An abolitionist and a champion of free love and women's rights
would seem decidedly out of place in nineteenth-century Texas, but
such a man was Stephen Pearl Andrews (1812-1886), American
reformer, civil rights proponent, pioneer in sociology, advocate of
reformed spelling, lawyer, and eccentric philosopher. Since his
life mirrored and often anticipated the various reform movements
spawned not only in Texas but in the United States in the
nineteenth century, this first biography of him sharply reflects
and elucidates his times. The extremely important role Andrews
played in the abolition movement in this country has not heretofore
been accorded him. After having witnessed slavery in Louisiana
during the 1830s, Andrews came to Texas and began his career as an
abolitionist with an audacious attempt to free the slaves there.
His singular career, however, comprised many more activities than
abolitionism, and most have long been forgotten by historians. He
introduced Pitman shorthand into the United States as a means of
teaching the uneducated to read; his role in the community of
Modern Times, Long Island, was as important as that of Josiah
Warren, the "first American anarchist," although Andrews's
participation in this communal venture, along with the significance
of Modern Times itself, has been underestimated. Other causes which
Andrews supported included free love and the rights of women,
dramatized by his journalistic debate with Horace Greeley and Henry
James, Sr., and by his endorsement of Victoria Woodhull as the
first woman candidate for the Presidency of the United States.
These interests, together with his consequent involvement in the
Beecher-Tilton Scandal, provide insight into some of the more
colorful aspects of nineteenth-century American reform movements.
Andrews's attacks upon whatever infringed on individual freedom
brought him into diverse arenas-economic, sociological, and
philosophical. The philosophical system he developed included among
its tenets the sovereignty of the individual, a science of society,
a universal language (his Alwato long preceded Esperanto), the
unity of the sciences, and a "Pantarchal United States of the
World." His philosophy has never before been epitomized nor have
its applications to later thought been considered. "I have made it
the business of my life to study social laws," Andrews wrote. "I
see now a new age beginning to appear." This biography of the
dynamic reformer examines those social laws and that
still-unembodied new age. It reanimates a heretofore neglected
American reformer and casts new light upon previously unexplored
bypaths of nineteenth-century American social history. The
biography is fully documented, based in part upon a corpus of
unpublished material in the State Historical Society of Wisconsin.
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