The Civil War, Blindness, and Postwar Reform, 1860–1872
During the 1850s, the abolition movement experienced tremendous change and growth wrought from several major national political developments. The decade began with the Compromise of 1850, a series of five bills passed by Congress that allowed for the entrance of California as a free state to the Union, the organization of several southwestern territories, and the end to a land dispute involving Texas. The most abhorrent facet of the compromise for abolitionists was the Fugitive Slave Act. This law eased the process for recapturing escaped slaves and required citizens to assist in the recovery of fugitives if asked by federal officers. Even moderate antislavery supporters were deeply offended by the idea that they would be forced to help slave catchers, and many became increasingly sympathetic to abolition as a result. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act further galvanized this antislavery sentiment. It eliminated the previous demarcation of slavery’s northern boundary, allowing for the practice’s unprecedented expansion into the North. The law also called for residents of territories to vote on the issue of slavery. Shortly after the act’s passage, violence erupted in Kansas between pro- and antislavery settlers, setting the stage for the civil war to come. Many northern leaders began voicing their concern about the rising “Slave Power,” as the South became known. Worried that slave owners intended to make slavery a national institution, they began to contribute to the northern antislavery dialogue.
Abolitionists facilitated the growth of this antislavery sentiment through their newspapers, public lectures, national conventions, and participation in partisan politics. When the Liberty Party declined in the late 1840s, a more moderate antislavery Free Soil Party emerged. By 1854, Free Soil had also declined, and the Republican Party arose as a more traditional political organization that only loosely opposed slavery. With the demise of the Whig Party, which was unable to maintain its southern wing amid the political turmoil of the early 1850s, the Republicans became the only challenger to the Democrats. The party consisted of a motley crew that included northern antislavery Democrats, antislavery Whigs, and Free Soilers. Despite being labeled “black republicans” by their opponents, Republicans did not push for black voting rights or equal educational opportunities. They ignored racism in the North and instead preferred to focus on keeping the western territories free of both slavery and blacks. The party’s slogan, “Free soil, free labor, free men,” applied to whites only. Republicans favored a white West that would allow hardworking citizens to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and achieve the American dream—which did not include blacks. As a lifelong advocate of racial equality, Cowles found this political trend disturbing. She recognized that excluding blacks from public education, voting, and good jobs meant denying them opportunities for advancement. Garrisonians, who had always been skeptical of antislavery politicians, in general remained cautious about the Republican Party.
Throughout the late 1850s, Republicans emphasized the tyranny of the Slave Power. Violent incidents made this argument increasingly compelling to many northern voters. In the wake of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, pro-slavery southern settlers attacked and burned much of Lawrence, Kansas, in order to intimidate local abolitionists and further efforts to make Kansas a slave state. The northern public reacted with concern. Days after this incident, on May 22, 1856, southern congressman Preston Brooks brutally beat Republican senator Charles Sumner with a cane in the chambers of the Senate for insulting his cousin in an abolitionist speech. It would take years for Sumner to recover from the emotional and physical trauma of the attack. Brooks was fined but otherwise went unpunished and returned home a hero. His district reelected him, and exuberant supporters sent him replacement canes from all across the South. Republicans, on the other hand, depicted the Brooks assault as further evidence of the violent Slave Power attempting to bully freedom-loving northerners.
Although appalled by the violence of southern slaveholders, Cowles and other abolitionists continued to hope for some recognition of black rights in the North. Republicans recognized that popular sentiment did not support this position and so continued to distance themselves from issues like equal access to education or political rights.
National tension continued to increase in the late 1850s with the Dred Scott ruling of the Supreme Court. Enslaved African American Dred Scott had sued for his freedom based on the fact that he and his master resided for several years in the free North. After the case made its way through the judicial system for several years, in 1858 the justices voted 7–2 to reject his claims and confirm what blacks already knew: they had no rights that whites had to respect. The Dred Scott ruling also suggested that northern states might have to accept southern claims regarding their right to bring slaves anywhere. People previously unsympathetic toward abolitionists suddenly began to wonder if slavery might slowly creep into the North.
John Brown’s ill-fated attack at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in November 1859 angered southerners and further increased regional animosity. A militant abolitionist, Brown, together with twenty-one men, including two of his sons, attacked the federal arsenal in hopes of instigating a slave rebellion. Instead, the raid failed, and most participants were captured or killed. Although many northerners and abolitionists initially expressed dismay at Brown’s act of violence, especially when it came out that several upstanding northern antislavery leaders had financed the raid, Brown’s continued fearless condemnation of slavery throughout his imprisonment and up until his execution impressed many critics. Abolitionists eventually eulogized Brown and helped to publicize his eloquent denunciation of southern tyrants. Many began to agree with Brown that the nation would have to pay a price in blood for its continued tolerance of slavery.
Cowles had a personal relationship with the Brown family: she was acquainted with John Brown Jr., Brown’s eldest son, who wrote to her in January 1860, only a few weeks after his father’s execution, about his worries that he would be called to Washington, DC, for interrogation regarding the Harpers Ferry raid. Brown had hoped to visit Cowles but explained that he might need to leave the area because “the hounds are baying [at] my back.”1 Though he had not been involved with Harpers Ferry, Brown was anxious that he might be imprisoned. He had already suffered mistreatment when he spent several months in prison in Kansas and temporarily lost his sanity as a result.
As Cowles settled into her new teaching position in Delhi, New York, in the wake of Harpers Ferry, she watched with interest as Republicans across the nation began to jockey for position in the battle for the 1860 presidential nomination. State delegates met in Chicago in May 1860 at the Republican convention to choose their nominee. Prior to the Republican convention, New Yorker William Seward was assumed to be the obvious candidate. A former governor and then senator, Seward was the recognized leader of the party. His delegates arrived at the newly built convention building in Chicago full of exuberance and confidence. On the first day of the convention, 10,000 excited people crammed into the convention center, including several thousand women, who sat in the galleries.
Beginning with the Whig and Liberty parties in the 1840s, women had been fixtures at political events, especially in the West, so their presence in Chicago was no surprise. The 1850s in particular saw the rise of a few high-profile women in partisan politics. As the moral imperative of slavery became an increasing concern to the northern public, women’s path toward politics opened even more. As long as women could argue their emphasis on the morality of slavery, they could rationalize their participation in partisan politics. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which focused on the sinfulness and immorality of slavery, was first published as a series of articles in a Free Soil paper, the National Era. Stowe used her novel to convince increasing numbers of women that a “higher law” demanded their moral opposition to slavery and their involvement in partisan politics. Jessie Benton Frémont, the wife of the first Republican presidential nominee in 1854, John Frémont, inspired thousands of women in the 1850s to become her husband’s enthusiastic supporters. Intelligent, beautiful, and politically astute, Jessie became the model political wife. She used her charm and wisdom to glide into previously all-male spaces and was greeted with smiles and respect. John was a successful explorer and a devoted civil servant, but he was not a natural politician. His advocates appreciated Jessie’s knowledge and political instinct as they guided John through the campaign. Republican women across the North chanted Jessie’s name and attended rallies, raised money, and encouraged their brothers, husbands, fathers, and friends to vote Republican. The antislavery Jessie’s popularity combined with the explosive impact of Uncle Tom’s Cabin to create an atmosphere ripe for women to become involved in politics.
The night before the first balloting at the Republican convention in Chicago, Seward’s confidant New York delegates toasted their candidate’s impending victory with champagne. But they had not counted on the political brilliance of David Davis, who stayed up all night rallying delegates for his dark horse candidate, Abraham Lincoln. He convinced many that Seward was too radical to win a national election. Davis also rounded up hundreds of loud young men to cheer Lincoln during the public gatherings at the convention center. Seward did not secure enough delegates during that first ballot, and by the third Lincoln had achieved the unthinkable: he defeated Seward and won the nomination.
Because of Lincoln’s reputation for caution and unwillingness to take a strong stand against slavery—the very qualities that helped him defeat Seward—Cowles did not support him. Even after he won the 1860 election and the nation teetered toward civil war, she remained skeptical. Like her Garrisonian friend Abby Kelley, she focused on emancipation for all slaves and recognized that Lincoln was determined to preserve the Union. “I would rather see our union fly into fragments then see our cause compromised,” a friend wrote to Cowles in agreement with her principles. Not all abolitionists concurred with this assessment of the Republicans. William Lloyd Garrison and many others were optimistic about Lincoln’s victory and became convinced that, once and for all, an antislavery president would preside over the nation. After declaring that Cowles would make a “splendid general,” Betsy’s niece Cornie nonetheless disagreed with her aunt and announced her support for Lincoln: “I hope we shall now feel we have a government established that will hold this Union together and make us a free and Independent people.”2 Respectful and often playful disagreement characterized Betsy’s relationship with all her nieces and nephews.
As South Carolina and other southern states seceded between December 1860 and June 1861, the North began to prepare for war. Men and women in small towns and urban centers sought ways to participate in defending the Union. For thousands of men and a few stealthy women, the path led to military participation. In Cowles’s hometown of Austinburg, a group of young men immediately formed a company for the Union Army. Among those who joined was Betsy’s nephew Giles Hooker Cowles, son of her older brother William. The military initially refused to sign up African American volunteers, so local black residents in Austinburg were unable to participate. But after two years of lobbying by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, black men were allowed to pick up guns and join the fight in 1863.
Betsy received updates about war developments in Ohio from friends and family. Cornelia’s passionate abolitionist sentiments emerged in her description of the happenings in Austinburg during the weeks preceding war. “There was never such a response to a war cry before,” she claimed. “I wish they might have it to their hearts’ content. I hope they will wipe out slavery so clean that the word will never be found in our dictionaries again.” Dr. Lorenzo Whiting was equally adamant in his abolitionist sentiments. “My hopes are high that the villain ‘down in Dixie’ may get a sound threshing. But it will cost us dearly, and whether the great principles of righteousness & justice will finally triumph is a matter of great doubt in my mind.”3
Although a few women chose to disguise themselves as men and join the army, most sought more traditional forms of participation. Popular Republican lecturer Anna Dickinson encouraged women to find a path to help win the war and, more importantly, end slavery. Dickinson rose to fame in the early 1860s as one of the most eloquent and persuasive orators in the North. Only nineteen years old, Dickinson was a powerful speaker whose youth and passion attracted overflowing audiences that included men, women, whites, and blacks. This was a stunning reversal for women public speakers who only a decade earlier were denounced for stepping outside the woman’s sphere and intruding into male arenas.
Dickinson grew up in Philadelphia and learned early of women’s oratorical skills through her Quaker faith. Women had long since served as ministers and spiritual leaders in the Quaker religion, and Dickinson had many models to follow. Mentored by the experienced and skilled antislavery and women’s rights leaders Lucretia Mott and Garrison, she developed a lecturing style that built from a meticulous thoughtfulness to an emotional crescendo as she attacked slavery and the South. She consistently supported emancipation and racial equality in her speeches and eventually focused on the importance of allowing blacks to join the northern army. Dickinson managed to appeal to different constituencies throughout the Civil War, working closely with Republican Party leaders despite her tendency to critique their policies. Abolitionists like Garrison adored her, and women’s rights leaders Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony admired her.
Cowles certainly would have known about Dickinson and read her speeches in newspapers, where they were widely reprinted. She may have even witnessed the nation’s leading speaker perform as Dickinson lectured across the North. Cowles likely would have celebrated Dickinson’s success as an abolitionist and a woman lecturer, recognizing in the young orator’s overflowing audiences evidence of the progress women had made since she herself considered standing at the podium more than two decades earlier. Dickinson’s career in many ways represented achievements that Cowles helped make possible. Cowles’s years of abolitionist and women’s rights leadership and her stellar career as a teacher and devotee of women’s education certainly smoothed the path for Dickinson. Here was an articulate, publically confident woman who could educate and inspire thousands of men and women with her words. She always appeared fearless, respectable, and patriotic; her widespread influence was impossible to measure. Cowles may have thought back to 1850, when the Ohio Woman’s Rights Association could not find a single woman to speak in support of its cause before the Ohio state legislature. Dickinson represented a new generation of young women who came of age in the 1850s, a highly partisan decade during which politics infiltrated many aspects of life.
Though Dickinson regaled large audiences with her political eloquence, she required institutional support to achieve the abolitionists’ greater goals. This came in the form of a new organization called the Women’s National Loyal League (WNLL), created by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in 1863. Experienced abolitionists and women’s rights advocates, Stanton and Anthony ensured that the WNLL advocated freedom with an eye toward women’s rights as well. They collected petitions demanding full emancipation for all slaves in an effort to convince Congress that a majority of Americans desired immediate abolition. As women took to the streets and collected thousands of signatures, they became politicized. Continuing to rely on the idea that women should act as stewards of morality in politics, Stanton and Anthony emphasized patriotic duty as the rationale for women’s increasing intrusion into political spaces. At the WNLL’s national convention in New York in the spring of 1863, Anthony introduced a resolution that demanded equality regardless of race or gender. Some participants objected to the introduction of women’s rights at the convention, but a majority believed with Anthony that demands for equality could not be put on hold because the timing was inconvenient.
While Cowles agreed with the demands of the WNLL, she did not participate in the organization. Indeed, many older woman abolitionists, including Maria Weston Chapman and Lucretia Mott, declined to join. Exhausted from years of activism, they preferred to limit themselves to smaller, local projects. The WNLL asked women to take to the streets and discuss politics with their neighbors. Cowles had spent years writing and supporting antislavery petitions during her youth. Although thrilled to see petitioning make a return among women, she simply lacked the energy to undertake such difficult work in her later years. The WNLL attracted a younger leadership full of exuberance and confidence. Members managed to gain 100,000 signatures within a year, allowing a new generation of women to sing in the political chorus calling for emancipation.
For those who wanted to contribute to the war effort in more traditional ways, the Sanitary Commission offered a popular new avenue for women to use their skills toward war aims in caring for the wounded. The term “sanitary” referred to health and cleanliness, issues of special concern during wartime, when disease devastated armies. Elizabeth Blackwell and Dorothea Dix initially conceived the idea for the Sanitary Commission. Although both were involved in the medical field, they came from very different backgrounds. Blackwell had scraped and clawed her way to a medical education at Geneva Medical College and thus became the first American woman to receive a medical degree in 1849. She continued her education in Paris for a year and then returned to open a small dispensary in New York that provided medical service to poor women and children. With the onset of the Civil War, she began working to create a woman-centered national organization to address sanitary issues for soldiers. She hoped that women’s organizational skills and expertise in relation to health and cleanliness would be appreciated. Dorothea Dix, a leader in the movement to aid and treat mental disorders among the poor, helped to create the nation’s first public mental hospitals. Unlike Blackwell, who focused on women’s influence on policy issues in Washington, Dix hoped that the Sanitary Commission would create a space for women to provide medical service on the battlefields. Eventually, both Dix and Blackwell found themselves outmaneuvered by politically skilled men, and the Sanitary Commission became a male-dominated institution that collected supplies and raised money for the military. Women’s importance in the organization continued, however, as local groups organized and initiated their own goals. Women labored long hours to ensure that soldiers had adequate supplies and medical care.
Women were particularly skilled in raising much-needed funds for the Sanitary Commission, although they often kept those funds at the local level. They initiated sanitary fairs modeled on antislavery fairs. Cowles was thrilled to learn that her early work organizing and honing this fund-raising model proved useful during the Civil War. The first sanitary fair was held in Chicago in October 1863 and raised a stunning $80,000. Organizers created a beautiful and patriotic environment full of useful and elegant goods. Enthusiastic patrons made purchases and offered generous donations. They left the fair feeling positive about contributing to the war and impressed with the talent and hard work shown by the women of the Sanitary Commission. National leaders of the Sanitary Commission were less enthusiastic, however, because Chicago organizers decided to devote much of their proceeds to local efforts and did not contribute as much to the national organization, where the money would be in men’s hands.
While young women guided the Sanitary Commission at the local level, older women contributed as well. Indeed, as they initiated their own careers in reform, younger women learned important organizational, communication, and political skills from Blackwell and Dix. Cowles occasionally contributed to and attended sanitary fairs, offering the younger women tidbits from her decades of activism.
The Civil War opened doors for women in reform through the Sanitary Commission and the Women’s National Loyal League, but it also made available new occupations and roles previously closed to women. Working-class women moved into new spaces such as munitions factories and public offices, adapting to new types of work as they became available and growing skilled at balancing paid labor with the multiple responsibilities of family life. Neighbors, friends, and relatives cared for young ones as women worked long hours and earned necessary income while husbands, brothers, and fathers were temporarily or permanently absent.
For many of the women and girls who worked at the U.S. Army Arsenal at Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in the fall of 1862, their new jobs proved fatal. On September 17, explosions ripped through the building, blowing out the windows and doors and causing the walls and ceiling to catch on fire. Survivors jumped out of windows or ran out of the building injured and aflame, begging nearby people for help. More than seventy-eight people died, many of them women and girls. This tragedy highlights the widespread entrance of women into male-dominated spaces during the war and also raises the concerns that many expressed about the dangers of allowing women into these spaces. Munitions factories were risky workspaces, and many argued that women simply did not belong there. Some worried that promiscuity would thrive if men and women worked together in close quarters, and others believed that women’s presence threatened men’s workplace identity as well as the purity of womanhood. Many women workers participated in this conversation by demanding safety in the workplace and asserting themselves in local politics.
Cowles would have known about the Allegheny tragedy because it occurred about 350 miles away from her Delhi, New York, school. Though she left no written correspondence about the accident, she likely continued to support women’s increased access to all types of occupations. She knew that the war offered a unique moment to reconsider old assumptions about women’s versus men’s work. She had long since hoped that women would prove themselves as skilled workers, medical professionals, public servants, and business owners and permanently break down barriers that had previously excluded them from these positions.
As the Civil War continued to weary and worry the nation in 1864, Cowles and other abolitionist women devoted more time to wondering what the nation would look like after the conflict. They were especially uneasy about the status of newly freed slaves, concerned that northern politicians would fail to protect them and provide them with tools for success. Free African Americans in the North knew better than anyone that “freedom” had different levels of meaning. As second-class citizens denied basic rights, blacks understood that their supposed freedom was very limited. When Harriet Jacobs finally escaped to the North in 1842, she felt disappointed and betrayed. Every aspect of her life was circumscribed: she had to ride in segregated cars on the railroad, she was limited to domestic work, and she remained constantly on the lookout for slave catchers.
Abolitionist women participated in the Freedman’s Aid movement, which sought to secure for emancipated people education, job opportunities, and political rights. This seemed like a natural next step for abolitionists who had devoted their careers to ending slavery. Ohioan Josephine Griffing joined Philadelphian Charlotte Forten and many others in working with freed people in the South. Forten, an African American teacher, left her comfortable life in Philadelphia to teach freed people on South Carolina’s Sea Islands from 1862 to 1864. Dozens of black and white women eventually joined her, determined to offer eager freedmen and freedwomen the education they desired. Although these women often brought with them middle-class expectations about religion, behavior, and dress that affected their ability to empathize with free blacks, they worked to ensure government support and protection for emancipated men, women, and children.
By 1864, Cowles had retired from teaching and returned to Ohio. She joined a Freedmen’s Aid organization in Cleveland, but declining physical health limited her involvement. A debilitating case of cataracts was causing blindness in one eye. As most of her neighbors, friends, and relatives read daily reports about the endless and bloody Battle of the Wilderness and General William Tecumseh Sherman’s siege of Atlanta, Betsy struggled with her vision. Her declining sight did not prevent her from reading and writing, however, and she began a diary that she would maintain for several years with brief daily entries.
The mid-nineteenth century saw the rise of a health reform movement in the United States that emphasized the individual’s control over his or her body and gave Cowles hope. Reformers encouraged Americans to cleanse and strengthen through exercise, hygiene, water therapy, and diet. The popular “lifting cure” involved muscle development through gymnastics and weight lifting. Gyms sprang up across the North, and people began experiencing the health benefits of building strength. The Graham diet called for the consumption of bran, fruits, and vegetables and avoidance of meat, coffee, tea, and alcohol. Reformers embraced this diet because it made them feel pure and virtuous. The “water cure” required adherents to drink glass after glass of water and to take cold baths multiple times per day. Participants also wrapped themselves in cold, wet towels for hours at a time. “Electropathy” reformers experimented with electricity as a solution to everything from mental illness to various diseases.
A lifelong reformer who was always willing to experiment, Cowles tried some of these new health trends. She hoped that one of the treatments might cure her eye disease. She may have known it was a long shot, but she remained optimistic and open-minded. After an old friend and avid reformer, T. R. French, claimed, “I believe electricity will cure you, and without causing you any pain or suffering,” she allowed him to treat her eye with electricity, but this failed to improve her situation. She went to the Clifton Springs Water Cure in New York and, though she confessed being “discouraged” by her doctor’s report, concluded simply, “Must persevere.”4 Her eye continued to deteriorate. She knew that some of the health reforms lacked scientific support, but she had always been willing to allow her faith to guide her. When she joined spiritualist séances, she sincerely believed that she could communicate with her dead parents. Even when some spiritualists proved to be charlatans, she continued to hope that the movement as a whole had some validity.
Eventually Cowles acknowledged that neither water nor electricity was going to restore her eyesight, and so she turned to more traditional forms of medicine. Even as unlicensed health reformers opened water spas and electropathy clinics in the 1850s and 1860s, the medical field experienced a professionalizing trend with the introduction of a standardized medical education. Although still deeply flawed in many ways, this new trend helped to decrease dangerous experimentation and required more formal education and licensing. Cowles hoped to benefit from these changes. In November 1864, she visited a doctor in New York, who confirmed her eye was “defective.”5
She decided to follow the advice of friends and family, especially Dr. Whiting, and opt for surgery on her eye. This was a risky choice. As her nephew Alfred Cowles warned, “If an operation . . . is inevitable do not trust yourself in the hands of any of these advertising quacks.” Surgery during this period remained dangerous. Limited knowledge of infection meant that surgeries frequently resulted in sepsis and patient death. Why would she risk her life to save sight in one eye? Cowles loved knowledge and travel, and her eye problems caused her persistent discomfort and curtailed both of these activities. She was a voracious reader—consuming books, pamphlets, and newspapers for hours every day—and cataracts rendered this beloved activity tedious and tiring instead of joyous. Ever since she was a young girl, Betsy had embraced the challenge of travel. Even though it was difficult for single women to move about without a chaperone, she had been all over the North multiple times. She knew the streets of New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago. She had friends in every northern state and loved visiting them. As her eyesight declined and the pain increased, she was forced to reduce her travel. Such constraints pushed Cowles to choose surgery. And thanks to the generosity of her nephew Alfred Cowles, publisher of the Chicago Tribune, she had no financial concerns that might impede her decision. When he heard that she might choose to have her surgery with a less qualified doctor in Cleveland instead of New York due to expense, he wrote, “If you think the probability of successful treatment is stronger in favor of New York don’t let the pecuniary consideration govern [your decision]. I will stand the expense.”6
Though she elected to have surgery in New York in November 1864, six long months passed before the operation took place. Her diary reveals a tense but hopeful patient anxious to get the dreaded procedure over with, relying on her faith to help her endure. “Exhausted from the nervous high tension [of waiting],” she confessed. “A little discouraged but still trust in Him who has never failed me in times of need.”7 The relentless continuation of the war did nothing to help Betsy’s mood. By the time she made her decision, Lincoln had won reelection, and the North was confident that victory was inevitable. But the enemy continued to fight. Battle after battle resulted in more injuries and deaths. For women this meant coping with the loss of loved ones and, in some cases, traveling to the South to bring a deceased husband, brother, or son home for a proper burial. It was a common sight by the end of the war to see a mourning woman, dressed in black, standing next to a pine box at a train station. Many women found the idea of a loved one being buried anonymously in a mass grave too much to bear. They traveled to battle sites and arranged to have their spouse or son disinterred, placed in a coffin, and transported home, where the customary funereal rites could take place.
Like so many others, Cowles experienced the pain of losing a family member to the war. Her nephew Giles Hooker Cowles, son of William and Lydia, died during the Petersburg Campaign, a brutal battle that began in March 1864 and was followed by a nine-month siege. While this long blockade helped to end the war, the loss of Giles Hooker devastated the Cowles family. Betsy became even more disheartened in April 1865, when the war reached the nation’s capital. John Wilkes Booth shot President Lincoln at Ford’s Theatre as he watched a production of Our American Cousin with his wife. Lincoln was carried across the street to the Peterson House, where he died of his wounds the following morning. Betsy mourned with the nation, and dreariness enveloped her. Ever the abolitionist, she wrote, “‘Southern chivalry’ struck a defenseless man.” She expressed “gloom in view of the great loss.”8
Cowles’s surgery was scheduled for early May, only a few weeks after Lincoln’s assassination, but it was repeatedly rescheduled. Day after day she expected to undergo treatment but was disappointed time and again. Finally, at the end of the month she received the procedure. She spent the next five weeks sequestered in a dark room, an environment that did little to lift her spirits. And the results were disappointing: the surgery failed. Instead of giving up, Cowles decided to have the surgery again in the hope that the second time it would work.
But there would be no good news for Cowles. She waited through the rest of 1865, visiting the Clifton Springs Water Cure several times in an effort to keep her spirits up and improve her overall health. She finally had the second surgery in 1866, but it only worsened her condition, leaving her blind in her right eye. By the end of the year she had the eye removed and replaced with an artificial one. Despite three surgeries in two years and the loss of sight in one eye, Cowles regained her natural good spirits after it was all over. She accepted her loss with an equanimity born out of the larger culture of death pervading the nation during this period. Eyesight seemed such small a sacrifice compared to what others had lost.
Indeed, as Cowles learned to live with one eye, she soon had to cope with another loss that caused her years of sorrow. Her sister Cornelia died in 1869. Both Betsy and Cornelia had returned to Ohio in the mid-1860s, and so they were together when the illness developed. Cornelia first became sick with a carbuncle—an infection similar to a boil accompanied by fever and chills—in early May, slowly deteriorating day by day and week by week. When their doctor failed to help, the sisters turned to the popular health reform known as magnetism, in which magnets were placed on parts of the body to withdraw the “bad humors” that caused the illness. But their faith in the healing powers of magnets could not stall the progress of Cornelia’s sickness. By early June the sisters recognized the end was near and gathered the family to say their good-byes. “Fear that our darling sister must go,” she acknowledged in her diary. “God help her & us.”9
Though Betsy had experienced many losses during her life, the death of Cornelia was the most painful. These two women were more than sisters—they were best friends. In choosing a single life, both knew they would have no husband or children to comfort them during hard times. But they had always had each other. Whether living together or far apart, the sisters relied on each other for advice, support, good cheer, and unending love. Both found avenues for their talents and interests that allowed them to remain independent. Cornelia’s musical gift led to a long-term career as a pianist, music teacher, and singer. Betsy’s intellect and ambition guided her to a successful career as a reformer and educator. Each admired the other’s life choices. Betsy occasionally joined her sister during a music tour, singing at antislavery meetings and other gatherings. Cornelia began her work life as a teacher and would continue to teach music throughout her life.
For Betsy this loss meant she would no longer have a sympathetic ear and life partner. As a testimony to her love for Cornelia, she commemorated her sister’s death every week in her diary for five years. But Betsy did not give up her desire to live a fulfilling life. She was unyielding in her determination to make the most of every day she remained on earth. She continued to travel, participate in reform activities, and occasionally teach a Sunday school class. In 1870, she attended her thirtieth reunion at Oberlin College, overjoyed by the opportunity to meet old friends and catch up. That same year she also traveled to New York and Illinois. Sixty years old and blind in one eye, she still valued her independence enough to travel across the country without fear.
After the war many abolitionists continued to work on issues of racial equality. Whereas some, like William Lloyd Garrison, argued that their work had ended when the Thirteenth Amendment making slavery illegal was added to the Constitution in 1865, others continued to battle racism and discrimination in both the South and the North. Many women, like Rebecca Primus, an African American resident of Hartford, Connecticut, moved to the South to teach freed people. Within two years of arriving in Royal Oak, Maryland, Primus and local blacks proudly built and financed their own school. While she admired many qualities in the local African Americans she interacted with, Primus and many other northern women teachers found that they had to negotiate their own expectations and biases when interacting with former slaves. Primus felt uncomfortable with the emotional style of religion practiced by locals and also disapproved of the fancy dress adopted by some freedwomen. Even as she ridiculed these practices, she recognized her own dress and behavior might seem odd to those she was judging.
Had Cowles been ten years younger, she probably would have joined Primus and many others in moving south to teach the newly freed people. She had developed a reputation for leadership in working to open education to African Americans throughout the antebellum period. She refused to exclude students based on race and risked her job on more than one occasion because of her commitment to racial equality. Her research and publication of the Plea for the Oppressed calling for the repeal of the Black Laws brought her to national prominence in the movement for racial equality. After the Civil War, she watched with hope as more and more women traveled south to teach those who had for so long been denied even the right to literacy.
While Cowles could not begin a new teaching career below the Mason-Dixon Line, she continued to attend women’s rights lectures and meetings. A lifelong advocate of women’s equality, Betsy loved to mingle in gatherings of young women activists. She found their energy and ideas exciting. Her leadership in the women’s rights movement in the 1840s and 1850s helped create new opportunities for the next generation.
When the movement divided over whether or not to support the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments, Cowles mostly stayed on the sidelines. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued against supporting these amendments because they explicitly excluded women from the vote. Others, like Lucy Stone, asserted that reform must involve compromise and slow progress. The Fifteenth Amendment guaranteed the franchise to a class of people, African American men, who desperately needed it to defend their political, social, and economic rights. The battle for female suffrage would come next. Little could these activists have known that it would take another fifty years before they achieved their goal.
As a new generation of women and men continued the reform traditions begun by women like Betsy Mix Cowles, the remarkable reformer died in her hometown of Austinburg, Ohio, on July 25, 1876, after a brief illness. She was sixty-six years old. Even in her last months she was busy, collaborating with local women to raise money to build a new Congregational church. On arriving in Austinburg sixty-five years earlier, her family had lived temporarily in the old log building that served as the local church. It was fitting that the new building Cowles helped to finance was completed just in time for her funeral. Her obituary in the Cleveland Leader, a paper edited by her nephew Edwin Cowles, remarked on Cowles’s abolitionist leadership, the powerful influence she had on her students “from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” and her kindness. She was buried in the cemetery near her family home.10
Cowles lived an extraordinarily full life. She participated in nearly every reform movement of the antebellum period and was particularly relentless in her support for abolition and racial equality. She created the largest female antislavery society in the nation. This group was the first to help build a statewide women’s abolitionist organization and also helped catalyze the most successful petition campaign of the movement. Cowles was one of the first women to graduate from Oberlin College. As a single woman she created a life for herself guided by her ambitions and goals. She built an exceptional career in education, moving from teacher to principle to superintendent. She made personal sacrifices in support of equality for everyone regardless of race or sex, and she fought against racial inequality in her schools and communities.
Cowles was a leader in the women’s rights movement as well, serving as president of the 1850 Ohio Woman’s Rights Convention. She conducted research on women’s work opportunities and challenges and modeled successful, independent womanhood through her career and her single lifestyle. Well loved by friends, colleagues, students, and family, Betsy exhibited poise, patience, brilliance, and commitment throughout her professional and reform careers.