Philosophic Content in The Unionist

The Unionist formed a part of the reading material available to the African-American women students at the Canterbury Female Academy. This important fact – consistent with Black community reading practices in the early nineteenth-century – meant that these students were absorbing some of the most important rhetorical, political, and pacifist ideas of the time. Politically, the letter from William Jay (son of the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Jay) about the history of Black civil rights in America would have been a signal to the students that there were some prominent white men confirming the heritage they had learned from the parents and grandparents – of Black participation in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, of voting rights, of passports and citizenship rights. News from the Caribbean confirmed that Haitian Independence and the British Emancipation of 1833 had been successful and were being actively sustained. The writings of Lydia Maria Child, one of the most prominent anti-racist white women in the Abolitionist movement, were available from the office of the Unionist, and contained material about the Canterbury Female Academy itself. She pointed out how the laws protecting the institution of slavery limit every opportunity for self-improvement by free Blacks – as every student in that school knew viscerally. Child’s writing has a feminist dimension, both implicitly and explicitly, modeling female literary achievement (she was already a famous fiction and self-help writer before becoming a committed Abolitionist). Finally, the students were reading – ahead of its availability to most of the American public – the pacifist theories of Jonathan Dymond (1796-1828). This English Quaker and linen-draper wrote an influential text of moral philosophy, praised by voices as disparate as Swinburne, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, and William Lloyd Garrison. Twentieth-century historian Peter Brock considered Dymond’s exposition of the Quaker Peace Testimony to be the most significant philosophic attempt to universalize that doctrine. There was an active Peace Society in Windham County, which caught up with Dymond long before his work was published in the United States; the Windham County Peace Society, led by Crandall’s ally Samuel J. May, issued a pamphlet by Dymond on the subject of peace. One of the complete issues of The Unionist contains a full essay on government from Dymond’s larger exposition on ethics. It is obvious from the context that this essay was part of a series in The Unionist. What this means is that the African-American women at the Canterbury Female Academy were reading the latest radical philosophic material – from white American lawyers, from white American women Abolitionists, and from a white British pacifist. The availability of Black philosophic writings, though, was a gap which will be discussed in a later essay.

For Further Reference

• Brock, Peter. Pacifism in the United States: From the Colonial Era to the First World War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968.
• Brock, Peter, ed. The Quaker Peace Testimony 1660 to 1914. York, United Kingdom: Sessions Book Trust, 1990.
• Duban, James. “Thoreau, Garrison, and Dymond: Unbending Firmness of Mind.” American Literature 57:2 (May 1985): 309-317.
• Dymond, Jonathan. On the Applicability of the Pacific Principles of the New Testament to the Conduct of States: and on the Limitations which those Principles Impose on the Rights of Self-Defence. First American from the Second London Edition. Brooklyn Connecticut: People’s Press, A.F. Lee, 1832.
• Dymond, Jonathan. Essays on the Principles of Morality, and on the Private and Political Rights and Obligations of Mankind. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1834.
• Garrison, Francis Jackson and Wendell Phillips Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879: The Story of His Life Told by His Children, Volume 1: 1805-1835. New York: The Century Company, 1885
• Lynd, Staughton. Intellectual Origins of American Radicalism. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966.
• Rycenga, Jennifer. “The Sun in its Glory: The Diffusion of Jonathan Dymond’s Works in the United States, 1831-1836.” Quaker Studies, 26:2 (2021): 241-259.

Above: Lydia Maria Child, white woman who authored two important pamphlets in the midst of the Canterbury crisis - "An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans called Africans" (1833) and "The Oasis" (1834). Later in her career she became the editor of leading Abolitionist newspapers and helped Harriet Jacobs to get her writings into print.