THE NORTH
“THEN LET IT SINK. I WILL NOT DISMISS HER.”
Prudence Crandall came to Canterbury, Connecticut, as a career move. In 1831, the twenty-seven-year-old teacher was working in the town of Plainfield when the more upscale residents of Canterbury invited her to start a school for their daughters. Owning a school for young ladies of means was just about the pinnacle of achievement and financial security for a single woman in Crandall’s class. She invested what money she had in a large, handsome house in the center of town and soon her “genteel female seminary” was an established success.
At that point, Sarah Harris applied. “A colored girl of respectability…called on me some time during the month of September and said, in a very earnest manner, ‘Miss Crandall, I want to get a little more learning, enough if possible to teach colored children, and if you will admit me to your school, I shall be under the greatest obligation to you,’” the teacher remembered later. The girl’s father, a farmer, was active in the antislavery movement, and she probably had a pretty well-informed idea of what local reaction to her enrollment might be. “If you think it will be the means of injuring you,” Sarah added, “I will not insist on the favor.”
Crandall was a Quaker, who opposed slavery and believed in educating freed blacks. She was also capable of being extremely hardheaded—when the Canterbury proposal first came up, her brother worried how long Prudence could manage to stay on the good side of her students’ self-important parents. But the school was her home and her income, and she hesitated for a while before finally agreeing.
Sarah Harris had gone to the local public school and had attended classes there with some of the students in Crandall’s much superior establishment. She probably hoped that as a known quantity, she would be accepted without much fuss. “There could not have been a more unexceptionable person than Sarah Harris, save her complexion,” wrote Samuel Joseph May, one of Crandall’s loyal supporters. But once word spread, it became obvious that people weren’t going to cooperate. A delegation of women, led by the Episcopalian minister’s wife, warned that unless the black girl was sent away, the school would be ruined. “Then let it sink. I will not dismiss her,” Prudence retorted. Pressed against the wall, her response was true to type and bore out all her brother’s worries about her stubbornness. When the white students threatened to leave, she decided to start a school for African American girls—or, as she advertised in The Liberator, “for young Ladies and little Misses of color.” The curriculum would be the same as before, including the teas and piano recitals.
The idea of young black women being educated in a manner appropriate for upper-class whites enraged people further. Catharine Beecher thought it was terrible and the Norwich Republican accused Crandall of trying “to foist upon the community a new species of gentility, in the shape of sable belles…to cook up a palatable morsel for our white bachelors…. In a word, they hope to force the two races to amalgamate.” The fear of mixed marriages was the greatest of white anxieties, but when one of her neighbors brought it up to Crandall, she retorted: “Moses had a black wife.”
A town meeting, led by Andrew Judson, a lawyer, politician, and Crandall’s next-door neighbor, warned the school would “collect within the town of Canterbury large numbers of persons from other States whose characters and habits might be various and unknown to us, thereby rendering insecure the persons, property and reputation of our citizens.” As a woman, Crandall was not permitted to attend the gathering. Her male representatives, who came bearing an offer to move the school to a less conspicuous spot in town, were not allowed to speak and were met with “fists doubled in our faces.”
Meanwhile, fifteen very brave African American students arrived in April 1833. They came from Philadelphia and New York and Boston as well as Connecticut. Some were the daughters of slaves. One, whose mother was too poor to pay the $25-per-quarter tuition, was supported by another woman, a childless ex-slave who had saved up the money by working as a servant. The ride in on the stagecoach gave the girls some idea of what they would be up against. One was dumped off at a town six miles from Canterbury. She shouldered her baggage and walked.
The local shops refused to sell food to the school. The village doctor and druggist boycotted Crandall’s students. Someone threw manure into the well and smashed the school windows. When the girls went out to take their daily walk, people blew horns, fired pistols, and threw chicken heads at them. Town officials arrested a seventeen-year-old student from out of state on vagrancy laws and were threatening to whip her “on the naked body” when supporters arrived to put up bond for her release. On May 24, the Connecticut state legislature passed a “Black Law” making it illegal to establish a school for the instruction of out-of-state black children. “Joy and exultation ran wild in Canterbury,” wrote one of Crandall’s students. “The bell rang and a cannon was fired for half an hour. Where is the justice? In the midst of all this Miss Crandall is unmoved.”
A month later, Prudence Crandall was arrested. “I am only afraid they will not put me in jail,” she told her supporters. She slept in a cell whose former occupant had been a murderer before she would allow her supporters to post bail. She went on trial in August, with the prosecution led by her neighbor Andrew Judson. Despite the judge’s obvious prejudice against the school, the jury could not reach an agreement. But a second panel, after having been instructed by the judge that free African Americans were not actually citizens, convicted her of violating the Black Law. While Crandall appealed, her school went on. Abolitionists from around the world began visiting Canterbury to deliver presents and support.
But there were signs that the Quaker schoolmistress was beginning to falter. Most notably, she became engaged to a visiting minister who her friends regarded as dubious husband material. She may have realized, deep down, that her position was hopeless and reached out to matrimony as a lifeline. After an appeals court threw out her conviction on technical grounds, Canterbury citizens slit the neck of a cat and hung it on the school gate, then tried to set the building on fire. In the middle of the night on September 9, 1834, men smashed the school’s downstairs windows with clubs and iron bars. While the girls huddled upstairs in terror, the mob destroyed the house beneath them. Crandall’s own wavering confidence infected the students, who already had good reason to wish they were someplace else. They returned to their homes, and the school was closed for good.
The short-term finale to Crandall’s story is not particularly cheerful. She had, indeed, married the wrong man. Much later, she said he “would not let me read the books that he himself read.” (Prudence-like, she read them anyway.) When he died, she moved to Kansas where her brother had a farm. A regiment of black Union soldiers discovered her living in poverty and raised a fund to present to her. “My whole life has been one of opposition,” she told an interviewer in 1886. “I never could find anyone near me to agree with me.”
But over the long run, there was a happy ending. Sarah Harris did become a teacher, as did some of the other girls who endured that traumatic time in Canterbury. After the war, Connecticut voted to give its black citizens the right to vote, with Canterbury’s Windham County leading the way. Crandall had not been able to carry through her plan to educate young black women, but as her old friend Samuel May said, she had been successful in teaching her neighbors. The state legislature repealed the Black Law and voted to give Crandall a pension for life, “mindful of the dark blot that rests upon our fair fame and name, for the cruel outrages inflicted upon a former citizen of our Commonwealth.” One of the first signatures on the resolution was that of Andrew Judson’s nephew. While her opponents have faded into total obscurity, remembered only in their role of villains in this story, Prudence Crandall is one of the heroes of Connecticut history. And the big house in the middle of Canterbury is now a museum and a National Historic Landmark.
“WE ABOLITION WOMEN ARE TURNING
THE WORLD UPSIDE DOWN”
Slavery became the all-consuming political question between 1830 and the Civil War. But it was a moral issue, too, and a number of Northern women felt they had an obligation to fight an institution that broke up families and subjected young women to sexual molestation. Abolition of slavery was different from other reform movements, partly because it drew women so clearly into politics, and partly because it drew them so near to genuine violence. Between 1834 and 1837, there were at least 157 anti-abolition mob actions in the North, and Prudence Crandall was far from the only stubborn woman who stood up against her angry neighbors. Speaking against slavery in a Maine church, Ellen Smith encountered an audience that responded by “howling, stamping, kicking, slamming…pew doors, and pounding…the pews with their fists.” Boys threw hymn books at her. When the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison—always a lightning rod—attempted to speak before a racially mixed group of women in Boston, the mayor begged the audience to disperse rather than incite a riot. The ladies declined. “If this is the last bulwark of freedom, we may as well die here as anywhere,” said Maria Weston Chapman, the wife of a wealthy merchant. She eventually led the audience out through the angry mob, in pairs, black and white together.
The antislavery movement did a lot to liberate its female members as well as the slaves. (One Boston volunteer called the times “distressing and exciting.”) Northern society was still deep in the era of Catharine Beecher and the cult of domesticity, yet abolitionist women were not only signing petitions and going to political meetings, they also began speaking in public, to mixed audiences.
“Confusion has seized us and all things go wrong,” wrote Maria Chapman mischievously.
The women have leaped from “their spheres.”
And instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along,
And are setting the world by the ears!
…….….….……
They’ve taken the notion to speak for themselves,
And are wielding the tongue and the pen;
They’ve mounted the rostrum, the termagent elves!
And—oh horrid!—are talking to men!
The first female antislavery lecturers were Angelina and Sarah Grimke of South Carolina. Their family was part of the slaveholding elite, and even though many of its members were high achievers, it’s still a mystery how the Grimkes produced such a unique pair of women. Virtually everything the sisters did was a first, unprecedented. Yet they seemed utterly unself-conscious, almost oblivious to their notoriety. Sarah, the older, was four when she accidentally witnessed the whipping of a slave, and the sight upset her so much that her nurse found her on the wharves, asking a ship’s captain to take her to a place where such things never happened. “Slavery was a millstone around my neck,” Sarah wrote later, “and marred my comfort from the time I can remember.” After her father died she flouted every convention of the South, where it was unacceptable for women to even travel alone, and moved to Philadelphia to live independently. Her family tried to avoid gossip by announcing they were sending Sarah on a trip for her health.
In an age when women were supposed to be hypersensitive to the demands of social decorum, the Grimkes, earnest, humorless, and kindly, always seemed able to follow their own stars. In 1834, Angelina, who had followed her sister north, published Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States. In it, she urged Southern women to persuade their husbands and fathers “that slavery is a crime against God and man,” and to free, or at least educate, any slaves they owned. It was the only such document a white Southern woman would ever write, but its intended audience probably never saw it, since it was burned whenever it reached a Southern post office and Angelina was barred from ever returning to Charleston.
Sarah and Angelina had been conducting “parlor talks” with Northern women interested in the slavery issue, and the American Anti-Slavery Society offered them jobs as the first female abolitionist lecturers in the United States. Soon they began speaking in churches, although friends warned them that lecturing before large groups would be seen as a “Fanny Wright affair.” But the Grimkes managed much better than Wright, possibly because of their impeccable personal lives and their high moral tone. Both men and women wanted to hear the Southern slaveholders turned abolitionists, so the organizers began opening the meetings to everyone. Angelina was the more gifted speaker, and Sarah, who tended to be rather flat and to lose track of the time while she was talking, adopted the role of helper and backup. The sisters spoke at five to six meetings a week, each in a different town, traveling by stage, horseback, or wagon. They frequently had to skip meals and take their nourishment at the tea parties their admirers expected them to attend at every stop. The halls were almost always stuffy, and very crowded. At Worcester, they lectured to more than 1,000 people while hundreds of others stood outside. In Woonsocket Falls, the beams of the gallery began to crack under the crowd, and when no one would leave, Sarah had to close the meeting.
The speaking tour ended when Angelina contracted typhoid fever. During her recovery, she fell in love with Theodore Weld, a dashing antislavery lecturer who had encouraged her speaking career. Friends did not expect much from the relationship, since Weld had pledged not to marry until slavery was abolished. But after a long, intellectual correspondence that dwelt mainly on things like religion and the importance of logical inquiry, Weld suddenly declared that “for a long time you have had my whole heart.” Angelina responded characteristically, in a letter that first rapturously announced they were “two bodies animated by one soul” and then swerved into a discussion of her plans to address the Massachusetts state legislature. In February 1838, Angelina submitted antislavery petitions to the Massachusetts House committee, and became the first woman ever to speak before a legislative hearing. She talked for two hours and then returned two days later to continue her remarks. At the second appearance, the room was so packed that she was asked to stand at the Speaker of the House’s lectern so the crowd could have a better look at her. Sarah, meanwhile, was seated in the Speaker’s chair. “We abolition women are turning the world upside down,” Angelina told her.
Three months later, the first American woman to address a legislative body became the first American advocate of women’s rights to marry. Angelina had become as vocal about the subjugation of women as she was about slaves, and her supporters were thrilled by this demonstration that a woman who believed in female equality could nonetheless find a husband. The day after the wedding ceremony—at which nobody promised to obey and Theodore denounced the laws that gave husbands control over their wives’ property—they went to Pennsylvania Hall for the Women’s Anti-Slavery Convention.
Pennsylvania Hall was a handsome new building the Philadelphia reformers had built at great expense to make sure they would have a place for their lectures and meetings. That evening, William Lloyd Garrison spoke to 3,000 abolitionists while a large, noisy crowd milled around outside. As Angelina was introduced, bricks crashed through the windows. Nevertheless, the new bride lectured for over an hour through the noise and the shower of stones and glass. The abolitionists survived their encounter with the Philadelphia mob, but their proud new meeting hall didn’t. The rioters burned it to the ground.
Angelina and her husband invited Sarah to live with them, and the Grimke sisters settled down to housekeeping, determined to show that women with “well regulated minds” were not “ruined as domestic characters.” Still, it was a good thing that Weld was as committed to Spartan living and good works as his wife and sister-in-law. Angelina and Sarah were fervent believers in the health reform movements of the era and adopted the diet of Sylvester Graham, which prohibited meat, butter, and cheese. They also continued to boycott slave-labor products like sugar, tea, coffee, and spices. They cooked hot food only once a week and served their bemused guests rice and molasses for dinner, and breakfasts of raw apples and cold water. Angelina gave birth to the first of three children in 1839 and was ever after something of an invalid. Sarah told a friend that her sister’s problem was a fallen uterus, so severe that it sometimes protruded from her body, causing great pain.
The sisters and Theodore founded a progressive boarding school, where gray-haired Angelina, clad in her bloomer costume, served meals in the chilly community hall. Despite their meager income, they entertained an exhaustive number of guests. They also supported a swarm of relatives and some ex-Grimke slaves, one of whom was afflicted with fits and a bad temper. In 1868, the sisters discovered they had black nephews, the sons of their brother Henry, who as a widower had been engaged in a long secret relationship with a slave named Nancy. (When he died, Henry directed his son and heir, Montague, to care for Nancy and her children as members of the family. Montague ignored the will and appropriated the boys—his half-brothers—as his servants.) Sarah and Angelina welcomed the young men into the family and paid for their college education. With their aunts’ help, Archibald Henry Grimke graduated from Harvard Law School and became a leader in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, while Francis James Grimke graduated from Princeton Theological Seminary and became a prominent Washington minister.
The Graham diet must have worked, for the Grimke sisters lived on far beyond the Civil War era. At age seventy-nine, Sarah was still marching up and down the countryside, selling copies of John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women. In March 1870, an election day, suffrage supporters decided that a few brave women would attempt to vote, in the first of what would later become many thousands of such demonstrations. A fierce snowstorm arrived with the election, but forty-two women and their male escorts formed a procession and marched to the polling place amid jeers of the townspeople. At the head of the procession, first of the first pioneers, were Angelina and Sarah Grimke.
“PUTTING THEM ON AN EQUALITY
WITH OURSELVES”
In 1833, Lydia Maria Child, of frugal-housewife fame, wrote An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. One of the first antislavery books to be published in America, it was also one of the boldest, arguing that the races should be able to mix freely when traveling, at the theater, in church, and when choosing marital partners. It shocked her traditional readers, and while she continued to write, the general public never again snapped up her books as they had before. “Her fine genius, her soul’s wealth has been wasted,” mourned Sarah Hale of Godey’s. (Hale’s magazine managed to ignore not only the abolition issue but also the entire Civil War.)
Child, along with the Grimke sisters, was unusual even among abolitionists in her belief in integration and the equality of the races. The Northern women who worked for abolition were generally not free of racial prejudice—many female abolition societies refused to allow black members. In Fall River, Elizabeth and Lucy Buffum found that the other white women in their antislavery group were willing to let “respectable” black women attend the meetings but “did not think it was at all proper to invite them to join the society, thus putting them on an equality with ourselves.” (The Buffum sisters were always ahead of their time. As a child, Elizabeth recalled listening to her older sister Sarah read a futuristic essay she had written about twentieth-century America in which “she pictured the Negroes as in possession of the government and at the head of society” and “great consternation existed at the capital because the daughter of the President of the United States had married a white man.” Some of their friends, Elizabeth added, “did not like the paper very well.”)
Middle-class black women in the North were almost all deeply involved in antislavery work. The vast majority of African American families, however, were poor, and had neither the leisure nor the income to participate in outside activities. Still, some poor women made heroic efforts to contribute to the cause. Hannah Austin of Hartford, for instance, supported an invalid husband and four children by taking in washing, but she still managed to stay active in a local abolitionist society.
“THE MOST ODIOUS OF TASKS”
In the early 1830s, when the abolition movement was just beginning, the male leaders presumed that women would take part just as they had in the Revolutionary War—by rearing abolitionist children and by leading the boycott of slave-produced products. “How can you eat how can you drink,” asked an anonymous poet in The Liberator:
How wear your finery, and ne’er think
Of those poor souls in bondage held,
Whose painful labor is compelled?
But boycotting had been easier in an era when housewives could make most of their own food. The difficulties and deprivations that came with avoiding slave-labor goods were so great, only the Grimkes seemed capable of sticking to their principles. The boycott, one ardent abolitionist admitted, banned from the dinner table “almost everything good.” But women found other ways of getting involved. They went to lectures and joined sewing circles where people made items for fund-raising fairs while listening to one member read from an antislavery tract. The issue of whether something as unserious as refreshments should be featured at these gatherings sometimes took on epic proportions. The Dover Anti-Slavery Sewing Circle approved a motion to “retain the good old custom of having a social cup of tea,” and the next retracted it. At another point the members voted to fine anyone who served more than “one kind of cake.”
Women also began circulating abolition petitions, which they forwarded to John Quincy Adams, the crusty ex-president who had returned to Congress as an outspoken opponent of slavery. The petitions infuriated Southern legislators. The female petitioner was “the instrument of destroying our political paradise,” hyperventilated John Tyler of Virginia, the future president, “a fiend to rejoice over the conflagration of our dwellings and the murder of our people.” Collecting signatures involved braving slammed doors and racial slurs, and it was an enormous psychological strain for middle-class women, particularly since the job was never-ending. (Having collected signatures for the banning of slavery in Texas, the women would be sent out again to Washington, D.C., or Missouri.) Even the unstoppable Lydia Child called petitioning “the most odious of tasks.” But it was a powerful force in politicizing Northern womanhood. In 1836, 20 percent of the adult women in Lowell and 38 percent in Lynn, Massachusetts, signed antislavery petitions.
The abolition movement came to rely heavily on the money raised by women. Maria Weston Chapman, the merchant’s wife from Boston, was a particular genius at fund-raising and began what became a national phenomenon—antislavery fairs. Women made fancy scarves and doilies with antislave messages. They sold penwipers demanding their users “wipe out the blot of slavery” and needlework bags depicting a black man under the lash. Lydia Child made a cradle quilt for one fair that was embroidered with the words: “Think of the Negro-mother when her child is torn away.” Embroidered linens boasted mottos like “May the points of our needles prick the slaveholders’ consciences.”
Maria Chapman was also the editor of antislavery magazines and newspapers, and such a fierce behind-the-scenes organizer that many regarded her as William Lloyd Garrison’s chief lieutenant. (Lewis Tappan, Garrison’s opponent in the battle for control of the abolitionist movement, called her “a talented woman with the disposition of a fiend.”) Chapman, who spent her life within the large circle of prosperous abolitionists in Boston, was never ostracized socially because of her activities. But she still felt uncertain, in private, about whether she was betraying her femininity or shortchanging her family. “How heretical, harsh, fanatical, moon-struck, unsexed I am,” she wrote a friend. She worked on, while raising three children. Her husband, who suffered from tuberculosis, gave her his full support. He died in 1842, whispering, “I leave you to the cause.”
The hyperpolitical atmosphere of the era also drew many women into traditional politics, especially in 1856 when John Charles Fremont became the first Republican presidential candidate. Many female veterans of the abolition movement were particularly enraptured with Fremont’s wife, Jessie, the daughter of Senator Thomas Hart Benton and a partner in all her husband’s activities. His supporters cried for “Fremont and our Jessie,” and women’s enthusiasm for the ticket was so intense that traditionalists worried they were going overboard. Julia Lovejoy, a Kansas minister’s wife, tried to deflect “little Misses and young ladies” into appropriately feminine modes of political expression, proposing that they sew “ornamental work for the parlor” with “the names of ‘Fremont and Jessie’ wrought in choicest colors.” Older women, Lovejoy suggested, might retire to the dairy room and “make a mammoth ‘Fremont cheese.’”
“I AM TRYING TO GET UNCLE TOM OUT OF THE WAY”
In 1850, Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law. The act made it easy for Southerners to reclaim former slaves who had fled to the North, or even kidnap free black people and drag them back across the border. It struck terror into the Northern black community. “Many families who had lived in [New York City] for twenty years, fled from it now,” wrote Harriet Jacobs. “Many a poor washerwoman who, by hard labor, had made herself a comfortable home, was obliged to sacrifice her furniture, bid a hurried farewell to friends and seek her fortune among strangers in Canada.” Although only a few hundred black people actually wound up being transported back to slavery under the law, those who did were given names and faces. The newspapers were full of stories about African Americans living in the North who had suddenly been wrested away from their homes and jobs and dragged down south by people who claimed to be their former masters. The stories were so pathetic that even Catharine Beecher was whipped into righteous wrath. “It did my heart good to find somebody in as indignant a state as I am about this miserable wicked fugitive slave business,” Harriet wrote to her sister. “Why I have felt almost choked sometimes with pent up wrath that does no good.” Another Beecher sister, Isabella, was equally roused. “Now Hattie,” she wrote. “If I could use a pen as you can, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is.”
The Fugitive Slave Law helped bring forth Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which did more than any other piece of literature to mobilize Northern sentiment against slavery. It was Stowe’s first novel, and it took several Beecher siblings to get it written. Catharine moved into Harriet’s home to take care of the children while Isabella copied the manuscript. (Calvin Stowe, although extremely supportive, doesn’t seem to have been much practical help.) “I am trying to get Uncle Tom out of the way,” Catharine wrote from the Stowe household. “At 8 oclock we are thro’ with breakfast & prayers & then we send off Mr. Stowe & Harriet both to his room at the college. There was no other way to keep her out of family cares & quietly at work & since this plan is adopted she goes along finely.”
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an extraordinarily powerful book. After decades of fiction about brave but deferential orphans whose fine character wins them a good husband, Beecher’s novel practically exploded with energy and passion. The characters were one-dimensional, but its depiction of the “peculiar institution” is still affecting. It tells the story of Tom, the faithful and religious slave, who is sold down the river by an impecunious owner and passes through the home of the saintly, doomed Little Eva and on to the plantation of the villainous Simon Legree. It was a woman’s book that saw slavery chiefly as a threat to families. When her master tries to sell her child, the slave Eliza is forced to flee across the Ohio River, leaping from ice floe to ice floe, in a scene that made theatrical productions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin a favorite for generations.
The book became the most popular novel of the nineteenth century. Its sequel, Dred, sold over 100,000 copies in a single month—the equivalent of perhaps a million today, given the difference in population. “Mrs. Stowe, who was before unknown, is as familiar a name in all parts of the civilized world as that of Homer or Shakespeare,” wrote Putnam’s Magazine in 1853. It may have been only a legend that Abraham Lincoln called her “the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” But she was definitely the little woman who mobilized the antislavery sentiments of average Americans, particularly other women. On New Year’s Day in 1863, when abolitionists gathered at Boston Music Hall to celebrate the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation, the crowd chanted “Harriet Beecher Stowe! Harriet Beecher Stowe!” until Mrs. Stowe stood up, with tears in her eyes, and acknowledged their cries.
“I CRAWLED ABOUT MY DEN FOR EXERCISE”
Stowe had almost no firsthand knowledge of slavery, but she had access to plenty of abolitionist reports, including one in an antislavery magazine about a woman named Eliza, who carried her daughter to freedom across the frigid Ohio River. The real Eliza had six children. When she learned that she was about to be sold, she took her youngest girl and escaped in midwinter, crossing the Ohio by leaping from one ice floe to the next. Miraculously arriving at the other side, she was sheltered at the home of the Rankin family, one of the most active stations on the Underground Railroad that aided fugitive slaves. Cutting her hair to disguise herself and her daughter as boys, she made her way to Canada. But the following year, she reappeared at the Rankins’, once again disguised as a man and determined to rescue the rest of her family. She made her way back to the old plantation and returned to the river with her five children. They stood in the shallows all day to throw the bloodhounds off the scent. At twilight Mr. Rankin, disguised in women’s clothing, distracted the slave catchers. Eliza and her children were ferried across the river and made their way back to Canada.
Perhaps because stories of female slaves who ran to freedom were relatively rare, they captured the imagination of the public. Ellen Craft, a light-skinned slave in Georgia, became a celebrity in the North when she escaped with her husband, William, by disguising herself as a young white man who was traveling north with his slave. Ellen bandaged her right hand so that hotel registrars couldn’t tell she was unable to write, and pretended to be deaf to avoid long conversations. She wrapped her head, as if she had a toothache, to cover her beardless chin, and donned green glasses. After a series of close calls they arrived in Philadelphia in 1848, where abolitionists sheltered them, and Ellen recovered from a near breakdown resulting from the stress of the trip. Meanwhile, people flocked to shake the hands of the couple who had pulled off such a dramatic flight. When the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, the Crafts feared they might be recaptured, and their friends helped them make their way to England, where they went to school and raised a family. After the Civil War they returned to Georgia, purchased a plantation, and established a school for black children.
Lydia Maria Child helped an escaped slave named Harriet Jacobs turn her experiences into one of the frankest and most astonishing memoirs of African American life in bondage. Jacobs was the granddaughter of a free black woman who made a modest living selling baked goods to her neighbors. Harriet’s owner refused to let her grandmother purchase her freedom, but her mistress did teach the girl to read, and Harriet believed she would be set free her in her mistress’s will. Instead, Jacobs was bequeathed to a three-year-old niece, along with a bureau and worktable. Jacobs, who was sexually harassed by the little girl’s father, eventually ran away. But she was unable to get out of the area and wound up hiding for seven years in an attic in her grandmother’s home. “The garret was only nine feet long and seven feet wide,” she wrote. “The highest part was three feet high, and sloped down abruptly to the loose board floor. There was no admission for either light or air…. It was impossible for me to move in anerect position, but I crawled about my den for exercise.” Finally, she had an opportunity to escape to the North.
Jacobs’s story, like most of the fugitive slave memoirs, was directed at the female heart, which responded to the mother torn from her children, the young girl sullied by a lecherous old man. Child, the editor, wrote that she hoped it would rouse Northern women “to the sense of their duty in the exertion of moral influence on the question of slavery.” Not every writer was as generous with her assistance as Lydia Child. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who Jacobs first approached for help with her story, not only ignored the plea but sent Jacobs’s letter to her former employer, asking for corroboration so Stowe could include it in her own upcoming book.
“WHY CAN’T SHE HAVE HER LITTLE PINT FULL?”
As the nineteenth century wore on, women took to the podium more and more frequently, and for young women reared in reform circles, lecturing began to seem like a perfectly feasible, and exciting, career. “See if Im not a speaker some day,” fifteen-year-old Ellen Wright wrote to a friend in 1855. “See if I dont rouse the people.” Audiences were particularly eager to hear about slavery from black people who they assumed had the inside story. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, a member of a prominent free black family, was employed by the Maine Anti-Slavery Society as a traveling lecturer and attracted large audiences even though her experiences with slavery were almost as remote as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s. Male ex-slaves were common on the lecture trail, and Harriet Tubman made occasional speeches. But Sojourner Truth was the only female ex-slave who pursued a career as a public speaker. Perhaps she was the only American strong enough to overcome the combined insecurities that came with being a woman and being a slave.
Sojourner Truth was born Isabella Van Wagenen, in New York’s Hudson Valley. She was sold for the first time when she was nine, winding up with a farm family named Dumont. She looked upon her master “as a God,” Truth said later, even though he beat her regularly. She ran away from the family shortly before New York abolished slavery. But over the years she sometimes slipped into the kind of dependency and acceptance of abuse common among battered women. At one point she fell in with a religious charlatan named the Prophet Matthias, whom she joined in a bizarre commune that included a fanatic who called himself “the Tishbite,” and a wealthy man whose wife was promptly appropriated by Matthias as his “match spirit.” Isabella, the only African American in the commune, stayed with the group until it broke up and even afterward continued to send Matthias money.
Eventually, Isabella found strength in her own form of religion, which involved the traditional solace of a loving God but also added a sense of strength and specialness. She regularly saw visions and heard voices telling her she had a mission. That sort of thing was not unusual—in the nineteenth century, many women trying to gather the strength to leap over social boundaries were helped along by mystical experiences. Isabella’s visions helped her remake herself into Sojourner Truth, a woman selected by God to travel and preach. Tall, with a low, powerful voice, she became celebrated for her direct and colorful language. Addressing a women’s rights convention in Ohio, she said: “I have heard much about the sexes being equal; I can carry as much as any man, and can eat as much too, if I can get it. I am as strong as any man that is now. As for intellect, all I can say is, if a woman have a pint and man a quart—why can’t she have her little pint full?” In a famous encounter in Indiana, pro-slavery hecklers claimed Truth was really a man—an accusation frequently thrown at women who spoke in public. The hecklers insisted that Truth show her breasts to the women in the audience. Instead, she bared her breasts to the entire room, and, according to the Boston Liberator, told the men that she “had suckled many a white babe, to the exclusion of her own offspring…and she quietly asked them, as she disrobed her bosom, if they, too, wished to suck!” She went to Indiana to hold rallies when a law forbade blacks from entering the state, and when rebel sympathizers threatened to burn down the hall where she was to appear, Truth said, “Then I will speak upon the ashes.”
Truth was one of the few public women of her day who did not pick favorites when it came to the claims of race and sex. “If colored men get their rights and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before,” she said. Not all black women agreed with her. Frances Watkins Harper decided that the women’s rights movement was a luxury reserved for the white and prosperous. “I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America,” she said.
“DOES SHE BELONG TO YOU?”
Elizabeth Jennings was born in New York, the daughter of a free African American tailor. One of her brothers was a businessman in Boston, another a dentist in New Orleans. Elizabeth was a teacher and an organist at the First Colored American Congregational Church. In 1854, she was twenty-four years old and unmarried. On Sunday, July 16, she was rushing to play the organ in church. She and her friend, Sarah Adams, saw a horse-drawn trolley car and held up their hand to stop it. “We were starting to get on board,” Elizabeth said later, “when the conductor told us to wait for the next car.” The one they had stopped did not bear the sign “Colored People Allowed.”
“I told him that I could not wait…he then told me that the other car had my people in it…I then told him I had no people…I wished to go to church as I had been going for the last six months and I did not wish to be detained.” The conductor finally said she could enter, “but remember, if the passengers raise any objections, you shall go out.”
“I answered again and told him I was a respectable person, born and raised in New York, did not know where he was born, that I had never been insulted before while going to church, and that he was a good for nothing impudent fellow for insulting decent persons while on their way to church,” she recounted. “He then said I should come out or he would put me out.” The conductor tried to pull Jennings off the car while she hung on to the window. He and the driver grabbed hold of her arms and dragged her “flat down on the bottom of the platform, so that my feet hung one way and my head the other, nearly on the ground. I screamed murder with all my voice.” As soon as the driver let go to return to his horses, Jennings made another dash into the car. The driver then drove the entire trolley to the nearest station house.
A police officer removed Jennings from the car “and tauntingly told me to get redress if I could.” She took him at his word. A public protest was held the next day, and Frederick Douglass wrote about her case in his newspaper. Supporters hired a young attorney named Chester A. Arthur to represent Jennings in court. Arthur, who later became president of the United States, had been admitted to the bar only two months before. On his advice, she filed suit for $500. The jury awarded her $225—a large sum in that era. “Railroads, steamboats, omnibuses, and ferry boats will be admonished from this, as to the rights of respectable colored people,” wrote the New York Daily Tribune, overoptimistically.
A century before Rosa Parks made history, black women in America repeatedly stood their ground against conductors, ticket-takers, and cabdrivers who tried to turn them into second-class citizens. Frances Watkins Harper had a series of bruising fights on the Pennsylvania trains. Sarah Walker Fossett, a well-known hairdresser in Cincinnati, went to court when a conductor shoved her back on the street as she tried to board a streetcar. Mary Green, the secretary of the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society, refused to get off a white car in Lynn and was “dragged out…in a very indecent manner with an infant in her arms, and then struck and thrown to the ground. Her husband when he arrived on the scene, was also beaten for daring to interfere for her protection.”
The battles went on after the Civil War. In 1865, Harriet Tubman was injured in New Jersey by a railroad conductor who dragged her out of her seat and threw her into the baggage car. At about the same time, Sojourner Truth, working in the Freedmen’s Hospital in Washington, had several run-ins with streetcar conductors who refused to allow her to ride with whites. Truth fought back ferociously, had one conductor fired, and had another arrested for assault and battery. Before her campaign was over, she reported, “the inside of those cars looked like salt and pepper” and conductors were urging black women to “walk in, ladies.” But Truth was painting the brightest picture possible. She had been seriously injured by the row with the conductor, and at seventy years old, she needed a long time to recover. It must have taken her at least as long to get over hearing the conductor demand of her white colleague, “Does she belong to you?”
“IT IS PLEASANT TO LOOK AT—
ALTHOUGH IT IS BLACK”
The emotional burdens on middle-class black women in the nineteenth century were stupendous. The barrier of prejudice separated them from white people of similar taste and education, and they had almost nothing in common with the vast majority of other African Americans, who were still unschooled and rough. They felt compelled to behave with perfect decorum at all times, and it’s no wonder that many of them suffered from migraines. Black women who had the advantage of a good education were expected to use it to improve the race, to teach even if they hated the classroom. Charlotte Forten, a member of one of the nation’s wealthiest black clans, wrote that teaching children made her feel “desperate.…This constant warfare is crushing, killing me.” But she kept at it, eventually traveling south to work with newly freed slaves.
Forten’s story was an excellent example of the pressures that confounded young black women who were financially and educationally among the most fortunate African Americans in the nineteenth century. Her family had been free Americans since long before the Revolutionary War; their lifestyle was described as “uncommonly rich and elegant.” But her father found the racism in American society unbearable and emigrated to England after his wife died, leaving his daughter with her grandparents and aunts and uncles. She was tutored at home because the schools available to blacks were inferior. When she was fourteen years old, she was sent to an integrated school in Salem, where she met all the celebrities of the antislavery movement, including William Lloyd Garrison, Lydia Maria Child, and Maria Chapman. But she felt abandoned by her father and isolated. She referred to her books as her “closest friends” and strove desperately for self-improvement. (One evening, after teaching all day, she “Translated several passages from ‘Commentaries’ and finished the ‘Conquest of Mexico.’”) But she was dogged by a sense of failure. Although she bitterly resented the racism she encountered in middle-class white people, she had imbibed enough of their attitudes to look on most other black people with disdain. “He has such a good honest face,” she wrote of a wounded soldier she had met. “It is pleasant to look at—although it is black.”
When she traveled to the Sea Islands in South Carolina to teach freed black people during the Civil War, at first her students did not know how to treat someone who seemed neither to deserve the deference they gave to white people nor the friendly familiarity with which they treated other African Americans. She eventually won them over with her piano playing, and her work with the ex-slaves seemed to give her the professional fulfillment she always sought. Personally, she was still lonely. She developed a friendship with David Thorpe, a Rhode Islander who was running a local plantation, and the local residents began to gossip about the white Yankee and the black teacher. “Rumor says he more than likes me,” she wrote bleakly in her journal. “But I know it is not so. Although he is very good and liberal he is still an American and w’ld of course never be so insane as to love one of the proscribed race.”
Charlotte Forten must have told herself that marriage was virtually out of the question for her. But when she was forty, she met Francis Grimke, the ex-slave nephew of Angelina and Sarah who the sisters had sent to Princeton. Grimke, a minister, was twelve years younger than Charlotte, but they shared the same intellectual interests and dedication to the service of African Americans. As the son of a white man and black woman, Grimke must also have shared her feeling of not quite belonging to either race. They worked and wrote together, enjoyed the intellectual discussions they had each longed for, and lived happily ever after until Charlotte died in 1914, at age seventy-six.
THE SOUTH
“KEPT MOIST AND BRIGHT
WITH THE OIL OF KINDNESS”
Harriet Beecher Stowe insisted all her life that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not an attack on Southerners—after all, Simon Legree was a transplanted Yankee. But Southerners failed to appreciate the distinction. “Mrs. Stowe betrays a malignity so remarkable that the petticoat lifts of itself, and we see the hoof of the beast under the table,” wrote one critic. Caroline Lee Hentz, a Southern writer, produced a series of novels defending slavery even though her dialogue suggested she had never talked to a black person in her life. In the great tradition of the pro-slavery novel, her books were populated with African Americans who had no desire whatsoever to be free. “It is true they were slaves but their chains never clanked,” she wrote in Marcus Warland. “Each separate link was kept moist and bright with the oil of kindness.”
In the pre–Civil War era, only about 5 percent of white Southern women actually lived on plantations and about half the Southern households owned no slaves at all. Still, slavery defined everything about life in the South, including the status of white women. Southern culture orbited around the strong father figure, simultaneously ruling and caring for his dependents—Mary Hamilton Campbell was struck when her servant Eliza referred to Campbell’s husband as “our master.” Black and white women never seemed to develop any sense of common cause, but every Southern female from the plantation wife to the field slave was assigned a role that involved powerlessness and the need of a white man’s constant guidance. A Southern slave owner named George Balcombe advised a friend to “Let women and Negroes alone. Leave them in their humility, their grateful affection, their self-renouncing loyalty, their subordination of the heart, and let it be your study to become worthy to be the object of their sentiments.”
“THERE IS MANY THINGS TO DO ABOUT A PLACE
THAT YOU MEN DON’T THINK OF”
Southerners compared themselves to the ancient Romans, another proud race of slave owners. Dipping back two millennia, they gave their slaves names like Cato and Cicero and celebrated a culture in which families were strong, men were in charge, and slaves did the physical labor. Women were expected to follow the lead of the Roman matron, who presided over the hearth, took care of the children, and entertained her husband’s guests. Poor women, of course, did not get to stay home—they worked as seamstresses and washerwomen, often to support a family in which the man had run away or failed in his duties as a breadwinner. Slave women were expected to labor with their men in the fields. But plantation wives, who set the tone for Southern culture despite their small numbers, did not do physical housework. Their letters, which are full of reports about gardening, smoking of meat, cooking, and sewing, actually referred to work done by slaves, which the white mistress supervised.
The overwhelming impression of the lives of most plantation wives is of isolation. When Anne Nichols moved to her husband’s Virginia estate, she wrote that she was “absolutely as far removed from every thing…as if I was in a solitary tomb.” Houses were far apart, and Southern mores prohibited ladies from traveling alone, or even with another woman. “It is quite out of our power to travel any distance this summer as we have no gentleman to go with us,” wrote a stranded plantation mistress. Considering how fragile women were presumed to be, planters left them alone on remote farms among hundreds of slaves with stunning impunity. “I presume you have planted all the crop. I have only to add that I wish you good luck and good speed,” wrote one husband in 1790. John Steele, who had been away in Washington for years while his wife ran the plantation, responded to her complaints by writing, “I know you will live disagreeably, the Negroes will be disobedient, the overseer drunken and foolish, but I must rely on your good management.” These casual demands were sometimes interspersed with reminders about the importance of maintaining the standards of Southern femininity, which the wives must have found maddening. “I would willingly follow your advice and not go in the sun if I could avoid it, but there is many things to do about a place that you men don’t think of,” wrote a Louisiana woman to the husband who had left her in charge. The husbands’ absences were not always compulsory. Southern men went to spas to “take the waters” about five times more frequently than women.
“I WOULD NOT CARE IF THEY ALL DID GO”
For all their indignation about Northern abolitionists, Southern women were distinctly less enthusiastic than men about the institution of slavery. Charles Eliot Norton, a Northerner who visited Charleston in 1855, wrote home of the strangeness of hearing principled Southern men defend slavery. “It is very different with the women,” he added. “Their eyes fill with tears when you talk with them about it.” It could be that Norton’s hostesses were simply trying to be accommodating and sympathize with their guest’s harangue. But in their journals and letters, the plantation wives frequently recorded opinions about slaveholding that were at best mixed. “In all my life I have only met one or two womenfolk who were not abolitionists in their hearts—and hot ones, too,” an overseer told Mary Chesnut, a wealthy Carolinian. Although only a handful of Southern women ever spoke out publicly against slavery, there were a number of instances in which women surreptitiously helped their own family slaves escape. A New Orleans slave, who was being sold to Georgia traders, was freed from his handcuffs by his young mistress, who pointed out the North Star to him and told him to follow it. When a Maryland plantation owner died and the slaves were scheduled for sale to pay his debts, the dead man’s granddaughter visited the slave quarters and helped them get away. In Mississippi, a fugitive slave who sought refuge with his former owner was warned by the man’s wife that her husband was planning to turn him in. She gave him money and directions that led him to the North. There is also some evidence that women who owned slaves were more likely to regard them as human beings. They emancipated favored slaves in their wills more frequently than men did and seemed more sensitive to the breaking up of slave families. When they wrote to relatives who had relocated on the frontier, women often inquired by name about the slaves who had been taken west with the settlers, something their husbands and sons almost never did. Some white women developed deep and lasting friendships with female slaves, most often the nurse who had been the family “mammy.” (Susan Davis Hutchinson reported paying a condolence call on a friend upon the death of a slave “who had been more of a mother than a servant to her.”)
But in general, women seemed to dislike slavery mainly because they found it so difficult to handle the slaves. “I sometimes think I would not care if they all did go, they are so much trouble to me,” wrote one Southern housewife in a typical outburst. Sarah Gayle, the wife of an Alabama governor, berated herself for losing her temper with the slaves and wrote in her journal, “I would be willing to spend the rest of my life at the North, where I never should see the face of another Negro.” Just as Northern women complained about the difficulty in getting good servants, the Southern women complained bitterly about their slaves. Absent the incentive of wages, slaves were motivated mainly by the fear of punishment, and although some white women did whip their servants, most did not really have the power to instill physical fear. Mistresses who actually hurt slaves generally did it in the heat of anger, grabbing whatever was available—knitting needles, kitchen knife, fork, or boiling water—and sometimes permanently maiming them.
Southern women constantly pointed out that unlike Northern women, they were responsible for housing and clothing their servants and tending them when they were sick. They frequently described themselves as the real slaves. Caroline Merrick, who admitted that much of the comfort of her life was due to her servants, nonetheless felt the “common idea of tyranny and ill-usage of slaves was often reversed,” and claimed to have been “subject at times to exactions and dictations of the black people…which now seem almost too extraordinary to relate.” Southern women felt they had to go to a great deal of trouble to look after slaves, who did not go to a great deal of trouble for them. But their claims that they wanted to see an end to the system were mostly imaginary, as demonstrated by how miserable they were when the slaves actually left. The housewives did not want to do the work themselves—they simply wanted the people who did it for them to work harder.
If Southern women ever really hated slavery, it was because they feared it was sexually corrupting their men. “Slavery degrades the white man more than the Negro and oh exerts a most deleterious effect upon our children,” wrote Gertrude Thomas of Georgia, who suspected that both her father and husband had black mistresses. Catherine Hammond, who remained loyal to her philandering husband during a scandal involving his conduct with his nieces—her dead sister’s children—did leave him in 1850 because he refused to give up his slave mistress. In an indication of what a Southern male who had been taught to dominate could be like, Hammond blamed the rupture on the “utter want of refinement and tone” in his wife’s family.
“God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system,” wrote Mary Chesnut. Like many of her fellow Southerners, she disliked the institution yet wanted the service. But on the subject of sex, her intense feeling was uncomplicated. The most famous remark in her diaries was that every Southern lady “tells you who is the father of all the mulatto children in everybody’s household, but those in her own she seems to think drop from the clouds, or pretends so to think.”