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John Neal
Photo: Unknown photographer, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons9

John Neal

American writer and activist (1793–1876)

John Neal (August 25, 1793 – June 20, 1876) was an American writer, critic, editor, lecturer, and activist. Considered both eccentric and influential, he delivered speeches and published essays, novels, poems, and short stories between the 1810s and 1870s in the United States and Great Britain, championing American literary nationalism and regionalism in their earliest stages.2

From Wikipedia’s article on John Neal (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Born Aug 25, 1793, died Jun 20, 1876.1

About

Neal advanced the development of American art, fought for women's rights, advocated the end of slavery and racial prejudice, and helped establish the American gymnastics movement.

The first American author to use natural diction and a pioneer of colloquialism, Neal was the first to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch in a US work of fiction. He attained his greatest literary achievements between 1817 and 1835, during which time he was America's first daily newspaper columnist, the first American published in British literary journals, author of the first history of American literature, America's first art critic, a short story pioneer, a children's literature pioneer, and a forerunner of the American Renaissance. As one of the first men to advocate women's rights in the US and the first American lecturer on the issue, for over fifty years he supported female writers and organizers, affirmed intellectual equality between men and women, fought coverture laws against women's economic rights, and demanded suffrage, equal pay, and better education for women. He was the first American to establish a public gymnasium in the US and championed athletics to regulate violent tendencies with which he himself had struggled throughout his life.

A largely self-educated man who attended no schools after the age of twelve, Neal was a child laborer who left self-employment in dry goods at twenty-two to pursue dual careers in law and literature. By middle age, Neal had attained comfortable wealth and community standing in his native Portland, Maine, through varied business investments, arts patronage, and civic leadership.

Neal is considered an author without a masterpiece, though his short stories are his highest literary achievements and ranked with the best of his age. Rachel Dyer is considered his best novel, "Otter-Bag, the Oneida Chief" and "David Whicher" his best tales, and The Yankee his most influential periodical. His "Rights of Women" speech (1843) at the peak of his influence as a feminist had a considerable impact on the future of the movement.

From Wikipedia’s article on John Neal, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.2

Companies

Early life and education

Childhood and early employment

John Neal and his twin sister Rachel were born in the town of Portland in the Massachusetts District of Maine on August 25, 1793, the only children of John and Rachel Hall Neal. The senior John Neal, a school teacher, died a month later. Neal's mother, described by former pupil Elizabeth Oakes Smith as a woman of "clear intellect, and no little self-reliance and independence of will", made up the lost family income by establishing her own school and renting rooms in her home to boarders. She also received assistance from the siblings' unmarried uncle, James Neal, and others in their Quaker community. Neal grew up in "genteel poverty", attending his mother's school, a Quaker boarding school, and the public school in Portland.

Neal claimed his lifelong struggle with a short temper and violent tendencies originated in the public school, at which he was bullied and physically abused by classmates and the schoolmaster. To reduce his mother's financial burden, Neal left school and home at the age of twelve for full-time employment.

As an adolescent haberdasher and dry goods salesman in Portland and Portsmouth, Neal learned dishonest business practices like passing off counterfeit money and misrepresenting merchandise quality and quantity. Laid off multiple times due to business failures resulting from the 1806 Non-importation Act against British imports, Neal traveled through Maine as an itinerant penmanship instructor, watercolor teacher, and miniature portrait artist. At twenty years of age in 1814, he answered an ad for employment with a dry goods shop in Boston and moved to the larger city.

In Boston, Neal established a partnership with John Pierpont and Pierpont's brother in-law, whereby they exploited supply chain constrictions caused by the War of 1812 to make quick profits smuggling contraband British dry goods between Boston, New York City, and Baltimore. They established stores in Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston before the recession following the war upended the firm and left Pierpont and Neal bankrupt in Baltimore in 1816. Though the "Pierpont, Lord, and Neal" wholesale/retail chain proved to be short-lived, Neal's relationship with Pierpont grew into the closest and longest-lived friendship of his life.

According to scholars Edward Watts and David J. Carlson, Neal's experience in business riding out the multiple booms and busts that eventually left him bankrupt at age twenty-two "cemented his sense of the central importance of relying on his own personal resources and talents".

From Wikipedia’s article on John Neal (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Career

Occupation: novelist, writer, magazine writer, literary critic, editor, journalist, poet, art historian.4

Building a career in Baltimore

Neal's time in Baltimore between his business failure in 1816 and his departure for London in 1823 was the busiest period of his life as he juggled overlapping careers in editorship, journalism, poetry, novels, law study, and later, law practice. During this period he taught himself to read and write in eleven languages, published seven books, read law for four years, completed an independent course of law study in eighteen months that was designed to be completed in seven-to-eight years, earned admission to the bar in a community known for rigorous requirements, and contributed prodigiously to newspapers and literary magazines, two of which he edited at different points.

Two months after Neal's bankruptcy trial, he submitted his first contribution to The Portico and quickly became the magazine's second-most prolific contributor of poems, essays, and literary criticism, though he was never paid. Two years later he took over as editor for what ended up being the last issue. The magazine was closely associated with the Delphian Club, which he founded in 1816 with Dr. Tobias Watkins, John Pierpont, and four other men. Neal felt indebted to this "high-minded, generous, unselfish" association of "intellectual and companionable" people for many of the happy memories and employment connections he enjoyed in Baltimore. While writing his earliest poetry, novels, and essays he was studying law as an unpaid apprentice in the office of William H. Winder, a fellow Delphian.

Neal's business failure had left him without enough "money to take a letter from the post-office", so Neal "cast about for something better to do... and, after considering the matter for ten minutes or so, determined to try my hand at a novel." When he wrote his first book, fewer than seventy novels had been published by "not more than half a dozen [American] authors; and of these, only Washington Irving had received more than enough to pay for the salt in his porridge." Neal was nevertheless inspired by Pierpont's financial success with his poem The Airs of Palestine (1816) and encouraged by the reception of his initial submissions to The Portico. He resolved that "there was nothing left for me but authorship, or starvation, if I persisted in my plan of studying law".

Composing his first and only bound volume of poetry was Neal's nighttime distraction from laboring sixteen hours a day, seven days a week, for more than four months to produce an index for six years of weekly publications of Hezekiah Niles's Weekly Register magazine, which Niles admitted was "the most laborious work of the kind that ever appeared in any country".

In 1819, he published a play and took his first paying job as a newspaper editor, becoming the country's first daily columnist. The same year he wrote three-quarters of History of the American Revolution, otherwise credited to Paul Allen. Neal's substantial literary output earned him the moniker "Jehu O'Cataract" from his Delphian Club associates. By these means he was able to pay his expenses while completing his apprenticeship and independently studying law. He was admitted to the bar and started practicing law in Baltimore in 1820.

Neal's final years in Baltimore were his most productive as a novelist. He published one novel in 1822 and three more the following year, eventually rising to the status of James Fenimore Cooper's chief rival for recognition as America's leading novelist. In this turbulent period he quit the Delphian Club on bad terms and accepted excommunication from the Society of Friends after his participation in a street brawl. In reaction to insults against prominent lawyer William Pinkney published in Randolph just after Pinkney died, his son Edward Coote Pinkney challenged Neal to a duel. Having established himself six years earlier as an outspoken opponent of dueling, Neal refused and the two engaged in a battle of printed words in the fall of that year. Neal became "weary of the law—weary as death", feeling that he spent those years in "open war, with the whole tribe of lawyers in America". "Ironically,... at precisely the moment when [Neal] was endeavoring to establish himself as the American writer, Neal was also alienating friends, critics, and the general public at an alarming rate."

By late 1823, Neal was ready to relocate away from Baltimore. According to him, the catalyst to move to London was a dinner party with an English friend who quoted Sydney Smith's 1820 then-notorious remark, "in the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?". Whether it had more to do with Smith or Pinkney, Neal took less than a month after that dinner date to settle his affairs in Baltimore and secure passage on a ship bound for the UK on December 15, 1823.

From Wikipedia’s article on John Neal (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Personal life

  • BornAug 25, 1793, Portland5
  • DiedJun 20, 1876, Portland6
  • CitizenshipUnited States7

Family and civic leadership

In 1828, Neal married his second cousin Eleanor Hall and together they had five children between 1829 and 1847. The couple raised their children in the house he built on Portland's prestigious State Street in 1836. Also in 1836 he received an honorary master's degree from Bowdoin College, the same institution at which Neal made a living as a self-employed teenage penmanship instructor and that later educated the more economically privileged Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

After the 1830s, Neal became less active in literary circles and increasingly occupied with business, activism, and local arts and civic projects, particularly after receiving inheritances from two paternal uncles that dramatically reduced his need to rely on writing as a source of income. James Neal died in 1832 and Stephen Neal in 1836, but the second inheritance was held up until 1858 in a legal battle involving Stephen's daughter, suffragist Lydia Neal Dennett. In 1845 he became the Mutual Benefit Life Insurance Company's first agent in Maine, earning enough in commissions that he decided to retire from the lecture circuit, law practice, and most writing projects. Neal began developing and managing local real estate, operating multiple granite quarries, developing railroad connections to Portland, and investing in land speculation in Cairo, Illinois. He led the movement to incorporate Portland as a city and build the community's first parks and sidewalks. He became interested in architecture, interior design, and furniture design, developing pioneering, simple, and functional solutions that influenced other designers outside his local area.

Many of his literary contemporaries interpreted Neal's change in focus as a disappearance. Hawthorne wrote in 1845 of "that wild fellow, John Neal", who "surely has long been dead, else he never could keep himself so quiet." James Russell Lowell in 1848 claimed he had "wasted in Maine the sinews and cords of his pugilist brain". Friend and fellow Portland native Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described Neal in 1860 as "a good deal tempered down but fire enough still".

After years of vaguely affiliating with Unitarianism and universalism, Neal converted to Congregationalism in 1851. Through deepened religiosity he found new moral arguments for women's rights, potential release from his violent tendencies, and inspiration for seven religious essays. Neal collected these "exhortations" in One Word More (1854), which "rambles passionately for two hundred pages and closes with breathless metaphor" in an effort to convert "the reasoning and thoughtful among believers".

At the urging of Longfellow and other friends, John Neal returned to novel writing late in life, publishing True Womanhood in 1859. To fill a gap in his income between 1863 and 1866 he wrote three dime novels. In 1869 he published his "most readable book, and certainly one of the most entertaining autobiographies to come out of nineteenth-century America". Reflecting on his life this way inspired Neal to amplify his activism and assume regional leadership roles in the women's suffrage movement. His last two books are a collection of pieces for and about children titled Great Mysteries and Little Plagues (1870), and a guidebook for his hometown titled Portland Illustrated (1874).

By 1870, in his old age, he had amassed a comfortable fortune, valued at $80,000. His last appearance in the public eye was likely an 1875 syndicated article from the Portland Advertiser about an eighty-one year-old Neal physically overpowering a man in his early twenties who was smoking on a non-smoking streetcar. John Neal died on June 20, 1876, and was buried in the Neal family plot in Portland's Western Cemetery.

From Wikipedia’s article on John Neal (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Politics

Using magazine and newspaper articles, short stories, novels, lectures, political organizing, and personal relationships, Neal throughout his adult life addressed issues including capital punishment, dueling, feminism, insolvency law, lotteries, militia tax, rights of American Indians, rights of free Black Americans, slavery, social hierarchy, temperance, and women's rights. Of these, "women's rights were the cause for which he fought longer and more consistently than for any other." Much of Neal's writing and lecturing on these topics demonstrated "a basic distrust of institutions and a continuing plea for self-examination and self-reliance".

Additionally, Neal was heavily involved in William Henry Harrison's 1840 presidential campaign, which almost resulted in his appointment as a district attorney. He also promoted the pseudoscience movements animal magnetism, clairvoyance, phrenology, and spiritualism.

Bankruptcy law

Neal became active in bankruptcy law reform shortly after his own bankruptcy in 1816. As a young Baltimore lawyer he took an unpopular stance against Chief Justice Marshall's opinion in Sturges v. Crowninshield (1819) and played a prominent role in the movement for a national bankruptcy law. He continued by attacking the policy of imprisonment for debt in his Baltimore novels and in American and British newspapers later in the 1820s.

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Capital punishment

Neal began his campaign against public executions after witnessing one in Baltimore. He attacked capital punishment by writing in newspapers, magazines, novels, and debates, achieving national influence in the US and reaching a more limited audience in the UK. Late in life he related still "having no belief in the wisdom of strangulation, for men, women, and children, however they might seem to deserve it, and being fully persuaded that the worst men have most need of repentance, and that they who are unfit to live, are still more unfit to die."

Dueling

In his first novel (1817), Neal portrayed dueling as a holdover from an aristocratic era that is immoral, pointless, antidemocratic, and anti-American, charging "that here, in America, a gentleman may cut another's throat, or blow out his brains with complete impunity." His "Essay on Duelling" that year attacked the institution as a gendered performance, or "the unqualified evidence of manhood", believing that "in his closet every man wishes duelling abolished, and if every man who wishes it sincerely in private would but speak as firmly in publick [sic], it would be abolished."

Feminism and women's rights

Neal was America's first women's rights lecturer and one of the first men to advocate for women's rights and feminist causes in the US. At least as early as 1817 and late as 1873, he used journalism, fiction, lectures, political organizing, and personal relationships to advance feminist issues in the US and UK, reaching the height of his influence in this field around 1843. Neal supported female writers and organizers, affirmed intellectual equality between men and women, fought coverture laws against women's economic rights, and demanded suffrage, equal pay, and better education for women.

Neal's early focus on women's education was primarily influenced by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman as well as works by Catharine Macaulay and Judith Sargent Murray. His early feminist essays from the 1820s fill an intellectual gap between eighteenth-century feminists and their pre-Seneca Falls Convention successors Sarah Moore Grimké, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Margaret Fuller. As a male writer insulated from many forms of attack leveled against earlier female feminist thinkers, Neal's advocacy was crucial to bringing the field back into published discourse in the US and UK after a lull at the turn of the century.

From the "feminist undertones" in his first novel (1817) through the illustrations of "patriarchal cruelty" in Errata (1823) and "Idiosyncrasies" (1843) to the vindication of independent, unmarried women in True Womanhood (1859), Neal broke with writers of his generation by consciously and consistently including women and women's issues throughout his career as a writer of fiction. "Idiosyncrasies" explored the male feminist perspective through the character Lee who said, "we men... imprison the soul of woman, and set a seal upon her faculties—... allowing her no share whatever in... governing ourselves: Having found the cause,... and believing in my heart... that where the evil was, there the remedy must be sought for, I went to work".

"Men and Women" (1824), his first feminist essay, recalls the eighteenth-century priority of female education: "Wait until women are educated like men—treated like men—and permitted to talk freely, without being put to shame, because they are women". At that future time, he posited that the greatest of male writers "will be equalled by women". Going further than his predecessors on intellectual equality, he "maintain[ed] that women are not inferior to men, but only unlike men, in their intellectual properties" and "would have women treated like men, of common sense." The article more fully explores the concept he raised in "Essay on Duelling" (1817), in which when he urged women to use "the reason that Heaven has apportioned so equally between her, and her brother" to rid the world of duels.

Over the 1820s, Neal shifted his focus from educational and intellectual ideas to political and economic issues like coverture and suffrage. In an 1845 letter to activist Margaret Fuller, he said

I tell you there is no hope for woman, till she has a hand in making the law—no chance for her till her vote is worth as much as a mans [sic] vote. When it is—woman will not be fobbed off with a six-pence a day for the very work a man would get a dollar for... All you and others are doing to elevate woman, is only fitted to make her feel more sensibly the long abuse of her own understanding, when she comes to her senses. You might as well educate slaves—and still keep them in bondage.

Neal delivered America's first women's rights lecture as an Independence Day address in Portland, Maine in 1832. He declared that under coverture and without suffrage, women were victims of the same crime of taxation without representation that caused the Revolutionary War. He reached the peak of his influence on feminist issues at the time of his "Rights of Women" speech (1843) before a crowd of 3,000 people in New York City. He attacked the concept of virtual representation in government that suffrage opponents argued women could enjoy through men: "Just reverse the condition of the two sexes: give to Women all the power now enjoyed by Men... What a clamour there would be then, about equal rights, about a privileged class, about being taxed without their own consent, and virtual representation, and all that!"

The "Rights of Women" speech was widely covered, albeit dismissed, by the press, and Neal printed it later that year in the pages of Brother Jonathan magazine, of which he was editor. He used that magazine in 1843 to publish his own essays calling for equal pay and better workplace conditions for women, and to host a printed debate of correspondence on the merits of women's suffrage between himself and Eliza W. Farnham. Looking back more than forty years later, the second volume of the History of Woman Suffrage (1887) remembered that the lecture "roused considerable discussion..., was extensively copied, and... had a wide, silent influence, preparing the way for action. It was a scathing satire, and men felt the rebuke."

For twenty years following his work with Brother Jonathan magazine, Neal wrote about women almost exclusively in fiction but only occasionally about feminist issues in periodicals. He mused about crossdressing and the performative nature of gender in "Masquerading" (1864), "one of the most interesting essays of his career". He followed this with two women's rights essays for the American Phrenological Journal (1867), the women's rights chapter of his autobiography (1869), and twelve articles in The Revolution (1868–1870).

Neal became prominently involved as an organizer in the women's suffrage movement following the Civil War, finding influence in local, regional, and national organizations. When the American Equal Rights Association split in 1869 over the Fifteenth Amendment, Neal regretted the division of efforts, but lent his support to the subsequent National Woman Suffrage Association because of its insistence upon immediate suffrage for all women. He cofounded the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, organized Portland's first public meeting on women's suffrage in 1870, and cofounded Maine's first statewide Woman Suffrage Association in 1873.

Lotteries

Neal made his earliest arguments against lotteries in Baltimore newspapers as a law apprentice, then in Logan (1822). His argument that the law should treat lotteries the same as other forms of gambling found influence across the US and in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. In The Yankee, he "opened fire upon all [lottery] offices,... both at the bar, and in our legislative halls, and never rested, until the system was up-rooted... throughout our whole country". Lotteries fell into disfavor in the US in the 1830s.

Militia tax

In his "United States" essay (1826), Neal made his first published argument against the poll tax that financed the US militia system. He said that both "the poor and the rich are taxed... under the militia law" which was designed "to defend property of the rich man. The rich, of course, do not appear in the field. The poor do. The latter cannot afford to keep away; the former can." He proposed replacing the poll tax with a property tax to pay men serving in militias, thereby making the system more equitable.

Rights of American Indians

Neal published essays, novels, and short stories to advocate the rights of American Indians. At a time when "native American" was a nativist term referring to Anglo-Americans, Neal declared in his first novel (1817) that "the Indian is the only native American." In "A Summary View of America" (1824), Neal argued that American Indians "have never been the aggressors" in conflicts with European-Americans and that "no people, ancient or modern... have been so deplorably oppressed, belied, and wronged, in every possible way." He called for recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, decrying that "the law of nations has never been regarded, in dealing with them:... their ambassadors have been seized, imprisoned, and butchered,... [and] war has never been declared against them". Outlining the process by which the US government seized Indigenous land, Neal said,

The frontier people pick a quarrel with the Indians... No declaration of war follows; no ceremony; but, forth goes General [Andrew] Jackson—or general somebody else; wasting and firing the whole country. A truce follows: a ceding of the conquered country—for the protection of the whites.

Neal used novels like Logan (1822) to challenge racial boundaries between White and Indigenous Americans. Reacting to the Indian Removal Act (1830) and popular literature that supported it, Neal published the short story "David Whicher" (1832) to explore peaceful multiethnic coexistence in the US. The tale also "contested how popular literature employed colonial violence to provide a model of and justification for its continuation in the name of national expansion".

Rights of Black Americans

Neal protested disfranchisement of free Black Americans by revealing how "free-born Americans,... because of their colour," not just in the slave states, "but in the states where slavery is regarded with horror... are suffered even to vote,... being either excluded by law... or excluded, by fear". Wary of "practical racism" among White Northerners, Neal drew attention to members of his gymnasium who in 1828 "voted that... no colored man... can be permitted to exercise with white citizens of our free and equal-community. Hurra for New-England! We have no prejudices here—None but wholesome prejudices, at any rate." Disappointed they would not admit the Black men he sponsored for membership, Neal ended his involvement with the gym shortly thereafter. In fiction, Neal explored the differences between Northern and Southern prejudices against Black Americans, particularly in The Down-Easters (1833). He nevertheless believed in phrenological inferiority, explaining that "while we disregard colour, we pay great attention to form, in our estimation of capacity. The negro head is very bad." This led him to a proto-eugenicist argument for legalizing interracial marriage so that future generations of "the negroes of America would no longer be a separate, inferior class, without political power, without privilege, and without a share in the great commonwealth".

Slavery

Neal was "resolutely and heartily opposed to slavery", interpreting the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to mean that "the slaves in America were created free... Ergo—They may abolish the government, which, by keeping them as they are kept, has 'violated its trust.'" In reaction to widespread rape of enslaved women, he reported that "white fathers... are guilty of selling their own flesh and blood to bondage... In the Southern States of America, where coloured women are sought after, purchased, and cohabited with by white men... because the profit of the master is in direct proportion to the fruitfulness of the slave."

Believing that "sudden emancipation of the whole [enslaved population], at once, is impossible" and that it would perpetuate Black Americans' status as "a much-to-be-dreaded caste" in the US, he supported "gradual emancipation [which] has done well in the New England states; and in New York." Because New England had "nothing to lose by emancipation; but rather... much to gain by it; since the value of white labour would rise", Neal called for federally-funded compensated emancipation to spread the cost throughout the states.

Neal supported the American Colonization Society, founding the Portland, Maine local chapter in 1833, serving as its secretary, and later meeting with Liberia's first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts. Neal likely avoided the movement for "immediate, unconditional, and universal emancipation" because of a long-standing feud with William Lloyd Garrison. The feud was not resolved until Neal declared in 1865 that "I was wrong... and Mr. Garrison was right."

Social hierarchy

Neal's Quaker upbringing likely instilled in him an aversion to "worldly titles" he said were unfitting in republican society. He mocked them with humorous works like the title page of his first novel (1817) that claimed the book was "Reviewed By—Himself—'Esquire.'" In "A Summary View of America" (1824) he decried that the US had fallen away from its ideals of equality to a place in which "titles are multiplying... Even the pride of ancestry... has found root in that republican soil. There is a tremendous contention... between the families of yesterday, and those of the day before." As a lawyer he refused to address Chief Justice John Marshall or any other judge as "your honor," claiming that "there is no greater humbug in the minds of men than this obsequious bowing to men of high station. The great thinkers of the world are the workers of the world, the producers of the world."

Temperance

As a child, Neal decided to avoid intemperate drinking and maintained this personal conviction throughout his life. He did not associate himself with the temperance movement until after he returned to Portland, Maine, from London. His first invitation to lecture an audience was for the annual address for the Portland Association for the Promotion of Temperance in 1829. Neal Dow, John Neal's cousin, was a leader of the prohibition movement, and in 1836 Neal engaged in public debates with his cousin to defend moderate wine drinking as an alternative to total abstinence. It was in this period between the late 1830s and late 1840s that Neal became disillusioned with the temperance movement, which had moved away from a focus on moral suasion to enacting prohibition laws; Dow and his followers "instead of regarding the injunction, 'Be temperate in all things,' were furiously intemperate on the subject of temperance; making total abstinence the condition of citizenship, and almost of civilization." Neal remained convinced of "the evils of intemperance... They could not well be exaggerated; the only question was about the remedy."

From Wikipedia’s article on John Neal (this version), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Sources

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