“She was all ablaze with inspiration that in ten minutes she made you forget whether it was a man, a woman, or one of Mary Wollenscraft’s ‘third sex,’ who was pulling on your heart.”
New York Evangelist April 1863
Author’s Note from That Dickinson Girl
In writing this novel, I have tried to stick closely to the actual facts and events in Anna Dickinson’s life. Although the character Julia and her many problems are a figment of my imagination, Anna did travel with a companion on many of her speaking tours and her intimacies with other women are well documented.
Floyd Burns, another fictional character, represents the many newsmen who both admired and tried to bring Anna down. All of the epithets and homages she is called in the novel are taken directly from news reports of the day.
As the Republicans main vote-getter in the midterm election, Anna Dickinson was violently attacked by Copperheads against the war wherever she went. I show this in the Middleton speech scene in which I have combined several events that occurred during her second New England tour, and in the mob attack and hair cutting incident in Shamokin which actually took place. The idea that someone would pay to have her raped or assassinated is not too hard to believe.
The trip to Gorham, New Hampshire in the winter of 1862 is also an invention, although in December 1862, Anna was very ill and disappeared from public view. All through her life, Anna was drawn to the White Mountains, climbing Mount Washington twenty-three times, so it seemed a fitting place for her to run to when she comes to believe her father is John Greenleaf Whittier.
This possible relationship is a dramatic leap I have made based on a confluence of facts. First, there is a portrait of Whittier as a young man, hanging at the top of the stairs in his preserved home in Amesbury, that made me do a double take when I saw it. The resemblance to Anna is uncanny. Second, Whittier was in Philadelphia and living several houses down from the Dickinson home at the right time to have an affair with the acclaimed beauty, Mary Edmundson Dickinson, and third, he wrote many poems to a number of Marys, not all of whom are definitively identified. Whether there was a biological relationship or not, Anna Dickinson did visit him several times and maintained a correspondence with him all her life.
The only change I have made to the timing of the events is a small one. I have moved the leave taking of the 6th USCT regiment from Camp William Penn a few weeks ahead for the dramatic effect of tying it in with the 54th regiment’s assault of Fort Wagner made famous in the movie Glory.
The real-life Robert Purvis was a close friend and supporter of Anna until her death in 1932. As one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia and descended from Black slaves, he occupied a unique position in the abolitionist movement. He helped fellow abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, found the Anti-Slavery Society in 1833. He was the main funder and organizer of the Underground Railroad in Philadelphia. I have tried to represent his view on slavery, intermarriage, and Lincoln as accurately as possible based on my research. For more information about his life and work, I recommend But One Race: The Life of Robert Purvis by Margaret Hope Bacon.
His son, Dr. Charles Burleigh Purvis, who grew up just a few houses down from Anna, became one of the founders of Howard University and attended President James Garfield when he was assassinated in 1881.
Who was Anna Dickinson?
“Miss Dickinson’s personal allusions sometimes throw her out of sympathy with her audience. She leaves many a rankling arrow on those she need not have made her opponents; her sarcasm is superb, but not always judicious; and her logic is sometimes ‘only a woman’s logic’…Nevertheless, all who love Liberty, will follow her with their prayers and benedictions.”
AGATE [Whitelaw Reid] Cincinnati Gazette. 1864
In 1863 at the height of the Civil War, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (1842-1932) was the most photographed woman in America. Her name a household word. Her image printed on teabag labels.
She stood nose to nose with the great men and women of her time and argued them down. She was the first woman to give a political address to Congress. A diminutive bundle of unflagging energy with a passion for justice, she had the showmanship of Lady Gaga and the political astuteness of Rachel Maddow.
Known as America’s Joan of Arc, Anna Dickinson was sixteen years old when she stepped on to the world’s stage in 1860, rising to speak at a public debate on women’s rights and driving a man from the hall with the power of her words alone.
Scooped up by the abolitionists of the day and hired by the Republican party to campaign for them, the young girl found herself catapulted to the height of fame and fortune by the age of twenty-one.
After the war, she attempted to maintain her public image and level of income by giving lectures across the country on a wide range of socially-focused topics including economic equality for men and women, rights for the freed slaves, prostitution, reconstruction, and Chinese immigration and by writing books.
In the 1880s, when the books failed to sell and the lecture circuit dried up, Anna, who was the sole support of her family, and who had lost her millions in bad investments and the Chicago fire, looked around for a job that paid a woman as well as a man and settled on the theater, shocking her many supporters, especially other Quakers.
She wrote and performed in a number of plays that were well received in Boston and elsewhere, but were panned by New York critics who, shocked by her naturalistic approach to dramatic performance in an age when melodrama ruled, thought her an untrained actress who did not know how to emote. Predating the dramatic productions of Ibsen by ten years, today some consider her the first “modern American stage actress.”*
In the 1890s, with no remaining sources of income, she returned home to live with her sister, Susan (renamed in this work to Lisbeth, derived from her middle name, to avoid confusion with Susan Anthony). Anna, prickly, depressed, and possibly alcoholic, did not get along with the sister who had long been envious of her. In 1891, after an altercation with a scissors, her sister had her declared insane.
In turn, Anna sued her and the doctors, defended herself in court, and won. She went on to sue the newspapers who had reported her to be an “indigent mad woman.”
Winning that case turned out to be the end of her career as, in retaliation, the newspapers, the sole source of publicity at the time, blacked out all reports of her further appearances. In fact, many people believed she had died.
Although she received thousands of proposals for marriage, Anna eschewed men and took numerous lovers, including Susan B. Anthony, who later in life, wrote in a letter to her beloved “Chicky Dicky” that while she had had many Annas, she had been the best of all.
Anna E. Dickinson died unknown and unsung in 1932, at the home of the doctor and his wife who had rescued her from the mental institution forty-one years before.
To learn more about Anna’s life see:
America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson by J. Matthew Gallman. Published by Oxford University Press, 2006
Embattled Maiden: The Life of Anna Dickinson by Giraud Chester. Published by G. P. Putnam, 1951
What Answer? her novel about a mixed marriage, her memoir Ragged Register, and her political stance, A Paying Investment are available free from Google Books
*For a review of her life on the stage, see Nothing Ladylike About It: The Theatrical Career of Anna E. Dickinson by Stacey A. Stuart, a dissertation published in 2004. https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/1552/umi-umd-1430.pdf
Note: It was with great frustration and sadness that I learned that all her unpublished plays had been destroyed during a housecleaning at the Library of Congress.
The rest of her voluminous cache of papers, letters, performed plays, speeches, and memory albums, including Susan B. Anthony’s heart-rendering break up letter, can be found in the Anna E. Dickinson Papers in the Library of Congress.
To learn more about the relationships between women in the mid-1860s see:
Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America by Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. Published by Oxford University Press, 1985.
Searching the Heart: Women, Men, and Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century America by Karen Lystra. Published by Oxford University Press, 1989.
Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists by Jean H. Baker. Published by Hill and Wang, 2005.
Read Anna’s coming of age story in That Dickinson Girl.
