Goshen’s Joan of Arc: Anna Elizabeth Dickinson

 

 

     This article appears in a local library publication The History Journal #2 (2026) which explains the emphasis on the village of Goshen.  I post it here as well, as Dickinson’s remarkable story deserves, I think, a broader audience.  More photographs are included in the print publication.  

 

     The most casual visitor to Goshen, in New York’s Hudson Valley, will notice the sizable Orange County Government Center on Main Street.  Built in 1967 with a design by Paul Rudolph, it was in part demolished and extensively remodeled, with the renovated structure opening in 2017 [1].  Across the street from this recent and functional complex are elegant buildings from the town’s earlier ages, including the Anthony Dobbins Stagecoach Inn and stately spacious homes such as Maplewood (now the village hall).  Where the courthouse now stands was once a mansion built by William Wickham in 1774 and later occupied by his son, General George Wickham.  In 1867 the home was razed and an even grander one built by Robert Berdell who had succeeded Jay Gould as president of the Erie Railroad.  Berdell occupied the home for a relatively short time [2].  In 1889 the property was bought by Goshen Sanitarium Company and in 1990 homeopathic physician Dr. F. W. Seward established the Interpines Sanitarium which came to specialize is “disorders of the nervous system” [3].

     Shortly after opening his asylum, Dr. Seward received a celebrity patient, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who had been a prominent abolitionist and feminist, and after the Civil War, took advantage of the public’s taste for oratory and adult education to establish herself as one of the most popular and highly-paid speakers in the country.  Though her arrival in Goshen was a matter of chance, she was to spend much of the second half of her life there, all but absent from the public realm where she had earlier figured so prominently.  Yet, though her move to Orange County was unplanned and she lived in Goshen in comparative obscurity, her life there may have been in some ways more personally satisfying than her period of fame.

     Born in 1842, the young Quaker woman from Philadelphia was, before and during the Civil War, among the most effective and passionate anti-slavery speakers.  Her parents had been active abolitionists and she embraced the cause from childhood.  At the age of thirteen, she wrote a letter to William Lloyd Garrison’s paper The Liberator in which the ringing tones of her rhetoric are already evident.  Protesting the tarring and feathering of a Kentucky teacher who had submitted a letter to the local paper condemning slavery, she concluded with these words:

 

 How long will Northern men watch this struggle between Freedom and Slavery? – of constant, arrogant demand on the one hand, and meek and quiet submission (except with one small, true, devoted band) on the other?  How long will they see their rights trampled on, their liberty sacrificed, their highest and most lofty sentiments crushed beneath the iron heel of oppression!  How long will they bear all this without one effort of resistance?” [4] 

 

     At the age of seventeen, she began speaking at public meetings not only opposing slavery but also, as one event titled the evening’s topic, “Women’s Rights and Wrongs” [5].  From the time of her earliest speeches she enjoyed immense success.  Her obvious passion and high-flying rhetoric belied her femininity, youth, and slight stature, attracting great crowds (and eventually significant fees) for her appearances.  She made contact with other American progressives such as William Lloyd Garrison, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton who assisted her in booking engagements and assured her positive press coverage at least in anti-slavery publications, though she was criticized in papers that favored the South, labeled the Copperhead press by abolitionists. 

    The conclusion of an 1863 speech urging Black enlistments provides an example of the sort of “purple passage” that thrilled audiences of the day.

 

 

We had culture to put against their ignorance; schools against rum-shops; churches against race-courses; the brain of New England against the degradation of South Carolina!  We have wronged you enough : you have suffered enough: we ask no more at your hands; we stand aside, we'll let you fight for your own manhood, your future, your race.  Xerxes scourging the Hellespont ; Canute commanding the waves to roll .back, are but types of that folly which stands up and says to this majestic wave of public opinion, "Thus far." The black man will be a citizen, only by stamping his right to it in his blood. Now or never! You have not homes! — gain them. You have not liberty! — gain it. You have not a flag! — gain it. You have not a country! — be written down in history as the race who made one for themselves, and saved one for another. (Immense cheering.) [6]

 

 

     Six months later, her fame had risen to the extent that she was invited by Republican senators and representatives to address them, becoming the first woman to speak before Congress.  President Lincoln and his cabinet were also in attendance, and Dickinson used the occasion both to push Lincoln whom she viewed as too moderate in both his prosecution of the war and his attitudes toward treatment of freedmen and, at the same time, to provide an endorsement of his second term despite the challenges of more radical Republicans.

      After the war, she remained extremely popular as a lecturer.  During the nineteenth century, oratory as an art form was widely appreciated from politicians and clergymen, but also as a form of entertainment.  Attending improving lectures was a common recreational activity for all classes.  The Lyceum system, initiated by Josiah Holbrook in 1826, and the Chautauqua Movement of John Heyl and Vincent Lewis Miller, organized in 1874, are evidence of the popularity of adult education through hearing touring speakers.  One scholar counted more than three thousand advertised lectures in New York City between 1840 and 1860 and noted that Boston in 1846 offered twenty-six competing courses of lectures.  Indeed, a writer for Putnam’s Monthly noted this phenomenon as distinctly American, declaring that this country’s public has “founded a new profession,”  with no model in England [7].

     Dickinson’s celebrity reached the point that she was receiving fan mail from across the country.  Her image was printed on visiting cards her admirers could paste in their family albums as well as in unauthorized advertisements for a variety of products [8].  She often spoke five or six times a week at fees ranging from one hundred to one thousand dollars a night [9].  James B. Pond, a prominent lecture manager whose clients included Mark Twain, said “Anna E. Dickinson, for many years, indeed from her first appearance until she retired from the lecture field was, without question of a rival, the ‘Queen of the Lyceum.’” [10]  Twain himself paid tribute to her abilities [11].

 

 

She talks fast, uses no notes what ever, never hesitates for a word, always gets the right word in the right place, and has the most perfect confidence in herself. Indeed, her sentences are remarkably smoothly-woven and felicitous. Her vim, her energy, her determined look, her tremendous earnestness, would compel the respect and the attention of an audience, even if she spoke in Chinese.

 

 

Her income reflected her fame, often topping $20,000 in a year, nearly forty times the average income of Americans and higher than all but one or two of her competitors on the lecture circuit [12].

     Eventually after the war her lecture tours became briefer and less well-compensated.  The slavery issue was no longer debated and women at the podium no longer such a novelty.  Dickinson insisted on setting her own fees and programs and some of her favored topics such as women’s rights, interracial marriage, and the integration of Chinese into American society found little support.   She annoyed feminists by her reluctance to join their organizations and trade unionists by her suspicion of their movement.  She decided that she would have to seek another way to support herself and her family, which had long relied on her financial aid. 

     In 1868 her sole novel What Answer? was issued, presenting a sympathetic view of interracial marriage.  Though, as William Dean Howells points out in a review, “one phase of our great social problem is not treated with perfect courage in it.” [13]  He objects that the argument for what a headline from the story calls "Miscegenation. Disgraceful Freak in High Life. Fruit of an Abolition War” [14] is considerably enfeebled by the fact that the book’s heroine Francesca looks altogether white, that her lover did not know when their relationship began that her father was a mulatto, though a cultivated and rich one, and that the hero himself is a comfortable and “elegant patrician” [15].  While the story is undeniably conventional and sentimental, it attacks bigotry in the sensitive topic of intermarriage, and incidentally provides a vivid picture of the New York Draft Riots of 1863.  As for people of mixed race, the protagonist’s friend Jim pointedly comments.

 

 

“The damned rascals talk about the amalgamationists, and all that, up North.  'T wan't the abolitionists; 't was the slaveholders and their friends that made a race of half-breeds all over the country; but, slavery or no slavery, they showed nature had n't put any barriers between them, — and it seems to me an enough sight decenter and more respectable plan to marry fair and square than to sell your own children and the mother that bore them. Come, now, ain't it?" [16]

 

Dickinson as Hamlet

 

 

     In spite of her Quaker family’s disapproval of the stage [17], she wrote plays in which she then acted the lead as Mary Tudor, Joan of Arc, and Anne Boleyn, as well as performing the role of Hamlet in men’s clothing [14].  She toured the West in 1873, becoming the first white woman to reach the top of Colorado's Gray's Peak, Lincoln Peak, and Elbert Peak [15].  With her eye always on making a living, she wrote about her travels in A Ragged Register (Of People, Places, and Opinions), published in 1879, a mildly entertaining book that recalls Twain’s Roughing It.  In 1876 she published A Paying Investment, a book of essays in which she advocated for substantial investment in education, particularly for programs aimed at integrating freedmen and immigrants (including Chinese) into American life. 

     Dickinson had since her teen-age years enjoyed extraordinary praise for her oratorical abilities from the press and the public, while attracting criticism primarily from political enemies.  She had proceeded then to considerable achievements as a writer, actor, and adventurer, but she was to suffer a dramatic turn of her fortunes when, at the age of forty-nine, she was involuntarily bundled off to a grim state psychiatric hospital.  In her view she had simply been  kidnapped.  Though she was not long confined against her will, the second half of her life was spent in comparative privacy and obscurity, apart from legal suits by which she sought to rehabilitate her reputation and punish those she saw as her antagonists, while living quietly with Sallie and George Ackley. 

     Her humiliating commitment to an asylum was not wholly a surprise to those who cared for her.  In spite of her considerable talents and accomplishments, she had earlier in her life exhibited a certain impulsive instability.  In a book published during her period of celebrity, Elizabeth Cady Stanton states that even “as a baby, Anna was cross, sleepless, restless, and crying continually with a loud voice, thus preparing her lungs for future action. She was a wayward, wilful, intensely earnest, imaginative child, causing herself and her elders much trouble and unhappiness. They, seeing her impatience of control, endeavored to ‘break her will.’” [20]  In an early twentieth century book for young people, meant, according to its dedication, to “link the flower of early America with the ‘new freedom’ of today,” she is quoted describing her attitude as a schoolchild: “They could punish me all they liked . . . I would never obey a rule that had not been explained to me and that wasn't fair — never! Teachers and mothers were always telling good little girls not to play with me, and I was glad! Girls the teachers call 'good' sometimes are not that at all; they just know how to hide things from the teachers.”  At the outset of her adult life, she is said to have refused to accept a teaching job at a lower salary than the man who had previously held the position had received.  “’Sir,’ she said, ‘though I am too poor to-day to buy a pair of cotton gloves, I would rather go in rags than degrade my womanhood by accepting anything at your hands!’" [21] 

    Not long after she had succeeded in finding work at the U. S. Mint she was fired for what her superior felt an intemperate speech before the Pennsylvania Anti=Slavery Society denouncing Gen. McClellan as a traitor following the Battle of Ball’s Bluff [22].  While it doubtless seemed to others a rash move to have endangered a secure government job, the income from which she and her family sorely needed, she was driven then to seek her income elsewhere and that is when she turned to full-time public speaking, leading to her extraordinary success as an orator.  In a letter to William Lloyd Garrison, she preferred to attribute her dismissal from the Mint to “my  Abolition sentiments & the yet graver offense, being a woman, of expressing them in public.”  She then asked him if he might arrange engagements for her in Boston, asking if such appearances “would pay,” adding “I must work to live.” [23]  She was to continue to behave irascibly on occasion to friends and supporters even to her own disadvantage.

     Unlike many of her fellow progressives, particularly the women among them, she was not a temperance speaker, never advocating prohibition, very likely because she herself enjoyed drink and in fact was prescribed alcohol as a medicine.  As she approached middle age, however, her alcohol use began to concern her sister and friends.  She nourished a sense of resentment against those she regarded as foes, a feeling that began to resemble paranoia, and, as she drank and isolated herself in her room, her sister came to think that she required medical intervention.  Susan Dickinson arranged for a group of seven people, including the local Overseer of the Poor, the Director of the County Home, , and two men from the community to help restrain her, to break into her room and deliver her to the [Pennsylvania] State Hospital for the Insane in Danville [24].

     After she had spent a little over five weeks at this institution, her friends including Stanton and Philadelphia financier A. J. Drexel, collected funds to provide her a more genteel setting in which to recover, and she became a patient of Dr. Seward’s at Interpines in Goshen.  She was doubtless gratified when he told the New York Times that in his view she was altogether sane [25].  In this setting she was able to stroll the streets of the small town and observe the horses on the Historic Track.  She became friends with Sallie Ackley who worked as a housekeeper in the sanitarium and they took to playing cards nightly and drinking together.  While Dr. Seward had thought her sane, he did think alcohol was for her a problem and he warned both women that they could not continue.

     Their reaction was to walk out.  In early 1892 Anna, together with Sallie and her husband George Ackley, who had done odd jobs around Interpines,  left the facility and began living together, an arrangement that would last the rest of their lives.  The relation between the two women was certainly the deepest of Dickinson’s life.

     Anna Dickinson had attracted a number of suitors, but never had a long-term relationship with a man.  Throughout her life, though, she had passionate affairs with women.  Her forty-year intimacy with Sallie Ackley was far from her first homoerotic attachment.  During her tours, she would often share a bed with women, many of whom admired her immensely.  In the nineteenth century many people slept together  for purely practical reasons, but notes like that from Fanny Garrison who wrote “I missed my soft pillow so many times, and have wished some how or other I might wake up and find a pair of some body’s dear arms around me” lead one to believe that many of these relationships were romantic.  Lilly Gillette sent an invitation saying “When you come you will sleep with me, & when you sleep with me we shall have a splendid talk.” [26]  Dickinson wrote Susan B. Anthony most affectionately: “I want to see you very much indeed, to hold your hand in mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you – I can’t have you?”  Anthony responded warmly.  “hope to snuggle you darling closer than ever.”  On another occasion: “I do wish I could take you in these strong arms of mine this very minute.” [27]  Anthony called the younger woman “darling Dicky-Dicky,” “My Chick-a-Dee,” and “My Dear Chicky Dick Darling.”  Laura Curtis Bullard wrote to her “I want you to love me.  I am sure I can’t help loving you” and suggested “a little escapade together.”  She hints at the transgressive character of their love, saying “are you ready to be flaunted in the face & eyes of people . . . you will be, as my dear girl . . .  I kiss you a thousand times.”  She anticipated their being together in New York City: “you shall share my bed as well as board.  I love to have my velvety peach of a woman beside me, & feel the touch of her soft hand.” [28]

     Such passages might be multiplied at length.  People did use flowery language for non-physical friendships, but in Dickinson’s case, there is every reason to think that her deepest emotional attachments were all with women and that these relationships were expressed physically.  One cannot say that Dickinson considered herself a Lesbian (indeed, the word homosexual was never used in English until 1892); indeed, the question may well never have entered her mind.

     The strongest evidence for her love life is surely her steady four-decades-long companionship with Sallie Ackley.  Dr. Seward who knew both of them clearly felt they were lovers.  Sallie sometimes signed her brief notes to Anna “Cupid” and included protestations of love.  The fact that the two stayed together is remarkable in itself; it is even stranger when one considers the dynamics of the household.  Everyone observed that Anna had “the best room in the house; her own personal maid; clothes purchased in New York City; special foods and soaps; and breakfast in bed.”  She was, in short, treated as if she were “visiting royalty” [29].  The opinion in town had always been that Sallie “controlled her husband” {30]; now Anna was in charge.  George’s sister Bertha thought that she exercised an “odd power” over Sallie, who always complied with Anna’s wishes.  As Dickinson had educated herself to an unusual degree and had had considerable experience in the wider world, unlike Sallie and George, there was an inequality between the couple and their housemate, “Miss D.,” as she was called by the Ackleys. 

     At any rate, the three of them lived quietly, first over George’s confectionary shop, for some years in Midtown Manhattan, and later in a handsome house that still stands at 34 Murray Avenue in Goshen.       The primary public activities of the second half of Dickinson’s life occurred in courtrooms.  Spirited, uncompromising, and a bit paranoid, she sought what she saw as justice in  a long series of legal moves.  She had in 1888 sued the Republican National Committee in a dispute over speaking fees, a case that lingered on for four years.  In 1893 she brought actions against eight individuals who had assisted in forcing her into the mental hospital in three different suits which she eventually won, though she was awarded only symbolic damages.  She also won when she sued the New York Press which had described her as insane, though cases against two other papers were unsuccessful [31]. 

     Her libel suits were aimed more at protecting her reputation than seeking compensation.  She set about writing an autobiography to ensure her legacy, but differed with prospective publishers over its content.  She wrote numerous letters to newspaper editors and to politicians complaining of her mistreatment as well as commenting on issues of the day.  In 1910 she agreed to an interview with journalist Ida Tarbell in an article about “Women Who Knew Lincoln” [32].  She maintained her interest in politics and she kept updating her scrapbooks, but she took no further public role.  Her suspicions about old friends, including the ever-loyal Ellen Miles, the genteel Robert Purvis, even at times Sallie herself, indicate the strains of the paranoia to which she was subject.

     When Sallie died in 1929, Dickinson was remembered standing in front of their house as the body was carried out, delivering her final oration, a eulogy to her deceased companion [33].   It is a poignant scene to imagine, the woman whose voice had once swayed the passions of thousands, now mourning the passing of what was surely the love of her life, a woman with whom she had managed to find a kind of  affection and domestic stability for the final decades of her life.  Though Dickinson was a difficult and demanding  person, even to her loved ones, though their ménage was unconventional, the household need not have been the less happy for that.  Dickinson lingered a few years longer, during which time George invited his two half-sisters to live with him, but they could not tolerate Anna’s domineering habits, and  departed after a short time.  In 1932 she was buried in Goshen’s Slate Hill Cemetery near the graves of George and Sallie Ackley.

    Anna Elizabeth Dickinson was a woman who had done a great deal to move America forward, toward equal rights for women and for non-white citizens, a woman of remarkable achievements, first of all in oratory, but in writing, acting, and mountain-climbing, as well.  Furthermore, she is exemplary as  a fundamentally gay woman leading her life in a society that failed to understand same-sex attractions.  In the end her life illustrates in addition the enduring charms of a settled home life and the rural appeal of a small county seat in the Hudson Valley.  A quiet life seems to have suited her more than the whirl of celebrity that had surrounded her in earlier years.  She had found her safe haven in Goshen.

     On Main Street there, among the shops of the small town, a bronze plaque commemorates “America’s Civil War Joan of Arc” Anna Elizabeth Dickinson [34].  The passer-by who knows her story may reflect on her high-flying rhetoric which played a historic role in moving America toward granting a full share in public life for non-whites, women, and immigrants, but, looking about the town’s peaceful streets, the visitor might reflect as well on the appeal of the bucolic domestic obscurity in which Dickinson found some peace in her later years. 

 

 

Gravestones of Dickinson and the Ackleys in Goshen, New York

 

 

1.  The building had been probably the most architecturally important structures in  Goshen.  Listed on the New York and National Registers of Historic Places as well as by the World Monuments Fund, the alterations to the structure attracted protests from as far away as Japan and Germany.

2.  In 1876 he shot and killed Wisner Murray, the mayor of the village who worked at the National Bank of Orange County where his father was president and had been having an affair with his wife.  Acquitted on the grounds of self-defense (Murray and his brother had been belaboring him with horsewhips), he decided to leave Goshen.  A story of the case including details of testimony, appears in the July 22, 1876 New York Times.

3.  He was the cousin of Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward.  He remodeled the building and added a wing.   Dr. Seward’s son F. W. Seward, Jr. led the institution until it closed in 1959. 

4.  The Liberator, February 22, 1856.  Upon her death many of Dickinson’s papers including letters, the texts of her unpublished plays, and pages from her scrapbooks had been sent by the Orange County probate judge to the Library of Congress where they are now available online.

5.  J. Matthew Gallman, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (2006), 16.  This carefully done, well-documented biography is the principal accessible source on Dickinson’s life.  Giraud Chester’s Embattled Maiden (1951) who was the first to make good use of the documents in the Library of Congress is also for the most part a solid factual account of her life. 

6.  Addresses of the Hon. W. D. Kelley, Miss Anna E. Dickinson, and Mr. Frederick Douglass : at a mass meeting, held at National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, for the promotion of colored enlistments. (1861)

7.  Donald M. Scott, “The Popular Lecture and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth-Century America,” The Journal of American History Vol. 66, No. 4 (Mar., 1980), pp. 791-809.

8.  Gallman, p. 55.

9.  Chester, p. 85.

10.  Chester, p. 86.

11.  Letter to San Francisco Alta California, April 5, 1867.

12.  For the average income see https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1746.  Foe Dickinson’s income, see Chester, p. 109.

13.  The Atlantic, January 1869.

14.  What Answer, 190.

15.  What Answer, 263.

16.  What Answer, 195.

17.  Chester, 107, 169.  Her brother wrote that he hoped the reports of her involvement in theater were “a lie,” adding “I hope thee is growing more and more a child of God,” and she initially denied the intention to go on stage. 

18.  The play about Anne Boleyn was titled Crown of Thorns.  Her other plays were Aurelian or Rome’s Restorer, Laura, The Test of Honor, and An American Girl.

19.  She was the second to climb Pike's Peak and the third atop Longs Peak.  The Boulder County News reported that she did her mountaineering shamelessly wearing men’s trousers.  See Robertson, Janet, The magnificent mountain women : adventures in the Colorado Rockies. 

20.  In James Parton’s Eminent women of the age : being narratives of the lives and deeds of the most prominent women of the present generation (1868), 479.

21.  Kate Dickinson Sweetser, Ten American Girls from History (1917).

22.  Giraud Chester, Embattled Maiden, 29.

23.  Letter to Garrison March 16, 1862.

24.  Gallman, p. 180.

25.  New York Times April 13, 1891.  “Frederick W. Seward, the physician that declares Anna Dickinson Is sane.”  The bulk of the story lists Seward’s qualifications.

26. Gallman, p. 46-7.

27.  Gallman, p. 109.

28.  Gallman, p. 111-112.

29.  Gallman, p. 206. Visiting royalty

30.  Gallman, p. 207.

31.  Gallman, p. 195-196.

32.  Chester, p. 296n. Ida M. Tarbell, “The American Woman,” American Magazine, LXIX, April, 1910, pp. 801-14. ;

33. Chester, p. 292.

34.  Gallman (213) includes a photograph of the plaque and notes that the information it contains has several errors, saying that she lived in Goshen for forty-one years whereas she and the Ackleys were in New York City for nineteen of those years.  The plaque says she “was invited by President Lincoln to address Congress,” though she was in fact invited by Republican congressmen.  Finally, the plaque describes the Fifteenth Amendment as “prohibiting the disenfranchisement of any person based on  race, sex, color, or previous servitude”  though, of course, women did not get the vote for another fifty years.