adLLg 4%e’REBECCA BUFFUM SPRING ANDTHE POLITICS Of MOTHERHOOD INANTEBELLUM AMERICA

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S A R A H Btr/itj

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Lb" 1859, rooghly, month afto,John B='• uruuc<=fitl raid on Harpers Ferry, a woman walked through a crowd of "evil-look­ing" men and made her way to the steps of the prison where John Brown was incarcerated. Accompanied by her nineteen-year-old son, Rebecca Buffum Spring waited in the guardroom for thirty minutes, braving the "rough talk" of the men in the room and the suffocating heat of the stove­warmed air before being allowed to visit "Old Man" Brown in his cell.1

After visiting with the prisoner for some time, Spring and her son were forced to leave on the order of Sheriff J.W Campbell. He argued that the crowd outside was growing dangerous and had threatened violent action if she remained much longer. In her unpublished autobiography, written late in her life, Spring described the scene she and her son encountered as they left the prison:

The great, tall Sheriff, with a scowl on his face, impatiently opened the door, and hurried out a little woman and a boy, in the face of a furious mob of the worst looking men I ever saw. We stood for a moment on the little platform, and looked down over a sea of thousands of angry eyes, and saw clenched hands raised, threateningly; and I did not feel afraid. As we descended the steps they stood aside, giving us only just room to pass, and soon we were safe in the hotel. 2

In the published account of her visit, Spring added this thought: "I, who dare not pass a cow and who have such a terror of great dogs, was so uplifted in spirit that I had lost all feeling of fear and walked through the mob ... without thinking of the mob at all. I believe I was safer because I was not afraid .... It is good sometimes to get a glimpse of the power within us."' Much of this inner power derived from her upbringing: as a Quaker and a passionate anti-slavery activist, Spring was used to con­fronting opposition and had experience in standing up for her beliefs/ Thus, despite the harrowing experience and her precarious position as a northern abolitionist woman surrounded by angry southern men, Spring refused to leave the town and even managed to arrange a second visit be­fore she returned to her home, a communitarian settlement known as the Raritan Bay Union in Eagleswood, New Jersey.

56Like other Garrisonian abolitionists, Spring used gendered language

to link the personal with the political.5 The power she claimed for herselfwas strength of soul; by linking it to her uplifted religious spirit, she effectively emphasized women’s roles as moral superiors. Similarly, like Mosesparting the Red Sea, she made her way through the crowd and arrivedsafely at her destination. She was also careful to offset inner power withdescriptions of her outer powerlessness. Yet there is a subversive clementin her portrayal of herself as a “little woman” and her grown son as a“boy.” She called southern manliness into question when she contrastedthe “great, tall” sheriff and the violent crowd against the image of herhelplessness. She implied that only brutes, or “great dogs” would threatenviolence against a woman and her son; in Spring’s mind these were nottrue men but snarling animals.

Such examples of gendered imagery and language do more than ifiusIrate Spring’s character; they also provide the modern-day historian with anintriguing glimpse into the gendered wodd of antebellum America. Previous historians have attempted to categorize Spring as either a “subtle feralrdst” or a conservative abolitionist.6 But such characterizations are overlysimplistic and ignore the complex namre of Spring’s actions. In an era whenthe “Cult of True Womanhood” defined women’s position as confined tothe domestic sphere, Spring’s physical and moral show of support forJohnBrown both challenged and underscored traditional definitions of femaleroles and illustrated the extent to which Spring recognized and manipulated her position as a gendered being Like other women in reform andbenevolent movements, she used her domestic role as wife and mother asjustification to step beyond the private sphere of the home. When RebeccaSpring visitedJohn Brown’s prison cell, she enacted a performance of gender in which she used traditional notions of femininity and women’s dutiesto justil what was, in essence, a radical political action.

Gender performance as a theoretical concept is not nei hut it hasreceived increasing attention from historians in recent years. In the 1 960s,and more recently in the 1 990s, social scientists like Ewing Goffman,Kath Weston, and others applied notions of performance and representadon to identity’, race, and gender, thus calling into question categories thatonce seemed absolute and natural.7 Building upon this framework, as wellas the works of French philosophers like Simone de Beauvoir and MichelFoucault, in l99OJudith Butler, a critical theorist, published Gender Troublein which she argued that gender was neither clear-cut nor biologicallybased, but was instead a social construction. Gender does not exist of itsown accord, so much as it is “done,” or performed, by people. Thus, gender norms are defined by repeated reenadilnents that, taken as a whole,are meant to delineate what it is to be feminine or masculine. It is possible to perform one’s appropriate gender improperly, and such instancesuf failure are duly punished, often violently, for transgressions of genderthreaten identity and social order.

SARAH BARMN

PF 57Katificen Brown is one of the first historians to place gender perfor

mance in a historical context. In her groundbrealdng work Good TtivesiMzsp J’Venches and Anxious Patriarchs: Geodei Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia, she discusses the ways in which eighteenth-century men and womendefined, redefined, and challenged gender norms. Brown persuasivelyargues that gender discourse, however instable, sewed as the basis for colonial Virginia’s developing social and political structure. The “anxiouspatriarchs” defined their political status and identity in contrast to their“seemingly natural” dependents: slaves and women.9 In actuality thissocial order was anything but natural and thus required repeated performances to maintain the illusion that it was. Unfortunately for manywhite men, their dependents did not always willingly follow the choreographed steps they had been assigned. Slaves ran away or rebelled andwomen refused to obey their fathers and husbands. As Brown convincingly contends, these failed performances persistendy threatened self-sewing definitions of white masculinity, thereby reinforcing Butler’s theorythat gender — and one might add race is little more than “an identitytenuously constituted in time, instituted in an exterior space through astylized repetition of acts.lS

Other historians have developed this notion of exterior space to agreater extent. WalterJohnson’s Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum SlaveMarket is particularly useful for its in-depth analysis of performance’s public nature, both in its physical and philosophical sense. Presentations ofmasculinit)% femininity, and dependency only become meaningful if theymake sense to an audience. In examining the letters, narratives, advertisements, and other declarations of self that were generated or influencedby the antebellum slave market, Johnson succeeds in demonstrating thatwhite slaveowners as well as the slaves themselves drew from a “culturalregister of ... roles” in an effort to make themselves make sense to others.”In the public arena of the marketplace as well as the narrower public ofcorrespondence, men and women defined their identities in reference toothers. Traders’ manipulations of the bodies of their human cargo, buyers’ public discussions on the finer points of purchase, and slaves’ attemptsto guide the terms of their sales in a manner that would benefit themselvesare all examples of seW-performance, of people attempting to constructtheir identities in a meaningful way for an audience.

Historians have long grappled with notions of public and privatespheres, particularly inasmuch as they refer to gendered arenas of influence. For eady practitioners of women’s history, the rhetoric of the“sphere” sewed as a convenient method for discussing American women’shistorical roles. However, like the category of gender, the trope of separate spheres is not as well defined or binary as eady historians presentedit to be.’2 In 1966, Barbara Welter’s article on the “Cult of True Womanhood” identified men and manhood with the public, women and “true”womanhood with the private.’3 More recent works have moved beyond

Little H7omen and Evil-Looking Men

58 PFthis explicit dualism, recognizing that the boundaries between public andprivate are more often blurred than distinct. Bruce Dorsey’s ambitiouswork, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City, for example,tackles the tenuous definitions of public versus private and masculinityand femininity among reform-minded men and women of Philadelphia.UkeJohnson and Brown, Dorsey draws heavily from the philosopherJurgen Habermas’s theory of the public sphere, rooting antebellum gendernorms in the “uncertain gender milieu” of the eighteenth-century republican rhetoric of civic virtue.’4 In Dorsey’s account, Habermas’s publicsphere was created “out of the private sphere of individual conscience,before ‘public’ and ‘private’ came to mean a rigid dichotomy between thepolitical and economic realm of men and the domestic realm of womenin the nineteenth century”5 Like the spheres themselves, the definitionsof manhood and womanhood were not firmly delineated, and as a result gender “entailed a measure of The division betweenpublic and private, manliness and femininity was not immutable, and itwas possible — although discouraged — for men and women to traversethe boundary Dorsey’s treatment of Quaker women’s access to the publicsphere is especially enlightening, noting as he does that many, pathculadysingle, Quaker women drew upon spiritual authority as well as “appropriating discourses that employed feminine, rather than masculine, imageryand language.”7 As preachers and visionary prophetesses, these womenmade their way into the public realm; they traveled on the streets andentered the markets and prisons that were traditionally bastions of masculine political power.’8

When Rebecca Spring wrote her memoir near the end of her longlife, she was, in effect, performing a final act of self. In the often-ramblingpages of “A Book of Remembrance” Spring writes more about the peoplewho moved in and out of her life than she does about herself. A significant exception is the account of her visit to John Brown in 1859. Likethe men and women in Johnson’s Soul by Soul, Spring’s identity is revealedthrough her observations and descriptions of others. Drawing upon hercorrespondence and autobiography, and paying particular attention to theJohn Brown episode, this study will examine the manner in which Springmanipulated, challenged, and supported the gender norms of her time inan effort to construct a meaningful identity for herself. At the same time,understanding her construction of self also leads to a greater understanding of the worid she lived in and the cultural register of meaning availableto her audience(s).

Rebecca Spring was born in Providence, Rhode Island in 1811, thefourth daughter of devout Quakers.’° Her father, Arnold Buffum, wouldbecome the first President of the New England Anti-Slavery Society; heheavily influenced the activist lives of all of his children, his daughtersespecially. As Spring’s older sister Elizabeth Buffum Chace recalled, theirfather had a “tender heart, and. . . unshrinldng conscience,” and he em

SARAH BARKIN

IPF 59braced “without doubt or question, the principles of the Garrisonian antislavery movement.. . . Thus was I born and baptized into the antislaveryspirit. Our family were [sic] all Abolitionists.”2°

Quakers also believed in educating both girls and boys, and Springattended the New England Friends Boarding School with her sistersand, notably, a young woman who would become a radical abolitionistand feminist: Abhy Kelley.2’ With her sisters and other young women,Spring participated in a literary society As Elizabeth described it, thegroup was “called ‘The Female Mutual Improvement Society,” and themembers “agreed to meet one evening a week and read some usefulbook, and contribute original compositions of our own.”22 Often the“useful” books centered around religious and political themes, encouraging the society’s members to think, from an early age, beyond theconfines of the home.

Academically minded, Spring proved an apt recipient for herfather’s abiding interest in education. Arnold Buffum was particularlyintrigued by the European educational reforms aimed toward factorychildren and he encouraged his daughters to teach in similar institutions. Spring taught at a coeducational school for mill children in Uxbridge, as well as the integrated and coeducational Philadelphia Colored Infant School after her father’s business interests took the familyto Pennsylvania in 1834.

On October 26, 1836, Rebecca Buffum married Marcus Spring, awealthy philanthropist who shared her passion for social reform. LitheBuffum Chaee Wyman, Spring’s niece, remembered Marcus as a “handsome, lovable man, who had a decidedly artistic endowment.”23 Theirmarriage was a loving, companionate partnership, and although Springabandoned the simple dress of the Quakers in favor of the more expensive clothing her husband’s wealth afforded, they also put their moneyto good use by investing in a number of social, cultural, and politicalprojects. One of their more noteworthy ventures was their investmentin the North American Phalanx, a communitatian experiment based onthe socialist principles of French philosopher and mathematician CharlesFourier.24 Although they had never moved to the community, the Springsultimately withdrew their financial support and in 1853 they, along withother Phalanx dissenters, formed their own settlement, The Raritan BayUnion, on Marcus’s Eagleswood estate in Perth Amboy, NewJersey.25 Reflecting Spring’s interest in education, the centerpiece of the Union wasits coeducational school, which claimed the honor of abolitionist Theodore Weld’s service as principal and Angeina Gtimké Weld and her sisterSarah’s presence as faculty members. Although the Union lasted only ashort time as a eommunitatian settlement, the school continued to function for several years, and it drew students from a number of notablefamilies in New England.26

Little Women and Evil-LookingMen

6o ePFSpring’s Quaker background instilled in her a strong belief in girls’

right to equal education, and in her memoir she credits her father with supporting his daughters in their political pursuits as well: “[O]ur father wasso fond and proud of his daughters that he thought them worthy to be citizens of the country they all loved.”2 She was interested in women’s greaterpolitical equality, and like other Garrisonian abolitionists, she often linkedwomen’s subjugation with the demeaning and tyrannical qualities of slavery: “Slavery in our Land of Liberty was as inconsistent as taxing women,after declaring ‘Taxation without representation is tyranny.”28 Yct her support for equal rights was not as public in nature as her support for abolitionand educational development, a fact her niece Lilhie noted when she wrote,“frs. Spring made at least one speech in favor of woman’s rights, but shewas never exactly a public worker in [woman’s] reform.”29 Rather Springemphasized women’s important roles as mothers, which she saw as endowing them with certain obligations toward the rest of society. In this respectshe was like other women in the 19th century who used their positions aswomen asjustiulcation for stepping into the public realm of reform.

An example of Spring’s integration of motherhood and reform canbe seen in the motion she and Abby Cox put forward at the first AntiSlavery Convention for American Women held in New York City in 1837.The motion read:

RESOLVED, that there is not a class of women to whom theanti-slavery cause makes so direct and powerful an appeal asto mothers; and that they arc snlcmnly urged by all the blessings of their own and their children’s freedom, and by all thecontrasted bitterness of the slave-mother’s condition, to lift uptheir hearts to God on behalf of the captive, as often as theypour them Out over their own children in ajoy with which ‘nostranger may intermeddle’; and that they are equally bound toguard with jealous care the minds of their children from themining influences of the spirit of pm-slavery and prejudice.°°

Spring’s position in regards to women was complex. Like otherGarrisonian abolitionists, she supported, albeit in a muted way, woman’srights, yet she also agreed with the notion that one of slavery’s worst sinswas the way in which it “stripped. . . slaves of their manhood and womanhood.”3’ Motherhood was an essential element of True Womanhood; inseparating slave mothers from their children, using them as “breeders,” orforcing them to work during pregnancy at dangerous risk to the child theycarried, slaveowners in the abolitionist view — proved themselves enemies of moral social order. Furthermore, Spring’s support for this motionindicates her belief that mothers were somehow more attuned to slavewomen’s suffering and were therefore in a prime position to act. Indeedthey were obligated to educate their children in the evils of the slave systemand protect them from learning to be prejudiced.

Although Spring’s motion at the anti-slavery convention was unanimously endorsed, her support and promotion of motherhood was not always greeted by her friends and acquaintances with as much enthusiasm.

SARAH BARKIN

6iHer close friend, the Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fullei teased herabout a letter Spring had written regarding Fuller’s little boy: “Your letter,my dear Rebecca, was written in your noblest and most womanly spirit.Thank you for your sympathy about my little boy.” She went on to sa“Yet in answer to what you say, that it is still better to give the world thisliving soul than a part of my life in a book; it is true; and yet of my book Icould know whether it would be of any worth or not, of my child I mustwait to see what his worth will be.”32 While Fuller loved her son dearly, herview of motherhood was not as ecstatic as Spring’s; it was tempered by awariness that was at odds with Spring’s “womanly spirit.” Unlike Spring,Fuller did not see motherhood as trumping her career as a writer. Ifanything, her written works provided her with a greater sense of securitythan parenthood did.

It was partly in the name of motherhood that Spring made the journey to John Brown’s prison cell in 1859. On hearing that her friend, theabolitionist Lydia Maria Child, had written to Governor Wise for permission to attend the prisoner, Spring resolved to accompany her. Althoughher husband was initially reluctant to let her go, she responded by saying,“We have talked against slavery all these years, now somebody has donesomething. These men have risked their lives: I must go.”33 Still averse tothe notion, Marcus returned to his job in the citç but he later sent her anote stating he thought it was a pity Spring did not accompany Child onher mission. As Spring recalled in her autobiography: “Taking this forConsent, before Mr. Spring returned home, my young son and I were onour way South.”34 Not everyone believed that Marcus’s consent was necessary. Lithe Wyman wrote, “I am inclined to believe that she really actedindependently of him. I was told at the time that she did not have to consult him because he chanced to be from home on that important day.”35Nevertheless, by including this consultation, real or otherwise, into hernarrative, Spring at least paid lip service to the gender mores of the time.She may have felt that her visit would be more palatable to her intendedaudience if they knew it was sanctioned by a male authority figure.36

Spring’s son Eddie was nineteen years old when he accompanied hismother to Virginia, but her emphasis on his presence is telling for a coupleof reasons. First, his company underscored her role as a mother, thusreinforcing her maternal position and justifying her transgression into thepublic sphere. Second, as a grown man, Eddie could effectively serve as amale chaperone, both providing his mother with physical protection andreassuring those who might be worried that despite appearances, she wasstill under a man’s control.

On reaching Virginia, Spring discovered that Lydia Maria Child hadin fact not gained permission to visit, leaving the Springs to find theirown way. It was not an easy one. Violence was an ever-present threat, butSpring persevered nonetheless. When asked why she had come, she re

Little H/omen and Evil-LüokingMen

62called answering: “[Wjhen men fight and hurt each other, women shouldgo and take care of them.”37 This statement reveals much about herworidview; for Spring, men were destructive, and it was a woman’s obligation to nurse them back to health. Such reasoning reinforced nineteenth-century definitions of gender, even though she was ultimately performinga subversive and political act. She did not travel to Virginia to minister tojust anyone, but rather she sought to care for an extremely controversialpolitical figure: a man who had attacked a United States armory in a raidthat had resulted in the deaths of several people.38

Spring may have been conscious of her precarious position and thusrepeatedly highlighted the “feminine” aspects of her trip. For instance,she brought leaves to decorate Brown’s cell, she brought him a fresh pillowcase, sent bandages for his wounds, and, perhaps most revealing, shebrought along her worsted and began to knit while they spoke, for whichBrown “looked gratified.”39 In recounting these actions, Spring may havehoped to call attention to the stereotypically constructive “nature” ofwomen and deflect interest away from those actions that threatened thestatus quo. Even when she asked Brown to relate his motives for the attackshe assured him and the southerners surrounding the prison thatshe was merely a vessel to convey information: “I want to ask you onequestion,’ said I, ‘not for myself, but for others.”4° As a woman, she hadno interest indeed what interest could she have in such matters? inhis answers, but as a messenger, it was a necessity that she ask.

Spring’s observations of Brown also provide insight into her viewson masculinity and violence. As a Quaker, she did not, at least outwardly,condone his violent actions, and yet, neither did she rebuke him for them.Rather, she sought to understand why he had undertaken such harsh measures. After ascertaining that he did not attack the Ferry for personal revenge, Spring avoided discussing his violent actions altogether. Instead,she deseribedJohn Brown with language filled with religious imagery. Forinstance, on gaining entrance to the prison a second time, she depicted thechange in Brown’s appearance:

Captain Brown on our second visit, was sitting at a table writing. He looked well, his hair, washed and brushed, was thrownup from his forehead; it was soft and white and looked likea halo about his head. His high white forehead had a gloryabout it as he stood looking like an inspired old prophet.4’

In describing him in such a way, Spring implied that there was something holy, even Biblical in his person. In her mind, the violence of hismission had an element of Old Testament justice about it. There mayeven have been a hint of millenarian hope in her depiction of him asa prophet, as if his deeds foretold the Second Coming of Christ as wellas the end of slavery.42 In a letter to Andrew Hunter, the prosecuting attorney in the cases against several of Brown’s fellow conspirators, Springdescribed the spiritual element of Brown’s mission:

SARAH BARKPJ

ePF 63When I entered the prison I expected to see a rough, hardman, but I found instead the most beautiful Christian graces.I had asked to be allowed to enter, hoping to bring some holylight into the valley of the shadow of death, through whichMr. Brown must shortly pass, -And, behold—the glory ofthe Lord shone round about him—-and my feeling of pitychanged to veneration.43

Spring had expected her mission to be one of mercy; she thoughtshe would be bringing the light of religion to John Brown. In this passage, however, she indicated that Brown not only did not need her pity, hedeserved her “veneration.” In subsuming her potentially volatile missionof feminine mercy to the “greater” masculine power of Brown’s religiousstrength of purpose, Spring reassured her audience that she knew herplace in the gender hierarch and indeed, she depicted that hierarchy ashanded down by God. Furthermore, when Spring imbued Brown with religious authority she also argued that in his raid against the armors Brownmerely acted on faith, sewing as a martyr for a just cause: “For twentyyears he had believed that he had a divine call to free the slaves; he hadtried, and failed, and the slave power seemed stronger than ever; his littleband of earnest young men were scattered, dead, or in prison, himselfcondemned to die on the scaffold, but his faith never left him.”

The tacit acceptance of Brown’s violent raid may have raised him tothe level of true manhood in her eyes, but such respect did not extend tothe “evil-looking” southern men surrounding the prison. Brown attackedarmed men at an arsenal in an effort to end what many believed, andrightfully so, to be the unjust and tyrannical system of slavery But thesouthern men’s violence had no aura of hoiy calling or virtuous patriotism. Rather, these men were unmanly in that they took joy in attackingthe defenseless. Not only did they treat slaves brutally, but their behaviorat the prison indicated that they would be willing to commit violent actsagainst a “little woman” and a “boy.” They were only able to show theirstrength when the odds were in their favor.45 Spring was outraged whenshe discovcred that a group of southern men had shot and killed oneof the wounded raiders while he was being treated for his wounds. Herindignation caused her to leap out of her chair and confront the groupdiscussing the event: “Who killed him? How cowardly to kill a woundedman.”46 In Spring’s eyes, such violence was not only unjustified, it wasa sign of unmanliness, of weakness. True men would not have killed awounded prisoner.

Although Spring avoided explicitly mentioning Brown’s violence incontrast to her emphasis on southern brutality, it nevertheless held true forher that destructiveness was an inherently male quality. Recall her answerto the man who questioned her presence: “When men fight and hurt eachother, women should go take care of them.”47 In Spring’s worldview, whenmen sought to destroy life, women were obligated to nurture it, even ifthey had to step into the public sphere to do so.

Little Women and Evil-LookingMen

64Spring’s efforts were not limited to the leader of the Harpers Ferry

raid. As Lueretia Mott noted in a letter to her niece Anna Temple Brown,“I have intended to write direct to Reha. Spring... She deserves creditfor remembg. [sic] all the poor prisoners, with such generous exertions.”46In particular, Aaron Dwight Stevens became one of the main recipients ofthose “generous exertions.” In her correspondence with Stevens, Spring’semphasis on motherhood and women’s nurturance took a more extremeform. She first met Stevens during her visit to John Brown. Aaron was ayoung man — he was twenty-nine years old at the time of his executionin March 1860— and Spring’s empathy toward him was evident in everyaccount she provided of his character. In “A Book of Remembrance,”she described Stevens as “an old crusader in spirit, and yet he was lovingand gentle as a child. He was only dangerous to wrong and oppression.”4°She determined that the eariy loss of his mother “when he was quite achild made him a wanderer in his eady life.”5° Without female influence,Stevens — in Spring’s estimation — was driven to the overtly dangerousand rootless life he had led and as a result he faced a similarly violentdeath by execution. Throughout her memoir, she emphasized his gentleness, pointing out his “love of God, of nature, and of good people,” andhis “manly” courage in the face of death.5’ Perhaps most important inSpring’s mind was Stevens’s appreciation for “true” womanhood. In “ABook of Remembrance” she reprinted one of his letters to her in whichhe stated: “There is no greater joy on earth for me than to see a noblewoman, for in her I see more of God than in anything else.”52 Once again“woman” appeared as the spiritual superior, reinforcing nineteenth-century notions of female morality.

Spring attempted to remedy Stevens’s motherless situation by standing in as a surrogate in his time of need. She went so far as to addressone of her letters to him as “My dear little boy”53 For his part, Stevensreturned the sentiment, “And now my dear Mother, what shall I say?As you have been a mother, sister, and all to me in this hour of need,say a few kind words to my father and sister.” He then closed the letter,“Your son in the bonds of love, truth, friendship and righteousness.”54 Intheir communications with one another, Stevens and Spring enacted theroles of kinship. Their performances were not only gendered, they weresubversive as well. Unlike gender, kinship was supposed to be immutable;it was determined by “blood.” In demonstrating that kinship, too, couldbe performed, the blurred boundaries of gender as a social constructionappeared even more tenuous in contrast. When Spring emphasized hermaternal nature by bringing her son Eddie with her to the prison, her actions underscored her position as an actual mother. On the other hand, hermaternal performance with Stevens exposed the fragility of social familyand gender norms; she expanded the notion of motherhood to includethose not related by blood and subsequently used that expanded role tointercede on Stevens’s behalf.55

SARAH BARKIN

IPF 65Though Spring failed to save Stevens from the scaffold, she car

ried out one last act of defiance in support of the Harpers Ferry band.Spring acknowledged the male, destructive power of the state to executeStevens for his participation in Brown’s transgression on southern masculinity, but as his surrogate mother she arranged to reclaim his bodyand have him buried at her husband’s Eagleswood estate in “the land ofthe free.” Spring’s final endeavor essentially appropriated southern statepower and transformed it in a bold act of both kinship and gender performance.56 In burying Stevens and Absalom Haslett — another conspirator — in the North, Spring denied the southerners their completerevenge; their hope that the executions of the Harpers Ferry crew wouldrestore their defamed masculinity and honor was only partially — onemight say impotently — satisfied. Moreover, in her mind this recalcitrant act derived from her view of southern manhood as emasculated;she believed them to be cowards who preyed violently on the weak, thusthey did not deserve her respect.

A close reading of Spring’s memoir and correspondence reveals theextent to which gendered mores were understood, challenged, and manipulated in antebellum America. The cultural register that Spring livedwith and used on a daily basis gave “A Book of Remembrance” its meaning as a performance of self. Spring justified her radical political actionswith gendered rhetoric emphasizing motherhood, physical frailty (on herpart), and domestic duty. She understood the political implications of heractions, as well as the threat such deeds might pose to the status quo. Invisiting and supporting John Brown, she definitively stated her alliancewith the anti-slavery political activists in a public arena. The prison waspublic not only because it was accessible, but also because it served asa symbolic representation of the state’s power and masculinity. Springrecognized the larger political implications of Brown’s and by implication her — actions. As she wrote: “The truth is that the raid at Harper’sferry [sic] was the beginning of the Civil War, and the Proclamation ofEmancipation finished John Brown’s work.”57 Thus she also understoodthe need to make her part in such actions palatable to her audience.

Spring’s visit to Brown’s prison cell and her correspondence with andburial of Aaron Stevens had a larger impact as well, perhaps not in anearthly context hut in a more unwoddly sense. In a letter to Spring, LydiaMaria Child remarked on the spiritual effects of Spring’s actions: “It mustalways be a source of pleasant recollection to you that you have had theability and the will to do so much to console John Brown, and his unfortunate family and companions. Such deeds become flowers in gardens ofthe eternal wodd.”58 Like Spring, Child reinforced the notion of womanas nurturer, as a gardener of ethereal blossoms whose beauty, if not appreciated in the immediate and secular sense, would come into their ownin the more enduring afterlife.

Little Women and Evil-LookingMen

66 IPFAs a “little woman” in a world of angry men, Spring carefully negoti

ated her way through the “gray area” in which the gendered public andprivate spheres overlapped, using and manipulating long-held notions offemininity to disguise the public and political nature of her actions. Indoing so she exposed the fragile nature of socially constructed roles, sometimes surprising herself with the audacity of her deeds. In the actions ofthis one individual, modern historians are confronted with a compellingexample of the means by which women of the antebellum period transformed the domestic into the political, the allegedly powerless into thepowerful. And Spring’s audience recognized the dangerous implications— both physical and intellectual — of her actions. Writing in the earlyyears of the twentieth century Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman remarked onthe bravery her aunt displayed in journeying to Brown’s prison cell: “It ishard now to realize that it was a greatly heroic thing for a woman and aboy to do. . . but great and heroic it was for Rebecca Buffum Spring andher lad to go on that errand in the early November of l859.”°

SARAH BARKIN

e]PF 6

NOTES

Rebecca BufTum Spring “A Book of Remembrance,” Rebecca Spring Papers,11541, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanlbrd, CA: 120.

2 Ibid, 124.Rebecca Buffum Spring, “A Visit toJohn Brown in 1859,” in Virtuous Lives: Four Qyaker

Sisters Remember Family L//7, Abolitionism, and Women’s Suffiage, ed. Lucille Salitan and Eve LewisPerera (New York: Continuum, 1994), 122-23.

In one case in particular, Spring found herself using her religious beliefs as a defensefor her anti-slavery stance. In “A Book of Remembrance” Spring described an altercation on asteamboat outside of St. Louis, in which she identified herself as an abolitionist to a group ofsouthern slave owners. After taking refuge in her cabin, she managed to assuage their anger —and violent intentions — by declaring that abolitionist sentiments were a necessary componentto her Quaker religious beliefs adding the astute observation that “People will tolerate a gooddeal of diversity in religious belief” See Spring, “A Book of Remembrance,” 15-17.

Kristin Hoganson, “Garrisonian Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Gender, 1850-1860,” American Qgarterly 45, no.4 (Dec. 1993): 558-95.

6 Marie Marmo Multaney appears intent on proving that Spring was a feminist, nomatter how subtly she expressed it. While most of Ivfullaney’s arguments are most convincingwhen she discusses the contrast between Spring’s conventional femininity and reform interests,in the end she emphasizes the “feminist” element in Spring’s reform careec See Marie MarmoMullaney, “Feminism, Utopianism, and Domesticity: The Career of Rebecca Bulfum Spring,1811-191 l,”AwJersey History 104, nos. 3-1 (1989): 1-21. Amy Ssverdlosr, on the other hand,underscores Spring’s conservatism. Swerdlosc points to a resolution Spring put forward at thefirst Anti-Slavery Convention for American ‘Amen in 1837, which linked the abolitionistmovement to women’s “traditional” roles as mothers. Like Mullaney, Swerdlow seems intent onpigeonholing Spring rather than admitting and analyzing her complexity See Amy Swerdlow,‘Abolition’s Conservative Sisters: The Ladies’ New York City Anti-Slavery Societies, 1834-1840,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, ed. Jean FaganYellin andJohn C. Van Home (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press), 31-44.

Erving Gotfman defines “performance” as “all the activity of an individual whichoccurs during a period marked by his continuous presence before a particular set of observersand which has some influence on the observers.” See Erving Gotfman, The Presentation of Se/fin Everyday Life (1959; New York: Doubleday, 1972), 22; Kath Weston discusses the ways inwhich people — particularly gay men and lesbians — construct their identities in a worlddetermined to classify them in one category (man) or another (woman). According to Weston,even identifying someone/oneself as gay or lesbian imposes “a ‘Western’ classification in whichsexual behaviors and desires are understood thoroughly to infuse a self.” See Kath Weston, Long,Stow Bur,c Scenatgi and Serial Science (New Yorlc Roudedge, 1998), 33; and Gender Ai Render Me:Lesbians Talk See, Ctas4 Colo Yations, Studmuffins (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

8 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of ldentz0, 10th annisersaryed. (1990; New York: Roudedge, 1999). See especially chapter four in Part Three: “BodilyInscriptions, Performative Subversions,” 163-80.

Kathleen Brown. Good Wives, Xaois Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, andPower in Colonial Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 372. It isironic that the patriarchs teere the true dependents, basing their identities on those who wereconsidered their social and racial inferiors.

0 Butler, Gender Trouble, 179. Butler’s emphasis.Walter Johnson, Soul by SouL Ljfe Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1999), 13.2 Linda Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of

Woman’s History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9-39. Kerber emphasizes theneed to move beyond the Constraints of dualistic rhetoric in favor of a more complex andreciprocal language of gendered interaction. Paula Baker notes that women’s arguments forpolitical participation in the antebellum years used their roles and concerns in the private realmtojustify their cross over into the public world of politics. See Paula Baker, “The Domesticationof Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Histoncal Review 89(June 1984): 620-47.

13 Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820-1860,” American Qyarterlyl8(Summer 1966): 151-74.

Little Women and Evil-Looking Men

6$14 Bruce Dorsey, Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum Guy (Ithaca, NY

Cornell University Press, 2002), 13.Ibid.

6 Ibid., 15.Ibid, 39.

ID Ibid 40-41. According to Habermas’s definition of the public sphere, prisons werepublic not only because they were accessible (mainly to men) but also because they were oftenrun by state governments and as such were representations, in a physical sense, of the state’spolitical power. SeejOrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Spherr:An Inquiryinto a Category of Bourgeois Sociqy, trans. Thomas Burger with Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1989).

Unless otherwise stated, the biographical information is drasen from two of MarieMarmo Mullaney’s essays on Rebecca Spring. See “Rebecca Buffum Spring, 1811-1911,” inPast and Premise: Lives ofiiswJersey IVomen, ed. The Woman’s Project of XewJersey (Ivietuchen.NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1990), 84-86; “Feminism. Utopianism, and Domesticit)” (see note 6).

20 Elizabeth BulTum Chace, “My Anti-Slavery Reminiscences,” in Virtuous Lives (see note4), 95.

21 Dorothy Sterling, Ahead of Her Time: Abby Ketley and the Politics ofAntislavery (New York:W W Norton, 1991), 83, 264.

22 Elizabeth Bulfum Chace, “Reminiscences of Childhood,” in Virtuous Lives, 36.23 Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman, American Chivalry (Boston: W B. Clarke, 1913), 51.° George Kirchmann, “Unsettled Utopias: The North American Phalanx and The

Raritan Bay Union,” ,9fewJersry History 97 (Spring 1979), 25-36.25 There are a number of different accounts relating to the Springs’ involvement in

the Phalanx’s dissolution. A couple of historians point to Rebecca’s insistence on mandatoryreligious meetings as one of the primary points of contention. Marie Mullaney argues thatRebecca mistook the religious pluralism that dominated the Phalanx for irreligion. GeorgeKirchmann tends to place the blame more squarely on Marcus’s financial influence, but he alsoargues that the Springs created “great bitterness and discomfort” when they lobbied for a fixedliturgy at the Phalanx. See Mullaney,” Rebecca Buffum Spring,” 85; Kirchmann, “UnsettledUtopias,” 32.

26 Jayme Sokolow, “Culture and Utopia: The Raritan Bay Union.” J’fewJersey Histoyy 94(Summer-Autumn 1976): 89-100.

27 Spring, ‘Book of Remembrance,” 88.28 Thid., 106-107. It is interesting to note that this is the very excuse Abby Kelley used as

justification for not paying taxes on the farm she and her husband Stephen Fosterjointly owned.Unfortunatel the government did not agree and put their farm up for auction several times.In 1880, Abby and her husband finally abandoned the protest and paid their tax bill, declaringthat Stephen’s health was too poor to continue. See Sterling, Ahead of Her Time, 367-73.

29 Wyman, American Chivalry, 5930 Turning the World Upside Down: The Anti-Slavery Convention ofAmerican Women Held in New

rork GiN May 9-12, 1837, 1st ed. with an introduction by Dorothy Sterling (New York: feministPress at the City University of New York, 1987), 17. Italics not mine.

31 Hoganson, “Garrisonian Rhetoric,” 575.32 Margaret fuller to Marcus and Rebecca Spring, 12 December 1849. In Robert

Hudspeth, ed. The Letters of Margaret Fuller, vol. 5 (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, 1983),294-9 7.

Spring, “Book of Remembrance,” 109-10.Ibid., 110.Wyman, 59.

36 In emphasizing the fact that she obtained his permission throagh a letter rather thanin person, Rebecca accomplished two goals. She protected herself and her mission with a veilof male approval, and she protected her husband from carrying too much of the blame shouldher actions offend. Thus, Rebecca nominally respected the gender hierarchies of her time,while she simultaneously subverted them.

Spring,llO-ll.38 The Harpers Ferry Armory and Arsenal svas established by George Washington

in 1794. Thus it was a symbol of a new nation’s victory and might. In the minds of someSoutherners (and Northerners),John Brown’s assault against such an icon may have representedan attack against the very core of American democracy. Brown’s attack on Harpers Ferry canbe read in multiple ways. On the one hand he hoped to arm slaves for rebellion against tyranny,thus echoing revolutionary rhetoric of male virtue. On the other hand, he was defacing

SARAH BARKIN

ePF 69Southern manhood, symbolically appropriating it not only for himself and his Northern cause,but also for enslaved — and thus emasculated — black men, for Southerners such an act struckat the very core of their being. For a more in-depth discussion of American Revolutionarymasculinity and the role it played in the intergenerational battle for male identifs; see Dorsey,Reformmg Men and Ilkmen.

Spring, 120-21.° Ibid., 122.“ Ibid., 125.‘° Robert Abzug discusses in fascinating detail the different cosmological explanations

that motivated antebellum reformers in his work Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and theReligious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).

Rebecca Bufl’um Spring to Andrew Hunter, 2January 1860. Reprinted in Spring, “ABook of Remembrance,” 137.

° Ibid., 126. Such language also brings to mind Christ’s suffering before his cruciftxion.° Kristin Hoganson provides an excellent analysis of Garrisontan rhetoric regarding

Southern honor and brutality. See Hoganson, “Garrisonian Rhetoric,” 582-583.46 Spring, 112.Spring 110-Il.Lucretia Coffin Mutt to Anna Temple Brown, 2 January, 1860. In &tectadLetkrs of

lacretia Coffin Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 292.° Spring, “A Book of Remembrance,” 164-65. The biographical information is drawn

from “A Book of Remembrance,” 165-75.50 Spring, 167.SI Ibid., 166, 169.52 Aaron Dwight Stevens to Rebecca Buffum Spring, 18 March 1860, Reprinted in

Spring, “A Book of Remembrance,” 162.Rebecca Buffum Spring to Aaron D. Stevens, 13 february 1860. Rebecca Spring Papers,

M0541, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, CA.iS Aaron D. Stevens to Rebecca Buffum Spring, 13 March 1860. Reprinted in Spring,

“A Book of Remembrance,” 147.°° In Antigone’s Claim: Ainship Between Life and Death,Judith Butler argues that Antigone’s

act of kinship — burying her brother in defiance of the King’s lases — serves as a “trespass onthe norms of kinship and gender that exposes the precarious character of those norms, theirsudden and disturbing transferability, and their capacity to be reiterated in contexts and in waysthat are not fully to be anticipated.” Rebecca’s performance of kinship can be read in a similarfashion. Seejudith Butler, Antigone’s Cloister Ainship Between L(ia and Death (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 2000), 24.

56 Spring’s burial of Stevens and Absalom Haslett, another of the Harpers Ferry crew,was remarkably similar to Antigone’s defiant burial of her brother. As Butler contends: “Antigonecomes, then, to act in ways that are called manly not only because she acts in defiance of thelaw but also because she assumes the voice of the lass’ in committing the act against the law.Her agency emerges precisely through her refusal to honor his [King Creone’s] command, andyet the language of refusal assimilates the very terms of sovereignty that she refuses. . . . [SI heasserts herself through appropriating the voice of the other, the one to whom she is opposed;thus her autonomy is gained through the appropriation of the authoritative voice of the oneshe resists. See Butler, Antigone’s Claim, II.

Spring, 126.Lydia Maria Child to Rebecca Buffum Spring, 19 March 1860, Rebecca Spring

Papers.° Wyman, American Chivatyy, 60.

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