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the guardians of her children. The Longs lived faraway from Shelburne, in a place out west calledCleveland. 6David Long, entrepreneur, county commissioner,and fervent abolitionist, was the first physicianto set up a practice in the intended “capital” cityof Ohio’s Western Reserve, so called because theterritory had once been held in reserve by Connecticutfor possible future settlement by its citizens.Educated in New York City, Dr. Long wasa man of considerable cultivation and notablecompassion. He and his wife, who assisted himin nursing the sick, had already taken in theeight-year-old daughter of a deceased patient.They were not about to turn away their orphanedrelatives, all four of whom were said to be physicallyattractive and musically talented. Callingupon his wealth and influence, Dr. Long sawto the educations of John and Darwin; helpedSolomon (who fell in love with and married theLongs’ seventeen-year-old daughter Mary) setup a merchandise business; and likely arrangedfor T.C. to obtain employment with the Bank ofCleveland as a teller. 7The nation’s chaotic monetary policies playedhavoc with the budding career of the second oldestof the Longs’ wards. In 1832, Andrew Jacksonvetoed congressional legislation that sought toextend what the populist president regarded asthe unduly privileged charter of the Second Bankof the United States. Jackson’s successful “BankWar” left financial regulation solely up to thediscretion of each state and ushered in an eraof wildcat banking. Over the next two decades,T.C. was periodically forced to leapfrog to a newfinancial institution because a previous employerhad collapsed or lost its banking charter.The Earnest Miss SeymourAlthough he never stopped scrambling aftersuccess in business, T.C. was much luckier inlove, wooing and eventually winning the intelligent,serious-minded, verbally gifted CarolineMaria Seymour of Auburn, New York. T.C. methis future wife, who was born in Canandaigua,New York, to Orson and Caroline Maria ClarkeSeymour in 1820, while clerking at the Bankof Auburn during the mid-1830s. Upon thedeath of her banker father in 1824, Caroline’smother had moved with her eight children intothe home of Orson’s brother James, the Bankof Auburn’s cashier. Her mother’s unremittingunhappiness and her uncle’s “fearsome”Presbyterianism turned Caroline’s childhoodand adolescence into what she later termed a“long dark night.” “My father’s early death andmy mother’s constant mourning for him hadmade me a . . . super-sensitive child naturallyreverential to the authority of the home and thechurch,” she once elaborated. “I was thus alwaysunder torture for my sins—which were supposedto consist in a love for ‘worldly pleasure’—childthat I was, and sins that were never mine even inmy mature years!” Uncle James insisted that hiswards attend revival meetings, at which Carolineencountered leaders of American Protestantism’sSecond Great Awakening such as Charles GrandisonFinney and Jedediah Burchard. Their“emotional preaching stressed perfection of mankindand attainment of millennial happiness,”according to Seymour Severance scholar JudithRaftery—concepts that “guided [Caroline’s] life’swork [after] her religious fervor waned.” 8Although an instrument of her mental distress,James Seymour was to hand Caroline her deliverancewhen he introduced his niece to his favoriteclerk and made known his approval of the youngman as a suitor. T.C.’s relative poverty (he slept atthe bank at night on a bed that was hidden undera counter during the day) did not disqualify himin the eyes of Caroline’s guardian, himself a formerbank clerk who would rise to the presidencyof the Bank of Auburn in 1849. 9T.C. liked to joke that Caroline had “chased himall over the State of New York [until] she made