Jane Swisshelm - Activism and Newspaper Writing

Activism and Newspaper Writing

During this time, Jane Swisshelm began writing articles against capital punishment, and stories, poems, and articles for an anti-slavery newspaper, the Spirit of Liberty, and others in Pittsburgh. When the Spirit of Liberty went out of business, Swisshelm founded the newspaper Saturday Visitor in 1848. It eventually reached a national circulation of 6,000, and in 1856 was merged with the Pittsburgh Journal. She wrote many editorials advocating women's property rights.

In 1857, she divorced her husband and moved west to St. Cloud, Minnesota, where she controlled a string of newspapers. She promoted abolition and women's rights by writing and lecturing. The city was a developing center of trade, located on the Mississippi in the central part of the eastern border of the state.

Writing in The Saint Cloud Visitor, Swisshelm waged a private war against Sylvanus Lowry, a Southern slaveholder and Indian trader who had settled in the area in 1847. Politically influential, he had been elected to the Territorial Council, and as the city's first mayor in 1856. By then he reigned as Saint Cloud's Democratic political boss. Swisshelm was especially infuriated that Lowry owned slaves, as Minnesota was a free state.

But, in 1857 the United States Supreme Court's ruled in the Dred Scott case that slaves had no standing as citizens to file freedom suits, and that the Missouri Compromise was unconstitutional, so the state's prohibition against slavery could not be enforced. More Southerners migrated to St. Cloud and Minnesota with slaves. After the outbreak of the Civil War, most Southerners returned to the South, taking their slaves with them.

Writing in The Visitor, Swisshelm accused Lowry of swindling the local Winnebago as a trader, ordering vigilante attacks on suspected land claim jumpers, and abusing his slaves. He started a rival paper, The Union, later called the St. Cloud Times, to offset her influence.

After one of her fiery editorials, Lowry formed a "Committee of Vigilance," broke into the newspaper's offices, smashed the printing press, and threw the pieces into the nearby Mississippi River. Swisshelm soon raised money for another press and raised her attacks to a fever pitch. Formerly being groomed for the state post of Lieutenant Governor, Lowry saw his influence over Saint Cloud politics lessened but was elected to the state senate in 1862. He died young in 1865 in St. Cloud.

When Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the presidency, Swisshelm spoke and wrote in his behalf. When the American Civil War began and nurses were wanted at the front, she was one of the first to respond. After the Battle of the Wilderness, she had charge of 182 badly wounded men at Fredericksburg for five days, without surgeon or assistant, and saved them all.

In 1862, when a Sioux Indian uprising in Minnesota resulted in the deaths of hundreds of white settlers, Swisshelm was among those demanding the federal government punish the Indians. She toured major cities to raise public opinion about this issue end and, while in Washington, D.C., met with Edwin M. Stanton, a friend from Pittsburgh and then Secretary of War. He offered her a clerkship in the government. She sold her Minnesota paper and continued to work as an army nurse during the Civil War in the Washington area until her job became available. She became a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln.

After the war, Swisshelm founded her final newspaper, the Reconstructionist. Her attacks on President Andrew Johnson led to her losing the paper and her government job. In 1872, she attended the Prohibition Party convention as a delegate.

As well as being a prolific journalist, Swisshelm published Letters to Country Girls (New York, 1853), and an autobiography entitled Half of a Century (1881).

Swisshelm died in 1884 at her Swissvale home and is buried in Allegheny Cemetery. The city of Pittsburgh neighborhood of Swisshelm Park, adjacent to Swissvale, is named in her honor.