Anne Royall

From Philosopedia

Royall, Anne Newport (1769–1854)

Royall was a contentious freethinker, according to a biography, Anne Royall’s U.S.A., by Bessie Rowland James. She wrote Sketches of History (1826), followed by The Black Book, which was about “the black deeds of evil doers,” resulting in one newspaper calling her “a poor, crazy vagrant.” She piqued quite a few different individuals, as pointed out by Kansas freethought editor Fred Whitehead.

In Saratoga Springs, New York, where she stayed in the same Saratoga Springs boarding house as Theodore Dwight, a newspaper editor, James noted,

“At every meal while Dwight said grace Anne muttered complaints, such as ‘Our meals grow cold under these prayers of hypocrisy.’ The diners tittered. . . . She called attention to the ‘venom in his eye’ and to his ‘austere countenance heavily charged with puritanical frigidness.’ ”

• She opposed missionaries: “Under the name of foreign missions, home missions, Bible societies, children’s societies, rag-bag societies, and Sunday School societies, the missionaries have laid the whole country under tribute. This is done under the pretense of spreading the Gospel. The gospel has nothing to do with it. . . . Either the country must put down these men, or they will put down the country. Their object and their interest is to plunge mankind into ignorance, to make him a bigot, a fanatic, a hypocrite, a heathen, to hate every sect but his own, to shut his eyes against the truth, harden his heart against the distress of his fellowman, and purchase heaven with money.”

• She opposed the campaign to stop the Sunday mails: “The Third Presbyterian Church [in Philadelphia] even went an annoying step farther. On the Sabbath a chain was stretched across the street in front to prevent traffic from passing.” [This subsequently was forbidden by law.]

• In Burlington, Vermont, a storekeeper named Samuel Hickok threw her down the front steps into snow, resulting in “a contusion, a dislocated ankle, a fracture of the larger bone of the leg, a smaller bone broken above the ankle, knee badly sprained, and the flesh much bruised.”

• She once declared that she wanted to “drill an army of women and shoot every Presbyterian I can find!” Meanwhile, Freemasons were generally said to have welcomed and supported her.

• When the Pennsylvania Senate and House honored her with a banquet, she noted the “Hon. Logan who is keen for uniting Church and State; he openly avows it and is a warm friend of Dr. Ezra Stiles Ely. May both their heads be severed before we see the day.” She then gave a toast: “Blue-skins: May all their throats be cut!”

• In Washington, children of Christian fanatics broke her windows, and the parents carried “loads of tracts to my door, crying out, ‘Who wants to go to heaven? Here is your passport.’ ” The “commander-in-chief” who had led the nocturnal vigil, John Coyle Sr., reported Mrs. Royall called him a “d—d [damned] old bald headed son of a b—h [bitch].” Not once, but three times! Meanwhile, “Holy mobs of boys (black and white)” arrived “to shower the house with stones, yell, and blow horns.” Charged with disturbing the peace, she was convicted and fined $50., which was paid by two newspaper reporters, who wanted to defend the principle of freedom of the press.

• To a mob of students at the “celebrated University of Vagabonds,” her description of the University of Virginia, she decided, “The Presbyterians have the whole of Virginia under their thumbs.”

• In Washington, D.C., she started a newspaper called Paul Pry. When finally closing it she claimed her editorials had been the first to proclaim the abandonment of reform by General Jackson, the first to challenge the Post Office loans and the Post Office frauds, the first to challenge the Indian land frauds of the great land companies, and the first to put a stop to the enormous swindling of a knot of “God’s people, as they impiously call themselves.” She then started The Huntress, which favored states rights in opposition to the encroachments of the general government. She attacked celebrations of the landing at Plymouth Rock, pointing out the slaughter of the Pequot Indians and the torture of their people during witch-hunts.

In 1854, Royall died and was buried in the Congressional Cemetery in a grave that remained unmarked until 1914, when a small monument was erected. Except for the James biography and publicizing of Mrs. Royall by Fred Whitehead, few are aware of her place in freethought history.

{Alice S. Maxwell and Marion B. Dunlevy, Virago—The Story of Anne Newport Royall (1769–1854) [1985]; WWS}