John Neal Part Four: Progressive Causes
First, I want to stress again the magnitude of my debt to Neal’s Wikipedia page and the writer Dugan Murphy. This is a blog post and not a scholarly research piece, but I hope I have been adequately clear when I am quoting him. Other sources, I think, have attribution. Most of this is loose paraphrase of Murphy, rearranged to support my purposes. Any errors introduced in the process are my own.
Neal’s entry into the world of public intellectual debate and his espousal of feminism coincided. In his autobiography, writing about a debate he participated in before he went to England, he writes about how he came to believe in women’s suffrage:
“Take the best and most comprehensive definition of slavery, as you find it existing here, and you will be satisfied that one half of your whole white population -- that is, all your females, -- are born to slavery, that they live in slavery, and are dying in slavery….
They are taxed without representation. They cannot hold office. They are denied the right of suffrage. All their earnings and savings, after marriage, belong to their husbands, or masters, who make the law. They can neither acquire, hold, or transmit property, other than as their masters, the lawgivers, may prescribe (p. 50)
After his return to Portland, feminism became the cause he devoted the most time and energy to. In the meantime, in typical Neal fashion, he embraced and espoused a dizzying number of social causes.
As noted in an earlier entry, Neal included an anti-dueling theme in his first novel, Keep Cool (1817). Today you have to be a real history buff to understand how common dueling was. Prior to 1815, one in 12 American naval officers who died on active duty were killed in duels. Stephen Decatur, one of our great early naval heroes, died in a duel in 1820. Jonathan Cilley, Hawthorne’s Bowdoin classmate mentioned earlier, died while in office in the US House of Representatives, shot to death on the Bladensburg, Maryland dueling ground on February 24, 1838.
Neal considered dueling an archaic remnant of the aristocracy, immoral, pointless, anti-democratic, and anti-American. However, Neal’s anti-dueling campaign, and other anti-dueling efforts, were ineffective. The carnage of the Civil War turned public opinion against dueling and gradually brought it to an end.
In that same first novel, Neal pointed out that “the Indian is the only native American” at a time when others were using the term to refer to Anglo-Americans (as opposed to, for example, Irish immigrants). He wrote later "no people, ancient or modern ... have been so deplorably oppressed, belied, and wronged, in every possible way."
He argued against the poll tax that funded militias, pointing out that both "the poor and the rich are taxed" but the poor also were required to serve while the rich could buy their way out of service in militias that existed to protect rich men’s property. Similarly, and with other reformers of his time, he opposed lotteries because they took advantage of poorer people, and opposed imprisonment for debt.
He was a vocal opponent of slavery, founding the Portland, Maine local chapter of the American Colonization Society in 1833, serving as its secretary, and later meeting with Liberia's first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts. William Lloyd Garrison convinced many of the case for immediate abolition of slavery, but Neal disagreed. Many of Neal’s feuds seem to have retained lifelong force, but the one with Garrison was resolved when Neal declared in 1865 that "I was wrong ... and Mr. Garrison was right."
I can’t minimize his stance against capital punishment, nor can I describe it any better than Murphy did in the Wikipedia page, mostly using Neal’s own words:
Neal began his campaign against public executions after witnessing one in Baltimore.[303] He attacked capital punishment by writing in newspapers, magazines, novels, and debates, achieving national influence in the US and reaching a more limited audience in the UK.[304] Late in life he remembered still "having no belief in the wisdom of strangulation, for men, women, and children, however they might seem to deserve it, and being fully persuaded that the worst men have most need of repentance, and that they who are unfit to live, are still more unfit to die."[305]
His causes were many, but he was most active as a campaigner for women’s rights. Look to the history of the women’s rights movement in the US and it will seem to start with the Seneca Falls Convention in July of 1848. John Neal gave two public orations on the subject of women’s rights in Portland in 1831. In his Wandering Recollections… he recalled:
I asserted that our women were slaves, bond slaves, not having a right to their own bodies, their own children, nor their own earnings; which is the very definition of absolute slavery: not being allowed to acquire or transmit property during marriage, nor to vote before marriage, nor after marriage, though taxed to the uttermost; nor, under any circumstances to have a voice in the making of laws, in the administration of laws, or in the choice of rulers.
He became America’s first lecturer on women’s rights, and it became the cause he fought most vigorously for. Margaret Fuller, herself an early inspiration to the later leaders of the movement, admired him for his "magnetic genius," "lion heart," and "sense of the ludicrous" as a lecturer, and invited him to address her students in 1838. Of him, she also wrote, “I knew none who was so truly a man.”
His influence as a speaker peaked with his 1843 "Rights of Women" speech at the Broadway Tabernacle, New York City's largest auditorium at the time.
But his interest and activity never waned.
Like other reform movements of the era – remember Neal was a member of the colonization society and opposed immediate and unconditional abolition, just as he believed in temperance but opposed prohibition – the women’s rights movement was split in its goals. Perhaps because of his legal training, Neal concentrated on coverture law and the right to vote. He wrote to Fuller in 1845:
I tell you there is no hope for woman, till she has a hand in making the law — no chance for her till her vote is worth as much as a mans [sic] vote. When it is — woman will not be fobbed off with a six-pence a day for the very work a man would get a dollar for ... All you and others are doing to elevate woman, is only fitted to make her feel more sensibly the long abuse of her own understanding, when she comes to her senses. You might as well educate slaves — and still keep them in bondage.
After the Civil War Neal remained involved in the suffrage movement as an organizer. He cofounded the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, organized Portland's first public meeting on women's suffrage in 1870, and cofounded Maine's first statewide Woman Suffrage Association in 1873. That was only three years before his death in 1876. If you consider his advocacy to have begun with his epiphany in Baltimore, he devoted more than 50 years to the cause of women’s rights.
In earlier entries, I concluded with before-and-after comparisons to underscore Neal’s impact. In this one on his social advocacy, that provides a mixed result. He railed against dueling early and often, but the carnage of the Civil War gets credit for bringing it to an end. He opposed lotteries and the militia tax- and service- system, and those were reformed. But lotteries have regained new popularity. Modern reformers might argue as Neal did that lotteries and our current military service system prey on the disadvantaged. He advocated for Native Americans. Terrible legal and cultural abuses occurred after his death. He was for temperance and against prohibition, and realistically his stance didn’t seem to make any difference, though we might give him credit for being right. He opposed the death penalty. [Sigh]
His greatest efforts were on behalf of women’s rights, and women won the right to vote, but not until 44 years after he died. They still have not won the full and equal position he advocated.
He was pugnacious and prickly and perhaps full of himself, but maybe here we can give him credit for living Atticus Finch’s value, “Real courage is when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”