Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest

5. Women Lecturers and Radical Antislavery

c hap t er 5 Women Lecturers and Radical Antislavery The Quakers accosted her. An experienced and road-weary Garrisonian lecturer from Massachusetts, Abby Kelley had encountered hostile audiences across the Northeast for nearly a decade. She had come to the Old Northwest in June 1845 at the invitation of the Ohio Anti-Slavery Society . By the time she arrived at the Orthodox Yearly Meeting of Quakers in Mount Pleasant, she had been lecturing across the state for four months. The usually nonviolent Quakers reacted surprisingly fiercely to her, however . Only a few minutes after she rose to offer an unsolicited antislavery speech, she was asked to sit down and be quiet. She replied that she “must speak whether men would hear, or whether they would forbear.” While the congregation watched in some confusion, “she was seized by one or two elderly men and dragged out of the house, with, perhaps two or three women pulling at her dress.” Many of the younger Quakers followed Kelley out of the meeting house “to defend her from injury” and to hear what she had to say. Determined to satisfy her audience, Kelley walked down the street, stopped at the front step of abolitionist Aquilla Hurford’s door, and “spoke to those who assembled to hear.” Despite the inconvenient location, “the street was crowded for a considerable distance, all eager to catch the sound of her voice as it rung through their midst in behalf of the suffering and bleeding slave.” 128 . omen lecturers Eight years later, Mount Pleasant would again host a female antislavery lecturer, though the audience and the reaction were different. When Josephine Griffing, a friend and protégé of Kelley, arrived at the abolitionist meeting in a grove outside Mount Pleasant, she found an eager crowd despite bleak rainy conditions. All of the “thrilling”speakers who preceded her were “colored men”who had offered bold,intelligent,and articulate speeches. Griffing and her husband, Charles, spoke at the close of the meeting, and the mostly African American audience responded with exuberance. “I have never witnessed more patience, earnestness and delight,” wrote Josephine, “than was manifested in those countenances, crowded together under umbrellas and carriages, for a little shelter, and that they might hear amid the roaring thunder and the storm, which tossed the trees above them, words which they received as prophetic and sentiments to which their glad hearts often responded.” The “glad hearts” across the Old Northwest that listened to Griffing and the other abolitionist speakers in 1853 had become increasingly comfortable with women taking to the pulpit to preach the “gospel of liberty.” African American audiences such as the one in Mount Pleasant welcomed Griffing and other female speakers because the women addressed issues of concern to free blacks. But not all audiences were so convivial. As Kelley’s violent ejection from the Quaker meetinghouse in Mount Pleasant suggests, Ohioans were sometimes inhospitable. The Orthodox Friends had many reasons besides Kelley’s sex to disapprove of her uninvited discourse. Her standing as an eastern Garrisonian proved particularly galling. Westerners had little patience with the controversies of the eastern abolitionist movement and were especially intolerant of Kelley and other women lecturers who tried to import these conflicts into the region. While Kelley irked some orthodox Quakers, she had a stimulating effect on Ohio’s Garrisonians. In particular, women found her to be a source of inspiration .After Kelley visited Betsey Mix Cowles at her home in Austinburg, Cowles converted to Garrisonianism and employed her charm to proselytize for the radicals. Josephine Griffing, Lizzie Jones, and several others decided to take to the lecturing stand, preaching the Garrisonians’ uncompromising position.These speakers attacked the members of the clergy for their failure to condemn slavery and pleaded with abolitionists to eschew party politics and focus on moral suasion.They worked in coordination with male lecturers, often traveling and speaking in pairs or mixed-sex and mixed-race groups. Even as they were inspired to take the podium by an eastern Garrisonian, however, women such as Griffing and Jones established a western approach omen lecturers . 129 to lecturing characterized by cooperation and negotiation and including a distinctly non-Garrisonian focus on challenging racial inequality in the law and social settings. Though Ohio, Michigan, and Indiana abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s preferred third-party politics, Griffing, Jones...