Chapter 2
THE CAUSE OF THE SLAVE, AS WELL AS OF WOMEN
When they gathered, Black women often did so to serve the needs of everyone. In antislavery societies, benevolent associations, literary clubs, and vigilance auxiliaries, they tended to their communities and to one another. As Elizabeth Wicks put it in an address to the African Female Benevolent Society in Troy, New York: “For are we not a company of sisters united to support and assist each other?” The answer was yes. But to “support and assist” one another also entailed taking risks. For abolitionism, above all other causes, Black women linked arms, reached across the color line, and took their chances. When male leaders rejected their efforts, women began to speak about their rights.1
OPPOSITION TO SLAVERY had always lived in the minds and souls of people of African descent. When the radical abolitionist movement was born in the early 1830s, Black people across the diaspora had been living their own antislavery politics of resistance for at least three hundred years. Eighteenth-century Americans had organized against slavery’s most flagrant abuses, insisting that as long as human bondage persisted it should do so by the rule of law. These early antislavery societies demanded that rules about manumission and suppression of the international slave trade be strictly enforced. Slavery might legitimately continue, these early activists admitted. When it did finally end, in years or even decades, many of them proposed that all former slaves should be colonized, or removed from the United States to the Caribbean or West Africa. The first decades of antislavery activism conceded that slavery would likely continue for decades and left anti-Black racism unchallenged.2
It was something new, then, when Americans, Black and white, began to call for slavery’s immediate, unequivocal, and irredeemable abolition. It assumed the equality of Black and white Americans. These ideas sounded radical, but their justifications ran deeper than mere sensation. Abolitionists drew upon Christian ideals that viewed all humans as equal in the eyes of God. They embraced the natural rights tenets expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Inequality rooted in racism ran contrary to higher principles. They rejected the Constitution and state laws that grew out of proslavery and illegitimate impulses that no righteously minded person was bound to respect. Radical abolitionists committed to changing the hearts and minds of Americans by “moral suasion,” prepared to lecture, publish, and preach until the national tide turned forever against slavery.3
The movement began with ideas, but it also required tactics and strategies if it was to succeed. Abolitionists had only a small number of committed members, but they multiplied their reach many times over by investing in print culture. Presses, paper, and ink turned into weapons in the hands of typesetters, editors, and scores of agents who distributed newspaper weeklies, such as William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator, far and wide. The same presses churned out tracts, pamphlets, and convention minutes that widely spread the movement’s ideas, making them tools of persuasion. Speechifying was equally important. During countless appearances at podiums, open air groves, and salons, abolitionist lecturers used their individual style and personal testimony to introduce crowds to slavery’s many ills. Trekking across New England, along the Atlantic seaboard and west to the Mississippi, abolitionists put the best of the oratory arts on display. They enraptured audiences, by weaving drama and pathos with polemic and facts and figures. Crowds, filled with the converted, the curious, and combatants, thronged.4
Abolitionism was a dangerous business from the very start. Crowds turned into mobs, and opponents, into assassins. Early martyrs included Presbyterian minister and journalist Elijah Lovejoy, who was killed in Illinois in a melee that also destroyed his press and abolitionist materials. Few antislavery lecturers could avoid the swarm of an angry crowd or the harrowing words of a heckler. Violence occurred as a regular part of the movement, requiring that activists take care with how they traveled and with whom. State authorities also meted out punishments. Abolitionists could expect to face charges of sedition for the mere possession of antislavery materials, especially in Southern states. Lending direct aid to a fugitive slave promised criminal prosecution. Risk ran in many directions.5
Free African Americans living in Northern states endorsed the radical abolitionist critique of slavery. They saw their own interests in the antislavery cause, but it was not a crude or distant self-interest. Though they generally lived beyond slavery’s reach, the threat of kidnapping was ever present. And the discrimination they faced was rooted in the enduring association of Blackness with enslavement. They reasoned that free Black people would be barred from full equality as long as slavery persisted. Many in the Free States had once been held as property. Their liberty was new, and fragile. Many others had loved ones who remained against their will in slaveholding states. To oppose slavery, to fight for its downfall, was to protect one’s freedom and work for the liberty of family and friends.6
Abolitionist advocacy especially targeted white American women. Editors and speechmakers alike thought middle-class women to be particularly susceptible to pleas grounded in slavery’s immorality—its corruption of women and scuttling of family ties. These tactics converted many to the antislavery cause. But the movement resonated even more deeply. White women saw their own oppression in the plight of the enslaved. As persons who were legally disabled by laws of marriage, property holding, and inheritance, they saw slavery as analogous to their own condition: Women were, in this view, owned by men, without rights or the capacity to act by way of individual will. They suffered under the slavery of sex. These women joined the abolitionist movement, lecturing, writing, and raising funds. They learned the political sophistication that later fueled calls for women’s rights.
Women on the antislavery lecture circuit generated unease, but they also drew large audiences and attention. Sisters Angelina and Sarah Grimké unsettled their fellow Quakers and abolitionist circles when they began to write and then speak out publicly against human bondage. Daughters of a South Carolina planter and slaveholder, the two had fled to New England, where they openly denounced their family’s way of life and testified to what they knew about slavery’s inhumanity. They did so at great risk. Not only did the sisters sacrifice family ties, they faced ridicule and violence on the antislavery circuit. Notoriously, they spoke openly about politics and cast off the privileges of white Southern womanhood, becoming permanent insiders-outsiders. Still, the sisters converted people who arrived curious about unorthodox women into antislavery supporters passionate about ending human bondage.7
Free Black women wrestled with where they fit in the new antislavery politics. Enslaved people’s experiences resonated with their own plight: They suffered anti-Black discrimination, and had family and friends who remained in bondage. They clashed with men, Black and white, in their efforts to champion the antislavery cause. They also strained against narrow prescription of their public roles. But their circumstances were distinct. Black women generally did not experience the troubles related to property holding and inheritance that concerned white women of the propertied middle class. And the growing political circles built by white women often did not welcome them. When they organized, Black women increasingly created their own associations, spaces from which they began to tell their own stories of what it meant to call for women’s rights.8
IT TOOK COURAGE to be an antislavery woman. Some risked their reputations, challenging those who thought the politics of abolitionism was men’s business. Others risked the charge of overstepping by fueling the national strife over slavery’s future. Those who left the confines of their homes, churches, or women’s circles encountered ridicule. Women also faced violence. Their opponents rarely made exceptions for women when they meted out recrimination. Black women abolitionists endured a litany of risks, and racist violence marred their public lives, even as teachers or churchgoing women.
At home in Boston, Susan Paul readied her valise for a trip to Philadelphia and a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1838. Among the things she had to pack was her courage. Paul knew that the days at the convention would spark with urgency, as Black and white women mingled in meeting halls and at podiums. For only the second time, radical women had dared to announce their cause and meet openly in front of a doubtful public. Paul could not wholly foresee the troubles that would threaten this budding sisterhood. In the coming days, they planned to walk the city streets, arm in arm without regard for the color line. Living their principles would demand a price on the rocky terrain of antislavery politics.9
Paul came equipped with courage that she inherited from the first generation of Boston’s brave Black abolitionists. Her father, the Reverend Thomas Paul, raised his daughter in a Baptist community that included the incendiary antislavery pamphleteer David Walker. Rev. Paul’s congregants included Maria Stewart, the writer and speaker whose public career had been cut short when she championed the political ambitions of Black women.Stewart had proposed placing the future of slavery’s demise and the future of free Black Americans into women’s hands. It was a promise that Susan Paul sought to keep.10
Paul entered public life as a teacher at Boston’s Primary School Number 6. She followed in the footsteps of her mother, Catherine Waterhouse Paul, also an educator. But Paul did more, and soon transformed her schoolroom into a platform for antislavery work. This began when Paul authored a book that featured the life story of a remarkable student. Her Memoir of James Jackson broke new ground, the first Black biography published in United States and the first evangelical children’s text about an African American child that was not fiction. Its publication was controversial, and Paul struggled to get the memoir published after being rejected by Baptist Church publishers that were reluctant to be associated with a text themed on slavery and racism.11
Not content to stay cloistered in classrooms or at her writing desk, Paul organized her pupils into the Juvenile Choir of Boston and traveled with them on the road throughout New England. On stage, the choir performed a repertoire that condemned slavery and colonization with songs such as “Ye Who Are in Bondage Pine” and “Home, This Is Our Home.” It was a test of New England’s commitment to racial equality and Paul exposed its fault lines. Though Massachusetts had abolished slavery decades earlier and led the abolitionist movement, racism plagued the work of Paul and her young charges. After a performance in Salem, coach drivers refused to shuttle the choir back to Boston. Paul found the group another way home, remaining steely and resourceful throughout the ordeal. She later remarked: “We were not surprised at our treatment from these persons. This is but a faint picture of that spirit which persecutes us on account of our color—that cruel prejudice which deprives us of every privilege whereby we might elevate ourselves—and then absurdly condemns us because we are not more refined and intelligent.”12
The urgent efforts of radical antislavery societies drew Paul to politics. She saw Black women playing pathbreaking roles in that movement. The Black women of Salem, Massachusetts, took the trouble to advise William Lloyd Garrison that he had wrongly accused Black Americans of failing to establish antislavery societies. The women published their constitution in The Liberator, evidence that the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, led by Black women, had been founded in February 1832. They lit a spark. Paul joined antislavery societies—first the New England Anti-Slavery Society and then its women’s auxiliary, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society—and was immediately out in front of a movement. It did not take long for her to learn that women could not maintain middle-class comportment at antislavery meetings.
Paul soon witnessed firsthand how opponents did not hesitate to place women in the crosshairs of the contest over slavery during the October 1835 meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. A mob disrupted the proceedings, descending upon the delegates and attempting to capture the women’s guest speaker, British abolitionist George Thompson. Eventually, the crowd let the women escape. But they took William Lloyd Garrison into their hands and nearly lynched him on the streets of Boston. Paul weathered the melee and remained steadfast in her antislavery commitments.13
WOMEN ANTISLAVERY ORGANIZERS acted upon a new ambition. Though their local meetings remained important, and they still attended men’s meetings, in 1837, American women called for their own national convention. It was time, the call explained, for women to lead the movement, much in the way that women antislavery activists in Britain did. Not everyone welcomed the opportunity, and some women stayed home, reluctant to challenge the men who had steered the radical opposition to slavery through its early years. Those who packed their bags and set out for women’s gatherings were building something altogether new.
In 1838, Paul joined this new wave. She traveled by coach from Boston, part of a delegation that included two Black members, Paul and Martha Ball. A shared commitment to the cause moved these antislavery women—Black and white—to welcome one another across the color line. They were allies in a women-led foray into national politics, yet the alliance was not easy or untroubled. Antislavery women walked together on Philadelphia’s streets, but they did not travel in the same shoes. Racism divided their experiences, casting a shadow over women’s conventions, both outside and inside the meeting halls. When the women pledged to meet for politics, in public, together—Black and white—everyone had reason to be uneasy.14
Among the women who greeted Susan Paul in Philadelphia was Sarah Mapps Douglass. They knew one another from the antislavery press. Both women had been featured in Garrison’s The Liberator. But at the convention, they met face-to-face, among the few Black women who made the trip to Philadelphia. Though small in number, this handful quickly assumed leadership, contributing their political acumen. Their presence was also symbolic for the women’s antislavery movement. The visibility of women like Paul and Douglass testified to the convention’s antiracist ideals. The delegates endorsed Susan Paul as a vice president, Sarah Mapps Douglass as treasurer and business committee member, and Martha Ball as secretary. These Black women then assumed seats within the convention’s inner circle, steering toward a political platform and a distinctly women’s agenda. It was a promising start. But it also proved to be as close as Black women would ever get to national leadership in the antislavery movement.15
The warmth of sisterhood had greeted the visitors to Philadelphia. So too had warning signs. Placards hanging on the city’s walls and lampposts encouraged opponents to disrupt the proceedings. The convention’s second afternoon ended peaceably, with the women retiring to their rooms and taking meals without trouble. By evening, the mood was changed. Delegates returned to Pennsylvania Hall to join a crowd of three thousand who hoped to hear antislavery lectures from William Lloyd Garrison and Angelina Grimké Weld. A mob outside threatened, and the speakers delivered their remarks against a backdrop of breaking glass and shouting. When the meeting finally broke up around ten that night, the women confronted the truest danger as they stepped out of the relative safety of the hall and onto the streets. They clutched one another, trying to avoid the menacing crowd. Not everyone escaped unassailed, and before it was all over, several African Americans endured assaults and sustained severe injuries.16
Threats did not discourage the leaders of the women’s convention and they stuck to their meeting plans. Authorities tried to convince them otherwise. The next day, Pennsylvania Hall’s managers and city authorities conferred about how to ensure the safety and free speech rights of antislavery speakers. Mayor Jonathan Swift put his finger on the problem: the mob was especially provoked by the presence of Black women. Swift proposed a compromise in which the women would continue to meet, but without Black women in attendance. The women’s convention refused. They had the backing of Pennsylvania Hall’s managers, for whom open rather than segregated accommodations were a principle: “We are accused of allowing our colored fellow-citizens to sit without molestation in the different parts of the Saloon:—in other words, of having no particular place or gallery assigned to colored men and women. We freely admit this; we should have been false to our principles if we had refused to admit men of every sect, rank, and color, on terms of equality, to witness our proceedings.”17
J. C. Wild, Destruction by Fire of Pennsylvania Hall. On the Night of the 17th May, 1838
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
This failure to reach a compromise proved fatal. The women’s daytime meeting went forward, but the mayor canceled the evening’s antislavery speeches. Even that was not enough to quell the mob’s bloodthirst. After dark, the horde reassembled, larger and even more determined to do damage. Things reached a fever pitch, and then city officials, including fire fighters, stood by as the mob torched Pennsylvania Hall. They lit fire to piles of furniture and then fueled the flames with gas jets torn from the walls and aimed at the open blaze. City officials tacitly condoned this when they did nothing at all. No human life was lost that night, but the point was made. A women’s antislavery meeting—one that mixed Black and white activists—should expect to confront terror. Pennsylvania Hall, a brick-and-mortar symbol of women’s ambitions, was reduced to little more than rubble and ash.18
Commentators offered many explanations for the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, most of which had to do with the economic and political anxieties of white men, some of whom were outsiders who had journeyed to Philadelphia just to harass antislavery proponents. Still, women like Sarah Mapps Douglass and Susan Paul could not avoid another lesson. Just being at women’s political gatherings could expose them to violence that no one—neither antislavery activists nor municipal officials—stood ready to prevent. In the days that followed the burning of Pennsylvania Hall, the mob shrank, but it did not wholly end its attacks. African American women remained its special targets. Their bodies were at risk. So too were the institutions they helped to build. The same crowd attacked a structure slated to house a new shelter for “colored orphans.” They set upon and damaged Bethel Church, home to Black worshipers, including Jarena Lee. Few women risked more—from their respectability to their very lives—than women like Paul and Douglass.19
BLACK WOMEN WANTED to lead antislavery societies, and perhaps they had earned that much. In this, they were not unlike white antislavery women who also aspired to sit on the boards and business committees that defined principles and set strategies for the movement. Experience in the women’s conventions of the 1830s suggested that Black and white women might move forward in tandem, parlaying their skills and savvy into seats at the table. They even had allies, men within the American Anti-Slavery Society who acknowledged their capacities and endorsed their quest for power. But when talk of women’s rights in the abolitionist movement surfaced, leaders were deeply divided and Black women got the rawest end of the deal
Hester Lane never faced a mob, but she did face opposition from national antislavery leaders. She had been born enslaved in Maryland, the records suggest. Whatever her origins, by the 1820s, Lane was a free woman, settled in New York City, and thriving. Some termed her a whitewasher. She might have preferred calling herself a decorator. In any case, New Yorkers recognized Lane for having devised a novel technique for coloring the walls of homes. As an entrepreneur who operated her own business and owned her own home, Lane stood out in a city in which most Black women labored as domestics and laundresses.20
Though she settled in New York, and mixed with civic leaders, visiting notables, and a growing community of Black women activists, Lane never forgot Maryland or the enslaved people she had left behind. By the 1820s, she was earning enough to buy the freedom of others. It was costly, daring work. But Lane had a gift for subterfuge, entering and then exiting the South undetected after bargaining for the purchase of people whose lives demanded a price. She bid at auctions and negotiated with reluctant and greedy slaveholders. One report credited her with freeing eleven people, from Maryland to South Carolina, a story Lane did not deny. She was moved by humanitarianism and secured the freedom of entire families, even when that required more than one foray into slaveholding territory. Still, even in this work, Lane operated as a businessperson. She expected those she liberated to repay the cost of their freedom.21
Lane planted deep roots in New York. She was a builder, and her commitment to the antislavery cause led her to organize with other women and support the New York Committee of Vigilance. The committee’s principal concern was the safety of Black people living in New York City—those already free and fugitives seeking liberty. Led by Black men—journalists, ministers, and teachers—the committee defended the freedom of Black Americans, which brought on confrontations with kidnappers, slave hunters, and local officials, all of whom aided the interests of slaveholders. In the vigilance committee, women like Lane found a home for their political interests.
Women’s vigilance committee work mixed with ideas about their rights. A poem published in the committee’s newspaper, Mirror of Liberty, provides one glimpse into how those in Lane’s circle thought about women. David Ruggles, the committee’s head, suggested that “woman’s rights” could extend even to enslaved women.22 Ruggles wrote: “Woman’s Rights.… Was woman formed to be a slave—To sink in thralldom to the grave, And freedom never know! Say, must she toil and sweat, and bleed, A pampered lordling’s pride to feed, And every joy forego?… But, Tyrant King, avaunt, I pray; Humanity demands thy stay ’Till she address the nation: And plead the cause of woman’s right, By urging on in Pharaoh’s spite INSTANT EMANCIPATION.” Ruggles cast the end of slavery as a fulfillment of the rights of Black women.23
Ruggles’ endorsement of women’s rights may have been limited to his poetry. In the everyday of vigilance committee work, men in the leadership saw women like Lane as helpmeets and rarely put them out front. Still, Lane slowly built a reputation. Heading the aptly named “Effective Committee,” for example, she led a “penny program” that financed the work of the always fiscally strapped committee. Lane led the work of the African Dorcas Society, another group that had formed under the watchful eye of men, but which soon operated independent of their gaze. Its purpose was to ensure that children had proper clothing to attend the city’s African American–run schools. Women like Lane generally moved in the spaces reserved for them, such as schoolrooms and parlors. But not always. In at least one instance, “men and women” of the vigilance committee came together and opposed the seizure of an alleged fugitive, openly resisting his detention on the city’s streets.24
Like many women who assumed a public profile, Lane’s community tested her and she faced a curious mix of denigration and admiration. It was a difficult line to walk. On one occasion, Lane was caught up in a scandal that arose out of her associations with a former slave, Martha Johnson, whom Lane had aided to come to New York. Sometime later, unnamed others alleged that Lane had threatened Johnson with sale into the slave markets of the South. It was a serious charge that, if proven, would undercut Lane’s reputation as an antislavery leader. She might also have been prosecuted under New York law. Lane fired back, denying the accusation and then claiming to have been libeled; her character had been falsely maligned. The men of the vigilance committee convened a tribunal. Johnson appeared and admitted that she and Lane had gotten into a disagreement about overdue rent. Falsely charged, Lane fought and kept her reputation.25
Lane’s ambition grew, and she aimed to join the highest ranks of the antislavery movement. Her money and fundraising for the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) laid a foundation. Sometimes Lane made cash contributions on behalf of “an association of ladies in New York,” as was the case in 1835. Other times, Lane made personal contributions, such as in 1836 when the AASS acknowledged her for a donation of thirty dollars. Her earnings enabled Lane to join a small class of Black abolitionist-philanthropists. Money was an avenue to power, and Lane wanted to stand as a peer to the men who underwrote the antislavery movement.26
Leadership included steering the movement, especially through moments of conflict. The year 1839 was rife with tension in the American Anti-Slavery Society. Lane arrived at the annual meeting as a delegate for New York City. Trouble immediately surfaced over the future direction of the society, with some members advocating a decidedly political turn toward lobbying and litigation as strategies for change. Others urged the society to stay close to its roots in moral suasion—the changing of hearts and minds through public speaking and the written word. Lane not only occupied a front seat for these debates. She also voted on multiple resolutions, generally siding with the political abolitionists. The meeting minutes recorded “ayes” and “nays,” and among them were the voices of Lane and a handful of other women casting their ballots.27
The women did not go unnoticed and their presence troubled the 1839 convention. How awkward it must have been for Lane to listen as the secretary included women’s names on the delegates’ roll only to have a debate erupt. Resolutions flew in an effort to control the woman question: “That the roll of this meeting be made by placing thereon the names of all persons, male and female, who are delegates from any auxiliary society or members of this society” and “That the term ‘person’ as used in the 4th Article of the Constitution of this society, is to be understood as including men and women and as entitling women to sit, speak, vote, hold office and exercise the same rights of membership as persons of the other sex.” The exact nature of the dispute became clear: the delegates agreed that women could represent their local antislavery societies but were at odds over whether women should be elected to leadership roles.28
As Lane exited the meeting, she was left alone to think through the awkward note upon which the meeting had concluded. A faction of 123 men, her allies in the political wing of the society, had lodged a formal protest that opposed the intrusion of women’s rights into the work of an antislavery society. Women might form “distinct societies of the female sex,” but their incorporation into the leadership, it was argued, risked inviting “unnecessary reproach and embarrassment to the cause of the enslaved.” It was a shot across the bow at antislavery women, and not one of them signed onto this dissenting report. Lane had risen in the ranks of the society, but there remained an open question about how far she, and women like her, might go.29
One year later, Lane was back. The following May, in 1840, she readied herself for the American Anti-Slavery Society’s annual meeting. Again, the delegates convened in her hometown, New York City, ensuring that Lane and a large contingent from the Empire State would be present. Things felt uneasy, however. The intervening twelve months had not been a cooling-off period. Instead, delegates arrived prepared to lock horns over women’s leadership, and nobody wasted time with niceties. In the meeting’s earliest moments, the chair appointed a business committee that included a woman—Abby Kelley, a leader of the Lynn (Massachusetts) Female Anti-Slavery Society. Like Lane, Kelley had risen to leadership through fundraising for the national organization. The vote upon her appointment revealed a deep split among the more than one thousand delegates: 557 for and 451 against. Kelley’s opponents—those who rejected women in leadership roles—resigned and then walked out, dividing the organization irreconcilably.30
The split, though costly, did open the way for women’s leadership in what remained of the AASS. At the same meeting in 1840, women stepped into unprecedented roles as members of the Finance Committee and as delegates to the upcoming World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London. The Executive Committee of nine included three women: Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, and Maria Chapman. Nearly 120 women delegates from throughout the Northeast and New England joined them. The price had been high; it included the loss of an active faction of men who left to create their own society. But the split exiled fears that powerful women might undermine the work.31
Even as many of her old allies had exited, Lane stayed, maintaining her place among the delegates. Her friend Charles Ray, whose wife, Henrietta, had collaborated with Lane in New York’s Ladies Literary Society and the African Dorcas Society also remained. Ray knew that Lane aspired to leadership. When time came for delegates to nominate members to the executive board, David Lee Childs nominated Lucretia Mott and his own wife, Lydia Maria. The two, both well-known white activists, won their seats. Ray’s nomination of Lane did not fare as well, failing to win the votes that would seat her alongside Mott and Childs. It was an embittering turn of events. In the coming months, society members wrangled over what precisely had happened. Ray strongly intimated that Lane had been rejected because she was African American. Writing in the Colored American, he quipped: “The principle [of women’s rights] could not carry her color—eh!” Others countered that Ray voluntarily withdrew Lane’s nomination under a cloud: she was said to be loyal to the faction that had split from the society. It was even suggested that Lane herself was opposed to women’s leadership in the movement, marking her as disqualified. “It is to be supposed that the Society would be guilty of this obvious impropriety of appointing to office a woman who denies her own right of membership?” retorted William Lloyd Garrison in The Liberator. The net result was that a total of four white women had been elevated to the society’s highest ranks, while the sole Black woman candidate—Hester Lane—was not.32
Lane never went on record about what happened at the 1840 meeting, and she quickly disappeared from the antislavery scene. A bit of her did survive, but only as a symbol. Lewis Tappan, who had led the 1840 exodus from the American Anti-Slavery Society, spoke of Lane during the 1843 meeting of his new American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. In Tappan’s telling, Lane’s story was a convenient fable that reduced her to evidence for how former slaves deserved the society’s benevolence. He described Lane as “a woman well known to myself and to many of my associates here.” He lauded her heroic efforts to rescue those held in bondage, missions she herself financed. Lane, he said, was a woman of exceptional intelligence. But Tappan left out a fateful chapter in Lane’s life. He never recounted her time as a philanthropist and aspiring leader within antislavery politics. He erased how she had been caught in the crosshairs of a debate over women’s rights, one in which women’s equality had lost out to a color line. An antislavery newspaper quietly noted her death in July 1849, when Lane succumbed, along with more than five thousand other New Yorkers, to that summer’s epidemic of cholera.33
AT THE START of 1848, few Americans anticipated that the year would go down in history as a legendary one for women’s rights. Only decades later would activists brand it as the start of a movement for women’s suffrage. In that year, small communities of women began organizing around demands for rights. That spring in Philadelphia, for example, African American churchwomen insisted that they, like men, should have preaching licenses in the AME Church. Later that summer, a small band of white, mostly middle-class women in the Upstate New York village of Seneca Falls produced a manifesto that demanded equality with men. Women’s rights saturated the air in 1848, though precisely what liberation looked like depended upon which air one breathed.34
In Black churches, the troubles over women’s power paralleled those of antislavery societies. Women paid ministers, purchased lots, and erected sanctuaries. They filled pews, managed Sunday schools, attended class meetings, and made the church a regular part of daily life. Occasionally, women stood up to preach the scriptures. Together, these works started a women’s movement in the Black church. Debate in white religious circles mirrored that in Black churches, but rarely did the two spheres of Christian politics intersect.35
By the 1840s, preaching women no longer toiled as solitary figures as had Jarena Lee. Around Lee grew up a sisterhood that included a broader range of churchwomen, and her concerns soon became theirs. Members of groups calling themselves the Daughters of Zion and the Daughters of Conference came to church politics by more conventional routes, starting out as helpmeets to men who expected to steer religious life. Their circumstances would not remain conventional, however. Women—whether fashioned as preachers or helpmeets—challenged the limits placed upon them in Black Methodist circles. Their work required organizing, subterfuge, and alliances with men sympathetic to their cause. Black churchwomen knew that when they invoked rights, above all else they were aiming to break men’s monopoly on the pulpit.36
W. L. Breton, Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia, 1829
LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
But in the spring of 1844, the Daughters of Zion faced a problem. They planned to attend that year’s AME Church general conference. It was an important occasion held only every four years, where delegates elected church leaders and voted on policy. The women knew that church rituals invited them in but also kept them silent. If they wanted to be heard in the proceedings, they needed a strategy. Perhaps they conspired beforehand, or maybe they hatched a plan only after arriving in Pittsburgh for the conference. Banded together, women in the AME Church prepared to fight for the right to have preaching licenses. The only question was how to accomplish that in the face of sixty-eight ministerial delegates who had no intention of listening to them at all.37
The challenge demanded ingenuity, and the women devised a scheme that promised to be controversial. They would win their own power through a strategic alliance with men. First, they needed to find a willing accomplice. The Daughters of Conference approached the Reverend Dr. Nathan Ward, a missionary delegate and founding member of the church’s Indiana Conference. He heard them out. Ward, the women proposed, would act as their spokesperson, seizing the conference floor and putting forth an amendment to church law that would guarantee licenses to female preachers. They handed him ammunition: a petition.38
At the conference, Ward did as he promised. He rose before the dozens of men delegates and explained that on behalf of the forty church members who had signed the petition, he demanded preaching rights for churchwomen. Looking on was itinerant preacher Julia Foote, who later described the mayhem that erupted: “This caused quite a sensation, bringing many members to their feet at once. They all talked and screamed to the bishop, who could scarcely keep order. The Conference was so incensed at the brother who offered the petition that they threatened to take action against him.” The women’s demands were explosive and the resolution failed. Still, the churchwomen put the leadership on notice that they had organized as a sisterhood that included laywomen helpmeets and controversial preaching women. They expected to shape church politics by way of a new collective point of view that linked the struggles of extraordinary women, like Jarena Lee and Julia Foote, to the aspirations of all churchwomen.39
If the results of the 1844 meeting discouraged them, the Daughters of Conference gave no sign of it. Over the next four years, they prepared to continue the battle. By 1848, the general conference scene had grown only more intimidating. Women gathered in the hallways and on the periphery of the conference chamber. There, they observed men—the leadership—of a burgeoning denomination that came from fourteen states: 175 officials and 375 lay leaders. The formal agenda was ambitious, including electing a second bishop, structuring the church missionary society, establishing a book depository, planning for commons schools, and enacting sanctions for divorce and remarriage.40
To get on the agenda, the Daughters again needed an ally. Perhaps it was Eliza Ann Bias who suggested that her husband, J. J. Gould Bias, could be trusted to speak for the women. He had a track record of supporting women’s leadership. Bias did the women’s bidding, putting their resolution on the conference floor. The deliberations that followed have not survived. But the record does show that the Daughters scored a victory: the leadership agreed to their demand for women’s preaching licenses. Going forward, women like Jarena Lee would not need to broker special deals before commanding the pulpit.41
There had been opposition, it seems, and a rebuttal later surfaced, making clear that the war over churchwomen’s power wasn’t over. Daniel Payne, a brilliant and ambitious Baltimore-based minister, protested the women’s victory. He began with the proposition that women’s roles should conform to the ideals of respectability and domesticity. The licensing of women preachers was, he warned, “calculated to break up the sacred relations which women bear to their husbands and children,” leading to the “utter neglect of their household duties and obligations.” Payne played upon concerns about how slavery already threatened the sanctity of African American family life. Just as the consumption of alcohol led men to neglect their families, Payne urged, women might also abandon their home duties if they bore the responsibilities of a licensed preacher. Payne exploited real tensions in the lives of preaching women, who did feel a pull between religious responsibilities and domestic obligations. Payne made a record of his objections. But in 1848, churchwomen’s rights moved forward.42
Only a few months after AME Church women scored a victory for their rights, women in Seneca Falls, New York, also set forth a demand for churchwomen’s rights. The Declaration of Sentiments, a document drafted during the July 1848 convention, criticized thinking that deprived women of preaching licenses: “He allows her in Church, as well as State, but in a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.” The meeting’s final resolutions included a demand that spoke to the right to preach from the pulpit: “Resolved,… it is pre-eminently his duty to encourage her to speak and teach, as she has an opportunity, in all religious assemblies.”43
Black women did not attend the Seneca Falls convention. They were not barred or excluded. Still, only white women took part in the proceedings. On those meeting days in July, the Black women of Seneca Falls were elsewhere. Even those who were members of the meeting place, the Wesleyan Methodist Church, did not attend. Certainly, Sarah James knew that women planned to gather in her village to discuss their rights. Her home on State Street sat just two blocks from the Wesleyan Methodist Church. The notice appeared in the Seneca Falls Courier and in Douglass’s North Star. A stream of delegates passing along the streets of her village would have been hard for James to miss. James ran an activist household. Her husband, barber Thomas James, participated in antislavery and Free Soil Party politics. Sarah herself did not work outside the home, or at least she did not report doing so two years later when the census taker visited. Perhaps she spent her days in July caring for her daughter Martha and attending to household duties.
Samantha Wright’s husband, Joshua, also served on the board of the Wesleyan Methodist Church. Their home stood on Troy Street, three short blocks from the women’s convention. Still, Wright did not join the proceedings. The same was true for the many other Black women in Seneca Falls. Julia Ann Dillsworth, like Sarah James, was likely at her home on Walnut Street, overseeing the day-to-day demands of her small family and the boarders whose rent supplemented her family income. Harder to place on those summer days are women like Nabby Anderson. More than seventy years old, Anderson perhaps was too frail or infirm to attend a political gathering. Louise Hill was Anderson’s peer, an elderly woman who lived in a white household headed by Elias Wayman. She may have been obligated to work that day, despite her advanced age.44
Abby Gomor should have been there. Perhaps she was hard pressed to join a midweek meeting of women. She labored in a farming household headed by Richard Gay that was situated toward the outskirts of town on Cayuga Road. Gomor was not, however, a stranger to the women who drafted the Declaration of Sentiments. She was a member of Seneca Falls’ Trinity Episcopal Church, where she worshipped with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the meeting’s organizers. The two knew one another, and Stanton later told one version of Gomor’s story in the History of Woman Suffrage, though it was more like myth. Stanton wrote about Gomor as an object of pity, a Black woman who, as a property holder and taxpayer, should have been entitled to her vote in New York. But her sex, Stanton decried, kept Gomor from the polls. Stanton never explained why, then, Gomor did not join her and other women of Seneca Falls women’s convention to demand that right.45
FOR BLACK WOMEN, the “cause of the slave, as well as of women” were two parts of a whole. On the floor of colored conventions in 1848, this proposition unsettled the deliberations. The conventions began with Black activists organizing against colonization, but the agenda quickly expanded to include a sweeping range of issues. Foremost was slavery, and convention delegates—who included former slaves—banded together to secure the freedom of their brothers and sisters in bondage. Delegates also took up civil rights, believing that their status as free people would be compromised as long as slavery persisted. They also put questions about freedom on the table: What social, political, and economic rights should former slaves have in a world that doubted they were citizens at all? In 1848, the issue of women’s rights was added to convention agendas, though it was not an easy fit.46
Even when unbidden, women made their way to the conventions. In early September when the weather was mild, Sydna Francis and her husband, Abner, boarded a steamboat in western New York destined for the 1848 National Convention of Colored Citizens in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a delegate, elected to represent Black Buffalo, and his words were recorded in the minutes published later that year. Sydna carried her own credentials as head of Buffalo’s Female Dorcas Society, where she advocated for women’s education. She was among the women that supported the newspapers and conventions headed by men; she raised the money and paid the bills. This was not enough, however, to give her a voice at the convention. Still, Francis’s presence could generate a debate.47
Francis listened in as Frederick Douglass used his authority as president to introduce women’s rights onto the convention agenda. It is likely her ears perked up. Those who knew Douglass were not surprised. He was known as a woman’s rights man. The previous year, 1847, Douglass had begun publishing his new weekly, the North Star, by proclaiming: “Right Is of No Sex, Truth Is of No Color.” He had been present at the Seneca Falls women’s convention and had acted as an ally to a white delegate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, when she proposed to include women’s vote among that meeting’s demands.
Francis quickly learned that inserting women’s rights on the agenda of an African American convention invited controversy. It became clear that she and the other women present at the national convention were causing trouble when the words of Resolution 33 rang through the convention hall: “Whereas, we fully believe in the equality of the sexes, therefore, Resolved, That we hereby invite females hereafter to take part in our deliberations.” It was a modest proposal, one that declared women equal but extended to them no power. Instead, men would usher in women and, although they might “take part” in “deliberations,” it was unclear whether they could vote. In short order, the matter was squelched when the proposition was “indefinitely postponed.” The affirmation of women’s authority had not been defeated, at least not yet. But it was surely not a victory. Resolutions indefinitely postponed often remained in limbo, put off and never voted upon.48
Douglass was not done and he enlisted the aid of a woman. Her name was Rebecca Sanford. Perhaps Francis noticed Sanford as she entered the meeting hall, the only white woman recorded as taking part in the convention—indeed, as the only woman mentioned by name. Sanford stood out. Her words might be important. But even before she spoke, Sanford’s presence was symbolic of what Douglass hoped to incorporate into the convention. Sanford was passing through the city on her way farther west, after having taken part in the August women’s rights meeting in Rochester, New York. For Douglass, Sanford embodied women’s rights.49
Sanford did indeed speak, but not for all women. It was late in the day, early evening, in fact, when Douglass suspended the regular deliberations to introduce “a lady who wished to say something on the subject of the Rights of Woman.” He turned the podium over to Sanford. She explained the issues that had concerned the white women who had convened at Seneca Falls and Rochester that summer: the right to vote, rights to marital property, and a role in “making the laws.” If Sanford knew that just hours earlier the convention had tabled a debate over the rights of Black women, she did not let on. She never acknowledged Francis or women like her, never suggested how her interests fit with those of Black women. Sisterhood never surfaced in Cleveland. A white woman—a guest permitted to speak from the podium—appeared unaware of what freedom meant for the Black women who sat before her.50
Douglass’s concern was not Francis. Instead, he was interested in a principle, and he used Sanford’s remarks to revive his resolution. After speaking in clumsy terms about the interests of women, Sanford stepped down, and things got even more complicated. Delegates traded resolutions that parsed words rather than the rights of women. Some argued that when the convention had deemed “all colored persons present, delegates to this Convention,” women had been made delegates because they “considered women persons.” Others sought to clarify: “The word persons used in the resolution designating delegates [should] be understood to include woman.” A resolution finally carried and a shout went up: “Three cheers for woman’s rights.” And still, not one Black woman had spoken.51
Francis had just witnessed the convention arrive at a resolution that endorsed her right to serve as a delegate and take part in convention proceedings. But it was an awkward series of events that got her there. Men claimed to be allies with Black women. Sanford ignored Black women altogether. If anyone conferred with Francis, there is no evidence of it. And this is how the meeting concluded. Francis and her husband shared the steamship ride across Lake Erie, back to Buffalo, with Douglass himself. Likely each of them had a distinct view of what it meant for women to win “three cheers.”52
Francis left Cleveland shrouded in questions. Unclear was whether she could claim allies in white women or in Black men. But she knew, at least, that Black women could be counted upon to band together, that they might collectively make a case for their rights in political culture. These earliest efforts may have been awkward, but these years were the start of a new, persistent questioning about the degree to which African American political leaders would incorporate women and their rights into their platforms. Others, it seemed, still spoke for them. But Black women could also speak for themselves—taking the opportunity that their fundraising provided to insert themselves and their interests onto the agenda. They were satisfied, it appeared, to do this work from the inside and to combine their challenges to the inequality of sexism with a defiance of racism.
BLACK WOMEN LAID the groundwork for their movement in the rocky soil of women’s antislavery conventions, Black Methodist conferences, and the heart of Black politics: the colored convention movement. Their counterparts among white middle-class women were at the start of their own movement, one that insisted upon building power within discrete women’s spaces. These differences, though not stark or all-defining, suggest how American women charted divergent routes to power and political rights going forward. These differences were not only structural or strategic. And they cannot be reduced to the effects of racism. Black women would never sever their political power from the movements and organizations that sat at the heart of their communities. At times, their drive to power led them to convene as women. But all roads brought them back to the needs of the African American public culture in which they had been formed.