Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  3.“First Woman U.S. Civil Service Commissioner Recalls Early Days as Teacher in Sandusky,” Sandusky Star-Journal, May 22, 1920, 6.

  4.Catherine Melville-Milne obituary, Sandusky Daily Register, March 12, 1895. Helen M. Hansen, “At Home in Early Sandusky: Foundations for the Future,” 1975, 36–37; copy given to the author by Ezell and Sharon Smith, of Sandusky.

  5.“Teachers Meeting at the High School,” Sandusky Daily Register, May 9, 1874.

  6.“School Exhibition,” Sandusky Daily Register, June 26, 1874.

  7.Editorial, The National Teacher, a Monthly Journal of Education, vol 5, W. D. Henkle, editor and publisher, Salem, OH, 1875, 75.

  8.Charles Smart, Twenty-Third Annual Report of the State Commissioner of Common Schools to the General Assembly of the State of Ohio, for the school year ending August 31, 1876 (Columbus: Nevins and Meyers State Printers, 1877), 40. United States Office of Education, 1876.

  9.“Appointment of Teachers,” Sandusky Daily Register, June 29, 1875.

  10.“New Year’s Day Open Houses,” Sandusky Daily Register, January 1, 1875.

  11.“Sex in Brains,” Los Angeles Herald, July 16, 1897, 6; she also relates this story in the preface to Facts and Fictions of Life (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1893); Ely Van De Warker, “The Relations of Women to Crime,” Popular Science Monthly, November 1875.

  12.Charles E. Frohman, Sandusky’s Editor (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1972).

  13.“Notes and Comments,” Sandusky Daily Register, April 28, 1876; “Board of Education,” Sandusky Daily Register, April 29, 1876.

  14.“Classical and English School,” Gallipolis Journal, August 14, 1862; Ohio Biographical Sketches, 1876, ancestry.com.

  15.Marriage license, ancestry.com; “School Opening Delayed,” Gallipolis Journal, September 18, 1862.

  16.Advertisement in Jackson Standard, February 21, 1867. Substantiated in Ohio Biographical Sketches, 1876, ancestry.com.

  17.Gallipolis Journal, June 18, 1874.

  18.The Stark County Democrat (Canton), September 3, 1874, 4; Hamilton Examiner, September 3, 1874, 2.

  19.“Commissioner Smart,” Sandusky Daily Register, July 21, 1876; the article in the original newspaper on file in Sandusky has been torn out, but it was reprinted in full in the Highland Weekly News, August 10, 1876, 1.

  20.“Notes and Comments,” Sandusky Daily Register, July 17, 1876.

  21.Springfield Republic quote reprinted in “Commissioner Smart,” Sandusky Daily Register, July 21, 1876; reprinted in full in the Highland Weekly News, August 10, 1876, 1.

  22.Ohio News Items, Cambridge (OH) News, June 8, 1876, 1.

  23.The Eaton Democrat, February 17, 1876.

  24.HHG, “Men, Women, and Gods,” in Men, Women, and Gods and Other Lectures, 11.

  25.HOWS, vol. 3, 22; quoted in Lisa Tetrault, The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women’s Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 99.

  26.In the Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, the preface to Is This Your Son, My Lord and the essay “The Fictions of Fiction,” HHG describes her fiction as “true” and/or as autobiographical, sometimes even explaining who was who.

  27.“Sex in Brains,” Los Angeles Herald, July 16, 1897, 6; she also relates this story in the preface to Facts and Fictions of Life (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1893); she tells a slightly different version in “Welcome Lady Commissioner,” The Federal Employee 5, no. 24 (June 1920): 8.

  28.Carol Groneman, Nymphomania: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).

  29.Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

  30.Linda Gordon, The Moral Property of Women: A History of Birth Control Politics in America, rev. ed. of Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: Birth Control in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 74.

  31.Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” Representations: The Making of the Modern Body, Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Spring 1986): 1–41.

  32.Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002), 360–385.

  33.Andrea Tone, Devices and Desires: A History of Contraceptives in America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 3–5; Gordon, Moral Property of Women, 66.

  34.Tone, Devices and Desires, 14–17.

  35.“Commissioner Smart’s Denial,” Jackson Standard, August 10, 1876.

  36.Reprinted in the Sandusky Daily Register, July 31, 1876.

  37.Sandusky Daily Register, July 31 and August 7, 1876.

  38.Sandusky Daily Register, August 7, 1876.

  39.“School Commissioner Smart,” Jackson Standard, August 17, 1876, 2.

  40.Jackson Standard, August, 24, 1876.

  41.Jackson Standard, September 7, 1876.

  42.Jackson Standard, August 3, 1876.

  43.Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Penguin Random House, 2007); Richard Wightman Fox, Trials of Intimacy: Love and Loss in the Beecher-Tilton Scandal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Barbara Goldsmith, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Harper Perennial edition, 1999).

  44.Sandusky Daily Register, August 30, 1876.

  45.From the Chillicothe Herald, reprinted in the Jackson Standard, October 16, 1876.

  46.HHG, preface, Is this Your Son, My Lord? (Boston: Arena Publishing, 1890), xvi.

  47.HHG, Is this Your Son, My Lord?, 38.

  48.I have not found a marriage certificate after extensive research. Even if they did marry, it would not have been legal because Smart had not divorced Lovenia.

  4. Purgatory and Rebirth

  1.Orvin Larson, American Infidel: Robert G. Ingersoll (New York: Citadel Press, 1962), 117–120.

  2.Quoted in Larson, 120; Susan Jacoby, The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 59–61.

  3.Larson, American Infidel, 129–132.

  4.Lecture as reprinted, Robert Ingersoll, The Liberty of Man, Woman and Child (New York: C. P. Ferrell, 1915), 396.

  5.Sandusky Daily Register, July 7, 1877, 1.

  6.Cincinnati Enquirer, July 26, 1877, 5; Jackson Standard, August 9, 1877.

  7.Sandusky Daily Register, February 13, 1877.

  8.“Ohio Legislature,” Cincinnati Enquirer, January 16, 1878, 2; “Notes and Comments,” Sandusky Daily Register, January 22, 1878.

  9.“From Schools to Insurance,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, December 20, 1883, 11.

  10.Jackson Standard, January 24, 1878.

  11.HHG, Men, Women, and Gods, 107.

  12.As reported in Jackson Standard, January 24, 1878; 1878 Detroit City Directory, 80. Copy residing at Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

  13.Ann C. Chenoweth probate records, case 1447, Lincoln County (MO), Recorder of Deeds Office.

  14.Gallipolis Journal, August 19, 1880; Highland Weekly News (Hillsboro), December 16, 1880, 3.

  15.Detroit city directories listed the names of teachers in each school, but there are no teachers named Smart or Chenoweth between 1878 and 1883.

  16.HHG, “The Fictions of Fiction,” in Facts and Fictions of Life (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1893), 34.

  17.HHG, “Historical Facts and Theological Fictions,” Men, Women, and Gods, 108.

  18.Various ads in Detroit Free Press, March–April 1878, and in 1878 Detroit City Directory, 80; “Results of Tontine Policies,” Detroit Free Press, December 19, 1879, 1.

  19.“Sayings and Doings,” Detroit Free Press, November 4, 1881, 1; “Triumph of the Equitable,” Detroit Free Press, January 20, 1883, 1.

  20.George W. Stark, City of Destiny: The Story of Detroit, Illustrated (Detroit: Arnold-Powers, 1943), 393–411. Copy residing at the Burton Historical C
ollection, Detroit Public Library.

  21.“Griswold Hotel,” www.historicdetroit.org accessed April 1, 2019; Griswold Hotel postcards, Detroit Historical Society online collections.

  22.Ann C. Chenoweth Probate Records, case 1447, Lincoln County (MO), Recorder of Deeds Office.

  23.HHG, “Vicarious Atonement,” Men, Women, and Gods, 70. She also describes a son who broke his mother’s will and charged her for room and board in HHG, “Men, Women, and Gods,” Men, Women, and Gods, 4.

  24.“Ingersoll,” Detroit Free Press, November 9, 1882. She may have secured an introduction to Ingersoll via a man named James Redpath. Redpath served as Ingersoll’s manager for a time, and in the 1850s, he published a Free Soil newspaper at the Kansas-Missouri border, through which he may have known Bernard Chenoweth. John R. McKivigan, Forgotten Firebrand: James Redpath and the Making of Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

  25.HHG Speech at dedication of Ingersoll Portrait, Washington Law Library, May 8, 1921, reprinted in Rena B. Smith unpublished biography, Edna Stantial Collection, SLRI; M. T., “Helen H. Gardener: How her Successful Advent into Literature Began,” Sunday News (Wilkes-Barre, PA), March 24, 1895, 14, widely syndicated; “Col. Ingersoll Done in Soprano,” New York Sun, January 7, 1884, 1, states she showed him her writing “three years ago.”

  26.Several volumes of Ladies Repository are listed in Ann Chenoweth’s estate inventory.

  5. Ingersoll in Soprano

  1.“Chickering Hall,” New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, www.nycago.org accessed April 1, 2019.

  2.“From Schools to Insurance,” Cleveland (OH) Leader, December 20, 1883, 11.

  3.Alexander Hamilton lineage mentioned in Charles Smart entry, Ohio Biographical Sketches, 1876, ancestry.com.

  4.HHG Speech at dedication of Ingersoll portrait, Washington Law Library, May 8, 1921, reprinted in Rena B. Smith unpublished biography, Edna Stantial Collection, SLRI; M. T., “Helen H. Gardener: How Her Successful Advent into Literature Began,” Sunday News (Wilkes-Barre, PA), March 24, 1895, 14, widely reprinted.

  5.T. H. MacQueary to Rena B. Smith, November, 16, 1926, reprinted in Rena B. Smith unpublished biography, Edna Stantial Collection, SLRI.

  6.Ad, New York Times, January 6, 1884, 11. Foreshadowing later problems in documenting her life, the New York Times ad misspelled her name as “Gardner,” which is how the press reported on her for much of the year.

  7.“Chickering Hall,” New York City Chapter of the American Guild of Organists, www.nycago.org accessed April 1, 2019.

  8.Adelaide Johnson Sitting Notes, tenth sitting, August 18, 1902, Adelaide Johnson Collection, box 71, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC (LOC). Manager named in ad, Buffalo Commercial, February 9, 1884, 2.

  9.Ingersoll introduction reprinted in HHG, Men, Women, and Gods, x.

  10.“Ingersoll in Soprano,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1884, 8. This is a description of her Chicago lecture, but she gave the same speech and wore the same black velvet dress throughout this tour.

  11.New York World review, reprinted “Christianity Crushed,” Detroit Free Press, January 12, 1884, 3; Buffalo Sunday Morning News, February 10, 1884, 4.

  12.“Ingersoll in Soprano,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1884, 8.

  13.HHG, “Men, Women, and Gods,” Men, Women, and Gods, 14, 24.

  14.Wheeling Daily Intelligencer (WV), April 30, 1884, 2. For more on women and American atheism, see Annie Laurie Gaylor, ed., Women Without Superstition—“No Gods-No Masters”: The Collected Writings of Women Freethinkers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, WI: Freedom from Religion Foundation, 1997); Evelyn A. Kirkley, Rational Mothers and Infidel Gentlemen: Gender and American Atheism, 1865–1915 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000).

  15.“Christianity Crushed,” Detroit Free Press, January 12, 1884, 3.

  16.“Col. Ingersoll Done in Soprano,” New York Sun, January 7, 1884, 1; subsequent headlines shortened this to “Ingersoll in Soprano.”

  17.Leigh Eric Schmidt, Village Atheists: How America’s Unbelievers Made their Way in a Godly Nation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); Susan Jacoby, Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004).

  18.Ad, Buffalo Commercial, February 9, 1884, 2; Syracuse Sunday Courier, reprinted in The Truth Seeker, March 1, 1884, 137; “Wahle’s Opera House,” Buffalo Commercial, February 9, 1884, 3; “Miss Gardner’s Lecture,” Buffalo Commercial, February 11, 1884.

  19.“Ingersoll in Soprano,” Chicago Tribune, April 28, 1884, 8.

  20.George E. Macdonald, Fifty Years of Freethought: Story of the Truth Seeker from 1875 (New York: Truth Seeker, 1929); Schmidt, Village Atheists; Roderick Bradford, D. M. Bennett: The Truth Seeker (Prometheus Books, 2006); Bradford, “D. M. Bennett: The Nineteenth Century’s Most Controversial Publisher and American Free-Speech Martyr,” Freethought Today 24 (May 2007).

  21.HHG, “Lecture by the New Male Star,” The Truth Seeker, April 2, 1887, 213.

  22.Ads in The Truth Seeker began running August 2, 1884, 496.

  23.The Truth Seeker, September 13, 1884, 584–585.

  24.The Truth Seeker, September 20, 1884, 596.

  25.The Truth Seeker, October 11, 1884, 654.

  26.“Miss Gardener on the Characteristics of Her Sex,” The Truth Seeker, January 24, 1885, 50–51.

  27.Quoted in Lucy N. Colman, “Mrs. Slenker’s Ghost-hunting,” The Truth Seeker, May 9, 1885, 292.

  28.E. A. Stevens, “Miss Gardener Scolded,” The Truth Seeker, March 20, 1886, 183.

  29.U.C. to Editor, The Truth Seeker, October 22, 1887, 683.

  30.“Miss Gardener in Her Own Behalf,” The Truth Seeker, May 30, 1885.

  31.Lucy N. Colman, “Mrs. Slenker’s Ghost-hunting,” The Truth Seeker, May 9, 1885, 292. Theresa Sobieski also defended HHG, The Truth Seeker, May 16, 1885, 315.

  32.Joanne E. Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003).

  33.For example, Ingersoll refused to defend his friend D. M. Bennett, publisher of The Truth Seeker, when he was arrested for distributing a free love pamphlet, as described in D. M. Bennett to Ingersoll, May 31, 1879, Ingersoll-Farrell family papers, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (NYPL).

  34.HHG, “Our Great Dead—Ingersoll,” Free Thought, September 1899, 507–509.

  35.Dedication page, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Men, Women, and Gods and Other Lectures (New York: Truth Seeker, 1885).

  36.HHG to Paul Kester, October 26, 1921, Paul Kester Collection, NYPL.

  37.“Helen Gardener on Social Heresies,” The Truth Seeker, November 27, 1886, 755–756.

  38.“Miss Gardener on the Characteristics of Her Sex,” The Truth Seeker, January 24, 1885, 50–51. She signed off from St. Louis in this letter, The Truth Seeker, October 11, 1884, 654.

  39.Alfred Hamlin Chenoweth, Pension File, National Archives and Records Administration (NARA); Harris, Chenoweth Family in America, 370.

  40.C. S. Smart to H. B. Hyde, January 3, 1885, Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States records, carton 12, Baker Library, Harvard Business School (HBS).

  41.Samuel Putnam letter, The Truth Seeker, April 11, 1885, 229.

  42.HHG, “Nobody Wants to Play,” The Truth Seeker, April 25, 1885, 261; HHG, “St. Louis Clergymen Aroused,” The Truth Seeker, August 1, 1885, 487.

  43.HHG, “Library Vandals,” The Truth Seeker, November 28, 1885, 758.

  44.Samuel Putnam, “Advance Notice,” The Truth Seeker, September 5, 1885, 573.

  45.HHG, “Historical Facts and Theological Fictions,” in Men, Women, and Gods, 93.

  46.“The Albany Convention,” The Truth Seeker, August 22, 1885, 536.

  47.E. A. Stevens, Editorial Notes, The Truth Seeker, May 19, 1888, 313.

  48.Chicago Times review, reprinted in The Truth Seeker, February 13, 188
6, 110.

  49.W. M. Chandler, Book Review, reprinted in the The Truth Seeker, November 21, 1885, 750.

  50.A.B.B. (Antoinette Brown Blackwell), Book notices, The Truth Seeker, December 26, 1885, 830–831.

  51.Zoa Topsis, “‘Men, Women, and Gods’ in Court,” The Truth Seeker, May 26, 1888, 326.

  52.Amarala Martin, Book Notices, The Truth Seeker, February 6, 1886, 94.

  53.Review from The Sociologist, reprinted in The Truth Seeker, January 9, 1886, 30.

  54.“Miss Gardener’s Address to the Clergy and Others,” The Truth Seeker, January 2, 1886, 6. She described her daily mail in a profile written by Emily Bouton for the Toledo Blade, reprinted in The Truth Seeker, May 23, 1891, 323.

  55.HHG to Dr. E.F. Strickland, Feb. 6, 1894, Strickland Autograph Collection, SLRI.

  56.Editorial notes, The Truth Seeker, March 20, 1886, 185.

  6. The Cultured Poor

  1.HHG, “Rome or Reason,” North American Review 143 (November 1886), 519–521.

  2.HHG to Edward Eggleston, April 26, 1886, Century Company Records, Manuscripts and Archives Division, New York Public Library. Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations (NYPL).

  3.Larson, American Infidel, 189, 210, 226–227, 264.

  4.Society Page, New York Daily Graphic, February 12, 1887, quoted in Larson, 229; “at homes” described in Larson, 229–235.

  5.“A Party at Colonel Ingersoll’s,” The Truth Seeker, February 26, 1887, 133.

  6.Cora Rigby, “The Diplomatic Corps,” Woman Citizen, May 2, 1925, 12–13.

  7.HHG Speech at dedication of Ingersoll Portrait, Washington Law Library, May 8, 1921, reprinted in Rena B. Smith unpublished biography, Edna Lamprey Stantial Collection, SLRI.

  8.“Clubs with Queer Names,” The Sun (NYC), December 9, 1888, 3.

  9.Christine Stansell, “When the Village Broke Free,” New York Times, June 2, 2000, E29.

  10.“The Liberal Club,” The Truth Seeker, February 19, 1887, 117.

  11.Correspondence, The Truth Seeker, September 24, 1887, 620.

  12.Editorial Notes, The Truth Seeker, April 9, 1887, 233.

  13.Blurb, The Truth Seeker, December 10, 1887, 791.