had undisputed authority) and to deny the slaveholding Republic of Texas admis-
sion to the Union. Two-thirds of the signers of these petitions were women,
prompting a Mississippi senator to declare that there would be less trouble “if the ladies and Sunday school children would let us alone.”
From the beginnings of antislavery agitation, the public response was often vio-
lent. Riots aimed at blacks and their white friends exploded in nearly every northern city. Mobs destroyed black neighborhoods in New York and Philadelphia. A
mob surrounded a convention of the Boston Female Anti-slavery Society in 1835,
forced the women to leave, then went looking for Garrison. Garrison was roughed
up, but then he escaped the mob by going into police custody, where he was
charged with disturbing the peace. In Washington, D.C., a doctor was arrested
while picking up botanical samples at the post office. The samples, it turned out, were wrapped in an abolitionist tract. In July 1834 a New York City mob sacked
the house of the white abolitionist merchant Lewis Tappan, moved on to the
Rev. Charles Finney’s Chatham Street Chapel, where abolitionists were said to be
meeting, and finished the evening by attacking a British (and thus supposedly aristocratic) actor at the Bowery theater. The manager saved his theater by waving two American flags and ordering an American actor to perform popular minstrel routines for the mob. Democracy and working-class aspirations—not to mention local
authorities—were in league with racism.
Southern whites had fewer free blacks or abolitionists to attack, but they found
their own ways to respond. A crowd in Charleston rushed the post office, removed
antislavery literature that was held there, and made a bonfire at the center of town.
A committee in Mississippi invited Garrison and other antislavery leaders to come south and be hanged. In Congress, southerners and their northern friends forced
President Jackson to permit southern postal workers to censor the mails. They also forced Democrats and southern Whigs to adopt the Gag Rule, abridging the right
of petition to avoid discussion of slavery in Congress (see Chapter 11).
In these ways, abolitionists demonstrated the complicity of the party system
(and the Democrats in particular) in the institution of slavery. They brought the slavery question to public attention and tied it to questions of civil liberties in the North and political power nationally. They thus threw light on the compromises
with slavery that made the United States possible, and they undermined the white
republic at its foundations. Moreover, they did all that with an active, public membership that included prominent women and blacks. The abolitionists were a dan-
gerous minority indeed.
THE POLITICS OF GENDER AND SEX
Whigs valued a reformed masculinity that was lived out in the sentimentalized
homes of the northern business classes or in the Christian gentility of the Whig
plantation and farm. Jacksonian voters defended domestic patriarchy. Whereas
most were unimaginative paternalists, Democrats often made heroes of men whose
flamboyant, rakish lives directly challenged Whig domesticity. Whigs denounced
Andrew Jackson for allegedly stealing his wife from her lawful husband; Democrats often admired him for the same reason. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, who was
The Politics of Gender and Sex
435
vice president under Martin Van Buren, openly kept a mulatto mistress and had
two daughters by her; with his pistols always at hand, he accompanied her around
Washington, D.C. “Prince” John Van Buren, the president’s son and a prominent
New York Democrat, met a “dark-eyed, well-formed Italian lady,” who called her-
self Amerigo Vespucci and claimed to be a direct descendant of the man for whom
America was named. She became young Van Buren’s “fancy lady,” remaining with
him until he lost her in a high-stakes card game.
Whigs made Democratic contempt for sentimental domesticity a political issue.
William Crane, a Michigan Whig, claimed that Democrats “despised no man for
his sins,” and went on to say that “brothel-haunters flocked to this party, because here in all political circles, and political movements, they were treated as nobility.”
Much of the Whig cultural agenda (and much of Democratic hatred of that agenda)
was rooted in contests between Whig and Democratic masculine styles.
Moral Reform
Sexual self-control became a badge of middle-class status.
Men supposedly had the greatest difficulty taming their ap-
petites. The old image—beginning with Eve and including Delilah and Jezebel and
other dangerous women of the Old Testament—of woman as seductress, persisted
in the more traditionalist churches and in the pulp fiction from which middle-
class mothers tried to protect their sons (see Chapter 10). Whig evangelicals, on the other hand, discovered that women were naturally free of desire and that only men were subject to the animal passions. “What terrible temptations lie in the
way of your sex,” wrote Harriet Beecher Stowe to her husband. “Tho I did love
you with an almost insane love before I married you, I never knew yet or felt the pulsation which showed me that I could be tempted in that way. I loved you as I
now love God.” The middle-class ideal combined female purity and male self-
control. For the most part, it was a private reform, contained within the home.
Sometimes, however, evangelical domesticity produced moral crusades to impose
that ethos on the world at large. Many of these crusades were led by women from
Whig families.
In 1828, a band of Sunday school teachers, most of them women, initiated an
informal mission to prostitutes that grew into the New-York Magdalen Society.
Taking a novel approach to an age-old question, the society argued that prostitu-
tion was created by brutal fathers and husbands who abandoned their young
daughters or wives, by dandies who seduced them and turned them into prostitutes, and by lustful men who bought their services. Prostitution, in other words, was not the result of the innate sinfulness of prostitutes; it was the result of the brutality and lust of men. The solution was to separate prostitutes from bad male power, pray
with them, and convert them to middle-class morality.
The Magdalen Society’s First Annual Report (1831) inveighed against male lust
and printed shocking life histories of prostitutes. Some men, however, read it as pornography. Others used it as a guidebook to the seamier side of New York
City. The wealthy male evangelicals who had bankrolled the Magdalen Society
withdrew their support, and the organization fell apart. Thereupon many of the
women reformers set up the Female Moral Reform Society, with a House of Indus-
try in which prostitutes were taught morality and household skills to prepare them 436