Moral Champions and Public Pathfinders: Antebellum Quaker Women in Eastcentral Indiana

Abstract

Moral Champions and Public Pathfinders: Antebellum Quaker Women in Eastcentral Indiana Peggy Brase Seigel* For twenty years before the outbreak of the Civil War, women from Quaker communities in Eastcentral Indiana championed social and political reforms, much like reform-minded women throughout northern states. In the 1840s women primarily concentrated in Wayne, Henry, Union, and Randolph counties joined the widening crusade against slavery. Organizing and participating in a broad range of antislavery organizations, these Indiana women were often as outspoken as their better-known sisters. During the 1850s women from the same areas led a state women's rights organization that brought women together each year to discuss women's inferior status and to arouse women to action. Their pre-Civil War efforts culminated in January 1859 when three of their leaders became the first women to present a women's rights petition to the Indiana General Assembly. Despite their attempts to change public opinion, to improve the condition of Black Americans, and to forge new directions for women of their day, however, these pioneer reformers have received little attention from historians. The connections between Eastern antislavery and women's rights reformers have long been established. Feminist historians including Blanche Glassman Hersh, Lori D. Ginzburg, and Nancy A. Hewitt explain this progression as a two-part process. In the 1830s Eastern women first became involved in public reform activities as a result of a growing religious fervor and newly realized leisure that encouraged women to work against the social evils of their day—slavery, intemperance , prostitution. Secondly, experiences as female reformers during the next decade inevitably led women into role conflicts with men and made women conscious of their own enslavement because of their sex. Many of these same women, in turn, sought to improve women's condition by organizing women's rights organizations in the 1850s and increasingly called for the power to vote (Hersh 7, 30, 3334 ; Ginzburg; Hewitt 27-28). Such patterns of feminist evolution, if applied to Indiana's antebellum women reformers, can be useful as preliminary schemes, but do not take into account either Indiana's isolation from Eastern reformers or Eastcentral Indiana's strong Quaker agrarian subculture. 88Quaker History Antislavery Reform in Indiana Although female antislavery societies were primarily concentrated in the East in the 1830s, organized antislavery work also began in isolated areas in Ohio and Michigan settled by evangelical protestants. Soon after the formation of the American Anti-Slavery Society and female antislavery societies in Philadelphia and Boston in 1833, women in Leanawee County in Southwestern Michigan organized an antislavery society under the leadership of two young Quaker women, Elizabeth Chandler, a native of Philadelphia, and Laura Haviland, a pioneer settler from Western New York. From her frontier home, Elizabeth Chandler wrote for two national antislavery newspapers, Benjamin Lundy's Genius of Universal Liberty and William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, and thus became a link between national reform movements and the Michigan frontier. In 1835 Betsey Mix Cowles, a school teacher and daughter of a Connecticut-born Congregational minister, organized the Ashtabula County Female Anti-Slavery Society in the Ohio Western Reserve. Aside from reform newspapers that reached the state, however, Indiana remained bypassed by the influences of Eastern antislavery reformers until the end of the 183Os. Evangelical preachers of the Great Revival led by Charles Finney in Western New York as well as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society trained by Theodore Weld to conquer the West are not on record as having come into the state. Only towards the end of the 1830s did formal antislavery organizations come into being with the formation of small local societies at Hanover College and in Dearborn County and the Indiana Anti-Slavery Society in Milton, Wayne County, in September 1838. The following year brought Arnold Buffum, a Quaker from Providence, Rhode Island, a leading lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society and thus the first reformer of national stature to reach the state. Simultaneously, men and women in Jefferson County organized the Neel's Creek AntiSlavery Society. In early 1841, eight years after the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society, activities of Indiana antislavery societies became public record with the establishment...