Partners in Motion: Gender, Migration, and Reform in Antebellum Ohio and Kansas

In December 1861, six young women armed with hatchets and axes marched into a saloon in Mound City, Kansas, and proceeded to smash all the bottles and kegs they could find. One of the ringleaders was twenty-four-year-old Sarah Grimkc Wattles. While her collaborators, her younger sisters Emma and Mary Ann and the Botkin sisters, kept the bartender busy, Sarah walked out onto the street, where a whisky drummer had stopped his wagon and was standing with a group of onlookers enjoying the show. Sarah calmly strolled around the wagon and opened all the spigots on the barrels, letting the whiskey run onto the street. The drummer accosted Sarah, threatening to strike her down, but Amelia Botkin stepped between them and promised to split his head open with her hatchet it he did not back off. Townspeople intervened and nearly lynched him for even suggesting that he might hit a woman. Sarah, Emma, and Mary Ann, "almost drunk from the whisky fumes," returned home as conquering heroines.1 Everyone agreed that their fledgling frontier town was much better off without the pernicious presence ot the saloon. Even the bartender, "By" Hildreth, years later thanked Emma Wattles for turning him from his wicked ways.'

The Wattles girls moved to Kansas in 1855 with their parents, Augustus and Susan Wattles, who had worked for the abolition of slavery since the mid-1830s. Along with Augustus's brother and his wife, John and Esther Wattles, they migrated from New England to Ohio, lived in many places in Ohio and Indiana, and then moved out to Kansas to work tor the free-state cause after the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Like many abolitionists, both Wattles families embraced other reforms including temperance, diet reform, and women's rights. They passed their progressive views about the need to improve society and to expand opportunities for women on to their children, especially to their daughters. For the Wattles, migration became a necessary means for accomplishing gender reform.

In their mobility, the Wattles family typified Americans of the nineteenth century. In 1850 nearly half of all heads of household resided in a state not adjacent to the state of their birth. During the decades before the Civil War, Ohio, called the "gateway to the West," had one of the most transient populations in the country.3 As New Englanders, the Wattles would have found much company in Ohio, especially in the Western Reserve in the northeast and around Marietta along the Ohio River. In these areas, the compact communities centered on church and school and governed by participatory local government reflecting the culture of New England. So did the acquisitive nature of the people, eager to "get ahead" materially. Elsewhere in Ohio, settlers arrived from Pennsylvania to establish scattered farms across the middle belt of the territory, while Southerners, many originally from Virginia, relocated to southern areas of the state. In these regions with more dispersed settlement, the county government prevailed so that Ohio came to reflect a blend of cultures.4

Whatever the settlement pattern, however, these newcomers to Ohio, and to the neighboring states oi Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois, hoped to improve themselves economically. Almost all of them desired land and links with commercial markets, seeking locations offering the potential for easy transportation and communication connections to outside markets. By migrating west, then, the budding entrepreneurs and farmers extended the commercial economy that was flourishing in Eastern urban centers.

Like all migrants, Yankees moved as family groups in a pattern of chain migration, with earlier settlers encouraging others to join them. As historian Susan Gray has suggested, Yankees in particular tended to form various organizations for the purpose of colonization. These emigration societies purchased land and established tight communities with the familiar institutions of school, church, and township government, arrangements that enabled them to negotiate the "dialectic of market and morality." Individualistic commercial capitalism could be very destructive to the cohesion of communities and families. By maintaining traditional institutions that provided the means for j-oeial control, transplanted Yankees felt they could embrace the new commercialism and still enjoy harmonious communities.5 Yet, while Americans everywhere were moving toward participation in the market economy, we cannot assume that they changed at the same pace or with the same degree of enthusiasm. Middle-class people living in cities engaged in commercial activity sooner and more completely than those living on farms. Farm families maintained aspects of the traditional household economy even while gradually entering the commercial marketplace.6

The Wattles families defied these patterns in some respects but were nonetheless profoundly affected by the transformations going on around them. When they moved to Ohio in the 1830s, they did not settle first in an area dominated by New Englanders, but in Cincinnati, a busy river town that controlled the trade of the Miami River valley and upper Ohio River.7 There the people may not have loved slavery, but they appreciated the river trade and valued harmonious relations with their neighbors on both sides of the river, including those who owned slaves. They wanted nothing to do with radical abolitionism.8 In deciding to live in Cincinnati and in nearby rural communities in southwestern Ohio, as well as similar places in Indiana and Kansas, the Wattles repeatedly chose to live on frontiers-frontiers not only in the sense of new settlements forged from undeveloped wilderness, or in the usual sense of a place where two different ethnic or racial groups met, often in contest for land or cultural hegemony. The Wattles created frontiers in the sense of boundaries that divide ideological communities. The most obvious boundary separated those who accepted slavery as a legal fact and those who opposed it. But the Wattles also challenged blatant materialism and adhered to varying ideals of communitarianism. Over time they came to endorse limited forays into the market economy, but unlike their fellow Yankees, they relied more upon personal morality than institutions to regulate greed. And finally, the Wattles lived on a frontier between differing views about gender. These ideas also evolved, ranging from the simple endorsement of marriage as an equitable partnership, to active participation in the political struggle for women's rights. It was in seeking to implement this set of ideas that the Wattles kept moving. The story ot the Wattles families suggests the possibility of the purposeful use of migration to facilitate social reform, including gender change.