Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  During these long months of war, Alice and her two sisters helped their mother around the house and tried to distract themselves from thoughts of their brothers in uniform. To them, the war meant stoic silences, anxious nights, and feelings of uselessness. “Silent, patient, inactive anxiety! The part of war the women bear is by far the harder part,” Alice would later recall.44 For the rest of her life, she was haunted by memories of the Civil War. Years later she attended a Decoration Day parade in New York City where aged and infirm Civil War veterans paraded with their tattered flags. More than the men themselves, the sight of these decrepit flags, so lovingly crafted by bereft wives, sisters, and mothers, devastated her. “Poor, tattered silken wrecks! What memories they arouse! What tears they start!” she wrote. Upon realizing that no one cheered for “these pathetic symbols of glory and of death,” she found herself “with pictures of unutterable sorrow in my heart and tears on my cheeks.”45

  Ten-year-old Alice interpreted these wartime feelings of uselessness and angst differently than did her older sisters, who were already contemplating marriage. Alice felt that she had more in common with her brothers. In the autobiographical novel she later wrote about her family’s Civil War experiences, she gave herself no sisters. Alice wrote as if she had been the only Chenoweth daughter, a young girl whose three doting brothers sent news from the front lines filling her imagination with brave sacrifices and battles, intellectual and martial. She later declared that readers of this novel, An Unofficial Patriot (1894), “will know all about me and mine.”46

  EAGERLY ANTICIPATING a visit from newlyweds Bernard and Caroline, Reverend Chenoweth delivered a particularly inspired sermon on Sunday, April 24, 1864, focusing on his happy religious experiences, and then served communion to congregants in Indianapolis.47 Inclement weather prevented him from traveling home, so he spent the night at a friend’s house. The next morning he died of a massive heart attack. He was 55.

  Alfred’s death shattered Alice, age eleven, who would later describe her father as “the soul of my home” and attribute his untimely death to the strain of the war.48 Within a few months, Alice’s paternal grandparents, John and Mary Chenoweth, followed their son to the grave. By the end of the summer, all three of her brothers—Bernard, William, and Alfred—had sustained devastating war wounds. In addition to Bernard’s typhoid and Alfred’s eye injuries, William’s leg was crushed by a horse, leaving him in constant pain and unable to do sustained work for the rest of his life.49

  Alfred’s sudden death left Ann with three single daughters, ages eleven to twenty, a farm, a homestead, and several hundred acres of land to manage in and around Greencastle. When her own father had died, Ann’s mother relied on her oldest son to run things. Because of the war, Ann had no such option. As a widowed woman in 1864, Ann had few options at all.

  Throughout much of the nineteenth century, a married woman’s legal identity was subsumed under that of her husband in the legal tradition known as “coverture.” Married women could control no property—including their own earnings or inheritance—and they had few, if any, legal rights to the children born from their own bodies. Beginning in the 1820s, freethinking lecturer Frances “Fanny” Wright and a few other intrepid women had urged legal reforms for married women. This movement gained ground after abolitionist women, including Sarah and Angelina Grimké, began lobbying for women’s rights. In the 1840s and 1850s, some states revised married women’s property laws. Male legislators were often compelled to action not by concerns about women’s autonomy but rather by paternal fears of dissolute sons-in-law. If a wealthy man had no sons and thus had to leave property to his daughter, who could say whether or not his son-in-law would take good care of it? Better to pass laws allowing daughters to retain their inherited lands. Husbands drawn to risky business ventures also favored these statutes as a way of preserving their assets from creditors.50

  By the 1860s, pioneering women’s rights activists, such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who decades later would become Alice’s close friend, had attained minimal rights for married women, but these varied widely by state. Reformers suspended their efforts during the Civil War so that they could fully support the Union, only to see many of their hard-won legal gains overturned. As Ann struggled to navigate the byzantine probate proceedings required of widows, she likely had no idea that women had begun organizing to change the laws to make them more favorable to women like herself.

  Even though Indiana had among the more progressive laws regarding married women’s rights, the Putnam County Probate Court did not appoint Ann to administrate Alfred’s will, and she had to petition the court to be appointed legal guardian of her own minor children. Nor could she dispense with the family’s property or money as she saw fit—she had to first get the probate court’s permission each and every time she wanted to sell a parcel of land. Compounding matters, Alfred Chenoweth had died in debt. He had repeatedly borrowed money from his father John, leaving Alfred’s estate indebted to his father’s.

  Within months of Alfred’s passing, Ann received court approval to sell the family house and land. With this cash in hand, Ann was able to repay most, but not all, of the estate’s debts, leaving a total of $625.52 for each child, from which Ann paid herself for feeding and housing them.51

  The stress of Alfred’s death and of settling his estate overwhelmed Ann. With one son already dead and three sons on active duty, Ann entrusted her youngest child Alice to her own devices and steered her other two daughters to early marriage. After his discharge in the summer of 1864, Bernard moved with his wife Caroline to St. Charles County, Missouri, near the town of Dardenne, to try his hand at farming. The rest of the family soon joined him there in the hopes of starting over once again.

  IN MOVING FROM Virginia to Indiana to Missouri, the Chenoweths followed a familiar path for members of the Virginia gentry. One of the most prominent families in Dardenne were the Hatchers, descended from John Hatcher, a Revolutionary War veteran and Virginia state legislator, whose son Henry had helped settled the town.52 Seizing her best opportunity for advancement, in 1866 Alice’s sister Julia, then seventeen, married thirty-seven year old Frederick Hatcher, a Union veteran and son of town founder Henry.53 The following year, Alice’s brother William married Parmela Hatcher, Frederick’s younger sister. Alice and her mother moved in with William and Parmela and soon their three children under the age of four.

  Ann still had to travel back to Indiana several times a year to appear before the Putnam County Probate Court to provide receipts for her expenditures and report on her children, including her oldest daughter Kate, who had married a farmer and returned to Indiana. On October 29, 1867, Ann trekked to Greencastle to request that the court remove her as Alice’s legal guardian. She affirmed that Alice was living with William and that he should be her legal guardian; the court agreed.54

  There is no way to tell what fourteen-year-old Alice thought about this arrangement. Even if she and her mother remained in the same house, Alice must have known that her mother had revoked an official legal tie with her. She also might have wondered, rightly, what was to become of her. For a family whose ancestral pride was grounded in land ownership, this branch of Chenoweths now owned scarcely an acre. The family homestead gone, Alice shuffled between the farms of her older siblings. The stories she had grown up hearing about the Chenoweths and Peales of Virginia seemed a far cry from the reality of the Chenoweths of Dardenne, Missouri.

  The Chenoweths arrived in Dardenne a few years before the advent of electricity and mechanization. For them, farm life meant backbreaking labor and constant uncertainty. The vast majority of white farmers in St. Charles County raised wheat and corn as well as cattle and swine. Prior to the Civil War, the owners of large plantations relied on the labor of enslaved people to clear and harvest the crops. As yeoman farmers after the war, the Chenoweth-Hatchers may have employed a few black sharecroppers or freedmen, but if so, no such records exist. Most likely, they worked the land themselves. As a teenager
, Alice’s life revolved around preparing meals, tending crops and animals, and helping care for a growing brood of nieces and nephews. The Hatchers were founding members of the Dardenne Presbyterian Church, and “nearly everybody within reach of the church attended the services.”55 Alice was likely conscripted into church attendance whether she wanted to go or not. One bright spot to farm life: young Alice developed a lifelong love of horseback riding.

  Alice Chenoweth, age sixteen, hoping for a life beyond her siblings’ farms in Dardenne, Missouri.

  Neither did farm life suit Alice’s brother Bernard. His lingering typhoid made it difficult for him to work the long farm hours, and he lacked the capital necessary to get a successful farm up and running. A Civil War friend encouraged him to apply for a job as superintendent of schools of Worchester, Massachusetts. A glowing letter of recommendation from Ulysses S. Grant guaranteed the post, and Bernard moved his family across the country. Alice never saw her favorite brother again.

  Bernard’s failing health made it impossible for him to stay in Massachusetts. His doctor advised him to seek a warmer climate, so within a year, Bernard returned to Virginia, this time to Richmond. Bernard purchased three cows and sold milk to his neighbors. Even though he was a valiant soldier, a trusted officer, and a good man, Bernard made “no money during the war and has made none since.”56

  Grant’s election as president in 1868 gave Bernard hope. It seemed his fortunes might rebound when Grant nominated him to be the U.S. consul in China. This post and its $4,000 annual salary provided welcome news for Bernard, who by then was “living on pawned watches and rings . . . but painfully short of money for dinners for himself, wife, and two children.” Bernard eagerly accepted the post, but his typhoid was too far advanced for him to enjoy it. He served in China for just six months before dying in the summer of 1870.57 He was thirty-four years old. His widow ably fulfilled his duties and petitioned to be made the U.S. consul herself. Caroline was not formally appointed, but some histories of the Foreign Service include her as an early female diplomat.58

  Alice was devastated by Bernard’s early death. Bernard had been a passionate abolitionist, doting brother, and “a kind son and a good man” who had “shielded his widowed mother from every hardship.” But because Bernard was also an “unbeliever,” their mother Ann fretted over his destination in the afterlife. “As [Ann] sat and gazed at his dear face in a transport of grief,” Alice wrote in her first published essay several years later, “the door opened and her preacher came in to bring her the comfort of religion.” But to Alice, the minister’s words seemed cruel. He told this grieving mother that because Bernard had “not accepted what was freely given” he was damned to hell. The minister told Ann that she would never be reunited with Bernard and that she should instead focus on loving her youngest living son, Alfred, a churchgoing man who had recently become a doctor, settling with his wife, Ella Crume, in nearby Olney, Missouri.59

  Alice’s mother decided to follow Alfred to Olney, limiting her youngest daughter’s options. Brother William planned to move his family to Cowley County, Kansas, well over 400 miles away, where his prospects looked better. Should Alice make the trek with William’s family to an even more remote part of the country? Move in with her pious brother Alfred the doctor, as her mother had done? Remain on sister Julia’s farm in Dardenne?60 Or should she marry young, as both sisters had done, and start her own family?

  None of these alternatives appealed. No doubt Alice also knew that some colleges admitted women, but even if she could gain admission, who would pay her tuition and board? Even as a relatively privileged white female from a landowning family, Alice’s options were very limited. She knew that there were few ways for her to sustain herself financially, most of them distasteful and really only one respectable. Inspired by the daring examples of her cherished father and eldest brother and with little left to lose, Alice chose to make her own way in the world as a teacher.

  2

  The Best and Cheapest Teachers

  The past education of woman gave her an outlook which simply embraced a husband or nothing at all, which was often only a choice between two of a kind.

  —HELEN HAMILTON GARDENER, 1885

  BY THE SUMMER OF 1872, nineteen-year-old Alice Chenoweth had packed up her meager belongings and traveled the 380 miles from Dardenne, Missouri, to Cincinnati, Ohio.1 During the eight years since her father’s sudden death, Alice had come of age watching her nation and her family teeter on the brink of destruction.

  Alice had witnessed her sisters and sisters-in-law bear and bury babies and her brothers suffer from gruesome wartime wounds, both visible and invisible. She had watched her mother struggle to remain financially solvent and to navigate the various legal and societal barriers erected to keep women dependent on men. Growing up on tales of her father’s bravery and forced to sit on the sidelines awaiting her brothers’ news from the front, Alice had imagined a different life from that on a farm in Dardenne. In later years, she would never mention having lived in Missouri.

  To a farm girl in Missouri, Cincinnati appealed as a big city, easily accessible by steamboat or direct train from St. Louis. By 1870, Cincinnati was the sixth-most populous city in America and one of the nation’s most densely populated urban centers. Cincinnati boasted 45 miles of streetcar tracks, 170 miles of gas mains, 5,290 public lamps, and 151 firemen who ably protected every district. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings inaugurated professional baseball, and by the end of the decade, Cincinnati opened its world-class Music Hall and Zoo.2 In the 1870s, the “Queen City” was the place to be.

  When Alice stepped off the train, she would have smelled the barley and hops from one of the city’s legendary breweries as well as the scent of fresh-cut lumber from one of the nearby lumber yards. She would also have smelled the slaughterhouses—Cincinnati earned its nickname “Porkopolis” by leading the nation in the production of pork. As a bustling manufacturing city, coal powered life in Cincinnati, creating dark thick smoke that obscured Alice’s view even on perfectly sunny days. What a thrill to witness, smog and all, the growth of industry and the making of an American metropolis.

  As she traversed the few blocks from the train station to her boarding house on West 8th Street, Alice passed Joseph Brothers Scrap Iron Yard, various livery stables, a Presbyterian church, a German Protestant church, Baptist churches, three public markets selling produce and flowers, and several schools. She could also glimpse the largest suspension bridge in the world, built by John Roebling, who later designed the Brooklyn Bridge.

  Alice’s neighborhood, now known as the West End, had borne intimate witness to the coming of the Civil War and its aftermath. For generations, freedom seekers had crossed the Ohio River from Kentucky into Cincinnati, from slavery into freedom, and many settled in neighborhoods like the West End, not far from the river. The children in Cincinnati’s public schools did not model the diversity in the West End neighborhood, though, because black students attended segregated schools.

  This multiracial industrial neighborhood was not the only legacy of the Civil War visible to Alice. On her walks, she would have also passed by two of the nation’s leading manufacturers of prosthetic limbs, James A. Foster’s Union Patent Artificial Limbs and Dr. Bly’s Patent Artificial Limbs, and maybe even nodded to veterans on their way to and from selecting new arms and legs.3 Alice had not yet been alive for twenty years, but so far, the Civil War had shaped nearly every aspect of her life and every decision she had made, including her move to Cincinnati as a single woman living on her own.

  BACK IN DARDENNE, Alice, an attractive young woman from a respected family, no doubt entertained suitors and listened to her mother’s entreaties about the importance of early marriage. Both of her sisters had already married, and for women, the average age for marriage was twenty. For Alice, then nineteen, marriage provided the path of least resistance and the most obvious route out of her sister Julia’s farmhouse. But having spent her teens tending to her nieces an
d nephews on the farm, Alice was not interested in a traditional marriage buttressed by the domestic servitude of wives. She would later write that “the past education of woman gave her an outlook which simply embraced a husband or nothing at all, which was often only a choice between two of a kind.”4

  Rather than opt for a husband or nothing at all, Alice ventured to Cincinnati to seek an education and start a new life as a teacher. In this, she typified the experiences of a growing number of young women in the decades immediately following the Civil War. The women of Alice’s generation—those born in the 1850s and 1860s—represented a turning point for single women, or “spinsters” as they were then called. A record 7 percent of women in Alice’s generation remained single, and among women born between 1855 and 1900, over 10 percent never married.5 For some, the decision to remain single wasn’t really a decision at all. The Civil War took the lives of at least 620,000 men (2 percent of the total population) and maimed untold thousands more.6 In the 1870s and 1880s, there simply were not enough eligible men to go around.