Seneca Falls Was Built on Abolition: Networks Behind the First Women's Rights Convention

Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Library of Congress.

Of the people who signed the Declaration of Sentiments in 1848, 70 percent were involved in the anti-slavery cause, according to this study, and the convention's organizers, its network of towns and even its meeting hall were products of the abolition movement. The essay is by a Cultural Resources Diversity Internship Program intern at Women's Rights National Historical Park, part of a series on abolition and the women's rights movement; the analysis is the intern's, summarized here in hubnx's own words.

The organizers

Only one of the five organizers, Lucretia Mott, had public speaking experience. The other four, Martha Coffin Wright, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Jane Hunt and Mary Ann M'Clintock, had no speaking background but did have roots in the anti-slavery cause, and that prepared them.

• Lucretia Mott was a leader of the abolition movement by 1848, took part in the founding convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society and helped found the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. A Quaker minister, she traveled widely in the North as a speaker.
• Martha Coffin Wright, Mott's sister, lived in Auburn, New York; she too helped found the Philadelphia society, and her kitchen was used by freedom seekers on the Auburn Underground Railroad.
• Jane Hunt and her husband Richard were Hicksite Quakers active in the abolition and temperance movements, and their home in Waterloo was a stop on the Underground Railroad.
• Mary Ann and Thomas M'Clintock, also Hicksite Quakers, opened their home to anti-slavery lectures, signed abolition petitions and belonged to the Free Produce Society, which boycotted goods made with slave labor. They housed the Rev. Jermain Loguen for a night on his flight to Canada after he helped in the Jerry Rescue in Syracuse.
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton became an abolitionist after meeting Harriet Powell, a fugitive slave staying at her cousin Gerrit Smith's home in Peterboro, New York.

Three towns, one network

Seneca Falls, Auburn and Rochester each belonged to state-wide abolitionist networks. Rochester was an Erie Canal boomtown and reform city that was home to free African American communities, Quakers and Evangelical Christians. It was known as a one-way stop on the Underground Railroad, connecting Buffalo and Syracuse and linking areas south of Rochester to Canada. Frederick Douglass, after returning from England in 1847, decided to base his newspaper, the North Star, there. Other prominent Rochesterians in the cause included Susan B. Anthony and Isaac and Amy Post, whose home sheltered freedom seekers. Auburn was a major crossing point, where Harriet Tubman settled and where William Henry and Frances Seward, devoted abolitionists, helped freedom seekers; Martha Wright's circle overlapped with theirs.

Seneca Falls had its own connections. The Seneca County Anti-Slavery Society formed in 1837, and in 1838 at least eighteen petitions went from the county to Congress with over 1300 signatures. In 1843 Thomas M'Clintock was elected a manager of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1840 he and Richard Hunt gave William Lloyd Garrison woolen cloth so he could wear a suit untainted by slave labor to the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London.

Hunt House. NPS photo.

The signers and the chapel

The author relies on historian Judith Wellman's study of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments. Besides family ties and religious affiliation, support for anti-slavery was the third common trait, and in total 70% of the signers were involved in the cause. Twenty Seneca Falls signers were associated with the Free Soil Party, which sought to keep slavery out of western territories; others attended anti-slavery lectures or took abolitionist papers such as the North Star; the rest were Hicksite Quakers who signed petitions to Congress and, in Waterloo, ran the Underground Railroad.

The convention itself met in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel, completed in 1843. Wesleyan Methodists had split from the Methodist church over slavery, and their chapel was the most liberal in town, open to abolitionists and reform groups. When Abby Kelley once came to speak against slavery, every public meeting place was closed to her, and she spoke in an apple orchard. So, the author argues, there would have been no hall for a women's rights discussion without the abolitionists.

Wesleyan Chapel. NPS photo.

What women took from abolition

The author concludes that the women's rights movement owed much to abolition. Its ideas helped women step outside their prescribed sphere, and female anti-slavery societies gave them chances to build communities, lead, and take part in public and political issues. Women abolitionists who spoke to mixed audiences set a precedent. The movement also offered networks of support and methods of agitation and defense against oppression and violence.

The text of the Declaration of Sentiments. Library of Congress. The original, written and signed at the 1848 convention, has been lost.

Sources

• A Cultural Resources Diversity Internship Program intern at Women's Rights National Historical Park, A Great Inheritance: The Abolition Movement and the First Women's Rights Convention at Seneca Falls, National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words. The source's footnotes cite Wellman's 1985, 2004 and 2006 studies, among others.