Hearts Beating for Liberty: Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest by Stacey M. Robertson (review)

During the 1830s and 1840s antislavery feeling, though years in the making, was beginning to take hold in the Old Northwest states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Slavery’s antagonists, once operating in a relatively quiet and unorganized state, were now coalescing. And as northern and southern attitudes diverged, so too did their moral compass. This all accompanied the rising southern economy where, taking advantage of the cotton gin’s development and cheap available tracts of land, ambitious southerners found no faster way to fortune than using slave labor to set up a cotton plantation. Soon, however, despite enjoying high demand for their competitive cotton in the textile mills of New England and Great Britain, slaveholders saw that adding thousands more slaves to their expanding operations was fostering sharp negative reactions and posing danger to their national political and economic power. By 1833 the newly founded American Anti-Slavery Society was busy decrying the spreading slave-based economy and calling for immediate emancipation.

Before long, American slaveholders saw antislavery influences spreading through numerous antislavery organizations being formed in Ohio and other states. And, because slavery’s wrongs had a strong moral dimension that touched female as well as male social roles, women began taking an active part in the organized opposition. It was here among abolitionists that women found opportunities beyond the limits of their traditional home and family duties to enter the public arena.

In Hearts Beating for Liberty Stacey M. Robertson recounts the lives and pathways taken by women joining the antislavery struggle in the Old Northwest. Focused to a large extent on carefully documenting Ohio developments, the author brings to light the numerous contributions of these dedicated western women and their leaders to the cause. Her intent: to show that shifting the focus from East to the West “forces a reconsideration of antislavery history” to correct the bias of eastern scholarship. Here in the Old Northwest, “a region with a complicated history of slavery and racism, abolitionists working at the grassroots level created a distinct approach characterized by cooperation and flexibility” in building their movement (2).

Her excellent introduction challenges the view that western abolition was an eastern import and points out that “Racism and the Black Laws” of the Old Northwest along with its diverse population “created an environment that demanded a pragmatic abolitionism.”

This sets the stage for what follows in seven chapters, organized by topic and in a generally chronological fashion. The opening chapter describes overall features of antislavery organization in Ohio, indicating how, unlike in the East, county and statewide groups predominated— and how the female antislavery societies would take on regional issues with national influence, cooperate with men and sister societies in petition campaigns to the mutual benefit of abolitionism, and involve themselves in African American education efforts. Chapter 2 turns to abolitionist women and the Liberty Party, where western women found that through quiet involvement, “the ‘feminine’ area of morality overlapped with the ‘masculine’ political domain in ways that made them more knowledgeable, politically skilled, and accepted.” Chapter 3 takes up their involvement in the Free Produce movement in hopes that slavery might be made unprofitable by citizens “refusing to purchase or use any products made by slaves.” Chapter 4 details how western women pressed their radical agenda through organizing sewing societies, participating at antislavery fairs and conferences to awaken public sentiment. Chapter 5 focuses in on women public speakers such as Betsey Mix Cowles, Lizzie Hitchcock, and Josephine Griffing, who discussed local issues by aiming to attract supporters less by using hardline methods than more effective cooperative approaches. Chapter 6 on abolitionists and fugitive slaves shows that western women, despite the scoldings of eastern Garrisonians to stop “wasting time and energy” on the futile task of aiding escapees, nonetheless pressed on, finding “their work with fugitives as deeply fulfilling and sometimes life changing.” A final chapter looks to...