In 1849, Benjamin F. Roberts, an African American shoemaker, filed suit against the Boston School Committee after they refused to admit his five-year-old daughter, Sarah. The court dismissed the case, but Senator Charles Sumner assisted in the appeal and argued unsuccessfully that as citizens, African Americans should have access to public schools. In Schooling Citizens, Hilary J. Moss presents many such examples of educational activism among antebellum African Americans that prefigured a twentieth-century story about citizenship rights, educational inequality, and white resistance to black schools. Long before Plessy v. Ferguson, Moss argues, the Roberts v. Boston case “gave birth to the precedent that segregation in all areas of public life … did not contradict the Constitution” (181).

Their zeal threatened entrenched white power, so African Americans had to be pragmatic about their activism.

In case studies of three antebellum cities—New Haven, Connecticut; Baltimore, Maryland; and Boston, Massachusetts—Moss challenges our assumptions about Americans’ support for universal education. Schooling Citizens explores educational activism among African Americans and describes the link that developed between issues of citizenship and the creation of public school systems. As in the twentieth century, early nineteenth-century African Americans protested taxation without representation, “argued that school segregation irreversibly stigmatized their children,” disagreed about the merits of integrated schools, suffered when white administrators replaced black teachers with white teachers, and continually demanded full citizenship rights (154). Moss argues that although Horace Mann and other education reformers extolled the merits of universal education, their common school rhetoric “tacitly suggested that black people did not need the same education as whites.” For African Americans, “a separate education would serve their subordinate station” (157).

Moss’ examination of newspaper editorials, apprenticeship contracts, help-wanted ads, census records, and petitions for public support of black schools demonstrates the contingency of history. Before the 1830s, white opposition to black education in these major cities was not a foregone conclusion. Bostonians widely read Phillis Wheatley’s poetry; white residents of New Haven applauded the educational thrust of the African Improvement Society (AIS) upon its founding in 1827; and Baltimore employers advertised for literate black laborers. But Moss persuasively argues that white support for black education cannot be interpreted as support for black equality. In Baltimore, free African Americans could not own property, build religious institutions, “enter into contracts,” or bear witness in court (6). They could, however, acquire literacy without facing the types of resistance that came to characterize New Haven and Boston. White Bostonians supported black education insofar as it did not intrude on the spaces they claimed for themselves. When the school committee allocated public funds to build a black school in 1834, for example, they summarily rejected plans to build the school in a white community. A prelude to the struggle against residential desegregation, residents cited a decrease in morality and property values as consequences of living near a black school as if “the city planned to erect a penitentiary or poorhouse, not an educational institution” (142).

The value placed on literacy and education by free antebellum African Americans foreshadowed the attitudes of former slaves after the Civil War. Their zeal threatened entrenched white power, so African Americans had to be pragmatic about their activism. To temper white opposition to black education in Baltimore, for example, some free blacks avoided associating themselves with abolition and highlighted vocational education and its benefits to society as a whole rather than advertising the literary training in their schools (97, 104). In New Haven, John Brown Russworm’s “faith in the mutability of racial prejudice” encouraged the use of moral suasion to counter arguments about black degeneracy. While white Americans pointed to delinquency among African Americans to rationalize inequity, activists like Russworm argued that black people’s “good behavior” made them model citizens (31). African American educational advocates believed that education, as an improving force, would convince white Americans to acknowledge African American citizenship (7, 96). “Education,” Moss writes, “could not empower antebellum African Americans to rise and fall by their own merits when so many other avenues of socioeconomic advancement remained closed to them” (194). Literacy mattered little in a society that restricted black people’s access to occupational opportunities.

A century before the modern civil rights movement, black Americans adopted strategies of “protest and compromise,” “loyalty and deference,” and “agitation and acquiescence” to secure the rights of American citizenship (97, 114). Between 1839 and 1850, for example, black Baltimoreans submitted three petitions to the city council. The first requested that African American property owners be exempted from paying school taxes because of the lack of provisions made for black schools. A few whites admitted the injustice of funding white schools with taxes paid by black property owners, but most did not advocate against the tax. In a second petition, activists asked for financial support for the two privately funded black schools in the city. The third petition requested that black children have access to free public education. Although the petitions garnered support among white residents, each petition failed (118-120).

Moss uses the transition to public oversight for black schools in Boston to illuminate less passive forms of resistance and the disunity among some black educators. In 1816, when the school committee incorporated Belknap Street School into the public school system, African Americans lost autonomy as white school administrators replaced black teachers with white teachers. White Bostonians’ refusal to allow black students to take advantage of public schools for white children led a group of African Americans to call for a boycott of the Belknap School (137). Then, when Thomas Paul Smith petitioned for a black principal instead of supporting the boycott, he suffered extreme repercussions from other members of the black community. Benjamin F. Roberts, “the first school desegregation plaintiff in the nation” and other advocates for desegregation violently attacked Smith for his disloyalty (165).

In the face of gradual emancipation, increased abolitionist activism, African American demands for civil rights, and news of Nat Turner’s revolt, many northern white Americans adopted resistance in lieu of tolerance (19). Moss presents three editorials that condemned interracial efforts to establish an institute for higher learning in New Haven. The editorialist argued that a black college would “sustain assertions that African Americans were American citizens” (37). Moss perceptively posits that the author’s “conflation of black improvement with citizenship, his conception of education as a zero-sum game, and his contention that uplift would thwart black removal would soon become mantras in white diatribes against black schooling” (42-43).

The historical events described in Schooling Citizens foreshadow many subsequent struggles over education and race. “Readers who have benefited from the scholarship of Ronald E. Butchart and James Anderson, among others, who have revealed new complexities in understanding African American education in the South, should garner new insights from Moss’ location of similar issues across the wider geography of antebellum America. Moss clearly demonstrates that adding race to conversations about the history of American education reveals that “inequity was embedded into [public schools] from the start” (190). This well-researched and well-written volume brings together untapped records and a careful analysis of previously underutilized archival materials to reveal the long struggle for black educational equality. It is an important work that forces a reconsideration of America’s commitment to universal education.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2.5 (March, 2011).

Christina L. Davis, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of History at the University of Georgia, is completing a dissertation on Reconstruction-era teachers in black schools.

On May 9, 1843, a Black delegation gathered for a two-day series of meetings in New York City and resolved to collaboratively write and publish a public call for a national convention of colored citizens. A committee of three writers drafted the call and approximately fifty signers from Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania pledged support. The delegation identified the dearth of annual national conventions as a key issue preventing Black-led political organizing from having a stronger impact on the condition of Black people in the U.S. In the reprinted call appearing in minutes of the 1843 National Colored Convention, the signers argued:

Since we have ceased to meet together in National Convention, we have become ignorant of the moral and intellectual strength of our people. We have also been deprived of the councils of our fathers, who have borne the burden and heat of the day—the spirit of virtuous ambition and emulation has died in the bosoms of the young men, and in a great degree we have become divided, and the bright rising stars that once shone in our skies, have become partially obscured.

The call represents Black men’s increasing anxieties about the growing intellectual and organizational distance between senior figureheads and emerging leaders. The signers cite the eight years since the last national colored citizens convention was held in Philadelphia in 1835 as irrefutable evidence of this distance. And yet this call inadvertently creates another form of distance: by focusing on the politics of male leadership, the call truncates Black women’s ideological and economic contributions that also helped to sustain colored conventions’ interests, political viability and cultural influence.

I describe two instances where historical records either ignore (Black women) or misrepresent (Black communities, in general) lived reality. In 2015 the Colored Conventions Project launched online exhibitions to encourage our learning and meaningful exchange about the significance of the colored conventions movement to American political history. Using digital media as a critical lens, I sketch a portrait of Black intellectual cultures by clarifying links between the socio-economic character of Black women, communities and political organizing. I also illuminate the ways in which rich social histories can be charted through open-source digital media by taking as an example the online exhibit “Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention.” The exhibit highlights the economic and cultural assets of Black people as well as the narratives and initiatives connected to the convention. It especially highlights Black women’s often-underrepresented contributions to convention cultures. The exhibit brings attention to diverse forms of political expression captured in convention proceedings and newspapers while also placing important antebellum Black political conventions in a broader context of regional Black political activity.

More than a century before the digital age emerged, Black activists sought to translate a multitude of Black experiences into records about Black life that could answer the question: what is the condition of free Black Americans? For these Black thinkers, data describing individual and collective achievements forced readers to acknowledge Black Americans’ contributions to contemporaneous nation-building efforts. Departing from styles of biographical writing that cage Black women’s economic and political roles within patrilineal narratives about their husbands, fathers and brothers, the exhibit “Black Wealth” situates Black women as the leaders, educators, and entrepreneurs that their life stories prove them to be. Scholars have traditionally studied and characterized colored conventions with men as central points of entry into convention cultures and ideological debates. By moving Black women from the margins to the center of the exhibit, the Colored Conventions Project makes a crucial intervention in the historiography of the colored conventions movement. The exhibit’s tabulations depict a collective image of Black antebellum life taken from data reports presented by the convention’s Committee on the Condition of Colored People. By extrapolating and visualizing these reports, the project inserts Black-led, census-style reports into politics surrounding Black Americans’ struggles for power over self-determination. Working toward meaning-making in the digital age, this essay interrogates the intellectual and economic connections between Black women, Black data and colored conventions in the antebellum era.

Colored Convention Cultures: Black Women’s Economic Prosperity and Census-Style Reports        

Delegates of the 1843 national convention emphasized Black communities’ diverse labor and entrepreneurial pursuits, characteristics they thought would best communicate a diverse number of Black communities’ economic achievements and potential. Fifty-eight credentialed delegates met to debate various subjects before a lively audience. The men discussed delegates’ voting rights, regional favoritism, the role of Christianity in Black political organizing and the effectiveness of collective insurrection to securing civil liberties for oppressed Black people in the U.S. Many of the convention’s most celebrated Black leaders, including William Wells Brown, Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, James N. Gloucester, and Charles B. Ray, represented Massachusetts and New York. Indeed, this convention is best known for the heated debate that ensued when delegates voted on whether or not to endorse Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America”—with Douglass leading the charge against endorsing Garnet’s radical call to arms and defeating its adoption by the slimmest of margins.

1. Delegate Attendance Trends at National Colored Conventions, 1830-1864. The minutes of the colored conventions movement offer many insights into Black mobility and geographically concentrated activities during the ante- and postbellum eras. This graph charts rates of delegate attendance at national conventions in the northeastern United States between 1830 and 1864.

The convention’s publication committee captured and printed many of these leading Black men’s interventions, as did activist-themed newspapers such as The Cleveland Daily Herald, The Emancipator and Free American, and The Liberator. But what of Black women intellectuals and community leaders? Although women are seemingly invisible within the printed proceedings, the Colored Conventions Project’s larger mission is dedicated to highlighting women’s political and economic contributions. Thus, “Black Wealth and the 1843 National Colored Convention” focuses on the socio-economic histories of connected women such as Julia Williams Garnet, Elizabeth Gloucester and Dr. Sarah Marinda Loguen-Fraser. Their prosperity and activism furthered the convention’s principles and missions beyond delegate appointment. In one compelling example, an important member of Brooklyn’s Black bourgeoisie, Elizabeth Gloucester, amassed business holdings and a personal fortune that matches, and in many cases surpasses, that of the convention’s male celebrities.

Elizabeth Gloucester’s economic history—one glimmer in the archives of the Colored Conventions Project—prompts us to explore her activism and professional ties. Gloucester’s husband, James, hailed from a family known to many as a Black ministerial dynasty in Philadelphia’s free Black elite communities. An orphan upon her mother’s death, Elizabeth joined the Gloucester family while just a girl. She grew up in a thicket of activity among Philadelphia’s Black intelligentsia wherein Black religious and political cultures were tightly bound. During her climb to economic eminence in Brooklyn, Gloucester acquired several properties and businesses including second-hand clothing stores, a furniture store, and a boarding house known as Remsen House, which was nestled between Myrtle and DeKalb Avenues, a popular merchant district. As directress of and a fundraiser for the New York Colored Orphans Asylum, Gloucester donated significant sums to the home to further its educational goals and to improve the lives of impoverished children. Indeed, the businesswoman’s properties and organizational affiliates were deeply intertwined with a host of political activities and institutions: Underground Railroad sites, Black churches, literary societies, freedom parades, a women’s commerce and trade group. Gloucester’s economic history is an invaluable conduit by which we understand Black women’s integral roles in promoting the principles and missions of the 1843 national convention. Undoubtedly, Gloucester’s estate and occupations would have been prime evidence to support the 1843 delegation’s interest in validating Black communities’ social value and community development by publishing data reports in the pages of the proceedings.

Because we know that colored conventions were not historically discrete meetings, but were rather embedded in broader historical contexts involving many actors and events, the exhibit likewise highlights Black-led data reports. Convention organizers could only “hope that…every city, town, hamlet, and village [would] be represented as well as Literary and Benevolent Societies” at the five-day series of meetings. But delegates knew that enumeration could defy space, time, and racial bias; they also knew that the federal decennial census apportioned taxes and congressional representation. Even today as we struggle with the dilemma of racial bias in the “historical record” over 170 years later, we should increasingly seek out historical Black data repositories that challenge and complicate our understanding of American (political) history. Such repositories present a compelling opportunity for new investigations into Black data curation. This is especially significant in light of federal reports such as a 1918 Department of Commerce publication that confirms the bureau’s frequent misrepresentations of Black population trends prior to the thirteenth decennial census. The 1843 delegation seized an opportunity to dispel myths about Black people’s economic stagnancy by including statistical and qualitative reports that could reframe readers’ understanding of Black communities’ progress in America.

As James McCune Smith discovered after deftly sifting through the 1840 federal census, the U.S. government had published erroneous and blatantly fabricated calculations on the condition of Black people while simultaneously presenting the still-young federal census as a legitimate means by which Americans and global readers could construe an intelligent understanding of the nascent New World. Labor, educational attainment, family units, service, physical ability—each of these categories, among others, were thought to reflect the general ambition and progress of a young and vibrant nation. McCune Smith exposed incorrect calculations in the census’s population category for Deaf and Dumb, Blind and Insane Colored People, and exposed misleading interpretations of vital statistics on Black people. As the 1843 convention’s statistical reports suggest, some Black leaders viewed faulty calculations and resulting interpretations of the general condition of Black people as threats to free Blacks’ prosperity and uplift initiatives.    

Erroneous census records dangerously impaired Black mobility, undermined community building and seemed to render moot the advances Black leaders had made within their communities. Further, such records offered legislators and communities a rationale for discriminatory practices, promoting the idea that free Black populations were disproportionately insane, impoverished, rapidly decreasing, and thus degenerate. For these reasons and others, a number of northern states and western territories in antebellum America passed a series of laws that limited Black travel in and out of the state, that disallowed or restricted Black people’s ownership of land and chattel, that disallowed or restricted Black voting and court testimony rights, and that generally required free Blacks to meet onerous measures in order to live and work. For example, Ohio’s application of Black exclusion laws in 1829 proved an impetus for the colored conventions movement.

Falsified federal census records also threatened Black economic freedom during a time when many Black leaders believed that economic progress among the Black masses would be a ticket to gaining civil rights. How would ambitious Black entrepreneurs know where to settle to start a new business venture? How likely was it that talented Black teachers would travel to and seek out employment in a seemingly economically stagnant school district?

2. Reported Societies in New York, 1843. Black communities often organized and raised funds to support a host of societies that enriched Black communities’ educational, moral, political, and economic well-being. This graph enumerates the number and variety of New York societies that appear in the 1843 report of the Committee Upon the Condition of the Colored People, presented at the 1843 National Convention of Colored Citizens at Buffalo, N.Y. Cities without values reflect absent statistics in the report.

Thus, we should critically interrogate the 1843 convention delegation’s self-reporting efforts as responses to at least two conversations. They should be viewed in relation to racially discriminatory data collection practices apparent in federal censuses and the power they subsequently apportioned. They should also be viewed as responses to intra-communal concerns about Black people’s general elevation. The 1843 convention strategically appointed data collection leaders with access to pecuniary support and to socio-economically diverse Black populations. And, because political philosophy played an important role in data collection processes, these leaders undoubtedly needed to have the intellectual acumen to move reports from aggregation to publication. Elizabeth Gloucester’s husband, James, chaired the reporting Committee on the Condition of Colored People, which included Abner Francis, William Munro, Sampson Talbot, Theodore Wright, and W. H. Yancy. Organizers directed delegates to submit statistical and qualitative information about their constituents and later compiled and printed reports in the minutes. Black elected representatives might have asked simple, survey-style questions: What sort of work do you do? How much money do you earn per year? What types of societies host meetings? How many drunkards and morally degenerate people are among you? They also consulted local, state and private organizations’ statistical data. Black data collectors often lacked sophisticated skills in statistical analysis and contended with limited funding for data collection. Still, their reports accumulated and organized information about Black communities that the U.S. State Department would not gather until 1850. Their reports portrayed a more diverse image of Black free communities while also providing evidence of the sorts of intellectual inquiries that represented their view of free Blacks’ economic vitality.

Delegates initiated the 1843 statistical report with the lofty goal of a large-scale portrait of Black American life. They intended to collect information about Black communities’ character, divisions of labor, and state of well-being or disunion as they existed in the east, west, north and, perhaps most quixotic in ambition, the south. However, the 1843 statistical report ultimately provides occupational, population, organizational, and economic data only for three states: New York, Massachusetts, and Ohio. In relation to cities in the triumvirate states, the stats depict New York City as an organizational hub of numerous societies including men’s and women’s benevolent and literary societies, an educational society, and a public library. Mechanics, merchants, and agriculturalists are among occupations most represented in Albany, Buffalo, and Rochester, N.Y., and in New Bedford, Mass., and Columbus, Ohio. A related report on agriculture was also featured in the minutes of the 1843 national convention. It argues that numerous Black men and their families had excelled at community-building in Ohio, where they collectively owned thousands of acres of land, built schools and homes, and manufactured their own goods. These reports challenged contemporaneous political theories such as the notion that Black people lived longer (and thus better) within the institution of slavery than they had as free people, and that free Black men and women had not contributed to the nation’s economic and social well-being. The 1843 data reports enumerate the labor and social conditions representing what free Black northeastern and midwestern communities had achieved through entrepreneurial diversity and organizational achievement. This brief overview of a colored convention’s ties to Elizabeth Gloucester, a Black woman of incredible success, and its numerical and sociological reports, seeks to broaden what we know about Black informational enterprises and the broader debates to which they are connected.

We continue to confront a striking absence of Black voices and lived experience in historical records, so the onus is upon scholarly and public communities to critically examine and explore a more substantial history of America’s development. The Colored Conventions Project is leading the charge to bring buried histories of Black men’s and women’s political organizing to public audiences. We champion online exhibits as an important form of digital pedagogy. We collaborate with national and local teaching partners, student content contributors and the scholars featured in our forthcoming collected volume to promote innovative undergraduate and graduate research and exhibits. We have also benefited from a historic agreement with Gale, part of Cengage Learning Inc., to feature newspaper articles hosted in its databases. In many ways, the project’s collaborative nature is a reflection of the collaborative spirit so strongly embedded in cultures of the colored conventions themselves. 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.1 (Fall, 2015).

Sarah Patterson is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Delaware. Her dissertation examines Black intellectual cultures and ideals, particularly through the ways in which Black women’s political writing addresses social reform movements between 1856 and 1910. She is a co-coordinator for the Colored Conventions Project and will co-edit the collection Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age.            

When the leadership of the woman suffrage movement lifted its self-imposed moratorium on political action following the Civil War, it released an enormous pent-up reserve of resolve, organizational momentum, and guarded optimism. Petitioning Congress for the right of suffrage, resuming annual woman’s rights conventions, initiating the first woman suffrage debate in the Senate, promoting universal suffrage, and lobbying national opinion leaders put the nation on notice that suffragists were determined to expand woman’s sphere. But prior experience with antebellum caricature alerted suffrage leaders to expect a vigorous visual barrage from illustrated periodicals in response to their political action. This essay examines the role of the art of condescension as an obstacle to the accomplishment of the suffragists’ hopes and dreams.

Only isolated, relatively good-natured missiles were fired in the first two years following the Civil War. Yankee Notions ridiculed “Miss Anthropy,” “Miss Timorous,” “Miss Susan Banter,” “Bridget O’ Toole,” and “Miss Susan Dash” in a series of cartoons aimed at universal suffrage. Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, on its May 1867 front cover, chose the stereotyped fickle woman to rationalize opposition to suffrage (fig. 1). “When the ladies have votes,” contended the caption, “the best looking man will be their choice.” If “Good Looks Are Indispensable,” this would indeed be a “Blow for Congress.”

The year 1868 eclipsed the cumulative total of suffrage-related content for the two prior years. In part, this was due to the founding of the Revolution, a publication edited by Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony. In February 1868 an illustration by Frank Beard, published in the Comic Monthly, threw down its own gauntlet, depicting the eccentric George Francis Train, the financial backer of the enterprise, sharpening his own “Axe to Grind” on the symbolic whetstone of the Revolution (fig. 2). According to the cartoon, the women “turn the crank,” unknowingly promoting the sale of Train’s “Lots in Omaha.” Independent of the illustrator’s allegation of commercial exploitation, Train’s affiliation with the Revolution eventually proved to be a financial and public relations liability.

Cartoonists manipulated the meaning of the revolution metaphor for their own mischievous designs. In the periodical Days’ Doings, December 24, 1870, a clever illustrator sketched a comic “railroad accident”—an infant having soiled its diaper in a passenger car (fig. 3). The humor is contrived by the incongruous violation of a contemporary domestic custom: “A Meek and Well-Disciplined Husband ‘Fixes’ the Baby While His Wife [an enormous woman] Reads The Revolution.” Meanwhile, looking over the shoulder of the obedient husband, who is in the act of changing the baby’s diaper, an indignant male’s countenance visibly expresses dismay with the reversal of roles, while a woman across the aisle conceals her amusement with a strategically placed handkerchief over her face.

Yet the news of the formation of Sorosis, a New York woman’s club, generated a higher volume of popular art than the Revolution. On May 19, 1868, the front cover of the Illustrated News mocked the social innovation with a judgmental twist: “The Sour Sisters’ Club First Regular Meeting at Del Monico’s New York.” In June Harper’s Bazar countered this pejorative tone with an unqualified affirmation—”The Ladies Club at Del Monico’s—Women’s Rights and No Surrender.” The following month Phunny Phellow caricatured the New York woman’s club as “The Queen of Clubs” (fig. 4). Is it too speculative to assume that the incomplete lettering Miss S. on the scroll identifies Miss Susan B. Anthony as the queen?

Save a few exceptions, 1869 marked a discernibly negative philosophical change in the Harper’s Bazar editorial tone. To become a “girl of the period” or “wife of the period” was now tantamount to abandoning cherished traditional values. In January, Harper’s Bazar observed the “Girl of the Period” affiliating with the “Atalanta Skating Club,” “The Syren Flirting Club,” “The Pallas Billiard Club,” and the “Hippodamia Driving Club.” Moreover, the club fad was blamed for the “[b]aby left squalling” at home. “What’s to become of Baby?” asked Harper’s Bazar. Similarly the Harper Brothers’ flagship, Harper’s Weekly, devoted a double-page print to the alleged collective ills of Sorosis, and it caricatured a black woman in male attire at a woman’s rights convention as “The Colored Sorosis.” In the same vein, the “Modern Cornelia—a veritable Rum ‘un” in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper was afflicted with “Female Suffrage,” “Sorosis,” “Universal Suffrage,” “Negro Suffrage,” “Gin,” “Rum,” “Brandy,” and the “Ballot Box.”

The celebrated political cartoonist Thomas Nast did more to alter the 1869 posture of Harper’s Bazar than any other artist. Suspicious that votes for female suffrage and equal rights threatened family values, he championed the “Lost Art” of domesticity and warned against the practice of “Cooperative Housekeeping.” In the December 1869 Phunny Phellow, Nast, who had made a living demeaning the Irish, denigrated women at Irish expense by combining ethnicity and gender identity to put an Irish woman in double jeopardy (fig. 5). The only way women could purify the ballot box, he reasoned, was for a stereotyped Irish cleaning lady to cleanse the outer sphere of the ballot box with “soap” and “soda” rather than purify the inner vessel with a wise, honest vote.

From 1867 to 1870, the progressive increase in cartoons in the illustrated periodical was linear. It peaked in 1870, but the volume of prints for the years 1869, 1871, 1872, and 1874 was respectable. What causal factors, other than those already mentioned, account for the frequency and negativity of content? In terms of the single most visible personality with respect to the sheer number of prints, Victoria Woodhull claims that distinction, even over Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. However, no event may have been more organizationally disruptive than when Horace Greeley and other prominent leaders abandoned women’s suffrage to fight for black suffrage.

This decision gave at least a portion of the women’s movement less access to Greeley’s New York Tribune. It also accelerated the pace for the adoption of the fifteenth amendment to the Constitution, dissolved the American Equal Rights Association, and substantially contributed to the division of suffragists into two separate and philosophically distinct camps—the National (NWSA) and American (AWSA) Woman Suffrage Associations.When the fifteenth amendment, which guaranteed black Americans the right to vote, was ratified in 1870 Punchinello ‘s Henry L. Stephens celebrated with a full-page illustration of “The Great National Game”—American baseball (fig. 6). “Our Colored Brother,” proudly wearing the belt of the forty-first Congress as part of his sparkling new national uniform, swings the bat—labeled fifteenth amendment—with consummate confidence at the approaching ball, enthusiastically exclaiming to a woman (in the on-deck circle)—carrying the bat of the sixteenth amendment—and her electively disfranchised Chinese and Alaskan companions (who, incidentally, carry no symbolic bats), “Hi Yah! Stan’ Back Dar; it’s Dis Chile’s Innin’s Now!” So it was; the fifteenth amendment, now ratified, inclined suffragists toward the sixteenth amendment.

But the ineluctable fracture between the competitive National and American Woman Suffrage organizations caused Phunny Phellow to ponder which association would seize the mantle of leadership in the fight for the sixteenth amendment. Would it be Theodore Tilton’s National Woman Suffrage Association or Henry Ward Beecher’s American Woman Suffrage Association? Paradoxically, a full front cover spread in Phunny Phellow‘s July 1870 issue framed the question in masculine terms: “Who is to be the Cock of the Walk?” (fig. 7). The cartoonist maneuvered Tilton and Beecher, the two roosters, into battle posture for a good old-fashioned cockfight to determine who would lead the quest for “suffrage” and “women’s rights.” Truthfully, the AWSA’s commitment to patience and moderation yielded the center stage to the NWSA.

In the meantime, two new charismatic players, the sisters Victoria Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin, had become part of the drama, thanks to Commodore Vanderbilt’s world of stock brokerage on Wall Street. The whirl of publicity surrounding the female stock brokers was dizzying but quite favorable. On February 26, 1870, Days’ Doings pictured “the lovely financiers” at “work in their private office.” One week later Harper’s Weekly displayed the women as “the Bewitching Brokers.” In April, Yankee Notions simply drew them as the “female financiers,” while Punchinello comically ascribed their success with Mr. Vanderbilt to the ladies’ entrancing “Mesmerism in Wall Street.”

However, the stunning breakthrough in national prestige for Victoria Woodhull came on January 11, 1871, when she appeared on behalf of the NWSA before the House Judiciary Committee. On February 4, 1871, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper gracefully pictured her as a dignified woman and commended her performance for taking “far higher ground than has usually been assumed by her coadjutors. Her sex’s right of suffrage she claims under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution, showing that women possess the right to vote now, without a Sixteenth Amendment.” This brilliant act suddenly transferred the suffrage ordeal from the legislative to the judicial arena.

In March, Wild Oats featured Victoria Woodhull on its front cover, lobbying Ben Butler in “Beauty and the Be_st Man in the House” (fig. 8). An April cartoon in Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun showed an enamored Ben Butler following Victoria Woodhull “on the trail for woman votes.” On May 6, 1871, Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper humorously represented Uncle Sam trying to persuade President Grant to put “the Best General,” an attractive woman suffragist (Victoria Woodhull or Tennessee Claflin?), on “that Southern Commission of yours… and you’ll hear but little more of the Ku-Klux.” In fairness, these were not derogatory images.

But the glow of the “Woodhull Memorial,” as Victoria Woodhull’s congressional petition was called, was like a fire-fly at night, flashing its brilliance for a moment only to flicker and die out. Of course, the memorial would not finally succumb until it had its day in court—the Supreme Court—but an impatient press could not wait.

Still, the print mystique of Victoria Woodhull and her sister began to tarnish in June 1871. Days’ Doings, for example, meticulously chronicled the sisters’ embarrassing family domestic problems. The superficial tarnish became more corrosive as the St. Louis German-language Puck and Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun reported Victoria’s advocacy of free love. Whisperings of spiritualism, socialism, and radical ideas in the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly further tainted Victoria’s reputation. By January 1872 the front cover of Wild Oats depicted Woodhull, “the Fair Angler,” dangling various lines of temptation—”Husband Every Day,” “Free Love,” “Immorality,” and “No Marriages”—to gullible males (fig. 9). The sign below her shuttered windows reads, “Vic Woodhull—Teacher of and Broker in Free Love—Immorality?—General Adventuress—Office Wall St.—Sign of the Golden Satyr.”

Another Wild Oatscartoon proclaimed Horace Greeley and Victoria Woodhull (who was nominated for the presidency by the Equal Rights Party) as separate entries in the 1872 presidential race. Greeley was riding “the well known nag Protection,” and Woodhull was astride “Free Love—No Marriage.” In June, Nick Nax, Wild Oats, and Days’ Doings each published cartoons depicting the Equal Rights Party’s nomination of Victoria Woodhull for president and Frederick Douglas for vice president. Days’ Doings called it “The Free-Lovers Convention in Apollo Hall, New York.” One illustration in Wild Oats described the convention as “The Woman’s, Negroes, and Workingman’s Ticket.” The other noted that the convention “Resolved that the Lordly Arrogance of Man in Determining the Sphere of Woman is Adverse to the Spirit of the Age.”

The sisters suffered the additional indignity of being incarcerated in the Ludlow Street Jail just days before the presidential election. They were charged with “circulating obscene literature through the mails.” That literature consisted of the sensational announcement in the Woodhull and Claflin Weekly that Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was alleged to have had an illicit relationship with the spouse of Theodore Tilton. The indictment of so prominent a reformer as Beecher further fueled the attacks on the suffrage movement. Now an early stalwart of women’s suffrage was said to be immoral—not least in a newspaper devoted to the cause of equal rights. The impact of what one paper referred to as “The Monster Scandal” can be seen in “The Brooklyn Plymouth Minstrel Troupe,” which appeared in Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun, November 1874 (fig. 10). The cartoon denounced Beecher, Tilton, Woodhull, Stanton, Anthony, and Ben Butler—all principals in the movement to expand women’s sphere. In May 1875 Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun demeaned Anthony and Tilton—”Miss Susan B. Anthony sits on the knee of the Monster Tilton. ‘She jumps up mighty quick,’ when detected by Miss Bessie Turner.” The relentless attack continued in the next issue, with a print that showed Beecher, Anthony, Stanton, Woodhull, and Claflin all sitting on Tilton’s elongated knee in a compromising position (fig. 11). The caption explained the scene as “What it will come to if Tilton goes on using that knee in this loose manner.”

Still the Woodhull Memorial had laid the groundwork for a judicial review of whether or not the recently amended constitution now guaranteed women the vote. Reaction to this development may partly explain the treatment of suffragists such as Susan B. Anthony who was arrested for civil disobedience after voting in the presidential election.

On May 8, 1873, the New York Daily Graphic pictured “Miss Anthony Telling the Story of Her Arrest to the Woman Suffrage Convention.” The next month, on June 5, 1873, the Daily Graphic accorded Miss Anthony front-cover publicity as “The Woman Who Dared” (fig. 12). “[She has] been held to account before the law for this daring deed,” revealed the text, “but [her] trial seems more than likely to [de]generate into a farce, if indeed it is ever held. 

However, should the lady succeed, the result will be such as our artist has predicted in the surroundings of our graphic, Statue No. 17.” What the artist had predicted was a fundamental reversal of roles: “the female policeman will be a terror to male nurses and marketers. Oratorical women will hold the public rostrum and then a torch-light procession of dazzling beauties will prove a wonderful sensation in coming elections.” Nevertheless, the editorial conceded, “Whenever women rule the hour, they must acknowledge the person of Miss Anthony, the pioneer who first pursued the way they sought.” The trial was held and Anthony was found guilty (though not required to pay the fine).

Thanks to the case Minor vs. Happersett the substance of the Woodhull Memorial did receive the Supreme Court’s scrutiny. The disappointing verdict was announced on October 21, 1875, in a front-page visual editorial in the New York Daily Graphic (fig. 14). The cartoon pictured Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Anna Dickinson with Chief Justice Waite and bore the title, “Real Versus Imaginary Wants.” The subtext made the paper’s view clear.

Misses Anthony and Dickinson and Mrs. Stanton: We hold that this [the fourteenth Amendment] gives women the right to vote any way you might let us.

Chief Justice Waite: In the opinion of the Court, the 14th Amendment does not confer on women the right of suffrage.

Public Opinion: And you might add, Mr. Chief Justice, that the great question of the day is how to improve the suffrage, not how to extend it.

On January 31, 1874, the New York Daily Graphic conceived a cartoon showing a woman-suffragist athlete attempting to match the long jump record of a black male athlete, who, in the symbolic leap toward the fifteenth Amendment, acquired the vote for black, male Americans (fig. 14). “I ought to be able to jump as far as Cuffee,” shouted the high-flying, ambitious woman. But postbellum caricature and a host of other complex factors, internal and external, deterred partisans of woman suffrage from achieving their laudable goals until a more level playing field was installed in the twentieth century.

Further Reading:

For related articles see the author’s “Antebellum Caricature and Woman’s Sphere,” Journal of Women’s History 3:3 (Winter 1992) and his collaborative work with Carol B. Bunker, “Woman Suffrage, Popular Art, and Utah,” in Carol C. Madsen, ed., Battle for the Ballot, Essays on Woman Suffrage in Utah” (Logan, Utah, 1997). Other essays by Bunker on nineteenth-century pictorial themes include: “The Campaign Dial: A Premier Lincoln Campaign Paper,” Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association 25:1 (2004): 186-202 and with John Appel, “‘Shoddy,’ Anti-Semitism, and the Civil War,” American Jewish History 82:1-4 (1994): 43-71.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).

Gary L. Bunker is emeritus professor of psychology at Brigham Young University; his most recent publication relating to the history of prints is entitled, From Rail-Splitter to Icon: Lincoln’s Image in Illustrated Periodicals, 1860-1865 (2001).

Recent charges against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) for registering nonexistent voters have raised the specter that the 2008 election will be marred by voter fraud. But as anyone who has studied American history knows, voter fraud—and allegations of corruption—are as old as the republic itself. The more closely contested the race, the likelier the possibility of fraud and the accusations of fraud.

This was certainly true in early New Jersey, which had one of the most divisive, yet dynamic, political environments of the early national period. Like many other states in post-revolutionary America, New Jersey required that citizens, in order to vote, must possess a certain amount of property—50 pounds, to be precise. Yet unlike most other states, New Jersey also allowed free blacks who met the wealth requirement to vote. And alone among all the states at the time, New Jersey allowed qualified unmarried women (single women or widows) to cast ballots in local, state, and federal elections. Not surprisingly, such liberal voting provisions were highly controversial and subject to constant attack. Yet they remained in force in 1807 when the legislature limited voting to white males.

From a very early date, New Jersey, small though it was, was wracked by internal regional and religious divisions. These divisions translated into differing party loyalties, with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans gaining strength in the northern counties and Federalists acquiring a firm base in the southern region. Even within each county, local animosities were often quite fierce. In such a volatile situation, each side constantly attempted to secure every last vote in order to gain an edge in a given election.

This was, of course, an era long before formal voter registration procedures had been put in place, or even considered. Individuals would present themselves at the polling place and swear they had met the state’s particular voting requirements. Other individuals, or the election registrar, could challenge the voter’s qualifications if they had reason to suspect malfeasance. Nonetheless, most who presented themselves were allowed to vote. In fact, then as now, getting out the electorate was the main issue of concern. Commenting on the “indifference” of the New Jersey population to voting, Polish visitor Julian Ursin Niemcewicz observed in 1797, “As long as their purse is respected, as long as one does not overwhelm them neither with taxes nor with onerous duties, it worries them little by whom and how they are governed.”

As each party vied for dominance in the state, every vote counted. Getting voters to turn out required a major effort. Supporters would go from house to house to rally potential voters and give them carriage rides to the polls, which often might be located miles away over dusty roads. Because of the high property qualification and the exclusion of married women, the number of eligible female voters was always relatively small, probably in the hundreds in any given election. Nevertheless, they loomed large in the minds of the opposition. In the heat of party conflicts, members charged that their opponents had taken sexual advantage of the women whom they accompanied to the polls. Others suggested that the women had been coached about their choice of candidates. Still others maintained that the women had been physically coerced into voting. In 1803, New Brunswick Federalists were accused of “rallying the petticoat electors and hurrying them and others to the polls.” In 1802, “whole wagon loads of the ‘privileged fair’” were said to have been brought to the places where ballots were cast.

The issue of women voting came to a head in 1807 during a hotly contested battle over the location of the new Essex County courthouse. Local voters were asked to choose between Newark and Elizabeth as the site for the new building. Heated propaganda spewed forth from both locales prior to the election. The election itself witnessed unprecedented voter turnout. Newark prevailed. However, supporters of the other site quickly challenged the result, pointing out that the number of ballots cast was three times larger than the eligible voter population. A legislative inquiry eventually uncovered massive voter fraud and voided the election.

The most important result, however, was to provide opponents of female suffrage with ammunition. In the next session of the assembly, legislators hurled charges and countercharges about corruption and fraudulent behavior at state elections. Much of the misbehavior, it was clear, came from white men who voted even though they were not qualified or who voted at different polling places more than once. The solution, however, focused on marginal populations: women, foreigners, and free blacks. Because women’s dress “favoured disguise,” it was said, some women “have repeated the vote without detection.” More generally, women, blacks, and foreigners had “no interest in the welfare of the state” and were “mere instruments of parties in the state, or the agents of executive designs, formed out of it.” Perhaps most frightening of all, if women, free blacks, or aliens could vote, they might also be able to serve in public office. Legislator John Condict saw this as a disaster in the making. “It cannot for a moment be supposed,” he said, “that the authors of the constitution meant to entrust the command of our army, and the direction of our state, either to women, to negroes, or to aliens.” Soon thereafter, the legislature passed a law confining the franchise to free, white males.

So voter fraud, or charges of voter fraud, have always been with us. What is most important, however, is to ensure that when fraud is suspected, only actual perpetrators of it are identified and punished, rather than symbolic representatives or voters whose suffrage rights happen to be vulnerable. In 1807 New Jersey, there was a real voter fraud problem that was seized on by Democratic-Republicans to suppress female Federalist votes. In 2008, there is little evidence that charges of voter fraud are anything but a modern GOP tactic to suppress Democratic votes. ACORN has only been found to have overstated the number of people it has registered to vote. Yet problems in voter registration do not necessarily translate into fraudulent votes. Election officials presumably have the ability to prevent ineligible voters from casting ballots.

Unlike the McCain campaign and other present-day Republicans, who are gearing up their voter suppression measures even as I write, the politicians of the Early Republic sometimes considered excessive voting totals only an index of popular interest in our elective government. As one commentator observed shortly after the courthouse debacle, “I believe [our electors] yet profess an ardent zeal for the cause of liberty, which neither artifice, menace or fraud, can remove.”

FURTHER READING:

On women’s political participation in the early American republic, see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Paula Baker, “The Domestication of American Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 620-647; Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1986); Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “”The Petticoat Electors”: Women’s Suffrage In New Jersey, 1776-1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 159-93; Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Rosemarie Zagarri, “Gender and the First Party System,” in Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 118-134; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Political News and Female Readership in Antebellum Boston and Its Region,” Journalism History 22 (1996): 2-14; Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign Of 1840: Three Perspectives From Massachusetts.,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 277-315. For the larger political context of the New Jersey situation, still helpful is Carl E. Prince, New Jersey’s Jeffersonian Republicans: The Genesis of an Early Party Machine, 1789-1817 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1967).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

[BLOGITORIAL NOTE: I asked Prof. Rosemarie Zagarri, author of Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), to post on a myth that she and a number of other scholars have already dispelled. The answer to the question posed above is still “mostly,” but there were wider forms of participation in the celebratory politics of the Early Republic and direct participation for some wealthier women and African Americans because of property requirements for suffrage rights. New Jersey is the famous case of this. Zagarri’s post indirectly answers my question, but goes it one better by also drawing an up-to-the-minute parallel between the politics of Jefferson-era New Jersey and the current election cycle. In both cases, the prospect of new or unusual numbers of voters led to charges of voter fraud.– JLP]

Eliza W. Farnham and the varieties of women’s emancipation in nineteenth-century California

To the struggling advocates of Woman’s Rights, it may seem a hopeful sign of the times that one of their sex should put forth a book … descriptive of farming, especially when they make the delightful discovery that the writer speaks in a great measure from personal experience in the business. But it must not be forgotten that life in California is altogether anomalous, and that it is no more extraordinary for a woman to plough, dig and hoe with her own hands, if she have the will and strength to do so, than for men to do all their household labor for months.

—California In-Doors and Out, 28

Eliza Farnham, once one of the best known and highly praised women nonfiction authors in the United States, is being rediscovered as an exceptional resource for the history of women in the West. Students of California’s history, in particular, have begun to see lost visions of expansion, womanhood, and national destiny in Farnham’s understandings of herself and of her sex in the epoch of gold and statehood. In Farnham’s published writings, two idiosyncratic ideological assemblies bear examining. First, she relies on faith in the nation’s achieving its Manifest Destiny through expansion and conquest as a framework for women’s elevation. Second, while her commitment to women’s advancement included many elements of the women’s rights movement of her day, she refuses the call for equal legal and political rights. In this way, she defies the common link between feminism and expanding democracy.

The basic story of Farnham’s life was quite extraordinary.

Eliza Burham, later Farnham, was born in the Hudson Valley of New York State in 1815. She spent her childhood in the far west of the state, working as a servant for a childless couple. The driving force of her early life was to join the small stream of ambitious women pressing for education and the wherewithal to become active thinkers, able to make their contribution to human knowledge. To this end, a largely self-educated Farnham published four major books dealing with the West, national destiny, and the elevation of women.

Perhaps the most unique among her books is Farnham’s third, My Early Days. Published in 1859, it is an account of her childhood in western New York State. Unlike her two previous books—which celebrate western expansion as the salvation of American destiny and the exceptional woman—My Early Days is a portrait of relentless suffering in the backwoods of the eastern United States, among ignorant, brutal people. There, whatever source of redemption young Eliza might find had to be deep within herself. Farnham’s other works are written in the treacly prose of antebellum, especially female, literature, but not this volume.

My Early Days begins when, at the death of her mother, five-year-old Eliza was separated from her father and her siblings and exiled to a rural community, peopled by drunkards, atheists, weak men, and brutal women. There she was placed in the home of the Warrens, a childless couple. Later as an adult, Eliza adopted a personal faith that emphasized belief in the divine (although carefully framed outside of conventional Christianity, without reference to Jesus), in the redemptive power of “the West,” and in the superior force of womanhood through maternal capacity. But Eliza the child lacked these spiritual resources, and the author faithfully renders the desperate emotions and impoverished understandings of her younger self. She portrays the evilness of “Aunt,” the woman who raised and worked her, in psychological rather than moral terms. As part of a continuing effort to free herself, young Eliza stole money from Aunt, convinced that it wass owed her as compensation for her labor and the unfulfilled obligation to educate her. Adult Eliza, the author, treats this as a thoroughly appropriate theft.

The account of backwoods irreligion is particularly fascinating. The Warrens were Quakers, yet thoroughly atheistic. The only reading materials in their house, which the young Eliza hungrily consumed, were condemnations of religion and praise of reason, including Paine and Voltaire. The author’s ability to recapture her childish hunger for knowledge and the joy she found in her unfolding reason compete with her adult condemnation of this repulsive literature of infidelity. Although she never quite escaped the imprint of this early teaching, Farnham came to regard having been denied faith in Jesus’s redeeming and comforting love and in the existence of an afterlife as the greatest of the many abuses (physical, emotional, intellectual) she suffered as a child.

Without the twin socializing forces of Christian redemption and maternal love, the child grew up virtually outside of society. People called her a fool, when in truth she had the seeds of a considerable intelligence and read everything she could get her hands on. At the beginning of the book, she isn’t even called by her real name but by hostile nicknames. One of these is Tonewanta, a reference to Eliza’s dark, Indian-like complexion, deepened by exposure to the sun and hard outdoor work. The personal struggle described throughout the book reaches far beyond issues of gender: the child Eliza had to become not just a true woman but a knowing human being. “The I which I understood to be my true, suffering self … was wandering in frozen desolation,” the author writes, “vainly seeking alleviation of its present anguish.”

Three quarters of the book, by far the most powerful parts, cover Eliza’s vain efforts to escape this backwoods prison. She imagined “walking, when the snow should have gone and the roads become dry, to some distant town or city, and seeking some rich and benevolent person for a patron, who would educate me and wait til I could repay the kindness by the fruits of my knowledge and labor, or if I failed to find such a person, then I could certainly find somebody who would hire me to work and so I could get money on my own.” Finally, after seven years under these conditions, she found the strength within her young self to reach out to a brother, who came to bring her out of the wilderness. “This is my niece,” he lied when they return together to the Hudson River Valley of her birth, “a wild girl, whom I have just caught in the forests of the West.” This is where My Early Days ends.

Over the next ten years, Eliza became educated, civilized, and superficially Christianized. In 1836, at the age of twenty-one, she married an Illinois lawyer, Thomas J. Farnham, ten years her senior. Few figures more fully embody the spirit of Manifest Destiny than T. J. Farnham. Very soon after marrying Eliza and fathering their first son, Farnham contracted a virulent, aggressively nationalist case of the western fever. After leading a party of Illinois patriots in an ill-fated invasion to drive out the British in the Willamette Valley, he turned to central California as a more promising site for his expansionist ambitions. In Santa Cruz, he joined the growing Yankee community and acquired land from a local Californio family in payment for legal services.

Meanwhile, Eliza, who had moved to New York from Illinois, was struggling to support herself and her children. Following the model of her husband (who himself wrote a series of books about his western triumphs), in 1846 she published her first book about her years in Illinois, Life in Prairie Land. The book remains one of the earliest female-authored accounts of the life of American settlers “on the frontier.” Farnham presents herself as an observer of frontier quaintness and charm and a propagandist for the redemptive potential of the West. What remains from the experience she would later describe in My Early Days is a contempt for the moral weakness and frivolity of eastern middle-class women. While Farnham came to believe that exceptional women like herself could have a leading role in the unfolding of the national destiny in the West, she also believed the majority “of my sex … unfortunate as to have had their minds thoroughly distorted from all true and natural modes of action by an artificial and pernicious course of education … endure the self-denial that [western life] imposes without enjoying any of the freedom it confers.”

Farnham’s “West,” as it emerges in Life in Prarie Land, is thus a brutal yet potentially liberating environment. While it afforded women new opportunities—for “strength of mind and bold thought”—the brutality of the frontier also threatened the destruction of womanliness. Farnham explores one side of this tension through the many “untrue” women who appear in Life in Prairie Land. One farm wife for instance is “the mere physical material of the woman, put together in a somewhat exceptionable style and sadly soiled.” But there are also true women, untouched by eastern falseness, who lead the settler enterprise past its initial challenges, through loss and violence, to the edenic possibilities of the West.

Life In Prairie Land was completed in 1846, just as Farnham undertook the next of her odyssean labors. Still in search of paying work, she secured an appointment as the first matron of women at the New York State prison at Sing Sing. Following in the footsteps of the British Quaker Elizabeth Fry, the first female reformer of whom she ever learned, Farnham adapted modern notions of rehabilitation to women prisoners, formerly regarded as morally irredeemable. As her assistant, she hired Georgiana Bruce, a young English immigrant and former member of the utopian community Brook Farm. The prison’s trustees came to regard Farnham as a dangerous radical, and after two years, in 1848, they succeeded in driving her out. She was briefly employed by the physician and reformer Samuel Gridley Howe. Farnham worked most notably with Howe’s deaf and blind student, Laura Bridgman. And she even read draft versions of Life in Prairie Land to Bridgman using a finger spelling method devised by Howe and Laura’s teachers.

In 1848, just after the end of the U.S.-Mexican War, news came to Eliza that her husband, with whom she had lived only briefly, had died in Santa Cruz. She would now have to head west to manage the land he had left her. To fund the trip, Eliza announced that she would organize a “company” of upstanding Yankee women to sail with her. As wives and paragons of morality, these female migrants would save the men of California from the moral and spiritual decline threatened by the Gold Rush. When this plan failed, Eliza determined to go west anyway and, in 1849, sailed from Boston with her two children, one other Yankee woman, and a young nursemaid, possibly a former inmate at Sing Sing. Along the way, the nursemaid ran off with a crew member. When the ship stopped in Valparaiso to take on stores, Farnham went in search of a replacement. The captain, irritated at her for charges she had made against him, departed without her, taking the rest of her goods and party, including her children. Eliza waited in Chile almost two months for the next ship and arrived in San Francisco in February 1850 to find her son quite ill. With her children and her baggage, Farnham finally made her way to Santa Cruz, determined to realize the tremendous moral and domestic potential of the Far West. All she was missing was a companion, a partner, another woman. Her old friend Georgiana Bruce soon joined her. Together these two roofed and joined their new house, broke sod and planted potatoes, ordered fruit trees, and raised poultry. To be able to work and move freely, they wore bloomer costumes, to their neighbors’ amusement. They discussed the future of women as they hammered and planted and harvested.

Written mostly between 1853 and 1855, Farnham’s second book California In-Doors and Out is an intimate account of the peoples of California at the very beginning of statehood. Farnham finds the land’s natural beauty thrillingly uplifting, a spiritual stand-in for Christian conviction. One long episode describes a horseback trip that she, Georgiana, and two men took to a valley covered with strawberries, in which fresh beef (left by Californios who had just slaughtered long-horned cattle) was literally hanging from trees. Yet the very richness of California had within it the seeds of destruction in the gold fields, where greed, violence, and corruption were turning the heaven of California into its opposite. How could the possibility of California be realized and the dangers it posed be survived and tamed?

Like many others, Farnham approached this dilemma as a devoted Anglo-Saxonist. Those who she regarded as the “noblest race on earth” were the proper stewards of California’s cultivation and development, the only race that could be trusted to lead its orderly, forward progress. And yet these same people, lured by the land’s promise of unlimited wealth, had become speculators without conscience, greedy aspirants for personal gain, gold-driven monsters who had created a hellish society of immorality, intemperance, and criminality.

Farnham organizes the duality of the Anglo-Saxon confrontation with California—embodied in the conflicting impulses to exploit and cultivate its riches—around the distinction between Man and Woman. Thus, to race must be added gender. Man represents the worst of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, the values of gain and speculation; Woman, the best, the alternative outcome of improvement and redemption. Thus only Woman can lead the way to America’s true Manifest Destiny in the new western lands. As Farnham wrote in the notice she circulated to recruit other women for her first California enterprise, “Among the many privations and deteriorating influences to which the thousands who are flocking thither will be subjected, one of the greatest is the absence of woman, with all her kindly cares and powers, so peculiarly conservative to man under such circumstances.”

Men are too weak to confront the fabulous potential of the West. Gold is a drug and men cannot be trusted with it. Woman is the only force that can counter this horrible descent. “Man may never be so coarse, gross or selfish, yet, if his fireside be presided over by purity, uprightness, and integrity in his wife,” he might yet be saved. This formulation of female devotion to the general good versus male pursuit of individual gain is not unique to Farnham. Catharine Beecher, writing at the same time, offered a similar solution to the dilemma that excessive individualism posed to the creation of an orderly, stable, republican community: woman’s essential selflessness, her inherent capacity for republican virtue, could work as a counterbalance to man’s fundamental individualism. What distinguishes Farnham is that she situates this trope in western lands and imbues it with the Manifest Destiny of national expansion. “There is,” she declares, “no country in the world where the highest attributes of the female character are more indispensable to the social weal than to California.”

But the nature of Woman’s role in the destiny of expanding America, for Farnham, presented its own dilemmas. What exactly is required of Woman to take up this profound, national responsibility? How must Woman’s standing in society change? Farnham found herself on the very border of women’s rights convictions, but to go further was to threaten the lofty difference of womanhood that lay at the center of her hopes. These were dilemmas about women, their roles, and their rights that she may well have shared with others in the 1850s. In order to resolve them for herself and her readers, Farnham included a series of conversations in California In-Doors and Out between herself and Georgiana Bruce; in these conversations Bruce articulated sentiments about social order, democracy, and women considerably less conservative than the author’s. It is as if Farnham was sufficiently divided on these matters that she needed a surrogate to give voice to the dialogue she was conducting within herself.

Georgiana subscribed to ideas about equality of the sexes being put forward in the East at that moment by the women’s rights movement. Farnham believed instead that each sex had distinct spheres and talents, that women were properly domestic and men public, and that women neither needed nor would benefit from individual legal and political rights. Yet leaving their differences at that misses much of Farnham’s position and what it says about views of women’s conditions, especially in a western expansionist environment. As Farnham concedes, “I actually did many of the things which her [women’s rights] party demanded freedom to do.” Side by side as they were debating women’s rights, the two women broke ground and planted crops, donned bloomers, and became skilled carpenters, drawing strange looks from their neighbors, Anglo and Californio alike.

Still Farnham could not follow her friend onto the women’s rights path. For her, the West became a test for different programs for women’s elevation, and the results disproved the claims for women’s rights. Even Eliza’s own experience showed the complexities the West posed to women’s freedom. Farnham’s Santa Cruz farming experiment failed after less than two years. The labor was too hard, Farnham’s business acumen too flawed and capital resources too limited, and the men she employed too untrustworthy. Within two years, she had married, and although she preached marriage as the highest service a woman could render to the new state of California, her own was a disaster. Her new husband, William Fitzpatrick, was abusive and a drunkard. Four years later, Eliza got one of the first recorded divorces in American California and then left the state. The most productive aspect of her time there was California In-Doors and Out, the publication of which helped her support herself and her children.

Farnham’s alternative to the program of women’s rights was the principle of Woman’s Superiority. The idea that women are not only different from men but their superiors is just under the surface in California In-Doors and Out. But so much of her emphasis in this book is on women’s greater fragility with respect to the harsh conditions of emigrating and pioneering that the argument from female superiority does not yet fully emerge. After a second trip to California in 1856, Farnham returned east to publish her fourth book, the two-volume Woman and Her Era.

Here, Farnham openly rejects both the call for equal rights and the claim that the two sexes are fundamentally the same. Although she appreciates “the courage and faithfulness” of women’s rights advocates, she nonetheless regards their movement as “erroneous in philosophy, and in many practical matters, partially mistaken in direction.” Instead of rights, she argues, women need recognition for their superiority. Not a conventionally religious person, Farnham does not rely on Christian conviction or limit her claims of superiority to the moral sphere. As women were able to give birth to children, she thought that they were physically stronger, biologically superior, to men. So far in human history, she declares, “progress has been in the main undeniably intellectual and natural, rather than spiritual; as it needs be while it remains so exclusively in masculine hands.”

While she was in the midst of writing Woman and Her Era, Farnham brought her alternative program of Female Superiority to the 1858 Women’s Rights Convention. She agreed with most other women’s rights advocates that much about the current condition of women constituted a kind of enslavement: the unjustness of male domination and female subordination in marriage laws, the sexual double standard that made women guilty of sexual crimes while ignoring and forgiving men, and the exploitation and underpayment of women workers. Like women’s rights women, she called for unfettered freedom for individual women to seek employment and opportunity. She even seemed to envision something like an organized social movement of women: “The courage to speak out what social bondage bids us hide, can hence be moved, in the mass of Women, only by a support which assures them of sympathy; … no earnest lover of our sex can fail to find in its position to-day, abundant cause for rejoicing, and rich inspiration to noble faith in its future.”

Nonetheless, Farnham was not well received by her women’s rights audience. Her class elitism, the insult her ideas conveyed to men (and male supporters of women’s rights), and the strong strain of resentment for actually existing women—as opposed to the ideal essence of Woman—made the doctrine of the Superiority of Woman an unlikely candidate for a popular political ideology. The Polish and Jewish-born freethinking feminist, Ernestine Rose, who shared the platform with Farnham regarded her as an opportunist, who “wished to avail herself of whatever had been done, not caring to identify herself with the movement.” Farnham returned the disregard. When she published Woman and Her Era, Farnham listed many female reformers and philanthropists as representatives of true womanly character. The list included Lucy Stone, Lucretia Mott, and Lydia Maria Child but omitted more radical rights advocates such as Rose, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.

In July 1863, Farnham made her way to the Gettysburg battlefield. She arrived a few days after the shooting had stopped, ready to help nurse the thousands of wounded and dying men who awaited care. Exhausted and perhaps having contracted some sort of infection, Farnham subsequently returned to New York, worked for the next five months to complete Woman and Her Era, became sick, and then died, two days before Christmas, 1864.

A year and a half later, at the first women’s rights convention held after the Civil War, writer Caroline Dall mentioned Farnham’s life, work, and death. Her tribute was restrained, even hostile. Farnham’s life, claimed Dall, had been “a bitter disappointment to herself,” a charge to which Elizabeth Cady Stanton responded with far greater empathy. Stanton was exactly the same age as Farnham, shared many similar ambitions, and seemed to understand that their paths and prospects had been, at least for a time, similar.

Who does realize in life all that in starting was looked for? Who has nothing to regret? With a heart so generous and sympathizing as hers … a life so rich in practical usefulness, she was not only a blessing to others, but she must have had a more than an ordinary share of peace and happiness that gladdens every Christian life.

“I have just read her last great work,” Stanton continued. Although she approached Woman and Her Era with “prejudice,” Farnham’s conviction about female superiority deeply affected her, conveying “a higher idea of woman’s destiny.” Such ideas—about women’s specialness and superiority—do in fact characterize Stanton’s postwar writings more than they do her prewar convictions. Perhaps Farnham was a source, and “the glorious thoughts that thrill my heart” were a genuine influence on Stanton’s enduring thought.

E. P. Thompson, in his classic study of the precursors of British working-class consciousness, argued for the importance of studying byways of the past, which only in retrospect do we know to be historic dead-ends but which at the time seemed as straight a road into the future as any other. Such a historical subject is Eliza Farnham, once a prophet of women’s glorious future, subsequently a minor figure, perhaps once again useful as an indicator of grand and influential visions of the interrelated possibilities of women’s and the nation’s expanding boundaries.

Further Reading:

Eliza Farnham published five books, four of which are discussed in this article in the order in which they discuss different parts of her life: Life in Prairie Land (New York, 1846); California In-Doors and Out; or How we Farm, Mine and Live Generally in the Golden State (New York, 1856); My Early Days (New York, 1859), which was republished by A. J. Davis & Co., as Eliza Woodson: The Early Days of One of the World’s Workers, A Story of American Life (New York, 1864); and Woman and Her Era 2 vols. (New York, 1864 ). In addition, Farnham wrote an account of her relationship with Georgiana Bruce, The Ideal Attained; being the story of two steadfast souls and How they Won Their Happiness and Lost it Not, which was published just after her death (New York, 1865). Georgiana Bruce kept her own account of the relationship in a diary that has been published by the Santa Cruz Historical Society as Georgiana Bruce Kirby: Feminist Reformer of the West, Helen S. Giffen, et al., eds. (Santa Cruz, Calif., 1987). Georgiana Bruce Kirby (her married name) discussed Farnham in Years of Experience: An Autobiographical Narrative (New York and London, 1887). Madeleine B. Stern, the idiosyncratic and underappreciated scholar of nineteenth-century gender and sexuality, wrote about Eliza Farnham in several venues, most extensively in her introductions to republications of Life in Prairie Land and California In-Doors and Out (Nieuwkoop, Neth., 1972). More recently, Jo Ann Levy, historian of California women, has published an engaging joint biography of the two women, Unsettling the West: Eliza Farnham and Georgiana Bruce Kirby in Frontier California (Santa Clara, Calif., 2004). Levy includes a full account of the shifting interest of historians and literary scholars in Farnham. Levy and others have noted that Georgiana Bruce Kirby was the unattributed historical model for Mrs. Elliot in Wallace Stegner’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Angle of Repose (Garden City, N.Y., 1971), other characters of which were also derived from historical figures Mary Foote Hallock and Helena DeKay Gilder. An account of the Rose/Farnham antagonism can be found in Carol A. Kolmerten, The American Life of Ernestine Rose (Syracuse, N.Y., 1999).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Ellen Carol DuBois is professor of history and women’s studies at UCLA. She is the author of Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848-1869 and, with Lynn Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents.

Several years ago, a friend who was editing a special issue of a history journal asked me to contribute an article about women and the Constitution. Having just completed some research on women and The Federalist, I knew the technique that I would use: Assuming that women were nowhere discussed in the debates in the Constitutional Convention, I would look at the use of gendered language for clues about what the Founders thought about women and their place in the government they were creating. Like most other historians, I believed that the available political ideologies–republicanism and liberalism–excluded women. Republicanism extolled self-sacrifice for the common good, while liberalism vaunted the individual. But neither ideology, received wisdom held, thought that a woman could be a citizen, with a politically significant self, either to sacrifice or to be served by government.

I wanted to study th e terms of exclusion, the bases for asserting that women were politically insignificant. I thought that if I paid close attention to the way in which language was used and if I listened carefully to the silences–the places where gender might have been discussed but wasn’t–then I might have something useful to contribute to our understanding of the place of women in early American politics and political thought.

So I dutifully went about my work of reading through the Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven, 1986), the compilation of notes taken by James Madison and other participants in the Constitutional Convention and the closest thing we have to an actual transcript of the debates, looking for a hidden discourse of gender. What I found there surprised me–an explicit reference to women in one of the most important moments of one of the most important debates. (The Records are now online at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Website.)

The reference wasn’t supposed to be there, we’ve been told. So far as I know, no historian or political theorist had ever noticed these words before or remarked upon them. In fact, the reigning assumption was that women were nowhere mentioned in the Constitution, and the only question was what should be made out of this fact. Some have argued that women’s omission meant that they were implicitly included, and hence were members of what Benedict Anderson has called the “imagined community” of the new American nation. Others have argued that women’s omission was intentional and hence that women were not part of the political community created by the Constitution.

But what if women indeed were mentioned? Would we have to change our interpretation of the place of women in the Constitution? And would the context in which women were mentioned shed new light on other aspects of the Constitution? Would we have to think about the Constitution in new ways?

Women were introduced, as it were, to the Constitutional Convention on June 11, in one of the early debates about representation in what would become the House of Representatives. According to James Madison’s notes, Roger Sherman of Connecticut proposed that each state’s representation “should be according to the respective numbers of free inhabitants.” Two South Carolinians, John Rutledge and Pierce Butler, immediately responded that representation should instead be based not upon population but upon each state’s material contribution to the national government. It was in this context, a debate about whether representation should be based upon population or wealth (which would include slaves), that Pennsylvania’s James Wilson, one of the most active and influential members of the convention, suggested that it be “in proportion to the whole number of white & other free Citizens and inhabitants of every age sex & condition including those bound to servitude for a term of years and three fifths of all other persons not comprehended in the foregoing description, except Indians paying taxes, in each state.”

We can recognize this formulation as the first draft of the infamous Three-fifths Clause, which is what it became by the end of the summer, after several more months of debate and editing by the Committee of Style (the Convention’s copy editors, charged with improving the document’s rhetoric without changing its substance). Purely for stylistic reasons the Committee deleted the phrase “of every age sex & condition” (along with, incidentally, the adjective “white”). In other words, the framers had expressly included women among those whom the new government was intended to represent, and then had almost immediately edited their presence out, leaving explicit only–and I will return to this matter later–an odious compromise with slavery.

It might be objected that when the convention struggled to find the words for an acceptable compromise on slavery, it was merely engaged in formulas and word games, and not trying to make a sweeping statement about gender and politics. To some extent, that is true. The delegates to the Continental Congress had wrangled over that issue year after year. When James Wilson introduced this germ of the Three-fifths Clause, he was simply repeating, word-for-word, the formulation for levying assessments that Congress had recommended in 1783. Both in Congress and the convention, the delegates were trying to effect a simultaneous compromise on two very difficult issues: first, whether taxation and representation should be based on population or on wealth, and then, how slaves should be taken into account.

The issue of gender, make no mistake, was rather far from anyone’s mind. In Congress and then in the convention, when the delegates hammered out their formulas for representing and accounting for slave property, nobody spoke up when the term “sex” was mentioned. And, there is no record of any discussion about women, their rights, or their duties, at any point during the Constitutional Convention. On this, the standard interpretations have been correct.

At the same time, however, gender had been brought into the discussion, and even though no one wanted to draw out the implications of this fact, it could not help having important implications for government and political thought. As feminist scholars always note, gender is always there. In any political theory or any form of government, women are either included or excluded; the only question is on what terms, and whether those terms are explicit or implicit. The Constitution presents an interesting case, for the explicit–but unexamined–inclusion of women was quickly obliterated, making the presence of women in the Constitution even more shadowy. Unless the light is very bright, you cannot see them at all. Still, they are there, and the terms of their inclusion have important implications.

First of all, the mere mention of “sex,” however fleeting and inadvertent, means that the Constitution rests on an inclusive theory of representation. Historians who believe that the American Revolution and the new American nation rested on a foundation of republican political thought have generally argued that government represented only those men who had sufficient property to make them independent; government was supposed to be for and by the propertied. To be sure, there was debate in the Convention about whether property or persons were to be represented–and it was the advocates of persons who prevailed. Once representation was shifted off the ground of property and onto that of persons, there was no longer any obvious rationale for excluding women. It would have been quite easy to use the word “men,” but the delegates chose instead the more inclusive “persons,” and in their debates, if not the final, edited version of the Constitution, they made it clear that “persons” included women.

They did so, I believe, for two reasons. First, many of them believed that the purpose of government was to protect society. Wilson himself made this clear a few years later in his Lectures on Law–delivered to an audience of both men and women in Philadelphia over the winters of 1790-91 and 1791-92–when he noted that “by some politicians, society has been considered as only the scaffolding of government; very improperly, in my judgment. In the just order of things, government is the scaffolding of society; and if society could be built and kept entire without government, the scaffolding might be thrown down, without the least inconvenience or cause of regret.” This notion was not original to Wilson, by any means. Rather, it was the liberal orthodoxy of Paine, of Madison, of Jefferson. Men (and women) realized their potential not in public, but in private. Hence, “government was instituted for the happiness of society.”

And women were members of society. Every political and social theorist who discussed this matter–not only Wilson, but Paine, Jefferson, and all the influential Scottish thinkers from Francis Hutcheson to Adam Smith–were explicit here. If government’s role was to protect society, and society included women, one of the objects of government was the protection of women.

Implicit, then, in the Constitution’s doctrine of representation was that the new government, in securing the happiness of society, was to look after women–not as women, but as members of society. To put it another way, the liberalism of the Constitution is far more capacious than we have generally imagined. Most historians of American political thought consider liberalism a rather cramped philosophy, one that rests on the Lockean principle of self-ownership. Society, in this view, is nothing more than what C.B. Macpherson called “relations of exchange between proprietors,” and political society nothing more than “a calculated device for the protection of this property and the maintenance of an orderly relation of exchange.” Yet the handful of words that the Committee of Style deleted from James Wilson’s formula for representation suggests the presence of a liberalism that is more encompassing, more generous, more nurturing even–or at least a liberalism with that potential.

We can see some of that potential when we look at the Bill of Rights. Those who characterize liberalism as excessively individualist often also complain that Americans are exceedingly concerned with their rights. But the rights protected by the First Amendment are not, by and large, the rights of the atomized individual but those that are expressed in public. The Establishment Clause protects both the right of conscience and the right to worship with others, while the freedoms of speech, press, assembly, and petition are clearly the rights of the public sphere; they are the rights that sustain society. And the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Amendments all protect citizens from overbearing government, not from their fellow citizens. Significantly, all of these rights pertained to women. Women were not, as Linda K. Kerber has recently demonstrated, called to the duties of citizenship. But they certainly were accorded its rights.

The Constitution, then, included women, and it made women rights bearers. But that does not seem to have been the express intent of any of the Constitution’s authors. If it had been, surely they would have been more explicit about it, and the Committee of Style would not have deleted James Wilson’s phrase about “every age sex & condition.” When Wilson introduced that language, his purpose was not to make sure that women–or children, or any of the others who could not represent themselves–were represented, but to solve a particular problem, one that had very little to do with gender. That problem was whether wealth or population was to be represented in the House, and how slaves were to be counted, whichever approach was used. Why, then, add the phrase about age, sex, and condition, and not just leave it at “three fifths of all other persons”? Why mention gender at all?

Let us remember why Wilson introduced the clause and what its origins were, which brings us to the second reason that the Constitution includes women. Here we leave the realm of abstract principle and enter the one of practical politics, or, to be more accurate, the one where principle and politics converge. Wilson was suggesting that representation be based upon population–a democratic proposition–and sweetening it for Southerners by offering to count three-fifths of their slaves. Context, however, shapes meaning: When the same formulation had been suggested in the Continental Congress several years earlier for levying taxes, it penalized the South, rather than rewarding it, for the South would have paid extra taxes for its slave population.

The debates over taxation had begun in 1775, when Benjamin Franklin suggested that each state’s expenses be computed in proportion to the number of male polls between sixteen and sixty in that state. Because this was a standard formula in the North for determining who voted–male taxpayers–it might have seemed a reasonable and innocent basis for assessing taxation. In the context of Congress’s debates, however, it was a significant concession to the South, as it would have excluded all slaves from taxation, even though adult slaves, male and female both, were generally taxed in the South. A year later, John Dickinson countered with what might have seemed a much more democratic proposition, that taxes be in proportion to the total “Number of Inhabitants of every Age, Sex and Quality, except Indians not paying Taxes.” Clearly, however, the language was crafted as a response to Franklin’s proposal, and Dickinson’s intent was to make certain that the Southern states were taxed on their slaves. Without even using the word “slave,” Franklin and Dickinson had opened up a discussion about slavery.

In the context of these debates, the language of sex was an instrument for taxing–or not taxing, as the case might be–slaves. To propose counting only tax-paying males between sixteen and sixty was to exclude a significant part of Southern wealth–and wealth-creating laborers, including female slaves–from taxation. To counter, as Dickinson did, with a proposal to tax everyone, whatever their age, sex, or status, was to advocate that slaves be taxed. Hence, Dickinson’s “every Age, Sex and Quality” meant “tax the slaves.” To those words, Congress eventually added the Three-fifths Clause, which represented a compromise between Franklin’s proposal (tax none of the slaves) and Dickinson’s (tax them all). Had the clause gone into effect, it would have exacted a partial tax on slave property. But then, when James Wilson suggested exactly the same language as the basis for representation in the House, it gave the South a bonus for holding slaves, increasing their representation in the House by about 25 percent. When it would have inflated their tax bill, the Southern states quite obviously would have preferred not to have their slaves counted, but when it would increase their representation in Congress, they just as obviously would want all of their slaves to be counted. Women, then, were brought into this debate not for themselves, but only to enable the delegates, first in Congress and then in the Convention, to deal with the divisive issue of slavery by embedding it in more general, less inflammatory terms.

Looking back on these debates and political maneuverings more than two centuries later can make one dizzy. The delegates to the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention were always aware of both the philosophical implications and practical effects of any proposal they made, and although they tried always to gain the practical point without sacrificing ideological consistency, they sometimes impaled themselves on the horns of their own contradictions. So it was with gender and slavery. Between 1775 and 1788, democrat after democrat laid out the rationale for broad representation, one that implicitly included women and accorded them civil rights. But these same democrats, in order to create a form of government that best protected both liberty and their own states’ interests, made or resisted a series of compromises with slavery. In the process, the inclusive language of gender–“every age, sex & condition”–was twisted to sustain slavery.

So far as I can tell, the first person to notice that the Constitution included women was not a feminist trying to use that principle to empower women or to make a claim on their behalf. Instead it was a Kentucky senator, Richard M. Johnson, who, in the 1820 debates over the Missouri Compromise, defended the Three-fifths Clause. True, slaves, who could not vote, were represented, but so were women and minors. Then, in 1843, another Southern congressman, Thomas Gilmer, from Virginia, elaborated the argument by pointing to women and comparing their political status to slaves. Gilmer began with a paean to the protective state. “Each State is responsible for the care and protection of every part of its population; and its power should be in proportion of its responsibility.” By this principle, slaves should be represented, “as part of the human family, whose lives and sustenance are protected by government . . .” “It is true,” Gilmer acknowledged, “that slaves do not vote. Neither do women or minors. Yet these are enumerated in the apportionment of representatives. Representation is never confined to that class of population alone who vote.” Women (and children) now stood for all those who were represented but who could not represent themselves. The denial of women’s right to vote became an instrument for the perpetuation of the power of slaveholders.

So what does this convoluted history tell us? It holds, I think, both a promise and a warning. First, the promise: The Constitution and the liberal political thought that informed it embodied a doctrine of protection and inclusiveness that make both document and doctrine richer, more encompassing, more hopeful, and more social than critics have sometimes thought. The Constitution included women, and it called for their protection as members of society. But a vision does not realize itself; and a promise does not bring its own fulfillment. Principles can be bent to a variety of ends. The social Constitution and its doctrine of protection, even at the time they were authored, were bent to sustain slavery. In half a century’s time, that vision had been all but forgotten except by those who would use it to defend the continuing subjugation of other human beings. We might object that this is not what the Founders intended except that they gave us both the promise and its perversion, conceived at the same moment, the one always the other’s undoing.

Yet, if there is undoing, there is doing as well, and what has been undone, may yet be repaired. This, perhaps, is what Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, Lucy Stone, and a handful of other feminists were thinking in 1866 when they petitioned Congress for universal suffrage. The Constitution, they noted, “classes us as ‘free people,’ and counts us as whole persons in the basis for representation . . .” Feminists remembered that the Constitution included women, and they asked the nation, as should we, to make something of it.

Further reading: Some of this article is adapted from my “‘of every age sex & condition’: The Representation of Women in the Constitution,” Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 359-87. Rosemarie Zagarri and Linda K. Kerber have been exploring, respectively, the promise and the limitations of early American political thought for women. See Zagarri’s “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (June 1992): 192-215, and “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., 55 (1998): 203-30, and Kerber’s No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York, 1998). The quotation from Wilson can be found in Robert Green McCloskey, The Works of James Wilson, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1967). The quotation from C.B. Macpherson is in his The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (London, 1962). The Journals of the Continental Congress are also at the Library of Congress’s American Memory Website. I thank Margo Anderson for a serendipitous meeting and the reference to the Missouri debates.  

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (April, 2002).

Before Jan Lewis passed away in 2018, she was professor of history, Rutgers University, Newark. She was interested in the connections among family, gender, race, and political thought in the early national era. This article is part of a book she was completing for Cambridge University Press on that topic.

Clothing studies are too often overlooked by historians and even material culture scholars. Kate Haulman makes an overdue and important contribution with The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America. While much of what Haulman writes is known among scholars of American costume history, she is the first to pull together a deep and diverse group of resources to present an academic interpretation of American fashion and its political and social meaning in the late colonial and Revolutionary eras.

Using the “four major port cities of British North America: Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston” (3), Haulman analyzes fashion’s embodiment of eighteenth-century cultural and political tensions, focusing on its role in the argument for Revolution. The first of the book’s three sections examines social and economic status and gender relations-and the permeable parameters thereof—as reflected in fashion. The wearing of wigs by men (leading to complaints of an overly feminine appearance) and hoops by women (prompting accusations of indecency) became the particular focus of conflicts about gender roles.

Americans in the early republic walked a tightrope, trying to balance legitimacy as a new nation with the development of a unique culture. Fashion embodied this effort.

Chapters 3 and 4, comprising Part Two, discuss the tensions of the 1760s and 1770s over an influx and then taxation of imported goods (including fashions), which led to urgent calls for frugality and home manufacture. Foreign fashions became increasingly unnatural and outrageous, with the effeminate “Macaroni”—wearing tiny hats perched on huge wigs, über-stylish coats, and “mouche” patches on their faces—offering particular targets of ridicule. Similarly, women who invested in a “high roll” hairdo or wig risked the scorn of patriots coming down on their heads. A woman’s commitment to domesticity (preferably including spinning and weaving) and her rejection of frivolous foreign fashion verified her femininity. The general adoption of foreign fashions led to a backlash of “…restrained propriety as the true signifier of high status” (96); in the same manner, political power required sartorial restraint.

Part Three explores the infusion of fashion in Revolutionary politics, when a display of homespun or other simple garb signaled American patriotism—as a flag pin does today on the lapel of a politician. Once the Revolution was over, “…some argued that political transformation should signal a change in culture, and that an independency of dress was a place to start” (181). To appear legitimate to foreign powers, however, Americans had to maintain a fashionable appearance according to Western European prescriptions. Resistance to the calls for a national costume and continued dependence on foreign fashions led to prophesies of economic ruin and the republic’s collapse. Thus, Americans in the early republic walked a tightrope, trying to balance legitimacy as a new nation with the development of a unique culture. Fashion embodied this effort, as well as Americans’ pursuit of international trade and domestic manufacture, and concerns about social and gender identification.

Haulman is skilled at drawing together a diverse range of letters, newspaper advertisements, and various other period papers, but her book would have been strengthened by a deeper understanding of the material culture which forms the core of her subject. She states in an early endnote that “I approach fashion first as a discursive practice, which illuminates material culture as a site of power struggles and contested meanings” (227). The focus on documentary study to the relative exclusion of object study results in some unfortunate errors, however. Within the first three chapters, Haulman presents period portraits to illustrate the era’s costume and discuss its social implications. Several of the portraits are, in fact, fantasy dress, including the portrait of Daniel Parke II by John Closterman, 1706 (66); the female garb depicted in Isaac Winslow and His Family by Joseph Blackburn, 1755 (99); and the portrait of Rebecca Boylston by John Singleton Copley, 1767 (103). The artistic convention of portraying a sitter in fantasy dress began in the seventeenth century and continued throughout the eighteenth century; it was seen as creating an appearance of timelessness. Haulman misunderstands that artistic convention in her interpretation of two portraits of Isaac Winslow. In both paintings, Winslow wears the same coat—paired with an embroidered waistcoat in the 1748 image, and as part of a suit of matching fabric in the 1755 family portrait. Haulman points to the suit of Isaac Winslow in the 1755 family portrait as “…in keeping with the fashion of the day, but the use of the coat from the earlier work helps to give the figure the desired timeless quality” (99). In reality, the fashionable cut of the coat clearly indicated to his contemporaries that the portrait was painted in the mid-eighteenth century; within two decades, the coat was decidedly out of fashion. In contrast, Haulman describes the dress of “Lucy Jr.” as being “somewhat unusual, with its gathered sleeves” (100). But it is not a real dress at all; nor is her mother’s dress, with its bell-shaped sleeves—the women’s dresses, not Isaac Winslow’s coat, are intended to be “timeless.”

Haulman also misunderstands some of the conventions of language describing costume in the eighteenth century. For example, she relates the purchase in England of “a rich dress” for a young woman about to be married in 1754: “Given the prized nature of London goods, we can imagine her delight; but what if the dress was simply ‘wrong,’ whatever the reason?” (71) It was typical in prior centuries to describe a purchase as if it were a finished garment, rather than the cloth for it—thus, the purchase in London of the “wedding dress” was actually fabric yardage and probably trimmings. Women’s high-end clothing was not available ready-made in the eighteenth century; gowns were constructed by the “pin-to-form” method, requiring a woman to be present as the mantua-maker draped and pinned the gown fabric to fit the wearer closely over her corset.

Haulman ends her book with the apt observation, “Fashion was citizenship’s corset: a hidden but foundational device that underpinned the figurative garb of democracy and equality” (225). But she again misunderstands period clothing terminology and reveals her lack of experience in object study when she declares that women did not wear corsets until the end of the eighteenth century: “In the 1790s, the corset reentered the world of fashion. This is not to say that the midsections of women’s bodies had gone unsupported in the decades, even centuries, before. Stays, or ‘jumps,’ and stomachers stiffened by whalebone shaped the forms of many women in the early modern period” (217). Corsets were called “stays” in the eighteenth century. “Stays” were heavily boned undergarments that forced a woman’s torso into the fashionable and very rigid conical shape of the eighteenth century. “Stays” and “jumps” were not the same thing, as Haulman indicates. Jumps were unboned work garments, generally worn under a jacket or short gown, and stomachers were merely decorative panels intended to fill the front of the dress bodice. Haulman does not discuss the significance of the busk—a wooden or baleen slat that was slipped behind the center front of the stays, preventing a woman from bending at the waist and forcing her to sit and stand in an erect posture. The busk, stays, and cut of the dress (or the cut of a man’s coat) all forced a certain posture and bearing, declaring the wearer’s actual (or desired) social and economic status.

Such mistakes and omissions detract from Haulman’s otherwise impressive achievement. But she has certainly, in this far-reaching book, helped to legitimize costume history as a meaningful avenue for academic study and set a course for other historians to follow. Studies of fashion in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries bring forth many of the same concerns that Haulman considers—including complaints of feminine men and of the lower classes dressing above their station, denunciations of excessive attention to and overspending on fashion, dismay over the importation and mimicking of foreign fashions, and desires to adopt a simpler “American” style of dress. One hopes that her research will spur historians and costume experts to collaborate in investigations of these issues in other periods, so that we might finally have a comprehensive and substantive understanding of American costume and its political, social, and gendered meanings.

This article originally appeared in issue 12.3.5 (May, 2012).

Lynne Zacek Bassett is an award-winning costume and textile historian, author, freelance museum curator, and long-time member of the Costume Society of America. In her current position as guest curator for costume and textiles at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, she is researching a forthcoming exhibition and catalogue about American costume in the Romantic Era, 1810-1860.

Lyman Beecher on religion and politics in America

The political atmosphere was charged with issues of religion and morality. Regardless of the Constitution’s prohibition of any religious test for office holding, candidates’ spiritual lives and professions of faith came in for extended discussion and scrutiny. The political parties sought to bring religious voters into their coalitions, especially the large number of Americans who identified themselves as evangelical Protestants. Ministers thundered from their pulpits, although sometimes inadvertently wounding their preferred candidates with their utterances. Some asserted that America was a “Christian nation,” while others clamored for religious freedom, and sparks flew from the friction between Protestants and Catholics. Hot-button moral issues polarized the electorate, and a war that some decried as unjustified and downright immoral exacerbated tensions.

Sound familiar? At a forum of Democratic candidates in the summer of 2007, both Senator Hillary Clinton and former Senator John Edwards spoke of the importance of prayer, forgiveness, and how their Christian faith helped them through the most trying times of their lives. On the Republican side, the presence among the leading contenders of a Mormon (Mitt Romney) and a former Southern Baptist pastor (Mike Huckabee) elicited a further outpouring of discussion about the relevance of a candidates’ religion to his or her qualifications for the Oval Office. The two eventual nominees, Senators John McCain and Barack Obama, have both written in some detail about their religious experiences. In Faith of My Fathers, McCain wrote about how faith in God helped him survive imprisonment and torture during his Vietnam War captivity, and he movingly described a makeshift Christmas service he and his fellow P.O.W.’s put on in 1971. For his part, Obama took the title of his book, The Audacity of Hope, from a remark by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. He devoted a thoughtful chapter to religion and politics, in which he discussed his identification with the black church and his decision to join Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

The McCain and Obama campaigns have also had to work to contain damage caused by their engagement with religious themes. McCain caught flak for the perceived anti-Catholic comments of Texas megachurch pastor and televangelist, the Reverend John Hagee, who had endorsed McCain, while Obama had to repudiate Reverend Wright for a bevy of incendiary remarks. The two candidates also made trouble for themselves. McCain had to backpedal and explain himself when he said that the United States is a “Christian nation,” and Obama drew a barrage of criticism when he opined that “bitter,” working-class Americans “cling to guns or religion” along with nativism and protectionism.

Of course there is nothing new about the politicization of religion (and vice versa) in the United States. In fact, contrary to popular myth, there is nothing at odds with the Constitution about all this. Whatever the first amendment may say about the separation of church and state, religion has had a place in American politics, for better or worse, since the very founding of the nation. Perhaps no early American is more emblematic of this long-standing entanglement of religion and politics than the early nineteenth-century clergyman Lyman Beecher (1775-1863) (fig. 1). Today, Beecher is probably best known for his remarkable brood of children, who included the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the celebrity preacher, writer, and lecturer Henry Ward Beecher. Yet in his generation, Lyman Beecher was one of America’s most prominent clergymen. He was a revivalist during the Second Great Awakening, one of the organizers of innovative missionary and reform organizations such as the American Bible Society and the American Temperance Society, and a seminary president, to name just a few of his career highlights. In all of these very public roles, and many others, Beecher navigated the often perilous path between power and belief, religion and politics. A brief exploration of Beecher’s political experiences may thus allow us to see the present religion-politics matrix with a deeper and clearer perspective.

Lyman Beecher was born and raised in Connecticut and studied for the ministry at Yale. Religion and politics had historically been closely intertwined in that former Puritan colony, and taxpayer funds would subsidize the Congregational churches until 1818. Beecher assumed his first pastorate in 1799 over the Presbyterian Church at East Hampton, New York, just across Long Island Sound from Connecticut. At that time, many of his colleagues in the New England ministry bitterly opposed Thomas Jefferson, the Democratic Republican candidate for the presidency. Jefferson, they believed, had demonstrated a disturbing sympathy for atheistic, anti-clerical views with his insistence on the separation of church and state—articulated in his famous “Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom”—and his association with the likes of Tom Paine and other known religious skeptics.

To counter these apparent “infidelities,” the New England clergy unsuccessfully agitated for what one historian has termed “a voter-imposed religious test” that would override the Constitution’s prohibition of religious tests for government office. Figure 2 shows the kinds of invidious comparisons they drew between the piety and wisdom of George Washington and the irreligion of Jefferson. They pointed out, for example, that in his Farewell Address Washington had stated that “reason and experience both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principle,” while Jefferson, in Notes on the State of Virginia, had written that “it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”

Within this contentious, partisan atmosphere, Beecher first made a name for himself by denouncing the practice of dueling, especially on the part of seekers of public office. Not long after Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton, Beecher preached a sermon asking how anyone could vote for a murderer. He delivered the sermon at a few Long Island churches during 1805 and at a presbytery meeting in April 1806, and then published it as The Remedy for Duelling. To counter these sorts of unchristian methods, Beecher advocated a ballot-box solution in which Christians would sanctify the electoral process “by withholding your suffrages from every man whose hands are stained with blood, and by intrusting to men of fair character and moral principle the making and execution of your laws.” Beecher lived in an era of partisan polarization, and yet he claimed that his strategy was above party. “It is in vain to cry out ‘priest-craft’—or ‘political preaching,’” he said. “The crime we oppose is peculiar to no party.” Instead, displaying his talents as an activist and organizer, Beecher called upon “voluntary associations” to organize a “concert of action” to suppress the culture of dueling.

Following a move in 1810 to the more lucrative pulpit of the Congregational Church in Litchfield, Connecticut, Beecher continued to push for action by voluntary societies, which he termed “a sort of disciplined moral militia.” He attacked Sabbath breaking and drunkenness in an 1812 sermon entitled, “A Reformation of Morals Practicable and Indispensable.” In his Autobiography, Beecher recalled that he had first become concerned about the problem of alcohol abuse during his time in East Hampton when he observed how unscrupulous merchants plied the Montauk Indians with liquor. He also noted that even when clergymen gathered for such an event as an ordination, they happily imbibed substantial quantities of booze. Now he took a place in the vanguard of the temperance movement, the campaign to get drinkers to swear off at least hard liquor, if not every type of alcoholic beverage. Beecher had a keen appreciation for the necessity of working to change public opinion in order to bring about lasting change. Indeed, over the quarter century between 1825 and 1850, the temperance movement succeeded in slashing the alcohol consumption of the average American adult from seven gallons per year to fewer than two.

This success should not, however, lull us into thinking that policy and belief achieved some sort of easy alliance in nineteenth-century America. Beecher and his clerical peers endured some very difficult days. In support of New England’s commercial economy, for example, they opposed the relatively popular War of 1812. And in their own vineyard, they faced growing competition from rival sects, particularly the Baptists, who called for the separation of church and state. The successful end of the war in 1815 brought disgrace to the anti-war Beecher and his peers in the Federalist Party, substantially weakening their sway in state politics. The result was a sea change in the religious politics of New England. Now the old “Standing Order” of Congregational clergy and New England’s political elite found itself in the minority, unable to stem the tide of disestablishment sentiment. By 1818, Connecticut had formally disestablished the Congregational Church. Beecher realized that the church-state arrangements of the Puritan forefathers were gone for good, and at first he hung his head in gloom. Yet he soon came around to the conclusion that disestablishment was “the best thing that ever happened to the State of Connecticut. It cut the churches loose from dependence on state support. It threw them wholly on their own resources and on God.”

In sermons delivered during the late 1810s and 1820s, Beecher rethought the proper connection between religion and politics in a democratic society. He tried to chart a course between the pitfalls of partisanship and the promise of moral influence. In an 1823 sermon, The Faith Once Delivered to the Saints, he told his listeners to avoid “things merely secular” and to speak out only on “great questions of national morality.” He warned Christians not to get too attached to any political party but rather to cast their votes strictly on the basis of righteousness. As he phrased matters in an 1826 sermon to the Connecticut legislature, “Multitudes of Christians and patriots have long since abandoned party politics, and, not knowing what to do, have abandoned almost the exercise of suffrage. This is wrong. An enlightened and virtuous suffrage may, by system and concentration, become one of the most powerful means of promoting national purity and morality.” In other words, Beecher envisioned the evangelical community as an electoral arbiter that would stand between the political parties and base its judgments solely on moral principles.

Beecher applied these ideas during the Sabbatarian campaigns of the 1810s and 1820s. Sabbatarians wanted to stop the transportation of the mail on Sundays and close the post offices on that day. They believed that the republican experiment depended on Sabbath observation, because that was when the citizenry learned the moral virtue required of them in a free society. In 1814 Beecher became involved in a Presbyterian petition drive that beseeched Congress to halt postal transportation on the Sabbath day. Congress, however, judged the everyday movement of the mails too important to the communication of commercial and military information and so took no action. In 1828, Beecher, now pastor of Boston’s Hanover Street Church, was present at the inaugural meeting of the General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath, an organization made up of people who promised to honor the Sabbath and boycott transport firms that violated it. He penned the organization’s initial statement, one hundred thousand copies of which were printed and distributed nationwide, followed by a second petition campaign.

The anti-Sabbatarian opposition that emerged showed that the introduction of supposedly nonpartisan moral issues into politics would prove deeply divisive. Individuals and denominations suspicious of an overly powerful clergy pushed back, especially those like the Baptists who feared that any mixing of church and state—such as that required by government action on behalf of the Sabbath—would favor their rivals, the Congregationalists. As early political cartoons made clear (fig. 3), these fears were quite widespread. The second petition drive was quashed in a Senate committee led by Richard Mentor Johnson, Democrat of Kentucky (fig. 4). The committee took a hands-off approach to the Sabbatarians’ petitions, saying that it was not for the committee to decide whether the Sabbath should be on Saturday or Sunday. The committee also made a slippery-slope argument, suggesting that if Congress interfered with the Sabbath, petitioners would soon be asking for taxpayer-funded ministers and houses of worship. Johnson’s two reports against the Sabbatarian campaign, which were in fact written by his friend, the Baptist minister Obadiah Brown, made him a champion of religious freedom in some circles.

The political firestorm over the Sabbath was just a prelude to what would be an embattled few decades for Beecher. Through the 1820s and 1830s he found himself engaged in a bitter theological controversy, attacking Unitarian liberals for their rejection of Calvinism and defending himself against charges of doctrinal irregularities made by conservative, “Old School” Presbyterians. In 1832 he took his battle to what was then considered “the West” and assumed the presidency of Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati. There he came face to face with what was his era’s most controversial issue: slavery. Until taking up his post at Lane, Beecher had been able to avoid the matter. But when the Lane trustees forbade discussion of slavery for fear of antagonizing the school’s Cincinnati neighbors, Beecher faced a serious crisis. Most of the more radical student body bolted to Oberlin College, which had been founded in 1833 and had become a hotbed of abolitionist sentiment. Beecher’s preference for a moderate, unified antislavery course foundered, as it would across the nation in the years leading to the Civil War.

By 1840 Beecher reentered the political fray. During the 1830s, Americans who found President Andrew Jackson and his policies disagreeable had formed the Whig Party. Beecher’s eldest daughter, the educator Catharine Beecher, had been a leading organizer of petitions against Jackson’s policy of Indian removal, the forced relocation of Native Americans from their ancestral lands in the southeastern United States. In the presidential election of 1840, Lyman Beecher threw his support behind the Whig candidate, fellow Ohioan William Henry Harrison (fig. 5). Whigs played up the issue of Harrison’s piety, and Sabbatarians and temperance advocates flocked to his standard, regardless of his famous campaign image as a common man who inhabited a log cabin and drank hard cider. Unfortunately for the Whigs, Harrison’s sudden death a month after his inauguration dashed their hopes for an administration of godliness and morality.

In 1844 Beecher endorsed the Whig ticket of Henry Clay for president and Theodore Frelinghuysen for vice president (fig. 6). Frelinghuysen, former United States Senator from New Jersey and onetime president of the Sabbath Union, embodied Beecher’s ideal of “the Christian statesman,” but Beecher’s support soon became a liability for the Whigs. In a political move worthy of Karl Rove, the Democrats reprinted forty thousand copies of Beecher’s old anti-dueling sermon so as to embarrass Clay, who had been involved in a couple of duels in his younger days. The Whigs narrowly lost that election, in part because the growing Irish Catholic population in New York City, suspicious of the kind of Protestant moralizing represented by Beecher and Frelinghuysen, voted heavily Democratic.

What lessons can we take from this selective look at Lyman Beecher’s public career? For one thing, he was correct to conclude that the days of the New England founders, who had sought to make church and state mutually supporting, had passed. The United States Constitution is a secular document that prohibits religious tests for office and that outlaws direct state support of religious institutions. Beecher recognized that only to the extent that the United States was populated by those who adhered to traditional Christianity—what he termed “the faith once delivered to the saints” in his 1823 sermon, quoting Jude 3—would it be a Christian nation.

At the same time, the “separation of church and state” does not mean that voters informed by religious values would remain silent. As Beecher’s generation spoke out against Sabbath breaking, intemperance, Indian removal, and slavery, so people of faith today will continue to champion so-called social issues in the political arena. But they should not expect to be popular as a result. Beecher’s experience exposed both the necessity of speaking out and the inevitability of the ensuing controversy. Moreover, professed Christians of different denominations may very well line up on opposite sides of issues. Congregationalists and Baptists, for example, tend to take different stands on numerous questions today no less than in Beecher’s time.

Beecher achieved his clearest successes when he operated independently of government. The evangelical organizations in which he played such a prominent role really did change the culture and help inaugurate the Victorian era. The same is true of the temperance movement. Yet Beecher also showed that the political parties are unavoidable. He desired Christians to remain above the partisan fray, but he also realized the necessity of eventually choosing to be involved with one or the other if one hoped to influence public policy. Then as now, elections have consequences. Harrison’s untimely death and the Whigs’ narrow defeat in 1844, for example, led to war with Mexico and the expansion of slavery. Beecher’s son, Henry Ward, would side with the new Republican Party in the 1850s as the only effective instrument for breaking the Slave Power’s grip over the United States.

Lyman Beecher’s efforts to scrutinize the morality of governmental policy and to mobilize voter support for his causes ultimately contributed to the robust, participatory democracy of antebellum America. He carried a Puritan tradition of prophetic preaching into the early republic and set ground rules for Christian involvement in politics that are still relevant. Contemporary American political culture, with its “values voters” and “faith forums,” is heir to his legacy.

Further Reading:

An invaluable source for understanding Beecher is Barbara M. Cross, ed., The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass., 1961). Originally published in 1864, it is a collection of his and his children’s reminiscences and letters that were compiled during his retirement years after 1850. It also includes extracts from many of his most noteworthy sermons.

The best general biography of Beecher is Vincent Harding, A Certain Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and the Transformation of American Protestantism, 1775-1863 (Brooklyn, N.Y., 1991). There are perceptive chapters on Beecher’s evolving thinking about social reform in Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994) and John G. West Jr., The Politics of Revelation and Reason: Religion and Civic Life in the New Nation (Lawrence, Kans., 1996). Two works that include Beecher as an important participant in debates over religion and politics are Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (New Haven, Conn., 1993) and Richard R. John, “Taking Sabbatarianism Seriously: The Postal System, the Sabbath, and the Transformation of American Political Culture,” Journal of the Early Republic 10:4 (1990): 517-67. On the election of 1800 see Frank Lambert, “‘God—and a Religious President…[or] Jefferson and No God’: Campaigning for a Voter-Imposed Religious Test in 1800,” Journal of Church and State 39:4 (1997): 769-89. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848 (New York, 2007) provides a magisterial survey of Beecher’s age.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Jonathan D. Sassi is associate professor of history at the College of Staten Island and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and author of A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (New York, 2001).

Stephen Douglas, Frederick Douglass, and the blackened reputation of Abraham Lincoln

The propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be denounced…lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.

—Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” (1852)

[The government] wants us to sing “God Bless America.” No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.

—The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, “Confusing God and Government” (2003)

It has become a commonplace of modern politics to bemoan the presumably sorry state of our election campaigns by comparing them with the 1858 U.S. Senate debates between Stephen A. Douglas and Abraham Lincoln. The seven encounters around the state of Illinois exactly 150 years ago are often collectively regarded as the apogee of high-minded democratic discourse. “Lincoln-Douglas It Wasn’t,” reads the title of a blog entry on a George Bush-John Kerry debate in 2004. A suburban New York newspaper Website summed up its coverage of a 2006 debate for state senate with the headline, “It Wasn’t Exactly Lincoln-Douglas.” U.S. News and World Report described former presidential candidate John Edwards’s response to a 2007 video portraying him fussing with his hair by saying “it wasn’t the Lincoln-Douglas debates, exactly.” At one point in the presidential primary campaigns this spring, Hillary Clinton repeatedly called for Lincoln-Douglas styled debates with Barack Obama. “I think they would love seeing that kind of debate and discussion,” she said. The Obama campaign made a similar pitch to John McCain in response to the McCain campaign’s call for town meetings.

Of course, as anyone who has actually read the transcripts of the Lincoln-Douglas debates knows, they were characterized by often numbing repetition, mudslinging, and innuendo. The racial dimension of the innuendo was especially important. If patriotism is the last refuge of scoundrels, then racism—cloaked in the garb of anti-extremism—may well be the first.

Whether in fact Douglas was a scoundrel had become the key issue in American politics in 1858, and he was desperate to change the subject. That he was the likely Democratic nominee for president in 1860 was considered conventional wisdom by friend and foe alike. But Douglas was also widely considered damaged goods for the way he attempted to finesse the great political issue of his time, the expansion of slavery. In a time of increasing polarization, he consistently sought to seize the middle ground, a strategy that enhanced his political clout but that also generated suspicion that he would say or do anything for political gain. By the late 1850s, the key to his future lay in his reelection to a third term in the U.S. Senate. But, as Douglas well knew, that would happen only if he could shift the focus of the campaign away from his compromising legislative record to the record of an opponent who was not very well known outside Illinois but whom Douglas had the good sense to recognize as a mortal threat.

Douglas considered himself a patriotic nationalist, particularly compared with opponents he plausibly regarded as ideological and sectional. He had spent the previous decade navigating the treacherous slavery divide that had moved from a side issue before the Mexican War to the nation’s central problem. In 1850 Douglas crossed party lines to team up with Whig senator Daniel Webster, picking up the banner of the faltering Whig Henry Clay and getting the Compromise of 1850 through Congress and the White House. Many politicians and voters considered this legislative package the last word on the subject of slavery’s expansion. To be sure, proslavery advocates like John Calhoun and abolitionists like Harriet Beecher Stowe (who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin to protest the Fugitive Slave Act component of the compromise) would continue to carp about the national scourge. But they would do so primarily from the sidelines—at least until Douglas again leapt onto the national legislative scene.

Ironically, the man who undid the Compromise of 1850 was Douglas himself. Fishing for Southern support as he contemplated his presidential prospects, Douglas concocted a new bill, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which he rammed through Congress in 1854. The new law broadened a concept of popular sovereignty (first championed by Democratic presidential candidate Lewis Cass in the 1840s) to allow the voters in a particular territory—rather than the national government—to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery. Douglas would claim for years to come that he didn’t care whether slavery was voted up or down and that his real commitment was to the democratic process. When the law led to a bloody guerilla war in Kansas territory and then a proslavery constitution there, questions arose about Douglas’s sincerity. If his real concern was democracy, could he rightly support a constitution that most knew to be the result of proslavery’s violent and intimidating tactics? The dilemma was made all the more difficult for Douglas by the fact that the Democratic Buchanan administration endorsed the largely fraudulent constitution. To claim, as he eventually would, that the process in Kansas made a mockery of popular sovereignty, Douglas would have to break with the president. Furthermore, this position would permanently damage Douglas’s standing among the very proslavery advocates the Kansas-Nebraska Act was supposed to attract. Douglas’s stratagem proved too clever by half and backfired. He returned to Illinois to campaign in 1858 with many Democrats fiercely opposed to him.

Douglas’s opponent for the Senate seat had his own intra-party divisions to navigate. Abraham Lincoln, nominee of the recently formed Republican Party, had lukewarm partisan support; in fact, some Republicans advocated exploiting Democratic divisions by making Douglas the Republican nominee. Moreover, the core of Republican support came from drifting fragments of the old Whig Party, many of whose members were deeply wary of abolitionist elements within the new Republican coalition. Lincoln would have to woo these skittish Whigs to prevent their defection to the Douglasite Democrats.

With its rickety coalition and little-known candidate, the deck appeared heavily stacked against the Republicans. Douglas was already a politician of national note and his party, though facing one of the greatest crises of its history, was venerable and established. So, when challenged to a series of seven debates around Illinois in the summer and fall of 1858, Douglas might well have declined, confident that his name and the party’s machinery would carry him to victory. But, of course, he did not. Why? The answer is that the pugilistic Douglas saw in the debates an opportunity to fatally fracture the fragile Republican coalition.

There were two core components of this strategy: The first, which Douglas unveiled in his opening remarks at the first debate in Ottawa, Illinois, and returned to repeatedly (in fact, the debates were more like a series of alternating speeches, not entirely unlike contemporary presidential “debates”), was an appeal to those he wanted to consider former rivals. Only a few years ago, he said, there were two great political parties, Democrats and Whigs. As a Democrat, Douglas battled worthy foes like the late Henry Clay. But whatever their differences, both parties were national in scope and patriotic in tone. Now, however, the nation faced the prospect of a splintered political system typified by the upstart Republicans, whose politics were overtly sectional and extremist. Lincoln’s famous 1858 “House Divided” speech, in which he asserted the nation could not indefinitely survive half slave and half free, was exhibit A in this line of argument. Douglas repeatedly used Lincoln’s words from this speech against him, citing it as evidence that he considered a civil war inevitable and even desirable. By contrast, Douglas presented himself as a voice of moderation, loyal to the sacred trust bequeathed to his generation by the Founding Fathers, insisting there was no good reason why the national experiment could not continue indefinitely.

This component was the high road. The low road was explicit racism. This is a white man’s country, Douglas said again and again. The problem with Abraham Lincoln is that he wants to make it a black man’s country, too. In debate after debate, Douglas repeatedly lumped Lincoln with an array of abolitionist leaders like Salmon Chase and Owen Lovejoy, whose brother Elijah had been murdered in Illinois in 1837 for publishing an abolitionist newspaper (as a state legislator, Lincoln sponsored and was one of the few signers of a resolution condemning the crime). Indeed, Douglas characteristically preceded any invocation of Lincoln’s political affiliation with the adjective “black”—he was the candidate of the “Black Republican” party.

The quintessential Black Republican—the blackest of the black, as it were—was Frederick Douglass. By 1858, Douglass had established himself as the premier voice in American abolitionism. The former slave was now the publisher of an antislavery newspaper, and his oratory incited supporters and opponents alike. Nowhere was Douglass’s stirring oratory more potent than in his famous 1852 Independence Day speech, “What to the American Slave is the Fourth of July?” delivered before hundreds of listeners in Rochester, New York, and then widely republished. Douglass answered his question by saying “it is a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham…a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.” For Douglass, a civil war would be a matter of chickens coming home to roost.

Douglas invoked Douglass’s name a dozen times in the debates, most vividly in the second, at Freeport, when he offered his audience this (uncorroborated) masterpiece of race-baiting, accompanied by cries of “Black Republican” and “white, white”:

I have reason to recollect that some people in this country think that Fred. Douglass is a very good man. The last time I came here to make a speech, while talking from the stand to you, people of Freeport, as I am doing today, I saw a carriage and a magnificent one it was, drive up and take a position on the outside of the crowd; a beautiful young lady was sitting on the box seat, reclined outside, whilst Fred. Douglass and her mother reclined inside, and the owner of the carriage acted as driver. I saw this in your own town. All I have to say of it is this, that if you, Black Republicans, think the negro ought to be on a social equality with your wives and daughters, whilst you drive the team, you have a perfect right to do so.

Such rhetoric was appalling to some Americans in 1858, Lincoln among them. But for many, many others, it struck a chord—a chord too potent to be ignored by any politician. This is why Lincoln began the fourth debate, in Charleston, Illinois, with an avowedly racist line of argument that haunts his champions to this day. “I am not, nor have ever been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,” he said to applause. Lincoln went on to draw, as he would do repeatedly, a distinction between freedom for all African Americans (which he advocated) and equality (which he did not). He would make this case with crude humor, as when he pointed out that opposing slavery did not mean he wanted a black woman for a sexual partner (a dig aimed at Kentucky Democrat and former vice president Richard M. Johnson). He would also make his argument with great fervor, as he did in the fifth debate at Galesburg, when he accused Douglas of “blowing out the moral lights around us, and perverting the human soul and eradicating from the human soul the love of liberty.” His political fortunes depended on it.

In the end, however, Lincoln’s rhetorical powers were not enough to bring him victory. And while it’s impossible to know just how much of a difference Douglas’s racial rhetoric made, it almost certainly mattered. The history of political campaigns in the century and a half since have given analysts plenty of reason to think that appeals to white racial solidarity play well with the white majority, even when those appeals are more subtle. Or not, in the case of a 2006 political commercial used against U.S. Senate candidate from Tennessee, Harold Ford, in which a white woman lasciviously suggests Ford give her a call.

And what of Frederick Douglass? Actually, years before Lincoln, it was Douglass who went to Illinois, seeking a debate with Douglas on the merits of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. As Douglass biographer William McFeely noted, “There can never have been much hope that Douglas would share a stage with a black man, let alone this one.” In August of 1858, Douglass joked that Douglas’s recent troubles in his own party dashed the former slave’s hopes that the Little Giant would bring distinction to a name so similar to his own, concluding that Douglas’s fate was ultimately “in the hands of Mr. Lincoln” (his first public reference to Lincoln). Upon Douglas’s death in 1861, Douglass said that while he could not rejoice in the death of anyone, “I cannot but feel, but in the death of Stephen A. Douglass [sic], a most dangerous man has been removed. No man of his time has done more to intensify hatred of the negro.”

As far as Lincoln goes, Douglass himself would probably have agreed with his ally Wendell Phillips’s famous early Civil War description of the obscure Illinois politician as “a first-rate second-rate man.” Yet as is often the case in the most hateful of assertions—indeed, why some statements are hateful—there was a grain of truth in Stephen Douglas’s charge that Lincoln was a “Black” Republican. The depth of Lincoln’s commitment to white supremacy was suspect in 1858 and only became more so with the passage of time (indeed, by the end of his life, when he considered enfranchising black voters, Lincoln broached the possibility of the very kind of equality he explicitly denied advocating seven years earlier). After Lincoln’s death, Douglass described Lincoln as “the white man’s president.” But he also said after his first meeting with the Great Emancipator in 1863 that Lincoln “was the first great white man in the United States that I talked with freely, who in no single instance reminded me of the difference between himself and myself, of the difference of color.” If this was praising him with faint damnation, it is praise many of us would be glad to receive.

It would be a mistake to draw a straight line from Frederick Douglass to Jeremiah Wright and from Abraham Lincoln to Barack Obama. For one thing, Wright and Obama had a closer relationship than Lincoln and Douglass ever did, and for all his incendiary rhetoric, Douglass was too much the politician to offer up the sort of provocations that are Wright’s stock-in-trade (e.g., that the U.S. government deliberately infects African Americans with the AIDS virus). Nor can it be said that Hillary Clinton or John McCain has ever been as blatant in her or his racial appeals as Stephen Douglas—though New York Times columnist Bob Herbert has skillfully deconstructed the subliminal sexual subtext of an ad McCain ran last summer that showed Obama juxtaposed against Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and split-second images of the Washington Monument and Berlin’s Victory Column in all their phallic glory. Nevertheless, the 2008 presidential campaign has been notable for the degree to which politicians have explicitly tried to discredit opponents by calling attention to their supposedly extremist friends and allies. No figure has been more prominent in this game of guilt-by-association than Wright—and no topic has been more cynically exploited for political gain than race. We have come a long way, and yet a vision of society in which there is truly malice toward none remains an unrealized—impossible?—dream.

Further Reading:

The Lincoln-Douglas debates are available in many editions, including online; I have long used the user-friendly versions included in the first volume of the two-volume set, Lincoln: Speeches and Writings, published by the Library of America (New York, 1989), themselves drawn from the standard source, The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Basler (New Brunswick, N.J., 1953). On Douglass, see Philip S. Foner, Frederick Douglass: A Biography (New York, 1964) and William McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York, 1991) as well as David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, La., 1989) and James A. Colaiaco, Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York, 2006). Douglass’s work is anthologized in the Library of Black America’s Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, edited by Foner and abridged and adapted by Yuval Taylor (Chicago, 1999). See also James Oakes, The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2007) and Allen C. Guelzo, Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates that Changed America (New York, 2008). Bob Herbert followed his column “Running While Black” in the New York Timeson August 2, 2008, with a revealing television analysis of the McCain Hilton/Spears ad on Joe Scarborough’s Morning Joe program on MSNBC on August 4 (it can be viewed on YouTube).

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Jim Cullen teaches history at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, where he serves on the board of trustees. He is the author of The American Dream: A Short History of an Idea that Shaped a Nation (2003) and Imperfect Presidents: Tales of Misadventure and Triumphs, recently published in paperback by Palgrave-Macmillan, among other books.

Politics, loss, and satire

While on a short-term fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia beginning my dissertation research, staff in the print department drew my attention to a body of materials labeled “Salt River.” Not entirely knowing what to expect in the folders handed to me, I cautiously rifled through broadsides, invitations, tickets, handbills, and cards of varying color and form ranging in date from the 1840s to the 1870s. As I developed a working knowledge of Salt River and its significance to nineteenth-century readers as a popular symbol for the political defeat of candidates and their respective parties, I became preoccupied not just with the meaning of Salt River but how it was represented in print. Hyperbolic figures, irreverent caricatures, and crude engravings depicting a river voyage juxtaposed with verse, song, and prose paragraphs piqued my curiosity. I could not ignore the richness of a metaphor that represented loss as an experience akin to embarking on a thwarted river journey, the traveler’s equivalent of a slow, gradual death. Similarly, I could not dismiss images that were humorous to nineteenth-century Americans, so accustomed to river travel for leisure, adventure, discovery, or renewal.

Although the precise origin of the phrase “to row up Salt River” in nineteenth-century American vernacular is difficult to verify, folklore suggests some convincing possibilities. The entry in the Dictionary of American History explains that the phrase emerged during the 1832 presidential campaign, which pitted Andrew Jackson against Henry Clay. Clay reportedly hired a boatman to bring him up the Ohio River to Louisville where he was scheduled to deliver a campaign speech. As a supporter of Jackson, however, the boatman, mistakenly or perhaps deliberately, rowed Clay up Salt River, a branch of the Ohio, thus delaying his arrival in Louisville and causing him to miss his speaking appearance. Clay eventually lost the election, but whether or not the boatman’s wrong turn contributed to the loss cannot be proven. According to some scholars, the phrase emerged in an 1839 congressional speech, and by 1840 it had been adopted in campaign songs. Another version of the phrase’s origin story posits that pirates working along the Ohio River diverted vessels up Salt River to loot cargo and rob passengers. In these tales, the boatman and pirates execute their plan heroically or criminally, depending on one’s moral leanings. Whichever of these origin stories one accepts, it seems clear that the cliché “up salt river” originated in real events at a real place. It also seems clear that to Americans accustomed to river travel, the phrase carried a generic and quite humorous message.

But the phrase obviously had meaning for Americans who lived nowhere near the actual Salt River. This may have had to do with its generic content. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), a salt river is a small tidal river located away from a river’s mouth. The lithograph “A Correct Chart of Salt River” (1848) corroborates this definition and reinforces the impression that “up” Salt River implied two unreasonable acts: first, traveling the wrong way up a tributary that by definition flowed down, and second, traveling up an inferior waterway to isolated and irrelevant headwaters (fig. 1). The map projects an imagined path of the river as it branches from the Ohio and weaves around key landmarks before reaching “Lake Oblivion.” The map’s partisan labels reveal allegorical names—such as “Sub Treasury Bluffs,” “Noise and Confusion Shoals,” “Two Face Points,” and “Irish Relief Shoal”—that warn of a difficult, if not a futile journey, while parodying tenets of the Democratic Party’s platform. The OED also suggests a linguistic association of Salt River with a backwoods region inhabited by persons with an “uncultivated manner of speech.” A stock figure in nineteenth-century Kentucky humor was thus the “Salt River Roarer” or a half-horse, half-alligator frontiersman who embodies a masculine, indecorous, and hyperbolic temperament. The character’s boastful and crude humor expresses bravura, defiance, and disrespect, usually unleashed in a stunning verbal rant.

Salt River in Political Caricature

Political cartoonists during the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s employed textual and visual references of Salt River to persuade the public of the strengths and weaknesses of various candidates and to suggest an absence of true political viability. In some lithographs, Salt River holds a prominent presence as the stage upon which debate and confrontation occur. In other representations, political candidates and supporters of one party or another totter precariously above the river’s waters or struggle to stay afloat in its tempestuous swells. Other images suggest a candidate’s likely fate by showing him sitting idly in a decrepit rowboat on Salt River; sometimes a candidate’s fate is implied by a background signpost bearing the ominous words “Salt River.” In the 1840 cartoon “Matty’s Perilous Situation up Salt River” readers witness the slow death of Martin Van Buren, the Democratic candidate for president, who sinks into the water weighed down by the fiscal policies piled haphazardly on his head. Other details in the cartoon reinforce Van Buren’s imminent drowning by depicting the lack of institutional and public support: a hat laden with national newspapers floats away and in the background a building labeled “Humane Society’s Apparatus for the Recovery of Drowned Persons” stands idle. Whig party candidate William Henry Harrison, in contrast, stands confidently on a floating barrel while remarking, “It’s a pity to let the poor fellow drown; I had an idea of making him Inspector of Cabbages of Kinderhook for that’s all he’s good for; but I think he will sink.”

As the phrase “Salt River” percolated through public consciousness, its allusions encompassed more than political defeat. They also suggested the enormous barriers candidates faced. Several cartoons from the presidential campaign of 1848 show Salt River as a foreboding obstacle for all who seek the nation’s highest office. In “Fording Salt River,” the river cuts swiftly through the scene and pushes the White House far into the horizon. We glimpse the Whig candidate Henry Clay submerged head-first underwater with his legs flapping above the surface; Whig candidate Zachary Taylor and Whig supporter Horace Greeley tread neck-deep in the river, while the Democrat Martin Van Buren rides to the water’s edge on the back of his son John. In the same year, “The Modern Colossus. Eighth Wonder of the World” features a more impotent Van Buren, who attempts to straddle Salt River and bridge the two opposite banks, figuratively connecting the platforms of the abolitionist Whigs with that of the proslavery Democratic party. Arms outstretched, he exclaims, “O! I’m gone! I’m gone! I can’t stretch any farther without splitting myself asunder!” These lithographs turn politics into parody by dramatizing the ludicrous futility of establishing any middle ground between the Whig and Democratic platforms. The presence of Salt River minimizes the strength and intellect of the great compromisers; for they will be swept under water or will plunge into the river, unable to plant a foot firmly on either of its banks.

Scholars often draw attention to the abundance of sporting puns and metaphors in nineteenth-century political caricature. Boxing matches, foot races, or bull fights were commonly used to dramatize the competition between candidates and to sensationalize the political contest. Perhaps lithographers chose to filter their political opinions and preferences through such metaphors because they lent themselves to unambiguous interpretation. In sports, unlike politics, there is no moral ambiguity; the best always wins. Salt River brings to mind no such stark contrasts. It signifies a contest that does not depend on strength, bravery, perseverance, and intelligence but rather on sheer fortune. It is the lucky, not the strong or wise, who avoid Salt River. But what of those who find themselves futilely battling the river’s currents? What happens when someone falls into Salt River? If Salt River takes passengers to Lake Oblivion, what does that place look like and what do people do there? These kinds of questions give way to deeper questions: What happens to a party and its candidates after a defeat? What happens to the momentum and emotional investment of the campaign once the disappointing results are known?

Salt River in Ephemera

A mock riverboat ticket, for passage on the vessel “Dis-Union,” issued the evening after election day 1856, announces, “For Salt River!! Direct through without Landing” (fig. 2). Another invitation cordially invites you to “accompany the Party. The Large and Comodious But Unsafe Steamer Fusion, Will leave this day for Salt River” (fig. 3). Humor simmers in the irony of a well-equipped but dangerous steamer, which will not stop when it arrives at its destination, and boils to the surface in the elaborate collaboration of graphics and text. The Salt River invitation boldly offers the disclaimer, “N. B. No Life Preservers will be provided,” and Salt River tickets often list the crew who will be on board, casting well-known public figures—presidential and vice-presidential candidates and their advisers and supporters—to serve as captain, pilot, first mate, and steward. Sometimes the puns are not only verbal but visual, as in the example of Mr. Horace Greely and F. Douglass whose last name lends itself to pictures of a donkey (fig. 4). One imagines the tickets, invitations, handbills, and cards tucked into apron or trouser pockets or placed between the leaves of a book by friends and enemies bidding farewell to those about to embark on the campaign trail.

Another common form of Salt River ephemera are broadsides, composed as mock newspaper pages that lay out the narrative of a candidate and his party’s excursion up Salt River. The headline of one of these from the 1871 mayoral campaign in Philadelphia reads at once like a public announcement and a fable of political failure: “Extra Post. Democrat Salt River Excursion! Incidents of the Annual Voyage to the Old Stamping Ground. Vain Attempts to get in the Mayor’s Office—The Democracy and the Politics—What happened to the Democratic Kite Flyers—A Steamboat Collis-ion—The Old Canal Boat Knocked into Fragments—Rescue by the Broken-Backed Citizens—Off for Salt River—Rally Round the Flag” (fig 5). As a variation of the Salt River newspaper broadside, the pamphlet “Salt River Guide for Disappointed Politicians” (New York, 1872), describes the voyage of Horace Greeley and his supporters following the failure of their 1872 bid for the presidency. With Grant reelected president, Greeley, the candidate supported by the Liberal Republicans and Democrats; his running mate, Benjamin Gratz Brown; and a number of their supporters and competitors required rest after the strenuous labors of campaigning. “And what could possibly be so good,” for this purpose, “as the salt breezes of an inland river!” The pamphlet then narrates, in brisk prose and caricature, the canal boat’s voyage to Salt River. Elements of Kentucky humor and the oral tradition of tall tales find a place in the pamphlet’s visual reenactments of the journey and its mishaps. To quell the violent storm that threatens the destruction of crew and boat, Captain Greeley boldly takes command. “Seizing the barometer, he threw it overboard into the angry deep, and the storm at once subsided and they had fair weather in spite of a falling barometer.” The last page presents the reader with the graphic end of a Salt River excursion: “They followed the canal until they reached the historic river where the water is briny and runs up-hill. When once launched on these waters, they turned one against another and became mad—became political cannibals. So the places that knew them once now know them no more, and the crows of fortune pick sadly at their bones, long since washed ashore and innocent of meat.” Not only do Salt River travelers encounter a vicious death, but the river washes them from the public’s memory.

The lasting popularity of the Salt River metaphor invites more than static depictions of failure; it invites an exploration of the idea of failure and the experience of loss. Election issues during these years were contentious and complex, eliciting deep emotional investments by the candidates and their supporters. Policies regarding slavery, suffrage, Reconstruction, secession, and corruption produced impassioned opposition and controversial alternatives. When the stakes were so high and defeat so overwhelming, a difficult question presents itself: how can the excess of disbelief, disappointment, anger, uncertainty, and distrust be adequately and meaningfully contained and represented in print? A scene from the Salt River Guide suggests an answer (fig. 6). Prior to departing, “[the defeated Greeley and his party] gathered together for a last long weep—for a regular drip. Th[e] proprietor of the Herald brought them up before a trough or spout constructed out of planks which composes the Cincinnati platform. They stood up before that spout, at the end of which was a large tub, set by young Bennett to catch the flood of distilled sorrow. And there they opened the flood-gates of their hearts, and a stream of briny water flowed down that spout into the tub.” Here the Salt River image is not a crude jab at the losers but an elegiac meditation on political defeat and the uncertainty of loss in a winner-take-all democracy.

Further Reading:

I examined Salt River ephemera and political cartoons with depictions of Salt River in collections at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

The etymological origins of the phrase “to row [someone] up Salt River” and its variations in select newspapers and literary works are examined thoroughly in Hans Sperber and James N. Tidwell, “Words and Phrases in American Politics: Fact and Fiction About Salt River,” American Speech 26 (1951): 241-47 and more briefly in Lowry Charles Wimberly, “American Political Cant,” American Speech 2:3 (1926): 135-39 and Carl Scherf, “Slang, Slogan and Song in American Politics,” The Social Studies 25:8 (1934): 424-30. These latter two essays are useful for a more comprehensive examination of colloquialisms in nineteenth- and twentieth-century political jargon. An analysis of Salt River in Kentucky humor can be found in Ruel E. Foster, “Kentucky Humor: Salt River Roarer to Ol’ Dog Ring,” Mississippi Quarterly 20:4 (1967): 224-30.

For the history of political cartoons in nineteenth-century America consult Arthur Power Dudden, “The Record of Political Humor,” American Quarterly 37:1 (Spring 1985): 50-70; Stephen Hess and Milton Kaplan, The Ungentlemanly Art: A History of American Political Cartoons, revised ed. (New York, 1975); Allan Nevins and Frank Weitenkampf, A Century of Political Cartoons: Caricature in the United States from 1800 to 1900 (New York, 1944).

For an overview of the material culture of ephemera, see Todd S. Gernes, “Recasting the Culture of Ephemera,” in John Trimbur, ed., Popular Literacy: Studies in Cultural Practices and Poetics (Pittsburgh, Pa., 2001): 107-27.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.3 (April, 2007).

Liz Hutter, a doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, is writing a dissertation on the cultural importance of drowning in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American life.