What role did petitioning play in the fight for women’s rights and the abolition of slavery?

0:03Anti-slavery was a coalition of a lot of different views and that was true in the 1770s, and it was true in the 1850s and 1860s. It was almost always a minority view and part of what anti-slavery activists, black and white had to do was to persuade a public that either didn't care, or was actively opposed, often racist to care about this issue. Prince Hall is a great example. It's important to understand there are different debates about the American Revolution.

0:38Was it a political revolution? Was it an economic revolution? Was it a social revolution? The way I teach it in my classes, it was all of the above. It was clearly a political revolution, the creation of new sovereignties that were formerly colonies, the break from the English monarchy, the creation of these new legislatively centered constitutions. But the other thing that really happened during those revolutionary years was an outpouring of petitions, for instance, for women, petitioning for divorce, just hundreds and hundreds petitions sent to the new state assemblies saying, I would like a divorce. Now, today, that's the thing that goes to a court. But that was the kind of legislature's prerogative in those days.

1:22It's in that setting of lots of people beginning to make claims that they didn't think they could have made five years before. That Prince Hall in 1778 and 1776, there's another one, and there are some other petitions, begin to say, look there should no longer be slavery in Massachusetts. They basically argue on the basis of the fact that they're laborers and that there are many free Blacks in the state, which there were at that time, and that true labor and true citizenship in this new Commonwealth of Massachusetts, this new true Republic should not be able to coexist with slavery. There's a lot, of course, paraphrasing on what is a beautiful document and which can be read online. What happens is that in the 1780 Constitution, there is a clause that is thereby interpreted in 1783 in a court decision called Quack Walker to basically abolish slavery. But that clause in the 1780 Constitution probably wouldn't have been there in the phrasing that it

2:28was had not Prince Hall and others began to petition against slavery. The abolition movement in the North. Many Northern states begin to abolish slavery before 1830, state by state, anytime you see those abolition statutes in the Northern legislatures, they're usually preceded by some degree of petitioning. Often by free Black men and women themselves, sometimes by enslaved, Black women and men, and sometimes by white allies, including the quackers, who are very, very active. It's William Lloyd Garrison, who out of Boston, begins to think that maybe what we ought to do is try to make slavery a national issue, because until that time, it had really been a state and heavily local issue. William Lloyd Garrison today is celebrated as one of the true anti slavery visionaries and founders and activists,

3:26but at the time, as I teach my students, he was thought of as a quack. He was thought of as a radical, somebody whose views were out of touch with the mainstream. Even when the white majority in the North didn't want slavery to expand, they didn't want to interfere in the system of slavery as it existed in the South. People like Frederick Douglas, people like Maria Stewart, the Black female abolitionist, people like William Lloyd Garrison they wanted none of that. They wanted the entire system to be destroyed. They wanted what you might call immediatism, the immediate uncompensated liberation of slaves, but they knew they weren't going to get that right away. Garrison came up with an ingenious ploy, says, let's ask for something very moderate.

4:12We know that Congress doesn't think that they have power over Southern property laws, which were the laws that established slavery, or legalized it in the South. But we know that Congress has power of the District of Columbia, so let's lobby petition, the Congress, to basically outlaw slavery and the slave trade in the District of Columbia. There was an active slave market. Abraham Lincoln remarked on it when he was a member of Congress there, and they started petitioning for that. The reaction of Southerners, especially from the most slave heavy states like South Carolina was both outrage and vengeful. They saw these petitions as worrisome because they might get popular and might make anti-slavery more popular. They also saw them as an affront to Southern honor. John Calhoun, when he stands up and gives his positive defense of slavery,

5:08or slavery as a positive good. He's actually speaking about the antislavery petitions when he's making those speeches. It's a huge miscalculation, but what they do is they basically pass a gag in the House that runs from 1836-1844. It's a petition about slavery, not just anti slavery, but about slavery. It will not be read on the floor, which is the customary hearing that something would get.

5:33It would be immediately tabled and it would not be sent to a committee, or it would be sent to a committee that was known never to meet. This has the opposite effect of what the Southern Democrats, one of them named Pinkney, after who the gag is named had intended. In the two years after that is adopted, around 6,000 petitions are sent to the House and Senate with about, I'm going to guess 600,000-700,000 signatures upon them.

6:00It's the largest outpouring of popular petitioning on a per capita basis in American history. What it does is that it completely mobilizes and revolutionizes American women. You can see women, and I'm using the term women here, but you could get married at the age of 14 at that time. There are 12-14 year old females who are canvassing those petitions, whose names we see a decade later on the Seneca Falls Declaration. We see them entering politics for the first time in that massive massive anti-slavery agitation in the petitioning campaign and those women stayed in politics forever thereafter, and you can find them in the Seneca Falls declaration. You can find them in the Women's Suffrage movement and the Women's Rights movement all over the mid to late 19th century.