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. . .
The home Zakrzewska purchased in 1860 was at 139 Cedar Street in the town of Roxbury, on the outskirts of Boston. Roxbury would become annexed to Boston in 1868, but until that time, it was its own municipality. Originally a farming community, by midcentury it had already become a manufacturing and commercial center. Roxbury was also one of three ‘‘streetcar suburbs’’ to grow up to the southwest of Boston, its proximity to downtown ( just two miles from its closest border) making it a popular location for those who worked in the city but wished to live in a somewhat more rural setting. Development was slow at first, but the establishment of a streetcar line in 1856 that connected Roxbury to downtown Boston encouraged growth. Although little more than a horse-drawn coach on iron rails (electric cars did not run until 1888), the streetcar permitted individuals like Zakrzewska to purchase property at the southern end of Roxbury and still be able to work within the city limits.∫
At the time Zakrzewska purchased her home, Roxbury’s inhabitants, numbering roughly twenty thousand, included a broad mixture of nationalities and classes. Although clear segregation by income would not occur until later in the century, distinct neighborhoods were beginning to form. The Tremont area, bordering on Boston’s south end and closer to the Back Bay and Muddy River, was a manufacturing center and home to the lower middle class; Roxbury highlands, an area of steep hills at the far southeast corner of the suburb, was a predominantly residential section for people who were well-to-do. Zakrzewska’s home on Cedar Street was not technically part of Roxbury highlands, but its possession of a ‘‘large garden with terraces’’ and ‘‘blooming pear trees’’
suggests that it was considerably more upscale than the brick row houses mark-ing the Tremont district. Zakrzewska had been able to a√ord the house only because of a five-hundred-dollar loan she received from Samuel Sewall, one of the trustees of the New England Female Medical College and the father of the physician Lucy Sewall, who would help Zakrzewska run the New England Hospital for nearly twenty-five years.Ω
Most likely Zakrzewska felt compelled to purchase a home so soon after she arrived in Boston because of changes in her familial situation. Just six months after her move, she had received a letter informing her that her father had passed away. The news caused her particular pain because she and her father had not been on good terms. He had written disapprovingly of her decision to leave New York, where, he believed, the Blackwells had watched over her. In Boston, in contrast, she would be on her own, drawing more attention to herself
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than he deemed appropriate for a young woman. Annoyed by her father’s criticisms, Zakrzewska had written a stern letter in reply, requesting that he either withhold his judgments or cease writing. She never learned whether he had read her letter and felt great sadness that she might have caused him unhappiness in his last days. ‘‘[T]hat year,’’ she later wrote, ‘‘was one of the . . .
most tragic, and . . . most conflicting, in emotion, in judgment and in making decisions.’’∞≠
One of these decisions centered on who would take responsibility for her two youngest sisters, who were not yet on their own. More than likely, Zakrzewska bought her home in order to provide for them. Minna, who was nine years younger than Marie, posed less of a problem. Zakrzewska took her in and paid for her education as a language teacher, in exchange for which Minna managed the household. This arrangement lasted until 1863, when Zakrzewska’s ‘‘favorite sister’’ was able to move out on her own. The deep a√ection that flourished between these two women probably stemmed from their considerable similarities: neither married, both pursued careers, and both supported many of the same politically radical causes. They remained close until Minna’s early death from tuberculosis in 1877.∞∞
Rosalia, the youngest child in the family, was more of a handful. Only sixteen years old at the time of her father’s death, she su√ered more than any of her other siblings from a lack of stability in her life. She had been aboard ship en route to America when their mother had passed away five years earlier. Whom she stayed with immediately thereafter is not known—perhaps she lived with her married sister, Anna, for a while. But by the spring of 1856, when Zakrzewska had returned to New York and was boarding with the Blackwells, Rosalia had joined her. Kitty Barry, an Irish orphan Elizabeth Blackwell had adopted, remembered Rosalia as a particularly tortured child. In her reminiscences, she described an incident in which Rosalia had locked her in a closet, refusing to free her until she agreed to say that she ‘‘hated Dr. Blackwell.’’∞≤ Zakrzewska, who must have had her hands full, took advantage of her father’s remarriage to send Rosalia back to Berlin. Now, however, with their father’s death, Rosalia was returning to the United States once again. Although at first she went to live with Anna, by April 1860 Anna had become ill and was sending Rosalia to Boston. It is not di≈cult to imagine Zakrzewska reaching the decision that it was time to provide her sister with a stable home. Unfortunately, we know very little about how long Rosalia remained with her. Zakrzewska made only one comment to the e√ect that her youngest sister ‘‘acts quite nicely as nurse,’’
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helping to tend to the ill who occasionally boarded in their home. Other than that, all that is known is that Rosalia eventually married a ‘‘John C. Steinebrey’’
and moved out as well.∞≥
Zakrzewska’s sisters lived in her home at most for several years. In contrast, Heinzen moved into Zakrzewska’s home shortly after she bought it and remained until his death two decades later. The exact nature of their personal relationship is somewhat di≈cult to pin down, in part because neither wrote much about the other: Heinzen was virtually silent, and Zakrzewska did little more than repeat on several occasions that their bond stemmed from shared principles and a commitment to work together to promote social change.∞∂ But
the di≈culty in understanding their friendship stems as well from its unusual character: relationships of this intensity between a man and a woman that were not also romantic appear to have been uncommon at the time. At least, they have not been the subject of study in the same manner that marriages and same-sex friendships have been.
Zakrzewska was not, it should be noted, the only woman outside Heinzen’s marriage with whom he formed a close friendship. The German émigré and political activist Clara Neymann also viewed him as a personal friend and even a father figure, addressing her letters to him with the salutation ‘‘Mein lieber guter Papa’’ (my dear good father).∞∑ Other women with whom he corresponded and whose work he admired and promoted included Mathilde F.
Wendt, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Marie Blöde, and Ernestine Rose. But whatever the nature of his friendships with these women, all of whom were deeply involved in radical causes, he was closer to no one (with the exception perhaps of his wife) than to Zakrzewska.
It was through Heinzen that Zakrzewska became deeply entwined in the German radical community, eventually sitting on the executive council of the Society for the Dissemination of Radical Principles, a group of German émi-grés dedicated to abolition, su√rage, and a revision of the U.S. Constitution so that it would guarantee ‘‘equal rights for all citizens of the republic without regard to race, color, and sex.’’∞∏ She found within this community individuals who both shared and shaped her views on social justice, in particular her understanding of the place of science in radical political reform. More than a tool for acquiring information about the natural world, science represented for these radicals something akin to a worldview. Frequently describing society as a battleground between religion and arbitrary authority, on the one hand, and reason and political democracy, on the other, they linked science to humanitarian
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goals, convinced that the abolition of misery would not occur until individuals had the a
bility and the freedom to think for themselves. It is impossible to understand Zakrzewska’s relationship to Heinzen, and her passionate defense of science, without first exploring Heinzen’s political writings, in which he detailed his vision of a just society and what he believed would be necessary to bring it about. As William Lloyd Garrison II, a close friend of Zakrzewska’s, once commented, Heinzen’s ‘‘influence upon her life was deep and abiding.’’∞π
. . .
‘‘There is no higher principle than that of freedom.’’∞∫ No statement of Heinzen’s captures his convictions better than this; and no document inspired him more than the Declaration of Independence. Having transferred his hopes for a true democracy from Europe to his adopted land, Heinzen believed that the key to building a humane and democratic society rested in the Declaration’s pronouncement that ‘‘all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’’∞Ω Heinzen recognized that American society did not yet guarantee these rights for all, and he dedicated his life to fighting for such rights. Thus whether pronouncing his views on slavery, communism, religion, or su√rage, his starting point was that every human being, regardless of skin color or sex, had the right to be free and that the state had the obligation to protect this freedom. The domination of one group of people by another marked for Heinzen the height of barbarism.
Not surprisingly, Heinzen wasted little time after immigrating to America in joining the antislavery movement. Zakrzewska, we should remember, had once claimed that she had sought out Heinzen because of his commitment to abolition, declaring his position to be ‘‘equal to William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillipps.’’≤≠ In 1851, when he assumed the editorship of a German newspaper, the Deutsche Schnellpost, he used it immediately to promote abolition, frequently blasting both the Fugitive Slave Law and, after 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act.
Initially he also supported the Free Soil Party, and then the new Republican Party, though he turned against the latter when it refused to take an explicit stand against the Fugitive Slave Law in its 1860 platform. By 1864, he, along with many radical Germans, was supporting John C. Frémont in his challenge to Lincoln for the presidency. When Frémont withdrew from the race, convinced that he had no chance of winning, Heinzen still refused to back Lincoln, angry that he had failed to outlaw slavery throughout the United States. As for the Emancipation Proclamation, he dismissed it as a document
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inspired more by the need for a new military strategy than by moral and humanistic concerns.≤∞
Heinzen alienated many of his paper’s supporters with his harsh views of Lincoln, but he rarely worried about the popularity of his views, even when that translated into a loss of subscribers. After the war, Heinzen continued to lobby for the advancement of freed slaves. Although at times he suggested that blacks lacked certain abilities, he insisted that this reflected a history of lost opportunities rather than any inherent di√erence between the races. Consequently, throughout the period of Reconstruction, he advocated just as strongly for educational and employment opportunities as he did for citizenship and su√rage.≤≤
Heinzen’s hatred of slavery was matched by his distrust of communism, which he once branded ‘‘nothing more than a newly applied Christianity.’’≤≥
Zakrzewska, who declared herself ‘‘no friend of communism in any form,’’
obviously shared this sentiment.≤∂ Well aware that Marx and Engels embraced materialism every bit as much as he did, Heinzen was nevertheless troubled by what he considered to be a dogmatic element in Marx’s writings. Continuing his association between communism and religion, he accused Marx of playing
‘‘the pope’’ in a community in which ‘‘doctrines’’ substituted for ‘‘truth’’ and fanaticism replaced reason.≤∑
As the last sentence suggests, Heinzen disliked and distrusted Marx intensely.
But Heinzen’s criticisms, despite his harsh tone, reflected more than a heated contest between two men with clashing personalities. Heinzen believed Marx to be mistaken in his assessment of where battle lines needed to be drawn in order to bring about a radical reform of society: the proletariat did not need to overthrow the bourgeoisie; rather, republicans needed to oust royalists. The enemy, in Heinzen’s eyes, was the denial of freedom, not capital and private property. Rejecting Marx’s prediction that the inevitable consequence of capitalism was the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few, Heinzen insisted that both capital and property were critical to the development of an individual’s independence and sense of self-worth. Thus, rather than eliminate the right to property, Heinzen believed it should be protected for each and every one. And rather than criticize capital, he sought ‘‘to make every workingman as far as possible also a capitalist. . . . Not hatred against capital,’’ he insisted, ‘‘but hatred against oppression is the saving watchword.’’≤∏
Heinzen’s fundamental fear was that communism would end up enslaving its citizens by empowering the state and thereby threatening individual rights. For
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this reason, he was convinced that communism and democracy could never coexist. Still, Heinzen embraced what he understood to be the ultimate goals of communism, that ‘‘of abolishing misery and of bridging the chasm between a∆uence and poverty.’’ He simply favored the development of what he termed a socialist state, with an activist government that guarded individual rights—
indeed, that refused to police the private a√airs of its citizens—while funding ‘‘public streets, public fountains, public hospitals, public poor-houses, public insane asylums, public museums, public parks, public libraries, and public schools.’’ As critical of the conservatives’ emphasis on ‘‘self-help’’ as he was of communism, Heinzen insisted that it was the government’s responsibility ‘‘to let no one sink below a minimum of human prosperity, and to secure for each one, by means of state-help, the general requisites that put him in condition to obtain by his own activity what his natural talent may enable him to obtain.’’ Funding for the requisite ‘‘socialistic institutions’’ would come primarily from a progressive tax structure. ‘‘Every human being,’’ Heinzen insisted, ‘‘is entitled to enough, no one has a right to too much; and if none have too much, all will have enough.’’≤π
Yet, however much Heinzen may have advocated for such social improvements, he remained convinced that the radical social reform necessary to create his ideal socialist state could never occur in the absence of a participatory
democracy.≤∫ Thus he campaigned for nothing more vehemently than he did for freedom. Heinzen’s criticisms of slavery and communism, as we have seen, stemmed from his conviction that both curtailed the legitimate rights of human beings and thus prevented the emergence of a democratic society. Nothing, however, in his opinion threatened human freedom more than the church.
Heinzen’s hatred of the church knew, in fact, no bounds. Referring to priests as ‘‘spiritual wolves in sheep’s clothing,’’ he accused them of enslaving their followers, destroying their powers of reason and encouraging blind obedience.≤Ω
Rather than fostering independence of thought, church o≈cials used the fear of damnation to coerce people into subserviency, forcing them to focus on the afterlife rather than on the material conditions of their own lives and those of their fellow human beings. Reacting to a great extent to the dominant role the church played in European politics, Heinzen came to America suspicious of any signs of the power of this institution. ‘‘From a radical point of view,’’ he wrote shortly after he arrived, ‘‘the church is not to be separated, but to be cut o√ and to be neutralized.’’ He distrusted the suggestion of equality between the two institutions implicit in the U.S. Constitution’s call for a separation of church and
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state. For Heinzen, the church was a hierarchical institution that was ‘‘constantly endeavoring to place itself over [the state].’’≥≠ He feared that it would never rest content to remain a separate but equal partner.
Heinzen’s diatribes against the church continued throughout his lifetime.
Hardly an article or an essay that he wrote, regardless of the topic, failed to include an exegesis on the dangers of religion. Again and again, Heinzen declared religion and humanity absolutely incompatible, insisting that the only antidote to the marriage between ‘‘material misery’’ and ‘‘religious credulity’’
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