Liberty A Better Husband
Above Left: Edward Greene Malbone Self-Portrait , c.1805 & Above Right: Thomas Wilson Dorr (1805-1854) in 1842
Coverture and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Coverture was the gut punch of systemic injustice behind Abigail Adams' famous 1776 decorous plea to her husband to "Remember the Ladies" and on to Lydia Allen Dorr's 1859 last will and testament - razor sharp in it's language detailing how this American woman, a widow finally, might leave her recovered inheritance to her own daughters "free from the power and control of their husbands", bound as these next-generation married women still were under the continuing oppression of coverture and legal invisibility. Coverture is not considered at all by historians of the Dorr Rebellion because Lydia Allen Dorr has been ignored as a catalyzing agent of change. This resisting woman has been completely overlooked as an independent historical actor, someone deserving more critical inquiry than the simple cliched assumptions implied by historians summarizing her as "tall and stately", a socially-appropriate asset, just an object really, to the men driving the narratives.
Did you know? Abigail Adams' often-quoted, seemingly quaint, "Remember the Ladies" admonition was actually about abolishing coverture - not suffrage. I hadn't known her husband, our second President, laughed in reply.
"In March 1776, Abigail Adams saw an opportunity in the language of natural rights, and wrote to her husband, John Adams: In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies, and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands. Remember all Men would be tyrants if they could.[19] She was not writing generally about women's rights, or specifically about the right to vote. She was asking for relief from coverture. John responded, "I cannot but laugh."[20]" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture)
How much impact did coverture have on a woman's life path?
"Through marriage a woman's existence was incorporated into that of her husband, so that she had very few recognized individual rights of her own. As expressed in Hugo Black's dissent in United States v. Yazell, "This rule [coverture] has worked out in reality to mean that though the husband and wife are one, the one is the husband."[3] A married woman could not own property, sign legal documents or enter into a contract, obtain an education against her husband's wishes, or keep a salary for herself. If a wife was permitted to work, under the laws of coverture, she was required to relinquish her wages to her husband." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coverture)
Maslow's hierarchy of needs is a framework reminding us that fundamental human needs for safety are foundational motivators that come first. Safety needs include a woman's dominion over her own body, freedom from violence and abuse, and opportunities to learn and practice living-wage work to support her children and family securely. Yes, the achievement by American women, finally, of the right to vote in 1920 is a milestone in suffrage history, but this needs to be placed within the battle to rescind coverture laws. Yes, the Dorr Rebellion of 1841-42 is a suffrage crisis that didn't bring the vote to women. But beginning in 1844 Rhode Island men did modestly reform some laws around marriage and divorce, including "An Act concerning the Property of Married Women". (Despite the clause that "Property owned by married women before this act takes effect, not affected by it.)
Historians of the Dorr Rebellion often remark on the almost "Me-Too" movement power of what are known as the Dorrite women. Thousands of women, including many divorced or unmarried mothers, and those never before politically-involved were now unexpectedly moved to stand up and take action. They organized and pulled off mass public clambake fundraisers attended by thousands. It was always about something more galvanizing than the right to vote.
Historians of the Dorr Rebellion still puzzle over why so many Dorrite women latched on to the gossipy messaging that wealthy home properties would soon be seized and redistributed for their benefit! Where could this radical expectation have come from??? [Formisano 1993:92; Chaput 2013: 170-171] Let's pause to look at how the law of coverture accomplished this for a man like Sullivan Dorr who was imported from Boston to marry Lydia Allen, a seemingly priviledged adult young woman who even owned the home lot property of Rhode Island's Soul Liberty founder. That is, until her marriage, when coverture meant she owned nothing. In fact, she didn't even exist legally apart from her husband.
The legal power of coverture to redistribute property to a husband (without representation available to women) is key to my argument. In 1803, single Lydia Allen's future would have seemed filled with possibilities as she turned 21 and settled into a generous inheritance from her father's progressive will. Lydia Allen's lived experience is a case study proving that wealthy White privilege was insufficient to deliver on the hope that she, as a woman, might have a self-determining life. Lydia's resistance to her fate deserves attention; the Dorr Rebellion is a cautionary tale about how intergenerational injustice plays out.
Turning 21
Lydia Allen turned 21 in March 1803 and became a legal adult. Her father, Zachariah Allen Senior, had died in 1801 and left a generous and benevolent Last Will and Testament promoting education and well-being for his widow and their six children. His wife, Ann Crawford Allen, was left comfortably settled in the North Providence farm house property they had happily shared. There is no clause penalizing his widow financially were she to remarry. (Ann was 44; Zachariah had been 62.) All six of the children inherited equally: three girls and three boys. There is even a kind of unusual playfulness in his will, suggesting that his six children divide his estate by drawing straws. Zachariah's will provided for his Executors (who include his wife) to deliver to the children "the possession of the share of my Real Estate which shall be assigned to each Child" when they marry or turn 21.
All six children inherited equally, but the life opportunities they faced were not equal. The three Allen boys married, raised families, worked, and contributed to civic life. Not so for the three Allen sisters. After the questionable success of Lydia's marriage to Sullivan Dorr in October 1804, neither of her younger sisters married.
Lydia's youngest sister Candace Allen (1788-1860) stood up for herself. Candace Allen became one of only two women founding proprietors of the Providence Athenaeum. She supported the cultural life of Providence as an established presence in her own prominent East Side mansion, designed and built from 1818-1820 by the architect John Holden Greene (likely a relative of the artist Edward Greene Malbone). Yes, there was (a cover story?) that Candace's singlehood was due to a fiance tragically killed in War of 1812. Her unmarried public stature as an independent self-sustaining woman thus less of a social challenge. Lydia and Candace's other sister was Ann Allen (1784-1859), only two years younger than Lydia, and she too, never married. (I have done no research on her beyond noting Ann lived with Candace when they were both in their 60s.)
Candace Allen was an artist who painted miniatures. She contributed her paintings as one of many women artists showcased in the Rhode Island Art Association (RIAA) founding exhibitions in the 1850s. Others included Rosa Bonheur and Angelika Kaufmann. It was here at one of these two landmark art exhibitions that Edward Greene Malbone's famous miniature The Hours - one of the most acclaimed paintings in America - was exhibited with pride as newly purchased for the Providence Athenaeum by the "Citizens of Rhode Island", mostly women, after a landmark fundraising campaign led by a young girl.
Coverture shaped the life paths of Lydia Allen Dorr and her sisters Candace and Ann Allen. Separate and unequal from the opportunities that opened doors for their still-celebrated brothers: Philip (1785-1865), Zachariah Jr. (1795-1882) and Crawford Allen (1798-1872).
Liberty a Better Husband
The historical record shows that Lydia Allen was married to Sullivan Dorr on October 14, 1804. She was 22; he was 26. We know he was a young, driven, ambitious outsider from a driven, nouveau-riche Boston family involved early in the China trade. Indeed, Sullivan Dorr had been out of the country living in Canton, China from 1799 through 1803. While building his business network there, Sullivan Dorr had gotten to know key Providence families also active in the early China trade - notably, Brown & Ives and Edward Carrington (1775-1843). My working hypothesis is that Lydia's marriage to Sullivan Dorr was an old-school transactional deal to advance the business goals of the Allen family with that of Brown & Ives and/or Edward Carrington (1775-1843). Who brokered this? I have a short list I will continue to research.
Note that a generation later, Edward Carrington's son was married to Sullivan and Lydia Dorr's youngest daughter, Candace - the daughter to whom Lydia sought in 1859 to deliver an inheritance "free from the power and control" of her husband via a trust that evaded coverture laws. Note that this Candace, the youngest sister of Thomas Wilson Dorr, is married off to this Edward Carrington, Jr. on February 22, 1841 - just as her lawyer brothers Thomas and Henry were debating the abstract idea of how far to push the rule of law when change seems glacial. (Chaput: 52) Did Thomas decide three generations of women in his own family married off without their consent was enough, and he had to act? To do something to catalyze change? Time was ticking. His own sister Candace was the same now-Mrs. Carrington newlywed who used Thomas' library account in 1842 to sign out a sensational new book about a wife who poisons her husband. And this summary doesn't even bring in the archival records' allusions to domestic violence I've only recently come across.
Returning to Lydia Allen's unexpected marriage in 1804 to Sullivan Dorr. Most likely the sudden choice of an out-of-state marriage partner for this (too independent-minded?) heiress required someone not from Rhode Island or otherwise tapped into local gossip. It seems an attempt by key players to thwart any notion Lydia might have of female autonomy. Even if she was an adult heiress and part of a changing generation of American women articulating visions of her own independent life. (The rally around these new opportunities for women is the subject of Chambers-Schiller's classic 1984 study Liberty A Better Husband - Single Women in America: The Generations of 1780-1840.)
It's interesting to note that Sullivan Dorr departed the country altogether for an extended business trip to Europe at some point after his October 1804 wedding. A recent historian (Chaput 14, 238:note 13) cites an August 10, 1805 letter from Sullivan to Lydia (delivered care of her brother Philip Allen) where Dorr reports an "incredible profit of $100,000 after months of extensive trading in Europe. The August letter informs Lydia he expects to be gone for about another two more months. I asked the Rhode Island Historical Society for other letters that might help me find out exactly when Dorr sailed from Rhode Island and might have started writing to Lydia or others, but there is a gap in the Sullivan Dorr records from 1803-1809.
We know Lydia's son, Thomas Wilson Dorr, was born November 5, 1805 and thus conceived around February 1805. If his paternity is in question, where were the two possible fathers? I'm still seeking more documentation to clarify what we can and cannot know about this. So it would be helpful to determine when Sullivan Dorr sailed to Europe. Account Book records reproduced by Tolman (85, 107-108) show the artist Edward Greene Malbone was in Newport or based at his Boston Studio from July 1804 until Jan 1806, at which point Malbone closed his Boston studio and relocated to Charleston, South Carolina. On August 19, 1805 prior to closing his studio in Boston, Malbone deposited $900 in a bank and left his provocative oil painting The Danae, a box and books in storage with someone in Boston. Malbone died tragically young in Savannah in 1807.
Malbone's painting of the Danae is first mentioned in August 1805 as a work put into storage in Boston before he leaves New England. (Tolman: 159) After his premature death in 1807 at age 29, Malbone's estate inventory describes it as an oil painting. It was later shipped to Charleston and offered for sale in 1819 - a beautiful first-rate painting by the celebrated Malbone. Tolman speculates that it may be a copy based on the famous Danae by Correggio that the artist could have seen in the collection of the Duke of Bridgewater while Malbone was visiting London in 1801. Malbone's Danae is unlocated, but the subject matter is worth considering as we weigh the possibilities of Lydia's action in the face of a possibly unwanted marriage. The narrative moment most often chosen by artists depicting Danae shows the nude woman trapped in a bedroom by a threatened husband, and yet still she is impregnated by Zeus's shower of gold that is shown raining down on her.
Thomas Wilson Dorr (1805-1854) was raised with close-at-hand maternal examples of resistance as a goal in itself. I believe his activism had a personal, tragic motivation that historians have never even considered worth investigating. How is that possible?
