Women, Dissent and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790-1865

WOMEN, DISSENT, AND ANTI-SLAVERY I N B R I T A I N A N D A M E R I C A , 1 7 9 0 – 1865

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Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America, 1790–1865 Edited by ELIZABETH J. CLAPP AND JULIE ROY JEFFREY

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Oxford University Press 2011 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King's Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–958548–9 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Foreword This study of Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery in Britain and America is the third volume to result from the work of the Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies. Established in September 2004, the Centre is a collaboration between the School of English and Drama, Queen Mary, University of London, and Dr Williams’s Library, Gordon Square, London. Its objectives are to promote the use of the Library’s unique holdings of Puritan, Protestant nonconformist and dissenting books and manuscripts; to encourage research into and dissemination of these resources; and to increase knowledge and understanding of the importance of Puritanism and Protestant dissent to English society and literature from the sixteenth century to the present. To further these aims the Centre has developed an extensive programme of conferences, seminars, workshops, and publications. The annual one-day conferences have led to five volumes of essays: Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (2008), and Dissenting Praise: Religious Dissent and the Hymn in England and Wales (2011), both edited by Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes, and published by Oxford University Press; and now Women, Dissent, and Anti-Slavery, edited by Elizabeth J. Clapp and Julie Roy Jeffrey. Dissent and the Bible in Britain, 1650–1950, edited by Scott Mandelbrote and Michael Ledger-Lomas, is also forthcoming from the Press; Religious Dissent and the Aikin-Barbauld Circle, 1740–1830, edited by Felicity James and Ian Inkster, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. In addition the Centre’s postgraduates have published the following electronic editions online: The Letters of Joseph Priestley to Theophilus Lindsey 1769–1794, edited by Simon Mills (2007); and A Bibliography of the Writings of William Hazlitt 1737–1820 (2009), and New College, Hackney (1786–96): A Selection of Printed and Archival Sources (2010), both by Stephen Burley. The Centre’s Dissenting Academies Project, in association with the Sussex Centre for Intellectual History, is funded by the Leverhulme Trust and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It will produce both print and online publications: A History of the Dissenting Academies in the British Isles, 1660–1860, edited by Rivers and Wykes, with Knud Haakonssen and Richard Whatmore as associate editors, to be published by Cambridge University Press, and two relational databases to be published online on the Centre’s website. The Centre is also supporting the publication of a new

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edition of Reliquiae Baxterianae by Neil Keeble, John Coffey, and Tim Cooper, to be published by Oxford University Press, as well as a number of other major initiatives such as an edition of Henry Crabb Robinson’s diary and correspondence. Isabel Rivers David L. Wykes The Dr Williams’s Centre for Dissenting Studies, London

Contents Foreword List of Contributors

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Introduction Elizabeth J. Clapp

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1. Complicating the Story: Religion and Gender in Historical Writing on British and American Anti-Slavery David Turley 2. Martha Gurney and the Anti-Slave Trade Movement, 1788–94 Timothy Whelan 3. ‘We Ought to Obey God rather than Man’: Women, Anti-Slavery, and Nonconformist Religious Cultures Alison Twells 4. The Dissenting Voice of Elizabeth Heyrick: An Exploration of the Links Between Gender, Religious Dissent, and Anti-Slavery Radicalism Clare Midgley 5. Immediatism, Dissent, and Gender: Women and the Sentimentalization of Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Appeals Carol Lasser 6. Women Abolitionists and the Dissenting Tradition Julie Roy Jeffrey 7. ‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition Stacey Robertson

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8. Writing Against Slavery: Harriet Beecher Stowe Judie Newman

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Bibliography Index

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List of Contributors Elizabeth J. Clapp is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Leicester. Her publications include Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of the Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (1998), together with several articles on women’s activism which have appeared in such journals as the Journal of American Studies, Journal of the Early Republic and American Nineteenth Century History. She has recently completed a study of Mrs Anne Royall and the political culture of the early American republic. Julie Roy Jeffrey is Professor of History at Goucher College, Baltimore. She was recently the John Adams Chair in American History at the University of Utrecht (Fulbright Distinguished Chair) and has also received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship. Her publications include The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (1998) — awarded the Choice Award for Academic Book of Excellence and honourable mention for the Frederick Douglass prize — and Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (2008), as well as numerous articles and essays. She is also the co-author of The American People: The History of a Nation and a Society. Carol Lasser is Professor of American History at Oberlin College, Ohio, and Director of OCEAN: the Oberlin College Educational Alliance Network. She has written widely on women and gender in nineteenth-century America. Her publications include Educating Men and Women Together: Coeducation in a Changing World (1987); Friends and Sisters: Letters between Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell, 1846–1893 (co-editor, with Marlene D. Merrill, 1987), as well as numerous articles and essays in such journals as Gender & History, Signs, and the Journal of the Early Republic. Clare Midgley is Research Professor at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (2007); Gender and Imperialism (1998); and Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (1992), as well as numerous articles and essays. She has also served as an editor for Gender & History and Women’s History Review. She has recently become President of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History. Judie Newman is a Fellow of the English Association, and Professor of American Studies at the University of Nottingham. She has published widely on American and other literatures. She edited the first modern edition of

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Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1998), and her recent work on the literature of slavery includes articles and essays in a wide range of journals and books including Journal of American Studies, Slavery and Abolition, The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (edited by Cindy Weinstein, 2004); Transatlantic Stowe: Harriet Beecher Stowe and European Culture (edited by Denise Kohn, Sarah Meer, and Emily Todd, 2005); and Public Art, Memorials, and Atlantic Slavery (edited by Judie Newman and Celeste-Marie Bernier, 2009). Stacey Robertson is Associate Professor of American History at Bradley University, Peoria, Illinois. She recently held the Tracy Fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society. She is the author of Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist (2000) and has written a number of articles on abolitionists in the American Mid-West. David Turley is Emeritus Professor of Cultural and Social History and former Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Kent. He is the author of The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (1991), American Religion (1998), and Slavery (2000). He has also written numerous articles and book chapters on such topics as Transatlantic Reform, Frederick Douglass, Anglo-American Unitarianism and Reform, Representations of Abraham Lincoln, Black Agency in the Emancipation Process during the Civil War, DuBois and Black Social Science, and DuBois as Historian. He is currently completing two books, one on Slave Emancipations, the other on Black Social Science and the Emergence of an African American Intellectual Class. Alison Twells is Principal Lecturer in History at Sheffield Hallam University. She is the author of British Women’s History, 1780–1914: A Documentary History (2007) and The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850: The ‘Heathen’ at Home and Overseas (2009), as well as a number of articles and essays. Timothy Whelan is Professor of American Literature at Georgia Southern University, Statesboro. He has published articles on the seventeenth-century American poet Anne Bradstreet, but more recently in the area of Romantic studies and English dissenting history, 1750–1850. His publications include Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794–1808 (2008); Baptist Autographs in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester, 1741–1845 (2009); and The Complete Writings of William Fox: Abolitionist, Tory, and Friend to the French Revolution (2010), and he is general editor of Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720–1840, 8 vols (forthcoming 2010–11).

Introduction Elizabeth J. Clapp1

In January 1826 William Wilberforce, the Anglican anti-slavery campaigner, expressed his disquiet about women’s involvement in the British anti-slavery movement and the consequences he believed this would have for the female character: All private exertions for such an object become their character, but for ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions—these appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture. And though we should limit the interference of our ladies to the cause of justice and humanity, I fear its tendency would be to mix them in all the multiform warfare of political life.

Although on this occasion, Wilberforce expressed his alarm in a private letter, his opposition to ladies’ associations and their public role in reform was well known.2 Nor was he alone in citing the Scriptures and the roles outlined for women in them, as reasons against women’s activism in the cause of anti-slavery. A decade later, Wilberforce’s concerns were echoed across the Atlantic in a Pastoral Letter from the General Association of Massachusetts Congregational Churches: ‘The appropriate duties and influence of women are clearly stated in the New Testament. Those duties and that influence are unobtrusive and private, but the sources of mighty power’. The authors of the letter continued, ‘We cannot, therefore, but regret the mistaken conduct of those who encourage females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform, and countenance any of that sex who so far forget

1 I would like to thank Dr David Wykes for his advice on the Introduction, particularly concerning English religious dissent. 2 Letter from William Wilberforce to T. Babington, Esq., 31 January 1826, as cited in Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols (London: John Murray, 1838), V, 264–5; Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780– 1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 1995 edition), 48–9.

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themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers . . . ’.3 While Wilberforce and the Massachusetts Churches had differing attitudes towards the abolition of slavery, their views of women’s involvement in campaigns to end it were remarkably similar—the Scriptures clearly and categorically rejected women’s activism outside the private sphere. The evidence for such religiously inspired warnings against women’s public activism in the anti-slavery cause suggests both that women were involved in such activism in sufficient numbers to provoke comment, and that their belief in the cause was strong enough to overcome any opposition to their doing so. For these women did not lack in piety, even if they did not always listen to those male leaders who warned them against their involvement in public actions, professing to speak in the name of the Scriptures. On the contrary, their religious beliefs inspired them to become campaigners, and they followed their own consciences and interpretations of the Scriptures in order to bring an end to slavery. Nor were all male leaders of the anti-slavery movement or church leaders as strongly opposed to women’s participation—some positively encouraged it, as the essays in this volume suggest. Thus a Baptist congregation in London during the 1790s could offer a supportive milieu enabling a female printer to publish pamphlets against the slave trade;4 and in the 1850s, an American novelist, the daughter and wife of Congregational ministers, could utilize her religious upbringing to provide the inspiration and determination behind one of the great anti-slavery novels.5 Many anti-slavery women were both stirred to action by their religion, and frequently motivated by a desire to live out and practise the beliefs they held. This book examines the multiple ways in which women in both Britain and the United States of America were active in campaigns to abolish first the slave trade and then slavery itself in their respective countries. In recent years the significance of women’s involvement in the anti-slavery movements on both sides of the Atlantic has been recognized by scholars, with a number of important studies examining the key contributions. There have been major analyses of the nature of women’s abolitionist activism and the connections between female anti-slavery work and other reform movements, most notably women’s rights.6 There has, however, been much less consideration of how religious ideas, values, and practices contributed to female anti-slavery campaigns. During the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, women from a variety of religious backgrounds became involved in the ‘Pastoral Letter: The General Association of Massachusetts to Churches under Their Care’, New England Spectator, 12 July 1837, as cited in Kathryn Kish Sklar, Women’s Rights Emerges Within the Antislavery Movement, 1830–1870: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/ St. Martins, 2000), 120. 4 See chapter 2, this volume. 5 See chapter 8, this volume. 6 See chapter 1, this volume. 3

Introduction

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anti-slavery movements. While the part played by Quaker women has been acknowledged, the participation of women from other Protestant groups and denominations has been largely overlooked by scholars. The focus of this volume is on these women, those who belonged to the Puritan and dissenting traditions in the United States and Britain. This book starts with the understanding that women’s involvement in the anti-slavery movements in Britain and America was central to those movements but that women, like the men concerned, did not all speak with one voice. One of the major differences between women was their religious affiliation. Together the contributors to this volume consider the part that the traditions, practices, and beliefs of Protestant dissent in England and the closely related Puritan tradition in America played in women’s anti-slavery activism. They examine the varying ways in which women belonging to the different denominations which sprang from these two traditions drew on their religious beliefs to take part in the anti-slavery movements. This introduction explores the themes that run through the volume. It begins by giving an overview of the movements to abolish the slave trade and slavery itself on both sides of the Atlantic, providing the wider context for the more focused essays. In order to provide a framework for understanding the key religious issues throughout the period covered, it then examines the historical development of English religious dissent, and the main differences between the major denominations. The Puritan Way in America is similarly explored, highlighting the connections with English dissent. To facilitate an appreciation of women’s role in anti-slavery activism, as distinct from men’s, the interactions between women, religion, and reform and the complex issues this raises are then considered. Finally, the individual chapters are introduced, pulling out key issues, and exploring how each of them illustrates the central themes of the volume. The movements to abolish the slave trade and slavery had similar roots on both sides of the Atlantic, but it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the institution came under sustained attack in either Great Britain or North America. Until then, those reformers who voiced their opposition to slavery sought only to ameliorate the condition of the slaves rather than seeking the much more radical cessation of the Atlantic slave trade and, still more farreaching, the elimination of human bondage.7 Initially even the Quakers, who were later to be at the forefront of the anti-slavery campaigns, were prepared to accommodate the ‘contradictions of slavery’, and some were even slave merchants and owners themselves. It was the spiritual crisis among the 7

Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 23; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), 43–9.

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Quakers engendered by the Seven Years War which, David Brion Davis argues, resulted in ‘much soul-searching, attempts at self-purification, and a final commitment to disengage themselves, collectively, from the Atlantic slave system’.8 This first took the form among American Friends of ending their own participation in slavery, by putting pressure on those members reluctant to give up their slaves and links with the slave trade to do so. Having set the example themselves, they quickly took the initiative in seeking to end the slave trade through legislative means. Their transatlantic networks enabled them to encourage British Quakers to take their own action against the British slave trade through the distribution of pamphlets and eventually the organization of a petition to Parliament.9 The Quakers were not the only group who began to reassess their acceptance of slavery in the mid-eighteenth century. A number of developments in transatlantic culture coalesced at this time to prompt some groups and individuals to question the rationale for human bondage. A more secular social philosophy which was the result of ideas emanating from the European Enlightenment began to emerge. It produced a growing willingness to challenge rigid authority and a greater emphasis on sympathy for, and benevolence towards, those at the bottom of the social scale. Moreover, as writers concerned with ethical and moral problems increasingly stressed the importance of liberty and extended its meaning, they began to condemn slavery in all its forms, and it became more difficult to mount a serious defence of slavery. The development of evangelical religion with its belief in personal salvation and the hope of redemption from original sin meant that by the middle of the eighteenth century both religious and secular thinkers were beginning to have confidence that both individuals and institutions could be improved.10 But although moral doubts were raised by such intellectual challenges, this did not mean that anti-slavery beliefs had grown to such a point that they led inevitably to the abolition of slavery.11 The ending of slavery in the British Empire and the United States of America was rather the result of a concerted and organized attack on it, at the local, state, national, and even international level. For despite the cultural developments which had produced a growing distaste for slavery among some individuals and groups, the campaigns against it were far from certain. For many, slavery remained a viable economic institution, and there were major vested interests with considerable political influence, resolute that it should 8

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 44–5. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975), 211–35. 10 Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 94–6; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 39–49; Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 40–2. 11 Brown, Moral Capital, 40–2. 9

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not be abolished. Opposition to any attempts to end slavery was widespread and sometimes violent, and anti-slavery activism remained the cause of a minority, particularly in the United States. The strength of the pro-slavery forces meant that the battles to end slavery were protracted, and in the United States only ended as a result of the Civil War. The earliest attempts to end slavery in Great Britain were made by slaves themselves, in the form of resistance to their masters. Such resistance was noticed by white sympathizers and prompted a series of court cases, brought by Granville Sharpe and others in the 1760s and 1770s, to make slavery illegal in Britain. The use of habeas corpus to attain the liberty of individual slaves effectively ended slavery in England, Wales, and Scotland by the 1790s.12 It continued in the Empire, however, and it required the determined efforts of reformers from a variety of backgrounds in two long-running campaigns to achieve the abolition of slavery. The first wave began in the 1780s in an effort to end the slave trade, which despite considerable public support did not achieve its purpose until 1807. Many reformers hoped that the abolition of the slave trade would produce better conditions for slaves on the West Indian plantations and their eventual emancipation, but by the early 1820s there was little evidence of any movement in that direction. A mark of the frustration of campaigners was the formation in 1823 of what became known as the AntiSlavery Society, which contributed to a second wave of activism, first for the gradual emancipation of the slaves and then from 1830–1, the immediate abolition of slavery in the British Empire. This was partially achieved in 1833 with the passage of the Emancipation Act. However, the government introduced apprenticeship schemes as a means of dealing with the transition from slavery to freedom, and it required further campaigns to end these schemes before in August 1838 the slaves achieved full emancipation.13 In the United States the campaigns to end slavery followed a different path. The American Revolution and the debates over liberty and equality it engendered, put slavery on the moral and political agenda. A good number of slaves, persuaded by the rhetoric of the revolution and with the encouragement of the British army, seized the opportunity to escape to freedom. Such actions may have helped to focus the colonists’ minds on the issue of slavery, for in many of the northern states where slavery did not contribute much to the economic prosperity of the region, it increasingly became a source of concern. As they came to regard slavery as incompatible with revolutionary principles, several of the northern states sought an end to it, and in the years after independence abolition gradually spread across the north. The Atlantic slave trade also became a focus for opposition, as Americans became uneasy about the influx of unfree labour into their country and sought to blame the British for 12 13

Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 9–14. Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 43.

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imposing the trade on them. Though it was still hotly debated, the Federal Constitution allowed for the abolition of the slave trade in 1808.14 But if the abolitionists believed that the ending of slavery in the north and the abolition of the slave trade would sound the death knell for slavery, they were quickly disappointed. Slavery became more deeply entrenched in the southern states as the southern economy grew more dependent on its continuation, and its apologists mounted a vigorous defence of the institution. Moreover, as the United States acquired territory to the west, slave owners moved with their human property into these new lands, prompting frequent clashes in Congress between north and south over whether slavery should be allowed in these new states.15 While the expansion of slavery into the new western territories became a political issue, those who opposed slavery on moral grounds focused on bringing an end to slavery itself. In the early decades of the nineteenth century anti-slavery activism concentrated on the gradual emancipation of the slaves alongside attempts to encourage the colonization of free blacks in Liberia, in the hope that this two-pronged approach would end slavery in the south. The reluctance of free blacks to be sent to Africa and the failure to achieve voluntary emancipation caused some activists to seek more radical measures. In January 1831 in the first issue of the Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison demanded the immediate emancipation of the slaves, without compensation of slave owners, and he denounced slavery as a sin, declaring that the country that tolerated it was fully implicated in that sin.16 Many saw such language as inflammatory, but Garrison’s pronouncement inspired others. Through a variety of organizations, some of which were not always in accord with Garrison’s own concerns or methods, reformers used various means to campaign for the immediate abolition of slavery between 1831 and 1865. It was never a popular cause, and sometimes their meetings were met with violence, and frequently with hostility. Their activities, however, caused those who defended slavery to become ever more entrenched in their position and determined to protect the ‘peculiar institution’. The impasse that resulted was eventually to lead to the Civil War and the final abolition of slavery in the United States in 1865.17

14 Brown, Moral Capital, 105–10, 141–3; Matthew Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 3, 15–16; Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 255–342. 15 Mason, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic. 16 Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women In The Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 14–16. 17 The connections between abolitionism and the outbreak of the Civil War have been debated at length by historians. See Turley, chapter 1 this volume, for a discussion of some of these works.

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The anti-slavery movements in Britain and the United States of America drew activists from a variety of sources, but those for whom their religious beliefs and values provided the spur or validation for their actions were often to the forefront. This was particularly true for the female participants, both those who took leadership roles and those who formed what Julie Roy Jeffrey refers to as the ‘Great Silent Army of Abolitionism’.18 Prominent among them were Quakers, but reformers with other religious affiliations were equally involved. For both the breadth of the anti-slavery constituency and the willingness of its various elements to co-operate was unusual. The evangelicals—Baptists, Methodists, and Congregationalists, among others—had a different basis for their desire to end slavery from those who were rational dissenters. The evangelicals’ belief in an active God, one whose redemptive love could forgive and release them from the bondage of sin, granting salvation to the individual, could easily be transformed into a condemnation of slavery. Concern with the law of love and a strong sense of the millennium led to a conviction of the necessity for humanitarian reform and confidence that slavery was abhorrent in the eyes of God.19 Rational dissenters and Unitarians, on the other hand, rejected such ideas, seeing abolition as an extension of religious liberty. They saw liberty in more secular terms than the evangelicals, basing their anti-slavery thought on political and constitutional concepts, often reflecting their own legal status.20 Despite their differing approaches, those from the traditions of Protestant dissent in Britain and their sisters who traced their religious roots to their Puritan antecedents in the United States brought a distinctive set of voices to the anti-slavery cause. Religious dissent in England and Wales dates from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the passing of the Act of Uniformity two years later. The Restoration settlement re-established the Church of England as the state church, requiring everyone by law to attend their parish church. Just over 2,000 clergymen were displaced or ejected from their livings or teaching posts between 1660 and 1662. Between 1661 and 1678 Parliament passed a series of laws to enforce conformity to the Church of England. For the next twenty-five years ministers and their lay supporters who attempted to worship outside their parish church risked legal harassment, which at times was intense. Those who refused to conform were called nonconformists (and later dissenters). They finally obtained the right to worship in their own meeting-places by the Toleration Act of 1689, but it was a very limited toleration, and dissenters continued to suffer political and civil disabilities because they were not 18

Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 1–2. Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade, 184–99; G. M. Ditchfield, ‘Manchester College and AntiSlavery’, in Barbara Smith (ed.), Truth, Liberty, Religion: Essays Celebrating Two Hundred Years of Manchester College (Manchester College Oxford, 1986), 201–2. 20 Ditchfield, ‘Manchester College and Anti-Slavery’, 204–8. Rational dissent is explained below. 19

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members of the Church of England. They did not obtain the repeal of the various statutes against them until the nineteenth century.21 Before the early eighteenth century religious dissent was largely orthodox and Calvinist in doctrine, but divisions were to emerge on the question of the doctrine of the Trinity—the belief in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit as one God. Differences between the two main denominations, the English Presbyterians and the Congregationalists (or Independents), had originally involved mainly questions of church government and the qualifications required for ministry. Increasingly they were to centre on doctrine. The dispute finally came to a head in 1719, in a major confrontation known as the Salters’ Hall Debate involving most of the leading dissenting ministers in London. It was the principle of doctrinal subscription rather than the doctrines themselves which divided them. Nevertheless, Salters’ Hall did prove a turning point. Those who were doctrinally orthodox, especially on the Trinity, came to side with the Congregationalists. Those who appealed to reason and Scripture and prized freedom of enquiry rather than relying on doctrinal formulas, increasingly identified with the Presbyterians, and their congregations inevitably became more diverse and heterodox in opinion.22 The Baptists were divided between the Particular Baptists, who were Calvinist, and therefore accepted the doctrine of predestination, believing that only the elect could be saved, and the General Baptists, who were Arminian, and therefore believed that all could be saved. The other major religious group, the Quakers, were the most recent and the most radical denomination. In some respects they were a reaction to Calvinist orthodoxy. Rejecting all creeds and sacraments, they placed an emphasis upon seeking after religious truth, and on personal conscience as a basis of moral behaviour, which they expressed in terms of the light within. Membership involved convincement and the maintenance of Truth’s testimonies, in particular against the payment of tithes and other dues, or the use of oaths. They proved amongst the most determined opponents of everything they perceived as injustice, and were, as a consequence, amongst the most active reformers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.23

21 David L. Wykes, ‘Introduction: Parliament and Dissent from the Restoration to the Twentieth Century’, in Stephen Taylor and David L. Wykes (eds), Parliament and Dissent (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 1–3, 6–10. 22 Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes (eds), Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 5–9. 23 Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I, 66, 160–7, 186–94; Raymond Brown, The English Baptists of the Eighteenth Century (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1986); C. F. Carter, ‘Unsettled Friends: Church Government and the Origins of Membership’, Journal of Friends Historical Society, 51 (1967), 145.

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The dramatic growth in religious enthusiasm from the mid-eighteenth century fundamentally changed religious life in England and Wales and the American colonies. The Congregationalists experienced the greatest growth amongst English dissenters, and through the use of itinerant preachers they established an astonishing number of new congregations (with over 3,000 by 1851), particularly in the new industrial areas. Particular Baptists were also to benefit from the evangelical revival, but only some General Baptists. From the 1740s the General Baptists in the East Midlands and south Yorkshire were evangelized by the preaching of Dan Taylor and others, which led to the formation of the New Connexion. Other General Baptists, the so-called Old Connexion, particularly in southern England, rejected evangelical preaching and adopted Unitarian beliefs in the early nineteenth century. A minority of Quakers, led by Joseph John Gurney, were also influenced by the evangelical revival. The majority were not, and because of the exclusion of those members who ‘married out’ and the increasingly old-fashioned attitudes of many Quakers, the Society of Friends was in decline for much of the nineteenth century, though they had members who acquired great fortunes from manufacturing and industry. The Methodists were the largest religious body to emerge as a result of the evangelical revival, but they remained in relationship with the Church of England until after John Wesley’s death, and even then the largest and most conservative grouping, the Wesleyan Methodists, did not finally identify with dissent until the mid-nineteenth century.24 The major Presbyterian congregations also rejected religious enthusiasm. During the eighteenth century they came increasingly to question the doctrine of the Trinity and to adopt heterodox opinions. Within individual congregations these changes were slow and uneven, and therefore difficult to identify. As a consequence historians have used the term rational dissent to describe the changes within Presbyterian congregations in the late eighteenth century. Most anti-Trinitarian opinion at this date was Arian: that is the worship of God the Father alone, seeing the Son as subordinate though still divine. The spread of Unitarianism, with its insistence on the absolute unity of God and the humanity of Christ, was due principally to the efforts of the celebrated theologian and scientist Joseph Priestley and the strength of his controversial writings.25 Nonetheless, a more open declaration of Unitarian principles by individual congregations only occurred in the early nineteenth century. By rejecting religious enthusiasm Presbyterian congregations suffered significant losses, particularly in the countryside. Those that remained were wealthy urban congregations, increasingly Unitarian in belief, which were supported 24

David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman Ltd., 1989); G. M. Ditchfield, The Evangelical Revival (London: University College London Press, 1998), 106; Watts, Dissenters, 461–2. 25 Rivers and Wykes (eds), Priestley, 7–8, 36–8.

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by many important manufacturers and professionals. The conservative reaction to the French Revolution led to further significant losses, but early nineteenth-century Unitarianism benefited from the support of some of the leading industrialists and intellectuals. Their continual leadership of dissent meant that rational dissenters, and later Unitarians, were found in the vanguard of every reform movement during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.26 Dissent as a whole was to benefit from the remarkable economic growth that England and Wales underwent during the nineteenth century, and historians have pointed to the increasing significance of the middle class in congregations. With such changes came a desire for reform. Dissenters finally achieved the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828, but the results were largely symbolic. The Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 and the Municipal Reform Act of 1835 proved more important. The number of dissenting MPs, and therefore the political influence of dissent, grew significantly as a consequence of the 1832 Act, following the extension of the franchise to many of the industrial towns where dissent was particularly strong. Dissenters exerted even greater influence at the local level as a result of municipal and other reforms: controlling town governments, dominating school boards, poor law unions, and even the magistrates’ bench. The great increase in the numbers, wealth, and political influence of dissenters in the nineteenth century ensured their voice was heard in matters of reform.27 The Puritan tradition in America derived from much the same roots as religious dissent in England and shared many of the same characteristics. Like dissenters, the Puritans were orthodox Calvinists who believed that they should be allowed to worship in the manner they thought essential to achieve salvation. To begin with they hoped to secure this by reforming the Church of England from within, demanding the removal of all vestiges of Catholicism and replacing the doctrine and liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer with orthodox Calvinist practices. Thwarted in this objective by both Elizabeth I and her successor, James I, the Puritans became increasingly subject to persecution and as a consequence two groups of Puritans left for America.28 The first to leave were a group of Separatists who sailed for America on the Mayflower in 1620. They established a colony at Plymouth on Cape Cod where they practised their religion free from interference. More influential 26 John Seed, ‘Gentlemen Dissenters: The Social and Political Meanings of Rational Dissent in the 1770s and 1780s’, Historical Journal, 28 (1985), 302–6. 27 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), II; Hugh McLeod, Religion and Society in England, 1850– 1914 (London and New York: Macmillan, 1996); Dale A. Johnson, The Changing Shape of English Nonconformity, 1825–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). 28 Mark A. Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States and Canada (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002), 32.

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in the long term, were a second group of Puritans, still hoping to reform the Church of England from within, who left for America in 1630 led by John Winthrop. Convinced that they were doing God’s will, Winthrop and his followers believed they would eventually overcome opposition to reform in England and provide the model for a godly church.29 They created a Bible Commonwealth based on the idea of a covenant with God, in which all aspects of the colony’s social and political life were heavily influenced by Puritan beliefs in what has become known as the Puritan Way. Church membership was reserved for those who had been admitted to the church after having undergone a conversion experience on which they were publicly examined to testify to their godliness, and it was this membership which granted adult men a voice in both church and political affairs. The Puritan, or Congregational, church effectively became the established church in Massachusetts enforcing church attendance for all the colonists and attempting to impose conformity.30 However, almost from the beginning there were challenges to the authority of its leaders, as a number of people disputed the purity of the Puritan experiment and questioned aspects of Puritan spirituality. Such dissidents were quickly brought to account and often suffered banishment from the colony.31 One such was Roger Williams, who was exiled and travelled to Rhode Island, where in 1639 he founded what has been seen as the first Baptist Church in America. The maintenance of the Puritan Way remained a major concern of its leaders throughout the seventeenth century, as events in England and more local problems raised fears for the purity of the experiment. The English Civil War of the 1640s and the Interregnum which followed was a time of hope for many New England Puritans, who saw in the Puritan ascendancy in England the validation of their own actions in establishing a godly church in America. But the fragmentation of Puritanism in England during the 1650s and the creation of a vast array of sects, threatened to undermine and contaminate orthodoxy in New England.32 Still more dispiriting was the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 and with it the re-establishment of the Church of England, which dashed the hopes of the New England Puritans as well as their co-religionists in England. The resulting period of uncertainty and political instability was echoed in anxieties about the continuation of the Puritan experiment. For as generations born in the colony showed less commitment 29 Virginia DeJohn Anderson, New England’s Generation: The Great Migration and the Formation of Society and Culture in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 30 Noll, A History of Christianity in the United States, 42. 31 George M. Marsden, Religion and American Culture (Belmont, CA: Thomson Wadsworth, 2001), 24–5; Francis J. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment: New England Society from Bradford to Edwards (Hanover and London: University Press of New England, 1995), 62–70. 32 Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 129–40.

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to their parents’ religion, and it became more difficult to prevent dissident elements from settling there, the Puritan leaders found it increasingly challenging to maintain the purity of their way. A number of Quakers established meetings in both Massachusetts Bay and the other New England colonies despite their harsh treatment by the authorities, and the Baptists also began to demand toleration.33 By the end of the seventeenth century Puritan hegemony over New England society had been severely undermined. Although the Puritan Way only retained its dominance over the political and social life of New England during the seventeenth century, the Congregational Church itself remained the established church in Massachusetts and in some of the other New England colonies throughout the rest of the colonial period and into the early nineteenth century. The Puritan tradition, however, with its heritage of religious dissent against the established Anglican church and the idea that the Puritans were God’s people, continued to have a powerful resonance in America, particularly in those areas which were populated by migrants from New England. There were other groups in America who also saw themselves as part of the same tradition of religious dissent against the Anglican Church as the Puritans but who had a rather different history. The most significant of these were the Scots or Scots-Irish Presbyterians who settled in Pennsylvania. Like the Puritans they were orthodox Calvinists, but they maintained the forms of church government and religious practice they had established in Scotland and Ulster.34 The religious revivals known as the Great Awakening had their greatest impact amongst these two groups, introducing a new dimension to the religious life of the colonies. The initial purpose of preachers such as Jonathan Edwards, was to revive the essence of Calvinism and restore a sense of man’s dependence on God’s grace. The message was divisive, however, especially when the revivalists began to accuse the established clergy of being unregenerate or unconverted. This had the effect of splitting the Congregationalists, weakening the church in New England and opening the way to greater religious diversity.35 Although the Puritan tradition continued to be influential, it ceased to be the integrating force that it had been. Amongst the Presbyterians too, the revivals split the church between the ‘old sides’ and the ‘new sides’, many of whom later became Baptists. The Baptists gained most from the revivals, especially amongst the less educated and, for the first time, the slaves. Their encouragement of lay preachers and their emphasis on spiritual qualities rather than education amongst the church leadership, appealed particularly to the more egalitarian leanings of the masses.36 33 34 35 36

Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 154–67, 166–85. Marsden, Religion and American Culture, 31, 38–9. Bremer, The Puritan Experiment, 227–33. Marsden, Religion and American Culture, 31–7.

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The Great Awakening thus marked the transition to a different kind of religion, which emphasized worship led by untutored lay preachers rather than educated clergy, the importance of piety more than orthodoxy, and churches which decided on their own membership requirements. It also encouraged the questioning of traditional forms of authority, secular as well as religious. From the 1740s onwards many Protestants with Puritan antecedents—the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists—began to embrace republican ideals, and during the American Revolution the majority took the Patriot side.37 Although religious factors influenced the Revolution and played their part in determining loyalties, secular issues outweighed them and provided the rationale for the eventual demand for independence. However, the rational enlightenment ideas embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution, had an impact on the established churches in America, hastening their demise and putting an end to restrictions on the freedom of worship. One consequence of this was that over the next few decades many new religious groups developed, only some of which traced their roots to Puritanism. A second wave of revivals swept the United States of America during the early decades of the nineteenth century which furthered the democratization of religion, and once again increased church membership.38 The denominations that benefited most from this new religious fervour were the Baptists and Congregationalists, both of which had developed from Puritanism, but also the Methodists, who had their roots in the Anglican church. They differed considerably in theology and church organization, but together these revitalized churches had a profound impact on the social and political life of the new nation. Revivalism encouraged a new emphasis in the denominations with Calvinist roots, dispensing with predestination and stressing the ability of each individual to repent and embrace God’s saving grace. Thus personal sin became the individual’s responsibility, but evangelicalism also taught that conversion was only one of the steps towards salvation, and that the real test of conversion was to act in a benevolent manner towards all other humans. Converts were therefore expected to work for the moral perfection of society, as well as their own, and this meant eradicating sin in all its forms.39 As a

37 Mark Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 44, 64, 73; Ruth H. Bloch, ‘Religion and Ideological Change in the American Revolution’, in Mark A. Noll (ed.), Religion and American Politics: From the Colonial Period to the 1980s (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 44–61; Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 32–54. 38 Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 39 John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1984), 19–29.

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consequence these evangelical groups were at the forefront of a wide range of reform movements, including missionary efforts, temperance, moral reform, and the campaign to abolish slavery. Evangelical Congregationalists were not the only group who emerged out of New England Puritanism. In the early 1800s, influenced by the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the Unitarians split from the Congregationalists over disputes concerning the doctrine of the Trinity and the rights of private conscience. They maintained their affiliation to traditional Protestant teachings in many respects, but combined this with an optimism concerning human abilities. They never attracted the numbers the evangelicals did, but they were influential around the cultural centre of Boston, and their followers were often highly educated.40 Like the Unitarians in England, they became involved in reform, but rather for reasons of personal conscience than as a means to eradicate sin. Women as well as men were affected by the development of religious ideas and changes in religious practices. Orthodox Calvinism, especially as exercised in Puritan New England, placed great emphasis on the godly family and household and women’s role within them. The prominence given to individual conversion, however, raised questions about the religious roles of men and women. In many senses these were contradictory. Puritans recognized the spiritual equality of men and women, but both within the household and in the governance of the church, women were subordinate and were expected to be submissive to their husbands and ministers. They could be members of a church, and this was not dependent on their husband’s status, but they were required to remain silent in church and female testaments to conversion were heard in private. Moreover, both men and women were taught to read the Bible so that they could learn the word of God, but the interpretation of the scriptures was to be entrusted only to male ministers. As several historians have argued, however, women who gained the distinction of church membership and who achieved the reputation of being a good Christian, could exercise considerable influence. As wives, women acted as partners with their husbands in teaching their children and maintaining a godly household, and where her husband was not himself a church member, she was charged with encouraging his spiritual welfare. A woman who exemplified the Christian virtues could even lend moral authority to her husband in the community. Through her husband, if he was a church member, a woman could influence church affairs, though in an indirect manner.41 40 McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion, 26–7; Marsden, Religion and American Culture, 88–9. 41 Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 9, 215–16; Amanda Porterfield, Female Piety in Puritan New England: The Emergence of Religious Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 90–4.

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By the middle of the seventeenth century, more women than men were members of the Congregational churches of New England, but this had little impact on their status within the church. In England, except for Quakers, whose record-keeping was exceptional, and a handful of Independent churches, the evidence for church membership does not survive for this period for dissenters. The Quakers allowed women formal leadership roles, enabling them to act as preachers and to speak in meetings when the spirit prompted them. The women’s meeting also had a role to play in church governance.42 But in reality, women’s contribution to church activities in both countries was marginal to that of the male ministers and lay leaders until well into the following century. This changed little in any formal sense as a consequence of the revivals of the eighteenth century. But if women continued to be denied a recognized status within their churches, they were increasingly involved in what has been called a female devotional culture, which provided the foundations for separate female organizations in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Female prayer groups, benevolent societies, and missionary societies all developed from this female devotional culture, although their precise nature varied between the denominations, across regions, and depending on the urban or rural setting.43 As dissent grew and diversified in England and the Puritan tradition splintered in the United States, variations developed between the denominations on what they believed to be the religious nature of women and what the role of women should be within the church. As will become apparent, this is one of the central concerns of the essays in this volume. For although the evangelical churches—Baptists, Congregationalists, and Methodists— continued to emphasize women’s role as godly wives and mothers, and their dependence on men, rational dissenters, especially Unitarians, while seeing women’s role within the home as crucial, did not see that role only in terms of maternal or domestic duties.44

42 Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Prophesying in the Colonies and Abroad, 1700–1775 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1999); Catherine A. Brekus, Strangers and Pilgrims: Female Preaching in America, 1740–1845 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998); Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (London and New York, Longman, 1998), 17–19. 43 See, for instance, Janet Moore Lindman, ‘Wise Virgins and Pious Mothers: Spiritual Community among Baptist Women of the Delaware Valley’, in Larry D. Eldridge (ed.), Women and Freedom in Early America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 127–43. 44 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), 114–18; Kathryn Gleadle, ‘British Women and Radical Politics in the Late Nonconformist Enlightenment, c.1780–1830’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege, and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 125–6; Ruth H. Bloch, ‘American Feminine Ideals in Transition: The Rise of the Moral Mother‘, Feminist Studies, 4 (1978), 101–26.

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Religious ideals were not the only factor influencing women’s participation in church activities and reform movements; it was also shaped by legal and social constraints. Women’s legal status in both England and the American colonies was determined by English Common Law. Once married, women had no legal status separate from their husbands, being feme covert, and had no rights to any property brought to the marriage or acquired during the marriage; it all belonged to her husband. Although the American Revolution brought some changes to divorce and inheritance laws in the United States, women’s legal status hardly changed until the mid-nineteenth century in either country.45 Nor did they have any formal political power, the vast majority of women being unable to vote or hold any kind of political or civil office.46 These legal and political disabilities ensured women’s dependence on men, and their social subordination. Moreover, social constructions of women’s role, as well as religious ideals, assumed that her place was in the home, uninvolved in politics or the economy, and only exercising influence within the domestic setting where she was to uphold the moral purity of her family.47 In the past, based on these assumptions, scholars have argued that women’s actions were constrained by the roles imposed on them by society, but more recent scholarship has suggested that women used these ideological injunctions to enter into male arenas. Such behaviour was often seen by critics as unfeminine, as the censure of anti-slavery women by Wilberforce and the Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts would seem to confirm. However, groups of women, such as the anti-slavery women discussed in this volume, used the ideals of womanhood as points of departure rather than blueprints for their own conduct, and in the process decided for themselves what constituted appropriate female behaviour.48 Thus, inspired by the religious ideals which had seemed to confine them to domesticity and a merely supportive role within the church, women developed expansive roles beyond their homes.49 45 Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 17–19; Jan E. Lewis, ‘A Revolution for Whom? Women in the Era of the American Revolution’, in Nancy A. Hewitt (ed.), A Companion to American Women’s History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 91–2. Widows and single women over the age of twenty-one, feme sole, had a separate legal status. 46 Some women were able to vote in England, as discussed by Kathryn Gleadle, Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain, 1815–1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 28–42. On the exception to this in the United States, see 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. 47 Barbara Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860’, American Quarterly, 18 (1966), 151–74; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 149–92. 48 Mary Kelley, ‘Beyond the Boundaries’, Journal of the Early Republic, 21 (2001), 73–8; Julie Roy Jeffrey, ‘Permeable Boundaries, Abolitionist Women and Separate Spheres’, Journal of the Early Republic, 21 (2001), 79–93; Gleadle, Borderline Citizens, 1–11. 49 This scholarship is discussed by Turley, ‘Complicating the Story’, chapter 1, this volume. See also, Nancy A. Hewitt, ‘Religion, Reform, and Radicalism in the Antebellum Era’, in Hewitt (ed.), A Companion to American Women’s History, 117–31.

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They were able to do this, in part, because of the development of what scholars have identified as ‘civil society’ throughout western Europe and North America between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Contemporaries understood civil society as gatherings of private citizens meeting together, and explicitly engaging in the formation of public opinion. This might take the form of elite salons and tea tables, or voluntary associations of various descriptions, but for many women it also meant their churches and chapels.50 Operating outside the formal structures of the state, the dissenting churches and their counterparts in the United States offered women the opportunity to gather together, interact with each other, and, increasingly, make their voices heard. While this did not go uncontested, women took strength from their church networks to become involved in collective activism for causes which, in the case of anti-slavery, took them into the political arena. The essays in this volume examine the diverse ways in which women from the dissenting churches and Puritan tradition took part in anti-slavery activism. Reflecting on the ways in which women used their religious values to overcome obstacles put in their paths by social constructions and understandings of womanhood, they explore how women participated in the anti-slavery campaigns at different times and in different contexts. They address a number of questions focused on three central themes: first, the way in which the religious ideas and values of the dissenting tradition provided women, in particular, with the motivation to become involved in anti-slavery work; second, the specifically gendered manner in which women interpreted their religious values and how this was reflected in practice; and, finally, the means by which specific religious traditions gave women greater latitude (or the opposite) to become involved in identifiable kinds of activism. The volume begins with an examination by David Turley of how historians have examined the relationship between religion, gender, and the anti-slavery campaigns in Britain and America. Starting with what he calls participant histories, which included among them the memoirs of women involved in the movements, Turley then examines how the historiography gradually developed over the course of the twentieth century. Initially women were largely excluded from historians’ consideration, but with the emergence of works explicitly influenced by feminism in the last thirty years women’s contribution has again been recognized. Turley offers the historiographical background to the rest of the chapters.

50 Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public Life in America’s Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 5–10; Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart, ‘Introduction’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (eds), Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), xii–xiii.

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The seven essays which follow are arranged to look first at the British movement, progressing from the last decade of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth century. The volume then proceeds to examine the American movement moving from the influence of colonial religious movements to the outbreak of the Civil War. The three chapters with a British focus explore both the centrality of print and literary culture to women’s anti-slavery activities, and the importance of female devotional cultures amongst dissenting women over four decades. Each of the essays concentrates on a different individual or group of women, but they reflect on similar themes, and there are connections to be drawn between them. The subject of Timothy Whelan’s essay, Martha Gurney, printed and sold the pamphlet which in the 1790s instigated the sugar boycott of 1791–3, a pamphlet whose theme re-emerged in the 1820s through the work of Elizabeth Heyrick, the topic of Clare Midgley’s essay. In turn, some of the women Alison Twells examines sought to forward the campaign for immediate abolition ignited by Heyrick’s pamphlet. Similarly, for all these women their anti-slavery commitment was an integral part of their religious faith, which though they came from different denominations was shaped by the traditions of Protestant dissent and the fact that they were religious outsiders. The four essays with an American focus also pick up on these themes. Carol Lasser specifically examines the ways in which the anti-slavery appeals of British dissenting women, many of them from a background in rational dissent, were transformed in the process of crossing the Atlantic. American women drew on their experiences of conversion within evangelical communities to oppose slavery as an evil to be combated by moral suasion. Thus while celebrating the work of British women, particularly that of Elizabeth Heyrick, and adopting the demand for immediate emancipation, they altered their message to fit more comfortably with their own preoccupations. The women on whom Julie Roy Jeffrey concentrates looked back to an older group of English dissenters, the Puritans who fled to New England in the early seventeenth century. Although some of the Puritan traditions had diminished, these women revived them and used them to provide a different set of weapons in their attempts to force the major evangelical denominations to support immediate emancipation. Stacey Robertson, echoing Twells’s study of English dissenting women, looks more explicitly at how women in the different denominations which stemmed from the American Puritan tradition, expressed their anti-slavery commitment within their churches, and how these institutions influenced its representation in public life. Finally, Judie Newman analyses how Harriet Beecher Stowe, stimulated by her Congregationalist background, used the values of religious dissent to further the abolitionist cause in her writing. Through an examination of the reception of her novels and the performance of her plays on both sides of the Atlantic, Newman shows how Stowe marshalled the traditions of religious dissent to build

Introduction

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on, and strengthen, the transatlantic anti-slavery culture developed by such women as Martha Gurney and Elizabeth Heyrick. Together these essays make a major contribution to our understanding of how religious ideas and values influenced women’s participation in antislavery activism. Their examination both of the women who were at the forefront of the campaigns on both sides of the Atlantic, and of those who made up the ‘Great Silent Army of Abolitionism’, suggests that for these women their anti-slavery commitment was integral to their religious faith.51 Moreover, these women used their religious values and their interpretations of religious teachings to overcome obstacles, which social constructions of women’s place put in their way. Female anti-slavery activism could also be shaped by the different branches of religious dissent, whether rational dissent or evangelical dissent, as well as the individual denominations within these broader categories. The focus of this volume on women with a background in English Protestant dissent or the American Puritan tradition provides a new dimension to studies of women’s anti-slavery activism. It also offers a contrast between these two religious traditions which shared roots in orthodox Calvinism, highlighting the different social spaces they occupied. For even in the early nineteenth century, female English dissenters operated outside the religious mainstream, whereas their counterparts in the United States were part of what had been the established state religion in New England. As these essays suggest, however, the custom of challenging established religion and its practices, which was the legacy of both English dissent and the American Puritan Way, enabled women from these traditions to translate that heritage into anti-slavery activism.

51

The phrase is that of Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism.

1 Complicating the Story: Religion and Gender in Historical Writing on British and American Anti-Slavery David Turley

For 200 years in British colonial territories and what became the United States the slave trade and slavery underpinned an economic, social, and racial order that projected the power of slaveholders into the centre of their respective political systems. Anti-slavery challenged a comprehensive structure of wealth, power, and human control and became closely bound up with the large changes, including the transition to free labour, transforming the modern Atlantic world. The significance accorded anti-slavery in the historical treatments of these changes has varied, but the transformation has been so central to modern history that scholars have not been able to ignore antislavery altogether. Participants composed the initial accounts of anti-slavery movements in Britain and the United States. Their narratives carried the authority of proximity to events. Participants’ texts often refought old battles, but some gave prominence to women and touched on themes that modern studies have pursued. They treated religious experiences—still central to our understanding of the movements—and their perspectives foreshadow more recent changes in the historiography of women and anti-slavery. The emerging professional histories that followed were usually narrative surveys that revealed the historians’ assumptions about anti-slavery and their interpretative priorities. In turn, the assumptions of Klingberg, Coupland, and Mathieson on Britain, and Hart and Hume on the American movement provided the basis for the questions raised by the next generation of anti-slavery specialists. In the twentieth century attention returned to the role of religion in anti-slavery activism and prompted a major debate over the part it played in influencing American and British abolitionism.

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The emergence of feminism has deeply influenced the ways in which women’s role in the abolitionist movement has been recognized, mediated as it often was through religion. Out of the ferment of the 1960s the growth of social history in its various modern styles—studies of social structure, community and social movements—influenced the study of anti-slavery as the sub-discipline developed. From this period also an intellectually ambitious women’s movement, seeking a comprehensive genealogy, fuelled the expansion of the history of women that initially placed them in the contexts explored by social historians. But feminism challenged the theoretical adequacy of these frameworks since women’s history could not simply be an ‘add-on’; it required reconceptualizing the operations of social institutions and movements. The effect was to historicize intellectual explorations of gender systems and their relation to class, race, and national identity. One impact on anti-slavery studies, especially in the United States, is a body of work on black women in the crusade, expanding a distinctive black tradition of historical writing. Recently the ‘cultural turn’ in history has also produced deconstructions of (gendered) meanings in, for example, anti-slavery events and symbols. The first volume of Thomas Clarkson’s two-volume The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (1808) summarized diagrammatically the prehistory of abolition through the influences he believed converged to create the 1787 London committee against the slave trade. He drew major flows of influence from British Quakers as a body and the six individuals who constituted the 1783 Quaker committee on the slave trade. He indicated a transatlantic dimension through the combined forces of American Quakers, alongside Franklin and Jefferson, and the impact their anti-slave trade stance had in North America and Europe. But Quaker religious sentiment was only one strand of Clarkson’s sketch of an inclusive movement embracing Anglicans and dissenters. Inclusiveness was also a mark of anti-slavery in Prince Hoare’s Memoirs of Granville Sharp Esq. (1820). Sharp’s heroic stature was attributed to his perseverance in pursuing slave cases in Britain from the late 1760s and to his ability to unify supporters of anti-slavery and other philanthropic activity, ‘a churchman [i.e. an Anglican] in faith, in charity a universalist’.1 Religious inclusiveness did not incorporate women. Only Queen Elizabeth appeared on Clarkson’s diagram since she expressed a religious scruple about Africans being carried off by force. The influences surrounding Sharp and the ethos of the Clapham Sect with Wilberforce at its centre, as presented by his sons Robert and Samuel in The Life of William Wilberforce (1838), were overwhelmingly male. Clarkson acknowledged the religious consciousness of 1 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols (London, 1808), I, 259–62, 39–41, 222–3, 235, 492–3; Prince Hoare, Memoirs of Granville Sharp Esq. (London, 1820).

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patrician female supporters, Lady Scarsdale and Lady Middleton, as motivating their opposition to the slave trade but assumed that religious leadership could only be male. Discussing the French Amis des Noirs he noted that women were ‘not thought unworthy of being honorary and assistant members of this humane institution’. The later controversy about the historical value of Clarkson’s book and the relative significance of Clarkson and Wilberforce in the British movement generated a pamphlet controversy over the Wilberforce Life, which was continued in the younger James Stephen’s Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography (1849) and George Stephen’s Anti-Slavery Recollections (1854) but had nothing more to say about women abolitionists. In this debate, the motives of the Wilberforce group were portrayed as religious and familial, claiming for the Anglican Clapham group the success of anti-slavery and seeking to marginalize the liberal Clarkson with his connections to religious dissent. Anti-slavery women are only significant in participant accounts of the Buxton family. Charles Buxton’s Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton Baronet with Selections from his Correspondence (1848) presented his father as a Christian statesman sustained by family as a worthy successor to Wilberforce in leading parliamentary anti-slavery. His wife Hannah and sister-in-law Priscilla Gurney were stalwart partners and his daughter Priscilla crucial in communicating with fellow abolitionists, helping to draft speeches and partly organizing the women’s national petition. At the moment of emancipation Buxton described her as ‘next to Macaulay, my best human helper’. The Buxton women were documented by the next generation in Memorials of Hannah, Lady Buxton from Papers Collected by her Granddaughters (1883) and Priscilla (Buxton) Johnston’s Extracts from Priscilla Johnston’s Journal and Letters (1862).2 British participant history has less to say about women than the texts generated through the American movement. Harriet Martineau’s The Martyr Age in the United States of America (1838), originally written for a British readership to inform them of the realities of the American abolitionist struggle, sketches a different world. Anti-slavery women were prominent in a struggle requiring demonstrations of courage: Prudence Crandall’s efforts to keep open her school; Lydia Maria Child’s unpopularity when identifying

2 Robert Isaac Wilberforce and Samuel Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce, 5 vols (London, 1838); Sir James Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography, 2 vols (London, 1849); Sir George Stephen, Anti-Slavery Recollections: In a Series of Letters, Addressed to Mrs Beecher Stowe (London, 1854); David Turley, The Culture of English Anti-Slavery, 1780–1860 (London and New York: Routledge, 1991), 96–9; J. R. Oldfield, ‘Chords of Freedom’: Commemoration, Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2007), 33–55; Charles Buxton, Memoirs of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, Baronet, with Selections from his Correspondence (London, 1848); Hannah Buxton, Memorials of Hannah, Lady Buxton from Papers Collected by her Granddaughters (London, 1883); E. MacInnes (ed.), Extracts from Priscilla Johnston’s Journal and Letters (Carlisle, 1862).

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herself as an abolitionist writer; Maria Weston Chapman, Lucretia Mott, Abby and Sarah Southwick facing anti-abolitionist mobs in Boston and Philadelphia. Martineau portrayed these experiences as women’s ‘sacrifice’, acting out of ‘conscience’, and undergoing a ‘wringing of souls’, comparable with the ‘martyrdom’ of Amos Dresser’s whipping for distributing abolitionist tracts, or even Elijah Lovejoy’s murder while defending his anti-slavery press. This implied equality between men and women in the American movement was controversial in the years following Martineau’s image of an abolitionism ‘of one heart and of one soul’. Garrisonian commitment to the equality of women in reform, however, facilitated participatory accounts that gave plenty of space to women.3 Participants insisted religion was the source of anti-slavery conviction. Samuel J. May in Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict (1869) attributed Prudence Crandall’s courage to ‘the effect of her Quaker discipline’; Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Sarah Southwick stressed their upbringing in Quaker family anti-slavery traditions. Overcoming ‘sectarian’ religious opposition was also a painful aspect of anti-slavery women’s accounts. The Buffums met the hostility of other Friends when their Garrisonian affiliations emerged and the militant young Abby Kelley faced action against her by disapproving local Quaker meetings. Elizabeth Buffum eventually left the Society of Friends on anti-slavery grounds. Catherine Birney’s The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (1885) recounted the sisters’ struggles to escape family religious and social prejudices in South Carolina and their embrace of an activist version of Quakerism. Because the Grimkés’ religious quest and spiritual anguish, intensified by family tensions, led to public activism, a rich sense of their personal lives appeared crucial to their anti-slavery. It involved the geographical and psychological loss of ‘home’. Biographical history appeared particularly appropriate to Birney, the sisters’ admirer and friend, as it did to later writers charting the difficult movement of women reformers from the private to the public. When family relations were harmonious activists like Chace and the Southwick sisters, all involved with Underground Railroad work, used their narratives to present themselves as part of activist family units of parents, daughters, and sisters, passing on fugitive slaves from one to another, or supporting each other at threatened anti-slavery gatherings such as the attack on Pennsylvania Hall in 1838. The anti-slavery family also linked women members to female anti-slavery friends and networks devoted to petitioning and other forms of organization.4 Harriet Martineau, ‘The Martyr Age in the United States’, Westminster Review (December 1838), reprinted as a pamphlet in 1840. 4 Aaron M. Powell, Personal Reminiscences of the Anti-Slavery and Other Reforms and Reformers (New York, 1899), 1–17; Samuel J. May, Some Recollections of Our Antislavery Conflict 3

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The struggle to establish the legitimacy of anti-slavery in the 1830s, and later controversy, led several participant writers to recognize that the Garrisonian wing of abolitionism was creating an expanded zone of action for women. Martineau’s pamphlet version supported a ‘mixed’ student body at anti-slavery Oberlin, advocated an academic education for young women, and sustained Maria Weston Chapman’s view that anti-slavery petitioning rightly repudiated conventional notions of the ‘lady-like’: ‘what we have done is right and womanly’. May recognized Lucretia Mott’s role at the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and asserted that the conspicuousness of women in public activity measured the progress of civilization. Parker Pillsbury in Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (1884) described conflicts in churches over women’s insistence on taking part in anti-slavery meetings. ‘We had supposed . . . woman’s sphere was as broad as man’s and that order thought it no shame for a woman to speak in a meeting, but an honor rather and a duty’. May naturally underlined Lydia Maria Child’s abolitionist interventions as a writer and her editorship of the National Antislavery Standard. He and Birney were also convinced of the impact of the Grimkés in encouraging women to speak on anti-slavery. Women’s struggle to achieve a voice and public space, Chace concluded, provided ‘a liberal education’. The perspective, widespread in later historical writing, of anti-slavery as part of the prehistory of women’s rights was being formulated. 5 Activism also inspired the first black written accounts on black abolitionism, including black women abolitionists. Although Maria Stewart and Mary Ann Shadd Cary made an impact as speakers and writers, the earliest profiles of black women abolitionists appeared in the books of black male participant historians. In sections of collective biography William Wells Brown provided material on Charlotte Forten and Francis Ellen Watkins Harper. Similar descriptive ‘contributions’ came from Martin Delany about Phillis Wheatley and Mary Ann Shadd Cary.6 (Boston, 1869), 40–57; Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Anti-Slavery Reminiscences (Central Falls, RI, 1891), 8–39; Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (Boston, 1885), 5–167; Sarah Southwick, Reminiscences of Early Anti-Slavery Days (Privately Printed, 1893), 5–39. 5 Harriet Martineau, The Martyr Age of the United States of America, with an Appeal on behalf of the Oberlin Institute in Aid of the Abolition of Slavery. Re-published from the London and Westminster Review by the Newcastle Upon Tyne Emancipation and Aborigines Protection Society (Newcastle Upon Tyne, 1840), 1–20; May, Recollections, 92–7, 230–3; Parker Pillsbury, Acts of the Anti-Slavery Apostles (Boston, 1884), 119; Birney, Grimké Sisters, 162–7; Chace, Reminiscences, 46–7. 6 William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (Boston, 1863); Martin R. Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Politically Considered (New York, 1861); Manisha Sinha, ‘Coming of Age: The Historiography of Black Abolitionism’, in Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (eds), Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism (New York and London: The New Press, 2006), 23–38.

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One other theme important to later scholarship appeared in American participant accounts: transatlantic anti-slavery. This included the flow of information and ideas (the Southwick family’s links to the Liverpool abolitionist, James Cropper, for example); the opportunities for solidarity strengthened by mob violence that George Thompson’s visit to America afforded in the mid-1830s; the refusal to seat American women delegates at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840, key to the interpretation that links anti-slavery to women’s rights.7 The historiography of British anti-slavery until the 1960s was located within a narrative of empire that presented anti-slavery issues as having been resolved within the British imperial political and parliamentary system. Anti-slavery was an evangelically based humanitarianism that activists spread to the public and politicians willing to use imperial power to override colonial slaveholders and their trader allies. The work of Coupland, Klingberg, Mathieson, and Harris was an extended commentary on Lecky’s remark that the British crusade against slavery ‘may probably be regarded as among the three or four perfectly virtuous pages comprised in this history of nations’. Lecky bridged the judgment abolitionists made of their own efforts and a historiography confirming moral progress achieved through righteous opinion and Christian statesmanship. This history offered a limited sense of anti-slavery as a social movement. Philosophically, humanitarianism built on the possibility of disinterested benevolence that, when applied to ‘backward peoples’, could civilize them. Anti-slavery activity was driven largely by evangelicalism and the Clapham Sect in particular. The dynamic of this brand of Anglicanism, and of allied dissent, was subsumed in the ideas of religious principle and conscience; parliament was the major site of action. The humanitarian school concluded that abolition and emancipation were early victories for liberal imperial stewardship. Women were assistants and petition organizers whose determination had been combined with ‘quietude’.8 Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery challenged such historical complacency. Originally published in 1944, the book’s republication in 1964 during decolonization sparked an international debate. Abolition and emancipation in Williams’s view resulted from changes in class relations in Britain and the political economy of empire. What mattered was the conjunction of significant decline in the economies of the British Caribbean after the American 7

Southwick, Reminiscences, 6, 11–16, 22–3; Powell, Personal Reminiscences, 90–4. W. E. H. Lecky, A History of European Morals, 2 vols ( London, 1884), II, 153; Reginald Coupland, Wilberforce: A Narrative (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923); Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933); Frank J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, 1926); William Law Mathieson, British Slavery and Its Abolition (London: Longmans Green, 1926); John Harris, A Century of Emancipation (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1933). 8

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Revolution with the move in Britain towards industrial capitalism that generated a powerful new class attached to laissez faire and a free labour system. The argument left only a modest place for abolitionists, as propagandists whose political economy arguments had as much impact as humanitarian and religious appeals. Williams praised the liberal Clarkson who ‘personifies all the best in the humanitarianism of the age’ and the younger James Stephen at the Colonial Office who distrusted the planters’ motives, his work amounting to ‘a notable step in the protection of weaker peoples’. Wilberforce, in Williams’s view, possessed reactionary attitudes, including opposition to women’s anti-slavery associations. The failure in the 1840s of many abolitionists to oppose the equalization of the sugar duties so that West Indian free labour sugar went into further decline and Britain imported more slave-grown Cuban and Brazilian produce revealed the hypocrisy of the humanitarian-religious argument. Missionary evangelism amongst the ex-slaves, Williams argued, constituted a diversionary compensation for failure to provide the freed people with land and opportunities. By implication, women abolitionists supporting West Indian missions were complicit in a fraud.9 Anti-slavery as a humanitarian expression of evangelical Protestantism could never be presented so straightforwardly again. But part of the counterattack on Williams, led most notably by Roger Anstey, resurrected a ‘moral’ rather than a ‘material’ explanation of abolition and emancipation. Anstey emphasized that the rise of evangelicalism during the eighteenth century converged with philosophical benevolence to create empathy with others. Slavery halted moral progress. Anti-slavery dynamism still relied on leaders mobilizing followers with Christian appeals, but success required skilful parliamentary tactics, allowing moralists to appear as political realists. While incorporating secular influences, later work emphasized anti-slavery as a religious coalition tracing its ideology and practice across Quakerism, Anglican evangelicalism, Methodism, and the evangelicalism of religious dissent. Rational dissenters, later Unitarians, were integrated too. Often forming educated elites they perceived slavery as the antithesis of the moral autonomy and individual responsibility to which they were philosophically committed. All groups were allied in a ‘religion of humanity’ since humankind was one family under God. The ideological sources and religious idioms of anti-slavery were more complicated than previously thought.10 Most historians concluded that religion and skilful tactics were only part of the picture. David Brion Davis and Seymour Drescher made important attempts to get beyond the divide between the humanitarian-religious interpretation and the economic determinist approach. Davis saw slavery as posing 9

Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (London: Andre Deutsch, 1964 edn), 45, 178–88. Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), Part II; Turley, Culture. 10

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‘a symbolic test of the efficacy of the Christian faith’ but explained the development of anti-slavery as a process of cultural hegemony frequently expressed in the language of religion and ultimately, rather than consciously, favourable to the development of industrial capitalism. This line of argument rendered more difficult conclusions about abolitionists’ hypocrisy when some supported tough measures of social order in Britain and a laissez faire imperial economy. Drescher has emphasized how British anti-slavery used popular mobilization and led liberalizing and democratizing tendencies in the country. Since Drescher discounts Anstey’s argument on philosophical and religious concepts, it is unclear how he connects religion to mobilization. The religious dimension of popular anti-slavery, he suggests, consisted in drawing strength from social milieux that were also infused by evangelicalism, and particularly Methodism. But he does not posit a causal relationship.11 These arguments operate within a national framework for understanding British anti-slavery. Consideration of the mediation of anti-slavery issues between the national leadership and local abolitionists has also woven religion into the cultures of local communities. Involvement in local institutions brought individuals into contact with the wider social world through the dominant, but sometimes contested, ethos of their communities with their particular structures of social relations. Part of the specificity of social relations arose out of the local pattern of religious affiliations. Specifically, anti-slavery in Manchester in the late 1780s and early 1790s emerged as part of a cohesive reform culture led by liberal Christians—rational dissenters and latitudinarian Anglicans with Methodist allies. Their influence across a range of local institutions reflected Enlightenment notions of ‘improvement’. Thirty years later in Sheffield, local notables, drawn primarily from evangelical dissent, and operating through a different range of local associations, imparted their own distinctive tone to anti-slavery there.12 In the United States abolitionism was approached less as a distinct phenomenon than as part of the ‘problem’ of the Civil War. Writing about abolitionism aroused high feeling since it touched on issues of sectional loyalty and race that had long had political currency, renewed memories of defeat and liberation, and participated implicitly in the controversy over post-Civil War state power, race relations, and the construction of antebellum history. Some 11 David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1975), 346–85; David Brion Davis, ‘Capitalism, Abolitionism and Hegemony’, in Barbara L. Solow and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), British Capitalism and Caribbean Slavery: The Legacy of Eric Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 210–11, 217–19; Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1986). 12 David Turley, ‘British Antislavery Reassessed’, in Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes (eds), Rethinking the Age of Reform: Britain 1780–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 186–94.

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accounts revisited the antebellum controversy over abolitionism in terms of the significance of William Lloyd Garrison. Even anti-slavery sympathizers such as Henry Wilson found Garrison’s hostility to political action puzzling and counter-productive in its failure to mobilize northern religious sentiment. Similarly, Rhodes attributed to religion the support for political anti-slavery’s opposition to slavery expansion. Women got lost in accounts that focused only on anti-slavery’s effects on the great fact of the Civil War.13 Major Progressive historiography understood American historical development as the product of impersonal material forces and presented anti-slavery as epiphenomenal, but some with personal knowledge of anti-slavery wrote professionally about it as a social movement. Hume confirmed the female pantheon of anti-slavery activists; discussing the roles of the Grimkés, Kelley, and Mott he underlined the link to women’s rights. Hart noted that membership of different religious groups afforded women varying possibilities for action while tracing the ways that the Grimkés and others acted to broaden gender conventions in reform circles. His emphasis on abolitionists as perceived outsiders unusually led Hart to discussion of black women activists.14 Between the 1930s and the 1960s the relation of religion to abolitionism was framed as part of the debate over whether Garrisonians were the core of the movement or marginal religious extremists. Barnes and Dumond published interpretations of abolitionism, underpinned by editions of the Weld-Grimké and Birney letters, recognizing how evangelical revivalism in the Second Great Awakening produced zealous anti-slavery commitment. Women and men in ‘saved’ groups sustained their sense of grace, directed to the purification of the world from sin, and vindicated their sanctification through social action. Barnes and Dumond portrayed evangelical abolitionism as the major strand of the movement strongly attached to the churches, unlike the ‘infidel’ Garrisonians. Weld’s lecturing, writing, and petitioning; the Grimkés’ arguments and Angelina’s testimony before a Massachusetts legislative committee; Birney’s anti-slavery presidential candidacy were all facets of an evangelical abolitionism that they saw as a moral and practical style of reform located in New York and the Middle West rather than New England.15

13 Henry Wilson, History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 3 vols (Boston, 1875–77); James Ford Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, 2 vols (New York, 1893), I; Hugh Tulloch, The Debate on the American Civil War Era (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 71–103. 14 John F. Hume, The Abolitionists Together with Personal Memories of the Struggle for Human Rights, 1830–1864 (New York and London: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, The Knickerbocker Press, 1905); Albert Bushnell Hart, Slavery and Abolition 1831–1841 (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1906). 15 Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York and London: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1933); Dwight L. Dumond, Anti-Slavery Origins of the Civil War in the United States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1939).

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The significance of Garrison aside, the main criticism of this interpretation of abolitionism was of its simple model of change: the abolitionist message was so powerful that Americans eventually accepted huge bloodletting as a major consequence. The revisionist historians of the 1930s and 1940s (revisionist about the causes of the Civil War), concerned with the question of whether the sectional conflict was ‘irrepressible’, conceded the power of abolitionist propagandists but made them substantially responsible for bringing war. Considering such behaviour as a form of excess, revisionists focused on abolitionists’ pathologies. Despite their religious idiom, Donald argued in his essay ‘Towards a Reconsideration of the Abolitionists’ and in the first volume of his biography of Sumner, that their irrationality arose from psychological compensation for both social displacement at a time of change and unconscious repression of culturally impermissible psychic drives.16 Historians cannot plausibly ignore the psychology of reformers, but it needs to be calibrated with the significance of the issues they confronted. Abolitionism recovered a reputation for rational dealing with the world when historians wrote in a society where the Civil Rights Movement was accepted as a rational and moral response to injustice. Without setting aside the psychology of reform, Thomas’s intellectual biography of Garrison and several essays in the Martin Duberman edited collection The Anti-Slavery Vanguard put religion back into the analysis of what shaped abolitionist world views, taking the morality of reformers seriously. Thomas saw Garrison’s anti-political Christian anarchism, with an equal position for women in the universal moral transformation he envisaged, as stemming from Garrison’s conviction of the possibility of almost immediate perfection. Thomas’s essay in the collection edited by Martin Duberman argued that immediate perfectionism impelled some Garrisonians into utopian communities displaying a theological and psychological distance from the authoritarian evangelicalism of denominational abolitionists also discussed in Duberman. The religious variety and intellectual seriousness of abolitionism was emphasized, though without much attempt at exploring the role of women.17 The volume of essays edited by Perry and Fellman characterized abolitionist historiography at the end of the next decade, delivering work that located the boundaries of abolitionism and connected it to other features of American culture, turning within the movement to explore abolitionists’ ideas about race, labour, and social issues. Ronald Walters’ The Antislavery Appeal anticipated this emphasis on anti-slavery as embedded in, rather than on the 16 David Donald, Lincoln Reconsidered: Essays on the Civil War Era (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956); David Donald, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1960). 17 John L. Thomas, The Liberator: William Lloyd Garrison, A Biography (Boston, Toronto: Little & Brown, 1963); Martin Duberman (ed.), The Antislavery Vanguard: New Essays on the Abolitionists (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1965).

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margins of, American culture. The picture was more complex, not least because women were more visible than in previous considerations of abolitionism. But the essays were part of a tendency with regard to female reformers restricted to ‘a (somewhat elitist) focus on the roles of leading white women abolitionists and their connection to feminism’. Looking back, Fellman identified gaps in the history of abolitionism at the end of the 1970s as including the lack of a sense of the human variety of the movement. Goodman in 1998 devoted pages to African American and women abolitionists and the latest ‘progress report’, thirty years from the last, has responded to work published on black history. This wider embrace of recent writing has yielded essays on aspects of black (male) abolitionism, including anti-slavery in the early national period, black political thinking, and the way in which black reformers exploited the culture of print to reach black and white readers. The recent turn to cultural history is also evident in Julie Roy Jeffrey’s integration of women into a careful deconstruction of the meanings of abolitionist celebrations of West Indian freedom. Religion in this most recent version of the state of scholarship has been absorbed into the cultural. Evidence of newer styles of history remaking abolitionist studies will also be found in the discussion below on feminist scholarship.18 Black historical writing took a long time to have a significant impact on the white-dominated profession in the United States. A racialized order was organizationally sustained almost as much in the emerging liberal professions as in the wider American society. Paradoxically, the predominant perspective of African American historians, before a shift of emphasis in the 1970s, was of black people’s commitment to American ideals—‘Our History’ in Carter G. Woodson’s phrase—and their struggles to persuade whites of the changes that were necessary to make an inclusive reality. Recovering what ‘representative’ African Americans had done in anti-slavery, George Washington Williams and John W. Cromwell subscribed to a narrow idea of activism incorporating conventions, brief mention of local societies, church and denominational organizations, and writing. The few women noticed within this frame repeated those featured in earlier black texts—Wheatley, Cary and particularly Sojourner Truth, with her vital religion and acute, untutored intelligence pungently expressed. She and Harriet Tubman, alike in faith, became the totemic figures of black womanhood representing the abolition era. They recurred similarly in texts between the 1920s and 1940s of Brawley, 18

Lewis Perry and Michael Fellman (eds), Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Ronald Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism after 1830 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Michael Fellman, ‘Foreword’, in McCarthy and Stauffer (eds), Prophets of Protest; Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1998); McCarthy and Stauffer (eds), Prophets of Protest, essays by Newman, Winch, Young, McCarthy, and Jeffrey.

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Woodson, and Fauset. Yet black women’s activism was presented in personal terms. Benjamin Quarles in 1969 first seriously conceptualized black abolitionism as a social movement. ‘Abolition’s different drummer’ devoted energy to the progress of free blacks to influence the perceptions of whites about ending slavery. Blacks dominated the running of Vigilance Committees and constituted female free produce groups. But Quarles, embracing the tradition of ‘Our History’ and the ideal of integrated activity, focused on equality through activism in his argument about how blacks, including women, led the Underground Railroad and black ideas influenced whites in the campaign against colonization.19 Virtually all historical writing dealing with anti-slavery women for the past generation has been feminist in outlook. The intellectual development of women’s history applied to anti-slavery has emphasized a ‘feminist’ cluster of questions. The starting point emphasized that changing economic and social structures, dominant cultural assumptions, and explicit ideological discourses about women have shaped women’s lives. Feminist anti-slavery scholarship in Britain and the United States developed similarly in so far as the starting point suggested common lines of investigation. Differences of emphasis developed from empirical research and divergences in intellectual traditions as they inflected theorizing about women and feminist scholarship. The relevant conceptualizations dealt with power and agency, themes that framed scholars’ questions about women and anti-slavery. But usable concepts had to begin with some sense of women’s lives and behaviour. Once women were recovered as historical subjects questions arose of how to define the boundaries of what they said and did over time, and why the limits were where they were. Working in Britain from the trajectory of economic and social change from the late eighteenth century, and women’s place in the formation of social class (a focus consonant with the strength of Marxist feminism in the 1970s), and in the United States from a liberal feminist concern with social and cultural attitudes in a time of change, American, and then British, scholars began using the concept of ‘separate spheres’ for women and men. As an organizing and debated idea it was ubiquitous between the 1970s and the 1990s and remains a point of reference. Historians concentrating on the woman’s sphere took it as a description of social reality, or as allowing the 19 George W. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers and as Citizens, 2 vols (New York, 1883), II, 61–81, 419–51; John W. Cromwell, The Negro in American History: Men and Women Eminent in the Evolution of the American of African Descent (Washington, DC: The American Negro Academy, 1914), 27–46, 50–70, 105–14; Benjamin Brawley, Negro Builders and Heroes (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1937); Carter G. Woodson, Negro Makers of History (Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, Inc., 1928); Arthur Huff Fauset, Sojourner Truth: God’s Faithful Pilgrim (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1938); Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

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conflation of reality with prescriptive discourse about women’s roles. The question of whether it was reality and/or construction promoted, in theory and as part of a shift in historiography towards the ‘cultural turn’, interest in how relations between the sexes were socially and culturally constructed. If women were not regarded qua women, but considered historically in relation to men and their different modes of thought and behaviour, then women were to be understood no longer as making ‘contributions’ to a historical process but as part of a gender system that had imperatives governing women’s and men’s roles. The perspective of ‘construction’ could also integrate agency (on the part of women activists) that might modify the gender system.20 Initially women’s history marked out its territory in both the United States and Britain with broad surveys; women’s ‘contributions’ to reform were part of those narratives. Then Welter gave currency to the concept of ‘separate spheres’ through the idea of ‘true womanhood’, and it was quickly applied to discussions of benevolence and reform. Americans influenced British scholars in redirecting their earlier Marxist-influenced interest in the sexual division of labour to the role of women in defining a religiously grounded social morality of which they were also guardians. The religious impetus given greatest weight in Britain was Anglican, and then dissenting, evangelicalism with a leading role played by the Clapham Sect. Because Hannah More wrote extensively, and was the only independent woman associated with Clapham, she interested historians for her evangelical morality, its relation to politics, the role and education of women, and anti-slavery. She has come to be seen as the symbol of a domestic social morality that contributed to a dynamic role for women in a society of expanding civil associations. Her activities—in writing, education, domestic and foreign missions, Sunday schools, for example—were not connected to radical politics (More was emphatically anti-Jacobin), but suggest that some activities undermined any idea that the female and male spheres were separated entirely along the boundary of private and public. They revealed a ‘woman’s mission’ that included anti-slavery and incorporated non-evangelicals. Davidoff and Hall argued that women’s embodiment of an evangelical social morality integrated into a patriarchal family, with an outward-turning male sphere, had been an essential aspect in Britain of the formation of a middle class which, in turn, constituted the social basis for antislavery. This defined the female constituency of anti-slavery too narrowly but confirmed a tradition of writing about British women abolitionists as having to negotiate the proprieties of class as well as gender.21 20 Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, ‘Placing Women’s History in History’, New Left Review, 133 (1982), 5–29; Robert Shoemaker and Mary Vincent (eds), Gender and History in Western Europe (London: Arnold, 1998), 1–20. 21 Barbara Welter, ‘The Cult of True Womanhood: 1800–1860’, in Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), 21–41. Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and

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‘Separate spheres’ in American scholarship developed differently. Cott was influential in understanding it as ideology allowing the linkage of reform and religion. This and other studies focused on white middle-class women of the North-east, individually and as groups, not as a class in formation. The problematic was of female agency faced with gendered spheres. Ryan modified the argument in a study from outside New England showing how kinship, class and locality could cross-cut gender. DuBois opened up a rich seam of research, though one that threatened to distort the overall picture of female abolitionism, when she pointed to the anti-slavery suffragist minority who ignored conventional gender limitations. As Hewitt notes, these scholars stressed the evangelical roots of philanthropy and reform. Failure sufficiently to consider other forms of women’s religion as a source of activism, combined with doubt that religion could be sufficient explanation for the range of social outcomes, suggested exploration of factors other than evangelicalism within gendered spheres. Another implication of spheres and women’s reformism also became apparent: any significant measure of collective action occurred either because of (Smith-Rosenberg), or despite, spheres and thus created a form of ‘sisterhood’ out of female networks and the growth of special worlds of women. In the American context culture, even a ‘separatist’ culture, and gender appeared more significant than an integrative class order. At the end of the 1980s in both Britain and the United States ‘separate spheres’ was more a stimulus to other questions than the organizing idea it had been.22 Work on women’s activities that overlapped spheres raised the issue, in the frame of gender history, of whether women were turning gendered values to History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 6–15; Anne Stott, ‘Patriotism and Providence: the Politics of Hannah More’, in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760–1960: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 39–55; Anne Stott, ‘“A singular injustice towards women”: Hannah More, Evangelicalism and Female Education’, in Sue Morgan (ed.), Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 23–38; Anne Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 26–32; Alex Tyrrell, ‘“Woman’s Mission” and Pressure Group Politics (1825–1860)’, Bulletin of The John Rylands Library, 63 (1980), 194–230; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Turley, Culture; Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). 22 Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’s Sphere’ in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Yale University Press, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America 1848–1869 (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978); Nancy A. Hewitt, A Companion to American Women’s History (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2002), 117–20; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 53–76; Linda K. Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 159–99.

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public effect or were claiming the rights, through expressing the general values, of citizenship. This registered the tension historiographically between equality and difference that preoccupied feminist theorists. In Britain, apart from More, other women writers who contributed to the anti-slavery stream from the 1780s to the 1830s included the evangelicals Ann Taylor Gilbert and Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and the liberals Anna Letitia Barbauld, Helen Maria Williams and Amelia Opie. Women’s correspondence sustained antislavery interest and could form a group resource for female networks. From 1825 women built a network of anti-slavery associations. Membership often came from families containing male abolitionists and, where they paralleled male societies, engaged in gendered activities. Halbersleben characterizes the majority of women’s groups as practising ‘the politics of diffidence’, but the situation was more complex. Wilberforce disliked the creation of women’s societies and their petitioning. Yet petitions often expressed a gendered sensibility in sympathizing with the sufferings of the slave woman. Freedom would allow her ‘to occupy her proper Station as a Daughter, a Wife and a Mother’. Some women’s organizations supported the Agency Committee early and opposed apprenticeship after emancipation. Discussion about ‘dissident’ rather than ‘diffident’ women abolitionists has been personalized in the Leicester Quaker, Elizabeth Heyrick, who has emerged as the symbolic figure of a new stage of women’s anti-slavery after More. Her 1824 argument advocating immediate emancipation was one example of her pamphleteering from a radical position. She held local anti-slavery office and successfully promoted boycotts of slave-grown sugar.23 Heyrick epitomized the case that Midgley has made for reinterpreting radicalism in British abolitionism as the product of women’s commitment to immediatism and their leadership of the sugar boycott. It is a radicalism paradoxically rooted in the gendered guardianship of moral principle. Women were, however, strong supporters of the Christian element in ‘civilizing’ African and colonial peoples from the 1780s. That longer perspective suggests that immediatism was less radical than the implication that black people should have greater autonomy in negotiating the terms of ‘civilization’.24 Margaret Maison, ‘“Thine, Only Thine!” Women Hymn Writers in Britain, 1760–1835’, and, Kenneth Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker’, in Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–1930 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 11–67; Gleadle and Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 58–67; James G. Basker (ed.), Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Karen I. Halbersleben, Women’s Participation in the British Antislavery Movement, 1824–1865 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1993); Clare Midgley, ‘“Remember Those in Bonds, as Bound with Them”: Women’s Approach to Anti-Slavery Campaigning in Britain, 1780–1870’, in Joan Grant (ed.), Women, Migration and Empire (Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books, 1996), 73–102; Shirley Aucott, Elizabeth Heyrick 1769 to 1831, the Leicester Quaker Who Demanded the Immediate Emancipation of Slaves in the British Colonies (Leicester: n. p., 2007) 24 Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 42–64; Turley, ‘British Antislavery Reassessed’. 23

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American anti-slavery scholarship has devoted significant attention to female religious culture. The northern white middle-class family provided women with possibilities of performing non-economic functions and the imperative they should be moral and religious, particularly for women sensitive to changes in their roles brought on by the market revolution. Revivalist evangelicalism worked with some women because its themes of Christ-like redemptive suffering, obedience, and compassion matched the constructed ideal of the woman’s religious sensibility. Unitarianism too was Christ-centred so that liberal Christianity could also inform women’s ideal qualities. Experience within evangelical and liberal religious structures contributed to the confidence of activism. Abolitionists saw no reason why the increasingly accepted expression in benevolence and philanthropy of Christ-like female qualities should not also energize abolitionism. Gendered but sanctified characteristics justified women in seeking to make over society. Redemptive suffering in the anguished self, and in empathy with (female) slave victims, helped release Angelina Grimké into anti-slavery work.25 American women were active in ways similar to their British sisters. They nurtured anti-slavery families, contributed to newspapers, and wrote classic anti-slavery texts claiming the right to argue a case on public policy. Antislavery women became part of the print culture and thus participants in the public sphere. Anti-slavery petitioning from evangelical denominations made an acceptable moral plea, but involvement in public discussion bypassed male sanction and implicitly claimed quasi-citizenship. Examples of female agency created a sense amongst some male abolitionists, initially Garrisonians, that women should exercise leadership.26 25 Walters, Antislavery Appeal, 100–6; Goodman, Of One Blood, 207–23; Jill K. Conway with the assistance of Linda Kealey and Janet E. Schulte, The Female Experience in 18th and 19th Century America: A Guide to the History of American Women (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 163–9; Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Women and Religion in Early America, 1600–1850: The Puritan and Evangelical Traditions (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 156–73; Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Woman’s Rights and Abolition (New York: Schocken Books, 1971 edn); Jean Fagan Yellin, Women & Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 26 Lori D. Ginzberg, Women in Antebellum Reform (Wheeling, Illinois: Harlan Davidson Inc., 2000), 82–6; John R. McKivigan (ed.), History of the American Abolitionist Movement: Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender (New York and London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1999), xv–xvi; Yellin, Women & Sisters, 53–73; Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Judith Wellman, ‘Women and Radical Reform in Antebellum Upstate New York: A Profile of Grassroots Female Abolitionists’, in Mabel E. Deutrich and Virginia C. Purdy (eds), Clio Was a Woman: Studies in the History of American Women (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980), 113–27; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 142–4.

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Once the dynamic interaction between conceptualizations derived from feminist theory and historical practice had begun, and the sheer variety of women’s experiences and roles was established empirically, it was hard to avoid the issue in historical writing that was also troubling theorists. How far could reliance on the category ‘woman’, even woman in the context of gender, take analysis in understanding the variegated lives of women? Debate suggested this could appear a difficulty for various reasons. One anxiety was that reliance purely on the notion of ‘woman’ tended to make it easier to focus on the individual and blur, or relegate to a second order, differentiation between members of female groups or between different groups. Equally troubling, and for the opposite reason, was that common features of life that had been the distinctive material of much women’s history would be lost sight of.27 Early feminist writing on British anti-slavery women tended to subsume them into the type of the provincial woman who was evangelical and middle class. ‘Womanness’ could be worked with in relation to ‘separate spheres’ so long as the focus of attention was on female agency and the relation with male authority. Once relations between, or the distinct histories of, different groups of women in anti-slavery became the focus, then other analytical categories assumed importance. If ‘to be a good woman was to be a good Christian’ then religion generally acted as the form of mediation for anti-slavery women’s public action, and perhaps different kinds of religion did so differently. Work on British anti-slavery has pinpointed a threefold religious stimulus to activism at the cultural and intellectual levels—evangelicalism (sometimes expressing conflicting Anglican and dissenter loyalties), Quakerism, and Unitarianism. Evangelical women developed a sense of moral duty, sometimes a sense of moral superiority, from the paradoxical construction of their ‘natural’ disposition to religion that sanctioned both their moral ordering of the home and moral influence in society and abroad through support of missions and anti-slavery. The large presence of women and men of evangelical dissent in anti-slavery in the 1820s and 1830s, notably Baptists, Independents or Congregationalists, and Methodists has not produced much work that refines the idea of the evangelical with culturally specific denominational routes into anti-slavery. Anglican-dissenter unwillingness to collaborate on anti-slavery in some localities looks like Church–Chapel rivalry with hints of class difference. Although the presence of Wesleyan Methodist women petitioners by the 1830s suggests some social extension in evangelical abolitionism, this is a weak area in the historical literature. We know virtually nothing of how far abolitionism extended into labouring-class evangelical sects such as the Primitive Methodists and Bible Christians with their women class leaders and preachers. The distinctive points made about Quaker anti-slavery women 27 Christine Stansell, ‘Woman in Nineteenth Century America’, Gender & History, 11 (November 1999), 419–32; Shoemaker and Vincent (eds), Gender, 8–10.

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grant importance to confidence-inducing Women’s Meetings and administrative experience and skills needed within the Society of Friends, and a less strict sense than amongst evangelicals of boundaries between the domestic and the social. This scarcely accounts for figures like Elizabeth Heyrick, Elizabeth Pease, and Anne Knight who blended anti-slavery with exceptionally progressive views on other issues.28 Recently the liberalism of Unitarian women has been recognized to have had anti-slavery significance. The genealogy of Unitarianism incorporated forms of Enlightenment ‘natural’ religion, and many Unitarians concluded that the only significant difference between women and men was men’s capacity for physical force. There appeared no ‘natural’ reasons why women should not use their capacities for intellectual and moral growth to bring social progress, including the removal of slavery as an institution that stunted intellectual and moral growth. This stance of creating environments that fostered individual and social progress linked anti-slavery to other reforms and was a shared commitment of male and female Unitarian networks. Those networks were educated and generally in large cities; international links were to exceptional, visiting African American campaigners against American slavery and to leading Unitarian female Garrisonians in the United States. Unitarian women’s anti-slavery was intellectual rather than popular in character.29 While British women’s history, in thinking through the mediating role of religion in some of the relations of gender and class, has had a powerful impact on reform historiography, writing on anti-slavery in particular has had to go further. Because anti-slavery was embedded within imperial relations and slavery was a racial institution, post-colonial versions of ‘cultural turn’ thinking have become part of the theoretical mix, prompting historians to recognize that both female and male abolitionists ‘placed’ themselves in relation to slaves seen as part of a subject population across the empire and perceived as racially ‘other’. ‘Race’ thus played into gendered and class-based anti-slavery identities in ways that changed through the period of emancipation and its aftermath, as constructions of ‘race’ shifted. This raised the question of how the resulting 28 Morgan (ed.), Women, Religion, 1–69; Aucott, Elizabeth Heyrick; Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper, and Raphael Samuel (eds), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics and Patriarchy (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 55–70, 323–34; Gail Malmgreen, ‘Anne Knight and the Radical Sub-culture’, Quaker History, 71 (Fall 1982), 100–13; Deborah Valenze, Prophetic Sons & Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England ( Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985). 29 Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France, and the United States (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985); Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–51 (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 1998); Ruth Watts, Gender, Power, and Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (London: Longman, 1998); David Turley, ‘British Unitarian Abolitionists, Frederick Douglass, and Racial Equality’, in Alan J. Rice and Martin Crawford (eds), Liberating Sojourn: Frederick Douglass and Transatlantic Reform (Athens and London: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 56–70.

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tensions between ‘equality’ and ‘difference’ were handled in imperial antislavery: the religious conception of the equality ‘of one blood’, the oneness of humanity as God’s creatures, and the difference of the colonial and racial ‘other’. Hall has focused the issue through the lens of Jamaica after emancipation, the role of anti-slavery Baptist missionaries, and the Morant Bay Rising. Midgley’s case studies have considered anti-slavery women, privileged in relation to a range of imperial issues affecting colonial women, attempting to work through the paradoxes of speaking for colonial female ‘others’ from their own metropolitan perceptions while using the language of ‘sisterhood’.30 The deconstruction of ‘woman’ proceeded differently in the United States. Awareness of the dangers of generalizing from research on middle-class white women in the North-east even, or especially, if one posited a distinctive gendered culture, attended less to social class exclusiveness than race and the relevance of the existing paradigm to women of colour. The problem was particularly acute in the study of anti-slavery and could not be solved by ‘adding’ black women to the gendered picture that had been developed. The balance of analysis shifted to distinct categories of women in different contexts. Hence it was the limits of sisterhood that came into focus, with recognition of divisions on grounds of race, religion, and sometimes class. But little historical work on anti-slavery embodied the full post-modern critique of essentialism and concluded that difference and conflict were to be understood as contestations over meaning where power was constructed through discourse.31 The studies of female societies in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia showed they undertook similar gender-specific activities: making goods and holding fairs to raise funds, organizing petitions, listening to anti-slavery speakers, and educating themselves on issues through readings aloud. Sometimes a society produced a publication. Yet they were internally diverse bodies as well as distinct from each other incorporating, to varying degrees, women of different religious affiliation, race, and class. The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society started with evangelical women who were joined by Quakers and Unitarians. The latter were more inclined to unconventional, proto-feminist activity than the evangelicals, and this may have been informed with the confidence of class since they were drawn from the social background of merchants, bankers, and successful lawyers rather than the new evangelical middle class of teachers, clerks, small proprietors, artisans, and clergymen. Eventually white factionalism, liberals versus evangelicals, pushed African American women to the margins, and the 30 Hall, White, Male, 208–25; Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropolis and Colony in the English Imagination, 1830–1867 (Oxford: Polity, 2002); Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 14–26; Clare Midgley, ‘British Abolition and Feminism in Transatlantic Perspective’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (eds), Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 121–39. 31 Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History, 159–99.

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society broke up. New York was identified with relatively ‘conservative’ evangelical women with ties to revivalism, their leaders from prosperous merchant families and their anti-slavery growing out of a concern for a properly ordered family life that slavery denied. The Philadelphia women were largely Quakers, mostly Hicksites, included prominent African American members and, in the 1830s, acted vigorously to extend their influence into the state society. In later years, though, conflict and division occurred over whether abolitionists should take up political action; the society divided and turned inward.32 The variegated picture and evidence of divisions in other places have received coverage. Claim to a shared female identity as a basis for action, even though using a common language of Protestant morality, was hard to sustain for long in the face of diverging religious and class cultures and tastes. The only full-scale study of anti-slavery women in small towns and rural communities, Julie Roy Jeffrey’s The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism (1998), even so, underlines their steady commitment to anti-slavery moral principle, despite fluctuations in the strength of the cause in particular places and during the dominance of political anti-slavery in the 1850s. Divisions reflected divergences in the national movement and over relations with churches, but anti-slavery women across the country, Jeffrey concludes, recognized that abolitionism constituted a radical moral stance.33 ‘Sisterhood’ as a feature of the anti-slavery movement, and as a theme in feminist historiography, has come under strain in writing the history of black women abolitionists. Quarles produced the last substantial work of black antislavery history to embrace the tradition of ‘Our History’. From the beginning of the 1970s a new generation of black historians explicitly challenged the idea that the history of African Americans should be written within the frame of the struggle of the black minority to become part of a white-defined American democracy. The context was rather to be the black struggle for the power of self-definition and self-determination. The historical work of DuBois was the foundational support for building a new tradition of black rather than Negro history. These programmatic statements coincided with the most militant 32 Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (eds), The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press with the Library Company of Philadelphia, 1994), ix–x, 31–44, 67–88; Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1993); Deborah Bingham van Broekhoven, ‘“A Determination to Labor”: Female Antislavery in Rhode Island’, Rhode Island History, 44 (May 1985), 35–45; Goodman, Of One Blood, 224–30. 33 Hewitt (ed.), A Companion, 124–9; Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990); Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship; Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005).

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phase of the modern black movement but provide guidance to the emphasis on black distinctiveness in the anti-slavery history written later. Black women’s anti-slavery has been set within the building of free black communities in the North. The remarkable Forten family in Philadelphia combined an educated respectability and cross-race reform contacts with a strong sense of a unifying black female culture. Maria Stewart adopted a vanguard role in Boston in her public lectures advocating uplift through knowledge, ordered family life, and community-building aimed at destroying anti-black prejudice and bringing emancipation nearer. Stewart’s sense of justice, rooted in an evangelical conversion experience, had involved a personal sense of suffering comparable to the redemptive religious burden that other women took on, and a willingness to undergo martyrdom to end the oppression of Africans. Both black and white historians have recognized that black women, while cooperating with whites occasionally, developed a parallel abolitionism in part because of white women’s racial prejudice. Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman who, before the feminist era, had achieved special niches in the black historical tradition and Harriet Jacobs, more recently discovered, have been caught up in the ‘cultural turn’ which considered how whites culturally constructed them and how, contrarily, they presented themselves. They projected a strong sense of self-liberation as African American women and, in Painter’s argument about Sojourner Truth, in a cultural style both sui generis and partially African.34 Feminist historians have analysed how women’s anti-slavery contributed to the women’s rights movement in Britain and the United States. The relation was an issue at the World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 in London when American women delegates were refused admission and sympathizers joined them on the balcony. How significant was the event? Writing on British antislavery has focused on three issues arising from 1840: where did anti-slavery women stand on the introduction of women’s rights into anti-slavery? With what effect were parallels drawn between the situation of slaves and women? What religious and personal links were there from anti-slavery in 1840 to the organized women’s rights agitation of the 1860s? Midgley finds a minority of British 34 Vincent Harding, ‘Beyond Chaos: Black History and the Search for the New Land’, in John A. Williams and Charles F. Harris (eds), Amistad 1: Writings on Black History and Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 267–92; Sterling Stuckey, ‘Twilight of Our Past: Reflections on the Origins of Black History’, Amistad 2 (New York: Vintage Books, 1971), 261–95; Emma Jones Lapsansky, ‘Feminism, Freedom and Community: Charlotte Forten and Women Activists in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia’, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 103 (January 1989), 3–19; Donald M. Jacobs (ed.), Courage and Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington, Indianapolis: Indiana University Press published for the Boston Athenaeum, 1993), 127–53, 191–205; Yellin and Van Horne (eds), The Abolitionist Sisterhood, 119–37; Shirley J. Yee, Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860 (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Ginzberg, Women in Antebellum Reform, 66–70; Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2004); Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996).

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women favourable to the American delegates. The more conservative position was taken by evangelicals and evangelically inclined Quakers and the radical by Unitarians and liberal Quakers. Evangelicals saw anti-slavery as a religious duty and the radicals as an aspect of their right to public action. Radical Unitarians and Owenite intellectuals, a dissident minority, were the main exponents of the metaphoric parallel between slaves and women that required ‘slavery’ to extend to women’s undesirable social and political conditions. Radical Unitarians and Quakers supportive of the American delegates were active in women’s campaigns later—Elizabeth Pease, Elizabeth Reid, Anne Knight, Mary Howitt, Harriet Martineau, Emilie Venturi. The anti-slavery involvement of a small minority encouraged them to focus on women’s issues in later years.35 The time lag between 1840 and the organization of the Seneca Falls convention of 1848 is puzzling if the stimulus to American women’s rights of the London Convention was so important. ‘Feminist-abolitionists’ were a minority on both sides of the Atlantic; the evangelical majority of anti-slavery women showed moral courage but often limited their forms of action. The story of ‘feminist-abolitionism’ in America has been established from the pioneering individuals and organizational innovations of the 1830s, through the divisions of 1839–40, to the integration of women’s rights with Garrisonian abolitionism. Garrisonians articulated a philosophy of human rights from which, and for which, feminist-abolitionists spoke. As in Britain, parallels between slaves and women were drawn, but with larger initial effect because of the impact of the Grimkés. Isenberg, however, assimilating arguments about the variety of women’s activism, and sceptical of a linear progression from benevolence through anti-slavery to women’s rights, concluded that progress in women’s rights needed recognition in the larger context of citizenship, representation, and public consent. Petitioning marked potential progress in so far as women made claims in the language of citizenship by the late 1830s. But in that case the Garrisonians’ refusal to enter the political sphere, despite their pursuit of an agenda of human rights, would have to be seen as disabling, even as women took campaigning, publishing, and office-holding opportunities in that wing of anti-slavery. Pierson, however, has detected a more liberal attitude to gender roles in the political anti-slavery of the 1840s and 1850s that stops short of feminist-abolitionism.36 35 Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 165–7, 267–70; Gleadle, Early Feminists, 56–9, 62–5, 84–5; Rendall, Origins, 130–1, 307–10, 314–15, 322–3; Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983), 280–1. 36 Jeanne Boydston, Mary Kelley, Anne Margolis, The Limits of Sisterhood: The Beecher Sisters on Women’s Rights and Women’s Sphere (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969); Blanche Glassman Hersh, The Slavery of Sex: Feminist-Abolitionists in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship; Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to

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Scholarship has also taken notice of women in the transatlantic anti-slavery relationship. The experience of learning anti-slavery truths from the other culture is prominent in recent literature. The essays edited by Sklar and Stewart exploring the relation of women’s rights to transatlantic anti-slavery trace earlier English Quaker influence on Angelina Grimké as well as the impact of Thompson’s tumultuous visit in energizing her anti-slavery commitment. Hewitt’s essay illuminates how a smaller urban abolitionist community, Rochester, through proximity to borders, reception of foreign visitors and visits abroad by local activists could build up a feminist-abolitionism with an internationalist perspective. Women of colour were also inhabitants of this transatlantic world whether, like Sarah Forten, based in Philadelphia but receiving a wide range of visitors through the Female Anti-Slavery Society and reading international anti-slavery literature or, like Sarah Parker Remond, active in Britain and eventually an expatriate. Anti-slavery women often had long-term friendships across the Atlantic but came from anti-slavery cultures that were different in certain respects. On the ‘feminist’ issue in 1840 Sklar has argued that Americans held a more ‘advanced’ position than the British, but differences may have been exaggerated. British women were unable to hold leadership positions in ‘mixed’ anti-slavery organizations in the way that Garrisonian women could. But they were a minority of American women activists; the proto-feminists of 1840 were self-selecting whilst the non-feminist evangelicals stayed away. The British evangelical female majority also stayed at home. The conservative British male and female anti-slavery refusal of American feminism was the refusal of a minority supported by a minority. The issue owed its visibility to the fact that, after the division of 1839–40, the American minority had their own organization in contrast to the ‘feminist’ minority of British Radical Unitarians and Quakers who lacked one. Whatever the divergences between the organized women’s movements later, anti-slavery sentiment in relation to women’s rights was broadly similar in Britain and the United States in 1840.37 Finally, we can circle back, via Julie Roy Jeffrey’s recent book, to abolitionists’ own recorded memories, this time as an historical topic in its own right.

Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 2005); Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Anti-Slavery Politics (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 37 Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘“Women who Speak for an Entire Nation”: American and British Women Compared at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840’, Pacific Historical Review, (1990), 453–99; Sklar and Stewart (eds), Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery.

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They have been effectively contextualized, in an era of post-Reconstruction sectional ‘reconciliation’, as alternative narratives of the past deployed to insist in the present on the commitment that anti-slavery had required, and thereby stress for the future its continuing relevance in the face of racial prejudice and inequality.38

38 Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember. Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

2 Martha Gurney and the Anti-Slave Trade Movement, 1788–94 Timothy Whelan

The initial campaign to abolish the slave trade in England and America, beginning in earnest in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, crossed all denominational and doctrinal lines. Adherents joined in common sympathy to an ideal of human freedom and equality and a belief that as Christians they should follow the Golden Rule and ‘do unto others as they would have others do unto them’. The result was the most effective ecumenical endeavour of the eighteenth century. The contribution of the Quakers and some prominent Anglicans, such as Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, and William Wilberforce, is well known. Only recently, however, have historians focused on the involvement of Baptists in the early years of the abolitionist movement.1 Between 1788 and 1796, Robert Robinson, Robert Hall, Abraham Booth, James Dore, John Liddon, John Beatson, and William Ward published sermons and letters attacking the slave trade.2 In some cases, their efforts reached across the Atlantic, with Robinson, Dore, Beatson, Booth, and five other British Baptist ministers being elected to the Pennsylvania Society for See Timothy Whelan, ‘Robert Hall and the Bristol Slave-Trade Debate of 1787–1788’, Baptist Quarterly, 38 (2000), 212–24; Roger Hayden, ‘Caleb Evans and the Anti-Slavery Question’, Baptist Quarterly, 39 (2001), 4–14; John Briggs, ‘Baptists and the Campaign to Abolish the Slave Trade’, Baptist Quarterly, 42 (2007), 258–83; Brian Stanley, ‘Baptists, Anti-Slavery and the Legacy of Imperialism’, Baptist Quarterly, 42 (2007), 284–95. 2 Robinson (1735–90), Slavery Inconsistent with the Spirit of Christianity (1788); Booth (1734–1806), Commerce in the Human Species (1792); Dore (1763/64–1825), A Sermon on the African Slave Trade (1788); Liddon (1746/47–1825), Cruelty the Natural and Inseparable Consequence of Slavery (1792); Beatson (1743–98), Compassion the Duty and Dignity of Man; and Cruelty the Disgrace of his Nature. A Sermon, Occasioned by that Branch of British Commerce which Extends to the Human Species (1789); Ward (1769–1823), The Abolition of the Slave Trade, Peace, and a Temperate Reform Essential to the Salvation of England (1796); Evans (1737–91), pastor at Broadmead in Bristol, was instrumental in the formation of the Bristol auxiliary of the London Abolition Society; Hall (1764–1831), Robinson’s successor at Cambridge, contributed two letters to the Bristol Gazette in February 1788 against the slave trade. 1

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Promoting the Abolition of Slavery between 1775 and 1795. Among the twelve founding British members of that society (a group including Robinson and such figures as Clarkson, Sharp, William Pitt, and Dr Richard Price), was the Baptist layman William Hollick, a deacon in Robinson’s congregation in St Andrew’s Street, Cambridge.3 In London, another Baptist layman, John Barton, would serve as a founding member of the Committee of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery, formed in 1787.4 Other Baptist laymen who made contributions to the abolitionist movement include two Unitarians: Benjamin Flower (1755–1829), William Hollick’s friend and fellow attendant at St. Andrew’s Street, who consistently attacked the slave trade in his editorials in the Cambridge Intelligencer (1793–1803); and Joseph Johnson (1738–1809), a London bookseller who published or sold twelve pamphlets opposing the slave trade, including Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791). Another Baptist bookseller, operating in Holborn Hill, less than a mile from Johnson’s bookshop in St. Paul’s Churchyard, also made a significant contribution to the abolitionist movement. Though largely unknown today, Martha Gurney (1733–1816), a member of the Particular Baptist congregation in Maze Pond, Southwark,5 sold (and in some cases published) fourteen antislave trade pamphlets between 1787 and 1794, second only to the Quaker James Phillips of Lombard Street, the Abolition Society’s official printer. In fact, of all the London printers and booksellers who published or sold more than five pamphlets on the slave trade, only Phillips, Gurney, and James Ridgway could boast of never affixing their name to a work that advocated its continuance. Even more importantly, of the approximately sixty-five printers and booksellers in London who printed or sold at least one work related to the slave-trade controversy in the 1780s and ’90s, Martha Gurney was the only woman.6 Though a number of women writers would play a significant role in 3 See Act of Incorporation and Constitution of the Pennsylvania Society, for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery . . . Also, a List of Those who have been Elected Members of the Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew & Thompson, 1860), 5, 22–4. 4 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament, 2 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1808), II, 27–8; Abolition Committee Minute Books, British Library, ADD. MS. 21255, f. 58r; Briggs, ‘Baptists and the Campaign’, 264. 5 Particular Baptists were Calvinistic (a ‘particular’ atonement only for the elect) and Trinitarian in theology; General Baptists, like Joseph Johnson, were Arminian (a ‘general’ atonement available to all who freely choose) and, by the last half of the eighteenth century, often Unitarian. See Raymond Brown, The English Baptists of the Eighteenth Century (London: Baptist Historical Society, 1986). 6 I have found only two exceptions. Caroline Ridgway, wife of James Ridgway, sold Philip Francis’s Proceedings in the House of Commons on the Slave Trade, and State of the Negroes in the West India Islands (1796). Ann Smith of Liverpool, who operated a ‘navigation’ bookshop in Pool Lane, Liverpool, sold two pamphlets in favour of the slave trade—An Address to the Inhabitants in General of Great Britain, and Ireland; Relating to a Few of the Consequences

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fostering public support for the abolition of the slave trade through their poems and pamphlets, Martha Gurney was the only bookseller. Though she never appeared in the subscription lists of any abolitionist society, her efforts as a publisher and bookseller were instrumental in raising the consciousness of the English people against the slave trade, joining that select group of women, as described by Clare Midgley, whose ‘contributions [to the abolitionist movement] were more diverse and more important than has hitherto been recognized’.7 Few biographical materials exist about Martha Gurney. Most information comes from a few pages in a history of the Gurney family derived largely from the reminiscences of her nephew, William Brodie Gurney (1777–1855).8 She never married, earning a ‘comfortable subsistence, and, ultimately, a small independence’,9 her nephew tells us, as a printer and bookseller from 1772 to 1813, first at 34 Bell Yard and, after 1782, at 128 Holborn Hill.10 She was the daughter of Thomas Gurney (1705–70), shorthand writer for the Old Bailey and ardent Particular Baptist and supporter of the Calvinistic Methodist evangelist, George Whitefield.11 As a single woman, Martha Gurney most likely lived with her father until his death in 1770; her entrance into business shortly thereafter suggests that she received a portion of his estate, enough to open her own business. She probably learned the bookselling trade from her brother, Joseph (1744–1815), who, after completing his articles in 1766 with George Keith (the same Baptist printer/bookseller who apprenticed Joseph Johnson), opened his own shop, first at 39 Bread Street and then at 54 Holborn. Although he continued to operate as a printer and bookseller into the 1780s, Joseph Gurney had also been tutored by his father in the art of shorthand writing, and after the elder Gurney’s death, Joseph took his place as shorthand writer for the Old Bailey. He would later perform the same services for both Houses of Parliament, becoming the best-known shorthand writer of his day. During his long career which must naturally result from the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1788), and A Short Account of the African Slave Trade, collected from Local Knowledge, from the Evidence given at the Bar of both Houses of Parliament, and from Tracts written upon that Subject (1788). 7 Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 16. 8 William H. Gurney Salter, Some Particulars of the Lives of William Brodie Gurney and his Immediate Ancestors (London: Unwin, 1902). This rare book was privately printed for members of the Gurney family. 9 Salter, Some Particulars, 34. 10 Ian Maxted identifies her only as ‘M. Gurney’ operating as a bookseller at 128 Holborn, 1790–1805. See Maxted, The London Book Trades 1775–1800: A Preliminary Checklist of Members (Kent: William Dawson, 1977), 97. 11 The Gurneys were distant relations of the Quaker Gurneys of Norwich, from which Joseph John Gurney (1788–1847) and his sister, Elizabeth Gurney Fry (1780–1845), would later emerge and play a significant role in the abolitionist movement. For more on Thomas Gurney, see Salter, Some Particulars, 7, 15–33.

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(1766–1813), Gurney appeared as printer, seller, or transcriber on over 125 publications, including thirty-five religious works by dissenters and Anglican evangelicals (printed between 1768 and 1780) and more than eighty state trials. Martha Gurney was also mentored by another printer/bookseller who, like herself, has never been properly identified. John and Mary Lewis (1705?–1791) operated a printing shop in Bartholomew Close, near West Smithfield, London, from 1741 until John Lewis’s death in 1754, publishing numerous works by George Whitefield and John Cennick (1718–55), an associate of Whitefield before becoming a Moravian evangelist in the late 1740s. In 1756, Mary Lewis moved her printing business to 1 Paternoster Row, just around the corner from Joseph Johnson’s bookshop. She operated there until 1779, when she transferred her business to her daughter and son-in-law, Mary and Henry Trapp (whom she had apprenticed), and removed to Worcester to operate the printing business of her recently deceased brother-in-law, Richard Lewis. In 1782 she turned that business over to Richard’s son, George. She continued to appear as ‘M. Lewis’ on imprints from London until 1789.12 Though Ian Maxted describes her as ‘Printer to the Moravians’, Lewis was, like her husband, a Calvinistic Methodist and a follower of George Whitefield. Most likely she attended Whitefield’s Tabernacle in Moorfields, not far from Paternoster Row. Her Particular Baptist friends, Joseph and Martha Gurney, as well as the many Independent ministers whose works she printed, all shared a common faith grounded in Calvinism. This became evident in the late 1760s and early 1770s, when Joseph consorted with Mary Lewis on several publications, including the popular Gospel Magazine. They also served as masters to two apprentices in the 1760s, during the same time that Martha was learning the trade.13 Since no apprentice record exists for Martha Gurney, a definitive statement cannot be made about her training, but she did collaborate with her brother on the sixth edition of Brachygraphy, or Swift Writing Made Easy to the Meanest Capacity (1772), her father’s popular manual on shorthand writing, and with Mary Lewis in publishing and selling the second edition of Augustus Toplady’s pro-American pamphlet, An Old Fox Tarr’d and Feathered. Occasioned by what is called Mr. John Wesley’s Calm Address to the 12 Obituaries for Mary Lewis and Henry Trapp appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine, 61 (1791, Part 2), 877, and Gentleman’s Magazine, 61 (1791, Part 1), 587. Mary Trapp continued to operate as ‘M. Trapp’ from Paternoster Row until her marriage in 1795 to the Independent minister Timothy Priestley, brother to the Unitarian scientist, philosopher, and controversial religious and political figure, Joseph Priestley. 13 Maxted, London Book Trades, 138; Maxted, ‘The British Book Trades, 1710–1777: An Index of Masters and Apprentices’, found in Maxted’s web edition of the Exeter Working Papers in British Book Trade History, http://bookhistory.blogspot.com/2005/12/index.html. For more on women who succeeded their husbands as proprietors of their printing establishments, see Paula McDowell, ‘Women and the Business of Print’, in Vivien Jones (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1700–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 135–54.

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American Colonies (1775).14 Given the professional climate in which she lived in the 1760s and ’70s, with easy access to the shops of her father, her brother, and friends like Mary Lewis, Martha Gurney had ample examples from which to learn her trade and become a successful independent businesswoman. As the publishing trade flourished in the eighteenth century, so did the number of women involved in the trade, increasing by as much as fifty per cent in the last quarter of the century in London, where more than seventy women operated as stationers, fifty-four as booksellers, forty-five as printers, and twenty-four as bookbinders.15 This phenomenon resulted not only in an increase in the amount of reading material available to the public, but also, as William St. Clair contends, an explosion among ‘readerships, and the size of the whole reading nation’.16 Martha Gurney both contributed to and benefited from this phenomenon, especially within the dissenting community in London. Her name appears on just over 100 imprints, nearly always as a seller, but in a few instances in the 1790s, as publisher too.17 Among these works are nearly fifty titles by a spectrum of religious writers, including Particular Baptists and Independents (James Dore, Abraham Booth, Timothy Priestley, John Liddon, and Joseph Swain), Methodists (Samuel Bradburn), Presbyterians (David Rice), Quakers (William Allen), Unitarian Baptists (William Richards and Benjamin Flower), and one prominent Evangelical (and devoted Calvinist) Anglican divine, Augustus Toplady. The fact that so many ministers used Gurney to sell their productions was not lost on her nephew. ‘Her particular line of business’, he recalled, ‘brought her into acquaintance with a great many of the leading ministers and private Christians of different denominations, who were frequently surprised, in conversing with her, at her intimate acquaintance with the best works which she sold. But she had much leisure, and great enjoyment in reading’.18 Besides sermons, Gurney appeared on nine literary imprints, including two works by Baptist women: the controversial London poet and Calvinist polemicist, Maria de Fleury (1753–94), and the General Baptist schoolmistress turned poet, Alice Brachygraphy, first published in 1750, went through eighteen editions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. On the title page of the first edition of Toplady’s pamphlet, Lewis appeared as ‘Mary Lewis’, the only instance I have found in which she revealed her gender on an imprint. 15 Hannah Barker, ‘Women, Work and the Industrial Revolution: Female Involvement in the English Printing Trades, c.1700–1840’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representation and Responsibilities (London and New York: Longman, 1997), 85, 90. Neither Barker nor McDowell discuss Gurney or Lewis. 16 William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 118; see also James Raven, Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce, 1750–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 32–5. 17 About 1791 she appears to have acquired a press, most likely her brother’s press after his retirement as a printer in the late 1780s. This may also explain the cheap price and large quantities of some of the imprints she published after that date, especially those related to the sugar boycott. 18 Salter, Some Particulars, 34. 14

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Flowerdew (1759–1830). Gurney’s most profitable enterprises, however, were the numerous editions she sold (nearly all of which were printed by her brother) of Brachygraphy, and the transcriptions of thirty-one trials recorded in shorthand by Joseph Gurney between 1774 and 1806, including such famous state trials as that of Thomas Paine, Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke, William Stone, Edward Despard, and Lord Melville.19 Although historians have noted the work of Joseph Gurney and his son, William Brodie Gurney, as parliamentarian shorthand writers, Martha Gurney’s role as a prominent dissenting bookseller has only recently been noted.20 Even when publications to which her name is affixed have been mentioned and discussed by scholars, Gurney herself has remained a phantom, disembodied and genderless.21 She would not have been so to her customers in Bell Yard and Holborn Hill, despite the fact that she appeared on her imprints as ‘M. Gurney’, just as Mary Lewis appeared as ‘M. Lewis’.22 Using initials on imprints was common practice among all printers and booksellers at this time, male and female. It certainly masked their gender, especially among provincial booksellers, but for Londoners who would have purchased the majority of their books and pamphlets from a local bookshop, such as 128 Holborn Hill or 1 Paternoster Row, the gender of the proprietor would not have been a secret. Unfortunately, the legacy of booksellers using only their initials (coupled with a general assumption that since men dominated the printing and bookselling profession, initials must accordingly represent a male) has obscured from historians the identities and contributions of a number of women booksellers.23 As a result, historians have failed to realize

19

Salter, Some Particulars, 41. For Joseph and W. B. Gurney, see Edward Augustus Bond (ed.), Speeches of the Managers and Counsel in the Trial of Warren Hastings, 4 vols (London: Longman [and others], 1859–61); Salter, A History of the Gurney System of Shorthand (Oxford: Blackwell, 1924), 1–13; for Martha Gurney, see Timothy Whelan, ‘William Fox, Martha Gurney, and Radical Discourse of the 1790s’, Eighteenth Century Studies, 42 (2009), 397–411; and Timothy Whelan, ‘Martha Gurney and William Fox: London Baptists and Radical Politics, 1791–94’, in John Briggs (ed.), Pulpit and People: Studies in 18th Century Baptist Life and Thought (Milton Keynes: Paternoster Press, 2009), 165–201. 21 For example, Charlotte Sussman, in her discussion of women and the sugar boycott of 1792, quotes frequently from William Fox’s Address to the People of Great Britain and four other pamphlets sold by Gurney, yet fails to note her gender. See Sussman, Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 110–29. 22 The title pages to the 1775, 1777, and 1778 editions of Thomas Gurney’s Brachygraphy read ‘Printed and sold by J. Gurney . . . and his sister Martha Gurney’, one of twelve imprints on which she revealed her gender, either as ‘Martha’ or ‘Mrs.’ Gurney. 23 Frank Baker mistakenly identifies ‘M. Lewis’ as ‘Matthew Lewis’ and never realizes that Cennick’s London publisher was a woman. See Baker, John Cennick (1718–55) A Handlist of his Writings (Leicester: Wesley Historical Society, 1958), 10. One factor that may have contributed to the later obscurity of Gurney and Lewis is that neither woman appeared in any editions of the Lowndes’ London Directory or Boyle’s General London Guide. Martha Gurney did appear as 20

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that Martha Gurney (followed closely by Mary Lewis) appeared on the title pages of more books and pamphlets than any other woman bookseller in London in the last half of the eighteenth century.24 Even when little biographical information is known about dissenting printers and booksellers, like Martha Gurney, an examination of their imprints reveals much about their professional and, to a degree, their private lives. They consorted predominantly with dissenters, often specializing in sermons and pamphlets by ministers of their own denomination, though not exclusively. Their primary market was the dissenting community, often carving out particular niches within that community that reflected their denominational affiliations: James Phillips among the Quakers; Joseph Johnson among the Unitarians and General Baptists; Mary Lewis among the Calvinistic Methodists; Thomas Conder among the Independents and Congregationalists; and Martha Gurney among the Particular Baptists. Though not confining their work to one denomination, within their own denominations these printers and booksellers were certainly known and appreciated. Martha Gurney’s career as a dissenting bookseller began slowly; she appeared on only twenty-two imprints before 1788. In the next six years, however, she would appear on sixty titles, more than half her entire total. This increase reflects not only a rising demand for reading material by an everexpanding reading public, but also her growing interest in politics. The most pressing concern to Gurney was the abolition of the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Between 1788 and 1794 she published or sold fourteen pamphlets calling for parliamentary action to end the slave trade and, if necessary, a national boycott of all goods produced by slave labour. During those years she also published or sold an additional twenty-one political pamphlets, sixteen of which were written by her bookselling colleague, William Fox. With brilliant wit, biting satire, and a keen sense of history, Fox vehemently opposed the war with France, exposed the hypocrisy of national fast days that sought divine sanction for what he believed was an unjust war, repudiated Thomas Paine’s economic philosophy, excoriated the East India Company’s ‘piratical adventures’ in India, and ridiculed Parliament for being outraged at the execution of Louis XVI of France yet unable ‘to prosecute the inquiry any farther on the Slave Trade’.25 Other political works published or sold ‘M. Gurney, bookseller’ in the Universal British Directory (1791), I, 163, but is not present in Holden’s Triennial Directories. 24 Hannah Humphrey appeared on more imprints than Gurney or Lewis, but these were almost exclusively pictorial prints, such as James Gillray’s popular caricatures. 25 The Interest of Great Britain, respecting the French War (London, 1793); A Discourse on National Fasts, Particularly in Reference to that of April 19, 1793, on Occasion of the War against France (London, 1793); An Examination of Mr. Paine’s Writings (London, 1793); On the Renewal of the East India Charter (London, 1794), 6; and Thoughts on the Death of the King of France (London, 1793), 18.

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by Gurney include William Sharp’s An Oration Delivered on the Secular Anniversary of the Revolution (1789), John Liddon’s The Genuine Principles of all Religious Dissent, and Especially of the Protestant Dissenters in England (1792) (both sold in conjunction with Joseph Johnson); Charles Grey’s petition on behalf of the Friends of the People titled Authentic Copy of a Petition, Praying for a Reform of Parliament, Presented to the House of Commons, on the 6th of May, 1793 (sold by Gurney, R. H. Westley, and the radical Thomas Spence); and a provocative reprinting of Benjamin Franklin’s Information to Those who would Remove to America (1794), in which Gurney joined Johnson, R. H. Westley, Daniel Isaac Eaton, and James Ridgway (at that time serving his sentence in Newgate for seditious libel); an attached advertisement informed the public that Gurney was currently selling at sixpence the controversial Impartial Memoirs of the Life of Thomas Paine. A survey of Martha Gurney’s imprints between 1788 and 1794 demonstrates her increasing stature within the dissenting community of London, an acceptance largely due to her efforts to publish and disseminate pamphlets advocating the kind of political activism that marked the politics of her family, friends, business associates, fellow church members, and dissenters in general. Harriet Guest argues that women, especially women writers, were mostly valued at this time for ‘their exclusion from the marketplace’, harmonizing society through their domestic roles in the home, all of which complicated their efforts to find a fitting ‘place’ in society and a substantial ‘value’ in the marketplace.26 Martha Gurney, much like her friend Mary Lewis, was able to avoid this exclusion, especially within the dissenting ‘marketplace’. Through the publication of sermons by leading dissenting ministers, numerous editions of her father’s Brachygraphy, important transcriptions of state trials by her brother, and provocative pamphlets by William Fox and his fellow pamphleteers denouncing the slave trade and advocating the sugar boycott, Martha Gurney was able to create a well-defined ‘place’ for herself among London’s booksellers, one that would prove of great ‘value’ in the early 1790s to the abolitionist movement in England and America. In the mid-1780s, Joseph Gurney moved his family from Stamford Hill to a new house in Keene’s Row, Walworth, across the Thames from Martha Gurney’s bookshop in Holborn Hill and a short distance from the Baptist church at Maze Pond, where all the Gurneys would soon become members. According to the Maze Pond Church Book, on 18 April 1785, Martha Gurney and her niece, Elizabeth Gurney (1770–1840), ‘were proposed for communion . . . their moral characters being well attested to the satisfaction of the Church’. They were received into communion on 5 June 1785. Rebecca Gurney (1747–1814), Joseph’s wife, joined the congregation at Maze Pond on 26 Harriet Guest, Small Change: Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 286.

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5 March 1786, with Joseph joining on 5 August 1787.27 Their two sons, John (1768–1845) and William Brodie (1777–1855), would also join the church, both becoming prominent dissenters and public figures.28 For the next three decades the Gurneys would be one of Maze Pond’s leading families. W. B. Gurney would later say of his parents, ‘The interests of the Church and the happiness of their Pastor were . . . dear to their hearts, and their co-operation was cheerfully given in any plan of usefulness in which the Church and congregation engaged. He [Joseph Gurney] bore a high character, both for talent and integrity, and was highly esteemed by those who knew him best’.29 The campaign to abolish the slave trade provided the Gurneys with a perfect medium in which to combine their reformist politics with a genuine spirit of Christian benevolence. The Gurneys exemplified those ‘Christian philanthropists’, so aptly described by David Bogue and James Bennett, who, inspired by revolutions in America and France, felt ‘themselves bound, because they [were] Christians and citizens of the great republic of human nature, to take an interest in the welfare of all mankind, and promote their highest happiness’, believing ‘that the laws of God applied to social bodies as well as to individuals’.30 Joseph Gurney had been a subscriber to Granville Sharp’s Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade from its inception in 1787.31 The following year, James Dore (1763/64–1825), the Gurneys’ pastor at Maze Pond, preached a sermon for the benefit of the London Abolition Society that was published in November 1788 by James Phillips and sold, among others, by Martha Gurney.32 The Gurneys were indicative of the congregation at Maze Pond, a congregation united in its opposition to the slave trade; a prefatory note mentions that A Sermon on the African Slave Trade was printed ‘to gratify the wishes of an affectionate people, who are zealous friends to the glorious cause of universal liberty’. Thomas Clarkson recalled that after Dore’s Sermon, the Abolition Committee ‘voted their thanks to . . . the pastor and congregation of the Baptist Church at Maze Pond, Southwark, for their liberal subscription’.33 Dore’s Sermon, as well as its 27

Maze Pond Church Book, II (1784–1821), Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, ff. 43, 45, 52, and 58. 28 John Gurney would become a distinguished trial lawyer and Baron of the Exchequer in 1832; W. B. Gurney would become one of the leading Baptist laymen of his day. For more on their careers, see Salter, Some Particulars. 29 Salter, Some Particulars, 45. 30 David Bogue and James Bennett, History of Dissenters, from the Revolution in 1688, to the year 1808, 4 vols (London: Printed for the Authors, 1808–12), IV, 193, 189–90, 191. 31 ‘List of Subscriptions reported to the 11th of September, 1787’, in Society Instituted in 1787, for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, [1787]). 32 James Dore, A Sermon on the African Slave Trade, 3rd edn (London: Printed for J. Phillips, and sold by J. Buckland, C. Dilly, M. Gurney, and W. Button, 1788). The congregation collected £22.8s.1½d. for the Abolition Society. See Abolition Committee Minute Books, ADD. MS. 21255, f. 73r. 33 Thomas Clarkson, History, II, 27–8.

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subsequent distribution by Gurney and the Abolition Committee (which purchased 100 copies ‘for the use of the Society’),34 reflects the increasing level of participation by Baptists in the abolitionist movement and an awareness that the London Baptists could and should play a major role in this unfolding drama. Dore, like his friend Robert Robinson in Cambridge, embraced the French Revolution and the prospects of political reform in England. Henry Keene, chairman of the deacons at Maze Pond, was, like Robinson, a member of the Society for Constitutional Information and served on the London committee of Dissenters for the Repeal of the Test Acts in 1789. When the committee sent a letter that December imploring dissenters throughout England to attend a public meeting in London to lobby for repeal, Keene and Dore signed the letter, as well as four other deacons from Maze Pond, including Joseph and John Gurney. Keene and the two Gurneys also signed a diaconal epistle in October 1790 praising the ‘wonderful Revolution’ in France and complaining of religious persecution in England, requesting Dore to commence a series of lectures on the ‘principles of nonconformity, and of civil and religious Liberty’ and thanking him for his ‘repeated exertions to advance the cause of Humanity and Universal Freedom’.35 One of those ‘exertions’ was his Sermon on the African Slave Trade, in which Dore urged his audience—‘Britons’ who cherished the ‘Magna Charta, the Petition of Rights, the Bill of Rights, and the Coronation Oath, bulwarks of English liberty’—to end their complicity in human trafficking before God unleashed a ‘national judgment’ upon England. ‘The spirit of the nation is roused’, Dore optimistically concluded, ‘and Parliamentary wisdom will be soon employed in devising means to redress’ the evils incurred by the slave trade.36 Though the Gurneys would be greatly disappointed by the lack of ‘Parliamentary wisdom’ that Dore anticipated, they would be ‘roused’ by the emerging abolitionist movement. Martha Gurney began displaying in her shop the large fold-out drawing of the slave ship Brookes which had been commissioned by the Abolition Committee in March 1789 and published the next month.37 The abolitionists put tremendous pressure on Parliament between 1789 and 1791, bringing a cloud of witnesses, many of them sought out by Thomas Clarkson on his tours of England and Scotland, before the Privy Council and the Select Committee in the House of Commons. Through his role as shorthand writer for Parliament, Joseph Gurney gave his sister a 34 See entry for 24 February 1789, Abolition Committee Minute Books, ADD. MS. 21255, f. 86v. 35 Graham Hughes, With Freedom Fired: The Story of Robert Robinson, Cambridge Nonconformist (London: Carey Kingsgate, 1955), 88–92; Thomas W. Davis, Committees for Repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (London: London Record Society, 1978), 40; ‘A Diaconal Epistle, 1790’, Baptist Quarterly, 8 (1936–7), 216. 36 Dore, Sermon, 32. 37 Salter, Some Particulars, 34; Abolition Committee Minute Books, ADD. MS. 21255, f. 91r.

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distinct advantage over every other bookseller in London except James Phillips. William H. Gurney Salter, the family historian, remarks that the Gurneys, because of their reputation for transcribing and printing accurate records of court proceedings, ‘gained a good name for difficult work, in, e.g., the trials of Lord Baltimore, the Duchess of Kingston, Lord George Gordon (for the Riots), etc. . . . This led to a great increase in their professional work, and they were engaged to take discussions for private parties at the Bar of the two Houses of Parliament, by permission, e.g. on the Slave Trade, and also in some of the Committees’.38 Consequently, Joseph attended the six Committees in the House in 1791 that conducted the interviews on the slave trade; he also served as shorthand writer during the debate on the slave trade in the House of Lords in 1792,39 earning the appreciation of the London Abolition Committee as well as the future king of England. During the proceedings in the House of Lords, Gurney had an impromptu meeting with the Duke of Clarence (afterwards William IV). The Duke ‘had been in early life in the Navy’, recalled W. B. Gurney, and in the West Indies he had mixed with the planters and the members of the government, and had imbibed notions of the happiness and comfort of the slaves, which led him to think that they had received a benefit in being brought from their own country, and that it was lawful, and even praiseworthy, to bring more. He was on the side of the planters, and one day addressing my father, he said, ‘I thought from your countenance you were an Abolitionist. I thought you had an Abolition face’. The Duke’s remark, though not intended as a compliment, was doubtless true, for Joseph Gurney had long been opposed not only to the Slave Trade, but to the institution of Slavery itself.40

The abolitionist activities of Joseph Gurney and James Dore would soon become known in America, and by 1795 both men, as well as John Gurney, had become members of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery.41 While Martha, Joseph, and John Gurney were engaged in the campaign to end the slave trade, Rebecca Gurney (1747–1814), Joseph’s wife, was also active in benevolence work. Besides assisting in the formation of a maternity society at Walworth, in 1785 she was instrumental in forming a girl’s school in conjunction with the Protestant Dissenters’ Charity School at Horsleydown, Southwark, which since 1714 had been exclusively educating boys. In 1790 the

38

Salter, History, 11. Salter, Some Particulars, 34–5; W. H. G. Salter, A History of the Gurney System of Shorthand (Oxford: Blackwell, [1924]), 11, 13. 40 Salter, Some Particulars, 43–4. 41 Act of Incorporation, 22, 24. Joseph Gurney’s certificate of membership was dated September 25, 1795 and signed by secretaries James Todd and Walter Franklin and President James Pemberton. See Salter, Some Particulars, 44. 39

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school was moved to Walworth, and by the mid-1790s, the Walworth Girls Charity School was educating approximately thirty girls. She may also have assisted in founding a similar school for girls in Southwark at Shakespeare’s Walk, Shadwell, in 1792.42 As a result of this rich climate of social and political activism that permeated her family, church, and the larger dissenting community in which she lived and worked, Martha Gurney was ready by 1791 to join that host of ‘Christian philanthropists’ who were determined to rid the British empire of the evil of human trafficking. Martha Gurney entered the slave trade debate with Dore’s Sermon, but it was not until 1791 that she became a significant figure in her own right. That year she began selling the pamphlets of the relatively obscure bookseller turned radical pamphleteer, William Fox. Between 1791 and 1794, Gurney and Fox collaborated on sixteen highly provocative political pamphlets,43 three of which specifically addressed the slave trade. Fox was a minor bookseller at 128 Holborn Hill from 1773 to 1794, generally appearing on title pages as part of a consortium of sellers. He specialized in literary works, selling editions of Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dryden, Congreve, Rowe, Beaumont and Fletcher, Fielding, Samuel Richardson, and James Thomson, as well as such popular works as Edward Wortley Montagu’s Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Ancient Republicks (1778), Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (1781), Andrew Kippis’s Biographica Brittanica (1778), and the Universal History from the Earliest Accounts to the Present Time (1779–81). He seems to have had an interest in the slave trade prior to 1791, for in 1785 he collaborated with four other sellers in publishing Thomas Southerne’s dramatic version of Aphra Behn’s novel, Oroonoko. Martha Gurney probably met Fox through her brother, for the two men, besides being booksellers only a short distance from each other, were also subscribing members to the Humane Society, founded in 1774 by Dr William Hawes (1736–1808), Fox’s brother-in-law and a close friend of Joseph Gurney (John Gurney would marry Hawes’s daughter, Maria).44 In 1782 Fox entered into a business arrangement with Martha Gurney, for that year she moved her bookshop from 34 Bell Yard into his quarters in Holborn Hill. The two 42

Salter, Some Particulars, 49; A Brief Account of the Charity School, at Horsley-down, Southwark, instituted in . . . 1714 (London, 1796); Protestant Dissenter’s Magazine, 6 (1799), 164. 43 For a discussion of the bookseller Fox and the other three William Foxes who have mistakenly been given credit for his work, see Whelan, ‘William Fox, Martha Gurney’; for an analysis of Fox’s politics as expressed in his sixteen pamphlets, see John Barrell and Timothy Whelan (eds), The Political Writings of William Fox: Abolitionist, Tory, and Friend to the French Revolution (Nottingham: Trent Editions, forthcoming). 44 Both the Gurney and the Hawes families were friends of Benjamin Flower and his wife, and appear frequently in their letters; see Timothy Whelan, Politics, Religion, and Romance: The Letters of Benjamin Flower and Eliza Gould Flower, 1794–1808 (Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, 2008). For Fox and Hawes, see Isabella and Catherine Scott, A Family Biography 1662 to 1908: Drawn chiefly from Old Letters (London: James Nisbet, 1908), 103.

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operated as booksellers from the same address until 1794, at which time Fox disappears from any further title pages. He seems to have gone into a semiretirement in 1788, however, for he appears on only six imprints after that date. The fact that both Fox and Gurney appeared on imprints between 1782 and 1794 from the same address suggests that they were sharing more than a business location. Nothing is known, however, about Fox’s marital status; he may have become a widower in the early 1780s or had always been a bachelor and reached a point (he was about the same age as Gurney) when he needed assistance. In either case, it is probable that Martha Gurney’s arrival at 128 Holborn Hill was both a business and domestic collaboration. As Olwen Hufton has noted, in the eighteenth century, living alone was never considered ideal, either for men or women. Single women often lived with male relations or with other women, but it was not uncommon for a single woman and a single man (often a widow and widower), to live together in the same house; in some cases (though not in Gurney’s case), the woman managed the household in exchange for living quarters.45 The merger of Martha Gurney and William Fox may have been partially an arrangement of domestic convenience between two mature dissenters,46 but as their working relationship reveals, Martha Gurney had become Fox’s superior as a publisher and bookseller by the late 1780s. Although single women who competed with men in the market place were sometimes viewed as ‘viragos’ contributing to the decline of the traditional family unit,47 Gurney’s extraordinary relationship with Fox, the appreciation of her family and friends, and her successful business career suggest otherwise. Despite the social and economic obstacles single women faced at this time, as Bridget Hill reminds us, ‘many managed to be far more than mere passive victims and by sheer persistence made a life for themselves that gave them at least a degree of self-fulfilment and even a measure of independence’. For certain, she concludes, ‘spinsterhood produced many quite exceptional women’.48 Martha Gurney was one of these ‘exceptional women’, and her merger with Fox brought a new dimension to 128 Holborn Hill, providing him with the necessary impetus for his distinctive transformation from a minor bookseller and loyal Tory into one of the most distinctive and independent voices in the public debate over the slave trade and the war with France in the early 1790s. 45 Olwen Hufton, ‘Women without Men: Widows and Spinsters in Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Family History, 9 (1984), 361. A similar example to Fox and Gurney is that of James Gillray and his printer, Hannah Humphrey; Gillray moved into Humphrey’s quarters in 1791 and lived with her until his death in 1815. 46 Fox’s pamphlets reveal him to be a dissenter, but his denominational affiliation is uncertain. See Barrell and Whelan, ‘Introduction’, in Political Writings. 47 Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England 1660–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 125. 48 Hill, Women Alone, 181–2.

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In the spring of 1791, after Wilberforce’s bill to end the slave trade failed to pass in the House of Commons, William Fox joined Martha and Joseph Gurney in the growing army of abolitionists in England. His first and most important pamphlet, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum, after circulating in manuscript through the congregation of Maze Pond that summer,49 appeared in August, published and sold by James Phillips and Martha Gurney. The twelvepage inexpensive pamphlet went through twenty-six editions in one year and became the most widely distributed pamphlet of the eighteenth century, with approximately 200,000 copies sold or given away.50 Martha Gurney attached a note to the tenth edition stating that 50,000 copies of the pamphlet had been printed in the first four months of circulation. A similar note attached to the title page of the thirteenth edition declared that the phenomenal circulation of the Address ‘affords the most flattering hopes of the plan proposed being extensively adopted and producing very important effects: to further them a trivial price is affixed, that those who approve the Pamphlet may be more generally enabled to promote its circulation’. Copies of the early editions of the Address were sold for one penny, or five shillings per hundred. Gurney reduced the price as the demand for the pamphlet increased, selling single copies of the fourteenth edition (and all remaining editions) for a halfpenny each or 100 for 3s. 9d. By comparison, Paine’s Rights of Man was first sold for 3s. 6d. and then reduced for widespread consumption to 6d. a copy, at that time a cheap price for a pamphlet, yet six times the price of the Address.51 Numerous other printings, some without Fox’s approval, were carried out in 1791 and 1792, including one by the wealthy manufacturer and abolitionist, Josiah Wedgwood, who ordered 2,000 copies at the request of Thomas Clarkson.52 Even though the Abolition Committee did not commission the Address, the joint effort by Phillips and Gurney in printing and selling the first four editions reveals that Gurney, along with Fox, had garnered a high level of respect within the abolitionist community, enough to gain Phillips’s approval and cooperation. Fox was anything but polite in his Address, and his graphic description of the symbolic cannibalism inherent in the making of sugar brought instant condemnation of the pamphlet by supporters of the slave trade, especially 49 Richard Hillier, A Vindication of the Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Use of West India Produce . . . In Answer to A female Apologist for Slavery. The Second Edition, with Strictures on Her Reply to a Reply (London: M. Gurney [and others], [1792]), 3. This suggests that Fox may have been an attendant at Maze Pond. 50 William St. Clair offers a more conservative estimate of Fox’s Address at 100,000 copies. See Salter, Some Particulars, 35; St. Clair, The Reading Nation, 561. 51 St. Clair, Reading Nation, 256–7. 52 Katherine Eufemia Farrer (ed.), Correspondence of Josiah Wedgwood 1781–1794 (London: Women’s Printing Society, 1906), 187–8.

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those who did not wish to forego sugar in their tea.53 He accused every user of West Indian sugar of participating in the slave trade. ‘The slave-dealer, the slave-holder, and slave-driver’, he writes, ‘are virtually the agents of the consumer, and may be considered as employed and hired by him to procure the commodity’.54 The cost of consuming one pound of sugar, he contended, was equal to the annihilation of ‘two ounces of human flesh’. He was convinced that if enough Britons abstained from sugar, the boycott ‘would destroy the Slave Trade to the West-India Islands, bring fresh land into culture, and place the slaves in such a situation, that they must rapidly increase’.55 The very character of the people of England, he argued—as Christians, humanitarians, and lovers of freedom—was at stake. Since Parliament was ‘not only unwilling, but perhaps unable, to grant redress’, he urged them To abstain from the use of sugar and rum, until our West India Planters themselves have prohibited the importation of additional slaves, and commenced as speedy and effectual a subversion of slavery in their islands, as the circumstances and situation of the slaves will admit: or till we can obtain the produce of the sugar cane in some other mode, unconnected with slavery, and unpolluted with blood.56

More than any other single act or piece of writing, Fox’s Address, coupled with the aggressive marketing of Gurney and her abolitionist friends, such as Clarkson, Wedgwood, and ministers and laypersons of every denomination, solidified the abolitionist forces in Great Britain and America by focusing their energies on a boycott of West Indian produce. To these abolitionists, the boycott created not only a viable economic solution to ending the slave trade but also, as Charlotte Sussman argues, a degree of ‘consumerism’ that evolved into a form of universal suffrage among its advocates, resulting in a political campaign that bypassed Parliament and granted power directly to the people. ‘Only as consumers, a category of economic agent given new preeminence in the free-market capitalism of the later eighteenth-century’, she contends, ‘could these campaigners proclaim their political power’.57 The publication of the Address generated a strident pamphlet war, and Martha Gurney, far more than Joseph Johnson or any other dissenting bookseller, played a central role in the controversy. Her next pamphlet, Richard Hillier’s A Vindication of the Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Use of West India Produce . . . In Answer to a Female Apologist for 53 Cannibalism was often linked with slavery, both verbally and pictorially, in abolitionist literature of the 1790s. See Deirdre Coleman, ‘Conspicuous Consumption: White Abolitionism and English Women’s Protest Writing in the 1790s’, ELH, 61 (1994), 341–62. 54 William Fox, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum, 11th edn (London: M. Gurney, T. Knott, and C. Forster, 1791), 3. 55 Fox, Address, 4–5. 56 Fox, Address, 8–9 (emphasis by Fox). 57 Sussman, Consuming Anxieties, 42.

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Slavery, appeared in November 1791. Hillier, formerly a sailor involved in the West India trade, arrived in London the previous summer from Birmingham and promptly joined the Baptist congregation at Maze Pond on 3 July 1791.58 He arrived just prior to the release of Fox’s Address, for he writes that he became a convert to the sugar boycott after reading the manuscript as it circulated through the congregation at Maze Pond.59 Hillier was responding to An Answer to a Pamphlet, intituled An Address to the People of England, Against the Use of the West India Produce (London, 1791), an attack on Fox and the sugar boycott by an anonymous female apologist for the slave trade. Her short pamphlet was the first written response to Fox’s Address,60 and in the second edition of her pamphlet she accused Hillier of hypocrisy for his failure to have abstained from sugar prior to the appearance of Fox’s Address. This accusation, of course, provoked a second edition of Hillier’s Vindication, in which he informed his antagonist that his conscience had indeed been ‘asleep’ until he read Fox’s ‘well-timed, and spirited Address, to the People of Great Britain’.61 Hillier’s antagonist obviously did not speak for all women when it came to the issue of the slave trade. Most women were moved by Fox’s arguments and found themselves being actively recruited by leaders of the abolitionist movement. One advocate of the slave trade, in commenting on the phenomenon of the sugar boycott sweeping through the ranks of women in England, laid the blame squarely on Fox’s Address. Though he found its arguments ‘fallacious’ and ‘inconclusive’, he could not help but admit that ‘the rapid and extraordinary manner in which it has been circulated in all parts of the kingdom’ was the result of its ‘darling hypothesis’, one clearly ‘patronized’ by all the ‘English ladies’.62 David Jones, a radical Welsh reformer and abolitionist, in noting the same phenomenon, sought to enlist none other than the Duchess of York as a subscriber to the boycott. ‘Never, in so short a time’, he writes, ‘did a practice so novel, and which required a degree of self-denial, spread so rapidly’. Alluding to Fox’s Address, he adds, ‘Six months, I believe I may say five, have not yet expired, since the public have been called upon to lay aside the use of sugar; and yet, in the kingdom at large, the number of those who have complied with the proposal is reckoned considerably to exceed one hundred thousand. We never conceived that our example would so soon have been thus generally followed . . . .’63 58

See Maze Pond Church Book, II, ff. 16, 77, 78. Hillier, Vindication, 3. To my knowledge, this is the only pro-slave trade pamphlet written by a woman during the initial phase of the debate on the slave trade. 61 Hillier, Vindication, 3. 62 Strictures on an Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West-India Sugar and Rum (London, 1792), 3. 63 David Jones, An Address to her Royal Highness the Dutchess [sic] of York, Against the Use of Sugar ([n.d.], 1792), 10, 13–14. The British Library, oddly enough, attributes this work to the Duchess. 59 60

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The prominence of Gurney’s bookshop and the extent of her audience became evident in the phenomenal success of Fox’s Address. During the next three years she would consort with thirteen London printers and booksellers, nearly all dissenters, in selling the Address and twelve other abolitionist pamphlets.64 Early in 1792, she collaborated with Fox on another pamphlet, A Summary View of the Evidence delivered before a Committee of the House of Commons, Relating to the Slave Trade, which went through six editions that year. At the same time, Gurney was also selling William Bell Crafton’s A Short Sketch of the Evidence, delivered before a Committee of the House of Commons, for the Abolition of the Slave-trade, a pamphlet based upon the same materials as Fox’s Summary View and the only pamphlet sold by Gurney that was officially commissioned by the Abolition Committee.65 Crafton’s Sketch, like Fox’s Summary View, was a shorter version of another popular pamphlet, Thomas Clarkson’s An Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in the years 1790 and 1791: on the Part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave-Trade (1791). Clarkson had been commissioned by the Abolition Committee to prepare an ‘abstract’ of the Abridgment of the Minutes of the Evidence, taken before a Committee of the Whole House, to whom it was referred to consider of the Slave-Trade, which had been presented to the members of the House of Commons by the Committee just prior to the vote on the slave trade bill in April 1791.66 On 29 August Clarkson left London with copies of his newly printed Abstract, ‘traversing the Country upon the Errand of Humanity’, as his friend Joseph Hardcastle put it,67 seeking additional evidence against the slave trade, gathering petitions of the people to be presented at the next session of Parliament, and distributing copies of his Abstract.68 He soon discovered that the effect of Fox’s Address was ubiquitous. ‘There was no town’, he observed, ‘through which I passed, in which there was not some one individual who had left off the use of sugar’, estimating that some ‘three hundred thousand persons had abandoned the use of sugar’.69 Clarkson realized that the Address, with its call for a boycott, was creating more enthusiasm among abolitionists than the testimonials within his Abstract. 64

Among these dissenting booksellers were William Button, Thomas Knott, and Thomas Whieldon (Baptists); Phillips and William Darton (Quakers); and Joseph Butterworth (Baptist turned Methodist). Three others—Charles Dilly, James Ridgway, and Daniel Isaac Eaton— though they did not identify themselves as dissenters, nevertheless maintained close connections with them. 65 Abolition Committee Minute Books, ADD. MS. 21256, f. 39v. Gurney sold the third edition exclusively. 66 Clarkson, History, II, 348. 67 Joseph Hardcastle to John Clarkson, 9 November 1791, Thomas Clarkson Papers, British Library, ADD. MS. 41262A, ff. 17–18. 68 Thomas Clarkson to John Clarkson, 28 August 1791, Thomas Clarkson Papers, ff. 11–12. 69 Clarkson, History, I, 349–50.

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He also understood that neither he nor Phillips, his publisher, could compete with the discounted price that Martha Gurney had affixed to the sale and distribution of the Address. Clarkson’s Abstract had been effective in shocking the public with its graphic testimony of the horrors of the slave trade; Fox’s Address, however, despite its disturbing images of racial cannibalism, offered a more practical remedy for ending slavery through a boycott of its tainted produce.70 In March 1792, as Wilberforce and the Abolition Committee prepared for another vote on the slave trade in the House of Commons, Gurney continued to publish and sell abolitionist pamphlets. In Cruelty the Natural and Inseparable Consequence of Slavery (1792), the Baptist minister from Hemel Hempstead, John Liddon (1746/47–1825), argued that the slave trade was a ‘violation of all the rules of justice’, and any attempt to ‘regulate’ it, as its proponents argued in Parliament, was indefensible. Liddon was clearly aware of the effect Fox’s pamphlet was having among the opponents of the slave trade. The increase in those foregoing the use of sugar, he declared, was nothing less than ‘astonishing’.71 Samuel Bradburn, in his Address to the People called Methodists, concerning the Criminality of Encouraging Slavery, described those who were trafficking in human flesh as ‘blood-thirsty monsters, who manifestly take pleasure in torturing the defenceless objects of their malicious passions’. After quoting extensively from Fox’s Summary View of the Evidence, Bradburn advised his readers to do three things to bring about an end to the slave trade: petition Parliament, pray earnestly to God, and ‘abstain from the use of Rum and Sugar, till its abolition be completed, or till those articles be procured from some other quarter’. Bradburn also praised Fox’s Address, a work ‘which does peculiar honour to the principles and abilities of the writer’.72 Andrew Burn, in A Second Address to the People of Great Britain (published and sold by Gurney), offered a similar tribute to Fox: ‘What the Wisdom of a British Senate could not effect, the worthy Author of a late Address to the Public, is likely to accomplish, by rousing to powerful exertions,

70 Clarkson later created a shorter version of the Abstract titled An Abridgment of the Evidence Delivered before a Select Committee, in the years 1790 and 1791, on the Part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (composed in 1792 but not issued until 1794). The British Library, as does Peter C. Hogg, incorrectly attributes the Abridgment to William Fox. See Hogg, The African Slave Trade and its Suppression, a Classified and Annotated Bibliography of Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Articles (London: Frank Cass, 1973), 174. 71 John Liddon, Cruelty the Natural and Inseparable Consequence of Slavery, and both Diametrically Opposite to the Doctrine and Spirit of the Christian Religion (London: Sold by C. Dilly, M. Gurney, T. Knott, 1792), 4, 8, 30. Liddon had London connections, having been a former member of the congregation at Maze Pond in the 1770s prior to Martha Gurney’s arrival at Maze Pond. See Maze Pond Church Book, II, f. 9. 72 Samuel Bradburn, An Address to the People called Methodists, Concerning the Criminality of Encouraging Slavery, 5th edn with additions (London: M. Gurney, 1792), 5 (emphasis Bradburn).

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those sentiments of humanity, which it is to be hoped, are more or less implanted in every breast’.73 As W. B. Gurney relates, the success of Fox’s Address brought his aunt ‘to the acquaintance of some of the most intelligent Quakers, who valued her as a coadjutor, engaging as she did in the circulation of these pamphlets, not so much as objects of trade as means of promoting the benevolent design’.74 One of these Quakers was William Allen (1770–1843), the eldest son of a Spitalfields silk manufacturer.75 Inspired by the Quaker abolitionists, Allen decided as a teenager to give up sugar, a resolution he steadfastly kept until the actual emancipation of the slaves in 1834.76 As the debate over the slave trade waged on in 1790 and 1791, Allen became an attendant in the gallery at the House of Commons.77 On 12 January 1792, he delivered a powerful speech in Coachmaker’s Hall that shortly thereafter appeared as a pamphlet on the shelves of Martha Gurney’s bookshop in Holborn Hill. Taking his cue from Fox, the youthful Allen proclaimed to his audience that ‘The Consumer of West India Produce, may be considered as the Master-spring that gives motion and effect to the whole Machine of Cruelties’ involved in the slave trade, which to Allen was nothing less than ‘a chain of Wretchedness every link of which is stained with blood!’78 Abstaining from sugar, he argued, was the best option at the moment for ending the slave trade, and the women of England were vitally important in this cause. ‘As the Models of every just and virtuous sentiment’, he wrote, ‘we naturally look up to them as Paterns [sic] in all the softer Virtues. Their Example, therefore, in Abstaining from the use of West India Produce—must silence every murmur—must refute every objection— and render the performance of the Duty as Universal as their Influence!’79 Support for a boycott of West Indian produce reached a turning point in the spring of 1793, as the declaration of war with France became a rallying cry for the Pitt administration against political reform in general. Those who had supported the French Revolution were now characterized as Jacobins 73 Andrew Burn, A Second Address to the People of Great Britain; Containing a New and Most Powerful Argument to Abstain from the Use of West India Sugar (London: Printed for M. Gurney, 1792), 3. In 1792 Gurney also sold the anonymous Considerations Addressed to Professors of Christianity of every Denomination, on the Impropriety of Consuming West-India Sugar and Rum as Produced by the Oppressive Labour of Slaves. 74 Salter, Some Particulars, 34. Gurney consorted in selling editions of the Address with James Phillips and William Darton, both Quaker printers. 75 For more on Allen, see Irene Ashby, William Allen (London: Edward Hicks, 1893), 14, 52, 68–77, 145. 76 Ashby, William Allen, 24. 77 Life of William Allen, with Selections from his Correspondence, 3 vols (London: Charles Gilpin, 1846), I, 13. 78 William Allen, The Duty of Abstaining from the Use of West India Produce; a Speech, Delivered at Coach-Maker’s-Hall, Jan. 12, 1792, 2nd edn (London: Printed for T. W. Hawkins . . . and sold by M. Gurney [and four others], 1792), 7–8. 79 Allen, The Duty, 22, 23.

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promoting political and social upheaval. Conservatives used the slave revolt in St-Domingue in 1791 to strengthen this characterization of the radicals. Samuel Hoare wrote to Wilberforce in February 1792, relating that many Church and King advocates were propagating the notion that dissenters, both political and religious, were not seeking reform but rather revolution, ‘and that the Abolition of the Slave Trade is somewhat connected with it’. Abolitionists sympathetic both to political reform and abolition, like William Fox and Martha Gurney, were becoming liabilities. If their private opinions should be viewed as those of the Committee, Hoare writes, ‘our cause will be essentially injured’.80 Though these charges were untrue, they were nevertheless effective. After the House voted in April 1792 for a gradual abolition of the slave trade, setting 1 January 1796 as the date of final abolition, it became clear to many abolitionists that the movement was losing its momentum. Clarkson nevertheless managed to convince the Committee on 20 June 1793 to ‘draw up a Report . . . stating the different Measures which in their opinion ought to be pursued towards carrying into execution the Plan of abstinence from West Indian Sugar and Rum in the most extensive possible manner’.81 Clarkson’s militant plan of collective non-parliamentary action no doubt pleased Gurney, Fox, and their army of readers, but it did not sit well with Wilberforce, who feared that linking abolition with unruly popular movements and radical political reform (both of which stood in direct opposition to the policies of the Pitt administration) would alienate moderate MPs whose support was essential in passing any legislation to abolish the slave trade. Thus, by the summer of 1793 Wilberforce found himself at odds with a powerful legion of devoted abolitionists, in London and throughout the provinces, who were now, through their boycott of sugar, linked to Jacobinism. On 13 August, he persuaded the Committee to suspend the previous directive ‘respecting the expediency of recommending the disuse of West India Sugar and Rum’.82 The Clarkson–Fox–Gurney wing of the movement were now asked to refrain from using inflammatory rhetoric that might paint them as Jacobins and to allow Wilberforce and Parliament to do their business—a business that, by the end of 1793, abolitionists like Fox and Gurney were convinced was more concerned with defeating France than abolishing the slave trade. As the abolitionist movement lost momentum in 1793, Gurney’s contribution diminished as well. She published only two abolitionist works in 1793. One was an anonymous prose narrative titled The Negro: A Tale, in which the

80 E. L. Griggs, Thomas Clarkson: The Friend of Slaves (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936), 70–1. For Clarkson’s comments on the abolition movement being a ‘nest of Jacobins’, see History, II, 209–10. 81 Abolition Committee Minute Books, ADD. MS. 21256, f. 80v. 82 Abolition Committee Minute Books, ADD. MS. 21256, f. 84v.

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narrator pleads that England should do its duty and come to the rescue of the slaves, expiating its guilt not only through ending the slave trade but also by repatriating the slaves to their new homeland in Sierra Leone.83 The other pamphlet, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy, was the only reprint in England of a speech by David Rice, a Presbyterian minister in Kentucky. Gurney was already known in America, for in 1792 editions of Fox’s Address were issued by the American booksellers Daniel Lawrence and Benjamin Johnson of Philadelphia, William Durrell of New York, Samuel Hall in Boston, and J. Bailey and W. Dickson in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Rice’s speech before the delegates to the Kentucky state constitutional convention was designed to persuade them to end the slave trade and abolish slavery in their new state. ‘In America’, he declared, ‘a slave is a standing monument of the tyranny and inconsistency of human governments’, a ‘direct contradiction to [America’s] own avowed principles’.84 Editions of the speech were printed in Kentucky, Philadelphia, and New York. Gurney’s edition demonstrates once again her stature within the abolitionist community both as a publisher and bookseller and her deep conviction that ending the slave trade was but one step toward the goal of abolishing slavery altogether. William Fox was just as committed to the abolition of slavery as the Gurneys and the American David Rice, and he made this abundantly clear in A Defence of the Decree of the National Convention of France (1794), his final pamphlet on the slave trade and Martha Gurney’s final contribution as a bookseller/publisher to the abolitionist cause. Fox proposed that England should be happy with the decision by the French Convention on 4 February 1794, to declare a universal emancipation of all slaves throughout the French colonies. Now England could see firsthand the results of a decision it had, unfortunately, been incapable of making since 1788. With biting sarcasm, Fox ridiculed the MPs on both sides of the debate for falsely linking emancipation with anarchy. To Fox, emancipation would ensure order in the state because it would enable the freed slaves to become proper subjects of the law, deserving of its freedoms and limitations as well as its protection. The act of emancipation by the French was anything but ‘absurd, weak and improvident’, as Pitt had described it. Unfortunately, the example of the French was not likely to rub off on the English. ‘That liberty and happiness are to be confined to his foggy Island’, Fox declared, ‘is an Englishman’s favourite idea, to spread mischief and desolation through the earth, is his most luxurious enjoyment’.85 83

The Negro: A Tale. Addressed to the Consideration of the Humane and Just, 3rd edn (London: M. Gurney, 1793). 84 David Rice, Slavery Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy; Proved by a Speech delivered in the Convention, held at Danville, Kentucky (London: M. Gurney, 1793), 9, 10. Gurney’s edition was a reprint of the Philadelphia edition by Parry Hall in 1792. 85 William Fox, A Defence of the Decree of the National Convention of France, for Emancipating the Slaves in the West Indies (London: M. Gurney . . . and D. I. Eaton, [1794]), 5. For more on

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Shortly after the publication of A Defence of the Decree, Fox, along with James Dore and six other English Baptist ministers, was elected a member of the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery; the next year Joseph and John Gurney would follow him.86 Though her sex disqualified her from membership in the Society, Martha Gurney, in promoting as a publisher and bookseller the work of her pastor, her brother Joseph, her nephew John, and her colleague and pamphleteer, William Fox, deserves credit for a portion of their success as well as that of the other abolitionist writers she supported. They created a powerful crusade that not only exposed the slave trade as a national sin but was also through means of a particular private action— abstaining from slave-produced sugar—capable of producing slavery’s final dissolution. Though Gurney and Fox were instrumental in creating a national phenomenon with the sugar boycott, they failed to achieve their goal of abolishing the slave trade or emancipating the slaves. That would have to wait until the Slave Trade Bill of 1807 and the Emancipation Act of 1833 (implemented on 1 August 1834). Their work was not completely forgotten, however, for in 1824 a Quaker from Leicester, Elizabeth Heyrick, reinvigorated the abolitionist movement with her stirring pamphlet, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West-Indian Slavery. The proposed ‘means’, of course, was once again ‘abstinence from the use of West Indian Productions’, an ‘expedient’, she writes, alluding to the work of Gurney and Fox, that ‘many had recourse to . . . about thirty years ago, when the public attention was so generally roused to the enormities of the Slave Trade’.87 Heyrick’s pamphlets created a new generation of sugar boycotters who, unlike Gurney and Fox, would eventually be successful in bringing an end to slavery throughout the British Empire. It was only appropriate then, that in 1830, E. R. Edwards, a Birmingham printer, reissued An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West Indian Sugar and Rum, cementing the two abolitionist movements together and allowing William Fox and Martha Gurney, the one misidentified and the other doomed to obscurity, to bask once again, after nearly forty years, in the light of the truth they had laboured so valiantly to declare.

Fox’s Defence, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 381; John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 81–2. 86 See Act of Incorporation, 22, 24. 87 Elizabeth Heyrick, Immediate, not Gradual Abolition; or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West-Indian Slavery (London: F. Westley, and S. Burton, 1824), 4.

3 ‘We Ought to Obey God rather than Man’: Women, Anti-Slavery, and Nonconformist Religious Cultures Alison Twells1

In 1827 the authors of the Annual Report of the Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society issued the stern injunction to ‘obey God rather than Man’.2 In the report, mother and daughter Elizabeth and Mary-Anne Read, active in the Society since its formation in 1825, explained the group’s support for the campaign for immediate abolition ignited by Elizabeth Heyrick’s pamphlet, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition (1824). The male leadership of the movement was wrong in adopting the ‘gradualist’ position, the authors argued. Slavery was a sin wrought by men against God: it destroyed the dignity given to all human life, undermined God’s love, generated unhappiness, and corrupted the nation.3 It was the duty of Christian women to stand firm: We ought to obey God rather than Man. Confidence here is not at variance with humanity. On principles like these, the simple need not fear to confront the sage; nor a female society to take their stand against the united wisdom of this world.4

1 I would like to thank Clyde Binfield, Andrew Koke, Clare Midgley, Helen Rogers, and Timothy Whelan for giving so generously of their time and making many helpful and constructive comments on this essay, and Catherine Hall and Anne Summers for their helpful comments on a paper from which it developed. Tim Whelan pointed me in the direction of the Whitakers and Safferys; I am extremely grateful to him for his generosity. I would also like to thank the editors of this volume for their positive criticism and the Rev. Emma Walsh, College Librarian, the Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford, and librarians at the Bodleian Library, for their assistance. 2 Report of the Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society (Sheffield: J. Blackwell, 1827), 10. 3 For evangelical theology and abolition, see Roger Anstey, The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 1760–1810 (London: Macmillan, 1975), 157–99. 4 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report (1827), 10–11. William Wilberforce, writing to T. Babington, had claimed that ‘for ladies to meet, to publish, to go from house to house stirring up petitions’ was unsuited to the female character ‘as delineated in Scripture’. R. I.

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Pre-empting criticism of their independent stance, the Sheffield women claimed the legitimacy of their stance came from God: ‘No views of policy, no regard to worldly interest, must here interfere’.5 As the italicization of ‘female society’ suggests, obeying God rather than man has a potentially feminist dimension. Clare Midgley has argued that the implicit criticism of the male leadership of the campaign inherent in women’s independent action suggests a relationship between the anti-slavery movement and early feminism, by providing ‘a public questioning of male authority, an assertion of independence, and recognition that their [women’s] views were not adequately represented by men’.6 The concern to explore the relationship between women’s involvement in the anti-slavery movement and their empowerment as women has revealed the role of Quaker and Unitarian women, both beneficiaries of positive attitudes to women’s prominence within faith communities,7 in carrying the anti-slavery movement in radical and popular directions. Anne Knight and Elizabeth Pease are examples of women inspired by abolition to extend their campaign to public activism for the rights of women. The activism of Josephine Butler, Barbara Leigh Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes and other feminists of the 1860s and 1870s can also be traced to their formative experiences in abolitionist circles.8 But, as Mary-Anne Rawson’s usage of the phrase suggests, abolitionist women, hesitant about women’s adoption of a public role outside of their local religious communities or resistant to the early campaign for women’s rights, also shared the commitment to obeying God rather than man. Many of these women were Congregationalists and Baptists, from families to which the radical gender practices of some abolitionist Quakers and Unitarians cannot be uncritically extended. While it may be too harsh to characterize Congregationalism as the most conservative of denominations in its affinity to

and S. Wilberforce, The Life of William Wilberforce by His Sons, 5 vols (London, 1838), V, 264–5, quoted in Kenneth Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker’, in Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–1930 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 64. 5 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report (1827), 10. See also Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 107–8. 6 Midgley, Women Against Slavery, 116. 7 See Helen Plant, ‘Gender and the Aristocracy of Dissent: A Comparative study of the Beliefs, Status and Roles of Women in Quaker and Unitarian Communities, 1770–1830, with Particular Reference to Yorkshire’, Ph.D. thesis (University of York, 2000). 8 For the contribution of anti-slavery to early feminist politics, see Midgley, ‘Anti-Slavery and Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Gender & History, 5 (1993), 343–62; Midgley, ‘Anti-slavery and the Roots of “Imperial Feminism” ’, in C. Midgley (ed.), Gender and Imperialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 161–79; Vron Ware, Beyond The Pale: White Women, Racism and History (London/New York: Verso, 1992); Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1835–1851 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1995); Zoe Laidlaw, ‘“Aunt Anna’s Report”: The Buxton Women and the Aborigines Select Committee, 1835–37’, Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History, 32 (2004), 1–28.

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dominant middle-class Victorian constructions of gender roles and identities,9 and it should be noted that there was indeed a spectrum of attitudes within different faith communities,10 there has been little discussion of their perceptions of their roles as Baptist and Congregational women within the antislavery movement. The most numerous among dissenting abolitionists, they have received scant attention by historians.11 Yet to understand women’s engagement with domestic and global political concerns in the era prior to political democracy, it is essential to explore the religious cultures from which they came. For nineteenth-century evangelical nonconformist women, their anti-slavery commitments were put into practice in the context of local religious cultures, shaped by immediate circumstances and by wider denominational networks. Their social action expressed both the communal piety of the church and a personal piety which encompassed private devotions and public practices.12 Personal devotions extended from habitual prayer and Bible reading to the instruction of children and servants, the relief of the poor and participation in the wider missionary reform movement of which anti-slavery was a part. Anti-slavery was therefore an expression of the personal piety of evangelical nonconformist women, part of their ‘life in the world orientated towards God’ and central to the way their devotional lives were ‘worked out in practice’.13 9

See Linda Wilson, Constrained by Zeal: Female Spirituality Amongst Nonconformists, 1825–1975 (London: Paternoster, 2000), 223. 10 See for example Mary Howitt’s dissatisfaction with women Friends. Margaret Howitt (ed.), Mary Howitt. An Autobiography, 2 vols (London, 1889), 291–2. 11 The tendency of historians of women to steer shy of more private and seemingly conservative religiosity has been exacerbated by a further propensity within British social and cultural history since the 1980s for explanations of faith in materialist or psychological terms. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s pioneering account of the place of ‘separate spheres’ in nineteenth-century middle-class formation drew on a wealth of religious material in their rich depiction of the public and domestic lives of Quaker and Congregationalist men and women in Birmingham and Essex (Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780– 1850 (London: Hutchinson: 1987)). While Family Fortunes provided a ground-breaking challenge to histories of middle-class formation which focused on men and the public sphere, the study tends nonetheless to understate the role of women within philanthropy and the broader religious public, as well as to represent religious culture as shaped by the dictates of capitalist social formation. Our twentieth- and twenty-first-century struggle to understand spirituality and our lack of interest in the minutiae of theological debate presents a problem for us, for women in the nineteenth century were greatly engaged by them. Within women’s history the last few years has seen the beginnings of a return to discussions of faith and female agency initiated by Gail Malmgreen in Religion in the Lives of Englishwomen (London: Croom Helm, 1986). British historians have been encouraged in this respect by developments in North America, where questions of faith and religious belonging are not subservient to considerations of class and race and where there has been a greater willingness to explore the role of religion and the Second Great Awakening in fostering a commitment to reform. 12 Activism was one of the central characteristics of evangelicalism, as defined by David Bebbington, in Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). 13 Alister McGrath, cited in Wilson, Constrained by Zeal, 4. For a discussion of the predominance of the term ‘piety’ among nineteenth-century Protestants, and the use of ‘spirituality’ in

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This essay explores the commitment to obeying God before man in the context of two local dissenting cultures in Britain. In Sheffield, an emerging industrial town in the north of England, where Congregationalist Mary-Anne Rawson was a founder member in 1825 of the Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society and of the Sheffield Ladies’ Association for the Universal Abolition of Slavery in 1837, anti-slavery formed one part of a newly developing missionary public. With her sisters Eliza, Catherine, Sarah, and Emily, Mary-Anne Read (later Rawson) had been a participant in the range of societies which contributed to the formation of an urban evangelical civic culture. All of the girls were Sunday school teachers from a very young age and were active in the 1810s and 1820s in a range of philanthropic, Bible and missionary societies. Following her return to Sheffield from Nottingham on the death of her husband in 1829, Rawson became active in the campaign led by the new more radical branch of the Anti-Slavery Society, known as the Agency subcommittee, the formation of which in 1831 suggested the demise of an ameliorist approach and the acceptance of the need for ‘immediate’ abolition.14 During the 1830s, Rawson wrote reports, edited the anti-slavery volume, The Bow in the Cloud (1834), organized fund-raising bazaars, collected signatures for petitions and channelled support for the Thompson Normal School, a teacher training institution established for Jamaican girls by William Knibb and his family. She attended the 1840 Anti-Slavery Convention in London where, despite disagreeing with his gender politics, she formed a lasting friendship with William Lloyd Garrison, and continued to combine support for abolition with temperance and working-class education in Sheffield throughout the1840s.15 The support for abolition of sisters Maria Grace Saffery (1772–1858) and Anne Whitaker (1774–1865), Baptists from rural Wiltshire, was similarly motivated by a commitment to God over man. Their abolitionism was articulated in a more explicitly religious language and demonstrated in less obviously ‘political’ ways: in poetry and devotional writing, and in school teaching, and not in an involvement in public societies. The anti-slavery activities of the women of the Saffery and Whitaker families raise questions about what it means for historians when faith, and doctrines of sin, salvation, and sanctification, take priority.16 For these women, involvement in philanthropy, abolitionism, domestic reform, and Sunday schools emerged from a commitment this period more to denote the interior knowledge of the divine discussed in the elite circles of mystics such as Madame de Guyon, and the general ascendancy of the term ‘spirituality’ during the twentieth century, see Alister McGrath, Christian Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), 5, 13–14. 14 ‘Printed Letter of Instructions from the Anti-Slavery Society Office’, cited in David Turley, The Culture of English Anti-Slavery 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 40. 15 See Alison Twells, The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), chapter 3. 16 For a discussion of these issues, see Marguerite van Die, ‘“A Woman’s Awakening”: Evangelical Belief and Female Spirituality in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Canada’, in W. Mitchinson,

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to living a Christian life of service, as an expression of a Christian desire to make good and happy people who were both at peace with themselves and whose seriousness and piety contributed to the creation of the corpus christianum, the Christian social body. Their writings suggest that a closer attention to piety will yield a deeper understanding of the contributions to abolitionism of evangelical nonconformist women. Mary-Anne Rawson was no feminist. Although she nowhere indicates that she shared the fierce response of evangelical women to the presence of American ‘ladies’ at the London Anti-Slavery Convention in 1840—in Eliza Conder’s view, their forthrightness, untidy appearances and an overstepping of their scripturally prescribed separate spheres were ‘hieroglyphics for their “unwashen hands”’, that is for their deficiency as good Christians (Mark 7:5)17—she remained distant from the proceedings. In a letter concerning William Lloyd Garrison’s visit to Sheffield in 1870 she reflected briefly on his previous stay in her family home at the time of the Convention, and blithely dismissed the furore over the ‘Woman Question’ that had dominated the meeting and in which her American guest had been so thoroughly embroiled. At the same time, unlike her friend and contemporary Ann Taylor Gilbert’s rejection of Anne Knight’s request in 1849 that she sign a petition in support of women’s suffrage on the grounds of nature, science, and scripture, and the belief that providing a thorough and nonconformist education for her children as well as running a household provided a very expansive world,18 Rawson leaves no evidence of any engagement with early feminism. Indeed, she held apart from the campaign for women’s suffrage as it gathered pace in Sheffield, devoting her time in the 1840s to missionary reform at home and overseas. Mary-Anne Rawson’s capacity in 1827 to obey God rather than man had developed in the context of the ‘missionary domesticity’ of her nonconformist family life.19 Her mother Elizabeth Read’s commitment to creating an evangelical family life included encouraging her children—five daughters, born between 1800

P. Bourne, A. Prentice, G. Cuthbert-Brandt, B. Light, and N. Black (eds), Canadian Women: A Reader (Canada: Harcourt Press, 1996), 49–68. 17 E. Conder, Josiah Conder: A Memoir (London: John Snow, 1857), 318. It should be noted that Conder’s objection was partly sectarian as the American women were members of the radical group led by William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79) and Hicksite, that is, associated with those Quakers who resisted the growing tendency towards prioritizing the authority of the scriptures over the ‘light within’, and who were therefore heretics in the eyes of evangelicals. See Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘“Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation”: American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840’, Pacific Historical Review, 59 (August 1990), 453–99. 18 See my discussion in Alison Twells, ‘Missionary Domesticity and Women’s Sphere in LateGeorgian and Early-Victorian England’, Gender & History, 18 (2006), 266–84. 19 Twells, The Civilising Mission, chapter 3.

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and 1807, and one son, born in 181520—in both their personal piety and in the development of their religious activism. It was their involvement in a wider evangelical culture which marked the difference between their children’s experience of nonconformity and Elizabeth and Joseph Read’s own eighteenth-century childhoods. The culture of earlier generations of Congregationalists had been described by Isaac Watts as a ‘garden wall’d around’.21 They became much more engaged with the world during their period of dramatic growth during the religious revival of the late eighteenth century.22 Many, like the Reads, relative newcomers to early nineteenth-century Sheffield, were living in expanding towns where there was no sizeable established Congregational community. While part of a nonconformist tradition going back to at least the 1660s, the new evangelical civic culture then under construction was rooted in and involved the adaptation of this older dissenting culture to a rapidly changing urban and industrial environment.23 As a family, the Reads taught Sunday school classes at Zion Chapel near to their Attercliffe home, and were involved in the range of new societies which sprang up throughout the 1800s and 1810s: the Society for Bettering the Condition of the Poor, the Bible Society, the Lancasterian School Society, and the local auxiliary missionary society of the London Missionary Society.24 Such activities, alongside Joseph Read’s subscription to Queen Street Chapel and Zion Chapel and support for Rotherham College, newly established in 1795 for training men for the ministry, placed the family at the centre of Sheffield’s new evangelical civic culture. The Read family’s ‘missionary domesticity’ should be seen within a tradition in which the development of a religious household was a central part of women’s piety. Although the Reformation reinforced the patriarchal family, as Patricia Crawford suggests, women were able to make ‘an individual regime of piety out of their household and family matters’. Their domestic piety was both creative and empowering: involving private devotions, the education of children and servants, and charity among the neighbouring poor, it enabled women to ‘transcend the limitations of their earthly 20

A sixth daughter, Julia Read (1818–19), died in infancy. Quoted in Michael R. Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), I, 439. See Geoffrey Wainwright, ‘Types of Spirituality’, in Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, Edward Yarnold (eds), The Study of Spirituality (London: SPCK, 1986), 592–605. 22 Congregational membership swelled 78% between 1760 and 1810, and continued to grow, from 800 churches in 1810 to 3,200 by 1851. K. D. M. Snell and Paul S. Ell, Rival Jerusalems: The Geography of Victorian Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 93–120; R. Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in England 1662–1962 (London: Independent Press, 1962). 23 For Congregationalism in Sheffield, see David Hey, ‘The Pattern of Nonconformity in South Yorkshire, 1660–1851’, Northern History, 8 (1973), 86–118; Clyde Binfield, ‘Religion in Sheffield’, in C. Binfield, R. Childs, R. Harper, D. Hey, and B. Tweedale (eds), History of the City of Sheffield, 3 vols (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), II, 364–428. 24 Twells, The Civilising Mission, chapter 3. I am very grateful to Professor Binfield for clarification of these points. 21

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condition, to find spiritual satisfaction and to “apprehend the divine”’.25 The later eighteenth century saw a reinforcement of the association of family and church in the idealization of domestic life and representation of the gathered church as a ‘home’.26 The development of the domestic missionary reform movement in the early years of the nineteenth century further enlarged women’s religious worlds, as they engaged in domestic visiting, Bible distribution, and fund-raising activities within local neighbourhoods. In Sheffield as elsewhere, many of these developments were inter-denominational, as Congregationalists worked alongside Methodists, Baptists, and Unitarians, as well as those Anglicans inspired by the evangelical leadership of the Vicar of Sheffield, Thomas Sutton.27 This move towards ‘the world’ was not without tensions, however, clearly seen in Elizabeth Read’s recalling of Mary-Anne from Miss Dinah Ball’s school in Chelsea in 1817 following her daughter’s revelation that she had been playing cards, had visited the theatre, and attended a Church of England service, all activities which caused dissenters great consternation for their worldly and Anglican connotations. ‘[T]hese are not smiling subjects’, warned her maternal uncle William Smith, urging Mary-Anne that if she judged the ‘Church people’ not to have ‘some good qualities in their Composition’, to ‘be on your guard’.28 Dinah Ball later moved to Wincobank, the Reads’ new home on Sheffield’s northern edge from 1816, as a teacher to the younger girls, becoming part of an evangelical nonconformist country household, which offered hospitality to eminent visitors, preachers, and missionaries on furlough.29 The resistance of the parents to the world of the Church was again apparent in the 1820s, as Emily and Sarah Read, Mary-Anne’s two youngest sisters, began attending Ecclesfield parish church, while expressing their concern that their actions hurt their mother.30

25 Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), 209, 97. 26 For the 1790s and early 1800s, see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes. 27 See James Montgomery’s declaration on the occasion of the formation of the Leeds-based WMMS in 1813 that missionary activity was a shared and collaborative venture; despite some differences, denominations were ‘blended till they are lost, like the prismatic colours in a ray of pure and perfect light’. Sheffield Iris, 9 August 1814. Similarly, the Lancasterian School Society, founded after the visit to the town by the Quaker educationalist Joseph Lancaster in 1809, accommodated Anglican pupils until the establishment of the National school in 1813; their common purpose was expressed in the 1818 Annual Report of the Boys’ Lancasterian School, as ‘fellow helpers in the same great cause of humanity and kindness’. Ninth Report of the Sheffield Lancasterian School for Boys (Sheffield: James Montgomery, 1818). 28 Mary-Anne Rawson Papers, HJ Wilson Archive, Sheffield City Archives, MD 6038i. 29 See Twells, Civilising Mission, chapter 3. For the evangelical country house, see Doreen Rosman, Evangelicals and Culture (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 14. 30 Sarah Read to Eliza Read, 25 October 1827, HJ Wilson Archive, Sheffield City Archives, MD 5695.

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The growing acceptability of Anglican worship among the next generation of dissenters conflicted with a second wave of politicization of religious dissent in the 1820s and 1830s. Unitarians especially had campaigned for reform during the 1780s and 1790s, only to see their activism decline in the years of the Terror and wars with France. During the 1820s, as evangelical nonconformity became the dominant force within the popular anti-slavery movement, many dissenters wrestled with and overcame criticism that involvement in politics was incompatible with piety and godliness; a criticism, it should be noted, directed at men as well as at women.31 Rawson’s declaration in 1827 chimed in with the beginnings of the radical nonconformist movement, in which Sheffield took a lead role. Sheffield was possibly the first town to refuse payment of the church rates, the tax levied on all parishioners, regardless of denomination, for the upkeep of the parish church. At a Vestry Meeting called in 1818 to examine the accounts of the church wardens, the body with responsibility for setting a church rate, and to discuss the issue of levying such a rate upon the parish, the participants concluded that since more well-to-do Anglicans considered the pews for which they paid to be their exclusive property, and thereby excluded poorer parishioners by means of finance and pride, they should assume responsibility for the upkeep of the church. In a statement which clearly reveals the strength of dissenters among the ratepayers, the authors begged ‘respectfully to remind the seat-owners, that the rest of the parishioners maintain their own religious establishments, without having or seeking any assistance whatever for them’.32 The church rates issue was accompanied during the 1820s by a stepping up of the campaign against the Test and Corporation Acts (1673 and 1661), which were repealed in 1828; for an end to nonconformist exclusion from the universities; and for the removal of the compulsion to use the Church of England marriage service, the lack of legal registration of births and deaths outside of the Church of England, and the inability of nonconformists to bury their dead in a churchyard with their own ministers officiating. The Dissenters Marriage Act (1836) and the Civil Registration Act (1837) saw the partial redress of these disabilities. The 1820s also saw great energy in Sheffield for the movement for reform, where the Great Reform Act and subsequent election of 31 Michael Watts, The Dissenters: The Evolution of Evangelical Nonconformity, 1791–1859, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), II, 459–60. 32 ‘Report of a committee appointed at a vestry-meeting of the Parishioners of Sheffield, held on the fifth of March 1818, to examine accounts of the church-wardens . . . and to report on the necessity and legality of a Church-Rate upon the Parish, August 8 1818’ (Sheffield: John Ray, 1818), 7. For Sheffield as a forerunner to the campaign against church rates, see Watts, The Dissenters, II, 476–85. For the politicization of the vestry and the office of churchwarden during the 1820s, see Derek Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976).

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1832 resulted in the return of Liberal ‘reform’ candidates, including John Parker, supporter in Parliament of nonconformist causes.33 The Municipal Corporations Act (1835), which eventually resulted in incorporation in Sheffield in 1843, saw twelve dissenters out of forty-two men elected to the first council, a weaker dissenting interest than in other Yorkshire towns but still representing a transformation of politics at both local and national levels.34 The phrase ‘we should obey God rather than man’ derives from Acts 5:29, and was spoken by Peter as he and the other apostles refused the injunction to preach in Jerusalem. It was frequently cited in religious and political polemic from the Reformation forward,35 and in the early nineteenth century appeared in a range of texts by nonconformists and evangelical Anglicans to represent the rightfulness and godliness of a course of action against the self-interest of oppositional elements within established authority.36 It was deployed by the Sheffield women to support their independent stance regarding ‘immediate abolition’, for which they had been campaigning during 1825–26. This argument was supported by quotation from the Bible throughout the Report, which opened with the suggestion made by members of the Sheffield poor, whose enthusiasm for the boycott campaign the anti-slavery women had found encouraging, that the wealthier members of the community should heed the direction to ‘Go ye and do likewise’.37 The Report explained that immediate abolition was not intended to undermine the law, but was part of an aspiration to bring Christianity to slaves; ‘to afford to its objects the opportunity of walking conformably to the dictates of religion’.38 The Christianization of slaves, the authors contended, was undermined by the supporters of ‘gradual mitigation’, who conveniently forgot the denunciations of the Israelites in claiming that slavery was acceptable to God because it existed in the Old Testament. Gradualist sympathies with the financial plight of the planters further created a situation whereby ‘with the right hand we present the sword, to offer with the left the Gospel of peace’, leading them to ask ‘Can a fountain at the same time send forth sweet waters and bitter?’39 Moving closer John Parker, ‘To the Electors of the Borough of Sheffield’ (Sheffield: Robert Leader, 1834). See Ronald W. Ram, ‘The Political Activities of Dissenters in the East and West Riding of Yorkshire, 1815–1850’, MA dissertation (University of Hull, 1964); Watts, The Dissenters, II, 432–5, 470–9. 35 See for example, Ross Harrison, Hobbes, Locke and Confusion’s Masterpiece: An Examination of Seventeenth Century Political Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 19–26. 36 See for example, Mrs Trimmer, A Scripture Catechism (London 1836), 273; R. Aspland, ‘Clerical Zeal Against Unitarians’, in The Christian Reformer, 6 (1839), 301; John Bird Sumner, ‘Obedience to Civil Government Enjoined’, in A Practical Exposition of the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans (London: J. Hatchard and Son, 1843), 185; John Brown, The Law of Christ respecting Civil Disobedience (London, 1839), 83. 37 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 4. 38 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 9. 39 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 8. 33 34

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to home, the Report tackled the hypocrisy of those who were opposed to slavery but consumed slave-grown produce: ‘He who is faithful in much, is faithful also in little’.40 The commitment to ‘remote abolition’ was the new means by which society tried to perpetuate slavery, and was not very dissimilar from the older argument that black people were fitted to be slaves; both were based on the premise that ‘there exists in the breast of the Negro, a problem, which no principle of our nature can resolve’; that if free and treated well, the former slaves would turn against their previous masters. To the contrary, the Report argued, ‘God hath made of one blood all nations that dwell on the face of the earth’, and enslaved people were equal members of God’s family.41 The Sheffield women then turned to their related theme: that ‘remote abolition’ was not just anti-Christian, but involved an interference with the will of God and a willingness to obey mortal, rather than divine, authority: ‘We know not’, they continued, ‘how such reasons shall meet the eye of Him who has numbered every hair on the head of those poor negroes, and sees with no distinction those swarthy natives of a torrid zone, and the loftier forms of their fair-skinned oppressors’. At this point, the authors introduced the theme of independent action: to defer to those ‘high standing’ men who aimed to shape opinion was ‘humility much misapplied’. It was, in an argument clearly not designed to win Catholic support, the same humility ‘which has established the basis of the Papal chair; that is the foundation of that “authority which lifts vain men to eminence fit only for a God”’.42 Man was fallible, and only God’s tribunal should count: ‘The Bible, and the Bible alone is the touch stone to which we would bring slavery’, and to anyone else, they should say, ‘Away with such things’.43 To interfere in God’s plan would be ‘to set up our own wisdom in opposition to our Creator: “Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?” Shall we take into our own hands the government of the universe?’44 Immediate abolition therefore required a commitment to independence and moral integrity in the adherence to God’s will alone. One effect of the Reform Act of 1832 was to bring more abolitionist MPs into the House of Commons and so enable the passage of the Abolition Act in 1833.45 By 1838, when Mary-Anne Rawson made a more forthright declaration of independence as secretary of the Ladies’ Society for the Universal Abolition of Slavery, Anglicans were aware not only of the historic threat of dissent—of itinerancy, independence, anticlericalism—but of Sheffield’s changing complexion, to become a town characterized by liberalism and 40

Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 9. Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 4. 42 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 10. 43 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 11. 44 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society, Annual Report, 1827, 11. 45 See for example, Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 66–8; James Walvin, Slaves and Slavery: The British Colonial Experience (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 97–8. 41

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nonconformity.46 On this occasion, Rawson’s protest was against the slowness of male abolitionists in inviting members of the anti-apprenticeship Central Negro Emancipation Committee to speak in Sheffield; she responded by issuing the invitations herself. Her self-assured response to the furore which followed, during which six Anglican women resigned from the Ladies’ Society, was to assert that ‘interference’ on the part of the men was ‘uncalled for’, as the women represented ‘an entirely independent society’.47 Obeying God rather than man in this instance implied independence from both individual men and aspects of conventional gender roles and exemption from the structures and authority associated with the Anglican Church. Such expressions of independence were traditionally more problematic for women.48 The first-century church towards which the nineteenth-century evangelical movement aspired was characterized by a suspicion of clerical authority and subsequent celebration of independence while also insisting on women’s subordination to men. Whilst obeying God rather than man allowed Mary-Anne Rawson to engage in a number of activities that pushed the boundaries of women’s sphere—collecting signatories for petitions, for example—these stopped short of anything to do with ‘women’s rights’.49 But the Congregational model of women’s role, while conservative when seen from a purely secular perspective, allowed for a degree of principled oppositional behaviour as part of the religious tradition of receiving God’s message in one’s heart. Rawson’s independent stance in 1827 and again in 1838 reflected nonconformist conceptions of authority, independence, and church governance; and women’s part in the long Protestant tradition of rejecting priestly authority and the interpretative interventions of others. Newly articulated in the context of an urban civic culture in the making, the emphasis of women on the wrongs done to slaves as mothers and members of families brought familial and moral concerns into the civic arena. As part of a wider missionary reform movement which sought to reconstruct domestic life and so bring all peoples into the corpus christianum, women’s anti-slavery politics helped to give shape to the nineteenth-century nonconformist conscience. Feminist scholarship has taught us to deploy an extended and more nuanced definition of the ‘political’ and to look beyond public activities of the kind demonstrated by Mary-Anne Rawson in newly urbanizing Sheffield. Anti-slavery commitments can also be discerned in the quieter and more 46 See Binfield, ‘Religion in Sheffield’, in C. Binfield, et al., History of the City of Sheffield, II, 364–428. 47 ‘Resolution of the Ladies Committee of the Universal Abolition Society, 13 March 1838’, and letter from Mary-Anne Rawson to the Men’s Committee, n.d., Mary-Anne Rawson Papers, 743–62/63, John Rylands Library, Manchester. 48 Beverly Mayne Kienzle and Pamela J. Walker (eds), Women Preachers and Prophets through Two Millennia of Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). 49 See Twells, ‘Missionary Domesticity and Woman’s Sphere’.

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domestic reform activities of Maria Grace Saffery (1772–1858) and her sister Anne Whitaker (1774–1865) of Bratton and Salisbury in Wiltshire. These women, sisters originally from Stroud Green in Berkshire, became part of a network of Baptist ‘middling folk’, farmers and owners of property in a number of West Country towns and villages, families who were connected through marriage and friendship and through their historic involvement with early Baptist churches.50 At the centre of an earlier coterie was the celebrated hymn writer and poet, Anne Steele (1717–78), who wrote under the pen name of ‘Theodosia’, meaning ‘Gift from God’, and who was part of a literary culture influenced by the hymnody of Isaac Watts.51 The Steele, Gay, and Attwater women, later joined by Anne Whitaker and Jane Saffery, combined to produce perhaps the most distinctive collection of letters and family sources of Baptist women in this period.52 That the Safferys and Whitakers had much in common with the Reads in Sheffield is not surprising, given the genealogy and theology of Particular Baptist and Congregational denominations. Both believed that the church should be a voluntary gathering of self-governing members. Like the Congregationalists, the Particular Baptists, the larger of the two Baptist societies, had been transformed during the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and their Calvinism modified as a result of Andrew Fuller’s interventions during the 1790s and early 1800s.53 Many members were influenced by the broader evangelical culture of the period: Maria Grace Saffery had attended the ministry of evangelical Anglican Thomas Scott (1747– 1821).54 Also in common with the Independents was the surge of membership during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The geographical coverage of the two movements overlapped, with Congregationalists numerous in East Anglia and the East Midlands, parts of the south of England and, to a lesser extent, in Lancashire and Yorkshire while the Particular Baptists 50 See Marjorie Reeves, Sheep Bell and Ploughshare: The Story of Two Village Families (Bradford on Avon: Moonraker Press, 1978); Brian Talbot, ‘John Saffery (1763–1825)’, in Michael A. G. Haykin (ed.), The British Particular Baptists 1638–1910, 3 vols (Springfield, Missouri: Particular Baptist Press, 2003), III, 42–83. 51 See Marjorie Reeves, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture 1700–1900 (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997); Marjorie Reeves, ‘Literary Women in Eighteenth-century Nonconformist Circles’, in Jane Shaw and Alan Kreider (eds), Culture and the Nonconformist Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 7–25; Sharon James, ‘Anne Steele (1717–1778)’, in Haykin, The British Particular Baptists, III, 1–21; J. R. Broome, A Bruised Reed. The Life and Times of Anne Steele (The Cromwell Press, 2007), especially 152–3, 159–75. 52 Reeves, Pursuing the Muses; Timothy Whelan, Nonconformist Women Writers of the West Country, 1720–1840, 8 vols (Pickering and Chatto, 2011). 53 See for example, Andrew Fuller, The Gospel Worthy of all Acceptation (Northampton, 1785); Geoffrey F. Nuttall, ‘Northamptonshire and The Modern Question: a Turning-Point in EighteenthCentury Dissent’, Journal of Theological Studies, N. S., 16, Pt. 1 (1965), 101–23. 54 Talbot, ‘John Saffery’, 44–5.

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were also active in the East Midlands, Lancashire and Yorkshire and the West Country.55 The Wiltshire Baptists and the Sheffield-based Reads shared a commitment to the creation of a nonconformist domestic culture. Since the Reformation, family matters—including prayer and habitual devotions, and the education of children and servants—were central to the piety of dissenting women.56 Like Elizabeth Read, Maria Grace Saffery and Anne Whitaker established their family homes in this tradition. Anne Andrews’ marriage in 1798 to Philip Whitaker (1766–1847) saw her move into his family farm at Bratton; Maria married the Salisbury Baptist minister John Saffery (1763–1825) the following year. The sisters were soon immersed in the demands of pregnancies and raising small children, and much of the letter-writing from the first two decades of the nineteenth century focuses on children and new babies, illnesses and remedies, plans for visits, and enquiries into the location of the birthing stool.57 Extant letters from Maria Saffery to her daughter Jane reveal that, like Elizabeth Read, she took seriously her responsibilities as a Christian mother. Writing to twelve-year-old Jane in June 1817, she reflected on the joy of her daughter’s vivacious nature before introducing ‘more solemn and interesting reflections . . . My Jane is not a guiltless bird, an unconscious flower, just made to sing, and bloom, and die. No, God requires of her, a sweeter perfume and a nobler song’. The letter is concluded by Jane’s father, John Saffery, who tells her how he yearns for her salvation, urging her to reflect and pray and ‘humbly and believingly seek to him’.58 As with Elizabeth Read’s father Ebenezer, the (would-be) minister father played a central role in urging their daughter to take the right path: ‘Be persuaded my lovely maid, that I do not wish to make you sad, but to have you serious and pious – I want you to be happy, therefore I am anxious that you should find Christ precious and seek communion with God, and live while you live to his glory, then let death come when it will, you will be prepared for it, to go to glory’.59 This was no austere emotionally cold evangelical childhood; nor was John Saffery’s suggestion an expression of simple patriarchal authority. The quest to bring happiness, to oneself and others, was endlessly discussed, in the context of the 55

Snell and Ell, Rival Jerusalems, 93–120; Tudur Jones, Congregationalism in England; Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain. 56 Crawford, Women and Religion, 209. 57 See Anne Whitaker to Maria Grace Saffery, 14 March 1806, 2 June 1807, and more, many undated; Maria Grace Saffery to Anne Whitaker, 1792–1809, 1810–30; John Saffery to Anne Whitaker, 2 April 1806, 16 September 1803; Maria Grace Saffery to Philip Whitaker, 27 October 1805; Box 1, Acc. 142, Saffery/Whitaker Papers, Angus Library, Regent’s Park College, Oxford University. 58 Maria Grace Saffery to Jane Saffery, 12 June 1817. See also the birthday note, 5 May (no year). Letters from Maria Grace Saffery to Jane Saffery, 1814–46, Box 1, Saffery/Whitaker papers. 59 John Saffery to Jane Saffery, 15 July 1817, Box 2. See also John Saffery to Jane Saffery, 13 June 1817, Box 1; 25 July 1822, Box 2. Saffery/Whitaker papers.

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belief that this could be achieved only through a serious and consistent sense of Christian purpose and discipline.60 The correspondence between Anne Whitaker and Maria Saffery reveals approaches to children’s piety which were not gender specific. The upbringing of Alfred, Joshua, Edward, Philip, John, and Edwin, and two sisters, Emma and Anne, born to Anne and Philip Whitaker between 1799 and 1814, the same years during which Elizabeth Read gave birth to her bevy of daughters, reveals similar preoccupations with piety, poetry, literary endeavour, and missionary commitment. The Whitakers were active in Bratton church and in the Sunday school and later the British school, and in supporting similar developments in neighbouring villages.61 But a key difference between the Safferys and Whitakers in Wiltshire and the Reads and Rawsons in Sheffield is that the former do not seem to have participated as a family in the new public missionary and anti-slavery societies. Apart from John Saffery’s extensive tours on behalf of the Baptist Missionary Society and his son Philip’s later missionary commitments, there are few extant references to participation in public meetings and societies.62 There are two surviving reports from the Salisbury Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of the 1820s, for example, and the Safferys and Whitakers do not feature in them.63 There is no indication in their papers of any particular reason for this and, of course, there remains the possibility that they were involved but that the evidence has not survived. But whether or not they were activists in public societies, there is no doubt that their commitment to anti-slavery was expressed primarily in other ways, and in the context of an established Baptist dissenting culture in which women held a traditional prominence as writers and teachers. Despite their lack of public activism, a commitment to abolition was implicit in the rich and outward-looking domestic cultures inhabited by the Saffery and Whitaker families. The family subscribed to the Evangelical Magazine and the Baptist Magazine and later the Missionary and Juvenile Herald. Bratton Baptist church was engaged with anti-slavery and missionary causes: money was raised for the ‘Baptist representatives in India’ in 1811–12 and in 1814 the congregation began a contribution of 1d. per week. Reeves also reveals that a meeting was held on 1 August 1834 to celebrate abolition and £23 was raised for William Knibbs’s 60

Writing in 1834 to her now-adult daughter Jane, Maria Saffery discussed her battle with ‘faithless anxieties’ and compared faith to the seasons: ‘the changes are only on the surface, of things below’. Maria Grace Saffery to Jane Saffery Whitaker, October 1834, Box 1, Saffery/ Whitaker Papers. 61 Reeves, Sheep Bell and Ploughshare, 142–4, 147–9. 62 For John Saffery’s extensive Baptist and Baptist Missionary Society (hereafter BMS) commitments, see John Saffery to Jane Saffery, 25 July 1822, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker papers; Reeves papers, Angus Library, R19/1–5; John Saffery’s obituary, Missionary Herald, April 1825; Brian Talbot, ‘John Saffery (1763–1825)’, in Haykin (ed.), The British Particular Baptists, 42–83. For Philip Saffery, see his letters to Jane Saffery, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker papers. 63 Annual Reports of the Ladies’ Association for Salisbury, Calne (Calne: T. P. Baily, 1828, 1829).

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appeal for a church in Jamaica. In 1842, the Whitakers and other families in Bratton raised £80 for the BMS Jubilee.64 Maria Grace Saffery’s role as minister’s wife and teacher at her own boarding school in Castle Street, Salisbury, placed her in much closer proximity to Baptist activities across the region than her sister. John Saffery was secretary of the southern auxiliary of the BMS from 1792, holding the first Wiltshire Missionary Meeting at his chapel in February 1793, and becoming famous for his fund-raising, preaching, and missionary tours throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland.65 His association with the Bristol Academy brought considerable further involvement with missionary concerns. For example, a letter from J. W. Morris, Baptist minister in Dunstable, reported on his recent receipt of a ‘Bengallee New Testament’, brought by an Irish visitor recently arrived from Serampore and possibly the only one in Europe.66 Saffery provided lodgings for missionaries Joel and Ann Randall, on furlough from India, in 1816.67 Letters from the possibly rather dissolute missionary Thomas Godden in Jamaica, reveal that Godden had named his son Phillip Saffery Godden.68 Saffery engaged in extensive correspondence with missionaries, including Wiltshireman Joshua Rowe (1781– 1822), in India between 1814 and 1822, and James Coultart, a Scot who studied at Bristol Academy, and became a missionary in Jamaica between 1818 and 1836.69 It was in the context of her father’s association with the Bristol Academy that Jane Saffery developed her twelve-year correspondence with James Coultart, begun when she was thirteen years old. Coultart left England for Jamaica in 1817, only to return later that year after the death of his wife Mary Ann. He appears to have lived with the Saffery family for a while before returning to Jamaica (with a new wife in tow) in 1820.70 Some of Coultart’s communication to Jane is chatty: he mentions eating boiled dolphin, for example, while aboard the Eliza. A strong focus of the letters is his concern for Jane’s eternal happiness. Here he adopts a paternal tone, emphasizing his belief that true happiness comes from faith, from ‘that which remains under all circumstances, which fades not amidst the changes of life . . . ’ He writes about

See ‘Mother’s Notes for various talks’, Box 1, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library, Oxford (these appear to be Sunday school and other notes compiled by Marjorie Reeves’s mother); also Reeves, Sheep Bell and Ploughshare, 139–40. 65 See Reeves papers, 18/1–4; and 19/1–5, Angus Library; ‘Funeral Sermon for the late Reverend John Saffery’, Baptist Magazine, 14 March 1825, 189–91. 66 J. W. Morris to John Saffery, Baptist minister in Dunstable, 17 February 1802, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker papers. 67 Joel Randall to John Saffery, 4 June 1816, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker papers. 68 Letters from Thomas Godden, Jamaica, to John Saffery, 1819–21, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 69 Correspondence between John Saffery and James Coultart and Joshua Rowe, Reeves Papers, R13/1–24, Angus Library. 70 James Coultart to Mrs Saffery, 1 February 1832, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. For Coultart, see Memorials of the Jamaica Mission, including a sketch of the labours of early religious instructors in Jamaica (London: Yates and Alexander, 1869), 74–9. 64

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resisting temptations and other sins, such as French fashion and the waltz, and encourages Jane to be ‘fixed and unswerving’ in her Christian commitment.71 Coultart’s letters also provide critical commentary on missionary progress and the horrors of slavery, informing Jane of his new chapel in Kingston, which was large enough to house a congregation of 2,000, and his role in the formation of new Lancasterian schools and Sunday schools for both children and adults.72 (He expressed the hope that Maria Grace would be able to recommend a teacher, to whom he would pay a salary of £100 a year.)73 Anti-slavery was an implicit feature in this correspondence, part of a wider piety and religious commitment. An anti-slavery commitment can also be seen in the extant correspondence between Maria Grace Saffery and her pupils and their parents.74 Here we see Maria Saffery as a missionary wife and teacher, caring for the children of missionaries and providing all of her pupils with a global evangelical education which embraced anti-slavery concerns. Little Eliza Tinson’s father and mother, Joshua (1793-1850) and Elizabeth, were missionaries in Jamaica from 1822, where they remained—with visits to England—until his death in 1850.75 Joshua Tinson supplied a great deal of information that was clearly discussed in the school. In 1830, he made reference to three letters from ‘the Salisbury family’ urging him to write more frequently, refuting the suggestion that ‘we had forgotten the “private”, the “public”, the “Social” and the “Sacred Interest” felt in our affairs’.76 Tinson sent Maria Saffery a box of artefacts: a bottle containing a large centipede and a scorpion, a piece of bamboo, and some panama shells. For Jane Saffery, he sent a small basket made by an enslaved woman with berries and cotton wool in pods. He told of his plans to write letters to his daughter which would combine a natural history of the Caribbean islands with exhortations to youthful piety.77 Even discussions of baptisms in a river in which alligators had recently been spotted seem designed to appeal to childish tastes.78 Amidst all of this are lengthy discussions of the horrors of slavery and anti-missionary feeling on the island, as missionaries were imprisoned for preaching, people were flogged for praying, and magistrates were ‘advocates of vice and immorality, encouraging the baser sort in their Bacchanalian counsels, and exhorting the pious slave to abandon the Tabernacles and leave

71 James Coultart to Jane Saffery, 20 November 1818, 21 July 1820, 15 August 1827; James Coultart to Maria Grace Saffery, 1 February 1832, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 72 James Coultart to Jane Saffery, 21 July 1820, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 73 James Coultart to Maria Grace Saffery, 1 February 1832, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 74 Miscellaneous letters to Maria Grace Saffery, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 75 For Joshua Tinson, see Memorials of the Jamaica Mission, 82–5. 76 Joshua Tinson to Maria Grace Saffery, 2 November 1830, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 77 Joshua Tinson to Maria Grace Saffery, 10 June 1830, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 78 Joshua Tinson to Maria Grace Saffery, 30 July 1830, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers.

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the “consecrated cobblers” to howl at empty benches’.79 Tinson expressed the hope in 1831 that now reform was on the agenda in England, ‘the hateful, polluting, rotten, oppressive system of colonial slavery will not be forgotten’.80 ‘The cruelties practised on religious slaves are truly dreadful’, he wrote in August 1832, as Jamaica’s ‘feverish, unsettled state’ saw Tinson fearful for his life; the mission was ‘bleeding at every pore’.81 It is quite likely that the desire to travel to Jamaica of Jane’s school friend Margretta McDonald, who resided on the island between 1826 and 1832, was inspired by her experience at Maria Saffery’s school.82 With Jane, Margretta had been a missionary collector, and met a number of missionaries, including James Phillippo Mursell in June 1826 and William Carey later that year. Leaving for Jamaica in late 1826, Margretta’s letters are interesting for many reasons, not least as a document of her transformation from an anxiety-ridden young woman possibly lacking in purpose, to her engagement with issues of missionary education.83 Working as a teacher, Margretta also helped with the introduction of family service and spent a very happy month in the company of the Coultarts.84 Slavery formed the backdrop to her correspondence with Jane, especially in her criticisms of white Jamaicans, who were ‘as much heathens as the slaves whom they think inferior to them’.85 Another voice comes through in Margretta’s communications around the time of her marriage to a Mr (Robert?) Kirkland, a manager of the Jamaican estates of a Bristol-based planter, and who was ‘an attorney and a gentleman’. Margretta now made the argument that slavery was no worse than the class system at home: the slaves on this estate were well treated, were fond of Mr Kirkland, were well fed and never subject to the kinds of distress commonly seen in England and which Margretta had witnessed when collecting with Jane: ‘With truth I assure you that the charitable can scarcely find objects to require their 79 Joshua Tinson to Maria Grace Saffery, 10 June 1830, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. For missionaries in Jamaica and abolitionism, see Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects: Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination 1830–1867 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002). 80 Joshua Tinson to Maria Grace Saffery, 13 September 1831, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 81 Joshua Tinson to Maria Grace Saffery, 19 March 1832, June 1832, 10 August 1832, 14 August 1832, 25 October 1832, 3 March 1833, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 82 For other pupils and—occasionally—their missionary involvements, see letters from former pupils, Box 1, Saffrey/Whitaker Papers. Sarah Mursell, sister of the Baptist missionary to Jamaica James Phillippo Mursell, to Maria Grace, 15 January 1819, conveying her appreciation, and revealing her involvement in Lymington Bible Association. Sarah Mursell married Isaac Taylor Hinton in 1822. Taylor was editor of the Sunday School Magazine, and in 1832 emigrated to America via the Bristol-sponsored Philadelphia mission where he became a Baptist minister in St Louis, Missouri, and later Chicago. Former pupils also included Betsey Ryland, daughter of John Ryland. See John Ryland to John Saffery, 27 July 1808. 83 Margretta McDonald to Jane Saffery, 26 June 1826, 19 November 1826, 11 December 1826, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 84 Margretta McDonald to Jane Saffery, 12 December 1827, 8 April 1829, Box 2, Saffery/ Whitaker Papers. 85 Margretta McDonald to Jane Saffery, 3 July 1827, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers.

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charity’.86 Unfortunately, we do not have Jane’s responses to Margretta’s statements, which surely expressed opinions at odds with those to which the girls were normally exposed in West Country Baptist circles.87 While Maria Grace Saffery supported the anti-slavery movement through her school teaching and support for missionary families, her main engagement with the wider missionary reform movement was through her writing. The literariness of the Wiltshire women is one of their most striking characteristics. The extensive correspondence between Maria Grace and Anne Andrews as young women, living between their parents’ house in Isleworth and their grandparents in Salisbury, reveals their easy allusions to Shakespeare and to French and classical texts.88 Their letters evidence a keen interest in national and international radical political issues. Maria Andrews’ first published poem, Cheyt Singh. A Poem (1790), brought together literary, political, and religious concerns with a rebuke of the British government for its ongoing policy of conquest in India, specifically the defeat of the noble ruler of the title. Saffery’s argument was evangelical: that the British should be true examples of Christianity and that way would be able to convert the Indian people without recourse to military battles.89 In letters which appear to have functioned as spiritual diaries,90 the sisters freely criticized ministers, expressed the ‘mixture of pity and indignation’ they felt at the Anglican Church and regularly shared feelings of happiness and depression, discussing their spirits and ‘nervous systems’, self-doubt, and the perils of temptation, their ease with themselves and the world.91 Maria Saffery’s wider reading reveals a keen interest in the relationship between personal, national, and global spiritual affairs which would have 86

Margretta Kirkland to Jane Saffery, 5 February 1830, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. Margretta Kirkland to Jane Saffery, 15 March 1832. The rebellion of 1832 brought great insecurity and the Kirkland family moved to Canada. Margretta Kirkland to Jane Saffery, 1 September 1833, 19 November 1833, 22 April 1834, Box 2, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. 88 See letters from Maria Grace Andrews (Saffery) to Anne Andrews (Whitaker), 1792–1809, Box 1, Saffery/Whitaker Papers; Letters from Anne Andrews (Whitaker) to Maria Grace Andrews (Saffery), Box 1, Saffery/Whitaker Papers. See also Anne Whitaker’s poem to son Phillip, ‘On sending him Eustace’s Classical Tour instead of a religious work for which he had written’, cited in Reeves, Pursuing the Muses, 174. 89 Cheyt Singh. A Poem. By a young lady of fifteen (London, 1790). 90 I am grateful to Anne Summers for making this point. Neither of the sisters was very successful at maintaining a spiritual diary; Maria Grace Saffery had a nineteen-year gap between entries in hers, Box 4, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. In contrast, see Sophia Williams’s Diaries 1812–13, 1817 and 1820. Sophia Williams (1790–1890) married Thomas Whitaker, and became known as ‘Aunt Thomas’ in the family. Her spiritual diary mainly contains reflections on her use of the Sabbath and sermons, her attempts at godly behaviour, and musings on her difficulties in talking to the minister; she also mentions sermons by Carey, attendance at Missionary Prayer Meetings and an account of success at Serampore, Box 4, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. 91 See correspondence between Maria Grace Saffery and Anne Andrews Whitaker, 1810–30, Box 1, Saffery/Whitaker Papers; Box 3, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. 87

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informed her anti-slavery commitment. Copied extracts from the Life of Fenelon focus on how to shape minds and nations. François de Salignac Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, a seventeenth-century French mystic, was employed as educator to the seven-year-old Duke of Burgundy, grandson of King Louis XIV. The extracts from his writing copied out by Maria Saffery discuss his use of ‘sacred practices’ and fables and dialogues as a means of remedying the effects of a life hitherto lived according to the passions; to counter the influence of the boy’s father, a mild-mannered man but whose character was ‘equally remote from virtue’. Fenelon’s concern was with the inculcation of duty, obligation, industry; with infusing ‘a soul, a mind into the lifeless statue’, and so ensuring that he could bring happiness to both child and nation.92 A further set of notes on Extracts from the Life of Benjamin Franklin suggest that Maria Saffery was reading both as a mother and as a teacher. These copied extracts mainly concern the shortcomings of the Socratic method in education and public debate; and conclude that inviting contradiction through the interrogative method prevented the conversational openness and receptivity necessary to positive personal change.93 Such breadth of reading was encouraged among their children. In 1815, sixteen-year-old Joshua Whitaker read Fenelon’s Télémaque in French, and his commonplace books of 1822 and 1823 reveal a great enthusiasm for Byron and Southey, alongside material from sermons and religious essays, including those by the Reverend Robert Hall, Thomas Chalmers, and Bishop Hobart. Nonconformist political concerns and interdenominational campaigns featured here also: Joshua included Sir Aubrey de Vere Hunt’s song, ‘What is Power? Tis not the state’, an extract from James Montgomery’s The Chimney Sweeper’s Friend, and part of an extract from the Edinburgh Review of January 1825 titled ‘Slavery in the British Colonies in the West Indies delineated’.94 Jane Saffery was similarly well versed in the classics, natural history, and European Enlightenment writing, developing a particular interest in German culture and authors, including Madame de Staël, Schiller, and Goethe.95 Based at Bratton after her marriage in 1835, she formed a reading circle, started a lending library, and produced small literary magazines, The Rill (1836), The Village Quarterly (1837), and News from Parnassus. These reflected popular interests: in nature, statistics, and popular writers, such as Washington Irving and Felicia Hemans. Jane Saffery Whitaker saw literature as potentially 92 Possibly from M. L. F. de Bausset, trans. William Mudford, The Life of Fenelon, Archbishop of Cambrai (London, 1810). Box 1, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. 93 Possibly from Benjamin Franklin, The Life and Letters of Dr Franklin (London, 1816). Box 1, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. 94 Joshua Whitaker’s Diary, 1833, and Poetry and Commonplace books, 1822–3, Reeves Collection, Box 4b, Bodleian Library. 95 ‘Mrs Joshua Whitaker’s reading’, Boxes 1, 3, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library; Reeves, Pursuing the Muses, 176–8.

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improving, and urged her readers to apply their experience of reflecting on the Bible to their wider reading, ‘mingling [their] own reflections with those of the writer in reading any book’.96 Literature, like the Bible, could inspire Christian contemplation and be productive of a new self, if the reader was open to it. Maria Saffery’s unpublished ‘Lyra Domestica’ of the early 1830s includes poems addressing contemporary political and social movements: ‘Addressed to the Contributors of an Infant School Bazaar held at Salisbury, 1833’ and ‘A Plea for Infant Schools’ both represent the nonconformist demand for schooling free from the interference of the established church. Other poems, including ‘To the Memory of Mrs H. More’, ‘To the Memory of Dr Carey of Serampore’, and ‘The Missionary’, are celebrations of philanthropy at home and missionary success overseas.97 Maria Saffery’s Poems on Sacred Subjects (1834) continue the missionary sentiment with an ‘Address to Christian Ministers’, the last verse celebrating the commitment to take the Christian message to every tongue.98 She also celebrated in verse ‘The Philanthropy of Wilberforce’, included a ‘Sonnet to the memory of Mrs More’, and another poem with obvious abolitionist sentiments, ‘To Afric deliver’d from captivity’.99 While these poems represent Maria Saffery’s support for the wide-ranging missionary reform movement in Britain, their tone is religious rather than political. Indeed, her Poems on Sacred Subjects, as the title suggests, are mainly on biblical themes: titles include ‘The Exodus’, ‘The World After the Flood’, ‘Elijah on Mount Carmel’, and ‘Daniel in the Den’. The poems are reminders of the triumph of faith in biblical stories and thus serve as aids to spirituality. In the poem commemorating Wilberforce, his commitment to abolition is represented as the result of a ‘more than earth-born love’ which was felt by its recipients as ‘the Saviour’s sun-light on the mind’.100 ‘To Afric deliver’d from captivity’ places prayer as the key factor in abolition: Was it thy sigh of anguish burst the chain, When thine heart heaved as doth the swelling main, Amid the pauses of thy long despair? No,—’twas thy supplicant sigh, thy voice of prayer: Cry of thy meekness, not of thy disdain.101

Similar sentiments were expressed in the Baptist Magazine of the period, which contains a surprisingly small number of articles on slavery. One 96 ‘On the Habit of Reflection’, The Village Quarterly (January 1837), 39-40, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. 97 Maria Grace Saffery, ‘Lyra Domestica’, 25, 29, 30–1, 81, Box 6, Reeves Collection, Bodleian Library. There is no indication as to why Maria Saffery did not publish this volume. 98 Maria Grace Saffery, Poems on Sacred Subjects (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co, 1834), 195–6. Box 6, Reeves Collection. 99 Saffery, Poems on Sacred Subjects, 198–9. 100 Saffery, Poems on Sacred Subjects, 198. 101 Saffery, Poems on Sacred Subjects, 203.

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contribution of July 1823 identified prayer as the most important factor in influencing abolition: ‘You may all bring the case in prayer, before that God who has the hearts of all men in his hands, and can turn them, like rivers of waters, whithersoever he pleases. He who rescued Israel from the hands of the oppressor, in reply to the supplications of the afflicted, can listen to your requests on behalf of the most oppressed of humankind’.102 Maria Grace Saffery’s poetry was similarly conceived as an aid to piety, religious reflection, and prayer.103 For feminist and social historians, these can be difficult texts to interpret, especially when looking for instances of women’s political activism. The explicit religiosity and more subtle political engagement of Maria Grace Saffery and Anne Whitaker challenges historians not only to prioritize questions of faith and religious culture in women’s engagement with social and political movements, but also to think afresh about the categories of the ‘political’ and the ‘religious’, the ‘public’ and the ‘domestic’.104 It is clear that Maria Saffery believed her writing to be making a contribution to the antislavery cause. Her lack of involvement in public societies, in contrast with Mary-Anne Rawson and her sisters in Sheffield, cannot be explained in terms of a more rural location; as we have seen, the formation of public missionary and anti-slavery societies was a feature of Salisbury life in this period. While well-to-do Baptists and Congregationalists participated in a nonconformist culture in which there were many shared beliefs and practices, the specific context of the Saffery and Whitaker women, as the inheritors of a vibrant tradition in which women were mothers, teachers, and writers, is significant. Indeed, the domestic anti-slavery and missionary exertions of both families caution against a representation of the home as simply a ‘private’ space but as intimately connected with chapel, missionary, and wider reform communities. The Read sisters’ piety was developed in the context of a rapidly changing urban environment which was characterized by the newness of its populace and institutions, and by an enthusiasm on the part of middle-class evangelicals for culture-building. Their participation in public societies represented an involvement in the development of the corpus christianum, a Christian social body. In the era prior to the advent of political democracy, religion was the main arena in which women engaged in movements for social change. The injunction issued by Mary-Anne Rawson to obey God rather than man drew on nonconformist traditions of independence and agency, and the commitment

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Baptist Magazine, (July 1823), 278–83. Wilson, Constrained By Zeal, 116–30. 104 For a useful discussion of these issues, see Cecilia Morgan, Public Man and Virtuous Woman: The Gendered Languages of Religion and Politics in Upper Canada, 1791–1850 (University of Toronto Press, 1996). 103

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to interpreting for themselves God’s message. For nineteenth-century evangelical nonconformist women, anti-slavery was an expression of their personal piety; it was part of their interior knowledge of God and of their public expression of their religious faith.105 These characteristics were lived and brought to life in local religious cultures, shaped by immediate circumstances and by wider denominational networks. This essay has discussed two such cultures: one of rapid change and growth in urban Sheffield, in which the Read family played a part in the adaptation of a Congregational tradition in the process of building a new civic culture and movement for global reform; and another amongst a group of West Country Baptists whose more subtle engagement with anti-slavery emerged from a culture in which women were established as devotional writers and teachers. The move away from a perception of a rather undifferentiated evangelicalism towards a deeper understanding of local denominational cultures will illuminate the terms of women’s engagement with anti-slavery and the wider missionary reform movement of which it was a part. This may enable a more nuanced understanding of the impact of evangelical nonconformity upon nineteenth-century British women and their politics.

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4 The Dissenting Voice of Elizabeth Heyrick: An Exploration of the Links Between Gender, Religious Dissent, and Anti-Slavery Radicalism Clare Midgley

One striking feature of the history of abolitionism is the leading role played by an English woman from a dissenting religious background in a crucial challenge to the all-male national leadership of the British anti-slavery movement, a challenge that set in motion debates that led to a fundamental shift in abolitionist policy in both Britain and the United States. This was the outspoken attack by Elizabeth Heyrick on the policy of amelioration and gradual emancipation that had been adopted by the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain at its foundation in 1823. Heyrick, who published her pamphlet Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition in 1824, came from a provincial English family of rational dissenters but became a Quaker by convincement, and this paper explores the relationship between her involvement in these two strands of religious dissent and her articulation of a dissenting political voice within the British antislavery movement. In particular, it elucidates the ways in which Heyrick’s gendered religious identity underpinned her willingness to challenge the authority of the male leadership of the national movement. Despite a long-standing interest among scholars in exploring the relationship between religion and British anti-slavery, the connections between women’s antislavery activism and their religious beliefs and denominational affiliations has remained under-explored. One reason for this is that during the late 1980s and early 1990s, when the foundational studies of British women’s anti-slavery activism were written,1 the dominant historiography in the emerging field of modern 1 Louis Billington and Rosamund Billington, ‘“A burning zeal for righteousness”: Women in the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1820–1860’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different.

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British women’s history emphasized religion as a confining rather than a potentially liberating force in women’s lives. Gail Malmgreen’s edited collection on Religion in the Lives of Englishwomen 1760–1930 (1986), which stressed female religious agency, had much less impact in shaping the field than Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (1987), with its focus on evangelical Protestantism as a largely repressive force in women’s lives.2 Over the past decade, however, women’s religious agency has become the focus of increasing scholarly attention among historians of nineteenth-century British women.3 This is thus a propitious point at which to revisit the story of women’s involvement in the British anti-slavery movement. Elizabeth Heyrick provides a particularly interesting case study in this regard, both because of the importance of her tract Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition in radicalizing the transatlantic anti-slavery movement and because she moved from rational dissent to Quakerism in the period between her youthful support of the campaign to abolish the slave trade in the 1790s, and her emergence as an outspoken anti-slavery pamphleteer in the 1820s. Kenneth Corfield’s portrait of Heyrick as a ‘radical Quaker’ published some twenty-five years ago, noted that ‘a nonconformist conscience could provide a base for political radicalism of various kinds in the nineteenth century, and Heyrick must be placed in that context’. He made a number of persuasive observations about the relationship between her gender, Quakerism, and antislavery radicalism, providing a valuable addition to anti-slavery scholarship which had shown the importance of Quaker men to forging the British and transatlantic anti-slavery movements.4 However, Corfield did not explore the significance of Heyrick’s roots in rational dissent to her anti-slavery activism. Moreover, research into modern British women’s history produced over the two decades has provided

Women’s Politics, 1800–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 82–111; Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others. British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992); Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery. The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992). 2 Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of Englishwomen, 1760–1930 (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987). 3 ‘Between Rationality and Revelation: Women, Faith and Public Roles in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, Special Issue of Women’s History Review, 7:2 (1998); Sue Morgan (ed.), Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 1750–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); Sue Morgan and Jacqueline deVries (eds), Women, Gender and Religious Cultures in Britain, 1800–1940 (London: Routledge, 2010). 4 Kenneth Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker’, in Malmgreen, Religion in the Lives of Englishwomen, 58. For discussion of Quaker activists see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 213–54; Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital. Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 391–450.

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new resources for contextualizing and interpreting Heyrick’s radical abolitionism. We now have a much fuller picture of the nature and extent of middle-class women’s engagements in public life and politics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and a much more nuanced understanding of the ways in which their lives were affected by dominant gender ideology.5 Recent work has also provided deeper insights into the gendered religious cultures of Quakerism, rational dissent and Unitarianism (which emerged out of rational dissent and latitudinarian Anglicanism at this period). On the one hand, it has become clear that both Quakerism, with its tradition of female ministry, and rational dissent and early Unitarianism, with their emphasis on the importance of female education, provided openings for women to voice their views on spiritual, intellectual, and even political matters. On the other hand, it is evident that within these religious groups female institutional authority was very limited, and that, with memberships drawn mainly from the commercial, manufacturing, and professional middle classes, they were not immune to the impact of the spread of the evangelical ideology of ‘separate spheres’.6 A fresh look at the relationship between gender, religious dissent, and anti-slavery radicalism in the life of Elizabeth Heyrick offers the opportunity to develop on the insights offered by this recent scholarship and increase our understanding of the religious wellsprings of anti-slavery activism. Elizabeth Heyrick, née Coltman (1769-1831), was born in Leicester in the English Midlands, at that time, ‘a country town, dependent upon its immediate country side, very local in its outlook’.7 Elizabeth’s father John 5 Rendall, Equal or Different; Eileen Janes Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity. Women’s SelfRepresentation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760–1860. The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); Harriet Guest, Small Change. Women, Learning, Patriotism, 1750–1810 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000); Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power. British Politics, 1750 to Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation. Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); Clare Midgley, Feminism and Empire. Women’s Activism in Imperial Britain, 1790–1860 (London: Routledge, 2007). 6 Sandra Stanley Holton, Quaker Women. Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930 (London: Routledge, 2007); Helen Plant, ‘ “Subjective Testimonies”: Women Quaker Ministers and Spiritual Authority in England: 1750–1825’, Gender & History, 15 (2003), 296–318; Helen Plant, Unitarianism, Philanthropy and Feminism in York, 1782–1821: The Career of Catherine Cappe, Borthwick paper no. 103 (York: University of York, 2003); Helen Plant, ‘Gender and the Aristocracy of Dissent: a comparative study of the beliefs, status and roles of women in Quaker and Unitarian communities, 1770–1830, with particular reference to Yorkshire’, D.Phil. thesis (University of York, 2000); Elizabeth A. O’Donnell, ‘Woman’s Rights and Woman’s Duties. Quaker women in the nineteenth century, with specific reference to the north east monthly meeting of women Friends’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Sunderland, 2000); Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (Harlow: Addison, Wesley, Longman, 1998); Ruth Watts, ‘Rational Religion and Feminism: the Challenge of Unitarianism in the Nineteenth Century’, in Morgan, (ed.), Women, Religion and Feminism, 39–52. 7 A. Temple Patterson, Radical Leicester. A History of Leicester, 1780–1850 (Leicester: Leicester College, 1954), 3.

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Coltman (1727–1808) was a successful worsted hosiery manufacturer, a leading figure in what was the only large-scale industry in the town at the period; he was also a dedicated scholar and antiquary and a supporter of political reform. Her mother, Elizabeth, née Cartwright, was an accomplished amateur artist and poet, who corresponded with a network of literary men associated with her relative, London publisher and writer Robert Dodsley.8 Brian Harrison’s observation that ‘nineteenth-century reforms owe at least as much to the child’s conformity to parental dissidence as to his dissidence from parental conformity’9 provides a useful way into understanding Elizabeth Coltman Heyrick’s evolution as anti-slavery activist. The Coltmans, along with other wealthy local manufacturing families, were members of the congregation of the Great Meeting in East Bond Street. The Great Meeting, built by Presbyterians and Independents in 1708, was the hub of the Protestant dissenting community in Leicester. In the eighteenth century a gulf had opened up within dissent between those who adhered to the traditional Calvinist belief in the innate sinfulness of humans, and a punitive God who chose only the few for salvation, and rational dissenters who, influenced by Enlightenment thought, developed the image of a more benevolent God and stressed the religious importance of benevolence towards one’s fellow human beings. Towards the end of the eighteenth century rational dissent became identified with political radicalism: the ethics of benevolence were extended to support for the ‘rights of man’ at the time of the American and French Revolutions. Heyrick’s parents were part of this group of rational dissenters, and her father was a political radical and a supporter of the campaign against the slave trade.10 Heyrick’s upbringing in a family of rational dissenters was clearly an important source of her anti-slavery radicalism. It does not, however, explain her greater radicalism in comparison to her brothers, who took a much more cautious position on both domestic political reform and anti-slavery. Nor does it account for her public activism, which contrasted with her mother’s Isobel Grundy, ‘Heyrick, Elizabeth (1769-1831)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); David L. Wykes, ‘The Reluctant Businessman: John Coltman of St Nicholas Street, Leicester (1727–1808)’, Transactions of the Leicestershire Archaeological and Historical Society, 69 (1995), 71–85; Catherine Hutton, ‘Hasty sketch of the Coltman family’, 1802, Coltman MSS, 15D57, 387, Leicestershire Collection, Record Office for Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland (henceforth, ROLLR); Obituary of John Coltman, Esq., The Gentleman’s Magazine, February 1808, 181. 9 Brian Harrison, ‘A Genealogy of Reform in Modern Britain’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform (Folkestone: Wm Dawson & Sons, 1980), 134. 10 Patterson, Radical Leicester, 3, 16, 100; Wykes, ‘The Reluctant Businessman’, 75, 79, 84; Catherine Hutton Beale (ed.), Catherine Hutton and Her Friends (Birmingham, 1895), 86, 93; Samuel Coltman, ‘Memoirs and letters of the Coltman family’, III, Coltman MSS, 15D57, 450, Leicester Collection, ROLLR; Hymns and Poems of the Late Mrs Susanna Watts, with a Few Recollections of Her Life (Leicester, 1842); Susanna Watts Scrapbook, 1834, MSS in ROLLR. I am grateful to David Wykes for clarifying my understanding of John Coltman’s religious position. 8

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domestic focus. What then is the explanation for her dissidence from her mother’s model of femininity and her brothers’ political positioning? A closer examination of her early shaping as a gendered individual within the culture of provincial dissent can help throw light on this. One important aspect of this upbringing related to the limited opportunities she had as a girl to access the educational and professional resources open to her brothers. Among rational dissenters emphasis on women’s equal intellectual capacities combined with a stress on the primacy of women’s roles as companionate wives and nurturing mothers. Girls were thus not believed to need the same access to formal education as their brothers.11 Heyrick’s father had been educated at a dissenting academy for boys in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire.12 Its headmaster, Dr John Aikin, was a leading classics scholar whose own daughter, Anna Letitia Barbauld (1743–1825) was encouraged by her father to express her opinions. However, unlike her younger brother, she was not able to become a pupil at his school and she struggled to persuade him to teach her classics.13 Similarly, Heyrick’s brothers were sent away to receive a grammar school education, whereas Heyrick stayed at home. This situation in families of rational dissenters set up the potential for gifted young women to become frustrated by a sense of talents encouraged but never fully developed. Heyrick herself was a talented artist but was not given the opportunity to develop her talent fully. Family friend Catherine Hutton, in her unpublished sketch of the Coltman family written in 1802, wrote that at fifteen Elizabeth ‘discovered such a taste for painting, that her father hesitated whether he should not send her to London, to cultivate her talent, under the best masters’. However, concerns about feminine respectability overrode this impulse: ‘But, considering painting, as a profession, respectable only when distinguished by excellence, he gave up the chance of her becoming an Angelica Kauffman, for the more probable one of her making a good wife’. Heyrick’s mother, who had herself prioritized her domestic roles over her artistic talents, backed up her husband by actively seeking to shift her daughter’s focus from ‘high’ art to the domestic arts: ‘Her inclination for painting was therefore discouraged, and her mother endeavoured to initiate her into the mysteries of good housekeeping, and care’.14 The letters and reminiscences of Catherine Hutton (1756–1846), member of a prominent Birmingham family of rational dissenters and a life-long friend of Heyrick’s mother, throw further light on the balancing act between selfassertion and self-effacement practised by young women from well-to-do 11 Kathryn Gleadle, ‘British Women and the Radical Politics of the Late Nonconformist Enlightenment, c.1780–1830’, in Vickery, Women, Privilege and Power, 127. 12 Beale, Catherine Hutton, 6. 13 William McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld. Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 30–4. 14 Hutton, ‘Hasty sketch of the Coltman family’.

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dissenting families in the circles within which Heyrick was raised. Hutton, who remained single, devoted years to caring for sick parents and only embarked on a career as a novelist and writer when she was in her fifties.15 Her stream of witty letters to women friends express forthright views on religion and politics—including her enthusiasm for her new minister Joseph Priestley, the leading scientist and political radical who was one of the major forces in the development of British Unitarianism. However, she learned at a young age that it was politic to hide her intelligence and to defer to men when in mixed company. She writes of her conviction that men do not find opinionated women attractive: ‘with my associates in general I took care not to display the little knowledge I possessed; I wished not to be admired, but to be loved; and I was convinced that to be found or thought superior was not the way to be loved’.16 Her own mother had held up Heyrick’s mother ‘as the model of all earthly perfection’17 and she clearly took this to heart. Praising Mrs Coltman in an obituary in the Monthly Magazine, she observed approvingly that though ‘born with endowments that might have distinguished her from the rest of her sex, and qualified her to shine either in a literary circle or an exhibition of the works of painters’ she had ‘devoted her whole time after her marriage to the service of her Maker, the duties of her family, and the mitigation of distress in those around her’. She concluded: ‘in the several relations of daughter, wife and mother, her conduct was exemplary’.18 Elizabeth Coltman’s view that domesticity should be a married woman’s overriding focus was conveyed in a letter she wrote to Heyrick at the time of her marriage. In this she advised her that ‘Wife’s chief ambition ought to be to shine in the eyes of her Husband’ and urged her to be industrious, rise early, set the house in order and read the Bible.19 Other contemporary women from rational dissenting backgrounds, however, were less willing to conform to restrictive notions of female roles, and this wider circle of women offered Heyrick a sense of alternative potential futures that involved engagement with the public sphere and political issues. Anna Letitia Barbauld became a well-known poet and educationalist and published widely read pamphlets on controversial religious and political issues including slavery.20 Catherine Cappe of York wrote for Unitarian periodicals and publicly encouraged female involvement in institutional philanthropy at a 15 Rosemary Mitchell, ‘Hutton, Catherine (1756–1846)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 16 Catherine Hutton Beale (ed.), Reminiscences of a Gentlewoman of the Last Century: Letters of Catherine Hutton (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1891), 8. 17 Beale, Reminiscences, 134. 18 Beale, Reminiscences, 152. 19 Copy of letter from Mrs Coltman to her daughter Mrs John Herrick [sic], Spring 1789 in Coltman, ‘Memoirs and letters of the Coltman family’, II. 20 Mellor, Mothers of the Nation, 78–80; Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians, 80–7.

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national level. As Helen Plant notes, as a Unitarian she promoted female philanthropy not through the evangelical frame of women’s mission but as ‘a route through which specifically female forms of political identity and public virtue could be claimed and expressed’.21 Others within rational dissenting circles went further, openly questioning the limitations on women’s lives and advocating women’s rights.22 Rational dissenting circles, then, provided Heyrick with a complex mix of female role models. However, women could not become ministers or attend the dissenting academies. They were also generally excluded from membership of the formal cultural societies in which rational dissenters played such a leading role, though they were sometimes permitted to attend lectures. Gleadle notes that Heyrick and her friend Mrs Reid were excited to become the first women to attend a series of science lectures at the Literary and Philosophical Society in Leicester, of which Heyrick’s father was a founding member. As a young woman Heyrick also emulated Catherine Hutton in beginning to develop a network of female correspondents of the kind that provided a lively space outside the male-dominated culture of formal societies for nonconformist provincial women to discuss intellectual, literary, and political issues. In Heyrick’s case her network included Mary Scott, who was also from a rational dissenting family and who was the author of the Female Advocate (1774), a poem that asserted women’s intellectual equality with men by celebrating historical and contemporary women of learning, including the enslaved African-American poet Phillis Wheatley.23 Heyrick’s life as a lively and accomplished young woman in the culturally and politically engaged milieu of provincial rational dissent came to an abrupt end on her marriage at the age of nineteen. Elizabeth clearly threw herself into all her projects with a passion, and it is possible that her parents’ blocking of her self-expression as an artist contributed to her rather impulsive love match with John Heyrick, an unstable, financially profligate, and intensely jealous man. Heyrick, an Anglican, and the eldest son of the town clerk, soon gave up his legal career in Leicester for an army commission and the couple led an itinerant life, with Elizabeth spending time living in unhappy isolation in the married quarters of army barracks. When John died suddenly of a heart attack in 1797, he left Elizabeth a childless widow of only twenty-eight.24 Elizabeth’s marriage to an Anglican, whose father was a key figure in the Tory-dominated Corporation of Leicester (the local government of the town, from which dissenters were excluded until the passing of the Municipal 21

Plant, Unitarianism, Philanthropy and Feminism in York, 23. Gleadle, ‘British Women and Radical Politics’, 123–51. Gleadle, ‘British Women and Radical Politics’, 131–3, 147–8; Ferguson, Subject to Others, 127–9. 24 A Brief Sketch of the Life and Labours of Mrs Elizabeth Heyrick (Leicester, 1862); Hutton, ‘Hasty sketch of the Coltman family’. 22 23

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Reform Act in 1835), followed by her unsettled and roving life with her armyofficer husband, meant that she had made an early break from her family, local connections, and milieu of religious and political dissent. While she initially returned to her parents’ home on her husband’s death she was not content to slot back into her former life: she did not look for a new husband, nor did she opt for the typical life of an unmarried provincial middle-class woman, focused around caring, sociability, and ladylike accomplishments. Instead, to the consternation of family and friends, and following a period of mourning, social withdrawal, and deep spiritual introspection during which she kept a diary full of resolutions against self-indulgence, she began to explore the possibility of joining the Society of Friends. In 1798, on a stay in Hackney, Heyrick met distinguished members of the Society including Priscilla Hannah Gurney (1757–1828), a minister and cousin of the future prison reformer Elizabeth Gurney (later Fry). On 6 March 1799 she recorded in her diary a religious visit from Joseph Nicholson, an Irish Friend, and Mary Lloyd (d. 1821), the wife of Charles Lloyd (1748–1828), Quaker banker and philanthropist of Bingley Hall near Birmingham. Finally, in 1802, she was received into the Society of Friends at Leicester and adopted plain Quaker dress, a move which set her apart from wider society and from her own family in a publicly visible way.25 Becoming a Quaker by convincement was accompanied by another major decision: rather than simply living on the allowance given to her by her father she resolved to train as a teacher and set up a school for girls, one of the few occupational openings for middle-class women at this period. In 1802 she travelled to York in order to gain experience as a schoolteacher. There she became friends with William Tuke (1732–1822), a wealthy Quaker merchant who in 1793 had founded the York Retreat, an asylum pioneering humane treatment of the insane, and who provided her with an inspiring role model of the Quaker as humanitarian activist.26 York was also significant as a locale where women played a particularly influential role in the Society of Friends at this period. William Tuke’s wife and daughters were themselves prominent itinerant preachers, who travelled around the country addressing public meetings drawn from all classes and both sexes.27 Combining marriage and motherhood with the exercise of public spiritual authority and itinerant ministry, the Tukes presented Heyrick with a very different model of womanhood to that provided by her mother. 25 Coltman, ‘Memoirs and letters of the Coltman family’, III; Reproduction of manuscript life of Elizabeth Heyrick in Beale, Catherine Hutton, 185. 26 Letter from Mrs Heyrick to her mother Mrs Coltman, York, 15 October 1802, in Coltman MSS, 15D57, 64. 27 Sheila Wright, ‘Quakerism and Its Implications for Quaker Women: The Women Itinerant Ministers of York Meeting, 1780–1840’, in W. J. Sheils and Diana Wood (eds), ‘Women in the Church’, Studies in Church History, 27 (1990), 403–14; see also Sheila Wright, Friends in York. The Dynamics of Quaker Revival (Keele: Keele University Press, 1995).

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The attraction of a possible future role as a minister is part of the explanation that Catherine Hutton gave for Heyrick becoming a Quaker: Methodism might have done; but Quakerism presented itself, which was preferable in two respects: First in enjoining a more savage renunciation of all her taste and elegant accomplishments. Secondly . . . it presented a distant prospect of displaying her fine sense and elocution; for, if she continues a quaker, she will certainly one day be a distinguished speaker. She has the most earnest desire to do right. . . . 28

Hutton gives us the picture of a young woman in whom a strong tendency to self-denial is combined with a fervent desire for self-expression, a woman who is given to extreme actions but is also full of good sense, who is both verbally eloquent and seriously principled, and who has the potential to make an impact in the wider world. In the event, as we will see, Heyrick was to put these talents and qualities to use not through the channel of religious ministry, as Hutton had predicted, but through other forms of engagement with the world outside the home. Hutton herself was uneasy with the ways Quaker women moved beyond the domestic sphere, as she revealed when discussing an encounter in 1788 with a Quaker lady who entered into a public dispute with a gentleman about the slave trade: At first I joined her, as I look upon all men as my fellow creatures, be their colour as it may; but I soon drew off and left the cause to her, who was willing to support it. I determined very early in life never to enter into a dispute. I had never seen one person convinced by his opponent, but I had seen many offended, besides I always thought it unamiable in woman. Our Quaker thought otherwise, and she displayed much zeal and sound argument, while fifty people were listening with the most profound attention, till the contest grew so warm that the gentleman recollected he ought rather to submit to a lady than quarrel with her.29

Hutton’s agreement with the woman’s anti-slavery views was at war with her discomfort with a woman drawing attention by engaging in public debate with a man. This is of course exactly what Heyrick herself came to do when she published Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition. It is likely she had heard Hutton’s tale many years earlier, creating an association in her mind between Quakerism, women’s participation in public debate, and advocacy of anti-slavery. Gleadle, noting that a number of radical women became Quakers at the turn of the century, suggests that reaction against the French Revolution and particularly intense hostility to radical women in the wake of William Godwin’s publication of the memoirs of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798 may have led them to turn to a religious group ‘where female expression was valued, but less Hutton, ‘Hasty sketch of the Coltman family’. Letter from Catherine Hutton to Mrs Andre, Blackpool, 16 Oct 1788, as quoted in Beale, Reminiscences, 62–3. 28 29

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politically directed’.30 For Heyrick, however, conversion was followed not by entry into female ministry but rather by greater engagement with public life and political issues: she embarked on a career in education in 1802, became a campaigning pamphleteer from 1805 onwards, and finally emerged as an antislavery activist in the 1820s. Gleadle’s explanation also ignores the deep spiritual crises which often impelled individual women’s religious conversion. Heyrick’s path into Quakerism was through a period of prolonged grieving and spiritual introspection following the death of her husband in 1797, and has interesting parallels with the spiritual path of her contemporary Hannah Spurr Kilham (1774–1832). As Alison Twells has pointed out, Kilham’s early rebellion against her comfortable Anglican family background was manifested in conversion to Methodism, followed by her marriage in 1797 to the leader of the secessionist New Connexion, Alexander Kilham, a move which aligned her to radical dissent at the very time radical women were becoming viewed with increasing hostility. After only a short period of marriage she was, like Heyrick, left a widow, and two years later her baby daughter died of smallpox. Like Heyrick, she found relief from her grief when she attended Quaker meetings, discovering a community within which she could deal with her private loss and where she was free to follow the ‘inner light’ of God.31 She began her long period of philanthropic and missionary work among poor women in Sheffield, Ireland, and West Africa following her conversion to Quakerism in 1802. Twells’s description of Kilham as ‘a woman absolutely assured in her possession of spiritual equality, of her right to stand up to any authority in the process of being true to herself and to God’ seems equally applicable to Heyrick.32 Heyrick’s outspoken stance on the rights of the poor and the enslaved built on her earlier courageous personal decisions to become a Quaker and to open a school in the face of family disapproval. She wrote to her mother from York in 1802, asserting her right as an adult woman to make her own decisions rather than bow to family or social pressure: The rest of my family and friends disagreeing with me in opinion, is no reason why my own judgement is to be discarded as a useless thing—We are not all endowed with equal degrees of reason and discernment; but, when arrived at years of maturity, every individual must govern his actions according to the measure he has received, and not by that of another . . . 33 Gleadle, ‘British Women and Radical Politics’, 142 and 352, note 114. Alison Twells, ‘ “Let us begin well at home”: Class, Ethnicity and Christian Motherhood in the Writings of Hannah Kilham, 1774–1832’, in Yeo, Radical Femininity, 25–51. 32 Twells, ‘ “Let us begin well at home” ’, 32. 33 Letter from Elizabeth Heyrick to her mother Mrs Coltman, York, 15 October 1802, Coltman MSS, 15D57, 64. My thanks to Jess Jenkins of LLRRO for sharing with me her unpublished paper, ‘A woman before her time—Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831)’, which drew my attention to this passage. 30 31

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Heyrick went on to challenge her mother’s model of femininity that placed domesticity above all other concerns: I shall find no difficulty in composing my mind to returning home and to a true value and enjoyment of my domestic blessings, but I shall not so easily loose [sic] the conviction that I have both inclination and capacity for more active employments than those which my situation there can furnish me with . . . 34

In following her own religious and career path in the face of family disapproval, Heyrick was supported by the close network of the Society of Friends. Her school project was aided by an offer of financial help from John Priestman, and she received spiritual guidance at this time from Mary Capper (1755–1845), a minister based in Birmingham. Capper’s own memoirs give a vivid picture of the close group of women Friends who sustained her in her own religious journey when she herself experienced a painful breach with her Anglican parents after she embraced Quakerism. Clearly empathizing with Heyrick’s inner struggles of faith and outer struggles with her mother, Capper wrote to her in 1806 counselling her to follow the dictates of her own conscience—the inner voice of God: ‘in all thy doubts seek the power of “within”, silently, patiently wait, resign thyself as thou art to the disposal of a gracious Creator’.35 The nature of Quaker organization and social interaction encouraged Quaker women to form intense and long-standing spiritual friendships, and with such support converts to Quakerism like Capper and Heyrick were able to avoid social isolation despite being outside the extensive kinship networks which were so important to members of the in-marrying group.36 Thus, if her family background in rational dissent had equipped Heyrick with a good education and sense of women’s worth as intellectual beings, becoming a Quaker by convincement involved her following the path of her own conscience over deference to the wishes of her family and social circle. This did not mean, however, that Heyrick became an advocate of women’s rights or presented Quaker women’s equal roles as ministers as the model for wider social equalities for women. Her Familiar Letters, Addressed to Children and Young Persons of the Middle Ranks (1811) provides an insight into her views at this time of proper gender relations among the middle classes. In a passage which reads at first sight as a classic exposition of ‘separate spheres’ and which has been quoted by Kenneth Corfield as evidence that Heyrick was not a feminist, she states: ‘If public offices, political transactions, commercial 34

Letter from Elizabeth Heyrick to her mother Mrs Coltman, York, 15 October 1802. Extracts from manuscript life of Elizabeth Heyrick reproduced in Beale, Catherine Hutton, 196; Letter from Mrs Heyrick to her mother Mrs Coltman, York, 15 October 1802; Katherine Backhouse (ed.), A Memoir of Mary Capper (London, 1847). 36 Sheila Wright, ‘ “Every Good Woman Needs a Companion of her Own Sex”: Quaker Women and Spiritual Friendship, 1750–1850’, in Morgan (ed.), Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain, 89–105; Holton, Quaker Women. 35

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exertions, be the province of man; the education of children, the order and oeconomy of the family, and the business of creating the pleasures of home, all devolve upon women’. However, for Heyrick, as for other women from rational dissenting, Unitarian, and Quaker backgrounds, a gendered division of labour did not imply female inequality but rather was the practical base for a companionate marriage. Heyrick makes no mention of wifely obedience or female subordination to their husbands, an essential component of ‘separate spheres’ for conservative evangelical Anglican ideologues like Clapham Sect member Hannah More. Rather she stresses that men’s and women’s social roles are different but complementary: ‘the grand principles of human duty are the same for both sexes’ and ‘if a different sphere of action be assigned to each, it is in order that the harmony of the whole may be more complete’. She emphasizes that the roles of men and women are ‘of equal importance to the good of the whole’ and presents happiness as founded on mutual dependence between men and women, rather than female dependence on men. While she does not question ‘the powers and privileges which the appointments of Providence and the laws of society afford to man’, thus clearly distinguishing herself from those who followed Mary Wollstonecraft in presenting married women’s denial of legal rights as a form of slavery, she stresses that family life will be undermined if male power and privilege are ‘employed against women’.37 Heyrick is also in favour of young women being trained to play an active part in family businesses or entering areas of employment which are more suited to women than men, including making and selling female clothing and teaching girls.38 Labels like ‘feminist’ or ‘anti-feminist’ are thus too crude to encapsulate Heyrick’s views on the position of women, though she was closer on the spectrum to those who advocated women’s rights than to those who sought to enforce women’s social subordination to men. As a rational dissenter, she had been raised to believe in women’s equal intellectual capacity to men; in becoming a Quaker she had joined a group which put their belief in women’s spiritual equality into practice in their acceptance of female ministry. In instructing her nieces, she presented men’s and women’s roles as different but complementary and of equal value, an approach which was in line with mainstream Quaker views about gender roles, which stressed mutual support rather than wifely obedience in marriage.39 The promotion of female education and contribution to the debate on women’s social roles were not, however, to prove the main focus for Heyrick’s

37 Elizabeth Heyrick, Familiar Letters, Addressed to Children and Young Persons of the Middle Ranks (London, 1811), 30–1. 38 Heyrick, Familiar Letters, 73–6 (quote at 74). For a discussion of women’s involvement in family businesses at this period see Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 272–316. 39 O’Donnell, ‘Woman’s Rights and Woman’s Duties’, chapter 4, 101–40.

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energies, and her self-assertion emerged not through advocacy of women’s rights or through female ministry but rather through her outspoken writings as a radical and reformist pamphleteer and, most strikingly, in her engagement in the anti-slavery cause. From 1805 she began to express publicly her opinions on a series of controversial issues, anonymously publishing the first of over twenty pamphlets opposing war, animal cruelty, poor prison conditions, corporal and capital punishment, low wages, and the oppression of the poor.40 By the time she wrote her 1824 pamphlet Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, which gained the widest attention of all her works, she already had nearly twenty years of experience as a pamphleteer.41 Though Heyrick’s emergence as a public anti-slavery campaigner dates to the 1820s, her interest in the movement can be traced back to the 1790s, stimulated by local activism against the slave trade in Leicester and by her family’s involvement in the cause; her interest was then sustained through the first decades of the nineteenth century through both family connections and her new Quaker contacts. In the early 1790s the campaign to end the slave trade attracted considerable support from across the religious spectrum in the town thanks in part to the influence of the local MP, Thomas Babington, whose home at Rothley Temple was one of the main hubs of the evangelical Anglican Clapham Sect that led the parliamentary campaign against the slave trade. In Leicester, as elsewhere, the campaign involved the setting up of a local committee, public meetings and petitions to Parliament.42 Babington was one of the directors of the Sierra Leone Company, formed by the Sect in 1791 in an attempt to combat the slave trade by setting up a British colony in West Africa settled by freed slaves; it was a venture to which Heyrick’s father gave his financial support.43 Babington’s wife Lydia, herself a subscriber to the national Abolition Society, was the sister of For a thoughtful discussion of these pamphlets see Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick’, 53-8. I have identified the following seven anti-slavery pamphlets authored by Elizabeth Heyrick, all of which were published anonymously: Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; or, an Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting rid of West-Indian Slavery (London, 1824); No British Slavery; or, an Invitation to the People to Put a Speedy End to It (London, 1824); An Appeal, Not to the Government, but to the People of England, on the Subject of West Indian Slavery (London, 1824); An Enquiry, Which of the Two Parties is Best Entitled to Freedom? The Slave or the Slave-Holder? From an Impartial Examination of the Conduct of Each Party, at the Bar of Public Justice (London, 1824); Letters on the Necessity of a Prompt Extinction of British Colonial Slavery: Chiefly Addressed to the More Influential Classes. To Which are Added, Thoughts on Compensation (London, 1826); Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women (Leicester, 1828); Apology for Ladies Anti-Slavery Associations (London, 1828), reprinted in serialized form in Genius of Universal Emancipation, 3rd series, 2, no. 7 (December 1831), 110–12; 2, no. 8 (January 1832), 133–5; no. 9 (February 1832), 149–52. 42 Patterson, Radical Leicester, 91; J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery. The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 106, 115; Ernest Marshall Howse, Saints in Politics: ‘Clapham Sect’ and the Growth of Freedom (London: Allen and Unwin, 1952). 43 Wykes, ‘The Reluctant Businessman’, 84. 40 41

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Zachary Macaulay, who became the first governor of the new colony.44 In the 1820s Macaulay was to become a leading figure in the Anti-Slavery Society and a sympathetic adviser to Elizabeth Heyrick as she attempted to get the national committee to consider her arguments for immediate emancipation of slaves.45 Babington was also a strong proponent of the boycott of slave-grown sugar, which gained widespread support in Leicester: a newspaper claimed in 1792 that the inhabitants of Leicester were ‘nearly unanimous in rejecting the use of sugar and rum’.46 Elizabeth Heyrick was herself to become an enthusiastic advocate of abstention in the 1820s, arguing that it was the most effective means of bringing about the immediate end of colonial slavery.47 Continuing interest in the anti-slavery cause is evident in the Coltman family even after the lull in popular anti-slavery activism in Leicester and elsewhere after 1792, as reaction against the French Revolution and the outbreak of war with France led to a government clampdown on all forms of public activism. A revival of petitioning in 1796, when Wilberforce unsuccessfully introduced a bill to end the slave trade, was the occasion of a letter to Heyrick from her brother John discussing their mutual support for slave emancipation and his conviction of the need to again rouse the public against the slave trade as the only way to bring about its end.48 Heyrick’s concern about slavery was probably further stimulated in 1801 on hearing from her parents about their experience of visiting a ship used in the slave trade whilst on holiday in Liverpool—an incident recorded by Catherine Hutton, who wrote of her shock at realizing how narrow and crowded a space the naked and chained slaves were confined in.49 There was a revival in abolitionist activity in Leicester in 1807 in the leadup to the successful passage of the Abolition Act and in 1809, Heyrick’s mother recorded her excitement at spending an hour in conversation with Thomas Clarkson, leader of the popular campaign against the slave trade, and her enthusiasm on reading his book on the history of the abolitionist campaign.50 There was another flurry of anti-slavery activism in Leicester in 1814 when a town meeting petitioned for the abolition of the slave trade to be raised at the

44 List of the Society, Instituted in 1787, for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (London, 1788). 45 See Midgley, Women against Slavery, 114–15. 46 Howse, Saints in Politics, 41; Hampshire Chronicle, 30 January 1792, as quoted in Oldfield, Popular Politics, 140. 47 For a detailed consideration of the British abstention campaign, and Heyrick’s role in it, see Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 41–64. 48 Letter from J. Coltman, Jun., to his sister Mrs Heyrick, 1797, Coltman MSS, 15D57, 34. 49 Letter from Catherine Hutton to Thomas Hutton, Lancaster, 12 July 1801, as quoted in Beale (ed.), Reminiscences, 132. 50 Patterson, Radical Leicester, 91; Letter from Mrs Coltman to Miss Gifford, 3 September 1809, as quoted in Beale, Catherine Hutton and Her Friends, 146; Thomas Clarkson, A History of the Rise, Progress and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the Slave Trade by the British Parliament, 3 vols (London, 1808).

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peace conference that marked the end of the wars with France.51 However, it was only from 1823, with the launch of a new popular campaign focused on slave emancipation, that the main focus of Heyrick’s activism switched to antislavery. She was by now a long-standing member of the Society of Friends with access to a close-knit national network of co-religionists and an awareness of Quakers’ long commitment to the cause. Indeed, the earliest contacts that Heyrick had made in the Society of Friends were strong abolitionists. Mary Lloyd, the minister who had visited and counselled her in Leicester as she wrestled with her decision to join the Society of Friends, was married to Charles Lloyd, who was active in Birmingham in the campaign to abolish the slave trade and whose brother John Lloyd was a founder member of the national Abolition Committee. Quaker philanthropist William Tuke, whom Heyrick stayed with in York in 1802, was an active campaigner for the abolition of the slave trade.52 Priscilla Hannah Gurney, one of the first Quakers Heyrick met on a visit to London, was the cousin of John Joseph Gurney (1788–1847), a leading anti-slavery activist in Norwich, and brotherin-law and close friend of Thomas Fowell Buxton, who took over Wilberforce’s role as leading anti-slavery advocate in Parliament in 1823.53 The argument and rhetoric of Elizabeth Heyrick’s most influential pamphlet, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, drew both on her family roots in rational dissent and on the Quakerism she had adopted as an adult. Published anonymously, it was initially thought by many to be the work of a man. Indeed, Heyrick did not adopt a female subject position in arguing her case. She does not, for example, draw on the evangelical ideology of the period that presented women as guardians of public morality: instead she talks in genderneutral terms of ‘rights’ and ‘justice’. Nevertheless, her rhetoric and her outspoken stance were shaped by her position as a woman with roots in two distinct dissenting religious traditions. Heyrick’s argument for the immediate emancipation of enslaved Africans was couched in the language of rights: ‘The slave has a right to his liberty, a right which it is a crime to withhold’.54 Combating slave owners’ counterassertion of their own property rights in slaves, she argued that they had in fact defrauded slaves of their most just earthly inheritance, or birth-right, their liberty. She challenged any approach to the question of emancipation which placed equal weight on the interests of the planter and those of the slave, arguing that ‘the right of the slave, and the interest of the planter, are distinct questions’ and that ‘the liberation of the slave ought ever to be regarded as an 51

Patterson, Radical Leicester, 91. Anne Digby, ‘William Tuke’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 53 David E. Swift, John Joseph Gurney, Banker, Quaker and Reformer (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1962). 54 Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, 5. 52

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independent object; if it be deferred till the planter is sufficiently alive to his own interest to co-operate in the measure, we may for ever despair of its accomplishment’.55 In the face of arguments that slaves were not yet ready for freedom, she asserted that slavery was a continuing injustice which nothing can justify: ‘the detaining our West Indian slaves in bondage, is a continued acting of the same atrocious injustice which first kidnapped and tore them from their kindred and native soil, and robbed them of that sacred unalienable right which no considerations, how plausible so ever, can justify the withholding’.56 Heyrick’s language of rights echoes the radicalism of the 1790s and the writings of Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft on the rights of man and of woman. In the early 1790s support for religious and civil liberty were closely intertwined and leading rational dissenting ministers Richard Price and Joseph Priestley were outspoken supporters of both the American and the French revolutions. Heyrick’s own father, along with other leading members of the Great Meeting congregation, had in 1789 led local involvement in the campaign to repeal the Test and Corporation acts and gain civic equality for dissenters, in opposition to the Anglican and Tory Corporation of Leicester.57 David Turley, discussing the subtle differences between the three main religious-intellectual traditions articulating an anti-slavery appeal in Britain, has noted that tracts by rational dissenters in the late eighteenth century drew more explicitly than Quakers or evangelicals upon Enlightenment ideas and thus tended to use a more secular language focused on concern about ‘abrogations of a man’s “natural right” to liberty’.58 Heyrick’s argument marked a continuation of that politically radical approach, but took it into the very different political context of the 1820s. This was a period when many middleclass dissenters had adopted a more cautious reformism, an approach reflected in the policy of the amelioration and gradual abolition of slavery adopted by the leadership of the Anti-Slavery Society on its foundation in 1823. That same year Lucy Aikin, in her memoir of her father, Anna Letitia Barbauld’s brother John Aikin, wrote privately of the problems of writing openly about his radicalism in an age of reaction: ‘But think of the age we live in!—think of the Quarterly Review, the Saints, the clergy, the tories and the canters, and tell me now we can be at once safe, and honest!’59 Heyrick, in contrast to her brothers, did not share this generational shift away from radicalism, despite the impact of political repression on her own family. In 1792 her Tory brother-in-law prosecuted the local radical bookseller and newspaper editor Richard Philips, a close associate of her father’s, for 55

Heyrick, Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, 6. Heyrick, Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, 8. Patterson, Radical Leicester, 65. 58 D. Turley, The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860 (London: Routledge, 1991), 24. 59 Lucy Aikin to William Roscoe, 20 January 1823, 920, ROS 67, Liverpool Record Office, Liverpool Library, Liverpool, as quoted in McCarthy, Anna Letitia Barbauld, xv. 56 57

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selling seditious literature including Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.60 The Revolution Club in Leicester was disbanded and replaced by the Constitutional Society, only for this too to be disbanded in 1793, marking the quashing of the radical activity in the town in which Heyrick’s father had been so heavily involved.61 A 1796 letter written by John Coltman to his sister reveals the divergent perspectives of the two siblings in the face of this repression. John stated: ‘I am now going to talk about our Rulers—don’t however imagine any Jacobinical or Seditious sentiment is coming—However we may disagree respecting the freedom of White men, on the question of Negro emancipation we are agreed’. John goes on to state his belief that the public again needs to be aroused to bring about the end of the slave trade as ‘nothing but the people themselves can wipe out this foul stain from our national escutheon [sic]’.62 Heyrick and her brother shared a view of the need for public action to end the slave trade, but differed in their stance on domestic politics. This was a period when radicalism of all descriptions came under scrutiny and exacerbated differences amongst reformers. Rational dissenters were branded Jacobins and many who had earlier been sympathetic to radicalism began to adopt more cautious political positions. In 1794 Manchester abolitionist and political radical Thomas Walker, who was tried and acquitted that year of sedition, complained of his disillusion with dissenters who ‘through fear or some other motive . . . have been so strongly the advocates of an Overstrained Moderation that they have rather been the enemies than the friends of those who have ventured the most and effected the most for the rights of the people’.63 Evidence of such caution is also evident in a letter Catherine Hutton wrote that year: ‘I am so far a Democrat that I am a friend of the people while they are under due subjection, and I take offence at hearing them called the swinish multitude; but God preserve me from being under the government of the people. Of all tyrants, that many-headed monster is the worst’.64 Elizabeth Heyrick, in holding on to her political radicalism in 1796 when many were distancing themselves from their families’ radical pasts, and when public condemnation of radical women was particularly virulent, demonstrated a willingness to maintain an independent stance on political matters. Her stance suggested that she valued adherence to political principle over political expediency or class interest, a position that foreshadowed her later outspoken advocacy of immediate emancipation for enslaved Africans. 60

Patterson, Radical Leicester, 65–74. Patterson, Radical Leicester, 72–4. 62 Letter from J. Coltman, Jun., to his sister Mrs Heyrick, 1796, Coltman MSS, 15D57, 34. 63 Thomas Walker, Review of Some Political Events in Manchester (Manchester, 1794), 125, as quoted in E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 57. 64 Letter from Catherine Hutton to Mrs Andre, Bennett’s Hill, 27 February 1794, as quoted in Beale (ed.), Reminiscences, 115. 61

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By 1817–19 there is evidence that Heyrick’s continuing political radicalism did not simply involve the combination of support for civic and religious rights earlier advocated by her father but also encompassed the economic rights of the labouring poor. This stance set her directly at odds with her brothers, and involved making analogies between the condition of the working class and the condition of colonial slaves which were in contrast to middle-class abolitionists’ tendency to condemn the slave labour system while idealizing ‘free’—waged— labour. While her brother John opposed his employees’ attempts to organize for higher wages, Heyrick wrote a series of pamphlets advocating better wages and the right to strike.65 As a woman, of course, she had not had the opportunity taken up by her brother to become directly involved in the family hosiery business, so she was in the position of being able to look at the issues slightly from the outside. It was from such a positioning above worldly commercial concerns that dissenting middle-class women were encouraged to influence privately their male relatives on moral matters—as is evident in the appeal to women by the abolition society of Manchester in the 1790s.66 However, Heyrick went far beyond the exertion of private moral influence, making her criticisms public and couching them in the language of rights rather than that of morality, attacking the laissez-faire approach to political economy adhered to by her father and other middle-class dissenters of the period.67 Her political position now bore more resemblance to that of working-class radicals. Heyrick’s Exposition of One Principal Cause of the National Distress, published in 1817, which argued that distress among factory workers would be most speedily relieved by an immediate advance in wages and expressed her conviction that ‘no timid, reluctant half-measures, must be resorted to:—no gradual emancipation’ anticipates the language of her call for immediate, not gradual, emancipation of colonial slaves in 1824, evidence that her radical abolitionism was an integral part of her broader radical politics.68 In contrast, her brother John adopted a cautious position on both colonial slavery and domestic politics. He was a member of the committee of the Leicester Auxiliary Anti-Slavery Society which that year argued against immediate emancipation on the grounds that ‘universal experience shews, that in the body politic, no less in the natural, inveterate diseases admit only a slow and gradual cure’.69 Her other brother, Samuel, was also clearly a supporter of this more cautious anti-slavery line: he wrote to his wife in 1824 Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick’, 53–9. See Midgley, Women against Slavery, 22. 67 John Seed, ‘Theologies of Power: Unitarianism and the Social Relations of Religious Discourse, 1800–50’, in R. J. Morris (ed.), Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth-Century Towns (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), 135–42. 68 Elizabeth Heyrick, Exposition of One Principal Cause of the National Distress, particularly in Manufacturing Districts; with some Suggestions for its Removal (London, 1817), 29. 69 The Committee of the Leicestershire Auxiliary Anti-Slavery Society, An Address on the State of Slavery in the West India Islands (Leicester, 1824), 20–1. 65 66

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urging her to inform his sister about the scheme of gradual slave emancipation adopted by the Spanish government.70 If the roots of Heyrick’s anti-slavery stance can be traced to her rational dissenting family background, what explains her greater radicalism than that of her brothers? Does her conversion to Quakerism help provide an explanation? By the 1810s, when she began to write radical pamphlets on the rights of the poor, she was already a Quaker, and her membership of this religious community, which was locally less economically and socially powerful than the dissenting manufacturing elite of the town, may have been a factor in addition to her gender which helped her distance herself from the economic interests of her birth family. However, as we have seen, there is evidence that she already had a more radical stance than her brothers even before converting to Quakerism; middle-class Quakers were no less susceptible than other dissenters to distancing themselves from political radicalism in the later 1790s; and many of the advocates of gradual abolition among the male leadership of the Anti-Slavery Society in the 1820s were Quakers. At first sight, then, Heyrick’s Quakerism does not help explain the radicalism of her 1824 pamphlet Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition. However, Helen Plant’s study of the position of women within Quakerism over the period between 1750 and 1825 can provide a more specific and gendered context within which to place Heyrick and understand the wellsprings of her antislavery stance. As Plant points out: Women’s emergence in the eighteenth century as the principal bearers of authentic spiritual leadership on the one hand, and the simultaneous denial to them of a commensurate role exercising disciplinary jurisdiction on the other, meant that both discursively and in practice there was discord in the relationship between gender and religious authority within the Society of Friends over this period.71

Plant goes on to note that, in the face of falling membership, prominent women Friends began to draw on their spiritual authority to challenge their subordination within the organizational structures of the Society. Joining the Society at this time, having links with several leading women ministers, and attending Yearly Meetings in London, Heyrick would have been aware of these developments. The language of Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition suggests that her challenge to the gradualist policy of the male leadership of the anti-slavery movement drew inspiration and strength from the way in which her Quaker 70 S. Coltman, Mt Weighton, 9 May 1824, to Mrs Mary Samuel Coltman, Coltman MSS, 15D57, 167. 71 Helen Plant, ‘ “Subjective testimonies” ’, 297–8. For the setting up of the Women’s Yearly Meeting see M. H. Bacon, ‘The Establishment of London Women’s Yearly Meeting: A Transatlantic Concern’, Journal of the Friends’ Historical Society, 57 (1992), 151-65.

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sisters challenged the male leadership of the Society of Friends at this time. In questioning the claim of the men’s Yearly Meeting in London of superior authority over the Women’s Yearly Meeting (which they had finally been granted permission to hold in 1784), women, Plant shows, ‘exploited Quaker beliefs about masculinity’. They maintained that the men’s assembly was marred by a worldly spirit since male Friends were failing to overcome their masculine desire for earthly wealth and status and drifting away from relying on the guidance of the inner light of God.72 In attacking the policy of the national committee of the Anti-Slavery Society Heyrick used very similar language: It had been well, for the poor oppressed African, had the asserters of his rights entered the lists against his oppressors, with more of the spirit of Christian combatants, and less of worldly politicians;—had they remembered, through the whole of the struggle, that it was a conflict of sacred duty, against sordid interests,—of right against might;—that it was, in fact, an holy war.73

While her rhetoric was not explicitly gendered, Heyrick adopted the same language which her Quaker sisters had found to be effective as a means to openly criticize their male leaders. It was a language which would have been both familiar and discomforting to the prominent Quaker men—James Cropper of Liverpool, William Allen and Samuel Hoare of London—who, having gained support for promoting measures to bring about the gradual abolition of slavery from the Yearly Meeting of the Society of Friends in 1822, in January 1823 had joined with a number of evangelical Anglicans to found the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions.74 The effectiveness of such a rhetorical approach lay in the fact that women were targeting an area of weakness acknowledged by male Friends themselves, as business success in manufacturing and banking led many to increased material wealth and social status and encouraged them to move beyond the enclosed and rather ascetic and inward-looking world of the Society of Friends into wider and far more ‘worldly’ social, professional, and political circles.75 Quaker men’s opposition to slavery, as Christopher Brown has noted, ‘drew substantially on [their] doubts about the pursuit of wealth’.76 Indeed, as David Brion Davis emphasizes in his discussion of the role of Quakers in the development of transatlantic abolitionist networks in the late eighteenth Plant, ‘ “Subjective testimonies” ’, 310, 311, 313. Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, 18. 74 Roger Anstey, ‘The Pattern Of British Abolitionism in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in Bolt and Drescher, Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform, 23–4. 75 Plant, ‘ “Subjective testimonies” ’, 308–9; James Walvin, The Quakers. Money and Morals (London: John Murray, 1997). 76 Brown, Moral Capital, 398. 72 73

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century, travelling ministers—some of whom were women—prepared the way for abolitionism ‘by exhorting influential Friends to cast off worldly contaminations, which included ties with slavery’. Successful Quaker businessmen, like the anti-slavery leader William Allen, found in social reform ‘a “spiritual” outlet that balanced worldly success’ and ‘furnished an inner test of moral worthiness’.77 Men like Allen, then, would clearly have been sensitive to Heyrick’s criticism that it was worldliness—the failure to treat anti-slavery as a ‘holy war’ and to rely on divine support—which had led to the failure of the abolitionist leadership to recognize that a policy of immediate emancipation was superior to one of gradual emancipation because it could rely on Divine, rather than only human, backing: Had the labours of the abolitionists been begun and continued on Divine, instead of human reliance, immediate emancipation would have appeared just as attainable as gradual emancipation. But, by substituting the latter object for the former . . . they have converted the great business of emancipation into an object of political calculation;—they have withdrawn it from Divine, and placed it under human patronage;—and disappointment and defeat, have been the inevitable consequence.78

Heyrick’s stress on the importance of following the dictates of conscience on the question of slavery by adhering to a principled position reflected Quaker emphasis on following the inner voice of God rather than the dictates of external social authority: the more simple and direct the reference to the will of our Divine Lawgiver, and that of his viceregent, conscience,—the more determined will be our resolution,—the more decisive our conduct.—‘How shall I do this great wickedness and sin against God’—will be the most influential of all considerations.79

Here again, Heyrick’s argument was not explicitly gendered, but it was written from the perspective of, and draws strength from, her position as a member of a religious group that gave women a public voice as important as that of men on matters of conscience and saw women as more able than worldly men to access the inner voice of God. A woman’s gendered social position could inform her public voice or philanthropic or political engagements even when she did not choose to write from an explicitly female viewpoint, and indeed did not even identify herself in print as the author of a pamphlet. This was perhaps particularly the case with dissenting women who remained at one remove from evangelicalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. For middle-class 77 78 79

Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 213–54, quotes at 231, 245. Heyrick, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, 18. Heyrick, Immediate, not Gradual Abolition, 18–19.

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evangelical women the creation of spheres of activity and influence beyond the domestic often involved stressing their femininity: on asserting women’s moral superiority and their particular empathy for suffering, on articulating ‘women’s mission’, on focusing their philanthropic, missionary, and antislavery work on women and children, and on writing for a predominantly female audience. In contrast women from backgrounds in rational dissent, confident in their intellectual equality with men and involved in radical circles which challenged the social and political status quo, had from the late 1780s engaged actively in political pamphleteering on issues such as the Test and Corporation Acts as well as the slave trade. Among Quakers, women’s spiritual equality was institutionally recognized by their acceptance as ministers, and married women ministers who travelled extensively away from home were held up as exemplary women rather than condemned as inadequate wives and mothers. Quaker stress on following the inner voice of conscience meant that women were encouraged to speak up against worldly male authority on matters of conscience. Heyrick’s roots in rational dissent, followed by her decision in early adulthood to become a Quaker by convincement, were crucial to the development of her dissenting anti-slavery voice. Involvement in these two dissenting religious traditions, combined with her own dissent from her family as she claimed her right as an adult to chart her own path in personal life, religious belief, occupation, and involvement in politics, developed in her the intellectual and spiritual resources on which she could draw in taking her dissenting anti-slavery stand in the 1820s. She did this not as an isolated individual, but rather in the context of strong precedents in the rational dissenting tradition for female engagement in political issues, and drawing strength from being part of a current support network of principled Quaker women who placed duty to God over duty to earthly forms of authority. While her feminism was not explicitly articulated, her assertion of women’s intellectual and spiritual equality with men and their right to speak out publicly on matters of conscience was implicit in her outspoken and uncompromising challenges to the gradualist anti-slavery stance of both her male family members involved in local anti-slavery activity and the leading male members of the Society of Friends who sat on the national committee of the Anti-Slavery Society. Heyrick, like American Quaker anti-slavery activist Angelina Grimké, wanted more than the equality accorded by Quakers to women preachers: she wanted a voice as a public reformer.80 She published her pamphlets anonymously and never gained the celebrity—or rather notoriety—acquired by Grimké as public Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘“The throne of my heart”: Religion, Oratory, and Transatlantic Community in Angelina Grimké’s Launching of Women’s Rights, 1828–1838’, in Kathryn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart (eds), Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Antislavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 132. 80

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anti-slavery lecturer and advocate of women’s rights. Nevertheless, she succeeded in initiating a debate that led by 1831 to a fundamental shift in the policy of the British anti-slavery leadership from promoting mitigation and gradual emancipation to campaigning for the immediate emancipation of colonial slaves. Rapidly issued in an American edition after its dispatch to Quaker abolitionists in Philadelphia, Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition also stimulated the emergence of the radical Garrisonian wing of the American anti-slavery movement in the 1830s.81

Midgley, Women against Slavery, 103–18; David Brion Davis, ‘The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Antislavery Thought’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49 (1962–3), 209–30; Merton L. Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Struggle for Negro Freedom (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1966), especially 106–7. 81

5 Immediatism, Dissent, and Gender: Women and the Sentimentalization of Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Appeals1 Carol Lasser

For over six decades, from the 1790s to the 1850s, religious women connected anti-slavery movements across the Atlantic, forging bonds of friendship, sharing strategies and resources, nurturing commitments, and constructing an international movement. Yet the transatlantic exchange of people and ideas was not without its problems. Concepts and discourses took on new shapes and meanings as they travelled long distances. Spoken in distinct political, social, and economic accents, by and for different constituencies, the meanings of words were transformed. This essay suggests a divergence between the justifications for female interventions offered early in the anti-slavery struggle by dissenting British women who drew on liberal political economy to explain strategies for enacting emancipation, and the American women who claimed their legacy while altering its emphasis. In the United States, religiously mobilized female anti-slavery advocates praised their predecessors but elided a key element of their analysis: the argument that emancipationists intervene, both rhetorically and materially, in the economics of the system to hasten its end. In the first third of the nineteenth century, women on both sides of the Atlantic laid a gendered claim to the moral right to participate in the A shorter version of this essay was presented as ‘British and American Women in Transatlantic Anti-Slavery Movements: Political Economy, and Politicized Sentimentality’, at ‘Best of Intentions? Abolition of the Transatlantic Slavery’, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, 20 December 2007, and appears under that title translated into Hebrew in Zmanim, 107 (2009), 20–9. I thank Elizabeth Clapp and Julie Jeffrey for their astute readings, and Stacey Robertson for good conversations about this material. I am particularly grateful for the assistance of Gary Kornblith. 1

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formation of public opinion in the name of ending slavery. But American women, who cited the campaigns waged previously by their transatlantic sisters to abstain from the consumption of the products of slave labour, did not invoke arguments about political economy and profitability, contentions popularized in particular by the rational dissenters who identified as Unitarians. Thus, even as they paid tribute to the groundbreaking work done by British abolitionist women in general, and dissenter Elizabeth Heyrick in particular, American women failed to grasp that the abstention strategy Heyrick promoted envisioned women consumers directly operating the levers of economic change. Heyrick told her countrywomen that, without male politicians or legislators, they could choose purchases for themselves and their households that would make slavery unprofitable. Heyrick formulated an immediatism that went beyond the conversion of the heart to demand that feelings be put into the service of practical market manipulation. Across the Atlantic, the core of American female abolitionism came to the movement bound together by evangelical beliefs emphasizing personal conversion and moral duty. Both sides featured representations of their beliefs inscribed on brooches, bracelets, bowls, and pin boxes emblazoned with the kneeling slave, as well as vows of abstention from slave-produced goods of all kinds. But as the tokens proliferated, self-fashioning overshadowed economic strategy. The stage was set for the performance of women’s anti-slavery sentiment. As gendered voices, British and American women commanded vast attention when they framed sympathy for the slave as their female duty, and worked to convert others to their moral cause. But, while they broadened the audience for their voices beyond the confines of their homes, they narrowed the scope for their interventions. They made immediatism a matter for a woman’s heart not her head. The transition in the transatlantic discourse began in the 1830s when American abolitionist leaders, male and female, articulated extensive praise for the direction taken by the British in their anti-slavery work. In particular American abolitionists extolled the British embrace of ‘immediatism’, contrasting the courage and urgency of British emancipation proposals with the tentative and gradualist orientation of the colonizationist schemes that had dominated American thinking from Thomas Jefferson to Henry Clay. The Americans were keenly aware that the inclusion of British women had helped mobilize a broader anti-slavery public. So, when Angelina Grimké in 1836 sought to rally her countrywomen to the immediatist cause, she cited British women in general, and Elizabeth Heyrick in particular: . . . what . . . have women done for the great and glorious cause of Emancipation? Who wrote that pamphlet which moved the heart of Wilberforce to pray over the wrongs, and his tongue to plead the cause of the oppressed African? It was a woman, Elizabeth Heyrick. Who labored assiduously to keep the sufferings of the

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slave continually before the British public? They were women. And how did they do it? By their needles, paintbrushes and pens, by speaking the truth, and petitioning Parliament for the abolition of slavery. And what was the effect of their labors? Read it in the Emancipation bill of Great Britain. Read it, in the present state of her West India Colonies. Read it, in the impulse which has been given to the cause of freedom in the United States of America. Have English women then done so much for the negro, and shall American women do nothing? Oh no! Already there are sixty female Anti-Slavery Societies in operation. These are doing just what the English women did, telling the story of the colored man’s wrongs, praying for his deliverance, and presenting his kneeling image constantly before the public eye on bags and needle books, card-racks, penwipers, pin-cushions, &c.2

In celebrating English women in general, and Elizabeth Heyrick in particular, Grimké glided over a major difference in the emergence of immediatism on opposite sides of the Atlantic and the part played by women on either shore. In Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, published in 1824, Heyrick specifically targeted women and their emotions, believing that touching their female hearts would move them to sacrifice. But her strategy also drew centrally on economic concepts made familiar by Adam Smith. Building on an eighteenthcentury precedent when the ‘anti-saccharites’ called on women as well as men to announce their intention to abstain from the purchase of goods produced by slaves, Heyrick went further. By imposing the discipline of profitability on planters, she argued, abstention would school them in the economic rationality of slave emancipation.3 As Clare Midgley has described elsewhere in this volume, over the course of her life, Heyrick moved from the Unitarianism into which she was born to the Quakerism she embraced by convincement. In so doing, Midgley suggests, Heyrick moved beyond her earlier rationalist arguments for the rights of slaves towards a more religious conviction that the authority of God forbade the enslavement of others. Yet, it should be noted, Heyrick did not leave behind her education in rational dissent, even in her embrace of her new religious identity. Like many dissenters, she talked the language of both The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. Even if planters remained 2

Angelina Emily Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (Boston: 1836), 23. David Brion Davis, ‘The Emergence of Immediatism in British and American Anti-slavery Thought’, Mississippi Valley Historical Review, 49 (1962), 209–30, especially 219–20. On Heyrick, in addition to Clare Midgley’s work in this volume, see her Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790–1865 (London: Routledge, 2007), 55–60; also see Kenneth Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker’, in Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of English Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 41–67; and Jennifer Rycenga, ‘A Greater Awakening: Women’s Intellect as a Factor in Early Abolitionist Movements, 1824– 1834’, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, 21 (2005), 31–59, although Rycenga emphasizes transatlantic commonalities instead of the ways that Heyrick’s understanding of immediatism differed from that of the Americans. 3

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impervious to their moral obligations, she believed they could not resist acting on their economic self-interest. Observing the interconnectedness of the two systems, Heyrick wrote: What rational hope is there left of the extinction of slavery but by rendering it unprofitable? And how can we render it unprofitable but by rejecting its produce? And how can such an extensive rejection of its produce be obtained as shall render it unprofitable, without direct appeals to the hearts and understandings, to the feelings and principles of individuals, on the folly, danger, and wickedness of upholding such a system of iniquity?4

By 1824, Heyrick defined immediatism as direct action, undertaken without delay by individuals making particular and targeted economic choices. Such an approach brought together her early Unitarianism with her subsequent gendered Quaker empowerment. Heyrick had a clear vision of the course to emancipation: Guide people to buy correctly; this involved appeals to the heart; with regenerate hearts, good people would pressure planters into making morally right decisions, even if the planters themselves did not experience the sympathy that could produce a conversion of their hardened, economically driven hearts. As Heyrick observed, women could participate effectively in working for changes in the feelings of consumers. A lady, she thought, may ‘exert a powerful influence over public opinion and practice . . . without violating that retiring delicacy which constitutes one of her loveliest ornaments’.5 Heyrick framed her consumerist immediatism in contrast to ‘petitions and the remonstrances’ that she argued had proved ineffective in bringing full emancipation to the enslaved people of the West Indies. She knew the difficulties in mounting such campaigns and in securing sympathetic hearings for formal written appeals. Yet Heyrick’s objections went further. ‘Why petition Parliament at all’, she asked rhetorically, ‘to do that for us, which . . . we can do more speedily and more effectually for ourselves?’ Her consumerist strategy, she was convinced, was ‘shortest, safest, most effectual’. It was ‘more decisive, more efficient than words’. It was ‘more wise and rational, more politic and safe, as well as more just and humane,—than gradual emancipation’. And it was ‘more lucrative . . . in the cultivation of . . . plantations’. For Heyrick, the invisible hand, driven by sympathetic consumer choices, would speedily bring about emancipation without the cumbersome mechanisms of the state. Acting as private individuals in civil society—that place where the market brought together all human actors as equals—women could work with anti-slavery men to achieve their ends.6

4

Elizabeth Heyrick, Apology for Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations (London, 1828), 12. Elizabeth Heyrick, Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women (Leicester, 1828), 3. 6 [Elizabeth Heyrick,] Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition; Or, An Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West Indian Slavery (London, 1824), 23, 11, 39. 5

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Heyrick envisioned the synergy of consumer conscience and producer profit. Knowledgeable about the ‘anti-saccharine’ campaigns of the 1790s and well educated in liberal political economy, Heyrick was unexceptional among female dissenters schooled in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. British Unitarians embraced free trade ‘as consistent with free religion and free thought’. They subscribed to notions of laissez-faire as the path to progress, and many applied these ideas to their understandings of international trade and the evils of tariffs that they saw as distorting and corrupting the operations of the free market. Moreover, they embraced the economic rationale for the superiority of free wage labour over older forms. They believed that self-interest, when attached to free selves, drove human endeavour forward, and they taught these propositions to girls as well as boys.7 British dissenting women brought this perspective to the abolition question in a range of ways. The free-thinking radical Frances Wright barely knew her father, who died when she was only two, but later took as her birthright the family tradition that credited him with helping fund a cheap edition of Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man in 1791. Her mother having pre-deceased her father, the orphaned Wright spent her next seven years with her traditionally Anglican maternal relatives, but, in 1813, moved to the home of her uncle James Mylne who held a chair in philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Like his father-in-law John Millar, who had taught law at Glasgow, Mylne advocated political reform while moving away from established religion. In her Glasgow years, Wright reclaimed her liberal heritage. By the time she first sailed for the United States in 1818, she had announced her departure from the Anglican Church. On her return to England, a friendship with Jeremy Bentham and his circle extended and deepened her nonconformity.8 During her second visit to America, she drew on her wide reading in liberal political economy to construct a plan for emancipation by means of a giant pyramid scheme she intended to demonstrate at Nashoba, the utopian agricultural enterprise she founded in Tennessee in 1825. According to her calculations, the founding of enough such communities would make it possible to end slavery within perhaps sixty years—with profit to those who invested in the 7

Helpful on this is Douglas Charles Stange, British Unitarians Against Slavery, 1833-65 (Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson, 1984), 36–43 and 221–4, a book more highly esteemed by American scholars than by British historians of dissent. See also Mark Knight, Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 17–86; Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), especially 11–12. For Unitarian attitudes towards women’s education, see Ruth Watts, Gender, Power, and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (London: Longman, 1998), especially chapter 5. 8 Celia Morris, Fanny Wright: Rebel in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 4–15; A. J. G. Perkins and Theresa Wolfson, Frances Wright, Free Enquirer: The Study of A Temperament (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1939), 3–18 and 60; William Randall Waterman, ‘Frances Wright’, Studies in Economics, History and Public Law, 115 (1924), 25 and 61–2.

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people to be freed, since she believed that each individual among this human capital could provide for his/her own emancipation and that of at least one other. Idealistic and impractical, the plan failed, but it exemplified notions of political economy common in British reform circles of the period.9 Closer to the dissenting mainstream, Harriet Martineau was born into a family that attended the Unitarian Octagon Chapel in Norwich. Her schooling included two years with the clergyman-schoolmaster Isaac Perry, who departed from Congregationalism to join the dissenting chapel. In 1822, Martineau began to publish in the Unitarian Monthly Review. Although she claimed that by 1831, she ‘had already ceased to be an Unitarian in the technical sense’, the impact of her training on her work was clear. Martineau stressed reason and humanism, particularly with respect to the slavery question. She honed her distinctive voice early in her career with Illustrations of Political Economy, a series begun in 1832. Her fourth volume, Demerara: A Tale, argued that the abolition of slavery was necessary for the future success of Britain’s colonial sugar industry.10 Anticipating Eric Williams by over a century, Martineau asserted that the declining fortunes of the plantations, sinking under the weight of unproductive slave labour and soil exhaustion, made colonial slavery dependent on protective duties to survive. In her ‘Summary’, the didactic conclusion of her primer, Martineau enunciated her ‘Principles’: Where the labourer is not held as capital, the capitalist pays for labour only. Where the labourer is held as capital, the capitalist not only pays a much higher price for an equal quantity of labour, but also for waste, negligence, and theft, on the part of the labourer. Capital is thus sunk which ought to be reproduced.11

Like Wright, Martineau argued that free labour was more profitable than slave labour; like Heyrick, she argued that rational economics as well as moral sentiments promoted emancipation. Like most Unitarians, she embraced ‘the Gospel of Free Trade’. Martineau explicitly connected the market and

Gail Bederman, ‘Revisiting Nashoba: Slavery, Utopia, and Frances Wright in America, 1818-1826’, American Literary History, 17 (2005), 448 where she cites Fanny Wright, ‘A Plan’, Genius of Universal Emancipation, 15 October 1825. 10 R. K. Webb, Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960); the quotation is found in Harriet Martineau, Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, 3 vols, 3rd edn (London, 1877), I, 158. 11 For an American edition of this volume, see Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy. No. IV. Demerara. A Tale (Boston, 1832), especially 196 and following. I thank Max Kornblith for checking this material for me; a crucial phrase is missing from the transcription of this work as it appears in Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy: Selected Tales, Broadview editions (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2004). Martineau makes other market connections throughout Demerara, including chapters 5 and 8. 9

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emancipation through political economy. Her thinking about the economics of abolition was not gendered, except for her understanding that women exhibited a particular propensity to be moved by moral matters. American abolitionist women, by contrast, rarely engaged in discussion of questions of political economy. Their religious experiences gave them a different orientation. Indeed, in the United States, ‘dissent’ had an entirely different meaning than that attached to it in Britain, and the denominations associated with nonconformity in Britain occupied very different spaces in America. Quakers had been among the founders of the middle colonies, and in Pennsylvania they had enjoyed early political prominence. While wealthy, worldly Quakers renounced slaveholding before the American Revolution, the tension between Hicksites and the so-called Orthodox Quakers that emerged in the 1820s highlighted the different meanings that this testimony could take, especially for women. Meetings in the Philadelphia area included prominent abolitionists such as Lucretia Mott, but Mott’s active anti-slavery work often occurred with the support of her husband, but not the larger Quaker community. Despite the autonomy they might gain in their sex-segregated meetings, many Quaker women encountered resistance to taking their message beyond their households, as the discontented Quaker convert Sarah Grimké learned. American Quakers thus distinguished themselves by their anti-slavery practice, but nonetheless limited women’s authority. Meanwhile Unitarians, especially in Boston, ascended to the status of religious establishment as congregations brought to their pulpits the liberal theologians produced by Harvard’s Divinity School. In New England, elite men and women practised their religion and their anti-slavery within a privileged community.12 More important for the American anti-slavery movement was a different practice of faith. Inspired by the Second Great Awakening, most abolitionists in the 1830s took as the model for their anti-slavery performance the conversion experience, the emotional change that transported believers to a new religious state. While distinguishing itself from more mainstream Protestant denominations, including Anglicans in the South and traditional ‘Old Measure’ Congregationalists in New England, this ‘New Measure’ theology challenged the authority of the churches, and urged individuals to take their quest for salvation into their own hands. Many American anti-slavery radicals chose to ‘come out’ of the denominational structures altogether, decrying the 12 On Mott, see Beverly Wilson Palmer (ed.), Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); on Grimké, see Larry Ceplair (ed.), The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké: Selected Writings, 1835–1839 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989). Also helpful is Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000). On Boston Unitarians and anti-slavery see Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993).

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willingness of nationally organized churches to maintain fellowship with slaveholders. Religious American abolitionist men and women thus chose their outsider status; it was not thrust upon them by the state and its established churches. Moreover, leaving the mainstream churches did not mean that anti-slavery men would be disenfranchised. While they could, like William Lloyd Garrison, opt out of electoral politics, only women were legally denied the ballot. In the era of Jacksonian democracy, suffrage extended to almost all white men. Gender and race, not religious practice, served as the bases for exclusion.13 Formally banned from the polls, American women found churches supportive locations in which to practise their anti-slavery activism. Whether in the women’s meetings of the Quakers, the female-dominated congregations of the ‘Burned Over District’, or the Unitarian gatherings in Boston, anti-slavery females found themselves welcomed as the keepers of domestic morality, and they embraced the role. Focused almost exclusively on extirpating the sin of slavery, women looked for a window on the personal soul, not a strategy for changing society when they reflected on matters of political economy. For women in the early republic, mobilizing public opinion meant crafting the moral arguments that led to religious conversion. While aware of consumer abstention in Britain, American women read these efforts as individual decisions of the heart undertaken for personal purification from sin, not levers for collective action based in the dynamics of the market.14 Personal morality was at the centre of the cosmos constructed in the 1830s by American immediatists, male and female, in their quest for what historian Robert Abzug has called the ‘sacralization’ of everyday life. Unlike their British anti-slavery counterparts, Americans did not turn against gradualism because of the slow pace of state response; rather they declared themselves immediatists when they repudiated a colonization movement that insisted on removing both slavery and peoples of African descent from the nation. Many antislavery campaigners in the United States self-consciously distanced themselves from the rational humanitarianism that had been so significant in the dissenting congregations of late Georgian England, the training grounds for British abolitionists. Despite the steady hand of Quakers and the well-reasoned 13 Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (New York: Appleton-Century, 1933); James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 14 The classic plea for such an anti-slavery conversion is Angelina Emily Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (New York, 1836); Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 8. On the mobilization of women in antebellum reform see Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

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positions of the Unitarian elites, most of the founders of American abolitionism were instead the products of the Second Great Awakening, the transatlantic religious revival that, on American shores, was characterized by the Arminian rejection of Calvinist notions of predestination. These Americans upheld righteous emotional moralism, and they gendered emotion as female. Thus, as women filled churches, especially in the North, American clergy welcomed this rebirth of religion and the renewal of congregations whose foundations had been undermined by the progress of clerical disestablishment in the post-revolutionary era. And they authorized women to act on behalf of morality.15 Evangelical women responded to preaching that denounced the degeneracy of a society allegedly overrun by urban vice and licentiousness, and by threats to the family and to the hard-working artisanal middle class. Religious and benevolent activity became defining characteristics for ‘respectable’ and domestic American women who sought to promote virtue in their local communities and in their homes. And emphasis on the role of personal volition in securing salvation empowered women; it built for them a sense of self and of agency. Thus, when American abolitionists began their campaign against the sin of slavery, church women stood ready to enlist. Religiously oriented women had already learned the principle of moral suasion that they could now apply to anti-slavery work.16 As Stacey Robertson more fully documents elsewhere in this volume, American abolitionists grounded their appeals for women’s engagement in anti-slavery work in these highly gendered religious terms. Anti-slavery appeals asked men as well as women for moral sympathy, but women’s supposedly greater capacities for emotion, especially for identifying with the particular feelings of those of their own sex, gave women a special purchase. The increasing attention paid to their domestic and familial roles encouraged 15 See Whitney R. Cross, The Burned-Over District; the Social and Intellectual History of Enthusiastic Religion in Western New York, 1800–1850 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1950). On the rejection of gradualism see Stewart, Holy Warriors. See also Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 16 For the mobilization of women in the American anti-slavery movement see Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Anti-Slavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women’s Anti-Slavery Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005). On petitioning see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). Nancy Hewitt has suggested how different religious orientations influenced women’s different forms of activism; see her Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984).

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middle-class women to think of themselves as wives, mothers, and daughters. They reacted with horror to the thought that slavery nullified these essential relationships by which their gender was defined. American anti-slavery women believed in the efficacy of personal conversion and the need to ‘testify’ to such before their congregations; hence they took their renunciation of the sin of slavery to be occasion for religious speech. Anti-slavery ministers encouraged the propriety of these efforts ‘to enlighten and correct public opinion on the subject of slavery’, believing ‘The united voice of females would immediately turn the scale of popular opinion from its present wrong bias, and place it on the side of righteousness’.17 Just as American women explored possibilities for interventions in the construction of public opinion, British women too were elaborating their strategies for participating in the movement seeking emancipation in the British Empire. Following Heyrick’s spur to action, British women had organized female anti-slavery societies and plunged into the anti-slavery campaign. Despite Heyrick’s distrust for the method, women’s 1833 petitions to Parliament crowned a decade of work, and received recognition in the celebration of the success of the British Emancipation Act providing for the freedom of West Indian slaves. Yet, dissatisfied with the apprenticeship system and aware of the limits of unilateral emancipation, many continued their efforts at home and abroad. In 1834, Glasgow women funded George Thompson’s travels in the United States where a special part of his labour focused on publicizing British women’s efforts for ‘the cause of the bleeding Slave’ and encouraging American women to organize. American women responded enthusiastically, with claims of a special gendered fitness for anti-slavery work, knowing that they were, ‘[a]s women, influencing the destinies of Men, of Nations’.18 Yet, just as Angelina Grimké shaped her praise to her own purposes, so too other anti-slavery American women and their male supporters drew selectively from the British example. They appreciated the moral condemnation of slavery that their transatlantic sisters had articulated, but they embraced wholeheartedly the work of petitioning, ignoring Heyrick’s rejection of it. Ironically, as they venerated Elizabeth Heyrick for her work in founding immediatism, they failed to see that she promoted abstention as a form of direct economic action targeted at harming slaveholders. Benjamin Lundy introduced Heyrick’s Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition to Americans 17 The quotation is from John M. Putnam, Address delivered At Concord, New Hampshire, December 25, 1833, Before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of That Place (Concord, New Hampshire, 1836), 10–12. I have explored the rhetoric of anti-slavery in Carol Lasser, ‘Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Anti-slavery Rhetoric’, Journal of the Early Republic, 28 (2008), 83–114. 18 The quotation is from First Annual Report of the Glasgow Emancipation Society (Glasgow, 1835), in which the Glasgow Society printed a letter from the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia, 44.

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between 1825 and 1826 as he published the essay in serial in his maverick journal, Genius of Universal Emancipation. In 1830, he excerpted her Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women and, just about the time of her death, he printed for his readers her Apology for Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations. Lundy praised Heyrick’s work as part of the efforts of ‘British ladies’, whose works were ‘zealous labors in the holy cause’, the ‘irrefutable arguments and the most powerful appeals to the justice of the nation’. Lundy emphasized emotions in his appeals for the anti-slavery conversion of his readers, especially the women among them, as, for example, when he drew attention to the figure on the cover of the Report of the Female Society for the Relief of British Negro Slaves, described as ‘a figure of a half clothed female negro in chains, and in the attitude of sueing for mercy and relief of her distressed condition’. Lundy framed the work of Heyrick in particular, and British anti-slavery women in general, as what he wanted to see: active women engaged in disseminating publications that reflected the emotional work of women, the cultivation of heartfelt sympathies for the plight of the enslaved, particularly for enslaved women. Women would read, and weep, and appeal to men who would do the political work of emancipation.19 By failing to recognize Heyrick’s rejection of petitioning as well as her interest in political economy, Lundy could reinterpret her understanding of the efficacy of abstention as simple morality, exhorting: After the broad exposure of the complicated wickedness of slavery, we cannot but regard the consumption of its produce as a wilful aiding and abetting of that complicated wickedness; we cannot but regard the exhibition of that produce for sale, in this enlightened and Christian country as a mark of barbarism, a reproach and stigma upon the national character. We have no moral right to the productions of slavery; they are, in the very worst sense, stolen goods, and the receiver or purchaser, knowing them to be stolen, is as guilty as the thief.20

19 Heyrick’s reputation in America appears to have been largely posthumous; Lundy was one of the few anti-slavery authors to reference her before 1831, the year of her death and the time at which American anti-slavery began its serious exploration of immediatism. Lundy appears to have been the first to publish most of her works, which appeared in his Genius of Universal Emancipation. For Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition, see Genius of Universal Emancipation, 26 November 1825, 21 January 1826; excerpts and commentary on the Appeal to the Hearts and Consciences of British Women appear in Genius of Universal Emancipation, August 1830, 74–5. Apology for Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Associations ran in Genius of Universal Emancipation, December 1831–February 1832. In the United States, the Unitarian Christian Register, 26 February 1825, noted the existence of the pamphlet but did not identify its author; it endorsed the sentiments, even as it reserved judgement on the efficacy of abstaining from West India sugar as a means to immediate emancipation. The Congregational Recorder and Telegraph, 28 October 1825, identified the author as a British ‘lady’, and reinforced the pamphlet’s argument that ending the slave trade would not end slavery as such. Lundy’s conflation of Heyrick, British women, and the kneeling slave appears in Genius, 25 August 1827. 20 ‘Elizabeth Heyrick’, Genius, July 1833.

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Focusing on moral, not political, economy, Lundy helped anti-slavery Americans see personal conscience as the end in itself. Abstention demonstrated commitment; it was an individual’s choice, not a collective action, and a statement of belief, not an economic tool.21 Embracing moral suasion as a strategy, American women undertook a petition campaign that appeared on the surface similar to the work of their British counterparts. But whereas male American abolitionists emphasized the ‘safety, practicability, and expediency’ of immediate emancipation in the societies they formed in the 1830s, American women remained devoted to the fight against slavery as a sin, framed within gendered terms. American women insisted that they followed the example established by their sisters across the ocean, but they drew upon only part of their work. The founders of the New York City Female AntiSlavery Society, for example, wrote into the preamble to their 1834 constitution a commitment to gendered morality and a tribute to British women. Invoking the need to protect ‘more than a million of our own sex . . . now groaning under the yoke of an insupportable and most degrading bondage, unprotected by law, or by any sense of shame, from . . . merciless stripes and cruel outrages’, the New York women stated their belief that ‘an enlightened and Christian public sentiment alone is, under God, likely to abolish this most atrocious and complicated system of iniquity, and thus to avert from our country, the impending judgments of the Almighty’. They then observed, ‘female influence is calculated to effect great good in such a cause, as has been abundantly shown in the abolition of British colonial slavery’. The New York women did not try to wield their influence as consumers intervening in the market. Their mode was moral and avowedly not political. But unlike Heyrick, they eschewed politics not because they had a more effective way. Rather, their gendered identities allowed them a public presence only if they refused a political role.22 A meeting of the Pittsburgh Anti-Slavery Society asked for the ‘sympathies’ of Christian females, the ‘mighty influence’ of women, and especially the power of sympathizing as mothers, exhorting, ‘Women did much for the abolition of slavery in Great Britain’, and urging American women to follow in their footsteps. Addressing the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia, African American abolitionist James Forten endorsed this moralistic approach, calling on his listeners to awaken the ‘sympathies’ of other Christian females, the ‘mighty influence’ of women, and especially, the power of sympathizing mothers, urging, ‘Female Philanthropy’, Genius, 8 September 1827; ‘Resolutions of the Female Society for the Relief of British Slaves’, Genius, 15 September 1827. 22 The phrase ‘safety, practicability, and efficiency’ appears in both the Anti-Slavery Society of Lane Seminary, Preamble and Constitution (n.p., n.d. [1834]) and Constitution of the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society, Records of the Oberlin Anti-Slavery Society, Oberlin College Archives. The language in these documents can be read in contrast to Constitution and Address of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Chatham Street Chapel (New York, 1834). 21

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‘Women did much for the abolition of slavery in Great Britain’. Forten called on women to enlist family and friends on behalf of those he called ‘my countrymen in chains’. Attacking the ‘gross error . . . [the] anti-christian spirit’ of critics who charged that ‘females have no right to interfere with the question of slavery, or petition for domestic affairs . . . that they had better be at home attending to their domestic affairs’, Forten insisted: ‘Yours is the cause of Truth, and must prevail over error; it is the cause of sympathy, and therefore it calls aloud for the aid of woman . . . Yours is the cause of Christianity’. Finally, he concluded with praise for ‘WOMAN’ who guided the emancipation of slaves in the West Indies, urging American women to prove themselves equal in capability to their British counterparts.23 American women saw Elizabeth Heyrick as the guiding genius of British women’s anti-slavery. In 1837 the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Convention praised Heyrick’s pamphlet for ‘awaken[ing] Wilberforce and his colleagues from the dream of gradualism in which they were indulging, while the mill of despotism still ground on . . . No one could compute the mighty influence which its author, a woman, had exerted upon the world’. Even William Lloyd Garrison was ever ready to praise the British women in general, and Elizabeth Heyrick in particular, for their contributions to the moral appeal of immediatism. Addressing those marking the anniversary of the day of British emancipation in the West Indies at a ceremony in New York on 1 August 1838, he exclaimed: . . . had it not been for the superior devotedness, activity and perseverance of the Women of England, Scotland and Ireland, rekindling the expiring torch of philanthropy, from time to time, and stimulating anew the flagging zeal of religion, it is historically certain that the vast multitude who are this day rejoicing in freedom, throughout the British West India islands, would now be pining in slavery . . . Let it never be forgotten in the history of human liberty, that the doctrine which has annihilated the slave system in the West Indies . . . the doctrine of IMMEDIATE EMANCIPATION—was first promulgated in Great Britain by a woman—ELIZABETH HEYRICK.

Emphasizing the similarity in wording, Garrison overlooked the difference in meaning that he and Heyrick brought to ‘immediate emancipation’. While both sought to work outside the state, Garrison embraced moral suasion, not direct economic action.24

23 ‘Pittsburgh Anti-Slavery Society’, New York Evangelist, 13 June 1835; James Forten, Jun. An Address Delivered Before the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia on the Evening of the 14th of April 1836 (Philadelphia, 1836), see in particular 3, 13–16. 24 See, for example, ‘Slavery and Abolition by C. E. Beecher’, Genius, July 1837; ‘Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Convention’, Liberator, 18 February 1837; ‘Address’, Liberator, 17 August 1838; this is very similar to his remarks at the ‘Essex County Anti-Slavery Meeting’, Liberator, 5 July, 1839.

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In 1839, Boston African American abolitionist John T. Hilton used the First of August to credit British women, including the monarch herself, with using their female influence to push forward the cause of emancipation. In an interesting pairing, he raised a (presumably temperate) toast to: Elizabeth Heyrick and Queen Victoria: the former the first to promulgate the principles of immediate emancipation in the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the latter to carry them out successfully into practice. With one royal touch slavery was swept from her realm; chains, yokes and fetters rent asunder, as if smitten by the finger of Omnipotence, and chattels personal stood erect in the image of their Creator, forgetful, while the songs of Liberty burst forth from their hearts, that they had ever hung their harps upon the willows. Who would not bow with pure adoration to female influence like this, and long for the approach of that day when we shall behold in this Republic the like results, brought about by the exertions of our Childs and Chapmans, and their worthy coadjutors in this holy cause.

Later that year, the annual Boston Anti-Slavery Fair promoted a poem dedicated to British women. The Anti-Slavery Token, published by the Juvenile Emancipation Society in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in 1840 carried a sonnet to the memory of Elizabeth Heyrick, probably the same poem that appeared in the Liberator, penned by Anne Warren Weston, which read: Who hath arisen o’er the Atlantic wave, To plead for Right, for Freedom, for the Slave? ’Tis Woman speaks, and lo! At her command Free and erect eight hundred thousand stand!

And the Philadelphia Fair in December of the same year advertised that it had received a special item for its sale sent by the wife of George Blagden of Doncaster, Yorkshire, who wrote: ‘you will find some grass from the grave of our town’s-woman, Elizabeth Heyrick’. Veneration had clearly reached new heights.25 Some Americans understood that American women had forged a reinterpretation of the British precedents, with important implications for transatlantic anti-slavery. Edward Davis, son-in-law to Lucretia Mott, clearly summarized the national differences when he carefully explained to his British correspondent, Elizabeth Pease: You [Britain] force slavery from its present location by appealing to the avaricious feelings of the slave holder. We [Americans] exterminate it by appealing to his conscience and understanding. Suppose you are successful in supplying England with free cotton from the East Indies to the exclusion of ours, would this prove to our planters that slavery is sinful? No! Only that his business is unprofitable. The

25 Liberator, 16 August 1839; 20 December 1839; 18 September 1840; 25 September 1840; 25 December 1840.

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result might & I doubt not would be, to do away with our slave holding Laws but not our slave holding spirit.26

Davis well understood the American view of abolition as conversion of the heart. Distinctions between the American Free Produce movement and the British abstention campaigns underscore the distance between the conceptual frameworks on either side of the Atlantic. To be sure, Americans had long connected virtue and consumer choice; revolutionary Americans wore homespun as a badge of honour, and patriotic ladies pointedly removed tea from their tables. Antebellum anti-slavery activists similarly framed abstention in moral terms, often underscoring their positions with graphic images. Quaker anti-slavery pioneer Elizabeth Chandler wrote poetry that graphically pleaded for abstention: Oh press me not to taste again Of those luxurious banquet sweets! Or hide from view the dark red stain That still my shuddering vision meets.27

Self-sacrifice and sensitivity went hand-in-hand with abstention and personal purity. Women celebrated their capacity for modelling such behaviour. As ‘a Lady’ wrote for Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation in 1832, ‘How can [women] reconcile it to themselves that they, Christian mothers and wives and daughters, with all the kind and gentle sympathies of woman’s nature playing about their hearts, should be accessories in supporting one of the most heinous systems of oppression ever known in the world?’ At the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1837, a resolution proposed by Lucretia Mott, while less sensational, emphasized the moral orientation of the North American efforts, suggesting that, ‘despising the gain of oppression we recommend to our friends, by a candid and prayerful examination of the subject, to ascertain if it be not a duty to cleanse our hands from this unrighteous participation, by no longer indulging in the luxuries which come through this polluted channel . . . ’. Two years later, the third and final Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women renewed its commitment to abstain from the products of slave labour ‘that we may not be guilty of participation in the sin which we condemn, and that, to the power of solemn precepts, we may add that of a pure example’.28 26 Edward Davis to Elizabeth Pease, Philadelphia, 30 March 1840, in Taylor, British and American Abolitionists, 90–1. 27 Quoted from Ruth Ketring Nuermberger, The Free Produce Movement: A Quaker Protest Against Slavery (Durham: Duke University Press, 1942), 113. Chandler died in 1836, but this poem is most frequently cited from Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, The Poetical Works of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler: With a Memoir of Her Life and Character (Philadelphia, 1836). 28 ‘On the Use of Free Produce’, Genius, January 1832; Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held in the City of New-York, May 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th, 1837 (New York, 1837), 13; Anti-Slavery Convention

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As historians of the American Free Produce Movement have noted, abstention in the United States never succeeded in mobilizing more than a small minority of anti-slavery activists, dominated by Quakers for whom adherence to its strictures embodied a ‘testimony’ more than an economic strategy. Heyrick’s Quakerism had doubtless helped shape her nonconsumption commitment, but she had paired it with the rationalist arguments of her Unitarian upbringing. In the antebellum United States, however, many critics of slavery realized the massive effort that would be required to avoid the consumption of any slave products and the negligible impact that such discipline would have on the burgeoning slave economy. Arguing that the effort necessary to procure free labour substitutes would drain too much energy from the larger fight against slavery, the majority of American abolitionists either never embraced, or soon defected from, abstention. The Weston-Chapman family seems to have ignored the movement, as did ‘the Jacksons, the Phillipses, the Quincys, the Fosters, the Pillsburys, [and] the Wrights . . . ’. Although he practised abstention himself, Theodore Dwight Weld refused to publicize free produce, calling it only a ‘collateral principle’, despite the ongoing passion for it in his household. In 1841, on learning of some defections from the cause, Angelina Grimké Weld wrote: ‘If every bale of cotton and every piece of calico were stained with sweat and tears, and dyed in the blood which has flowed so freely in raising the raw material, who would be found ready to receive, and manufacture, and vend, and wear the fabric . . . ?’ While Theodore Weld explored new political strategies, Angelina Weld kept moral purity in the foreground.29 William Lloyd Garrison explained his decision not to abstain by accusing those who did of using their ‘choice in food and wearing apparel’ as an excuse, ‘a pretext to do nothing more for the slave, because they do so much (!) [sic]’. He observed that slaveholders did not even bother to denounce such actions. He was particularly angered by the abstention practised by some American Quakers, such as those in Indiana, whose yearly meeting refused to condemn slavery. These free produce consumers, charged Garrison using a biblical figure, ‘strain at a gnat, and swallow a camel’. Garrison argued both that abstention could not affect the economy and that consumers could not

of American Women, Proceedings of the Third Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held in Philadelphia, May 1st, 2d and 3d, 1839 (Philadelphia, 1839), 7. 29 In addition to Nuermberger, see Carol Faulkner, ‘The Root of the Evil: Free Produce and Radical Antislavery, 1820–1860’, Journal of the Early Republic, 27 (2007), 377–405; and Lawrence. B. Glickman, ‘ “Buy for the Sake of the Slave”: Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism’, American Quarterly, 56 (2004), 889–912. I thank Julie Roy Jeffrey for the reference to the Weston-Chapman non-participation in abstention; see letter from Evelina Smith to Caroline Weston, 23 May 1841, Weston-Chapman Papers, Boston Public Library; William Lloyd Garrison, ‘Products of Slave Labor’, The Liberator, 5 March 1847. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (eds), Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844, 2 vols (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1934), I, 296, and II, 872–3.

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possibly avoid all slave-implicated produce. His critics, however, noted his apparent inconsistency in applying principles of practicality to explain his departure from the free produce movement at the same time that he refused to engage in anti-slavery politics because, he claimed, he was morally required to distance himself from a flawed American constitution. If Garrison’s logic was not strong, he nonetheless recognized the difference between a consumer action that aimed to change the economy and one that instead enacted personal testimony.30 By the 1840s, most American anti-slavery men had moved beyond the moral suasion strategy that sought to end slavery by converting individuals to new understandings of morality, and turned instead toward political engagement. Likewise, most abolitionist women moved beyond free produce work. They continued to petition, and to stage anti-slavery fairs that sold goods to raise funds for movement activities. Some historians have emphasized the importance of the revenues generated at these venues for maintaining the momentum of anti-slavery activities and publications. Yet even the female appeals to potential purchasers stressed the moral purity of the products. The goods themselves announced their moral purity; they proclaimed the commitment of the consumers, but fair organizers did not expect to change the behaviour of slave owners by way of the market. By focusing on style, women did not challenge the gendered terms of their engagement in anti-slavery. Instead, by embracing their emotional work for the movement they made possible further sentimentalization of their efforts. While the culture of sentimentality ultimately infused female reform on both sides of the Atlantic, a significant number of British women raised in the dissenting tradition continued to seek interventions in the economy as part of the larger cause of philanthropic improvement. Some became active in Chartism, and others in Anti-Corn Law agitation. Meanwhile, American women’s associational activities rarely touched upon questions of equity in matters of trade or markets. Their work of benevolence might try to mobilize sympathy across lines of race, but class was nearly invisible to them. Cross-national sympathies went out to ‘African’ females while uniting them as Americans with their British sisters in struggle. Gendered sensitivity overshadowed difference.31 In this context, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin reached across the ocean. In Stowe’s tale of slavery and redemption, the heroine, Little Eva, a thoroughly feminine and thoroughly white child, sacrifices her life to educate her white family, its bondmen and bondwomen, and her country, about the evils of slavery. Throughout the novel, Stowe portrays moral white 30

Liberator, 5 March 1847. The biblical quotation is Matthew 23:24. On British women’s mobilizations in the period, see Midgley, Women Against Empire; and Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640-1990 (London: Routledge, 1999), especially part III. On American developments see Jeffrey, Great Silent Army. 31

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women, stirred by the horrors of family separation, violation, and violence, who push temporizing men to action, while African Americans find salvation through faith alone. Although the emigrationist ending undercut any radical abolitionist message, the book galvanized American anti-slavery sentiment. By telling an anti-slavery tale as a domestic drama writ large, Harriet Beecher Stowe, a full-blooded daughter of the Second Great Awakening, remained within the parameters of antebellum ‘true’ womanhood while making women’s power to influence the debate clear. Stowe implied that the immediate conversion of the hearts of enough white American women might end slavery. Stowe’s journey to England shortly after the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin renewed the bonds between anti-slavery women on both sides of the Atlantic, and emphasized the particular American moral message of antislavery as the religious—and not the political—work for women. Throughout her tour, Stowe remarked on her sense of identification with British women while she seemed almost wilfully blind to the workings of class in British society. She saw few anti-slavery women who might have claimed dissenting ancestry, yet she understood her work as part of the tradition of transatlantic women’s anti-slavery activism. In particular, she celebrated the conversion of highly placed members of the British elite to the cause. Nowhere was this more evident than in her description of her experience at a dinner given for her by Lord Carlisle. There she was introduced to his sister, the Duchess of Sutherland, whose magnificent Stafford House residence would give its name to the address sent by British women to their American counterparts in response to Stowe’s visit. After admiring the paintings by Rembrandt and Cuyp, examining a snuff-box decorated with a miniature portrait of the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire, and discussing American writers with her host and his guests, primarily other titled members of his extended family, Stowe praised the ‘evident air of sincerity’ that made the evening pass ‘most delightfully to me. I had never felt myself more at home, even among the Quakers’. So Stowe simplified British society.32 Stowe’s ability to transform the grand into the domestic continued throughout her visit to London. Writing of the reception honouring her at what she herself called the ‘most splendid of England’s palaces’, the magnificent home of the Duchess, Stowe commended her hostess for ‘receiv[ing] us with the same warm and simple kindness which she had shown before’. Stowe was delighted that ‘an air of warm homelikeness and comfort’ spread throughout the frescoed halls, and she praised the luncheon company assembled for showing manners she found ‘simple, friendly, natural, and sincere’. Stowe modestly insisted that the occasion was not so much an honour for her as it 32 Aelbert Cuyp was a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painter; See Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (Halifax: Milner and Sowberry, 1855), 166–70, and 178–87 for her accounts of her visits, with quotations on 182–3 and 170.

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was ‘the most public expression possible of the feelings of the women of England on one of the most important questions of our day—that, of individual liberty considered in its religious bearings’. For her American readers, Stowe converted one of the most aristocratic households in England into a simple New England family fireside, just as she reduced the complexities of slavery to a simple question of religious commitment to personal freedom.33 Thus Stowe had no qualms about being fêted by the Duchess. But others noted that her hostess’s reputation among some British reformers suffered from her connection to the clearances of the Scottish Highlands, whereby families were expelled from their farms to consolidate the lands into larger pastures for sheep-grazing. As Karl Marx pointedly observed of the event: ‘The enemy of British Wage-Slavery has a right to condemn Negro-Slavery; a Duchess of Sutherland, a Duke of Atholl, a Manchester Cotton Lord— never!’34 But Stowe defended her hostess, and expressed her appreciation for the leadership of the Duchess in issuing ‘The Affectionate and Christian Address of Many Thousands of the Women of England to their Sisters, the Women of the United States’. This transatlantic address, ultimately signed by more British women than any other anti-slavery petition, appealed across the ocean to American women ‘as sisters, as wives, as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow Citizens and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction from the Christian world’. Claiming that an address by women ‘shall not be suspected of any political motives’, it insisted, ‘all will readily admit that the state of things to which we allude is one peculiarly distressing to our sex’. With its appeal to women—notably not to the state—this address underscored the ongoing domestication of women’s anti-slavery efforts. However public their recognition, their goal was moral conversion, not economic or political sanctions.35 Julia Gardiner Tyler, the wife of the tenth American president, published the most famous response to the Stafford House Address. Writing for the Southern Literary Messenger from her post-White House residence on a Virginia plantation, Mrs Tyler insisted that Stowe had misrepresented the treatment of slaves in her book and subsequent visit to her British sympathizers. Southern white women, Tyler insisted, were themselves generous and benevolent in their dealing with their ‘dependants’.36 But it was left to another Southern female, the future secessionist Louisa McCord, to place Stowe’s British tour in the context of a long history of 33

Stowe, Sunny Memories, 182–3. Karl Marx, ‘The Duchess of Sutherland and Slavery’, People’s Paper, 12 March 1853. 35 For the full Stafford House Address, see The Times (London), 29 November 1852. For Stowe’s account of the Stafford House Address, see Sunny Memories, 178–87. 36 Julia Gardner [sic] Tyler, ‘To the Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of England’, Southern Literary Messenger, 19 (March 1853), 120, and following. As with many Southerners, Tyler calls slaves ‘dependants’ [sic] and ‘servants’. 34

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transatlantic women’s anti-slavery, with its interpretations, reinterpretations, and misinterpretations, and to recur to the central symbol of British women’s leadership. Infuriated by the Stafford House Address, McCord wrote with anger at the British ‘ladies’ who ‘have trusted to Mrs. Stowe’s spectacles, whose strange power of distortion shows everything under a false view’. She then launched into an attack on what she saw as the heritage of British meddling, taking as her starting point a direct quotation from Angelina Grimké’s praise of ‘a woman, Elizabeth Heyrick, who wrote the pamphlet that moved the heart of Wilberforce to pity and to pray over the wrongs of the oppressed sons of Africa’. Having warmed to her rhetorical task, she then proceeded: We can only say that if so, Elizabeth Heyrick was almost as mischievous a woman in her day, as Mrs. Stowe now threatens to be; for those tears of Wilberforce have caused more shedding of blood, more anguish of soul, more agony of body and mind, than it often falls to the lot of one man to give scope to. He attacked crime, not with the philosophic coolness which examines, compares, probes causes and effects, and thus has at least the fairest chance for cure;—but with a species of feminine pathetics and wailings, caught perhaps from Mrs. Heyrick, he set the example, and opened that sluice of sickly sentimentality which too often, taking the place of sound sense and argument, now inundates the world, causing agonies of body and soul, to which the worst scenes of the slave trade, heinous as they were, stand but as dust in the balance.37

For all her sensationalism, McCord identified a critical limitation in the direction taken by the anti-slavery campaign of American women. They had stressed their emotion-based mission of conversion, and with it a kind of gender essentialism. Rather than learning from their British counterparts about the power of political economy, most American women actively working for emancipation maintained their belief in the efficacy of the conversion of the heart, staking out a special role for female sympathy to justify their incursions into public debate. American anti-slavery women had embraced a strategy whereby they sought to influence ‘public opinion’ while avoiding any claim to ‘political’ standing as such. As they explained it, they drew on the precedent established by British women to justify their moral engagement, elaborating their claims to special sympathies as wives, as mothers, as daughters. But American women did not, on the whole, take up an analysis of the economics of slavery or its abolition; instead they abstained from slave goods so that their behaviour (and their persons) reflected their souls—a sort of self-fashioning of the exterior to reflect their interior hearts. They paid homage to their British predecessors for ‘British Philanthropy and American Slavery’, DeBow’s Review and Industrial Resources, 14 (March 1853), 264; the authorship is identified by Richard C. Lounsbury in his ‘Notes on the Texts’, 38, preceding his edited volume, Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays (Charlottesville: University of Virginia, 1995). 37

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formulating a basis for women’s engagement in anti-slavery work, but, moved in part by the powerful evangelical currents that gave their abolitionism a wider audience, they embellished the emotionalism of their appeal. By the 1850s, the mainstream of British women’s abolitionist activity too came to embrace sentimentality, forsaking the economic analysis that dissenting women had pioneered, the powerful fusion of head and heart that Heyrick’s lessons had once epitomized. The work of Heyrick and her early British counterparts had been lost in transatlantic translations.

6 Women Abolitionists and the Dissenting Tradition Julie Roy Jeffrey

Representing the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Maria Chapman wrote to all New England female anti-slavery societies in early June, 1837. Chapman’s communication to her ‘Christian Friends’ was prompted by the growing controversy over the Grimké sisters’ lecturing tour. Although Angelina and Sarah Grimké had just begun their work in New England, the clergy was already alarmed by the Quaker women’s outspoken abolitionist views and willingness to overturn social conventions by allowing both men and women to attend their meetings. At the end of the month, the association of Massachusetts Congregational clergy would compose a pastoral letter reminding church members that ‘Your minister is ordained of God to be your teacher’ and warning that when a woman became ‘a public reformer . . . her character becomes unnatural’. Trying to head off the attack on female activism that she sensed was coming, Chapman insisted that it was ‘of paramount importance that both men and women should understand their true positions and mighty responsibilities in this and the coming generations’. While obvious differences in the secondary pursuits of men and women existed, ‘in all things spiritual their functions are identical’. Generously interpreting the duties of the spiritual realm, Chapman reminded women that not only were they to obey all of God’s commands but also that they were responsible ‘to him alone’ rather than to ‘corrupt publick opinion’.1 Chapman encouraged women abolitionists to support the Grimkés’ work to ‘exalt the . . . character of our women’. Relying on an historical appeal that she believed still resonated powerfully in New England, Chapman suggested 1

Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (eds), Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké 1822–1844, 2 vols (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970 edn), I, 395–6. Henry Mayer details the Massachusetts controversy in All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: St. Martins Press, 1998), 233–4, quotes at 234.

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that contemporary women were ‘inferior’ to their ‘maternal’ ancestors, the seventeenth-century female dissenters who had fled from England in order to ‘pursue their Christian course unimpeded by sneers or ridicule, ecclesiastical mandates or publick outrage’. With the Grimkés’ help and with the assistance of female abolitionists, American women might recover the courage and focus of their foremothers.2 Chapman ended her communication by urging female anti-slavery societies to be inclusive. Knowing that some might fear that this approach would dilute support for immediate emancipation, Chapman insisted that the anti-slavery community would retain its purity. ‘If our worship be sincere of the God who created our race free, and the Saviour who came to redeem them from bondage’, she argued, ‘it will so appear in our active exertions for our enslaved countrymen, that the selfish, the hypocritical and the unfaithful, will be . . . compelled to hold themselves aloof from our ranks’.3 Chapman’s letter is interesting in its suggestion of the links between dissent and abolitionism. She relied upon the idea of the spiritual equality of believers to encourage female activism and conceived of anti-slavery societies as gathered communities of the faithful. Her depiction of a heroic seventeenthcentury nonconformity as a means of bolstering women’s anti-slavery commitment had its origins in the 1660s when New England clergy began to compare the founding generation, ‘the choice Grain’ God had sent ‘into this Wilderness’, to a degenerate generation needing to reform its ways. Chapman’s use of this particular version of the past suggests her belief that it still had the power to inspire. Although her historical appeal probably resonated most strongly in New England where, as one newspaper suggested in 1847, ‘families . . . are fond . . . of tracing their lineage back to some old Puritan’, others also recalled their heritage as separatists and Puritans. The Ashtabula County Anti-Slavery Society, a female anti-slavery society in Ohio, closed its first annual meeting with a rousing hymn urging all ‘the sons and daughters of the Pilgrims/ Who of noble birth are proud’ to further exertions for ‘the glorious cause of Freedom’.4 Scholars have long drawn attention to the prominence of dissenters in both the English and American abolitionist movements and the transatlantic ties between them. For the most part, scholarly attention has focused on nineteenth-century nonconformity and the contributions to anti-slavery from rational and evangelical dissenters. American historians have been particularly interested in the many connections between evangelical religion 2

Barnes and Dumond, Letters, 396. Barnes and Dumond, Letters, 397. Stephen Foster, The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 214–15; The Sun, 9 September 1847; Records of the Ashtabula County Anti-Slavery Society, 6 January 1836, Western Reserve Historical Society. 3 4

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and abolitionism. They have emphasized that American revivalism not only encouraged personal conversion but, by emphasizing that God expected the born-again Christian to pursue a life of active benevolence, also fostered social reform. The way in which American abolitionists spoke of their ‘conversion’ to abolitionism and argued that even hardened slaveholders were capable of repentance and salvation suggests how powerfully revivalism shaped the anti-slavery movement. Evangelical religion as a religion of the heart also helped abolitionists to feel with and for the slave while the conflation of piety and women offered an important rationale for female activism.5 The importance of nineteenth-century evangelicalism to abolitionism is evident, but there has been little examination of the contributions to the abolitionist campaign of religious ideas, values, habits, and practices that stretched back to an English and colonial dissenting past and ultimately to the Reformation itself. While the belief in predestination had faded, as one essayist argued, ‘The only fair representatives of the early English Puritan, since he was cut off from his parent trunk and transplanted to this soil, are now found here’. Adopted and renewed, the pre-evangelical tradition contributed to the organizational character and culture of American abolitionism, providing powerful weapons in the abolitionists’ attempts to force the major evangelical denominations to support immediate emancipation.6 5 Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the 19th Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), chapters 1–3; Richard Carwardine, Trans-Atlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790– 1865 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), xiv; Lewis Perry, Boats Against the Current: Revolution and Modernity, 1820–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 256; William E. Gienapp, ‘Abolitionism and the Nature of Antebellum Reform’, in Donald M. Jacobs (ed.), Courage and Conscience: Black & White Abolitionists in Boston (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1993), 33. 6 Randolph A. Roth, ‘The First Radical Abolitionists: The Reverend James Milligan and The Reformed Presbyterians of Vermont’, in John R. McKivigan (ed.), Abolitionism and American Religion (New York: Garland Publishing Co., 1999), 56. Louis S. Gerteis in Morality & Utility in American Anti-slavery Reform (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 62 suggests the ‘peculiar’ character of antebellum reform with appeals to Puritans and Founding Fathers and the formative influence of the Calvinist tradition. David K. Hall in ‘Religion and Society: Problems and Reconsiderations’, in Jack Green and J. R. Pole (eds), Colonial British America: Essays in the New History of the Early Modern Era (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1984), 327, writes that in the eighteenth century, ‘Calvinism survived and flourished because it was a way of life, a veritable culture’, and points out, 8, that crisis may renew old values. Despite the waning power of predestination, I argue that much of this culture persisted, especially in New England. Mark A. Noll in Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington, and George A. Rawlyk (eds), Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies of Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and Beyond, 1700–1990 (New York: Oxford, 1994), 8, suggests that evangelicalism combined aspects of traditional Christianity (especially the Protestantism of the Reformation) with innovative practices and beliefs. Historians of abolitionism have, for the most part, not built upon such insights. See also Michael Young, Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 30, 63–5. Peter W. Williams recommends thinking of abolitionism as a form of ‘popular religion’. Consequently we can see how its character drew upon dissenting precedents, ideas, and practices drawn both

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Dissenting history became a useful tool to critique American churches because, formally or informally, various dissenting faiths in the New World achieved the power and trappings of established religion. As late as the second decade of the nineteenth century, Congregationalism enjoyed state support in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut. Reminders of Congregationalism’s dominance still lingered in the antebellum period. When abolitionists referred darkly to ‘Orthodoxy’, they were suggesting not only that the Congregational Church had lost touch with its spiritual moorings but also that it now resembled the very establishment it had once condemned as arrogant, stagnant, and corrupt. ‘The truth is’, said a Unitarian clergyman, ‘that the Calvinistic party in this country have . . . long been accustomed to rule, direct and manage, as they pleased’. By the 1830s, even the once unruly Methodists were assuming the characteristics of establishment, with an elaborate organizational structure and a desire for harmony and control. Within a decade, they had become the nation’s largest denomination.7 Whilst an anti-establishment legacy was useful to both men and women in their attack on American institutions, it was especially important to women. Men could easily justify efforts in the public sphere, but women could not. Dissenting ideas thus became a helpful component of their efforts to defend their agitation on the controversial and very public question of slavery and to resist attempts to silence them. Yet these ideas also hampered some aspects of their work, especially their fundraising anti-slavery fairs. Here, ironically, British nonconformist women, who helped their American counterparts with fair work, contributed to the disagreements generated by dissenting values. In 1831, William Lloyd Garrison threw out the challenge of immediate emancipation, beginning an intense period of organizing. Anti-slavery lecturers gave hundreds of talks explaining why slavery had to be abolished and helped to organize anti-slavery societies. The men and women joining these organizations educated themselves about slavery, raised money for their cause, peddled anti-slavery newspapers and tracts, and circulated petitions. Their efforts to persuade fellow Americans to embrace Garrison’s programme were reminiscent of the eighteenth-century revivals that sought steady

from the near and distant past. Peter W. Williams, Popular Religion in America: Symbolic Change and the Modernization Process in Historical Perspective (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989 edn), 3, 5. ‘The Puritan Element in the American Character’, New Englander and Yale Review, 9 (1851), 535. 7 Roth ‘First Radical Abolitionists’, 56, writes of New England Congregationalists and Presbyterians, ‘Theirs was no longer an oppositional faith . . . It had been transformed by the habit of power and by the desire to maintain . . . the social and ecclesiastical order its adherents had fashion[ed]’; Clare Taylor (ed.), British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), 228; Young, Witness, 59. The Congregationalists were disestablished in 1818 in Connecticut, in 1819 in New Hampshire, and in 1833 in Massachusetts. Carwardine, Trans-Atlantic Revivalism, 154.

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progress towards a meaningful change of heart and soul rather than a rapid conversion.8 Legitimating women’s participation in the abolitionist movement was the belief, expressed in the constitution of the Groton (Massachusetts) Female Anti-Slavery Society, that the cause was sacred, not secular as many Americans were insisting. God abhorred slavery, the women affirmed, as a ‘flagrant’ violation of his ‘plain’ principles that bore ‘evil fruits’. Proof of slavery’s sinfulness lay in the fundamental source of reformed faith. Even though southern slaveholders were adept in using the Bible to justify slavery, abolitionist women had little doubt that the holy book supported their cause. After all, as one woman asserted, ‘the Bible is an abolitionist Bible from beginning to end’. They proved to be skilful interpreters of Scripture. When the Treasurer of the Dorchester (Massachusetts) Anti-Slavery Society visited West Chester, Pennsylvania, she met two slaveholding women who challenged her, declaring: ‘You certainly do not pretend that slavery is a sin, for we can prove by Scripture that it is not’. Dorchester’s treasurer, undaunted by their assurance, replied that she thought she ‘could easily prove from Scripture, that it was a sin’. Two days later, the southerners acknowledged she was right.9 By insisting that slavery was a sin and that immediate emancipation was a sacred duty, women suggested that their activism was not optional. To strengthen their case against slavery, they relied upon the basic reformed premise of the spiritual equality of all human beings. As the first annual report of the Dorchester (Massachusetts) Female Anti-Slavery Society explained, it was ‘the tendency of genuine abolitionism, to bring all upon a level, and to regard all mankind as God does, without respect of person’. Thus it was strange, thought Mary Grew, member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, ‘that an argument, nay, a train of reasoning, should ever be necessary to convince a human mind, that beings made in the image of God . . . are worthy of our notice’. Women agreed that slavery denied black men and women the ‘rights intended by the creator’ and argued that abolitionists were merely restoring them. Often women emphasized that slavery especially ‘degraded’ their slave sisters, but, whether they drew attention to women’s plight or argued that slavery dragged human beings ‘to a level with the beasts’, they were convinced that slavery offered ‘the most horrid portrait of human depravity ever exhibited’.10 8

Carwardine, Trans-Atlantic Revivalism, 96. Liberator, 9 April 1836, 17 September 1836; 6 March 1840. The Ashtabula women believed slavery violated ‘the plain commands of God’. Ashtabula County Anti-Slavery Society, 4 January 1837. First Annual Report of the Dorchester Female Anti-Slavery Society December 1837 (Boston: 1838), 20. Quakers in Indiana used the concept of inner light to justify their activism. ‘God works by means’, one explained. ‘He is now using men and women as instruments in his hand, for diffusing information [sic] among the people to awaken them’. Protectionist, 16 January 1841. 10 National Enquirer, 20 April 1837; Dorchester Annual Report, 3–4; Letter of Mary Grew to the Brooklyn Female Anti-Slavery Society, 17 March 1837. Brooklyn Female Anti-Slavery Society Records, Connecticut State Library; Liberator, 19 March 1836, 27 August 1836. 9

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Abolitionist women often exploited the notion of separate spheres to argue that they had special moral responsibilities. But because such claims generated accusations that female activists had overstepped the boundaries of their sphere (a notion that some anti-slavery women airily dismissed as ‘but the affectation of fastidious decorum’), women also relied upon older dissenting ideas to justify their anti-slavery work. ‘Has woman not a soul?’ asked Ruth Ward. ‘Was she not given for a helpmeet for man—Then why may we not work together for the poor downtrodden slave?’ The Dorchester report made a similar argument, pointing out that the Bible did not distinguish between men’s and women’s moral responsibilities, and, as a result, it was a sin for women to remain silent. The conviction of the spiritual equality of men and women was widely shared in female anti-slavery circles and became the basis for sweeping assertions of female responsibilities. Dorchester women declared that ‘future salvation or destruction, to a great extent’ mainly depended on women’s exertions.11 Although anti-slavery shared many similarities with benevolent and reform organizations, abolitionists, influenced by the central myth of Calvinism, sharply distinguished between their own associations and those devoted to other causes. Puritans and separatists had viewed the church as a voluntary or gathered community of saints standing apart from the larger sinful world. Like their dissenting ancestors, abolitionists emphasized the oppositional relationship existing between religious anti-slavery societies and worldly organizations. In part, abolitionists chose to see themselves as different, but that sense of difference was deepened by the ways in which others viewed them. As Anne Weston remarked in her letter to the New York Female Anti-Slavery Society, people might not support most reform or benevolent associations, but at least they wished them well. Not so in the case of anti-slavery societies. Weston captured the tension between anti-slavery and the larger community in her comment that those who were not with the abolitionists were against them.12 Frequently, women argued on the grounds of both spiritual and political values. The Portland (Maine) Anti-Slavery Society Constitution pointed out that slavery ignored the laws of the Creator and denied slaves their inalienable rights. Their constitution also made the point that slavery dragged human beings down to the level of animals. Portland Anti-Slavery Records, 1844–1851, Maine Historical Society. 11 Letter from Ruth Ward to Maria Chapman, October 1839, Weston-Chapman Papers (hereafter WChP), Boston Public Library (hereafter BPL). Dorchester Annual Report, 10–11; National Enquirer, 20 April 1837; Taylor, Abolitionists, 420; Liberator, 3 November 1837 and 27 August 1836; Records of the Lynn Female Anti-Slavery Society, 21 June 1837. Lynn Historical Society. 12 Hall, ‘Religion and Society’, 336, uses the concept of the central myth of Calvinism. Daniel Walker Howe, ‘Protestantism, Voluntarism, and Personal Identity in Antebellum America’, in Harry S. Stout and D. G. Hart (eds), New Directions in American Religious History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 216; Letter from Anne Weston to the New York Female AntiSlavery Society, 21 July 1835, Records of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter MHS). The argument over the type of refreshments to be served at

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In benevolent organizations, members were drawn together by shared interests and often social position. While American political ideals played an influential part in the creation of female anti-slavery societies, members also drew on the historical precedent of forming dissenting congregations. The experience seemed pertinent, for not only was the cause sacred, but some women regarded antislavery itself as religion. Experience Billings evidently thought, writing somewhat incredulously, that ‘People about here, (Foxborough, Massachusetts), have the impression that Anti-slavery is not religion’. By joining a female anti-slavery society, women separated themselves from other communities, and based their organization, as the Uxbridge (Massachusetts) Female Anti-Slavery Society constitution explained, on ‘faith in the fulfillment of the blessed promises contained in the Holy Scriptures’. All accepted a mutual covenant to destroy slavery, and each anti-slavery society surrounded membership with rituals suggesting entering into that covenant. Andover (Massachusetts) women considered the preamble to their constitution as their ‘creed’, which they accepted when they formally added their names to it.13 Female anti-slavery societies adopted various religious practices, some dating back to the Puritan era, others of more recent vintage. Associations routinely borrowed from familiar religious services to structure meetings, with scripture readings, explications of texts, and anti-slavery hymns.14 They also sponsored monthly prayer meetings, standbys of evangelical devotion, and drew upon Puritan customs and rituals. They declared fast days to encourage all to acknowledge the sinfulness of a country that tolerated slavery and to call for repentance and prepared anti-slavery catechisms. Taking over the task once belonging to their ministers, now dismissed as a ‘time-serving priesthood’, the meetings of the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Dover, New Hampshire, may have reflected the sense of difference between an anti-slavery society and another sort of gathering. Records of the Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Dover, February 1840, New Hampshire Historical Society. The distinction was strengthened with the split in anti-slavery ranks in the late 1830s and early 1840s. See Anne M. Boylan, ‘Women in Groups: An Analysis of Women’s Benevolent Organizations in New York and Boston, 1797–1840’, Journal of American History, 71 (1984), 510–14, for differences between benevolent and reform organizations. 13 Jane Shaw, ‘Introduction: Why Culture and the Nonconformist Tradition’, in Jane Shaw and Alan Kreider (eds), Culture and the Nonconformist Tradition (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1999), 2; Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Discipline in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 39; Howe, ‘Protestantism’, 208; Carwardine, Trans-Atlantic Revivalism, 150; Liberator, 30 April 1836, 27 August 1836, 17 September 1836. The constitution of the Massachusetts Female Emancipation Society made clear that in adding their names, members were subscribing to the sentiments expressed in the document. Circular 1840–1841. Anti-Slavery Papers, BPL. 14 Letter from Experience Billings to Maria Chapman, 31 August 1840; letter from Caroline Weston to Deborah Weston, 17 March 1837, WChP, BPL. Records of the Pennsylvania Female Anti-Slavery Society, 13 December 1838, 11 February 1836, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; letter from Sarah Rugg to Anne Weston, 16 February 1838, WChP, BPL; Dorchester Annual Report, 7; Sandra S. Sizer, Gospel Hymns and Social Religion: The Rhetoric of Nineteenth-Century Revivalism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 51–2.

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women issued jeremiads calling upon their countrymen and women to avoid calamity by throwing off slavery. Abby Kelley, preparing for a lecturing career, imagined herself as one crying out ‘against the sins of the Ninevah in which we live’, while Henrietta Sargent saw abolitionists as God’s mouthpiece: ‘I sometimes think that the Abolitionists are call’d forward at this time, merely to rise up in judgement against this generation’. The God she and others summoned up was not the loving Saviour embraced by nineteenth-century American evangelicalism but the angry God of an earlier era who punished his chosen people for violating his commandments. ‘God always admonishes before he takes vengeance’, Sargent believed and gave sinners ‘an ample opportunity to turn from forbidden paths’. But Angelina Grimké was not hopeful, for she believed that despite all her efforts, the country ‘WILL NOT repent, and . . . deliverance . . . will at last come in terrible judgment’.15 Such stern words more often created enemies than friends. Not surprisingly, especially in the 1830s, the decision to join an anti-slavery society and to pursue its agenda provoked criticism and hostility. For much of the antebellum period, women abolitionists rightly understood themselves as part of ‘a despised minority in numbers’, members of ‘the sect that is everywhere spoken against’. ‘We are surrounded by Enimies [sic] on the right & on the left’, reported Abby Talbot from Dighton. They also ran real risks when they united with other anti-slavery women, as Unitarian Samuel J. May’s description of his anti-slavery lecture in a Freewill Baptist Church in Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1835 illustrated. The meeting was interrupted by shouts of men and boys outside the building and eventually ‘a heavy stone broke through one of the blinds, shattered a pane of glass and fell upon the head of a lady sitting near the centre’, who shrieked and ‘fell bleeding into the arms of her sister’.16 In face of animosity, abolitionist women drew upon a variety of resources, traditions, and practices to keep up their courage and hold firm to their commitments. Abolitionists were well acquainted with one of the country’s foundational myths that told the story of the persecution English dissenters Foster, Long Argument, 226, 213, 216–17; Hall, ‘Religion and Society’, 337, 327. School primers in 1765 still included a seventeenth-century catechism or the Westminster Confession of Faith. Advocate of Freedom, 5 July 1838. Lydia Maria Child, Anti-Slavery Catechism (Newburyport, 1839), frontispiece; Abby Kelley, ‘Anti-Slavery Work’, Liberty Bell (1845), 203; Barnes and Dumond, Letters, I, 358, 373, 376; II, 2, 746, 784; letter from Patsy Newton to Maria Chapman, January 1840, WChP, BPL; Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The Churches in England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II (London: SCM Press, Ltd.), I, 193. One can view the resolutions offered and accepted during anti-slavery meetings as abbreviated forms of jeremiads. At a women’s antislavery conference in 1840, composed of delegates from several New England towns, the resolutions found the North guilty of abetting slaveholding, denounced prejudice as ‘antirepublican, anti-christian . . . in direct opposition to the example of Jesus Christ’, and condemned race laws as a disgrace. Liberator, 31 January 1840. 16 Friend of Man, 19 January 1837; letter from Abby Talbot to Maria Chapman, 26 June 1839, WChP, BPL; Samuel J. May, Some Records of our Anti-slavery Conflict (Miami: Mnemosyne Publishing Co., Inc., 1969 edn), 152–3. 15

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valiantly suffered for their faith before they fled to the colonies. References to Pilgrims and Puritans show that women were able to put their own experiences as a disliked but faithful minority into a larger, meaningful pattern. Quakers had their own story as Elizabeth Buffum Chace pointed out. She remembered that already as a child, she was ‘familiar with persecutions of the Quakers, both in Old and New England’. Women also drew strength from the sense that they composed a contemporary community of true believers, purified by persecution and united by belief, not denominational affiliation. The Female Anti-Slavery Society of Concord, New Hampshire, in an 1837 letter to Angelina Grimké, declared that the ‘few hundred miles and the lack of personal acquaintance’ constituted ‘no bar to communion of feeling and sympathy’. Rather persecution and trials, ‘some of the holiest bonds of endearment’, bound the women tightly together.17 Both male and female abolitionists, familiar with the history of early Christian and Reformation martyrs, could also place themselves in the long line of those who died for their beliefs. When they attended the world antislavery convention in 1840, both Lucretia Mott, a Quaker, and Mary Grew, a Baptist, noted visiting places where dissenters were executed. Mott walked to Newgate prison ‘where John Rogers of New England Primer memory was burnt at the stake’, while Grew passed the spot in Oxford where Archbishops Ridley and Latimer ‘rose to receive their martyr-crowns’. Like martyrs of old, some abolitionists believed that death could result from their commitment. As Dorchester women stoically acknowledged in their yearly report, they might be called upon to seal their testimony with blood. Angelina Grimké likewise declared in her 1835 letter to William Lloyd Garrison, later published in the Liberator, her willingness for martyrdom. ‘It is my deep, solemn, deliberate conviction, that this is a cause worth dying for’.18 While the Grimkés and others never paid the ultimate price of death for their convictions, they experienced lesser forms of persecution. Besides mob violence, many women encountered social disapproval, ostracism, and openly expressed antagonism. While lacking the drama of stories of the apostles and martyrs, these ongoing experiences of rejection fostered a sense of connection with those who had suffered in the past. In addition, women abolitionists faced the reality that

17 Horton Davies, Worship and Theology from Andrewes to Baxter and Fox, 1603–1690 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 121; Friend of Man, 19 January 1837; letter from Deborah Weston to Mary Weston, 19 October 1836, WChP, BPL; Elizabeth C. Stevens, ‘Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman: Motherhood as a Subversive Activity in Nineteenth Century Rhode Island’, Quaker History, 84 (1995), 39. 18 Friend of Man, 19 January 1837; Frederick B. Tolles (ed.), Slavery and ‘The Woman Question’: Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 (London: Friends Historical Association and Friends Historical Society, 1952), 24; Mary Grew Diary, 6 June 1840, M59 Research Publications, History of Women Microfilm, reel 973, # M13; Dorchester Annual Report, 13.

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many religious reformers had confronted before them, apathy and disinterest. As one woman pointed out, the trial of indifference might ‘appear light’, but it was actually ‘a heavy burden’. Sarah Plummer of Bangor, Maine, interpreted the apathy she encountered not in secular terms but as spiritual ‘agony’, relieved, as for so many before her, by devotional practices central to dissenting life, especially private prayer. ‘Then it is, that I flee to my closet, and I find that if the ear of man is closed, that the great Jehovah is ever open’.19 A sense of the absolute justice of their cause also united and energized antislavery women, who were far more certain that they understood God’s intentions than their Puritan ancestors had been. Because God was on the side of ‘the truth and right’, they should not feel ‘disheartened, because a multitude does not go with us’, said one Maine woman. Nor should they fear to confront authority. ‘If legislative enactments are put forth against us’, the Concord, New Hampshire, society proclaimed, ‘we must not be dismayed. There is One that is higher than the highest human authority—in obedience to Him we shall be safe’.20 Some of the authorities were far closer to home than the politicians in legislative halls. When Garrison had urged immediate emancipation in the 1830s, he and others had assumed that the Protestant churches would support the abolitionist crusade. The righteousness of the cause and, perhaps, the active role played by British nonconformity in the struggle to abolish slavery in the West Indies encouraged this belief. Some individual ministers and congregations did, in fact, respond to Garrison’s call. Yet all too many abolitionist women made unpleasant discoveries. Sally Jackman and Persis Seaver had united with the Congregational church in Loudon, New Hampshire, believing that it would avoid evil. Like the Puritans before them, the women expected their church to teach sound doctrine, oversee the correct dispensation of the sacraments, and discipline church members who failed to honour their moral and religious duties. By living up to these responsibilities, the true church provided moral guidance and spiritual direction and worked towards the creation of a godly community. Jackman and Seaver, however, found their church wanting and announced the church’s failure in the anti-slavery

19 Letter from Sarah Plummer to Anne Weston, 31 March 1838, WChP, BPL; letter from Anne Weston to the Uxbridge Female Anti-Slavery Society, 12 April 1835, Records of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, MHS. Davies notes Puritans felt the need for grace in order to face a Christian life full of loneliness and singularity. Davies, Worship, 121, 127; Hambrick-Stowe, Piety, 19. 20 Records of the Portland Anti-Slavery Society, 25 February 1844, Maine Historical Society; letter from Susan Taber (?) to Deborah Weston, 18 July 1841. Taber declared, ‘Nothing but a firm conviction of the righteousness of our cause could sustain us under such a weight of falsehood and contumely as is heaped us’, WChP, BPL. Friend of Man, 19 January 1837; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 258; Young, Witness, 192, for Grimké’s statement.

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newspaper, The Herald of Freedom. Addressing their church, they declared, ‘we do not consider you a body of Christians’.21 Using similar standards, Eliza and Mary Kenney became convinced that their Congregational church in Salem and its minister had fallen short. The minister had failed as a teacher of sound doctrine because he refused to condemn slavery as a sin, closed the church to anti-slavery lecturers, or neglected to announce special prayer meetings for the slave. Further, he did not foster a ‘full’ discussion of slavery in church meetings. As one responsible for the discipline of erring members and for the administration of the sacraments, he had not barred slaveholders from fellowship and communion. Other abolitionist women pointed out that Protestant clergy did not provide moral guidance or spiritual direction. It was contrary to the spirit of the gospel to treat whites and blacks differently in church, they argued.22 Evelina Smith, a resident in Hingham, Massachusetts, believed that the issue of slavery was so contentious that it would ‘make such a shaking among the churches as has never been felt before since the days of Cotton Mather, here in New England’. Her letters show how one cleric’s abolitionism evaporated and explains why many American dissenting churches refused to adopt the antislavery stance abolitionists originally expected. Initially, Smith welcomed the arrival of Mr. Stearns, who prayed for the slave during services and preached abolitionist sermons. While his stance pleased Smith, however, it offended other church members. Two men left the church during the prayer for the slaves, and others were so displeased by the anti-slavery sermons that they stayed away altogether. The potential loss of revenue from male contributors

21 Seymour Drescher, ‘Two Variants of Anti-Slavery: Religious Organization and Social Mobilization in Britain and France, 1780–1870’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone: Wm. Dawson & Sons. Ltd., 1980), 45; The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter, July 1840 and June 1842; Linda Jeanne Evans, ‘Abolitionism in the Illinois Churches, 1830–1865’, Ph.D. thesis (Northwestern University, 1981), 140, 193, 273; David D. Hall, ‘Narrating Puritanism’, in Stout and Hart, New Directions, 55–6; Liberator, 30 July 1841. While not all abolitionists reached such a conclusion, all agreed abolitionism was a sacred cause. The vital question of the church’s relationship with slavery and its attitude towards emancipation was discussed and debated in many settings. The Portland (Maine) Anti-Slavery Society, for example, took up the subject several times in 1844. When it was first debated, ‘some members of the friends present’ thought ‘the church much less guilty than others charge it with being’, but subsequently there was another ‘quite . . . animated discussion . . . respecting the proslavery character of the American church and clergy’. The Union (Pa) Anti-Slavery Society debated whether ‘slave-holding [should] be made a bar to communion’. In its 1842 Annual Report, the Salem Female AntiSlavery Society listed unacceptable church decisions and critiqued the attempt to put unity before purity. Records of the Portland Anti-Slavery Society, 10 August 1844, 28 September 1844, Maine Historical Society; 1842 Annual Report of the Salem Female-Anti-Slavery Society, PeabodyEssex Institute, Peabody-Essex Library Pennsylvania Freeman, 2 January 1840. 22 Liberator, 3 September 1841, 10 June 1842, 21 March 1845; John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), 19–26; Foster, Long Argument, 2; Hall, ‘Narrating Puritanism’, 56.

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was an obvious problem for the financial health of the church and for the pastor’s future. The gossip and disagreements swirling around Stearns’ anti-slavery views undermined congregational life and, some thought, its religious mission. Two years later, much had changed in the Hingham church. The minister had learned the costs of supporting abolitionism, and, as Smith reported, had grown very charitable and no longer condemned slavery. He seemed most interested in keeping ‘the parish together’, she noted scornfully, ‘to please all, & the Consequence is they have all grown very religious. We have a great many religious meetings and have all grown very good’. The plethora of evangelical services offended Smith, who found the Wednesday meetings at Stearns’ house meant to encourage conversion ‘so stupid that I shall not go again’.23 In the words of one Newport woman, the ‘long links of . . . sectarian connexion with some of the slaveholding churches at the South [were] clanking and clattering’ at the heels of northern clergy and their churches. While individual congregations might or might not support the abolitionist agenda, the national organizations of the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches desperately wanted to avoid taking any position that might alienate southern members and divide their denominations. In the opinion of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, American churches had placed ‘union and peace before purity’. During their campaigns against the slave trade and slavery in the British West Indies, British nonconformists had never faced what one Quaker woman defined as a ‘corrupting doctrine of expediency’ that was so powerful in the American churches.24 In an effort to influence national organizations, women and men prepared memorials and petitions urging church leaders to condemn slavery. They had little success. The general meeting of the Presbyterian Church held in 1836 in Pittsburgh, for example, avoided full discussion of the two memorials on slavery women had submitted. Since slavery was legal in many states, the committee concluded that it was ‘by no means proper for an ecclesiastical judicatory to interfere’.25 The failure of religious leaders to act either individually or collectively against slavery fuelled furious criticism that spilled beyond the issue of slavery.

23 Letters from Evelina Smith to Caroline Weston, 12 April 1841, 9 September 1841, 12 December 1841; letter from Evelina Smith to Maria Chapman, 25 June 1843, WChP, BPL. 24 Letter from Sophia Little to Amos Phelps, no date, 1838, Anti-Slavery Collection, BPL; Annual Report of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, 1842, Records of the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, Peabody-Essex Institute; Barnes and Dumond, Letters, 405; Kathryn Kish Sklar, ‘ “Women Who Speak for an Entire Nation”: American and British Women at the World Anti-Slavery Convention, London, 1840’, in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (eds), The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 318. 25 Friend of Man, 7 July 1836.

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Abolitionists accused their denominations of being authoritarian, hierarchical, and corrupt, echoing traditional anti-establishment denunciations dating back to the Reformation and even earlier.26 The Madison Anti-slavery Society condemned the ‘hellishness . . . in the church’, while in Pennsylvania, a selfdescribed ‘old Widdow’ lashed out against the ‘Pagan Idolatry’ which ‘Tainted’ all the churches.27 Lucretia Mott and others identified the fundamental problem. It was ‘lamentable, that the simple & benign religion of Jesus should be so encumbered with the creeds & dogmas of sects’, Mott pointed out. She lamented the ‘gloomy appendages of men’ that ‘obscured’ the ‘primitive beauty’ of religion. No matter what their denomination, abolitionist women agreed that human practices, ‘mere formal observances’, had carried their religious institutions far from the simplicity of the early church. As Sarah and Angelina Grimké pointed out, it was clear from the Bible that God never intended the present system of ministry or worship. They believed that ‘the whole church government must come down, the clergy stand right in the way of reform and I do not know but this stumbling block too must be removed before Slavery can be abolished’.28 Convinced of the failure of clergy, women felt justified in exposing their pastors ‘to the scorn & contempt of the world’. When Angelina Grimké chose to call Protestant ministers ‘priests’, she drew upon a culture of anticlericalism that had first been directed at Roman Catholic clergy. Like Catholic priests, Protestant ministers were claiming ‘divine ordination’ to confuse their followers and to impose a form of ‘spiritual bondage’. ‘Has heaven bestowed a divine light / On thy soul . . . that thou claimest the right / To dictate thus, and instruct me?’ asked a scornful poem published in the Liberator. Even Quakers were guilty of emphasizing the ‘infallibility’ of the elders which ‘almost inevitably leads to a surrender of the conscience’. All too often, Protestant clergy had allowed denominational loyalty or a desire to maintain the ‘respectability of . . . [their] cause’ to replace God’s commands and ‘the blessed truth of Jesus’. Some even hinted at corruption as did Evelina Smith and Baptist Mary Manter, who declared that she would ‘never give another cent to suport [sic] [a] Minister who can live in pleasure while the slaves are in bondage’.29 26

Friend of Man, 20 October 1836; 28 July 1836. There were, of course, other forces undermining clerical authority. Donald M. Scott, From Office to Profession, The New England Ministry 1750–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 121; Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). 27 Friend of Man, 24 July 1839; Barnes and Dumond, Letters, II, 813; Sarah Hopper Emerson (ed.), Life of Abby Hopper Gibbons Told Chiefly Through Her Correspondence (New York: 1887), I, 105; letter from Elizabeth Simpson to Maria Chapman, 29 April 1844, WChP, BPL. 28 Beverly Wilson Palmer (ed.), Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 90; Stevens, ‘Chace’, 40; Barnes and Dumond, Letters, 431, 498. 29 Letter from Evelina Smith to Maria Chapman, 25 June 1843, WChP, BPL; Barnes and Dumond, Letters, 431; letter of Anne Weston to the Putnam, Ohio, Female Anti-Slavery Society, 22 July 1835, Records of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, MHS. Taylor, Abolitionists,

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Women also attacked the proliferation of evangelical organizations and practices that suggested spiritual health but concealed a moral vacuum. Lydia Maria Child argued that ‘orthodoxy’ had ‘clothed most of the community in her straight-laced garments’. While there were plenty of meetings, much psalm singing and preaching, and saving of souls, there was little ‘genuine’ love for others and not much to show for all the excitement. The focus on personal salvation rather than active benevolence had narrowed the real mission of the church and diverted members from their duty to the slaves. Making a similar argument, another woman rejected the self-centred approach that she felt substituted for more important work of reform. ‘Oh! My soul I am sick of that religion . . . all our time must be spent for self, pray for self!’ While she continued to do meaningful work and felt the cause demanded still more exertion and more sacrifice, she saw herself and the few others who joined her as a small band ‘among many wolves that are ready to devour us’.30 Denunciations of church, clergy, and pious practices did not come easily or quickly, however. Those who felt alienated from their churches were not people who took religion lightly or who neglected prayer or the Scriptures. As James Gillespie Birney pointed out in his 1835 letter, ‘Vindication of the Abolitionists’, most abolitionists ‘are Christians by profession, and are found among the most active, zealous, and well-informed classes of the several churches in which they respectively belong’. Such Christians only gradually became troubled by clerical and denominational silence and equivocation on slavery. Deborah and Caroline Weston, both Unitarians, habitually attended different churches to evaluate the clergy’s commitment to abolitionism most evident in their sermons. An exacting judge, Deborah found the preaching of one Methodist minister ‘very good as far as it went’ but condemned the ‘villainy’ in another sermon at another church. In Fitchburg, Eliza Gill regarded the Unitarians as ‘aloof from our cause’, the Calvinistic Congregational minister hostile to anti-slavery, and the Baptists more acceptable but few in numbers. Probably a member of the Calvinistic Congregational Church, Gill enjoyed very little ‘comfort or spiritual benefit from preaching’ she heard and 164; Deborah Bingham Van Broeckhoven, The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Anti-Slavery Network (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 75–6; Liberator, 1 January 1842; Barnes and Dumond, Letters, 437–8; letter from Mary Manter to William Lloyd Garrison, 23 April 1842, Anti-Slavery Papers, and letters from Mary Manter to Maria Chapman, 30 July 1840 and undated 1840, WChP, BPL. I am interpreting Angelina Grimké’s charge. James Hudnut-Beumler, In Pursuit of The Almighty’s Dollar: A History of Money and American Protestantism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), xiv. Nathan O. Hatch pictures anticlericalism in a more populist vein in Democratization. 30 Liberator, 6 October 1837; letter from Lucinda Storrs to Dear Children, 31 January 1835, Storrs Papers, New York Public Library; Milton Melzer and Patricia G. Holland (eds), Lydia Maria Child: Selected Letters, 1817–1880 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 80; letter from Mary N. B. Smith to Abby Kelley, 16 August 1841, Kelley Foster Papers, American Antiquarian Society (hereafter AAS).

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was concerned that her children were exposed to ‘such conscience searing sentiments’.31 Mary T. Burrage, also of Fitchburg, Massachusetts, described the process of becoming a technical ‘covenant-breaker’ with her church although she maintained that her true ‘covenant is with the everlasting God’. Burrage, like Gill, was probably a member of the Calvinistic Congregational Church, a body that was divided over whether their pastor should declare slavery a sin. Day and night, she recalled, she had tried to discover what her duty was to the church and to the truth. ‘It has been a subject of anxious inquiry, in my mind, whether I could consistently remain in our church, considering the stand our pastor and the church have taken in regard to subjects vital to the cause of Christianity’. When the pastor offered a resolution to his congregation that it should avoid committing itself altogether on the question of slavery, she took his suggestion as proof that he was unwilling to preach the whole law of God. She decided not to ‘commune’ until circumstances changed. Two years later, in 1842, a group separated from that church to establish the Third Congregational Church, Trinitarian, in Fitchburg, and perhaps Burrage and Eliza Gill joined them. In the meantime, Burrage submitted a copy of the letter she had sent to the church deacons to the Liberator for publication.32 Since Protestant clergy had never been able to claim an exclusive right to interpret the Bible, female abolitionists bolstered their criticism of institutions and individuals by appealing to scripture. With her Bible before her, Maria Rice felt confident that ‘though a fool I need not err’. Such assurance led some women to reject clerical authority altogether. One Quaker woman explained: ‘Neither Minister, Elder, Overseer, Sect, nor Association should prevent me from thinking, acting, or speaking as a free woman’. Newport resident Sophia Little went so far as to dismiss the views of the most exalted Protestant churchmen of her day. ‘It matters little whether Dr. Channing or Dr. Beecher or any other Dr. in the land thinks as we do on the subject of slavery [;] is not the Lord on our side’.33 31

Letters from Deborah Weston to Caroline Weston, 5 October 1836, 19 October 1836; Deborah Weston, diary, 5 July 1835; Caroline Weston diary, 11 October 1835; 22 January 1837; letters from Eliza Gill to Maria Chapman, 28 April 1839, 6 December 1839, WChP, BPL. Gill probably belonged to the Calvinistic group that eventually split over the slavery issue, www. rollstone.org/history.html; Davies, Worship, 138, 162–3. Women also paid careful attention to whether ministers read the notices of anti-slavery meetings or not. See Glenn C. Altschuler and Jan M. Saltzgaber, Revivalism, Social Conscience, and Community in the Burned-Over District (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983). 32 Liberator, 22 May 1840. James Lazerow, Religion and the Working Class in Antebellum America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 83–129. 33 Letter from Maria Rice to Maria Weston, 23 October 1839, WChP, BPL; Hopper, Gibbons, 107; Sophia Little to Maria Chapman, 26 September 1840, WChP, BPL. Van Broeckhoven, Devotion of These Women, 70; Mack, Visionary Women, 21. As one New Hampshire woman warned her clerical teachers, ‘I shall speak in religious meetings’ whenever God’s spirit inspired her, Liberator, 6 March 1840.

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Ministers, not surprisingly, tried to curb unruly female critics. They had no better success than many establishment authorities before them. Eleanor Jewitt’s minister ‘lectured’ her for hours for her ‘improper conduct & overheated zeal’ in the anti-slavery cause to no avail. Because Gulielma Estes had walked with a black man in a public place, her minister quizzed her at length about her racial beliefs. He made his position clear, asserting that black people were members of a separate race who should not sit with whites in church. Estes boldly challenged such views by stating that she regarded character as a more important factor for marriage than race. At this point, her minister had heard enough. ‘He then said I would advise you to leave the church’, she reported, ‘or, come before them and acknowledge your wrongdoing and promise never to commit the same offenses’. Of course, she did not.34 Faced with clerical and theological error, many abolitionists followed dissenting tradition and quitted their flawed churches. The process was often neither smooth nor private. After the Kenney sisters wrote a letter withdrawing from the Congregational Tabernacle church in Salem, they received two visits from their deacon. In the first, he ‘interrogated’ them about their views of the ministry, the church, and the Sabbath. During the second visit, he began to talk about excommunication. ‘His conversation was frequently interspersed with sneers, scoffs, and insulting remarks, such as sneeringly asking us “if we felt ourselves to be more holy then the church” . . . flourishing the Bible and asking “if we received it as our only rule of faith and practice”’. Actually some of his accusations were not so far from the mark.35 The vestry of the church excommunicated the two sisters on the grounds of their absence from Sunday services. Refusing to go quietly and eager to publicize their story, the Kenneys reported to the Liberator that the vestry was trying to divert attention away from the real problem, ‘the pro-slavery spirit and measures of this church’. They also insisted that their letter be read before the congregation. When Quaker Abby Gibbons became convinced that her New York monthly meeting had departed from the original ‘leading principles and testimonies of the Society of Friends’, especially ‘the testimony of truth against the great evils of Slavery and Intemperance’, she adopted a similar strategy. Assuring the Friends present that she was not acting rashly, Gibbons ‘went quickly to the meeting and read her resignation before giving it to the Clerk, as the result of the latter course would have been its suppression, so far as the 34 Letter from Eleanor Jewitt probably to Maria Chapman, 5 January 1840, WChP, and letter from Gulielma Estes to Henry C. Wright,’ 11 August 1842, Anti-Slavery Papers, BPL. Scott outlines the clerical crisis in Office to Profession, 112–25. 35 In a note to a poem entitled ‘The Come-Outers’, Liberty Bell (1845), 98, Anne Warren Weston explained that the term had been ‘derisively bestowed’ on those quitting their churches ‘in the same spirit that the terms, Methodist, Quaker, and Puritan, were applied to the nonconformists of the three preceding centuries’, Liberator, 3 September 1841; Hylson-Smith, Churches, 204.

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reading was concerned’. Apparently, her performance had a great impact. ‘An unusual and startling thing was it for one of our own quiet and orderly Meetings to be disturbed by the grave affirmation of truths which branded its holy officials with the guilt of slavery, intemperance, and religious tyranny’.36 While some women found the act of separation a relief, others discovered how painful a step it was to take. The history of Rachel Stearns’ religious odyssey suggests how difficult she must have found her decision to abandon the ‘pro-slavery church’ that she had sacrificed so much to join. Stearns had grown up in Greenfield, Massachusetts, where she attended the Congregational church favoured by her mother and friends. At the age of 23, she was converted at a Methodist camp-meeting. Because she considered Methodists her social inferiors, it took a year before she could bring herself to join the church. Her solitary three-mile walks to the Methodist meeting house symbolized the social isolation that followed her new religious affiliation. Her Greenfield school collapsed when the Orthodox parents withdrew their children. Eventually she left Massachusetts to teach in a missionary school in Illinois. Returning to Springfield, Massachusetts, a few years later, she became an abolitionist and started a Sabbath school for black children. Her new commitments forced her to re-examine the Methodist Church. After ‘many a struggle’ she determined to leave the church that she believed condoned slavery by not condemning it. Hoping that she would be dismissed by church authorities, she ultimately had to turn herself out.37 Rachel Stearns had only been a member of the Methodist Church for eight years before she withdrew. Others were breaking attachments of a lifetime. Eleanor Pettigrew, of Felicity, Ohio, came from a family of Methodists. Her ‘venerable’ father had laboured for the church for more than fifty years, her ‘large family of brothers and sisters still found a home’ in the church, and there were ‘many friends’. To forsake family and companions ‘required courage such as warriors in a bloody battle-field know nothing of ’. Not surprisingly, religious independence could prove lonely. One poignant reminder of the emotional consequences of separation came from Agnes Crain, who lived in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. She wrote that ‘I no longer meet my former friends in the prayer meeting or lecture room, in the sectarian Sunday school or the

36 Liberator, 3 September 1841; Emerson, Gibbons, 115–20; letter from Isaac Hopper to Sarah Palmer, 11 October 1841, Sarah Hopper Palmer Papers, Swarthmore College. Troubled by another member’s disownment, the member of another Quaker meeting chastised her monthly meeting: ‘What, disown people for doing that, that they conscientiously believed was their duty, why friends, this is awful’. 37 Candy Gunther, ‘The Spiritual Pilgrimage of Rachel Stearns, 1834–1837: Reinterpreting Women’s Religious and Social Experiences in the Methodist Revivals of Nineteenth-Century America’, Church History, 65 (1996), 577–95; Letters from Rachel Stearns to Maria Chapman, no date, 1842, 29 November 1843, WChP, BPL.

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teachers meeting . . . and when I meet them and their pastor at the entrance of his church [I] become the subject of conversation’.38 Some women avoided further religious entanglements. Others, of whom Stearns was probably one, joined one of the come-outer sects. As the newspaper, The Independent, pointed out it was a Puritan and Congregational principle to ‘form new churches and new societies where old ones . . . adopt wrong principles. So did our Puritan ancestors, and in so doing, they glorified Christ and saved the land’. These new churches offered purity on the issue of slavery and a lack of authoritarianism that suited those disgusted with clerical pretensions. As one group of Wesleyan Methodists explained, they had thrown off ‘the Episcopal yoke’.39 Although male financial support was obviously important for the health of any new religious organization, women, constituting the majority of members of the evangelical churches, were important players in any successful separation. The records of the 1843 division in the first Baptist church in Chicago hint at the part women played in one separatist effort. When thirty-four members, including Frances Holden, withdrew from the church, they hired an abolitionist minister and established the Tabernacle Baptist church across the street from the First Baptist. Since this departure involved not only religious and moral principles but also financial issues, it is likely that the parting was not amicable. The new congregation proclaimed its faith: ‘Slavery is a great sin in the sight of God, and while we view it as such, we will not invite into our pulpit those who advocate or justify from civil policy or the bible, the principles or practice of slavery’. When Frances Holden crossed the street, she left her wealthy husband behind at First Baptist. Within a few months, however, he joined his wife, and one can imagine the many conversations that must have taken place between the two as he tried to decide whether to stay or go. The financial implications of his decision were considerable. When Holden joined Tabernacle Baptist, he became its richest member. But the ongoing spiritual health of the congregation did not depend on Holden but on the women like his wife who formed the backbone of the congregation. In

38

True Wesleyan, 18 October 1851. Letter from Agnes Crain to Abby Kelley, 26 March 1847, Kelley Foster Papers, AAS. In her letter to Maria Weston, 26 September 1840, Sophia Little described her ‘hermit like seclusion from all spiritual communities, not willingly I assure you’, WChP, BPL. 39 Letter from Rachel Stearns to Maria Chapman, 4 February 1844, WChP, BPL; The Independent, 23 June 1853; Wesleyan Church Records, Leicester, Massachusetts, 1844–1859, 1 March 1845, AAS; Carlton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 Through the Civil War (Toronto: The Macmillan Co., 1970), 227; Foster, Long Argument, 303; Douglas M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2001), 54. Besides for the Wesleyan Methodists, there were Union churches (often composed of abolitionist Presbyterians and Congregationalists), breakaway Friends meetings, and newly formed independent Congregational churches.

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1854, when membership reached 355, over two-thirds of the members were women.40 The struggle in the American churches was followed with interest in Great Britain. While at various times, in the 1830s and 1840s, nonconformist church bodies and prominent nonconformist lay people sent messages to American counterparts urging them to take a public stand against slavery, American denominations resisted foreign advice. American Methodist bishops chastised the representative of the British Wesleyan Conference in 1836 while a letter from 200 British and Irish Unitarian ministers prompted American conservative Unitarians to reply in 1843, ‘we know you will pardon us from saying that of what we can or ought to do, we must of necessity be the most competent judges’. As Sarah Grimké explained to Elizabeth Pease in 1844, efforts to influence American Friends failed because Quakers were as ‘stagnant as the dead sea’. But, never having faced the same issue of separation over slavery, some English nonconformists were disturbed as they saw strife and division disrupting dissenting denominations in the United States. The English Friends in the BFAS were so concerned about the split among Indiana Quakers that they tried unsuccessfully to mediate the differences in 1846. As Huldah Wickership told Elizabeth Pease, whom she did know personally, Indiana Quakers had had to choose between ignoring ‘the spirit of Christ within us’ by remaining in the meeting and forming a new organization ‘in which we could enjoy liberty of conscience’.41 The attack on the American churches also struck genteel English abolitionists as harsh and intemperate. While some American women abolitionists recognized the ‘rashness of expression’ especially evident in New England, many felt the language was appropriate. As Sarah Grimké pointed out, there was a ‘deadly war waged in N.E. between Righteousness and sin, between the theoretical and pharisaical and time-serving clergy and practical Christianity’. Sarah Neall agreed. ‘Up there among the wild hills of Puritan New England, has begun the struggle between the free spirit of the People and the tyranny of Ecclesiastical organizations’, she explained to English abolitionist, Elizabeth Pease. As a Philadelphia Quaker, Neall was not disapproving but envious of

40 Evans, ‘Illinois Churches’, 295–8. The new congregation’s resolution on slavery is found on the website of the First Baptist Church of Chicago, www.first-baptist-chicago.org/fbc/FBC4.html. 41 Betty Fladeland, Men and Brothers: Anglo-American Anti-slavery Cooperation (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 232; Douglas C. Stange, Patterns of Anti-slavery Among American Unitarians, 1831–1860 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1977), 190, 193, 210; Taylor, Abolitionists, 164, 204, 208–9, 253, 263; R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983), 80; letter from Huldah Wickersham to Elizabeth Pease, 18 October 1843, Anti-Slavery Papers, BPL.

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‘the fiery spirit that lives and thrives’ in New England abolitionism and bemoaned the Pennsylvania abolitionists’ lack of spark.42 Neall’s letter to Pease and the efforts of British nonconformists to influence their American counterparts on the slavery issue suggest the ties linking American and British abolitionists. American female abolitionists benefited from the example, the encouragement, advice, and monetary assistance that came from women in the British Isles. It may be that assisting American antislavery efforts helped to keep female anti-slavery alive in Britain after slavery was abolished in the British West Indies. Certainly, the work of preparing contributions for American anti-slavery fairs provided an ongoing purpose for British female organizations.43 The fund-raising fairs, especially the ones held in Boston and Philadelphia, were essential to the financial health of abolitionism, and unusual British and other European goods were critical to the fairs’ monetary success. As a member of the Boston society later remembered, the Boston Fair was ‘noted for having wares that were to be found in no Boston Shops’. By 1852, Anne Weston felt that without foreign goods, the great Boston fair would fail. ‘I do not think after the abundant splendours to which they have been accustomed, the Boston public would be satisfied with any display within the scope of the routine abolitionists’.44 Fairs, however, created a conflict between new and old dissenting religious values and values of the market economy. Dissenters had long believed that the spiritual realm stood in opposition to the worldly; Puritan jeremiads called upon New Englanders to abandon the profane ways that were diverting them from their spiritual duties. Evangelicalism reinforced suspicion of worldly things that could stand as a barrier to conversion. An abolitionist like Mary Manter expressed her misgivings about materialism and connected it to the fate of her cause. Clearly, she thought that abolitionists should be different from the pleasure-loving crowd. People needed to deny themselves ‘some unneedful things and be less careful to adorn their poor bodies and more carefull [sic] to adorn their minds and trie to be of some real use in the world’, she wrote. What motivated women in 1841 to ‘renounce’ their jewellery ‘for their own wearing’ and to offer it for sale at the Boston fair is not known, but perhaps some misgivings about luxury goods prompted them to part with their jewels.45

42 Taylor, Abolitionists, 256–7; Lucy Chase, Fragments, 30 November 1843, Chase Papers, AAS; Barnes and Dumond, Letters, II, 476; letter from Elizabeth Neall to Elizabeth Pease, 18 June 1842, Gay Papers, Butler Library, Columbia University. 43 See Liberator, 2 November 1833, 16 November 1833 for two examples of the importance of English anti-slavery women to female anti-slavery societies in the United States. 44 Letter from Anne Weston to Samuel May Jun., 1 October 1852, WChP, BPL; Sarah H. Southwick, Reminiscences of Early Anti-Slavery Days (Cambridge: 1893), 36. 45 Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740–1914 (New York: Longman, 1976), 87; Hall, ‘Religion and Society’, 337; letter from Mary Manter to Maria Chapman, 30 July 1840, WChP, BPL; Liberator, 1 January 1841.

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Julianna Tappan, a member of the New York Female Anti-Slavery Society, articulated her concerns about worldliness and its connection with antislavery fairs. Tappan had secured anti-slavery stamps from English and Scottish abolitionists which she was having reproduced on silk that would be made up into articles to be sold at fairs. ‘My views with regard to fairs have never been settled’, she confessed, and ‘are fast changing. It does not seem (to me) right to raise money for any benevolent society, or cause, by selling useless articles. Silk bags are useful . . . But there is so much time consumed and so much consulting of fashion, and conformity to the world, that I doubt much whether fairs, as they are conducted, are pleasing to God. How little of Christ here is in our actions, or feelings, or thoughts’. A West Brookfield (Massachusetts) woman raised another concern about fairs. Not only did some items for sale have ‘little or no intrinsic value’ but they were offered at ‘exorbitant prices’. In Pennsylvania, The Friends’ Weekly Intelligencer criticized both concerts and fairs as worldly diversions leading to mental and moral ‘dissipation’. In New England, Rachel Stearns tried to reconcile her conflicting feelings by making simple baskets of forest leaves for the Boston fair. She hoped that it would appeal to some buyer at the fair as ‘the only thing not poisoned by sin’.46 While they were unwilling to forgo the financial benefits of fairs that were so crucial to the economic health of their under-financed reform movement, American organizers understood the objections that kept on surfacing and went to some lengths to answer them, at least verbally. Boston managers, many of them from Unitarian backgrounds and not particularly concerned with the potentially sinful aspect of their fairs, acknowledged the criticisms of the moral management of fairs. But they argued ‘a Fair is not, like slavery, a malum in se, unless the same can be proved of the act of selling and of purchasing. Your committee pledge themselves that the fair of this year shall be conducted under a religious sense of duty’. In Philadelphia, the women insisted that their annual fair differed from those that came in for criticism because they had ‘always’ conducted their fairs ‘on strictly honorable mercantile principles’. Of course, buying and selling and consuming were essential elements of the problem.47 The women who mounted the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Fair justified their first sales because they were filled with useful goods, many of which were ‘adorned with anti-slavery prints or appropriate mottos’. In later years, although the Philadelphia Fair managers continued to assert their desire for

46 Letters from Julianna Tappan to Anne Weston, 26 May 1837 and October 1837; letter from Mary Gilbert to Maria Chapman, no date, 1843, WChP, BPL; Pennsylvania Freeman, 21 January 1847; letter from Rachel Stearns to Ladies of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, no date, Anti-Slavery Papers, BPL. 47 Undated Fair report, 1830s, WChP, BPL; Pennsylvania Freeman, 20 January 1848.

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as many ‘substantial and useful articles as possible’, their fair featured increasingly elaborate displays. Announcements for the 1846 fair, for example, assured fair goers that they would find a large variety of elegant goods, some imported from Paris and others from England. Managers rationalized their fair by describing its impact in evangelical terms. ‘Not alone by the silver and gold which swells its coffers, do we estimate’ the ‘utility’ of the annual fairs, the managers asserted. Fairs had a higher purpose: they excited ‘zeal among the young, and those who worked for it in sewing circles could often date their conversion to abolitionism to their efforts and see how their efforts revived flagging zeal’. No one could fault the ‘purity of the moral atmosphere’ of the Philadelphia fair.48 An article in the Pennsylvania Freeman in 1845 describing a rural fair held in Massachusetts attempted somewhat unconvincingly to meld dissenting values with materialistic and pleasurable pastimes. ‘The abolitionists have the satisfaction of feeling that they are teaching their contemporaries the secret of new enjoyments, as well as the application of righteous principles [and] are retaining what’s good about puritanism—its rigor of principle while we cast away its formal austerity and blamable asceticism’.49 Ironically, British anti-slavery women contributed to the steady progression of anti-slavery fairs away from dissenting and evangelical values. The very year that the Philadelphia women relied on religious vocabulary to defend their fair, they reported that they had received two beautiful shawls from Elizabeth Pease. Like Pease, other British women sent desirable rather than strictly useful goods that helped turn the fairs into luxurious emporiums. In a letter to Pease, Maria Chapman described the allure of English goods at the 1841 Boston Fair. ‘I wish you could have been present with us at one eventful moment at the fair’, she wrote. ‘We stood with mingled admiration and despair over the “English things” [that had arrived only when the fair was in session]—not knowing where to place them, and the crowd thronging in ready to snatch them out of the boxes, for the sake of securing them’.50 One wonders how Pease reacted to Chapman’s description of the avid desire, even greed of the crowd who wanted to buy and possess English goods. Certainly, the scene was a bit vulgar and may have shocked her. But the behaviour also pointed to the success of the fair, the goal which she and the Boston organizers shared. 48 Boston women initially favoured useful goods. Letter from Anne Weston to the New York Female Anti-Slavery Society, 21 July 1835, Records of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, MHS; 1837 Annual Report, Records of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; see also records for 12 December 1850. Pennsylvania Freeman, 1 January, 26 November, 10 December, 1846; 10 February 1848. See also 26 December 1850. Italics are the author’s. 49 Pennsylvania Freeman, 23 July 1846. 50 Pennsylvania Freeman, 1 January 1846; letter from Maria Chapman to Elizabeth Pease, 13 January 1842, WChP, BPL.

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The scene at the fair, however, does highlight the complex mixture of values, ideas, and behaviours contributing to American abolitionism. Historian Paul Goodman has suggested that no social movement before abolitionism had used such radical means of protest nor encountered such heated opposition as did the abolitionists. Their survival as an unpopular and small protest movement depended on the creation of viable organizations and a vigorous and convincing rationale that would inspire a few faithful adherents to work for decades with only modest success to show for their devotion. It is no surprise that female abolitionists drew upon the fundamental energizing religious and political ideas of their day to encourage female commitment and persistence in the cause. When one considers how powerfully older dissenting ideas shaped colonial and early national culture, perhaps it is not so surprising to discover that women also drew upon deep cultural currents flowing from their nonconformist past. This was a past that still resonated on a deep and perhaps almost unconscious level to support their struggle against the great sin in their world.51

51

Paul Goodman, Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 66.

7 ‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition Stacey Robertson

Sarah Ernst was angry. Writing a letter to the local anti-slavery newspaper, the Philanthropist, in February 1844, she chided her sister abolitionists in Cincinnati for their failure to act on their convictions. The Queen City boasted four female anti-slavery organizations, and yet all of them languished. How was this possible, wondered Ernst, when the city’s churches were full of women? She praised Jonathan Blanchard’s Sixth Street Presbyterian church for its intolerance of slavery, noting that it was ‘but one of four or five churches pledged to the cause of Right and Justice in this city’. But only a small handful of its large female membership participated in abolitionist groups. Dismissing the notion that women had no role in the movement, she argued that it was vain ‘to say that there is nothing that women can do in this cause, and feel this an excuse for folding the hands in quiet helplessness, till our Pope or Pastor shall bid us “rise and follow”. It is well known that in every successful enterprise for the amelioration of human suffering, women have always been the moving springs and most active allies’. Ernst concluded her missive with a plea: ‘Will you not make an effort this year to promote the cause of Universal Freedom as it never before has been done in Cincinnati? Will you not come and meet with us, with warm hearts and ready hands, to do what we can to put down this great sin?’1 Cincinnati churches and their dispassionate congregations continued to disappoint Ernst for the next fifteen years. Ernst and many others believed that Protestant women were particularly suited to be abolitionists. Women’s supposed instinctive virtue made them sensitive to the vulnerability of slave women and their families, and thereby natural opponents of slavery. Protestant churches, however, largely failed to

1 Sarah Ernst, ‘To the Female Abolitionists of Cincinnati’, Philanthropist (Cincinnati, OH), 7 February 1844.

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encourage abolitionism in their congregations. Most Christian denominations carefully avoided the topic of slavery as much as possible in order to avoid alienating their southern congregations. Several retreated from earlier antislavery positions as the tension between North and South increased in the decades preceding the Civil War. For women church-goers this vague and varying position in regard to slavery proved especially frustrating. With few avenues other than the church for expressing their opposition to slavery, they felt deeply betrayed by their ministers’ failure to preach against slavery. Sarah Ernst denounced Cincinnati churches for their ‘pro-slavery’ position and encouraged abolitionist members to abandon such institutions. Leaving the church required grim determination, however, as one’s religious community often included family, friends, and neighbours. Most women abolitionists preferred to stay in their churches and slowly build anti-slavery sentiment among their fellow congregants. This proved challenging and often impossible. The activism of grassroots abolitionists like Cincinnati’s Sarah Ernst demonstrates the complex relationship between religion and women’s abolitionism in the Old Northwestern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan. Initially the region experienced religious growth characterized by cooperation between denominations and independence among individual churches. This environment offered room for the spread of anti-slavery, especially in the Western Reserve. Women in small towns like Ashtabula, Ohio, found their abolitionism nurtured by enthusiastic congregations and supportive ministers. Often meeting in the safe space of a local church, they prayed, sewed, sang, and petitioned on behalf of slaves. As the population grew and more denominations began competing for congregants, however, anti-slavery experienced new challenges within mainstream churches. Tensions stimulated religious divisiveness and the creation of ‘come-outer’ churches that embraced antislavery. Women thrived in these environments, often taking on more public and leadership roles within the movement. Many come-outer churches became linked to the growing anti-slavery Liberty Party, which offered an opportunity for women to connect their abolitionism to partisanship. Combining the political and the spiritual, women embraced the Liberty Party with a lively boldness that surprised the region. The anti-slavery movement slowly emerged in the United States in the period following the Revolution, guided by African Americans, Quakers, and others who recognized slavery as a glaring contradiction in the new nation. It gained momentum in the 1830s with the rise of William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator and the subsequent explosion of anti-slavery organizations across the North. During this growth period the movement found much of its support among those who had experienced an evangelical ‘awakening’. Rejecting the notion of predestination and embracing the possibility of control over one’s destiny, this religious revolution encouraged participants to become increasingly involved in ‘perfecting’ the world around them. Exuberant young

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 157 Christians, both men and women, became absorbed in battling sin in all its forms. For a minority of these evangelicals, the greatest of these sins proved to be slavery.2 Abolitionists pressured churches to join their effort to eliminate slavery. They believed that Congregational, Presbyterian, Methodist, Unitarian, and Baptist churches were critical to the success of their movement. Supporters hoped that their tactic of moral suasion—using moral and Christian arguments to convince slaveholders to abandon the sinful institution—would appeal to ministers and churches of all denominations. They believed that churches should develop a written policy in regard to slavery—denouncing the institution as a sin and disciplining those who owned slaves. They wanted churches to foster discussion about slavery and educate their congregants about its unchristian and undemocratic foundation. They also hoped that churches would commit themselves to racial equality. These hopes proved naïve. While many individual church members converted to abolitionism, in general anti-slavery sentiment did not effect large-scale change in church policy. Mainstream Protestant churches resisted abolitionism not only because it would alienate southern members but also because of widespread racism. Many ministers followed the lead of famed clergyman Edward Beecher, who argued that slavery was a sin but individual slaveholders were not sinners. Despite their failure to convince any mainstream Protestant denomination to discipline slaveholders, anti-slavery activists influenced the development of separatist churches and missionary societies. Abolitionists organized the ‘Free’ Presbyterian Church in 1846 in response to the General Assembly’s decision to continue admitting slaveholders. This breakaway church focused on exposing the ‘proslavery practices of the major Presbyterian denominations’.3 Though the Methodist Episcopal Church emerged in the post-Revolutionary period with a general anti-slavery sentiment, by the 1830s it had retreated from this position. In 1816, black Philadelphians formed the abolitionist African Methodist Episcopal Church, and, in 1842, the Wesleyan Methodists broke away over the issue of slavery. The Baptist Church was the largest religious institution in the United States by the 1830s, but it lacked a central governing structure so individual churches did as they pleased regarding slavery. Abolitionists therefore focused on the church’s missionary societies, 2 The literature on the relationship between religion and abolitionism is voluminous. Some recent scholarship includes John R. McKivigan, The War Against Proslavery Religion: Abolitionism and the Northern Churches, 1830–1865 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984); John R. McKivigan and Mitchell Snay (eds), Religion and the Antebellum Debate Over Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998); Anna M. Speicher, The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000); and Douglas M. Strong, Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 3 McKivigan, Proslavery Religion, 102.

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which did have a central organization, demanding that slaveholders be prevented from contributing or office-holding. Failing in this effort, they created the anti-slavery American Baptist Free Mission Society in 1845.4 The Old Northwest experienced a slightly different trajectory in relation to religion and anti-slavery. As the region slowly attracted new emigrants, ministers recognized the need to cooperate with different denominations in order to develop viable churches among scattered settlements. The ‘Plan of Union’ brought together Presbyterians and Congregationalists to evangelize the West and ‘encouraged a uniformity of sentiment and practice in the early Western Reserve churches’.5 These churches, grounded in what Chris Padgett terms an ‘evangelical political culture’, often encouraged anti-slavery sentiment among their constituents.6 But with increased growth and diversity among the population came resistance to anti-slavery, and eventually many abolitionists left their churches to create separate institutions. These ‘comeouter’ churches thrived in the West offering abolitionists an important space for voicing their opposition to slavery.7 Even for those come-outers who declined to join an independent church, a strong religious sentiment continued to sustain their abolitionism.8 While American churches struggled to avoid the topic of slavery, many women became deeply involved in the anti-slavery movement. As historians have revealed, popular assumptions about female virtue paved the way for women’s entrance into abolitionism. Defining slavery as a sin that violated motherhood and family life, women emphasized their ‘natural’ opposition to an institution that degraded womanhood. Women’s supposed religious nature had already been used to rationalize their entrance into charitable organizations, temperance groups, and moral reform associations. So it was logical that female abolitionists would use the same rhetoric to defend their increasingly public role in a very unpopular movement. Hundreds of female anti-slavery societies emerged in the 1830s, and most of them focused on the sin of slavery and the important role of the church in eradicating sin. This sentiment was

4 The most thorough discussion of separatist churches and missionary societies remains McKivigan, Proslavery Religion. 5 Chris Padgett, ‘Evangelicals Divided: Abolition and the Plan of Union’s Demise in Ohio’s Western Reserve’, in McKivigan and Snay (eds), Religion and the Antebellum Debate over Slavery, 253. 6 Chris Padgett, ‘Abolitionists of All Classes: Political Culture and Antislavery Community in Ashtabula Co., Ohio, 1800–1850’, Ph.D. thesis (University of California, Davis, 1993), chapter 1. 7 On ‘come-outerism’ see Ryan Jordan, ‘Quakers, “Comeouters”, and the Meaning of Abolitionism in the Antebellum Free States’, Journal of the Early Republic 24 (2004), 587–608; McKivigan, Proslavery Religion; and Chris Padgett, ‘Comeouterism and Antislavery Violence in Ohio’s Western Reserve’, in John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold (eds), Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 193–214. 8 See Speicher, Religious World, 5–6.

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 159 widespread in female anti-slavery association constitutions, resolutions, letters, and public writings. Women abolitionists consistently explained how Christianity drew them into the movement.9 Abolitionism in the Old Northwest was linked to religion in complicated ways that deeply affected women’s participation in the movement. The rise of mixed-sex colleges in the West, including Oberlin, Knox, and Western Reserve College, produced hundreds of enthusiastic abolitionists. When Lane Seminary leaders in Cincinnati stifled discussion of slavery after the famed Lane Debates in 1834, many newly converted abolitionists left the institution and became public advocates for abolitionism, blanketing Ohio with their message of freedom and equality.10 Early on these evangelical reformers focused attention on women’s important role in the movement.11 Lane rebel and abolitionist lecturer James Thome read his Address to the Females of Ohio at the annual meeting of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society in Granville in 1836. ‘We need your aid—your sanction—your interests and prayers—your wakeful concern—your heart-beating sympathies—the encouragement of your unwavering faith’, he declared. Women, like men, were bound by Christian duty to ‘be active in furthering every moral enterprize [sic] which promotes the common welfare’.12 Emphasizing the spiritual, feminine nature of antislavery, Thome made it clear that true Christian women were abolitionists. The lack of denominational conflict that characterized the West also allowed for female abolitionism to thrive in particular communities. Isolated western churches seeking congregants tended to focus on commonalities more than differences. Less discord between denominations allowed for less internecine conflict among abolitionists, and thus more room for women. Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists, and Methodists all worked side by side in anti-slavery groups. As Cincinnati-based Philanthropist editor, Gamaliel

See, for example, Gail Bederman, ‘The Women Have Had Charge of the Church Work Long Enough’, American Quarterly, 41 (1989), 435–40; Anne Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Speicher, Religious World; and Elizabeth C. Stevens, ‘ “From Generation to Generation”: The Mother and Daughter Activism of Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lillie Chace Wyman’, Ph.D. thesis (Brown University, 1993). The best scholarly discussion of female anti-slavery is Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). 10 John L. Myers, ‘Antislavery Activities of Five Lane Seminary Boys in 1835–36’, Bulletin of the Historical and Philosophical Society of Ohio, 21 (1963), 95–111. See also Lawrence Lesick, The Lane Rebels: Evangelicalism and Antislavery in Antebellum America. Studies in Evangelicalism, No. 2 (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1980). On Theodore Weld see Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld & the Dilemma of Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). 11 See Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 12 James A. Thome, Address to the Females of Ohio Delivered at the State Anti-Slavery Anniversary, April 1836 (Cincinnati, 1836). 9

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Bailey, pointed out in 1845, ‘The policy of the friends of freedom in Ohio has ever been to avoid strife among themselves’.13 William Lloyd Garrison, with his anti-third-party and anticlerical approach, never managed to get a toe-hold in the Old Northwest. Small pockets of Garrisonians emerged in the Western Reserve of Ohio and certain locations in Michigan, but, by and large, their harsh condemnation of all churches and ministers as ‘proslavery’ did not sit well with westerners. This lack of conflict helped women to combine antislavery and religion through the development of cooperative Christian-based female anti-slavery societies. The structure of these western women’s anti-slavery organizations also encouraged a link to religion. While eastern women focused on organizing at the local level, western women tended to organize at the county and state level. The size of these groups made them more visible and thus more in need of a religious rationale for their existence. Two of the largest anti-slavery groups in the nation were located in the Western Reserve of Ohio: the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Portage County Female Anti-Slavery Society. The Ashtabula society enrolled nearly eighty women at its inaugural meeting and within twelve months it was bursting at the seams with more than 450 members.14 The Portage group increased tenfold, from 37 to 390 by August 1836.15 No other female anti-slavery society in the north-west or north-east rivalled them in numbers; the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society included less than 100 members in 1836, while the famed Boston group boasted only 250 that year.16 Because these county groups covered such a large area, attendance at meetings often required travel ‘The Liberty Party in Northern Ohio’, Philanthropist, 17 July 1845. See the Records of the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio (hereafter Ashtabula FASS, WRHS); and the Betsey Mix Cowles Papers, Kent State University Library, Kent, OH (hereafter BMC Papers, Kent). Theodore Dwight Weld mentioned helping to organize the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society during a visit to Austinburg in September 1835. Weld to Elizur Wright, Jun., 6 October 1835, Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond (eds), The Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 2 vols (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965), I, 240. Ashtabula Congressman Joshua Giddings, a committed abolitionist, declared in 1845, ‘I probably live in the strongest abolition county in the United States’. Letter from Giddings to David Lee Child, 13 November 1845, Boston Public Library (hereafter BPL). 15 Letter from Lucy M. Wright for the Portage County Female Anti-Slavery Society to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, 11 August 1836, Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society Letterbook, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, MA (hereafter MHS); and Ladies AntiSlavery Society, Portage County, Ohio, Records, 1836–1838 (hereafter Portage LASS), WRHS. 16 Jean R. Soderlund, ‘Priorities and Power: The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society’, in Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (eds), The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 70; and Ann Warren Weston for the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to the Putnam Female Anti-Slavery Society, 22 July 1836, MHS. Debra Gold Hansen writes that the Boston group had 200 members in 1836: Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993), 17. The Ladies’ New-York Anti-Slavery Society consisted of thirty-three officers and managers and most small communities had only a few dozen 13 14

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 161 and overnight accommodation—activities that clearly violated the ‘woman’s sphere’. As a result they attracted critical attention. Detractors argued that these meetings were both public and political—improperly drawing women into men’s work. Female abolitionists responded by defining their activism as morally driven and Christian inspired. When the Illinois Female Anti-Slavery Society held its inaugural meeting in 1844, participants cautiously focused their gathering around traditional female concerns—assistance, nurturance, and piety—thus creating a defence against accusations of violating the feminine sphere.17 They pledged, for example, to provide financial aid to a local African American woman who sought to purchase her daughter out of slavery—thereby addressing the shameful separation of the slave family and highlighting women’s ‘natural’ concern with family. They also promised to ‘dissolve’ any connection with churches that failed to acknowledge the sin of slavery, thus emphasizing Christian piety and the religious nature of their movement. Still worried that their resolutions would attract negative attention, Peoria abolitionist Mary Davis wrote an article for the Western Citizen that clearly depicted these Illinois abolitionists as ‘feminine’, motherly, and resolute. She described her sisters as ‘the most enlightened and lovely part of the female population of our state’, who—sensitive to their parental duties— brought their ‘little responsibilities’ with them to the meeting.18 These angelic women, committed to a ‘heaven-born sacred cause’, endured rowdy boys throwing eggs (‘one of which found a resting-place in the lap of a young lady’) and stealing carriage wheels in order to voice their objections to slavery. Two years later this same group would further link themselves to religion by coordinating their annual meeting with a non-denominational Christian antislavery gathering. In the announcement of their gathering, they highlighted this fact and further contended, ‘Anti-slavery women in our State can but feel that all that can touch the heart of the Christian or philanthropist, combine to call upon us to unite with all our might to resist that deadly foe to our country and our race—slavery’.19 Emphasizing both their association with Christianity and their feminine compassion, Illinois women hoped to deflect attention from their public activism. Many individual churches in the West, led by abolitionist ministers, offered women a safe and comfortable space to articulate their opposition to slavery. Space was a very important issue for women because of the growing rhetoric of ‘separate spheres’ that permeated early republic culture. As men increasingly

members. See First Annual Report of the Ladies’ New-York City Anti-Slavery Society (New York, 1836). 17 For a discussion of the meeting see ‘Female Anti-Slavery State Society’, Western Citizen (Chicago), 20 June 1844. 18 Mary B. Davis, ‘Female Anti-Slavery Convention at Peoria’, Western Citizen, 6 June 1844. 19 ‘Illinois Female State Anti-Slavery Society’, Western Citizen, 29 September 1846.

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moved into occupations outside of the home, a new gendered understanding of space emerged. The ‘public’ was defined as a masculine space where men conducted business, discussed politics, and occasionally, engaged in conflict. The ‘private’ domestic arena was women’s space. It was characterized by tranquillity, comfort, safety, and piety. In reality, men and women occupied spaces of all sorts—moving between private residences, shops, businesses, streets, and public transport. Gendered ‘spheres’ were in fact more a fluid set of ideas than a solid stable location. The way to control these amorphous spheres—particularly the ‘public’—was to regulate particular activities linked to each sphere, such as partisan politics and commercial transactions. Women were explicitly prohibited from participating in these ‘public’ activities.20 Women nonetheless found creative ways to integrate into these spaces— often employing popular assumptions about women’s nature to justify their activities. Abolitionists, for example, pointed to women’s ‘pious’ character as reason for their participation in a public reform movement that sought to protect the slave family as well as the virtue of female slaves. The church seemed to offer a relatively friendly space for women abolitionists. Primarily associated with the domestic sphere, the church became a location for women to express political sentiments while surrounded by, and thus protected by, Christianity. The church had a long history of promoting notions of female moral superiority and encouraged women’s ever growing participation in charitable groups and reform organizations. Always under the watchful eye of a minister, women eased themselves into a public role.21 Female anti-slavery societies in the West regularly met at local churches. When the mixed-sex Peoria (Illinois) Anti-Slavery Society had its organizing meeting in 1843, the gathering occurred at the Main Street Presbyterian church. A mob broke the meeting up and threatened participants, thus preventing the group from organizing.22 A few months later the Peoria Female Anti-Slavery Society succeeded where the mixed-sex group failed. Undaunted by the rough treatment they had experienced alongside their male colleagues 20 The following offer a good introduction to the critique of separate spheres: Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Linda K. Kerber, ‘Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History’, Journal of American History, 75 (1988), 9–39; Mary P. Ryan, ‘Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America’, in Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere (Boston: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), 259–88; and Amy Dru Stanley, ‘Home Life and the Morality of the Market’, in Melvyn Stokes and Stephen Conway (eds), The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 74–96. 21 See Boylan, Women’s Activism. 22 See ‘Mob in Peoria’ and ‘Freedom of Speech Suppressed’, Western Citizen, 23 February 1843. See also Hermann R. Muelder, Fighters for Freedom: The History of Anti-Slavery Activities of Men and Women Associated with Knox College (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959), 147–8; and Jeanne Humphreys, ‘Mary Brown Davis, Journalist, Feminist, and Social Reformer’, May 1939, Unpublished Honors Project, KO H927m, Knox College, Special Collections and Archives, Galesburg, Illinois.

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 163 in February, twenty local women gathered in the Main Street Presbyterian church in July to organize their women’s abolitionist group.23 The following year the newly organized Illinois State Female Anti-Slavery Society would meet at the same Main Street Presbyterian church in Peoria. The western churches that opened their doors to female anti-slavery society meetings usually did so because of sympathetic clergy. Anti-slavery ministers and their spouses were critical to the expansion and success of female antislavery in the Old Northwest. Reverend William Allen and his wife Irene Ball Allen moved to Peoria in 1842 to take the reins of the Main Street Presbyterian church. Both of the Allens boasted impressive anti-slavery credentials: William was an agent for the Illinois State Anti-Slavery Society, and Irene had been a student at Oberlin College.24 William offered vital support to the small cadre of women abolitionists in Peoria who felt isolated and beleaguered before his arrival. As Mary Davis declared following one of Allen’s anti-slavery lectures, ‘We feel that the minds of the people are deeply touched; and with such cheering prospects we are induced to go forward with renewed diligence to labor in the vineyard’.25 Irene brought energy and passion to central Illinois and quickly inspired the creation of a female group. In another river city, Jonathan Blanchard led the Cincinnati Sixth Street Presbyterian church and consistently offered his congregants a passionate anti-slavery message.26 He became a regional abolitionist lecturer and contributed writings to the Cincinnati-based anti-slavery newspaper, the Philanthropist. Blanchard’s wife, Mary Bent Blanchard, became a local anti-slavery leader and helped to create two female anti-slavery groups in the city: the Ohio Ladies Education Society for the Free People of Color and the Cincinnati Anti-Slavery Sewing Society. The Education group funded African American schools across the state and remained active for more than seven years. Its membership included a number of leading Cincinnati abolitionists, such as Sarah Ernst, a wealthy Unitarian, and Margaret Bailey, wife of Philanthopist editor Gamaliel Bailey.27 Blanchard’s Sewing Society provided essential support to the large fugitive population that inhabited and passed through Cincinnati. These female anti-slavery groups used Blanchard’s church as a friendly space to meet, but also a location to recruit, raise money, and proselytize.

Mary B. Davis, ‘Female Anti-Slavery Society of Peoria’, Western Citizen, 17 August 1843. Mary B. Davis, ‘The Progress of Truth in Peoria’, Western Citizen, 9 February 1843. For more on Irene Ball Allan see her letters in the Curtis-Ball Genealogy, Oberlin College Archives. 25 Mary B. Davis, ‘The Progress of Truth in Peoria’, Western Citizen, 9 February 1843. 26 ‘Ladies’ Cincinnati Anti-Slavery Society’, Philanthropist, 21 January 1840. 27 Bailey and Blanchard both served for several years in official positions within the group. See ‘Education Society’, Philanthropist, 9 August 1843; ‘To the Friends of Education’, Philanthropist, 18 February 1846; ‘The Fourth Annual Report Of the Ladies’ Education Society for the Education of the Free People of Color’, Philanthropist, 30 July 1845; and ‘To the Friends of Education’, Philanthropist, 18 February 1846. 23 24

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While anti-slavery churches opened their doors to female groups, this gesture did not necessarily translate to support for a wide range of women’s public activities. Many churches made clear their underlying belief that women’s roles should be subordinate and their ‘sphere’ limited. The Marshall Presbytery in Michigan in 1839 fervently supported female abolitionism, proclaiming ‘this Presbytery believe that to Christian females is committed an important and indispensable agency in the prosecution of every benevolent enterprise’. But they concluded by reminding supporters that ‘such agency properly sustained involves no active participation in those civil duties and that public service for which the God of nature has obviously and exclusively adapted the other sex’.28 The more vocal women abolitionists became in their churches the more they found themselves censured for intruding into the ‘public sphere’. Women responded by defending their activism and linking it to religion. The Economy (Indiana) Female Anti-Slavery Society declared in 1841, Notwithstanding our sex are looked upon by many as being out of their proper sphere when laboring in this cause, yet we would earnestly entreat this society, to endeavour [sic] individually to ascertain their allotted duty, and perform it, in the promotion of this righteous work, believing that we as a part of God’s rational creation, will, if we refuse to employ our talents on behalf of the oppressed be called upon to answer therefore at the solemn day of account, believing the omission of our known duties is marked among our darkest deeds.29

In other words, these women boldly claimed that God holds women accountable for challenging sin just as he does men, and women will have to pay a price if they fail to act. While some ministers promoted anti-slavery, most did not. The topic of slavery was anathema to religious institutions for fear of its divisive impact.30 Even the Quakers, with their long history of opposition to slavery, proved ambivalent at best in regard to the rise of organized anti-slavery in the 1830s and ’40s.31 This resistance to anti-slavery within church walls had an unintended effect: it spurred the growth of female anti-slavery. As their ministers quieted them, western women abolitionists became increasingly outraged that the most important sin confronting the nation was being ignored in their 28 Session of (Marshall) Presbytery at Union City, 30 October 1839, Records of the Presbyterian Church, Marshall, Michigan, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. 29 ‘Report’, Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle (New Garden, Indiana), 16 February 1842. 30 McKivigan, Proslavery Religion. 31 See Walter Edgerton, History of the Separation in Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends (Cincinnati, 1856); Thomas E. Drake, Quakers and Slavery in America (Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1965); Thomas D. Hamm, The Antislavery Movement in Henry County, Indiana (New Castle: Indiana County Historical Society, 1987), 10–13; and Ruth Anna Ketrig, ‘Charles Osborn in the Anti-Slavery Movement’, Ohio Historical Collections, 7 (1937), 50–84.

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 165 churches. Listening to spokeswomen like Elizabeth Chandler in Michigan who insisted that women had a special obligation to their slave sisters, they were befuddled by their clergymen’s uniform silence. Women slowly translated this confusion into a well-articulated critique of all Protestant denominations, what they simply referred to as ‘the church’. The stifling of discussion about slavery in their religious institutions had the effect of encouraging women abolitionists to focus on the failures of the church. They employed resolutions, addresses, and petitions to publicize their position. Many women chose to join a female anti-slavery society despite the opposition of their church. This created tension between abolitionists and the clergy. One way to address this tension was for the female anti-slavery society, as a group, to pass resolutions articulating their position regarding the church and slavery. By confronting their clergy as a group instead of alone, women drew strength from the support provided by a common feeling of frustration. One Illinois group proclaimed that ‘such professed ministers of the gospel as stand entirely aloof from the anti-slavery enterprise, and discourage others from engaging therein, do thereby throw the weight of their character into the proslavery scale; and while they profess to minister to the spiritual wants of their hearers, their communications carry with them the savor of death unto death’.32 These women deemed clerical remoteness as tacitly pro-slavery. They argued that any minister who kept quiet about slavery automatically lost his legitimacy. The Newport, Indiana, Female Anti-Slavery Society pointed to the church as the ‘most formidable’ of their ‘powerful enemies’. They concluded, ‘Instead of being the salt of the earth, or a city set on a hill, they have become a stumbling block in the way of many who have been honestly endeavoring to live up to the golden rule’.33 The mixed-sex Swan Creek group passed an even more aggressive resolution: ‘The professed Christians and ministers of the north, who apologize for slaveholding, or for slaveholders, are more guilty than they, inasmuch as they countenance and sustain the crime by their influence without the same temptations’.34 Silent ministers were worse than slaveholders because they had no motivation for denying the humanity of the slave. Some female anti-slavery societies felt so strongly the need to educate the clergy that they published addresses to Christian ministers. The Wayne County Female Anti-Slavery Society published two such addresses in which they highlighted the Bible’s disapproval of slavery, castigated the clergy for failing to stand up to slaveholders, and instructed Christians in how to end slavery: ‘Let then every christian minister and every religious association, and each individual member of religious society, endeavor to eradicate the stain of slavery from our land, by the effectual operation of the lenient principles of 32 33 34

‘Constitution and Proceedings’, Western Citizen, 6 April 1843. Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 2 September 1844. ‘Swan Creek (Warren Co.) A.S. Society’, Western Citizen, 17 August 1843.

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Christianity’.35 The Putnam, Illinois, women published a circular to ministers instructing them to preach abolitionism from the pulpit and prevent slaveholders from attending church.36 Other female anti-slavery groups in the West began petitioning churches to cease their connection with slavery. Betsey Mix Cowles and her Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society initiated such a petition campaign in Ohio.37 ‘I have obtained nearly all the names of the females belonging to this Church’, boasted Laura M. Wright of Morgan, Ohio, to Cowles in April 1835.38 Although there are no remaining copies of this petition, it appears that it was a protest against the church’s failure to speak out against slavery. Lucy Wright in Portage County, Ohio, circulated a petition ‘to the General Assembly of the Presbyterian church’ in 1836.39 As she explained, ‘We think it highly important that our ecclesiastical bodies consider this subject for if ministers of the gospel of Christ forge their brethren in bonds, how can we expect any thing favorable in the halls of legislation?’ Sarah Coleman of Andover informed Cowles that she had convinced all of the female members ‘on this street’ to sign the church petition, and she passed it on to another town.40 Maria Kellogg of Cherry Valley assured Cowles that she had garnered thirty signatures on their petition.41 Putnam resident Maria Sturges also encouraged the women of Ohio to continue pressuring their churches through petitioning. She excoriated churches for admitting slaveholders to communion and exclaimed, ‘Our societies are made up of members from almost every different denomination, and we think that Anti-Slavery memorials to all our ecclesiastical bodies should be gotten up and circulated without delay’.42 Not all female anti-slavery societies of the Western Reserve were able to criticize the church so openly. Sophia Arnold of the small, rather conservative New Lyme auxiliary confessed to Cowles, ‘We think it will not be proper to circulate the petition you sent not but I should be perfectly willing to sign the petition myself but most of this Society belong to the Baptist Churches for this reason 35 ‘Address of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Wayne County, Indiana; to the professors of Christianity in the United States’, and ‘An Address to the Professors of the Many Different Denominations of Religion in America’, Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 8 January 1842. 36 ‘A Circular addressed to the Ministers of the Gospel, of Different Denominations, by the Female Anti-Slavery Society, Putnam co., State of Illinois’, Western Citizen, 22 February 1844. 37 There are two biographies of Betsey Mix Cowles: Linda L. Geary, Balanced in the Wind: A Biography of Betsey Mix Cowles (Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1989); and Donna Marie DeBlasio, ‘Her Own Society: The Life and Times of Betsy Mix Cowles, 1810–1876’, Ph.D. thesis (Kent State University, 1980). On the Ashtabula Female Anti-Slavery society, see Padgett, ‘Abolitionists of all Classes’. 38 Letter from Laura M. Wright to Betsey Mix Cowles, 1 April 1835, BMC Papers, Kent. 39 Letter from Lucy M. Wright to Betsey Mix Cowles, 5 March 1836, BMC Papers, Kent. 40 Letter from Sarah Coleman to Betsey Mix Cowles, 11 April 1836, BMC Papers, Kent. 41 Letter from Maria Kellogg to Betsey Mix Cowles, 9 April 1836, BMC Papers, Kent. 42 ‘Proceedings of the Female Delegates at Mt. Pleasant’, Philanthropist, 12 May 1837.

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 167 we think it not best’.43 The anti-slavery Free Will Baptist Church emerged in this region only a few years after Arnold penned this note.44 There were hundreds of women like Sophia Arnold, who struggled to find her anti-slavery voice amidst a generally unwelcome religious environment. Most, like Arnold, preferred to avoid open conflict and sought a more comfortable middle ground. This allowed women to remain within their churches and still pursue the anti-slavery cause. Because the church was such an important part of most women’s daily lives it was critical for them to find a way to balance anti-slavery with organized religion. This balance proved to be challenging for many, even when they found themselves in supposedly anti-slavery churches. Sarah Ernst, a savvy abolitionist living in Cincinnati, worked for years to negotiate such a balance with the churches in her community. Ernst moved to Cincinnati from Boston in the early 1840s with her successful husband, Andrew Ernst. Wealthy, passionate, and committed, Ernst slowly began to build a strong anti-slavery community among the women of Cincinnati. Even though she identified as a Garrisonian—a distrusted minority of radicals among the larger anti-slavery community—she established herself as one of the leading abolitionist voices in the city. Every winter she organized a successful anti-slavery fair that brought hundreds of dollars to abolitionist coffers, and each spring she hosted a three-day ‘Union’ anti-slavery convention that attracted overflowing audiences and famous speakers from across the North.45 Despite this success, Ernst remained frustrated that one of the most influential anti-slavery ministers in Cincinnati refused to attend her fairs or conventions. The Reverend Charles Boynton edited the anti-slavery Christian Press and earnestly advocated abolitionism in lectures across the region. He earned the admiration of local Cincinnati reformers and Whigs, helping to make his Vine Street Congregational church one of the ‘most prosperous church organizations’ in the city by 1853.46 Despite their common commitment to the abolition movement, however, Boynton and Ernst were initially 43

Letter from Sophia Arnold to Betsey Mix Cowles, 5 April [1836], BMC Papers, Kent. See also Padgett, ‘Abolitionists of all Classes’. 44 Vernon L. Volpe, Forlorn Hope of Freedom: The Liberty Party in the Old Northwest, 1838–1848 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1990), 73–4. 45 For more on Ernst see Robertson, Hearts Beating. 46 ‘Cincinnati’, North Star (Rochester, NY), 7 May 1848; ‘The Christian Anti-Slavery Convention at Cincinnati’, Oberlin Evangelist, 8 May 1850; ‘Cincinnati Correspondence’, Anti-Slavery Bugle (Salem, OH), 31 May 1851; and Oberlin Evangelist, 16 July 1851; ‘From our Iowa Correspondent’, The Independent, 6 January 1853; and National Era (Washington DC), 20 January 1853; ‘AntiSlavery Men in Pro-Slavery Organizations’, Liberator, 13 August 1852; ‘Matters in and About the City’, Cincinnati Gazette, 5 December 1853. Mary Bent Blanchard, wife of former Cincinnati minister Jonathan Blanchard, received a letter from a Cincinnati friend who explained, ‘A gentleman in the city said to me last week that Dr. Rices’ church and Mr. Boynton’s were the most popular churches in (Cincinnati)’. Elizabeth Corwin to Mary Blanchard, 16/17 November 1847, Jonathan Blanchard Papers, Wheaton College Library, Wheaton, IL.

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distant and even hostile. Boynton disapproved of Ernst’s outspoken radicalism and, probably, her Unitarian faith.47 Ernst, for her part, resented Boynton’s coldness.48 Cognizant of the minister’s widespread influence, Ernst decided to set aside personal feelings and build a bridge toward Boynton and his church. In 1852, she devoted $50 from the proceeds of her anti-slavery fair (which Boynton shunned) to his newspaper, the Christian Press. Ernst was very conscious that this was a compromise. ‘When we sent the money to the “press” we knew how heartily Mr. Boynton hated and feared us, as Garrisonians, but we felt his was a good paper and being in our own city, and the only one too, and shunned by the pro slavery Christians of their own sect, we felt like giving them a little help’.49 Ernst recognized that if she could convince Boynton that he had nothing to fear from her others would follow his lead. Several members of her sewing society had left the group because Boynton convinced them of her dangerous ‘infidel’ influence.50 Ernst’s effort initially paid off: Boynton’s Vine Street church opened its doors for the first time to her Anti-Slavery Sewing Society, hosting its annual meeting. Boynton also publicly thanked Ernst for her donation: ‘The reception of [the $50 donation] gave us the more pleasure because evincing great liberality of feeling upon the part of the donors, inasmuch as our course does not, in all respects, meet their entire approval’. He concluded, ‘We tender the ladies of the Committee our hearty thanks, and wish them still greater success in similar efforts hereafter’.51 Ernst celebrated her victory by writing to a friend in January 1853: ‘I really believe Mr. Boynton was melted by our returning him good for evil’. She concluded, ‘Our donation to his paper was quite unexpected to him, for he has never been to our Bazaars and never as a participant to our Conventions’.52 The good feelings, however, were short-lived. Boynton soon reverted to criticizing Ernst for her uncompromising approach to abolition and her unorthodox religious views.53 Ernst’s effort to seek common ground with a powerful clergyman in her community represents the position of most female abolitionists in the West. Even as female anti-slavery societies boldly proclaimed that neutrality on the issue of slavery was in fact a tacit acceptance of the abhorrent institution, they Boynton envisioned women as ‘help-meets’ to men in reform movements. See ‘The Christian Idea of the Nature and Position of Woman’, Cincinnati Gazette, 7 June 1852. 48 Letter from Sarah Ernst to Miss Weston, 1 February 1852, BPL. 49 Letter from Sarah Ernst to Anne Warren Weston, 14 November 1852, BPL. 50 Letter from Sarah Ernst to Anne Warren Weston, 14 November 1852, BPL. 51 Garrison reprinted Boynton’s editorial: ‘Anti-Slavery Bazaar’, Liberator, 24 December 1852. 52 Letter from Sarah Otis Ernst to William Lloyd Garrison, 8 January 1853, BPL. 53 See the transcriptions of the Union Anti-Slavery Convention in the Cincinnati Gazette: 20, 21, 22, 23 April 1853. See also ‘Rev. Mr. Boynton and the Cin. Convention’, Anti-Slavery Bugle, 21 May 1853; ‘From the Ohio Anti-Slavery Bugle: Denying Christ’, Liberator, 29 July 1853; and ‘From the Anti-Slavery Standard: Sectarian Mendacity’, Liberator, 7 October 1853. 47

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 169 also worked creatively behind the scenes to push their clergymen toward an anti-slavery position. They understood that ministers had widespread influence and that their participation in the movement could have tremendous impact on its success. They also realized that as women their power to make demands on their clergy was limited. So they flattered and cajoled the religious leadership as best they could. If these creative and cooperative efforts failed, some women took the bold step to leave their churches. As Ohioan Susan Bishop explained in 1854, ‘I have long since come to the conclusion that the Church is the wrong place to look for light on the subject of slavery or moral reform’.54 This was almost always a final and reluctant step because it meant leaving family members, friends, and neighbours to start a new church, often with few adherents and little financing. Even the Quakers disappointed abolitionists in the West. Underground leader Laura Haviland and her husband Charles left their Quaker meeting in Michigan because it refused to allow discussion of slavery. They joined the Wesleyan Methodists.55 Dozens of female anti-slavery societies passed resolutions calling on their members to withdraw from ‘pro-slavery’ churches. The Putnam women announced in 1844, ‘We believe it to be the duty of every professor of religion who is anti-slavery to come out from pro-slavery churches that throw their entire influence on the side of the oppressor, that we may not fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness’.56 The Henry County women happily declared, ‘Many members in several branches of the so called Christian churches, after having struggled for years to obtain liberty, even to labor in the cause, seeing no hope of effecting the object, have at last withdrawn and formed new societies, which in united bodies come up to the help of those engaged in the work’.57 Such a decision usually initiated much conflict within individual religious communities and even anti-slavery societies. The Illinois State Female AntiSlavery Society at their annual meeting in 1844 debated a resolution encouraging abolitionists to leave their ‘pro-slavery’ churches. This proved to be a hotly contested resolution and the only one that failed to pass unanimously: ‘We recommend as many members of this Society, as are connected with proslavery churches, or churches not taking a decided stand against the sin of slavery, to dissolve that connection’.58 Some women in this group felt reluctant to cut their church ties and resisted being pressured into making a controversial and life-changing decision. Those who voted for the resolution also felt passionately about this issue. Mary Davis continued the conversation ‘A Discussion’, Anti-Slavery Bugle, 5 August 1854. Laura Haviland, A Woman’s Life-Work: Labors and Experiences of Laura S. Haviland (Chicago, 1887), 33. 56 ‘Putnam Co.’, Western Citizen, 3 October 1844. 57 ‘Female A.S. Meeting’, Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, 8 August 1843. 58 ‘Female Anti-Slavery Society’, Western Citizen, 20 June 1844. 54 55

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in a local anti-slavery newspaper. ‘Much has been said with regard to the seventh resolution, on church action, contained in the report of the Female State Convention’, she explained.59 ‘The effect of a church connection of this kind is most paralyzing to the energies of the Christian abolitionist. I can speak from experience. For more than two years it has acted upon me as a dead weight, and I feel that were I to continue in such connection, I should soon become so inactive as scarcely to deserve the honorable title of abolitionist’. Interestingly, the male state abolitionist society that met at the same place and time as the women debated a similar resolution. In the end the men merely agreed that churches were responsible for the continuation of slavery and that ministers who failed to speak out on this issue ‘forfeit the confidence’ of the community. They did not follow the lead of the women and recommend leaving the church.60 Women’s decision to leave their churches offered them a certain freedom from the restrictions of mainstream religion. Many, like Mary Davis, chose to simply remain outside of any organized church. This allowed her to intensify her critique of the church. It also led her to engage more directly in political abolition, particularly through the Liberty Party. Even before Mary Davis began to advocate for the Liberty Party in the 1840s, other church-oriented female abolitionists adopted a political approach to anti-slavery that melded nicely with their religious approach. This involved a subtle use of particular political methods, including petitioning, that they deliberately linked to religion. Maria Sturges and her Muskingum (Ohio) Female Anti-Slavery Society promoted the popular Christian-based ‘Fathers and Rulers’ petition. This petition, which politely asked Congressmen to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, became the most common petition among women abolitionists, with hundreds sent to Washington DC in the 1830s. Female anti-slavery societies across the North, from Rhode Island to Illinois, printed, copied, and circulated this petition with an enthusiasm that shocked the nation. Modest and self-effacing, the ‘Fathers and Rulers’ petition offered a ‘humble memorial’ to the ‘honorable body’ that represented the ‘guardians of a ‘Duty of the Christian Abolitionist’, Western Citizen, 11 July 1844. ‘The Seventh Anniversary of the Illinois Anti-Slavery Society’, Western Citizen, 20 June 1844. This article notes that the group ‘had an interesting and animated discussion, which occupied nearly half a day, on the following resolution:—That the American Church is the bulwark of American Slavery, and that it is inconsistent with Anti-Slavery principles, and deeply injurious to the Anti-Slavery cause, to sustain, in any manner, a minister or church that is not engaged in active opposition to Slavery’. After debate the resolution was replaced with this one: ‘That the American Church sustains a most fearful responsibility in upholding the system of Slavery, and must be divorced from all connexion with it before we can expect it to cease, unless it end in a way to jeopardize the peace and safety of the nation, and that those churches and ministers who are not open and active in opposing the existence of that sin, are indirectly countenancing or justifying it—are chargeable with its consequences, and forfeit the confidence of the community’. 59 60

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 171 Christian people’.61 It firmly proclaimed that Christian feeling required the nation’s legislators to end slavery in the nation’s capital. Coating its demand in religion and morality, the petition on one level embraced the woman’s sphere. In making demands on politicians and presuming political knowledge, it also clearly brought women into the public sphere. While the ‘Fathers and Rulers’ petition pushed women into the public through religion, the Liberty Party even more clearly revealed a large overlap between political and church abolitionism in the Old Northwest. The Liberty Party, derisively referred to by opponents as the ‘abolition church’, emerged in 1840 among abolitionists who believed that more direct engagement in partisan politics was necessary to promote their cause.62 Liberty leaders, especially in Illinois, highlighted the idea that abolitionists should ‘vote as they pray’ and emphasized the moral nature of politics.63 As the Illinois Liberty Party proudly declared in 1844: ‘Politics properly considered is a branch of morals, and . . . every man is bound to exercise the elective franchise, under a deep sense of his moral obligation to his fellow man and his God’.64 Clergymen dominated the Illinois Liberty Party leadership and individual Congregational churches in the state often required a commitment to abolitionism for membership.65 The Liberty Party in the West relied almost exclusively on churches for its success and growth.66 The party experienced the most success in small communities with strong abolitionist ‘come-outer’ churches like the Free Will Baptists, Free Presbyterians, and Wesleyan Methodists. In New Garden, Indiana, where a large contingent of breakaway anti-slavery Quakers lived, ‘two of every three voters cast a third party ballot’.67 In Galesburg, Illinois, Reverend George W. Gale’s religious community helped offer the Liberty Party sixty per cent of the town’s votes.68 Women took advantage of this overlap between religion and politics. Hundreds of female abolitionists in the Old Northwest began to actively and openly support the Liberty Party throughout the 1840s. Until recently, historians overlooked their participation because, as Julie Roy Jeffrey has suggested,

61 ‘Petition of the Ladies resident in the state of Ohio’, Philanthropist, 24 June 1836. There is a slightly different version of this petition in the papers of Theodore Dwight Weld, Barnes and Dumond (eds), Letters, 175–6. 62 Strong, Perfectionist Politics, 93. 63 John R. McKivigan, ‘Vote As You Pray and Pray As You Vote: Church-Oriented Abolitionism and Antislavery Politics’, in Alan M. Kraut (ed.), Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1983), 179–204. See also Volpe, Forlorn Hope. 64 ‘State Convention of the Liberty Party of Illinois’, Western Citizen, 1 February 1844. 65 Volpe, Forlorn Hope, 67–9. 66 Volpe, Forlorn Hope, xiii. 67 Volpe, Forlorn Hope, 64. 68 Volpe, Forlorn Hope, 67.

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these women did not make headlines.69 They did not write party policies or choose political candidates. Women were almost always absent from the published proceedings of Liberty Party conventions save, perhaps, a brief recognition of their efforts in a single resolution. Partisan women nonetheless attended Liberty meetings, raised money, ‘influenced’ their men, petitioned state and national governments, and published their political opinions.70 Western women abolitionists and female anti-slavery societies framed their support for Liberty within a religious context. The female abolitionists of Dundee, Illinois, for example, demanded that local men vote for Owen Lovejoy, the Liberty Party candidate for Congress, because he was ‘a living picture of the philanthropist and Christian’.71 In a letter extolling the Liberty Party, Mary Davis concluded, ‘the mighty hand of God seems to be extended to aid the cause of Liberty’.72 A Michigan Liberty correspondent instructed local women that anti-slavery possessed ‘political as well as moral character’, and therefore ‘has peculiar claims upon your sympathy, and may well demand the warm aspiration of your souls for its success. It is the cause of suffering 69 Jeffrey, Great Silent Army, 136–7. Anti-slavery historians have, until recently, assumed that third-party abolitionism in the Old Northwest precluded women’s participation. See, for example, Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973); William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Volpe, Forlorn Hope. A recent resurgence of interest in anti-slavery third parties has, by and large, continued to disregard women. Although Frederick J. Blue’s No Taint of Compromise: Crusaders in Antislavery Politics (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005) devotes two chapters to women, Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery & the Politics of Free Soil, 1824–1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), ignores women; and Bruce Laurie, Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pays scant attention. The women who do receive attention are often related to male politicians (Jessie Benton Fremont) or outspoken leaders (Jane Swisshelm), not the rank-and-file. Some scholarship that more thoroughly explores women’s participation includes: Linda J. Evans, ‘Abolitionism in the Illinois Churches, 1830– 1865’, Ph.D. thesis (University of Illinois, 1981); Douglas Gamble, ‘Moral Suasion in the West: Garrisonian Abolitionism, 1831–1861’, Ph.D. thesis (Ohio State University, 1973); John W. Quist, ‘ “The Great Majority of Our Subscribers are Farmers”: The Michigan Abolitionist Constituency of the 1840s’, Journal of the Early Republic 14 (1994), 325–58; Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Leslie Schwalm, ‘The Antislavery and Reform Activities of Women in Wisconsin’, M.A. thesis (University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1984); and Alice Taylor, ‘From Petitions to Partyism: Antislavery and the Domestication of Maine Politics in the 1840s and 1850s’, New England Quarterly, 77 (2004), 70–88. See also Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery & Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 70 Maine women abolitionists, for example, increasingly entered partisan politics in the 1850s. See Taylor, ‘From Petitions to Partyism’. For more on women and the Liberty Party see Robertson, Hearts Beating. 71 ‘Address of the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Association of Dundee’, Western Citizen, 25 March 1846. Lovejoy lost the 1846 election. He was elected to Congress as a Republican in 1856. See William F. Moore and Jane Ann Moore (eds), Owen Lovejoy: His Brother’s Blood, Speeches and Writings 1838–64 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), xxix. 72 Mary B. Davis, ‘For the Western Citizen’, Western Citizen, May 9, 1848.

‘On the Side of Righteousness’: Women, the Church, and Abolition 173 humanity; and when has such a cause failed to touch a chord of sympathy in woman’s heart?’73 Another Michigan Liberty Party editor asked, Ladies, will you meet with us? Surely, on this subject the pulsations of your hearts will be in unison with those of our own. We look to you as helps in this great work of benevolence. Come then to the meeting and cheer us on, and nerve our arms in assisting to bring back the country to a just sense of the necessity of purifying it of this Heaven-doomed curse of slavery. If you should hear its political aspect and hearings discussed, it will not harm you. ‘Your tears may rust the captive’s chain’ and your silent prayers accelerate the happy period when ‘every yoke shall be broken’, and the moral condition of the oppressors, as well as of the oppressed, ameliorated.74

If some women proved hesitant to attend a partisan meeting, Liberty Party organizers made it easy for them by coordinating their gatherings with the meetings of female anti-slavery groups. This clearly allowed female abolitionists to attend Liberty Party meetings without the stigma of being openly political—they were able to disguise their political abolitionism with their church abolitionism. The Illinois State Female Anti-Slavery Society met at the same time as the annual Liberty Party gathering for four years in the mid 1840s. At the 1845 meeting in Alton, for example, the men gathered at a local Baptist church while ‘the female convention met downstairs in the same building’.75 It was a simple act to close the women’s meeting early and join the political debate upstairs. The Liberty Party offered a natural outlet for women’s religious-based abolitionism. Meetings occurred in churches and Liberty leaders were often clergymen. With its emphasis on morality, the sinfulness of slavery, and ‘voting as you pray’, women felt comfortable advocating its policies, candidates, and goals. They sometimes disguised their activism by coordinating female groups to meet at the same time as Liberty Party meetings, or constantly emphasizing the religious nature of their political activism. Regardless, Liberty’s church base in the Old Northwest gave women a unique avenue into political activism that would pave the way for their increased partisanship in the Free Soil and Republican parties during the 1850s. In the Old Northwest the church had a complicated and defining effect on women’s abolitionism. In some cases it offered women a safe space for their abolitionist activity and in fact nurtured this activity. Passionate ministers and committed churches provided women with the spiritual and organization tools they needed to promote anti-slavery. These women held meetings in their churches, promoted the cause within its walls, and found emotional sustenance ‘Extract From an Address to the Liberty Association of Detroit, by Horace Hallock’, Signal of Liberty (Ann Arbor, MI), 20 May 1844. 74 ‘To the People of Oakland County’, Signal of Liberty, 18 July 1842. 75 Evans, ‘Illinois Churches’, 66. 73

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among fellow abolitionists. Drained by the pervasive anti-abolitionism that permeated both North and South, such support was critical for women, especially those who lived in small isolated communities across the West. When women had to work in opposition to the church their abolitionism often leaked over into other areas including politics. Standing up to an unsympathetic minister or an openly anti-abolitionist congregation was a difficult decision—but many women chose to leave their churches in order to be faithful to their anti-slavery sentiment. The women who chose to join ‘come-outer’ churches often became the most zealous in their critique of religion for its failures in relation to slavery. Others turned to the Liberty Party as an appropriate avenue for expressing their abolitionism. Like the men in their lives, these women believed that Liberty offered the most pragmatic and still spiritually based opportunity to end slavery. Though excluded from partisanship as women, these activists found that the Liberty Party was not like the other parties. Its focus on sin, prayer, and virtue meant that women could find a niche. Enthusiastic and outspoken, Liberty women fused religion and politics in a way that allowed them to redefine both the public and the private.

8 Writing Against Slavery: Harriet Beecher Stowe Judie Newman

In Sara Paretsky’s best-selling novel, Bleeding Kansas (2008), the Grelliers and their neighbours the Schapens are the last remnants of the evangelical abolitionist families who went to Kansas in 1855 to defend ‘Free Soil’ against the proslavery forces massing next door in Missouri.1 In 1854 the Kansas– Nebraska Bill had created two new territories, Nebraska and Kansas, with local options on slavery. In 1855, when Kansas held its election, the proslavery camp resorted to vigilante tactics, sending in 5,000 supporters from Missouri, barring ‘Free Soil’ men from voting, and electing a proslavery legislature. In 1856 another band of Missourians plundered and burned the abolitionist stronghold of Lawrence, Kansas. During the uproar Harriet Beecher Stowe published an open letter to the women of America, urging them to distribute tracts, circulate petitions, and subsidize lectures: ‘For the sake of outraged and struggling liberty throughout the world, let every woman of America now do her duty’.2 The response from her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was somewhat more direct. Anti-slavery settlers in Kansas gave the name ‘Beecher’s Bibles’ to the rifles which he encouraged his congregation to send west to the abolitionists. Essentially what was at stake in Kansas was the possibility of the extension of slavery to the whole of the United States, and evangelical Christians were right on the frontline of the struggle. In the twenty-first century, however, evangelical Christianity is rather less synonymous with the forces of radical social reform. In Paretsky’s fictional Kansas, the Grelliers are ineffectual if well-meaning liberals, pitted against the 1

Sara Paretsky, Bleeding Kansas (New York: G. P. Putman’s Sons, 2008). Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘An Appeal to Women of the Free States of America, on the Present Crisis in our Country’, The Independent, 23 February 1854, reprinted in Joan D. Hedrick (ed.), The Oxford Harriet Beecher Stowe Reader (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 456. 2

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‘Salvation Through the Blood of Jesus Full Bible Church’ Schapens, who are pro-war, anti-abortion, homophobic, and mesmerized by the money-making potential of a divine heifer, supposedly able to speak the name of God and trigger the Second Coming. In the struggle between the two families, the Grelliers come off distinctly worse than the single-minded Schapens, who may still be waiting for the Second Coming, but meanwhile believe in ‘prosperity Christianity’, (in which religion supposedly augments believers’ bank accounts) and make a fortune in the Christian dairy industry. For the modern reader, the Schapens represent the popular image today of evangelical Christians. Yet, in Stowe’s day, their ancestors spearheaded social causes of the most radical nature, including women’s rights, temperance, universal education, foreign missions, prison reform and above all, abolition. Why this change? How did evangelicalism move from one side of the political spectrum to the other? The answer may lie in the individualist nature of the creed. Most evangelicals believed, conservatively, that the social and moral reformation of the world must begin with the individual. As William G. McLaughlin has argued, in many respects the reform activities of evangelicals were all missionary efforts, to save the souls of the poor, the drunk, or the criminal, so that they would no longer be a social problem. Conversion would instantly supply Protestant virtues such as sobriety, industry, and thrift, and they would rise effortlessly in the world—a success myth based on the idea that ‘Christianity is your character and character is your capital’.3 There is therefore a direct continuity from the most socially radical reformers to their present-day heirs in the ranks of American conservatives, supporters of free enterprise, and rugged individualism. Analysis of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery writings demonstrates both the effectiveness of her evangelical strategies, drawing on biblical rhetoric and popular religious forms to insist on the need for abolition, and, on occasion, the potential for appropriation by less edifying social and popular movements. Evangelical closet dramas and the camp-meeting are particular examples of forms which Stowe knew how to exploit. Throughout her work the relation between religion and slavery was both her central concern and a major weapon in her abolitionist armoury. As a Congregationalist, lapsed Calvinist, and later an Episcopalian, the sister, wife, and daughter of some of the foremost American religious thinkers of the nineteenth century, Stowe’s religion was a key element in her antislavery writings. The nature of her religious beliefs has been intensively discussed.4 Her father, Lyman Beecher, was closely identified with a Calvinist 3

William G. McLaughlin (ed.), The American Evangelicals, 1800–1900. An Anthology (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1968), 13. 4 Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

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emphasis on human depravity and the necessity of God’s freely given grace; her mother, Roxana Foote, an Episcopalian, died when Stowe was five and was regarded by her children as a saint. Lyman had seven sons who became ministers of the gospel; Stowe’s children included one son and one son-inlaw who were also ministers. She married Calvin Stowe, a biblical scholar and seminary professor, with a marked propensity to see visions. Her brother, Henry Ward Beecher, was a noted preacher, who had perfected his art in small towns and at camp-meetings in backwoods Indiana, concentrating on home truths vividly expressed, for audiences impatient with abstraction.5 As a Romantic evangelical he emphasized the intuitive perception of truth through the feelings, and believed that poetry or art could more readily reach hearts than ratiocinative sermonizing. Thus the most important of all the elements for a preacher was imagination: ‘Imagination is the true germ of faith; it is the power of conceiving as definite the things which are invisible to the sense’.6 The lesson was not lost on his sister, whose most famous novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, has been described as ‘one huge sermon’ (Lawrence Buell), a ‘great revival sermon’ (Ann Douglas), ‘a jeremiad’ (Jane Tompkins), and ‘infused with the powerful rhetoric of conversion preaching’ (John Gatta).7 In the novel there are hardly any clergymen; the emphasis is upon popular religious forms. Uncle Tom has been converted at a camp-meeting four years before the action of the novel begins, sings camp-meeting hymns, and preaches in his cabin, in a demonstration of the fellowship of all true believers. The novel was aimed squarely at converting disbelievers to the anti-slavery cause, by awakening imaginative empathy. One of the most important tenets of evangelical religion is the need for individual regeneration through a conversion experience, usually understood as manifesting itself through intense emotional behaviour, and thereafter, more coolly, by good works which demonstrate that one’s life has come under the influence of God. As a result, evangelicalism encouraged attempts at social reform, but also the visible display of the feelings. Joan Hedrick, Stowe’s biographer, notes that when Stowe was ‘born again’ aged thirteen (during the course of one of her father’s sermons) her family felt that not enough emotional disturbance had been put on display, and she was vigorously cross-examined by the Rev Joel Hawes to establish her credentials.8 5 Christopher Benfey, A Summer of Humming Birds, Love, Art and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (New York: Penguin, 2008), 68. 6 McLaughlin, American Evangelicals, 20. 7 Mark G. Vasquez, Authority and Reform. Religious and Educational Discourses in Nineteenth-Century New England Literature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2003), 244; John Gatta, ‘Calvinism Feminized: Divine Matriarchy in Harriet Beecher Stowe’, Connotations, 5, 2–3 (1995), 147–66. 8 Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, 144.

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Usually Stowe found her father’s sermons as unintelligible ‘as if he had spoken in Choctaw’, but, on this occasion, she was drawn in by an unusually direct sermon on the love of Christ.9 Hedrick argues that orthodox Calvinism had come under attack in the 1840s, especially from the exponents of the doctrine of ‘perfection’. American perfectionist leaders went further than Wesley’s original concept of perfection (as the ultimate state of grace achievable on earth). In their hands the creed fired Utopian projects such as the Oneida community, and legitimated radical social change. But Calvinism remained a powerful influence on Stowe. Much of the energy of her writing stems from the desire to convert her white audience to the cause before it is too late for them, as well as for the slaves. Calvinism dictates that God can send any unconverted adult to hell. Her sister, Catherine, abandoned it when her beloved fiancé died before he had experienced conversion, and was thus supposedly bound for damnation. Stowe herself agonized over the same question, particularly in relation to the suicide of her brother George in 1843, and the sudden death of her student son, Henry. Her pieces for the New York Evangelist, for example, focus on the anxiety that one might die ‘unprepared’.10 In her thirties Stowe experienced a second religious awakening, in which she replaced a doctrine of perfection with a gospel of suffering, uniting her experience as a woman with that of the oppressed slave and suffering Messiah.11 In this second conversion she no longer sought perfection of the self, but the idea of improving society remained with her. After the agonizing death from cholera in 1849 of her baby son, Charley, she experienced a fellow feeling for slave parents who could do nothing to protect their children, and for whom separation by slavery was as inexorable as separation by death. Inspired by a religious vision of a bleeding slave, Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), a novel which she described (in her anonymous foreword to the 1878 edition) as imbued by a ‘catholic religious spirit’ which accounted for its appeal to Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians.12 Stowe’s focus on the imitation of Christ, rejecting perfectionism in favour of validating the common and the everyday, produced the first work of American literary realism, and the greatest bestseller of the nineteenth century, widely translated across the globe.

9 Naomi Z. Sofer, Making the ‘America of Art’. Cultural Nationalism and NineteenthCentury Women Writers (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005), 36. 10 Joan D. Hedrick, ‘From Perfection to Suffering: The Religious Experience of Harriet Beecher Stowe’, Women’s Studies, 19, 3–4 (1991), 341–56. On perfectionism see also Ira L. Mandelker, Religion, Society and Utopia in Nineteenth-Century America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984); Leonard Bernstein, ‘The Ideas of John Humphrey Noyes, Perfectionist’, American Quarterly, 5 (1953), 157–65. 11 Hedrick, ‘From Perfection to Suffering’. 12 Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘Introduction’, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: Houghton, Osgood, 1878), xii.

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Criticism of Stowe for her naïve nineteenth-century racialism tends to ignore the tactical nature of her writing. She was, above all, a strategist. It is often forgotten that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was designed to reach out to a southern audience through serial publication in the National Era. The paper was explicitly anti-slavery, but its editor, Gamaliel Bailey, had been chosen because of his diplomacy and moderation, and his view that Southerners could be persuaded that slavery was more than a sectional issue.13 Stowe was not preaching to the converted as so many other abolitionist writers were; instead many of her strategies revolved around conversion and its methods. Stowe carefully emphasized the goodness of southern planters in an attempt to use the tactics of ‘moral suasion’ and bring North and South together. The novel begins with the relatively benign Shelbys in Kentucky, moves on to Augustine St Clare’s lax household in New Orleans, and, only at the close, focuses on the horrors of the field hands’ labour on Legree’s plantation. Legree is a northerner. The intention was not to attack the South but to attack slavery. Stowe pointed out that she had known slaveholders who were otherwise just, upright, and generous: ‘She felt that justice required that their difficulties should be recognized and their virtues acknowledged. It was her object to show that the evils of slavery were the inherent evils of a bad system, and not always the fault of those who had become involved in it’.14 The objective was to convince readers that abolition was a Christian imperative, rather than the belief only of fanatics and extremists.15 Stowe’s aim was union, whereas previous abolitionist writers tended to divide the nation.16 She expected abolitionists to condemn the book as too mild, and southerners to accept it.17 The result was quite the reverse. Initially published as a serial (1851-2) and then in book form, Uncle Tom’s Cabin immortalized her as, in Abraham Lincoln’s alleged description of 1863, ‘the little lady who made this big war’. Written in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which, by making it illegal to assist an escaped slave, effectively transformed the whole of the United States into a slaveholding nation, the novel became an immediate 13 Susan Belasco Smith, ‘Serialization and the Nature of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, in Kenneth M. Price and Susan Belasco Smith (eds), Periodical Literature in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995). 14 Stowe, ‘Introduction’, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ii. 15 Patricia R. Hill, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Religious Text’, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture. A Multi-media Archive, directed by Stephen Railton, http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc [accessed 4 December 2008]. The website contains many original works by Stowe, including The Christian Slave, The Key, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, literary criticism, historical materials, film and music, and provides summary and contextual information. 16 Gladys Sherman Lewis, Message, Messenger and Response. Puritan Forms and Cultural Reformation in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Lanham, London, and New York: University Press of America, 1994), 229. 17 Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘Introduction’, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, xvi.

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bestseller, probably proportionately the best-selling novel of all time. Though it was the first American novel to sell more than a million copies, though it was quickly translated into thirty-seven languages, it does not appear in any of the classic works of American literary criticism until the 1980s. The reasons are threefold: it was written by a woman, it had a cultural and propagandist function, and it was popular. As a novel, therefore, Uncle Tom’s Cabin offers something of a test case for the definition of aesthetic values in literature. Its effectiveness as propaganda has been matched only by the controversies that it continues to arouse. The history of its reception offers a potted history also of the relation between American literary and social criticism. If it was a bestseller as a novel, it was also arguably the most popular play of the nineteenth century, repeatedly adapted to provide ‘Tom Shows’, volatile mixes of song and dance, special effects, blackface minstrelsy, and not-so-covert racism.18 The accent fell heavily on spectacle: Eliza escaping across dry ice pursued by live bloodhounds, little Eva, often played by a child actress, ascending to heaven on wires, Legree a stereotypical melodramatic villain to be booed and hissed. Novelty performances on horseback or on ice were also popular. The play survived the Civil War and in 1900 there were 500 troupes performing it on the road in America. It was equally popular in Europe, as were, to a lesser extent, adaptations of her second anti-slavery novel Dred.19 As a result it has often been difficult, at least in the popular mind, to separate Stowe’s fiction from its worst dramatic embodiments. Although Stowe had no hand in the commercial adaptations, nor in the mass of commercial memorabilia spawned by them (Topsy dolls, poems, songs, dioramas, children’s games, wallpaper, medicines, china plates, and busts),20 the legend was propagated that she had created a stereotypical image of a docile, subservient, black man, who gave the American language the term ‘Uncle Tom’ to mean a traitor to his race. The early twentieth century saw a decline in the popularity of the novel as modernism flourished, with its governing assumptions that literature was not aimed at effecting social change. In America the novel’s comeback began inauspiciously, with James Baldwin’s ringing 1949 condemnation of Stowe as portraying blacks in whiteface, employing a racist vocabulary, in which black equates with evil, and creating in Tom a fleshless figure, ‘robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex’.21 Because Tom turned the other cheek, he 18

Harry Birdoff, The World’s Greatest Hit. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (New York: S. F.Vanni, 1947). Judie Newman, ‘Staging Black Insurrection: Dred on Stage’, in Cindy Weinstein (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Harriet Beecher Stowe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 113–30. 20 Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985); Jo-Ann Morgan, Uncle Tom’s Cabin as Visual Culture (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007). 21 James Baldwin, ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, in Elizabeth Ammons (ed.), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1994), 498. 19

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appeared to be subservient. The rise of the ‘New Americanists’, and particularly of feminist criticism in the 1970s, led to a major reassessment focused upon sentimentalism. Where Baldwin saw emasculation, feminist critics such as Jane Tompkins saw feminization. In the comprehensive re-evaluation of the sentimental novel of the 1980s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a major focus, with the argument made for its radical Christian vision as based on matriarchal values (the novel extols motherhood in almost every chapter), its strong female characters (both black and white), its emphasis on family and domesticity as Utopian ideals, and above all, in the figure of Eva, its feminist revision of sinful Eve into Evangel, a bringer of the good news of the gospel. Sentimentalism tends to overemphasize emotional indulgence and exaggerate the inherent goodness of humanity, focusing on a physical appreciation of God and nature, rather than on logic and reason. In the hands of the women writers of the period it buttressed the cult of domesticity, featuring women as guardians of morality, protectors of the home and the family. While potentially politically retrograde, and occasionally propagandistic, sentimental novels had clear designs upon the reader and upon the social world. In Tompkins’ argument, Uncle Tom’s Cabin supports the view that the popular domestic novel of the nineteenth century represented a massive attempt to reorganize culture from the woman’s point of view.22 The novel may be a ‘three-handkerchief ’ tearjerker (in 1852 Congressman Horace Greeley cried so hard over it on a railway journey from Boston to Washington that he had to get off in Springfield and spend a night in a hotel to recover), but contemporary readers are less likely to reject it as a lachrymose denial of reality than to applaud it for its physicality of affect. The bodily nature of sentimental fiction’s effects (involuntary weeping) highlights the physical in a way which is unavoidable, and is extremely effective in combating the sleight of hand by which apologists for slavery—a trade in bodies—erased the black body from American culture. In a nation divided according to the body, a frank recognition of physicality, and of the link between spontaneous expression of emotion and a deeply religious nature, became a form of resistance to the ‘reasoned’ arguments for black inferiority. Re-evaluations of Stowe’s treatment of race are still in process. On the positive side of the argument, Stowe was steeped in black history and benefited in the novel from her reading of slave narratives. After Gandhi and the Civil Rights Movement, Tom’s patient forbearance has been reinterpreted as a strategy of passive resistance while the example of Topsy tends to support environmentalism over racist essentialism. Recent scholarship on minstrelsy has located the novel’s political slipperiness in the ambiguity of the signifiers borrowed from the minstrel show, which provided terms, images, characters, and style which could be exploited by both pro- and 22 Jane P. Tompkins, ‘Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Literary History’, Glyph, 8 (1981), 79–102.

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anti-slavery forces.23 When Sam and Andy clown about on the lawn, lose the horses, and crack a succession of puns, they conform to the minstrel stereotype, but they do so in order to delay the slave trader Haley in his pursuit of the fleeing Eliza. If the fact nonetheless remains that the novel envisages a future for its characters only outside America (Canada, Africa, or heaven, in ascending order of value) and that later feminists have had reservations about the glorification of the home (even a politically dynamic one), Uncle Tom’s Cabin still raises pressing questions about race, gender politics, and aesthetic assumptions. Though critics have applauded the variety of Stowe’s characterization, her gift for dialogue and comedy, the narrative pace, and the encyclopaedic range of American locations, the case for her as a writer tends to rest on political and social rather than formal grounds. Amidst the welter of ideological claims the formal features of the novel have been comparatively neglected until recently. Sacvan Bercovitch’s The American Jeremiad managed to ignore Uncle Tom’s Cabin entirely, although it offers a clear example of this quintessentially American form, linking social criticism with spiritual renewal.24 As Gladys Sherman Lewis has demonstrated, however, in addition to using sermonic techniques, the novel also draws upon popular forms such as spiritual biography and captivity narrative.25 Tom may begin as a convert, but his faith is sorely tested on the Legree plantation, and he struggles with despair, until he sees a vision of Christ and finds his faith confirmed. Eva’s story is intimately modelled on a popular genre: the spiritual biography of the dying child.26 Captivity narratives had been very popular since the seventeenth century (usually depicting whites taken captive by Native Americans, undergoing various trials and emerging with a renewed faith in God) and the pattern of several ‘removes’ from place to place, with different forms of ordeal, and only faith to sustain the captive, was readily adapted to the slave’s story, though with an ironic twist in that the whites were now the ‘savage’ captors.27 In the novel when Mr Wilson invokes concepts of duty and providence, George Harris asks him, ‘if the Indians should come and take you a prisoner from your wife and children . . . if you’d think it your duty to abide in the condition to which you were called as opposed to viewing the first stray horse as an indication of providence’.28

23 Sarah Meer, Uncle Tom Mania. Slavery, Minstrelsy and Transatlantic Culture (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005). 24 Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). 25 Lewis, Message, Messenger and Response. 26 Rita J. Smith, ‘Those that Go Before: Ancestors of Eva St Clare’, New England Quarterly, 70 (1997), 314–18. 27 Lewis, Message, Messenger and Response. 28 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London: Penguin, 1981). Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses.

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George’s story, modelled on slave narrative, with its characters passed along the Underground Railroad, repelling their pursuers in a gun battle, and escaping in disguise, offers a lively counterbalance to the more spiritual but less cheerful story of Tom. The novel employs a symbolic geography as George and his family travel north to freedom, to heaven in Canada/Canaan, while Tom’s story moves further south, down to a hot Gothic hell on Legree’s Red River. Stowe borrowed extensively from Gothic, a form with which she was well-acquainted, from its employment in temperance literature, in which the mind ruined by alcohol often figures as a haunted and ruined house.29 A readership versed in temperance literature, and familiar with the notion of the individual being enslaved by drink, was primed for the anti-slavery message and could be expected to be receptive. Even a murder story found a place in the novel, narrated by the infanticide Cassy, as did inset stories, travelogue, regional sketch, and philosophical speculation. Arguably Uncle Tom’s Cabin is less a novel than an anthology of nineteenth-century popular genres. Stowe was prepared to use everything in her narrative toolkit to dismantle slavery. The success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin drew upon, and also contributed to the explosion of print culture in antebellum America, in which, following the invention of electrotyping, penny newspapers, mammoth weeklies, gift books, tracts, annuals, and ladies’ magazines flew along the ever-expanding railroads, assisted by low postage rates, better domestic light, and cheap eyeglasses. The expanded power of the press also changed how the public sphere was defined and was fully exploited by abolitionists, notably in the mass mailing campaigns of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and its marketing through travelling agents of pamphlets, envelopes, scarves, pincushions, and other forms of abolitionist material culture. Nonetheless, the only work concerning slavery to sell at all well was the American Anti-Slavery Society’s 1839 pamphlet, Slavery as It Is, by Theodore Weld, which was entirely factual.30 It is easy to underestimate how unusual Stowe was in finding a successful recipe for anti-slavery fiction. To appreciate the scale of Stowe’s success with Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it is worth considering how little anti-slavery literature appealed to the popular market. The novel was almost unique in engaging a mass readership and (through its dramatic adaptations) a mass audience. Most anti-slavery writing was preaching firmly to the converted. Slave narratives, the autobiographies of escaped slaves, often ghost-written by sympathetic whites, were many in number, and often sold cheaply in aid Karen Halttunen, ‘Gothic Imagination and Social Reform: The Haunted Houses of Lyman Beecher, Henry Ward Beecher, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’, in Eric Sundquist (ed.), New Essays on Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 107–34. 30 Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003); Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print. Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Ronald J. Zboray, ‘Antebellum Reading and the Ironies of Technological Innovation’, American Quarterly, 40 (1988), 65–82. 29

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of the abolitionist cause, but their need to emphasize the authenticity and representative truth of the ex-slave’s account tended to produce volumes heavy on fact and distinctly light on suspense, sensation, or excitement. The exception, Melville’s 1855 novella, Benito Cereno, is certainly thrilling enough, with its sentimentally naïve Yankee captain, blind until almost the last heart-stopping moment to the fact that the slave ship before him has been taken over in a violent insurrection by its Africans, who perform as slaves before the audience of Captain Amasa Delano in a conscious staging of slavery. Melville took a risk in emphasizing role-reversal and performance in the novella. In the sinister shaving scene, even the monumentally obtuse Delano wonders ‘what could be the object of enacting this play of the barber’ before him,31 a heavy hint to the reader of a conscious nod to British melodrama—George Dibdin Pitt’s The String of Pearls (1847), better known as Sweeney Todd: The demon barber. In Pitt’s hugely popular melodrama, the faithful black servant saves the honest sailor hero from Todd the cannibal barber, a situation reversed by Melville in the character of the murderous manservant, Babo.32 As a result, however, the emphasis on black ferocity and violence backfired, and for some readers blackness became equated with evil, rather than with heroic resistance. Melville’s debt to the theatre offers an important context for Stowe’s own drama. Evangelical Christianity has a long history of disapproval of the theatre, and yet Stowe did write one anti-slavery play, The Christian Slave, a closet drama, designed to be read in a private or semi-private location. The play adapted Uncle Tom’s Cabin to engage directly with the horrors of slavery. This was unusual. In America, slavery onstage tended to be distanced either temporally or spatially. King Shotaway (1823) performed by the African Company (black actors) portrays insurrection on Saint Vincent,33 Thomas Morton’s often revived The Slave (1817) the rising in Surinam.34 Bird’s The Gladiator (1831), performed six weeks after the Turner rebellion, involves slave auction, separation of families and full-scale revolt, but the hero is Spartacus.35 The revolt in Conrad’s Jack Cade (1835) occurs in the Middle Ages.36 31 Herman Melville, ‘Benito Cereno’, in The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces 1839–1860 (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1987), 87. 32 George Dibdin Pitt, The String of Pearls; The Fiend of Fleet Street. 1st March 1847, Britannia Theatre, Hoxton. Based upon Thomas Prest, ‘The String of Pearls; or The Sailor’s Gift. A Romance of Peculiar Interest’, The People’s Periodical, 21 November 1847. 33 Henry Browne, The Drama of King Shotaway, 1823 (not extant). See John Daniel Collins, ‘American Drama in Antislavery Agitation, 1792–1861’, Ph.D. thesis (State University of Iowa, 1963). 34 Thomas Morton, The Slave; or Blessings of Freedom (London: 1816). 35 Robert Montgomery Bird, The Gladiator in Allan Gates Halline (ed.), American Plays (New York: American Book Company, 1935). 36 Robert T. Conrad, Jack Cade: The Captain of the Commons, in Montrose J. Moses (ed.), Representative Plays by American Dramatists, 1815–1858 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925).

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Elizabeth Ricord’s Zamba (1842) is set in Martinique, and the preface introduced the play as having ‘no relation to the sentiments on the subject of slavery, that, of late, have excited such interest in our Republic’.37 Ricord is more concerned with combating Catholicism than slavery; the slaves remain slaves, but evangelical Christianity transforms them into happy Protestants. Ossawatomie Brown (1859), the exception to the rule, was a conspicuous failure despite being staged two weeks after Brown was hanged.38 In the play Brown is not involved in the murders, and does not think up the plan to raid the ferry. The Black Schooner, or the Pirate Slaver Amistad (1839) does not survive, but it does not seem to have evoked much sympathy for the slaves; the playbill emphasized the ‘terrible doom’ which was very nearly suffered by Inez, the Captain’s daughter, at the hands of Cinques, the chief mutineer.39 The generally lukewarm quality of the public stage may well be the result of the fear of public disorder excited by violence on stage. Many anti-slavery plays, however, were closet dramas, written to be read, or at best performed privately, and it is in this context that Stowe’s only dramatic work needs to be understood. Because not performed in public, closet plays were not squeamish about sex or violence. Sophia Little’s The Branded Hand (1845) involves branding, incestuous sexual assault, and a woman sadistically lashed;40 in Warren the hero is flayed to death, his flesh removed by the extended claws of a bobcat.41 Nonetheless most closet dramas were essentially evangelical propaganda. In Wilfred and Mary, for example, the heroine is engaged to a wonderful man called Wilberforce.42 What is interesting is the number of plays which deal (like Benito Cereno) with sudden role reversals, with whites recast as suffering slaves, or slaves posing as free men. In The Branded Hand the black slaves, pretending to be seamen, are en route to freedom, assisted by a friendly white captain, when a man-of-war appears. In this play the whites deceive the slaves, offering to accompany them to Nassau but steering them back into American waters. The captain (like Delano) observes ‘mysterious glances, smothered smiles, and looks significant’ but realizes the true state of things too late and ends up branded, as if he were an escaped slave.43 Other closet dramas focus on the free being cast temporarily as slaves. Daniel 37

Elizabeth Ricord, Zamba, Or, The Insurrection. A Dramatic Poem in Five Acts (Cambridge: 1842). 38 Mrs J. C. Swayze, Ossawatomie Brown; or The Insurrection at Harper’s Ferry (New York: 1859). 39 Anon., The Black Schooner, or The Pirate Slaver Amistad, Bowery Theatre Playbill, 6 September 1839, http://amistad.mysticseaport.org/library/images/theatre/hvd.bowery.whole.gif [accessed 21 May 2005]. 40 Sophia Little, The Branded Hand: A Dramatic Sketch Commemorative of the Tragedies at the South in the Winter of 1844–45 (Pawtucket: 1845). 41 Daniel Whitney, Warren. A Tragedy in Five Acts (Boston: 1850). 42 Theodore Saint Bo, Wilfred and Mary; or Father and Daughter (New York: 1861). 43 Little, The Branded Hand, 27.

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Whitney’s Warren (1850) involves a free black re-enslaved. Both the anonymous The Captured Slave (1845) and William Wells Brown’s Experience (1856) involve a white sold into slavery.44 In The Kidnapped Clergyman (1839) the clergyman (who has eaten too much cake after preaching a proslavery sermon) falls asleep and dreams that he is sold into slavery, awakening a reformed man.45 Such anxieties were sharpened or reanimated by the Fugitive Slave Law, which had reopened the possibility of sudden changes of racial and citizen status, as any person of colour could be returned to the status of the presumptive slave, even if he or she looked white. The Christian Slave, Stowe’s adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for a dramatized reading, was her only theatrical work, and exploits to the full the anxiety of role reversal. It is also in many ways a reversal of the novel. The play was created expressly by Stowe for Mrs Mary E. Webb, as a solo performance. Mrs Webb, a light skinned mulatta, was the daughter of a Spanish father and a black mother who reached freedom at the third attempt, three weeks before the birth of her child in 1828. Though her father originally raised her in luxury, he later withdrew his support.46 Because her mother had been a slave in Virginia, Mrs Webb was a potential victim of the Fugitive Slave Law. The play was performed in Philadelphia, Salem, Boston, and New York inter alia in 1855–6, usually under the patronage of anti-slavery societies, and most memorably in London at Stafford House, the mansion of the Duchess of Sutherland, on 2 July 1856. In the drama Stowe focuses from the beginning on the ordinary and the domestic, at the expense of melodrama, sentiment, and sensation. Stowe thus countered the popular stage adaptations which tended to obscure the topic of slavery with minstrel performances and spectacle.47 In her dramatization Stowe cuts all of George Harris’s story, to focus on Tom and Cassy. In the first two acts there is considerable sentimentality, and even minstrelsy. The effect, to judge by the contemporary reviews, was pleasant but rather dull.48 Then everything changes. In the third act the current of feeling reverses, into despair and anger. Whilst the plot concerns individual reversals, the quality of

44 Anon., The Captured Slave (Buffalo: 1845); William Wells Brown, Experience; Or How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone (written 1856, not extant); synopsis in W. Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), chapter 18. 45 Anon., The Kidnapped Clergyman: Or, Experience the Best Teacher (Boston: 1839). 46 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Christian Slave: A Drama Founded on a Portion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dramatized by Harriet Beecher Stowe Expressly for the Readings of Mrs Mary E. Webb. Arranged, with a short biographical sketch of the reader, by F. J. Webb (London: 1856). Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses. 47 Meer, Uncle Tom Mania; Susan F. Clark, ‘Solo Black Performance before the Civil War: Mrs Stowe, Mrs Webb and “The Christian Slave” ’, New Theatre Quarterly, 12 (1997), 339–48; Eric Gardner, ‘Stowe Takes the Stage. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Christian Slave’, Legacy, 15, 1 (1998), 78–84. 48 Anon., ‘Dramatic Readings by a Colored Native of Philadelphia’, Illustrated London News, 2 August 1856, 121–2.

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reversal is also inscribed into the dramatic structure. The play begins in Uncle Tom’s cabin rather than in the Shelby home, and presents an image of black capability and domesticity. Political content is minimized (the scenes involving Senator Bird are cut), as are scenes of family separation, Lucy’s death by suicide, the death of Prue, most of Eva’s death scene, and almost all outdoor scenes. The emphasis is on the interior and the home, with lengthy parallel scenes in Acts One and Two, set respectively in Aunt Chloe’s kitchen (specially written for the stage version) and then in Dinah’s kitchen. Apart from a few scenes outside, focused on the foiled pursuit of Eliza, and largely comic, Acts One and Two take place in parlour, kitchen, boudoir, dining room, and hall. Ophelia gives Topsy a lesson in bedmaking; Aunt Chloe cooks chicken for Tom; even the villainous Marie St Clare, in another new scene, is shown folding pillowcases and discussing types of sheeting. The emphasis was carefully tuned to a genteel audience. In London, the play was performed at 3.30 (closer to tea time than to an evening entertainment), attended by aristocrats and the upper middle classes (at a cost of half a guinea it was expensive), and followed by a house tour to admire the Duchess of Sutherland’s furnishings. But after the first two acts have glorified the importance of domesticity, the third act suddenly reverses all the genteel audience’s expectations. The scene shifts to slave quarters, a gin house, a hut, a wood, and Legree’s Gothic mansion. In Act Three Cassy takes over the story to evoke the spectre of sudden enslavement, loss of domestic status, and (perhaps most shockingly) loss of Christian faith. The role of Cassy could as easily have been cut from the play as any of the other subplots, but instead Stowe gives her seven of the last eight scenes, including a four-page monologue. In contrast to the domesticity of the first two acts, Cassy relates how slavery tore her family apart, giving us ‘page upon page of an angry black woman whose domestic dreams have been all but destroyed by slavery’.49 Cassy is established in the novel as cultured; she has been ‘delicately bred’, (49) and brought up in luxury in ‘splendid parlours’. (51) Indeed her description of her fine furniture suggests a parallel with the immediate surroundings in Stafford House; Mrs Webb was reading behind a lectern in its grand hall flanked by a large potted plant. Suddenly Cassy’s father dies, and she finds herself entered into the inventory of his goods, and promptly sold as a slave concubine. The reversal plot of the closet drama is staged in full, but is also extended to suggest potential loss of genteel class status, and gendered respect. For a respectable, class-conscious audience this was an adroit strategy. As a parlour play it lulled the audience into a sense of false security before coming out of the parlour and into the violent spaces of slavery. Stowe also exploited the coincidence of elements of Mrs Webb’s life to the full. She too was a light-skinned mulatta, had been carefully educated, let

49

Gardner, ‘Stowe Takes the Stage’, 82.

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down by a father, and faced potential redefinition as a slave under the Fugitive Slave Act. Playing Cassy, the effect was that of a living double, an image of ‘before and after’, staging both black accomplishment and gentility, and the threats of its reversal, into corruption and degradation. The play ends with Tom’s triumphant death and his last words of Christian victory: ‘Who—who—who—shall—separate—us from the love of Christ? LOVE! LOVE! LOVE OF CHRIST’. (63) But Cassy remains unredeemed. She tells Emmeline that, ‘If God would give me back my children, then I could pray’, (61) but unlike the novel, the drama does not provide any family reunion. Audiences familiar with the novel would certainly have noticed this omission, since the novel closes with a whole series of family members being improbably reunited. Cassy describes herself as having the devil in her, gives an account of her murder of one master and the infanticide of her son, acknowledges how she was ‘passed from hand to hand’, (54) describes herself as ‘a lost soul’, (54) and tells Tom, ‘There’s no use calling on the Lord; he never hears! There isn’t any God, I believe; or, if there is, he’s taken sides against us. . . . Everything is pushing us into hell. Why shouldn’t we go?’(49) Her last words are ‘His wrath is upon us. He is turned away in anger’. (61) Nor is she alone in being denied the salvation so freely on offer in the novel. Sambo and Quimbo are not converted into Christians in the play. The white master, Augustine St Clare, is also heading for the pit. In the novel Augustine is a sceptic but is drawn towards God by the combined forces of Eva and Tom, and dies murmuring hymns with the final rapturous word ‘Mother’, implying reunion in heaven with a saintly woman. In the play, he goes to his maker with more ominous portents. He has just read the account of the separation of the sheep from the goats in the Bible (Matthew, 25: 32–41) quoting, ‘Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire’, (43) and then plays the ‘Dies Irae’ (44) from Mozart’s Requiem. The act ends with news of his sudden death. Essentially the play suggested that the sin of slavery would result in damnation for those who had not fully converted to anti-slavery. In America this kind of jeremiad evoking wrath and judgment was an accepted literary form. In Britain, however, Stowe was exploiting a major opportunity offered by the private, uncensored nature of the dramatized reading. By the 1843 Theatres Act, the Lord Chamberlain had an unlimited power of veto. Scripture was considered unsuitable for the public stage; all sacred invocations, references to God, Lord, heaven, angels, and any direct quotation from the Bible were banned. The Bible could not be used as a stage property, and it was a serious offence to bring ministers of the Christian religion into contempt, effectively preventing any actor appearing on stage as a clergyman. Even innocuous examples (Charles II in disguise as a clergyman in Douglas Jerrold’s 1831 The Bride of Ludgate) were objectionable.50 But in The Christian 50 J. R. Stephens, The Censorship of English Drama, 1824–1901 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).

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Slave Stowe was able to stage a full theological debate between Cassy and Tom, with no holds barred, to establish that American slavery was coterminous with American sin. As Ann Douglas has noted, nobody in antebellum America discussed slavery in secular terms; it was the last American political issue to occasion full theological debate.51 The play makes it clear that salvation is not a foregone conclusion, and conversion is almost entirely absent. Tom is saved, but, in the example of Cassy, the play’s title becomes ironic. She once was a Christian slave, but she is so no longer. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Tom was such a paragon that his character almost suggested that slavery could be a positive force for religious good. But this was not the case with Cassy. Additionally, the dramatic adaptation answered those of Stowe’s black critics who had attacked the novel for its Christian submissiveness; Cassy is neither Christian nor submissive. In 1852 (anticipating James Baldwin’s criticism by almost a century), William C. Nell, a black abolitionist, protested against Uncle Tom’s Cabin for its emphasis on Tom’s willing submission to tyranny. Stowe took the point. In her introduction to Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) she argued that his book demonstrated the injustice of any idea of blacks as deficient in courage and energy.52 In her play, she strengthened the role of Cassy, in opposition to Tom, and made it abundantly clear that slavery was not a Christianizing institution. In many respects The Christian Slave prefigures the concerns of Stowe’s other anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856), with its warring religious figures: Milly (evangelical and forgiving) and Dred (a prophet of doom and vengeance, intent on insurrection). Stowe’s gift was to mould her literary strategies to the immediate problem which needed to be addressed. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin she emphasizes the Fugitive Slave Law, hence the novel’s focus on flight and captivity, with the Harris family’s journey to freedom opposed to Tom’s ever-deepening bondage. The Christian Slave was also designed to respond to the Fugitive Slave Law, though it focused more closely on the potential for redefinition of apparently free citizens as slaves, and abandoned attempts at moral suasion and conciliation in favour of threats and warnings of damnation. Dred, however, was written in the midst of the agitation over Kansas. As a result, it leaves the domestic interior largely behind to stage its action outside, in forests and open spaces, in order to create an image of a future slaved frontier. The novel is set in North Carolina, in an area on the edge of the eponymous swamp, sparsely populated and evocative of the southern frontier, with scattered settlements and few churches. But Stowe also adds elements which would create a western ‘frontier’ impression for her readers. Almost every Ann Douglas, ‘Introduction: The Art of Controversy’, in Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (London: Penguin, 1981), 23. 52 Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘Introduction’, in William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston: 1855). 51

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character appears at different points on horseback, for example, as opposed to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, where the normal modes of transport are carriages and riverboats, their enclosed spaces offering substitutes for the parlour. The heroine, Nina, is an excellent rider, whereas in Uncle Tom’s Cabin riding a small pony immediately hastens Eva’s death. There are scenes of dashing horsemanship; ambushes by masked riders; attempted lynchings; and above all an emphasis on taking religion out into the open air, in the camp-meeting scenes. Parlour dwellers tend to be implicitly condemned and are proslavery, notably Aunt Nesbit and almost all the clergymen. Dred, the messianic free black, haunts the forests around his fortified stockade much as a sentimentalized Native American might, dropping unannounced from trees, playing with friendly squirrels, and carrying a bowie knife and hatchet. Lisette and Harry are established as virtuous by the profusion of greenery about and inside their cabin. Although these elements owe something to the plantation novel (as Sarah Meer has established), the characters rarely repose in their domestic surroundings.53 When Harry presents Lisette with silk for a dress, he does so when both are on horseback, ‘flying off as if on the wings of the wind’.54 When she is doing the ironing, he swings her into the saddle and rides off with her. Nina sets off at a brisk pace and beats her galloping brother to a neighbouring plantation in time to buy Lisette. At every point Stowe confronts the reader with an image which asks what the unconquered West would be like under slavery—a paradise with God at its centre (as evoked by the pastoral campmeeting) or a paradise emphatically lost to the sin of slavery. Stowe’s desire to check the extension of slavery to the new West, led her also to focus on poor whites. Although the prospect of eventually having to compete with freed slaves was not an enticing one for poor whites, who were thus easily recruited to the proslavery mob, they were already the victims of wage levels depressed by slave competition. What would be the results for northern labour if the system were to be extended to Kansas and beyond? Would poor whites also become slaves, or, worse than slaves? In the novel, the formerly genteel Sue Cripps and her children are entirely supported by the energy and industry of their slave, Tiff, and offer an image of white degradation. Economically they are less comfortable than slaves. Nina’s Uncle John is mortified to discover a family of emaciated whites squatting on his plantation and scavenging for food from his slaves, and promptly declares that they should be taken into bondage. ‘The white working classes can’t take care of themselves, and must be put into a condition for us to take care of them.

53

Meer, Uncle Tom Mania. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, ed. Judie Newman (Keele: Ryburn B.A.A.S. American Library, 1992. Reprinted Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 87. Subsequent references follow quotations in parentheses. The reader unfamiliar with the plot of Dred will find a useful summary in Newman, ‘Staging Black Insurrection’, 116–17. 54

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What is liberty to them? Only a name—liberty to be hungry and naked’. (286) Similar views are expressed by Aunt Nesbit: ‘there ought to be a law passed to make ’em all slaves’. (150) Harry has heard of poor whites selling their children into slavery. (153) When Clayton counters that it is slavery which impoverishes, and that hundreds of people are leaving North Carolina for the West because they cannot support themselves in the slave South, his friend Frank Russel has the solution to depopulation. When the South is able to outvote the North, he argues, slavery will be extended, (581) leaving the North as Greece to the great slaveholding Rome of the South and West. At the centre of the novel stands Stowe’s great set piece, the description of a southern camp-meeting, with its revivalists, emotional outbursts and subsidiary drinking and socializing, unsurpassed before Mark Twain in its blend of humour and realism. The camp-meeting features as the disputed territory of salvation or damnation. Geographically, and in terms of the time scheme of the novel, it is situated between two other outdoor encampments: the maroon stronghold in the swamp and the camp of a slave trader with his coffle. It is thus positioned between the two warring forces of slavery and of freedom. In situating her characters within the frame of the camp-meeting Stowe chose an emblematic location. The camp-meeting is a ‘union’ one, involving preachers from different denominations, a tactic which implicitly asks whether it will be possible to maintain national unity while slavery flourishes. There are two sorts of ‘soul-drivers’ at the camp-meeting, the clergymen holding the revival and angling for converts, and the assembled slave-traders and slave-hunters in the congregation. One slave escapes from the coffle, and is sheltered by Dred, who highlights the proximity of the different camps. ‘Camp-meeting and drivers’ camp right alongside each other! Shepherds that sell the flock, and pick the bones’. (359) Just as Stowe drew upon closet drama and evangelical rhetoric in her previous works, so in Dred she exploited the popular religious form of the camp-meeting, particularly to discuss the role of emotion in religious experience. The camp-meeting also offers an arena in which Stowe can grapple with the problems of writing popular fiction which conjoins emotional release, and serious moral intent. In some respects it provides an opportunity to discuss the deficiencies or advantages of sentimental literary practice, contrasting different preaching styles and different audience responses. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century the American campmeeting was usually a temporary occupation of summer woods, where the church could meet with God and return to the world transformed. The location implicitly represented sacrality in a form of living temple or new Eden, its trees often described as the pillars of a temple or as a cathedral in the wilderness. Camp-meeting tents were usually decorated with leafy boughs. The camp-meeting experience was very closely linked to the frontier. In Dred Stowe describes it as a leading feature of American religion ‘peculiarly suited

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to the wide extent of the country, and to the primitive habits which generally accompany a sparse population’. (299). Later commentators have agreed; the camp-meeting was often the only social event for men and women to attend together, and large numbers would travel great distances to spend days on the ‘grounds’.55 Henry Ward Beecher reported between sixty and seventy conversions in three weeks in Indiana.56 Stowe exploits the less physical meanings of the term ‘grounds’. The camp-meeting offers grounds for various religious and political arguments; the evidence of the coffle offers grounds for abolition; Dred’s camp is the very ground of freedom, and the Declaration of Independence is read there. In theory the camp-meeting also offered a free space in which normal distinctions of class and creed were reversed or effaced. Usually there was a preachers’ shed or pulpit, five feet or so above the ground, with in front of it the ‘mourners’ bench’ or ‘anxious seat’ (popularly known as the glory pen) for sinners mourning their sinfulness and in transition between sin and conversion.57 Sinners were brought up from the sex-segregated congregation to experience conversion; preachers went down into the pen where men, women, saved, and sinners mingled freely, sometimes including black and white. Women could also function as exhorters to assist the converts. Ministers thus ended the separation between church and congregation, men and women, involving significant reversals of ‘normal’ status. As Bruce has argued, the result was a sense of social distinctions being erased, as the mourner separated from his previous life to begin a new one. Familiar ways of relating to people were suspended, statuses reversed, distinctions negated, as the convert entered a new world ordered according to his relation to God. Camp-meetings were highly sensational, sometimes with thousands of people crying out, preaching, praying, weeping, singing, or falling prostrate in what was often seen as an ‘emotional orgy’.58 Conversions were often accompanied by displays of acrobatic Christianity, jerks, writhing, or convulsions. Jerks were particularly popular, developing from a twitch to a complete bodily paroxysm, and spreading rapidly to hundreds of people. The success of a meeting was measured by the number who ‘fell before the power of God’.59 The fallen sometimes remained lifeless for hours and were carried off to tents to recover. Inevitably this level of emotional transport occasioned unease in some spectators. Fanny Trollope attended ‘that most terrific saturnalia, a 55 William G. McLaughlin, Revivals, Awakenings and Reform: An Essay on Religion and Social Change in America, 1607–1977 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Timothy L. Smith, Revivalism and Social Reform. American Protestantism on the Eve of the Civil War (New York: Harper and Row, 1965). 56 Hedrick, ‘From Perfection to Suffering’. 57 Dickson D. Bruce, Jun., And They All Sang Hallelujah. Plain-Folk Camp-Meeting Religion, 1800–1845 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1974). 58 Bruce, Jun., And They All Sang Hallelujah, 53. 59 Bruce, Jun., And They All Sang Hallelujah, 54.

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camp-meeting’60 and described the jerking and howling as reminiscent of ‘a cell in bedlam’.61 She was repelled by the image of women reduced to the appearance of idiocy, and recoiled from the sight of the ‘insidious lips’ of preachers on the faces of young girls.62 In Britain, she declared, any Englishman would have interrupted the scene at once and put the perpetrators on the treadmill.63 Stowe’s camp-meeting is interrupted by the voice of Dred, invisible high in the trees, condemning all present for their complicity in slavery. But, before that occurs, she gives full rein to the imaginative possibilities of the scene. The camp-meeting offers both the fleeting possibility that the inspired word can bring people together, save them and save the Union, and at the same time critiques sensationalized utterances and over-mobilized emotions, where these are not followed by action. An initial hymn pulls the different groups together into ‘one vast, surging sea of sound’ (323) in which ‘negroes and whites, slaves and freemen, saints and sinners, slave-holders, slavehunters, slave-traders, ministers, elders, and laymen’ sing with one breath, a nation undivided. Many of those present give themselves up for conversion without resistance ‘swayed by the feeling of the hour’, (324) though the dinner break intervenes with comic effect. Uncle John is about to surrender to conversion but instead ‘hears the call’ of dinner and three glasses of wine. Discussion centres upon the desirability of such temporary enthusiasm. Tiff comments that ‘when de preaching is done, dere don’t ’pear to be nothing to it’. (327) Sprightly Nina sees little point in sermons, Clayton (feeling strongly about Nina) declares for feeling and enthusiasm, conventional Anne is visibly shocked. Although the meeting is jointly organized by Presbyterians and Methodists, divisions swiftly appear; the various preachers are in hot competition for the audience, and the grounds swiftly become a battle ground for different interests. Poor white groups also discuss the morning’s spectacle, at a whisky-booth, and in a group of slave hunters. Abijah Skinflint (first seen watering his whiskey) does a brisk trade, while sharing his Calvinist and Yankee views. Ben Dakin, a slave-hunter, who is ‘generally converted at every gathering of this kind’ (303) until he falls off the wagon a few months later, negotiates the purchase of a new slave and then, fresh from a fight with a rival hunter, presses forward to the altar. The afternoon sermon stirs up a similar enthusiasm all over again. ‘The excitement now became general’, (338) with a frenzy of conversion on all sides. Feelings run high—only to be checked and brought to a close by the voice of the invisible Dred, roundly condemning all present. For Stowe, he is clearly designed to represent a silent, invisible witness, God, 60 61 62 63

Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: The Folio Society, 1974), 93. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 132. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 134. Trollope, Domestic Manners, 135.

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with whom the reader (also of course invisible but with similarly panoramic access to the various scenes at the camp-meeting) should be allied. In The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, after reviewing various horrific incidents of slavery, Stowe comments, ‘Think that Jesus Christ has been present, a silent witness through every such scene of torture and anguish—a silent witness in every such court’.64 Dred is repeatedly associated with the term ‘witness’ and views the campmeeting as a travesty of false prophets. In the novel, the truly sacred place is Dred’s camp, a clearing surrounded by enormous trees from which hang jessamine pendants ‘like censers’ with a ‘mosaic’ of flowers filling the gaps between them, where a ‘choir’ of birds sing. (310) Dred also lives on a frontier, that between earth and heaven. Stowe describes his mystic nature as located in ‘a twilight ground between the boundaries of the sane and the insane’ (353) open to supernatural intimations and trances. Yet it has to be said that Dred does not convince those who hear him. Some of the audience assume that he is part of the theatrics, a ‘plant’ by one of the preachers (366) designed to manipulate them. For the fictional audience, Dred’s hermetic words fall on deaf ears. He might almost be speaking Choctaw as far as Clayton or Uncle John is concerned—or indeed anyone lacking an intimate knowledge of Old Testament prophetic books. Clayton dismisses him as ‘some crazy fanatic’. (366) Stowe recognizes the justice of his words, but concedes that the abolition message needs some popularizing and mediation if it is to be conveyed effectively. A more successful preacher is represented by Father Dickson, a figure in whom Stowe invests her own evangelical Christianity. Pacific, but uncompromising, steadfastly defying a lynch-mob, Dickson is a composite character based on several abolitionist clergymen (particularly Amos Dresser and Elijah P. Lovejoy) who were persecuted for their opposition to the ‘peculiar institution’.65 The camp-meeting scene immediately modulates into a deathbed, that of Emily, a member of the coffle of slaves. It is Dickson who brings her back to Christ as she lies dying, by singing a hymn that recalls the memory of her mother. The account of Emily’s death affects the interstate trader with a moment of remorse, and is described at length to Father Bonnie (a rival proslavery preacher) by Dickson. Bonnie is moved and weeps freely. Dickson also makes it the basis of his camp-meeting sermon on the following day. For a moment his audience is swayed: ‘As he spoke with feeling, he awakened feeling in return’, (370) but when the sermon is over, ‘it seemed to melt away, as a wave flows back again into the sea. It was far easier to join in a temporary

64 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Salem, New Hampshire: Ayer, 1987), 206. 65 Stowe, Dred, 742.

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whirlwind of excitement, than to take into consideration troublesome, difficult, and expensive reforms’. (371) The Clayton party go home without waiting for the camp-meeting to end. ‘The novelty of the effect was over’. (373) Two weeks later, Father Bonnie drives a brisk bargain with the same slave-trader for three new hands. (347) Temporary emotional excitement does not always have positive results. In the scenes of mobocracy with which the action closes Stowe tests the essential appeal of sentiment against the crowd—and finds it distinctly wanting. Sympathy becomes suggestibility, contagious excitement, and violence, as the audience becomes the mob. Despite this ominous end to events, Stowe does not entirely discredit the camp-meeting, or by implication, the importance of appeals to popular emotion. Ben Dakin, fresh from a fight with a rival slave-tracker, yields to the feeling of the camp-meeting, revealing that ‘in some blind way, he does think himself a sinner, and in need of something he calls salvation’. (323) Stowe contrasts him with the comfortable inhabitants of cushioned northern pews. Ben will, if only temporarily, declare against drink; they will never declare ‘against the cotton-bale’. (323) Popular religion may have its drawbacks but it scores higher than the orthodox variety represented by the theological hairsplitters in ‘The Clerical Conference’. The conference is called to attempt to reunite the Presbyterian Church, which split over the question of abolition. Throughout the chapter, the preachers understand the church as an institution rather than as a fellowship of believers, and refuse to condemn slavery, in the interests of maintaining a semblance of unity. Dr Calker loves the church better than God, ‘and, by the church, he meant the organization of the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America’. (526) Their only aim is to avoid giving any foothold to rival sects. ‘The Episcopalians are keeping watch over Episcopacy, the Methodists over Methodism, the Baptists over Baptism. None of them dare espouse an unpopular cause, lest the others, taking advantage of it, should go beyond them in public favor’. (497–8) In the Reverend Shubael Packthread, master of all forms of indirect and ambiguous utterance, Stowe creates the most repellent image of the professional clergyman outside Trollope. Packthread lurks ‘as a spider does behind his web’, (522) entangling his victims in contradictory meshes of statement, until they fall captive to his views. Mr Jekyl, a Calvinist elder, believes that, since God has evidently brought many people into the world only to make them miserable, there can be no argument with slavery doing likewise. In the event, it is popular evangelical religion which represents the force of reform in the novel. Nina dies suddenly of cholera, fortunately just after she has been born again, (439) and Clayton therefore resolves to make the fight against slavery his life’s work. This is the only major conversion to abolitionism in Stowe’s novels, and it is motivated by love. Similarly Milly dissuades Dred from violent insurrection, by evoking the love of Christ, and the main

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characters escape together, a mixed-race group, to freedom. The description of Milly is modelled, as is her early life, on that of Sojourner Truth, black abolitionist and feminist.66 Like Sojourner’s, Milly’s mistress has sold all her children to slavery. Originally consumed by the desire for vengeance, Milly attends a camp-meeting, where a particularly inspired sermon makes her empathize with God because he too had lost a child; she falls flat among the mourners and is converted to Christian love. Just like Truth, she forgives her erring mistress, caring for her throughout her last illness, and abjuring revenge. When Dred’s projected insurrection is brought to an abrupt halt by Milly’s Christian intervention, the novel makes an adroit tactical decision. Stowe was not about to fall into the trap of undermining the ‘submissive’ stereotype only to redemonize the freed slave as bloodthirsty. Instead she replaces the bogey of slave insurrection with the real violence of whites in the South. The scenes of mass violence, of ‘mobocracy’ and lynch law, evoking the violence in Kansas, involve a white mob which whips a defenceless clergyman, threatens women and children, and besieges Clayton’s home. Stowe therefore does not avert the threat of insurrection from conciliatory motives, but to portray the violence of America as it actually is—led by white ruffians, and directed against other whites. Writing against slavery involved the deployment of every literary resource at Stowe’s disposal, even those (such as minstrelsy) which sometimes turned back upon her. Probably her most important gift was the ability to adapt her attack to the immediate conditions: the Fugitive Slave Law in Uncle Tom’s Cabin with its twin plots of escape to freedom (George and Eliza) and deepening bondage (Tom); the redefinition by that act of citizen status in The Christian Slave, reversing the affirmations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and the spectre of the enslaved frontier following the Kansas–Nebraska conflict, in Dred. Yet despite being an adroit tactician, Stowe never stopped emphasizing that slavery was absolutely and essentially wrong. As Augustine St Clare declares, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, ‘the thing itself is the essence of all abuse’. (262) But she changed tactics as and when necessary, and as a result, demonstrated just what literature could achieve in the hands of a popular religious writer.

66 Harriet Beecher Stowe, ‘Sojourner Truth, the Libyan Sibyl’, Atlantic Monthly, 11 (1863), 473–81.

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Index Allen, William 48, 62, 108 American Baptist Free Mission Society 158 American Revolution 13 influence of, 5 Anti-slavery, history as humanitarian reform 25, 26 ‘cultural turn’ in 37, 40 early histories of 21–5 economic interpretation 25–6 participant accounts 21–5, 42–3 recognition of African Americans 24, 30–1, 40 recognition of women’s role 24, 28 revisionist interpretations 29, 30 role of Garrisonians 28 see also, Feminism, Women’s History Anti-slavery, transatlantic networks 42, 111, 112, 120, 124–5, 128, 130, 150–1 American admiration for British women 122–4 Stafford House address 129–30 Anti-slavery Convention of American Women (1837) 125 Anti-slavery fairs 127, 151–4 Boston 124, 151 concerns about 152 Philadelphia 124, 152–3 values of 151–3 Anti-slavery ideas and liberal political economy 111–14, 116, 118 and sentimentalism 111, 121, 127 as expression of personal piety 86–7, 122 abstention from slave-produced goods, 58, 112 differences between Britain and USA, 124–5, 127, 130 liberty 4 moral suasion 122, 157, 179 roots 4 spiritual equality 136 ‘Symbolic Cannibalism’ 58 transformation of 111 Anti-Slavery Society (Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Dominions) challenges to 107 formation of 5, 88

Anti-slavery writing poetry 85, 124, 125, 144 and print culture 183–4 Atlantic slave trade 5 Babington, Thomas 100–1 Baptists 44 definition of 45n divisions among 8 General Baptists 8, 9 General Baptists, definition of 45n General Baptists, Old Connexion 9 growth of in America 12, 13 origins in America 11, 12 Particular Baptists 8, 9, 77 growth in numbers 77–8 participation in anti-slavery 53 rural culture of 77 status of women within 15, 78 Baptist Missionary Society 79, 80 missionaries 80, 81–2 Baptist women American church 157–8 and anti-slavery 67–8, 145 domestic culture of 79 moral culture 77 Barbauld, Anna Letitia 34, 45, 92, 93 Barton, John 45 Beatson, John 44 Bible, the use of on stage in Britain 188–9 use of to criticize slavery 136, 146 use of to justify slavery 136 Booksellers, religious dissenters 50 female 46, 49–50 Booth, Abraham 44, 48 Boycott movement 58, 75, 125 Boynton, Rev Charles 167–8 Brachygraphy 47, 48n, 49, 51 Bradburn, Samuel 48, 61 Bratton Baptist church, Wiltshire 78, 79 Burn, Andrew 61 Camp-meetings 176, 177, 191–3 use of in Dred 190, 191, 193–5 Cappe, Catherine 93–4 Cennick, John 47 Chandler, Elizabeth 125, 165

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Chapman, Maria Weston 23, 24, 132–3, 153 Child, Lydia Maria 22, 145 Christian Slave, the 184, 186–9 and domesticity 187 reversal plot in 187–8 See also, Stowe, Harriet Beecher Churches, American British views of disputes 150 failure to support abolitionism 141–3, 156, 157, 164 women’s criticism of 143, 145 Church leaders support for women’s activism 2, 120 women’s criticism of 138, 142–3, 144–6, 164–6 Cincinnati 155–6, 163 Clapham Sect 21, 100 history of 21, 22, 32 Civil War, American and abolition of slavery 6, 27 causes of 27–8, 29 Clarkson, Thomas 22, 44, 53, 57, 58, 60, 63 and campaign against the slave trade, 26, 60, 101 History 21–2 Clergy attempts to restrain anti-slavery women 147 Coltman, Elizabeth (née Cartwright) 91 domesticity of 92–3, 98 Coltman, John (father of Elizabeth Heyrick) 91, 100 Coltman, John (brother of Elizabeth Heyrick) 101, 104 ‘Come-outer’ churches 117–18, 147, 149, 156, 158, 169–70 comparison to dissenting churches 149 Committee of the London Society for Effecting the Abolition of Slavery 45 Conder, Thomas 50 Congregationalists 8 growth of 9, 71, 77–8 growth of in America 13 sense of community 71 status of women within 15, 67, 76 Congregationalist women and anti-slavery 67–8 conservatism of 67, 76 critics of, in America 135 female critics of 145 Consumerism 114–5 and anti-slavery fairs 153 and boycott movement 58 Coultart, James correspondence with Jane Saffery 80–1

Davis, David Brion 4, 26–7, 107 Davis, Mary (of Peoria, Illinois) 161, 163, 169–70 De Fleury, Maria 48 Dissenters, see English religious dissent Dore, James 44, 48, 52, 53, 54, 65 Sermon on the African Slave Trade 52 Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp 189–96 as response to Kansas crisis 189–90 depiction of camp-meeting 191, 193–5 depiction of poor whites 190–1, 193 role of church in 195 See also, Stowe, Harriet Beecher Eaton, Daniel Isaac 51 Edwards, Jonathan 12 Emancipation Act, 1833 5, 120 English religious dissent 135 and women’s understanding of 3 changes in belief 8, 91 see also Salters’ Hall debate 8 contrast with American experience 117–18 growth of 10 historical development of 3 networks among 47, 48, 50 restrictions on civil liberties of 73 roots of 7 Ernst, Sarah 155–6, 163, 167–8 Evangelicals, Evangelicalism, Evangelical religion 7 and reform 14, 134 anti-slavery beliefs 7, 133–4 beliefs 13, 176, 177 influence of beliefs on anti-slavery 4, 112, 117, 156–7 revivalism 134 women’s roles 109 Evangelical culture and child-rearing 78–9 civic culture 69, 71, 76, 86 tensions within 72–3 disapproval of theatre 184 rural culture 77, 86 See also Baptists, Methodists, Congregationalists Federal Constitution Abolition of the slave trade, 1808 6 Female anti-slavery societies and dissenting churches 138 comparison with gathered communities, 133, 137–8 criticism of 161 meeting in churches 162–3 studies of 38

Index tensions with churches 165 Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society, Ohio 133, 156, 160, 166 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society 38, 132, 160 Dorchester (Mass.) Female Anti-Slavery Society, 136, 137, 140 Groton Female Anti-Slavery Society, 136 Ladies Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia 122, 160 New York City Female Anti-Slavery Society 39, 122, 152 Peoria Female Anti-Slavery Society (Illinois) 162–3 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society 39 Portage County Female Anti-Slavery Society 160, 166 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society 66, 69 Sheffield Ladies’ Association for the Universal Abolition of Slavery 69, 75 Female benevolent societies 15, 71, 72, 137–8 Feminism campaign for women’s suffrage 70 feminist histories of anti-slavery 21, 31 limits of in anti-slavery movement 76 roots of in anti-slavery 28, 40–1, 67 Flower, Benjamin 45, 48 Flowerdew, Alice 48 Forten, Charlotte 24, 40 Forten, James 122–3 Fox, William 50, 51, 55, 63, 64, 65 An Address 57 An Address, number sold 57 And reaction to French emancipation of the slaves, 64 Female response to An Address 59 Response to An Address 59, 60 Franklin, Benjamin 21, 51, 84 Free Produce Movement, America 125–6 reaction to 127 see also boycott movement French Revolution Reaction to 10, 53, 73, 101 Fugitive Slave Law, 1850 179, 186, 189 impact of 186, 188 Garrison, William Lloyd 6, 69, 70, 118, 123, 126, 135, 156, 160 historians’ views of, 28, 29 views on abstention 126–7 Gradual emancipation 103, 107 colonization 6, 112 Great Awakening 12

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impact of 12–13 Grey, Charles 51 Grimké, Angelina 109–10, 112–13, 120, 126, 132, 139, 140, 144 scholarship on 23, 35 Grimké, Sarah 117, 132, 144, 150 Gurney, Elizabeth 51 Gurney, John 52 and access to Parliament 53–4 Gurney, Joseph 46, 51, 52, 54 shorthand writer 46, 49 Gurney, Martha 2, 44 and abolition of the slave trade 53 anti-slave trade pamphlets 45, 60, 61 as bookseller 60, 61, 62 as publisher 48 biographical details 46, 50 collaboration with William Fox 55 collaboration with Joseph Gurney 47 contribution to anti-slave trade campaign 55, 63, 65 imprints of 48, 51 influence on American campaign 64 interest in slavery 50 pamphlet war 55, 58 past obscurity of 49 Gurney, Priscilla Hannah 95, 102 Gurney, Rebecca 51, 54–5 Gurney, Thomas 46 Gurney, William Brodie 46, 49, 52 Hall, Robert 44 Heyrick, Elizabeth (née Coltman) 90 anti-slavery ideas of 102–3, 113 as a Quaker 89, 95–6, 98, 106 as a writer 100, 102 background in rational dissent 88–9 criticism of 130 development as activist 97, 106, 109–10 differing viewpoint from brothers 104–6 education 92 female network of 94, 98, 109 Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition 65, 66, 88, 96, 102, 106, 107–8, 110, 113, 120–1 influence on American women 112–13, 120, 123–4, 131 involvement in anti-slavery 34, 100, 101–4, 120 marriage 94 radical social views of 105–6 views on gender relations 98–100 widowhood 95 Heyrick, John (husband of Elizabeth) 94

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Hillier, Richard A Vindication of . . . 58 Hollick, William 45 Hutton, Catherine 92–3, 96, 104 anti-slavery views 101 view of Quaker women 96 Immediate emancipation, Immediatism 6, 34, 69, 74–5, 88, 102, 135 and appeal to emotions 121 as a question of personal morality 112, 114, 118 Heyrick’s definition of 114, 120 Independents, see Congregationalists Johnson, Joseph 45, 47, 50, 51 Keene, Henry 53 Kelley, Abby 23, 139 Kirkland, Margretta (née McDonald) 82–3 changes in views of slavery on marriage 82–3 correspondence with Jane Saffery 82–3 Knight, Anne 41, 67, 70 Lane Seminary, Cincinnati debates over slavery 159 Leicester 90 anti-slave trade activism 100, 101–2 Great Meeting Chapel 90 radical politics 103–4 Lewis, John 47 Lewis, Mary 47–8, 50, 51 Liberator, The 6, 124, 140, 144, 146, 147, 156 Liberty Party 156, 171 women’s involvement in 171–3, 174 and religion 172–3 Liddon, John 44, 48, 51, 61 London Abolition Society 52 London Anti-Slavery Convention, 1840 25, 40, 42 reaction to by British women 41, 70 Lundy, Benjamin Genius of Universal Emancipation 120–2, 125 McCord, Louisa 129–30 Martineau, Harriet 41, 116–17 anti-slavery ideas of 116–17 depiction of women in American antislavery, 22–3, 24 The Martyr Age 22–3 Massachusetts Congregational Church 11, 12 Massachusetts Congregational Churches, General Association of Reaction to women reformers 1, 132

Maze Pond congregation 47, 51, 57, 58 Melville, Herman Benito Cereno 184 Methodists 9 growth of in America 13, 135 status of women within 15 Missionary societies 38, 71 Morality anti-slavery as a moral cause 125, 130 as gendered concept 119, 122 moral suasion 122 More, Hannah 32 Mott, Lucretia 23, 117, 125, 140, 144 Movement to abolish slavery 3 roots of 3 Movement to abolish the slave trade 3, 5, 44 loss of momentum 63 pressure on Parliament 61 roots of 3, 52 Municipal Reform Act, 1835 10, 74 Nonconformists, see English religious dissent Old Northwest, the (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio) and anti-slavery 158–9, 161, 173–4 religious life of 156, 158 Paine, Thomas 49, 50, 51, 103 Rights of Man 57, 104, 115 Parliamentary Reform Great Reform Act, 1832 10, 73 impact of 75 Pease, Elizabeth 41, 67, 124, 150, 153 Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery 44–5, 54 and women 65 Petitions 35, 113, 114, 120, 121, 122, 127, 129, 166, 170–1 Philips, James 45, 50 Piety as female quality 134 women’s expressions of 70 Pitt, William 45 Pittsburgh Anti-Slavery Society 122 Presbyterians, Presbyterianism English 8 reaction to evangelical revivals 9 Scots, Scots-Irish 12 Price, Richard 45, 103 Priestley, Joseph 9, 93, 103 Priestley, Timothy 47n, 48 Protestant dissent, see English religious dissent Publishing trade and women 48 Puritans

Index women and church membership 14 Puritan tradition 12 and influence on abolitionism, 134 origins of 10 women’s understanding of 3, 133 Puritan Way 3, 11 maintenance of 11 Quaker women 15, 37, 90 belief in spiritual authority 106–7, 108 belief in spiritual equality 97, 106, 109 involvement in anti-slavery cause 3, 39, 67, 102, 117, 118 role of 96–7, 99 sense of community 98 Quakers 9, 44 accommodation with slavery 3 beliefs of 8 involvement with the anti-slavery cause, 7 transatlantic networks 4 American 12 and anti-slavery sentiment 4, 117 British and anti-slavery sentiment 4, 21 Rational dissent, Rational dissenters 7 and anti-slavery beliefs 7, 113 and radical politics 91, 103, 104 and reform 10 origins of 9, 91 women’s roles in 92–4, 99 Rawson, Mary-Anne (née Read) 66, 69, 70–6 reaction to early feminism 70 Read, Elizabeth 66, 70–1, 72 Reforming culture 55 Reformist politics 52, 73, 91 Religious dissent, see English religious dissent Religious freedom in America 13 Rice, David 48, 64 Richards, Williams 48 Ridgway, James 45, 51 Robinson, Robert 44, 53 Saffery, Jane 78, 80–3 as reader 84–5 correspondence with James Coultart, 80–1 correspondence with Margretta Kirkland, 82–3 Saffery, John 78, 80 Saffery, Maria Grace (née Andrews) 69, 77, 78, 80, 81 and child-rearing 79 as reader 84

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as writer 83, 85 Salters’ Hall debate 8 Scripture use of to criticize women’s activism 2 use of to justify activism by women 2, 66, 74–5 Second Great Awakening 13 impact of 13, 117, 119 Sharp, Granville 5, 44, 52 Memoirs 21 Sharp, William 51 Sheffield 27, 69 inter-denominational activities in 72 involvement of dissenters in local politics 74 political reform 73–4 Sheffield Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society 66, 69 anti-slavery arguments of 66, 74–5 Slave trade Parliamentary debates 54 Slavery as a political issue 6, 171–4 as a sin 66, 118, 122, 136, 157 depictions on the stage 184–6 missionary reaction to 81–2 Slavery, defence of 4 American 6 female apologists 59 morality of 6 Society for the Purpose of Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 52 Southern states dependence on slavery 6 Steele, Anne 77 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 2, 127–9, 130, 175 and class 128–9 and the Duchess of Sutherland 128–9, 186 desire for conversion 178 religious beliefs of 176–8 role of conversion in novels 182, 189, 195–6 See also, Dred, The Christian Slave, Uncle Tom’s Cabin Sugar boycott 51, 59, 61, 65, 101 and links to radicalism 63 conservative reaction against 62 revival of idea 65, 101 women and 59, 62 Sunday School attendance at 79 women as teachers 69, 71 Swain, Joseph 48 Test and Corporation Acts campaign for repeal of 53, 73, 103 repeal of 10

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Toleration Act, 1689 7 Toplady, Augustus 47, 48 Trinity, doctrine of 9, 14 Tuke, William 95 influence on Elizabeth Heyrick 95, 101 Tyler, Julia Gardiner 129 Uncle Tom’s Cabin 2, 177–84 and morality 127–8 as a play 180 literary criticism of 180–2 literary influences on 182–3 purpose of 179 success of 183 See also, Stowe, Harriet Beecher Unitarians, Unitarianism and political reform in England 73 anti-slavery beliefs of 7 criticism of by women abolitionists 145 origins of in England 9, 90 origins of in America 14 status of women within 15, 92–3 Unitarian women and anti-slavery 37, 38, 67 and domesticity 93 education of 92–3, 115 Ward, William 44 Wedgwood, Josiah 57, 58 Westley, R. H. 51 Weston, Anne 137 Weston-Chapman family 126, 145 See also, Chapman, Maria Weston; Weston, Anne Whitaker, Anne (née Andrews) 69, 77 and child-rearing 79, 84 as writer 83 Whitefield, George 46, 47 Wilberforce, William 44, 63 bill to end the slave trade 57, 101 Life of William Wilberforce 21–2 Parliamentary bill 61 reaction to women reformers 1, 16, 26 Wollstonecraft, Mary 103 Women and association with domesticity 119–20, 127–9

and civil society 17, 86 engagement in public life 90 involvement in reform, justification 16 legal status of 16 ‘missionary domesticity’ 70, 71–2, 76 nonconformist domestic culture 78 political status of 16 role of, in Calvinist thought 14 role of in evangelical culture 68, 70, 86, 109, 162 ‘separate spheres’ 162 status within churches, eighteenth century, 15 status within churches, variations between, 15 Women, anti-slavery and appeal to emotions 121, 129 and appeals to dissenting past 133, 135, 140 and moral imperative 111–12, 118–19, 164 and separation from their churches 148 as expression of personal piety 86–7 as ‘natural’ supporters of anti-slavery 159 as teachers 81 criticism of 139–40 criticism of male leaders 67, 76, 88 duty to oppose slavery 66–7, 112, 132, 137, 155, 158 exclusion from early histories 21–2 independence of 74–6 Women, single 46, 56 Women writers anti-slavery 45–6, 86, 102, 179 in Baptist circles 79, 83–6 role in the market 51 Women’s history and differences among women 36–7, 38–9, 40 and female religious cultures 35, 36–7, 39 and religion 88–9 concept of ‘separate spheres’ 31–2, 33 emergence as a discipline 21, 31 gender history 34–5 transatlantic anti-slavery 42 Wright, Frances 115–16 and anti-slavery ideas 115–16