Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm (December 6, 1815 – July 22, 1884) was an American journalist, abolitionist, and women's rights advocate.
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Swisshelm was born Jane Grey Cannon in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, daughter of Thomas Cannon, a Presbyterian merchant and real estate speculator. When she was eight years of age, her father died, leaving the family in straitened circumstances, and Jane worked at manual labor and teaching.[1] A teacher at age 14, she married at age 21; she moved with her husband, James Swisshelm, to Louisville, Kentucky, where she first encountered slavery. It made a strong impression on her. Jane was strong-willed, and her marriage was difficult. In 1839, she moved to Philadelphia, against her husband's wishes, to care for her ailing mother. After her mother's death, she headed a seminary in Butler, Pennsylvania. She rejoined her husband two years later on his farm, which she called Swissvale, east of Pittsburgh. (Today the area is Edgewood, Pennsylvania).
During this time, she began writing articles against capital punishment and stories, poems, and articles for an anti-slavery newspaper, the Spirit of Liberty,[1] and others in Pittsburgh. When the Spirit of Liberty went out of business, Swisshelm founded her own called Saturday Visitor in 1848. It eventually reached a national circulation of 6,000, and in 1856 was merged with the Pittburgh Journal. She wrote many editorials advocating women's property rights.
In 1857, she divorced her husband and moved west to St. Cloud, Minnesota, where she controlled a string of papers, promoting abolition and women's rights by writing and lecturing. Writing in The Saint Cloud Visitor, Swisshelm waged a private war against General Sylvanus Lowry, an aristocratic Southerner who had settled in the area and reigned as Saint Cloud's political boss. Swisshelm was especially infuriated that Lowry owned slaves in the free territory of Minnesota. Writing in The Visitor, she accused General Lowry of swindling the Indians, ordering vigilante attacks on suspected claim jumpers, and torturing his own slaves. After a particularly fiery editorial, Lowry formed a "Committee of Vigilance," broke into the newspaper's offices, smashed the printing press, and threw the pieces into the nearby Mississippi River. She soon raised money for another press and raised her attacks to a fever pitch. General Lowry, who was being groomed for the post of Lieutenant Governor, was forced to watch the destruction of all his influence over Saint Cloud politics. He died in obscurity in 1865.
When Abraham Lincoln was nominated for the presidency, she spoke and wrote in his behalf. When the civil war began and nurses were wanted at the front, she was one of the first to respond. After the Battle of the Wilderness, she had charge of 182 badly wounded men at Fredericksburg for five days, without surgeon or assistant, and saved them all.[1][2]
In 1862, when a Sioux Indian uprising in Minnesota resulted in the deaths of hundreds of white settlers,[3] it prompted her to demand punishment by the federal government against the Indians. She toured major cities to this end and, while in Washington, D.C., met her Pittsburgh friend Edwin M. Stanton, then Secretary of War, who offered her a clerkship in the government. She sold her Minnesota paper but worked as an army nurse during the Civil War in the Washington area, until her job became available. She became a friend of Mary Todd Lincoln.
After the war, Swisshelm started her final newspaper, the Reconstructionist, but her blasts against President Andrew Johnson led to her losing the paper and her government job. In 1872, she attended the Prohibition Party convention as a delegate. As well as being a prolific writer for newspapers and magazines, she published Letters to Country Girls (New York, 1853), and an autobiography entitled Half of a Century (1881).[1]
Swisshelm died in 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.