Three Quaker petitions submitted to the House in 1790 sparked heated debate and forced Congress to specify the power of the federal government in the regulation of slavery, an issue largely ignored by the Constitution. The House report articulated what came to be known as the “federal consensus,” the position that only the states could abolish or regulate slavery within their jurisdictions. Approval of the report outlining the consensus created a new and significant barrier to persons hoping to fight domestic slavery at the federal level, for it forced abolitionists to limit their petitioning to requests to end slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia, which they maintained was clearly under the exclusive jurisdiction of Congress. Despite this setback, Quakers and other early abolitionists learned a valuable lesson: sending petitions to Congress stirred debate about slavery. As the Pennsylvania Abolition Society reported, the petitions and the debates they sparked “served to disseminate our principles, by exciting a commotion on the subject.” Indeed, the Quaker petition of 1790 put into motion for the first time in the United States a strategy of petitioning to spread the doctrine of abolition.³

About the same time that Americans started petitioning the Continental Congress, events were occurring in Great Britain that would profoundly affect future antislavery petitioning in the United States. Unlike Americans, who sent a few petitions to Congress each year, as early as 1787 male British abolitionists petitioned en masse calling for an end to the slave trade. Petitioning allowed British abolitionists to draw on the power of the public rather than having to rely on private attempts to influence individual political leaders. By the 1830s the process of gathering signatures and presenting petitions demanding parliamentary action had developed into an elaborate ceremony, wherein the petitions symbolized a mobilized people and provided a tangible measure of public opinion. Yet if the antislavery constituency represented by the petitions was to be taken seriously, signers needed to be viewed as credible by members of Parliament and the public. Not surprisingly, antiabolitionists attempted to discredit abolition petitions by claiming that signers were juveniles, paupers, and criminals. As a result, abolitionists vigilantly monitored the circulation, signing, and submitting of petitions to Parliament to ensure the apparent credibility of signers. Women were excluded from signing for fear that the marks of these allegedly irrational creatures would undermine the integrity of abolition memorials.⁴

By the turn of the century, aided by massive petition campaigns that popularized the cause, abolitionism was burgeoning in England. In the United States, however, it remained intermittent, and the movement, which throughout the 1800s had made steady progress toward its goals, faced multiple setbacks. During the 1790s there was evidence to warrant abolitionists’ optimistic belief that steady progress might continue and slavery eventually would become extinct. Prominent statesmen and clergy backed the abolitionist movement, and it even enjoyed support from slaveholders of the Upper South. Northern states set in motion both judicial and legislative mandates that eventually emancipated slaves, and during the 1780s and 1790s a growing number of slaves were manumitted in Maryland, Delaware, and especially Virginia. This progress was dealt a serious blow in 1787 with ratification of the federal Constitution, which failed to end slavery in the new nation. Although the Constitution permitted the federal government to end the African slave trade in 1808, not only did it fail to abolish slavery, but it affirmed the right of masters to recover runaway slaves. Most damaging, though, was the “three-fifths clause,” which allowed slaves to be counted as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation in the House. The clause, in effect, recognized slaves as individual property and created a strong incentive for perpetuating and extending slavery.⁵

Support for abolition was further weakened during the last decade of the eighteenth century by a number of bloody slave revolts throughout the world, which decreased tolerance for criticism of slaveholding. Americans learned of the massive 1791 slave uprising in St. Domingue from large numbers of French planters seeking refuge with their slaves in Virginia. The first major slave revolt in the United States occurred on August 30, 1800, when a Virginia slave named Gabriel assembled an army of at least 1,000 slaves to seize the Richmond arsenal. The effort was thwarted and the plotters were hanged, but the revolt greatly intensified fears of slave insurrection and further decreased tolerance for criticism of slavery. A final blow to abolitionism as it was practiced during the Revolutionary era occurred in 1793 with the invention of the cotton gin, which dramatically increased cotton production, which relied heavily on slave labor, and spread the plantation system throughout the lower South. What antislavery sentiment remained during the first two decades of the nineteenth century was embodied in the American Colonization Society, founded in 1816. Colonizationists advocated a plan of gradual emancipation by which masters would voluntarily free their slaves, who would be transported for “resettlement” in Liberia. Its chimeric humanitarianism combined with its gradualism won for the organization adherents from the upper echelons of American political society, including Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Friends of colonization could be found among slaveholders as well as the evangelical clergy, who appreciated the idea of Christian missionary work in Africa. Ironically, James Birney and William Lloyd Garrison, who would become outspoken critics of the society, were colonizationists until the late 1820s.⁶

There was a burst of abolition petitioning in 1819 when the general mood of complacency toward slavery was interrupted by the sectional conflict over Missouri statehood. The question sparked particularly intense debate because at that time the Union was composed of twenty states—ten slave and ten free—and the proposed constitution of Missouri permitted slavery and barred the emigration of free blacks. Admission of Missouri as a slave state not only would have upset the balance of power in Congress, but because it would have created the first new state from Louisiana Purchase land, its status as slave or free carried considerable symbolic importance. Protests of northern congressmen were strengthened by an outpouring of petitions, such as those from Ohio emanating from a campaign organized by a Quaker, former Tennessee slaveholder Charles Osborn. Using his reform newspaper the Philanthropist to publicize the campaign, Osborn rallied Ohioans to hold public meetings in which they drew up petitions against admitting Missouri as a slave state. Petitioning efforts to halt the admission of Missouri were not confined to Ohio. On November 17, 1819, some 2,000 people gathered at a New York City hotel to denounce the idea of permitting slavery in new states and to draw up a petition. Similar petitions were sent from Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, and Vermont. In the end Congress reached a compromise whereby Missouri was admitted as a slave state, Maine was admitted as a free state, and slavery was excluded in the rest of the Louisiana Territory north of latitude 36°30’.⁷

Further groundwork for mass antislavery petitioning was laid in 1827 when Benjamin Lundy organized a campaign in Baltimore that asked Congress to pass a law providing that all children thereafter born to slaves in the District of Columbia be declared free at a certain age. After some wrangling, the House, by a large majority, negated printing of the petition and ordered it to lie on the table. Lundy was undeterred. In 1828 he launched a lecture tour through the North to encourage further antislavery petitioning. His message was not lost on a young reporter for the Boston Courier named William Lloyd Garrison, who subsequently urged Massachusetts to join other states in petitioning against slavery in the District. In October 1828 Garrison sent petition forms to Vermont postmasters, who paid nothing for their mail, requesting them to gather signatures and send the petitions to Congress.⁸ Garrison and other opponents of slavery submitted enough petitions in 1828 to stir debate in Congress. Petitions for abolition in the District also flowed from citizens of Washington, D.C., itself as well as New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Freemen, such as those in Adams County, Pennsylvania, lent their names to petitions, and the free black press praised the signature-gathering efforts of the predominantly white antislavery societies. “Nothing ever affords us more pleasure,” wrote the Reverend Samuel Cornish, black abolitionist editor of Freedom’s Journal, “than to find our friends active in the cause of oppressed humanity.”⁹

The frequency of petitioning for African American civil rights increased significantly beginning in 1830 with the organization of the National Negro Convention. This movement was founded in response to abuses suffered by Cincinnati’s free black population, which had expanded rapidly by the mid-1820s, spawning fierce competition for jobs between free blacks and immigrant (mostly German and Irish) workers. White Cincinnatians reacted by barring black children from the city’s public schools and enforcing state “Black Codes,” which had been largely ignored since their institution in 1807. The codes prohibited blacks from serving on juries, testifying against whites, or joining the militia and required them to post a $500 bond guaranteeing good behavior. The local African Methodist Episcopal church reacted by organizing a petition drive for repeal of the codes. White leaders responded with impunity, ordering the entire population of free blacks, some 2,200 people, to post the $500 surety bond in only thirty days or to leave town. Before the majority of the community had time to raise the money or flee, over the weekend of August 22, 1829, rioters set fire to the black tenement in the city’s “Little Africa.” Thousands were left homeless, and about 200 free blacks fled to Canada.¹⁰

The Cincinnati crisis spurred free blacks throughout the North to organize protests and to petition Congress for their civil rights. In direct response to events in Ohio, free black leaders organized the First National Negro Convention, held in Philadelphia September 20-24, 1830, which marked the beginning of a movement that would continue through 1861. The Third National Negro Convention, held June 4-13, 1832, in the wake of Nat Turner’s rebellion, declared that free blacks must fight for their own rights but should do so through moral suasion alone. Many public demonstrations followed, and in Philadelphia, for example, large numbers gathered to send memorials to the Senate and House of Representatives asking for the repeal of legal restrictions against free blacks. In 1835 the convention recommended to free blacks “the propriety” of petitioning Congress and the state legislatures “to be admitted to the rights and privileges of American citizens, and that we be protected in the same.” This call was sounded years earlier by Maria Stewart, a free black, who in 1833 entreated Boston’s African Masons, “Let every man of color throughout the United States, who possesses the spirit and principles of a man, sign a petition to Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia.”¹¹

Free blacks involved in the Negro Convention movement persuaded a number of key whites to oppose the Colonization Society, a crucial step in the emergence of immediate abolitionism and the growth of mass antislavery petitioning. Samuel Cornish and James Forten’s 1827 essays attacking colonization as well as discussions with the free blacks led William Lloyd Garrison to reconsider his commitment to colonization. In 1832 Garrison published Thoughts on African Colonization, which accused the society of pledging not to interfere with slavery and of being grossly indifferent to the welfare of free blacks. Rather than colonization or gradual emancipation, Garrison advocated immediate abolition. “Immediatism” was defined more clearly by John Greenleaf Whittier in his pamphlet Justice and Expediency, which explained that immediate abolition meant that the work of reforming dangerously mistaken public opinion must begin immediately. In doing this work immediately, he wrote, abolitionists must remember “that public opinion can overcome” the many obstacles in their way, and thus they should “seek to impress indelibly upon every human heart the true doctrines of the rights of man.” The rhetorical strategy described by Whittier—moral suasion—presumed that slaveholders as well as Americans in general were at their core reasonable and virtuous. Once the evils of slavery were made apparent, it assumed, the public would pressure slaveholders, who, unwilling to withstand the pressure of public opinion, would emancipate their slaves. Petitioning fit well with the doctrine of moral suasion because it offered radical abolitionists a means to act immediately to seek emancipation by reshaping public opinion through mass moral appeals.¹²

In line with the tenets of moral suasion, in the first edition of the Liberator, published on January 1, 1831, Garrison urged readers to petition to rid the nation’s capital of the “rotten plague” of slavery. He lamented the fact that hitherto “only a few straggling petitions, relative to this subject, have gone into Congress.” They were too few, he concluded, “to denote much public anxiety, or to command a deferential notice.” Garrison called on abolitionists to make a “vigorous and systematic” petitioning effort “from one end of the country to the other” to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia. A year later Garrison and eleven others formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society, pledging in its constitution, signed by seventy-two men (among whom about a quarter were free blacks), “to inform and correct public opinion” through a variety of methods, including petitioning. Early in 1832 the president and secretary of the society sent a petition to Congress for the immediate abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, and in September the New Englanders prepared a petition for general circulation, which was published in the Liberator. Likewise, many other antislavery societies formed in New England and the West during the early 1830s incorporated pledges to petition in their founding documents.¹³

Petitioning was endorsed by abolitionist leaders at the national level in December 1833 at the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Members resolved “to urge forward without delay” a petition to Congress for abolition in the District and named specific congressmen into whose hands the memorials should be entrusted. They also urged the president of the convention to write letters to members of Congress beseeching them to present petitions and to “fearlessly advocate” passage of abolition measures. The same issue of the Liberator that reported the new national organization’s pledge to petition also reminded those already engaged in gathering signatures to send in their petitions. There would probably be 3,000 signatures on the memorial from Boston and vicinity, the paper reported, but it cautioned that the petitions undoubtedly would be referred to a committee of slaveholders and that “nothing favorable to the cause of freedom can be expected from those who traffic in human flesh.”¹⁴

The Philadelphia women knew full well what they risked. “Your Memorialists are aware that at this juncture our attempts may be considered intrusive,” they wrote, “but we approach you unarmed; our only banner is Peace.” Ultimately the petition and its circulators won the signatures of 2,312 women. Upon sending the petition to Congress, the committee attached a letter that addressed the propriety of women petitioning on the explosive issue of slavery. In a humble, almost apologetic tone the women expressed confidence that congressmen would discern that “nothing less than a deep conviction of the necessity of the measure your petitioners would recommend, could have induced them to appear in this public manner.” Although the petition from the Females of the State of Pennsylvania ultimately was tabled, it won the attention of male abolitionists. Printed in the Liberator of February 18, 1832, without comment, the women’s petition was afforded a rather mixed, if not odd, commentary the following week: “If the spirit which actuates these fair ones of Philadelphia, should become general, the slaveholding states might well tremble for the fate of their institutions.” But recognition of the potential power of female petitioning was followed by the ambiguous observation that if women entered politics in this way, citizens would have to “fill the House with such old bachelors as have shown themselves capable of resisting the formidable array of bright eyes and witching smiles.”¹⁸

The Philadelphia women’s petition proved at once unusual and representative of the relationship between antislavery women and petitioning before 1834. It was, on one hand, atypical because although petitioning had become a main feature in the activism of proliferating male antislavery societies, women sympathetic to the cause refrained from sending their names to Congress. The actions of the Quaker women defied the long-standing custom of women limiting their petitions to individual requests for personal grievances and marked the first instance of women petitioning collectively against slavery. By aiming to arouse discussion of ending slavery within the context of heightened fear of slave insurrection, the petitioners created the potential for disruption and disunion and, in so doing, risked being viewed by congressmen and members of their local communities as subversive. Yet, on the other hand, the response the petition provoked from the Liberator displayed abolitionists’ typical ambivalent attitudes about the expansion of female activism in the movement. While the newspaper acknowledged that women’s petitioning might have a marked effect, it denigrated the nature of this form of activism as mere flirtation. The risks evident in the rhetoric of the Philadelphia petition and the response it received from the Liberator amounted to two powerful restraints that deterred women from petitioning before 1834: the radical nature of immediate abolitionism and the radical departure from established norms of female petitioning.

The extremism of affiliating with abolitionists by signing a petition cannot be underestimated. To publicly declare oneself an abolitionist in the 1830s was to align with a small and despised minority. One placed oneself at the fringes of middle-class society and even risked the distinct possibility of violence against one’s person. By raising an issue most Americans preferred to ignore, attacking a system that provided the basis of the national economy, questioning the very foundation of U.S. government, and advocating racial equality, immediate abolitionists professed to seek not just reform but massive restructuring of the social, economic, and political order. As such, abolitionists found themselves at the extreme end of the spectrum of antebellum reform movements. They not uncommonly incurred the disapproval, if not the wrath, of neighbors and even other reformers. Besides risking social rejection, persons who espoused immediate abolition also courted retributive violence. In 1835 alone, abolitionists endured thirty-seven mob attacks. In August of that year Lydia Maria Child reported that “very large sums” were being offered to anyone who would convey visiting British abolitionist George Thompson to the slave states. That same year Garrison fell victim to a mob that beset a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. Rioters smashed through doors, captured Garrison, and dangled him from a window. The mob then fastened a rope around his waist and led him through the streets to city hall, where he was committed to a cell for disturbing the peace. Even the Yankee metropolis of New York was unsafe for abolitionists, for according to Child, $5,000 had been offered on the New York Stock Exchange for the head of leading antislavery philanthropist Arthur Tappan. The father of James Birney, a slaveholder turned abolitionist, warned that should he return to Kentucky, he would be murdered. Neither did antislavery literature escape the scorn of southerners. After learning that abolition materials were in the mail, a mob broke into the Charleston post office and made a bonfire of the sacks containing the offending literature. The flames illuminated the hanging effigies of Garrison and Tappan.¹⁹

While women were deterred from signing antislavery petitions for fear of disapproval and even violence from those hostile to the movement, their reticence was compounded by directives from within the movement about appropriate gender behavior. “You are called anew to the field of action,” announced an appeal in the Ladies’ Department of the Liberator in March 1832. “Some of you may plead the effeminacy of your sex, and some—mental inferiority; but oh! This is nothing else than mockery.” The paper urged females to “firmly step in and fill our ranks” and instructed them to “arm your fathers and brothers with the patriotic feelings of liberty and equal rights.” While the appeal called women “into the field of action,” they were instructed to limit their efforts to indirectly influencing male relatives. There was no explicit call for women to petition, and the directive to sway fathers and brothers implied that women should confine their efforts well short of the halls of Congress. Likewise, “An Address to the Daughters of New England” published in the Liberator on March 3, 1832, commanded, “Think not because ye are women, that ye can take no part in the glorious cause of emancipation.” “You have influence—exert it.” Yet nowhere in the address did the author mention the idea of women petitioning.²⁰

The absence of direct calls for women to petition was accompanied by articles and poems in antislavery newspapers during the late 1820s and early 1830s that praised women as silent creatures of sympathy and virtue. The sickroom, the Liberator described in 1831, was where one could behold woman at her “loveliest, most attractive point of view.” There she moved with “noiseless step” and was “firm, without being harsh; tender, yet not weak; active, yet quiet; gentle, patient, uncomplaining, vigilant.” Freedom’s Journal, a free black newspaper, warned in 1827 that “a woman who would attempt to thunder with her tongue, would not find her eloquence to increase her domestic happiness.” The next year the paper described the perfect wife as possessing a low, soft, musical voice “not formed to rule in public assemblies but to charm those who can distinguish a company from a crowd.” The greatest advantage of such a voice, the Journal said, was that “you must come close to her to hear it.” These writings reinforced the notion that the ideal woman was neither a public speaker nor a petitioner to Congress but, rather, a nursemaid and a silent helpmate.²¹

To portrayals of the sacrificing and silent female were added vivid warnings that the “fair sex” lacked the powers of deliberation and was ruled by the passions. “With reason somewhat weaker” than that of men, observed the Liberator in April 1831, women “have to contend with passions somewhat stronger.” Prevailing notions about the danger of woman’s suasive powers were evident in a poem published in the Liberator on January 15, 1831, titled “The Powers of Woman”:

Directives that women should remain silent and warnings about their propensity for deception were reinforced in antislavery newspapers by descriptions of the horrid fate that would befall outspoken women. In 1827, Freedom’s Journal published the ironic tale of Tabitha Wilson, who according to the storyteller named Ned, was talented and beautiful but was “compelled to remain in a state of maidenhood.” Why, asked Ned, was Tabitha deserted by beau after beau? “She had a tongue, that was indeed—a tongue.” In one instance a man left Tabitha and married another girl “who took such particular care of that unruly member, the tongue, that all who saw her, regretted she used it so little.” How did Tabitha cope with the loss of her lover? “She neither sighed, nor swooned, nor uttered hysterical laughs, . . . but her tongue went clickety, clack, click clack, until you would have sworn that the long-hidden doctrine of perpetual motion had been discovered, and that this honor was to Miss Tabitha Wilson, spinster, who had accidentally made the discovery, in the daily use and exercise of her tongue.” Ned recounted that Tabitha’s “faculty of tongue moving” increased with age until she “degenerated into a most venomous backbiting old maid” whom a jury eventually found guilty of slander. Ned concluded his tale with a stern warning:

Given the negative attitudes, even among radical abolitionists, about women raising their voices in public debate, both black and white middle-class women eschewed petitioning in favor of other types of antislavery activism, especially boycotting the products of slave labor. As early as 1806 Alice Jackson Lewis of Chester County, Pennsylvania, urged members of the Philadelphia Friends Women’s Yearly Meeting to avoid purchasing the products of slave labor. The American free produce movement was bolstered by widely circulated pamphlets published in 1824 and 1828 by British abolitionist Elizabeth Heyrick calling for boycotts of slave products. Women’s boycotting efforts were further encouraged in 1826 when Elizabeth Margaret Chandler began writing a regular column in Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation in which she often sounded the free produce call. In 1829 two societies were organized to promote the use of free products: the Female Association for Promoting the Manufacture and Use of Free Cotton, formed in Philadelphia, and the Colored Female Free Produce Society of Pennsylvania, begun by the women of the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Between 1817 and 1862 some fifty-three free produce stores, at least five of which were run by women, were opened around the country. Boycotting slave-made goods was a favored activity among female abolitionists not only because it attacked the economic core of slavery but also, as Margaret Hope Bacon explains, because it was “one of the very few avenues open to women to express their opposition to slavery.”²⁴

Even when women formed antislavery societies during the early 1830s, they initially turned away from petitioning and confined their efforts to boycotting, fund raising, and educating free blacks. The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, organized in October 1833, pledged in its constitution to “aid and assist” the antislavery movement “as far as lies within our power.” By this they meant disseminating antislavery propaganda and improving the “moral and intellectual character” of the community’s free blacks. The society, composed of black and white women, met only four times a year and was initially “more a symbolic than a truly functional organization.” It operated primarily as an auxiliary to the male-run Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society by contributing funds and serving as audience members at the men’s meetings. Likewise, members of the Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Society, organized in 1835, did not petition initially but focused their energies on the moral improvement of free blacks. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, on the other hand, was composed almost entirely of Quaker women, both black and white, who had developed a tradition of public speaking and social activism. While this group did begin some petitioning in 1834, their main goal before then was to assist in educating free blacks.²⁵

Associations composed exclusively of African American women followed a similar course and did not petition during the 1820s and early 1830s. The earliest organizations of free black women were devoted to raising money to support churches, Masonic orders, and mutual aid societies formed by men in the 1780s and 1790s. When female benevolent organizations multiplied during the 1820s, African American women formed societies devoted to aiding those in need, to achieving intellectual improvement, and to accomplishing social change. Benevolent associations such as the Female Branch of Zion and the United Daughters of Conference, both of New York City, focused on aiding the sick, burying the dead, and supporting widows and orphans. Many African American women, particularly Philadelphians, also belonged to female literary societies. Although aimed partly at the self-improvement of their members, these societies also sought to benefit the entire race and to promote the cause of emancipation. Yet like most other female organizations, they did not petition Congress against slavery during the 1820s and early 1830s.²⁶

Despite the fact that the antislavery press prescribed a role for women in the movement that stopped short of petitioning, by the mid-1830s a number of forces were at work that would weaken constraints against women’s antislavery petitioning. The foundation for this shift had been laid in part by the 1830 campaign to block removal of the Cherokee from Georgia. During the mid-1830s, moreover, women were becoming increasingly involved in benevolent reform societies, which petitioned for incorporation and funding, and temperance women petitioned collectively to limit the approval of liquor licenses. Besides this experience petitioning local and state governments, the religious impulse behind immediate abolition provided women a rationale for expanding their antislavery activism to include petitioning Congress. Like many men who committed themselves to abolition, women commonly embraced the cause after undergoing dramatic conversion experiences fostered by evangelical revivals. Others located their duty to end slavery in the doctrines of Quakerism, Universalism, and Unitarianism. These commitments were intensified by widely held beliefs that women were more religious and more virtuous than men, which implied that women possessed a moral duty to reform the world. The ideology of female moral superiority expanded women’s sense of their social duties and held radical possibilities for justifying their expanded activism. Women could convincingly rationalize broadening the scope of their abolition work on the particularly feminine grounds that because slaveowners repeatedly assaulted the virtue of female slaves and tore mothers from their children, it was especially women’s duty to eradicate slavery from the Christian nation. Immediate abolitionists’ philosophy of moral suasion, moreover, provided an opportunity for female reformers to attempt to influence federal policy, even though they lacked the vote, by reforming public sentiment.²⁷

By 1834 a variety of factors, including the growing use of petitioning by female activists and the call of religious duty, enabled a number of antislavery women to expand their activism and join men in petitioning Congress. That year women sent a dozen petitions; in 1835 they sent nine, and in 1836 they amassed eighty-four.²⁸ The growing frequency of female antislavery petitioning was supported by three events during 1830-35 that led women to become more comfortable with the idea of petitioning Congress and convinced male abolition leaders of the benefits of enlisting women in petition drives. First was the campaign to end slavery in the British dominions, in which hundreds of thousands of British women signed petitions from 1830 to 1833. Though before 1830 British abolitionist leaders neither condoned nor encouraged women’s petitioning against slavery, they eventually realized that women’s signatures could substantially bolster petitioning campaigns. With the help of women, from 1831 to 1833 antislavery activists submitted 5,020 petitions to Parliament. The petitions presented in 1833 alone bore the signatures of 298,785 women, nearly a quarter of the total number of names. A large portion of the female signatures—187,157—were ascribed to a single petition circulated by the London Female AntiSlavery Society for only ten days and without mention in the abolitionist press. The massive petition was presented to the House of Commons on May 14, 1833, the day the Emancipation Bill was introduced. Abolitionist George Stephen described it as a “huge featherbed of a petition, hauled into the House by four members amidst shouts of applause and laughter.”²⁹

Presentation of the female petitions to Parliament set the stage for American women to enter the ranks of petitioners. Garrison, who was on a mission to England on behalf of the New England Anti-Slavery Society, witnessed presentation of the national petition signed by some 187,000 women, which, he wrote, “excited considerable sensation and some merriment. . . . Cheers for the Ladies of Great Britain!” It is entirely probable that Garrison had in mind the success of British women’s petitioning efforts when, after returning to the United States in September 1833, he issued a call for signatures and especially urged that “the ladies, too, and the free people of color, should unite in this good work.” The petitioning feats of English women abolitionists were also cited in 1833 by Lydia Maria Child, an American novelist turned abolitionist, in her Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. “Sixty thousand petitions have been addressed to the English parliament, a large number of them signed by women,” Child claimed inaccurately. Though she admitted that it would be “useless and injudicious” to remonstrate for the abolition of slavery in the United States in general, Child proclaimed that with respect to slavery in the District of Columbia, “it is the duty of the citizens to petition year after year, until a reformation is effected.”³⁰

The potential for American women’s petitioning was fostered also by reactions to the persecution of a Connecticut Quaker woman, Prudence Crandall, who with the help of the American Anti-Slavery Society had opened her school to free black girls. Outraged white residents of Canterbury, where the school was located, convinced the legislature to enact a law prohibiting education for out-of-state blacks. Despite the law Crandall continued to teach and was jailed three times, though her convictions were reversed. When town residents failed to close the school through legal means, they blocked Crandall’s source of supplies, filled her well with manure, and finally, burned the school building. Although Crandall endured for almost a year, she eventually left town. The events in Canterbury angered abolitionists, and late in July 1833 the Emancipator published an Appeal to the Females of the United States in Behalf of Miss Prudence Crandall, which deplored the “elements of moral evil” that were “powerfully at work in the midst of us.” To what “earthly influence” could the people look to save the country from “the most dismal scene,” the writer asked, “but to the gentle yet firm remonstrances of WOMAN?” The appeal urged women to make their voices heard. “Why should not the legislature of Connecticut ... be respectfully MEMORIALIZED by the females of every mountain glen, and hamlet in the United States, for the repeal of this most disgraceful enactment against FEMALE effort for FEMALE improvement” Although the outcry did little to secure Crandall’s school to educate young black women, the events in Canterbury provided a rallying point for female abolitionists and set a precedent for petitioning on behalf of other women.³¹

Crandall’s sacrifices inspired Scottish women to sponsor British abolitionist George Thompson’s lecture tour in the United States, which succeeded in fueling American women’s interest in antislavery and especially in petitioning. Beginning in August 1834, for fifteen months Thompson traveled throughout New England, where he lectured about abolitionism to huge crowds and persuaded women to form antislavery societies, many of which took up the work of petitioning. After he spoke to a group of women in Providence, Rhode Island, for instance, they formed a ladies’ antislavery society, and 106 women signed its constitution. A year later, in their first annual report, the ladies were still praising Thompson: “When our friend and fellow-helper George Thompson, of England, came among us, and pled the rights of the poor, down-trodden slave, his pathos charmed us, and his eloquence riveted the eye and the mind of every hearer upon himself and his subject.” In the autumn of 1836 the society agreed that petitioning Congress deserved their “hearty cooperation.”³²

By 1835 American abolitionists recognized the important role women could play in the petition campaign. Previous appeals to women, as we have seen, urged them to pray, to boycott the products of slave labor, and to employ female influence to convince male relatives of the evils of slavery. These calls, with few exceptions, stopped short of ordering women to influence public opinion directly on the subject of slavery. In 1835, however, abolitionist leaders began to exhort women to exercise their right of petition. The New England Spectator charged in March that “every man and woman in the northern states, who does not petition Congress to do something, and who does not pray for the extermination of slavery in the District of Columbia, is guilty of the sin of perpetuating slavery in the District of Columbia.” In calling on abolitionists to petition that fall, the Liberator stated, “Let not our female friends forget that on them we rely for powerful and efficient aid in this work.”³³

An even stronger plea for women to embark on petitioning came from John M. Putnam, pastor of the Congregational Church in Dunbarton, New Hampshire, who on Christmas 1835 addressed the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Concord. “The united voice of females would immediately turn the scale of popular opinion from its present wrong bias, and place it on the side of truth and righteousness,” he proclaimed. Abolition of slavery in the British dominions, the clergyman said, was won “in no small degree” thanks to the petitioning activities of women. When the petition containing 187,000 female signatures was presented, “the question was decided, that slavery must cease. It was said in Parliament, on the reception of this weighty petition,—‘It is now time for us to act, since the women have come thundering at our doors!’” Women “turned the scale” in England by petitioning, Putnam explained, because “ladies” possessed “the keys to truth and righteousness” as well as an “immense influence.” Therefore, he told the Concord women, “a vast responsibility rests upon females, when any good cause is to be carried forward.”³⁴