Petticoat Press #9: Gail's Era for Mary Abigail Dodge

Petticoat Press #9: Gail's Era for Mary Abigail Dodge by Jeanne Arnieri

Mary Abigail Dodge (1833-1896)

Mary Abigail Dodge was another rather famous woman writer during the Civil War era. Using the pen name Gail Hamilton, her features, opinions and reporting were published in the National Era before the War and the New York Tribune and Atlantic Monthly during and after.

Shy and wary of personal publicity she hid behind her nom-de-plume. She was born in Hamilton, Massachusetts, the source of her professional name. When young she taught at Catherine Beecher's Hartford Female Seminary. Her penname Gail, shortened from her middle name, was vaguely male/vaguely female. The teacher began sending her poetry and essays to editors who found her witty and insightful.

Gail's Era by BeckyCollis

Gamaliel Bailey (1807- 1859 )

One of those editors Gamaliel Bailey invited her at 25 to be governess for his six children in Washington City. Bailey, a physician, was a strong abolitionist who'd founded the National Era, a short-lived but influential anti-slavery paper before the Civil War, which he edited with wife Margaret Lucy Shands Bailey 1812-1888, also a professional editor and columnist. The Baileys influenced antislavery opinion in the capitol with weekly salons that gathered like-minded intellectuals to discuss the cause.

Mary Abigail must have attended these gatherings despite her shyness. She was self-conscious about her appearance as she had an injured eye (stabbed with a fork when she was 2!) and was rather reclusive in person if not in print.

Embroidered slippers worked during the war for poet John Greenleaf Whittier

After Gamaliel Bailey died in 1859 Margaret Bailey continued the newspaper for another year or two with Mary Abigail continuing to contribute, although she returned to Massachusetts to care for her mother. 

Gail's Era by Elsie Ridgley

It's difficult to find Gail Hamilton's columns before the 1870s but she also wrote many books on social topics, particularly on marriage, a strange subject for a woman who never married---a choice that did not stop her from having strong opinions.

In 1859 the National Era considered her an asset.

1872

1877

After the war her ideas grew increasingly conservative; she was opposed to women's rights, civil service reform and was an advocate of James Blaine in the 1876- 1884 presidential elections, a distant relative. Finally nominated in 1884 Blaine lost in a vicious campaign climate to Grover Cleveland.

1878, Blaine assuming the persona of Gail Hamilton

Gail's Era by Denniele Bohannon

Gail Hamilton created feuds with her publishers Ticknor and Fields and the Atlantic magazine, believing they had cheated her in royalties. She published her grievances in thinly disguised fiction: A Battle of the Books in 1870.

Gail's Era by Becky Brown

 Publisher Annie Adams Fields was sad to lose her affections:

"Mary Dodge whom we have known so well and sincerely loved has seen fit to withdraw her friendship---and without a word..." Diary entry, February 12, 1868

1878

Late-life portrait from Hamilton's Life & Letters

Mary Abigail finished a biography of James Blaine in the 1890s. She died of a series of strokes in August, 1896 and was eulogized in many newspapers such as the Kansas City Star, with their obituary below.

A remembrance in 1900

The Block

Gail's Era, BlockBase 2320

As the block was published without a name we'll call it Gail's Era.

Liberty's Birds# 6: Carols & Oaths

 

Liberty's Birds# 6: Carols & Oaths by Becky Collis

On May 21, 1856 Missourians who were furious at the Free-State settlers refusal to leave the Kansas Territory raided the town of Lawrence. They burned the newspaper office, the hotel and Sara's newly built house on the hill.

Pro-slavery sympathizers rode into Lawrence under this flag.

Sara traveling in the East, hoping to release Charles from prison, heard about the catastrophe when she was in Chicago.

Carols & Oaths by Denneile Bohannon

It seems that Sara commissioned a photograph of the ruined town

 from which this wood etching was drawn but the daguerreotype is now missing. 

Her burnt-out house was on the crest of the ridge.

Carols & Oaths by Becky Collis

I'd imagine in the months following "The Sack of Lawrence" the purple coneflowers bloomed, ripened and invited the gold finches to snack, nature's consolation.

Pale Purple Coneflowers are a Kansas native.

Botanists have pepped up the color and the showiness.

Goldfinches love the late summer seeds.

The Block

A rose and a cardinal

now a cone flower & a gold finch

Carols & Oaths by Elsie Ridgley

The conclusion of Sara's book was quite effective in inspiring more Kansas immigrants.

Petticoat Press # 8: Star---Sara Jane Clark Lippincott

 

Petticoat Press # 8: Star for Sara Jane Clark Lippincott by Elsie Ridgley

Musée d’Orsay

Sara Jane Clark Lippincott (1823-1904) 

Tintype from Boston firm Southworth & Hawes about 1850

In 1850 Sara Clark was a rising journalism star, a poet and reporter who gained fame in the 1840s when she was in her twenties, using the penname Grace Greenwood. At the end of the decade she was assistant editor at the monthly periodical Godey's Lady's Book published in Philadelphia, concerned with fashion, gossip and light literature.

.

But she also wrote for The National Era, a Washington antislavery weekly---

where Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Log Cabin was first published as a serial.

BOSTON, November 9, 1850 " The universal excitement, on the Fugitive Slave bill, still continues; and this is well. It is a strong outburst of generous and genuine popular feeling, in which every lover of freedom and justice must exult. The great Northern heart is awakened at last."

Godey's editor Sarah Josepha Hale fired her for her antislavery writings. Either Godey's or abolition---she chose antislavery and moved to Washington, writing for the National Era and the Saturday Evening Post.

 Star for Sara Jane Clark Lippincott by Denniele Bohannon

Sara was born in Pompey, New York and attended good schools, among them the Greenwood Institute in New Brighton, Pennsylvania where her physician father had established a practice. In 1853 at 30 years old she married Philadelphian Leander K. Lippincott (1831-1896), also a newspaper writer and they had a daughter Ann Grace, born in Michigan in 1855. Together the Lippincotts published and wrote periodicals for children.

Star by Becky Collis

When the Civil War began Sara spent her time lecturing for Union causes, such as the Sanitary Commission, which raised money for hospitalized soldiers, earning the praise of Abraham Lincoln who called her "Grace Greenwood, the Patriot.".

1864

"A rabid Unionist and a rabider Abolitionist"

After the war she continued to work for newspapers such as New York's Tribune and Times.

Portrait probably after the war. She has a "fringe," the post-war hair fashion.

The Divorce Plot comes up again after the war. Husband Leander was apparently a philanderer and a thief, fired from his position at the patent office for misappropriation and accused of land fraud.

No record of a divorce has been found but both fled to Europe (separately.)

Star by Becky Brown

(She has great skill at combining edgy fabrics and making it work!)

She died in 1904 at her daughter's home in New Rochelle, New York

This New York Times obituary tells us she was FIRST at many things,

all probably unlikely. It is easier to look for firsts than analyze a woman's writing career.

A better memory of her from Frederick Douglass who was

being assailed in New York in 1877. She bravely and ably defended him.

The Block

Novelist Beth Gutcheon, discovering quilt blocks in the mid-1970s, named this one "Star."

 Star for Sara Jane Clark Lippincott by Jeanne Arnieri