Free Hearts and Free Homes

Gender and American Antislavery Politics

Michael D. Pierson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780807854556, 9780807827826
• eBook ISBN: 9780807862667
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: American Civil War History
• Index: History

By exploring the intersection of gender and politics in the antebellum North, Michael Pierson examines how antislavery political parties capitalized on the emerging family practices and ideologies that accompanied the market revolution.

From the birth of the Liberty party in 1840 through the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, antislavery parties celebrated the social practices of modernizing northern families. In an era of social transformations, they attacked their Democratic foes as defenders of an older, less egalitarian patriarchal world. In ways rarely before seen in American politics, Pierson says, antebellum voters could choose between parties that articulated different visions of proper family life and gender roles.

By exploring the ways John and Jessie Benton Frémont and Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln were presented to voters as prospective First Families, and by examining the writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and other antislavery women, Free Hearts and Free Homes rediscovers how crucial gender ideologies were to American politics on the eve of the Civil War.

CHAPTER 1
Liberty Party Gender Ideologies

THE STORY OF antislavery politics begins in early April 1840 in Albany, New York, when 121 abolitionists gathered to debate whether to nominate independent candidates for the presidency and vice presidency. After two days of debate, they emerged with nominations in hand and the first candidates of what would come to be known as the Liberty Party.¹ It would remain the home of antislavery politics until 1848, when it merged with new antislavery constituencies to form the Free Soil Party. Always at a disadvantage because of the basic unpopularity of its central issues, racial equality and the abolition of slavery, the Liberty Party also ran its first campaign in 1840 with very little organization or money. The result was a dismal 7,000 votes, but it showed modest growth and won 65,000 votes for its 1844 presidential nominee, James G. Birney. It proved to be a significant part of the history of antislavery politics.

Liberty never, however, became a modern, centralized political party. The diffuse nature of the Liberty Party poses problems for historians who seek to assess its political culture. The scarcity of its elected officials means we cannot rely on them to serve as mouthpieces for the party’s beliefs. In addition, its national committee never became a significant force for the dissemination of party ideology or the control of party members. The party’s most effective apparatus proved to be its independently edited, partially subsidized newspapers. As Reinhard Johnson has noted, the party’s newspapers “became a forum in which party members attempted to define the character of the new party.”² The party badly needed such a forum for divergent voices. Liberty activists never coalesced around a single party ideology, and they remained split on vital topics such as the constitutionality of slavery and the desirability of formulating party positions on issues other than slavery. With such a diffuse organization and with party members frequently at odds with one another, party newspapers served as essential outlets for different points of view.

Party newspapers debated gender roles as well, and agreement here was as far beyond reach as it was on other issues. The July 4, 1846, issue of the Ann Arbor Signal of Liberty highlights the range of opinions about gender that Liberty Party editors allowed into their columns. The issue contained three distinct opinions on women’s rights, all of which enjoyed some support among party members. First, the paper’s editor ridiculed the idea of woman suffrage by claiming that women cared more about dating than they did about the ballot. The male executive committee of the Michigan State Anti-Slavery Society articulated a second position, issuing a statement urging women to publicly help the antislavery campaign. While the men told women that “it was not your province or your duty to enter that arena and war amid the din and strife of contending parties,” they supported a greater public voice for women and excused it by arguing that northern women had a responsibility to act because of the sufferings enslaved women endured. The third stance was voiced from outside antislavery’s organizational structure. Maria Celestia of Grand Rapids wrote to “demand” that men either prove their unique capacity for self-government or recognize that women “shall certainly ask the next Legislature for our rights.”³ Even in a single issue of one newspaper, then, the Liberty Party advanced a wide range of opinions about the place of women in society.

The profusion of gender positions, however, does not mean that the party regarded gender as unimportant. Rather, in editorials and in didactic fiction, Liberty Party newspapers idealized northern family structures, warned families of potential threats to proper gender roles, and attacked slavery for its destructive family practices. In doing so, they sought to bond voters to the party by constructing cultural connections between the voters’ beliefs about gender and partisan expressions. As historians Norma Basch, Stephanie McCurry, and Kirsten Wood have shown, parties had gained supporters by creating gendered politics as early as 1828.⁴ Although the Liberty Party failed to create a unified vision of gender, the blame lies not in their lack of exertion but in the wide diversity of people who made up the party by its final years.

When the Liberty Party was founded in 1840, it rallied around patriarchy as its family ideology. This conservative consensus did not last long, however. Soon the growing popularity of antislavery in regions of the North affected by the market revolution undermined the patriarchal consensus by bringing into the party people who believed in domestic feminism. Soon, Liberty’s supporters disputed whether public activism based on domestic feminism or feminine submission should be the standard for women’s behavior. Liberty’s inability to integrate domestic feminism into a unified political culture was mirrored by similar failures within the Whig and Democratic Parties, the major parties of the 1840s. Eventually, the parties’ failure to blend domestic feminism and patriarchy created an opportunity for insurgent parties, like the antislavery Republicans, to use domestic feminism to gain ascendancy in the 1850s.

While writing about gender did not help to build an ideologically unified party, it held a more basic attraction for Liberty Party editors. Liberty politics alone could not provide a large enough paying readership to support most Liberty Party papers, so almost all party editors had to appeal to a general family audience. This meant adding courtship sagas, children’s literature, household advice, poetry, and editorials about gender roles to their antislavery news. Editors were not shy about their desire to make Liberty-sponsored papers more than simple antislavery broadsides. Sherman Booth began his editorial tenure in Wisconsin by depositing free copies of his paper at businesses in the hope that men would “examine it yourselves, and carry it home to your families.” The editors of the Montpelier Green Mountain Freeman boasted that they would edit “not only the best POLITICAL, but also the best and most attractive FAMILY JOURNAL in the State of Vermont.” To fulfill this commitment, the paper ran weekly features such as “The Family Circle” and the “Children’s Department.” The editor of the Albany Patriot announced that he would adopt a similar format to boost circulation:

A moment’s reflection must make it plain to you, that to put the Patriot on any permanent, paying basis, we must make it a paper of general interest in the family circle. The number of those who sympathize with us is not large enough to maintain a paper devoted altogether to one topic, even so comprehensive a one as that which is the foundation principle of the Liberty Party. We must give articles on all sorts of subjects, as any family newspaper ought to do, and gain a hold on readers old and young, male and female, learned and rude—if we can. This we have been trying hard for some time to do. We have said to ourselves, week after week: “Well, next week, we will have a Patriot with more variety in it.” But alas the next week is like the last one, only perhaps “more so.”⁵

Despite knowing what it needed to do in order to attract “readers old and young, male and female,” the Patriot never changed. Crippled by an insufficient readership, it soon folded. For Liberty editors, gender ideology and family fiction offered potentially fertile ground for building both party loyalty and profitable subscription lists. The contradictory positions of the Liberty Party on gender cannot, therefore, be attributed to carelessness or apathy. Rather, editors experimented—consciously or not—with different positions in search of the most popular gender ideologies upon which to construct a party culture.

The Liberty Party began its existence with a less diverse range of opinion about gender than it later developed. The party’s founders in 1840, many of whom had opposed the efforts of Garrisonians to place a woman, Abby Kelley, on the executive committee of the American Antislavery Society, did not look favorably upon women’s rights. Unreceptive to the idea of electing women to responsible positions within the abolitionist movement, the party’s organizers soon found themselves attacked by Garrisonians for their conservative positions on gender.⁶ Equally unattractive to the party’s leadership were the gender roles enacted by the opposition Whig Party during the 1840 campaign. Whigs encouraged women to participate in electoral rallies, an idea that struck Liberty men as another distasteful part of the demagoguery of the Whig’s Hard Cider campaign.⁷ Surrounded by Whigs and abolitionists who seemed eager to grant women a political voice and a public presence, the Liberty Party came into being determined to uphold more traditional gender roles.

The ideological choice of patriarchy made sense, especially in light of the party’s base of support. The evidence on the demographics of the Liberty Party’s supporters, though sketchy, suggests that Liberty votes came from religious, agricultural communities not yet affected by the market revolution. As historian Vernon Volpe has argued, “any attempt to attribute the Liberty appeal to dramatic economic change must struggle with the fact that the party drew its strength from relatively small, homogeneous, and stable agricultural communities” that had avoided commercial development.⁸ Alan Kraut’s study of the Liberty Party’s unusual success in Smith-field, New York, finds that the party’s support came from laborers and mechanics living in an “agricultural community, only marginally involved in western New York’s growing commercial economy.”⁹ These isolated towns, usually drawn to Liberty by isolated antislavery patrons, newspapers, or ministers, formed much of the party’s early rank and file. As people relatively untouched by the changes the market brought to agriculture, the party’s supporters directly experienced patriarchal families and reproductive strategies. In short, neither the party’s anti-Garrisonian leadership nor its early rank and file was likely to question patriarchy.

The early Liberty Party’s temperance and antislavery arguments proved to be very conservative in their depictions of men and women. They presented both slavery and alcohol as evil because they threatened the ability of individuals to fulfill traditional gender roles. The antialcohol literature that permeated Liberty Party newspapers, especially in the early years, almost always begins by describing hardworking young men and industrious, pretty women. Only alcohol stands between them and their future as happy husbands and wives, as Jerome Nadelhaft has noted about temperance literature in general.¹⁰ Typical of this fiction is a story from the Boston Free American in 1841, “One Glass of Bitters before Breakfast.” The heroes of this tale are paragons of their genders: Samuel Johnson has a “manly and vigorous” intellect but also “a loving heart.” Jane is “plain, almost homely,” but her eyes “danced about so” and she had “little tiny feet” and “her form was exquisitely rounded.” Samuel becomes an alcoholic, however, after taking bitters under doctor’s orders and Jane’s life is ruined because her fiancé becomes a drunkard. As the narrator concludes the story, “Jane is unmarried. The disappointment of her earlier years soured her spirit. . . . She became an unsocial old maid, useful in the circle of her relatives, but beyond it, seeking no acquaintance, no society.”¹¹ Denied her place as wife to her one true love, this Liberty Party heroine sees her happiness ended for life.

Women’s ability to act when faced with alcoholic husbands is notably limited. Even when the plot features active wives, the focus stays primarily on the male drinker, as is the case in the Chicago Western Citizen story, “The Inebriate, or Woman’s Love.” This hard-working couple, featuring Charles Foster, a “worthy mechanic” and his unnamed wife, who “earned her bread by daily toil” prior to marriage, is nearly destroyed by his drinking. Charles “worked and drank, and abused his wife, for three or four years.” Only after years of abuse can his wife convince him to take the pledge, an accomplishment that makes the (still anonymous) woman “one of the noblest of her sex. She exerted her love and influence for the good of her husband, and has tested by experience the power of woman’s affection.”¹² He is reformed, becomes an employer, and will soon be rich. His wife has reformed her husband after years of abuse, years in which she patiently played out the role of obedient wife even to a husband who beat her. This was, in fact, her duty. When a wife in a Concord Granite Freeman story abandoned her husband to return to her father’s house, the narrative ends with the local minister intoning: “What God hath joined together, let not RUM put asunder.”¹³ At some level at least, this religious injunction passed judgment on both the rum-drinking husband and the wife who deserted him. In Liberty fiction, an ideal wife makes the best of even an abusive household.

If the chief fault Liberty writers found with alcohol was that it denied women the promise of patriarchal families, slavery offended for much the same reason. Enslaved women in Liberty Party news are represented as passive sufferers. These women almost never become known to readers as people; rather, they are featureless abstractions, little more than spaces in the plot where “mothers” and “wives” must be. Thus, the Bangor Expositor noted in 1843 that “the death or insolvency of the master is almost invariably’ [sic] followed by the separation of families. The father is sold to go in this direction, the mother in that, and the children in another.” Even news accounts about specific women afford them little identity beyond that of their place in their family. The Boston Emancipator related the story of “a wife [who] was sold from her husband, and from her children, to be driven to the far South as a marketable beast, to breed and work. The thought of being forever separated from her dear friends, her husband and children, was more than she could bear.” This anonymous woman hangs herself by the roadside. These representations objectify women as parts of a family tree and promise them—like Jane in the temperance story—no existence outside the family. Or, as an English woman asked in an abolitionist appeal copied into a Liberty paper: “Which of you would be happy if the husband in whose life and love your whole being is centered” were taken away?¹⁴

But what should the relationship between wives and husbands be? In what kind of relationship should women center their lives? The patriarchal nature of early Liberty Party family ideals becomes most apparent when Liberty authors compared free households with those on slave plantations. For Garrisonian abolitionists and feminists, such overt comparisons between the status of northern wives and southern slaves provoked outrage at the unequal condition of married women and sparked calls for legal reform in the North. Garrisonians found northern coverture laws and southern slave codes to be similar in terms of the rights they conveyed upon women. “Free” married women, they argued, could not testify against their husbands in court, own property, keep their own wages, or sign contracts. Also like slaves, they were subject to corporal punishment. Liberty Party writers, however, responded with assurances that the two cases were not at all similar.

Liberty Party publications denied the legal similarities between northern wives and southern slaves. The Philadelphia American Citizen, for example, contrasted what it saw as Christian family ideology with slave law so that readers might see how slavery contradicted the law of God:

Chris[tianity].—“The husband is the head of the wife.”

Slav[ery].—“The master is the head of the wife.” . . .

Chris.—“Wives, submit yourself to your husbands.”

Slav.—“Wives of slaves, submit to your masters.”

Chris.—“Teach young women to be chaste, obedient to their husbands.”

Slav.—“Teach young slave women to disregard chastity and obey their master.”¹⁵

Christian theology, presented here with an uncritical eye, makes women utterly subservient to their husbands. Slavery is evil not because it makes women subject to male authority, but because they are made to obey the wrong man. While Garrisonians such as Sarah Grimké, Nathaniel Rogers, and Henry Wright would argue that wives should not be made to submit to their husbands either, the early Liberty Party had no reservations about such unabridged male authority.

Liberty Party men also denied the feminist-abolitionist argument that wives needed to be emancipated from patriarchy just as slaves needed to be freed from slavery. The Norwich Vermont Freeman illustrated what it saw as the superior legal protections granted to wives over slaves by imagining an argument between a northern drunkard and a southern slaveholder. Both the fictional drunkard and the slaveholder argue that they wield the greater power to inflict misery upon women and children. The drunkard claims for himself the legal right to destroy the happiness of “my helpless wife” and to “snatch from her feeble hands the tender pittance she has toiled to earn” to feed her children. But the northern drunkard loses the fight, and not only because the slaveholder can legally whip people to death and sell children. Rather, the Liberty Party author claims that the drunkard’s wife enjoys legal protections that will protect her from the drunkard’s worst actions. The slave...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• FREE HEARTS AND FREE HOMES
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER 1 Liberty Party Gender Ideologies
• CHAPTER 2 From Liberty to Free Soil
• CHAPTER 3 Antislavery Women and the Triumph of Domestic Feminism
• CHAPTER 4 Democrats and the Defense of Patriarchy
• CHAPTER 5 Gender in the 1856 Republican Campaign
• CHAPTER 6 Republican Women and the 1856 Election
• CHAPTER 7 Republican Gender Ideology in 1860
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX
• SERIES