Political News and Female Readership In Antebellum Boston and Its Region

NOTES

• Hannah Lowell Jackson [Cabot] to Sarah Jackson Russell, 18 May 1837, pp. 1–2, typescript transcript p. 25, Almy Family Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College (hereafter “SL”). She was also concerned with the effect of Van Buren's decision on local affairs, such as the meeting at Faneuil Hall on 17 May 1837 which resulted in a call for civil disobedience and, if necessary, forcible resistance. For an account of this event, see The Post Office and the People,” Boston Daily Evening Transcript (17 May 1837), [2]; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 223–4; Arthur B. Darling, Political Changes in Massachusetts, 1824–1848: A Study of Liberal Movements in Politics (1925; Cos Cob, Conn.: John E. Edwards, 1968), 203. Patrick Tracy Jackson was overextended during the Panic of 1837 because he had invested heavily in Boston real estate, especially around what would become Pemberton Square and Tremont Row (including Scollay's Buildings); James Jackson Putnam, A Memoir of Dr. James Jackson, With Sketches of His Father Hon. Jonathan Jackson, and His Brothers Robert, Henry, Charles, and Patrick Tracy Jackson; and Some Account of Their Ancestry (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 150–3. For a consideration of the Jackson family in the context of their familial networks among Boston Brahmins, see Peter Dobkin Hall, The Organization of American Culture, 1700–1900: Private Institutions, Elites, and the Origins of American Nationality (New York: New York University Press, 1982), 66–67.
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• Richard D. Brown, Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), ch. 7; Thomas C. Leonard, “The Democratic Revolution and the News: Reading as Performance in the Early Republic,” Valley Forge Journal 5 (1991): 195–208; idem, “News at the Hearth: A Drama of Reading in Nineteenth-Century America,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 102 pt. 2 (1993): 379–401. The latter article deals with representations of reading; in n. 13 (p. 389), he presents some evidence of women newspaper readers that suggests he does not believe the representation in all cases matched reality. For another view, see Michael D. Pierson, “Between Antislavery and Abolition: The Politics and Rhetoric of Jane Grey Swisshelm,” Pennsylvania History 60 (1993): 305–21.
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• The women's sphere has, of course, generated an enormous amount of scholarship. Seminal works include Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18(1966): 151–74; Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman's Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: 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); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth-Century America,” Signs 1 (1975): 1–30; and with particular relevance for this study, Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1981) and Mary Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984). The central place accorded the women's sphere in discussions of how women actually live has recently been questioned; see, for example, Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman's Place: The Rhetoric of Women's History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39.
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• For a dissenting view that stresses the eclecticism of women's reading preferences, see the analysis of library charge records in Ronald J. Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 11.
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• Mary Beth Norton, Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), especially, 178–89; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); idem, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 28 (1976): 187–205; Ruth H. Bloch, “The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America,” Signs 13 (1987): 37–58; Rosemarie Zagarri, “Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother,” American Quarterly 44 (1992): 192–215; Karen K. List, “Two Party Papers' Political Coverage of Women in the New Republic,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 2 (1985): 152–65; but see also idem, “The Post-Revolutionary Woman Idealized: Philadelphia Media's ‘Republican Mother,’” Journalism Quarterly 66 (1989): 65–75; and idem, “Magazine Portrayals of Women's Role in the New Republic,” Journalism History 13 (1986): 64–70; Charles E. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 143, 249. For other views of women's political consciousness, see Elaine F. Crane, “The World of Elizabeth Drinker,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 107 (1983): 3–28. Likewise, Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, 1790–1860 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995) has uncovered a hitherto overlooked wealth of female authored history dating as far back as 1790, which reveals political astuteness and a degree of public presence through print.
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• Gerda Lerner, “The Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” in Women and Power in American History: A Reader, vol. 1, To 1880, ed. Kathryn Kish Sklar and Thomas Dublin (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1991), 172–84; Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); idem, “Moral Suasion Is Moral Balderdash’: Women, Politics, and Social Activism in the 1850s,” Journal of American History 73 (1986): 601–22.
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• Without analysis of comparable evidence in manuscript sources for the eighteenth century, we cannot know if nineteenth-century women are reading more newspapers or simply leaving more extensive records of their reading. Norton, in Liberty's Daughters, states that such evidence “may be found in the diaries or correspondence of nearly every white woman in late eighteenth-century America” (p. 189), but this does not form the focus of her study.
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• The scope of the area under study is defined in Francis X. Blouin, Jr., The Boston Region, 1810–1850: A Study of Urbanization (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press), ch. 2. Our evidence for this article derives from a systematic reading of antebellum family papers from the Boston region in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Massachusetts Historical Society. We originally (in August-September 1993) honed in on segments of eighteen collections at the Schlesinger Library which, because of their detailing of private and cultural affairs, would be most likely to yield information on women's fiction reading, 1837–1857. However, as the ubiquity of political references became apparent even in these ostensibly domestic diaries and letters (only two of these collections contained no apparent political content), our focus changed. As we approached the resources at the American Antiquarian Society (three collections) and the Massachusetts Historical Society (seven collections) in 1994, we selected papers that would probably reflect women's political consciousness (only two collections contained mere passing references to politics). The collections cited in this essay represent but some of the richest. The typical collection contains the letters and diaries of more than two or three women.
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• Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry Into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1974), 15, 38–42; Norton, Liberty's Daughters; Kerber, Women of the Republic and “The Republican Mother”; Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds. The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994); Wendy Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets: Women Abolitionists and the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991); Kristin Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850–1860,” American Quarterly 45 (1993): 558–95.
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• James R. McGovern, in his book on the Pierce and Poor families, Yankee Family (New Orleans: Polyanthos, 1975) calls them “representative [of] middle to upper-middle class families from New England” (p. ii). Mary Poor's diaries as she employed them to help her keep track of occasions of intercourse with her husband is the focus of chapter 1 in Janet Farrell Brodie's Contraception and Abortion in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994). Information on Billings appears in the United States Bureau of Census, Population Schedules of the Seventh Census of the United States, 1850 (Washington, D.C.: National Archives, 1963), Norfolk County, roll 329, p. 151. Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, Letters of Elizabeth Cabot, [ed. Richard C. Cabot?] (Boston: privately printed, 1905). Sarah Josepha Hale, unlike the other women, maintained a career. Best known as an editor of various journals including the famous Godey's Lady's Book she also wrote novels and was active in founding the Seaman's Aid Society. For more information about these women and their reading habits, see Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Books, Reading, and the World of Goods in Antebellum New England,” American Quarterly 48 (1996), forthcoming.
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• While previous historians have noted the presence of women in antebellum politics, they have tended to view this as largely symbolic, even ornamental, or as the result of the intense electioneering between parties. In any case women are portrayed as passive participants, in keeping with the women's sphere. See, for example, Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 4, 8, 73, 121, 127, 134–39; Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), especially 135–37. But other historians disagree with this assessment: Lerner, “The Political Activities of Antislavery Women”; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; idem, “‘Moral Suasion is Moral Balderdash’”; and, especially, Carolyn J. Lawes, “Public Women, Public Lives: Women in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1818–1860” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Davis, 1992). For broader considerations of women's political activity, see Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 18–27; and Michael McGerr, “Political Style and Women's Power, 1830–1930,” Journal of American History 77 (1990): 864–85.
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• Lerner, “The Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 172–184; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, passim.; Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, “‘A Determination to Labor…’; Female Antislavery Activity in Rhode Island,” Rhode Island History 44 (1985): 35–44; compare with Nancy A. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822–1872 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984). For a general consideration, see Glenna Matthews, The Rise of Public Woman: Woman's Power and Woman's Place in the United States, 1630–1970 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 5.
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• Gerda Lerner, The Grimké Sisters from South Carolina: Rebels Against Slavery (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967), 164–182; Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, The First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman's Rights (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1885), ch. 13.
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• Elizabeth Fuller to “Lizzie” [i.e., Elisabeth B. Cheever], Sabbath Evening, February 1837, p. 1, Cheever Family Papers, courtesy American Antiquarian Society (hereafter, ‘AAS’); Mary Pierce to John and Lucy Pierce, 2 November 1838, p. 2, Poor Family Papers, SL.
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• Elizabeth B. Cheever to Henry Cheever, 4 December 1837, p. 3, Cheever Family Papers, AAS.
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• Robert Merideth, “Introduction,” to Edward Beecher, Narrative of Riots at Alton (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1965), v-xxix. Luther Lee, A Sermon, Preached in the Methodist Episcopal Church, in the Village of Fulton, N.Y., Sabbath Evening, December 3d, 1837, on the Occasion of the Death of the Rev. E.P. Lovejoy; Who Was Murdered by a Mob at Alton, Ill. November 7, 1837 (Fulton, N.Y.: T. Johnson, 1838). On the national response, especially from newspaper editors, see Paul Simon, Freedom's Champion: Elijah Lovejoy (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1994), ch. 9.
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• Francia, who became dictator in 1814, instituted agricultural reforms, abolished the aristocracy, developed local industry, and pursued isolationist policies amidst hostile neighboring countries. Mary H. Belden to Sarah Watson [Dana], 24 October 1838, p. 2; this mistaken report about his death is cleared up through a newspaper item, 21 December 1838, p. 2, Dana Family Papers, SL. Nathaniel Cheever to Elizabeth B. Cheever, 6 February 1837, p. 3, Cheever Family Papers, AAS; Mary Pierce to John and Lucy Pierce, entry for 28 May in letter of 25 May 1837, p. 3, Poor Family Papers, SL. The book, which contained essays on Polish emigration and education, was August A. Jakubowski [1814–1837], The Remembrances of a Polish Exile (Philadelphia: printed by Adam Waldie, 1835; Albany: Packard and Van Benthuysen, 1835); for background on the author, who came to the United States in the “Great Emigration” following the Russian suppression of Polish nationalists in the Rising of 1830, see pp. 5–8.
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• Mary Pierce to John and Lucy Pierce, 18 July in letter of 6 July 1838, p. 3; 11 and 10 September in letter of 8 September 1838, p. 2; 16 September in 14 September 1838, p. 1, Poor Family Papers, SL.
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• Mary Pierce to Henry Varnum Poor, 19 September 1840, p. 2, Poor Family Papers, SL.
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• Frederic Cople Jaher, “The Politics of the Boston Brahmins: 1800–1860,” in Boston, 1700–1980: The Evolution of Urban Politics, ed. Ronald P. Formisano and Constance K. Burns (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1984), 75; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 71; Lerner, “Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 181.
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• Sarah Smith (Cox) Browne, Account of Family Expenses, 1834–45, Series II, 1847–49, July 1840, November 1848, December 1848, August 1849, December 1849, March 1840, December 1849, June 1840, November 1847 and 1848, March 1849, July 1840 and 1842, December 1843, November 1848, October 1840, November 1845, August 1840, in unprocessed materials, Browne Family Papers, SL. The newspaper subscriptions mentioned occur in December 1840, and throughout 1841 and 1842, December 1843, January 1844, 1845 (whole year), 1846, July 1843, and September 1845.
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• Alpheus S. Packard, History of the Bunker Hill Monument (Portland, Me.: Brown Thurston, 1853), 7–32; Richard Frothingham, History of the Siege of Boston, and of the Battles of Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill (1903; New York: Da Capo Press, 1970), 337–59. For first hand accounts of the fair and women's participation in the activities, see Daniel F. Child and Mary D. Child, 22 August 1840, 5, and 8–10 September 1840, Diary and Commonplace Book, 1839–40, Daniel F. Child Papers; and Annie B. Lawrence, 10–12 September 1840, Diary, 23 November 1839–14 January 1841, Lamb Family Papers, —both in the Massachusetts Historical Society (hereafter ‘MHS’). The fair is covered in the “The Monument Fair” and “Correspondence of the Atlas,” Boston Daily Atlas, 12 September 1840, p. 2, and 16 September 1840, p. 2; and, from the Democratic side, “Bunker Hill Monument Fair,” “The Fair,” “A Letter from the Post Office at the Fair,” Boston Morning Post, 9 September 1840, p. 2, 14 September 1840, p. 1, 15 September 1840, p. 1.
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• [Sarah Josepha Hale], editorial, The Monument 1 (15 September 1840): 26; advertisement, “The Monument Press,” The Monument 1 (8 September 1840): 4.
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• Angela Marie Howard Zophy, “For the Improvement of My Sex: Sarah Josepha Hale's Editorship of Godey's Lady's Book, 1837–1877” (Ph.D. diss, Ohio State University, 1978); Sherbrooke Rogers, Sarah Josepha Hale: A New England Pioneer, 1768–1879 (Grantham, N.H.: Tompson & Rutter, 1985); Isabelle Webb Entrikin, Sarah Josepha Hale and Godey's Lady's Book (Philadelphia: Lancaster Press, 1946); Patricia Okker, Our Sister Editors: Sarah J. Hale and the Tradition of Nineteenth-Century American Women Editors (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995).
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• “The Heroes of Bunker Hill,” The Monument 1 (15 September 1840): 25; [Elizabeth Oakes (Prince)] Smith, “Bunker Hill Ode,” The Monument 1 (12 September 1840): 18; Patience P. Paradox, “Paragraphs from the Pen of P.P.P.,” The Monument 1 (10 September 1840): 10. Compare with Kerber, Women of the Republic, ch. 3; Matthews, Rise of Public Woman, ch. 3.
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• Sarah Josepha Hale, The Lecturess; or, Woman's Sphere (Boston: Whipple and Damrell, 1839); “Auld Auntie” [Abigail] Pierce to Lucy Pierce Hedge, 25 February 1840, postscript to Lucy Tappan Pierce to Lucy Pierce Hedge, 29 January 1840, p. 4; Mary Pierce to Lucy Pierce Hedge, 30 June 1840, p. 1; Mary Pierce to Henry Varnum Poor, 17 April 1841, pp. 2–3—all in Poor Family Papers, SL. The singular article to which Fierce refers is probably Sophia Dana Ripley, “Woman,” Dial 1 (January 1841):362–66. For a discussion of the article, see Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski, Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century: A Literary Study of Form and Content, of Sources and Influence (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), 116–18; and on Fuller's group: Charles Capper, “Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston,” American Quarterly 39 (1987): 509–28 and idem, Margaret Fuller, An American Romantic Life: The Private Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), chs. 8 and 9. The Vital Records of Brookline, Massachusetts, to the End of the Year 1849 (Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute, 1929), 67, gives Elizabeth White Davis Thayer's birth date as 25 August 1824.
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• Mary Pierce to John and Lucy Pierce, 6, 16–18, 20, 25 February and 1 March in letter of 31 January 1839, pp. 1–4, and 4 March in letter of 2 March 1839, p. 4; 18 January 1842, p. 3; 5 May 1844, p. 3; on the Whig procession, Mary Pierce Poor, Diaries, 21 November 1848, p. 64 and on election day, 6 November 1849, p. 61; on proofs, Poor, Diaries, 2 November 1849, p. 60 and 19 December 1850, p. 123. All of these documents are in the Poor Family Papers, SL. On the Poor family, see McGovern, Yankee Family and Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Henry Varnum Poor: Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956).
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• Louisa Lee Waterhouse, 14 February 1840, Journal, 1839–1841, p. 117, L.L. Waterhouse Papers, MHS. This Whig-sponsored temperance measure would cause the defeat of that party in the next election. See also Annie B. Lawrence's discussion of the singularity of Abigail Adams's letters, 19 October 1840, Diary.
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• Elizabeth Dwight to Elizabeth L. Eliot, 25 August 1844, p. 3, Cabot Family Papers, SL; Augustin Thierry, Recits des Temps Merovingiens: Precedes de Considerations sur l'Histoire de France (Bruxelles: Meline, Cans, 1840); Lucy Aikin, Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth (Philadelphia; A. Small, 1823); Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby; or, The New Generation (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart; New York: W. H. Colyer, 1844).
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• Calista Billings, Diary, 1848–49, 4 September 1848, p. 57, SL.
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• For other examples of women attending political processions and meetings in Boston see Daniel F. Child and Mary D. Child, 15 October 1840, 15 August 1850, 29 April 1852, Diary, MHS; Elizabeth Atherton Clapp, Journal, 27 April 1852, p. 14, David Clapp Collection, MHS; Charlotte F. Foster, 17 September 1851, Diary, MHS; Lorenza Stevens Berbineau [Francis Cabot Lowell II's servant], 5 June 1854, F.C. Lowell II Papers, Vol. 123, MHS; and Annie B. Lawrence, 10 September 1840, Diary.
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• Billings, Diary, 25 October 1848, p. 68, 3 November 1848, pp. 70–71. She is probably referring to Abigale Folsom, an abolitionist well-known for her disruption of public meetings from the floor. On Folsom, see Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Anti-slavery (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 208–9.
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• Billings, Diary, 6 November 1848, p. 72, 9 November 1848, pp. 72–3, 10 November 1848, p. 73. Archibald H. Grimké, The Life of Charles Sumner (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1892), 188–203; Moorfield Storey, Charles Sumner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), 58–61. On Billings' attendance at Whig meetings, see 11 September 1848, pp. 58–59, 22 September 1848, p. 61, 27 September 1848, p. 63.
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• The Advertiser (23 October-1 November), Atlas (24–30 October), Bee (25–30 October), Christian Watchman and Reflector (28 October-4 November), Commonwealth (26 October-2 November), Courier (25–30 October), Dodge's Literary Museum (30 October), South Boston Gazette and Chronicle (23 October-6 November), Herald (25 October-1 November), Investigator (27 October-3 November), Morning Journal (29 October), Liberator (22 October-12 November), Mail (25–28 and 30 October), Post (29 October), Daily Evening Transcript (October 23-November 1), and Evening Traveller (24 October-1 November), for example, make very little or no mention of women (other than family members) at the funeral or at the Faneuil Hall commemoration. Of these, two, the Transcript and the Herald, noted women's presence at the U.S. Circuit Court and carried short fillers on a “Statue of Webster, by the Ladies.” The Bee and the Mail (both 30 October) acknowledged in but a line or less the number of women in the Boston crowds the day of the funeral. The Herald (30 October) gives only slightly more coverage to the composition of the crowd at the funeral at Webster's estate in Marshfield. One clue in the newspapers to women's interest is a large and prominently placed advertisement for mourning bonnets which appeared the morning after Webster's death. Advertisement for White's Bonnet Rooms, Daily Courier (29 October 1852), 1; “N.B. Families called into mourning, will find a large assortment of mourning bonnets, veils, collars, & c. constantly on hand, and of the most fashionable styles.”
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• Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 31 October 1852, p. 4, Cabot Family Papers, SL.
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• “A Day of Mourning,” Boston Daily Courier (30 October 1852): 3; Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 31 October 1852, pp. 5–6; Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 29 October 1854, p. 7, Cabot Family Papers, SL. Of course, the Democrats could afford such nonpartisan expressions, for his independent though personally disavowed candidacy for President against the regular Whig nominee, Winfield Scott, had split that party's vote; the Democrats hoped to pick up some of Webster's former followers who were more moderate on the slavery issue than the mainstream Whigs.
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• Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 14 May 1855, p. 8. The scandal she refers to is the removal of Hiss from the Massachusetts legislature because of his improper behavior while on the Joint Special Committee on the Inspection of Nunneries and Convents. See John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People's Movement (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1990), 102–3, 117–18.
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• Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 13 November 1854, p. 3. At first glance, Dwight may seem to be confusing the Democrats with the Free Soilers, whose candidate, Henry Wilson, had cut a deal with the American Party: he pulled out of the race on the eve of the election in exchange for being named to the Senate seat left vacant by Edward Everett. But this was a secret bargain revealed only at the last minute. The “coalition” to which she refers probably reflects the composition of the electorate who voted for Gardner. In this election, twice as many Democrats cast ballots for the American Party as they did for their own, as did more than a majority of Free Soilers who included among their ranks many prior defections from the Democrats (as well as from the Whigs). Hence the great number of Democrats and Free Soilers who joined wayward Whigs in supporting the American Party probably led her to lump Free Soiler and Democrat together, while ignoring the Whig defections—more of a deliberate slur on the Free Soilers than a confusion between them and the Democrats. For the estimates of the relative strengths of the various parties and their sources of support in this election, see William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 133–39 and Table 5.3 (p. 504). Her electoral prediction contradicts what some historians have called a surprising victory. See Mulkern, Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts, 75–76; Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 332.
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• Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 27 February 1855, p. 10.
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• Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 24 April 1854, p. 3, 13 November 1854, p. 2, Cabot Family Papers, SL. Soon after the beginning of the war she had enhanced her knowledge of the Crimean crisis by reading Count A. de Gurowski, Russia As It Is (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1854). The copy we consulted in the Georgia State University Library bore the inscription, “Anne H. Waring from her Husband, 1855,” a testimony to shared interest across the sexes in the topic.
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• Elizabeth Dwight to Ellen Twisleton, 19 February 1855, p. 5, 13 November 1854, p. 3, Cabot Family Papers, SL.
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• Charlotte Hyde to Sarah Amanda Ives Hyde, 23 September 1856, pp. 2, 5, Bradley-Hyde Family Papers, SL. James A. Rawley, Race and Politics: ‘Bleeding Kansas' and the Coming of the Civil War (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1969), 158–60. John Greenleaf Whittier, The Complete Poetical Works of John Greenleaf Whittier, ed. Horace E. Scudder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1894), 321–22; the poem praises the “Pathfinder,” John C. Frémont.
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• Sarah Smith (Cox) Browne to Sarah Ellen Browne, 30 October 1857, p. 2; Sarah Ellen Browne to Sarah Smith (Cox) Browne, 13 December 1857, pp. 2–3; Sarah Smith (Cox) Browne to Sarah Ellen Browne, 14 December 1857, p. 1; Sarah Ellen Browne to Sarah Smith (Cox) Browne, 17 December 1857, p. 4—all in Browne Family Papers, SL. Norman F. Furniss, The Mormon Conflict, 1850–1859 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1960), 105–18, 148–67.
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• Lucy Pierce Hedge to Mary Pierce Poor, 20 August 1856, pp. 2–3, Poor Family Papers, SL. George William Curtis, The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times, An Oration, Delivered on Tuesday, August 5, 1856, before the Literary Societies of Wesleyan University, Middletown, Conn. (New York: Dix, Edwards, 1856) advocated a radical antislavery stance on “Bleeding Kansas.”
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• Lucy Pierce Hedge to Mary Pierce Poor, 20 August 1856, p. 3. We cannot find any references to this incident in the published biographies and letters of Jessie Frémont (or her husband), nor even in Irving Stone's Immortal Wife: The Biographical Novel of Jessie Benton Frémont (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1944).
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• Perhaps no contender for First Lady has had such independent renown until well into the twentieth century. See for example, Jessie Benton Frémont, The Letters of Jessie Benton Frémont, ed. Pamela Herr and Mary Lee Spence (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Pamela Herr, Jessie Benton Frémont: A Biography (New York: Franklin Watts, 1987), 252–55, 259–74. For background on her husband, see Ruhl J. Bartlett, John C. Frémont and the Republican Party (1930; New York: Da Capo Press, 1970). One Republican observer [quoted in Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 375] estimated that women made up half the crowd at Frémont gatherings in upstate New York. The same source (p. 317), denotes the weakness of Frémont's one-time noncommittal and short-lived affiliation with the Democratic Party. This, when combined with his albeit tepid antislavery stance made him acceptable to many Conscience Whigs.
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• The Boston Morning Post, 16 September 1840, p. 2, see also 3 October 1840, p. 2, and 13 October 1840, p. 2. The uses of gender considerations as a strategy during political campaigns, of course, goes far back into American history. For an earlier example, see Norma Basch, “Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election of 1828,” Journal of American History 80 (December 1993): 890–918. Historians debate the causes of the decline of the Whig Party in the 1850s; indeed, one recently dubbed it a “mysterious disappearance” [see Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development from the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 237–64)]. Perhaps if one takes into account the role of women in Whig political culture some new light can be shed on the demise of the party as a victim of an antifeminist reaction and the masculinization of political expression. For a broad consideration of “masculinization” and its longstanding impact on American political and cultural life see, Michael S. Kimmel, “Invisible Masculinity,” Society (September/October 1993): 28–35. Of course, dur-ing the 1840 campaign the masculinity (or virility) issue went the other way, as seen in the phrase “used up man” applied to the Democratic candidate Martin Van Buren. One Whig woman confessed some regret about this usage: “it seems as if the Whigs ought to leave off using such expressions as ‘Van is a used up man’ now that their victory is sure.” Mary Pierce to Henry Varnum Poor, 27 December 1840, p. 4, Poor Family Papers, SL.
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• For background, see Michael D. Pierson, “‘Guard the Foundation Well’: Antebellum New York Democrats and the Defense of Patriarchy,” Gender & History 7 (1995): 25–40.
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• Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 4, recognizes “feminine versions of Whiggery” as represented by Sarah Josepha Hale and Catharine Beecher. However, rather than comprising a unique subset of the party as Howe suggests, women may have indeed created and shared with men Whig political culture in general.
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• Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, passim.
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• Of course, women remained constrained by their inability to vote, hold office, and most of the time, to speak in public to mixed audiences. The Whig political vision and programs, however, sought precisely to encompass the disfranchised. Whigs retained the republican idea of moral representation, the suppression of the individual interest in the name of the common good. Their support of women's and African Americans' petitions even in the face of the gag rule, is but one iteration of this ideal. By the 1850s, however, the number of women's signatures on antislavery petitions, as well as the amount of benevolent activism, declined sharply from the late 1830s in rough parallel with the rise and fall of the Whig party. Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs, 60–66; Lerner, “Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 181; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, ch. 4. The political life of women in one antebellum locale is treated in Lawes, “Public Women, Public Lives.” According to Karen Beckwith, American Women and Political Participation: The Impacts of Work, Generation, and Feminism (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986) there has been no noticeable increase in the amount of women's political activity (outside of the vote) since the first “non-feminist generation” of women born in 1910 or before (pp. 80–90).
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• For pioneering work in this area, see Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Ladies, Women, and Wenches: Choice and Constraint in Antebellum Charleston and Boston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Elizabeth Fox-Genovese portrays the political consciousness of Louisa McCord and Mary Chesnut in Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), chs. 5 and 7, respectively, but her discussion of gender conventions (pp. 192–241) does not deal with politics. See also Elizabeth R. Varon, “‘The Ladies Are Whigs’: Lucy Barbour, Henry Clay, and Nineteenth-Century Virginia Politics,” Virginia Cavalcade 41 (1992): 72–83; idem, “‘We Mean to be Counted’: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia” (Ph.D. diss. Yale University, 1993); Joe L. Kincheloe, Jr., “Transcending Role Restrictions: Women at Camp Meetings and Political Rallies,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 40 (1981): 158–69. Julie Roy Jeffrey, Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississiopi West, 1840–1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979), 61–2, suggests that pioneer women were interested in political news; but Glenda Riley, The Female Frontier: A Comparative View of Women on the Prairie and the Plains (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1988), 97, 99, 149–51, has them reading mainly domestic advice and non-political news. Marilyn Ferris Motz, in her True Sisterhood: Michigan Women and Their Kin, 1820–1920 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), writes that women there seldom discussed politics in their letters (pp. 65, 72).
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• If so, evidence from newspapers might not adequately reflect that involvement. In New England, women who read newspapers to expand their political consciousness beyond domestic issues seldom saw their political activities reported. We might expect the same elsewhere; personal letters and diaries can reveal information otherwise obscured by the media.
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