Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates

Abstract

Women claimed their right to petition Congress on national issues long before they won the right to vote. They first petitioned elected representatives only on personal or local matters, but in 1830, women petitioned Congress against Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act and continued thereafter to petition Congress on other national issues, especially against slavery. Catharine Beecher organized the 1830 women's petition movement against Indian removal, an effort applauded by some and stridently condemned by others. In The Removal of the Cherokee Indians from Georgia (1907), Georgia representative and removal proponent Wilson Lumpkin castigated antiremovalists such as Beecher as “Northern fanatics” who had “gotten up thousands of petitions, signed by more than a million, of men, women, and children” (p. 47). Since piles of petitions sent to Congress were destroyed and even reportedly burned for fuel, we are left with estimates such as Lumpkin's to help us gauge early petition campaigns—and he may have exaggerated to emphasize the opposition he faced in his removal efforts.