Chapter 3: The False Dawn of Seneca Falls
Supplement to Endnotes
Endnote 1) It is with some speculation that I claim the Barto family embraced the ideas and platforms of the Democratic Party: Mary’s stepfather was a judge who would remain a staunch Democrat long after the Whig Party and, at the end his life, the Republican Party emerged as the home for social reformers. And his son (Mary’s stepbrother, Henry. Jr.) carried on the torch for the Democrats who pejoratively referred to social reformers as “ultras.” These anti-reform sentiments were so strong that Henry Jr. did not approve of George’s service in the Colored Cavalry.
Endnote 3) The Acts did much to protect men’s ambitions. Women’s rights advocates backed the acts, but vital support came from legislators who hoped to protect married speculators and businessmen from the devastation of financial failure. Allowing wives to claim separate estates would protect husbands who fell on hard luck from the merciless reach of creditors.
Popular sentiments about women protecting children from failing men, and men from their own failing selves, justified the new acts too. The market fever that gadded men, like George Cole, from one risk to the next, also encouraged a new understanding of the home and women’s place in it. The aspiring middle classes, especially, depicted the home as the last and best sea wall to stop the waves of ambition and selfishness that imperiled America’s market-driven society. Legislators worried that the reckless trading or debauchery of a husband could rob a mother of the roof over her head and, therefore, her ability to nurture her children.
The initial Property Acts also had more to do with sentimental notions of motherhood than it did with awarding women selfhood. These otherwise bold acts and laws, that awarded wives control over their own possessions, were adopted in order to hedge men’s liabilities during their scramble for prosperity; and these laws rested on the conservative notion that women were men’s moral guides -- purer beings, domestic angels -- not their equals
On the complexity of coverture: No figure played the bête noire to women’s rights more than the late William Blackstone, the renowned English jurist who starkly laid out the doctrine of coverture. “By marriage,” he wrote, “the husband and wife are one person in law.” Her “very being” and legal existence was suspended during her marriage. It was “consolidated” in the being of her husband, “under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything...her condition during her marriage is called her coverture.” In popular summaries of his work, and in countless magazines and sermons in the decades following the Revolution, Blackstone’s coverture -- in which the husband covered or concealed his wife’s identity -- was boiled down into clichés to explain the rights and duties of husband and wife
Coverture, though, was never as bleak as advocates of women’s rights made it out to be. Local judges had often spoke in favor of the wife’s agency, tailoring decisions to the practical needs and situations before them; and widely read American jurists like Tapping Reeve, James Kent and Joseph Story--though they mostly hewed to Blackstone--emphasized the complexity of actual families. Most importantly, many American wives had enjoyed various methods of retaining their own estates through equity court (chancery courts), marriage settlements, passive and active trusts, and antenuptial contracts. In short, women had not been entirely “covered” in marriage. See: Blackstone’s four-volume Commentaries (1765-1769); Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982), pp. 113-135; Hendrik Hartog, “Lawyering, Husbands’ Rights, and the ‘Unwritten Law’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of American History 84, no. 1 (June 1997): 67–96.
Endnote 4) A fuller vision of women’s rights found expression in New York’s Earnings Act of 1860, which won wives the right to keep their wages, make business contracts, challenge their husbands’ once-assumed custody of children, sue and be sued. These changes removed some of the most glaring internal contradictions contained in the previous Acts. (For example, if a woman owned property but could not sell it at will, or sue for its damage -- which New York women could not do with the Act of 1848 -- did she own property in any meaningful sense?) The Earnings Act of 1860 would prod the “Woman Question” down the long road toward suffrage and the partial erasure of sex as a constitutional distinction. As far as how this may have affected Mary Cole, the Earnings Act likely inspired her to try to take greater control of her small fortune that she inherited three years before-- efforts that would lead to the affair and the murder.
Even so, the Earnings Act was eventually pared down by the courts. For example, the New York judiciary declared key portions of the Earnings Act (1860) unconstitutional. And judges also required that women’s separate estates be clearly documented; even if a wife had all her contracts, certifications and receipts in order (and hadn’t permitted her money or belongings to melt into the shared possessions of family) many judges continued to apply the logic of coverture to the many cases that the statutes did not distinctly address or spell out. So long as judges continued to see marriage through the lens of coverture, or question the legality of the Property Acts, or fear that the legislation endangered the institution of marriage, New York courts defended the status quo.
Finally, the victories of the various acts stole some of the thunder of the growing suffrage movement as it no longer could be argued that women needed the vote in order to secure laws essential to women’s interests. The best work on this ironic legislative victory is Norma Basch’s In the Eyes of the Law.
Endnote 5) Particularly problematic were sections of the Earnings Act that suggested that a wife who had married before the Property Acts, could reclaim her estate, ex post facto. This, it was argued, violated the original terms of the marriage vows in question. Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, pp. 200-207.
Endnote 8) On the will of Henry Barto, Sr.: Instead of bequeathing the standard “widow’s third” to Frances Barto (Mary’s mother and his second wife), Henry Sr., designated five thousand dollars to be lent on interest to someone with property worth at least ten thousand. The profits reaped from the interest would be Frances’s lifelong support. In this way, Henry Sr. got around supplying his widow her due dower, but it is not clear if her bequest was an improvement on the typical dower of 1/3; there is no suggestion in the will of estrangement, but instead, her name evokes tenderness in the record. So why give her this instead of the standard widow's third? Norma Basch, perhaps, answers this question when she argues that there is a pattern of husbands leaving more to their children than widows: Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, p. 107.
Endnote 17) For more on Self-Making and the war, see 3.17, here.
Endnote 19) George W. Cole was part of a cohort of men, born in the first three decades of the nineteenth century, who had not fought in the Revolution (or the War of 1812), but who had lived daily in the shadows of its heroes. Men in antebellum America -- from Abraham Lincoln, to James Russell Lowell, to Ralph Waldo Emerson -- lamented that the moment for true greatness had passed. The Revolution had stirred ambitions but left young men with no clear way to channel their ambitions other than seeking wealth. They yearned for a field of action and fame.
In his much-too-forgotten book, Patricide in the House Divided, George Forgie argued that it was men in the age of Lincoln who came to see the Civil War as an outlet for pent-up ambitions. The Civil War provided a release from the collective sense of shame for not having lived up to the heroic deeds of the revolutionary generation. Parents from the “post-heroic generation” endowed (and saddled) their children with names of revolutionary heroes and read from a flood of contemporary advice manuals which encouraged young men to emulate the hallowed heroes of 1776. American men, Forgie argued, eventually took up rifled muskets so they could, among other things, move out from the long shadows of General Washington and his fellow patriots.
Forgie’s work now seems dated, a relic of psychohistory which reduces history to mankind’s universal, often unmet, mental needs. Still, Forgie’s fundamental argument is compelling. The American Civil War was the bitter fruit from seeds planted during the American Revolution, and the logical result of championing freedom and equality while clinging to America’s original sin of slavery. But the sectional war was also the result of ambitions and dreams of self-improvement that traced back to General Washington’s war and the infectious ideas articulated in the Declaration of Independence. See: George Forgie, Patricide in the House Divided: A Psychological Interpretation of Lincoln and His Age (New York: Norton, 1979)
Endnote 20) As happened with Mary and George Cole, the war altered gender roles in millions of families. In some ways the war sharpened Victorian gender roles; in others, it blurred them. The military roles of men, perhaps, confirmed ideas about men’s natural competitive nature versus the nurturing ways of females. Still, questions emerged for countless men and women, about the proper roles of a husband and wife. The supposed agreements of men and women -- how they worked, who controlled the money, what devotion meant-- became more vexed because of separation, death, loneliness, and the injuries of once able-bodied men. See, for example: Faust, Mothers of Inventions: Women of the Slaveholding South in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Endnote 21) On the Civil War and women’s rights movement: New York’s Acts of 1848 and 1849 and the Earnings Act of 1860 -- which together framed the Coles’ first decade of marriage -- had at least symbolically chipped away at a husband’s claim upon his wife’s earnings and property. On the eve of the war, the Women’s Right movement appeared to be on the verge of transforming family relations for (mostly white) American families of means. But as Norma Basch has written, “after 1860, organized feminist pressure to improve the legal status of New York wives evaporated. An 1862 amendment of the Earnings Act, for example, returned legal guardianship of children to the father” and it also “erased the clauses of the 1860 act which made spouses equal in intestacies with respect to realty.” Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, p. 207.
Leaders from the women’s movement remained active in politics, forming a Loyal League that gathered petitions in support of the immediate emancipation of slaves. But the resolutions demanding suffrage, the sharp critiques of the institution of marriage, the calls for liberalized divorce laws, fell nearly silent upon the first firing of cannon. Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Random House, 2010), pp.81-84.
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