The Maturation and Merging of Teaching and Antislavery, 1840–1850
The 1840s proved a critical decade for Cowles. Her two passions, abolition and education, came together, allowing her to establish herself as a leading Ohio reformer and a force to be reckoned with. The battles she fought provided her with experience and wisdom that would lead to the pinnacle of her career in the following decade.
When Cowles graduated from Oberlin in 1840 at the age of thirty, most public schools in the West remained disorganized, and teachers were underpaid. Cowles hoped to avoid returning to such a position; after all, she had pursued an education at Oberlin in order to open career doors. She most wanted a position at one of the new female seminaries in the state. Nearly thirty opened their doors in Ohio between 1830 and 1850. These schools offered teachers like Cowles an opportunity to challenge students with a more advanced curriculum than public schools offered. Some female seminaries developed coursework equivalent to that of male colleges, which included geography, rhetoric, botany, algebra, and physics. Students had to be twelve or thirteen years old to be admitted, so they were generally more mature and serious in their approach to education. Overall, the environment at female seminaries offered a stark contrast to the unruly, confused, overcrowded classrooms Cowles was all too familiar with. The opportunity to work with serious and motivated older girls in a comfortable, focused classroom was very appealing.
It took two years, but Cowles eventually found a good position at the all-white Portsmouth Female Seminary in southern Ohio. Earning $25 a month, she enjoyed her enthusiastic young students and was grateful to be back in the classroom. Because of her Oberlin education and the impeccable organizing skills she developed during her years of antislavery leadership, Cowles did double duty as an administrator and a teacher at Portsmouth. Working long hours as assistant to the superintendent and teacher to twenty-eight students, Cowles barely slept during those first few months. “I have no time to be lonely, homesick, or any thing of the kind,” she explained to her family during the fall term.1 When she did find a few spare moments, she used them to advance her skills as a teacher by taking drawing lessons. Utterly devoted and focused, she immersed herself in the school, her students, and the curriculum.
Though Cowles had little time to yearn for her family and friends in the Western Reserve, her absence was felt in Austinburg. She was a favorite at social gatherings and among community groups because of her gleeful personality, organizing skills, and work ethic. The Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society faltered and eventually slipped into a coma without Cowles to breathe life into it. Cornelia, especially, missed her sister. She worked with family friend Dr. Lorenzo Whiting to arrange a teaching position in nearby Canton, Ohio, where Whiting lived with his wife. Despite their efforts, Betsy remained in Portsmouth, fully committed to her position at the female seminary. By the end of her first year, however, Cowles’s abolitionist sentiments had convinced her to shorten her career in southern Ohio.
Portsmouth sat on the Ohio River, bordering the slave state of Kentucky. This close proximity to the South made it dangerous to support antislavery and racial equality publicly. It was not uncommon for outspoken abolitionists along the border to be harassed and bullied. White assumptions about black inferiority ensured that daily life for African Americans in this part of the state was especially difficult. The infamous Black Laws provided legal support for such stereotypical assumptions. By excluding blacks from public schools, the law guaranteed second-class citizenship for African Americans.
At the local level, whites had more specific fears about extending education to blacks. They worried that interracial schools would attract more people of color to their communities. This would mean more competition for jobs and possibly lower wages. Those whites struggling to find work as domestics and laborers dreaded the idea of competing for low-paid positions with African Americans. More importantly, interracial schools would fly in the face of their effort to remove all blacks from the region entirely, an unstated goal of the Black Laws. Offering people of color education would only encourage their continued presence. This antiblack sentiment was widely held, especially in southern Ohio.
Cowles boldly resisted the spirit of the Black Laws during her tenure at the Portsmouth Female Seminary. She knew this would be a difficult battle to win. Other women abolitionists both in the West and in the East had unsuccessfully attempted to challenge the exclusion of African Americans from schools in earlier years. In 1833, when all the white parents in Canterbury, Connecticut, withdrew their children from Prudence Crandall’s school because she had admitted a black student, she defiantly opened a school exclusively for African American girls and attracted students from nearby states. The white community declared war on the school and its students, refusing them all basic services and poisoning their well. Eventually, the state legislature passed a law making it illegal to teach out-of-state African American students without the permission of the town. On losing its court case against Crandall, the town turned to vigilante action: a mob burned down her school. Fearful for the safety of her students, Crandall closed her doors. Closer to home, in Cincinnati, another controversy over African American education emerged during the same period. A small group of resilient and determined white women moved to Cincinnati in 1834 and began teaching local African Americans. They also met with community resistance, including threats, bullying, and harassment.
Despite her knowledge of these earlier failed efforts, Cowles decided to invite local black children to participate in her Sabbath school (similar to a modern Sunday school). “I have been out and collected a class for myself in Sabbath school,” explained Cowles in a letter to a friend. “They are guilty of a crime—what think ye? Why of possessing real black skin and for this crime have been excluded [from other schools.]”2 Sabbath schools emerged at the beginning of the century in an effort to provide children—particularly from poor families—with moral and spiritual instruction. Church membership across the nation had been on the decline since the late eighteenth century, and as a result many worried that young people were not receiving the necessary Christian education. Sabbath schools seemed to offer an acceptable alternative, reassuring Americans that the next generation would not be spiritually empty. These schools focused on reading the Bible, so literacy was often incorporated into the curriculum. Sabbath schools became a substitute route for African Americans to learn to read.
Cowles embraced the Sabbath school movement, and within a few months of arriving in Portsmouth, she initiated her interracial class. The reaction in Portsmouth was immediate and blistering. African Americans had predicted this. One young girl told Cowles, “She liked much to come [to the school]; but did not know as she could for some of the white children were going to leave, because [blacks] were there.” Many of Betsy’s neighbors took personal offense at her bringing black and white children into the same classroom, even in an effort to promote Christianity. Local whites quickly withdrew their children and demanded that Cowles stop teaching her Sabbath class. She defied her critics. Despite the withdrawal of all her white students, she kept her Sabbath school open and devoted herself to teaching black children. She understood the real and symbolic importance of education, even if limited to religious instruction.
By the end of the school year, Cowles was exhausted and demoralized. The antiblack sentiment she witnessed among her neighbors and colleagues forced her to reconsider her employment options. Her friends and family continued to encourage her to return to northern Ohio, and she finally succumbed. Less than a year after she arrived, she packed her bags and did not look back.
When Cowles left Portsmouth, Ohio, in 1843, she was thirty-three years old and eager for a new challenge. Fortunately, a career opportunity presented itself that raised her status and allowed her to put into practice many of the ideas she had developed in relation to girls’ education since leaving Oberlin. Better yet, the position was in her hometown of Austinburg at a school cofounded by her father.
Like many private schools of the period, the Grand River Institute (GRI) was originally designed to train young men in the ministry. It was founded in 1831 by a small group of Congregationalist leaders in Austinburg, including Giles Cowles and the town’s founder, Eliphalet Austin. Two wealthy landowners allowed the school to use their land, and in return students labored on both the land and the attached mills. The GRI struggled with financial and enrollment problems during its first few years but eventually found another generous benefactor in wealthy merchant Joab Austin, and the school was relocated near his business. Still trying to attract greater enrollment in 1840, it opened its doors to female students. By the time Betsy joined the institution a few years later, thirty girls had matriculated.
The school appointed Cowles principal of the Women’s Department. Her Oberlin education made her a very attractive candidate. Few women could boast the wide-ranging knowledge that Cowles had attained during her two years at college. Moreover, she had extensive classroom experience, including her most recent year at the Portsmouth Female Seminary. When she began teaching classes in mathematics, physiology, geography, and music, her students found themselves blessed with a highly intelligent and skilled instructor. Girls also looked to Cowles for moral and religious guidance outside the classroom, and she eagerly complied. She encouraged her pupils to use their education to improve the world around them. She used her own antislavery activism as evidence of the good that women could achieve if they set their minds to it. Smart, successful, and respected, Cowles modeled a new vision of womanhood for her female students.
Settled in Austinburg with a satisfying job, surrounded by family and friends, Cowles found time to reignite her abolitionist activism. Her formal involvement with abolition had declined since 1838, when she began her studies at Oberlin. During this busy time of professional development, Cowles still managed to promote antislavery through small acts of resistance to racial discrimination, which helped to build abolitionist sentiment. Her decision to invite African American girls to her Sabbath school exemplifies her persistent adherence to the spirit of antislavery even if she was not formally involved in promoting the cause. Once she returned to Austinburg, however, she began to increase her organizational activity.
The antislavery movement had changed during Cowles’s hiatus. In the late 1830s, William Lloyd Garrison, the influential editor of the Boston-based Liberator, had become increasingly outspoken on controversial issues such as women’s rights, nonviolence, and the church’s failure to take a stand against slavery. Many of Garrison’s antislavery colleagues expressed discomfort with his mounting notoriety. They fretted that his advocacy of women’s equality, his rejection of all forms of violence and resistance (including war), and his condemnation of the church and clergy would repel potential supporters. Many simply disagreed with and disliked the Boston radical. Unable to silence Garrison, his opponents confronted him at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in the spring of 1840. Garrisonians (as they became known) supported the election of experienced antislavery lecturer Abby Kelley to the meeting’s all-important policy-making Business Committee. Garrison’s enemies opposed the election of a woman to such an important position. In a heated vote Kelley won, and her opponents angrily walked out and formed their own rival American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. This group avoided “extraneous” topics and made sure that women took on only subordinate roles within the organization. Whereas antislavery opponents had always denounced women abolitionists for stepping outside the “woman’s sphere” and interfering with men’s business, some people within the movement also questioned women’s roles. Ever since the Grimké sisters lectured to mixed-sex audiences in the late 1830s, more conservative abolitionists had held that women should not usurp men’s leadership roles in antislavery organizations. Unlike Garrison, who saw discrimination and prejudice based on sex as equivalent to discrimination and prejudice based on race, many abolitionists—both men and women—held conventional ideas about women as naturally domestic and subservient.
Around the same time as the controversy over women’s roles, another divisive issue emerged. Because moral persuasion as a tactic had failed to convince slaveholders to free their slaves, many in the movement began to look for a more pragmatic method to battle slavery. They decided to create a third political party devoted to the single issue of abolition. In 1840, these activists organized the Liberty Party and nominated slaveholder-turned-abolitionist James G. Birney as their presidential candidate. Garrisonians vehemently opposed the Liberty Party because they believed that partisan politics would corrupt antislavery and eventually weaken its moral focus. Office seekers would replace antislavery evangelists, and the movement would become so watered down as to be unrecognizable. Garrisonians argued that the Liberty Party was the most dangerous enemy of “true” abolition, and they worked diligently to undermine it.
As a result of these internal debates, the movement divided, and antislavery groups across the East, from small to large, took sides. Abolitionists in the West tried to avoid the conflict by remaining cooperative even amid disagreement. Although two organizations with different methods emerged in Ohio—one aligned with the Garrisonians and one with the Liberty Party—they agreed to work together and respect each other’s differences. Some abolitionists participated in both organizations, helping to create a community that remained cordial because its members agreed to disagree. Watching from the sidelines, Cowles sympathized with the Garrisonians, whom she considered ahead of their time: “Fanatics [like Garrison] of one age are the wise, sane, and conservative of another.”3
By 1845, the Garrisonian group in Ohio had lost ground to the Liberty Party, and they began to worry about their presence in the West. They initiated an attack on the Liberty Party, and tensions increased. The Garrisonians added fuel to the fire when they invited the controversial Abby Kelley, whose election to the Business Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 had helped cause the split, to lecture in Ohio. A Massachusetts resident, Abby Kelley had become an antislavery lecturer in the late 1830s after witnessing the oratorical skills of abolitionists Sarah and Angelina Grimké. The two South Carolina sisters convinced Kelley that she too had a public role to play in antislavery. Kelley gave her first speech to a mixed-sex audience at the second national antislavery women’s convention in Philadelphia in 1838. Despite a mob shouting threats and throwing rocks outside the building throughout her speech, Kelley continued to “plead the cause of God’s perishing poor.” Thus baptized into the world of antislavery lecturing, Kelley quickly became a skilled advocate for the movement. Dressed in a simple black dress with her long brown hair pulled back in a bun, she developed a lecturing style that was at once feminine and also untraditional. Passionate, firm, and knowledgeable, she mesmerized her audiences with horrific stories about enslaved women and children and the moral necessity of immediate emancipation. Because she was a tireless lecturer, traveling across the North for months at a time, she quickly became the symbol of female public speaking, radicalism, and eventually women’s rights. To be called an “Abby Kelleyite” meant that one had violated both political norms and gender roles.
When she arrived in Ohio in the summer of 1845, Kelley had an immediate and explosive impact on the state’s abolitionism. Many Liberty Party activists denounced her as an irritating representative of the troublesome Garrison. They worried that Kelley would drive away potential supporters. They had good reason to be wary. Kelley quickly pushed the Garrisonian group to become more uncompromising—further disrupting the tentative cooperation that existed among abolitionists in the state. One Liberty Party paper described her speeches at the annual meeting of the Garrisonians as “treasonable.” Other Liberty Party advocates and moderate abolitionists in Ohio initially expressed a more tempered wariness about Kelley’s presence in the state. Gamaliel Bailey, a leading Cincinnati abolitionist and editor of the antislavery Philanthropist, encouraged his colleagues to listen respectfully to Kelley. But Bailey’s patience quickly wore thin, and he warned Kelley that her attempt to import the conflicts of the East to the West would meet firm resistance.
Unlike the grumpy Bailey, Cowles was thrilled with Kelley’s presence in Ohio. Here was a woman who excited and motivated Betsy. Kelley was independent, outspoken, and intelligent. She promoted antislavery above all else, and she paved the way for other women. Cowles knew that a few women had stepped up to the podium in support of antislavery. The first American-born woman to take to the platform was Maria Stewart. A young African American widow, Stewart condemned slavery and encouraged her fellow Boston blacks to challenge racial inequality and support temperance and education for their community. Ruthlessly criticized for speaking to a mixed-sex audience in 1833, Stewart left the lecturing field, though she maintained her commitment to antislavery for the rest of her life. The Grimké sisters of South Carolina followed in Stewart’s footsteps and experienced the same ferocious attack. Not only did Catharine Beecher object, but a group of Presbyterian clergymen argued that the sisters had violated “true” womanhood by entering the public domain and adopting the role of men. The sisters brought “shame and dishonor” to womanhood.
Abby Kelley engendered similar harassment when she joined the antislavery movement as a public speaker. Unlike the Grimké sisters and Maria Stewart, however, she remained in the field for decades. Kelley benefitted from the network of Garrisonian abolitionists who provided her with support, advice, and encouragement. The Garrisonians nurtured female antislavery societies and promoted women to positions of leadership and power within their organizations. Maria Weston Chapman, a beautiful, wealthy Bostonian, edited the Liberator during Garrison’s absences, and the talented Lydia Maria Child edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard in New York City. Both Chapman and Child served on the Executive Committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society.
The Garrisonians created a cultural oasis for themselves. They came together to build their strength, share ideas, and sustain one another. Indeed, many young, single Garrisonian men and women fell in love, married, and worked to apply their ideas about equality to their relationships. When Oberlin graduate Lucy Stone married abolitionist Henry Blackwell, the couple wrote a “marriage protest” objecting to coverture. They declared their marriage “an equal and permanent partnership.” Stone also decided to keep her maiden name; those women who followed in her footsteps became known as “Lucy Stoners.”
After her initial visit to Ohio in 1845, Kelley returned with her new husband, Garrisonian Stephen S. Foster, in 1846. Kelley and Foster were familiar with Cowles’s reputation for antislavery leadership, so their first stop was Austinburg with the purpose of meeting the famed Cowles. Kelley wrote to Cowles, “I want to become acquainted with you.” Kelley and Cowles spent several days together in late January, building the foundation of a friendship very important for both women. Close in age (both were in their mid-thirties) and equally committed to abolition, they built a relationship on common interests and genuine fondness for one another. Betsy wrote to Cornelia after meeting Abby in an effort to share her exuberance. She described Kelley and Foster as “all that is noble and excellent.” She concluded, “I love them very much.” The feeling was mutual. Kelley wrote of Cowles to influential eastern abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman, “[She has a] soul as free and a mind as comprehensive as the Universe.”4
Cowles’s loyalty to Kelley and the Garrisonians was tested even while Abby and husband Stephen Foster were guests in her home. Knowing that Cowles was well loved in northern Ohio reform communities and particularly at her alma mater, Kelley asked her new friend to write a letter of support for their upcoming trip to Oberlin. While Oberlin was known for its antislavery sympathies, most reformers in this small community preferred a moderate approach, working collaboratively through political parties and religious institutions. They spurned the confrontational methods and uncompromising positions of the Garrisonians, particularly their denunciation of the church. Foster had published an inflammatory pamphlet in 1843 titled “A Brotherhood of Thieves: Or a True Picture of the American Church and Clergy,” in which he denounced all major churches in the United States for failing to take a strong position against slavery. Kelley and Foster did not expect a generous welcome at Oberlin. A letter from Cowles might open doors and minds for the radicals.
Betsy immediately penned the requested letter to her former teacher and dear friend Henry Cowles. “I know the tide of prejudice is strong against them,” she admitted. “[But] I believe them to be the untiring zealous friends of humanity & when they are understood [they] are appreciated as [abolitionists].”5 She emphasized their virtuous motives and self-sacrificing labor. She encouraged Cowles to listen to their words and ignore the rumors.
Despite Betsy’s letter, Kelley and Foster failed to win over the Oberlin community. Henry Cowles penned a thoughtful critique of their lectures in the Oberlin Evangelist, pointing out the problems with their arguments and methods. His wife, Helen, also disliked the radicals, but she emphasized more superficial issues related to Kelley’s failure as a “lady.” She explained to Betsy that she disliked Abby’s “look of contempt and scorn” and found her voice “so strained as to be disagreeable.” Despite Oberlin’s reputation as a radical center, its residents were not used to women lecturers. “When she arose to speak,” explained Helen, “breathless silence prevailed. She said she was surprised that any one should be opposed to having a woman speak here in Oberlin as they heard young ladies read compositions every year and she thought that they admired extemporary speeches much more than written discourses. This created quite a laugh.” Helen found Abby less amusing. Repulsed and offended, she stood up and left in the middle of Abby’s lecture, sending a clear message to the speaker and the rest of the audience. Oberlin faculty member James Fairchild denounced Kelley’s public oratory as a violation of feminine propriety, assailing her for the “sharpness of her words and the bitterness of her denunciations.”6
Cowles’s dear friends from Oberlin, Timothy and Betsy Hudson, also had an unfavorable opinion of Kelley. Liberty Party abolitionists, the Hudsons disapproved of Kelley’s condemnation of all institutions and churches that tolerated slavery. They accused Kelley of intentionally spreading false rumors and vaguely alluded to some of her “vulgarities.” Spreading gossip and engaging in “vulgarities” suggests, at best, a lack of virtue and piety and, therefore, an unforgivable collapse as a lady. It was a common tactic to question the virtue of public women, attempting to link them to illicit sexuality as a method for disempowering them. The Hudsons hoped that Cowles would come to her senses and distance herself from the disreputable Abby Kelley. Indeed, Betsy Hudson informed her friend that she liked her “a little less” for contracting a serious case of “Abbyism.”7
Cowles rejected these indictments. As a trailblazer herself, she sympathized with those who chose different paths. She understood that Kelley’s independent, outspoken personality offended people like Helen Cowles and Betsy Hudson because it threatened their understanding of respectability and social order. They scolded and humiliated Kelley because she violated the quiet, submissive vision of womanhood they embraced.
Kelley was deeply grateful for Cowles’s support. Life as an antislavery lecturer was often lonely, difficult, and exhausting. She traveled hundreds of miles over poor roads and through unpredictable weather only to end up in shabby inns with bedbugs for companions. Audiences ranged from enthusiastic to hostile. Opponents heaped verbal abuse on her and sometimes physically accosted her. They accused her of being a “jezebel,” “fanatic,” and “infidel.” They questioned her virtue and spread rumors about her. Despite her beauty, poise, and intelligence, she was often described in unflattering terms. In a rare confession, Kelley alluded to the emotional toll this abuse took on her. “You have never known what it was to be looked upon with distrust and suspicion by the honest common people, and hunted and persecuted by the ‘chief priests and rulers of these people,’” she explained to Cowles. As a result of this ostracism, Kelley cherished Cowles’s firm friendship. “Your frankness and warm-heartedness have done my soul good,” she gushed. “They have made me happy.”8
Cowles embraced Kelley and the Garrisonians with an enthusiasm that led to a dramatic increase in her antislavery activism. Her first goal was to expand her horizons by attending the national anniversary meetings of the Garrisonian abolitionist groups in New York and Boston. These three-day annual meetings offered beleaguered abolitionists a chance to rejuvenate, network, reconnect with friends, and socialize with like-minded reformers. Attendees debated hot-button issues, passed resolutions, and developed policy for the coming year. For Cowles, it meant the chance to meet antislavery luminaries like Maria Weston Chapman, Wendell Phillips, and Garrison. She could chat with other rural women and share ideas about building a successful antislavery coalition in isolated locations. Most importantly, she could begin to feel truly connected to the larger national movement.
Encouraged by Kelley, Cowles attended her first national meeting in the spring of 1846. This experience cemented her position as a national antislavery leader. Arriving in New York City with Kelley and Foster, she was immediately transfixed. Thanks to her longtime antislavery activism and Kelley’s support, she was elected to the Business Committee. This was quite an honor for a first-time attendee from a small rural town and is evidence of Cowles’s national reputation as a respected abolitionist. This elite group constructed the resolutions to be debated at the meeting and strongly influenced the tone of the gathering. Cowles spent hours sequestered in a room with the movement’s most famous leaders, including Garrison, Kelley, Parker Pillsbury, and Charles Remond. She developed friendships with these leaders; Garrison would visit her home during his western tour a year later, as would Frederick Douglass. Many renowned women served on the committee as well, including the brilliant Caroline Weston, Underground Railroad operator Abigail Mott, and several local innovators. Interacting with these vibrant women gave Cowles the inspiration she needed to return home and apply her new ideas to Ohio antislavery.
But this was a challenge. Many of her friends and fellow abolitionists in Ohio rejected Garrisonianism because they considered it uncompromising and radical. They disliked the harsh tone and overly broad denunciations employed by Garrisonians. Patriotic and deeply religious, they were offended by the radicals’ tendency to obliterate all clergymen and politicians in their speeches and writings. They were especially troubled by the Garrisonians’ “disunionist” philosophy calling for the North to break away from the South in order to distance itself from the “pro-slavery” Constitution. Dismantling the Union seemed unthinkable to most abolitionists. It threatened their sense of national identity and civic pride. It required putting antislavery at the heart of the nation. Cowles hoped to convince skeptical Ohioans to do just that. And she developed her own cooperative, bold approach, which proved very effective and influential.
From their first meeting, Kelley wanted Cowles to become an antislavery lecturer—to use her powerful voice to promote Garrisonianism in the West. She attempted to coax Cowles into lecturing, explaining that her status as a single woman with no children or domestic responsibilities freed her to engage in such an untraditional career. When Kelley chose to leave the lecturing field temporarily due to her pregnancy in 1847, she pushed Cowles even harder. “May the cry of the bleeding hearted and down trodden fill your ear by the glare of the day [and] stir your conscience to duty.” Kelley increased the pressure by drawing Cowles closer into her tight-knit network of friends and family. She shared intimate information about her pregnancy, confessing worries and fears. Kelley even regaled Cowles with a detailed description of her husband’s “bachelor brother.” Perhaps hoping to spark a romance, she remarked to Betsy, “he is a glorious soul and if he [should] go into a partnership with Stephen will be a grand acquisition to our little circle.”9
Despite this intense lobbying, Cowles rejected the dangerous and difficult life of an antislavery lecturer. Some of her friends discouraged her from following in Kelley’s footsteps. When Timothy Hudson heard the rumor that Cowles was going to begin lecturing, he cautioned, “If you seriously think of speaking much don’t think of ever marrying. The wife & mother can not very well add to her numerous duties, that of the public orator.”10 Hudson ignored Cowles’s clear preference for the single life, assuming that deep down she really desired a family and that she would eventually come to her senses. He also suggested that women could not have both a public and a private life. The message was that true women knew their place. Even if she ignored Hudson’s advice, Cowles knew that women lecturers like Kelley experienced vicious attacks and personal insults. While she was at home in front of a classroom full of students, she did not feel comfortable lecturing to hundreds of strangers in support of an unpopular cause. She valued her privacy and her safety.
Cowles instead took the approach that thousands of unmarried, educated women would follow in the coming decades: she created a space for herself in the civic world on her own terms. She negotiated a pragmatic method for promoting abolition among her fellow westerners that softened the sharp corners and disguised its boldness. She did not change or compromise her position; she simply repackaged the message. Employing her prodigious networking and collaborative skills, she pushed for racial equality and the end to slavery through everyday activities, such as sewing and socializing, which allowed her to publicize Garrisonian ideas and finance the movement while drawing minimum ire from opponents.
In the fall of 1846, still energized by her interactions with leading abolitionists in Boston and New York, Cowles decided to initiate an antislavery fair in order to raise funds to support the Garrisonians in Ohio and also to publish an anti–Black Law pamphlet for wide distribution. With the memory of racial prejudice at Portsmouth still fresh, she was determined to help eliminate the discriminatory Black Laws.
Fund-raising fairs had a long history associated with food, revelry, and trade, but by the early nineteenth century, they had become closely linked to the serious work of women’s reform activism. Benevolent and charitable groups had used fairs to finance their activities for decades, and female antislavery societies followed their lead. In the complicated process of organizing a “bazaar,” women abolitionists began by soliciting donations from supporters. Fair organizers used the pages of local antislavery newspapers, their churches, and word of mouth to request contributions. Most rural attendees at fairs preferred basic goods that would help improve and simplify their daily lives. “We wish that articles of real utility, such as must be purchased somewhere by every family may [be donated].”11 Products like baskets, shoes, and clothes sold well. Food products were also popular. Advertisements for the fair repeatedly requested donations of cheese, butter, fruit, grain, flour, eggs, and poultry from local farmers. Fair leaders believed these goods and the labor involved in producing them offered a sharp contrast to the South’s luxury-loving, indolent, plantation lifestyle. Thus fairs became symbols of the virtuous, industrious free labor system of the North.
One important method for ensuring donations to the fairs was to create antislavery sewing societies. These female-run organizations offered not only the assurance of a long-term commitment to the fair—sewing groups worked for months preparing goods to sell—but also created a safe space for women to generate the energy needed to sustain their reform enthusiasm throughout the year. Sewing societies in fact acted for women as political parties did for men. Education, gossip, food, and fun were central to these meetings. The blending of pleasure and work encouraged women to attend regularly. Men occasionally accompanied their wives to the sewing circles, allowing them to appreciate the labor involved in women’s work. After attending a meeting at a neighbor’s home, Ohio Garrisonian Daniel Hise mused in his diary, “They had quite a good turn out of Ladies whose lives are devoted to the cause of universal emancipation. Heaven helps them, therefore they must succeed.”12
Once goods had been donated, organizers arranged a location for the fair, publicized the event, and created a beautiful, inviting setting that welcomed potential buyers and converts. Wreaths made from evergreen trees brought the fresh smell of the outdoors into the fair building, and brightly colored bows were attached to tables, signs, and doors. A musical group often played popular tunes, and sometimes attendees could buy tickets to participate in a picnic dinner that typically included barbequed meat, vegetables, fruit, cakes, bread, and butter.
Antislavery fairs provided essential financial support to the movement. The most successful fair, sponsored by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, was held annually from 1834 until 1858 and is estimated to have raised more than $65,000 over those years (equivalent to nearly $2 million today). The Philadelphia fair, hosted by the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society from 1836 until 1853, generated over $16,500. Cincinnati women hosted an antislavery fair for four years in the 1850s and brought in more than $4,000. Dozens of smaller, rural fairs earned money as well.
Cowles’s fair in September 1846 exemplified her collaborative abolitionist strategy. She managed to work effectively with all stripes of abolitionists, balancing her Garrisonian sentiments with the expectations of the more conservative abolitionists around her. She advertised her fair as open to everyone: “Come one, come all, friend and foe.” Nearly 1,000 people “of all sects, creeds and politics” attended the fair, and according to one attendee, “every heart seemed joyous.” Abolitionist politician Joshua Giddings regaled attendees interested in antislavery politics with a lively speech. Those devoted to education and “uplift” for the black community enjoyed a musical performance and “speaking exercises” by “colored children and youth from Cincinnati.”13
Cowles cooperated with all types of abolitionists, an approach for which Kelley and other eastern Garrisonians criticized her. They contended that working with moderates was dangerous and unproductive. Cowles ignored such observations, recognizing that working efficiently with others sympathetic to the movement would require compromise. She hoped to convert moderates to the Garrisonian position, but she was willing to work with everyone in the meantime. Practically speaking, as a small minority within the antislavery movement in Ohio, the Garrisonians had to cooperate with all brands of abolitionists in order to make progress.
Cowles’s fierce independence is also evident in her decision to devote some of the proceeds from her fair to her anti–Black Law publication, Plea for the Oppressed. She wrote and published this three-part pamphlet meticulously critiquing Ohio’s Black Laws in the fall, and it was well received by most abolitionists across the North. Indeed, two years later Timothy Hudson asked Cowles to share her pamphlet with him when he was collecting data for a new publication on the Black Laws to be produced by the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. “Remembering that in the fall of 1846 you exerted yourself nobly on behalf of the colored people of Ohio & that you collected many facts bearing on that proposed work, I beg you to forward me copies of whatever you may have or can honestly lay your hands on that will aid me in the collection of facts.”14
But the Garrisonians disapproved of the use of antislavery funds for such a project. Although they supported racial equality, they argued that battling the Black Laws and other efforts toward racial justice did not directly challenge slavery. “We condemn none of these benevolent enterprises—they are all good—Heaven speed them, but they never can redeem the slave,” explained editors Benjamin and Lizzie Jones in their Ohio newspaper the Anti-Slavery Bugle. “Enlist as many persons in them as you choose, prosecute them with as much vigor as you please, yet not a slave chain will be broken thereby.” One Garrisonian claimed that the Plea for the Oppressed “has no more to do with Anti-Slavery, than with the man in the moon.”15
Cowles disagreed, as did most western abolitionists. The western Liberty Party vigorously assailed the region’s Black Laws and invited the participation of women abolitionists. By 1840, women had managed to infiltrate partisan politics by emphasizing their virtuous feminine influence over corrupt politicians. The Whig Party in particular invited women to attend political conventions, participate in parades and picnics, and vocalize their support for the party. Whig women in Illinois even gave several speeches in support of William Henry Harrison during the 1840 presidential campaign. Both the Whig and Liberty parties eagerly highlighted women’s support as evidence of their moral superiority. “Let not the women be afraid of ‘dabbling in politics,’” instructed one Liberty Party politician.16 Liberty Party women worked tirelessly to repeal the Black Laws throughout the 1840s, petitioning state governments and raising awareness through pamphlets like Cowles’s Plea for the Oppressed.
Cowles also changed the minds of some Garrisonians, who softened their opposition to this tactic. She was thrilled when Benjamin and Lizzie Jones changed their position and used their paper to condemn racial discrimination in Ohio. “I am glad to see that you are publishing articles on the unconstitutionality of the ‘Black Laws of Ohio,’” wrote Cowles in a letter to the Bugle. “Too long have these statutes, infamous and black in character as the source from which they emanated, disgraced this nominally free State.” During an antislavery lecturing tour of Ohio, Lizzie informed Betsy that audiences across Ohio appreciated her Plea. In many of the communities that Lizzie visited, the issue of racial inequality was a priority for local abolitionists. Even Kelley—who once complained to Cowles about Ohio women’s sewing societies because they aided “fugitives and schools and asylums for the free” instead of “real” abolitionist efforts—asked to receive a copy of Plea. In deciding to ignore official Garrisonian policy and follow her own thinking, Cowles exemplified independent abolitionism.17
As Cowles navigated her leadership among Ohio abolitionists in 1846 and 1847, she continued her work at the Grand River Institute, carefully blending and balancing her abolitionism and her teaching. In 1848, however, a new career opportunity presented itself. This avenue emerged out of a new educational system appearing across the nation and adopted by Ohio in 1847. Rejecting the disorganized system that put older and younger students into the same classroom, Ohio adopted a graded approach in its new Akron Law. This law allowed for the dividing of students into grades by age and ability. Cities could vote to replace old district schools with new “Union” schools that included primary schools for younger children and high schools for older youth. Cowles quickly embraced these changes and became a leader in the effort to revolutionize American education. She also continued to incorporate her antislavery principles into her teaching, further coalescing her two life passions.
Her new teaching position was in Massillon, Ohio, a vibrant city with nearly 4,000 inhabitants and a growing school-age population. Concerned about its ability to provide area youth with first-class schooling, Massillon residents embraced the Akron Law and restructured the city’s educational system. The resulting Massillon Union School opened in 1848 with three departments: primary, grammar, and high school. Serving more than 450 students, including eleven African Americans, the school sought to provide youth with excellent skills and knowledge that would help them succeed in life. Cowles was appointed principal of the grammar department, a powerful position in the new school. Although she reported to the overall principal, she was one of the most influential teachers at Massillon Union. Cowles used the leadership skills she developed at Grand River to organize a very efficient and effective department. She earned $300 a year, less than half the salary of her boss but significantly more than a fellow male teacher received. Placement of a woman in authority over a male colleague was unusual during this period and reflected Cowles’s extensive education and experience. This position of power was helpful when she encountered another example of community-based racial intolerance.
When Cowles began teaching in the new Massillon grammar department, there were eleven black children at the school. This was an important change from when she taught her Sabbath school in Portsmouth seven years earlier. Ohio had just passed a law that allowed blacks to attend public schools as long as there were no written objections to their presence. Any parent or voter in the district, however, could submit such an objection, making it easy for racially intolerant citizens to have influence beyond their numbers. As antislavery lecturer Henry C. Wright declared when he visited Massillon, “Any drunken, polluted vagabond of this town is, by law, empowered to cast all the colored children, however intellectual, well-behaved and desirous to learn, from the public schools.” Knowing that their presence might be challenged, the small contingent of black youth at the school became model students. Though one of the African American boys initially “was as mischievous as the rest of the boys,” he quickly improved his behavior after a single discussion with a teacher.18
While the teachers and students at Massillon Union School accepted the diverse classroom, a few white parents quickly circulated a petition to force the children of color out of the school. At first the trustees of the school simply ignored the petition, hoping the parents who signed it would choose kindness over intolerance. This approach failed when the parents hired a lawyer and forced the school to dismiss the children.
An outraged Cowles initiated a bold campaign to publicize the expulsion and build public support for allowing the black students to return. She disregarded local detractors and took a firm stand against racial discrimination. Cowles began her campaign by publishing a letter in an antislavery newspaper summarizing the situation and emphasizing the personal impact on the rejected students themselves. Two of the girls, she explained, did not know of their expulsion and “walked a distance of two miles through mud and rain” only to arrive at school and face rejection. Utterly bereft, the girls “lingered in the yard weeping most bitterly.” By highlighting the emotional turmoil experienced by the young girls, Cowles gave a human face to the true impact of discrimination.
Cowles next used her abolitionist experience and large network of friends and colleagues to encourage a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law. Like many reformers, Cowles believed that change would occur when there was enough support for it. If outraged Ohioans would simply express their opposition, the Black Laws would be eliminated. Enormously confidant in the power of public opinion and the legal process, Betsy urged everyone to act on behalf of the earnest young black students in Massillon who deserved an education.
Finally, Cowles once again organized an antislavery fair, this time in Massillon at the local Presbyterian church to bring awareness to the “outrage” in that city. Betsy did most of the work for the fair, including soliciting donations, arranging for volunteers, advertising, setting up, and finalizing last-minute details. She had help from Cornelia and fellow Garrisonian Maria Giddings, daughter of abolitionist politician Joshua Giddings, but others failed to provide assistance. “The few labored until they were exhausted.”19 Worried that locals would avoid the fair because of the tension over the black children’s expulsion, organizers made a special effort to attract attendees. They decorated the fair room with evergreens to create a welcoming atmosphere and borrowed the “best piano” in town to feature local musical talents. Cowles was happy with the results. Raising nearly $200—approximately $6,000 today—the fair attracted Baptist, Methodist, and Episcopalian churchgoers who eagerly purchased a variety of products. Though the city’s elite avoided the fair because they tended to have more economic and other ties to the South and slavery, local political leaders and their wives “cheerfully” lent their support.
Cowles’s campaign was courageous. She knew that others who publicly voiced their opposition to the Black Laws had been personally attacked. When Illinois resident Mary Davis and a few other women signed a Black Law repeal petition in 1847, they were accused of desiring sexual relations with African American men. This tactic of tapping into fears about interracial relationships often succeeded. Abolitionists usually defended the purity and piety of white abolitionist womanhood. But in this case abolitionists took a more aggressive approach. After denouncing the state’s “stupid, guzzling legislators,” one male abolitionist editor asserted, “We should commend the taste and spirit of a woman who should give the preference to any respectable negro who has the heart of a man in his bosom, over . . . such poor specimens of humanity as are now upholding the infamous Black Code.” Mary Davis asserted that the man responsible for starting the “unmanly, low, and vulgar” rumors was a coward.20 Davis and other abolitionists nonetheless suffered tremendously from such personal attacks.
Cowles’s three-pronged campaign raised awareness that helped lead to the repeal of most of the Black Laws in Ohio only a few months later. This was a monumental achievement since Ohio was the only state to repeal its Black Laws. Cowles’s campaign was the culminating event in a series of anti–Black Law efforts led by abolitionists of all stripes who had been lobbying the state for repeal for over a decade. The Ohio Liberty Party attacked the Black Laws repeatedly during the 1840s. African American abolitionists, who experienced the impact of the Black Laws through daily humiliations, concentrated on repeal as a top priority. Indeed, the 1849 State Convention of Colored Citizens of Ohio focused its gathering entirely on methods to eliminate the state’s Black Laws. The success of this movement bolstered the entire Ohio abolitionist community.
The repeal campaign that Cowles initiated in Massillon demonstrates how effectively she had combined teaching and antislavery in her life by the end of the 1840s. It also reveals her leadership as both an abolitionist and an educator. At Portsmouth—in the early part of the decade—her effort to establish an interracial Sabbath school generated resistance and ultimately resulted in her decision to depart. She left southern Ohio feeling dispirited. Once she returned to Austinburg, however, she developed leadership skills and antislavery experience that allowed her to establish a clearly defined sense of her own goals and commitments. She embraced bold Garrisonian abolitionism and thrived in her new relationships with eastern antislavery leaders, including Abby Kelley and Garrison. She developed a national antislavery reputation that elicited a request in January 1849 from Frederick Douglass and the Executive Committee of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society to become their female agent. This position would require her to help establish female antislavery societies and serve as a leader for women’s abolitionist activities in the region. Although her commitment to Massillon prevented her from accepting this prominent position, the request signified the widespread respect and admiration she had earned among abolitionists.
Cowles created her own path within the movement. She focused on racial equality in education, converting some Garrisonians to the efficacy of this method, and used her tremendous organizing and collaborative skills to help eliminate the Black Laws in Ohio. As she looked back at her achievements in 1849, she must have felt pride and hope. But she recognized that slavery persisted and that the battle would continue. She also knew that her goals for expanding opportunities for girls and women still remained elusive. The decade of the 1850s offered Cowles new avenues for building her commitment to women’s equality and also modeling successful independent womanhood through her rising career.