A Newberry Library and Chicago Historical Society Exhibit: October 1, 2004, to January 15, 2005



  
Primary Sources: Claiming Human Rights
North of Slavery | Sex and Citizenship | Industrial Democracy

North of Slavery
Slave Manacles, c. 1850
Chicago Historical Society: Decorative and Industrial Arts Collection

Notice to Owners of Slaves, 1861
Chicago Historical Society: Prints and Photographs Collection

The Notice to Owners of Slaves, offering 200,000 acres of land in exchange for 150 slaves, illustrates the South�s ongoing need for slaves, even during the Civil War. Slave overseers used manacles like these around slaves� wrists when transporting or punishing them. They could be removed only with a special wrench. To abolitionists, manacles and slave auctions symbolized the evil they hoped to eradicate.

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Speech of John Hossack, Convicted of Violation of the Fugitive Slave Law: Before Judge Drummond, of the U.S. District Court of Chicago
[Chicago]: Printed by James Barnet, [1860]
Newberry Library: Oversize, Ruggles 422

The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 required the federal government to assist with retrieving runaway slaves even in free states like Illinois. In an act of civil disobedience, businessman John Hossack and seven others helped a runaway slave named Jim Grey escape from federal custody just as he was about to be sent back South. Convicted in a Chicago court, Hossack paid a $100 fine and spent ten days in jail, although he was released each day to dine with Chicago officials and prominent citizens. In his strongly worded defense, Hossack argued, �the parties who prostituted the constitution to the support of slavery, are traitors.�

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Speech of John Hossack, [1860]

John Jones Certificate of Freedom,
November 28, 1844

Mary Jones Certificate of Freedom,
November 28, 1844
Chicago Historical Society: Archives and Manuscripts Collection

In 1844, John Jones and Mary Jones obtained these certificates of freedom in Madison County near their home in Alton, Illinois. Although both were free people, they risked being sold into slavery if they did not carry proof of their status. After moving to Chicago, where John Jones made a living as a tailor, the Joneses became leaders of the local abolitionist movement. The Joneses lived at 116 Edinah Street, now Plymouth Court, where their house served as a local �station� on the Underground Railroad. The militant abolitionist John Brown stayed at the Joneses� house in 1859 when he passed through Chicago on his way to his infamous raid at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. After the Civil War, the Joneses worked to overturn racial segregation in Chicago and Illinois.

John Jones Certificate of Freedom, 1844

Mary Jones Certificate of Freedom, 1844

John Jones, 1865           Mary Jones, 1865
Aaron E. Darling
John Jones and Mary Richardson Jones
Oil on canvas, c. 1865
Chicago Historical Society:
Painting and Sculpture Collection

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Fork Given to Mary Jones by Frederick Douglass, c.1844

Frederick Douglass Commemorative Spoon Belonging to Mary Jones, c. 1895
Chicago Historical Society: Decorative and Industrial Arts Collection

Chicagoans John Jones and Mary Jones�African American abolitionists�worked closely with well-known abolitionist Frederick Douglass for the destruction of slavery. Born into slavery in 1817, Douglass escaped to the North and wrote a memoir that is still widely read today. Douglass gave this fork, engraved �Frederick to Mary,� to Mary to mark her marriage to John Jones. This spoon commemorates the death of abolitionist Frederick Douglass in 1895. Douglass died at a time of increasing restrictions on the rights of African Americans to vote, use public accommodations, and attend public schools. These utensils were one way that this community preserved its history and the memory of a beloved leader.

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Wilbur Fisk Storey
The Suppression of the Chicago Times
[Chicago, 1863]
Newberry Library: Case a 6.162

Chicago publisher Wilbur Fisk Storey considered it a newspaper�s job �to print the news, and raise hell.� As a loyal Democrat, a racist, and fierce opponent of abolitionism, Storey published harsh critiques of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party during the Civil War. On the morning of June 3, 1863, General Ambrose E. Burnside ordered federal troops to seize the newspaper�s offices. Local officials, including Republican Senator Lyman Trumbull, condemned the act and successfully petitioned Lincoln to rescind the order the next day. In this pamphlet, Storey describes how the federal government tried to censor him.

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The Suppression of the Chicago Times

Sex and Citizenship
Elizabeth Packard
Great Disclosure of Spiritual Wickedness!! In High Places with an Appeal to the Government to Protect the Inalienable Rights of Married Women
Boston: Printed by The Authoress, 1865
Newberry Library: E 5 .P1229

As a result of disagreements over religion and money, Theophilus Packard committed his wife of twenty-one years, Elizabeth Ware Packard, to the Illinois insane asylum in 1860. Three years later, Elizabeth�s son secured her release. Immediately upon her return to their Kankakee home, Theophilus locked her inside and prepared to move her out of the state. Through the help of friends, Elizabeth proved her sanity in court. Abandoned by her husband, Elizabeth moved to Chicago and sold door to door this book recounting her experience. She convinced Illinois to change its commitment process and spent the rest of her life advocating for greater protections for wives from tyrannical husbands.

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Great Disclosure of Spiritual Wickedness!!

Elizabeth Packard


Myra Bradwell
�Rights of Married Women,� in Chicago Legal News
Chicago: The Chicago Legal News Co., 1869
Newberry Library: Case A 6 .I635

Myra Colby Bradwell began publishing the Chicago Legal News in 1868, to agitate for a wide range of women�s rights. In this editorial, Bradwell argued for the broadest possible interpretation of an 1869 Illinois law granting married women the right to control their own incomes.

As a married woman, Bradwell confronted several legal problems. She had to obtain a special state charter in order to control the publication of her own newspaper. Also, she was qualified to become an attorney, but she was denied admission to the bar because she was married. She appealed this decision to the United States Supreme Court, but lost. Twenty years later, Illinois changed its law and, acting on her original petition of 1869, admitted Bradwell to the bar.

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Rights of Married Women, 1869

Myra Colby Bradwell, 1870

Myra Bradwell, editor Chicago Legal News, c.1870
Chicago Historical Society: Prints and Photographs Collection


Margaret Dreier Robins in front of the Coliseum, June 1912
Chicago Historical Society: Prints and Photographs Collection

Margery Currey, 1910s
Newberry Library: Eunice Tietjens Papers

Letter from Margery Currey to Eunice Tietjens, August 8, 1912
Newberry Library: Eunice Tietjens Papers

Eunice Tietjens, 1910s
Newberry Library: Eunice Tietjens Papers

Chicago women were voting years before the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution eliminated barriers to voting on the basis of sex. In 1891, the Illinois state legislature granted women the right to vote in school elections, and in 1913 it extended this right to presidential and local elections.

Margaret Drier Robins led a delegation of marching suffragists from the Women�s Trade Union League to the Republican Party convention in June 1912. When Teddy Roosevelt lost the nomination he formed the Progressive Party that returned to Chicago two months later to nominate him for President. This letter from Margery Currey to Eunice Tietjens, two members of Chicago�s literary scene, recounts Currey�s participation in a suffrage parade during the Progressive Party convention. back to top

Margaret Dreier Robins

Margery Currey

Letter from Margery Currey to Eunice Tietjens

Eunice Tietjens


Letter from Theodore Roosevelt to Edith Franklin Wyatt
December 15, 1912
Newberry Library: Edith Wyatt Papers

Despite mixed feelings, Theodore Roosevelt officially supported women�s suffrage in his 1912 presidential campaign. His discomfort with the subject is evident in a letter he wrote in reply to Chicago literary critic Edith Franklin Wyatt. Roosevelt suggests that women�s suffrage might help in the fight against prostitution. He also expresses doubts about the positive effects of women�s votes, however, noting that there has been little change in states that have granted them suffrage.

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Letter from Theodore Roosevelt
page 1

Letter from Theodore Roosevelt

page 2

Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage To Women
�Woman�s Protest Against Woman Suffrage,� in
To the Voters of the Middle West
Chicago, 1909
Newberry Library: J 325. 64

Chicago novelist Caroline F. Corbin considered socialism and women�s suffrage closely allied evils. Together, she believed, the two would undermine the traditional family and ultimately harm women. In 1897, Corbin formed the Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women (IAOESW). In this tract, IAOESW argues that imposing the obligations of suffrage upon women will undermine their ability to fulfill their civic responsibilities as mothers and wives. Instead, it argues that women are fully represented by the votes of their husbands, brothers, and sons.

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Illinois Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women

John T. McCutcheon
�There Ought to be Schools for the Instruction of Women Voters�
June 16, 1913
Newberry Library: John T. McCutcheon Papers

This cartoon appeared in the Chicago Tribune five days after the Illinois House of Representatives approved women�s suffrage in Illinois.

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There Ought to be Schools for the Instruction of Women Voters

Industrial Democracy
Edward Winslow Martin
�Chicago in the National Railroad Strike of 1877,� in
The History of the Great Riots
Philadelphia: National Publishing Company, 1877
Newberry Library: H 55.528

In July 1877, railroad workers across the country went on strike to protest wage cuts. When the strike reached Chicago, workers in other industries quit work in solidarity with the railroaders. In one of the more controversial events of the strike, Chicago police raided the West Side Turner Hall where Czech woodworkers had gathered to discuss the strike. Shortly after this raid, police, militia, and federal troops attacked a crowd of workers nearby in what became known as the �Battle of the Viaduct.� Like many accounts of the strike, this image portrays workingmen shooting pistols at the police. However, the text of Edward Martin�s book notes 14 �rioters� killed with no police fatalities.

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Michael P. Conzen and Christopher Thale
�Beyond Haymarket Square: Agitation for the Eight-Hour Workday, April 25 - May 4, 1886,� in James R. Grossman, Ann Durkin Keating, and Janice L. Reiff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Chicago

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004

Strikes, parades, and meetings spread across Chicago and its suburbs in April 1886 as trade unions prepared to enforce their demand for an eight-hour workday beginning May 1, 1886. This map illustrates the wider context of the events at Haymarket Square.

On the night of May 4, radical union leaders called a rally in Haymarket Square on Chicago�s west side, and as the police marched in to disperse the crowd an unknown person threw a bomb into the midst of the police lines. Seven policemen were killed in the explosion and by their own gunfire in the confusion that followed. Eight anarchist leaders were arrested and tried for the killings, and in 1887 four were executed.

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Attention Workingmen! Great Mass-Meeting To-night, at 7:30 o'clock, at the Haymarket, Randolph St., Bet. Desplaines and Halsted.
[Chicago: s.n., 1886]
Newberry Library: Oversize, Ruggles 12

Calling on Chicago�s workers to attend a rally in Haymarket Square the night of May 4, 1886, this bilingual broadside and three others like it figured prominently in the trial of eight anarchists accused of conspiring to kill police officers. The eight were sentenced to death after a trial marked by an openly biased judge. Four were executed and one committed suicide in 1887.

In 1893, Illinois Governor John Peter Altgeld pardoned the remaining three Haymarket defendants, citing trial irregularities. Beyond the courtroom proceedings, Altgeld believed in individual rights and a tolerance for radical ideas. Praised and criticized for his action, Altgeld lost his bid for re-election in 1896.

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Attention Workingmen!

Globe Bomb, c. 1886
Chicago Historical Society: Decorative and Industrial Arts Collection

At the trial of the Haymarket defendants, prosecution witnesses testified that Louis Lingg, a German-born anarchist, made bombs like this one at his Sedgwick Street boarding house. The two halves of the bomb would be filled with dynamite powder, a blasting cap, and a fuse, and then bolted together. Lingg committed suicide in his cell before he could be executed.

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Louis Lingg
Louis Lingg, anarchist and Haymarket affair defendant, 1886
Chicago Historical Society: Prints and Photographs Collection

Albert Parsons
Anarchismus

Chicago: Mrs. A.R. Parsons, 1887
Newberry Library: J 27 335.6 O 703

Lucy Parsons, n.d.
Newberry Library: Charles Kerr Company Records

Following their execution, Albert Parsons and the other �Haymarket Martyrs� continued to play a role in Chicago politics. Parsons and his co-defendants had published autobiographies and statements of their politics while in prison. Appearing in 1887, Anarchismus is the German translation of Parsons' work, published by his wife Lucy. Only 300 copies of the English version of the book were circulated, the rest being confiscated by police. The German-language version, however, seems to have circulated freely among Chicago�s large German speaking population. Radicals and supporters of unionization held annual memorials of the hangings well into the 1940s, and Lucy Parsons was a prominent figure in Chicago�s anarchist and radical labor circles until her death in 1942.

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Anarchismus

Lucy Parsons, n.d.


Police Club Used at Haymarket, 1886

Gallows Lapel Pin, 1887
Chicago Historical Society: Decorative and Industrial Arts Collection

Chicago policeman Captain William Ward held this club standing in Haymarket Square on May 4, 1886. He asked the crowd to disperse shortly before the now famous bomb explosion. In an act of remembrance, Ward inscribed on the club: ��Billy� from Haymarket Riot, May 4, 1886.�

This brass scaffold-shaped lapel pin is stamped �Nov. 11 / 1887,� the day the Cook County Sheriff executed four of the men convicted of the Haymarket murders. Some Chicagoans wore these pins as a commemoration of the Haymarket martyrs.

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Shift Change at the Pullman Car Works, in
The Story of Pullman, c. 1893.

Newberry Library: Pullman Company Archives

George Pullman believed his sleeping cars and his model town embodied the best of America. The sleeping cars were elegant and inspired good behavior among train passengers. The town of Pullman on Chicago�s South Side provided modern housing for workers and returned a profit to its investors. Instead of fulfilling the �hope of bettering the relations of capital and labor,� as a promotional pamphlet boasted, the name Pullman became associated with the nation�s most bitter conflict between workers and employers. At the heart of the dispute were questions about the power of corporations and associations of working people.

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Shift Change at the Pullman Car Works

�King Debs,� in Harper�s Weekly
New York, July 14, 1894
Newberry Library: +A 5 .392

In the midst of a deep economic depression that had plagued the nation since 1893, workers at the Pullman Company joined the newly formed and militant American Railway Union (ARU). In May of 1894, they went on strike to protest wages and rents in the company-owned housing. Against the advice of ARU leader Eugene V. Debs, the union called for a nationwide boycott on handling and repairing Pullman sleeping cars. The cover of popular magazine Harper�s Weekly voiced the perspective of railroad executives and the U.S. Attorney General who argued that a national railroad strike was tantamount to insurrection because it completely disrupted trade and government business.

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King Debs

�Scene of Destruction and Pillage in the Panhandle Yards� and �The Riot at Forty-Ninth Street,� in the Chicago Herald
Chicago, July 8, 1894
Newberry Library: Pullman Company Archives

Chicago was relatively peaceful during the early weeks of the American Railway Union�s boycott of Pullman sleeping cars. Major violence erupted only after a federal court ordered the arrest of Eugene Debs and other union leaders on charges that they had violated the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Ironically, the law was intended to limit the power of large corporations. When federal troops arrived in early July to enforce the court�s order, several working-class neighborhoods erupted in violence. Soon after, the boycott was crushed. These clippings from the Chicago Herald recount the turmoil as workers�especially women�took to the streets to prevent trains from leaving the stockyards.

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Forty-Ninth Street, 1894

Panhandle Yards, 1894



 
This exhibit has been organized by the Newberry Library's Dr. William M. Scholl Center for Family and Community History and the Chicago Historical Society. It has been made possible with major funding provided in part by The Institute of Museum and Library Services, a federal agency that fosters innovation, leadership and a lifetime of learning. Generous support also provided by The Chicago Reader and Dr. and Mrs. Tapas K. Das Gupta.
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