What Hath God Wrought (88 page)

In 1834, a Rhode Island state assemblyman named Thomas Dorr formed a Suffragist movement calling for a new constitution on the basis of universal manhood suffrage. The Suffragists contested the annual state elections as a third party but never gained more than 10 percent of the vote. Dorr himself seemed a quintessential patrician reformer: from a wealthy family, a graduate of Phillips Exeter and Harvard, antislavery, a Whig. His diverse followers included disfranchised workers and artisans, the labor leader Seth Luther, and also middle-class men who objected to the archaic amateurism of the state courts under the charter and the legislature’s power to intervene in judicial cases.

The Rhode Island Whig Party became impatient with Dorr’s third-party activities and expelled him for splitting the Whig vote. The Democrats then recruited him, not because the local politicians liked him (they didn’t) but at the urging of out-of-state party leaders who saw in Dorr’s cause a way for the Democratic Party to show its support for popular sovereignty. In 1841, with working-class discontent exacerbated by hard times, Dorr’s Suffrage Association held an unauthorized convention that drew up a document called the “People’s Constitution” of Rhode Island. This People’s Constitution was “ratified” by a referendum in which all white men in the state could vote. Of course, this referendum had no legal status, although the authorities allowed it to take place. The Dorrites asserted that more than fourteen thousand men voted for their constitution, but without any impartial monitoring this result cannot be trusted.
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The number was critical, since it represented just over half of the adult men in the state and gave the Suffragists their claim to constitute the popular majority.

Events moved rapidly in April 1842. An election for state officials under the charter occurred; seven thousand men voted in it. The reformers staged a parallel poll of their own even though the state legislature this time declared it illegal. Some six thousand voters, Suffragists claimed, unanimously elected Thomas Dorr state governor. Dorr announced that his followers would seek to enforce the outcome of this election rather than that of the authorized one. He addressed cheering thousands in rallies and appeared in public with hundreds of armed men. He listened to Democratic politicians in other states, such as Silas Wright and Mike Walsh of New York, Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri, and former Treasury secretary Levi Woodbury, encouraging him to bold action. Ex-presidents Jackson and Van Buren expressed support. Francis Blair of the
Washington Globe
, leading organ of the Democratic Party, warned the charter government that if it dared try to suppress the rival state government, force would be met with force.
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Rhode Island governor Samuel King felt sufficiently alarmed to request military help from President Tyler in maintaining law and order. Tyler did not rush to support a Whig governor against a movement enjoying Democratic Party support at a time when he too was courting Democrats. On the other hand, he could hardly appear unsympathetic to a state’s plea for aid against insurrection, the southern white nightmare scenario. So Tyler ruled King’s request premature, adding, however, that in the event an insurrection materialized, he would intervene to sustain constituted authority, without any inquiry into “the real or supposed defects of the existing government.”
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(Tyler would have been mindful that his own Commonwealth of Virginia at this time retained a state constitution with property voting qualifications and a malapportioned legislature.)

On May 3, Thomas Dorr’s supporters inaugurated him as governor of Rhode Island, along with a “People’s Legislature” that met in a deserted factory. This convinced Tyler that the time to dispatch a few federal troops had come. It turned out they were not needed. The eighty would-be legislators in Dorr’s shadow government had no real stomach for confrontation. They met for only two days before adjourning and laid no plans for a resort to force. The constituted authorities, by contrast, displayed organization and decisiveness. On May 18, Dorr foolishly led some armed men in an attempt to capture a state arsenal under cover of fog. When the mist lifted, it revealed the arsenal bristling with defenders. Dorr’s followers wasted no time fleeing; the authorities then clamped down on his movement. Democratic politicians, national as well as state, sensed that the Rhode Island public was not really ripe for revolution and did not attempt to intervene on behalf of the Suffrage Association. Dorr found himself arrested, convicted of treason against the state of Rhode Island, and sentenced to life imprisonment.

The charter government meanwhile summoned a legal constitutional convention; the document it drew up became known as the “Law and Order Constitution.” In November a referendum ratified this constitution, 7,032 to 59, with the Dorrites boycotting. Surprisingly little differentiated this constitution from the “People’s” one. The legally proposed document gave the right to vote to all native-born men who paid at least a dollar a year in taxes and to any immigrants who could meet the traditional property requirements. Like the “People’s Constitution,” it reapportioned the legislature, providing substantial equity of representation in the lower house, though not in the state senate. Both basic laws included a bill of rights and left the judiciary subordinate to the legislature. The most important difference between them was that the “People’s” document had not required a property qualification of immigrants. On the other hand, the “Law and Order” constitution enfranchised taxpaying black men, where the “People’s” constitution had restricted voting to whites.
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After he had served a year in prison, the state legislature ordered Thomas Dorr released; his conviction was annulled in 1854, not long before he died. Although Dorr had succeeded in intimidating an unresponsive system to change its constitution, much in Rhode Island politics went on as before. The two political parties in the state found no difficulty adjusting to the new system. James Fenner, a bitterly anti-Dorrite Democrat, ran as the “law and order” candidate with Whig support and won the state governorship in the first election held under the new constitution. Although more men were enfranchised, the turnout of qualified voters remained the lowest of any northern state’s.
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Outside Rhode Island, both political parties pointed to the Dorr Rebellion to illustrate their respective political philosophies. The Democratic press proclaimed Dorr a hero and martyr of popular sovereignty. Whigs, on the other hand, accepted the judgment of Henry Clay that Dorr’s uprising typified the dangers to “the permanency and stability of our institutions” along with nullification, Jacksonian illegalities, and the repudiation of state bonds.
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Clay might well have added mob violence and the anti-rent movement to his list. In 1845, well after the issue had become moot, Democrats forced a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives on resolutions endorsing Dorr’s claim to the Rhode Island governorship and condemning his imprisonment. Democrats voted 107 to 7 in favor; Whigs voted 67 to 7 against. The uprising highlighted the different political philosophies of the two parties, popular sovereignty versus constitutional order and restraint.
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When a case involving a dispute over legal authority in Rhode Island came up before the U.S. Supreme Court, Daniel Webster defended the charter government’s actions; his argument constituted a classic statement of Whig constitutional philosophy.
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While the high court was hearing the case in 1848, revolutions by disfranchised townsmen and workers rebelling against archaic, undemocratic political systems swept across Europe. What Americans called “the Dorr War” in their smallest state seemed a miniature counterpart to these revolutions. If other states had waited until after industrialization to liberalize their voting requirements, they too might have undergone similar crises. Popular sovereignty had explosive implications in the world of the 1840s. Under these circumstances, and perhaps reflecting that his home state practiced slavery, Chief Justice Taney ruled against the “People’s Constitution” and validated the charter government. Despite his party’s rhetorical affirmations of popular sovereignty, the chief justice preferred prescriptive authority.
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V

A week after the first day of spring, Atlantic seaboard weather still felt wintry on March 28, 1841. In Washington, President Harrison had fallen ill. In East Cambridge, Massachusetts, a thirty-nine-year-old unmarried schoolmarm visited the county jail to give a Sunday school class, substituting for the regular teacher. She noticed (along with the debtors, minor criminals, and defendants awaiting trial) the local “lunatics” confined in an unheated cell. Dorothea Dix not only took it upon herself to provide them with some warmth, she kept coming back, reading up on the situation of the indigent insane, and composing a petition to the state legislature. When published, her
Memorial to the Legislature of Massachusetts
proved a bombshell. “
I tell what I have seen!
” she proclaimed—and much of it she found “revolting.” She had seen people “
Chained, naked, beaten with rods
, and
lashed
into obedience!”
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Miss Dix had found her true vocation, combining the talents of a publicist who mobilized public opinion with those of a lobbyist who could make things happen.

The treatment of the indigent insane in Massachusetts was actually relatively enlightened, Dix discovered, compared with what went on in other states. Typically, societies at the time incarcerated the indigent insane under whatever conditions cost the least; this could mean private basements or cages. Dix took her crusade on the road. Tall, slender, with angular features and her hair pulled back severely, Dorothea Dix embodied the Victorian image of female dignity and rectitude. She appealed to both heart and head. Her impassioned humanitarian outrage could move audiences, while her writings marshaled statistics and evidences of neglect. Dix spent time at the York Retreat in England, where she saw the Quakers apply principles of faculty psychology to the treatment of mental disorders. She cited the latest scientific papers by “alienists” (as psychiatrists were then called) about the efficacy of “moral” (that is, psychological) treatment as compared with traditional physical remedies for insanity (mainly bloodletting and blistering—the same as the remedies for almost every illness). Herself a Unitarian disciple of William Ellery Channing’s doctrine of the perfectibility of human nature, she could preach Christian compassion with an evangelical power that transcended denominations. “Raise up the fallen, console the afflicted, defend the helpless, minister to the poor, reclaim the transgressor, be benefactors of mankind!”
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Dix’s solution to the problem of the indigent insane was to place them in state-run asylums. The word “asylum,” of course, means “haven,” and she envisioned asylums as homelike places of tranquility and treatment. Those who recovered could be released; the others would at least be treated humanely. For years Dix traveled all over the United States and Canada, taking her campaign to one legislature after another with remarkable effectiveness. Since states confined the insane in a variety of institutions, she sometimes needed to address issues involving prisons and almshouses. But two issues she scrupulously avoided. By not mentioning women’s rights, she got politicians to take her seriously; and by staying well clear of antislavery, she brought southern state legislatures on board.
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Dix proved instrumental in founding a multitude of asylums for the mentally ill.

Dix’s core support came from Whigs, who found her cause compatible with their disposition toward redemptive reform and positive government. Like the reformers of schools and prisons, she addressed the shaping of human character. She maintained a long friendship and correspondence with Millard Fillmore, the New York Whig who became Zachary Taylor’s vice president and successor. Dix also cultivated Democratic politicians whenever she could. But when she shifted her attention to the federal level, a Democratic president frustrated what would have been her greatest achievement. In 1854, after years of lobbying by Dix, a bill setting aside 10 million acres of public lands to fund insane asylums finally passed Congress, only to fall before the veto of Franklin Pierce, a neo-Jacksonian strict constructionist. “I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for making the Federal Government the great almoner of public charity,” he explained.
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Dix’s career illustrates a general principle of the growth of women’s political participation in nineteenth-century America. As women achieved more education, as the transportation and communications revolutions broke down their isolation, as the evangelical movement reached out to them, and as the industrial revolution enabled more and more of them to earn their own money (both within and without the home), women became increasingly active in public life. In the South as well as in the North, in free Negro communities as well as among whites, religious and benevolent causes benefited early from women’s energies and talents. These kinds of activity seemed most compatible with prevailing assumptions about women’s roles. A good “republican mother” could there exert leadership without appearing to break out of her proper “sphere” and challenge male authority. While men were acknowledged to be self-seeking, aggressive, and competitive, a woman like Dix could assume responsibility for making society compassionate and providing the helpless with a home away from home in the form of an asylum. Female reformers could also address, with some show of legitimacy, problems directly affecting women and children, such as intemperance, prostitution, prison reform—and, ultimately, slavery.
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Nudging their way into political controversy, women had participated in the sabbatarian movement and in opposition to Indian Removal. They had signed abolitionist petitions to Congress.