What Hath God Wrought (89 page)

Of the two major parties, the Whigs did more to encourage women’s political participation than did the Democrats. As the party of evangelical benevolence and government activism, the Whigs found it made sense to enlist the support of women even though they could not vote. In recruiting women and then relying on them to influence their men, the Whigs followed the example of the evangelical revivalists. Contemporaries commented on the presence of women in a presidential campaign for the first time in the Harrison demonstrations of 1840. Women not only cheered from the sidelines and of course prepared the food and decorations for the rallies, they marched in the parades themselves. The Whig women of Richmond invited Daniel Webster to come address them; twelve hundred of them turned out to hear him. “Though it be out of the common course for you to take part in the political strife,” the Mississippi Whig Sergeant Prentiss told the Whig women of Portland, Maine, “yet it is your right and your duty to come forward at a time like this, and say by the interest your presence manifests, how much you have at stake.” Occasionally women defied prevailing custom enough to make the speeches. One Jane Field roused the Whigs of Lincoln’s Springfield with her rhetoric, calling out that “Every hill, and vale, and mountain crag shall echo the heart cheering shout of Harrison and Liberty.”
⁹³
Lucy Kenney of Fredericksburg, Virginia, published, under her own name, several Harrison tracts, including one entitled
The Strongest of All Governments Is that Which Is Most Free
. (Kenney, who was nothing if not entrepreneurial, offered her campaign services to the Democrats as well, but Van Buren spurned them, while the Whigs paid her a thousand dollars.)
⁹⁴

The extent to which the Whigs mobilized women dismayed their rival party: “This way of making politicians of their women is something new under the sun,” admitted a Georgia Democrat. “We have been pained,” declared a Democratic newspaper, “to see our fair countrywomen unsex themselves” by getting involved in politics.
⁹⁵
Democrats continued to lag behind Whigs in organizing women in the election of 1844. They did enlist women in the movement to secure clemency for Thomas Dorr, but this and the journalism of Anne Royall remained exceptions within the insistent masculinity of Democratic ranks. The Democratic Party’s principal constituencies—small farmers, immigrants, and the working class—held more cautiously traditional attitudes toward women’s political involvement than did the commercial middle class. On the whole, the Democratic Party would remain less responsive to women’s rights than its opponents until long after the Civil War.
⁹⁶

Recognizing that theirs was the party of the middle class, the Harrisonians presented their candidate as the custodian of the domestic values cherished by the middle class, as the guardian of hearth and home. The symbol of the log cabin, handed to them by the Democrats, suited this strategy to perfection. Women supporting Harrison could see themselves as acting within the bounds of Victorian conventions, not necessarily as social rebels. They discussed the legitimacy of certain tactics: Should a woman threaten to break off her engagement if her boyfriend would not promise to vote right? Whig women seem to have supported their party for much the same reasons that men did—economic, religious, cultural—and not to score points for their gender. The Harrison campaign shows women taking an active interest in the public, civic sphere, though not yet in their own rights as such. But that would not be long in coming. In 1840, six-year-old Abigail Scott climbed a tree and called out to the other children her enthusiasm for Old Tippecanoe; as an adult, Abigail Scott Duniway crusaded for women’s suffrage.
⁹⁷

The involvement of women in the public arena owed much to the printed media, just beginning to discover women as a potential audience. The magazines of the day not only printed articles for and about women, they hired women to write them; and before long women appeared in editorial offices as well. A modern scholar has identified over six hundred female magazine and newspaper editors in nineteenth-century America.
⁹⁸
The greatest of them, undoubtedly, was Sarah Josepha Buell Hale, editress (she always insisted on the gendered form of her title) of the Boston
Ladies’ Magazine
from 1828 to 1836, the first magazine directed entirely to women; and then, in Philadelphia, of
Godey’s Ladies’ Book
from 1837 to 1877. At the eve of the Civil War,
Godey’s
had a circulation of 150,000, making it the most widely read magazine in the United States, and certainly one of the most influential.
⁹⁹
The roster of authors whom Hale’s magazines published included most of the famous and popular American writers of the day, among them Edgar Allan Poe, James K. Paulding, Lydia Sigourney, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick.

A small-town New Hampshire girl, Sarah Josepha Buell had been brought up by parents who believed in equal education for the sexes and saw that she acquired at home the equivalent of a college education. She married a promising lawyer, David Hale, who shared her intellectual interests. For nine happy years they pursued mutual self-improvement and parenting. Then, in 1822, David suddenly died, four days before the birth of their fifth child. Like Queen Victoria after the death of Prince Albert, Sarah Hale wore black for the rest of her life. A widow with a family to support, Hale turned to her only asset—her literary skills. In a year a volume of poetry appeared; in five years, a successful novel,
Northwood
, established her reputation and created the chance to edit the
Ladies’ Magazine
. In 1830 she published a book of verses for children aimed at the Sunday school market; it included the enduring classic, “Mary’s Lamb.”

A profound irony characterized Sarah Hale’s career: this hardheaded successful businesswoman put out magazines that defined and celebrated female domesticity. A full participant in the market economy herself, she imagined a female world apart from it, a separate sphere. Hale made herself the arbiter of taste for middle-class women in matters of dress, housing, cooking, child-rearing, literature, and morality. Through the medium of print, she constructed and disseminated that polite culture to which her readers aspired. But Hale also wanted to enrich and expand the women’s sphere. She labored early and consistently for women’s education and helped found Vassar College. Her magazines promoted concern for women’s health, property rights, and opportunities for public recognition—though not suffrage. By reading her magazine, which reached one hundred pages per issue in the 1840s, women all over the country kept in touch with what seemed to them the wider women’s world. Respecting the wishes of Louis Godey, her magazine’s owner, Hale avoided explicit references to party politics. But she found other ways to get across her message of pro-Union Whiggery, and her nationalism has been usefully compared to that of Daniel Webster.
¹⁰⁰
She attached much importance to her efforts on behalf of the construction of Bunker Hill Monument and the preservation of Washington’s plantation home, Mount Vernon, as patriotic shrines that North and South could agree to honor. Her most important legacy for Americans today is the holiday of Thanksgiving, originating in New England, which she worked for many years to nationalize and which finally achieved presidential sanction under Lincoln.
¹⁰¹
Hale believed that women had a special role in American society, to counterbalance the harsh competitiveness of male-dominated capitalism and to reconcile sectional conflict through the invocation of sentiment. If Dorothea Dix represented the moral reform side of Whiggery, Sarah Josepha Hale gave voice to its conciliatory, national unionist aspect.

VI

John Quincy Adams and other northern antislavery Whig congressmen like William Slade of Vermont and Joshua Giddings of Ohio deeply embarrassed the southern Whigs. In the South, the Whig Party felt vulnerable to the charge that it was soft on abolitionism, much as, in the 1950s, the Democratic Party worried about being thought soft on Communism. William Cost Johnson’s gag rule of 1840 represented a southern Whig attempt to prove the Whig Party’s loyalty to southern interests. Representative Johnson, a Maryland Whig, had few slaves in his district and supported colonization and gradual emancipation for his state, but he insisted as strongly as any member from the Deep South that the slavery question was one for southern whites only to sort out. In January 1840, Johnson reintroduced the extreme version of the gag rule, the one Calhoun had originally demanded, under which the House of Representatives would not even receive antislavery petitions. Calhoun had by now rejoined the Democratic Party, and it was an election year, as it had been when the first gag was adopted. So the House Democratic leadership refused to be outbid for the support of slaveholders. They accepted Johnson’s proposal and implemented it: The House adopted the tighter version of the gag rule by a close vote, 114 to 108. But this version was harder for northern members to swallow; over half the northern Democrats voted against it, and not a single one of the northern Whigs followed their Maryland colleague’s lead.
¹⁰²

When Harrison’s Whig-dominated Congress assembled in 1841, antislavery members seized the opportunity to raise the question of the gag rule. Two weeks of the bitterest wrangling and parliamentary snarls ensued. Three times the House voted to repeal the gag rule and three times then reversed itself—all by narrow margins. The problem came down to this: Although the Whigs had a majority of forty in the House, forty-five of their members were southerners. Eventually, faced with the urgency of the economic crisis, the exhausted Whigs abandoned their effort to deal with the gag rule so they could take up the rest of their program. The Democratic minority supported the gag, partly because it tied up the Whig majority. Later, when Tyler split from the Whigs, his little band of southern state-righters led by Henry Wise of Virginia continued as they had always done to join with the Calhounites in support of the strictest enforcement of the gag.

In January 1842, John Quincy Adams presented a petition from forty-two residents of Haverhill, a town in his constituency, requesting the dissolution of the Union (to free the petitioners from complicity in slavery). Of course Adams disagreed thoroughly with the petition that he thought it his duty to lay before the House. But Henry Wise demanded the former president be censured. Adams turned his ensuing trial before the House into a vindication. Seventy-four years old, unintimidated by threats and hate mail or the invective of outraged southern members, he spoke brilliantly for a week in his own defense, embarrassing his prosecutors (ruining the political career of his chief prosecutor, Thomas Marshall of Kentucky) and rallying enthusiastic support among northern Whigs. The press treated it as a sensation. Rather than let this go on for another week, his adversaries threw in the towel and “tabled” the censure motion. Adams, in a gesture of triumph, laid two hundred other petitions before his stunned colleagues. Afterwards the old man toured the North, feeling somewhat awkward in his unaccustomed role of popular hero.
¹⁰³

By this time northern Democratic congressmen had become anxious; the signatures on antislavery petitions now included not only Yankee evangelical spinsters (as Jacksonians had alleged) but working-class people and Democratic voters, especially in the “Upper North” above Pennsylvania. Even some southerners, beginning with Wise, could see that the gag rule (like the war against the Seminoles) was costing more than it was worth and should be abandoned.
¹⁰⁴
The number of northern Democrats in the House voting to continue the gag steadily declined. Finally, in December 1844, the House voted 108 to 80 to repeal the gag rule. Northern Whigs as usual voted unanimously for repeal, and this time they got strong support from northern Democrats, who voted 54 to 16 to get rid of a rule that had become a clear liability. Old Man Eloquent had won his long fight to vindicate democratic freedom of expression. The cause he had embraced out of conviction had proved an effective vehicle for shaping public opinion. Characteristically, he gave credit to the Almighty: “Blessed, forever blessed, be the name of God!”
¹⁰⁵

VII

The Whig Party, despite its strength in the electorate, its talented leadership, and the coherence of its program, was robbed by a cruel fate and its own appalling blunder (the death of Harrison and the choice of Tyler as his running mate) of the chance to carry out the mandate it had received in the election of 1840. As a result a national bank was not reconstituted, nor Clay’s comprehensive American System enacted. And never again did the party control the presidency and both houses of Congress at the same time. Still the Whigs had their impact on American society, although in ways less direct than national political control would have permitted. Through reform movements like that of Dorothea Dix, through influencing the culture as Sarah Hale did, by working for literacy and economic development at the state level as Abraham Lincoln did in Illinois, and by holding up moral wrong to public examination as John Quincy Adams did in Congress, the Whigs brought their distinctive value system to bear. The Dorr Rebellion in Rhode Island, where the Democrats’ felt urgency regarding white manhood suffrage conflicted with the Whigs’ commitment to law and order, illustrated one of the contrasts between the parties’ priorities. The common characterization of this period as “the age of Jackson” has obscured the contribution of the Whigs. Yet, as economic modernizers, as supporters of strong national government, and as humanitarians more receptive than their rivals to talent regardless of race or gender, the Whigs deserve to be remembered. They facilitated the transformation of the United States from a collection of parochial agricultural communities into a cosmopolitan nation integrated by commerce, industry, information, and voluntary associations as well as by political ties. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, we can see that the Whigs, though not the dominant party of their own time, were the party of America’s future.