● ● ● callous treatment of the insane. There was the temperance movement, in which Albert Baker had been active, and which succeeded in having prohibition voted in New Hampshire in 1848 by state referendum, although it was not implemented by law till 1855. There was the plight of the mill operatives, including the “ladies of the loom” at Lowell, hard pressed by cheap immigrant labor; and although New Hampshire legislated a ten-hour working day in 1847 ostensibly to protect these girls, the mill owners (probably including Abigail’s husband, Alexander Hamilton Tilton) had taken steps to circumvent the law and procure the signatures of their employees to contracts permitting them to work as many hours as the employers saw fit.
Above all, there was the crusade against slavery. Three days before Jackson died the issue flared up in New Hampshire in a famous debate in the Old North Church in Concord, Nathaniel Bouton’s church. The debate was between Franklin Pierce and John P. Hale, the first abolitionist member of the United States Senate. Mrs. Glover’s sympathies were inevitably divided between her anti-slavery sentiments and her personal loyalty to Pierce, the loyalty persisting right down to the presidential election of 1852. In that year her crusading zeal went into the election campaign for Pierce, clear evidence that she was still not an abolitionist in the political sense despite the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law two years before.53
53 Poems by her ardently supporting Pierce appeared in the Patriot, July 28 and October 20, 1852. [Mary M. Glover, “The Flag of Our Union,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 28 July 1852, p. 4; Mary M. Glover, “Sonnet, to Gen. Franklin Pierce,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 20 October 1852, p. 4.] The second one ends:
Is there no bard imbued with hallowed fire,
To wake the chords of Ossian’s magic lyre,
Whose numbers, breathing all his flame divine,
This Patriot’s name to ages would consign?
This makes clear that the often-repeated story of a quarrel between Mrs. Glover and Mrs. Tilton over Pierce’s election cannot be true in its traditional form [see Sibyl Wilbur, The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Boston: Christian Science Publishing Society, 1929), p. 51]. They may well have differed sharply over some of the issues in the election, but they were united in their support of Pierce. The Baker view was that expressed by Hawthorne in his campaign biography of Pierce:
He fully recognized, by his votes and by his voice, the rights pledged to the south by the constitution. This, at the period when he so declared himself, was comparatively an easy thing to do. But when it became more difficult, when the first imperceptible movement of agitation had grown to be almost a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue the northern man, who dared to love that great and sacred reality—his whole, united, native country—better than the mistiness of a philanthropic theory.
[Nathaniel Hawthorne, Life of Franklin Pierce (Boston: Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, 1852), p. 31.]