THERE IS DEATH IN THE POT - The University of Texas at Arlington

Domesticity and Free Produce: The “Ladies’ Repository”
In addition to Elias Hicks, Chandler was influenced by Quaker editor Benjamin
Lundy. As the editor of the Genius of Universal Emancipation, Lundy was probably the
most important abolitionist in the United States in the 1820s. Lundy supported gradual
emancipation and limited colonization schemes in Haiti and Texas though he did not
support the American Colonization Society. Lundy’s Genius was an important source of
information about women’s anti-slavery activism in this period, most notably by
reprinting Heyrick’s Immediate Not Gradual Abolition shortly after its British
publication. 38 He published other British and American female writers and printed
information about British women’s anti-slavery societies, as well as guidelines for
organizing and running such associations. In September 1829, in keeping with this
tradition of supporting women’s activism, Lundy established the “Ladies’ Repository” as
a regular feature in the Genius and offered editorship of the column to Chandler, who had
published numerous works in the paper between 1826 and 1829. Along with Chandler,
Lundy hired another young editor, William Lloyd Garrison, to help with the Genius. 39
The association with Garrison and Lundy influenced Chandler’s intellectual
development. She used the forum of the “Ladies’ Repository” to urge a peaceful,
domestic revolution to abolish slavery.
38 Salerno, Sister Societies, 21. Salerno argues that without Lundy’s “intervention,” Heyrick’s
“arguments might have had little direct impact on American women.”
39
Robert Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 142.
108