INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfihn master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type o f computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced by sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. 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This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 ©Copyright by LORIEN FOOTE 1999 All Rights Reserved SEEKING THE ONE GREAT REMEDY: FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW AND NINETEENTH-CENTURY REFORM A dissertation APPROVED FOR THE DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY BY E Acknowledgments A dissertation is not the work of one person. I am indebted to several people for the research, writing, and ideas to follow. First I would like to thank Dr. Robert E. Shalhope, my dissertation director, for his insightful comments, careful editing, and brilliant example. My dissertation committee. Dr. David Levy, Dr. Don Pisani, Dr. Ben Keppel, Dr. Jamie Hart, and Dr. Richard Nostrand, were careful readers and helpful guides. Megan Benson and Dedra Redwine also read my drafts and provided useful suggestions. The Interlibrary Loan Department of the University of Oklahoma library handled my numerous requests with efficiency and personal attention. I would also like to thank the staffs of several archives : the Boston Public Library, Houghton Library, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the New York Public Library, Butler Library, Kroch Library, the National Library of Ireland, and the Staten Island Institute of Arts and Sciences. I could not have researched this dissertation without the generosity of several friends who opened their homes to me on my lengthy research trips. My stay with these kind IV souls will never be forgotten: Greg Eastman and John Horn, Beth and Jack Porter, Dedra and Eric Overholt, and Sid and Gail Leibovich. I would like to thank the Graduate College at the University of Oklahoma for its travel funding, the faculty of the History Department at the University of Oklahoma for awarding me a fellowship, and the P.E.O. National Scholar Award for supporting my research for two summers. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, who let me work on their computer, far more advanced than mine, and provided quite a few meals, loads of laundry, and immeasurable love and understanding. Table of Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One: ''I am too much engaged in Worldly pursuits": The Family Fortune 8 Chapter Two : "Humanity is before God as one man" : Association 47 Chapter Three: "Has not the President used a very sharp knife": A War for Freedom 93 Chapter Four : "All on his country's red altar he laid": Creating a Myth 139 Chapter Five: "What shall the harvest be": Reconstructing the South 192 Chapter Six: "We must make land common property": The Last Great Remedy 233 Bibliography 268 VI INTRODUCTION For a brief time during the Civil War, Francis George Shaw became a household name. His son. Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, died leading the 54th Massachusetts assault on Fort Wagner and lay buried in a common trench with his African- American soldiers. Frank Shaw's letter to Union commanders requesting that his son's grave not be disturbed glorified the burial and was reprinted widely in newspapers across the North. Symbolically, Shaw's letter linked black and white in a common cause, and northern commentators seized on Shaw's action as representative of the moral superiority of their cause. Historians have seen Shaw only through the lens of his son's death or have portrayed him as an active reformer and abolitionist whose main importance lay in the fact that he fathered two famous children: Robert Gould Shaw and Josephine Shaw Lowell. In reality, Shaw's contributions to the American reform scene equaled that of his daughter and overwhelmed his son's moment in the spotlight. As a young man, born into one of the nation's wealthiest families, he rejected capitalism and its associated tenets of private property, free labor, and class. Influential, well-respected, and an associate of leading intellectuals, Shaw used his wealth and position to advocate alternatives to America's dominant ideology. His presence in the inner circle of the major reform movements of the nineteenth century is a significant fact too long overlooked; within organizations commonly presented as completely coopted by free labor advocates, Shaw, a true radical, maintained his opposition to capitalism. Historians have probably overlooked Shaw's contributions because he was not a public figure. Retiring and shy, he generally shunned speech making and public office. Neither did he leave behind volumes of material expressing his ideas — short, cryptic letters were his rule. This extreme reticence, even with his closest friends, made him an unlikely candidate for biography. A closer look at archival sources, however, reveals that Shaw was at the center of all the many reform movements with which he was associated. One of the earliest converts to abolition in the 1840's, his financial support sustained many of the movement's most important figures. Lydia Maria Child, William Lloyd Garrison, and Wendell Phillips counted on Shaw for money, advice, and support. As an advocate of Association, a French socialist movement that was the most popular secular communitarian movement of the antebellum period, Shaw wrote a series of important articles and 2 translated several books that gained influence among New England reformers. Again he was a financial backer and key advisor to Association's leaders. During the Civil War and Reconstruction, when Shaw devoted himself to Freedraen's Aid and the raising of a northern black regiment, his leadership directed policy in a more radical direction. After the war, his financial and moral support of Henry George was a key factor in spreading George's ideas and making Progress and Poverty one of the best selling books in American history. Shaw was one of the most respected reformers of his time, and there were few major figures of the nineteenth century who were not acquaintances and correspondents of him and his wife, Sarah Blake Sturgis Shaw. Besides their influence on reform, the couple promoted literary and artistic development in the United States. Giving freely to struggling novelists, sculptors, and painters, the Shaws were important patrons of the arts. They counted among their admirers Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Elizabeth Gaskell, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and James Russell Lowell. This dissertation intends to establish the significance of Frank Shaw's activism for nineteenth-century reform. Throughout his life, Shaw struggled to reconcile his transcendentalist belief in the primacy of the individual with his rejection of competitive capitalism and the quest 3 for a social order based on the common ownership of property. Many Americans of the nineteenth century felt a similar dilemma: they promoted Jeffersonian individualism but, remembering their Puritan heritage and the republican promises of the American Revolution, quested for community. There was an important tradition of communalism in American thought during the nineteenth century, reflected in the proliferation of communal experiments in the antebellum period extending to the radical labor movements of the 1880's and Progressivism. Frank Shaw was a vital link between this antebellum tradition and the late nineteenth century. Before the Civil War, Shaw was an advocate of Association, a utopian reform that promoted a form of socialism. He introduced currents of thought outside the British tradition to the American reform scene through his translations of the French novelist George Sand and the French followers of Charles Fourier. Shaw applied these communal ideas to his efforts on behalf of the freedmen during the Civil War and Reconstruction. He advocated a common school system that would include blacks and whites and land redistribution as tools to remold southern society along egalitarian precepts. When Reconstruction failed and northern society experienced economic depression and labor revolt in the 1870's, Shaw believed that the flawed economic 4 structure of capitalism was to blame for both problems. After reading Progress and Poverty he sought to spread Henry George's ideas that poverty and other social ills were the result of private ownership of land and other resources.