The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 31 (2020)
Copyright © 2020 Satomi Minowa. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

“Free Love” in Sectional Debates over Slavery in
Mid-Nineteenth-Century America

Satomi MINOWA*INTRODUCTION
In February 1861, president-elect Abraham Lincoln left his hometown of
Springfield, Illinois, heading for his inauguration in Washington, D.C. The
nation was then in the midst of the greatest political crisis since the foundingof the republic: shortly after Lincoln was elected the first president from theantislavery Republican Party in 1860, Southern states resolved to withdraw
from the federal Union to save their peculiar institution. En route by train forthe capital, Lincoln stopped to address crowds and legislatures in cities
across the North. In a speech he delivered in Indianapolis on February 12,
Lincoln invoked the image of free love to denounce the secession of theslave states. He claimed that these Southern states’ idea of the Union
represented “no regular marriage, but rather a sort of free-love arrangement,
to be maintained on passional attraction” and thus dissoluble at will. In thisanalogy of a familial and marital relation, secessionists, who gave priority tostates’ rights over the unity of the nation, were similar to selfish andimmoral free lovers who would stay in marriage as long as sexual attraction
lasted but were ready to leave it when any undesirable issues arose. Bylinking the sacred bond of the Union with the indissoluble marital bond,Lincoln equated the secession with “free love” in politics.1
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the concept of free love
*Assistant Professor, Tokyo University of Social Welfare

157

158

SATOMI MINOWA

stimulated emotions far out of proportion to the small size of the free love
movement. Born out of radical strands of antebellum reform culture in the
1850s, free love ideology challenged prevailing norms regarding marriage,
gender roles, and sexuality. Free love advocates attacked the institution of
marriage, repudiating the intervention of the government and church inprivate decisions about sexual relationships. They asserted that marriage
destroyed affections and perpetuated women’s subjection by legally
sanctioning men’s unchecked access to women’s bodies. For these radical
men and women, mutual love and consent, not marital law, defined thepurity and legitimacy of sexual unions; genuine love between men andwomen existed only when both parties were completely equal andindependent. Free love ideology was an attempt to reshape not only
marriage and sexuality but also the meaning of freedom. Free love
advocates believed that freedom and bondage stemmed from sexual anddomestic relations and viewed sexual autonomy as the most crucialcomponent of individual freedom. Through their sex-radical ideas, freelovers challenged the dichotomy between the public and private, politicized
the intimate domain, and infused new meanings into freedom andcitizenship.2
Public knowledge about free love increased throughout the 1850s, asreaders of the popular press learned about free lovers who established smallcolonies based on their principles. Among the best-publicized communal
experiments in free love were Modern Times, founded in Long Island, New
York, in 1852, and the Berlin Heights settlement, planned and founded
between 1856 and 1857 in a small village in Ohio. Nineteenth-century freelovers professed an anarchistic faith in individual autonomy and rejected theintervention of others in decisions about private relationships, but that does
not mean that these radicals endorsed sexual libertarianism. They sharedwith their middle-class contemporaries the ideal of sexual restraint; in fact,many free lovers believed that Americans had sex too frequently, without
mutual consent and love, under the legitimating cover of marriage. The
advocates asserted that free love would enhance sexual purity and abatesexual excess by endorsing women’s sexual autonomy and thus
circumscribing men’s unchecked access to their wives’ bodies, available inindissoluble marriages. Their idea of free love was in many cases a plan for
the future based on a philosophical conviction rather than a desire to engage
in unconventional sexual relationships. Many free lovers continued toremain legally married and thus obeyed normative marital and sexual
customs.3

“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

159

Compared to the Mormons, who also defied conventional sexual morality
by practicing polygamy and counted 40,000 followers by 1860 according to
the US Census, the number of self-professed free lovers was quite limited.
For instance, the Social Revolutionist, one of the leading organs of the freelove movement prior to the Civil War, had merely four hundred subscribers.4
Even when free lovers’ concerns for women’s subjugation within marriage
managed to draw a certain degree of sympathy from divorce reformers andSpiritualists, their solution of dismantling legal marriage rarely obtained
approval from contemporary reformers, let alone from the general public.
Despite free love’s apparent lack of popular support, however, midnineteenth-century Americans across the country spoke incessantly about“free love” and its alleged influence on society.
The booming print culture of the mid-nineteenth century was to a large
extent responsible for free love’s disproportionate influence. As historians
like Joanne E. Passet have argued, print culture, particularly readers’networks found in the sex-radical press, was crucial for the development of
the free love movement, which lacked formal organizations, dues, andregular meetings.5 Debates over free love, however, reached beyond thepages of these specialized publications. Heated controversies regarding freelove appeared in mass-distributed publications, promulgating the notion offree love far beyond the circulation of the sex-radical press.
Antebellum America saw an expansion of commercial, popular
publications designed for mass audiences. The development of new printing
technologies and more effective circulation methods by the mid-1830s
meant that daily and weekly newspapers, books, and pamphlets began toflood the market at low prices. Newly created penny newspapers attracted
the masses by reporting stories on crime and politics with a touch ofsensationalism. The expansion of the national postal system allowed thesecheap publications to reach readers throughout the country.6 Free love was afavorite topic in the commercial popular press, which was searching for
novelty, and stories about free lovers helped generate sales that sustained
these publications.
In this article, I explore “free love” as a political metaphor in sectional
debates over racial slavery before and during the Civil War. As public
discussions about free love multiplied in the 1850s, the term became one of
the crucial components of antebellum political discourse. The return ofslavery to the center of US politics in the same decade defined the contoursof these discussions. Under intensifying sectional divisions, a wide range ofAmericans, regardless of partisanship—slavery defenders and abolitionists,

160

SATOMI MINOWA

Democrats and Republicans, Northerners and Southerners—used theanathema of free love to condemn the immorality of their adversaries. The
usefulness of free love as a rhetorical device lay in its extreme vaguenessand plasticity, because the term could be appropriated to attack a variety ofpeople. In some contexts, free love described the particular social theories ofsocialist communitarians, religious heretics, or radical Spiritualists; inothers, the phrase could stand for broad efforts to achieve liberal divorce
laws and women’s rights, extramarital sexual practices like prostitution or
adultery, or disunion for the preservation of slavery. In all these contexts, thephrase represented a serious threat to the institution of lifelong monogamous
marriage, which was understood to be a cornerstone of democracy, liberty,
civilization, and the stability of the nation.
In this article, I bring race into the analysis of these conflicting
representations of free love. Previous studies on the nineteenth-century freelove movement have paid only fragmented attention to the popular
perceptions of free love, and they have rarely dealt with the issue of race.7
Yet, in order to examine the cultural meanings of free love, it is crucial toengage with the concurrent histories of slavery, emancipation, and theimplications of freedom within the broader American culture. I argue that, tothose who used “free love” not as a positive self-identification but as a social
stigma, the term had racial implications. “Free love” became such an
abominable label in nineteenth-century America not just because itsupposedly threatened the integrity of marriage and conventional gendernorms but also because it might jeopardize the racial purity and dominanceof whites. Anti–free love rhetoric was thereby integrated into the antebellum
discourse opposing interracial socializing and sex. With intensifying
sectional conflicts after the 1850s, the meaning of sexual freedom became
inevitably tied to political discussions about slavery and racial equality.
I. WHY “FREE LOVE” MATTERED IN POLITICAL DEBATESABOUT SLAVERY
From the late 1840s onward, political disputes over the institution of
racial slavery divided the nation between the free and slave states. With
massive westward expansion, the question of slavery in newly acquired
territories made sectional hostilities come to the surface. The KansasNebraska Act of 1854 angered Northern public opinion as it repealed theMissouri Compromise of 1820, which forbade the extension of slavery to
the Kansas and Nebraska territories. The enactment of the law accelerated

“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

161

public support for antislavery congressmen in the North and led to theestablishment of a new party based on an anti-Nebraska political coalition,
namely the Republican Party, in the same year. As the sectional contest overslavery intensified in the late 1850s and eventually led to the outbreak of the
Civil War in 1861, the opposing political parties offered distinctive socialand cultural worldviews in their appeal for votes. Gender occupied a primal
place in these political discourses. As historian Michael D. Pierson hasargued, “by politicizing gender, parties hit upon an easily understoodshorthand by which less than fully engaged voters could form a sense ofshared identity with mass politics.”8 Partisan politics over slavery became
inextricably tied to contested ideologies about marriage and gender.
By the late 1850s, “free love” became one of the crucial vocabularies tohighlight the partisan divisions on gender and sexuality. The fact that freelovers sprang from a radical faction of Northern reformers made the epithet“free love” an exceptionally useful tool for proslavery Democrats. In the
North, social changes brought about by industrialization, a market economy,
and evangelical Christianity transformed family formation over the first halfof the nineteenth century. The new middle-class ideal of domesticity, with its
ideas about the moral superiority and maternal duties of women, increased
women’s authority over the household and helped facilitate women’s
activism in the public sphere as well.9 In contrast, the slave South retained
patriarchal practices and an ideology based on male authority and female
subservience. Owing to the existence of slavery, Southern social structure
remained built on strict hierarchies of age, gender, race, and class; whitehusbands and fathers rejected any challenges to their patriarchal privileges.
Specifically, during sectional conflicts over slavery, patriarchy became thecentral component of proslavery politics. By drawing an analogy between
slavery and marriage, proslavery theorists argued that slaves, like women,
were naturally fitted to submit to the control of the male head of thehousehold. They relied on patriarchy as a metaphor to naturalize hierarchy
and thus rationalize the institution of racial slavery. The ideal of patriarchal
mastery served to strengthen political alliances between wealthy plantersand self-employed yeomen in the South, and between Southern andNorthern proslavery Democrats. In proslavery discourse, women’s natureand social role thereby assumed political significance. The defenders ofslavery adhered to male authority over women within the household. They
accused Republicans and Northern reformers of allowing women to control
the family, participate in public life, and even demand equal rights.10 In theeyes of Democrats and their constituents, free love ideology symbolically162

SATOMI MINOWA

demonstrated the absurdity of the reformist North. As will be seen,
proslavery discourse frequently utilized the image of free love in order toprove the faults of abolitionism, the Republican Party, and the Northern
political economy in general.
II.

RACE IN ANTI–FREE LOVE RHETORIC

As the free love movement grew increasingly notorious during the 1850s,
journalists and writers loosely adopted the phrase “free love” to represent
what they perceived as distinctively un-American sexual and maritalcustoms. When anti–free love rhetoric included references to racial others
within and outside the nation, it solidified a national identity based on
individual autonomy and marital fidelity.
Anti–free love rhetoric emerged in tandem with pervasive anti-Mormon
sentiments during the 1850s. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day
Saints, popularly known as the Mormons, was founded by Prophet Joseph
Smith in upstate New York in 1830. In 1843, Smith received a revelationcommanding polygamy, or “celestial marriage,” among the faithful, but theknowledge about the practice remained limited to select members of thechurch for a decade afterward. Meanwhile, hostility and harassment ofneighbors toward this new religious sect culminated in the mob murder ofthe prophet in 1844, which forced the Mormons to migrate westward to
avoid persecution. When Mormons finally settled in the western territory of
Utah in the late 1840s, isolated from the rest of the nation, they embarked on
the task of implementing a separationist theocracy. In 1852, the church’s
new leader, Brigham Young, officially authorized the practice of plural
marriage. Mormon polygamy, an overt defiance of conventional sexual
morality, ignited popular outrage from their contemporaries and became astaple source of dissent against Mormonism.11
Anti-Mormons employed stereotypes of the foreign other to portray
Mormon religiosity as backward, anti-Christian, and un-American. The 1856
platform of the Republican Party promised to eliminate Mormon polygamy
along with slavery in western territories, calling them the “twin relics ofbarbarism.” The phrase identified slavery and polygamy as anachronistic,
savage institutions in which Mormon women as well as slaves were
oppressed and sexually violated.12 In asserting the danger of Mormon
theocracy and sexual morality, anti-Mormon writers particularly relied onorientalist images of Eastern sexual lasciviousness and political despotism,
calling Mormonism the “American Mohammedanism” and drawing a

“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

163

parallel between Mormon polygamy and Turkish harems. The prevalence ofIslamic motifs in anti-Mormon discourse demonstrated what Timothy Marrcalls “domestic orientalism,” which is the process of transposing negative
images of Islam and Muslims onto communities within the United States.
According to Marr, equating domestic groups and actions with thoseascribed to alien infidels “excommunicated them from the province ofAmerican acceptability,” while enabling those employing such rhetoric to“reassure themselves of the righteousness of their own vision of America asa nation with a Christian mission.”13 This logic permitted Mormonism’s
opponents to portray the Mormons, all of whom were white, as guilty not
only of religious and political deviance but also “race treason.”Mormonism’s critics warned that polygamy naturally belonged to the“Asiatic and African” races, below the advanced white race; Mormon
practices would thus produce racial degeneration, physically as well as
morally.14 Until Mormons relinquished polygamy in 1890, orientalist andwhite-supremacist views that identified monogamy with Christianity andwhiteness continued to define the contours of anti-Mormon vocabularies.
Anti-Mormon sentiments significantly influenced popular perceptions offree love, not least because antebellum newspapers often considered
Mormon practice to be a variety of free love. For many of theircontemporaries, free love and Mormon polygamy were essentially the samething, in that they presumably shared a (particularly male) desire to strip off
the restrictions of civilization and indulge in sensual pleasures. James
Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald, for instance, repeatedly suggested
hidden mutual sympathies between Mormons and free lovers. The New York
Herald was then the world’s largest daily newspaper, selling 77,000 copies
in 1860. The paper was known for its sensationalism and strident,
vituperative editorials. Bennett was politically conservative, vocally antiCatholic, antiabolitionist, and anti-Republican.15 The Herald claimed, “At
bottom, there is no radical difference between the free lovers and theMormons. Both deny the efficacy of the divine institution of marriage as anoutlet for the sensual passions. . . . Both believe in the right of the parties toa marriage contract to dissolve it at will.”16 Some newspaper reports on
Mormon communities across the country also had the phrase “free love” intheir headings; the Cincinnati Daily Enquirer’s article titled “ Free-Loveism”
reported on “free-lovers” at a Mormon community in Wallingford,
Connecticut, while the Buffalo Evening Post’s article “Free Love in New
Jersey” told a story about a New Jersey local society of Mormons.17
Free love, therefore, faced similar charges of race treason as did

164

SATOMI MINOWA

Mormonism. The nineteenth-century free love movement consisted of white
men and women, and the general public also acknowledged this as a fact.
The press nevertheless denounced free love by connecting the concept, not
as a reform ideology but as a set of practices, to marital and sexual customs
among non-Christian, nonwhite people. Popular newspapers illustrated
various types of marriage and courting in other parts of the world under theheading “free love.” As in the case of anti-Mormon discourse, anti–free love
journalists and writers most often evoked the popular images of Eastern
polygamy.18
Unlike Mormon polygamy, however, the notion of free love could
describe variant forms of deviant sexuality, as the term encompassed “nonmarriage” in all its forms. Mainstream Americans believed that thosepractices described as free love were at odds with monogamous lifelong
Judeo-Christian marriage. After a small group of young evangelicalministers started the foreign mission movement in 1812, Americans sentProtestant missionaries overseas to proselytize pagans in various parts of the
globe. Religious periodicals and secular newspapers disseminated excerpts
from the foreign missionaries’ journals. Their descriptions of local cultures,
religions, and peoples significantly influenced the way Americans perceived
the world outside the United States.19 In the missionary discourse, maritaland sexual practices were among the most crucial markers dividing
Christians and heathens. Take a newspaper article reporting on the practiceof trial marriage that missionaries observed in the Congo. According to thereport, trial marriage allowed affianced couples to examine theircompatibility for one year before the marriage bond became official andindissoluble. Despite Christian missionaries’ efforts to abolish it, the local
people stuck to their custom. The article called the practice “African free
love,” as cohabitation and premarital sex were immoral and unacceptable tothe sensibility of the middle-class American audience.20 Other nineteenthcentury newspaper reports on “free love” practices likewise focused on theprevalence of informal marriage and concubinage in countries such as Haiti,
India, and Mexico.21 In popular print culture, “free love” thus functioned asa convenient, all-encompassing phrase for any marital or sexual practiceoutside of idealized Christian marriage.
For those who denied marital reform, lifelong monogamy was, even if notwithout minor flaws, the best possible way to regulate sexual relations,developed from ages of Christianity and Western civilization. Free love, incontrast, represented an underdeveloped state of society where men who
lacked self-restraint and moral integrity dominated and sexually exploited“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

165

women. The spread of free love ideology, in turn, would degenerate thewhite population of America. The New York Ledger, the most commerciallysuccessful magazine of midcentury America, wrote that free love leaders
were “persons dissatisfied with the entire present industrial and social
order—persons bent on reconstructing society, by substituting the conceitsof their own lusts and egotisms, in lieu of the prevailing, common-sense
principles developed by ages.” The New York Ledger was a family-friendly
magazine featuring serialized stories, poems, current events and moral
essays, and its weekly circulation reached approximately 400,000. The
Ledger’s columnist argued that the ancient Greeks practiced free love before
the advent of Christ, indulging in sexual mingling according to “passional
attraction” and “unrestrained individual sovereignty.” As for the present
time, the Ledger continued:
In the East, where man is a sickly tyrant and woman a passive slave,
Free-Loveism has done its work, and social, political and industrial
imbecility, are the legitimate fruits. Out in Utah, Free-Loveism is also
doing its perfect, abominable work. Those who are for subjecting the
man to the animal, and for making woman the mistress of thatanimal—picking her up here in sunshine and casting her off there instorm, leaving her brood to scatter as fate wills—will all hasten to theFree-Love feast, and the devilish revel will go on, at first with dainty,
mincing step and seemly behavior, but at length with riotous swiftness,to end in a reckless debauch.22
In exemplifying the harmful power of free love ideology, anti–free lovers
used for analogies pagans and nonwhites, whose “free love” practices
demonstrated the uncivilized, animalistic state of their society. Free love
was antithetical to Christian marriage, which operated from the premise thatit permanently bonded the family with a sense of duty and responsibility as
well as affection. By referencing non-Christians and nonwhite people
outside the United States, anti–free love rhetoric legitimated the moral
supremacy of American, Christian, and white monogamy.
In the popular imagination, the practice of free love was associated not
only with nonwhite pagans in foreign places but also with racial others
within the country. Journalists and writers employed the phrase “free love”
to describe the sexual and family relations of African American slaves. Fromthe colonial period down to the Civil War, enslaved blacks were deprived of
the right to make a marriage contract because of their status as property.

166

SATOMI MINOWA

Slaves often practiced informal marriage within and across plantations, andsome slaveholders even encouraged them to do so. Under severe constraint,
many slaves sustained strong marital and family ties. However, nonlegal
unions between slaves were vulnerable to slaveholders’ arbitrary decisions
to sell or give away either of the parties. As Brenda E. Stevenson hasemphasized, monogamous marriage, patriarchal privilege, and a nuclear
male-headed household made up the foundation of Southern white families
across class, cultural, and ethnic lines. Thus, the very fact that slaves had nolegal right of marriage made the institution much more essential towhiteness in the South. Up until the collapse of slavery, marriage marked
and reinforced the boundary between freedom and slavery, between whiteand black in Southern society.23
In racist discourse in the popular print media, family formations amongslaves were sometimes described as “free love,” which was meant to signify
promiscuity outside monogamy. The New York Herald attributed theunavailability of legal marriage among enslaved African Americans to their
inclination for free love, or, “the indisposition of one man to be satisfied
with one wife.” The Herald wrote, “Sambo was a promiscuous husband on
almost all plantations, and on many a first rate Mormon plantation law wasloose, and there were very few planters who ventured to insist upon any
morality in slave intercourse.”24 While the economic needs of slaveholders
denied marital and parental rights to slaves, whites blamed slaves
themselves for the paucity of stable nuclear families on plantations. Unlike
whites, enslaved African Americans were supposedly licentious by natureand unfit for normative monogamous relationships. The association between
African Americans (particularly in the South) and free love continued wellafter abolition. An 1877 article in Pomeroy’s Democrat, published by exCopperhead editor Mark M. “Brick” Pomeroy, asserted that Southern blacks“adopted the free love system, which is even worse in its effects upon thewhites and blacks than is polygamy, because there is an entailment ofoffspring that become homeless as the dogs of Constantinople.”25
Discussions about free love took place in the larger discursive space whererace and sex constituted one another, shaping the definitions of licit andillicit, normative and non-normative.
III.

FREE LOVE AND MISCEGENATION

When Americans invested the term “free love” with expansive meanings,
they were expressing their concern about the supposed laxity of morals in“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

167

the country. The various types of illicit behaviors that these people labeled
as free love included liaisons across racial boundaries. While US laws andcustoms had always prohibited interracial marriage between whites andblacks, the issue attracted special attention from whites in the 1850s. The
mid-nineteenth-century popular press often conflated free love with socalled amalgamation, implying to their readers that free love contained thenotions of interracial love and race mixture. For instance, a newspaper
article on Brazilian society reported how “miscegenation has full sway” inthe area, writing, “The free population is of every shade and hue, propagatedby untrammelled ‘free love.’”26 In the midst of heated sectional contests
over the destiny of racial slavery, the charge of promoting interracial
marriage or sex was one of the most potent political tools by which thedefenders of slavery attacked the Northern reform culture that had produced
abolitionism as well as free love ideology. The resulting (and often
intentional) misperception that free love actively promoted intimacy acrossthe color line aggravated negative responses to the already infamous cause.
From the colonial period onward, white Americans had outlawed sexual
unions between whites and blacks for fear of jeopardizing the stability ofwhite dominance, but how strictly they enforced bans on interracial sex
depended on social, political, and economic circumstances. Interracial
marriage and sex became central political issues when whites perceived
challenges to existing racial boundaries. Notably, the emergence of radical
abolitionism in the early 1830s caused a storm of anxiety about interracial
sex, called “amalgamation,” in Northern cities. While those who constituted
the earlier generation of antislavery activists were elite white men who
envisioned gradual abolition, the new abolitionist movement was a masscoalition of blacks and whites, men and women, determined to end slavery
immediately and achieve racial equality. Their opponents portrayed suchcooperation as equivalent to amalgamation and vehemently propagandizedthat the abolitionist movement sprang from the desire of abolitionists toencourage race mixture through interracial marriage. The power ofamalgamation discourse to stir white anxiety and hostility was evinced insuch violent mob reactions against abolitionists and African American
residents as the New York City riots in 1834 and the Philadelphia riots in
1838. As Leslie M. Harris argues, “Amalgamation ideology sexualized alltypes of black-white interactions, and became a way to attempt to prevent
black-white cooperation even on the most basic neighborly levels.”27 Overthe next two decades, Southern as well as Northern whites were increasingly
preoccupied with regulating “amalgamation” on the streets of economically168

SATOMI MINOWA

booming cities, where working-class whites and blacks closely mingled atworkplaces and commercialized leisure venues.
Despite antiabolitionists’ claims, only a few abolitionists openly
challenged statutory bans on interracial marriage between whites and blacks.
Starting from the early 1830s, white and black abolitionists, including
William Lloyd Garrison and Lydia Maria Child, went on successive
petitioning campaigns to repeal the 1705 Massachusetts law prohibiting
interracial marriage. Child argued that “the government ought not to beinvested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciencesof citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has tochoose his religion.”28 The participants in the repeal effort rightly
acknowledged that antimiscegenation laws were a cornerstone of white
supremacy and demanded interracial marriage rights as a perquisite forblack equal citizenship. The campaign convinced Massachusetts statelegislators to repeal the law in 1843. Faced with antiamalgamation hysteria,
however, the majority of antebellum abolitionists evaded the issue ofinterracial marriage rights, stressing that they had no intention of
encouraging interracial relationships.29
Rather than the legalization of consensual unions between blacks andwhites, abolitionists’ interests regarding sexuality centered on the critique of
coerced sex between male masters and female slaves in the South. Despite
statutes against interracial marriage and fornication, Southern slaveholders
could sexually exploit female slaves without any social or legal penalties.
The sexual deviance of slaveholders proved to be abolitionists’ mosteffective theme for moral persuasion and mobilization. Abolitionists
maintained that slavery’s greatest injustices were its three-fold violations of
the sanctity of marriage—by denying legal marriage to slaves, by tolerating
slaveholders’ extramarital coerced sex with their female slaves, and by
precluding the efforts of male slaves to protect their partners from sexual
aggression.30 Abolitionists thus countered the accusation of promoting
miscegenation by arguing that it was slave masters of the South who
actually disgraced the institution of marriage and practiced illicit intercourse
across the color line.
The increasing political importance of the antislavery movement and theaccompanying anxiety about interracial relationships during the 1850s gave
a new dimension to the implications of free love. Some anti–free lovers
argued that freedom of affection might erode prohibitions against loveacross the color line and thereby disrupt the existing racial hierarchy. Since
free lovers opposed any form of intervention in private relationships, those“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

169

opposing the movement assumed that free love included the abolition ofantiamalgamation laws and customs.31 The New York Herald sarcasticallywrote of “free love associations,” whose scheme was “to embrace in one
common bond of union and passional affinity the whole human race.” The
Herald continued, “How far the plan was reduced to practical execution, nothaving the reports and statistics of their societies before us, we are unable tostate. Of course, the negro element was permanently recognized in theiroperations, and what figures are wanting to substitute we shall no doubt
gather from the color of the next generation.”32 The article thereby impliedthat the free love movement actively encouraged interracial relationships
and that the advocates were already acting on this principle. The
conservative press, as a way of deflecting popular sympathies from the freelove movement, often implied that free love facilitated race mixture.
Associating interracial marriage or sex with free love became a way to
attack abolitionism. Defenders of Southern slavery spread the false idea that
antislavery reformers actively embraced both amalgamation and free love.
The opponents of antislavery and abolitionism argued that political alliances
between white and black reformers demonstrated their desire for interracial
free love. In its report about a meeting of the city’s colored women’s
association, the New York Herald attacked its reformist rivals, Henry J.
Raymond of the New York Times and Horace Greeley of the New York
Tribune. The Herald depicted how Raymond and Greeley, whose papers
championed the antislavery Republican Party, had behaved toward African
American female members at the meeting: “Conspicuous among the happycompany were the representative philosophers of the Times and Tribune,
whose polite attention to the ladies were generally commended. The
condescension of the ladies in reciprocating their attentions and providingthem with sweet mottoes, was amusing to witness. Whether the free love
principles of these journals includes the colored race in the social circle,
may not hereafter be a doubtful question.”33 The Herald article assumed that
the Times and the Tribune, because of their advocacy of antislavery, also
supported free love; it also implied that these papers meant to apply thedoctrine of free love to interracial intimacy as well. These assumptions were
far from the truth, but the Herald continued making similar allegations
against abolitionists and Republican supporters. By linking antislavery andabolitionism with free love, the antireform popular press demonized bothcauses, indicating to its readers that the ultimate purpose of opposition toslavery was promiscuous mingling across the color line.

170

IV.

SATOMI MINOWAFREE LOVE RHETORIC IN THE 1860 ELECTION AND THE CIVIL WAR

During the 1860 presidential race, the Democratic Party employed thestereotype of a pro–free love Republican Party in their campaign. A satiricallithograph by Louis Maurer depicted the Republican presidential candidate,
Abraham Lincoln, and his boosters as radicals and eccentrics who demanded
all kinds of “rights” (fig. 1). Among them stands a male free lover who
proclaims, “I represent the free love element, and expect to have free license
to carry out its principles.” His untrimmed beard and scholarly air might
have reminded nineteenth-century readers of known free lovers such as
Stephen Pearl Andrews (fig. 2). The male free lover links arms with anelderly female free lover who has an unflattering masculine face and an
exposed shoulder. She looks up to Lincoln and says, “Oh! What a beautiful
man he is, I feel a ‘passional attraction’ every time I see his lovely face.”
The female figure was based on the prevalent caricature of a female freelover who was devoid of feminine virtues and controlled by her libido yet
who was too masculine and ugly to attract men. Free lovers’ gendernonconformity as manifested in their appearance repeatedly turned up in

fig. 1 Louis Maurer, “The Great Republican Party Going to the Right House,” Currier &Ives, New York, ca. 1860. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

171

fig. 2 Stephen Pearl Andrews. Courtesy of Special Collections,Fine Arts Library, Harvard College Library.

anti–free love rhetoric. Taking the other arm of the male free lover is a
Mormon, who asserts that he wants “religion abolished and the book of
Mormon made the standard of morality.” These three figures—the two freelovers and the male Mormon polygamist—as a group represented the
supposed sexual immorality of Republicans. The cartoon also depicted afierce women’s rights activist who wishes to subject men to the authority ofwomen and who is as manly and unattractive as the female free lover. The
free lovers and the women’s rights reformer thus threaten to overturn the172

SATOMI MINOWA

conventional gender order. The remaining Lincoln supporters in the print
include a male black abolitionist and many other shady men who simply
claim their rights to property and free access to food and housing. Lincoln,
who rides on a rail carried by the Republican publicist Horace Greeley, leads
this erratic band of people toward a lunatic asylum. The 1860 Democratic
campaign tried to tarnish the Republican Party by associating its policies
and constituents with sexual licentiousness as well as racial and gendersubversion.
When Lincoln won the 1860 election, the association of Northern culture
with the destruction of religion and family offered Southern secessionists
symbolic justification for their withdrawal from the Union. They wereconvinced that secession was the only means to repel the invaders at thethreshold; as patriarchs and Christians, they vowed to defend their property
and household from the Northern power.34 The ideological link between thedismantling of slavery and marriage among Southerners appeared in
William Mumford Baker’s novel Inside: A Chronicle of Secession. Born inWashington, D.C., Baker was a Presbyterian clergyman who ministered inAustin, Texas, between 1850 and 1865. He experienced the Civil War as aUnionist in the South. In the wake of the war, Baker serialized Inside in
Harper’s Weekly under the pseudonym of George F. Harrington, fashioning
himself as a native Southerner with a Union allegiance. Although the story
was a work of fiction, Baker intended to present Inside as documentation of
wartime Southern society under the Confederacy. In the novel, during a
discussion about the legitimacy of secession, a Southern matron, Mrs.
Juggins, mentions a rumor that in the previous week “marriage has been
altogether abolished” among the Yankees. According to Mrs. Juggins, “Upthere the women all wear pants like men, make speeches, vote, and, I do
suppose, carry their revolvers, curse and swear, drink and gamble, just likemen! When any man and woman happen to meet any where and take a likin’
to each other they just consider themselves married—free love, they callit!”35 In Confederate discourse, this distorted image of “free love” incited
fears that Northern rule would blur the gender boundary, destroy Christianmorality, and result in rampant sexuality.
Southern supporters of the Confederacy attacked the Northern free labor
society with the charge of promoting “free love,” yet the ambiguity andmalleability of the phrase allowed Lincoln and supporters of the Union toappropriate it to attack Southern slave power. Harper’s Weekly, a popular
journal that promulgated Republican propaganda during the war, used therhetoric of free love to attack the Confederate States for withdrawing from“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA173

the Union. Harper’s wrote, “The principles of the Confederacy is . . . thefree-love principle. When a State is tired it goes off. Its whim is theconstitutional justification of its course.”36 The War Democrat Daniel S.
Dickinson compared the secessionists, who seemed to consider that “anation may at pleasure withdraw from its treaty obligations without previous
provision or consent of the other side,” to an unfaithful partner who would
repudiate the marriage covenant just as he or she liked. Dickinson claimed
that “the right thus to secede must rest upon a political free love, where
States unequally united, may on discovering their true affinities, dissolve thefirst condition and become sealed in confederate wedlock to their chosencompanions during pleasure, and the authors of the discovery should go
down to posterity as the Brigham Youngs of modern confederacies.”37 By
using the metaphor of free love, Dickinson intended to address
Confederates’ neglect of the indissolubility of the Union to form otherpolitical alliances. As an example of those who practiced free love, however,
he referred to Brigham Young, the leader of the Mormons, who wassimultaneously married to multiple women. Mormon polygamy did notexactly make sense in Dickinson’s context, which referred to serial
monogamy. The confusion surrounding “free love” in Dickinson’s speechdemonstrates how nineteenth-century Americans like him conflated different
kinds of nonlifelong monogamy under the term “free love.”
Some Union supporters turned to the phrase “free love” specifically toaccuse Confederate slaveholders of practicing miscegenation. At thecelebration of Emancipation Day on August 1, 1862, the abolitionist John S.
Rock described his view of interracial “free love” in the slave South, whereslaves’ domestic work within white households and forced sex between
male slaveholders and female slaves destroyed both white and black
families. Rock spoke to the audience: “The white child cries after the black
wet nurse, and refuses to be comforted by its mother . . . and the mulattochild is dandled on the knee of its white father until he gets ‘hard up,’ thenhe sells it. . . . Emancipation will entirely revolutionize society. This systemof free love must be abolished.”38 To Rock “free love” meant white men’s
exercise of unauthorized power to satisfy their sexual desire regardless ofthe color line. In Republican discourse that equated the federal union withmarriage, the Union, which strove to hold the country together, was the true
defender of the sacred bond of marriage. The Confederacy, on the contrary,
represented free lovers, un-American infidel destroyers of marriage andlicentious practitioners of miscegenation.
Not all Northerners were convinced by Republican ideology. In the North,174

SATOMI MINOWA

growing fears of interracial sex since the antebellum period culminated in
the invention of the term “miscegenation” during the Civil War years.
During the 1864 presidential campaign, the Democratic pamphleteers David
Croly and George Wakeman anonymously published a seventy-two-pagetract entitled Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races,
Applied to the American White Man and Negro. Croly and Wakeman coined
the term “miscegenation” from the Latin miscere (to mix) and genus (race) torefer to interracial marriage, replacing the older term “amalgamation,” a lessspecific word that originally referred to the “union of metals withquicksilver, and was . . . only borrowed for an emergency.” The tract argued
that the “blending of blood” from various races, particularly between whiteand black through intermarriage, was necessary for human progress and that
it was the ultimate purpose of the Republican Party.39 Pretending to be awork by pro-Republican abolitionists, the tract was in fact an elaborate
parody to warn readers of the possible consequences of abolition and todeflect public support away from Abraham Lincoln’s reelection. While theauthors’ hoax was soon debunked, the term “miscegenation” continued toappear in political debates about race and sexuality.40 This new word was notcreated ex nihilo but rather grew out of decades of political discourse that
equated the abolition of slavery with race mixture,41 and in this context freelove functioned as extremely potent rhetoric.
CONCLUSIONAs Americans underwent intensifying sectional conflict and then the
bloody Civil War, the notion of free love appeared in every corner ofpolitical debates. Just as marriage and gender roles became political issues
that highlighted partisan divisions in the decades preceding the war, their
imagined antithesis, free love, provided a vocabulary by which Americans
articulated their worldviews. The vagueness and plasticity of “free love”
permitted various groups of Americans to define the phrase in different ways
and employ it to stigmatize their political foes as immoral, un-American,
and anti-Christian. While Southern proslavery commentators emphasized
the Northern origin of free love ideology to attack the socioeconomic system
and reformist culture of the North, Northern Union supporters used themetaphor of free love to chastise slaveholders’ sexual exploitation of female
slaves as well as the Southern states’ secession from the federal union. The
ubiquity of free love rhetoric in political contests over the abolition ofslavery demonstrates how ideas about marriage, gender, and sexuality

“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

175

shaped American political discourses in crucial ways.
The use of the notion of free love by Americans across a wide spectrum ofpolitical allegiances strengthened the social stigma of free love. The Civil
War halted the momentum of free lovers, and the movement remained
virtually inert until a younger generation of advocates rekindled the cause in
the early 1870s. Nonetheless, by the late 1860s, the term “free love,” theenemy of marriage, was fixed in American common usage.
NOTES“The Presidential Elect,” North American and United States Gazette, February 12, 1861,
2; “Domestic Intelligence,” Harper’s Weekly, February 23, 1861, 119.
2
For important studies on the nineteenth-century free love movement, see Hal D. Sears,
Free Love in High-Victorian America (Lawrence: Regent Press of Kansas, 1977); Taylor
Stoehr, Free Love in America: A Documentary History (New York: Ams Press, 1979); John C.
Spurlock, Free Love: Marriage and Middle-Class Radicalism in America, 1825–1860 (NewYork: New York University Press, 1988); Jesse F. Battan, “‘The Word Made Flesh’:Language, Authority, and Sexual Desire in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of theHistory of Sexuality 3, no. 2 (October 1992): 223–44; Jesse F. Battan, “‘You Cannot Fix the
Scarlet Letter on My Breast!’: Women Reading, Writing, and Reshaping the Sexual Cultureof Victorian America,” Journal of Social History 37, no. 3 (Spring 2004): 601–24; Joanne E.
Passet, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women’s Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2003).
3
Satomi Minowa, “The Multiplicity of ‘Free Love’ Discourses,” in “The Limit of Freedom:
Free Love Controversies in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” (PhD diss., University of
Delaware, 2017), 67–119.
4
Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2000), 72; Stoehr, Free Love in America, 6.
5
Passet, Sex Radicals, chap. 2.
6James L. Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald and the Rise of the Popular Press(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989), chaps. 2–3.
7
Amanda Frisken’s work on free lover and suffragist Victoria Woodhull is a rare study that
deals with the racial implications of free love. Frisken argues that the newspaper coverage ofWoodhull’s demand for free love and universal suffrage in the early 1870s reflected
postbellum anxiety about miscegenation between white women and African American men.
Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Radical Theater and the Political
Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
8
Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery
Politics (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 116.
9
Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–
1835 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle
Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1981); Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of Women’s Activism: New York andBoston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
10
Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations,and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995); Brenda E. Stevenson, Life in Black and White: Family andCommunity in the Slave South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Christine Leigh1

176

SATOMI MINOWA

Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1997);
Pierson, Free Hearts, 95–114.
11
Sarah Barringer Gordon, The Mormon Question: Polygamy and Constitutional Conflict inNineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 19–29.
12Ibid., 55–57, 63–65.
13
Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2006), 185–218, quotation at 136.
14
Martha Ertman, “Race Treason: The Untold Story of America’s Ban on Polygamy,”
Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 19, no. 2 (2010): 287–366. On orientalism and racism
in anti-Mormon discourse, see also Tammy Heise, “Marking Mormon Difference: How
Western Perceptions of Islam Defined the ‘Mormon Menace,’” Journal of Religion and
Popular Culture 25, no. 1 (2013): 82–97; Margaret Denike, “The Racialization of White
Man’s Polygamy,” Hypatia 25, no. 4 (Fall 2010): 852–74; Christine Talbot, “‘Turkey Is in
Our Midst’: Orientalism and Contagion in Nineteenth-Century Anti-Mormonism,” Journal of
Law and Family Studies 8, no. 2 (2006): 363–88; Bruce Burgett, “On the Mormon Question:
Race, Sex, and Polygamy in the 1850s and the 1990s,” American Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2005):
75–102.
15Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History, 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan,1942), 303; Crouthamel, Bennett’s New York Herald, 24–25.
16“The Mormons and the Fourierites,” New York Herald, March 17, 1858, 4.
17“Free-Loveism,” Cincinnati Daily Enquirer, May 26, 1867, 1; “Free Love in New Jersey,”
Buffalo Evening Post, August 22, 1856, 2.
18
See, e. g., “Free Love in the East,” New York Times, October 23, 1855, 4.
19
Christine Leigh Heyrman, American Apostles: When Evangelicals Entered the World ofIslam (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), 8–10, 20–22.
20“African Free Love,” Columbus Tri-Weekly Enquirer, December 29, 1855, 2. See also
“African Free Love,” Columbian Register, December 22, 1855, 1.
21
J. M. Hawks, “Letter from Hayti,” The Liberator, May 10, 1861, 4; “Hayti,” Charleston
Mercury, April 28, 1859, 4; “The Experiment of Free Negroism,” Semi-Weekly Mississippian,May 6, 1859, 2; “Free Love,” Semi-Weekly Mississippian, May 6, 1859, 4; “British India: Its
Disloyalties, Free Love and Religion—The Russian Advance,” New York Herald, January 2,
1870, 6; “Marriage in Mexico,” Freeman, April 13, 1889, 3.
22“Free-Loveism,” New York Ledger, August 7, 1858, 4. On the New York Ledger and its
immense popularity in the midcentury, see Frank Luther Mott, A History of American
Magazines, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938), 356–63.
23
Jacqueline Jones, Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow: Black Women, Work, and the Family
from Slavery to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Emily West, “Surviving
Separation: Cross-Plantation Marriages and the Slave Trade in Antebellum South Carolina,”
Journal of Family History 24, no. 2 (April 1999): 212–31; Stevenson, Life in Black andWhite.
24“Free Love among the Niggers,” New York Herald, August 27, 1865, 4.
25“Let Peace Prevail,” Pomeroy’s Democrat, October 13, 1877, 1.
26“Brazil,” Daily Age, January 2, 1865, 4.
27
Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in
the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Leslie M. Harris,“From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of the Five Points’: The Discourse of Interracial
Sex and Reform in Antebellum New York City,” in Martha Hodes ed., Sex, Love, Race:
Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press,
1999), 191–212, quotation at 207; Lemire, “Miscegenation,” chaps. 3 and 4; David R.
Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

“FREE LOVE” IN SECTIONAL DEBATES OVER SLAVERY IN MID-NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA

177(New York: Verso, 1991), 108–9; Joshua D. Rothman, Notorious in the Neighborhood: Sex
and Families across the Color Line in Virginia, 1787–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2003), 113–29.
28
Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans(Boston: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), 196.
29
Lemire, “Miscegenation”; Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rulers of theFive Points,’” 194–95.
30
Ronald G. Walters, “The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American
Abolitionism,” American Quarterly 25, no. 2 (May 1973): 177–201.
31
In my dissertation, I discuss that few free lovers explicitly questioned the legitimacy of
antimiscegenation laws. Free lovers’ silence on the issue of interracial relationships indicates
their insensitivity or indifference to marital regulations that contributed to the maintenance of
racial hierarchy. Most probably, free lovers presumed that affections were naturally
intraracial. Minowa, “Limit of Freedom,” 166–69.
32“Progress and Prospects of Human Freedom,” New York Herald, November 19, 1858, 4.
33“Meeting of Citizens of All Colors,” New York Herald, February 22, 1857, 5.
34
McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 288–92, 302–4.
35
George F. Harrington (William Mumford Baker), “Inside: A Chronicle of Secession,”
Harper’s Weekly, February 3, 1866, 69. The novel was later reprinted as a book. By
illustrating the tragedy of the Civil War from the perspective of a Southern Unionist, Baker’s
novel sought to help restore unity to the divided nation after the war. George F. Harrington(William Mumford Baker), Inside: A Chronicle of Secession (New York: Harper and Brothers,
1866); “William Mumford Baker” in Thomas William Herringshaw, Herringshaw’s
Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: American
Publishers’ Association, 1898), 71. On the novel Inside, see also Patricia Okker, Social
Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville: University ofVirginia Press, 2003), 110–12.
36“The Lounger,” Harper’s Weekly, August 10, 1861, 499.
37
“The Union—It Must and Shall Be Preserved!” New York Tribune, July 11, 1861, 6.
38“Celebration of the First of August,” The Liberator, August 15, 1862.
39
Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American WhiteMan and Negro (New York: H. Dexter, Hamilton and Co., 1864), 7.
40
Sidney Kaplan, “The Miscegenation Issue in the Election of 1864,” Journal of Negro
History 34, no. 3 (July 1, 1949): 274–343; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness, 155–56; Peggy
Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America(New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 28.
41
Harris, “From Abolitionist Amalgamators to ‘Rules of the Five Points’”; Lemire,
Miscegenation.