The Magnetic Mr. Poyen, Part II (Originally published August 30, 2024)

by Bethany Groff Dorau, Executive Director

We're back with another scintillating edition of How to Magnetize Friends and Influence People! In case you missed our last episode, which offered a peek into my bouncing brain, once described as "squirrels locked in a small room", it is linked here.

We met Charles Poyen, a member of the Poyen family who landed in Newburyport along with other refugees from the French West Indies, learned a little bit about Animal Magnetism, and discovered that healing with magnets is still very much a thing.

This episode begins a generation before, in the 1790's back in Guadeloupe, with a murder or two. We are told by the nonagenarian Sarah Smith that the French Revolution "reached the French West Indian colonies with even more intense cruelties than in the mother country." This beggars belief somewhat, as the mother country was cruel as can be, but let's just say there was plenty of violence to go around. The rather more cool-headed John J. Currier said simply that there were "scenes of anarchy and confusion" in the French West Indies.

Sarah Smith was closer to the mark. The French Revolution came to Guadeloupe like a wrecking ball. The wealthy planters were tied by blood and money to the aristocracy of France, and the revolutionaries hated them equally. To further stoke the flames, the revolutionaries abolished slavery, upon which the West Indian economy was based, and the planters invited the hated British to invade in order to preserve the institution of slavery in 1794.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Two years earlier, the Poyen family, wealthy sugarcane planters from the village of Habitation Piton near Saint-Rose, Guadeloupe, were attacked. The oldest and youngest sons, Robert de Poyen and Saint Sauveur de Poyen were "killed by the brutal mob of republicans", according to Smith. 51-year-old Pierre Robert de Saint Sauveur Poyen fled with his three surviving sons, two daughters, and a step-nephew, Count Francis de Vipart (François Félix Hector de Vipart Morainvilliers). They managed to get aboard a Newburyport brig, one of many sent to bring molasses and sugar back to the distilleries that dotted the waterfront. The family arrived in Newburyport in March 1792.

I'll get back to Charles Poyen, I promise, but first, I must tell you about the Poyen step-nephew,  Count Francis de Vipart. Well, more to the point, I must tell you about Mary Balch Ingalls, distant relative of Pa and Ma and Laura Ingalls, and my 4th cousin. Apparently after some time in Newburyport, the Count made his way up river, and in 1805 he wooed and married Mary Balch Ingalls, just 18 (he was 27 or 28). She died three years later and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Haverhill. The bereaved Count returned to France and eventually to Guadeloupe.

The poet John Greenleaf Whittier, whose brother married the Count's cousin, Abigail Poyen, wrote a romantic poem about the grave of the young Countess. The poem inspired such paroxysms of grief that her grave became a pilgrimage site of sorts, and then people started chipping off bits of it as souvenirs. The family erected a cage around the stone to protect it, which did the trick for many years, but the stone is now gone - some say hidden away for safekeeping.

The rest of the Poyen crew settled in Newburyport, at least for a few years after their arrival in 1792. Pierre, called "Peter" in his probate record, and entirely without a first name in the Newburyport death record, didn't last the year, dying of "loss of home, change of climate, grief and anxiety", according to Smith.

Pierre's son Joseph stuck around as other family members found their way back to Guadeloupe. And what does a young French aristocrat do for cash in late 18th century Newburyport? Open up a dancing school, naturally. Four years later Joseph, now styling himself as "Poyen Rochmond", placed this ad in the Newburyport Impartial Herald.

Two years after that, in 1798, he was also teaching "the useful and necessary art of self-defense" by broad sword. He also apparently played the violin, which he put to good use as a fiddler for country dances later in his life.

Joseph Poyen married a local gal, Sally Elliot, in 1805, and their nine children and their descendants spread across Haverhill, Amesbury, and Merrimac, where they can still be found today.

The Poyen Sampler, wrought c. 1819, likely by Elizabeth Josephine Poyen, is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

So many people to meet! But, I have promised you a story about Charles Poyen, nephew of Joseph the dancing, fiddling self-defense instructor. Charles Poyen was the son of Mathieu Augustine Poyen, Joseph's younger brother.

Many of the French refugees returned to Guadeloupe once it was safe to do so, and, of course, once Napoleon had reinstated slavery in 1802, making the sugar plantations economically attractive once again. Charles Poyen was born in Guadeloupe around 1806, where his father had returned to re-claim the family plantation.

When Mathieu Augustine Poyen died in 1827, he left a large, profitable plantation, enslaving some 90 people. Charles inherited this wealth along with his mother and siblings, and seems to have set off to France to study medicine. Sometime in 1832, he developed a painful and complicated "nervous disease" that effected his stomach and right side. He was treated by a doctor who employed a clairvoyant named Madame Villetard. Poyen was healed, he began reading voraciously about animal magnetism, and he returned to Guadeloupe to try it out on the people his family and others enslaved. Thus convinced that "the human soul was gifted with the same primitive and essential faculties", in other words, anyone could be mesmerized.

Determined to spread the word of healing through animal magnetism to America, Charles Poyen sailed for New England and descended upon his uncle Joseph Poyen, who was then living in Rocks Village, in 1834. He stayed for five months before moving on to Lowell, where he set up shop as a French and art teacher.

Charles Poyen appeared in the Lowell directory in 1836. It is not known, though it is likely, that the Louis Poyen staying at the same place is a relative.

Charles Poyen claimed that he never mentioned animal magnetism for six months when he was first living in Lowell, until he found himself in conversation with the mayor, Elisha Bartlett who seems to have convinced him that there was a market for his passionate advocacy of mesmerism. Poyen, thus encouraged, set out to find a publisher for an existing treatise on the subject.

When no publisher bit, Poyen decided a round of lectures and demonstrations of the mesmeric trance that was the cornerstone of the practice of magnetism would help him build an audience. January 1836 found him lecturing in Boston. In February, the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal published an essay, then his translation of the Report on the magnetical experiments made by the Commission of the Royal Academy of Medicine, of Paris was published in June.

Though his star was certainly on the rise, in the fall of 1836, he sent home to Guadeloupe for money to continue his lecturing, as it was not yet profitable. It was not until he took his lecture tour to the mill town of Pawtucket and met Miss Cynthia Ann Gleason that he became a real celebrity.

Well, friends, here we go again. I'm out of space with so much more to tell. Stay tuned for the next newsletter, in which I promise to wrap it up already as Charles Poyen uses magnetism to get the factory gals to work on time, launches the career of Miss Cynthia Gleason, and inspires generations of magnetizers here in Newburyport.