6 / Itinerant Lecturers in a Fracturing Nation, 1850–1861
When we in the dark take what we deem a right position, light is sure to come sometime.
—Ichabod Codding, Letter to Maria Codding, March 11, 1855
In March 1861, Josephine S. Griffing ridiculed small-town Old Northwest people by detailing how controversy ensued when she spoke publicly in the region. In a letter to the Liberator, Griffing delicately poked fun at the ignorance of one woman she met in her sojourn across Indiana that year. Near the town of Warsaw, her hostess asked quietly “whether I was a woman. ‘They say,’ said she [of Griffing], ‘no woman ever talked as she talks, and I never knew one to talk at all.’” The novel presence of a female lecturer led her to doubt Griffing’s gender identity. Griffing argued that this woman was “terribly religious” and had a narrow worldview. This abolitionist equated the other woman’s piety with a kind of silent, obedient womanhood that she herself eschewed.1 While Griffing’s letter made light of her own resistance to local mores and her actions’ effects on recalcitrant community members, she had serious intentions. She demonstrated with her own transgressions—her own decision to take a “right position”—that there were multiple possible ways Old Northwest antislavery lecturers, including female ones, could behave. These activists faced distinctive challenges from 1850 through the first year of the Civil War. Griffing exemplified this, as one of a cohort of tenacious Old Northwest abolitionists who for three decades, in the face of conflict, had refused to allow their foes to silence them. While her Indiana hostess disapproved, Griffing knew that she and her allies nonetheless must disregard propriety and speak out, for only thus could they combat slavery and prejudice.
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In these conflict-ridden years, Old Northwest itinerant antislavery lecturers soldiered on for freedom of speech in the face of substantial mob violence. Anti-abolitionists attacked activists even more frequently, and they felt even more “in the dark” than they had done at any time since the 1830s. The national tendency toward increasing sectionalism heightened tensions in this already-unsettled region, and the reformers’ mission remained a difficult and unpopular one. The antislavery political parties accompanied and escalated sectional discord even as they became relatively powerful in the Old Northwest, where they actually found more support than in other regions. Both of these developments augmented anti-abolitionists’ impulses to muzzle antislavery people locally, regardless of their views on politics. To face down this opposition, activists had to muster substantial inner motivation to continue their work. Their conviction that all necessary hands must take up antislavery tools overcame their qualms about the consequences they faced for their unpopular reform activities.
In this era, the lecturers who traveled the Old Northwest were an increasingly diverse lot. African American men remained rare but vocal itinerants there, and African American and white women joined them, still in small numbers, but more often in these years than previously. Their public speeches proved excessively provocative for some communities that rejected their message, even when it came from a relatively more neutral messenger—a white man. Many Old Northwesterners refused with particular vehemence to consider listening to ideas that subverted the social order—much less from people they considered so low within it.
While the personnel may have changed, the patterns of activism in the region did not alter substantially after 1850. Ohio remained the state that antislavery lecturers toured most, with Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois trailing, in that order. Two sources of Ohio and Michigan’s strong itinerant presence were the Western Society and the American Society, which sent lecturing agents—men and women, African American and white—through the states at regular intervals.2 While African American men like Frederick Douglass and C. S. Depp lectured in Illinois in the mid-1850s, lectures by female abolitionists were extremely rare—at least in part since a number of the itinerants were politically affiliated in that state.3 Political antislavery had also become less welcoming of women than it had been earlier with the Liberty Party. Indiana, while still infrequently visited, saw a stronger showing of both African American and white female lecturers, including Abby Kelley Foster in 1850 and Sojourner Truth in 1858 and in 1861, accompanied by Josephine Griffing.4
Abby Kelley Foster was a formidable lecturer who traversed the Old Northwest beginning in the 1840s. This Massachusetts-born activist was raised Quaker, and she had taken up immediate abolition, nonresistance, and racial equality in the mid-1830s. She became an American Society agent and activist in the women’s movement in the following decade. Kelley gained increasing notoriety as she traveled the country, and married the forceful abolitionist orator Stephen Foster in 1845. That year and the next they also toured the Old Northwest to fortify the Ohio American Society against its Liberty challengers, and they helped start the Garrisonian newspaper the Anti-Slavery Bugle.5 Kelley Foster also encouraged other women to become lecturers, including Jane Elizabeth Hitchcock Jones, Sallie Holley, and Josephine Griffing.6 Griffing and Jones also published in the Anti-Slavery Bugle and held offices in the Western Society. Griffing hosted Kelley Foster at her home at Litchfield, Ohio, in 1850, and despite having a one–year-old baby, she agreed to go on the road as an antislavery lecturer.7 Whether they lived in the region or visited from the East, lecturers in the Old Northwest found significant challenges as they continued to organize and speak there, for the region remained substantially hostile to abolition, regardless of who they were.
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With the growing presence of women and African Americans of both genders in their ranks, Old Northwest itinerants found that the identity-based denial of freedom of speech that earlier lecturers had experienced remained widespread. Their cause could become even more unpopular when hostile people learned that the speakers’ identities were outside the white male norm. In some cases, more was at stake in silencing lecturers than the antislavery message the itinerants wished to discuss, for gender and race could provide additional obstructions. In September 1853, lecturer Sallie Holley returned to her alma mater, Oberlin College, while touring Michigan and Ohio. She found her alumna status little help in securing freedom of speech at the college.8 This New York-born woman had attended Oberlin beginning in 1847, and while there took a stand against her fellow students’ racial prejudices. While the school was more racially progressive than most, not all students or faculty there opposed racial bias as strongly as she did. Upon graduating she became an abolitionist lecturer in response to Kelley Foster’s invitation, and gained a lecturing commission from the American Society.9 During Holley’s visit in 1853, the faculty of the college refused to allow her to speak in the Oberlin chapel, claiming that “it was improper and unscriptural for a woman to address a promiscuous [mixed-sex] audience.”10 Antebellum Americans had linked freedom of speech to a woman’s right to speak publicly ever since Angelina Grimké had stepped onto the platform in the early 1830s.11 Religious venues had often used these gender boundaries to silence female speakers.
In Oberlin, Holley’s supporters in the “Ladies’ A. S. Society” and “The Young Ladies’ Literary Societies” then requested a woman-specific lecture. The faculty initially denied permission, for they feared that doing so would give the appearance of supporting women’s rights, but they finally relented. Their stalling left Holley and her friends with little time to publicize the meeting, but she spoke regardless. The college’s goal of keeping the talk a single-sex affair did not hold, for ultimately some local men foiled the faculty’s plan by attending the lecture. As a small parade of men then entered the audience throughout the lecture, the end result was, in fact, a “promiscuous audience!”12 Even at this coeducational institute, lectures by women remained controversial, which made it all the more difficult for them to promote their cause.13
Female lecturers were not alone in facing hefty obstacles to freedom of speech, for in a different case of divisive identity, one particularly notorious abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, found that his reputation barred him from speaking in some places that other abolitionists could access. As a middle-class white man, he held more privileges and access to the public than many female or African American lecturers, but his religious and governmental unorthodoxy rendered him so infamous that some Old Northwest people quite simply outlawed his presence. When he visited Battle Creek, Michigan, in October 1853, local Methodists barred him from their meetinghouse, a site where Sallie Holley had recently held a successful meeting.14 Garrison backed down, seeing no further options in this instance. The Battle Creek Methodists silenced Garrison by refusing him the right to lecture publicly. Holley, though a woman, was a less contentious choice of lecturer. Garrison’s anticlerical, even seditious reputation meant that controversy followed him and likely kept him away from this religious lectern, proving that infamy—on top of their controversial message—could provide substantial barriers to lecturers’ freedom of speech. In Michigan in the 1850s, even less famed speakers had trouble securing the freedom to address the public.
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While Michigan frequently hosted antislavery lectures, community hostility to them remained widespread, and was especially fervent in some towns. In February 1856, following one peaceful meeting in the Pontiac Courthouse, immediatist lecturers Richard Glazier of Ann Arbor and Aaron M. Powell of New York encountered a hostile mob when they attempted to speak a second time.15 Pontiac had a long history of contested meetings, for as early as February 1837, antislavery lecturer and Oberlin professor John P. Cowles had met a mob armed with “stones and snow balls” when he spoke in the local church. The man who led this mob was Nicholas Gantt, the editor of the local Democratic newspaper, the Democratic Balance. The sheriff and his posse had to calm the situation to prevent bloodshed.16 Later, famed eastern lecturer Parker Pillsbury had also had to abandon his 1850 Pontiac meeting after failing to find a speaking venue. This religiously educated New Englander took his first agency with the American Society in 1839. He continued lecturing for decades, and after the Civil War, his was a rare voice in support of women’s suffrage among male antislavery leaders.17
In 1856, Pontiac was still unwelcoming, and local officials locked Glazier and Powell out of the courthouse when the time for their second meeting arrived. They persevered, and relocated to another hall. While they filled it to capacity, locals hardly universally acclaimed them. Glazier, a lecturer for the Michigan State Society, found that when he spoke, loud voices interrupted him. More traumatically, a group of youths took a violent approach and flung beans and corn at the speakers, which Glazier called being “treated to a rather crude dish of succotash.” Glazier saw partisan motivations behind the trouble they faced, for he believed that their foes supported the Democrats.18
A successive attack on the two visiting lecturers compelled Pontiac’s antislavery women to take up stations as bodyguards, as women had done previously in the region to defend antislavery people’s rights. Pontiac remained tense as the lecturers stayed in town and frustrated local efforts to silence them. When Glazier spoke the following day, this led to threats of violence against Mr. Drake, the hall’s owner. Someone anonymously wrote Drake that if he permitted the abolitionists to use his hall again, he and the building might be attacked; he would risk both “the property” and “his head.” Even so, the meeting proceeded without disturbance. When they left that evening, the speakers had a most interesting safeguard: a phalanx of “very kind and firm lady friends” accompanied Glazier and Powell home. They gave the men, Glazier said, “protection from insult, perhaps injury,” from agitated town residents who resented their reform efforts. Here, as elsewhere in the Old Northwest, women served as defensive corps against violence in threatening situations and when authorities failed to come to itinerants’ aid.19 This Pontiac incident was not, as Merton L. Dillon has suggested, an example of women rescuing men “ignominiously,” but rather exemplifies how abolitionists of both sexes were creative in securing their rights—and strategically used their foes’ unwillingness to attack women to their advantage.20 The tumult at Pontiac in 1856 shows the extent of community resistance to activists’ rights to publicly speak and share their message—and their own determination to exercise those same rights.
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Antislavery itinerants in the Old Northwest attracted substantial opposition for their ideas and identities in the 1850s, but they found their antagonists also increasingly curbed activists’ freedom of speech because anti-abolitionists feared lectures’ effects on partisan politics. This had been the case to a degree since the 1830s, but Democrats and others more and more attacked this right as political abolition became stronger, and especially after the Republican Party formed. It organized in 1854 and began to present a viable political threat by 1856. In the Old Northwest, the introduction of the antislavery platform into mainstream politics with this new party’s growth hardly stifled anti-abolitionists’ impulse to egg and maim. These hostile acts even extended to abolitionists who eschewed politics.
Whether or not their own tactics were overtly political, antislavery lecturers confronted fierce partisan opposition from Old Northwest Democrats. A partisan mob attacked lecturer C. S. Depp in Monmouth, an Illinois Democratic stronghold, in 1856. When Depp had arrived that March, he found bellicose throngs who flung eggs at him to force his silence. Born a slave in Virginia, Depp obtained his freedom at the age of twenty-one, and by 1856 he was a professional lecturer with at least ten years of experience.21 Depp spoke in the Baptist Church his first night in town without disturbance, but this peace did not last. The following night when he convened another well-attended meeting, people began to throw eggs and “other missiles” at him. One of them struck him in the mouth, wounding him severely enough to end the lecture. When the editor of the local Republican paper, C. K. Smith of the Monmouth Atlas, wrote of the incident, he identified Depp’s assailants as “the Pierce Party,” meaning the Democrats. Some Monmouth Democrats saw Depp’s antislavery lecture as an indubitably partisan gesture. They thus claimed that they had to attack his freedom of speech to defend their political interests, but whether Depp had such intentions for his speech is unclear.22
Depp, among other abolitionists, found that these muzzling efforts intensified with the growth of political abolitionism, for he had held a successful meeting in Monmouth the previous year. Smith saw the attack on Depp as proof that local “mobocracy” had escalated with the expansion of partisan tensions.23 While political abolitionists had over time increased the prevalence of antislavery ideas in public discussion, this did not render abolitionists or their ideas safe, and in fact the reverse could be true.
Old Northwest allies of antislavery lecturers couched their objections to the assault on Depp in universal rights language. The Atlas editor bluntly contrasted these rights claims with extralegal violence: “The question now is—shall freedom of speech be tolerated in Monmouth, or shall mob law rule?” While this editor feared what he saw as escalating infringement on town freedoms, local government did enforce some consequences for the attack, as officials arrested two young men who had recently arrived in the area for mob participation. This was an unusual outcome, for anti-abolitionists rarely faced consequences for such attacks, and even less frequently for pursuing an African American. As he assessed this attack on Depp, Smith drew similar conclusions to others sympathetic to abolitionist lecturers—including that resisting the slave power was vital. He cited the need to protect “free discussion” and said that citizens of “free” states would not permit such limitations as these, so like those slave states imposed on their citizens.24 These questions of partisanship and identity haunted other lecturers in the Old Northwest, and interfered with female abolitionists’ freedoms in the Old Northwest at least as much as they did male ones’.
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As Holley had seen, women who lectured against slavery faced distinctive free speech challenges that stemmed from the contemporary ideology of domesticity—including the view that they had no rightful place speaking in public. In many cases, notions of gender informed their opponents’ reception of their lectures. African American women speakers, in this region with its “Black Laws” and the associated pervasive racial bias, confronted both increasing challenges and occasional opportunities to convert audiences from hostile to open viewpoints. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, an eloquent free-born African American writer and speaker, experienced both of these extremes in the Old Northwest. She briefly resided in Ohio in the early 1850s, but soon returned east, where she became an antislavery lecturer. By 1857 she was lecturing as far west as Michigan and Ohio, where she married a local African American man, Fenton Harper, in 1861. Their marriage was brief since he only lived for four more years.25 She remained a vibrant activist, one much-admired by her peers. Harper’s fellow African American abolitionist, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, deemed her 1857 and 1858 Old Northwest tour wildly successful, arguing that both “the whites & colored people here are just going crazy with excitement about her.” Cary, herself a lecturer, teacher, journalist, and lawyer, yielded the platform to what she deemed Harper’s superior speaking talents, for “there would just be no chance of favorable comparison.’”26 However, Cary herself also spoke across the Old Northwest and Upper Canada in the late 1850s. While her main focus was raising awareness of the emigrationist cause and funds for the Provincial Freeman, as an African American woman she, too, had to fight for a public platform. She consistently claimed a prominent role with her newspaper, activism in conventions, speaking tours, and work for women’s suffrage.27 Harper and Cary were lifelong and pioneering activists, and they shared their activist struggles in the Old Northwest with another, ever-quotable contemporary, Sojourner Truth.
In 1858, former slave and famed lecturer Truth undertook a solo tour of northern Indiana, where she met a reception tainted with partisanship, sectionalism, racism, and sexism. Truth—birth name Isabella Baumfree—was born into slavery in New York State around 1797. After her master illegally kept her in bondage beyond emancipation in 1827 in that state, she fled in 1829 to New York City and freedom. After a religious conversion, she renamed herself and became a traveling preacher across the East and the Old Northwest. She made extensive ties with other abolitionists across racial lines, and beginning in 1851, spent two years lecturing in Ohio, frequently working with Marius R. Robinson, before moving to Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1856.28
The reaction Truth found when she spoke in Silver Lake, Indiana, in September 1858 exemplified how identity and the political climate very much influenced attacks on abolitionists’ freedom of speech. Her local foes had claimed prior to her arrival that she was actually a man in women’s clothing who secretly worked for the Republican Party. They did not suggest that she might be a woman and a Republican—and she in fact was a Garrisonian who did not identify with the Republicans until 1861. The accusation of manhood is ironic when considered in the light of her famed 1851 speech at the Akron Woman’s Rights Convention where Frances Dana Gage claimed ten years later that she asked rhetorically, “Ar’n’t I a Woman?” Scholars agree that in that speech Truth herself troubled gender categories, but did so to promote women’s rights and to question the racial and class limits of the women’s movement.29 In Silver Lake, Truth’s local supporter, William Hayward, attributed this rumor about her sex to local Democrats, whom he called “the border-ruffian Democracy of Indiana.” In his eyes, these southern sympathizers refused to permit antislavery discussion, and thus spread this falsehood about Truth’s alleged manhood to silence her. Her sex and her race became tools for local partisans who aimed to quell her right to speak openly.
Disregarding the rumors, Truth still held her meeting in the United Brethren meetinghouse, and it was well attended by Democrats, anti-abolitionists, and Truth’s allies. There, a Democrat named Dr. T. W. Strain interrupted Truth and boldly demanded that she prove she was a woman by showing her breast to the ladies present.30 Despite the uproar that ensued, Truth complied. She dramatically bared her breast to all, boasting to her detractors that her body had nourished numerous white babies whose “manhood” now exceeded that of her hecklers.31 With her adroit word choice and actions, Truth directly questioned her critics’ masculinity, and denigrated them.
With her deft reply, Truth refused to permit her foes to shame or silence her. Historian Nell Irvin Painter links the Indianans’ refusal to accept Truth’s sex to a common discrediting tactic of denying the womanhood of other African American speakers, including Harper. This was not just about gender, for Truth’s antagonists claimed she lacked “authenticity,” as critics had claimed of other African American public figures, including men like Frederick Douglass on his early speaking tours.”32 As they tried to paint her as unnatural, Truth’s detractors claimed she represented improper womanhood. This assertion could be both related to her unusual height and stature, and to her choice to speak publicly. Silver Lake’s anti-abolitionists thus critiqued how activists inverted the social order by placing women and African Americans on the rostrum.
This fantastical incident of the audience demanding that a woman publicly expose her body with intention to discredit and humiliate is closely tied to Truth’s identity as a formerly enslaved African American woman. Even her advanced age did not protect her from this attempt to mortify her. Truth had bared her arm to reveal her musculature during her 1851 Akron speech, but Strain nonetheless made what was a shocking demand of a public speaker (much less a female one) in the antebellum era.33 In this strife-filled region, Truth’s opponents attempted to derail her abolitionist lecture by focusing on her alleged partisan masquerade, and on her physical body. This taboo act reveals anti-abolitionists’ ability to dominate public speech in the Old Northwest—and the lack of respect African Americans encountered there. Both were entangled with the region’s extensive racial bias and sexist treatment of female speakers, as the individuals’ behavior showed.
While this attack on Truth’s freedom of speech became quite notorious, her compatriots among African American itinerant women also fought their own skirmishes to secure the verbal freedom needed to fight slavery publicly. In the face of these challenges, their steadfastness—based on message, race, and gender—was itself of great propaganda value. Frances Harper exemplified this with her series of lectures around Sandusky, Ohio, in February 1860. There, “thronged audiences” generally received her very well, but she did find a poor reception in one place, which her fan T. R. Davis blamed on use of alcohol and “contemptible ignorance.” Davis wrote in a review of her speeches that they would both positively affect the political atmosphere and help eradicate racial prejudice, “this unreasonable prejudice against the colored people of the country.”34 This would have been powerful motivation for an African American woman lecturer to take public action, despite the obvious dangers of doing so.
The publicity potential of this opposition remained on Harper’s mind later in the year, for that September, she lectured in Green Plain, Ohio. She wrote that her race prevented her from peacefully traveling on the “Cincinnati and Zanesville road” to the Western Society’s 1860 annual meeting. There, she encountered hostile people who “insulted” her. Her experience shows that African Americans who lived and lectured in the Old Northwest hardly needed reminding of the problems that slavery and the “Black Laws” created. Nonetheless, touring speakers—including Harper—addressed these problems. She saw lecturing to African Americans as part of an uplifting enterprise, for in her view “elevating them” by instructing them on “build[ing] up a character” was part of the antislavery mission. She claimed so-called African American “inferiority” was at the root of discrimination, “social ostracisms and political proscription.” Thus as a middle-class woman, she wanted to mold Old Northwest African American communities in her own image, to help demonstrate their capabilities.35 In her view, whites like Jane Elizabeth Jones shared this responsibility, so she asked Jones and her fellow lecturers—Pillsbury and Abby Kelley Foster—to go visit Ohio African American towns and engage with their communities. African Americans in Ohio and Indiana had established several dozen independent agricultural communities as early as 1808, and this continued throughout the antebellum era. By the 1840s, they were pockets of self-sufficient prosperity.36 Still, Harper showed some class bias in her belief that these towns’ residents could be improved further, as she sought to have lecturers exert a positive effect on African Americans by being with them and uplifting them. To her, such an outcome would have made the risks of the road worthwhile.
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Beyond the longstanding danger and violence that Harper and her compatriots risked encountering, by 1860 the larger partisan climate also created even more freedom-of-speech problems for antislavery itinerants. Even as political antislavery peoples’ stars had risen in the 1850s, their tactic was not the only option in the Old Northwest. Indeed, immediate abolitionists—including Truth, Marius R. Robinson, and Griffing—had maintained separate lecture circuits throughout the decade and beyond.37
The Western and American Societies sent lecturers to the Old Northwest even after the Civil War began. Before then, itinerant agents of the “radical abolitionist” Western Society, including Benjamin S. Jones and Charles and Josephine S. Griffing, continued to lecture in Michigan throughout the early 1850s.38 In 1856 the American Society attempted to replicate its 1843 “One Hundred Conventions” tour across the East and Old Northwest. The lecturers who took part included both easterners like Stephen S. Foster and Aaron Powell and locals like Michigan’s experienced Massachusetts-born lecturer Giles Stebbins and Ohio’s Marius Robinson.39 In 1857, Jane Elizabeth and Benjamin Jones joined in, along with Abraham Brooke.40 Even in 1858, famed eastern lecturers like Parker Pillsbury, Abby Kelley Foster, Foster, William Lloyd Garrison, and Charles C. Burleigh came to Ohio to lecture for the Western Society, and Kelley Foster and Pillsbury returned in 1860 and 1861.41
These immediatist lecturers saw their work as unfinished, and even believed that political antislavery, as Robinson wrote of the Republicans in February 1860, might interfere with their work for the cause. In that year’s election, Lincoln had his successful presidential candidacy, and thus an antislavery party rose to national office. The Republican Party’s success failed to convince immediatists that their work was superfluous, for they saw the party’s moderate policies as too gradualist to aid slaves.42 They thus lectured and publicized their agenda repeatedly in the Old Northwest, and witnessed persistent challenges to public organizing as they wrestled with local people for their freedom of speech in a tense sectional and partisan climate.
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The connection between antislavery free speech and partisan politics arose in 1861 during two particularly tumultuous days of abolitionist meetings at Ann Arbor, Michigan. From the beginning of that fractious year, abolitionists faced massive opposition as advocates of their unpopular yet increasingly inescapable cause. Despite the tension, Josephine Griffing, Parker Pillsbury, and Giles Stebbins spoke at the annual convention of the Michigan State Anti-Slavery Society on January 27 and 28. This incident, along with others in the region in 1861, reveals that anti-abolitionist mobbing cannot have been a mere product of initial organizing efforts in the 1830s, for people met the antislavery message with violence even after decades of public agitation, and even when the fight against slavery had moved from the fringes to the center of politics.43
Overt threats circulated throughout the growing college town in the days leading up to the meeting. These drove away allies, and the lecturers had to search extensively for a meeting hall before they found one. This was in keeping with Ann Arbor’s mixed history of allowing abolitionists meeting space.44 Mr. Rogers, owner of the hall where they had planned to convene, learned of these risks in advance, but waited until the day of the meeting to revoke their permission to use his space. He said he favored “free discussion,” but feared that the city authorities would afford him no “protection” from damage to his property. After Mayor Barry also refused the use of the courthouse, the abolitionist group turned to the Free Church of the Friends of Human Progress, a radical Friends organization that advocated nonresistance, women’s suffrage, and abolition.45 Some of their local members, including Catherine A. F. Stebbins, took part in and wrote about the gatherings.46
On the first evening of scheduled meetings, the lecturers’ freedom of speech battle began. A throng of “drunken ‘roughs’” filled the church and kept up a steady partisan roar as the itinerants attempted to speak.47 Griffing persevered, as her touring companion and Catherine’s husband Giles remembered in his 1890 memoir: “I can see her on that plain, low platform, with only a little space around her vacant, and she, fearless, erect, radiant, speaking clear tones that conquered wrath and even won a hearing part of the time.”48 In her speech, Griffing used the strongest possible terms to defend abolitionists’ right to appear and speak. She cited the “necessity of our guarding free speech and our own personal rights here at the North.”49 With this call for fortitude, Griffing demanded that they face the immediate turmoil of their Ann Arbor meeting by confronting their opponents head-on.
The meeting’s leaders and attendees soon found local resistance insurmountable and dangerous, for the crowd’s deeds did not end with noise. This mob, “one of the fiercest” that ever confronted the much-mobbed Pillsbury, assaulted the abolitionists and their assembled audience. Pillsbury’s florid language vividly depicts this attack by a “most ferocious and savage throng, composed of collegians, clerks, drunken Irish boys, lawyers, and plug-uglies . . . all mingled in a disgusting, irresponsible mass, sweeping all before it.” As they escalated from words to violence, the anti-abolitionists damaged the hall severely, tearing up the benches as they vented their fury. Local activist Richard Glazier suffered kicks and blows to the face, as did other attendees.50 The meeting organizers saw the danger they faced, and declared the assembly over. After they departed, the anti-abolitionists destroyed the windows, tore up the desk, and pulled the stovepipe out of the wall.51 These speakers and listeners represented many of the most radical views of their era—and their communities refused to allow them to freely voice these views. While the violent attack on Pillsbury may have influenced his account of these riot, the assailants’ violent determination and actions do indicate that they were angry, in all probability due to both the tense political times and the activists themselves.
The abolitionists could not rely on local law enforcement to protect them, for the “city authorities” took little action on their behalf. Pillsbury deemed the attack “worthy of Boston”—a city rife with anti-abolition violence since 1834—in its ferocity.52 While Mayor Barry had promised “protection” to locals Giles Stebbins and Glazier, he was conspicuously absent from the meeting, having excused himself to attend a concert. Other officers did come but offered the abolitionists no help.53
The anti-abolitionist attack did not extinguish local reform fire, for the trio of itinerant lecturers and the local activists continued their efforts. The following day, they made rudimentary repairs to the hall, enough to permit them to hold their second day of scheduled meetings. They cleaned up, swept away the broken pieces of wood and glass, and reassembled the stove. The hall again became “well filled” with antislavery people.54 They proceeded with the annual meeting’s business, including choosing their officers. While they endured continual interruptions, Pillsbury, Griffing, and Giles Stebbins all obtained a hearing.55
As Griffing had the previous day, the attendees directly linked the attack to the rights to freedom of speech that they claimed, and to partisan politics. Catherine Stebbins declared that they found common ground in the face of these trials: “We were all united in one thing, at least—viz., free expression of opinion.”56 As a longtime reformer who had signed the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, Stebbins had a history of interest in broad social change. She had a clear commitment to outspoken activism, and to the liberty of expression necessary to do it.57 When Giles Stebbins spoke, he blamed the local Democratic newspaper, the Michigan Argus, for inciting community hostility. He, too, argued that the mob represented “determination to crush free speech.” Several other Michigan abolitionists, including Richard Glazier, also spoke at the meeting. Glazier asserted that the mayor and other prominent citizens should have stopped the mob and protected their rights.58
In the resolutions the Michigan State Society offered that day, they wholeheartedly presented the attack on the meeting as a free speech issue. Indeed, they saw this as a critical moment, an “hour of peril to the cause of free institutions in this young and hitherto promising nation.” Their urgent task was to protect and use their “divinely given and most inalienable rights,” regardless of the risk to their “reputation, property, or life.” Only thus could they ensure individual and collective liberty. At this meeting, as did people elsewhere in the region, the Michigan Society drew upon language that linked their struggle to larger battles the nation faced. Rather than citing existing legal precedent, these abolitionists, as did those Michael Kent Curtis observed in his study of free speech, instead used as their resource and justification a broader claim to universal, natural rights, the “God-given rights that state and federal constitutions secured but did not create.”59 The people of the Michigan Society claimed their right to free expression in the face of continual community resistance, and in the process expanded the conversation about this protection—and their willingness to take risks to secure it.
Indeed, the anti-abolitionists remained an outspoken presence at the meeting, and they focused their greatest hostility on Pillsbury. When he spoke for a second time that afternoon he faced “noisy demonstrations,” but he persevered. In his speech, he invoked the sacred nature of freedom of expression, which he argued lay at “the very foundation of free institutions,” and claimed in gendered terms they must defend it. Pillsbury cited both mobs in the ancient world and contemporary ones to demonstrate that activists must “resist manfully” when attacked, to prevent their enemies from dominating them.60 In a letter he wrote five days later, Pillsbury slyly mocked the mob’s inability to stop their assembling, alluding to the abolitionists’ strength by comparing their Michigan trials to well-known experiences in the East: “An occasional riot, like that at Ann Arbor, [can] relieve the monotony, clear the atmosphere, and remind us of New York State and Boston.”61 With his tone, Pillsbury depicted their opponents’ impact as minimal. As he discussed mobs as a familiar, even a comforting presence, he deflated their capacity to undermine the antislavery mission, and affirmed for others the potential power of reform. Pillsbury thus inferred that he and his allies were in the right in standing up for themselves.
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The fracas at Ann Arbor shows how community views on activists grew even more divided, as did their nation. Eight days after the itinerants had left town, Catherine Stebbins assessed the conflict and placed it in the town’s larger context. In a letter to the Liberator, she voiced her surprise that such depravity could be found in Ann Arbor, given that the college was the “educational center of Michigan.” Contradictorily, she also admitted that local activists had expected trouble. Prior to the arrival of the travelers, people ranging from northern and southern university students to local “merchants and business men” had issued warnings that “the meeting ought not to be held.” They claimed that the Mayor should intervene and stop it since at that moment, the nation faced “such an hour of peril and excitement.” This presumably alluded to the tense partisan moment and the very real threat of impending war.62 Stirring up sectional issues was a risk some town residents were unwilling to take. The flare-up at Ann Arbor exemplified the larger disputes in the region over the wisdom of discussing abolition and race, issues likely to incite substantial debate. As the sectional conflict deepened, the heated Old Northwest abolition fights gained increasing relevance to national politics, and an ever more divisive tone.
The strain on Ann Arbor’s abolitionists carried on after the itinerants departed. When Catherine and Giles Stebbins attended a concert the weekend following the contentious meetings, their antagonists recognized them and greeted their arrival with “a shower of hisses.” When the mayor subsequently entered, the same men had nothing but cheers and jubilation for him. Catherine Stebbins insinuated that, in her view, Mayor Barry drew his popularity from the low sort of people rather than respectable ones, thus providing further evidence of his culpability, even his complicity, with the previous week’s mob.63 If nothing else, this account shows that the Stebbins’s neighbors saw them as responsible for inciting the riotous events by supporting and participating in the antislavery meeting and affiliating with radical causes. As the Fussells and others had found in previous decades, local activists absorbed the ongoing community shocks after itinerants had continued on their way. The travelers’ path, too, remained rough, because others in the state shared Ann Arborites’ frosty welcome for antislavery lecturers.
Michigan tested the mettle of the recently mobbed trio of speakers, for anti-abolitionism followed them elsewhere. From Ann Arbor, Griffing, Pillsbury, and Giles Stebbins traveled on to Detroit, and then to Northville. In both places they faced mob threats, but remained resilient and agitated for “freedom of speech” and against slavery.64 At their Farmington, Michigan, meeting shortly thereafter, an anonymous enemy lit a match wrapped in cayenne pepper and other noxious substances in an attempt to prevent their assembly. Even this did not drive them out of their meeting, for Griffing noted that they held their ground with resolve; they opened the windows and coughed their way through the proceedings. This was the end of their tour as a group: Pillsbury did one last lecture in Plymouth, Michigan, before returning east; Stebbins traveled home; and Griffing journeyed on. These lecturers kept to their planned series of speeches, indicating that they refused to allow community opposition to quell their fervor for reform.
As Griffing prepared for the next phase in her tour, she reflected on the rapid escalation of both mobbing and muzzling of abolitionists in Michigan. She saw this as proof that the nation’s regions all shared in the era’s rising political tension. At that moment of transition, when war appeared ever more likely, Griffing wrote from Plymouth to the Liberator that over the previous two weeks, she and her fellow lecturers had faced increasing physical danger, thanks to their foes and their powerful allies. She saw “the mob” as determined to overthrow orderly society and place slaveholder’s priorities at the pinnacle of government. She found that abolition’s opponents surrounded them, and whether North or South, all were deeply enmeshed with the “corrupt” political and religious structures.65 Over the ensuing four months, Griffing faced further evidence of this broad-based anti-abolition challenge to lecturers’ freedom of speech in the Old Northwest.
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As the war began in 1861, silencing discussion of antislavery issues and politics proved increasingly difficult, but people still tried. The political and reform climate of the Old Northwest grew ever more polarized, as it did with the rest of the nation, following South Carolina’s secession in December 1860. In 1861, to take one example, many ministers still discouraged mention of it from their pulpits, but congregations in places like Bourbon, Indiana, nonetheless pushed the issue. There, at least one church voted to amend the constitution to abolish slavery. The controversy raged on, as Josephine Griffing soon found in churches and on secular lecture platforms.
When Griffing toured northern Indiana in February and March of 1861, churches in Plymouth and Franklin denied her permission to speak. Prior to Griffing’s arrival in Plymouth, the Methodist church had already hosted a partisan dispute when the minister had requested a prayer for President Lincoln. In response, the Democrats in the congregation had threatened to leave the church en masse. Having quelled that uprising, the minister told Griffing he was reluctant to court further “disturbance” and partisan splits with a speech like hers. The Franklin minister not only denied Griffing access to his church, but aired his own racial beliefs as he claimed he “would take up arms sooner than abolish slavery, and allow the ‘niggers’ to come to Indiana.” He thus linked her antislavery message with his greatest fear that abolition would lead to an African American invasion of Indiana. In Franklin, Griffing instead obtained a large schoolhouse for a speaking location, and filled it with an attentive audience.66 She saw that these tensions had only worsened with the beginning of the war.
In June 1861, Griffing and Sojourner Truth lectured across northern Indiana, and the turmoil that they left in their wake exposed the links among racial prejudice, the Indiana “Black Laws,” free speech, partisan politics, and mob action. While Truth had faced disruptions and interruptions to her 1858 Indiana meetings, she had toured in the Old Northwest for 25 years without encountering the extreme degree of persecution that she found in 1861 in Angola. This town, the capital of Steuben County, lies in the northeast corner of Indiana, the area where Griffing then lived. At this time a resident of Battle Creek, Michigan, Truth had visited and spoken in Steuben County four years previously “without opposition.” Times had changed, for the Civil War had begun in April, and this only amplified the political disputes in Angola, a “Copperhead” stronghold with a large resident population of those Democrats who opposed the war and African American rights, and blamed abolitionists for the conflict with the South. Truth’s subsequent attempt to travel and speak with Griffing reveals how anti-abolition Indianans used any means they could, including the “Black Laws” that restricted movement of African Americans into their state, to silence itinerants who advocated controversial positions in their divided region.
While on tour in Indiana, Truth publicly supported the Union war effort in her lectures, which was risky given the anti-war Democrats’ strength there. Truth, as a Garrisonian, had eschewed politics until the Civil War, when she became a Union advocate—and thus an implicit supporter of the Republican Party—and argued for African American men’s right to take up arms.67 After hearing of her support, the Home Guard, a local pro-Union group, invited Truth to address a meeting at the Angola courthouse. Truth’s friends in the area, the Unionist “ladies,” had dressed her up in the colors and patterns of the stars and stripes. This martial style made Truth nervous; it frightened her to appear as if she were “going into battle.” She rode to the courthouse in a carriage full of the men of the Home Guard, armed to protect her from arrest under the “Black Laws.”68 She knew well that speaking for the Union in Angola was a hazardous act—especially for an African American woman.
Truth was unable to deliver her speech in peace. She was in the very act of proclaiming her enthusiasm for the Union cause and demanding a military role for African American men when a loud, angry throng rushed into the building and drowned out her voice. These men menaced her with various assaults, which Griffing enumerated as “tar and feathers, eggs, rails, shooting, and a general blowing up,” and closed down the meeting. This decisive push to silence her sent a clear message that Angola neither welcomed Truth nor her views.
Beyond the physical threats aimed at forcing Truth to leave Indiana, Angola’s anti-abolitionists applied government pressure. The courthouse walls rang with legal actions against Truth for ten days. First they arrested her for being African American; then charged her with being a “mulatto”; and finally arrested her for coming to, then tarrying in, the state. Intending to silence her abolition and pro-Union views, the anti-abolitionists charged Truth with violating the “Black Laws” statute that stated, “No negro or mulatto shall come into, or settle in, or become an inhabitant of the State.” Local anti-abolitionists also invoked the Dred Scott decision as they prosecuted eminent residents for hosting Truth in their homes. Griffing argued that this proved local residents’ outrage at these leading citizens for granting Truth any of “the rights of a human being,” in defiance of the majority position in the Scott decision.69 She saw their adversaries as determined to use all available methods to close off her and Truth’s attempts to speak, writing, “No dog ever hung to a bone as have these hungry hounds to Sojourner, under the cover of law.” Local anti-abolitionists gave clear evidence of their commitment to silencing abhorrent views in their community.
Angola’s anti-abolitionists unrelentingly pursued Truth, with tactics ranging from the legal to the violent. They even served papers to the Steuben County sheriff for allowing Truth to speak in the Angola courthouse, directly attacking the local government representative for granting this unwelcome person access to a public platform. Truth, Griffing, and their allies faced and vanquished all of these attempts.70 After her ten days of persecution, Truth departed Angola without legal consequences. The anti-abolitionists’ claims did not stand up in court, indicating that conviction of a visiting lecturer under the “Black Laws” was not as easy as it was to threaten her, interrupt her speech, delay her in her travels, and harass her for her views and her race. Town residents informed Truth and Griffing that a pile of guns lay in the back of a grocery store, and that a secret league of men planned to use these arms against them. While the anti-abolitionists themselves faced no legal consequences for violating Griffing’s and Truth’s right to speak, in the end the court failed to endorse their charges and Truth was free to depart, but she could not secure free speech in Angola.
This was not an isolated incident, and these events had deep roots in their turbulent context. Griffing tied all of these aggressive acts against Truth to partisanship, race, and temperance. As a resident of the region, she found it evident that the “secessionists”—as she termed them, the “Copperhead” Democrats—created this county’s flaws and Truth’s persecution, and were also deeply involved in what she decried as the region’s extensive (and in her words “accursed”) liquor trade. The conflict was wrapped up with broader debates over reforms that even went beyond politics and antislavery. She referred to all of their opponents as “the old line pro-slavery Democrats,” and blamed what she saw as their disloyalty to the Union for their devotion to the “Black Laws” and their opposition to abolition and its proponents’ free expression.
Freedom of speech and its government protections were at the center of this controversy. Griffing called Truth’s persecutors hypocrites for using legal language and yet not permitting either woman to exercise the verbal liberty that they believed the US Constitution and Indiana state law guaranteed. She wrote that the anti-abolitionists couched their opposition to Truth in terms of “devotion” to these documents, while at the same time flouting their “highest requirements and provisions.” Here, as she and others had done previously, Griffing drew upon the implicit understanding that the First Amendment guaranteed free speech. As she responded to the attack, Griffing linked her and Truth’s struggle to larger national battles and to ideas of universal, natural rights that she believed the authorities should explicitly safeguard. With these words, she participated in a larger conversation about abolitionists’ freedom of speech that had been ongoing in the region since the 1830s.
Griffing and Truth tapped into ideas in their reform culture that Americans’ rights included freedom of speech regardless of race. Rights, race, and politics were all thus inextricable in Angola, as elsewhere in the Old Northwest. Truth, with her usual verbal dexterity, would not allow the cold racism of her foes to pass without comment. She said in the courthouse to her mobbing audience that her presence brought community tensions to the surface, “‘it seems that it takes my black face to bring out your black hearts; so it’s well I came.’”71 Truth’s comment about “black hearts” shows that her antagonists in Angola unveiled their deepest beliefs and prejudices when her presence provoked them. Painter writes that Griffing depicted this conflict as an issue of politics. Juxtaposing Griffing’s commentary with Truth’s retort about their “black hearts,” Painter argues that unlike Truth, Griffing missed the racial dimensions of the situation: “Where Griffing saw politics, Truth saw race.”72 However, Griffing’s response to the attacks on Truth actually shows that while she demonstrably saw politics as relevant to the situation, she presented Truth’s travails in Steuben County as a race-based issue—and thus was well aware of her context. When Griffing argued that the anti-abolitionists’ unwillingness to acknowledge Truth’s humanity both motivated and justified their use of the “Black Laws,” she claimed that the effort to silence this African American woman indeed stemmed from her race. Here, Griffing and Truth revealed their nuanced views of the ideas of race and its significance that were prevalent in Indiana and the nation, a perspective that shows why it is important to consider the Old Northwest and its singular reform climate to understand how people thought about race and rights in 1861.
Comprehension of these events in Angola also requires examining the community factors that enabled the violence. In denouncing the incidents at Steuben and discussing how to resist them, Griffing herself saw flawed manhood as key. She wrote that this county, while “intelligent and loyal,” and thus not wholly anti-Union, nonetheless lacked the “proper authority” to stifle such attempts at oppression. Griffing placed the blame for this lack of backbone on her assessment that for thirty years, mobs had ruled and “thoroughly subjugated” northern men, so that they had “almost lost the identity of manhood,” and they were largely afraid to obtain the “authority” required to face down a mob. They needed to do so to protect citizens’ rights.
Gender mattered to activists like Griffing, for she argued that in the face of these crowds and the repression they instigated, antislavery people—as advocates of freedom, regardless of gender—must exercise masculine strength to redeem the nation. Whether the struggle would take place in military channels or in battles over freedom of speech in a small town, Griffing argued that the conflict was then inevitable. She wrote: “When manhood shall assert itself, as it must and will do, whether on marshalled or unmarshalled battlefields, by President Lincoln or Sojourner Truth, the line will be drawn, speedily and unmistakably, between Liberty and Slavery, Victory and Defeat.”73 Thus Griffing claimed that Truth could also deploy manhood, which complicates abolitionists’ other usages of the term as needed to protect their rights. What were the ingredients of manhood if Truth could exert it too? With these words calling on Truth’s manhood, Griffing betrayed a flexible conception of the gender identities of female abolitionists, including herself. As fighters for racial justice and freedom of speech, Truth and others could enact the masculine power that Griffing demanded. The contemporary reform vocabulary may have lacked a term for the female equivalent of the force the term “manhood” implied, the dominance that Old Northwest abolitionists knew was vital to their freedom of expression.
The courtroom battles themselves represented the struggle between silence and liberty of expression. The right to speak, with freedom on its side, confronted ruling slavery, which, Griffing wrote, “made a conquest in this country by the suppression of free speech.” Presenting the conflict, “the battle of Sojourner,” in these lofty terms allowed these two determined lecturers to reap the publicity benefits of notoriety, despite the fact that they ultimately failed to secure free speech in Angola. The previous fall, antislavery organizers could not safely hold a meeting in the Steuben county seat, but Griffing claimed the uproar over Truth’s mobbing had roused “a hundred” local men who would act in their defense. She noted the “most influential and noble-hearted women” whose attendance in the courtroom showed Truth and Griffing the strength of local support for their freedom of speech. She called this valiance “manhood,” and credited her and Truth’s “persistent agitation” of what she termed the “negro” question with inspiring it. In the previous two weeks, they had aroused a new and spirited fighting force, one willing to defend physically the right of all people to speak freely.
As a result, in Angola, Indiana, and the surrounding area, Griffing proclaimed that this conflict had brought her and Truth great results for their past month of work. While “very small majorities” closed nearby churches to them in the ensuing weeks, nevertheless the two women had held successful meetings outside. Under these tense circumstances, their gatherings drew masses of brave young men and a diverse array of other people, from ancient military veterans to nursing mothers. Their message appealed to many in this moment as the war began, when the nation’s future was far from evident. Griffing saw this town and this region as vital spaces to work toward freedom of expression and to open all places to “discussion.”74
While this Indiana conflict was short-lived, nonetheless Griffing saw ahead for herself a continued life of activist conflict. She linked her and Truth’s efforts to broader struggles, for still to come was the remainder of “this war of the negro,” to be followed by a fight for the “rights of woman.” In this incident of Indiana race and speech oppression, Griffing connected the local battles—to win herself and her friend the right to speak—to the larger Civil War, and to the future struggles for complete freedom for African Americans and all women. Griffing declared that only following these victories and only upon her death, would she cease her activism and be still, only when she reached “the quiet of the grave.”75 These freedom-of-speech skirmishes were part and parcel of the struggle to reform the Old Northwest. They reveal that there, activists found freedom of expression an essential component of their local fight—and that both they and their opponents knew that organizing in the region depended on it. Out of this understanding reformers developed legal and extralegal, formal and informal methods to push their agendas.
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As they worked to gather allies through touring and lecturing, itinerants unified antislavery people from across the spectrum of beliefs, and they reached audiences that ranged from inspired to infuriated. Traveling lecturers created a unique local reform culture by traversing the Old Northwest, and the immense effort that they put into transforming the parameters of public speech in the region affirms the great importance contemporaries ascribed to this place. Itinerant speakers faced down substantial risks, and their public activism spread the antislavery and anti-prejudice message across the Old Northwest.
As Sojourner Truth saw and personally experienced, activists in the region found for decades that their struggle to secure public speech in the face of violence was closely tied to the fight against the “Black Laws.” This legislation impeded both their activism and African American rights. Old Northwest reformers’ battles to meet and freely express their views were but part of their overall activist agenda. Indeed, they simultaneously also actively opposed racial prejudice through organizing against it, and thus aimed to create their ideal America. Their antislavery beliefs required direct action, and they came with the conviction that reformers had to eradicate the ills they saw around them.76 As Old Northwest activists fought racially biased laws, they sought to realize their human rights vision. Their labor against the “Black Laws” reveals how they implemented their practical commitment to changing their society. With their rhetoric and strategies, Old Northwest activists thus overtly dissented from their racist culture, despite intense opposition. In the heartland of northern anti-abolition and racism, their claim for equal rights for African Americans directly attacked the support structures of slavery and prejudice.