Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was an American orator, actress and playwright. She was an advocate for the abolition of slavery and for women's rights.
Background
Anna Dickinson was born on October 28, 1842, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was the second daughter and fifth child of John and Mary (Edmondson) Dickinson, both descended from Quakers who settled in Maryland in the late seventeenth century.
Education
Dickinson's father died in 1844 when she was two years old after giving a speech against slavery. Left in poverty, Anna's mother opened a school in their home and took in boarders to support the family. Dickinson was educated at Friends Select School of Philadelphia and for a short time, until age 15, at Westtown School. A hardworking student, she spent any money she earned on books, having acquired an interest in literary classics from her mother. At the age of 14, she converted to the Methodist Church, and remained active in the church throughout her life.
Career
After losing a position in the Philadelphia mint in December 1861, for accusing General McClellan of treason, Anna Dickinson turned to oratory as a vocation. She had attained a local reputation by espousing abolition and woman's rights at antislavery and Quaker meetings; in the spring of 1862 she spoke in New England, at the invitation of William Lloyd Garrison. She profited by the increasing disposition toward abolition tenets in the North and became a national sensation. The Radical Republicans acclaimed her a Joan of Arc and put her on the stump in the 1863 state campaigns in New Hampshire, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New York. Her political activities opened for her the important lecture halls of the North and acquainted her with many of the leading Abolitionists and Radical Republicans, including William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Charles Sumner, Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Tilton, Whitelaw Reid, and William D. Kelley.
Through the arrangements of Kelley, she was invited to speak on January 16, 1864, in the hall of the national House of Representatives before an audience of political and military dignitaries, including President Lincoln. Her address coupled a plea for vindictive reconstruction with an advocacy of Lincoln's reelection. This inconsistent position was resolved on a Boston lecture platform some weeks later when, after an interview with Lincoln, she repented her endorsement of the President and sarcastically mimicked his personal characteristics. Paralleling the course of the Radicals, she announced in September her support of the Republican party without concurring in Lincoln's desire for lenient reconstruction.
The huge measure of applause that Anna Dickinson had grown accustomed to receiving as a result of her war speeches was never again forthcoming. The rest of her long life was spent, at first, in trying to regain national attention, later, in escape. She crossed and recrossed the country on the lyceum platform, advocating harsh reconstruction, pleading for woman's rights and education, opposing the growing trade-unions. In 1872 she supported Greeley for the presidency, returning to the Republican fold to campaign for Harrison in 1888.
Meanwhile, in 1876 Anna turned to the stage, essaying the role of Hamlet as well as parts in her own plays: A Crown of Thorns, concerning Anne Boleyn; Aurelian, dealing with the war between Rome and Palmyra; and Laura, a contemporary problem comedy. She wrote a play for Fanny Davenport, An American Girl, adapted a play from Jane Eyre entitled Love and Duty, and wrote The Test of Honor. Disappointed in her dramatic adventures, which had depleted her resources and had not yielded satisfying returns in public acclaim, she left the stage in 1883. She had also tried her hand at fiction. In 1868 she brought out a novel, What Answer? in which a white man and a quadroon marry, in defiance of social prejudice. Later she published A Paying Investment (1876), a tract advocating mass education, and A Ragged Register of People, Places and Opinions) (1879), which narrated her adventures on the lyceum platform.
From 1888 through the following decade, Dickinson instituted a number of lawsuits unsuccessfully against the Republican National Committee for alleged breach of contract in the 1888 campaign, and against the men who took her, in 1891, to a state asylum in Danville, Pennsylvania. A hung jury at this trial left the matter of her insanity legally unproved, permitting her to collect libel damages from several New York newspapers which had termed her insane. The last forty years of her life she lived as a recluse in the home of a family, first in New York City, then in Goshen, New York, receiving in the family circle the sympathetic treatment she had sought in vain from the nation since the Civil War.
Personality
Anna was striking in appearance, sarcastic, possessing a strong contralto voice and complete confidence in her emotional biases.