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  • Jane McManus Storm Cazneau, 1807–1878
  • Megan Jenison Griffin

Jane Cazneau, the most prolific female journalist on US foreign policy during the antebellum period, was not wanting in self-confidence. "To a certain point," she wrote Secretary of the Navy George Bancroft in July 1846, "I can and do control over half of the entire daily circulation [of the New York Sun] and from my position thus hold the balance of opinion on any man or measure" (qtd. in Nelson 30). While her admirers included former Vice President Aaron Burr and former President of the Texas Republic Mirabeau Lamar, her political opinions drew the ire of many, including Senator Thomas Hart Benton, who criticized her "masculine stomach for war and politics" (qtd. in Hudson 69). Her most telling dispute, though, was with her colleague Margaret Fuller. In a letter to James Nathan in June 1845, Fuller grumbled, "[Cazneau] is coming on Saturday with a set of Ionian distingúes to dine here!" (118).1 What exactly Fuller meant by the descriptor is not entirely clear, although her sarcasm is evident. The Saturday event was one of many afternoon teas for influential literati hosted by Mary Cheney Greeley, the wife of the prominent New York newspaper editor Horace Greeley. Cazneau's set included literary friends and fellow organizers for the Female Industrial Association: Ann Sophia Stephens, Caroline Sawyer, and E. D. E. N. Southworth.2 Fuller's dislike of Cazneau and her friends was apparently reciprocal. Caroline Sawyer recalled the event in a letter to the group's mutual friend Mirabeau Lamar, remarking, "[Cazneau] proposes another visit [to Mrs. Greeley's] in order to have an opportunity of turning Mrs. Stephens loose upon Miss Fuller. It would be amusing, and quite surprise her out of her dignity" (qtd. in Graham 71). Cazneau and Stephens were childhood friends and remained close throughout their lives; that they had a shared dislike of Fuller was only one mark of their friendship. [End Page 416]

At least two issues fueled Cazneau and Fuller's disagreement at this time: their different approaches to women's rights and their beliefs on westward expansion. Cazneau, playing off Fuller's recent work of a similar title, wrote in July 1845 that the real "women of the nineteenth century" were those of the laboring classes, not the affluent and well-educated ladies in Fuller's book ("Women of the Nineteenth Century"). In this essay, she advocated practical and moderate solutions to gender inequality in the workforce, encouraging women to learn branches of business for which they might be better suited than men, and she mocked what she saw as Fuller's sense of self-importance. The two women were also divided on the annexation of Texas, an issue at the forefront of political debates during the summer of 1845. Cazneau argued for annexation under the pennames Storms or Montgomery for the New York Sun and the United States Magazine, and Democratic Review; Fuller, on the other hand, had only recently written in Woman in the Nineteenth Century that if Texas were annexed no one would "dare again to feel the throb of heavenly hope, as to the destiny of this country" (341). Fuller's opposition stemmed from Texas's admission as a slave state while Cazneau contended that Texas could be an important bridge for slowly moving slavery southward and, eventually, out of the country.

Despite their dispute, their journalism, and in particular their direct connections to editor Horace Greeley, kept them in each other's path. Before Greeley sent Fuller to Europe in 1846 to report for his New-York Tribune, he had sent Cazneau to the Mediterranean in 1839 to write "Letters from an American Lady" (signed Josephine) for his New Yorker. Fuller also reviewed literature for the Tribune, and Cazneau's own first Tribune column appeared only days before Fuller died in a shipwreck in 1850. The women had a number of other striking similarities: Both served as foreign correspondents for their respective New York newspapers: Cazneau covered the US-Mexico War as MONTGOMERY for the New York Sun (1846–1848), and Fuller, writing for the New-York Tribune, reported on the various revolutions in Europe—most...

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