Lydia Allen Dorr & the Coming Hour
Gap Analysis: In 1803 at age 21, young Lydia Allen inherited the homestead lot of Rhode Island founder, Roger Williams, but not the agency to act on his pioneering ideas about Soul Liberty. Within a short time Lydia was married to Sullivan Dorr and this RI Dorr family is now best known for the radical actions of the son, Thomas Wilson Dorr, leader of the antebellum suffrage crisis known as the Dorr Rebellion.
I offer a provocative new feminist interpretation of the Dorr Rebellion. My research proposes Thomas Wilson Dorr's paternity should be questioned and Lydia Allen's loss of her homestead inheritance and all other legal rights at marriage (due to coverture) had long tail implications. This is a case study of why researchers with diverse perspectives can review the same evidence, question assumptions to reframe the problem, and in this way bring fresh insights to the conversation.
My thesis is backed by scholarly research and offers a better explanation for over a century of historiography on the Dorr Rebellion that struggles to explain:
What led Thomas Wilson Dorr to take radical action?
How to account for the depth and strength of the women-majority Dorrite supporters? Many of them were unmarried or divorced women - not typical reform-minded women - motivated to take action in an outpouring of finally feeling heard. For example, in coming together for a thousands-strong mass public clambake fundraiser dinners. Like our own recent "Me Too" movement, something touched a raw nerve, more fundamental to women's basic security than suffrage per se.
Was Thomas Wilson Dorr really prepared to be a patricide and kill his own father? Everyone remarks on the boundary-crossing implied by Thomas Wilson Dorr's willingness to fire a cannon on the arsenal that treasonous night of May 17-18, 1842 - which would have meant possibly killing "his father", Sullivan Dorr, who was inside. I consider the evidence of why Thomas' father might instead be the famous Newport-born artist, Edward Greene Malbone, and the son knew this secret uncertainty and his mother’s sacrifice?
Coverture meant Lydia Allen's 1803 inheritance was legally lost to her in 1804 when she was married to Sullivan Dorr. This is the kind of systemic injustice home ownership property seizure without representation that I argue is behind why Dorrite women latched on to the captivating idea during the 1841-1842 Dorr Rebellion that the homes of powerful people might soon be their own. In 1844, Rhode Island law did begin to modestly reform married women's property rights. As late as 1859, Lydia Allen Dorr's Last Will & Testament to her daughters included specific provisions to circumvent the laws of coverture, and provide money to Lydia's daughters "free from the power and control of their husbands".
For over a century, art historical records have alluded provocatively to the romantic involvement of the single young adult heiress Lydia Allen and the famous Newport-born artist, Edward Greene Malbone after July 1803, when he painted Lydia three times and Lydia's newly-widowed mother over a series of ever-more distracted months. One outcome is an oft-remarked-upon rare, unfinished Malbone oil painting that I place in the new context of the small suite of Malbone oils done to celebrate intimate family marriages.
Was Edward Green Malbone an unacceptable suitor because he and his sisters were raised by an unmarried mother, Patience Greene? Did freedom from coverture play into her choice? What new evidence can we nail down about this woman who appears to have unconventionally remained an unmarried mother (spinster) land-owner in Newport, never baptized her children, allowed Edward to attend theater (controversially), and may well be the Patience Greene of Newport who was prompt to sign the very first American census as Head of Household - despite being an unmarried mother? The complicated Greene and Malbone families larger-than-life legacies add new avenues for research insights as we consider freedom, liberty and governance during times of change.
It is a mistake to say the Sullivan Dorr house was built by the famous John Holden Greene. In 1794 the young builder apprenticed with Ormsbee, architect of the Nightingale House (now the Brown Public Humanities Center). The so-called Sullivan Dorr House was J. H. Greene’s first commission, a whole fifteen years later, in 1809. Both architect John Holden Greene and artist Edward Greene Malbone were born in 1777 and came to Providence in 1794. I suspect the two Greene’s share a kinship tie- but proving this has been tricky. Lydia Allen Dorr and her never-married sister Candace Allen continued to keep the architect John Holden Greene in their lives for decades after the artist Edward Greene Malbone died in 1807. Lydia’s younger brother Zachariah (whom she helped raise) later married the daughter of a likely-related (but different) Patience Greene (Mrs. Welcome Arnold). Sullivan Dorr may have moved from outside Providence when he married Lydia Allen in 1804, but did he ever really move in?
Unspeakable anxiety about Thomas Wilson Dorr's paternity and the ability to control women’s bodies adds new undercurrents to the womens’ fan painting job assigned to Dorr as prison labor during his solitary confinement for treason. Dorr’s painted womens’ fans were saved. (See Gallery)
Woven together, my research and reframing of existing evidence suggests a new context for the Dorr Rebellion. Even if you were a Soul Liberty Rhode Island White woman of such privilege that you inherited Roger Williams’ homestead lot, your valiant efforts to create a life of liberty did not seem relevant to over a century of historians looking at your son’s bio in micro-detail. It's time to change that. Diverse voices looking at the archives matters.
This is a case study of why researchers with diverse perspectives can review the same evidence, question assumptions to reframe the problem, and in this way bring fresh insights to the conversation.
Nancy Austin, PhD ©2022
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