Letters from New York (1843)

AUTHOR: Child, Lydia Maria

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen)

In some of these letters Child emphasizes animal sentience and promotes animal welfare; she also links kindness to animals to Temperance, Abolition, and women's rights.

This volume collects letters initially written for the National Anti-Slavery Standard (under the same title) on a variety of topics, including reform issues such as Temperance, prison reform, women's rights, and, of course, Abolition. Some also address animal sentience and cognition, and voice her support for animal welfare. Child does not question human superiority, but argues for compassion and benevolence based on superiority. Thus, in “Letter II,” one explicit exception to her intention that she will not portray the “disagreeables of New-York” concerns the treatment of street dogs, which she ultimately links to  questions of moral education. Like William Alcott and others, Child thinks that cruelty towards animals fosters cruelty in general:

Twelve or fifteen hundred of these animals have been killed this summer; in the hottest of the weather at the rate of three hundred a day. The safety of the city doubtless requires their expulsion; but the manner of it strikes me as exceedingly cruel and demoralizing. The poor creatures are knocked down on the pavement, and beat to death. Sometimes they are horribly maimed, and run howling and limping away. The company of dog-killers themselves are a frightful sight, with their bloody clubs, and spattered garments. I always run from the window when I hear them; for they remind me of the Reign of Terror. Whether such brutal scenes do not prepare the minds of the young to take part in bloody riots and revolutions is a serious question (11).

In “Letter XX,” Child meditates on the significance of birds, which she calls “winged and graceful thoughts” and “a refreshment to my soul.” It is their absence, Child says, that makes her “feel the imprisonment of a city” (125). “Thus should it be,” she continues: “where mammon imprisons all thoughts and feelings that would fly upward, their winged types should be in cages too” (125-126). She then goes on to discuss the plight of the many hundreds of caged birds for sale in New York shops, whose constitution she likens to that of “a dyspeptic merchant in his marble mansion” (126). Child immediately links the situation of these imprisoned birds to that of slaves: “I seldom see a bird encaged, without being reminded of Petion, a truly great man, the popular idol of Haiti, as Washington is of the United States” (126). She recounts how Petion himself, based on his experience of slavery, enticed his daughter to free a captured bird that she was given as a present (126-127).

Child then relates an incident that she learned of from her grandfather, in which a bird displayed cunning and intelligence by collecting leaves from a nearby white ash tree to protect her nest against an approaching snake. The snake died upon contact with the leaves before it could devour the bird's eggs. Child is quick to associate this kind of animal intelligence with the knowledge of Indigenous Americans and slaves: “That little bird knew, if my readers do not, that contact with the white ash is deadly to a snake. This is no idle superstition, but a veritable fact in natural history. The Indians are aware of it, and twist garlands of white ash leaves about their ankles, as a protection against rattlesnakes. Slaves often take the same precaution when they travel through swamps and forests, guided by the north star” (128).

Another anecdote about a parrot who had learned some Spanish but was then sold to England and eventually forgot her Spanish vocabulary only to remember some of it in old age just before its death serves Child to assert: “There is something strangely like reason in this. It makes one want to know whence comes the bird's soul, and whither goes it” (129). Having once observed a pair of swallows building a nest and raising their little ones, Child does not hesitate to broach the question of women's rights based on her observations of the swallows: “It was evident that the father-bird had formed correct opinions on 'the woman question',” Child writes, “for during the process of incubation he volunteered to perform his share of household duty” (130). Even though he “performed the office with far less ease and grace,” for Child the male bird's behavior “showed that his heart was kind, and his principles correct, concerning division of labour” (130). Due to these and similar observations, stories, and anecdotes Child is convinced that “instinct” is “a matter of education” rather than “a special revelation to each creature” (129). And what humans can learn from animals is how they fulfill “all the laws of their being without obstruction” (132).

“Letter XXVIII” is a short, almost rhapsodic essay on the power of love. “The cure for all the ills and wrongs,” Child writes, “the cares, the sorrows, the crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word, LOVE” (184). But the force of love is not restricted to humans only. In fact, for Child, in its religious sense, love is a kind of cosmic power. Accordingly, its effects are also observable in the animal world: Due to “its magic influence” even the “despised donkey,” Child writes, “will follow his master, and come and go at his bidding, like a faithful dog; and he delights to take the baby on his back, and walk him round, gently, on the greensward. His intellect expands, too, in the sunshine of affection; and he that is called the stupidest of animals becomes sagacious” (184-185). Hence animals need to be treated with “untiring gentleness” (186). Harmony is achieved through the power of love, not coercion: Child takes this to be “an instructive lesson for reformers” (186).