Harriet Martineau
multitude, was half-murdered in the street. Harriet had given a
promise, long previously, to attend an abolitionists' meeting; and
though these occurrences showed her that there was actual personal
danger in keeping her word, she was not to be intimidated. She went to
the very next meeting of the ladies' society, which was held a month
after the one so violently disturbed, and there, being unexpectedly
begged to "give them the comfort" of a few words from her, she rose,
and as the official report says, "with great dignity and simplicity of
manner," declared her full sympathy with the principles of the
association.
She knew well how grave would be the social consequences to her of
thus throwing in her lot with the despised and insulted abolitionists;
but she felt that "she never could be happy again" if she shrunk from
the duty of expression thrust upon her. The results to her were as
serious as she had apprehended. She received innumerable personal
insults and slights, public and private, where before all had been
homage; the Southern newspapers threatened her personal safety,
calling her a foreign "incendiary;" and, to crown all, she had to give
up an intended Ohio tour, on the information of an eminent Cincinnati
merchant that he had heard with his own ears the details of a plot to
hang her on the wharf at Louisville, before the respectable
inhabitants could intervene, in order to "warn all other meddlesome
foreigners."
All this abuse and insult and threatening from the lower kind of
persons, interested for their purses, had, of course, no influence
upon the hundred private friendships that she had formed. Ardent and
deep was the affection with which many Americans came to regard her,
and with some of them her intimate friendship lasted through all the
succeeding forty years of her life. Emerson was one of these friends,
and Garrison another. It was her frequent correspondence with these
and many others that kept her interest in the affairs of the United
States so active, and made her so well-informed about them as to give
her the great authority that she had, both in England and America,
during the life and death struggle of the Union, so that at that time,
when she was writing leaders for the London _Daily News_, Mr. W.
E. Forster said that "it was Harriet Martineau alone who was keeping
English public opinion about America on the right side through the
press."
Loath to leave such friendships behind, and yet longing for home, she
sailed from New York at the end of July, 1836, and reached Liverpool
on the 26th August. A parting act of American chivalry was that her
ship-passage was paid for her by some unknown friend.
It was while she was in the United States that the first portrait of
her which I have seen was painted. She herself did not like it,
calling the attitude melodramatic; but her sister Rachel, I am told,
always declared that it was the only true portrait of Harriet that was
ever taken. At this point, then, some idea of her person may be given.
She was somewhat above the middle height, and at this time had a
slender figure. The face in the portrait is oval; the forehead rather
broad, as well as high, but not either to a remarkable degree. The
most noticeable peculiarity of the face is found in a slight
projection of the under lip. The nose is straight, not at all turned
up at the end, but yet with a definite tip to it. The eyes are a clear
gray, with a calm, steadfast, yet sweet gaze; indeed there is an
almost appealing look in them. The hair is of so dark a brown as to
appear nearly black. A tress of it (cut off twenty years later than
this American visit, when it had turned snow-white) has been given
to me; and I find the treasured relic to be of exceptionally fine
texture--a sure sign of a delicate and sensitive nervous organization.
Her hands and feet were small.
She was certainly not beautiful; besides the slight projection of the
lower lip the face has the defect of the cheeks sloping in too much
towards the chin. But she was not strikingly plain either. The
countenance in this picture has a look both of appealing sweetness
and of strength in reserve; and one feels that with such beauty of
expression it could not fail to be attractive to those who looked upon
it with sympathy.
The competition amongst the publishers for Miss Martineau's book on
America was an amusing contrast to the scorn with which her proposals
for her _Political Economy_ had been received. Murray sent a message
through a friend, offering to undertake the American work; and letters
from two other publishers were awaiting her arrival in England. On the
day that the newspapers announced that she had reached town no fewer
than three of the chief London publishers called upon her with
proposals. She declined those of Bentley and Colburn, and accepted the
offer of Messrs. Saunders and Otley to pay her L300 per volume for the
first edition of three thousand copies. The book appeared in three
volumes, so that she received L900 for it. She completed the three
goodly volumes in six months.
She had wished to call the book _Theory and Practice of Society in
America_, a title which would have exactly expressed the position that
she took up in it, viz., that the Americans should be judged by the
degree in which they approached, in their daily lives, to the standard
of the principles laid down in their Constitution. Her publishers so
strongly objected to this title, that she consented to call the work
simply _Society in America_. She held to her scheme none the less, and
the book proceeds upon it. She quotes the Declaration of Independence
that all men are created equal, with an inalienable right to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that Governments derive
their just powers from the consent of the governed. "Every true
citizen," she claims, "must necessarily be content to have his
self-government tried by the test of the principles to which, by his
citizenship, he has become a subscriber." She brings social life in
the United States of 1834-6 to this test accordingly.
That method of approaching her subject had some advantages. It enabled
her to treat with peculiar force the topics of slavery, of the
exclusion of women from political affairs, and of the subservience to
the despotism of public opinion which she found to exist at that time
in America.
But she herself came to see, in after times, that her _plan_ (leaving
the details aside) was radically faulty. She was, as she says, "at the
most metaphysical period" of her mental history. Thus, she failed at
the moment to perceive that she commenced her subject _at the wrong
end_ in taking a theory and judging the facts of American society by
their agreement or disagreement with that _a priori_ philosophy. It
was the theory that had to be judged by the way in which the people
lived under a government framed upon it, and not the people by the
degree in which they live up to the theory. The English public wanted
a book that would help them to know the American public and its ways;
the Americans required to see through the eyes of an observant,
cultivated foreigner, what they were being and doing. It is this which
a traveller has to do--to observe _facts_: to draw lessons from them,
if he will, but not to consider the facts in their relationship to a
pre-conceived theory. Human experience is perennially important and
eternally interesting; and this is what a traveller has to note and
record. Political philosophies must be gathered from experience
instead of (what she attempted) the real life being viewed only as
related to the philosophy. In fine, her error was in treating
abstractedly what was necessarily a concrete theme.
With this objection to the scheme of the book, all criticism may end.
All criticism did not end (any more than it began) in this way in
1837. Speaking out so boldly as she did on a variety of the most
important social topics, she naturally aroused opposition, which the
power and eloquence of the style did not mitigate.
The anti-slavery tone of the book alone would have ensured violent
attacks upon it and its author, as, after her ostracism because of her
anti-slavery declaration, she well knew would be the case. "This
subject haunts us on every page," distressfully wrote Margaret Fuller;
and greatly exaggerated though this statement was, it certainly is
true that there is hardly a chapter in which the reader is allowed to
forget that the curse of humanity made merchandise, shadowed life,
directly or indirectly, throughout the whole United States. Neither by
the holders of slaves in the South, nor by their accessories in the
North, was it possible that she could be regarded otherwise than as an
enemy, the more powerful, and therefore the more to be hated and
abused, because of her standing and her ability. In estimating the
courage and disinterestedness which she displayed in so decisively
bearing her witness against the state of American society under the
slave system, it must be remembered not only that she had many valued
personal friends in the South, and amongst the anti-abolitionists of
the North, but also that she knew that she was closing against herself
a wide avenue for the dissemination of her opinions upon any subject
whatsoever. No book written by an abolitionist would be admitted into
any one of thousands of American homes. The abolitionists reprinted
portions of _Society of America_, as a pamphlet, and distributed
it broadcast. The result was that, up to the time when slavery was
abolished Harriet Martineau was continually held up to scorn and
reprobation in Southern newspapers, "in the good company of Mrs.
Chapman and Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe."
Even greater courage was displayed by Harriet Martineau in her
boldness of utterance upon some other points, about which freedom of
thought was as obnoxious in England as in America. When she maintained
that divorce should be permissible by mutual consent, provided only
that the interests of children and the distribution of property were
equitably arranged for; when she pleaded for the emancipation of
women; or when she devoted a chapter to showing the evils which spring
from the accumulation of enormous fortunes, and incidentally attacked
the laws and customs of primogeniture, of the transfer of land, and
the like, which are devised specially to facilitate and encourage such
accumulations: in these and other passages of an equally radical
nature, she braved a large body of opinion in English society, as
well as in the other country for which she wrote. She mentions
subsequently, that for many years she was occasionally startled by
finding herself regarded in various quarters as a free-thinker upon
dangerous subjects, and as something of a demagogue. I have little
doubt that the "advanced" political philosophy of _Society in America_
did originate such suspicions in minds of the Conservative order, "the
timid party," as she described them in this same book. Yet she adds:
I have never regretted its boldness of speech. I felt a relief in
having opened my mind which I would at no time have exchanged for
any gain of reputation or fortune. The time had come when, having
experienced what might be called the extremes of obscurity and
difficulty first, and influence and success afterwards, I could
pronounce that there was nothing for which it was worth
sacrificing freedom of thought and speech.
There was but little in _Society in America_ of the ordinary book of
travels. As an account of the political condition and the social
arrangements of the American people it was of singular value. But
the personal incidents of travel, the descriptions of scenery, the
reminiscences of eminent persons, of all which Harriet Martineau