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Anna
Elizabeth Dickinson
by Sara E. Polsky
"I regret that Providence has furnished
only one woman for such a crisis as this. I wish
we had fifty Anna E. Dickinson's scattered all
over the country telling people the truth." Thus
wrote the chairman of the New Hampshire State
Republican Committee in June 1863. The woman he
referred to, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, had
emerged from obscurity two years previously to
become a leading abolitionist and celebrity.
Anna was born in 1842 to Quaker parents
John and Mary Dickinson. Her father was
dedicated to the abolition movement, and died of
a heart attack shortly after giving a rousing
antislavery speech in 1844. Since Anna was just
two years old at this point, she did not
remember John Dickinson well. The fact that he
died fighting slavery, however, probably
inspired her to work for the same cause from an
early age.
But the success of her career owed
mostly to her association with noted editor
William Lloyd Garrison, a radical reformer who
favored immediate abolition of slavery. At age
thirteen, Dickinson contributed an essay to
Garrison's newspaper, The Liberator, and in
October 1861, she shared the platform with him
at a meeting of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery
Society. He was so impressed by her enthusiasm
and intelligence that he offered to help her
find speaking engagements if she were ever to
come to Boston. This offer was to prove a great
boost to Dickinson's oratorical career when,
shortly thereafter, she wrote to Garrison asking
him to secure lecture engagements for her in the
Boston area. At her request, Garrison arranged a
number of lectures throughout Massachusetts. As
Dickinson toured the New England states, she
quickly gained popularity.
Anna Dickinson's rising celebrity status
led her to closer ties with Republican leaders.
By 1863, although Dickinson had become immensely
popular as an abolitionist and an orator, she
was finding it difficult to make her lecturing
into a paying career to support her mother and
sister as well as herself. But her problem was
solved when Benjamin Prescott, chairman of the
New Hampshire State Republican Committee,
invited her to speak in favor of the Republican
gubernatorial candidate in the spring of 1863.
Morale in the North at this time was at a low
ebb, following the humiliating defeat at
Fredericksburg and the stalled siege of
Vicksburg. President Lincoln and his fellow
Republicans were determined to continue the war,
but the national government could not do this
without the help of the states -- and that help
would not be forthcoming without Republicans in
positions of power. New Hampshire Republicans
realized that a Republican victory in the state
election was essential. For this reason,
Dickinson was called upon to give twenty
lectures throughout the state, and was given a
fair share of the credit when the Republicans
pulled through to victory.
After Republican campaign organizers in
other states heard of Dickinson's success in New
Hampshire, they called on her to join their own
campaigns. Accordingly, in March 1863, she began
her campaign tour in Connecticut, hoping to
secure another state victory for the Republican
party. Despite the fact that many had predicted
the defeat of Connecticut's Republican governor
by at least ten thousand votes, he was
re-elected. Dickinson's oratorical skill had
helped the Republicans to avoid a major anti-war
victory, and republicans everywhere assigned to
Anna Dickinson the major responsibility for
influencing the final outcome of the Connecticut
election and the distribution of political power
in the Union. For a young woman of her years,
this was a monumental achievement. By the end of
1863, Dickinson had helped the Republicans
eliminate the problems posed by the Democrats in
the New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania,
and New York elections. She was nationally
acclaimed as the Joan of Arc of the Union cause.
Due to her successes in the 1863
elections, Anna Dickinson was invited to speak
before Congress, perhaps the first woman ever to
do so. President Lincoln and his wife attended
part of her speech, and even though most of what
they heard was critical of Lincoln, they
retained a great respect for Dickinson.
But respect was not enough to keep
Dickinson in the public eye or put food on her
table, and after the Civil War she was forced to
find other means of making money. She was nearly
successful as an actress, but was so hated by
the press for her oratorical success that her
plays were given bad reviews and she was unable
to launch her career. In 1910, still twenty-two
years before her death, someone wrote to a New
York newspaper asking whether the great Anna
Dickinson, women's rights advocate,
abolitionist, and orator, was still alive. The
newspaper's editor replied that she had been
dead for ten years. The living Anna Dickinson
filed this clipping away with her other
mementos. She so longed to be back in the
spotlight that even this brief mention was
something to treasure.
Anna Dickinson's impact on abolition,
the women's rights movement, and the North's
success in the Civil War was forgotten long
before her death in 1932. But now is as good a
time as any to remember her contributions as an
orator, a radical Republican reformer, and the
Civil War era's Joan of Arc.
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