Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right

Gender and Power in Women's Antebellum Antislavery Fiction

Holly M. Kent

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781631012761
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Political Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Decades before the Civil War, the free American public was gripped by increasingly acrimonious debates about the nation's "peculiar institution" of slavery. Ministers considered the morality of slavery from their pulpits, legislators debated it in the halls of government, professors discussed it in their classrooms, and citizens argued about it in their communities. Antislavery women wrote novels and stories designed to convince free Americans about slavery's evils, to discuss the future of abolitionism, and to debate the proper roles of free and enslaved women in the antislavery struggle. Many antebellum writers and editors believed fiction was an especially gender appropriate medium for women to express their ideas publicly and a decidedly effective medium for reaching female readers. Believing that women were naturally more empathetic and imaginative than men, writers and editors hoped that powerfully told stories about enslaved people's sufferings would be invaluable in converting free female readers to abolitionism.

Female antislavery authors consistently expressed a belief in women's innate moral superiority to men. While male characters in women's fiction doubted the validity of abolitionism (at best) and actively upheld the slave system (at worst), female characters invariably recognized slavery's immorality and did all in their power to undermine the institution. Certain of women's moral clarity on the "slave question, " female antislavery authors nonetheless struggled to define e how women could best put their antislavery ideals into action. When their efforts to morally influence men failed, how could women translate their abolitionist values into activism that was effective but did not violate nineteenth-century ideals of "respectable" femininity?

Holly M. Kent analyzes the literary works produced by antislavery women writers during the antebellum era, considers the complex ways that female authors crafted their arguments against slavery and reflected on the best ways for women to participate in antislavery activism. Since existing scholarship of antislavery women's literature has largely concentrated on Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin, the voices of other, more obscure antislavery women writers have all too often been lost.

Her Voice Will Be on the Side of Right brings the ideas, perspectives, and writings of a wide range of female antislavery authors back into our understandings of debates about gender, race, and slavery during this crucial era in U.S. history.

CHAPTER ONE

“Her Heart Was Touched with the
Wrongs of the Injured Ones”

The Emergence of Women’s Antislavery Fiction, 1821–1832

But we have perhaps extended these remarks too far—our readers may remind us, that it is our craft to write for their amusement & to allow them to extract instruction for themselves if perchance so valuable an essence can be obtained from the light material of a tale.

—CATHARINE MARIA SEDGWICK

In 1831, Elizabeth Margaret Chandler published her story “Tears of Woman: An Allegory” in the influential antislavery newspaper the Genius of Universal Emancipation. In the tale, an angel is dispatched from heaven to see if he can persuade the people of earth to abolish slavery. The angel approaches numerous men, pleading with them to end the peculiar institution. Without fail, the angel’s appeals are rejected by his listeners, with man after man refusing to accept any moral responsibility for the sin of slavery or to feel any pity for enslaved people. Having found men consistently indifferent to the sufferings of the enslaved, the angel is about to return to heaven in failure and despair when he has an inspiration: he stops addressing men and begins speaking to women. And here, he finds all of the empathy for the enslaved that men had so conspicuously lacked. As soon as free women begin to shed tears over the enslaved, freedom ceases to be an impossible dream and becomes a concrete reality. Enslaved people’s best hope for liberation thus resides, the angel discovers, not in the economic or political power of men but in the emotional power of women.¹

This chapter analyzes how fictional narratives such as “Tears of Woman” discussed women’s place in the antislavery struggle during the 1820s and 1830s and argues that writers defined the medium of fiction as a powerful, gender-appropriate space through which white, middle-class women could appropriately convey their antislavery convictions. Concerned about enslaved women’s ability to effectively seek their own emancipation in gender-appropriate ways, authors insisted that white women were rightly the central force for antislavery change; they alone had both the moral clarity and the emotional power necessary to be effective antislavery advocates without transgressing the proper boundaries of bourgeois womanhood.

This chapter centers on the literary work of two central, pioneering authors who were writing during these formative years of the antislavery movement, Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Elizabeth Margaret Chandler. Sedgwick published 1824’s Redwood, one of the first American novels to take slavery and abolition as its primary subject, and Chandler served as the editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation’s Ladies’ Department, publishing a considerable amount of her own fiction there. While Sedgwick has been the subject of scholarly consideration for several decades, much of this scholarship focuses on her most famous novel, Hope Leslie, and on the domestic fiction she published during the antebellum era.² Scholarship about Chandler is still not terribly extensive, despite Chandler’s vital importance as an author and editor in the early years of the antislavery movement.³

The years during which Chandler and Sedgwick wrote their antislavery fiction, the 1820s and early 1830s, have likewise remained relatively marginalized in studies of early antislavery activism. Recent work by scholars including Christopher Cameron, Bruce Dorsey, and Alisse Portnoy has brought these “lost years” more fully back into understandings of abolitionism, providing new insights into the connections between struggles for Native American rights, colonizationist activism, and abolitionism, and the vital importance of free African Americans as leaders and central figures in antislavery organizing and movement building.⁴ Jacqueline Bacon and Sarah N. Roth have also written monographs about the importance of print culture in the early antislavery movement, demonstrating the significance of African American newspapers to the development of independent African American abolitionism and of antislavery fiction as a site for debates about African American men’s relationship to the state during the early republic and antebellum eras.⁵ This chapter contributes to this wider scholarship about the development of antislavery print culture, reflecting on the complex ways female writers used fiction as a site for antislavery advocacy.

Chandler, Sedgwick, and the Role of Fiction in Antislavery Print Culture

Before discussing the fiction Chandler and Sedgwick wrote in the 1820s and 1830s, it is worth considering each writer’s relationship to the emerging antislavery movement. By the time Chandler began working as editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation’s Ladies’ Department, she had already been involved in the antislavery cause for several years. Born in Delaware in 1807, at the age of nine Chandler moved to Philadelphia, where she joined the city’s Quaker abolitionist community. She quickly became a staunch supporter of the free produce movement and began expressing her antislavery views through the poetry she published in local newspapers as a teenager.⁶ Although Chandler published her work anonymously, her identity was known to many in antislavery circles, including Genius editor Benjamin Lundy. Lundy began publishing her work in 1826, asking her to become editor of its Ladies’ Department three years later. Even after she moved to the Michigan frontier in 1830, Chandler continued her involvement in antislavery activism. She became one of the cofounders of Michigan’s Logan Female Anti-Slavery Society, continued to correspond with Lundy, and worked as editor of the Genius’s Ladies’ Department until her death at the age of twenty-seven in 1834.

Lundy had founded the Genius in 1821, hoping the newspaper would be “an active instrument in the attempt to abolish that cruel and disgraceful system in the American Republic.”⁷ A longtime antislavery advocate, Lundy worked at several colonizationist periodicals prior to founding the Genius.⁸ Although contact with radical abolitionists such as Chandler pushed Lundy closer to advocating immediate abolition during the Genius’s eighteen-year run, he nonetheless retained strong ties with the colonizationist movement throughout his career. Colonizationists, who advocated the migration of enslaved people to Africa after their emancipation, were an active, vocal presence in debates about slavery, freedom, and civil rights during the early republic and antebellum eras. Organizations like the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817, insisted that colonization was the best answer to the slave question, since, they claimed, enslaved African Americans could, even if emancipated, never hope to enjoy true equality in the American republic. That white members of organizations such as the ACS were uncomfortable with the idea of an America with a large, free African American population went largely unspoken but was nonetheless a powerful undercurrent in colonizationist ideology.

Unsurprisingly, the majority of free African Americans were fiercely anti-colonizationist, though the movement did have a few vocal African American supporters, including John Russwurm, cofounder of the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. Yet while a small number of free African Americans expressed support for colonization, most African American activists focused on the need to both end slavery and advocate for full racial equality on American soil. Given this reality, and Lundy’s ongoing affiliation with colonizationists, it is perhaps not unexpected that his Genius does not appear to have attracted a significant number of African American readers. In the pieces he published in the Genius, Lundy did not make a concerted effort to overcome this racial barrier, instead addressing himself to his anticipated audience of white readers⁹

In her literary work, Sedgwick manifested similar unease about immediate abolition, while at the same time decrying the evils of slavery. Born in Massachusetts in 1789, Sedgwick was the sister of an abolitionist brother, Henry Sedgwick, and was part of antislavery circles in her native state. Despite these connections, she remained reluctant to wholeheartedly embrace immediate abolitionism. One antislavery friend, fellow author Eliza Lee Follen, frequently sought to pin her down on the slave question. “What dear are your views & feelings upon the subject?” Follen asked in an 1834 letter. “We [Follen and her husband, Charles Follen] are very anxious to know; as far as pity for the suffering is in question we do not ask we know you feel for all that live but the benevolent as well as the wise differ upon this subject & we are particularly desirous to know what you think about it.”¹⁰ Sedgwick’s reply, though not the ringing endorsement of abolitionism Follen likely hoped for, was nonetheless encouraging. “I do indeed feel with you,” Sedgwick reassured her friend. “& I would do something more than feel—It is a subject that has much occupied my thoughts.”¹¹ With her novel Redwood and an unpublished antislavery text she wrote during the 1830s, Sedgwick did “something more than feel”; she used fiction to make the case against slavery and in favor of white women’s involvement in antislavery work.

Sedgwick, Chandler, and Lundy all stressed the value of using fiction as a means of encouraging (they assumed, reluctant) white readers to consider the issue of slavery. Sedgwick’s friend Louisa Minot wrote to her after Sedgwick had published Redwood, “I think the work invaluable because it will instill principles into those who would never receive them from any other source.”¹² Sedgwick echoed this idea in her unpublished antislavery novel, noting that, since she had made antislavery arguments central to her text, “our readers may remind us, that it is our craft to write for their amusement & to allow them to extract instruction for themselves if perchance so valuable an essence can be obtained from the light material of a tale.”¹³ With this assertion, Sedgwick at once noted that her readers might chafe at encountering moral messages in the context of a “light tale” written for their “amusement” and raised the question of whether “valuable” moral principles could, indeed, truly be “extracted” from fiction. She indicated that they could and that readers of her novel would find “instruction for themselves,” provided that she presented these moral messages sufficiently engagingly in her fiction.

Throughout his editorial work, Lundy likewise stressed fiction’s value in conveying antislavery messages to resistant audiences. After Chandler’s death, he compiled a collection of her literary work, writing a preface for the volume that highlighted the importance of her fiction to the antislavery movement: “Knowing the eagerness of many to peruse the tales of fancy, she occasionally wrote a piece of that character. … But she always took especial care to choose the subject, and present the narration, so as to leave a moral impression on the mind of the reader, favourable to the cause of humanity.”¹⁴ Lundy clearly indicated his awareness that fiction, while popular, was still looked on with suspicion by some readers. As Nina Baym and Cathy Davidson have detailed, anxieties about the moral dangers of fiction, specifically the negative impact fiction could have on the minds of impressionable female readers, circulated widely in early republic and antebellum America.¹⁵ Given these concerns, Lundy hastened to reassure readers Chandler had only penned her “tales of fancy” occasionally, in response to explicit reader demand, and had been careful to make her fiction explicitly moral in its content. Provided they were cautious about how they did so, Lundy noted, writers like Chandler could capitalize on readers’ hunger for fiction by writing compelling antislavery narratives, which would engagingly introduce them to antislavery ideas.

As scholars such as Mary Kelley have demonstrated, during the early and mid-nineteenth century, the medium of fiction was consistently associated with female readers.¹⁶ In the pages of the Genius, Lundy and Chandler certainly emphasized the power of fiction to bring antislavery ideas to a female audience. It was especially important that antislavery advocates successfully reach women, Lundy argued, because “the virtuous matrons of our country will have an important part to perform in the great work of emancipation.”¹⁷ Chandler echoed this point in an 1830 editorial, noting to her female readers that she wrote stories because she believed works of fiction would be successful “in arresting your attention, and bending an hour of your serious thought” on slavery.¹⁸ Lundy took this point a step further, stating that if it were not for fiction, he doubted that women would take any interest in debates about abolition. “It is not to be expected that the ladies, generally,” he asserted in 1821, “would be willing to sit down to what would seem to them an uninteresting detail of political transaction unless they could calculate on finding something likewise lively and amusing.” Lundy would therefore endeavor to attract and retain his female readers’ attention by publishing entertaining fictional works and “‘blending the useful with the sweet,’ to make it as interesting to them as possible.”¹⁹ To counteract female readers’ preconceptions of antislavery as a tedious political subject, “lively and amusing” fiction would abound in the Genius’s Ladies’ Department.

To interest women in abolition, authors needed not ask them to contemplate abstract moral concepts but rather appeal directly to their naturally potent imaginations and emotions. It might be effective to use logic and rationality to bring men into the movement, but when seeking to convert women, an approach centered on the heart, rather than on the head, was necessary. To bring women into the cause, writers needed to publish emotional works that, as Lundy declared, “cannot fail to excite the tear of virtuous sensibility.”²⁰

Lundy consistently argued that by using emotional appeals in their fiction, antislavery writers could effectively reach female readers in ways that would be impossible through drier forms of rhetoric. In his edition of Chandler’s writings, Lundy noted, “Her appeals were tender, persuasive, heart-reaching; while the strength and cogency of her arguments rendered them incontrovertible.”²¹ He drew a clear distinction between two key aspects of Chandler’s work: its emotional content and its argumentative power. He asserted that Chandler first sought to reach her female readers through “tender” emotional appeals, and once she had done so successfully, she provided clear arguments against the institution. Female authors were thus capable of making rational arguments against slavery; they simply cloaked such arguments in emotional rhetoric to draw in female readers who might otherwise turn away from discussions of slavery uninterested.

Affirming that women needed to be approached through their hearts rather than their minds in some respects echoed dominant nineteenth-century stereotypes about women’s intellectual inferiority to men. Yet these arguments also bear a different interpretation. That women were more emotional than men might, Lundy and Chandler contended, actually be a positive quality, decidedly advantageous to the antislavery cause. Writing during an era in which sentimental culture was ascendant in the United States, authors’ privileging of women’s gendered capacity to feel could signify not weakness but rather strength. As Lori Merish, Laura Mielke, and Stephanie Shields have noted, sentimental culture had some potentially positive implications for middle-class women, given that the rhetoric of sentimentality praised feminine emotion as superior to masculine reason.²² Using intensely emotional fictional narratives to speak to women was, as such, an approach based not solely in writers’ distrust of women’s intellects, but also in their faith in women’s feelings.

Chandler’s and Sedgwick’s decision to express their antislavery ideas through fiction was also rooted in cultural norms surrounding women’s public speech in the nineteenth century. Writing during an era in which the idea of a female lecturer inspired horror in most Americans, and women’s involvement in any political movement was distinctly ...