Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (86 page)

If women had a special aptitude for refinement and sociability, then their first obligation was to civilize their children and prepare them for republican citizenship.
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Since women’s world was the home, the home became more significant than it had been earlier—a refuge from the nervous excitement and crass brutality that were increasingly coming to characterize the city and the commercial world in general. Women became responsible for the taste and respectability of the family and at the same time became the special purveyors of culture and the arts. Although women were excluded from participation in America’s political institutions, William Loughton Smith of South Carolina told a female audience in 1796, nature had assigned women “valuable and salutary
rights” that were beyond men’s control. “To delight, to civilize, and to ameliorate mankind . . .
these are the precious rights of woman
.”
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Yet if wives and mothers had an important role in educating their husbands and sons in sociability and virtue, then they needed to be educated themselves. Too often, reformers said, women had been educated “not to their future benefit in life but to the amusement of the male sex.”
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They had been educated in frivolity and fashion; they had been taught to dress, to sew, to play the harpsichord, and to paint their faces, but not to use their minds in any meaningful manner. Republican women, it was hoped, would be different. They would scorn fashion, cosmetics, and vanity and would become socially useful and less susceptible to male flattery. Such republican women could become powerful forces in changing the culture. “Let the ladies of a country be educated properly,” said Benjamin Rush, “and they will not only make and administer its laws, but form its manners and character.”
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Rush prescribed for women reading, writing, bookkeeping, geography, some natural philosophy, and especially the reading of history; this last was to be an antidote to novel-reading, which many reformers assumed was destroying women’s minds. Because “the proper object of female education is to make women rational companions, good wives and good mothers,” they need not be educated for the professions or for participation in the male world. Certainly, they should never be taught philosophy or metaphysics, which might destroy their feminine nature.
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Virtually every American reformer in this period, male and female, endorsed the education of women. In 1796 Massachusetts minister Simeon Doggett expressed astonishment that “one half of the human race have been so basely neglected.” It was undoubtedly the consequence of barbarism that depressed “the delicate female . . . far below the dignity of her rank.” In enlightened America, however, “this trait of barbarity” was rapidly disappearing and women were assuming “their proper rank.”
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American reformers went way beyond their English and European counterparts in urging that women be taught not just to sew, sing, dance, and play musical instruments but to think and reason and understand the world, if not like a man then at least more than they had in the past.
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Consequently, during the two decades following the Revolution scores of academies were founded solely for the advanced instruction of females, a development unmatched in England. Although most of these academies were located in the Northern states, the young women, mostly from well-to-do families, came from all over the country. In addition to the usual ornamental subjects, they were taught grammar, arithmetic, history, and geography. For the first time in American history young women were able to acquire something resembling higher education in a formal and systematic way. Many of the women trained in these academies went on to achieve distinction in the nineteenth century.
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Once the rights of woman were discussed in public, their subversive implications could not always be contained. A writer in a Boston magazine of 1802 calling herself “Miss M. Warner” opened with a conventional listing of women’s so-called rights: to cook for her husband, share in his troubles, and nurse him when he was sick. But then she paused and expressed what she assumed her readers must be feeling. These were not rights; “these are duties. . . . Agreed, they are/ But know ye not that Woman’s proper sphere/ Is the domestic walk? To interfere/ With politics, divinity, or law,/ A much deserv’d ridicule would draw/ on Woman.” Ridicule or not, many began pointing up the injustice involved in excluding “from any share in government one half of those who, considered as equals of the males, are obliged to be subject to laws they have no share in making!”
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Some Americans now even glimpsed the possibility of women becoming full-fledged citizens with the right to vote and hold political office. In 1764 James Otis had broached the issue of the right of women to political participation. But it was the Revolution itself that really raised women’s consciousness. Women brought up in the post-Revolutionary decades had different expectations from their mothers. In her 1793 salutatory address at the Young Ladies Academy of Philadelphia, Priscilla Mason proclaimed the right and the responsibility of women to become orators. Not only were they equal to men in their ability to address political issues on public occasions, they were superior to men, as witnessed by the fact that many women had succeeded despite the best efforts of men to keep them down. “Our high and mighty Lords (thanks to their arbitrary constitutions),” declared Mason, “have denied us the means of knowledge, and then reproached us for the want of it.” This bold young orator
went on to call not just for equal education for women but for their equal participation in the learned professions and political office.
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Although some women in the 1790s began to assert themselves in public in this manner, public performances by women were generally frowned upon. Jefferson thought that if women were permitted to “mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men,” the consequence would be a “depravation of morals.” Even attending lectures with men present created some uneasiness.
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Given this experience and these attitudes, imagine the sensation created in Boston in 1802 by Deborah Sampson Gannett. This forty-two-year-old woman appeared onstage in female clothes to recount her experiences in the Revolutionary War as a disguised Continental Army soldier. Following her lecture, Gannett changed into a military uniform and demonstrated her ability to perform the soldier’s manual exercise of arms.

After her spectacular appearance in Boston, Gannett went on a year’s tour throughout New England and New York, playing mostly to packed houses—the first such lecture tour by an American woman. Yet her lectures, written by her mentor and memoirist Herman Mann, were ambivalent. Her mere presence, of course, awed many spectators, for she was attractive and not at all masculine. At the same time, however, Gannett needed to assure her audience that she was not the threat to the social order that she appeared to be. By 1802 a reaction against the egalitarian sentiments of Mary Wollstonecraft was taking place, and Gannett had to adapt to the new climate of opinion. Even Judith Sargent Murray had written that “we are not desirous to array THE SEX in martial habiliments.”

Gannett admitted that what she had done twenty years earlier in joining the army in disguise was “a breach in decorum of my sex unquestionably,” which “ought to expel me from the enjoyment of society, from the acknowledgement of my own sex.” But then she went on to explain that she had been caught up in a frenzy of patriotism “that could brook no control” and had “burst the tyrant bands which
held my sex in awe
, and clandestinely, or by stealth, grasped an opportunity which custom and the world seemed to deny as natural privilege.” In the end, however, she offset her assertion of freedom and independence for her sex by conceding that the proper role for women was to mold men and to be satisfied with the “dignified title and encomium of MISTRESS AND LADY, in our
kitchens
and in our
parlours
,” and by acknowledging that “the
field
and the
cabinet
are the proper spheres assigned to our MASTERS and our LORDS.” Still, the
fact that she was traveling without male escort and lecturing to large audiences was an inspiring object lesson in female autonomy.
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Since the Revolution had made all Americans conscious of rights, feminists were bound to note that the Revolution had failed to fulfill its promises for women. Some, like the writer Charles Brockden Brown in his novel
Alcuin: A Dialogue
(1798) and the legal commentator St. George Tucker, saw an inconsistency between the Revolution’s rhetoric and American practice. Tucker had to admit that women were taxed without their consent, like “aliens . . . children under the age of discretion, idiots, and lunatics.”
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For a brief period between 1790 and 1807 unmarried property-holding women took advantage of a clause in the New Jersey constitution that granted the franchise to all free inhabitants with property worth fifty pounds. Apparently some women voted for Federalist candidates too often, for critics began complaining that women were too timid and pliant and too dependent on male relatives for direction to exercise the ballot intelligently. In 1807 a Republican-sponsored law limited the franchise to white taxpaying male citizens. Few women in New Jersey seem to have lamented the loss of the vote.

Despite all the talk of women’s rights, most women in this period were not yet eager to vote and participate in politics. The suggestions in the magazines of the day for female political equality were few and far between, and none of the major political leaders ever seriously considered the direct political participation of women in politics. “A woman in politics is like a monkey in a toy shop,” declared the noted lawyer Jeremiah Mason, the Federalist U.S. senator from New Hampshire in 1814. “She can do no good, and may do harm.” President Jefferson abruptly cut off any suggestion that women might be appointed to governmental office: it was “an innovation for which the public is not prepared, nor am I.”
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Although the gaining of political rights for women was never a realistic possibility in this period, there were isolated voices preparing the way for the future.

All this promotion of rights and reforms helped to strengthen the civil society that worked to hold the Republic together. But these particular rights and reforms did not begin to deal with the greatest evil afflicting American society—slavery.

14
Between Slavery and Freedom

The greatest republican reform of the period was the anti-slavery movement. Of course, the Revolution freed only a fraction of the nearly half a million slaves in the colonies in 1776—and many modern historians have called the Revolution’s inability to free all the slaves its greatest failure. But the Revolution did accomplish a great deal: it created for the first time in American history the cultural atmosphere that made African American slavery abhorrent to many Americans.

By attacking slavery more fiercely than ever before, Revolutionary Americans freed tens of thousands of slaves. But the Revolution’s libertarian and egalitarian message had perverse consequences. It forced those Southerners who chose to retain slavery to fall back on the alleged racial deficiencies of blacks as a justification for an institution that hitherto they had taken for granted and had never before needed to justify. The anti-slavery movement that arose out of the Revolution inadvertently produced racism in America.

H
EREDITARY CHATTEL SLAVERY
—one person owning the life and labor of another person and that person’s progeny—is virtually incomprehensible to those living in the West today, even though as many as twenty-seven million people in the world may be presently enslaved.
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In fact, slavery has existed in a variety of cultures for thousands of years, including those of the ancient Greeks and Romans, the medieval Koreans, the Pacific Northwest Indians, and the pre-Columbian Aztecs. The pre-Norman English practiced slavery, as did the Vikings, the many ethnic groups of Africa, and the early Islamic Arabs; indeed, beginning in the 600s Muslims may have transported over the next twelve centuries as many sub-Saharan Africans to various parts of the Islamic world, from Spain to India, as were taken to the Western Hemisphere.
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Yet as ubiquitous as slavery was in the ancient and pre-modern worlds, including the early Islamic world, there was nothing anywhere quite like the African plantation slavery that developed in the Americas. Between 1500 and the mid-nineteenth century some eleven or twelve million slaves were brought from Africa to the Americas. The prosperity of the European colonies in the New World depended upon the labor of these millions of African slaves and their enslaved descendants. Slavery existed everywhere in the Americas, from the villages of French Canada to the sugar plantations of Portuguese Brazil.

Slavery in the New World was never a monolithic institution; it differed both in space and time, and slavery in British North America differed sharply from slavery in the rest of the New World. In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the English mainland colonies imported about two hundred thousand African slaves, a small percentage of the millions who were brought to the Caribbean and South American colonies, where the mortality rates were horrendous. Far fewer slaves died prematurely on the North American mainland. In fact, by the late eighteenth century the slaves in most of the English mainland colonies were reproducing at the same rates as whites, already among the most fertile peoples in the Western world.
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