Page 317 - American Stories, A History of the United States

But in another sense the crusade was successful. It made the public conscious of
12.1 the slavery issue and convinced many northerners that the South’s peculiar institution
was morally wrong and dangerous to the American way of life. The South helped the
antislavery cause in the North by responding hysterically and repressively to abolition-
12.2 ist agitation. In 1836, southern congressmen forced adoption of a “gag rule” requir-
ing that abolitionist petitions be tabled without being read; the post office refused to
deliver antislavery literature in the slave states. Prominent northerners who had been

12.3 Quick Check unmoved by abolitionist depictions of slave suffering became more responsive when
their own civil liberties were threatened. The politicians who later mobilized the North
What was the Underground railroad, against the expansion of slavery into the territories drew strength from the antislavery
and who were its main operators?
and anti-southern sentiments that abolitionists had already called forth.
From Abolitionism to Women’s Rights

Abolitionism was also a catalyst for the women’s rights movement. From the begin-
ning, women participated actively in the abolitionist crusade. Between 1835 and 1838,
the American Anti-Slavery Society bombarded Congress with petitions, mostly calling
for abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. More than half of the thousands of
these petitions included women’s signatures.
Some antislavery women defied conventional ideas of their proper sphere by
becoming public speakers and demanding an equal role in the leadership of antislavery
societies. The most famous of these were the Grimké sisters, Sarah and Angelina, who
attracted enormous attention as the rebellious daughters of a South Carolina slave-
holder. When male abolitionists objected to their speaking in public to mixed audi-
ences of men and women, Garrison defended them and helped forge a link between
blacks’ and women’s struggles for equality.
The battle to participate equally in the antislavery crusade made women abolition-
ists acutely aware of male dominance and oppression. For them, the same principles
that justified the liberation of the slaves also applied to emancipating women from
restrictions on their rights as citizens. In 1840, Garrison’s American followers with-
drew from the first World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London because the sponsors
refused to seat the women in their delegation. Among the women excluded were Lucre-
tia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Wounded by men’s reluctance to extend the cause of emancipation to include women,
Stanton and Mott began discussing plans for a women’s rights convention. They returned
to New York, where a campaign was already under way to reform the state’s laws limiting
the rights of married women. Ernestine Rose, a young Jewish activist, and Judge Thomas
Herttell, a political radical and freethinker who had introduced the first bill to reform the

Seneca Falls Convention An state’s marriage laws to the New York legislature, spearheaded this campaign. It came to a
1848 gathering of women’s rights crescendo at the famous Seneca Falls Convention, which Stanton and Mott organized in
advocates that culminated in upstate New York in 1848. These early feminists, in their first national gathering, issued
the adoption of a Declaration of a Declaration of Sentiments, modeled on the Declaration of Independence, charging that
sentiments demanding voting and “the history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of
property rights for women.
man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over
her.” They demanded that all women be given the right to vote and that married women
Quick Check be freed from unjust laws giving husbands control of their property, persons, and children.
What goals did The Seneca Falls Rejecting the Cult of Domesticity with its doctrine of separate spheres, these women and
Convention seek to accomplish?
their male supporters launched the modern movement for gender equality.

Conclusion: Living with Diversity

Nathaniel Hawthorne was a great American writer who observed the perfectionist fer-
ment of the age but suggested in his novels and tales that pursuit of the ideal led to a
distorted view of human nature and possibilities. He illustrated the dangers of pursuing
perfection too avidly in his tale of a father who kills his beautiful daughter by trying

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