Eminent Women: Ann Fairfax Washington Lee and Susanna Mehitable Rogers Sangiovanni Pickett Keate, Part 2
Susanna Keate was 64 years old when she helped Wilford Woodruff and the women of St. George do the temple work for seventy eminent women of the world.
She was born Susanna Mehitable Rogers in Quebec in 1813. Her early life was spent moving around Canada with her family, following her father’s work as a trapper. She sometimes went with her father as he set traps.
When Susanna was seven years old, her growing family moved to northern New York State. Susanna’s sister Caroline wrote the following verse about their idyllic childhood:
How oft’ with my playmates in childish abandon
I’ve roamed through the valleys, new pleasures to find.
The murmuring streamlets, the birds singing gaily
Would chase all the gloom and the care from my mind.
In 1825 the Rogers family was present when Marquis de Lafayette made his triumphal tour of the country. According to a family story, when Lafayette kissed a baby in a crowd, Susanna, standing nearby, exclaimed, “Oh, I wish I were a baby!” Lafayette heard and bowed and kissed her hand.
Five years later, the family moved to Manhattan to look for work, eventually running a boarding house by today’s Battery Park.
In the fall of 1833, a new boarder came to the boarding house. In order to explain who he was, it would help to explain the entire history of the Napoleonic Wars, particularly the events in the Kingdom of Naples, now part of Italy, but since this is not the place for a comprehensive review of the Napoleonic Wars, here is a brief description. Naples and Sicily were ruled by King Ferdinand IV. In 1799, French revolutionary forces replaced the king with a republican government, but that only lasted a few months until the clergy returned Ferdinand to the throne. In 1806, Napoleon appointed his brother, Joseph Bonaparte, as the King of Naples. When Napoleon transferred Joseph to Spain, Napoleon gave Naples to his brother-in-law, Joachim Murat. Naples remained in upheaval as the Napoleonic Wars raged on. Ferdinand eventually regained the throne and Murat was executed.
The Rogers’ new boarder, Benedetto Sangiovanni, had served under Joseph Bonaparte, then under Joachim Murat. In 1819, he became a knight of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St. George.
After Murat lost power, the new government put a price on Sangiovanni’s head. He remained in hiding for three years.
At one time he had a narrow escape from one of the friars. As he tried to approach, Benedetto told him “If you come any nearer I will shoot you.” The Priest said, “Oh my son, I want to do you good. I want to give you good council and bless you.” He kept coming, so [Sangiovanni] shot him. Upon examining him, he found a stiletto in his sleeve.
Sangiovanni eventually escaped Naples, going first to America, and then to London. He was heavily involved with the Italian refugee community, and became a distinguished sculptor.
Sangiovanni went to France to help Don Carlos of Spain and Achille Murat, the son of Joachim Murat and Caroline Bonaparte, regain power in Naples, but the plot failed and he fled France. Achille Murat left Europe, inviting Sangiovanni to join him in Florida, where he would provide him with land.
Sangiovanni landed in New York on his way to Florida and secured lodgings with the Rogers family. While there, he received a stream of distinguished visitors including Joseph Bonaparte.
When 52-year old Benedetto Sangiovanni asked for 20-year-old Susanna Rogers’ hand in marriage, her father was very honored and talked her into accepting the proposal. Almost immediately Susanna left her close and affectionate family to go with her new husband to Florida to live with Achille Murat and his wife, Catherine Willis Gray, a great-grandniece of George Washington.
The Sangiovannis quickly realized the prospects in Florida were limited and moved to London, where Benedetto kept up his revolutionary activities and his career as a sculptor.
Benedetto and Susanna stayed with the Gabriele and Frances Rossetti family until they found lodgings. One of the children in the family, poet and artist Dante Gabriel Rossetti, described Sangiovanni in his biography as a close family friend, a tall, gaunt man, very intelligent, and “who had, I believe, ‘knifed’ somebody in early youth.”
In 1835, Benedetto and Susanna had a son, Guglielmo Giosue Rossetti Sangiovanni, later known in America as “Sanjo.”
From here Dante Rossetti will tell part of the story:
Sangiovanni, as a husband, was not unkind in his way, but had all the jealousy (perfectly gratuitous in this instance) and the dominance of a Southern Italian; and his wife was almost a prisoner in her dingy tenement… My mother, with some of us children [including Christina Rossetti], often looked in upon her solitude, and held her in deserved esteem. After some years she came to understand (I know not how) that Sangiovanni was already a married man, having a wife still living in Italy. This was, I suppose, true; and not less true that Sangiovanni had heard nothing of his first wife for many years, and had genuinely believed her to be no more. About the same time our Mrs. Sangiovanni got to know something about the Mormons; so one day she vanished with her son to Mormonland, and was never again traced… Sangiovanni, after much agitated inquiry, resumed his ordinary work [sculpting], and he died at Brighton in 1853.
While briefly in Liverpool, Susanna reportedly had a dream of a man on a street corner with an open book who told her about a key she was supposed to use to make a journey.
When she met Wilford Woodruff and Heber C. Kimball in London in 1840, she recognized Kimball as the man in her dream. The next month, Parley P. Pratt arrived in London with a letter for Susanna from her parents, who had met the missionaries in New York and joined the church.
Kimball and Woodruff visited regularly with the Sangiovannis, and although Benedetto remained opposed to his wife’s baptism, she managed to be baptized without his knowledge, and had her son baptized.
Susanna’s family encouraged her to return to America, including her brother, who wrote:
Sister, farewell, but not forever.
Bound with the cords of grace
Time’s rolling stream will bring thee over
To Zion’s glorious resting place.
Susanna continued to have regular contact with Wilford Woodruff and the members of the church as often as she was able. Meanwhile, Sangiovanni suffered poor health and became more abusive. The family story mentions that one day Sangiovanni left his keys on the table as he left the house. Susanna recognized them as the keys from her dream and immediately took them, and entered a door that Sangiovanni always kept locked. It led to a stairway, and in the stairway, she found a chest containing papers and money and gold coins. She took several coins and immediately packed her belongings and left the house and, with assistance of the missionaries and her friend Mary Ann Mitchell, made arrangements to travel with her son to America.
Susanna ended up in St. Louis. She had no way of finding her family, since the Saints had left Nauvoo and spread throughout the surrounding area. While in St. Louis, she met a member of the church, William Pickett, a close associate of Almon Babbit, and the husband of Agnes Moulton Coolbrith Smith, the widow of Don Carlos Smith. Pickett asked Susanna to become his second wife, and they were married, but when she became pregnant, he made arrangements to send her and her son Sanjo to Winter Quarters.
When Susanna arrived there, she found that the church did not recognize the plural marriage, and church leaders annulled the so-called marriage. Her son Horatio Pickett was born in a dugout near Winter Quarters.
William and Agnes Pickett and their children left for Utah and then California, where William eventually died in the gold fields and Agnes’s daughter from her first marriage, Ina Coolbrith, previously Josephine Smith, became a notable figure in the early California literary community.
At this point, Susanna found her Rogers family. She lived with a sister for a while, and went west with the Saints in 1852. She worked as a schoolteacher until she married widower James Keate in 1856. The Keates accepted a mission call to Southern Utah and shared in all the privations of early St. George. According to notes in the family history, James lived with his third wife, Jacobine, and Susanna continued to teach school and adopted a Paiute daughter, Cora, for company.
Susanna taught school in St. George and lived a long and useful life, doing temple work, and spending her later years surrounded by her son Horatio’s large family. Her son Sanjo served a mission in Italy and ended his days as caretaker of the Deseret Museum in Salt Lake City.
When the women of St. George assembled in their new temple in 1877, the temple president, Wilford Woodruff, was a friend of Susanna’s since the day that she met him and Heber C. Kimball on a street corner in London. And when the temple work was done for George Washington’s family, Susanna did the endowment for Ann Fairfax Washington Lee, the wife of George Washington’s beloved half-brother, a woman who had also lived an eventful, difficult life.
(See listing in Topical Guide for earlier entries in this series.)