Elizabeth Elkins Sanders
Elizabeth Elkins Sanders was a notable 18th and 19th-century pamphleteer and advocate for Native American rights, born in Salem, Massachusetts. She was the second daughter of Thomas Elkins, who passed away when Elizabeth was very young. In 1782, she married Thomas Sanders, a successful businessman in Salem, and together they raised six children. Sanders was actively engaged in various reform movements, particularly focusing on prison reform, education for the poor, and health reform. Her most passionate advocacy centered around the rights and dignity of Native Americans, which she articulated through her writings.
In response to the injustices faced by indigenous peoples, particularly during Andrew Jackson's presidency, she published an influential pamphlet titled *Conversations, Principally on the Aborigines of North America.* In this work and others, she expressed her admiration for Native American culture and condemned both U.S. policies toward indigenous populations and the foreign missionary movement, which she believed undermined the intrinsic value of "primitive" societies. Despite her progressive views often being at odds with the prevailing sentiments of her time, Sanders's writings showcased her commitment to social justice and her belief in the inherent dignity of all cultures. She lived to the age of eighty-eight, leaving a legacy of advocacy that continues to resonate with discussions on indigenous rights and cultural respect.
Subject Terms
Elizabeth Elkins Sanders
- George IV
- Born: August 12, 1762
- Died: February 19, 1851
Pamphleteer and advocate of justice for native Americans, was born in Salem, Massachusetts, the second daughter of Thomas Elkins and Elizabeth (White) Elkins. Little is known of her early life or education. Her father’s occupation is unknown; he died at age twenty-six, before Elizabeth reached two years of age. On April 28, 1782, she married Thomas Sanders, son of a Gloucester merchant. After a period of employment in the firm of Elizabeth’s kinsman Elias Hasket Derby, Salem’s leading merchant, Thomas went on to become one of Salem’s most successful businessmen. Living in a handsome house on Chestnut Street, the couple had six children, two sons and four daughters, born between the years 1783 and 1804. The family was renowned in Salem for their warm hospitality.
An active supporter of numerous reform movements, Elizabeth Sanders gave generously of her wealth; however, she reportedly exercised careful discrimination in her philanthropic endeavors, rejecting any appeal she deemed based on “sickly sentimentality.” Well read, and of strong and fixed opinions, she contributed numerous articles to local papers, favoring prison reform, programs for reclaiming delinquents, and greater educational opportunities for the poor. Interested also in health reform, she particularly objected to physicians who were too liberal in the dispensing of drugs.
However, the issues about which Sanders felt most strongly were the plight of the American Indians and the evils of foreign missions. Her sympathy for the Indians and other “primitive” peoples grew out of her omnivorous reading. Influenced by accounts of travelers among the Indians, including the French Jesuit Pierre Charlevoix, the naturalist William Bartram, and the Moravian minister John Heckewelder, she became convinced that the American Indians were a people of superior morality and culture who were the “dethroned monarchs of the land,” long treated without justice or humanity. She was particularly incensed by the expulsion of the Creeks and Cherokees from Georgia, a policy she identified with Andrew Jackson. Consequently, during Jackson’s campaign for the presidency in 1828, she published anonymously a 179-page pamphlet entitled Conversations, Principally on the Aborigines of North America. Written in the form of talks between a mother and her children, the pamphlet expressed her admiration for Indian culture, her indignation over its destruction, and her contempt for the “sanguinary chieftain,” Andrew Jackson. The next year she developed similar themes in her book The First Settlers of New England, focusing on the conquest of other Indian tribes, and the un-Christian conduct with which the Indians were treated by white usurpers. At this time she also began her attack on the foreign missions, contending that while so many wrongs were unredressed at home, it was absurd to spend vast sums on foreign missions.
Her objections to foreign missions were not, however, based primarily on financial or parochial concerns. Rather they derived from her belief in the inherent virtue of “primitive” cultures. Moreover, as a staunch Unitarian, she recoiled from those who carried “the appalling dogmas of Calvinism” to virtuous and happy Polynesians. This viewpoint led her to praise Herman Melville’s Typee (1846) for revealing the “scandalous and wicked transactions” of missionaries in the Sandwich Islands, and to defend the book against those who wished to suppress it. Sanders was convinced that most missionaries, particularly those of evangelical and Calvinist persuasions, were motivated by a desire to live opulently at the expense of others. Their preaching, she believed, only served to degrade peoples whose native religion often compared favorably with that of the missionaries. Her ideas, first expressed in magazine articles, were incorporated into a series of polemical pamphlets: A Tract on Missions (1844), The Second Part of a Tract on Missions (1845), and Remarks on a “Tour Around Hawaii” by the Missionaries, Messrs. Ellis, Thurston, Bishop, and Goodrich, in 1823 (1848), all written when Elizabeth Sanders was in her eighties.
Although Sanders is described as kindly, quick-witted yet tolerant, especially sympathetic and appealing to the young, and of having reigned as “Salem’s most delightful old lady,” her writing is characterized by a trenchant, even sarcastic, prose style.
Old age did not dampen her wide-ranging interests. When her eyesight failed, she had the books in which she was interested read to her. In addition to her reform writings, she also published Reviews of a Part of Prescott’s “History of Ferdinand and Isabella,” and of Campbell’s Lectures on Poetry (1841). She died of “infirmity of lungs,” at eighty-eight years of age, seven years after her husband’s death. Although she appears to have been personally very influential in her community, her views ran counter to the prevailing currents of her day, particularly its expansionist fervor, evangelical zeal, and sentimentality. They represented a largely unsuccessful effort to carry over into the nineteenth century elements of an essentially eighteenth-century world view—particularly deism, rationality, and the concept of the “noble savage.” The missionary enterprise she ridiculed and the Indian policies she denounced long continued popular.
Sanders’s family remained a prominent one. Her son Charles is best known as the donor of the Sanders Theater to Harvard. Two daughters, Mary Elizabeth and Caroline, married the brothers Leverett and Nathaniel Saltonstall. A grandson, Thomas Sanders, helped finance Alexander Graham Bell’s development of the telephone.
In the absence of a full biography, the reader must rely on recent sketches by E. S. Dodge in Notable American Women 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary (1971), and by B. M. Stearns in The Dictionary of American Biography. See also M. C. D. Silsbee, A Half Century in Salem (1887); Vital Records of Salem, vols. I (1916) and III (1924); and L. Saltonstall, Ancestry and Descendants of Sir Richard Saltonstall of New England (1897). Obituaries appeared in The Salem Gazette, February 21 and 22, 1851, and The Salem Register, February 27, 1851.