1 Petition of the Men and Women of Ohio; Chapman, Right and Wrong in Massachusetts, 11-13.

2 Freehling, Road to Disunion, 308. Richard Sewell states that by leading many northerners to see that slavery threatened their own civil rights, the petition controversy “proved a godsend” to the abolitionists; see Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 7-8.

3 As Richard J. Carwardine argues, “For many, petitioning represented a means of operating in an era of mass politics without being compromised by the corruption of new partisanship” (Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 32). The fact that William Lloyd Garrison forsook the vote though he did petition Congress is discussed in Mayer, All on Fire, xiv.

4 This definition of petitioning is drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary, and the discussion of the changing function of petitioning in U.S. politics draws on Morgan, Inventing the People, 222-30.

5 David C. Frederick explains that the substantive meaning of the right of petition was shaped by the twin duties of reception and response. He states further that it is possible to claim with some certainty that by the eighteenth century “the right included the expectation that the government would receive the petition and issue a response whatever the subject matter of the plea. . . . The development of the right to petition in practice, therefore, led to the expectation of a response, favorable or not” (Frederick, “John Quincy Adams,” 115).

6 This study builds on scholarship about women and political culture by, among others, Mary Ritter Beard, Nancy F. Cott, Linda K. Kerber, Norma Basch, Paula M. Baker, Nancy A. Hewitt, Ann Boylan, Lori D. Ginzberg, Mary P. Ryan, Jan Lewis, Nancy Isenberg, Elizabeth Varon, and Rosemarie Zagarri, who have examined the ways in which women were denied full citizenship during the formation of the republic and the means through which they attempted to claim their rights throughout the nineteenth century and beyond. See Beard, “Legislative Influence of Unenfranchised Women”; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood; Kerber, Women of the Republic; Kerber, “No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies”; Basch, “Equity vs. Equality”; Baker, “Domestication of American Politics”; Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change; Hewitt, “Social Origins of Women’s Antislavery Politics in Western New York”; Boylan, “Women and Politics”; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence; Ryan, Women in Public; Ryan, “Gender and Public Access”; Lewis, “ ‘Of Every Age Sex & Condition’”; Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America; Varon, We Mean to Be Counted; and Zagarri, “Rights of Man and Woman.”

7 Enstad, Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure, 3, 121-22, 12; Enstad, “Fashioning Political Identities”; Waugh, Feminine Fictions, esp. chap. 1; Butler, Gender Trouble, 2, 145.

8 Kenneth Cmiel, for instance, notes that public opinion had become so important that when President Jackson exercised unprecedented authority in 1832 by vetoing the charter for the Second Bank of the United States, he addressed his presidential message not to Congress, as was customary, but directly to the public; see Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence, 64. Enstad, Ladies of Labor, 86, 227 n. 2, succinctly describes the exclusion of women and people of color from the nineteenth-century middle-class public based on the incommensurability of the category of woman with the category of citizen.

9 Ryan, Women in Public; Ryan, “Gender and Public Access,” 218, 206.

10 Our Mothers Before Us: Women’s Writings to Congress; Carolyn Brucken, “A Guide to Researching Women’s Petitions at the National Archives,” personal correspondence, Apr. 17, 1997.

11 Susan B. Anthony, “Speech to the 1863 Convention of the American AntiSlavery Society,” in Proceedings of the American Anti-Slavery Society at Its Third Decade (1864), 74.

1 Colton, Right of Petition, 2.

2 Ibid., 6.

3 Butt, History of Parliament, 51, 61; Smellie, “Right of Petition”; Charles E. Rice, “Freedom of Petition”; A. L. Brown, Governance of Late Medieval England, 215-17; Myers, “Parliamentary Petitions in the Fifteenth Century,” 387.

4 Smellie, “Right of Petition”; Morgan, Inventing the People, 224-25; Leys, “Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” 46.

5 Higgins, “Reactions of Women,” 216; True Copy of the Petition of the Gentle-women, & Trades-men wives.

6 Higgins, “Reactions of Women,” 200-202, 180, 212-13. Cynthia A. Kierner also recognizes the significance of women’s petitioning during the English Civil War in relation to subsequent efforts by women. She writes, “Before 1642, women petitioners always acted alone, but radical sectarians in the Civil War era petitioned in groups, setting an important precedent for women’s collective political activism” (Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, xx).

7 Morgan, Inventing the People, 226-28; Smellie, “Right of Petition,” 99; Leys, “Petitioning in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” 47. Johnson quoted in Smellie, “Right of Petition,” 99.

8 Bailey, Popular Influence upon Public Policy, 6; Higginson, “Short History,” 144-46, 150-53.

9 Petitioning was, English jurist William Blackstone wrote in 1765, the proper reaction to “such public oppressions as tend to dissolve the constitution and subvert the fundamentals of government” (Wills, Inventing America, 54-55, 64-65, 377).

10 The Edenton women’s petition is reprinted in Ashe, History of North Carolina, 1:427-29n.

11 Arthur Iredell to James Iredell, Jan. 31, 1775, quoted in Kerber, Women of the Republic, 41.

12 Cott, “Divorce and the Changing Status of Women in Eighteenth-Century Massachusetts,” 594; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 184. For further analysis of women’s divorce petitions during the Revolutionary period, see Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg; Buckley, “‘Placed in the Power of Violence’”; and Meehan, “‘Not Made Out of Levity.’”

13 Kierner, Southern Women in Revolution, 49, xxiv; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 85-87.

14 Abigail Adams to Mercy Otis Warren, Apr. 27, 1776, in Rossi, Feminist Papers, 12.

15 Brooke, Heart of the Commonwealth, 191, 207-9; Bogin, “Petitioning and the New Moral Economy of Post-Revolutionary America,” 419-21; Walsh, “Mechanics and Citizens.”

16 Kerber, Women of the Republic, 99.

17 Horton, Free People of Color, 43; Reed, Platform for Change, 64.

18 Viet, Bowling, and Bickford, Creating the Bill of Rights, 18, 23, 150-52. See also Morgan, Inventing the People, 213, and Don L. Smith, “Right to Petition,” 80.

19 Higginson, “Short History,” 157-58; Morgan, Inventing the People, 229-30; Combs, Jay Treaty, 161-63; Annals of Congress, 4th Cong., 2d sess., Jan. 30, 1797, 2015-24.

20 This observation echoes Jan Lewis’s conclusion that during the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century “women’s membership in civil society would be defined in relationship to that of free blacks.” She notes in particular that “the understanding of women’s civil rights emerged most clearly in discussions about attempts to limit the civil rights of free blacks” (Lewis, “‘Of Every Age Sex & Condition,’” 381).

21 Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 7; Graebner, Fite, and White, History of the American People, 1:432. Circulation figure for Godey’s Lady’s Book is from Flexner, Century of Struggle, 65.

22 Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, xvii, 32.

23 Boylan, “Women and Politics,” 364-65, 370-71; Lebsock, Free Women of Petersburg, 196, 199-203; Kinney quoted in Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 51-53.

24 Boylan, “Women and Politics,” 372.

25 Blocker, American Temperance Movements, 14, 18-19.

26 Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 40.

27 Prucha, “Protest by Petition,” 43-46.

28 Ibid., 46-47, 49; Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 25.

29 Andrew, From Revivals to Removal, 210; Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 18, 24-25.

30 “Circular Addressed to the Benevolent Ladies of the United States,” Christian Advocate and Journal, Dec. 25, 1829; Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 25-26.

31 Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 27; Petition of the Ladies of Steubenville, Ohio.

32 Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 28, 27.

33 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 21st Cong., 1st sess., Jan. 11, 1830, 506- 11, and Feb. 2, 1830, 109; Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 29.

34 Prucha, “Protest by Petition,” 52-57. See also Andrew, From Revivals to Removal, esp. chaps. 7-8.

35 Karcher, First Woman in the Republic, 87-90; Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 40, 22, 33-34.

36 Colton, Right of Petition, 6.

37 Ibid., 7.

1 Liberator, May 5, 1832.

2 Dillon, Abolitionists, 4-7; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors, 11; Ohline, “Slavery, Economics, and Congressional Politics,” 336.

3 Ohline, “Slavery, Economics, and Congressional Politics,” 336-37, 340, 351, 354, 359; diGiacomantonio, “‘For the Gratification of a Volunteering Society,’” 173-74, 189-90, 197; Knee, “Quaker Petition of 1790,” 157.

4 Drescher, “Public Opinion and the Destruction of British Colonial Slavery,” 25, 50; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 80, 84-85.

5 James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors, 23-24, 27; Dillon, Abolitionists, 18.

6 Dumond, Antislavery, 112; James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors, 29; Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion; Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords; Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 15; Mayer, All on Fire, 135-36; Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 72-73.

7 James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors, 31; Aptheker, Abolitionism, chap. 1. A copy of the Ohio petition can be found in the Philanthropist, Jan. 1, 1820. The petition campaign was also mentioned in the Philanthropist, Jan. 22, Feb. 5, 1820, and Annals of Congress, 16th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 28, 1819, 800.

8 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 20th Cong., 2d sess., Feb. 12, 1827, 1099- 1100; William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Editor of The Boston Courier,” Aug. 11, 12, 1828, in Garrison, Letters, 1:66, 65. Years later Garrison would boast that during the 1828 effort he gathered 2,300 names in three or four weeks on a petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia; see Garrison to Oliver Johnson, Feb. 10, 1836, in Garrison, Letters, 2:37.

9 One thousand citizens of the District of Columbia sent a petition complaining about the scenes of slave trading and kidnapping “continually taking place among us.” They urged Congress to pass a law declaring that all children born to slaves in the District after July 4, 1828, be freed at age twenty-five years. The petition from the inhabitants of the District of Columbia was printed in Freedom’s Journal, Feb. 1, 1828, and, years later, in the Liberator, Mar. 14, 1835. In New York the Corresponding Committee of that state’s Manumission Society saw to the circulation of petitions to Congress and the state legislature calling for abolition in the District. See Freedom’s Journal, May 9, 1828. In Ohio the Abolition Society of Stark County, meeting on November 3, 1827, passed a resolution instructing a committee of three to draft a memorial to Congress for abolition in the District and to circulate it. See Freedom’s Journal, Dec. 7, 1827; Cornish was quoted in Freedom’s Journal, Feb. 1, 1828.

10 Bethel, Roots of African American Identity, 120-23.

11 Gross, Clarion Call, 10, 20, 29; Bell, Survey of the Negro Convention Movement, 7; Maria Stewart, “An Address Delivered at the African Masonic Hall,” Boston, Feb. 27, 1833, in Maria Stewart, Maria W. Stewart, 62.

12 Goodman, Of One Blood, 4; Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, 54, 56-57; Whittier, Justice and Expediency, 10; Dillon, Abolitionists, 43.

13 Liberator, Jan. 1, 1831; Dillon, Abolitionists, 49; Liberator, Feb. 11, Sept. 8, 1832. In their 1833 constitution the Western Reserve Anti-Slavery Society resolved that “the rights of [man] require every citizen to petition Congress, to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and all territories under their control.” In September 1834 the newly founded Tallmade (Ohio) Anti-Slavery Society instructed its Board of Managers to circulate petitions to Congress and the state legislature. In November 1834 members of the founding convention of the New Hampshire AntiSlavery Society stated that they regarded it “the solemn duty of all the friends of liberty and religion to exert their utmost influence for the immediate abolition of Slavery” in Washington, D.C., and “that to this end it is highly important to send petitions to Congress this present year” (Emancipator, Sept. 21, Oct. 12, 26, 1833, Nov. 25, 1834).

14 Liberator, Dec. 21, 1833.

15 Nancy A. Hewitt notes that women generally joined men in signing Quaker testimonies against slavery, but the extant Quaker petitions sent to Congress before the 1830s I found in the National Archives were signed by only the officers of the yearly meeting, who were men. See Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 82.

16 Petition of the Female Citizens of the County of Fluvanna to the General Assembly of the Commonwealth of Virginia, printed in the Liberator, Feb. 25, 1832, from the Richmond Whig. Similar petitions expressing uneasiness over the potential for slave unrest were sent by men to the Virginia and North Carolina legislatures. See Petition of the Inhabitants of Sampson, Bladen, New Hanover, and Duplin Counties to North Carolina Assembly, ca. 1830, and esp. Petition of A. P. Upshur et al., Northampton County, to Virginia Legislature, 1831, both in Schweninger, Southern Debate over Slavery, 117-18, 118n, 128-31.

17 Petition of the Females of the State of Pennsylvania. Interestingly the same form of petition used in the 1831 effort was still in circulation in 1837. For an example of the continued circulation, see Petition of the Female Citizens of Philadelphia.

18 The letter signed by the coordinating committee headed by Mott can be found with the Petition of the Females of the State of Pennsylvania. The petition itself was printed in the Liberator, Feb. 18, 1832, and comments about the women’s petition were offered in the Liberator, Feb. 25, 1832.

19 Browne, “Encountering Angelina Grimké,” 55; Lydia Maria Child to Mrs. Ellis Gray Loring, Aug. 15, 1835, quoted in Dillon, Abolitionists, 91. A detailed account of the mob attack on the meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society can be found in Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 1-5, and Dillon, Abolitionists, 64- 66, 90.

20 Liberator, Mar. 24, 1832; “An Address to the Daughters of New England,” Liberator, Mar. 3, 1832.

21 Liberator, Mar. 12, 1831; Freedom’s Journal, Apr. 20, 1827, June 20, 1828.

22 Liberator, Apr. 23, Jan. 15, 1831.

23 Freedom’s Journal, May 11, 1827; Liberator, Apr. 23, 1831.

24 Bacon, Mothers of Feminism, 101; Heyrick called for boycotting the products of slave labor in Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition. See Williams, “Female Antislavery Movement,” 161, and Bacon, “By Moral Force Alone,” 278-79.

25 Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 13-14; Swerdlow, “Abolition’s Conservative Sisters,” 34, 36; Soderlund, “Priorities and Power,” 76.

26 Boylan, “Benevolence and Antislavery Activity among African American Women”; Yee, Black Women Abolitionists; Scott, “Most Invisible of All”; Lapsansky, “Feminism, Freedom, and Community”; Scott, “On Seeing and Not Seeing”; Sumler-Lewis, “Forten-Purvis Women of Philadelphia”; Porter, “Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies”; Winch, “‘You Have Talents—Only Cultivate Them.’”

27 Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 40; Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 11-17.

28 Figures for the number of antislavery petitions sent to Congress by women come from the database of the Our Mothers Before Us project at the National Archives. The numbers were confirmed in personal correspondence with Sarah Boyle, National Archives, Nov. 5, 1996.

29 The petitioning of British women was begun after women formed a network of antislavery societies throughout the nation. On April 8, 1825, the first women’s antislavery society was formed in the home of Lucy Townsend. This group, the Female Society of Birmingham, sparked the formation of a network of seventy-three women’s antislavery associations throughout England between 1825 and 1833. See Midgley, Women against Slavery, 43-47, 62-67; Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery, 70, 80, 59. These first antislavery petitioning campaigns were followed in 1837-38 by a final signature-gathering effort against the apprenticeship system. A national women’s petition on behalf of apprentices addressed in 1838 to the newly crowned Queen Victoria bore the signatures of 700,000 women, a number described as “unprecedented in the annals of petitioning.”

30 Garrison to the Liberator, May 24, 1833, in Garrison, Letters, 1:233; Liberator, Sept. 7, 1833; Child, Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, 232. Child erred in stating that 60,000 petitions had been submitted to Parliament; perhaps this was a typographical error, for 6,000 would have been nearly accurate. From 1830 to 1831 a total of 5,484 antislavery petitions were presented in Parliament, and about 1 percent of them were signed by women. See Midgley, Women against Slavery, 67.

31 Fuller, Prudence Crandall; Foner, Three Women Who Dared. The call to petition was printed in the Female Advocate and reprinted in the Emancipator, July 27, 1833.

32 Emancipator, Apr. 28, 1835, Dec. 1, 1836. Thompson’s conscientious efforts to convince women to become abolitionists made him the target of scathing attacks. He was branded a “meddling foreigner” and “an emasculated messenger” of a bunch of “canting old women.” The New York Courier and Inquirer recommended that Thompson ought to be “packed up like a quintal of codfish, and sent back to the Caledonian damsels who exported him” (quoted in C. Duncan Rice, “AntiSlavery Mission of George Thompson to the United States,” 28).

33 New England Spectator quoted in the Emancipator, Mar. 10, 1835; Emancipator, Mar. 10, 1835; Liberator, Oct. 31, 1835.

34 Putnam, Address Delivered at Concord, 12.

1 Petition of the Ladies of Glastenbury; Petition of the Ladies of Marshfield.

2 Morning Courier and New York Enquirer, July 9, 12, 1834. The petition of the ladies of New York was presented on February 2, 1835, by Representative John Dickson of New York, and the text of the petition was published in the Emancipator, Feb. 24, 1835.

3 Petition of 2,218 Females of Jamaica and Vicinity; Petition of 120 Ladies of Boston; the Philadelphia women’s petitioning effort is mentioned in Soderlund, “Priorities and Power,” 77-78; Petition of the Citizens of Ohio; Petition of the Women of Harrisville, Ohio.

4 Martineau, Martyr Age of the United States, 28-29. The petition is also printed in Three Years’ Female Anti-Slavery Effort in Britain and America, 43.

5 Petition from the Female Citizens of the State of Ohio; Ladies Petition of Orange County, New York.

6 See, for example, Petition of the Inhabitants of Livingston County, New York. Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven also notes that “legislators were not ready to consider the mass petitions of females in the same category as those from voters” and that “some abolitionists preferred male petitioning” because men exerted greater influence on congressmen; see Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled,’” 185, 191.

7 Petition of 800 Ladies of New York, 1835.

8 Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 77.

9 Ibid., 33. For a thorough discussion of the different types of female reform efforts during the nineteenth century, see Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change.

10 Petition of 800 Ladies of New York, 1835.

11 Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond concluded that the Fathers and Rulers of Our Country form was “by far the most popular form for ‘female petitions’ until 1840. Tens of thousands are in the files of the House of Representatives (boxes 85-126) in the Library of Congress. Except for the short ‘sentence forms’ distributed by the American Anti-Slavery Society during the period 1837- 1840, it was the commonest form in the campaign.” Barnes and Dumond include the text of the Fathers and Rulers petition form, attributing its authorship to Theodore Weld. See Weld, Letters, 1:175 n. 1, 175-76. Extant signed Fathers and Rulers petitions sent to Congress include, for example, Petition of 600 Ladies of Utica, Oneida County, New York. The Address to Females in the State of Ohio, to which the Fathers and Rulers form was attached, was reprinted in the Emancipator, July 21, 1836.

12 “Fathers and Rulers of Our Country Petition Form,” in Weld, Letters, 1:175- 76.

13 Muskingham County, Ohio, Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to Females.

14 Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 77; Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled,’” 182. During the nineteenth century there was a tendency to view religion as resting on the personal or domestic sphere, which was considered particularly feminine. Consequently the general belief was that religion existed outside the secular realm, which was considered particularly masculine. Beginning in the late eighteenth century this dichotomy was reinforced by prescriptive literature that advised women to be devout and virtuous, while men were excused from such standards due to the fact that their “passions” were constantly “subject to be heated by the ferment of business.” Statements that women should be more pious than men reflected the fact that as a group women were indeed more religious than men. More women belonged to and joined churches during most of the colonial period, and they dominated church membership in the early nineteenth century as well. Whatever its origins, belief in women’s natural inclination toward religion implied that piety was natural for women and somehow unnatural for men. For discussions of gender and religion during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Ruether and Keller, Women and Religion in America; Cott, “Young Women in the Second Great Awakening”; Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, chap. 4; and Welter, “The Feminization of American Religion, 1800-1860,” in Welter, Dimity Convictions, 83-102.

15 Catherine H. Birney, Grimké Sisters, 174.

16 For examples of antislavery petitions composed for men’s signatures and signed entirely or predominantly by men, see Petition of the Citizens of the United States and Petition of the Citizens of Philadelphia against the Admission of Arkansas.

17 Petition of the Women of Harrisville, Ohio; Petition of the Females of Winthrop, Maine. The text of the petition describes the signers as “citizens of the republic,” which indicates that the form was initially written for men’s signatures. However, it was circulated by women in Winthrop, Maine, who crossed out “citizens of the republic” and inserted “Females of Winthrop, Me.” Examples of the petition form that circulated throughout Vermont during 1836 include Petition of the Females of Washington County, Vermont, and Petition of the Females of Addison County, Vermont.

18 Examples of this form include Petition of the Ladies of Massachusetts and Petition of the Ladies of Dousa, New Hampshire. The extended quotation is from Petition of the Females of Washington County, Vermont.

19 Yellin, Women and Sisters, 3-26.

20 Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, “Mental Metempsychosis,” in Genius of Universal Emancipation, Feb. 1, 1831, quoted in Yellin, Women and Sisters, 13.

21 Petition of the Ladies of Dousa, New Hampshire; Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” 32.

22 Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 20-22.

23 Petition of the Women of Harrisville, Ohio; Petition of the Females of Washington County, Vermont; Petition of the Females of Addison County, Vermont; Petition of 359 Ladies of Massachusetts; Yellin, Women and Sisters, 24-25.

24 This observation builds on Jean Fagan Yellin’s argument in her study of the woman-and-sister theme in the rhetoric of women abolitionists. Yellin states that in emphasizing “the speechless agony of the female slave,” white antislavery feminists were “identifying with the female slaves in terms of gender but articulating a feminist consciousness that was race-specific” (Yellin, Women and Sisters, 25). Karen Sanchez-Eppler, who has also studied the woman-and-sister theme, notes the “difficulty of preventing moments of identification from becoming acts of appropriation.” This, she says, “constitutes the essential dilemma of feminist-abolitionist rhetoric” (Sanchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” 31).

25 McInerney, Fortunate Heirs of Freedom; Petition of the Females of Washington County, Vermont; Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia, 8; Petition of the Female Inhabitants of South Reading, Massachusetts; Petition of the Ladies of Dousa, New Hampshire; Petition of the Ladies of Massachusetts.

26 Examples of this form are the Petition of the Citizens of the Town of Fayston, Vermont; Ladies Petition of Orange County, New York; Petition of the Female Citizens of Ohio; and Petition of the Citizens of Lockport, New York.

27 Osler, “‘That Damned Mob.’”

28 Petition of the Women of Harrisville, Ohio.

29 Cogan and Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage.”

30 Petition of the Ladies of Glastenbury; Petition of the Ladies of Marshfield; Calhoun quoted in Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 30; Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 111. The figures on the increase in women’s petitions come from the Our Mothers Before Us database and were confirmed in personal correspondence with Sarah Boyle, National Archives, Nov. 5, 1996.

31 Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 51.

32 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 16, 1836, 1961-62; Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 27, 31-32.

33 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 21, 1836, 1994-2000.

34 Ibid., Dec. 21, 1836, 2000-2002.

35 Ibid., May 25, 1836, 4031, and May 26, 1836, 4052-53.

36 James Birney to Lewis Tappan, Aug. 10, 1836, in James G. Birney, Letters, 1:351.

1 American Anti-Slavery Society, Appeal to the People of the United States. The Pinckney report, Garrison’s remarks, and the pledge to use the gag rule as a fire-brand were printed in the Liberator, June 4, 1836.

2 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to the Women of Massachusetts, was issued as a circular in July 1836. A copy of the handbill form can be found in box 84, Library of Congress, box 17, National Archives, Washington, D.C., Sept. 25, 1837. The address was printed in the Emancipator, Aug. 25, 1836, and reprinted in Three Years’ Female Anti-Slavery Effort in Britain and America, 55-56. Muskingham County, Ohio, Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to Females, was printed from the Philanthropist in the Emancipator, July 21, 1836. Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven notes that the Kent County (Rhode Island) Female Anti-Slavery Society acknowledged receipt of the Ohio address in its minutes of May 11, 1836. See Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled,’” 184 n. 14; Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (for the sake of accessibility, all quotations are taken from the text reprinted in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 36-79); Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia.

3 Muskingham County, Ohio, Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to Females; Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 59-61, 63.

4 Muskingham County, Ohio, Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to Females; Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to the Women of Massachusetts; Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 66.

5 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to the Women of Massachusetts; Muskingham County, Ohio, Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to Females; Nye, Fettered Freedom, 282-315. Lincoln echoed the Massachusetts women’s address when he stated in his 1858 “Speech at the Republican State Convention” in Springfield, Illinois, “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.”

6 Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address of the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia.

7 Adams quoted in Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 216; Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 2d sess., Dec. 26, 1836, 1313-14, and Jan. 18, 1837, 1411-12.

8 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 2d sess., Feb. 6, 1837, 1585- 86; Emancipator, Jan. 19, 1837.

9 Adams, Letters to Constituents, 9, 11, 21, 23, 35.

10 Ibid., 36-37.

11 Ibid., 40; Lewis, “‘Of Every Age Sex & Condition,’” 381.

12 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 132.

13 Mary Grew to Maria Weston Chapman, Sept. 9, 1836, quoted in Ira V. Brown, “‘Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?,”’ 3; Minutes of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, Feb. 9, Aug. 16, 1836, Mar. 2, 1837, quoted in Williams, “Female Antislavery Movement,” 172 n. 43. Brown says it was the Philadelphia women who suggested holding a convention, while Williams credits the Boston group.

14 Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 3-4.

15 Zagarri, “Rights of Man and Woman,” 225-26; Ira V. Brown, “Cradle of Feminism,” 145-46.

16 The circular was unsigned and makes no claim to issue from a particular antislavery society or committee. It seems clear, however, that the author was a woman because the circular refers to female slaves as “our sisters.” Moreover, there is a reference to a slaveholder visiting a relative in a village of Massachusetts in 1836, so it is likely that the author lived in that state. It is probable that the circular was written by Maria Weston Chapman in her capacity as corresponding secretary of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. In May 1836 Chapman had written the letters that sparked the convention idea, and in July of that year she wrote the Address to the Women of Massachusetts. The call to the first female antislavery convention was printed in the Liberator, Mar. 4, 1837, and in the Emancipator, Mar. 16, 1837.

17 Circular announcing the Female Anti-Slavery Convention, Liberator, Mar. 4, 1837; Emancipator, Mar. 16, 1837.

18 Circular announcing the Female Anti-Slavery Convention, Liberator, Mar. 4, 1837, Emancipator, Mar. 16, 1837; Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor, 105.

19 The comments from the National Enquirer were reprinted in the Emancipator, Mar. 16, 1837.

20 Ruth Bogin and Jean Fagan Yellin, introduction to Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, 11; Hansen, “Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society,” 51-52; Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 4.

21 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Proceedings of the AntiSlavery Convention of American Women, Held in the City of New York. In addition to the pamphlet version of the proceedings, I consulted those printed in the Liberator, June 16, 1837. The convention’s discussion of the petitioning plan is also described in Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, 47; Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 24; and Hewitt, Women’s Activism and Social Change, 91.

22 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 133-36, for example, implies that the executive committee of the AASS devised the plan for the national campaign. Stanton was quoted in the Emancipator, Nov. 24, 1836. The success of the Boston women is discussed in Hansen, “Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society,” 51.

23 Minutes of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, in Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 13.

24 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Proceedings of the AntiSlavery Convention of American Women, Held in the City of New York, in the Liberator, June 16, 1837; Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 17.

25 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Proceedings of the AntiSlavery Convention of American Women, Held in the City of New York, in the Liberator, June 16, 1837; Sterling, Turning the World Upside Down, 12.

26 Stone’s article in the New York Commercial Advertiser was reprinted in the Liberator, June 2, 1837.

27 Bacon, “By Moral Force Alone,” 280; Winch, “‘You Have Talents—Only Cultivate Them,’” 116. Nonetheless, most of the work was done by Grimké, and when she reissued the pamphlet later in the year, she considered affixing her name as author; see Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 214-15. The idea of including Grimké’s name on the second edition of the Appeal was discussed in a letter to her from Theodore Weld; see Theodore Weld to Angelina Grimké, Dec. 15, 1837, in Weld, Letters, 1:494-95.

28 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States.

29 Ibid.

30 Ibid. Jean Fagan Yellin agrees that this passage from An Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States was “crucial to the development of nineteenth-century American feminism.” The concept Angelina Grimké articulated, Yellin explains, is that freedom means the ability to engage in significant action, which Grimké defined as public speech. Grimké’s ultimate conclusion, Yellin notes, was that free women should speak out in public. See Yellin, Women and Sisters, 34-36.

31 Dillon, Benjamin Lundy and the Quest for Negro Freedom, 221-27.

32 Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Address to the Women of New England.

33 Ibid.

34 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 262 n. 15.

35 The petition was printed in the Friend of Man, Aug. 2, 1837.

36 The circular was published in the Liberator, June 23, 1837, and in the Friend of Man, Aug. 2, 1837.

37 Petition of the Citizens of Philadelphia for Repeal of the Gag Rule. Another strong statement against the gag rule was signed by Abby Kelley and 1,026 women of Lynn, Massachusetts, and yet another by 191 ladies of Oberlin, Ohio. See Petition of Eliza C. Stiles and Petition of Mrs. Levi Burnell.

38 Petition of Elizabeth Wilson.

39 Ibid.

40 Petition circular in the Liberator, June 23, 1837.

41 Ibid.

42 Ibid.

43 Letter from a member of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society written on the back of a petition from Women of Bedford County, Pennsylvania, January 15, 1838, box 94, Library of Congress, box 22, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

44 Henrietta Sargent to Abby Kelley, July 16, 1841, Foster Papers; Mary G. Chapman to John O. Burleigh, Sept. 10, 1838, box 133, Library of Congress, box 38, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

45 Liberator, July 14, 1837.

46 Emancipator, Aug. 17, 24, Sept. 17, 1837.

47 Report of the Dorcester [Massachusetts] Female Anti-Slavery Society, in the Liberator, Mar. 23, 1838; Melder, “Abby Kelley and the Process of Liberation,” 246.

48 Chapman quoted in Williams, “Female Antislavery Movement,” 171-72; Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 1:342. Yellin also emphasizes the important role female antislavery conventions played in the emergence of the women’s rights movement: “The Anti-Slavery Conventions of American Women, held in New York in 1837 and in Philadelphia in 1838 and 1839, were signal events in American history. They opened a new path for women’s political concerns, offering an organized expression of those concerns a decade before the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. They were racially integrated, with black women and white women working together in a common cause. They drew their strength from women all across the region. And the principal participants went on to shape other nineteenth-century reform movements” (Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, ix).

1 Liberator, Aug. 4, 1837.

2 Cott, Bonds of Womanhood, 101, 103. Cott drew these statistics of signature rates from Kenneth A. Lockridge, Literacy in Colonial New England (New York: Norton, 1974), 38-42, 57-78. The statistic on female academies comes from Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading,” 407. The link between sign literacy and the reading of novels is made by Davidson, “Female Education, Literacy, and the Politics of Sentimental Fiction.”

3 Davidson, “Female Education, Literacy, and the Politics of Sentimental Fiction,” 311; Kelley, “Reading Women/Women Reading,” 410, 403.

4 Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled,’” 182.

5 Liberator, Aug. 4, 1837.

6 Juliana A. Tappan to Anne Weston, July 21, 1837, quoted in Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 273.

7 Maria Weston Chapman, Right and Wrong in Massachusetts, 27; Liberator, Sept. 3, Aug. 4, 1837; Peck quoted in Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled, ’” 188.

8 Stanton quoted in Kraditor, Up from the Pedestal, 114; Kerber, Women of the Republic, 9, 119-20.

9 Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1837), in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 239; Hanna H. Smith to Abby Kelley, July 25, 1839, Foster Papers; Friend of Man, July 12, 1837.

10 Petition of the Females of Winthrop, Maine.

11 Frances E. Willard, “A White Life for Two” (1890), in Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 2:335-36. I wish to thank Campbell for bringing Willard’s appeal for name reform to my attention.

12 Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 55-56, 101.

13 Lerner, “Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 120-21; Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 136-37.

14 Liberator, Aug. 4, 1837. Judith Wellman also notes that circulating petitions “forced abolitionists to confront their own neighbors with carefully constructed antislavery arguments” (Wellman, “Women and Radical Reform,” 117).

15 Lerner, “Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 125; Chapman quoted in Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 81-82; Emancipator, Dec. 1, 1836; Lydia Maria Child to Ellis and Louisa Loring, July 10, 1838, and Child to Henrietta Sargent, Nov. 18, 1838, in Child, Selected Letters, 77, 93.

16 Emancipator, Aug. 17, 1837.

17 “A Lecture, Delivered Sunday Evening, by Albert A. Folsom, Pastor of the Universal Church, Hingham, Massachusetts,” extracted in Liberator, Sept. 22, 1837.

18 Quoted in Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Right and Wrong in Boston, 53; Winslow, “Appropriate Sphere of Woman,” 16.

19 The Massachusetts lecture tour was the Grimkés’ second oratorical venture. They had been trained as abolition lecturers by Theodore Weld at the convention of antislavery agents held in New York City, November 8-27, 1836. After their training the sisters stayed in New York to give parlor talks to women about the evils of slavery. See Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 113-19, and Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 23, 85.

20 Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 127.

21 Liberator, June 23, 1837.

22 Liberator, June 9, 1837.

23 “The Pastoral Letter of the General Association of Congregational Clergy,” Liberator, Aug. 11, 1837; “Appeal of Abolitionists, of the Theological Seminary, Andover, Mass.,” Liberator, Aug. 25, 1837.

24 Matthews, Rise of Public Woman, 70, 106; Angelina E. Grimké to Theodore Weld and John Greenleaf Whittier, Aug. 20, 1837, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 281.

25 Emancipator, Oct. 5, 1837.

26 Beecher, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, 3-6, 97, 101. Beecher, founder of the Hartford Female Academy, had met Angelina Grimké in 1832 when the young Quaker woman, who was considering enrolling in her school, traveled from Philadelphia to Connecticut to pay a visit. Though Grimké was dissuaded from attending by her orthodox Quaker associates, she continued to admire Beecher and in 1837 employed the celebrated educator’s words as the epitaph of her Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States. See Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 74-77.

27 Beecher, Essay on Slavery and Abolitionism, 103-4.

28 Grimké’s Letters to Catherine [sic] E. Beecher were printed in the form of thirteen letters in the Liberator between June 23 and November 3, 1837. The letters were printed in the Emancipator between July and November 1837 and in the Friend of Man between July and December 1837. They were published by Isaac Knaap in book form in 1838. See Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 146 n. The quotation is from Angelina Grimké, Letters to Beecher, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 193.

29 Angelina Grimké, Letters to Beecher, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 193-94.

30 Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 262-63.

31 John Greenleaf Whittier to Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Aug. 14, 1837, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 280; Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 199; Angelina E. Grimké to Weld and Whittier, Aug. 20, 1837, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 281-85. For an excellent analysis of the debate among Whittier, Weld, and Grimké, see Browne, Angelina Grimké, chap. 5.

32 Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 154; Lerner, “Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 123; Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 141, 352-53.

33 Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 277-79.

34 American Anti-Slavery Society, Correspondence between Elmore and Birney, 65; Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 266 n. 39, 131; Nye, Fettered Freedom, 37.

35 Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 279-82.

36 Angelina E. Grimké to Jane Smith, Feb. 7, 1838, in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 306; Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 167.

37 Maria Weston Chapman to William Lloyd Garrison, Liberator, Mar. 2, 1838; Japp, “Esther or Isaiah?,” 340.

38 A text of the exordium of Grimké’s speech was printed in the Liberator, Mar. 2, 1838. I wish to thank Phyllis M. Japp for alerting me that the text printed in the Liberator is more complete than the one printed in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 310-12. Despite the fact that the original and complete manuscript of the speech has not been found, it is clear that Grimké said much more than has been anthologized. Evidence that the speech was much longer includes the editor’s note at the bottom of the text of the exordium printed in the Liberator that states, “The orator then proceeded to discuss the merits of the petitions.” Moreover, in a letter to Garrison reporting on the event, Maria Weston Chapman provided a transcription of another part of the speech in which Grimké discussed the war in Florida. See Liberator, Mar. 2, 1838.

39 Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Society, Third Annual Report, 10; AntiSlavery Convention of American Women, Proceedings of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women Held In Philadelphia, 5, 7. In addition to being published in pamphlet form, the proceedings of the second convention were printed in the Liberator, July 27, 1838. Tappan referred to the murder of Elijah Lovejoy, an antislavery newspaper editor in Alton, Illinois. On November 8, 1837, Lovejoy’s press was destroyed by protesters, and he was killed during the altercation. Abolitionists depicted Lovejoy as a martyr for civil rights who was slain by the conspiring slaveocracy while protecting the right of freedom of expression. Abolitionists linked Lovejoy’s murder with the gag on antislavery petitions because both exemplified ways in which the slave power denied the rights of northerners.

40 Angelina Grimké, “Speech at Pennsylvania Hall,” in Grimké and Grimké, Public Years, 319-21.

41 Ibid., 322, 323.

42 Ira V. Brown, “‘Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?,’” 11-12.

43 Emancipator, May 24, 1838.

44 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Address to the Senators and Representatives of the Free States.

45 Ibid.

1 Adams, Speech on the Right of the People to Petition, 76-77.

2 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 22, 1835, 2032- 33, and 2d sess., Jan. 9, 1837, 1325.

3 Ibid., 2d sess., Jan. 9, 1837, 1337, and 1st sess., Dec. 22, 23, 1835, Jan. 12, 1836, 2032, 2064, 2170-71; Congressional Globe, 26th Cong., 1st sess., Jan. 28, 1840, 450.

4 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 2d sess., Jan. 9, 1837, 1337, and 1st sess., Dec. 22, 1835, Jan. 12, 1836, 2032, 2170-71.

5 Ibid., 2d sess., Feb. 7, 1837, 1616. When in 1816 Samuel Kercheval wrote to Jefferson that citizens in some sections of Virginia were attempting to claim a right of representation for their slaves, Jefferson responded,

6 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 23, 1835, 2070; 2d sess., Jan. 9, 1837, 1338, 1333, and Jan. 8, 1837, 1338-39; 1st sess., Dec. 22, 1835, 2032-33.

7 Ibid., 1st sess., Dec. 23, 1835, 2064, and 2d sess., Jan. 9, 1837, 1329, 1337; Kerber, “Meanings of Citizenship,” 835-36; Kerber, “No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies.”

8 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 1st sess., Dec. 22, 1835, 2032- 33.

9 Ibid., 1st sess., Feb. 2, 1835, 1131-32.

10 Ibid., 2d sess., Jan. 9, Feb. 7, 1837, 1315, 1624.

11 Adams, Speech on the Right of the People to Petition, 77-78, 74.

12 Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 2d sess., Feb. 6, 1837, 1589.

13 Ibid., 2d sess., Feb. 6, 1837, 1589, 1596.

14 Ibid., 2d sess., Feb. 9, 1837, 1675, and Jan. 9, 1837, 1315.

15 Adams, Speech on the Right of the People to Petition, 69, 65-66; Gales and Seaton’s Register of Debates, 24th Cong., 2d sess., Feb. 7, 1837, 1645.

16 Adams, Speech on the Right of the People to Petition, 70-75.

17 Ibid., 75-76.

18 Ibid., 81, 68.

19 Ibid., 65, 77. Abigail Adams had written to her statesman husband, John Adams, on March 31, 1776: “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would remember the ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation” (Abigail Adams to John Adams, Mar. 31, 1776, in Rossi, Feminist Papers, 10-11). On the petitions for suffrage directed at the New York legislature, see Cogan and Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage,” 427-39.

20 Adams, Memoirs, 10:35-36.

21 Ibid., 36-37.

22 The importance of Martin v. Commonwealth in emerging constructions of female citizenship is examined in Kerber, Women of the Republic, 132-36, and Kerber, “Meanings of Citizenship.” Among the state constitutional conventions that considered the prospect of granting women the rights of suffrage and office holding was that held in New York in 1821. See Zagarri, “Rights of Man and Woman,” 227-28. While congressmen had chastised the propriety of women petitioning against removal of the Cherokee from Georgia, there occurred no sustained debate about women’s right to petition or their status as citizens. See Hershberger, “Mobilizing Women,” 29.

23 Zagarri, “Rights of Man and Woman,” 203-30.

24 Adams, Speech on the Right of the People to Petition, 69, 65-66.

25 Zagarri, “Rights of Man and Woman,” 230.

1 Report of the Fifth Annual Meeting of the New England Anti-Slavery Convention, Liberator, June 8, 1838.

2 For other discussions of the decline in women’s organized petitioning activities, see Wellman, “Women and Radical Reform,” 121-24; Lerner, “Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 125-26; and Van Broekhoven, “‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled,’” 190-99.

3 Liberator, Oct. 26, 1838, May 3, 1839.

4 Liberator, July 20, Aug. 3, 1838.

5 Grimké biographers and historians of abolitionism have never mentioned this document likely because it has remained buried in the records of Congress for more than a century and a half. See Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Women of the United States, Feb. 10, 1839, box 133, Library of Congress, box 38, National Archives, Washington, D.C. The petition to which the Appeal is attached was dated September 10, 1838.

6 Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Women of the United States (1838).

7 Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 209.

8 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Circular of the Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, 25-28. Gilbert Barnes argued that the convention’s address merely “paid lip-service to the circulation of petitions; but all of its time was taken up with” other subjects. Yet in addition to passing resolutions about the importance of continuing to petition, delegates devoted the entire address to expounding on the reasons why women had the right to and should petition. See Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 273-74 n. 20.

9 Quoted in Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 344-45.

10 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 167-70.

11 Ibid., 176.

12 Ibid., 159; Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 25-28.

13 Stewart quoted in Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 149.

14 Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 360-71.

15 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 165-67, 277-78 n. 12.

16 Ibid., 177-79; Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 404-8.

17 Wellman, “Women and Radical Reform,” 121; Soderlund, “Priorities and Power,” 78-79; Petition of the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Despite its placement in the 1843 folder at the National Archives, the petition was dated by the authors as June 2, 1841.

18 Petition of 678 Women of Pennsylvania; Petition of 42 Citizens of Philadelphia; Petition of 37 Legal Voters and 40 Women of Columbia County; Petition of Louisa Bedford and 48 Other Ladies of Pennsylvania; Petition of Louisa Bedford and 59 Other Ladies of Philadelphia; Petition of M. S. Thorn and 77 Others; Petition of Ann W. Paxson and 37 Women of Pennsylvania; Memorial of 208 Women of Pennsylvania.

19 Petition of Charlotte Hartford and 178 Other Women of Boston; Petition of Sarah B. Litch and 100 others; Petition of Sarah Chapman and 721 Other Women of Boston; Petition of C. Swan and 80 Others; Petition of Hosea Trumball and 137 of Upton, Mass.; Petition of Caroline Wilkie with 110 Others; Petition of 61 Females of Braintree, Mass.; Petition of Sophia Foss and 71 Other Women of Southboro, Mass.; Petition of Hannah Faxon and 241 Others; Petition of Louisa Loring and 635 Other Women of Boston, Mass.; Great Petition to Congress from Citizens of Massachusetts, December 13, 1841-March 3, 1842. A similar request was made by another form of petition circulated widely in Massachusetts, signed by members of both sexes. See, for example, Petition of Charlotte Hartford and 178 Other Women of Boston, Jan. 14, 1842. Congressional Globe quoted in Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 468.

20 For example, the Petition of 585 Inhabitants of the State of New York; Petition of 857 Citizens of Cortlandville, Cortland County, NY; Petition of 1,111 Citizens of Oneida County, NY; Petition of Sarah H. Wicks and 85 Other Women of Oneida County, NY; Petition of 298 Female Inhabitants of the County of Lewis; Petition of 197 Ladies of the Town of Norway, New York. See also Petition of the Citizens of the 17th Congressional District in the State of New York.

21 Petition of 59 Females of the State of Indiana; Petition of 69 Females of the State of Indiana; Petition of 127 Females of the State of Indiana; Petition of 75 Females of the State of Indiana; Petition of 37 Inhabitants of Madison County, Indiana; Petition of the Citizens of Randolph County, Illinois (signed by 104 females and 167 males); Petition of Amy Newburn and 180 Other Women of Putnam County, Ill.; Petition of Lydia R. Finney and 254 Others; Petition from Mrs. M. P. Dascomb and 175 Other Ladies of Oberlin, Ohio; Petition from Mount Pleasant, Jefferson County, Ohio, for the Abolition of Slavery (signed by 73 men and 83 women); Petition from Mount Pleasant, Jefferson County, Ohio, against the Annexation of Texas; Petition of Phoebe B. Wood and 119 Others.

22 Petition of the Citizens of Pennsylvania Protesting against Rule 21; Great Petition to Congress from Citizens of Massachusetts, February 14, 1842-March 3, 1843; Petition from the Inhabitants of the Town of Nantucket; Petition from the Citizens of Ashtabula, Ohio.

23 Gunderson, Log-Cabin Campaign, 4, 7-8, 135-39; Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 106-7; Daniel Webster, “Remarks to the Ladies of Richmond,” in Webster, Works, 2:105-8; Varon, We Mean to be Counted, 71-72, 78-79; Zboray and Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840.”

24 Petition of Rebecca Buffum and 27 Female Citizens.

25 Judith Wellman argues that development of the national state, which supplanted local and religious definitions of community and citizenship, relegated women to the status not only of nonvoters but also nonentities. While I agree that the increasing importance of the vote made lack of the franchise a more acute problem for women, I do not agree that women were nonentities. Given that hundreds of thousands of enfranchised men continued to petition congressmen against slavery, the right of petition continued to exert some degree of political power, and women had established their right to petition Congress. See Wellman, “Women and Radical Reform,” 124.

26 Examples of the Women of America form include Petition of Alma Lyman and 52 Others; Petition of Sarah W. Wainright and 411 Women; Petition of Phoebe Knife and 804 Other Ladies; Petition of Sarah Forbes and 187 Other Ladies of Ashtabula, Co., OH; and Petition of E. A. Wetmore and 779 Others. Women of America petitions from Ohio, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and other states can also be found among the extant documents in the records of Congress. Van Broekhoven, Devotion of These Women, chap. 6, notes the impact of European revolutions on the rhetoric of this form of petition.

27 The inability of Congress to establish civil government in states created by the Mexican Cessation is detailed in Potter, Impending Crisis, chap. 4. Leonard Richards argues that the major reason for the repeal of the gag rule was that northern Democrats finally broke from the grip of their southern colleagues to vote against the gag. Northern Democrats jumped ship in December 1844, Richards explains, because they felt betrayed by the party. Northern congressmen expected that Martin Van Buren would be chosen as the Democratic candidate by the presidential nominating convention held in Baltimore. But southern members passed a rule requiring not a majority but a two-thirds vote to secure the nomination. This move effectively gave southerners a veto over the ticket, and the result was that James Polk, who served as Speaker of the House when the first gag was instituted and was a slaveholder, won the nomination. Their candidate defeated by dirty politics, northern Democrats, particularly those from Van Buren’s home state of New York, felt little loyalty to the party. They voted with northern Whigs to abolish the gag rule. See Richards, Congressman John Quincy Adams, 178. This analysis is repeated in Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 480-82.

28 Potter, Impending Crisis, 96.

29 Ibid., 99.

30 Circular of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society attached to Petitions from Citizens of Ohio; circular of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society attached to Petitions of 288 Citizens of Union County, Indiana.

31 Other petitions against the Fugitive Slave Law signed by women include, for example, Petition of the Ladies of Mercer County; Petition of the Inhabitants of Pennsylvania; Memorial of the Citizens of Potter County; Petition of the Citizens of Pennsylvania for Alteration of the Law; Petition of T. R. Townsend and Others; Petition of Mrs. Elizabeth Rodman and 1,728 Ladies; and Petition of 1,193 Citizens of Abington, Mass. Other petitions against the Fugitive Slave Law signed by Massachusetts women include Seven Petitions of Citizens of the State of Mass (from Needham, Raynham, Sherburne, Lancaster, Princeton, Norton, and Natick); Petition of Lydia Winslow and 172 Other Females; Petition of 448 Citizens of Canton, Mass. (signed by 227 men and 221 women); Petition of the Citizens of West Bridgewater, Mass. (signed by 131 men and 161 women); Petition of 293 Citizens of Georgetown, Mass. (signed by 178 men and 115 women); Petition of 392 Citizens of Hingston, Mass. (signed by 183 men and 209 women); and Petition of 2,833 Citizens of Portage County, OH. Other petitions from Ohio on the same topic include, for example, the Petition of the Citizens of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, and Memorial of Robert Willes and 92 Other Citizens of Ohio.

32 Petition of Citizens of Pennsylvania Praying for Alteration of the Law of 1793 (signed by 400 men and women, “colored people,” of Allegheny County).

33 Potter, Impending Crisis, 163-65.

34 Petition of M. Truesdall and 103 women of Elgin, Ill.

35 Resolutions from Public Meeting; Petition of the Women of Greece County, Ohio; Remonstrance of 78 Ladies of Oberlin; Petition of 414 Ladies of Oberlin; Remonstrance of 643 Women of Ohio City; Petition of the Ladies of Troy, Michigan; Petition from the Citizens of Wisconsin.

36 Remonstrance of Lucia W. G. Merrill and 136 Other Women; Petition of the Women of Andover, Mass. The first signer of this petition was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and sister of Catharine E. Beecher. The signers dated the petition February 10, 1854.

37 Petition of the Women of Iowa; Petition of Citizens of New York for Reconciliation.

38 Petition of James Hutchinson and 162 Others; Petition of the Citizens of Walworth, Wisconsin.

39 Memorial from Citizens of Skullyhill County, Pennsylvania. This petition was signed by 127 women of the Welsh Congregational Church of Mineisville. Likewise, Celia Manger and 153 women of Wisconsin entreated Congress, “by our love for our country, by our love for those who go forth to fight its battles, by the sacred names of those who have fallen on the field, as well as by our love of liberty for ourselves and for all,” to enact a law proclaiming the slaves free. See Memorial of Celia Manger and 153 women of Wisconsin.

40 Hamand, “Woman’s National Loyal League,” 40; Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 103-4.

41 For a description of Angelina Grimké Weld’s return to the platform, see Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 263-64. Julie Roy Jeffrey notes, “Given the goals of the [National Loyal League], its founders’ failure to make it biracial was an ironic commentary on the limitations of white abolitionism and perhaps on the focus of black women’s past efforts on elevating free blacks in the North. Although black women certainly favored the emancipation of slaves and the attainment of black legal and civil rights, and although black and white women did cooperate during the war, black and white abolitionist women continued to pursue many of their objectives, whether shared or not, independently of one another” (Jeffrey, Great Silent Army of Abolitionism, 217).

42 The text of this petition is taken from the Petition of the Women of the United States. It was also printed in the Liberator, Oct. 2, 1863.

43 Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 146.

44 Hamand, “Woman’s National Loyal League,” 44.

45 Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 109.

46 Angelina Grimké, “Address to the Soldiers of Our Second Revolution.” Lerner, Grimké Sisters, 264-65, discusses the address.

47 Stanton, Appeal to the Women of the Republic.

48 Quoted in Hamand, “Woman’s National Loyal League,” 50.

49 Ibid., 49-52; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 111-12; Sumner’s speech is reprinted in the Liberator, Apr. 1, 1864, and Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 2:78-80.

50 Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 146; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 111, 365 n. 13; Hamand, “Woman’s National Loyal League,” 53-54. These and other massive Loyal League petitions sent to the 38th Congress (Dec. 7, 1863-Mar. 3, 1865), which are so fragile that they cannot be unrolled to be read, can be found in oversized document drawer 16, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

1 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 266 n. 35; Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 14.

2 Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 266 n. 40; note from the clerk, 1864, SEN 38AH 20, Kansas Box 97, 38th Cong., Records of the U.S. Senate, Record Group 46, National Archives, Washington, D.C.

3 Sewell, Ballots for Freedom, 7-8.

4 Miller, Arguing about Slavery, 24; Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 110; report of the Starksborough, Vermont, Anti-Slavery Society, Emancipator, May 26, 1836.

5 Dumond, Antislavery, 246; Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, 35. Explicit statements about the importance of petitioning to the success of the antislavery movement can be found in a variety of primary sources. “Nothing can be made a substitute” for the “neighborhood influence” petitioners brought to bear as they agitated house-to-house, proclaimed the Friend of Man. The petition volunteers, declared the National Enquirer, rendered a vital service to the cause because they carried information “where our editors and lecturers are unable to penetrate.” See Friend of Man, Sept. 27, 1837; National Enquirer (n.d.); and Report of the Starksborough, Vermont, Anti-Slavery Society, Emancipator, May 26, 1836, all quoted in Barnes, Antislavery Impulse, 143-45.

6 Lerner, “Political Activities of Antislavery Women,” 125-26.

7 Frederick, “John Quincy Adams,” 119.

8 Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 248; Petition and Resolutions in Favor of Constitutional Amendment; Petition of Mrs. C. W. Bickley and Others.

9 New York Times, Jan. 27, 1900, and New York Evening Journal, Jan. 26, 1900, quoted in Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 250. After the success of the petition campaign to deny Roberts his congressional seat, petitioners continued to push for a constitutional amendment prohibiting polygamy. In 1904 the Democratic Party formally endorsed such an amendment in their national platform, and throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century petitioners to Congress continued to denounce Mormons and call for an antipolygamy amendment. Nonetheless, a half-century after it had begun, the campaign for an antipolygamy amendment died in the 1920s as anti-Mormon sentiment decreased appreciably after World War I. See Hardy, Solemn Covenant, 261, 300.

10 Our Mothers Before Us: Women and Democracy, 5:16; Grant, Anti-Lynching Movement, 31, 33, 65, 66; Memorial of Citizens of the United States (I wish to thank Alysha Black, Center for Legislative Archives, for giving me the opportunity to view this petition in the “treasure vault” of the National Archives); Petition of 2,413 Citizens of Massachusetts (the Massachusetts petition was followed a month later by, among others, an identical one signed by some 390 women and men from Englewood, New Jersey: Petition from the Citizens of New Jersey); Ragsdale and Treese, Black Americans in Congress, 160. Another example of petitions sent during the national drive for this legislation is the Petition of 114 Citizens Protesting against the Crime of Lynching. This petition, signed by women and men of Pennsylvania, stated simply that the signers endorsed the antilynching bill introduced by Representative White.

11 Petition of the Young Ladies Protective League of Washington, D.C. In 1918, for example, Katherine Beard, Susie Marse, John W. Thompson, and other members of the Colored Voters’ Republican Council of the State of New York petitioned the committee in charge of considering the bill to request that it be passed. The petition exposed the hypocrisy of white racism, stating that the horrible crimes of lynch mobs were “staring our men in the face [while] they are still marching onward with breasts to the front facing shot and shell to establish the democracy of the world” (Petition of the Colored Voters’ Republican Council of the State of New York). See also Grant, Anti-Lynching Movement, 168; Fascell, “Ten Historic Congressional Decisions,” 11; Schamel et al., Guide to the Records, 214.

12 “The Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” (1848), in Campbell, Man Cannot Speak for Her, 2:36; Cogan and Ginzberg, “1846 Petition for Woman’s Suffrage,” 427-39; DuBois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, 14, 18-19; Kerr, Lucy Stone, 60; Deckard, Women’s Movement, 256.

13 DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 53-55, 59-61; Flexner, Century of Struggle, 145-47. My interpretation of the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment and the rhetorical barriers it created differs from that of Flexner, who writes that it “raised the issue of whether women were actually citizens of the United States.” On the contrary, the issue it raised was not whether women were citizens but whether there was a difference between male citizenship and female citizenship. The amendment begins with the definition “All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” yet it penalizes states that deny suffrage to “male citizens” while establishing no consequences for the denial of suffrage to females who meet the definition of “citizen.”

14 Petition for Universal Suffrage.

15 Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 152-53; Stanton, National AntiSlavery Standard, Jan. 6, 1866, quoted in Hamand Venet, Neither Ballots nor Bullets, 152; Hamand, “Woman’s National Loyal League,” 55; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 61-62.

16 Petition for a Constitutional Amendment; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 63-66, 71-77. Circulation of the various petitions is discussed in Stone, Appeal to the Men and Women of America. The Appeal and petition were also published in the National Anti-Slavery Standard. See Hamand, “Woman’s National Loyal League,” 55.

17 Believing that male leadership in the American Equal Rights Association was ignoring the needs of women, in May 1869 Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association for women only. This group sought immediate enfranchisement of women and felt no need to use Republican Party channels to achieve their goals. Moderates such as Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, held a competing convention in November 1869 to form the American Woman Suffrage Association. This organization concentrated on passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, which further guaranteed adult male suffrage, and announced itself willing to postpone attainment of woman suffrage until the freedmen’s right to vote had been secured. See Flexner, Century of Struggle, 154-55; DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 189-202; Hamand, “Woman’s National Loyal League,” 55-56.

18 Text taken from Petition for Woman Suffrage from the Residents of the State of Colorado.

19 These figures were publicized by the National Woman Suffrage Association in its 1877 letter “To the Friends of Woman Suffrage.” The letter was attached to Petition for Woman Suffrage, 1877, HR45A-H11.7. From her 1848 address to the first women’s rights convention to her 1861 speech to the New York Judiciary Committee, Stanton had based her case for universal suffrage on the principle that all Americans possessed natural rights—blacks and women are no exception and should be granted the vote. But by 1869, likely out of frustration for having been betrayed by former abolition allies, Stanton no longer depicted white women and black men as partners in suffering. She found it rhetorically beneficial to contrast the two in order to demonstrate the superiority of white middle-class women, who, she believed, deserved the vote. Stanton scolded Gerrit Smith for considering “it important, for the best interests of the nation . . . that every type and shade of degraded, ignorant manhood should be enfranchised, before even the higher classes of womanhood should be admitted to the polls.” That same year Stanton declared in her “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention,” “If American women find it hard to bear the oppressions of their own Saxon fathers, the best orders of manhood, what may they not be called to endure when all the lower orders of foreigners now crowding our shores legislate for them and their daughters. Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who can not read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E. Dickinson” (DuBois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, 120). See also Stanton, “Address to the National Woman Suffrage Convention, Washington, D.C., January 19, 1869,” in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 2:353. According to DuBois, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, 119, similar racist statements recur in Stanton’s rhetoric from 1868 to 1869. See also Petition for Woman Suffrage from the Colored Citizens of the District of Columbia; Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote, 46-47; National Woman Suffrage Association, To the Friends of Woman Suffrage; American Woman Suffrage Association, “Response to NWSA’s Petition for a Sixteenth Amendment,” Feb. 4, 1878, in Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 3:104.

20 Flexner, Century of Struggle, 226, 257, 274, 278.

21 Ibid., 299-300, 319-27, 337; National Woman Suffrage Association, Appeal to the Women of the United States for a Sixteenth Amendment.