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'Tor the Sake of Suffering Kansas": Lydia Maria Child, Gender, and the Politics of the 1850s Margaret M. R. Kellow In the 1840s, Lydia Maria Child occasionally asserted that politics held no interest for her. When New York Democrats accused her of trying to influence a pohtical contest in 1846, by means of a column about a fugitive slave, Child denied any knowledge of the election in question.1 Rather ingenuously she averred that "I have never known anything about [electoral politics] since I was a little girl on the lookout for election cake. I know much better who leads the orchestras than who governs the state."2 In fact, however, although she was resolutely nonpartisan and strongly opposed to an antislavery pohtical party, national politics had rarely been long absent from Maria Child's attention.3 Her 1825 novel, The Rebels; or Boston Before the Revolution, constituted an extended discourse on the state of American republicanism.4 Homilies on the dangers of partisanship and the need for republican virtue recur frequently in the Juvenile Miscellany, the magazine for children that Child edited from 1826 to 1834.5 Her husband, David Lee Child, was a member of the legislature of Massachusetts and a vigorous supporter of John Quincy Adams in that state. Although a lawyer by profession, David Child edited the Massachusetts Journal, the organ of Adams and Webster supporters in the state, a task in which his wife assisted him and at which she occasionally took his place until the paper folded in the early 1830s. Even before Maria Child committed herself to antislavery, she spoke out publicly on other issues of national pohtical significance, such as the treatment of Native Americans. In 1833, Maria Child published An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, a comprehensive critique of American slavery and race relations, which included among other topics a thorough-going analysis of the role Southern supporters of slavery had played in national politics from the time of the Revolution.6 As Edward P. Crapol has pointed out, in Maria Child's 1833 Appeal can be found one of the earliest articulations of the Slave Power hypothesis which would come to dominate antislavery rhetoric by the late 1850s.7 As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard from 1841 to 1843, Child included extensive reportage on all bills, debates, foreign policy, and any other developments having a bearing on slavery, some of which she wrote herself. She also printed reports from Washington and pohtical commentary by her husband in the pages of the Standard. Although her activities and her publications forcefully asserted her right to a voice in debates over national pohtical questions, Maria Child © 1993 Journal of Women-s History, Vol 5 No. ζ (Fall) 1993 Margaret M. R. Kellow 33 stood determinedly aside from partisanship in the 1840s, convinced that such a contaminated instrument could not cure the nation's ills. In the 1830s and 1840s, Child had insisted that slavery was preeminently a moral problem. The pohtical process in her view contrived to sustain slavery rather than hasten its end. Although she recognized that abolition must necessarily be accompanied by legislative change to permit manumission in states where it was then restricted, in 1833 she had believed that emancipation had to be precipitated by moral transformations in the hearts of slaveowners. At that point Child saw politics, and partisan politics in particular, as more likely to obstruct than to accelerate this process. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Child attributed the slow growth of abolition sentiment and the virulence of antiabolitionism in no small measure to the action of partisanship. In her view politics blinded individuals to true morahty and prevented them from seeing where their true interests and those of the Republic lay. In politics, she believed, principles must inevitably be compromised. Thus she steadfastly opposed the efforts of those abolitionists such as James G. Bimey and Henry B. Stanton who advocated an antislavery pohtical party and who in 1840 organized the Liberty Party to contest the presidential election. "Moral influence," she had written in an 1842 editorial in the Standard, "dies under party action."8 By 1850, Child's convictions in this...

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