wages of their own labor, and to custody of children in cases of divorce. Fourteen northern states passed such legislation, culminating in New York’s wide-ranging
Married Women’s Property Act in 1860.
The first Woman’s Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, New York, in
1848. The busiest organizer of the convention was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, wife
of the abolitionist Henry B. Stanton and an attendee at the London convention of
1840. Stanton was a lukewarm abolitionist, but the argument over women in the
movement drove her into full-time feminism. Along with other feminist abolition-
ists, she organized the Seneca Falls Convention. The only male delegate was the
black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Sojourner Truth, another prominent black
opponent of slavery, also attended. Nearly all of the other delegates were white
women abolitionists. Both as abolitionists and as feminists, they based their de-
mands for equality not only on legal and moral arguments but also on the spirit
of republican institutions. The principal formal document issued by the conven-
tion, a Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions based on the Declaration of
Independence, denounced “the repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of
man toward woman.”
Most of those “injuries and usurpations” were political. The central issue was
the right to vote. Lucretia Mott and other Quaker delegates, along with many Gar-
risonian abolitionists, did not want a political movement. (“Lizzy,” Mott chided
Stanton, “thee will make us ridiculous.”) But Stanton knew that political rights—
voting in particular—were crucial. Voting was central to the “democratic” pattern that granted liberty and equality to white men regardless of class and excluded
Americans who were not white and male. Thus female participation in politics
was a direct challenge to a male-ordained women’s place. A distraught New York
legislator agreed: “It is well known that the object of these unsexed women is to overthrow the most sacred of our institutions…. Are we to put the stamp of truth
upon the libel here set forth, that men and women, in the matrimonial relation, are to be equal?” Later, Elizabeth Cady Stanton recalled such reactions: “Political
rights,” she said, “involving in their last results equality everywhere, roused all the antagonism of a dominant power, against the self-assertion of a class hitherto
subservient.”
CONCLUSION
By the 1830s, most citizens firmly identified with either the Whig or Democratic
Party, so much so that party affiliation was a big part of personal identity. In the states and neighborhoods, Whigs embraced commerce and activist government, arguing that both would foster prosperity, social harmony, and moral progress. Faith in progress and improvement led Northern and western Whigs, primarily the more
radical evangelicals among them, to imagine that liberty and equality might apply to women and blacks as well as white men. The Democratic response to this was
grounded in a defense of white patriarchy and the old republic. Like the Whigs,
they did not doubt the value of commerce. But they worried that the market and
its infrastructure of banking, credit, and paper money—all of it subsidized by government—forced inequality and dependence upon the republic’s white male citi-
zenry. Whig projects and Whig taxation, in short, corrupted the republic.
Conclusion
439
Democrats also looked with angry disbelief at attempts of Whigs (and rebellious
members of Whig families) to govern private and public behavior, and sometimes
even to attack the “natural” and fundamental distinctions of sex and race.
In sum, Whigs reformulated the revolutionary legacy of liberty and equality,
moving away from classical notions of citizenship and toward liberty of conscience and equality of opportunity within a market-driven democracy. They often attempted to civilize that new world by using government power to encourage com-
merce, social interdependence, and cultural homogeneity. When Democrats argued
that Whig “interdependence” in fact meant dependence and inequality, Whigs
countered with promises of success for individuals who were morally worthy of it.
Democrats trusted none of that. Theirs was a Jeffersonian formulation grounded in a fierce defense of the liberty and equality of white men, and in a minimal, inexpensive, decentralized government that protected the liberties of those men without
threatening their independence or their power over their households and within
their neighborhoods. That was the fundamental political argument in the United
States from the 1820s to the 1850, and, for all its noise and uproar, it underwrote a party system that was outwardly stable and safe. But with the rise of antislavery and the acquisition of new territory, the political system was forced to address
questions that the parties could not control.
13
MANIFEST DESTINY: AN EMPIRE FOR
LIBERTY—OR SLAVERY?