Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

• Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm
• Born: December 6, 1815
• Died: July 22, 1884

The daughter of Thomas Cannon and Mary (Scott) Cannon, Scotch-Irish Covenanters of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was a fiercely independent free-lance journalist and publisher, advocate of abolition, and an outspoken early feminist. Entering school at age three in the fairly recent settlement of Wilkinsburg, just east of Pittsburgh, to which her parents had moved, by age ten she was helping her widowed mother earn a living. When she was fourteen, her passionate love of justice brought her into the antislavery movement, and she also assumed the duties of local schoolteacher—a position she was to hold for six years, until her marriage on November 18, 1836, to James Swisshelm, a young farmer of the area.

In 1838 the Swisshelms moved to Louisville, Kentucky, where James Swisshelm unsuccessfully attempted to establish a business, while she worked as a corset maker and teacher. Seeing firsthand the cruelties of slavery, she found herself even more deeply involved in the abolition movement.

She returned to Pennsylvania in 1840 and there took charge of a seminary at Butler; she also began to write articles advocating the rights of married women. Two years later, she rejoined her husband on a farm he now owned near Pittsburgh, which she dubbed Swissvale. While performing her heavy domestic and farm duties, she continued to write stories and poems for The Dollar Newspaper and Neal’s Saturday Gazette and to contribute spirited polemical articles reflecting her hatred of slavery and her advocacy of the property rights of women to The Spirit of Liberty, The Pittsburgh Gazette, and other publications.

With a legacy from her mother, on December 20, 1847, she started a political and literary weekly, The Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter (her preferred spelling), a vehicle for the promotion of the great reform movements—abolition, temperance, and woman suffrage. Her independence and audacity in the editorship of the Visiter soon made her known and feared as a denouncer of evil. “Beware of Sister Jane” was said to be a popular byword in political and journalistic circles. One of her most famous attacks was the one she made in 1850 on the private life of Daniel Webster, an effort she liked to believe was instrumental in keeping Webster from becoming president. In 1853 she collected some of her articles from the Visiter in a volume entitled Letters to Country Girls.

Swisshelm separated permanently from her husband in 1857 (he later divorced her on grounds of desertion) and sold the paper. With her child, Mary Henrietta, called Nettie, who was born in 1851, she moved to Minnesota, where in 1858 she founded The St. Cloud Visiter. This journal was, however, forced out of existence in a few months as a result of a libel suit; she forthwith replaced it with The St. Cloud Democrat—despite its title a staunch Republican paper that supported Abraham Lincoln in the campaign of 1860.

Her independent and highly personal editing and writing on behalf of constitutional abolitionism won her the criticism not only of her natural enemies, but also of those who might have been expected to side with her. “Old-side Covenanters, Quakers, and Garrisonians, [who] could not cast [votes] without soiling their hands by touching that bad Constitution,” she was to write in her autobiography, “argued that I, of necessity, endorsed slavery everywhere by recognizing the Constitution.” The “thorough goers” of the old Liberty party, on the other hand, insisted that she favor the existence of slavery where it then was, since she was “working with the Republican party, which was only pledged to prevent its extension.” No argument that she adduced in behalf of overthrowing slavery through constitutional means “did half the service,” she went on, “of an illustration which came to me:

I had a little garden in which the weeds did grow,

And little Bobbie Miller had a little broken hoe. When I went into the garden to cut the weeds away,

I took up Bobbie’s little hoe to help me in the fray. If that little hoe were wanting, I’d take a spoon or fork,

Or any other implement, but always keep at work. If any one would send me a broader, sharper hoe, I’d use it on those ugly weeds and cut more with one blow;

But till I got a better hoe, I’d work away with Bobbie’s.

I’d ride one steady-going nag, and not a dozen hobbies;

Help any man or boy, or friend to do what needed doing,

And only stop when work came up which done would call for rueing.”

This caught on so well, she records, that the Republican party was popularly nicknamed “Robbie [sic] Miller’s Hoe—an imperfect means of reaching a great end, and one that any one might use without being responsible for its imperfections.” In the heat of the Lincoln campaign, she was burned in effigy in St. Cloud as “the mother of the Republican party.”

At the height of the Civil War, she went to Washington, where through her acquaintance with Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton she procured employment as a government clerk and also assisted at a war hospital. A correspondent for The St. Cloud Democrat as well as for The New-York Tribune, she became a close friend of Mary Todd Lincoln, and through her possibly had the ear of the president, although she often criticized the mildness of his policies.

During the Andrew Johnson administration, Swisshelm launched a radical paper, The Recon-structionist, in which her vehement attacks on the president cost her her government post. She returned to Swissvale (which she had sued to regain from her husband’s estate), where she spent the remaining years of her life.

In 1880 she published her lively Half a Century, an account of her life through the end of the Civil War. Meantime, she continued to contribute to various publications, advocating the causes dear to her, but was no longer active in any organized movements. She died at sixty-eight at Swissvale.

A journalist of distinction, hewing always to her own independent stand, Swisshelm was an example not only for courageous women of later generations but for crusading writers of both sexes and for dedicated reformers of all stripes.

Swisshelm’s publications include Letters to Country Girls (1853) and Half a Century (1880). Her correspondence was published as A. J. Larsen, ed., Crusader and Feminist: Letters of Jane Grey Swisshelm, 1858-1865, (1934). Biographical sources include The New York Times, July 23, 1884; Minnesota Historical Society Collections, vol. 12 (1908); L. B. Shippee, “Jane Grey Swisshelm: Agitator,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review, December 1920; S. J. Fisher, “Reminiscences of Jane Grey Swisshelm,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine, July 1921; B. M. Stearns, “Reform Periodicals and Female Reformers,” American Historical Review, July 1932; and Abraham Lincoln Quarterly, December 1950. See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1936) and the sketch in Notable American Women (1971).