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Proclamation honoring the memory of the late Jane Grey Swisshelm upon the occasion of her 200th birthday.
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WHEREAS, Jane Grey (Cannon) Swisshelm was born on December 6, 1815 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Thomas Cannon, a merchant and real estate speculator, and Mary Scott. Reared in a strict Presbyterian family, she attended local schools and at age fourteen became a schoolteacher. In 1836 she married James Swisshelm, a farmer’s son; they had one daughter. He expected deference and submission from the strong-willed Jane, and their marriage followed a long, rocky path; and
WHEREAS, in 1938, Jane and her husband moved to Louisville, Kentucky, a move occasioned by James desire to go into business with his brother. Already an abolitionist before they traveled South, Jane was radicalized by the experience of witnessing slavery first hand. She returned to Pittsburgh the next year to care for her dying mother, and James rejoined her there after his business went bankrupt; and
WHEREAS, after the death of her mother, Jane became director of a seminary in Butler, Pennsylvania. She also embarked on a career as a journalist for a local newspaper and wrote for a Pittsburgh antislavery journal. After this journal folded, she started her own antislavery paper, the Saturday Visiter in which she voiced her unbending opposition to slavery and advocated for women’s rights. Her newspaper gradually achieved a national circulation of 6,000 and bore her distinctive imprint on every page; and
WHEREAS, Jane finally divorced her husband in 1857, relinquished editorial control of her newspaper, and moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota with her six-year-old daughter, Zo, where she promptly took control of another publication, the St. Cloud Visiter. She turned that paper into a powerful antislavery journal and soon clashed with Sylvanus B. Lowry, a politically influential Southern slaveholder and Indian trader. He and his supporters destroyed her newspaper office and charged her with libel, resulting in suspension of the paper. But local antislavery supporters rallied behind her, and she resolutely launched another antislavery newspaper, the St. Cloud Democrat; and
WHEREAS, Jane’s liberal beliefs suffered a temporary setback when Sioux Indians rose up and massacred a number of white settlers in 1862. Again she toured the state, this time to advocate punitive countermeasures against the Sioux, and in January 1863 she went on a lecture tour throughout Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, New York, and Washington, D.C., demanding swift, severe government action against the Sioux; and
WHEREAS, while Jane visited Washington, she met an old friend from Pittsburgh, Edwin M. Stanton, secretary of war, who offered her a clerkship. Jane accepted the position and became one of the first female clerks in the quartermaster general’s office. She spent her free time working as a Union army nurse in hospitals in and around Washington. Appalled by the dismal conditions in the military hospitals, she wrote vivid and indignant letters home to her former newspaper; and
WHEREAS, in 1865, Jane started publishing another newspaper, The Reconstructionist, to express her support for the radical Republicans’ program of Reconstruction. But because of her criticism of President Andrew Johnson she lost her government job. She finally gave up her role as a newspaper editor in March 1866, when an arsonist tried to set fire to her pressroom and living quarters; and
WHEREAS, Jane sued her ex-husband for fraud and won her case in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania in 1868. The court granted her possession of the homestead in Swissvale, and after she had made improvements to the house, she and Zo moved in; and
WHEREAS, Jane spent the last fifteen years of her life working as a freelance journalist and public speaker. Based at Swissvale and at a country cottage in Indiana County, Pennsylvania, she often visited her sister in St. Cloud, and wrote for the Chicago Tribune during much of that time. She also wrote her autobiography, Half a Century, which was published in 1880; and
WHEREAS, Jane Grey Swisshelm died on July 22, 1884 at her Swissvale home and is buried in Allegheny Cemetery. The City of Pittsburgh neighborhood of Swisshelm Park, adjacent to Swissvale, is named in her honor;
NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the Allegheny County Council does hereby honor the memory of the late Jane Grey (Cannon) Swisshelm upon the occasion of her 200th birthday. Through her considerable literary and oratorical gifts, she contributed to the twin causes of abolition and women’s rights, and was part of a small but impressive cadre of women journalists and newspaper publishers who added their voices and their influence to the growing tumult of war and reform in nineteenth-century American society.