Notes to Chapter 3 / “Stand Firm on the Platform of Truth”: Freedom of Assembly and Local Antislavery Organizations in the Old Northwest

1. Spencer Diaries, 13 December 1843.

2. Blanchard, Memoir of Rev. Levi Spencer, 97.

3. Spencer Diaries, 13 February 1844.

4. Ibid., 23 June 1846; 2 July 1846.

5. The group of men who crossed the Ohio River for this attack claimed that Rankin’s notorious aid to fugitive slaves provoked them. When they attempted to set the barn and house on fire, one of Rankin’s sons and his nephew defended the home with pistols, and gave chase to their assailants. John Rankin, National Anti-Slavery Standard, December 9, 1841.

6. Spencer Diaries, 12, 13 June 1846.

7. Ibid., 7 April 1847; 31 May 1847.

8. Ibid., 21 October 1848. His reason for thinking this is unclear, given Peoria’s own violent anti-abolition history.

9. Western Citizen, May 30, 1844.

10. Seth Hinshaw, Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, August 3, 1842.

11. Ryan, “Civil Society as Democratic Practice,” 234; Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere.

12. Mary P. Ryan, “Gender and Public Access: Women’s Politics in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. Joan B. Landes, Oxford Readings in Feminism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 199, 203, 217–18.

13. Julia Prat to Susan Smythe, 30 April 1836, Wright–Smythe–Condon–Hosack Family Collection, Manuscript Collection, Ohio Historical Society, Columbus, Ohio; Barnes and Dumond, Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, vol. 1, 298–302.

14. The coeducational policy of this college was unusual but not unprecedented, for Oberlin, founded in 1837, was both coeducational and interracial. Genius of Liberty, July 24, 1841; Western Citizen, September 2, 1842; Muelder, Fighters for Freedom, 1; Julia Blanchard, Blessed Memories: The Life of Mrs. Mary A. Blanchard, by Her Daughter Julia. (Wheaton: 1890), 58.

15. Muelder, Fighters for Freedom, 130, 173; Blanchard, Blessed Memories, 35, 44; Mary H. Porter, Eliza Chappell Porter, a Memoir (Chicago: F.H. Revell Company, 1892), 100–101, 119–21, 162, 170.

16. Untitled essay on Samuel H. Davis, Samuel H. Davis File, Peoria Public Library Collection, Peoria, Illinois, Peoria, Illinois; Muelder, Fighters for Freedom, 174, 175; Samuel H. Davis File, Peoria Public Library, Peoria, Illinois.

17. Ernest E. East, Essay on Samuel H. Davis.

18. Peoria Register and Northwestern Gazetteer, March 10, 1838; December 8, 1838; January 28, 1842.

19. Peoria Register and Northwestern Gazetteer, November 12, 1841; December 24, 1841; April 22, 1842.

20. Western Citizen, September 16, 1842; May 23, 1844; Davis, Scenes of Oppression in the Refined Circles of the South, 5–6, 8.

21. Western Citizen, July 4, 1844; July 11, 1844.

22. Muelder, Fighters for Freedom, 187, 188.

23. Peoria Register and Northwestern Gazetteer, Feb. 10, 1843.

24. Peoria Democratic Press, February 15, 1843 [Emphasis added].

25. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing,” 5.

26. James Taylor, Moses Pettengill, John Reynolds, A. T. Castle, and Theodore Adams, “Freedom of Speech Suppressed,” reprinted in Samuel H. Davis, Free Discussion Suppressed in Peoria (Peoria, IL: Samuel H. Davis, 1843), 3–4.

27. Peoria Democratic Press, February 15, 1843.

28. Muelder, Fighters for Freedom, 146–47, 181.

29. Peoria Democratic Press, February 15, 1843.

30. Charles Ballance, History of Peoria, Illinois (Peoria: N. C. Nason, 1870), 110.

31. Taylor et al, “Freedom of Speech Suppressed,” in Davis, Free Discussion Suppressed in Peoria, 3–4 [Italics in original].

32. William T. Allan, “Letter from Illinois,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, June 29, 1843.

33. Western Citizen, February 23, 1843.

34. Western Citizen, March 23, 1843. [Italics in original].

35. Peoria Register, May 13, 1842.

36. Western Citizen, February 23, 1843.

37. Richards,“Gentlemen of Property and Standing,” 5.

38. Christopher Waldrep, The Many Faces of Judge Lynch: Extralegal Violence and Punishment in America (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 12; Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), 80–81.

39. Gilje, Rioting in America, 1, 4; David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), xii.

40. Christopher Waldrep, Lynching in America: A History in Documents (New York: New York University Press, 2006), xvi.

41. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing,” 3, 76–77, 15. See also Russel B. Nye, who erroneously argues that violent oppression of abolitionists largely ended after 1840. Russel Blaine Nye, Fettered Freedom, 175.

42. C. A. F. S., “Pro-Slavery Mob at Ann Arbor,” Liberator March 1, 1861.

43. I have encountered no study that captures the singular patterns of violence in the Old Northwest.

44. Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War, 13–14, 34, 82.

45. Susan Sessions Rugh, Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest, Midwestern History and Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 21; Davis, Frontier Illinois, 17, 170.

46. Quist, Restless Visionaries, 454.

47. Melish, Disowning Slavery, 201.

48. Nation, At Home in the Hoosier Hills, 2.

49. Western Citizen, April 6, 1843.

50. Western Citizen, August 17, 1843. For other such incidents see the Western Citizen, February 22, 1844; Muelder, Fighters for Freedom, 146–47, 181.

51. Western Citizen, August 17, 1843.

52. Western Citizen, August 17, 1843. [Italics in original.]

53. Western Citizen, August 17, 1843.

54. See chapters 4, 5, and 6 of this book. For examples of this elsewhere in the nation, see Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 51.

55. See also Irene B. Allan. Western Citizen, April 25, 1844; May 2, 1844.

56. Western Citizen, August 15, 1844.

57. Western Citizen, May 2, 1844. See also Western Citizen, August 8, 1844.

58. Laura Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction. (Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 1997), 3, 10; Lori D. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 1, 9, 69, 79, 97; Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Women’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (1988); Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 15; Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 252. A key text in understanding the development of domestic ideology is Nancy Cott’s classic book, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 8.

59. Western Citizen, May 23, 1844.

60. It is also possible that “Maria” was Davis writing under a pseudonym. Western Citizen, May 30, 1844; Michigan Anti-Slavery Society Daybook, vol. 4.

61. Nancy A. Hewitt, “On Their Own Terms: A Historiographical Essay,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 24–25; Nancy A. Hewitt, “The Social Origins of Antislavery Politics in Western New York,” in Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System, ed. Alan M. Kraut (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 205–6, 227; Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 25–26, 54–55.

62. Western Citizen, June 6, 1844; June 20, 1844; August 8, 1844; April 24, 1845; Zebina Eastman, “History of the Antislavery Agitation,” 660.

63. Lewis, “Address to Females,” April 6, 1843.

64. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 63; Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 3; Gerda Lerner, The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 114, 117, 123–25, 127; Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled’: Method and Ideology in Women’s Antislavery Petitioning,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood, 184–87.

65. Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, 2, 6, 48, 50–51. For further discussion of the importance of antislavery petitioning, see also Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 5; Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 65–66; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 18, 82.

66. Daniel Wirls, “‘The Only Mode of Avoiding Everlasting Debate’: The Overlooked Senate Gag Rule for Antislavery Petitions,” Journal of the Early Republic 27, no. 1 (2007): 116, 133.

67. Salerno, Sister Societies, 64–65.

68. Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 186.

69. Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship, 3.

70. Ohio Anti-Slavery Society, Report of the Second Anniversary, 13, 15.

71. “Abolition Movements: Bureau Liberty Convention,” Peoria Register, May 20, 1842.

72. “Proceedings of the Liberty Convention in Knox County, ILL,” Peoria Register, June 17, 1842.

73. Portnoy, Their Right to Speak, 82. For more on this, see Weiner, “Racial Radicals.”

74. Western Citizen, October 15, 1843; April 6, 1843.

75. Muelder, Fighters for Freedom, 182–83.

76. Records of the Henry County Female Anti-Slavery Society.

77. Salerno, Sister Societies, 127.

78. Lydia S. Lewis, “Address to Females,” Western Citizen, April 6, 1843.

79. Garman, “‘Altered Tone of Expression,’” 142, 150–51, 153.

80. Quist, Restless Visionaries, 423–25; Salerno, Sister Societies, 180.

81. Salerno, Sister Societies, 147–49.

82. Ibid., 146–47.