They said I would never marry. Twelve men in four years looked at the wheelchair and walked away.
My name is Elisabeth Wetmore and this is the story of my journey from rejection by society to the discovery of a passionate love that changed the course of history.
Virginia, 1856. I was twenty-two years old and considered myself disabled.
I lost the use of my legs at the age of eight after a fall from a horse that broke my spine, forcing me to use this mahogany wheelchair my father had ordered for me.
But no one understood that the wheelchair wasn’t what made me “unmarriageable,” but rather what it represented: a burden.
A woman who can’t be with her husband at parties, a woman who shouldn’t have children, who can’t run a home, and at the same time, fulfill any of the duties expected of a Southern wife.
The twelve proposals my father arranged resulted in the same number of rejections, each one more difficult than the last.
“She can’t walk down the aisle.” “My kids need a mother who will chase them.” “So what if you can’t have kids?” This latest rumor, completely false, spread like wildfire through the Virginia community.
Doctors speculated about my fertility if I even got tested. Suddenly, I was no longer just a person with a disability, but a person deficient in every way, which was important for America in 1856.
When William Foster, a fat, drunk fifteen-year-old, rejected me even though my father had offered him a third of our annual inheritance, I understood the truth: I would die alone.
But my father had other plans. Radical, shocking, and completely outside the pale of social norms, so much so that when he told me, I thought I’d misunderstood him. He said, “You will marry Josiah, the blacksmith. You will be his wife.”
I looked at my father, Colonel Richard Whittemore, owner of 5,000 acres of land and 200 slaves, and was sure he was mad.
First, let me tell you about Josiah. I called him “the monster.” He was eight feet tall and weighed 300 pounds of hard muscle, sculpted by years of hard work in the forge.
His hands could bend iron bars, and his face struck terror into the hearts of all who entered the room. People feared him, slaves and freemen alike.
The white guys on our farm would stare at him and whisper, “Did you see how big that man is?” And Timor has a monster in his forge.
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