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A Journey in Search of America’s Promise

The young couple stared apprehensively at the ship that would carry them on their long, possibly perilous, journey. They contemplated the challenges and difficulties of the more than three-thousand-mile trip that was ahead of them, but their thoughts focused more on what they were leaving behind. Their love and marriage had upended their lives in so many ways that they never imagined when they first met.

Thomas William France was a fortunate son of the nineteenth-century English class system. He was born on New Year’s Day 1832 in Lancashire County, England, into a family that owned a large amount of land. Unlike most English children of that era, he was raised in the cocoon of wealth, comfort, education, and social status that land ownership provided. So long as he adhered to the rules and expectations of his privileged class, he would have access to social and economic opportunities available to only a few people.

Alice Carter was not so fortunate. She was born into a poor family tethered to the English lower class, destined for a life of poverty and few options. Education was unavailable, work was menial, and social relationships were prescribed and constrained. Her course in life was determined for her by her birth. Who she wanted to be and what she wanted to do with her life were not relevant; her destiny was not for her to decide.

Thomas William France and Alice Carter were not supposed to fall in love. They were from different worlds that were not permitted to commingle. Loving each other and pursuing a life together was a breach of their social obligations; it was a rejection of the rules and norms that determined who they could love and marry. Their love was an affront to the society in which they existed.

The France family would never recognize the love that had drawn Thomas and Alice to each other and would never accept their desire to be together. Thomas William’s father made clear to his son that marrying a poor, illiterate woman from a lower social class was not an option, regardless of how honestly Thomas believed he had found the love of his life. Love, no matter how authentic, could not supersede the rigors of the social order. The rules and norms of the order determined who you could love and be with, and there was no one in his family who Thomas could turn to for support and understanding. His mother had passed away and his father had remarried a woman with her own children who was incentivized to ensure her children would have a share of the France family estate. The stepmother had seized on the opportunity to exploit the wedge between Thomas and his father over the relationship with Alice. She had fanned the flames of fear about the damage the scandalous relationship would inflict on the family’s reputation and had eagerly encouraged the ultimatum her husband delivered to his son: end the relationship at once and forever or lose his inheritance.

The social order that prohibited Thomas and Alice from loving each other was a human creation, but it violated human nature. It sought to smother the innate human desire to determine one’s happiness and destiny. For generations, that social order had exercised control over all aspects of human life—family and social relationships, economic opportunity, worship, civic obligations—but it was operating on borrowed time because it was at war with perhaps the most essential element of the human condition: the yearning to breathe free.

Thomas William France was born into a social class that provided the comfort and security of wealth and opportunity, but the price for that comfort and security was too steep for him to pay. He was not willing to relinquish the core of his human freedom, even if retaining that freedom would cost him his inheritance, social standing, and even his family. He would reject everything he was supposed to value in order to retain the freedom to be with the woman he loved.

Alice Carter also would reject the edicts of the social order into which she was born. She would not let it determine the value and possibility of her life and would not a