Mary Livermore & Jane Hoge

[dawna]

Mary was intelligent, energetic, and serious. Bored with public school, she transferred to a private girls' academy, where she graduated with top grades and became a teacher herself at the age of sixteen. When her younger sister died after a long illness, she experienced a religious crisis. Her parents were devout Baptists and adhered to the old Puritan idea of "election," the notion that God decides whether you are destined for heaven or hell before birth. Tormented by concern for her sister's salvation and unable to come to terms with her parents' religious views, Mary left home at eighteen.

Since teaching was one of the few job opportunities available to educated women before the Civil War, Mary accepted an offer to become the instructor for six children of a wealthy slave-owning family in southern Virginia. The three years she spent there would dramatically alter her life. As a northerner, she had virtually no previous exposure to slavery. Although she admired the intelligence and gentility of her employers and acknowledged that they treated their servants less cruelly than some masters, she was appalled by the oppression inherent in the institution of slavery. She returned to the North at the end of her service "a pronounced abolitionist, accepting from no one any apology for slavery."

While teaching school in Duxbury, Massachusetts, she met Daniel Livermore, a Universalist minister whose religious outlook emphasized the possibility of salvation for all people. It was a philosophy that appealed to her personally and was far more receptive to her social activism than her parents' Calvinism had been. Daniel Livermore had won her mind, and eventually he won her heart. They were married in 1845. For several years, Mary devoted her time to caring for the couple's three children, writing short stories, and playing a traditional role as a New England minister's wife. In 1857 the couple moved to Chicago, where Daniel Livermore accepted a pastorate. Together they edited a reform newspaper called the New Covenant. In addition to espousing their Universalist beliefs, the couple promoted a variety of reform causes including antislavery and temperance, the nineteenth-century movement that favored abstinence from alcohol. Mary found that living in Chicago was a challenge in the 1850s. She would later recall that Michigan Avenue had the only decent pavement and sidewalks in the city, and open sewers left foul odors. Dust and mud were everywhere.

When the Civil War began in 1861, Mary Livermore was forty years old. On a trip to visit her family in Boston, she witnessed at every railway stop scenes of chaos prompted by the North's mobilization for the war. Soldiers appeared to be inadequately clothed; food was sometimes scarce. Later that year, the government gave its blessing to a privately organized agency called the U.S. Sanitary Commission, designed to coordinate relief efforts. Mary accepted a position in the Chicago office, eventually becoming codirector. With her husband's support and encouragement, she hired a housekeeper to care for the family and devoted most of her energies for the next four years to the Chicago branch office, nursing the wounded, traveling widely, and giving her first public speeches.

In every American war, women had acted as nurses, prepared food, knitted socks, and stitched clothing for soldiers. What was notable about Mary Livermore's contribution—and that of several others in this war—was that she was involved in a massive relief effort involving a level of administrative skill, organizational achievement, and assertiveness never before exhibited by American women. Along with her colleague Jane Hoge, Livermore went on a hospital inspection tour that took her to southern Illinois, Kentucky, and Missouri. The scenes of battle wounds, camp illness, and food shortages both sickened and inspired the women. Returning home, they began a relief effort that would eventually lead to the shipment of nearly eighty thousand packages to hospitals and battlefronts containing food and medical supplies worth $1 million.

Mary and Jane received national recognition for their efforts on behalf of Union soldiers, when, in 1863, they organized the Great Northwestern Sanitary Commission Fair. Receiving little encouragement from either the city fathers of Chicago or the Sanitary Commission's national office, they began an impressive campaign to solicit donations of food, farm equipment, needlework, china, crystal, and silver. For two weeks in late October and early November, hundreds of people took trains to Chicago to purchase these goods at the fair, attend evening entertainments, and show their support for the Union cause. President Lincoln donated his own copy of the Emancipation Proclamation, which brought $10,000 at auction. The Fair raised close to $100,000, an enormous sum for that time. It was the most successful such undertaking of the war and inspired women in other cities to organize similar fairs.

By the time the war ended in 1865, Mary Livermore had decided that it was time for a reform movement to help women. In her memoirs, published in the 1890s, she recalled: "[D]uring the war, and as the result of my own observations, I became aware that a large portion of the nation's work was badly done, or not done at all, because woman was not recognized as a factor in the political world." Aware that she and other women had been a "factor" in Union victory, she believed that women's talents should now be used as members of the electorate. Clearly her wartime experiences had given her new self-confidence and determination. Through the pages of the New Covenant, she began to espouse women's suffrage, and in 1869 she organized the Chicago suffrage convention.