USA > Illinois > The era of the Civil War, 1848-1870 > Part 21
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Up to this time the women's rights movement had found its strength largely in the east; Illinois as a western state had been somewhat slow to respond. Now, with the passing of the
18 Father McGorrisk, the Catholic priest at Ottawa, was a prohibitionist until he made an investigation and found that the liquor sales increased con- siderably and the establishments increased from twenty to thirty licensed shops in 1855 to 143 illicit doggeries in 1857. Ottawa Free Trader, June 6, 1857. See also Ottawa Weekly Republican, July 26, 1856, June 13, 1857; Presbytery Reporter, 4:89.
19 Peru Daily Chronicle, April 27, 28, 1854. These nineteenth century amazons did effective work at one time or other in Milford, Lincoln, Farming- ton, Canton, Plano, Tonica, Towanda, Liberty, and Winnebago. Quincy Whig, March 27, 1854; Canton Weekly Register, March 20, 1856; Illinois State Journal, March 25, 1856; Urbana Union, March 27, 1856; Joliet Signal, June 8, 1858.
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frontier, there was an awakening. Men who represented other radical movements of the day had been the first to find courage to present this new propaganda before the public; the versatile H. Van Amringe of Chicago pleaded for woman's rights and listed the cause with land reform and abolition in his lecture repertoire. Next women propagandists took the stage, though at first limiting themselves to discourses to the members of their sex on anatomy and physiology. In 1853, however, Miss Olive Starr Wait, a native of Madison county, and niece of William S. Wait, the Illinois reformer, attracted widespread attention by her lectures on " Women's Rights " in southwestern Illinois. Two years later her lecture route included the state capital. Miss Wait had a happy faculty of presenting her subject in a manner which offended few and attracted many. "For chaste elocution, happy illustration, beauty of diction and depth of pathos, these lectures have been but seldom equaled," wrote a discriminating patron.20 At the end of 1853 Lucy Stone visited Chicago and then started on a tour of the state on a feminist mission. In the discussion that followed, the removal of legal restrictions on women was advocated and even found supporters in the legislative halls at Spring- field.21
There was a good deal of confusion as to just what the women's rights movement covered. Few advocated the be- stowal of the franchise, and no one included political equality in the matter of officeholding. Admitting a distinct sphere for womankind, the women's rights forces insisted upon the injus- tice of contemporary legal discriminations as to property- holding, and in addition claimed those rights, the denial of which would defraud woman's very nature. Confined to the narrow training of the contemporary female seminary or col- lege, shut out of the high schools and colleges, many women labored to secure for their sex equality in education. "Let women be educated," urged one champion, "Tis her right, not the fashionable education of the boarding school, an education too often, of the head, at the expense of the heart! There
20 N. M. McCurdy to Joseph Gillespie, December 15, 1855, Gillespie manu- scripts. Miss Wait later became the wife of Honorable Jehu Baker.
21 Illinois Journal, January 24, 1853; Chicago Weekly Democrat, September 17, 1853.
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are five kinds of education which every woman has a right to: intellectual, moral, social, physical, and industrial." 22
Such advocacy began to have its effect; although Illinois Baptists, like the Reverend R. F. Ellis of Alton, were scandal- ized at the news that Miss Antoinette L. Brown had been ordained as Congregationalist pastor of South Butler, New York, "in a Baptist house." Yet within five years a Mrs. Hubbard, one of the earliest women preachers in Illinois, was preaching to a crowded house of "hardshell" Baptists in a small meeting house in Madison county.23
One off-shoot of the women's rights agitation was the attempt to establish a more sensible costume for women, since it was the feeling of many that woman's inequality grew out of the evils of dress which by ancient custom make "our women feeble when they might be strong," "stooping when they might be straight," and "helpless when they might be efficient." Feminine dress would not permit the vigorous physical exer- cise which develops superior intellects, and man, thus deprived of the society of women in many of his avocations and diver- sions, regarded her as his inferior. This was the argument of the dress reformers, whose adherents demonstrated their seri- ousness in 1851 and again in 1858, when wearers of the bloomer costume, designed by Mrs. Bloomer at New York, made their appearance on the streets of various Illinois cities. For the "Long dangling street sweeper" which had consti- tuted the female dress, there was substituted an abbreviated "skirt," reaching to the " courtesy benders." Bloomer parties were held to keep up the courage of the unterrified who braved the gaze of the curious and the sharp tongues of the town gossips. Many women, safe from the public gaze, enjoyed the convenience which the costume afforded for the performance of housework.24 Soon, however, the number of conversions
22 Alton Courier, January 27, 1854.
23 In May, 1859, the first class graduated in the women's department of Sloan's Central Commercial College at Chicago, " the first class of ladies who have received a thorough commercial education in the West, if not in the United States," Chicago Press and Tribune, May 19, 1859. Alton Courier, October 13, 1853; Stahl, "Early Women Preachers in Illinois," Illinois State Historical Society, Journal, 9 : 484-485.
24 See resolutions of dress reform meeting at Aurora, Aurora Beacon, April 8, 1858.
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declined; and the traditions of centuries triumphed over the would-be reformers.
With the passing of the frontier atmosphere, the church struggled to hold its monopoly of the sabbath against forces of progress which made it difficult to cease worldly affairs on the seventh day and against a popular tendency toward kinds of relaxation that could not adjust themselves to a puritanical sab- bath observance. Many stores and shops kept open doors on Sunday and seemed to take special pains to make as large a display as possible.25 Sunday railroads, newspapers, and mail service had their beginning. Certain communities took on a gala atmosphere on Sundays ; militia companies in uniform paraded to music while companies of young folk spent the day in merrymaking and the patrons of the liquor shops defied all attempts at Sunday closing.
All this offended the upholders of a sturdy backwoods puritanism. An organized movement for sabbath observance had existed in the state for several years; a Southwestern Illi- nois Sabbath Convention was organized in 1846 and a similar organization existed in the northern part of the state. In May, 1854, a sabbath convention for the entire northwest met in Chicago. These forces had secured the enactment of a state law for sabbath observance as well as many city ordinances prohibiting the sale of liquor on Sunday. They worked with zeal to stay the ever-alarming increase of sabbath desecration in all directions, but especially did they challenge the new encroachments of commercial enterprise. Attention was di- rected to the alarming desecration threatened by Sunday trains ; a sabbath convention met at Chicago in May, 1854, and denounced this danger as more appalling than from any other source. 26 Objection was even made to the running of the Chicago horse railway or omnibus lines. Nevertheless, it became more and more evident that on this score the Sunday
25 Rock River Democrat, July 5, 1853.
26 " If business monopolies set the example, the effect of that example will be to demoralize the country, and destroy the influence of the Bible and its ordinances," declared the editor of the Alton Courier who was willing to place the ban on "telling the news, though from the latter good may indirectly result," Alton Courier, May 20, 1854; Free West, May 25, 1854. Many editors of polit- ical journals took the same stand; also Ottawa Free Trader, June 18, 1853.
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observance movement was an abstraction that could not stay the hands of the clock of time.
The tendency toward democratic Sunday amusement gained headway in the towns and cities. This was especially true of the German element which in the summer months repaired to nearby picnic grounds or Sunday gardens and spent the day in merrymaking. To the Germans of Chicago, who associated with the sabbath not only the idea of religious worship but also the festive holiday atmosphere, the gayety of their Sunday gardens at Cottage Grove or of the Holstein picnic grounds three miles out on the Milwaukee road seemed an inalienable right. On the same principle the Belleville Germans assumed certain privileges in the parades of their military company and of their "gymnastic infidel company" that annoyed their fel- low-citizens.27 The Northwestern Sabbath Convention of 1854 therefore declared that "the vast influx of immigrants joining us from foreign and despotic countries, who have learned in their native land to hate the established religion and the Sabbath law as part of it, calls on us for special prayer and labor in behalf of this portion of our population, to reclaim them from this fatal error." 28 Such reclamation, however, made little progress; the socially-minded westerner, indeed, found an appeal in this new gospel of the joy of life that could not be offset by his own evangels. When, therefore, the German's right to his peculiar form of Sunday observance was threatened, sturdy champions among the native elements of the population came to his aid.
All the efforts of the restrictionists, therefore, seemed to end in failure. With the city clergy clamoring for the rigid enforcement of state laws and local ordinances,29 conditions in Chicago were described as follows : " Here in Chicago, we have fifty-six churches open on Sunday, during the forenoon and evening, but at the same time, there are no less than eighty ball rooms, in each of which a band plays from morning till
27 Chicago Daily Times, September 6, 1857; Chicago Press and Tribune, July 14, 1859. Protests were sent to Governor French by William H. Under- wood and others under date of September 20, 1851, July 8, 1852, French manu- scripts.
28 Alton Courier, May 23, 1854.
29 Chicago Press and Tribune, July 16, 1859.
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midnight, and waltzing goes on without intermission. In addi- tion to these festivities we have two theaters, each with its performers in tights and very short garments, rivaling Elsler in their graceful evolutions. Saloons have their front doors closed by proclamation, but do a thriving business through side entrances." 30
Health conditions in this period reflected the survival of frontier optimism and neglect. Although the traditional ague and fever did not long trouble the pioneer, yet the new con- ditions of the more thickly settled towns and cities bred disease which spread in epidemics through the community. With back yards, alleys, and streets filled with filth and offal and giving forth a fetid odor, with the environs of the public buildings and stores especially offensive, with market houses strewn with "sheep feet, pieces of decayed meat and vegetables," immunity from disease could scarcely have been expected. Impure and contaminated water supply was the rule, while the children of Chicago and other cities were given the milk from cows "fed on whisky slops with their bodies covered with sores and tails all eat off." 31 Smallpox was a dread visitor liable to appear anywhere during the winter months; vaccination was possible only to a limited degree and was scarcely popular. Hydro- phobia was the natural consequence of the packs of dogs that ran at large in the streets-for the city dweller of that day was not able to abandon in urban life the former guardian of the isolated farmhouse and the assistant of the shepherd.
But the pestilence which left behind the widest path of destruction was the cholera, the product of the filth that was accepted as a matter of course in the frontier settlement. A year of special calamity was 1848 ; cholera, making its appear- ance in the early spring, came to prevail all over the country and in Illinois decimated the population of many a town and village. Chicago, Springfield, and some of the larger cities under the lead of the local health authorities had taken simple precautions which greatly reduced the fatalities. In the crowded
30 Chicago Daily Times, clipped in Mound City Emporium, November 12, 1857; cf. Chicago Democrat, May 13, 1858.
31 Alton Weekly Courier, July 27, 1854. Editorial entitled " Why So Many Children Die in Chicago," Chicago Weekly Democrat, June 4, 1859. Nine out of every ten quarts of the milk drank in Chicago came from this source.
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portions of the smaller communities the victims were especially numerous. The mayor of Springfield appointed June 28 as a day of humiliation, fasting, and prayer in view of the probable advent of cholera in that city; by July death was so busy in their midst that a state of panic existed among the people of the city. West Belleville lost over fifty out of a population of 350. Where the disease raged at its worst a majority of the population left for the country, and most of the stores were closed, usually all the groceries. Almost everyone felt or affected to feel the unusual depression and other premonitory symptoms of the plague.32 The streets were empty except for the doctors rushing from victim to victim and the coffin-makers and undertakers, following closely on their heels ready to carry the corpses to the cemeteries. Huge piles of wood were lighted to purify the atmosphere and the smoke hung low on the heavy oppressive air of the prairie midsummer. It was a never to be forgotten year for those who survived the long strain.
In the autumn the dread disease disappeared. Winter seemed to clear the atmosphere; and much of the old careless- ness in sanitary matters returned, especially where the losses had not been heavy. As a result Chicago, Galena, and a few centers had serious visitations in the summer of 1850 with heavy mortalities. In 1851 the insidious disease reached into the interior towns of the state, many of which had been pre- viously immune.33 It presently subsided, however, and in later years reappeared only in isolated cases.
Medical service in the state improved steadily during these years. At the beginning of the decade Rush Medical College at Chicago with a full corps of instructors was turning out new physicians every year; Illinois College at Jacksonville for a brief period attempted medical education with a full medical faculty. In 1855 a Chicago homeopathic school, the Hahne- man Medical College, was given a charter; and arrangements were made to open in October, 1860. At the same time Lind University at Lake Forest was organizing a medical depart-
32 Western Citizen, July 31, 1849; Koerner, Memoirs, I : 543-544.
33 Western Citizen, July 30, August 6, 13, 20, 27, 1850; Chicago Daily Journal, August 23, September 3, 1850. Galena had fifty to sixty deaths in four days; the total of deaths by cholera in Chicago was 441. S. Sutherland to French, August 19, 1851, French manuscripts.
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ment at Chicago. At a meeting in Springfield a State Medical Society was organized in June, 1850. There was a fine spirit of public service in the profession which usually worked inces- santly largely on a credit basis. Chicago had a large city hos- pital under joint allopathic and homeopathic management. Meantime Dr. J. D. Freeman of Jerseyville had undertaken to propagate an eclectic movement throughout the state with an organ, the Eclectic Advertiser, " devoted to medical reform - and foreign and domestic news" in which he vigorously at- tacked the " shocking barbarity " of old school medical practice. The meeting of the Western Dental Convention at Quincy in 1858 also testified to the steady progress of the state away from pioneer conditions.34
Out of this vast ferment, in which the bacilli forming reactions of the frontier were furnishing the forces from which a twentieth century culture might develop, the abolition move- ment stood out most uncompromisingly. A sturdy band of idealists conducted their propaganda in utter disregard of the scorn and hostility of those who upheld the traditions of con- servatism and respectability. Ichabod Codding, Zebina East- man, Philo Carpenter and Charles V. Dyer of Chicago, C. W. Hunter of Alton, Shubal York of Edgar county, A. M. Good- ing of La Salle county, and President Jonathan Blanchard of Knox College were a few of the brave spirits who with a trans- planted New England idealism cooperated with Owen Lovejoy of Bureau county in maintaining the traditions of the movement of the thirties. Like Garrison and his followers they were thorough radicals, hospitable to every reform that came their way. They were enthusiastic believers in the brotherhood of man : they were champions of world peace and conscientious objectors to all war, they were staunch defenders of the rights of labor, they were advocates of land reform, of free soil as a check upon capitalists and monopolists, they were supporters of women's rights, and they took a leading part in the propa- ganda for educational reform.35
The popular free soil movement of 1848 tended to absorb
34 Illinois Journal, June 5, 1850; Dr. E. N. Banks to French, July 2, 1851, French manuscripts ; Chicago Press and Tribune, July 13, 1858.
35 See their organs, Gem of the Prairie, Western Citizen, etc.
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and obscure the activities of these liberty party men and fur- ther to discredit those abolitionists who held aloof, as "bitter- enders." Dyer, running as the liberty party candidate for gov- ernor in 1848, secured only 4,893 votes while Van Buren polled 15,702. When the free soil movement collapsed in 1850, however, the abolitionists saw their opportunity to reorganize; taking advantage of the general hostility to the fugitive slave law, they framed the protestations of the various churches against that enactment on the basis of the fundamental sinful- ness of slaveholding; a preliminary meeting at Chicago on December 9, 1850, opened the way for the organization of the Illinois State Antislavery Society at a convention at Granville on January 8 and 9, 1851.36 The new movement was launched under favorable auspices; its sponsors promulgated an elabo- rate constitution and a declaration of principles which asserted that slavery was "a heinous crime against the laws of God and man " and as such should be "immediately repented of and abolished." Soon, however, the conservative reaction under the magic spell of the "compromise " brought about the col- lapse of the movement in so far as making a successful popular appeal was concerned. In the election of 1852 they found themselves compelled to make a common cause with the free soil remnants but polled slightly less than 10,000 votes. When the Kansas-Nebraska act revived the slavery agitation in 1854, the abolitionists were so discredited that the anti-Nebraska forces in Illinois refused to follow their lead for a new repub- lican party, and only gradually did they work their way into positions of importance in the party that raised Lincoln to the presidency.37
In spite of the popular odium which prevented abolitionists from securing political control, they did wield an indirect influ- ence upon the old parties by compelling them in northern Illinois districts to take more advanced antislavery ground. On account of the abolition leaven, too, the conservatives were never able to undermine the influence which their more liberal colleagues derived from this source. Indeed such shrewd poli- ticians as John Wentworth, Jesse O. Norton, E. B. Washburne,
36 Western Citizen, December 17, 24, 1850, January 21, 1851.
37 Eastman, History of the Anti-Slavery Agitation in Illinois.
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and others, who led boldly for freedom when the public mind was favorable but insisted on a strict party regularity until they definitely abandoned the old parties for the republican organization, openly advocated many propositions which were usually looked upon as the peculiar monopoly of the uncom- promising abolitionists.38
With the growing importance of the slavery issue and with the serious moral issue raised by the abolition forces, the religious organizations furnished one of the most effective fields for abolition propaganda. As the national organizations had wrestled with this question and found it the rock upon which they had split into northern and southern wings, so within the state the fight was taken up by contending factions in almost every denomination. The clergy in general came to be divided into an antislavery camp and into a party that abhorred the menace of abolitionism.
Episcopalians believing that the conservative spirit of their church was one of the great bonds that held together the union, steered a safe noncommittal course between the Scylla of slavery and the Charybdis of abolition. The Methodist church in Illinois prided itself on its solemn and earnest protest against the evil of slavery and pointed to its vigorous anti-fugitive slave law resolutions; nevertheless, at the same time it acquiesced in the sanction of the institution in the slaveholding states to such an extent that zealous antislavery members from the northern part of the state demanded a separation of the church "from its criminal connection with slavery." 39 Most Congre- gational, Baptist, and Unitarian churches were controlled by elements unequivocally committed to abhorrence of the institu- tion of slavery; they even formally adopted "higher law" ground in their denunciation of the fugitive slave law. The Western Unitarian Conference at Alton in May, 1857, almost unanimously adopted a strong antislavery report following the secession of the protesting St. Louis delegation.40
The old school Presbyterians continued along the lines of
38 Eastman, History of the Anti-Slavery Agitation in Illinois.
39 Illinois Journal, August 1, 2, 1855; Chicago Tribune, October 25, 1860.
40 Western Citizen, November 5, 12, December 3, 1850; Free West, May 25,
1854; Chicago Daily Democratic Press, May 21, 1857.
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their traditional conservatism and refused to give consideration to any form of the slavery question. Within the new school group there were many who sought to proclaim the wickedness of slaveholding and, in view of the vacillating policy of the general assembly, to effect a general withdrawal or separation from that body. A free Presbyterian organization with a con- stitution declaring slavery a sin against God, had been formed in 1847 out of seceders from both the old and new school bodies; to it were attracted many earnest antislavery men in Illinois whose convictions of duty threw them out of sympathy with the religious groups to which they belonged. Two free Presbyterian churches existed in Illinois in 1851, at Paris and Bernadotte.41
Most Illinois new school Presbyterians deplored the work- ings of the whole system of slavery as it existed in this country ; they were divided, however, on the proposition to refuse the hand of the fellowship to the slaveholder in order "to free the Presbyterian church from all participation and communion with slaveholding." 42 Conservatives within the group even suppressed in their official publication antislavery resolutions agreed upon as a result of the persistence of the radical anti- slavery members. This issue led the synod of Illinois in 1849 to consider the expediency of withdrawing from the general assembly. The presbytery of Ottawa decided not to send commissioners until an unequivocal non-fellowship declaration was made. The presbytery of Illinois in session at Pisgah September 20, 1856, petitioned the general assembly to pro- claim slaveholding "as prima facie evidence of unfitness for church membership," and several other presbyteries took the same stand in the following year.43 The abolition group in the Third Presbyterian church in Chicago precipitated this issue in the spring of 1851 and carried a resolution declar- ing that as long as the unsatisfactory policy of the general assembly on this issue continued, the church would "stand aloof from all meetings of Presbytery, Synod, and Assembly
41 Western Citizen, December 17, 1850, January 28, 1851.
42 Ibid., November 13, 1849.
43 Reverend Lemuel Foster protested such suppression by the Alton pres- bytery in his little paper, The Truth Seeker, Alton, July, 1848; Western Citizen, January 8, 1850; Presbytery Reporter, 3: 356, 504; 4:28.
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