Before the advent of digitized historical newspapers, it would have been quite impossible to trace Gardener’s comings and goings and tell her story. Newspaper databases, including the Library of Congress’s Chronicling America (which is free), newspapers.com, and newspaperarchive.com identified hundreds of stories pertaining to Gardener. Genealogical databases, probate records, and local history centers provided important information about Gardener and her relatives.
U.S. government records, including Civil War pension records, military service records, records of the Senate and House Committees on Woman Suffrage, and Civil Service Commission records, were also very helpful in understanding Gardener and the men in her life. These are all housed at the National Archives and Records Administration (the civil service records at the Maryland branch, the rest at the D.C. branch).
This book is inspired by and indebted to the pioneering work of generations of historians of women’s rights and woman suffrage, including: Aileen Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Movement 1890–1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965); Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959, 1975, rev. 1996); Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, with new preface (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978, 1999), and Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998); Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, African American Women in the Struggle for the Vote (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998); Marjorie J. Spruill Wheeler, New Women of the New South: The Leaders of the Woman Suffrage Movement in the Southern States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); and Ann D. Gordon, who led the team at Rutgers University that collected and published the six-volume Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Papers (and the microfilm edition) and who has published numerous other related volumes.
Notes
Abbreviations
AHS
Anna Howard Shaw
AP
Alice Paul
CCC
Carrie Chapman Catt
HBS
Harvard Business School
HHG
Helen Hamilton Gardener
HOWS
History of Woman Suffrage
JSW
John Sharp Williams
LOC
Library of Congress
MP
Mary Phillips
MWD
Mary Ware Dennett
MWP
Maud Wood Park
NAA
National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution
NARA
National Archives and Records Administration
NAWSA
National American Woman Suffrage Association
NWP
National Woman’s Party
NYPL
New York Public Library
PK
Paul Kester
SLRI
Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University
WRC
Woman’s Rights Collection
WW
Woodrow Wilson
Preface
1.HHG, “Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” Woman’s Tribune, November 21, 1902, 1; reprinted in Free Thought, January 1903, 3–10.
2.Maud Wood Park (MWP), “Remember the Ladies,” 78, MWP Papers, box 15, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LOC); MWP, notes for more “Rampant Women,” 13, National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) Collection, reel 37, LOC; “Four Factors” in Maud Wood Park, “Hasty Summary of Congressional Work written in reply to Mrs. Inez Hayes Irwin’s inquiry,” copy, NAWSA reel 37, LOC.
3.Catt remarks, HHG funeral booklet, HHG Papers, Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University (SLRI).
4.HHG, “Our Heroic Dead,” copy in Edna Lamprey Stantial Collection, box 5, SLRI.
1. A Chenoweth of Virginia
1.Details about the Chenoweth family ancestry from Richard C. Harris and Shirley D. Harris, The Chenoweth Family in America: Some Descendants of John Chenoweth b. 1682, 1994, 9–10, 347. Supporting records regarding John Chenoweth’s home and slave ownership at Berkeley County Historical Society, Martinsburg, WV.
2.Harris, The Chenoweth Family in America, 360. John Chenoweth will recorded in Putnam County, Indiana, September 7, 1864, Will Record Book, 380, Putnam County Probate Office, Greencastle, IN.
3.Throughout her life, Gardener claimed that her novel An Unofficial Patriot was the true story of her family’s life (“only the names are changed”). Since no letters survive from this period of her life, my impressions of her childhood are largely drawn from this novel and supporting public records. Quote from An Unofficial Patriot (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1894), 7–8.
4.Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
5.HHG, Unofficial Patriot, 36–37.
6.Minutes of the Methodist Episcopal Church, vol. III, covering the years 1829–1845 (New York: T. Mason and G. Lane).
7.Nancy B. Hess, “The Heartland ‘Rockingham County,’ ” compiled for Rockingham County Extension Homemakers, October, 1976, 329–330. Copy residing at Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society.
8.Works Progress Administration, Articles from Rockingham County, The Peale Homestead, 1936, 302–303. Copy residing at Harrisonburg-Rockingham Historical Society.
9.Harrisonburg Rockingham Register, June 18, 1885, 1. The article references the earlier trial.
10.In the Harris Chenoweth genealogy book and elsewhere, the Chenoweth marriage is dated 1836, as is the birth of their first child Bernard. But official records at the Rockingham County Historical Society date their marriage to 1838. It is possible that Bernard was also born in 1838 (birth records were not officially kept in Virginia until the 1850s) or, less likely, that Bernard’s birth predated their marriage.
11.Rev. W. M. Ferguson, Methodism in Washington, District of Columbia (Baltimore: The Methodist Episcopal Book Depository, 1892), 147.
12.Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
13.HHG, Unofficial Patriot, 84, 70.
14.HHG, Unofficial Patriot, 90–91.
15.Putnam County Deed Books, Boatright Files, and Plat Books, Putnam County Public Library, Genealogy and Local History Room. 1860 Census enumerates the Chenoweths in house number 264.
16.Historical description from Putnam County Interim Report, 1982, Putnam County Public Library, Genealogy and Local History Room. In the 1860 census, John Chenoweth listed his occupation as “gentleman”—a rarity in Putnam County.
17.Jesse W. Weik, Weik’s History of Putnam County, Indiana (Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen, 1910), 70.
18.Professor Joseph Tingley writing about his arrival in Greencastle in 1843, quoted in John J. Baughman, Our Past, Their Present: Historical Essays on Putnam County, Indiana (Greencastle, IN: Putnam County Museum, 2008), 30.
19.Report from Western Christian Advocate, November 9, 1854, quoted in Baughman, 31.
20.HHG wrote about her educational experiences in “Mental Panics,” Free Thought, May 1889, 210–214; also described in biographical sketch of HHG, dated June 18, 1923, in National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) collection, reel 36, LOC.
21.The McGuffey Readers: Selections from the 1879 Edition, edited and with an introduction by Elliott J. Gorn (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1998).
22.HHG, “English as She Is Writ,” The Truth Seeker, March 26, 1887, 197.
23.“Report on Memoirs, Rev. Alfred Griffith Chenoweth [obituary],” Minutes of the
Thirteenth Annual Session of the North-Western Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church held at Delphi, Indiana, September 7, 1864 (Cincinnati: R. P. Thompson Printers, 1864), 18–19.
24.HHG, “How Mary Alice Was Converted,” in Pushed by Unseen Hands (New York: Commonwealth Company, 1892). HHG told Adelaide Johnson that this was an autobiographical story. Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, eighteenth sitting, Friday, September 3, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 71, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LOC).
25.Profile of HHG, May 20, 1891, Louisiana Review, 2.
26.“A Kansas Soldier,” Leavenworth Times, April 29, 1869, 2.
27.“Sex in Brains,” Los Angeles Herald, July 16, 1897, 6.
28.Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 41–42. Paine published the work in three stages, the last in 1807.
29.HHG, Unofficial Patriot, 148.
30.1860 census; Indiana Ministers List, North, Northwest, South, and Indiana Conferences, 1800–1900, 135. Copy residing at DePauw University Archives.
31.Eleventh sitting of Helen Gardener, August 19, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Collection, LOC.
32.Baughman, Our Past, Their Present, 88–89.
33.“Bravest of the Brave,” St. Joseph Gazette-Herald (St. Joseph, MO), August 10, 1900; “The Story of a Consul,” Hartford Courant, May 3, 1869, 1; Harris, Chenoweth Family in America, 365–366; Unofficial Patriot, 159–179; History of Buchanan County, 1881, reprinted by Seward W. Lilly, 1973, courtesy of the Northwest Missouri Genealogical Society, 464–465. For a history of “bloody Kansas,” see Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).
34.“The Story of a Consul,” Hartford Courant, May 3, 1869, 1.
35.HHG, Unofficial Patriot, 178. Bernard, William, and Alfred’s military service is substantiated in their Combined Military Service Records (CMSR), National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC (NARA).
36.Betty Skeens, “‘Crossroad Farm’ Was Civil War Hospital,” Daily News Record (Rockingham County, VA), Dec. 19, 1992, 1. The home is now on the National Register of Historic Places. For a history of the war in the Shenandoah Valley, see Edward Ayers, In the Presence of Mine Enemies: The Civil War in the Heart of America, 1859–1864 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004).
37.Lyon Gardiner Tyler, ed., Encyclopedia of Virginia Biography, vol. III (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing Company, 1915), 356.
38.Dialogue from An Unofficial Patriot, 190–191. Gardener claimed to have verified her account with documents in the War Department. President Lincoln’s extant correspondence does not contain letters to or from Chenoweth, but there are several letters from Gov. Morton recommending various Indiana citizens for war posts in line with Gardener’s description of events.
39.HHG, An Unofficial Patriot, 225.
40.“Report on Memoirs, Rev. Alfred Griffith Chenoweth [obituary],” Minutes of the Thirteenth Annual Session of the North-Western Indiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 18–19.
41.Bernard Chenoweth to General Grant, September 11, 1862, Bernard Chenoweth, CMSR, NARA.
42.“The Story of a Consul,” Hartford Courant, May 3, 1869, 1; Brown County World (Hiawatha, KS), August 17, 1882, 3.
43.Harris, Chenoweth Family in America, 370; Alfred Hamlin Chenoweth, Pension file and CMSR, NARA.
44.HHG, An Unofficial Patriot, 312.
45.“Letter by Helen H. Gardener,” The Truth Seeker, August 13, 1887, 515.
46.HHG to Paul Kester, July 31, 1912, Paul Kester Papers, Box 6, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (NYPL).
47.Alfred Chenoweth obituary, Minutes of the Northwestern Indiana Conference, 18–19, Special Collections, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN.
48.HHG to Paul Kester, July 31, 1912, Paul Kester Papers, NYPL.
49.Harris, Chenoweth Family in America, 367. William Chenoweth Pension File and CMSR, NARA.
50.Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011), 189–195; Joan Hoff, Law, Gender, and Injustice: A Legal History of U.S. Women (New York: New York University Press, 1991).
51.Putnam County Probate Records, book 6, pp. 139–142; book 7, 302. Putnam County Office, Greencastle, IN.
52.S. M. Watson, “Growing Up on Dardenne Prairie,” History of St. Charles County, Montgomery and Warren Counties, Missouri, 459; Bill Schiermerier, “Dardenne Prairie’s First Settlers,” Cracker Barrel, vol. 3, no. 507, December 5, 1984. All courtesy of the St. Charles (MO) County Historical Society.
53.St. Charles County Marriage Records, Courtesy of the St. Charles County Historical Society.
54.Putnam County Probate Records.
55.Watson, “Growing Up on Dardenne Prairie.”
56.“A Kansas Soldier,” Leavenworth Times, April 29, 1869, 2.
57.“The Late U.S. Consul in Canton,” reprinted from Harper’s Weekly, Leavenworth Times, September 12, 1870, 3.
58.Harris, Chenoweth Family in America, 366; “Caroline V. Chenoweth,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, November 30, 1890, 19.
59.HHG recounts “a case she knew herself,” but does not name names, in HHG, Men, Women, and Gods and Other Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1885), 4.
60.The 1870 census lists Alice as the third resident of Julia and Frederick Hatcher’s household in Dardenne.
2. The Best and Cheapest Teachers
1.Some later biographical entries of HHG claim that she also graduated from high school in Cincinnati. She does not appear in the city directory until 1872, but it is possible she attended high school before enrolling in the normal school.
2.D. J. Kenny, Illustrated Guide to Cincinnati and the World’s Columbian Expositions, Ohio at the Great Columbian Exposition (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke and Co., 1893), Cincinnati Public Library.
3.Robinson Atlas of Cincinnati, 1883–1884, plats 5–7; Sanborn Fire Insurance Map, 1904; the artificial limb companies have multiple ads in the 1872 Stranger’s Guide to Cincinnati, hotel handbook. All courtesy of Cincinnati Public Library.
4.HHG, “Vicarious Atonement,” Men, Women, and Gods and Other Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1885), 52.
5.Nancy Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 5th ed. (New York: McGraw Hill, 2011), 270.
6.J. David Hacker, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War Dead,” Civil War History 57, no. 4 (December 2011): 307–348.
7.Beecher quoted in Woloch, Women and the American Experience, 127.
8.Carl F. Kaestle, Pillars of the Republic: The Common School Movement and American Society, 1780–1860 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
9.According to Cincinnati city directories at the Cincinnati Public Library, she later moved around the corner to 420 Baymiller Street.
10.Kenny, Illustrated Guide to Cincinnati and the World’s Columbian Expositions.
11.“History of the Normal School” by Delia Lathrop (written for 1876 Centennial Exhibition), included in Henry A. Ford and Kate B. Ford, History of Cincinnati, Ohio (Cleveland, OH: Williams and Co, 1881), 194–195; John B. Shotwell, A History of the Schools of Cincinnati (Cincinnati: The School Life Company, 1902). Copies residing at the Cincinnati Public Library.
12.Lathrop in Ford, History of Cincinnati, Ohio, 194–195.
13.“Normal School Commencement,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 21, 1873, 8; Ford, History of Cincinnati, Ohio.
14.1873–1874 Report of the Normal School by Delia Lathrop, for the Common School Annual Report, 89–90.
15.Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women’s Movement in America, 1848–1869, with new preface (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978, 1999); Faye Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Laura E. Free, Suffrage Reconstructed: Gender, Race, and Voting Rights in the Civil War Era
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).
16.Ellen Carol DuBois, “Overcoming the Compact of Our Fathers: Equal Rights, Woman Suffrage, and the United States Constitution, 1820–1878,” and “Taking the Law into Our Own Hands: Bradwell, Minor, and Suffrage Militance in the 1870s,” both reprinted in DuBois, Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
17.“Our Lady Teachers,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 17, 1876, 9.
18.Lathrop, in Ford, History of Cincinnati, Ohio, 194–195.
19.Harris, Chenoweth Family in America, 366–368; William Chenoweth Pension File and CMSR, NARA.
20.“Woman’s Weakness: An Intimacy That Ended in Shame and Death,” Cincinnati Enquirer, March 30, 1878, 1; “Naughty Conduct of a Truly Good Man, Punishment Promptly Meted Out,” Cincinnati Enquirer, August 28, 1873, 2.
21.See, for example, Nina Auerbach, “The Rise of the Fallen Woman,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 35 (June 1980), 29–52.
3. A Very Bad Beecher Case
1.Many later biographical entries on HHG state that she taught at the Ohio State Normal School in Columbus, but that school did not exist until 1899. The Sandusky school may have been a branch of the statewide system.
2.Introductory Remarks, Sandusky Directory (Sandusky, OH: Printed and published by I. F. Mack and Brother, 1884). Copy residing at the Archives Research Center, Sandusky Library.
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