3 / “Stand Firm on the Platform of Truth”:

Freedom of Assembly and Local Antislavery Organizations in the Old Northwest

As a state we influence the west, the west influences our nation, and our nation the world.

—The Illinois Anti-Slavery Convention of 1838

In 1843, the McLean County Anti-Slavery Society struggled to meet in Bloomington, Illinois. As elsewhere in the Old Northwest, activists there found that securing freedom of assembly was arduous, and involved substantial risk of violence. The Reverend Levi Spencer’s 1840s experiences illustrate immediate abolitionists’ difficulties in organizing in the region. At the 1843 Bloomington meeting, one hundred men armed with clubs prevented fifteen abolitionists from gathering in a church; they had to relocate to a private home. The anti-abolitionists followed, and while they did not enter the house, they did damage the building.1 With this persistent opposition, these community members openly demonstrated both their contempt for local abolitionists and their refusal to permit meetings that advocated ideas repugnant to them.

Little community consensus existed on the appropriateness of antislavery and anti-prejudice organization in Bloomington, as elsewhere in the Old Northwest. Spencer had advocated abolition there for two years, but he had made little headway. He still found the extent of opposition dangerous and distressing. In 1844 Spencer and his allies tried to publicize another upcoming gathering, but most local ministers refused to read their announcement. Still, they met, and their opponents joined them in the meeting hall.2 The abolitionists peacefully began their meeting, but their adversaries interrupted Spencer’s address, throwing bricks and making noise. Spencer finished his speech regardless, and wrote in triumph of what he saw as the downfall of his antagonists, for they had asked permission for one of their number to speak. The abolitionists had agreed, but unfortunately for their foes, the meeting had actually converted this man, Mr. Hunt, and he had embraced abolition. He stood, said so, and sat down. The gathering concluded quietly, which was one fleeting triumph for activists’ freedom of assembly and the persuasiveness of their message.3

The Spencer family’s problems nonetheless carried on for years, which indicates that abolitionists’ unpopular efforts to meet could have long-term consequences. The Spencers feared for their safety, and the constant threats they faced from their fellow citizens made them miserable. This continued to be a problem, and in 1846, local residents planned a public meeting to coordinate ejecting “the abolitionists” from town.4 As the prominent local organizer, Spencer remained a focal point for anti-abolitionist aggression. Other people in town held him accountable for disrupting their community. Among other incidents, in June 1846 a group of men he claimed were volunteers for the Mexican War attacked his house. This act of violence against the Spencer residence had its precedents in the Old Northwest, including the September 1841 raid on the house of John Rankin, antislavery minister of Ripley, Ohio.5 Spencer’s attackers threatened to burn down the building but refrained, and then tried to get him outside to tar and feather him. Upon failing to extract him, they threw eggs and bricks into the windows, inflicting substantial damage. These missiles forced Spencer’s family, including his elderly mother, to flee into the corners of the house and away from the broken glass. Spencer finally managed to get help from a neighbor in the wee hours of the morning, whereupon the men departed, not wanting more witnesses to their actions.

The mob also attacked some of Spencer’s abolitionist neighbors, but they directed their main assault at the Reverend. The following night the military men departed, and Spencer claimed this restored quiet to the town. He identified many of his assailants (which he saw as consequently motivating some to leave Bloomington), but he opted not to prosecute, for reasons he kept to himself. He may have chosen not to confront his attackers in court, as he knew he was unlikely to face a jury of his peers when his views were so unpopular.6

The town eventually became a bit more tolerant of antislavery gatherings, despite the way Spencer’s neighbors made him a scapegoat for his unpopular ideas. The county antislavery society successfully held a meeting in Bloomington in April 1847. The change was minor, however, for that May the Justice of the Peace warned Spencer that he should not speak locally on abolition.7 By October of 1848, Spencer had had enough, and decided to move to Peoria. He thought there he could perhaps escape the strong bias he had encountered in Bloomington, for his pioneering efforts in organizing antislavery meetings.8 As Spencer’s experiences reveal, the choice to coordinate actions against slavery in the Old Northwest was not one local reformers could take lightly, and yet they nonetheless persisted with this work. The frequent violent efforts to stifle antislavery people’s freedom of assembly in the region failed to drive them away. Indeed, many of them actually drew inspiration from the opposition they faced—even if, like Spencer, they had to relocate to continue expressing their opinions.

* * *

Beginning in the 1830s, antislavery and anti-prejudice activists like Spencer brought their movement to the Old Northwest to uplift what they saw as a problematic region. Antebellum reformers were an evangelical lot who widely sought converts to their cause, and they particularly targeted these young states. The same characteristics that made them appealing reform venues—debates over social structure and order, ideologically mixed and geographically diverse populations, economic growth, racist laws, politics in flux—also made them places that strongly resisted when antislavery people publicly claimed the right to organize. These were difficult locales in which to be activists, for the possibility of violent attack was real.

Old Northwest antislavery reformers stated, as they planned their meetings, that they were ready and willing to face substantial challenges. They prove that people who fought slavery and prejudice in this volatile region took on a substantial burden. They also had a keen sense of the importance of their work and the myriad trials they faced. When an abolitionist who called herself “Maria” wrote in the Chicago Liberty Party newspaper the Western Citizen in May 1844 that local activists’ convictions meant they could “stand firm on the platform of truth” and face obstacles down, she spoke to the internal strength that motivated them as they gathered publicly.9 Reformers like “Maria” carefully considered their choice to embrace movements for change, for they could lead to ostracism and danger within these dispersed and unwelcoming communities. In this region, local activists who met to discuss abolition catalyzed conflicts over social control. Nonetheless, they created reform cohorts that incorporated diverse antislavery views, which only added to their controversial reception as they gathered to improve their region.

Old Northwest activists believed that to promote their goals, they had to meet freely and form local societies. They spent enormous amounts of time and energy organizing, joining in, and discussing their meetings. Seth Hinshaw, an Indiana abolitionist, explained in 1842 why people needed to attend such gatherings even if they had already embraced abolition. He claimed that meetings told people how they could work to get rid of this scourge, “the serpentine imp” of slavery, and find out “what there is for you to do. . . . ”10 According to Hinshaw, these assemblies were key to their particular activist quest. While reformers were always in the minority with their unpopular positions, they nevertheless made significant progress in spreading the antislavery movement across the difficult Old Northwest terrain. To do so, they had to band together and meet.

Antislavery organizers sought freedom of assembly so that they could form an antislavery public sphere for the diffuse populations of these racially tense states. While finding public space for activists in the region was a necessary step to spreading their message, they faced many problems—including violent opposition—as they did so. In states hostile to abolition and African Americans, activists had to find ways to make their views politically and socially resonant to a scattered, sparse populace. Unlike the public sphere the foundational theorist Jurgen Habermas imagined, theirs included politics, activist networks, and religion. As abolitionists tried to secure open public discussion, their opponents responded with persistent violence.11

The public sphere in antebellum America was the site of significant conflict and debate. People’s civic life focused and thrived on both the local and the municipal levels. By the 1830s, the public meeting had become a regular form of gathering, in theory accessible to all. The opening of this “democratic public space,” along with the expanded voting population that had come to include all white men, permitted individuals of various backgrounds to partake in political debates. In practice, anti-abolitionists often challenged activists’ “open access to the political sphere” in the Old Northwest—by interrupting their meetings, for example—and it thus was not always as open as in theory.12 In the eyes of many in the region, controversial ideas with the potential to enact social and political transformation remained largely unwelcome in public.

Accessing the public sphere nonetheless remained a priority for the activists who closely guarded their freedom of assembly. They linked this goal to the broader rights struggles of the era. This meant that they had to fight not only anti-abolition mobs, but also local and national limitations as to which people could congregate to make change. Some used petitions—a virtual gathering of ideas—to evade attacks on their right to convene. Many local residents met meeting organizers’ requests to assemble publicly with proprietary disdain, but the organizers persisted nonetheless.

* * *

From their earliest days of activity in the region, Old Northwest antislavery and anti-prejudice activists, male and female, faced external threats from their neighbors, who challenged their freedom of assembly. As early as 1836, the Ohio Society meeting at Granville encountered an anti-abolitionist mob armed with eggs and stones. These they soon aimed at some delegates; they also shaved the tails of many of the delegates’ horses. The abolitionists stood down their opponents, and tricked them by finishing their business and dispersing one night earlier than scheduled.13 They found a way to avoid assaults on their right to meet, while still accomplishing their goals. These challenges to abolitionists’ freedom of assembly lasted for decades in the Old Northwest, and required activists to have both ingenuity and self-motivation.

Activists’ personal ties and common circumstances contributed to their reform awakenings and to their ability to stay focused on acting for change. For example, Old Northwest female antislavery activists frequently shared similar religious and social roots. Many western female antislavery fighters, especially in Indiana, came from Quaker backgrounds. Like male abolitionists, there were also many Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists in their ranks. Whether married or single, these white women frequently had kinship or marriage ties to prominent male ministers and educators. Among the married, the majority of their husbands held strong abolitionist sentiments.

In the specific case of Illinois, many of its female antislavery activists had histories of reform work. Mary Avery Bent Blanchard of Galesburg was married to Jonathan Blanchard, who became the president of Knox College in that town in 1847. The Blanchards chose Knox, a coeducational stronghold of abolitionist sentiment, after beginning their reform careers in Ohio.14 In Peoria, both Eliza Chappell Porter and her husband, the Reverend Jeremiah Porter, zealously supported religious and benevolent activism. Shortly after their 1835 marriage, the couple moved to Peoria, where they briefly joined a small but expanding antislavery community. Some of Porter’s neighbors became enthusiastic abolitionists, and Jeremiah Porter’s (and later William T. Allan’s) church, the Main Street Presbyterian Church, formed a center of their activism.15 These examples aside, this community was far from united on slavery, even inside the marriage bond.

* * *

The divisions over slavery ran right through some activists’ marriages. The controversial Peoria newspaper publishers and reformers, Mary Brown Davis and Samuel H. Davis, exemplify this ideological split within couples, for they held dissonant positions on the issue for years. Prior to marriage, Samuel had worked as a printer in the East and the upper South. The Davises had most recently published a weekly newspaper in Winchester, Virginia.16 They and their five sons arrived in town from that state via the Illinois River in 1837, and began publishing the Peoria Register and Northwestern Gazetteer that April. Both spouses had direct ties to slavery, for Virginia-born Mary’s family owned at least 45 slaves, while northern-born Samuel claimed until at least March 1843 to own two slaves in Virginia.17

Samuel H. Davis involved himself in many aspects of his new town, but avoided an abolitionist stance for years. As the editor of one of the two Peoria newspapers, he maintained a strong public voice in other arenas, including the Peoria Temperance Society, Lyceum, and Colonization Society.18 He directly participated in politics as the Peoria County delegate to the Whig State Convention in Springfield in 1841.19 He thus served as a pillar of the community through his activism in numerous non-abolitionist organizations, and those that resisted direct action against slavery for political or strategic reasons.

In marked contrast to her moderate husband, Mary Brown Davis campaigned against slavery as early as 1837, and organized extensively for the cause. She was a founding member of both the Illinois Female Anti-Slavery Society and the Peoria Female Anti-Slavery Society. Davis also was the most published abolitionist woman writing in Illinois in the 1840s. Her first writings appeared in the Genius of Universal Emancipation on June 28, 1839, and in addition to her work editing and writing for the Register, Davis became a regular columnist in the Chicago Western Citizen from 1842 to 1849. She used the newspaper as a platform to argue for racial equality and to claim that women must take direct, public action against slavery.20 In this venture, her agenda diverged from that of her husband.

As the Davises exemplify, one partner in a couple could push a reluctant spouse toward abolitionism. Samuel Davis lacked his wife’s early, candid devotion to the abolitionist cause, and continued to support the Whig Party into the mid 1840s.21 Mary —and circumstances in Peoria—exerted some influence on Samuel over time, and he eventually converted to increasingly vocal abolitionism. He publicly demonstrated this change when he served as president of the State Liberty Party convention in July 1846. Cholera cut his life short in 1849, and the surviving family moved to Galesburg. Mary Brown Davis remained active in journalism and social reform into her old age.22 These personal details of abolitionists’ lives and their underlying principles uncover the material soil in which their activism grew to fruition. Local and regional adversity also fertilized this blooming of reform, as Illinois conflicts including the Davises’ own experiences from 1843 to 1848 illustrate. There, many antislavery people—whether male or female—found concrete proof of the necessity of their action in their neighbors’ violent resistance to their initial organizational push. This opposition to activists’ freedom of assembly strengthened their convictions, as became abundantly clear in Peoria’s early antislavery organizing.

* * *

On February 10, 1843, the Whig newspaper the Peoria Register and Northwestern Gazetteer announced: “The Peoria Anti-slavery society will hold a meeting in the Main-street Presbyterian church, on Monday evening the 13th . . . for the purpose of organizing and electing officers.”23 This was the Illinois river town’s first antislavery effort, and one open to both women and men.

From the outset, Peoria’s anti-abolitionists publicly denounced antislavery organizing in their town, and refused to let the meeting occur. Calling themselves the “citizens of Peoria,” in the Peoria Democratic Press, the local Democratic paper, they first held a public assembly of their own at the courthouse on February 12, 1843, to thwart the abolition society at its gathering the following day. They expressed their “entire disapprobation” of their foes’ “views and principles,” and argued that antislavery doctrine directly conflicted with federal and state law. These men claimed that abolitionism would create sectional and interstate animosity, “discord and disunion.” They alluded to the possibility of violent reprisal, resolving to use force to suppress the society, “when all other measures have proved unsuccessful.”24 The anti-abolitionists publicly announced their goal of silencing their opponents by reading their resolutions aloud and printing their meeting minutes in the Democratic Press three days later. This was not unusual, for anti-abolitionists frequently published the records of their meetings, and broadcast their intentions to mob their opponents in advance of their attacks—or in this case, explained them in print shortly thereafter.25 That announcement implied to the antislavery people in Peoria that violent confrontation was a real possibility if they carried out the idea of congregating publicly.

As planned, the anti-abolitionists at the courthouse attended the February 13 antislavery meeting at the Main Street Presbyterian Church to stop the Peoria Anti-Slavery Society from forming. The local abolitionists, women and men, gathered in their humble church building. When they convened, their opponents stifled the nascent society, claiming that “antislavery principles were illegal, unconstitutional, and disorganizing, and that if [the abolitionists] would not peaceably dissolve the meeting, they would do it by violence.”26 That Monday evening, the antislavery faction was vastly outnumbered, but nonetheless attempted to conduct their business, without success. In Peoria, the anti-abolitionists had overtly silenced discussion of the nationally controversial movement to eradicate slavery.

The two bitter factions published competing narratives of the meeting. John S. Zieber, the editor of the Peoria Democratic Press and a member of the mob, later claimed that his group had allowed the abolitionists to go about their business after voicing their objections to any local association.27 Both sides agreed that after a prayer led by the church’s Reverend William T. Allan, the abolitionists proceeded, until their adversaries interrupted with their own resolutions. William T. Allan and his wife Irene, an Oberlin alumna, shared an active interest in abolition. They had recently moved to Peoria.28 At the meeting, Allan disputed the anti-abolitionists’ points, eliciting quiet dissent from them, until he raised the issue of African American rights. The mob would not listen to this, and interrupted Allan with “loud and boisterous yells and stamping.” When he attempted to read further, the crowd cut him off with more noise. The anti-abolitionist throng curtailed freedom of assembly by shouting over the speakers, making it clear that the productive portion of their gathering was over. This yelling, and what the antislavery people called an escalating “spirit of violence” in the room, led them to adjourn. They realized the futility of proceeding in the mob’s presence, and feared for their safety.

The anti-abolitionists remained in the church until all of their foes had left in disgust. Their mission accomplished, they “then gave three cheers and retired in quiet.” The anti-abolitionist group thought that their show of strength had banished this menace from their town, and proven the “determination of the citizens of Peoria, that its fair fame shall not be tarnished by a public organization of a nest of negro stealers.”29 They thus branded their adversaries as thieves of human property, and scofflaws, and closed the evening with one final disruption: they sent Allan’s buggy careening into the nearby lake.30

In a letter to the Western Citizen, five of the abolitionists told their version of events, arguing that while they had escaped “personal injury,” the mob had “rudely and violently” abrogated their “INALIENABLE RIGHTS.”31 They believed that their antagonists had illegitimately curtailed their freedom of assembly. Allan characterized the evening, and the public abolition effort in Peoria, as a “fiery ordeal.”32 In that Western Citizen letter, the antislavery authors stated that the Peoria activists had offered no physical rebuke to their foes. They wrote, “[o]ver these defenseless females, and Christians, who will not resist evil with evil … the ‘respectable citizens’ secured a glorious triumph!”33 These authors thus constructed the attack on the Peoria abolitionists as unwarranted due to their passivity, but the reality was more complicated. While the neophyte antislavery society had not met the mob with violence, their organizing efforts meant that they had in fact begun to actively oppose their community norms. Their fellow citizens would not permit them the freedom of assembly to do so openly and safely, for their ideas appeared too hazardous and disruptive.

The mob action at Peoria galvanized abolitionism among both women and men in Illinois. By confronting unresisting men and women in a church, the Peoria crowd transgressed many activists’ views of the boundaries of justifiable conduct. Local antislavery agitators convened a meeting at nearby Farmington on March 9, 1843, to discuss how Peorians had suppressed the abolitionists’ freedom of assembly. The attendees denounced the silencing action and praised the local activists, particularly for their refusal to retaliate when attacked. That March in the Chicago Western Citizen, Mary Brown Davis cited the local mob as she proclaimed that the antislavery cause continued to progress in Peoria, despite community resistance. She called local anti-abolitionists hypocrites for violently assaulting their fellow citizens, and mocked their conduct. Davis also could not resist noting that local and statewide interest in the cause had vastly increased since the attack on the meeting, as had sympathy in the surrounding area.34 She thus claimed that the anti-abolitionists’ suppression had the opposite effect to the one they intended. Davis stood down her foes and pressed on to form a local antislavery group, as did her compatriots elsewhere in the region.

The previous spring, Washington, Illinois, had faced analogous issues when activists tried to organize and convene an abolition society. A group of their fellow citizens met to oppose their impending scheduled meeting, and verbally requested that the abolitionists refrain from gathering. They threatened violence with language very similar to that of the nearby Peoria anti-abolitionists. In response, Samuel H. Davis had defended their freedom of assembly in an editorial. He affirmed abolitionists’ rights in Washington and also in Peoria itself when Owen Lovejoy came to town to hold a meeting. This antislavery minister and later politician was the brother of Elijah Lovejoy, murdered in Alton in 1837.35 Old Northwest activists’ right to congregate was a hotly contested issue, and they refused to bow to their opponents’ pressure.

* * *

By invading a meeting convened to organize a mixed-gender Peoria Anti-Slavery Society, the anti-abolition group clearly aimed to control the social and political culture of their town.36 Like those in Peoria, other mobs of the era were often well-planned, and composed of men of social and economic prominence who bore “little fear of indictment or public censure.” Anti-abolitionists feared that local activists would try to change their towns, and consequently attacked them.37 In attacks on antislavery people, local residents who sought social control implemented vigilante justice, often motivated by their political and economic milieus.38 Old Northwest anti-abolitionists frequently found their inspiration in desire for community control and the social order. Indeed, local norms could be particularly troubled in the region, and violence was a means anti-abolitionists used to enforce these boundaries, albeit one which reformers refused to sanction themselves.

Anti-abolitionist attacks in the Old Northwest add nuance to the study of antebellum mob violence. Historians have explored this phenomenon under myriad names, including mobs, riots, lynching, vigilantism, and extralegal violence. Central to all were local community control and the threat or use of physical force. Determining the boundaries of permissible conduct—and thus whether violence can be deemed “extralegal” in a particular place and time—is challenging, and such borders were particularly fuzzy in “frontier” areas like the Old Northwest, where the legal system was rudimentary, and where people disagreed about rights.39 While the Fifth Amendment enshrined due process in law, people applied the concept unevenly in practice, and in the 1830s and 1840s due process only restrained the federal government’s ability to restrict people’s rights.40 Even as reformers argued that the Constitution guaranteed them freedom of assembly, their foes mobbed them with local sanction, guided by what they perceived to be the best interest of the community.

Mob violence and threats of it were in fact frequent tools anti-abolitionists used to stifle activists’ freedom of assembly. Although historians have established that extralegal violence against reformers was common enough in the antebellum period, they have tended to isolate anti-abolitionist attacks both chronologically and regionally. The Peoria incident conformed, to a degree, to patterns of anti-abolition violence historians have observed; most such episodes occurred as a response to initial organizing efforts, and declined after 1837 due to fears of loss of white liberties.41 This was one such initial effort, but the Old Northwest in fact remained the site of vital antislavery organizing and antiracist activism throughout the 1840s and even as late as the 1860s.42 Concurrently, crowds continued their efforts to silence activists across the region for decades. Also, while abolitionists across the Old Northwest met with mobs upon initially organizing, those in communities that already had vibrant local movements did so as well, thanks to strongly rooted local opposition.

While Old Northwest antislavery people’s experiences with mobs coincided to some extent with existing scholarly notions about the causes and functions of vigilante violence, they also differed from that of the national picture and that of the other sections.43 The antebellum North was far from unified, and analyses that only divide the North from the South omit the distinctive nature of the antislavery movement in the Old Northwest. The limitations of North versus South comparisons are evident in historian David Grimsted’s claim that northern mobs focused on property while southerners attacked both people and property.44 While slavery’s opponents faced much easier circumstances in the North than in the South, they nonetheless, even there, often had to physically battle for their freedom of assembly, particularly in the Old Northwest. Their foes attacked them, not just their property. While taking action against racism and slavery was controversial throughout the nation, it was particularly explosive in the Old Northwest, as became apparent in activists’ struggles in the region. In turn, this volatile environment affected the frequency and severity of local anti-abolitionist violence, as reformers sought freedom of assembly.

Places like Peoria reveal a history of the popular, extralegal violence that Old Northwest activists often faced as they challenged the burgeoning prejudice of their era and the concerns that the region’s increasing economic integration aroused. In river towns in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, many local residents engaged in southern trade, and consequently sought to stifle abolitionist discussion. The Mississippi River Valley’s expanding market system sent crops or processed commodities to market towns and then downriver to St. Louis or New Orleans.45 Geography and crop choice pushed residents of Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio toward this economic exchange, while Michigan’s location made this trade less essential to them. In the first three states, abolitionists themselves often promoted growth and increased interaction with the “market economy,” so they did not resist trade in the abstract, only the ways its conflicts of interest could limit their freedom of assembly and their ability to fight slavery. While economic and personal ties to the South were less salient for Michigan than in the northeastern states, it appears that they mattered there nonetheless.46 In all of these states, activists found people who wished to silence them with fists or bricks, rather than permit antislavery gatherings.

Across the Old Northwest, many mob members acted not only out of economic interest, but also because they feared that antislavery and anti-racist activists sought to entrench an African American presence in their towns.47 Indeed, their worst fears—that abolitionism would bring about heterogeneity and egalitarianism, if not racial mixing—coincided with the goals of the most radical among the reformers there.48 Many also found women’s activism on behalf of African Americans especially offensive.

* * *

Some Old Northwest individuals faced more difficulty than others in securing freedom of assembly; this was usually the case for activist women in the region, although both women and men faced efforts to prevent their meetings. Women seized a public presence in the face of particularly strong attacks on their freedom of assembly. Their communities ardently resisted when such women tried to gather to reform them. Female activists participated in both separate female and mixed-gender organizations, and their actions challenged the relationship between gender and politics. In the face of even more formidable logistical and cultural obstacles than their male counterparts encountered, they carved out a space for their reform work. Though formally excluded from politics, they took partisan stances and pushed for a larger public role than their eastern contemporaries. Also, while antagonism followed antebellum women’s activism across the nation, in the Old Northwest its scope and duration was unparalleled. Antislavery women there made a powerful, fervent contribution to local reform even as they faced major hostility. As female activists fought to obtain a public voice, they claimed a political place in this unsettled polity.

A cohort of female abolitionists labored to aid African Americans, both slave and free, and stretched the boundaries of political action with their publications, meetings, and petitions. Old Northwest female antislavery organizers whose work extended from the early 1830s through the Civil War wielded great power for social change, and resisted the limitations that their social norms prescribed.

In fact, women reformers took advantage of the unsettled environment of the Old Northwest to push against the boundaries of masculinity and femininity. Even as gender stereotypes hardened in the wider culture, both women and men strategically deployed ideas about their proper social roles to justify their public work for change. Old Northwest activism in the context of this politics of exclusion warrants scholarly attention for the gender diversity it reveals. The region’s obvious problems with racialized legislation and women’s work against it made women especially prominent in activism there. They responded to the inequities that they saw in their society and seized their chance to change them. This was difficult, however, and these gender concerns added another complication to abolitionists’ Old Northwest battles for freedom of assembly.

Female antislavery societies in Illinois in the 1840s provide a case study of the challenges Old Northwest activists faced in securing the liberty to gather freely. These women’s activities catalyzed debates over antislavery tactics and who had the right to gather to participate in an increasingly politicized movement. They were important activists in the region, and reveal how this reform milieu worked, what motivated people, and the obstacles they found to their efforts to create change with antislavery organizations at the local level. In Illinois and throughout the Old Northwest, women regularly participated in antislavery and Liberty Party political activity. Most of the Illinois abolitionist organizations of the 1840s—mixed, all-male, and all-female—identified with the Liberty Party, the main national antislavery third party. As a result, Illinois women’s antislavery efforts not only stretched gender roles by taking public action, but also integrated them directly into partisan politics. They boldly called for abolition and African American rights, even as their identity made this particularly challenging. They defied their exclusion from politics and publicly claimed partisan identities, all in the process of fighting slavery. A focus on local-level organizers reveals the vital activist labor women performed in smaller communities across the Old Northwest.

Even with their neighbors’ violent efforts to control their towns and stifle their freedom of assembly, Illinois women would not allow anyone to derail their reform mission. They began to establish separate female antislavery organizations after the February 1843 Peoria mob attack, and demanded the right for these organizations to gather publicly. These new associations were inclusive of all women, as in Putnam County, where the new female society welcomed anyone “friendly to the anti-slavery cause” to join with them in their fight. The newly organized women lost no time in setting up their infrastructure.49 These abolitionist women’s efforts to formalize their organizations prove their commitment to public action despite community displeasure with their activism.

In Peoria, women met on July 27, 1843, in the Main Street Presbyterian Church to form a Female Anti-Slavery Society. Mary Brown Davis organized the women’s meeting and provided the minutes for the Western Citizen. Male abolitionists attended the Reverend William Allan’s opening address, but they then departed and the meeting proceeded. The women chose this male Illinois Society agent to speak to their first meeting, possibly out of a desire to adhere to gender conventions about female public speech. By having a man deliver the lecture, they could have diminished controversy at their point of initial organization, even as they asserted their right to assemble.50

The women of Peoria immediately created an antislavery agenda for their community. They elected officers, chose Davis as secretary, and sought to delineate their role in the town at large.51 The women agreed that they should submit antislavery petitions to the state and national legislature, and they soon did so, and also shared their views publicly in other forums.52

* * *

Old Northwest activists, including the Peoria women, used their contentious local climate and freedom of assembly struggles to publicize and spread the antislavery message. When she wrote in the Western Citizen about the Peoria Female Society’s organization, Mary Brown Davis asked other women to form female antislavery societies. She entitled her article “Character of Peoria in Some Degree Retrieved,” and noted with pleasure that the women’s meeting had proceeded mostly undisturbed, in contrast to that of February 13. The anti-abolitionists left the women alone, but attacked Mr. Allan and his carriage yet again in retribution for his participation in the gathering. He “had the wheels taken from his carriage and thrown into the river, and was threatened with . . . ‘tar and feathers.’”53 Davis was careful to state that Allan did not plan or take an active role in the meeting, which left the agency in female hands, even though the women had granted Allan the public speaking platform. These Illinois women, as did their sisters elsewhere, took the lead in the local fight against slavery when men confronted excessive mob danger.54

At least in July 1843, the Peoria anti-abolitionists appeared reluctant to physically harm female activists. This is just one way activist women used gender protections to their advantage. The female society formed with more immediate success than their male counterparts, for the effort to create a mixed or male Peoria abolitionist organization faltered until 1844, in the face of mob opposition. In this town, as with other physical battles in the Old Northwest, antislavery women reversed the gender norms by leading the vanguard action that anti-abolition mobs denied to local men.

* * *

Not content with local-level organizations, on May 23, 1844, Peoria’s female abolitionists united with other women as the Illinois Female Anti-Slavery Society, a state organization affiliated with the Liberty Party. Controversy plagued its meetings from the outset. On April 25, Peoria’s antislavery women, including Irene B. Allan and Mary Brown Davis, had begun to publicize the first convention of the Illinois Female Society in the Western Citizen. They included men in this convention, inviting “all friends of the slave, whether male or female.”55 Irene B. Allan argued that a state society would provide their cause with strength in numbers and a better way to distribute their resources.56 Allan’s characterization of the new organization was benign, but not all Illinoisans agreed with her perspective.

Women who organized meetings faced significant gender-based challenges. In order to assembly publicly, female reformers had to explain to their state’s skeptical population their presence in worldly affairs and their desire to meet. A key example of this was from May 1844, when Illinois antislavery women’s efforts to openly gather as a state association catalyzed debate. This controversy reveals the social consequences their opponents saw in women’s public action, and gender’s impact on freedom of assembly. Mr. Norris, the editor of the Chicago Whig Party paper the Daily Journal, harshly criticized the Peoria women for their abolitionist activities. He castigated them for stepping outside of the household with this state female society, writing:

Shut up your ‘little responsibilities,’ ye mothers—initiate your husbands into the mysteries of your kitchens and larders, ye wives—and hasten to Peoria to look after the concerns of the Nation. Pay no regard to your domestic duties—they are minor considerations.

Western Citizen editor Zebina Eastman quoted from the article in the Journal, and then printed the women’s rebuttals.57

The activist women fought back with Norris’s own words, and argued that they had an essential public role to play in abolition. This debate before the Peoria organizing convention had broad implications, for the women responded to the attack on their organizing efforts by using elements of the restrictive separate spheres ideology in a liberating way. This was just one of a number of instances where Old Northwest antislavery women’s public activism contradicted domestic ideology by rejecting the separation of women’s and men’s worlds.58 Mary Brown Davis claimed that women’s forays into politics enhanced their ability to perform their “responsibilities.” “ . . . Anti-slavery women,” she wrote to the Western Citizen, “are the best wives, the best mothers, and the most useful part of the community.”59 In her view, activism complemented women’s domestic obligations. At the same time that Davis embraced these traditional duties, she argued that women’s public work was morally necessary. The aforementioned “Maria” also expressed anger and frustration at Norris’s mockery as she refuted him, by asserting that women must, on principle, take action against slavery.60

In the newspaper debate, as in their response to anti-abolition mobs, these Illinois women manipulated Norris’s gendered language of sex difference, and used it to justify their antislavery meetings and actions. With their words, Illinois female abolitionists vowed a commitment to conventional domesticity, but also discursively accommodated and enabled a range of actual political activity. Some women deployed stereotypes about women’s particular aptitudes to rationalize their reform work and defend their right to gather. Old Northwest antislavery women developed a unique sense of female strength, firmly rooted in their activism on behalf of others; they manipulated, challenged, and disregarded the mores of their era.

The rhetoric and political activity of Old Northwest antislavery women complicates the understanding of antebellum women’s public action. While they did not seek the vote, they behaved in ways outside the norms of female passivity and non-partisanship.61 Their most groundbreaking actions and words troubled the relation between women and politics. Over time, these women found that their moral commitment to eradicate slavery required them to contest some gender norms. They avoided suffrage, but nonetheless spoke out in a variety of settings, confronted authority, and broke laws that they regarded as unjust, such as fugitive slave legislation. Complicating their outspokenness, their moral stance allowed them to claim their activity as appropriate for women, while nonetheless reinforcing the social expectations that placed women at the moral center of society.

Despite the ongoing controversy, numerous women nonetheless attended the 1844 Illinois Female Society convention at Peoria. This meeting coincided with that of the Illinois Society, as the two organizations deliberately scheduled separate and parallel women’s and general annual meetings that year and the next. Forty-five women attended, and there read and unanimously adopted a constitution, planned business for the upcoming year, and elected a board of officers. Davis rejoiced in the Western Citizen that the meeting went very well and remained largely undisturbed, despite the earlier mob activity: “Truly, we may say, “Peoria is redeemed.”62 This success shows that women’s persistent efforts to secure freedom of assembly could prove fruitful in the end, and that they used controversies to their own purposes to spread the antislavery message. Abolitionist women—in Illinois as in the neighboring states—pushed to engage in a range of public action. Illinois was hardly alone in hosting a cohort of dedicated female abolitionists, and women’s actions brought them into public life and overlapped state boundaries.63 A main tactic used by organizers of antislavery meetings including these women was the petition; with this method, activists could continue their reforms even after their meetings had ended. In this way, they gathered together their names on paper to show their support for a cause, without necessarily putting their bodies at risk.

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Like their stalwart defense of their right to activism, the petitions that grew out of antislavery meetings were another strategy Old Northwest reformers used to evade attacks on both women’s and men’s freedom of assembly. They were central to their antislavery efforts, and women found them especially vital since they had a small number of political options; female activists’ delimited circumstances and few political rights drove them to this method of influencing their legislators. Dating back to feudal France and Russia, the petition was the traditional means for “subordinate” people to claim rights without violating the parameters of their social roles.64 Petitions did not require public gathering, and thus could avoid some of the controversy meetings elicited, especially for women. In her study of national antislavery women’s petitions, Susan Zaeske writes that by petitioning, women pushed beyond the usual boundaries of petitions as a deferential form and used them to “justify” their “collective exercise” of this political tool.65 With this choice, they also demonstrated the local and individual initiative that characterized Old Northwest activism.

As was true in the East, petition campaigns became a common technique among Old Northwest abolitionists in the 1830s, and one that enmeshed them in a First Amendment battle. This region produced large numbers of antislavery petitions. In 1836, the volume of petitions to Congress had become so high that proslavery representatives pushed through the first “gag rule,” which ordered the tabling of all petitions to the House of Representatives that addressed slavery. Congress followed this law with others, and blocked most antislavery petitions until 1844. An implicit gag rule also prevailed in the Senate from 1836 to 1850, when senators routinely tabled petitions from the North that mentioned slavery.66 In the House, among other representatives, John Quincy Adams put up a spirited fight to obtain a hearing for both male and female petitioners.67 Abolitionists extensively critiqued this limitation of their freedom of expression with claims that the gag rule violated their First Amendment rights.68 The gag rule also flouted the tenet of natural law that obligated leaders to take delivery of and address petitions from their constituents.69 Activists persisted in submitting thousands of petitions, but the actual power of this right was consequently very limited at this time.

The link between petitions and meetings existed on another level, too, for locally, Old Northwest activists used their meetings to protest against the gag rule and its infringement of their constitutional rights. As early as 1838, the Ohio Society asserted antislavery freedoms with a resolution that thanked Adams and Thomas Morris for defending the petition right.70 This pattern persisted into the 1840s, for antislavery activists extended their appreciation to Ohio Whig representative Joshua Giddings for his opposition to the gag rule. One place where this happened was at the 1842 Bureau County Liberty Convention in Illinois, where the attendees denounced slave-owners’ attacks on what they deemed “the dearest rights of freemen,” including petitioning, “free debate and discussion.”71 Liberty men again cited Adams for his outspoken actions, as in the Knox Liberty Convention that April.72 Adams and the Liberty men were not the only protestors, for women felt the gag rule’s impact keenly, as they lacked the vote.73 They, too, dissented from it and continued to petition in large numbers, and some among them broadened their efforts to include protests against the “Black Laws.”

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Old Northwest female abolitionist organizations’ petitions stretched the limitations of their era in another sense: they used them to create pathbreaking arguments against racial prejudice. They evaded attacks on their freedom of assembly with assertions that they had a direct relation to the state and a clear right to activism. Illinois antislavery women used petitions to openly express their political opinions and views on race. In 1843, the women of the Putnam County Society rushed to sign one such petition to Congress and the Illinois State Legislature that opposed the “Black Laws.” They circulated it successfully, obtaining 163 signatures, and stated that they would submit further petitions to abolish all laws that “strengthen the hands of the slaveholders.”74 The Illinois women’s petition efforts did not end there, for in 1847 Davis led the Illinois Female Society in a concerted effort for a statewide women’s petition to repeal their “Black Laws.”75 Their sisters in Indiana joined in similar efforts in their state by defying the restrictive racialized laws endemic there.76 These petitions, with their emphasis on transforming local racial laws, exemplify women’s more radical action that grew out of Old Northwest antislavery activism. This was a progressive local development, not, as historian Beth Salerno claims, a sign of the decentralization, even declension, of a national movement.77 Regional activists responded to the most pressing conditions they noticed, and at times they established different priorities—in this case, the local plague of the “Black Laws” drew Old Northwest antislavery women’s immediate attention.

In this region, women’s antislavery and anti-prejudice activism demonstrates that antebellum non-suffrage politics, far from being stagnant and staid, could have radical potential to improve the racial order. With their struggles for access to politics and public life, these women joined the larger battle for Old Northwest freedom of expression. As such, they reveal a new perspective on these struggles, one of people ostensibly on the margins of politics who claimed, nonetheless, to wield “an almost irresistible power” for change.78

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The moment of female societies in the Old Northwest was significant, but of short duration, as is visible in the limited tenure there of female abolitionists’ separate public presence. There was a steep climb and decline of women’s participation in these organizations, as seen in Illinois from 1842 to 1845. After their organizational spike in 1843, the Illinois Female Society met in 1846 and 1847, but with diminished attendance. Previous scholars have tied this shift in Illinois antislavery women’s participation in the movement to the growth of the Liberty Party at the expense of immediatist organizations.79 Since many of these women identified with the Liberty Party throughout the 1840s and found some acceptance for this (as seen with Davis’s Liberty Party columns in the Western Citizen), depicting the party itself as the culprit is unlikely to tell the whole story.

In the latter years, between 1845 and 1847, there was a small upsurge in calls for women’s participation in the Liberty movement, particularly in Michigan, where women established the greatest number of female societies. Women’s involvement there in organized abolition nonetheless declined as electoral politics obtained greater sway, the antislavery press focused on men’s activities, and the Liberty Party fell apart.80 Following some sporadic activism in Indiana until 1849, the evidence of separate female antislavery societies in the Old Northwest had vanished by 1852.81

Contrary to historians’ tendency to consider Old Northwest activists as a less advanced form of their eastern counterparts whose organizations followed in their footsteps, the increased divisiveness that supposedly pushed women out was not just a result of the region catching up with the East or finally gaining its attention.82 This argument places no agency in the hands of Old Northwest abolitionists. In places like Illinois, activists did squabble over women’s roles beginning at the time of the schism in 1840, but they had reached less consensus in their outcomes and attitudes on that issue—as was the case with others—than had the East. They diversified their efforts, but women hardly became invisible in Old Northwest antislavery and anti-prejudice activism. In small numbers with disproportionate strength, they joined forces with men and carried on their work in other forums, including newspapers and public lectures.

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Abolitionists’ exertions to protect their freedom of assembly in the Old Northwest prove that, despite substantial risks, a broad cohort of activists in the region organized meetings and asserted their right to public action for their cause. These local organizers—women and men—publicized and spread their movement using a range of public methods, including holding meetings and forming organizations. Old Northwest activists lobbied state and federal governments about slavery and the “Black Laws.” They used petitions to shape their government, and those who could, used the vote. Freedom of assembly and public gatherings like meetings and lectures were essential to all of these activities. In their quest to express themselves publicly, reformers had to grapple with their foes’ other efforts to limit their liberties. For them, freedom of the press was no easier to secure than freedom of assembly, and indeed, formed the focus of a major contest in the region.