This book has been a joy to research and write in no small measure because of the people who also believe that Lockwood deserves a biography. Wendy Chmielewski guided me through Lockwood’s papers as well as those of the Universal Peace Union at the Swarthmore College Peace Collection, and has become a friend. Robert Ellis has patiently steered me through the extraordinary collections housed at the National Archives and has demonstrated an unflagging interest in Lockwood’s life. The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the National Museum of American History, John Jay College, and the PSC-CUNY Research program generously provided travel and fellowship support without which this project would not have been possible. I am enormously grateful for the help provided by the library staff of the Wilson Center as well as student interns Bill Elliot, Sara Farrokhzadian, Lika Miyake, Sarah Rackoff, Gemma Torcivia, Julie Watson, and Stefanie Yow. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Russell Menyhart who, while a law student, unraveled many of the mysteries of Lockwood’s work on the Cherokee Nation case. Andrea Horowitz, Amy Leonard, and Jane Fuller also aided the project as research assistants.
I have been privileged to give numerous talks about Lockwood and am particularly grateful for the invitations received from John Jay College, Wayne State University, the New York Women Writing Women’s Lives Seminar, and the Wilson Center. Many people have discussed the project with me or read parts of the manuscript. The advice of Barbara Allen Babcock, Cecelia Cancellaro, Wendy Chmielewski, John Ferren, Elisabeth Gitter, Ann D. Gordon, Sarah Barringer Gordon, Miriam Levin, Ralph Norgren, Steve Tullberg, and Mel Urofsky, along with anonymous reviewers, has strengthened this biography in innumerable ways. Philippa Strum provided a home away from home during my many research trips to Washington, D.C., and read the entire manuscript. My debt to her is very large. I am grateful to New York University Press for publishing this biography and to Deborah Gershenowitz, my editor, for helping me to shape Lockwood’s story. My thanks go also to copy editor Emily Wright and managing editor Despina P. Gimbel, who have been loving friends of this manuscript.
Friends and family have encouraged me in this project and listened with goodwill to my endless talk of Belva. I thank Norma Wollenberg, Jacob Marini, Blanche Wiesen Cook, Sheila and Michael Cole, Deborah Klimburg-Salter, Tiana Leonard and John Kuldau, Serena and Robin Nanda, Jayne and Ted Merkel, Alice and Tim Stroup, Stephanie Cooper and Howard Weinberg, Simon Thornton and Marie-Dominique Even, Ruth O’Brien, Janet Pickering, Anneka Norgren and Luis Garzon, Tiana Norgren and Chris Rohner, and the three granddaughters, Elena, Ilomai, and Isabel, born during this book’s gestation. I wish for these granddaughters lives as interesting and accomplished as that of Mrs. Lockwood, Washington’s lady lawyer.
1
Early a Widow
I ask no favors for my sex.…All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us stand upright on that ground which God designed for us to occupy.
Sarah Grimké, women’s rights advocate, 1837
Belva’s mother, Hannah, was a Greene. Family histories describe the Greenes as descended from Magna Carta barons. An early forefather, John, is said to have sailed from England in the 1630s to the British West Indies, found it “Godless,” and shipped out for the Massachusetts Bay colony.1 He and others from whom Hannah was descended were also said to be followers of the religious dissidents Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.
Sometime after the War of Independence, Belva’s branch of the Greene family began a journey westward. A son of this clan, William, took his wife and children as far as Washington County, New York. Hannah, the youngest of six children, was born there in 1812. In 1814, wanting better farmland, William joined family members in another trek to the far western corner of New York State, where several of the men had purchased property from the Holland Land Company.
Hannah’s family settled in a frontier region some twenty-odd miles east of Niagara Falls. This had long been the land of the Iroquois Nation (Seneca), but in 1669 the French explorer, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, had established a post on what was then called the Niagara Frontier, and was followed by French traders and missionaries. In 1759 English forces expanded into the area following their capture of Fort Niagara. Later yet, warfare and politics placed the region in the hands of the United States, which sold much of it to financier Robert Morris. Seeking quick profits, he arranged the sale of a million and a half acres of western New York to Dutch bankers who capitalized the Holland Land Company, one of the many speculative investment groups that carved up the late-eighteenth-century frontier. Using newspaper ads, handbills, and tavern talk, company agents put out the word that good land was available on liberal terms of credit. Special incentives were established to encourage extended families, or networks of friends, to make the move together.2 Buoyed by dreams, Hannah Greene’s family became a client of the Holland Land Company, and after that, farmers and manufacturers of potash.3
Belva’s father, Lewis J. Bennett, was also born in Washington County, New York. His people were Scots. Late in life Belva proudly wrote to a niece that Lewis’s ancestor Nathan High fought in the Revolution, “so we have a part in the foundation of the Govt.”4 Lewis was five years older than Hannah. It is possible that the Greenes and Bennetts moved west to Niagara County at the same time, but Bennett lore was scarce; Belva always knew more about her mother’s people.
The Greenes claimed their lands from the Holland Company and started the hard work of clearing acreage. They sowed wheat, corn, and barley. Dairy farms were started, and then fruit orchards. Next came the gristmills and sawmills, powered by the plentiful local stream water. Rising from this industry were clusters of small farming communities. Royalton, in the southeastern corner of Niagara County, was one such village. The first town meeting was called within a few years of the Greenes’—now spelled “Green” by some—arrival. Hannah’s father, a respected Baptist elder, was elected to the post of inspector while Solomon Richardson, husband of Hannah’s older sister, Ruth, took up duties as constable.5 Royalton looked to its civic organization none too soon. A rural community needed law and order, roads and schools, and a sensible plan for dealing with the blessings, and problems, of the Erie Canal.
In 1814, when the Greens emigrated west, it took weeks to cross New York State. To obtain goods from the port city of New York, or to sell farm produce, or timber, from the center of the state required long, arduous, and expensive journeys across bad roads, and then ship passage on the Hudson River. Market expansion and westward movement cried out for a quick and inexpensive means of connecting the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes. Spurred on by future governor DeWitt Clinton, the New York State legislature agreed to support the building of an “artificial river.”6
Begun in 1817, and completed in 1825, the Erie Canal transformed the landscape and economy of northern New York. Hundreds of laborers and artisans flooded the route of the planned waterway, and remained after the canal was completed. They brought new cultures and a stronger cash economy. Water-powered manufacturing spread from the path of the canal, as did villages and towns servicing the needs of merchants and travelers. At Lockport a series of locks had been built to breach the Niagara escarpment, permitting the canal to continue west to Buffalo. When the canal opened in 1825, Lockport’s population equaled that of Rochester and Buffalo. It was a bustling hub whose cosmopolitan resources nourished the residents of surrounding villages like Royalton.
Hannah Green married Lewis