have mythologized Mary Ellen’s ordeal into an indictment of a laissez-faire society in which the rights of children were so tenuous that even animals were afforded better protection under the law. By contrast, Susan J. Pearson’s remarkable intellectual history of animal and child protection in the Gilded Age uses the Mary Ellen story to illuminate a wider historical sea change in the ways that Americans conceived of the state. In so doing, Pearson links animal and child protection to an astonishing array of social and cultural transformations without recasting the rise of the humane movement in the same teleological language that the protectionists themselves used.
Pearson contends that nineteenth-century Americans may have clung to exceptionalist ideals of weak, limited government, but in practice, the Civil War marked a consolidation of federal authority that intensified during the Gilded Age. The activities of state and local governments reveal an even more dynamic landscape of “state interference” during this era, especially with respect to the shared movement to prevent cruelty to animals and children. Although animal and child protection organizations were private institutions, they helped transform the reach of the state through an ideological project that Pearson calls “sentimental liberalism.” Vested with the powers of arrest in their state charters of incorporation, private SPCAs, SPCCs, and humane societies (which performed plural child and animal protection activities) fused the classical liberal language of rights with a sentimental conviction that “beasts and babes” had a right to protection because they could feel and suffer. According to Pearson, “Speaking the language of rights while amplifying the powers of the state, humane societies stood at the crossroads of what historians typically think of as two versions of liberalism--the one classical and minimalist, the other modern and interventionist” (p. 16).
Pearson explains that the right to protection from cruelty, however, did not confer an explicit right to liberty, or equality. Indeed, animal and child advocates saw little contradiction in making such positive rights claims within a broader status matrix of dependency and inequality. Thus, one might conclude that the humane movement simply reified the existing social order. Yet Pearson suggests that new anticruelty laws signaled a major departure from older conceptions of rights in common law tradition, where animals were defined as personal property and children were similarly defined as household dependents under coverture. In common law, cruelty to animals or children was a crime exclusively against the property owner. By contrast, New York State’s new law against cruelty to animals (1866) focused on the protection of the animal itself, instead of protecting the property interests of the owner.
Pearson shows that the ideological primacy of a movement language of kindness, feeling, rights, and individual moral redemption demonstrates a significant degree of continuity--rather than historical rupture--between the antebellum and postbellum eras of social reform. Moreover, the Civil War played a critical role in bridging these two eras. The abolition movement, Emancipation, and the Reconstruction Amendments directly grappled with questions of suffering and rights, challenging the state to protect the “rights of the defenseless” in key ways that shaped the rhetoric of animal and child protection.
Pearson’s imaginative use of diverse primary source materials substantiates the power of her argument. A superb work of intellectual history, The Rights of the Defenseless charts a clear genealogy for generations of social thought regarding children, animals, property, the family, and state formation, including Michel de Montaigne, John Locke, the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Adam Smith, and theologians of the Second Great Awakening. Pearson also uses other interdisciplinary sources, such as fiction, cartoons, illustrations, humane society periodicals, convention records, newspapers, scripture, legal documents, a