ERNESTINE AND WILLIAM Rose arrived in New York with both a desire for more freedom and the comfort of knowing that a group of Owenites had formed there. A few years earlier, the Times in England predicted that the American metropolis would soon become “the London of the New World.” In 1836, however, the contrasts between the city the Roses left and the one they settled in remained striking. London had more than 1.5 million inhabitants, New York fewer than 300,000. London stretched for miles in all directions; New York extended only from Manhattan’s Battery at the south end of the island north to Washington Square.1 London ruled not only the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland but also a growing overseas empire; New York was not even capital of the Empire State, much less the nation. But the city “swarmed intense,” as an 1836 guidebook declared, with more than 3,000 new buildings erected in the previous eighteen months.2
By the 1830s, New York had become the United States’ largest and busiest urban center, surpassing its rivals, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Now the “Empire City” dominated many fields: commerce, finance, entertainment, communications, and transport. It assumed a central role in American life. It “is the capital of our country,” the artist and inventor Samuel F. B. Morse asserted in 1831. “We always found something new to see and to admire” in New York, the English traveler Frances Trollope declared, making it highly “desireable as a residence.” New York was a city of immigrants, and coming from England, the Roses joined the largest group to arrive: 75 percent of those entering the United States then came from Great Britain, about 40 percent of them from Ireland.3
Shortly after landing, the couple leased their first New York City apartment, at 484 Grand Street. By the late nineteenth century, this address lay in the middle of New York’s teeming Lower East Side, home to tens of thousands of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. But in 1836, the Jewish population of the city numbered only about 4,000, less than 2 percent of the whole. Mild but pervasive antisemitism existed: the economic crash of 1837 prompted a widely disseminated cartoon featuring a pawnshop run by “Shylock Graspall.” On Grand Street, the Roses would have encountered an immensely diverse population: immigration made New York’s citizenry far more varied than London’s. “The inhabitants of New York … derive their origin from every part of the world,” the 1836 guidebook explained, reproducing the stereotypes of the day:
They exhibit a sort of human patchwork… . Here is the shrewd Yankee; the cool and twice-thinking Scotchman; the warm and never-thinking Irishman; the mercurial and light-hearted Frenchman; the grave Spaniard; the romantic German; the thoughtless African; in short, the natives, and the descendants of the natives, of every nation, and kindred, and tongue on the face of the earth.4
The first New York event after their arrival that impressed itself on Ernestine Rose was Independence Day. “I doubt whether I should ever forget … the first Fourth of July that I spent here,” she recalled. “Why, everything in nature appeared to change and become superior. The sun shone brighter; the trees looked more beautiful; the grass looked greener; the birds sang sweeter … for I viewed them all through the beautiful rainbow colors of human freedom.” The Roses probably attended the celebration in Washington Square Park, “where the 4th of July is principally glorified,” the guidebook advised. “There floats the American banner, with its thirteen stripes and twenty-six stars, on a staff one hundred feet high. …[M]en and women, girls and boys stand the whole day through, in crowds, to behold the troops of the military and listen to the sharp voice of the musketry, and the deep tone of the cannon.” Festivities always included a reading of the entire Declaration of Independence as well.5
In July, the Roses almost certainly suffered from the city’s “fierce summer,” as Trollope called it. They probably arrived with woolen garments better suited to the English climate. Clothing remained scarce and expensive then, geared to year-round wear, since most people could afford only a few outfits. Cotton cloth still cost more than wool; only the wealthy purchased silk. Like other respectable women, Ernestine Rose wore the confining dark-colored dresses of this period, with their high necks, long tight sleeves, small waists requiring corset stays, voluminous skirts, and layers of petticoats. Custom required all adult women to cover their heads with a cotton or linen “day cap,” often ruffled and tied under the chin, topped with a summer or winter bonnet when the wearer left her home. But Rose defied protocol by going bareheaded, at least indoors. One of the first newspaper accounts of her, from December 1837, describes her at a large meeting as “a young, beautiful, and interesting Lady with uncovered head, and fine flowing locks.”6
That newspaper, The Beacon, was the publication of New York’s Anglo-American Owenite community of freethinkers. Owenism had always been a transatlantic movement and many East Coast cities, but especially New York, became havens for British radicals fleeing their nation’s conservative persecutions of the 1820s. “It is owing to the debased English migration that such abominable stuff is circulated thro’ presses devoted to decry Christianity & loosen the bonds of Society and government,” a Gotham merchant complained about them.7 The Roses soon made contact with this radical group, who formed the flourishing society of “Moral Philanthropists,” a name identifying them as non-religious lovers of humanity. Meeting in the newly built, prestigious Tammany Hall, home of the Democratic Party, they drew “overflowing houses” interested in their debates on religion and society. The 1836 New York guidebook enumerated 150 houses of worship in the city before adding that “besides these religious societies, there is a congregation of Atheists who meet regularly on Sundays… . The Atheist sneers at the Christian; while the Christian, on the contrary, descends from his dignity to blast the Atheist.” In addition to publishing the weekly Beacon, this group maintained libraries and bookstores dedicated to free-thought writings, as well as sponsoring lectures, debates, and dinners. They welcomed the Roses into their circle.8
Within a few months of her arrival in New York, Ernestine Rose plunged into political action for women. Befriended by the older men who formed the core of the Moral Philanthropist society, she followed the lead of one of them, Judge Thomas Herttell, a well-known champion of free thought. The sixty-five-year-old Herttell had sought for years, unsuccessfully, to remove New York State’s religious laws, which excluded all non-Protestants from government service or being witnesses in lawsuits, mandated beginning legislative sessions with prayer, and compelled a religious sabbath. A week after the Roses arrived in New York, Herttell introduced a proposal to the Albany state legislature giving married women the right to own property. Current Anglo-American laws made a husband “upon marriage entitled to all the goods and chattels of the wife,” as well as her wages, inheritances, and custody of any children. A wife had no corresponding share in her husband’s possessions. Despite her accented English and unfamiliarity with the city’s streets, the twenty-six-year old Ernestine Rose went door-to-door through lower Manhattan to gather names on a petition supporting Herttell’s bill. “After a good deal of trouble I obtained five signatures,” she recalled. “Some of the ladies said the gentlemen would laugh at them; others, that they had rights enough; and the men said the women had too many rights already.” Rose remained immensely proud of this activism and referred to it repeatedly as the beginning of an American women’s movement.9
Property ownership might seem like an odd cause for an Owenite socialist to embrace, but it went to the heart of Rose’s belief in justice and equality under law. As a newlywed who earned income from selling perfumed products and who might still have had some of her mother’s legacy, she may well have wanted to protect her own property rights—even from William, who she might not yet have realized was “a law unto himself.” At the same time that she worked for married women’s property rights, she also spoke frequently in favor of a “community of property.” Most socialists living in capitalist societies have had to hold money-making jobs. However, although many New York freethinkers supported Owen’s socialism, a sizable number did not. Barely a year after she arrived in the United States, Rose began debating the paid Moral Philanthropist lecturer Benjamin Offen, on whether private or communal property was more conducive “to the happiness of mankind.” Offen, from the same generation as Herttell, opposed socialism and advocated free thought so singlemindedly that an associate compared listening to him to “dining daily on mutton.” He and Rose debated at Tammany Hall for thirteen weeks, from June to October 1837. Although they agreed on Owen’s maxim that the “accidental circumstances” of birth determined people’s religion and character, they differed on property ownership. Offen argued that “Mr. Owen’s system is not adapted to promote happiness.” Rose rebutted that “society may be improved by the few enlightened, and then rendered happy by a community of property,—which would destroy all that baseness on which much of trade and private property is based.”10
The Beacon’s first mention of Ernestine Rose did not use her name, instead calling her “a Polish lady, of great literary attainments, and warmly attached to Robt. Owen’s system.” “Polish” in these years denoted romantic heroism to Americans. “This distinguished and talented lady is a worthy descendant of that noble race whose country gave birth to the brave and generous Koskiusko,” the atheist Boston Investigator wrote a few years later about Rose. “He drew his sword [to support the American Revolution], and flew to the rescue of political freedom. She, with tongue and pen is doing good service in the cause of mental freedom. Her name will be equally cherished by all philanthropists.” Despite the “Polish lady’s manner of delivery, the number of facts introduced, and the many important isolated truths, which she stated,” Rose had difficulty convincing her New York audience of “the evils of private property.” Even though she supported socialism intellectually and morally, both she and William lived by private enterprise. He worked as a jeweler, she sold Cologne water out of the same shop, on Frankfort Street near the city’s center. They lived above the store and had moved there when their first one-year lease expired.11
Knowledge about their wares comes from a unique article in the free-thought Beacon newspaper, edited by Gilbert Vale. Vale, like Offen, had come from England to New York, where he taught navigation and mathematics before helping found the Moral Philanthropist society. He edited The Beacon from 1837 to 1846 and showered Ernestine Rose with praise throughout his years there. He mentioned “the Polish Lady” at least seven times in 1837, publicized her speeches, and lauded her “great literary attainments,” her “enlightened” views and “liberal” sentiments, and called her “young, beautiful, and interesting.” In March 1838, he used her last name for the first time, printing a piece on “Mrs. Rose and Cologne Water.” This prodded readers to patronize the Roses’ store and buy her products. Praising Rose as “an interesting Polish lady of education and great accomplishments … already partially known … from the part she had taken in some liberal public meetings,” he touted her “genuine” cologne as “infinitely superior to what is sold in New York.” “She therefore boldly challenges comparison, and invites inspection, and thus takes a useful and honorable position, which deserves to be crowned with success,” he added, before giving the store’s address and reporting that “Mr. Rose … repairs jewelry, watches, ornaments, and trifles, which nobody else thinks of… . Our fancy friends should call and see.”12
Although The Beacon published many paid advertisements, this was the only piece specifically recommending a business printed in the newspaper’s nine-year history. Part of Vale’s motive may have been the financial hardship the Roses probably suffered after the economic crash of 1837, since William Rose, an accomplished silversmith, now resorted to repairing “trifles.” But why did Gilbert Vale so favor Ernestine Rose, giving her free publicity and praising her with such warmth?
As an attractive, respectable, youthful married woman who spoke in public, Rose was unique in free-thought circles. Vale touted her as a worthy exemplar of his movement. Like most male freethinkers, Vale believed American women to be more “bound” by “the chains of superstition” than men, more “attracted to the priests, by whom they are controlled, and sometimes abused.” Both Frances Trollope and Alexis de Tocqueville confirmed this view, Trollope writing that she “never saw or read of any country where religion had so strong a hold upon the women.”13 There had been one other prominent female freethinker who lectured in the United States: Frances Wright from Scotland. But by the time Ernestine Rose came on the scene, “Fanny” Wright was notorious as an immoral, scandalous figure, denounced as “the Red Harlot of Infidelity” and “a crazy, atheistical woman.”14
An orphaned heiress fifteen years older than Rose, Wright became an Owenite in 1824. She founded her own interracial commune in Nashoba, Tennessee, which soon failed. She then worked with Robert Dale Owen, Owen’s son, publishing the Free Enquirer newspaper, lecturing frequently, and moving to New York in 1829. She turned a former church into an Owenite Hall of Science that seated 1,200 and spoke there weekly for more than a year. Initially Wright met with tremendous success. Her coherent Owenist philosophy, which explained the oppression of workers, women, and society in general by blaming religion, capitalism, and ignorance, inspired the short-lived Workingmen’s Party in New York City. But in 1830, Wright abruptly left the United States. Pregnant out of wedlock, she lived privately in Paris after marrying her child’s father, Phiquepal d’Arusmont, and ended her Owenite connections. When she returned to New York in May of 1836, just as the Roses arrived in the city, she resumed lecturing but had lost her old power. She was chased from the stage by men throwing stink bombs, hammering the floor with their canes, and shouting curses at her.
Gilbert Vale almost certainly wanted to spare Ernestine Rose such attacks by calling her “a Polish lady” and not using even her last name until 1838. But attacks on any female freethinker who attempted to speak in public occurred anyway. In December 1837, Rose left the friendly precincts of Tammany Hall and attended a large meeting in the evangelical Broadway Tabernacle on improving primary public school education. Discussion soon focused on whether the New Testament should remain part of the curriculum. A minister fulminated against “infidels” who wanted to remove religion from the schools, denouncing them as “abominable” and “blasphemous” opponents who “were industriously disseminating the horrible opinions that in proportion as we renounced God, despised virtue, trampled on morals, and violated all the finer sensibilities of our race, so were we free.” Ernestine Rose, bareheaded, stood to reply. Saying that “it was very painful to her, being a woman and a foreigner, to intrude upon the audience,” she asserted that a “desire to propagate knowledge and truth without mystery, mixture of error, or the fear of man” induced her to ask the minister a question about “his remarks on infidelity.” She was instantly shouted down. Three women screamed “Infidel, Infidel,” “Tammany Hall,” and “put her out,” while men hissed and hooted. The minister quieted the crowd and Rose asked if he would debate her. He replied that he “had always been taught, never to fight with a lady.” He was applauded; Rose continued to receive “hisses and groans.”15
Male freethinkers also met with extreme disapproval in this period. Abner Kneeland, editor of the atheist Boston Investigator, was convicted of blasphemy in 1838 and sent to prison for making an equivocal statement about God’s existence. (Rose denounced his imprisonment at Tammany Hall.) Freethinkers were routinely called “infidels” and harshly condemned. “If the principles of Infidelity continue to prevail, as they did now, we must perish and should deserve it,” the minister who opposed Rose declared. Believers charged infidels with all sorts of immorality and vice, arguing that without religion, the innate “depravity of human nature” would lead to “floods of dissipation.” An 1824 denunciation of “Characteristics of Modern Infidelity” in a Christian newspaper claimed that “The bloated countenances of the victims of intemperance and crime, which crowd the halls of Free Inquiry, give us an index … of the kind of instruction to which they listen… . There will be found the drunkard, the gambler, the libertine, herded together in a fellowship of iniquity.” Accused of all sorts of sins, infidels were also blamed for everything Christians objected to in the modern world, beginning with the French Revolution. “They are atheists, socialists, communists, red Republicans, Jacobins on one side,” went a blast from 1838, “and the friends of order and regulated freedom on the other. In one word, the world is the battle-ground, Christianity and Atheism the combatants, and the progress of humanity the stake.” A Massachusetts newspaper labeled the entire city of New York as a place “where infidelity openly stalks abroad, boasting of its power and of its deluded and accumulating numbers.”16
Female freethinkers received even harsher criticism, since in their case sexual immorality became added to the charges against them. “Infidel” literally meant “unfaithful,” signifying someone who did not believe in Christianity. But the word also carried the additional meaning of sexual promiscuity when applied to married persons, especially women. Female virtue had always been closely connected to sexual chastity and fidelity; in the early nineteenth century, this connection strengthened. Western culture viewed women primarily through a sexual lens. Routinely called “the sex” or “the fair sex” in this period, they were assumed to have a great deal of erotic power over men. This argument became a standard justification for keeping them out of political life. “The Fair Sex—Excluded by necessity from participation in our labours, since the presence of women would make us slaves, and convert the temple of wisdom to that of love,” a US politician toasted in 1825. “The hearts of your readers will shudder,” the Christian Advocate and Journal wrote about an 1828 New York freethinker meeting, “when they learn that fifty or sixty ladies have so far divested themselves of the fear of God, the respect for their characters, and that jewel which alone ornaments their sex [modesty], as to attend these lectures, where they are taught … to ridicule the Bible, that ‘they may learn chastity from Lot’s daughters.’ ” Lot’s daughters got their father drunk and had sex with him—a reference familiar to Bible readers. Such extremism in describing women simply sitting in a freethinker audience typified the hysteria of this era, which equated women’s lack of religious belief with sexual infidelity and moral corruption. “When a female undertakes to ridicule religion,” a contemporary wrote, “it is one of those marks of depravity that carries with it the most unnatural and odious idea in nature.”17
Neither Ernestine Rose’s probity nor Gilbert Vale’s protection prevented others from attacking her morals and conflating her with Frances Wright. “A new Fanny Wright has sprung up in New York,” the Connecticut Courant reported with gleeful inaccuracy; “Mrs. Rose, a Polish woman, divorced from her husband, doubtless with sufficient reason, is lecturing Sunday evenings at Tammany Hall. She is opposed to marriage, and all such monopolies, and carries leveling doctrines to their utmost extent.”18 Such charges contributed to Rose’s decision not to raise the issue of marriage until much later in her career.
Ernestine Rose and Frances Wright d’Arusmont met in 1839, when they spoke at a benefit for Benjamin Offen, who had fallen on hard times. The two women had a complex relationship. Rose would have naturally admired a freethinking Owenite woman who lectured publicly, but Rose’s heroes, the Owens, had been deeply offended by Wright d’Arusmont. She helped edit the Boston Investigator in 1837–38 and in its pages accused Robert Dale Owen of defrauding her. He replied that this ended “what once was friendship” between them because of “the deep injustice she has done me.” In 1844, Robert Owen and Frances Wright d’Arusmont found themselves on shipboard together en route to America. “I regreted to hear that Madm. D’Arousmond came on the same Boat that you was [sic throughout]. I know it must have been unplasent to you, she has an invateret spite amounting almost to vengence against you and your family,” Rose wrote Owen, in her poor English spelling. “I think she is a woman of a good deal of book-learning but of very smale mind,” Rose concluded. In later life, however, Ernestine Rose paid tribute to her predecessor and acknowledged her influence. “Frances Wright was the first woman in this country who lectured and wrote on the equality of the sexes,” Rose declared in 1860.
It was a Herculean task, the ground was wholly unprepared, all the elements were antagonistic, and consequently she received the reward of all noble reformers in the avant-guard of a good cause—slander, abuse, and persecution—yet her agitation shook the time-hardened crust of conservatism and prepared the soil for the plough… . In 1837, another woman [Ernestine Rose, speaking modestly in the third person] took up the work where she left off.19
Rose’s early debates with Benjamin Offen seem to have created a bond between them. In addition to speaking at his 1839 benefit, she collected donations for him when he required more help from 1843 to 1845. She and William delivered these funds to the elderly freethinker so that he could continue his lecture tours. Offen had originated the central annual event in US radical circles in these years: the commemoration of Thomas Paine’s birthday on January 29. Honored surreptitiously by London dissidents, this celebration had been transplanted by Offen to the United States in 1825. By then, evangelical Christian revivalism was replacing eighteenth-century Enlightenment Deism and free thought, which came to be seen as old-fashioned as well as “ungodly.” Paine’s Common Sense and his role in sparking the American Revolution had been largely ignored because of his later Age of Reason, in which he opposed all organized religions, but especially what he labeled “the Christian Mythology.” “All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit,” Paine declared in this 1794 treatise. “It took a brave man before the Civil War to confess he had read the Age of Reason,” Mark Twain remembered. The opinions that led believers to denigrate Paine endeared him to the Roses. In addition, Paine had been a hero to their “father,” Robert Owen, who named his newspaper The Crisis in homage to Paine’s pamphlet of the same name and who shared Paine’s Deism and Enlightenment ideals. Thomas Paine joined Owen in the Roses’ pantheon of heroic radicals. Throughout her long life, Ernestine Rose lauded Paine, although she wished he had been born at a warmer time of the year.20
The yearly celebrations of Paine’s birthday on January 29 led Ernestine Rose to influence the New York radical movement rather than just participate in its events. She came to the fore as a pioneer for women’s equality over the Paine activities. In 1839, William Rose was invited to “the dinner in the afternoon, to which ladies were not admitted” while his wife was asked to join “the ball in the evening.” Both Roses declined to participate at all, Ernestine remarking that “I thought Paine’s Rights of Man did not exclude women.” She added that if the hosts prevented women from dining, then they “may as well have the ball without them.” Meanwhile, she would work to “inspire” the other women “to have sufficient self-respect” not to attend as well. The Roses then organized an alternate Paine celebration that included women equally. This successful event led the other group to discard their “ ‘old English’ exclusive style,” and in 1840 “a large hall was taken, and we had a very fine party of men and women, young and old,” Rose remembered.21
Ernestine Rose first became central to the New York Paine celebrations in 1840 and remained integral to them until they ended twenty-one years later with the Civil War. She helped set a new tone for her first dinner, “which discarded that stiffness and reserve too prevalent in many of the fashionable meetings for amusement,” the Boston Investigator reported. Rose assisted the evening’s president and then gave the first speech (which was not recorded) “in a ready, extemporaneous and eloquent manner.” She went on to sing a song and offer three standard free-thought toasts: to “the march of improvement,” Robert Owen, and “reformers.” William Rose also sang and proposed three more original toasts, the first a qualified salute to the United States: “Our country—While we give it our patriotic support, let it not be at the sacrifice of that philanthropy and justice due to all mankind as brethren.” The second was for “freedom to the slave,” the third to Paine:
The philosophic Thomas Paine,
Who wrote his “Common Sense” so plain,
His “Crisis” in a trying time,
His “Rights of Man” ’gainst royal crime,
His “Age of Reason” ’gainst the priest,
Has thus Columbia’s sons released.22
Although Ernestine Rose spoke at this Paine dinner, she lectured very infrequently from 1839 to 1843, much less often than in the previous two years. Nor did she join a US branch of Owen’s Association of All Classes of All Nations (AACAN) organized by her friend Lewis Masquerier in 1840. The most likely reason for this hiatus from public activities was childbirth. Although Rose remained extremely reticent about her private life, she later assured an American interviewer that she did not lecture “to the neglect of her home duties, but only as she found the time to spare from her household and maternal cares, Mr. Rose aiding and encouraging her by every means in his power.” She confided more to her French interviewer, saying that she gave birth to “two children, whom she cherished, nursed with her own milk, and had the sorrow of losing at a very young age.” Public records for these babies and their deaths do not exist, but in this period, births occurred at home and registration often depended on individual choice. Although Rose never publicly mentioned her children again, she spoke movingly in 1852 about such losses:
When our little ones are removed by death from our care and affection, we feel most keenly our ignorance, and long to know more about the laws of health. Woman might be physician to her self and her children. But the medical schools are closed against her; she is denied the advantages granted to men, for obtaining the knowledge of these things, more necessary if possible to her than to the other sex.
In addition, Rose wrote Robert Owen in 1844 that her health had been “very bad.” “I had several quite severe attacks of depression of mind,” she informed her “dear Father,” “Mr. Rose wishes me to go to Washington, he and our friends think that the change of climate, scenery and society will be beneficial to me.”23
The Roses made a number of good friends within the US radical community. She became especially close to J.[osiah] P.[aine] Mendum, publisher of the atheist weekly newspaper the Boston Investigator. Ernestine Rose introduced him to her “intimate friend,” Elizabeth Munn, whom she taught “to believe in the principles of Free Thought, and also in the large sphere of womanly activity.” The couple married in the Roses’ apartment in 1847 and named their son Ernest after her. The Roses also socialized often with James Thompson, who helped organize the Paine banquets and founded the New York Chess Club in 1839. When he died in 1870, Ernestine Rose wrote that “he was our oldest and most intimate friend in New York.” She was also close to Dr. William Wright, a fellow freethinker. They agreed that whoever lived longer would attend the other’s funeral to make sure that no clergyman interfered with the secular ceremony. Others can no longer be traced, like the person who later wrote that “Mrs. Rose informed me that there was a sociable held at her house once a week, at which quite a number of young people attended, and gave me an invitation to come to the next meeting. I did.”24
In addition to mentioning friends in her 1844 letter to Robert Owen, Rose discussed “the community of Skaneateles,” an Owenite venture the Roses supported and hoped to join. Established near the town of the same name in the Finger Lakes region of central New York State, the settlement had been founded in 1843 by John A. Collins, a leading anti-slavery agent who converted to Owenism. Ernestine Rose addressed this new commune in its first year, urging “all here present who feel with me” that “the noble spirit of universal philanthropy is here to destroy the narrow-minded selfishness” to “come forward with the money” to support the project. As in many communes, money caused divisions from the start, since Collins wanted the property to be collectively owned, while Rose and others preferred investors to hold the land themselves. Rose prevailed and Skaneateles succeeded for about two years.25
Around ninety members lived on the 300-acre property, the men farming, running a sawmill, and building an aqueduct; the women raising the community’s children, sewing clothes, and cooking. Collins issued “Articles of Belief and Disbelief” mandating not only the familiar Owenite goals of no religion, no government, and “new moral marriage,” which allowed for separations and new unions when the spouses “can no longer contribute to each other’s happiness,” but also vegetarianism. Meat-eating, “together with the use of all narcotics and stimulants,” should be “renounced as soon as possible.” Ernestine Rose defended Skaneateles in speeches at least six times in Boston during the spring of 1844. She also visited the community that September and lectured, taking “a log for her stand” and “dwelling particularly on the advantage of always keeping the great object for which we came together, before us,” the group’s newspaper, The Communitist, reported.26
Trouble soon tore the commune apart, however. The diet caused problems, with one group subsisting only on “boiled wheat, rice and Graham mush, without seasonings of any kind,” while criticizing the others for eating “dead creatures.” Also, some members had affairs, “which caused considerable gossiping.” Rose and others blamed John Collins. He “is not the man for so great an undertaking,” she wrote Owen in December 1844. “Some of the other members do not understand the first rudiments of the social science and the rest are moral cowards though good men and thus become tools of the more designing.” Ernestine and William Rose never went to live at Skaneateles and the community formally ended in January 1846. It was the last Owenite commune in the United States.27
Rose’s trip to Boston in the spring of 1844, when she was thirty-four, prompted the first detailed description of her appearance and elocution, showing that by then she had become an accomplished lecturer. The Boston Investigator praised her “extraordinary powers to enchain the minds of an audience” and wrote that
her personal appearance wins the attention and respect of her hearers, the moment she rises. Her head is marked with traits of high intellectual dignity. The lines of her countenance express gravity and deep thought, mingled with much gentleness, and the beautifully expanded forehead towers above them, a fit abode for the lofty intellect dwelling therein. Her eye is large and beaming, and, in moments of inspiration, dilates with wonderful lustre. Her voice is very pleasant—full, rich, and varied; and her gestures singularly graceful, expressive, and appropriate.28
From then on, Ernestine Rose devoted herself to public speaking, initially for the free-thought movement.
That movement, however, had fallen on hard times. Flourishing in the mid-1830s, when the Roses arrived in New York, the Moral Philanthropists suffered financially during the economic crash of 1837. A few years later they could no longer afford to rent Tammany Hall and moved their meetings to smaller and smaller venues. Their free-thought bookstore closed in 1839 as business declined and their newspaper, The Beacon, faltered, becoming a monthly in 1844 before folding in 1846. The national Moral and Philosophical Society failed in 1841. The New York Owenites spent “their time more in discussing theories and abstract principles, than in using the means at their command to reduce them to practice,” a visitor complained. Similar problems also prevailed in Britain. Robert Owen’s extravagance had caused the collapse of his commune, Queenswood, and led to a revolt against him in 1844. Owen then visited the United States, which prompted the Roses to help organize a national convention of freethinkers in New York to celebrate his presence and try to revive the movement.29
The Infidel Convention, as it was advertised, opened at the Coliseum on Broadway with 500 freethinkers in attendance on May 4, 1845. With the group’s typically provocative defiance of Christian practice, the meeting assembled on a Sunday morning. The seventy-four-year-old Robert Owen, eternally optimistic, gave the first address, asserting that “if this Convention should now plant itself upon the true ground of universal charity and human brotherhood, it would carry the whole world along with it.” Ernestine Rose, equally positive, followed Owen. “She could not but hope for a brighter day, when she saw a body of free men and women, thus assembling in a public meeting and carrying with them so intelligent and enthusiastic an audience as the present,” a newspaper reported. “What had been stated by Mr. Owen needed nothing added thereto. … Enough was said to produce a new state of society—enough—more than enough had been said by him to produce universal reform—more, indeed than could be found in the united libraries of the whole world.”30
The convention then announced the names of 176 delegates from fourteen states, the District of Columbia, and Europe. In addition to Ernestine Rose, five other women represented their states, but none besides her spoke or served on committees. The group discussed grandiose ways to expand the influence of free thought, from building new libraries to hiring more lecturers, but without additional funding such plans remained pipe dreams. Both Owen and Rose spoke again that first evening, Owen reasserting that knowledge and charity could change the world. Rose expanded her previous argument for education into a specific endorsement of socialism, maintaining that “so long as the precept exists, Everyone for himself, and some supernatural power for us all,” the world would remain in a sorry state. “Those who create the most, get the least; those who build the largest castles, often have not where to lay their heads: and then we say that man is bad by nature, because if he has not a crumb to eat, he will take some from his neighbor,” she concluded. Samuel Ludvigh, editor of Die Fackel (The Torch), a German-language free-thought newspaper published in New York, spoke for the next hour in German. He represented a growing immigrant presence in the city. Just as British radicals had fled to New York in the 1820s because of their government’s persecution, so too Germans arrived in the 1840s, providing the city with a new wave of radical reformers and freethinkers.31
The next day, the convention ratified its elaborate constitution but spent the bulk of its time debating whether it should include the word “infidel” in its title. After hours of discussion, during which she had not spoken, Ernestine Rose argued that the group should adopt the epithet:
It seems that the name given us in derision, is, after all, the best, if only for this reason, to show the world that even nicknames can be lived down, or made respectable and fashionable. … We are not unfaithful to our principles. … She did not wish to wear the name; but if given to us, let us adopt it, and make our enemies ashamed of the hour they ever applied it to us.
“Infidel” presented the same quandary to nineteenth-century freethinkers that the word “queer” did to late-twentieth-century gay men and lesbians: should the community embrace an initially insulting name?32 The final title the freethinkers chose, “The Infidel Society for the Promotion of Mental Liberty,” did not resolve the conflict. A number of members, including Gilbert Vale, defected, and wrangles over the issue tore the society apart. A convention the following year drew only thirty-four members and the final one, in 1847, demonstrated that the Infidel Society had melted away. “The third convention?—It was a shadow of the first,” wrote Ludvigh in Die Fackel. “The gathering was very small and the valuable words of the speaker Mme. Rose spoken in the empty spaces of the hall. No spark of enthusiasm—the solemnity was like that after a lost battle. No Germans to be seen, and sadly I sat there, a silent observer of the event.”33
Ernestine Rose remained committed to free thought for the rest of her life. In the 1840s, she continued to weave the subject into her speeches on other topics, no matter how controversial it proved. At the end of a three-hour lecture to the New England Social Reform Society in 1844, she told women “never to enter a church again. Countenance them not. They oppress you. They prevent progression. They are opposed to reason.” Even this liberal audience had trouble with such sentiments, but Rose stood firm:
This appeal burst upon a listening throng like a thunderbolt and they were instantly lashed into the wildest excitement of fury and applause. … [T]he speaker was assailed with a shower of hisses. Mrs. R. [sic] waited calmly until the tumult had subsided, when she again repeated the injunction, and again the tumult rose still higher; and the repetition and uproar went on until the excited multitude, unable longer to keep up the din, were compelled, through exhaustion, to hear the daring heresy in silence.34
Ernestine Rose also continued to love Robert Owen. Owen’s optimism, which seemed ridiculous to many, rested on his hard-won and unshakable conviction that his dissident views about the world were correct. People would be better off if religion did not handicap them, if they had decent schools and jobs, if society’s wealth were more evenly distributed. On his deathbed, in 1858 at the age of eighty-seven, a minister asked him if he regretted wasting his life in fruitless efforts. Owen replied, “My life was not useless; I gave important truths to the world, and it was only for want of understanding that they were disregarded. I have been ahead of my time.”35
Rose did not blindly agree with Owen on everything. When he became a devotee of spiritualism in the 1850s, she commented that although “I never hear the name of Robert Owen, but I feel rising within me a sentiment amounting almost to reverence for that noble man,” she would only follow him on matters of fact, not his views of a supposed afterlife. “If Robert Owen should tell me that he saw a mouse pull a three-decker [building] through the streets of New York, I would say, ‘I cannot believe it.’ ”36 After the failure of Skaneateles, Rose no longer shared Owen’s conviction that a model community could change the rest of society. But she remained convinced that the world was wrong in many ways and that those who saw the truth needed to champion and work for their beliefs in the face of ridicule, hostility, and skepticism.
This passion grounded her work for the causes that next consumed her energies: the emancipation of women and anti-slavery. “Politically, Mrs. Rose is a radical; that is to say she believes that all members of the human race should enjoy complete freedom, consequently. … [S]he uses all her reason and energy to combat black slavery and women’s subordination,” her French interviewer concluded in 1856. From the early 1840s, Rose began to speak out in favor of women’s freedom and equality. In her 1843 speech at Skaneateles, she “made a spirited appeal to the women, respecting their degradation and rights. It was a most effective appeal, and met its response in the tears of the whole audience.” The text of that speech has disappeared. Only a few months later, however, near the end of Rose’s lengthy 1844 talk to the New England Social Reform Society, she made a passionate entreaty to “her sisters”:
What rights have women? Are they not the merest slaves on earth? What of freedom have they? In government they are not known, but to be punished for breaking laws in which they have no voice in the making. All avenues to enterprise and honor are closed against them. If poor, they must drudge for a mere pittance—If of the wealthy classes, they must be dressed dolls of fashion—parlor puppets—female things… . My sisters, speak for yourselves. Tyrants never will willingly relinquish their grasp.37
As a “woman’s rights woman,” Ernestine Rose achieved her greatest success, becoming a leader in the new movement for female emancipation. Her earlier battles for free thought and socialism prepared her for the intense struggle to create a movement for women’s freedom and equality.