For as long as SLAVERY flourished in the United States, opposition to its existence was its dogged partner. Whether by individuals or by groups such as the Quakers, antislavery sentiment predated the Revolutionary War and continued through the early years of the new republic. As early as 1820 Benjamin Lundy’s colonization newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation featured articles written by Elizabeth Chandler, a Quaker, in a column entitled “Ladies Repository.” It was not until the 1830s, however, that abolitionist opinion found formal expression through the formation of antislavery societies across the United States. The first such society is commonly considered to be the American Anti-Slavery Society, founded by William Lloyd Garrison in 1832. That group excluded women from its proceedings, causing Boston’s female abolitionists to create their own organization, the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, in the same year. Independently of these bodies, a group of free black women formed the Female Anti-Slavery Society in Salem, Massachusetts, also in 1832. This group, drawn from a diverse assemblage of Unitarians, Quakers, Congregationalists, and Baptists, took the process a step further by nominating Charlotte Phelps, wife of Reverend Amos Phelps, to serve as their president. Their high-profile fund-raising and petitioning occasioned much indignation in the press and even mob violence at their gatherings. One year later, after being refused entry to the meetings of the Philadelphia AntiSlavery Society, LUCRETIA Mott founded the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. At its inception, the society had 19 members, including two Quaker sisters from South Carolina, Angelina Grimke and Sarah Grimke. It was also unique for including African-American women among its members, drawn from that city’s sizable free black population.
Female antislavery societies had much the same goal as their male counterparts: the end of the institution of slavery within the United States. Most abolitionists objected to slavery on moral grounds, believing that it was expressly wrong for one human to hold another in bondage, and, using the rhetoric of the new republic, calling for equality, justice, and liberty for all. Abolitionists convened public meetings to explain their position and used the power of the printing press to try to educate the general citizenry in their beliefs. Garrison and other prominent abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass published antislavery newspapers, while numerous activists wrote pamphlets and tracts for distribution across the North and South. Despite prohibitions against direct organizational participation, Garrison was the first abolitionist leader to encourage women to get involved in the movement. He did so by invoking the widely held 19th-century idea that women were intrinsically superior to men in terms of morality and religiosity. His newspaper, The Liberator, featured a women’s column with the masthead “Am I not a woman and a sister?”
Female antislavery activists were central to these endeavors. Male abolitionists were generally comfortable with the idea of women raising funds for the movement, particularly as this mirrored the gender roles found in many churches of the period. Women also became adept at writing and circulating petitions, flooding the federal government with requests for the abolition of slavery through the 1830s and 1840s. Women were welcome to participate, provided their involvement was restricted to the background and did not violate social taboos against activities such as public speaking. In time, however, these restrictions became the impetus for the creation of female antislavery societies, which by their very existence directly challenged traditional social behaviors for the perceived weaker sex.
Although women, like men, often wrote and spoke publicly about their antislavery beliefs, they were frequently perceived to be stepping outside the acceptable boundaries of a woman’s “place” when they did so. To opponents of such female activism, it was especially disturbing that many female abolitionist writings appealed directly to other women, politicizing their roles as sisters, wives, and mothers. Angelina Grimke’s 1836 pamphlet An Appeal to the Christian Wo-men of the South, for example, pressed southern women to use their familial ties to men to exert influence over the business of the legislature and the ballot box. Sarah Grimke published a theological critique of slavery that same year, implicitly stepping into a sphere— ministry—that was generally, although not exclusively, the domain of men. In 1837 they went on to conduct an extensive speaking tour of New England, which garnered them additional notoriety. When the sisters and other women, including Lucretia Mott, followed up their published works with lecture tours, outrage at their behavior reached fever pitch. Catharine Beecher publicly criticized the Grimkes for their “unfeminine” behavior, while the collective clergy of Massachusetts issued a pastoral letter condemning the sisters. But the precedent had been set. After 1837 the doors continued to open for a growing list of paid female lecturers and public speakers, despite the already sharp and increasing antipathy against them.
Regardless, female antislavery societies flourished in the North and by 1837 were of sufficient number to warrant the first National Female Anti-Slavery Society convention in New York. Eighty-one delegates from 12 states attended the convention, an event that was multiracial, as were the female antislavery societies themselves. Opposition to the political and abolitionist activism of women, however, continued, and after the second national convention was held in Philadelphia in 1838, the meeting hall in which it had taken place was burned to the ground. Such violence exerted little impact on female petitioning. Having been proscribed from the political arena, women continued to pursue this convenient and publicly visible outlet for expressing political views.
By 1840 the American Anti-Slavery Society had, amid bitter acrimony, conceded women’s right to join its ranks. This, in turn, prompted dissenters to form their own women-free organizations. Thereafter the ABOLITION MOVEMENT lacked the unanimity it had enjoyed throughout the 1830s. Yet out of this bitter contretemps a new generation of female leaders and new levels of female participation emerged. It was as a delegate of the American Anti-Slavery Society that Lucretia Mott traveled to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840. There she was refused admittance, male delegates arguing that the presence of women would trivialize the proceedings and undermine everything they hoped to achieve. Mott found a sympathetic supporter in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the wife of another delegate to the convention. The two talked at length about the continued inequities experienced by women and resolved to hold a convention that expressly tackled the issue of women’s rights. Helped by numerous other women’s activists, that convention took place in Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848. For the next two decades the causes of abolition and women’s rights became closely entwined, although the pairing was never completely harmonious.
Female antislavery societies were crucial to the success of the abolitionist movement and also acted as a catalyst to the formation of a women’s rights movement later in the century. Using the tactics and political expertise they had gleaned from their abolitionist activism, women fought not only for the rights of the enslaved but for themselves. Their actions fueled the debate about gender equality for the rest of the century.
Further reading: Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina: Pioneers for Women's Rights and Abolition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Beth A. Salerno, Sister Societies: Women's Antislavery Organizations in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Kathryn K. Slar and James B. Stewart, eds., Women's Rights and Transatlantic Slavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007); Jean Fagan Yellan and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
—Catherine J. Denial
Figueroa, Jose (1 792-1 835) government official Jose Figueroa was the Mexican governor of California responsible for establishing a central government. Born in Jonacatepec, Morelos, Figueroa made his appearance on the national scene in 1821 at the time of the movement for the independence of Mexico, when he served as the personal secretary of General Vincente Guerrero. After Mexico became an independent nation, Figueroa assumed several military and political positions. In 1824, he was commanding general of Sinaloa and Sonora, where he actively suppressed Indian revolts. He was appointed governor (commandante general and jefe politico) of Upper (Alta) California in 1833. Among his duties were presiding over the education of the recently secularized mission neophytes, dividing up the Indian lands, and fostering the colonization of skilled workingmen and artisans into the province. He also had instructions to keep an eye on trade with the Russians and the American whaling ships.
Figueroa became embroiled in domestic political squabbles when he set about administering the law of the Mexican Congress to secularize the California missions. At issue were some of the most attractive lands in the province. Figueroa acted to thwart the schemes of Jose Maria Padres and Jose Maria Hijar (the latter already appointed
Millard Fillmore (Library of Congress)
As Figueroa’s successor as governor) in their colonization plans for mission lands. When General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna took office in 1834, he reappointed Figueroa to the office of governor of Alta California. Figueroa used the authority of his office to order the Padres-Hijar colonies off the mission lands and directed that they settle along the northern frontier of Sonoma, Solano, and Petaluma as a buffer against Russian expansion to the south. His quarrel with Padres and Hijar continued, and he eventually expelled them from California. He then wrote a political testament defending his actions, under the title The Manifesto to the Mexican Republic. Figueroa’s last actions as governor were concerned with securing the northern border against Indian revolt and Russian penetration. In 1835, he died in Monterey and was buried in Santa Barbara.
Figueroa was an important figure in the establishment of the authority of the central government in California. During his administration, he worked on the issues that were important to the Republic of Mexico. These included the administration of the Secularization Law of 1833 and safeguarding mission lands, securing the northern frontier against penetration by the Russians, and monitoring the expansion of American companies into the trades in hides and tallow. Loyal to his superiors in Mexico City, he was a man who stood up against the corruption and cronyism associated with much of Mexican political life at the time.
Further reading: Jose Figueroa, The Manifesto to the Mexican Republic (reprint, Oakland, Calif.: Biobooks, 1952); C. Alan Hutchinson, Frontier Settlement in Mexican California (New Haven, Conn: Yale University Press, 1969).
World History
