A woman with dark, glossy hair and sharp cheekbones stood confidently under a tent with her eyes closed. About a thousand convention-goers waited for her to speak, standing patiently or sitting on the grass. Five full minutes ticked by on the timepiece the organizers had provided to keep the convention schedule on track. Still she stood there with her eyes closed, and the crowd waited.
It was Friday, June 25, 1858, and the first day of the Rutland Free Convention had already been momentous, and hot. The massive tent was set in a green field on the outskirts of Rutland, Vermont, then a city of about 7,500 people, and it was visible from half a mile away. Booths surrounded the tent, selling lemonade, root beer and soda pop. “The whole aspect of the locality was precisely that of a Country Fair,” a New York Times reporter wrote. The convention-goers’ only other relief from the heat was ice water poured out of faucets set into two casks that were continuously being refilled by men driving horse-drawn wagons. The overheated crowd congregating here were a motley crew of people dedicated to various causes: abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, supporters of nonviolence, death penalty protesters, Spiritualists (followers of a religious movement based on communicating with the dead) and other progressives dedicated to ideas considered radical in 1858.
The woman the crowd was eagerly waiting to hear was not just another convention speaker.
Achsa W. Sprague was one of the convention’s instigators, among 150 people to petition for a convention of “all philanthropists and reformers” to be held in the small, central-Vermont city “to discuss the various topics of reform now engaging … progressive minds,” according to an announcement from the organizers. That morning, the 30-year-old Sprague had been elected one of the convention’s 18 vice presidents, one of three women chosen for the role.
Five years earlier, few (if any) who knew Sprague would have imagined her playing a lead role in something like this, or even standing in front of a thousand people. Back then, she struggled to walk across a room, due to debilitating chronic pain. She rarely left her family’s house, except for frequent visits to doctors. But things had changed dramatically, and Sprague’s gratitude toward the “spirit friends” who had taken away her pain would motivate much of the rest of her life, including her involvement in the Rutland Free Convention.
After the election of officers that morning in Rutland, the congregators took turns proposing resolutions for the convention to adopt. The second of the 11 resolutions stated, “that Slavery is a wrong which no power in the universe can make right.” Taking a radical stance against slavery’s institutional enablers, the resolution explained that any government or any religious body or figure that “by silence or otherwise, authorizes man to enslave man, merits the scorn and contempt of mankind.”