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Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
Strattons of Massachusetts Bay
Running Through the Sands of Time
The Long Line: A Stratton Chronicle — Chapter Eight
Fall 1846 — Geneva, New York
The other students were, for the most part, younger than him.
Joel noticed this on the first morning — the way they moved through the halls of the Geneva Medical College with the loose-limbed confidence of men who had not yet had the world knock much of anything out of them. Some were barely twenty. A few carried themselves with the careful dignity of young men recently emancipated from their fathers’ farms, determined to be taken seriously. They wore new coats. They had clean hands.
Joel’s hands were not clean in the sense that mattered. They had held a tow rope on the Erie Canal in October rain. They had pressed against the chest of a murdered man on a Rochester cobblestone while the blood cooled around his fingers. They had gripped a pistol in a waterfront tavern in Oswego while Stephen Wing calculated whether to draw, and one of them — the right — still bore a small tremor on cold mornings, a souvenir from the bullet that had punched through his chest and out the other side three years before.
He was thirty years old, once widowed, still technically married to a second wife from whom he had been long estranged, with a daughter named Julia who was seven and most likely in Mercy’s keeping while her father attempted to become a physician. He had arrived at Geneva through the three-cornered friendship that had shaped so much of his life: Senator William Henry Seward, Dr. Alexander Kelsey of Rochester, and Dr. Nelson Donnellan of Preble County had been bound together for years by the common cause of anti-slavery Whig politics — men who believed the Republic’s original promise had been betrayed and intended to do something about it. It was Kelsey who had first made a lawman of Joel, appointing him First Ward Constable in Rochester and later sponsoring his path to the Deputy Marshal’s office. It was Kelsey who had called on Donnellan’s friendship when Joel needed a physician of standing to vouch for him at Geneva. And it was Seward who had written the letter to the college, with the full weight of a senator’s name behind it.
What none of his classmates knew — and what Joel had no intention of telling them — was that Geneva was not simply a career change. It was an escape. Three years earlier, his superior in the Marshal’s office had orchestrated a conspiracy to frame an innocent man named Philo N. Rust for a trunk robbery, and Joel — trusting his superior the way a Deputy Marshal is supposed to trust his superior — had executed the warrant, made the arrest, and watched the case collapse in a courtroom when the real thief turned up dead in the Tombs prison. The district attorney had ruled that Joel was wrong and likely perjured himself. The perjury charge was never prosecuted, but Rust had filed a slander lawsuit. Joel had answered it the way a man with a ruined reputation and no money answers a lawsuit: with bankruptcy. His superior had been removed from office in November 1844. Joel had spent the next two years putting distance between himself and everything that name represented, and in September 1846 he had packed his trunk for Geneva with the deliberate intention of becoming something that nobody could take away from him.
Joel was grateful in the particular way of a man who knows he cannot repay a debt and has resolved to earn it instead.
The curriculum was not easy and not gentle. Medical education in 1846 was conducted largely through lecture — anatomy, chemistry, physiology, the theory and practice of medicine, materia medica — in a hall that smelled of chalk dust and the faint persistent ghost of the cadavers worked in the dissection rooms below. The professors were men of acknowledged competence and considerable self-regard, accustomed to rooms full of attentive young faces that had not yet developed opinions of their own.
Joel had developed opinions years ago. He kept most of them to himself.
What he could not keep to himself was his attention. He had spent a decade as a lawman training himself to notice what other men missed — the slight hesitation before a lie, the angle of a body preparing to run, the detail that did not belong in a scene that was otherwise familiar. He applied this same attention to the lecture hall, and found that it served him well there too. He read ahead of the assignments. He asked questions that occasionally silenced the professor for a beat longer than comfort allowed before the answer came. He was elected class chairman in his second session — not unanimously, and not without some friction from younger men who found his manner too assured — but elected nonetheless.
By the summer between his first and second year, he had found his footing.
Summer 1847 — Western New York
When lectures ended for the term, Joel put the anatomy texts away and took out the warrant book.
Medical school cost money — instruments, lodging, texts, the hundred small expenses that accumulated without mercy. His classmates found summer work in chemists’ shops or returned to their families. Joel did what he knew how to do. He corresponded with the Governor’s office, accepted assignments, and spent the summer finding people who did not wish to be found. It was work he had done for a decade. He was good at it.
The New York State Comptroller’s records for April 1847 document his services plainly: Francis J. Stratton, petition for expenses incurred in the pursuit and apprehension of a fugitive from justice — $386.74 audited and approved. The bureaucratic language strips all drama from it, which is fitting. Joel had no interest in drama. He had interest in tuition.
He returned to Geneva in September with the term’s expenses settled, a new set of surgical knives, and the particular weariness of a man who has spent the summer reminding himself that justice and necessity are not always the same thing. He put the warrant book away. He opened the anatomy text. He did not speak of the summer to his classmates.
It was that autumn that he found Hester Donnellan.
Autumn 1847 — Seward’s Summer Cottage, Lake Geneva
Senator William Henry Seward’s summer cottage on Lake Geneva was a different world from the formal Auburn house — lower ceilings, open windows letting in the smell of the water, the kind of place where a man who carried the weight of New York state politics in his shoulders could let them drop for an afternoon. The conversation at the supper table ranged just as far as it did in Auburn — from state politics to the merits of the Mexican War to the question, increasingly urgent and increasingly unresolved, of what a republic founded on the principle of human liberty was to do about the fact that it ran on the labor of enslaved people — but it ranged more freely here, without the formality that a senator’s town house imposed on everyone who passed through it.
Seward had known Joel for years, through the long chain of favors and introductions and quiet patronage that connected a canal country boy to the highest reaches of New York political life. He had arranged Joel’s appointment as Deputy U.S. Marshal. He had sent the Arabian mare Jumanah as a gift when Joel’s reputation as a lawman warranted something more than a salary. He regarded Joel, as far as Joel could tell, with the particular warmth that men of great influence sometimes extend to men of demonstrated capability — the warmth of a patron who has been proved right in his investment.
When Joel arrived at the cottage that autumn, Hester Donnellan was already there.
She was not what he expected. Nelson Donnellan’s daughter was fifteen, though you would not have guessed it from the way she occupied a room — her father’s sharpness of attention fully developed, the manner of someone who had been listening to adult conversation all her life and had long since stopped finding it intimidating. She was visiting the Sewards without her parents in the way that daughters of trusted family friends sometimes were permitted to do, and she carried herself as though the permission were entirely natural. Joel noticed her the way you notice a presence that has been observing you carefully before you have begun to observe it. She was reading in the corner of the parlor when Seward introduced them, and she set down the book with the unhurried deliberateness of someone who has decided the conversation is worth having.
“You are the medical student,” she said. It was not quite a question.
“I am,” Joel said. “And you are Nelson Donnellan’s daughter.”
“I am.” The same rhythm. A small acknowledgment that whatever else was true, they were talking to each other.
He was thirty-one years old, carrying the weight of a ruined reputation, a marriage he could not yet end, and a future he was still constructing. She was a girl who had grown up in a physician’s household, reading her father’s texts and listening at tables where most young women of her era were not invited to sit. The conventions of 1847 had clear opinions about the proper distance between a man of his history and a girl of her age, and Joel had every intention of respecting those conventions — which was not the same thing as failing to notice that Nelson Donnellan’s daughter had a mind worth waiting for.
Seward had procured, for the afternoon, a paper target and forty yards of clear ground behind the stable. He had a five-shot Colt revolver — the kind of weapon that had, in the past few years, gone from military novelty to the sidearm of choice for men whose work required more than one shot before reloading. There was a general interest in seeing it demonstrated.
Joel had been shot with a version of its predecessor. He demonstrated it with the calm of a man for whom a pistol was a tool rather than a novelty — five shots, no reload, tight grouping at a distance that made one of Seward’s house guests emit a low whistle.
He was aware, without looking, that Hester was watching.
“My father said you were a lawman before you were a physician,” she said later, as the guests drifted back toward the house.
“I was,” Joel said. “Among other things.”
“What other things?”
He considered how much truth served a first conversation and decided on a portion of it. “I drove mules on the canal. I was a constable. A Deputy Marshal. I put a counterfeiting ring out of operation on the St. Lawrence River.”
“And were shot in the process.”
He looked at her then. “Your father told you.”
“My father tells me things he considers important,” Hester said. “He considered that important.”
Joel was quiet for a moment. The afternoon light was long and gold across the grass, and somewhere behind them Frederick Seward was attempting to explain to a house guest the mechanics of the Colt’s revolving cylinder.
“I am going to be a physician,” Joel said. “The rest of it is past.”
Hester looked at him the way her father looked at patients — with the specific, unhurried attention of someone who has learned that what people say they are and what they actually are tend to be related but not identical propositions.
“Perhaps,” she said.
They walked back to the house together. By the end of that week, a correspondence had begun — careful and proper, with her father’s knowledge. Dr. Donnellan had made his terms plain: she would not marry until she was eighteen. Joel accepted those terms without argument. He had learned patience on the Erie Canal, and more of it in the courts of Rochester, and he understood that some things were worth the wait. There was also the matter of Kentucky — and what would need to happen there first.
Fall 1847 — Geneva, New York
The letter arrived at the Geneva Medical College faculty in the early autumn of 1847, and what it proposed sent a current of discomfort through the institution that the faculty handled in the way that institutions have always handled uncomfortable proposals: by declining to handle it themselves.
The letter was from a young woman named Elizabeth Blackwell, of Cincinnati, Ohio. It was dated October 3, 1847. She was twenty-six years old, and she wanted to study medicine.
She had, by that autumn, been rejected by nearly every medical college in the country. The rejections had not been rude — they had been the kind of polite, regretful, thoroughly considered refusals that institutions produce when they wish to say no without appearing to mean it. Some had cited the practical difficulties of a woman in a dissection room. Some had expressed concern for her welfare among male students. Some had simply said the thing directly: it was not done, it had never been done, and Geneva Medical College was not, the faculty trusted, prepared to be the first institution in the United States to pretend that it could be.
The Geneva faculty found themselves in possession of Blackwell’s letter — written, by every account, in a tone of determination that left no room for polite evasion — and a letter of recommendation from Dr. Joseph Warrington of Philadelphia, a name none on the faculty dared offend. Warrington had found her, to his considerable surprise, to be exactly what she presented herself as: a woman of genuine medical ability and serious scholarly purpose.
The faculty made a decision. They would put the question to the students.
This was, as everyone in the room understood, an act of institutional cowardice dressed in the language of democratic process. If the students voted no — as any reasonable man would predict they would — the faculty had their answer and their clean hands. If, by some unlikely turn, the students voted yes, the faculty could accept that outcome as the will of the community while quietly distancing themselves from responsibility for what followed. It was, in the precise sense of the word, a punt.
There was one condition: the vote must be unanimous. A single dissenting vote would resolve the matter. And there were one hundred and fifty male students in the Geneva Medical College class of 1847.
The faculty sent the question to the class chairman.
Joel read the letter twice. Then he read it a third time, the way he had learned to read warrants and depositions — for what it said and what it did not say, for the weight of the words and the shape of the silence around them. He thought about Asenath, who had died for want of a physician who understood the specific mechanics of a woman’s body. He thought about Hester, who had walked back to the Seward house beside him in the afternoon light with the assured bearing of a woman who had been allowed, by an accident of upbringing, to develop her own mind. He thought about the faculty’s letter, with its careful language and its transparent hope that the students would do what the faculty wished they could do themselves.
He called a meeting.
November 1847 — Geneva Medical College
The vote was taken by a show of hands, and it was not unanimous.
One hundred and forty-nine hands went up. One did not.
The holdout was a young man from a good family in western New York — not vicious, not unintelligent, simply possessed of the conviction, common enough in 1847, that certain arrangements of the world were natural and right and did not require examination. He had voted his honest opinion. He sat with his arms folded and his jaw set while one hundred and forty-nine of his classmates looked at him.
Joel waited. There were procedures. There was discussion. The young man explained his position with the confidence of someone who expected, when the room was given a moment to reflect, to be agreed with.
He was not agreed with.
What happened next was not recorded in the official minutes of the Geneva Medical College, because it did not happen in any room where minutes were kept. It happened in a stairwell.
Two of Joel’s classmates — men who had, during their time at Geneva, developed opinions about what kind of physician they intended to be and what kind of world they intended to practice in — invited the holdout to step outside for a private conversation. The conversation included, at some point, the holdout being held over the stairwell at a height that concentrated the mind considerably.
He returned to the room and changed his vote.
The vote was now unanimous.
Joel, as class chairman, wrote out the resolution. He wrote it carefully, in the formal language of institutional documents — the language that would need to hold up to scrutiny, to be quoted and cited and preserved, because he understood, in the way that men who have spent time around courtrooms sometimes understand, that a document like this one was not only for the moment it described but for every moment that came after.
Resolved — That one of the radical principles of a Republican Government is the universal education of both sexes; that to every branch of scientific education, the door should be open equally to all; that the application of Elizabeth Blackwell to become a member of our class meets our entire approbation; and in extending our unanimous invitation we pledge ourselves that no conduct of ours shall cause her to regret her attendance at this institution.
Resolved — That a copy of these proceedings be signed by the chairman and transmitted to Elizabeth Blackwell.
He signed it. Francis J. Stratton, Class Chairman.
He did not record, in any document that has survived, what he thought in the moment after he put down the pen. Whether he understood the full weight of what the signature represented. Whether he thought of Asenath, or of Hester, or simply of the mechanics of the next thing that needed doing. He was not, by temperament, a man who dwelt in moments. He was a man who moved through them.
February 11, 1848 — Geneva, New York
The Geneva Medical College commencement was conducted on a February morning, and Francis Joel Stratton, M.D., walked out of it with a degree that had taken two years of lecture halls and dissection rooms and late nights with anatomy texts and the particular discipline of a man who had taught himself to apply the same intensity to medicine that he had once applied to tracking counterfeiters across the Saint Lawrence River.
He was thirty-one years old. He had a daughter, a correspondence with Hester Donnellan, a bullet fragment lodged in his lung that would give him trouble for the rest of his life, and a medical degree that had cost him more than it had cost most of the men who graduated beside him. He also had a marriage that still required dissolving — a legal matter that New York would not easily accommodate, but that Kentucky, with the right connections and a legislature willing to act on petition, could resolve with a directness that saved everyone further inconvenience.
He did not linger over the ceremony. There was work to do, and the first of it was in Kentucky.
Elizabeth Blackwell enrolled at Geneva Medical College in the autumn of 1847 — the same term in which the resolution was signed — and graduated in February of 1849, one year after Joel. She was the first woman in the United States to earn a medical degree, and she knew, as well as anyone alive, exactly what the path had required: the faculty’s transparent attempt to make the students do their difficult work for them, the stairwell conversation that nobody officially acknowledged, and the signature at the bottom of a handwritten resolution that had opened a door that had never previously existed.
She kept that resolution framed on the wall for the rest of her life.
The name beneath it — Francis J. Stratton, Class Chairman — was not famous. The man behind it did not become famous, in the way that Elizabeth Blackwell became famous. He went first to Kentucky, where the state legislature granted him what New York had made difficult — a clean legal end to his marriage, the kind that required knowing the right people and calling in a political favor. Then he went to Preble County, Ohio, where Hester Donnellan had just reached the age her father had set as his condition, and on February 21, 1850, he married her. Julia came to live with them in Ohio — eleven years old by then, closer in age to her new stepmother than to her father, which says something both about the particular arithmetic of Joel’s life and about the kind of household Hester was willing to make. He practiced medicine beside his father-in-law, and then moved on to a series of further lives — spy, penitentiary surgeon, Patent Office employee, failed enlistee who served anyway — until he died in Washington in April of 1863, worn out at forty-seven by a chest wound and a war he could not fight and a country he refused to stop caring about.
But the resolution existed. His signature was on it. And Elizabeth Blackwell, for the rest of her long life, made sure it stayed on the wall where anyone who visited her could see it.
That is the kind of man he was.
Francis Joel Stratton, M.D. (1816–1863) graduated from Geneva Medical College, Geneva, New York, in February 1848. As class chairman, he signed the resolution admitting Elizabeth Blackwell to the college — the resolution that made Blackwell’s graduation in February 1849 possible, and that Blackwell kept framed on her wall for the remainder of her life. Following graduation he practiced briefly in Kentucky, where a legislature-directed divorce dissolved his second marriage. He married Hester Ann Donnellan on February 21, 1850, in Preble County, Ohio. His full story is told in Farmer, Lawman, Doctor, Spy in the Histories section of this site.
—Wm. F. Stratton, May 2026
Over 50 years of research into the Stratton, Schneider, King, and allied families—from colonial Massachusetts to Indiana and beyond. Built by Bill & Karen Stratton.
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