The Age of Andrew Jackson

Chapter Six: The Age of Association

Temperance, Antislavery, and Women’s Rights Movements in Jacksonian America 79 Chapter Six The Age of Association Temperance, Antislavery, and Women’s Rights Movements in Jacksonian America Beth A. Salerno On a summer day in July 1848, more than two hundred women and forty men gathered in a small town in upstate New York near the Erie Canal. They sat in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls and listened to a thirty-two-year-old mother of three read a stirring Declaration of Rights and Sentiments. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had drawn from the example of the Declaration of Independence and proclaimed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”1 For two days the attendees debated the proper extent of women’s rights, including the right to divorce, the right to vote, and access to the professions. On the last day, more than one hundred people signed their names to the declaration, and many went on to organize women’s rights meetings and organizations across New York, Pennsylvania, and New England. The effort to win women the right to vote culminated in 1920 with the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution. Historians such as Ellen Carol DuBois and Jean Baker have seen this meeting in Seneca Falls as the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement or, as one writer put it, “the Lexington and Concord of the women’s ‘revolution.’”2 Yet if one looks backward rather than forward, it is also clear that the meeting in Seneca Falls was the end result of a series of political, economic, and social beth a. salerno 80 changes in Jacksonian America. The impact of the market revolution , religious revivals, the expansion of white male suffrage, a communications revolution, debates over slavery, a nationwide fear of moral decline, legal reforms regarding women’s property— all these issues came together between 1820 and 1848, particularly along the Erie Canal in upstate New York. These changes brought together people as varied as a working-class glovemaker and an upper-class factory owner’s wife, Quakers and Episcopalians, a former slave and antislavery farmers, with the belief that they could and should change their world. There is hot debate among historians over what to call the period from 1820 to 1848. Daniel Walker Howe’s major treatment of the period, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America , 1815–1848, avoids the terms “Jacksonian America,” “the Age of Jackson,” and the “market revolution” in favor of “the Era of the Communications Revolution.”3 Another common term is “antebellum America,” used most often by historians focused on the coming of the Civil War. Each term has a different emphasis. An older term, the “Age of Association,” best emphasizes the point of this chapter. Drawn from the writings of French political commentator Alexis de Tocqueville, who traveled in America in 1831, the term “Age of Association” highlights the amazing growth and diversity of what are now called unions, brotherhoods, societies, organizations, and political influence groups. De Tocqueville observed that “Americans of all ages, all conditions, all minds constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds . . . ; Americans use associations to give fêtes, to found seminaries, to build inns, to raise churches, to distribute books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they create hospitals, prisons, schools.”4 The people in and around Seneca Falls were thoroughly caught up in the association-making process: attendees were members of religious associations, anti­ slavery organizations, and temperance societies. Some women had organized fairs to raise money for antislavery. Others helped to found newspapers to spread the temperance message. Even the Temperance, Antislavery, and Women’s Rights Movements in Jacksonian America 81 Wesleyan Methodist Chapel itself was a result of association, as a group of churchgoers abandoned their original church in 1843 when the minister refused to allow a woman to speak. They reorganized into a new association and moved to a new building, vowing that it would be open to all speakers, including those proclaiming women’s rights.5 The women and men attending the Seneca Falls convention, like most people in Jacksonian America, understood that America had a God-given destiny, inherited from the American Revolution. Each individual had a personal responsibility to work toward maintaining and improving that legacy. Yet...