SOURCE: "Lydia Maria Child: Abolitionist Critic of American Foreign Policy," in Women and American Foreign Policy, Greenwood Press, 1987, pp. 1-18.

[In the essay that follows, which was originally published in 1987, Crapol examines Child's life and writings—especially her abolitionist An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans—in order to demonstrate her complex and influential views on American foreign policy.]

One of the pioneer female critics of American diplomacy was the nineteenth century abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. Born in Medford, Massachusetts, in 1802, she was the youngest of the six children of David Convers Francis, a baker who obtained modest fame and fortune as the producer of the "Medford cracker," and Susannah Rand Francis. Before reaching the age of thirty, Maria Child, as she preferred to be called, had made her mark as an intellectual who was at once a successful novelist, a noted author of "how to" books for women, and the editor of Juvenile Miscellany, the first children's magazine to appear in the United States. An advocate of what the English historian J. H. Plumb has labeled the idea of modernity, Mrs. Child viewed slavery as an inhumane, outmoded institution and adhered to the belief that the betterment of humankind, including the elimination of slavery, would be attained through the "acceptance of man's rationality and control over nature."¹ She also operated on the belief that the institution of chattel slavery was acceptable in a society where the status of women and children in the family resembled a form of slavery. As a consequence, Maria Child championed the cause of women's rights on its own merits as well as being a means to undermine black slavery. In The Mother's Book (1831) she warned against the overemphasis on romance in young women's lives, urged instead that they cultivate their intellects, abandon their timidity and overcome their dependence on men.² Maria Child practiced what she preached. In an extraordinary reversal of roles for nineteenth century America she, admittedly more as a matter of necessity than of choice, financially supported her husband, David Lee Child, for most of their married life.

In the early 1830s at what appeared to be the height of her initial literary fame, Maria Child consciously endangered her public reputation by choosing to become an abolitionist. It was not an easy decision. Her husband made the first move, but she resisted and expressed serious reservations about the antislavery cause. An introduction to William Lloyd Garrison arranged by husband, David, led to her conversion. As she recalled years later, "I little thought then that the whole pattern of my life-web would be changed by that introduction. I was then all absorbed in poetry and painting, soaring aloft on Psyche-wings into ethereal regions of mysticism. He got hold of the strings of my conscience and pulled me into reforms."³ Once committed to a life of intellectual activism for social reform, Child's critique of the nation's diplomacy flowed naturally from her newly acquired antislavery beliefs. For more than forty years as writer, petitioner, organizer, pamphleteer, and editor she fought slavery, sought racial and sexual equality, and decried "the insane rage for annexation in this country" and the propensity to seize "the territory of our neighbors by fraud or force."⁴

The event that signaled Child's public debut as an abolitionist was the publication in July 1833 of her An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans. Not only was it the first book by an American, either male or female, to call for immediate emancipation, but it also included the first systematic exposition of the slave power thesis to appear in the United States. Path-breaking as well were Maria Child's unflinching denunciation of white racism in the North and South and her plea for a national policy of racial equality. Not surprisingly the Appeal's harsh attack on slavery, its indictment of white racism, and its demand for racial equality shocked and offended a large number of Mrs. Child's faithful readers. Unquestionably the majority of Americans found her analysis too radical, certainly it was not the sort of thing a respectable American woman should be writing. The North American Review, previously among her admirers, regretted that Mrs. Child had diverted her pen from its "legitimate spheres of action."⁵ She had anticipated such negative responses to her Appeal. In the book's preface Child stated defiantly that "I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, it is not my nature to fear them."⁶ Her prediction was correct. Sales of her books plummeted and the Juvenile Miscellany enterprise folded. With the publication of the Appeal Child courageously embarked on a lifelong struggle for blacks; but her abolitionism exacted a heavy financial toll as she never fully regained the broad popularity she once enjoyed among the reading public.

Despite its unpopularity with the general public and the political establishment in the United States, the Appeal represented a milestone in antislavery annals. It probably converted more women and men to the abolitionist cause than any other publication. Many northern antebellum women acknowledged their intellectual and moral debt to Mrs. Child both publicly and privately. In 1835 antislavery women in Lynn, and Salem, Massachusetts, sent her a gold watch in appreciation of her noble "first appeal in behalf of the American slave."⁷ Initially converted or strengthened in their commitment to the antislavery cause after reading the Appeal were such prominent and influential male opponents of slavery as William Ellery Channing, Theodore Weld, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and John Gorham Palfrey. Two members of this band of Child disciples, Republicans Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, ultimately wielded considerable political power as senators from Massachusetts, and in Wilson's case as vice president in the second Grant administration. Of all Maria Child's male "pupils," Sumner came closest to being her intellectual protégé and he fondly referred to her as "his teacher."⁸

Child's exposé of the influence of the slave power in her Appeal updated the old. Federalist argument that stressed the inequity of the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. In her view that clause, which counted a slave as three-fifths of a person in the population tabulation for representation, gave the South twenty undeserved members of the House of Representatives, allowing Southerners to be the "ruling power of this government" as evidenced in their control of the presidency, the vice presidency, the federal judiciary, and the Congress. The detrimental impact on the North as a result of this Southern dominance in the national councils was all too evident, Child alleged, and was reflected most clearly in the South's historical unfriendliness to commerce and that region's opposition to the growth of an American navy. She repeated another standard Federalist charge by claiming that the War of 1812 had been fought for southern, not national, interests. On the question of the tariff, Mrs. Child found the South to be totally inconsistent, first using duties to inhibit commerce and then objecting when the North favored the tariff to protect is nascent industries. Her partisan reading of the history of the United States's fifty year existence led to the conclusion that the South had a stranglehold on the levers of federal power, which guaranteed "the preservation and extension of slave power."⁹

In concluding her analysis of slavery's political influence on the republic, Child decried the slave power's restrictive grip on the nation's diplomacy. Her concerns about foreign policy focused on the issues of Haiti and Texas. More than a quarter of a century after the creation of the western hemisphere's first black republic, the United States still withheld formal diplomatic recognition of Haiti. Child not only argued that official recognition was long overdue, but justified, because Haiti was a political and economic success, "fast increasing its wealth, intelligence and refinement." In her call for recognition she highlighted the commercial benefits that would accrue to the United States from such action. American trade with the black republic, impressive even without the benefit of formal diplomatic ties, would be greatly expanded after recognition and the exchange of representatives. In the early 1820s it was estimated that America's exports to Haiti were as large as its combined exports to Sweden, Russia, Denmark, Prussia and Ireland and more shipping entered American ports from Haiti than any other nation except Great Britain, the British North American colonies, and the island of Cuba. In 1831 total trade with Haiti approached $3,000,000, much of it moving through New England's ports.¹⁰ But, according to Mrs. Child, neither simple human justice nor commercial logic would prompt the Andrew Jackson administration or the Congress to support recognition. The "existence of slavery among us" prevents it, she lamented, and even more distressing, "our Northern representatives have never even made an effort to have her independence acknowledged, because a colored ambassador would be so disagreeable to our prejudices."¹¹

Prior to Child's demand for recognition, several politicians had warily and obliquely raised the issue, most notably Caleb Cushing and Henry Clay. In response to these cautious soundings, public opinion remained hostile to the idea, and in that context Child's advocacy of Haitian recognition proved as courageous as it was ingenious. What she did was to employ a foreign policy issue to emphasize the central paradox confronting the citizens of antebellum America. The demand for the recognition of Haiti uncovered the basic contradictions inherent in prevailing American ideology, whereby a republic based on the principle of human liberty, defended and promoted racial inequality and sanctioned chattel slavery for several million human beings. The fact that the Haitian issue forced Americans to accept or reject black equality, and indirectly acknowledge the humanity of American slaves, probably explains why that issue, which appears so innocuous on the surface, became one of the primary objectives of the early abolitionist political program.

Southern designs aimed at acquiring Texas from Mexico emerged as another foreign policy issue that agitated Mrs. Child to action. On this question she was following the lead of the Quaker abolitionist, Benjamin Lundy, and her husband, David Lee Child, both of whom had warned her of this danger earlier. "The purchase or the conquest of Texas is a favorite scheme with Southerners," she said, "because it would occasion such an inexhaustible demand for slaves." At the time of the publication of the Appeal in 1833, she was gratified that "the jealousy of the Mexican government places a barrier in that direction."¹² To help ensure that Texas remained Mexican and not new territory for the expansion of slavery, Maria Child during the next several years personally helped gather 45,000 signatures against the annexation of Texas on petitions that were sent to the United States Congress.¹³ That prodigious feat was paralleled by her direct influence on the future direction of the antislavery enterprise, for Mrs. Child identified and pinpointed two of the key foreign policy issues—recognition of Haiti and opposition to the annexation of Texas—that became central to the petition campaigns mounted by men and women abolitionists in the 1830s and 1840s.

Despite her unprecedented achievement in so clearly defining the issues and projecting the line of intellectual attack for the antislavery forces, Child's critique of the slave power was not without flaws and partisan exaggeration. Her comments on the War of 1812, the question of Southern opposition to commerce and a navy, and her view of the South's flip-flop on the tariff were often simplistic, inaccurate, and one-sided. And although the three-fifths clause may have allowed the South to elect twenty additional members to the House of Representatives, at no time between the adoption of the Constitution in 1789 and 1833, when her book appeared, did the South as a section have a majority in that body. But her Appeal should not be dismissed as a paranoid jeremiad. The basic thrust of her argument was correct. The South did dominate the national government. Northern political support was necessary to maintain that domination, but dominate the South did. Mrs. Child recognized that reality, and while imploring the South to abandon slavery for its and the nation's moral and ideological salvation, concentrated on persuading her northern brethren that it was in their self-interest to work to eliminate slavery and its restraints on the nation's diplomacy.

As a trailblazing critic of foreign policy Mrs. Child consistently throughout her career expressed misgivings about the national mania for territorial expansion. Child was a resolute champion of the underdog, who instinctively sought to protect the reds and the blacks. Future expansion could only come at their expense. It would deprive the Indians of their land and destroy their culture, and it would tighten the bonds of slavery for blacks by opening ever more territory to the "peculiar institution." Child was deeply troubled by what she foresaw as the dire impact of future expansionism. In 1838 she confided to her friend Henrietta Sargent: "What God is preparing for us along the Indian frontier, in Mexico, Cuba, Hayti, I know not; but I think I see 'coming events cast their shadows before.' We certainly have done all we could to secure the deadly hostility of the red man and the black man everywhere." And she added this apocalyptic afterthought: "I think God will overrule events to bring about a change, long before the moral sense of this nation demands it as a matter of justice and humanity."¹⁴

Once she reached the forefront of the antislavery enterprise, Mrs. Child found herself in a whirlwind of activity that ran the political gamut from the tedious chore of circulating petitions to the emotionally and intellectually more satisfying task of dashing off polemical tracts such as An Anti-Slavery Catechism. Shortly after the appearance of the Appeal she joined the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and proceeded to organize, with the help of her close friend Louisa Loring, the first antislavery fair to be held in the country. These bazaars became an annual affair where women contributed needlework, cakes, jellies, preserves, and other goods to be sold to raise money for the cause. The expanding public role played by antislavery women caused some consternation within the movement's ranks as well as among the general public. Mrs. Child assured her sisters that while "some will tell you that women have nothing to do with this question … where women are brutalized, scourged, and sold, shall we not inquire the reason? My sisters, you have not only the right, but it is your solemn duty."¹⁵ Until her death in 1880 Child would be driven to do something for her oppressed brothers and sisters, be they black, red, white, or yellow.

As a leading antislavery couple the Childs were much in demand during the 1830s heyday of abolitionist activity. In recognition of their commitment they were among the group that hosted the controversial 1835 visit of the British antislavery leader George Thompson. Then in rapid succession the Childs were nominated or volunteered for three overseas ventures ostensibly designed to broadcast the antislavery message, but aimed as well to relieve their increasingly precarious financial straits. A grateful Thompson offered David Child a position in England as an antislavery editor, but before they could sail the entire scheme collapsed for lack of funds. Primarily to overcome the burden of debt, the Childs in early 1836 made plans to join Benjamin Lundy's free labor settlement in Tamaulipas, Mexico. The Texas revolution and the creation of the Lone Star Republic aborted those plans, since the territory Lundy's band was to settle was claimed by Texas. Mrs. Child saw the hand of the slave power at work as she complained that "the troubles in Texas have been got up by bad, ambitious men, stimulated by offers from Southern planters, who want that fine territory for slave markets." Disappointed and depressed at the turn of events, her spirit was "sorely tried concerning Texas" for "if this territory be acquired" by the United States she feared it would "throw back abolition half a century."¹⁶ Still hoping to go abroad, Maria and David volunteered at the 1836 annual meeting to be emissaries for the American Anti-Slavery Society on a fact-finding mission to Haiti and the British West Indies to gather information on the condition of free blacks in those islands. Once again they were thwarted as the Executive Committee of that organization thought the Childs, especially Maria, would be more valuable if they remained at home writing antislavery tracts and articles for the press.

Frustrated in his scheme for a Mexican free labor colony, their friend Benjamin Lundy initially became the major antislavery spokesman against Texas annexation. His two broadsides on the Texas insurrection were standard texts for opponents of further territorial expansion in slavery's behalf, and John Quincy Adams relied on Lundy's expertise and advice while waging the fight against annexation in the House of Representatives. Lundy's analysis of the events and forces that led to the Texas rebellion, while drawn from his own personal experience in that Mexican province, unmistakably was cast in the polemical mold of Mrs. Child's slave power thesis. The Jackson administration's swift recognition of the Texas Republic in March, 1837, in glaring contrast to its established policy of non-recognition of the black republic of Haiti, led Mrs. Child and her compatriots to identify the action as irrefutable evidence of the slave power's dominance in Washington. In the midst of this first Texas crisis the signs of slave power's influence were alarmingly visible. Perhaps most ominous was an action by the House of Representatives in 1836 that directly threatened the constitutional guarantee of the right of petition. The House's so-called gag rule, which automatically tabled all antislavery memorials and petitions, was a rude awakening for many in the antislavery enterprise since it exposed the precarious nature of their own civil liberties.

The Southern-inspired use of the gag in the House, which so blatantly threatened the civil liberties of white male protesters, had the political effect of linking "the claims of emancipation and free discussion." This prompted large numbers of Northerners to flock to the antislavery banner, although Mrs. Child believed many of these new recruits "care little or nothing for the poor slave."¹⁷ And even as it made new converts to the cause, the gag rule did little or nothing to abate the flood of petitions that continued to pour into Congress, which by April 1838 "filled a room 20 × 30 × 14 feet, closely packed to the ceiling." Just over half of those petitions were circulated and signed by women. That year in Northampton, Massachusetts, residents Maria and David Child also were busy at what she considered "that most odious of all tasks, that of getting signatures to Petitions."¹⁸ During the third session of the Twenty-Fifth Congress, December 1838-March, .1839, abolitionist petitions with a total of 500,000 signatures were presented on eight separate topics, including the issues of opposition to the annexation of Texas, and for the first time, the call for the recognition of Haiti.¹⁹ Actually the inauguration of petitions for Haitian recognition was a ploy to evade the gag rule, as abolitionists hoped to force a debate on the diplomatic and commercial merits of the Haitian case and ultimately the evils of slavery, to the floor of Congress. The tactic failed as petitions for Haitian recognition were routinely tabled in the same manner as other antislavery memorials.

Some historians of the pre-Civil War period have argued that the shift in the antislavery outlook from an earlier focus on black equality to one primarily concerned with the political, economic and social rights of northern white men led to the creation of an implicitly racist ideology based on the concept of free men, free soil, and free labor.²⁰ Although an accurate assessment, what this interpretation ignores is that the gag rule as an overt challenge to white civil rights probably represented an even greater immediate political threat to female than to male abolitionists. Unable to vote or to participate in the various activities associated with the electoral process, antislavery women saw the activity of circulating petitions as the most important form of political action open to them in antebellum America. To thwart that activity would deprive women of even that marginal political voice. The case for petitioning as being crucial to expanding women's public sphere was made repeatedly by abolitionist women and put most clearly by the Third Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in 1839:

It is our only means of direct political action. It is not ours to fill the offices of government, or to assist in the election of those who shall fill them. We do not enact or enforce the laws of the land. The only direct influence which we can exert upon our Legislatures, is by protests and petitions.²¹

Admittedly women's petition campaigns by and large failed in their objectives of changing domestic and foreign policy. But as historian Nancy Woloch asserted in her recent study of women in American history, antebellum women did succeed "in appropriating and feminizing a portion of the public sphere."²²

Maria Child reluctantly had attended the first Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women in New York in May 1837. She had come to doubt the wisdom of separate female organizations, believing they reinforced the false notion of the legitimacy of separate spheres for men and women and feeling they were "like half a pair of scissors." After heavy pressure from female friends in the movement, Child went as a delegate from Massachusetts. Honored by being elected one of its six vice presidents of the convention, she actively participated in the proceedings, offering several resolutions on slavery and the right of petition that were adopted by the assembly. Although she did not attend the second women's meeting at Philadelphia the following year, Mrs Child agreed to author the convention's "Address to the Senators and Representatives of the Free States," which was to be distributed to all northern members of Congress. Noting that various Congressional resolutions betrayed a belief in the ephemeral nature of the antislavery feeling, she denied that the abolitionist effort was simply a "fanatical and temporary excitement." She also chastised northern legislators for their passivity in the face of the slave power's encroachments. It was their "timid subserviency" that had allowed for Texan independence to be "so hastily acknowledged" by the American government. But not all Northern members of Congress were spineless, and in her "Address" Mrs. Child singled out Representative William Slade of Vermont and Senator Thomas Morris of Ohio for their political courage.²³

It was fitting that Mrs. Child should praise the work of Slade and Morris in Congress. Both men were staunch opponents of slavery and the slave power, and probably had been influenced in their antislavery beliefs by the analysis presented in her 1833 Appeal. Within months after Child's recognition of their service to the cause, each man would champion issues that she had helped bring to public attention. In December 1838 Representative Slade recommended that a memorial of the citizens of West Randolph, Vermont, be forwarded to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, "with instructions to report bill for recognizing independence of Hayti, and making provision for customary diplomatic relations with said republic."²⁴ Slade's motion to bring the issue of recognition before the House provided a storm of protest from his Southern colleagues. John Quincy Adams and a few others nonetheless supported Slade's action, but in early 1839 the Foreign Affairs Committee asked to be discharged of further consideration of Haitian recognition, effectively killing the issue in that session. For his part, Senator Morris in February 1839 delivered a famous speech that ostensibly was a defense of the right of petition for abolitionists. In reality the speech proved to be one of the more comprehensive attacks on the slave power, which in its line of argument drew heavily on the intellectual formulation developed by Mrs. Child in her earlier critiques. Widely reprinted, Morris's speech gained a certain notoriety among the faithful and was to become required reading in the growing antislavery library.

After completing the "Address to the Senators and Representatives of the Free States," Mrs. Child temporarily curtailed her public activities primarily because of financial difficulties brought about in good part by her husband's total lack of "business sense." She devoted her energies to aiding her husband in the latest of his unprofitable experiments with sugar beet cultivation, which he hoped would become an alternative to slave-produced cane sugar. In 1841 she emerged from a brief self-imposed exile to accept the position as editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly abolitionist newspaper based in New York City. As the first woman to edit a major antislavery publication, Mrs. Child labored for two years to set a moderate and reasoned tone at the Standard in hope of calmly persuading more Americans to the antislavery banner. Initially Mrs. Child's editorials reflected her determination to steer a middle course between the Garrisonians and the Liberty Party men, the two factions that split abolitionist ranks in the early 1840s. In the end she became identified with the Garrison faction, going so far as to endorse his call for disunion in an 1842 editorial. A disunionist stance had been unthinkable to her just nine years earlier when she issued the Appeal, but in the interim she had become radicalized by the experience of incessantly confronting the slave power's arrogant and aggressive domination of the existing union. Privately she went even further, confiding to her close friends that violence would be necessary to end slavery and purify the American republic.

The major foreign policy concern of the Standard during her tenure as editor was the prevention of the annexation of Texas. The newspaper covered in detail the Congressional debates on the Texas question and kept up the abolitionist drumbeat against taking the Lone Star Republic into the Union. Her husband, David, shared the commitment to antiannexation, writing a major broadside on the issue and traveling to Washington in the fall of 1842 to serve as informal correspondent for both the Standard and Garrison's Liberator. Mrs. Child also tried to coax non-abolitionist editors to oppose annexation, particularly the transcendentalist Parke Godwin of the Pathfinder. She sent Godwin her husband's pamphlet on Texas urging him "to tell the people the truth" because "slavery is making a desperate effort for the extension and permanence of its power on this continent."²⁵ Although the abolitionists had prevented Texas annexation since the 1836 insurrection against Mexico, Mrs. Child became rather fatalistic about continued antislavery success on the issue. In 1843 just after leaving the Standard she confided to fellow abolitionist Ellis Gray Loring that organizations, presumably her newspaper as well, "have about done their work" on Texas, but their effort "will be carried to its full completion by events they can neither foresee nor regulate."²⁶ And in the hectic period before the Tyler administration's successful annexation of Texas in 1845 by joint resolution of Congress, Maria Child again prophesied that the slave power juggernaut would only be stopped through bloodshed and violence.

Child's prediction of internecine violence was premature. The slave power seemed invulnerable as it rolled on in its territorial quests, and not being satisfied with Texas was now engaged in an unjust war with Mexico for territory stretching as far as the Pacific Ocean. Her pen was once again active in opposition to the Mexican War, but not in any official antislavery capacity. As a result of her exhausting and disillusioning experience as editor of the Standard, with the continual strain and tension of factional disputes and feuds, Mrs. Child had privately announced to close friends her retirement from the antislavery cause. Despite this semi-formal retirement, Lydia Maria Child never really left the antislavery enterprise either emotionally or intellectually. Thereafter she may have operated independently, free of institutional and organizational constraints, but she was no less instrumental in promoting the cause of the slave, and after the Civil War, the freedman.

As an independent critic perhaps her most effective bit of writing during the Mexican War appeared in one of her "letters from New York," a more or less regular column that ran in the Boston Courier. In this particular letter Mrs. Child recounted how a new hotel in the city had attracted her attention because of an unusual sign mounted on its facade. The sign depicted a great bird with out-stretched wings and in its beak was a banner with the motto: "The American Eagle allows little birds to sing." This "pompous annunciation of our national condescension and forbearance" caused her to smile, but only halfheartedly since her "perverse thoughts jumped from the eagle to Indian treaties and negro slaves." At that moment she heard martial music from a nearby park where recruits were being assembled for service in the war against Mexico. The tune beckoned "the brave and the free" to do battle for their country "without hinting that their mission would be to extend slavery, and rob a weaker nation; because little birds must not be allowed to sing."²⁷ To Maria Child the American sense of mission to benighted little nations seemed irrepressible, as did the slave power's incessant drive for territory.

After what amounted to very limited participation in the opposition to the Mexican War, Mrs. Child retreated further from the public limelight. For nearly a decade she rarely engaged in the formal organizational activities of the antislavery cause. Although she never wavered in her abolitionist convictions, the need to overcome nagging personal financial difficulties and to restore some order to her marriage after years of intermittent separation from her husband demanded most of her time and energy. It was not until the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Bill in May 1854, with its popular sovereignty provision that nullified the 1820 Missouri Compromise's prohibition on the extension of slavery above the 36° 30' parallel, that Maria Child once again was stirred to action in defense of the slave. She and her husband entered the fray together—David as lecturer and organizer for the Kansas Aid Society; Maria as author of a serialized tale on "The Kansas Emigrants" published in Horace Greeley's New York Tribune, and as fundraiser for the antislavery settlers in Kansas.

Predictably, Mrs. Child held the slave power responsible for passage of the Nebraska Bill, but on this occasion she was as harshly critical of Northern members of Congress for being completely servile to the slave interest. Apparently she was totally ignorant of Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas's role, which had little to do with slave power, in formulating the legislation to further his political and financial schemes to guarantee that Chicago would be the northern terminus of the projected transcontinental railroad. Although she distrusted Senator Douglas it was not his shenanigans that most bothered her. What Mrs. Child feared above all was that continued northern servility would allow the nation's diplomacy to be manipulated by the slave power to acquire Cuba and Haiti, either through war, or in the case of Cuba, through the liberal use of bribes among Spanish officials. Her fears were not unfounded. Southerners dreamed of Caribbean empire for slavery's expansion and in recognition of the political appeal of those dreams, the Democrats in their 1856 campaign platform endorsed "American ascendancy in the Gulf of Mexico" as one of their foreign policy objectives.²⁸

Now in her mid-fifties at the time the Kansas crisis erupted, Mrs. Child occasionally expressed a sense of despair at the successes of the "ever-encroaching Slave-Power." The emergence of the Republican Party with its modest antislavery stance of free territories and the selection of John C. Fremont to head its 1856 presidential ticket did offer Child renewed hope. It was gratifying for this old foe of slavery to see after almost a quarter century of "labor, discouragement, unpopularity, and persecution" that abolitionist principles at last were beginning "visibly to sway the masses." Mrs. Child's long experience in the cause had converted her to the need for organized political action to assure antislavery victory. In her view Garrisonians and the American Anti-Slavery Society were too narrow and intolerant and had little popular appeal. But in Child's elation over Fremont's nomination, she was not uncritical of the Republican candidate or, for that matter, of all politicians. He had been a filibuster who helped bring on the Mexican War. Despite the fact Fremont may have been deluded "by a blaze of false glory," in her eyes that was little excuse for the unjust aggression against Mexico.²⁹

If bleeding Kansas and the presidential contest between Fremont and the victorious James Buchanan rekindled Maria Child's desire to act against the slave power, her response to John Brown's raid at Harper's Ferry in late 1859 evoked national attention that rivaled, and probably surpassed, the public response to the Appeal in the 1830s. Upon hearing the news of the attack and Brown's capture, she wrote him offering to come to Virginia to nurse and aid him during his convalescence and trial. Captain Brown graciously declined her offer. In the meantime she had written Governor Henry Wise seeking permission to enter Virginia on her errand of mercy. Wise's reply to her request touched off a correspondence on the moral questions surrounding Brown's raid and the issue of slavery that quickly appeared in the pages of the New York Tribune.

The publication of the Child-Wise letters led Margaretta Mason, wife of Virginia Senator James M. Mason, to join the fray. Mrs. Mason accused Maria Child of gross hypocrisy in seeking to aid the "old murderer of Harper's Ferry." In her famous response condemning the evils of slavery Mrs. Child, reacting to Mrs. Mason's discussion of the kindnesses southern ladies heaped on slave women during childbirth, caustically noted that in Massachusetts "the pangs of maternity" met with generous support from neighbors, "and here at the North, after we have helped the mothers, we do not sell the babies."³⁰ The entire Child-Wise-Mason exchange was printed in 1860 as a pamphlet for circulation by the American Anti-Slavery Society. Over 300,000 copies were distributed throughout the North, with a number of copies reaching southern readers as well. An enormous circulation for that day, the pamphlet made Mrs. Child a national figure in the bitterly enflamed sectional dispute over slavery.

The election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 guaranteed that the raging sectional conflict that had been fueled by John Brown's Harper's Ferry attack would bring disunion and civil war. For almost two decades Maria Child had forecast the horror of civil strife as the inevitable outcome of the struggle between freedom and slavery. As the nation hung on the brink of war after the secession of the lower South and prior to Lincoln's inauguration, Maria Child confidently wrote fellow abolitionist Lucretia Mott in late February 1861 that "whatever turn affairs may take, the term of slavery is sure to be abridged by the present agitation. The blind fury of the Secessionists have [sic] converted them into the most valuable Anti-Slavery Agents."³¹ When war came the bloodshed and loss of life appalled her. But President Lincoln and the Republican-led Congress did proceed to enact many of the long-sought reforms on the abolitionist agenda. In rapid succession during 1862 slavery was abolished in the District of Columbia and the territories of the United States, a preliminary emancipation proclamation was announced by the President, and the Lincoln administration granted diplomatic recognition to Haiti and Liberia. Mrs. Child was "infinitely cheered" by these actions that she "had long given up the expectation of living to see." She applauded Charles Summer, who was in the forefront of the Senate drive for Haitian recognition, for his long-time devotion and service to the abolitionist cause. The Civil War may have been "an awful thing" but it did represent a "visible step of progress" for Mrs. Child and thousands of her antislavery brethren.³²

Abolitionist satisfaction at the progress achieved during the war could not conceal the political expediency inherent in not a few of the government's actions. There were several political and commercial reasons for Lincoln's support of Haitian recognition. One that played a key role was his desire to find a location for the colonization of freed slaves. The island of Haiti had long been touted as a logical choice for colonization and shortly after the United States extended official recognition a scheme for colonization at Ileà-Vache, Haiti, was approved by the Lincoln administration. The Haitian colonization effort proved to be a disaster for the several hundred freedmen who staged the resettlement effort. Mrs. Child apparently was unaware of either Lincoln's support for the plan or the human tragedy that resulted during the project's brief existence. Had she and the other abolitionists who originated the 1830s campaign for Haitian recognition been attuned to the racist implications of Lincoln's action, they would have realized that victory was purchased at the expense of one of their most cherished goals—black equality.³³

Mrs. Child, to her credit, did recognize and decry the widespread disdain for the freedmen's rights that was all too common both during and after the war. Her concern that black equality would be thwarted was apparent from the onset of the conflict. In late 1862 just before the official release of the Emancipation Proclamation, she labeled it merely a "war measure" and lamentably "no recognition of principles of justice or humanity surrounded the public act with a halo of moral glory." Even Union victory was bitter-sweet, as Mrs. Child seemed haunted by the devastating human cost of the war. In August 1865 she confessed to her old friend Sarah Shaw, a mother who had lost her only son in the war, that had she been told slavery would be abolished in her day, "I should have anticipated such enthusiastic joy as would set me half crazy." But in reality that did not occur, "what with the frightful expenditure of blood" and the emancipation of slaves "being forced upon us by necessity." What troubled and angered her as well was "the shameful want of protection to the freedmen since they have been emanicipated." With all that on her mind Mrs. Child admitted "there has been no opportunity for any out-gushing of joy and exultation."³⁴ But as in the past her unflinching intellectual honesty did not immobilize this intrepid reformer or lead to total despair. Undaunted she went on to become a leading advocate of education for the freedmen as a way to secure their political and social rights.

Just as she realized the immediate legacy of the Civil War would not be one of full political and social equality for the recently emancipated blacks, Maria Child doubted that Union victory and the destruction of the slave power would usher in a new diplomatic era marked by a less aggressive, less expansionist foreign policy. Although Child's antiexpansionist outlook originally evolved from her slave power analysis, defeat of the slavocracy did not lead her to abandon her opposition to territorial expansion, especially if it came through fraud or force and at the expense of a weaker nation. If the Union triumph brought the nation no nearer racial equality, it also only temporarily curbed the lust for territory and the spirit of annexation so central to the nineteenth century American psyche. One recent historian of Civil War diplomacy in fact has argued that the North's victory assured the United States' imperial hegemony in North America and the Western Hemisphere, and enabled it "to continue its headlong rush into superpowerdom."³⁵ While Maria Child in the post-Civil War period continued to object to morally tainted schemes of territorial expansion, she initially did not place the northern victory in the broad imperial context suggested by some twentieth century historians.

When the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867 the transaction did not arouse any opposition from Mrs. Child. Presumably the Alaska deal was unobjectionable because it came under the category of a mutually arrived at diplomatic agreement for territorial transfer between two nations of roughly equivalent power and strength. Such was not the case when President Ulysses S. Grant's administration sought to annex Santo Domingo. The actions of the United States were those of a bully, as the nation used its superior naval and military power to intimidate a weaker, essentially defenseless, neighbor. Filibusters who were sponsored by northern business and commercial interests were being used to prepare the way for American annexation. It was "a bad business," angrily wrote Mrs. Child in 1871, "a real filibustering project, twin brother to our taking Texas from the poor Mexicans. This Republic will sink rapidly to degeneracy and ruin, if we go on thus seizing the territory of our neighbors by fraud or force."³⁶ There was another reason for Child's anxi ety about affairs in Santo Domingo and her concern for the future of the American republic. Quite at variance with her genuine and lifelong racial tolerance, she was vehemently anti-Catholic and feared that annexation would bring into the Union a sizable Catholic population that was ignorant of and hostile to republican ideals. Her Yankee, Protestant antipathy for the recent Irish Catholic immigrants that arrived in such large numbers in New England prior to the Civil War apparently extended to Catholic Latins in the Caribbean as well. In the midst of her outcry against Dominican annexation she privately informed Senator Summer that it would be "exceedingly dangerous to add anything to the weight of Roman Catholic influence" in the United States since "the Roman Catholic Church in its spirit and its form, is utterly antagonistic to republican institutions." Summer ignored this atypical lapse of tolerance in his aging mentor. But for Mrs. Child anti-Catholicism remained an emotional ingredient in her reaction to Grant's effort at Caribbean expansion.³⁷

The pages of the National Standard, post-Civil War successor to The National Anti-Slavery Standard, served as Child's forum in the campaign against Dominican annexation. In the public debate she downplayed anti-Catholicism, focusing squarely instead on the issue of the injustice of American aggrandizement at the expense of a weaker neighbor. Sumner, engaged in what amounted to a personal crusade in the Senate to thwart Grant's plans, received her continued praise and frequent moral support. She was much relieved when the annexation scheme died, thanks primarily to Sumner's opposition as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The entire Dominican episode, favored as it was by a President she otherwise admired and respected, left the seventy-year-old reformer ever more wary of American leadership's thirst for imperial glory and overseas expansion. Mrs. Child was distressed further upon reading Grant's second inaugural address with its confident prediction that the civilized world was progressing toward republicanism under the aegis of the United States. Writing to Mrs. Shaw in late March 1873, Child confided that she liked the President's remarks on Indians and blacks, "but I am very sorry to see him so infected with the greed for annexation; and I thought it very injudicious to blurt out that prophecy about a Universal Republic."³⁸

Later that year when the Virginius affair became a cause célèbre it appeared Grant might annex Cuba. That island was wracked by a protracted insurrection against Spanish rule. A crisis with the United States erupted when Spanish authorities seized the Virginius in the fall of 1873 and summarily executed its predominantly American crew on the charge the ship was carrying arms and supplies to the Cuban revolutionaries. A national furor arose that prompted calls for the American takeover of Cuba. Harper's Weekly highlighted its coverage of what it labeled "the butchery in Cuba" with illustrated sketches of crew members and political cartoons urging the Grant administration to take action against the Spanish. One cartoon by Thomas Nast depicted Secretary of State Hamilton Fish boosting Uncle Sam into a bull ring as President Grant handed him a sword with the caption: "THE SPANISH BULL IN CUBA GONE MAD. It must be stopped. If Spain can't do it, WE MUST!"³⁹ Maria Child was sorely "vexed" at Nast's "mad bull" rendition. In her view the Spanish had not acted as a mad bull; they simply had defended themselves against filibusters and marauders. She also believed "our talk about humanity, and the vindication of our national honor, is all pretense—too flimsy to disguise our eagerness to grab at the possessions of Cuba." In Child's exasperation with American territorial lust she exclaimed "I do believe if we could annex the whole world, we should try to get a quarrel with Saturn, in order to snatch his ring from him."⁴⁰ It would appear that within a few short years after the Civil War ended, Mrs. Child had accepted the verdict of later historians that Union victory had set the stage for the creation of an American overseas empire.

In the 1870s Child concluded a lengthy and impressive career as foreign policy critic and champion of the underdog by adopting the cause of the Chinese immigrant. Through the tried-and-true methods of public letter writing and the lobbying of influential male politicans she opposed federal attempts to exclude Chinese from entering the United States. Frequently skeptical of "spread-eagle" nationalism with its inflated sense of mission, Child on this issue revealed her own somewhat romanticized vision of the mission of a republican United States recently cleansed of the taint of slavery. America now had "a glorious mission" to serve as "a High School for all the nations" by accepting, embracing, and assimilating all comers to its shores. In seeking to make the nation a pluralistic model of racial tolerance and political freedom, Mrs. Child denounced what she identified as a cresting wave of native Americanism, apparently unbothered by the inconsistency of opposing further Catholic additions to the population while urging open access for the Chinese.⁴¹ The focus of the anti-Chinese campaign was repeal of the 1868 Burlingame Treaty with China, an agreement that allowed for unrestricted immigration and movement between the two countries. In the end the forces of American nativism triumphed when Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Mrs. Child, who died in 1880, did not live to see the defeat of the last of her many foreign policy crusades.

Any assessment of Maria Child's impact on American foreign policy would have to begin with the recognition that she was ever the suspect outsider and unwelcome critic. At no time in her career did she formulate or execute the nation's diplomacy. At no time did she assume the burden of day-to-day decision-making or the challenge of long-range policy formulation. What influence Mrs. Child did have was necessarily indirect and difficult to gauge or measure precisely. As the voice of the oppressed and disfranchised in nineteenth century America she appealed to her contemporaries through the intellectual power and moral force of her ideas. From the public and private testimony of Child's peers it was apparent that the 1833 Appeal successfully presented antislavery's initial critique of slave power and its control of American politics and diplomacy. It served as primer for countless men and women who entered the fight against slavery in the 1830s and 1840s. In that sense she did help shape the intellectual, racial, and political consciousness of a generation of the rank and file of the abolitionist enterprise.

Further proof of the intellectual impact of Child's ideas appeared over the next two decades as the core of her pathbreaking synthesis was adopted and expanded upon by abolitionist men and remained the basis of the antislavery argument until the Civil War. One of the first males to expand upon Child's analysis was Judge William Jay, son of founding father John Jay. Judge Jay extensively reiterated Mrs. Child's argument that American diplomacy was "subservient to the interests of the slaveholders."⁴² The Child-Jay slave power analysis had further political influence when it became the ideological foundation of the platform of the Liberty Party in the 1840 campaign. James Birney, the party's presidential candidate, and Joshua Leavitt, editor of the party organ the Emancipator, were active proponents of Haitian recognition and in the forefront of the struggle against the annexation of Texas. In their speeches and writings Salmon Chase of Ohio and William Goodell of New York carried the argument through the 1850s. Goodell's 1852 book, Slavery and Anti-Slavery, represented the polemical epitome of the antebellum slave power conspiracy thesis. In the immediate post-Civil War years Child's acknowledged disciple, Henry Wilson, authored an insider's three volume retrospective on the rise and fall of the slave power.⁴³ Although the initial formulator of the slave power thesis, Lydia Maria Child has not received the full historical recognition accorded these men primarily because as a woman she was denied equal access to the political arena. She now must be acknowledged as the leader of the cadre of antebellum intellectuals who demanded and secured the demise of slavery and the slave power.

During the Civil War era when Mrs. Child was at the peak of her national prominence she probably had some sway on foreign policy issues with at least two prominent Republicans—Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson. Just how much influence she had in bringing the Lincoln administration to bestow Haitian recognition or in preventing President Grant from annexing Santo Domingo is virtually impossible to determine, much less measure in any quantifiable way. Her voice undoubtedly was heard, if only to reinforce Sumner, Wilson, and others in their previously held abolitionist convictions. Mrs. Child recognized the limitations under which she labored. As she grew older, the frustration of being unable to participate fully and equally in the nation's political affairs led her to become a tough public advocate of female suffrage and women's rights. At the twilight of her forty-year career she complained to Senator Sumner: "I have keenly felt my limitations as a woman, and have submitted to them under perpetual and indignant protest." When appraising her own influence on public affairs within the constraints placed upon her sex, Mrs. Child used the idiom of "the little mouse" ever active behind the scenes, rejoicing "over her work with infinite satisfaction" on the infrequent occasion when one of her crusades met with success. But in what may well be the most revealing testimony to what it was like to be a female challenging America's male-dominated foreign policy in the nineteenth century, Mrs. Child once confessed that "at times, my old heart swells to bursting … for it is the heart of a man imprisoned in a woman's destiny."⁴⁴

Notes

¹ J. H. Plumb, "Spreading the News," review of David Brion Davis' Slavery and Human Progress, New York Review of Books (January 17, 1985), 31.

² Lydia Maria Child, The Mother's Book (Boston, 1831), 168.

³ Lydia Maria Child to Anne Whitney, June 1879, in John Greenleaf Whittier (ed.), Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston, 1883), 255.

⁴ Lydia Maria Child to Charles Sumner, July 4, 1870, in Milton Meltzer and Patricia G. Holland (eds.), Lydia Maria Child Selected Letters, 1817-1880 (Amherst, 1982), 495; Lydia Maria Child to David Ricketson, February 15, 1871, in Patricia G. Holland and Milton Meltzer, The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child, microfiche edition. Curiously, throughout her long career as social activist and foreign policy critic Maria Child steadfastly refused to lecture publicly. For example, see Lydia Maria Child to William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, March 6, 1840.

⁵North American Review, 41 (1835), 193.

⁶ Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, 1833), Preface.

⁷ Anna Purinton to Lydia Maria Child, August 8, 1835, Collected Correspondence, microfiche edition.

⁸ Ibid. Charles Sumner to Lydia Maria Child, September 19, 1856; on the influence of the Appeal, see also Lydia Maria Child to Lucy and Mary Osgood, May 11, 1856, to Charles Sumner, July 7, 1856, and to Aaron M. Powell, June 6, 1868.

⁹ Child, Appeal, 112.

¹⁰Niles Register, XXVII, 31; Timothy Pitkin, Statistical View of the Commerce of the United States of America (New Haven, 1835), 219.

¹¹ Child, Appeal, 121.

¹² Ibid.

¹³ Patricia G. Holland and Milton Meltzer, eds., Guide and Index, The Collected Correspondence of Lydia Maria Child 1817-1880 (Millwood, N.Y., 1980), 28-29.

¹⁴ Lydia Maria Child to Henrietta Sargent, November 18, 1838, Collected Correspondence, microfiche edition.

¹⁵ Lydia Maria Child to the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society [October?—before 19 November 1835], Selected Letters, 41 .

¹⁶ Lydia Maria Child to Lydia Bigelow Child, March 10, 1836; Lydia Maria Child to Louisa G. Loring, May 30, 1836, Collected Correspondence, microfiche edition.

¹⁷ Ibid., Lydia Maria Child to Henrietta Sargent, November 18, 1838.

¹⁸ Ibid.

¹⁹ Gilbert H. Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse 1830-1844 (Gloucester, Mass., 1957), 266.

²⁰ See, for example, Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York, 1970).

²¹Proceedings of the Third Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women, Held in Phildelphia, May 1st, 2d and 3d, 1839 (Philadelphia, 1839), 26.

²² Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience (New York, 1984), 182.

²³Address to the Senators and Representatives of the Free States, in the Congress of the United States, by the Antislavery Convention of American Women (Philadelphia, 1838).

²⁴House Journal, 25th Cong., 3d Sess, 111; 143.

²⁵ Lydia Maria Child to Parke Godwin, May 2, 1843, Collected Correspondence, microfiche edition.

²⁶ Ibid., Lydia Maria Child to Ellis Gray Loring, June 26, 1843.

²⁷Boston Courier, October 27, 1846.

²⁸ See: Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-1861 (Baton Rouge, 1973).

²⁹ Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Shaw, November 9, 1856, Collected Correspondence, microfiche edition.

³⁰Correspondence Between Lydia Maria Child and Gov. Wise and Mrs. Mason, of Virginia (Boston, 1860), 26.

³¹ Lydia Maria Child to Lucretia Mott, February 26, 1861, Selected Letters, 377.

³² Ibid., Lydia Maria Child to Charles Sumner, June 22, 1862, 412.

³³ Ludwell L. Montague, Haiti and the United States, 1714-1938 (Durham, 1940), 76.

³⁴ Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Shaw, August 11, 1865, Selected Letters, 457-58.

³⁵ David P. Crook, Diplomacy During the American Civil War (New York, 1975), 9.

³⁶ Lydia Maria Child to Daniel Ricketson, February 15, 1871, Collected Correspondence, microfiche edition.

³⁷ Lydia Maria Child to Charles Sumner, July 4, 1870, Selected Letters, 495; for her anti-Irish sentiments, see Lydia Maria Child to Maria Chapman, April 26, 1842, 169.

³⁸ Ibid., Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Shaw, March 24, 1873, 513.

³⁹Harper's Weekly, November 29, 1873, 1068.

⁴⁰ Lydia Maria Child to Sarah Shaw [1873, after March 24?], Collected Correspondence, microfiche edition.

⁴¹ Lydia Maria Child to John Greenleaf Whitter, July 31, 1870, Selected Letters, 497.

⁴² William Jay, A View of the Action of the Federal Government in Behalf of Slavery (New York, 1839), 47.

⁴³ Henry Wilson, The Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, 3 vols. (Boston, 1872).

⁴⁴ Lydia Maria Child to Charles Sumner, Wayland, 1870, in Whittier, Letters, 208; Lydia Maria Child to Charles Sumner, July 7, 1856, Selected Letters, 283.