join the US Army and die in Texas at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836.) Her very successful series of prose letters, Religion Recommended to Youth, was first published in Chicago in 1815; later editions included Thayer's poems as well. In 1819 Thayer accepted a teaching position at the Wesleyan Seminary in New York City, where she contributed to periodicals and collaborated with her friend Harriet Muzzy (q.v.) on a volume of poems. But she fell out with her employer over her defection to the Swedenborgian New Jerusalem Church in 1821; her angry Letter on this occasion was published and reprinted on both sides of the Atlantic. For her next employer, Joseph Hoxie's Academy in New York, she wrote a set of lessons on American history. Later teaching jobs took her to Kentucky, Mississippi, and Louisiana. She died at her boarding-school in Harrisonburg LA, apparently of a heart attack. (ancestry.com 20 Nov. 2020; Blain; Thayer Papers, J. B. Cain Archives of Mississippi Methodism, Millsapps College, millsapps.edu)