7

Dissention, Division, Departure

ERNESTINE ROSE FOUND the 1860s a difficult decade. From 1861 to 1865 the Civil War upended her life, even though she remained in the North and had no male relative or friend engaged in the fighting. The women’s movement voluntarily suspended its meetings for the war’s duration, instead organizing a “Loyal League” to support the Union. Once the war ended, feminists split irrevocably over whether black men should get the vote before them. The free-thought movement continued to decline as the war revived religious devotion. Antisemitism also increased and Horace Seaver, head of the Boston Investigator, published editorials denouncing Jews, which Rose rebutted. Throughout the decade, she became increasingly ill, but periodically recovered. In 1869, the Roses left for Europe to try to restore her health.

Throughout this period, Ernestine Rose continued to work for her principles, ardently supporting women’s rights, anti-slavery, and free thought even under adverse conditions. She actively participated in conventions, wrote numerous letters, and gave many speeches, even though she could no longer manage the extensive tours she had previously undertaken. In 1860, for instance, she triumphed over a hostile Long Island minister who urged the women of his congregation not to attend a lecture of hers. Instead, “the disobedient daughters of Eve” thronged to her talk and refused to leave when she spoke about religion. “Had the minister simply refused to read the notice, and only left me … alone, I don’t think I would have had any audience at all,” Rose wrote in a public letter she titled “The World Moves!” “I would have confined myself to the subject of education, without touching religion … while as it was, I thought as he opened the ball, I would let him dance to his own tune,” she jested. “I have been requested to speak again as soon as they can make arrangements… . They had never heard a woman nor an Infidel speaker before.”¹

Such triumphs encouraged Rose to complete A Defence of Atheism, her short but powerful free-thought credo. First delivered in Boston on April 10, 1861, two days before the declaration of Civil War, this speech was reprinted three times as a twenty-four-page pamphlet by Rose’s friend, Josiah Paine Mendum, publisher of the Investigator. In it, Rose marshaled arguments from science, everyday life, and biblical criticism to prove her case that God does not exist. Rational and logical, but laced through with her trademark sarcasm and humor, A Defence of Atheism intermingled the latest scientific theories with older arguments against religion she had made in earlier years. It is written in the formal masculine voice, using “he” to stand for everyone, and capitalizes both “God” and “Atheism.”²

Rose begins by surveying the sciences. She rapidly concludes that none provides any evidence for the existence of a deity and that all disprove biblical accounts of creation. Geology refutes the possibility that the world was made in six days, since “it requires thousands of ages to form the various strata of the earth.” Chemistry “says that Nothing has no existence, and therefore out of Nothing, Nothing could be made.” Anthropology, illustrated by the missionary/explorer David Livingstone’s recent journeys in Africa, found “civilized, moral, and virtuous” tribes who “have not the remotest idea of a God,” proving that religious belief is not universal. Asking why “man thought or wrote about God at all,” she answers her own question by declaring that people worship because “Ignorance is the mother of superstition… . Before electricity was discovered, a thunder-storm was said to come from the wrath of an offended Deity.”³

Rose then turns to the story of Adam and Eve, using it to show that the God presented in the Bible was not all-knowing, all-powerful, or all-good:

Did God know when he created the serpent that it would tempt the woman, and that she was made out of such frail materials (the rib of Adam), as not to be able to resist the temptation? If he did not know, then his knowledge was at fault; if he did, but could not prevent that calamity, then his power was at fault; if he knew and could, but would not, then his goodness was at fault. Choose which you please, and it remains alike fatal to the rest.

As she continues through the Hebrew Bible, sarcastically deconstructing the story of Noah—“so he [God] destroyed everything, except Noah with his family, and a few household pets. Why he saved them is hard to say”—one hears echoes of the young Jewish daughter arguing with her rabbi father. As a mature atheist, however, Rose had mastered an equally thorough knowledge of the Gospels, which she used to indict Christianity. God “was forced to resort to the last sad alternative of sending ‘his only begotten son,’ his second self, to save” the world. “Did he succeed even then?” she asks rhetorically. “Is the world saved? Saved! From what? From ignorance? It is all around us. From poverty, vice, crime, sin, misery, and shame? It abounds everywhere. Look into your poor-houses, your prisons, your lunatic asylums; contemplate the whip, the instruments of torture, and of death … and tell me from what the world was saved!” Rose concludes this section by arguing that the promise of justice in an afterlife is at best a sham. “If a rich parent were to let his children live in ignorance, poverty, and wretchedness, all their lives, and hold out to them the promise of a fortune at some time hereafter, he would justly be considered a criminal or a madman.”⁴

In the second half of her Defence, Rose justifies Atheism, concluding that atheists are more moral than believers. Countering the standard religious argument that God cannot be understood, she asserts that it is unreasonable “to expect me to believe—blame, persecute, and punish me for not believing—in what you have to acknowledge you cannot understand.” She then argues that the fact that the world exists “does not prove a Creator”; it only shows that contemporary knowledge is deficient. Next, Rose asserts that religion is not “natural.” If “the belief in a God were natural,” she reasons, “there would be no need to teach it. We don’t have to teach the general elements of human nature,—the five senses… . They are universal; so would religion be were it natural, but it is not. On the contrary, it is an interesting and demonstrable fact that all children are Atheists, and were religion not inculcated into their minds, they would remain so.”⁵

Rose then questions the supposed link between religion and morality, which contemporaries took for granted—even the Italian revolutionary Guiseppe Mazzini, for example, who had radical social ideals, declared, “An atheist can have no sense of duty.” Instead, Rose maintains, “Morality does not depend on the belief in any religion. History gives ample evidence that the more belief the less virtue and goodness.” To prove her case, she cites the biblical justifications of slavery used by southern apologists. “Look at the present crisis—at the South with 4,000,000 beings in slavery, bought and sold like brute chattels under the sanction of religion and of God … and the South complains that reforms in the North are owing to Infidelity.” In her conclusion, Rose reverses the religious view of atheists as immoral to argue that religion has made people worse, not better:

Teach man to do right, to love justice, to revere truth, to be virtuous, not because a God would reward or punish him hereafter, but because it is right… . Let him feel the great truth that our highest happiness consists in making all around us happy; and it would be an infinitely truer and safer guide for man to a life of usefulness, virtue, and morality, than all the beliefs in all the Gods ever imagined.

Rose remained satisfied with this essay. Over thirty years later, when she was eighty-two, a friend wrote, “She gave me a copy of her ‘Defence of Atheism,’ and said she had nothing to alter.”⁶

In A Defence of Atheism, Ernestine Rose limited herself to her topic, but in real life she attempted to unite her three causes of free thought, feminism, and anti-slavery. None of these efforts succeeded. Despite Rose’s muting of free thought at feminist meetings, many women’s rights activists continued to shun her because of her lack of religious belief. “There are so few who dare to be friendly to her,” feminist Martha Wright wrote her sister Lucretia Mott in 1858. “I should feel better satisfied, if I had taken more pains to see Mrs. Rose,” Mott replied. “There is too much truth in thy remarks. It is too bad for such a woman, to have to feel neglected.” Five years later, little had changed. “My frd. Erneste. L. Rose has suffered, from the bigotry of very frds,” Mott wrote her cousin in 1863. “As to Mrs. Rose’s … atheism—people will cry ‘Mad dog’ when doctrines or sentiments conflict with their cherished ideas.” Mott repeatedly hoped that the time would come when Rose, Owen, and other freethinkers would be appreciated and “the denunciations of bigoted Sectarianism fall into merited contempt.”⁷

During these same years, freethinkers resisted supporting anti-slavery, which Rose passionately championed. In January 1862, she sent a toast to the Thomas Paine celebration in Boston calling for President Lincoln to “awaken from the lethargy in which the opiate of slavery has so long kept him” and to remove the “cancer” of slave ownership from the nation. A regular correspondent wrote the Investigator objecting to “E. L. Rose and others” prodding the newspaper “to do service for abolitionism.” He did not want Infidels to be “drawn into the Christian error of attributing the war to slavery” and thought that “long will be the fight if abolitionism is the Northern object.” Anti-slavery was an overwhelmingly Christian movement. Its religiosity inspired the most popular war song in the North, Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Written in 1861 to the tune of “John Brown’s Body,” the anthem merged anti-slavery with Christianity in both its chorus of “Glory, glory, hallelujah” and many of its verses:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored,

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

…………………………………………… .

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,

With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me:

As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,

While God is marching on.⁸

At the Infidel Convention in 1862, however, Ernestine Rose tried to sever that connection by presenting an anti-slavery resolution: “Whereas, Religion is the primary cause of all slavery … it is the bounden duty of every lover of freedom and justice … to aid in emancipating the slaves wherever found, and of whatever color.” Despite Rose’s prestige—the Investigator wrote that “her attendance at the Convention will greatly contribute to its interest”—a heated debate ensued, although the resolution eventually passed. Some objected to “Infidels meddling with the slavery question”; others “regarded the discussion of slavery as irrelevant”; still others opposed “running the country into a prolonged civil war, where twenty-six millions of people are undergoing all the miseries and horrors of war, for the freedom of three and a half millions of aliens, and foreigners by nature, and who too are undoubtedly of an inferior quality.” Rose herself knew she was correct and “defended her resolution as being the legitimate result of Infidelity. What is her infidelity? UNIVERSAL MENTAL FREEDOM! How can slavery exist with universal mental freedom which wages unceasing war upon all oppression?” Her heightened tone came from both her sense of righteousness and her unwillingness to compromise on such an important issue.

Free thought continued to decline. “The war has nearly broken up our organization, or rendered it inoperative,” the group’s president Horace Seaver lamented in 1863. The movement lost a prominent adherent when Joseph Barker abandoned free thought to return to religion. Barker had first come to the United States in 1851, where he actively supported both anti-slavery and free thought, and Rose had once praised him as “the man for us.” But the two had no further contact after Barker returned to both Christianity and England.⁹

Just before the war and during its early years, Ernestine Rose fought especially hard for the controversial topic of abolition and the even more unpopular cause of integration. “Mrs. Rose will come” to a series of meetings in upstate New York in 1861, Susan B. Anthony wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “she never felt so strong—to speak on Anti-Slavery.” Riots erupted when those meetings convened. Even in the North, most white Americans considered blacks inferior and opposed freeing the slaves. In Albany, when Rose objected to “the [segregation] laws that regulate steamboats, hotels, and public meetings … clamor and confusion rung in the hall, and for a time interrupted the proceedings of the Convention.” Although the mayor called on the police to keep order, hisses, groans, and stamping drowned out the speakers. Abolitionists canceled their anniversary meetings in the spring of 1861 because of the war, but when they convened again in 1862, Rose played an active part. At the American Anti-Slavery Society meeting early that May in New York City, she not only “urged the duty of the Abolitionists to stand firm to their principles and methods of action” but also spoke for “the publication in pamphlet form” of the African American abolitionist William Wells Brown’s address. Rose “considered it the most important speech of the day—excellent as were the others—and she wished it published and laid upon the desks of the Members of Congress, and others, who may still be troubled with the absurd idea that the slaves, if set free, cannot take care of themselves.” She closed by offering to donate money to publish his speech.¹⁰

A few weeks later, Ernestine Rose traveled to Boston to present her abolitionist resolution to the Infidel Convention. She also made a forceful speech at the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, harshly denouncing Lincoln for not having already freed all the slaves. Rose underestimated Lincoln’s political and logistical difficulties: he had won only a scant majority of northern votes in the 1860 election, the North did badly in the first year of the war, and he wanted to prevent the slave-owning border states from joining the Confederacy. As a disunionist, Rose condemned Lincoln’s and Congress’s insistence that the war was only being fought to preserve the Union, not to free the slaves. “Lincoln must answer to the ages for the use of the power he has taken and will not wield aright,” she charged. “If the President cannot move without pushing, push him on. I stand here to push you on.” When Rose questioned the president’s honesty, she was hissed by her fellow abolitionists. By this stage in her career, Ernestine Rose was so accustomed to thinking herself as right and “a minority of one” that she took opposition as a sign of her correctness: “I am proud to think I have said the best thing in the Convention—ecce signum! [behold the proof],” she declared after being hissed. She concluded by re-stating her disunionist principles, maintaining that a real “Union” did not exist, since the North had acquiesced to southern slavery rather than creating “a union based on reciprocity. Union can only be formed, not restored among us.” After this convention, Rose made at least one more anti-slavery speech, in Ellenville, New York, at the end of August.¹¹

Much changed between then and Rose’s next public appearance almost a year later in May 1863. The Confederate army advanced to within twenty miles of Washington, DC. The Union’s victory at Antietam that autumn convinced Lincoln to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, nominally freeing the slaves in the states still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, and allowing the enlistment of blacks into the previously all-white Union forces. The proclamation disappointed Rose and some others for leaving slavery intact in the border states, but both Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison praised the measure for heading in the right direction.

Rose and a number of other feminist abolitionists felt excluded from the war effort. Believing that northern women should pressure the government for immediate emancipation of all slaves and inspired by the male Loyal and Union Leagues that coalesced during these years, Stanton and Anthony created the Woman’s National Loyal League in the spring of 1863. They convened a meeting of over a thousand women on May 14 in New York City. Their goal was to bring women into the public sphere by organizing them to submit mammoth petitions to Congress from every state in the Union to support complete freedom for all slaves. Rose played a major role at this convention, where she spoke frequently and was on its influential Business Committee, which produced the League’s resolutions.¹²

All seven resolutions presented proposed full emancipation for blacks and called on northern women to support the war—except the fifth resolution. It held, “There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political equality of every subject of the Government shall be practically established,” which implied that women, both black and white, and black men, as citizens, should be allowed to vote. This issue occasioned considerable debate, while all the other resolutions passed unanimously. The delegate from Wisconsin stated that although she herself agreed with the resolution, “We all know that Woman’s Rights as an ism has not been received with entire favor by the women of the country, and I know that there are thousands of earnest, loyal, and able women who will not go into any movement of this kind, if this idea is made prominent.” Rose replied, “I, for one, object to throwing women out of the race for freedom. And do you know why? Because she needs freedom for the freedom of man… . Woman, as well as the negro, should be recognized as an equal with the whole human race.” As debate continued, Rose spoke again. Convinced she was correct, she became condescending. “It is exceedingly amusing to hear persons talk about throwing out Woman’s Rights, when, if it had not been for Woman’s Rights, that lady would not have had the courage to stand here and say what she did,” she began. “I think it will be exceedingly inconsistent if, because some women out in the West are opposed to the Woman’s Rights movement—though at the same time they take advantage of it—that therefore we shall throw it out of this resolution.” The measure eventually passed, but not unanimously.¹³

Rose devoted her set speech that evening to a harsh and detailed critique of Lincoln’s conduct of the war, similar to the one she gave a year earlier. Provocatively declaring that she was “not unconditionally loyal to the Administration” since “we women need not be, for the law has never yet recognized us,” she attacked most of the president’s previous policies, from his choice of generals, to not freeing slaves in the border states, to the composition of his cabinet. Showing a detailed knowledge of the government’s military tactics, personalities, and policies, she closed with her unpopular position that emancipation took precedence over union: “Why this hue-and-cry for Union, Union, UNION, which is like a bait held out to the mass of the people to lure them on… . I would rather have a small republic without the taint … of slavery in it… . Our work must be mainly to watch, and criticize, and urge the Administration to do its whole duty to freedom and humanity.” Rose’s views were so extreme and her denunciation of Lincoln so unsparing that Lucy Stone, the convention’s president, rebuked her, declaring that “all the loyal women will agree with me that we owe to the President and the Government … words of cheer and encouragement; and as events occur one after another, our criticisms should not be harshly made.” The Convention then adjourned.¹⁴

The next day, the Business Committee met to create a platform for the League. They resolved to back conscription, to advocate black men’s participation in the fighting, and to organize Women’s Loyal Leagues throughout the nation to support ‘OUR COUNTRY RIGHT, not wrong.’ ” Stanton then proposed a declaration that “our work as a National League is to educate the nation into the true idea of a Republic.” “Considerable preliminary debate, in which many ladies joined, took place on details of form and phraseology,” Anthony reported, and the group finally added the word “Christian” before “Republic.” Ernestine Rose almost certainly took part in this discussion and of course would have opposed the addition, but she remained isolated in her beliefs. Throughout the Convention, Christian doctrine and language predominated. Stanton’s lengthy Opening Address equated civilization with Christianity. All the letters sent to the Convention and almost all the speeches invoked religion. “Our Declaration of Independence was the very first national evidence of the great doctrine of brotherhood and equality which Jesus Christ had taught the world,” Angelina Grimké Weld stated in a typical intertwining of American values with Christendom. The organizers concluded that “A deep religious tone of loyalty to God and Freedom pervaded the entire meeting.” This spirit was in tune with the times. Church membership rose dramatically during the war, as did efforts to christianize the nation. In 1863, the National Association to Secure the Religious Amendment of the Constitution organized, with its goal of rewriting the Preamble so that it read

We, the people of the United States, recognizing the being and attributes of Almighty God, the Divine authority of the Holy Scriptures, the law of God as the paramount rule, and Jesus the Messiah, the Savior, and the Lord of all, in order to form a more perfect union …

The Loyal League’s final goal of endorsing a “Christian Republic” both reflected that religious outlook and ignored women’s rights. None of this spared the League from criticism. “The whole affair brought up vividly before the mind the funny women’s rights conventions of former days,” jeered the New York Herald, adding that the event “has been distorted into an atheistical revolutionary woman’s rights movement under the leadership of Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Ernestine L. Rose.”¹⁵

Two months after this Convention, violence connected to the Civil War erupted in New York City. Prompted by the institution of a draft in mid-July that allowed wealthy men chosen by lottery to either hire a substitute or pay $300 to exempt themselves while poor men had to serve, riots broke out in Manhattan. Mobs of white workers, many of them Irish immigrants, stormed federal buildings, pro-war newspaper offices, and police stations, setting fires and erecting barricades. They especially attacked black New Yorkers, lynching at least ten of them, burning down the Colored Orphan Asylum, and completely overwhelming the city’s police. In these Draft Riots, 120 New Yorkers died. Living at 95 Prince Street, just a few blocks from police headquarters, the Roses would have been near this mayhem. Union army troops, fresh from the Battle of Gettysburg, finally restored order.¹⁶

Simultaneously, Ernestine Rose encountered antisemitism from an unexpected source: the pages of her beloved newspaper, the atheistic Boston Investigator. Antisemitism directed at the ancient Hebrews and their Bible had a long tradition within free thought. Many men of the Enlightenment, including Thomas Paine, reviled the Jews of the Bible and their religion as the chief source of Christian “superstition.” They reserved special scorn for Moses, whose character Paine declared was “the most horrid that can be imagined” since he “committed the most unexampled atrocities that are to be found in the history of any nation.” Rose shared Paine’s opinion of religions as pernicious superstition and she had severely criticized both the God of the Bible and biblical figures in her Defence of Atheism. But she distinguished between the ancient Hebrews who created religion and contemporary Jews, whom she did not write about.¹⁷

Ernestine Rose and the Investigator’s editor, Horace Seaver, had a lengthy and warm relationship. She began reading the weekly Boston Investigator in 1837, the year he started working for the paper. He published Rose’s speeches at the Paine dinners and Infidel Conventions regularly from the 1840s on and printed her letters, usually with her name in the headline. In 1856, he reproduced a unique acrostic poem from a correspondent to “our mutual and noble friend,” Ernestine L. Rose, which despite its heartfelt admiration characterized her as both “God-inspired” and having a “ ‘Jewish’ face.”

Earnestest, bravest, best in speech of womankind,

Right in the face of error—champion of mind

Never faltering—God-inspired, so bold and true,

Excellence, sure, is but a synonym for you!

Significant, and most promising for the race,

To me, is the sight of thy soul-lit “Jewish” face!

I hail thy coming as pledge of the “better day”

Now so much talked about, for which we all do pray,

Erst dreamed of and oft sung by the prophets of old …

Lo! in thee its hopeful dawn we may behold!

Ring out the old, and ring in the better new,

Oh! burst in glory upon our enraptured view,

Selectest of day! Of all that have gone before,

Earnest of blessings, innumerable in store!

In turn, Rose helped raise money for a benefit to aid Seaver in 1858. In her solicitations, she praised his “talents, sound principles, good judgment, refined taste, and gentle spirit” as well as “his disinterested and unremitting labors for over twenty years in our cause.” Seaver warmly thanked “the estimable lady … who manifests in this case what is usual with her, a disposition that delights in contributing to the welfare of others.” Throughout the decades, the newspaper treated its Jewish Infidel correspondents, both Ernestine Rose and the Baltimore man who published as “Philo-Spinoza,” with admiration and respect.¹⁸

But the Investigator combined this regard for individuals with a routine antisemitism that permeated segments of US culture. In 1860, most Americans would never have met any Jews, who numbered only about 150,000 persons in a population of 31.5 million. Jews, however, were generally viewed both as “Christ-killers” and through the lens of Shakespeare’s character Shylock, known for his love of money and hatred of Christians. The Investigator regularly printed crude antisemitic (and anti–Irish Catholic) jokes. A typical one featured Christians pushing a Jew under water. The third time, he says he will convert, so he is then “drowned as a Christian.” The Investigator also published harsh denunciations of the ancient Hebrews, for their “ridiculous customs, murderous propensities, disgusting ceremonies, and determined scoundrelism.”¹⁹

In addition to strengthening Christianity, the Civil War heightened antisemitism. A number of northern newspapers alleged that the “descendants of Shylock” sold goods to the enemy, speculated in gold, and opposed the end of slavery. The most notorious result of these charges was Ulysses Grant’s General Order #11, issued in December 1862, which commanded that “the Jews, as a class” be “expelled” from Kentucky, Tennessee, and the Union-occupied sections of Mississippi “within twenty-four hours” for trading with the Confederacy. Although President Lincoln rescinded this widely criticized order within a few weeks, it signaled an intensification of anti-Jewish sentiments under the pressure of war. Horace Seaver shared these feelings and in 1863 began publishing lead editorials that expanded attacks on the ancient Hebrews to include modern Jews. Rose was roused to reply to one that appeared on October 28, 1863.²⁰

First denouncing the ancient Jews as “about the worst people of whom we have any account, and the poorest guides to follow,” Seaver then turned to “the modern Jews,” expressing relief because they had lost power and were “scattered among other nations, which rendered them comparatively harmless.” He condemned them for “clinging with wonderful tenacity” to their religion with “all its absurd rites and ceremonies,” while maintaining that “neither the Protestants nor Catholics can vie with them in this regard.” Next, Seaver deplored the replacement of a Universalist church in Boston by “a large synagogue,” since Universalism, a Christian denomination that held that all would go to heaven, was “liberal, democratic, equal, and saves the entire race,” while Judaism was “bigoted, narrow, exclusive, and totally unfit for a progressive people like the Americans, among whom we hope it may not spread.”

Ernestine Rose brooded over this editorial for a number of months. She gave her first critical letter the most significant date in the free-thought pantheon: Thomas Paine’s birthday, January 29. Challenging Seaver’s remarks about modern Jews, she teased him by writing, “Mr. Editor, I almost smelt brimstone, genuine Christian brimstone, when I read” your statement that they are unfit for this country. How “would you prevent their spreading? Would you drive them out of Boston, out of ‘progressive America,’ as they were driven out of Spain?” Rose then used her considerable knowledge of contemporary Jewish life in both the United States and Europe to rebut Seaver. She argued that in American cities Jews “have synagogues, and have no doubt spread as much as they could, and no calamity has yet befallen any place in consequence of that fact.” She maintained that Jews assimilated to the culture they lived in, that wherever they are “they act just about the same as other people. The nature of a Jew is governed by the same laws as human nature in general.” Where they “are still under the Christian lash … self-preservation forces them to be narrow and exclusive,” but

in other countries more civilized and just, they are so too; they progress just as fast as the world will permit them. In France, there is hardly any difference between Jew and Christian. The Jews occupy some of the highest positions in the Army, the State, in literature, the arts, and sciences; the same is the case more or less in Germany and other enlightened countries. Are then the Jews in Boston so much worse, that their spread is dreaded even by Infidels?

After mocking an antisemitic letter in the Investigator which maintained that the author knew what Jews were like since he lived “in a street where there are” several Jewish families and “they carry out the old Levitical law … not omitting circumcision and other barbarities,” Rose reasserted that the Jews are “as intelligent, social, and friendly” as other Americans. The weakest parts of her rebuttal were her attempts to defend Judaism, which she no longer believed in. She argued, unconvincingly, that circumcision hurts less than having one’s ears pierced. She insisted that Judaism was morally superior to Universalism because it worshipped only one deity rather than “three Gods” and did not believe in either a savior or an afterlife. She undermined the standard antisemitic charge that Jews were “cunning sharp traders” by pointing “to the renowned ‘Yankee,’ who, it is admitted by all, excels the Jew in that art,” a common observation. The English traveler Frances Trollope had written thirty years earlier that “I never met an individual in any part of the Union who did not paint these New Englanders as sly, grinding, selfish, and tricky. The Yankees … will avow these qualities themselves with a complacent smile, and boast that no people on earth can match them at over-reaching in a bargain.” Rose then ended on a conciliatory note. “I know there are honest, honorable Yankees as well as Jews: the Editor of the Investigator is one of the very best,” she concluded. “Then let us, as Infidels … not add to the prejudice already existing towards the Jews, or any other sect.” She signed her letter “Yours for Justice” and then sent another letter a few days later with $5 to support the Investigator, twice the amount of a yearly subscription.²¹

Ernestine Rose assumed she had convinced Seaver that he had been “too hasty” in making his “sweeping denunciation against the modern Jews.” Instead, Seaver repeated his original argument that Universalism was superior to Judaism, insisted that he had “nothing against a Jew personally,” and wrote that he never “intimated” anything about driving “the Jews out of Boston”—“what could have put such an idea into her head?” He called Rose “his too sensitive sister” and declared that if she wanted to see Judaism spread “she is more friendly to superstition than we supposed her to be.” Referring to Rose’s presumed relations with her own family, he added, “We have heard it said that if a Jew or Jewess forsake their religion, they are disinherited by the family and regarded as dead forever afterwards. If this be true,” Jews “are not equal … to the Universalists, for they are more forgiving than to act in this manner.” His ugly final riposte showed he had been stung by Rose’s charges against the Yankees. “If the Yankees, as a class, like money as well as the Jews we question whether so many of the former would be found in the ranks of the Union Army,” Seaver concluded. “They would be more likely to stay at home to deal in ‘old clothes,’ at a profit of ‘fifteen per shent.’ ” Adding injury to insult, he engineered the format unfairly, dividing Rose’s not very long letters into two parts so he could rebut each half separately and at length. “Our friend Mrs. Rose did not have the benefit … which she would have had if her matter had been published in a more connected manner,” one of the few correspondents supporting Rose wrote. “You had a decided advantage of the arrangements … enabling you to make your responses more effective.” This tactic not only weakened Rose’s arguments but also put her in the difficult position of responding late to many of Seaver’s criticisms.²²

This debate by correspondence continued for eight weeks, with Rose sending four letters in all. She became furious when Seaver wrote that because of her defense of Judaism, he had thought that “Sister Rose” might “leave us and go to Rome or Judea.” “No! ‘she is not yet disposed to give up the ship,’ ” Rose replied. “ ‘She’ has held fast to it long before she knew you, and as you did not at all help her to get on board of it, nor depend upon your piloting, she is not likely to slip off, however unsteady you may navigate the ‘ship.’ ” This led Seaver to accuse Rose of demonstrating that “she can scold bravely, if she cannot use convincing arguments.” He wrote that their discussion had become repetitive and then proceeded to repeat all his previous points at great length. In her final letter, Rose defended her “scolding”—“perhaps if you had received a little more scolding from women, the right kind I mean, you might deserve it less now.” She ended by writing that she was “quite willing to leave it to the readers of the Investigator to judge who used the most ‘invectives,’ who possessed the most ‘equanimity,’ and whether you fairly answered my questions.” Seaver claimed the last words, again accusing Rose of delivering “a scolding tirade,” and also left it “to our readers to decide which of the twain has preserved the better temper.”²³

If Rose’s letters had been written by a man, he might have been accused of arguing or disputing, but not of scolding. Most of the Investigator’s correspondents, all of them male, sided with Seaver, accusing Rose of not only “scolding like a termagant” but of writing “spleeny inanities” and being “personal, abusive, and ill-natured.” Rose did have a few defenders, however. Philo-Spinoza charged Seaver with “slandering a whole race of people,” and William Wood, who had criticized Seaver’s format, wrote that the editor “was not entirely rid of the old Puritanic notion that the whole of their race is only capable of Christ-killing.” He went on to say that he admired Rose’s “progressive liberality of sentiment, and her independence in its expression” so much “that some years since I named my only daughter ERNESTINE ROSE WOOD.” The Jewish Record, a religious newspaper, also praised Rose, who even if she no longer believed in Judaism, still possessed “some of the leaven of the Jewish spirit.”²⁴

This passionate and lengthy interchange of letters with Seaver remained the only time Ernestine Rose ever wrote about contemporary Jews and modern Judaism. Horace Seaver did not change his views at all, continuing to publish antisemitic diatribes against Moses. Early in 1867, he visited the synagogue whose replacement of a Universalist church had prompted the editorial Rose first responded to. Ignorant that Jewish men’s heads must remain covered, he “acted as a gentleman should” by removing his hat upon entering and then took great offense at being told, as he put it, “I vant you to put on yourn hat!” He continued to deny that he treated “modern Jews unfairly, though such a charge has before been proferred against us.”²⁵ For her part, Ernestine Rose never mentioned this matter again, and in later life, she wrote warmly to and about Seaver. It seems not to have affected her close friendship with J. P. Mendum, publisher of the newspaper, and Seaver’s good friend. Rose continued to subscribe but ceased her frequent writing to the Boston Investigator. For almost five years, from April 1864 until February 1869, she did not send a single item to the newspaper.

Without Rose’s letters to the Investigator, few sources exist for her life during the tumultuous final years of the Civil War. The couple moved uptown in 1864, from Prince Street in Soho to Broadway north of Washington Square. Ernestine Rose made “a soul-stirring speech” at the large first Anniversary Meeting of the Woman’s National Loyal League on May 12, 1864, in New York City. The group “nearly filled” the liberal Church of the Puritans close to her home, but the proceedings were not published and her speech has not survived. Large parades took place in lower Manhattan before the presidential election in November 1864, but it is not known whether Rose backed Lincoln. Early in March 1865, a “National Jubilee” parade celebrating Lincoln’s second term stretched for seven miles through lower Manhattan. The Civil War ended on April 9, 1865, and New York City “exploded” with spontaneous victory celebrations. Less than a week later, Lincoln was assassinated. Crepe “completely darkened” the city, the daily New York World wrote. “There was not a store on Broadway that was not draped in deep black, mingled with pure white.” William Rose’s jewelry store, underneath the couple’s apartment, probably joined in this public mourning. On April 24, Lincoln’s body arrived in New York to lie in state at City Hall. The following day his funeral procession wended uptown, watched by close to a million people. Whether the Roses were among them remains unknown.²⁶

A letter Ernestine Rose wrote declining an invitation to the Boston Paine celebration and Infidel Convention in January 1865 does survive. In it she joked that since Paine “chose to make his first appearance in the middle of winter,” he must “dispense” with her presence, since she could not face “the still harsher climate of Boston, when even” in New York “the weather is too severe for me to battle with.” Writing on her fifty-fifth birthday, she added, “I get every year a year older, (though ladies never get old) and what is worse, my strength does not increase with my years, though my love of liberty and hatred to superstition and tyranny does.” She closed by urging infidels to oppose the proposed amendment to include God and Jesus in the US Constitution’s preamble.²⁷

From the late 1850s, friends commented on Ernestine Rose’s ailments. “Mrs. Rose very poorly we hear (as usual), inflam[mator]y rheumm. &c. [sic.],” Lucretia Mott wrote her sister. “Who is there to take the lead?” “She has for some time been failing in health,” the Boston Investigator reported in 1859. Ten years later, Stanton and Anthony declared that she “has long been an invalid.” Sara Underwood, a journalist who interviewed Rose in 1868, wrote that “her health was so poor and uncertain that she was obliged to forbear taking much active part in the reforms so dear to her,” but added that Rose “was not forced into quietude until the shackles had fallen from the black race forever”—presumably after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery in December 1865.²⁸

As Rose’s health deteriorated, others began to supplant her. Underwood started writing monthly articles for the Boston Investigator. Previously, Rose had been the newspaper’s only regular female correspondent, but by the late 1860s, both the freethinkers Elmina D. Slenker and a woman who wrote as “Old Mother” also began publishing in the newspaper. During the Civil War, Anna Dickinson, a new young female orator, quickly captivated the public. Often called “America’s Joan of Arc,” Dickinson spoke in favor of the war, campaigned successfully for Lincoln and the Republican Party, and in 1864 became the first woman to address Congress. She had three chief advantages over Ernestine Rose in appealing to audiences: she was native-born, youthful, and not an atheist. But unlike Rose, Dickinson operated on her own and rarely joined forces with other women.²⁹

Within the women’s movement itself, Elizabeth Cady Stanton came to the fore during the 1860s. She and Ernestine Rose had many traits in common. Both lectured exceptionally well, their dramatic eloquence enabling them to hold audiences rapt for hours. Both had a keen sense of humor and a talent for sarcastic wit. Both swam against the mainstream, boldly defying contemporary beliefs. Both ardently opposed slavery and developed coherent philosophies of human rights and female equality. Both were seen as exceptional. Reporting on an 1868 convention, Underwood wrote that Rose and Stanton were the only women there who “would be singled out from a miscellaneous crowd as persons of mark,” adding that “no young girl” was “ever more lovely, in my eyes, than are Mrs. Rose and Mrs. Stanton in the beautiful ripeness of life’s autumn.”³⁰

But the two women also differed greatly, especially in social background. Stanton’s father was a wealthy judge in upstate New York where her family owned slaves. Stanton possessed both her caste’s prestige and some of its biases against foreigners, blacks, and the uneducated. Rose did not share Stanton’s prejudices, wealth, or social status. She sought to win people over through reasoned arguments, but her militant atheism repelled many, no matter how much she downplayed it at women’s rights conventions. Underwood wrote that if only Rose “had been less honest and conscientious” about her lack of religious belief, “she would today occupy a far higher position in public favor than she does.” In contrast, Stanton always identified as a Christian, even as she moved away from orthodoxy. During the 1860s, she routinely wore a large cross around her neck and frequently invoked Jesus’s authority to support her demands. She also had personal relationships with members of Congress and abolitionist leaders, made through her birth family and her husband, the anti-slavery politician Henry B. Stanton. As Rose’s energy waned, Stanton rapidly became a movement leader. By the second half of the 1860s, Rose tended to follow Stanton rather than creating her own path.³¹

The end of the Civil War ushered in a critical and difficult time for women’s rights. During the war, the movement had focused on freeing the slaves, but the end of slavery inevitably raised the issue of suffrage. Would every adult receive the vote, or only black men? Throughout her career, Ernestine Rose consistently argued, as she did in 1867, that all human beings deserved equal rights, which “do not depend on the shade of color, … on a somewhat different construction, or somewhat different shape of body, or somewhat different shape of mind.” For a short time after the war, it seemed possible to gain the vote for all. Early in 1866, Congress received its first women’s suffrage petition (earlier ones had gone to state legislatures) with Ernestine Rose’s signature written on it in large letters using very black ink. The petition, signed by more than 10,000 women, received little support from the government. Stanton and Anthony then organized the Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention—the first since 1860—to meet for one day in May in New York City. Rose’s name led the announcement that advertised the featured speakers.³²

But for the first and only time in her life, Ernestine Rose chose not to deliver her speech. She sat on the stage, listening initially to Stanton and then to three men: Theodore Tilton, editor of a popular newspaper; Henry Ward Beecher, a celebrated Brooklyn minister; and Wendell Phillips, the abolitionist whose anti-foreigner bias she had criticized in the 1850s. Stanton and Tilton championed women’s suffrage. Beecher regaled the appreciative group for over an hour, sprinkling his lecture with anti-Irish remarks before concluding, “It is more important that woman shall vote than that the black man shall vote.” In sharp contrast, Phillips harshly critiqued his audience, telling them how to act, which included “trampl[ing] mistaken Judaism under one foot.” He then excoriated the entire female sex, saying, “Let woman know that nobody stops her but herself. She ties her own limbs. She corrupts her own sisters.” By the time he finished, Ernestine Rose had “left the platform, because she said the subject was exhausted,” the next speaker announced. She herself may have been exhausted. Or, she might have been fed up with listening to long-winded male authorities who preached Christian doctrine and felt free to tell women what to do. Rose never explained why she did not give her speech. At the end of the session, with Rose still absent, the group changed its name from the Woman’s Rights Organization to the American Equal Rights Association, transforming itself from a feminist convention to one focusing on the vote for all. Rose agreed with its goals but did not make a financial contribution to the new entity, nor did she become one of its officers.³³

She did not give another lecture nor attend another public meeting for a year, until May 1867. In the interim, two factions emerged from the old abolitionist-feminist coalition, one prioritizing black male suffrage, the other votes for women. The first, led by Phillips, who called 1865 “the [male] Negro’s hour,” included William Lloyd Garrison, Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, and Frederick Douglass. Douglass, who still wanted the ballot for all, argued that the vote was “a question of life and death” for black men, while for women it was at most “a desirable matter.” Leading the feminist faction, Stanton injected racism and elitism into her demands. “So long as he [the black man] was lowest in the scale of being we [white women] were willing to press his claims,” she wrote in a public letter, “but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.” Rose never shared this racism, but she allied herself with Stanton when Congress passed the controversial Fourteenth Amendment in 1866. That measure seemed to acknowledge that women were citizens, and as such, guaranteed “equal protection of the laws.” But it also limited voting rights by adding the word “male” to the Constitution for the first time. Many abolitionist-feminists supported this amendment, but Stanton and Anthony praised Rose as being among the “few” women’s rights advocates who opposed it, along with Lucretia Mott and Paulina Wright Davis.³⁴

Conflicts between abolitionists and feminists worsened in 1867. At the May Equal Rights Association meeting in New York, Anthony announced that the organization badly needed money to campaign for women’s rights. Able to lecture once again with her customary eloquence and energy, Ernestine Rose began her speech to the Convention with this issue. “If we only had sufficient of that root of all evil in our hands, there would be no need of holding these meetings,” she declared. “Give us one million of dollars, and we will have the elective franchise at the very next session of our Legislature.” After joking that if women had the ballot, “our Senators and our members of the House” would court us as they are now courting freedmen, Rose made her familiar argument that all Americans deserved to vote. “We have proclaimed to the world universal suffrage; but it is universal suffrage with a vengeance attached to it—universal suffrage excluding the negro and the woman, who are by far the largest majority in this country,” she asserted. “White men are the minority in this nation. White women, black men, and black women compose the large majority of this nation.” Sojourner Truth, formerly enslaved in New York, followed up on the plight of black women: “If colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, they will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.” Although present, Rose did not speak again at this meeting, but most of the participants ignored Truth and other black women by advocating suffrage either for black men or for white women.³⁵

Desperate for money, Stanton and Anthony then allied themselves with a wealthy, eccentric racist who funded their new feminist journal, The Revolution. Beginning its weekly publication in January 1868, The Revolution championed women’s rights but also supported “educated suffrage,” which further alienated the abolitionists who wanted the vote for all black men, regardless of how much education they had. Rose almost certainly read The Revolution. She must have been pleased by the paper’s announcement that “elegant and attractive engravings” of herself and Frances Wright “now decorate the walls of ‘The Revolution’ office.” But she would also have been dismayed by an 1869 article which argued that “the Jews and the Chinese” should not be allowed into the United States, since “great harm accrues to us from the vast accession of voracious, knavish, cunning traders, especially Jews,” whom it characterized as “a race of mere bloodsuckers, especially gifted … in grinding the faces of the poor American sewing women.”³⁶

In addition, Stanton continued to use racist language in these years, often telling her audiences to “think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who cannot read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E. Dickinson.” Rose echoed her in an 1869 speech when she denounced Congress for ignoring women’s suffrage. “We might commence by calling the Chinaman a man and a brother, or the Hottentot, or the Calmuck [Mongol], or the Indian, the idiot or the criminal, but where shall we stop? They will bring all these in before us, and then they will bring in the babies—the male babies.” This is the only racist remark of hers ever recorded. It may reflect her anger at Congress or her increasing fatigue—caused by illness and age—which led her to copy Stanton.³⁷

Ernestine Rose’s health continued to fluctuate in the late 1860s, but she felt strong enough to speak at two New York City conventions in May 1868: the Equal Rights Association and the Universal Peace Union the next day. Neither group published its proceedings, but Sara Underwood attended both meetings and found Rose “the best speaker among the ladies.” She described her as “a woman of fifty [Rose was actually fifty-eight], with a slight lisp, and foreign accent, yet possessing all the fire and eloquence of youth. She was radical, sensible, forceful, and earnest.” Underwood added that “all the force and fire of her enthusiastic nature seemed to flash up” when Rose spoke, making her listeners forget her lisp and accent, “or to remember them only as additional charms.” Underwood described Rose’s Polish patriotism:

I remember well how she startled and electrified the members of the Universal Peace Society, in the midst of their mild platitudes and millenial dreams, by her description of the sort of peace she advocated—a peace brought with the sword! And with eyes flashing, her pale cheeks flushing, and her voice thrilling, she declared how she longed to plunge with her own hand, if need be, the dagger to the hearts of the enemies of her country’s liberty and rights.³⁸

Ernestine Rose’s next burst of public activity came between January and June of 1869, when she published three public letters and made a number of speeches. The first letter justified her life as a champion of reform who “had educated society up towards justice” and suffered “misrepresentation, slander, and persecution” as a result. She sent this piece to the Boston Investigator, ending her five-year boycott of its pages. Her next letter unleashed her sarcastic invective on a New Jersey clergyman who held that women should remain in the domestic sphere, providing “ornamentation,” while men alone went out to labor. “New Jersey is said to be out of the world; but where, Oh! where has Dr. J. T. resided? For if he had ever lived within sound, sight, or smell of a human habitation, he would have found out before 1869 that … poor woman like poor man has always been ‘doomed to labor’; only she has not yet been doomed to be paid for it as well as he.” Countering his assertion that women would lose their “delicacy” if they worked outside the home, Rose detailed the grosser side of housework, from “standing over kitchen fires,” with their “fumes and odors of grease” to “washing, ironing, and scrubbing” while inhaling “the agreeable healthful odors of soiled linen.” Instead, women would be far better off “in the mechanic’s shop, the artist’s studio, the chemist’s laboratory, the merchant’s emporium, the brokers’ and bankers’ offices, the jury boxes, the judge’s chair, the legislative halls, and the pulpit.”³⁹

Her third letter went to the January 1869 National Woman Suffrage Convention in Washington, DC, convened by Stanton and Anthony. This new group’s existence displayed the deepening division within the women’s rights movement over the issue of the proposed fifteenth amendment, which gave the vote just to black men, leaving out all women. In November, New England abolitionist-feminists formed a separate organization to support this amendment. In retaliation, Stanton and Anthony convened their meeting, hoping against all political reality to gain the vote for women as well. Rose firmly aligned with them, regretting that “indisposition” prevented her from attending “perhaps the most important” convention “that was ever held.” After repeating her standard arguments for women’s suffrage, she turned to the Fourteenth Amendment’s use of the word “male,” which she thought “ought to be expunged from the constitution and the laws as a last reminiscence of barbarism—when the animal, not mind, when might, not right, governed the world.”⁴⁰

Although she did not feel well enough to travel to Washington, Rose addressed Stanton and Anthony’s new, short-lived Working Women’s Association in New York City in early January. She began by recalling her Owenite work with cooperative organizations in England but stated that this was the first time she ever spoke to a female labor organization. She advised the women to raise money by asking prominent male speakers to donate their time, “for money was power, and union was strength.” She then recommended expanding jobs for women by forming both a female savings bank and an insurance company. She also advised women to train as watchmakers, jewelers, and in other “suitable industries.”⁴¹ Four months later, in May 1869, Ernestine Rose played an active role at the Second Anniversary Convention of the American Equal Rights Association. Clashes between the abolitionist and feminist factions over the Fifteenth Amendment dominated this tumultuous meeting. Stanton and Anthony were attacked for not supporting the vote for black men, which Rose never specifically opposed. These feminists insisted that if women did not get the vote then, they would remain disenfranchised for decades, which turned out to be the case. Ernestine Rose remained silent for the first day, although she sat on the stage, was placed on the Executive Committee, and was appointed both chair of the Committee on Resolutions and a “Vice-President at large.”

The next day, however, Rose spoke a great deal: recommending that members not respond to the charge that they were “free lovers,” urging that cooperative societies be formed to raise women’s pay, insisting that the movement began not in Massachusetts but in New York when she circulated her petition for married women’s property rights in 1837. She also corrected a minister who asserted that “woman’s rights were founded on the New Testament” by declaring “that Testament was only 1,400 years old, but woman’s rights were as old as woman herself.” In the evening, perhaps to calm the meeting, Anthony scheduled two old acquaintances of Ernestine Rose who lectured in their native languages. Mathilde Franziska Anneke, now living in Milwaukee, addressed the group in German and praised Rose for helping her at the 1853 Mob Convention. Jenny d’Héricourt, residing in Chicago, did not mention Rose in her French lecture, but a few weeks later published a shortened English version of her 1856 biography of “Madame Rose.” Rose spoke next. She began by enthusiastically claiming that “the world moves,” since “their cause had been greeted by thrilling words, both spoken and written, from England, France, Germany, and Switzerland,” as well as all sections of the United States. She then turned on Congress: “Why is it, my friends, that Congress has enacted laws to give the negro of the South the right to vote? Why do they not at the same time protect the negro woman?” Extolling the power of the ballot, that “great talisman” that “can unlock all doors” for women, Rose mocked the legislators for enacting “laws for the man and the brother,” while they “had not yet found out there was a woman and a sister.” She concluded by objecting “to the name of the Association, ‘Equal Rights.’ Congress evidently did not know what the word ‘equal’ meant. She proposed to change the name to the ‘Woman’s Franchise Association.’ ” This caught others by surprise. Lucy Stone opposed any such move “till the colored man gained the right to vote,” while Stanton ruled that there had to be a month’s notice before such an action. Rose then “explained that she by no means meant to throw the black man overboard. She merely wanted the Association to have a name that could not be misunderstood.”⁴²

The US women’s rights movement split irredeemably after this stormy meeting, dividing into rival suffrage organizations. The two groups feuded for twenty-one years, until 1890 when they finally reunited. These conflicts would certainly have troubled Ernestine Rose, but she never commented on them. She also never explained the decision she and William made to leave the United States to travel in Europe a few weeks after this convention. She intimated that she left “in hopes that a voyage across the Atlantic and residence abroad a few months” would cure her ailments. “May her health be restored by again breathing her native air!” Lucretia Mott wished in a farewell note. Paradoxically, Ernestine Rose took out US citizenship in her own name only seventeen days before the couple left the country. William Rose had become an American citizen in 1845 and by law then a wife automatically assumed her husband’s nationality. She never wrote about this decision either.⁴³

Both Rose and her co-workers in the US women’s movement assumed she would return when her health improved. Just a few days before she left, Stanton and Anthony’s National Woman Suffrage Association made her a member of their Executive Committee. They also appointed her as a delegate to the Women’s Industrial Congress meeting in Berlin that autumn. Rose delayed telling her friends and associates that she was departing but again never explained why. On May 17, she addressed the Sorosis Society, a professional women’s organization founded in 1868, on the proposed creation of a foundling hospital for unwanted infants. “Mrs. Rose said she would advocate the Foundling Hospital with all her heart and soul, but she thought prevention better than cure. The evil would never be remedied until men were punished as well as women” for prostitution. A few weeks later, just before Rose’s actual departure, Sorosis met again at Delmonico’s Restaurant to honor her. Abby Hutchinson Patton, a former member of the Hutchinson Singers who had performed at many reform events, “was deputed by that body to present Mrs. Rose … with a testimonial of their regard enclosed in a beautiful basket of flowers. A card accompanied it bearing an appropriate inscription:— ‘A basket of June roses to Mrs. Rose from Sorosis.’ ”⁴⁴

Susan B. Anthony in New York and J. P. Mendum in Boston raised “handsome testimonial[s]‌ in money, much to her surprise, for she was not aware that any movement of the kind was being made.” Anthony “spent three very agreeable hours” with Ernestine Rose the evening before her departure. “Probably our last separation in this world and she thinks that there isn’t another,” Anthony remembered, “but I hope that she will discover that there is a life after death.” On Monday, June 8, “Mrs. Rose went on board ship laden with flowers and very happy and grateful.”⁴⁵ This departure began a new, transatlantic phase in Ernestine Rose’s life.