Tag: abolition

Frances Trollope—a Troublesome Visitor

Adele Fasick4 Comments

We often hear stories of immigrants who came to America hoping to find a country superior to the one they left. Many settled in the new land and became enthusiastic American patriots. Some histories, however, tell the stories of immigrants who came for practical reasons and some who discovered that America did not live up to their expectations. Frances Trollope was one of these disillusioned immigrants. She came, observed, and then went back home. Worse than that, she wrote about her experiences in a book that outraged many Americans.

Frances Trollope, born Frances Milton in 1779, was a well-educated Englishwoman, daughter of a minister, wife of a barrister, and the mother of five young children. Her husband was not a wealthy man, and when Frances heard about a new idealistic community being set up in America, she decided that she could educate her sons inexpensively there and live a comfortable life. In 1827, she packed up several of her children and headed off for the new country. The plan was for her husband to follow later with their younger children.

Frances Trollope

Trollope’s idea had grown out of her friendship with Fanny Wright, a radical reformer who planned to build a new settlement in Tennessee where enslaved Americans could earn money to buy their freedom. The hope was that slavery would disappear and that slaveowners would not suffer any great loss of income.

When Frances Trollope arrived in America, she had learned enough about slavery to be a strong abolitionist. What she did not know, however, was that she would be surprised and shocked by the everyday habits of many Americans. She observed, took notes, and later wrote about what she had seen. Several years later, she published her first book: Domestic Manners of the Americans, which became both a best seller and one of the most hated books of the time. Her comments on the dining habits of the men she met on a river boat journey were often quoted by both friends and critics:

…the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured …the loathsome spitting, from the contamination of which it was absolutely impossible to protect our dresses; the frightful manner of feeding with their knives, till the whole blade seemed to enter into the mouth; and the still more frightful manner of cleaning the teeth afterwards with a pocket knife…

None of Trollope’s plans for life in America worked out as she had hoped. Fanny Wright’s community in Nashoba, Tennessee, was a failure and Trollope was not able to settle there with her family. She took her sons to Cincinnati, Ohio and tried to earn a living by writing and lecturing but was not successful. She was not sympathetic to the American culture and offended many people by noting the discrepancies between American ideals and the behavior she observed.  

In 1831, Trollope moved back to England and lived the rest of her life in Europe. She traveled around the continent and wrote travel books about Belgium, France, and Germany. She also began writing novels and by the time she died in 1863, had published 100 books.  Her books were very popular, and during her lifetime she was considered one of the outstanding novelists of the 19th century. Modern critics, however, have been critical of her work, and most of her books have become unavailable except in specialized collections.

Two of Frances Trollope’s sons became writers. Thomas Adolphus Trollope was a well-known historian and respected in his time, but Anthony Trollope, the younger son, outshone him. He was the author of several series of books that have been turned into BBC drama series. His Barchester Chronicles and The Pallisers have made him the most famous Trollope of them all.

Fanny Wright and Her Impossible Dream

Adele Fasick3 Comments

2021 has been one of the most divisive years Americans have endured. But if we look back at history, this is by no means the worst we’ve seen. The early years of the 19th century found Americans bitterly divided over the institution of slavery, the power of the federal government, and the importance of religion. Some people wanted nothing to change, but many others were determined to change society in a way that would eliminate slavery and ensure justice for everyone. The question was—how could that be done?

One of the most ambitions dreamers of a new, more just America was a young immigrant named Fanny Wright. Born into a wealthy family in Dundee, Scotland, in 1795, Fanny Wright was orphaned as a young child. She was raised mostly by an aunt of her mother’s and an uncle who was a professor of philosophy in Scotland. In the university library, she read every book she could find and soon began writing poetry and plays. When she read about America and how it was dedicated to a just and fair society for all, she determined to visit the country.

Fannny Wright

At the age of 23, she was able to fulfill her plan and sailed to America with her sister. She was delighted by the freedom of American society, but shocked when she discovered the realities of slavery. In the book she wrote about her travels she said, “The sight of slavery is revolting every where, but to inhale the impure breath of its pestilence in the free winds of America is odious beyond all that the imagination can conceive.”

After her book was published in Great Britain, many important people admired it and wanted to meet the young author. One of her most congenial new friends was the Marquis de Lafayette. In fact, they became such close friends that she moved into Lafayette’s house for a while and was rumored to be his lover. Whether that was true or not, when Lafayette was invited to return to the United States in 1826 to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the founding of the United States, Fanny and her sister followed in his footsteps.

On her second visit to the country, Fanny was even more troubled by the continued existence of slavery and the failure of Americans to confront the issue and find a way to end it. One popular idea in the 1820s and 1830s was that slaves should be freed and then transported out of the country. Very few people liked the idea of having free Blacks live in the same areas in which they had been enslaved. Two popular destinations for these people were Liberia, in Africa, and Haiti, the Caribbean Island that had won independence from France in 1804 and had abolished slavery.

Fanny Wright conceived an ambitious plan to demonstrate how slavery could be abolished in the United States without slaveowners losing the money they had invested. She proposed starting a farming colony where slaves could buy their freedom through the products they raised and sold. Unfortunately, the location she found was Nashoba, Tennessee, a swampy, isolated area that did not offer good soil for farming. It was also far from the markets where produce could be sold  and there were no roads. Fanny Wright had never farmed, and she apparently did not consult anyone who could give her practical guidance.

The bad start soon grew worse. Fanny had hoped to form a utopian community, but the Black residents were still slaves and were not given any responsibility for running the organization. Instead, Fanny recruited white men and women who wanted to form an ideal society, although they did not know much about how to farm or to run a business. Nonetheless, the trustees made all the decisions, while the slaves that Fanny had purchased, did the practical farm work.

When Fanny got sick, probably with malaria, and she left the colony under the supervision of the white trustees while she traveled to Europe to find treatment. When she returned to the farm a year later, she found that nothing had gone well. The farm was failing, most of the trustees had left, and the man who was left in charge treated the slaves just about as badly as they had been treated by their old masters.

When Fanny published a paper to justify her plans, she got herself into more trouble. For one thing, she suggested that the free Blacks could intermarry with white citizen and the differences between the races would disappear. She also revealed that she was an atheist and did not believe religious services would help the community. Both of those beliefs caused Wright to lose the support she had enjoyed earlier. Many people could hardly decide which was worse—believing in inter-racial marriage or being an atheist.

That was the end of the Nashoba colony. Fanny was able to purchase freedom for the eight slaves she had brought there and eventually to send them to Haiti, but the community never recovered. And the failure of Nashoba led to the end of Fanny’s dream of freeing all the slaves in America.

Fanny Wright spent the rest of her life traveling between Europe and America, lecturing on rights for women and sometimes on the abolition of slavery, but her reputation was damaged beyond repair. She died in 1852, years before the Civil War had finally led to the abolition of slavery in the United States.  

Thanksgiving Thoughts 2014

Adele Fasick1 Comment

Every year brings new challenges and new opportunities, although our poor planet doesn’t have much to be thankful for what with continuing drought and endless war. Still, I am thankful for NaNoWriMo—National Novel Writing Month—which

National Novel Writing Month--November
National Novel Writing Month–November

has given me the push I needed to write a first draft of the third book in my Charlotte Edgerton mystery series. I am still racing to meet the 50,000 word goal by the end of this month, so I am going to reprint the thoughts I first posted on my blog last year. Lydia Maria Child, although almost forgotten is one of the Americans we should all be thankful for.

Over the river, and through the wood,

to Grandfather’s house away!

We would not stop for doll or top,

for ’tis Thanksgiving Day.

Fifty or a hundred years ago almost every child in America would know that song because it was sung in classrooms all over the country. No matter that many American children lived in cities and had no experience of sleighs or woods or even Grandfather’s house, which might have been across the ocean instead of through the woods. Today the song would mean even less to children who may never have seen a real horse much less a spinning top—dolls we have with us still, although not like the ones our grandmothers had.

And so the song drifts off into history, but it is the only legacy left by a remarkable woman who would probably spin in her grave if she thought that of all the books she wrote, lectures she gave, and magazines she published, only this trifling set of verses is left. What has happened, she might wonder, to the explosive stories she wrote about intermarriage, abolition, and the rights of American Indians. Those were the works that led the Boston Athenaeum to revoke her free borrowing privileges. Lydia Maria Child was a firebrand despite the decorous cap and long, sedate dresses she wears in her portraits.

Born in 1802 in Massachusetts, she was a member of the first post-revolution generation. Her father Convers Francis was a prosperous baker and her older brother, also named Convers Francis, became a Unitarian minister and a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. It was her brother who encouraged her to try writing a novel and she completed Hobomok, with an American Indian as its hero. It was a popular success and started her on a lifetime writing career.

When she met the Harvard educated lawyer David Childs she was introduced to the abolitionist cause. They married and pursued lifelong careers as reformers and radicals. Unfortunately David was constantly in debt, made innumerable bad choices in business investments, and even spent time in prison for debt. Lydia (usually called Maria, which she preferred) had to be the stable breadwinner. She did this by starting a children’s magazine and by publishing books directed at housewives. Her hugely popular Frugal Housewife addressed the problems of middle-class women who struggled to maintain a house and feed a family.

But Maria Child was not content to linger over the problems of making soap and choosing fresh eggs, she was determined to help in the struggle to free slaves and women, two groups which she saw as being exploited by men who treated them as property. The book which angered many New Englanders was her An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans

Lydia Maria Child
Lydia Maria Child

Called Africans. In it she advocated the abolition of slavery but rejected the notion of sending freed slaves back to Africa. Instead, she wanted to integrate them into American society and make them the equal of white citizens. She accused Northerners of being just as racist as Southerners, which infuriated many old friends and leading citizens of Massachusetts. She believed in education and in intermarriage. She wrote:

An unjust law exists in this Commonwealth, by which marriages between persons of different color is pronounced illegal. I am aware of the ridicule to which I may subject myself by alluding to this; but I have lived too long, and observed too much, to be disturbed by the world’s mockery. In the first place, the government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion.  

Her sentiments shocked even many of the abolitionists who wanted to abolish slavery, but hesitated over the question of total equality. Maria Child spent most of her life facing controversy. She believed that men and women should work together in the Anti-Slavery Society and precipitated a long-lasting feud in that group. For all her long life she argued for freedom and equality. On this Thanksgiving Day we ought to give thanks to her, not for producing a sweet little verse, but for persisting in the endless struggle to make Americans live up to their highest aspirations.

As far as I know, there is no easily accessible biography of Lydia Maria Child. The one that I read is a detailed scholarly biography by Carolyn Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Duke University Press 1994). I highly recommend it, but not too many people will commit to 800 pages. Perhaps someday Professor Karcher will produce a shorter, more popular introduction to a woman who deserves more attention than she has received in our history books.

More Thanks for Lydia Maria Child

Adele Fasick1 Comment

Over the river, and through the wood,
To Grandfather’s house we go;
the horse knows the way to carry the sleigh
through the white and drifted snow.

Lydia Maria Child
Lydia Maria Child

Over the river, and through the wood,
to Grandfather’s house away!
We would not stop for doll or top,
for ’tis Thanksgiving Day.

Fifty or a hundred years ago almost every child in America would know that song because it was sung in classrooms all over the country. No matter that many American children lived in cities and had no experience of sleighs or woods or even Grandfather’s house, which might have been across the ocean instead of through the woods. Today the song would mean even less to children who may never have seen a real horse much less a spinning top—dolls we have with us still, although not like the ones our grandmothers had.

And so the song drifts off into history, but it is the only legacy left by a remarkable woman who would probably spin in her grave if she thought that of all the books she wrote, lectures she gave, and magazines she published, only this trifling set of verses is left. What has happened, she might wonder, to the explosive stories she wrote about intermarriage, abolition, and the rights of American Indians. Those were the works that led the Boston Athenaeum to revoke her free borrowing privileges. Lydia Maria Child was a firebrand despite the decorous cap and long, sedate dresses she wears in her portraits.

Born in 1802 in Massachusetts, she was a member of the first post-revolution generation. Her father Convers Francis was a prosperous baker and her older brother, also named Convers Francis, became a Unitarian minister and a professor at the Harvard Divinity School. It was her brother who encouraged her to try writing a novel and she completed Hobomok, with an American Indian as its hero. It was a popular success and started her on a lifetime writing career.

When she met the Harvard educated lawyer David Childs she was introduced to the abolitionist cause. They married and pursued lifelong careers as reformers and radicals. Unfortunately David was constantly in debt, made innumerable bad choices in business investments, and even spent time in prison for debt. Lydia (usually called Maria, which she preferred) had to be the stable breadwinner. She did this by starting a children’s magazine and by publishing books directed at housewives. Her hugely popular Frugal Housewife addressed the problems of middle-class women who struggled to maintain a house and feed a family.

But Maria Child was not content to linger over the problems of making soap and choosing fresh eggs, she was determined to help in the struggle to free slaves and women, two groups which she saw as being exploited by men who treated them as property. The book which angered many New Englanders was her An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. In it she advocated the abolition of slavery but rejected the notion of sending freed slaves back to Africa. Instead, she wanted to integrate them into American society and make them the equal of white citizens. She accused Northerners of being just as racist as Southerners, which infuriated many old friends and leading citizens of Massachusetts. She believed in education and in intermarriage. She wrote:

An unjust law exists in this Commonwealth, by which marriages between persons of different color is pronounced illegal. I am aware of the ridicule to which I may subject myself by alluding to this; but I have lived too long, and observed too much, to be disturbed by the world’s mockery. In the first place, the government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion.

Her sentiments shocked even many of the abolitionists who wanted to abolish slavery, but hesitated over the question of total equality. Maria Child spent most of her life facing controversy. She believed that men and women should work together in the Anti-Slavery Society and precipitated a long-lasting feud in that group. For all her long life she argued for freedom and equality. On this Thanksgiving Day we ought to give thanks to her, not for producing a sweet little verse, but for persisting in the endless struggle to make Americans live up to their highest aspirations.

As far as I know, there is no easily accessible biography of Lydia Maria Child. The one that I read is a detailed scholarly biography by Carolyn Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Duke University Press 1994). I highly recommend it, but not too many people will commit to 800 pages. Perhaps someday Professor Karcher will produce a shorter, more popular introduction to a woman who deserves more attention than she has received in our history books.