Digital Extra

  8/24/01
'The conscience of R.I.'
Elizabeth Buffum Chace to get State House honor.

By EDWARD FITZPATRICK
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE - Elizabeth Buffum Chace, who battled slavery, fought for women's suffrage and defended mill workers' rights, will be the first Rhode Island woman honored with a statue in the State House.

Secretary of State Edward S. Inman III chose Chace over two other finalists — abolitionist Christiana Carteaux Bannister and Portsmouth founder Anne Hutchinson.

Now, a commission created by Inman must raise $20,000 to create a bronze bust of Chace, which will be placed in the capitol amid the many paintings and statues of men who have made Rhode Island history.

"Quite simply, it's time that we allotted prominent space in this building to honor the contributions of Rhode Island women," Inman said yesterday during a State House news conference to announce his choice.

"Every day, people both young and old tour the State House for the first time. They see the faces of governors and [House] speakers past, eyeing them as they walk the corridors," Inman said. "And now, finally, they'll see the face of Elizabeth Buffum Chace, a Rhode Island woman we can all be proud of."

Chace, often referred to as "the conscience of Rhode Island," was born in 1806 and grew up on her grandparents' farm in Smithfield, where her parents instilled the Quaker values of simplicity, independence and freedom of speech. She spent one year at the Quakers' Yearly Meeting Boarding School, now Moses Brown, before her family moved to Fall River. There, she married cotton mill owner Samuel Chace and took on the issue of slavery.

Fervently principled, Chace never shied from unpopular stands. Unlike some other abolitionists, she favored racial equality and freeing the slaves immediately. She left the Quaker Meeting because at the time the group wouldn't toughen its stance against slavery. She later resigned from the Providence Woman's Club because they wouldn't admit a black teacher. And she and her husband, who moved back to Rhode Island in 1839, hid fugitive slaves in their Valley Falls home as part of the Underground Railroad.

After the Civil War, she focused on temperance and women's voting rights. She helped found the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association and appeared at many State House hearings on the issue. She pushed for better conditions for female prisoners, helped establish a state school for homeless children and lobbied for the admission of women to Brown University. The mother of 10 children, she formed the state's first kindergarten. She died in 1899.

"She is a good choice because her activism touched many, many different lives in this state," said Elizabeth C. Stevens, who spent 15 years researching Chace's life.

"She was concerned about poor women, textile workers, children, slaves, the dispossessed, women's suffrage and prison reform," said Stevens, who wrote a 500-page dissertation about Chace and her daughter for a Brown University doctoral degree. "She reached across a lot of different categories and classes."

But one commission member questioned Inman's choice of Chace. Inman made the announcement with many commission members present, and the Rev. E. Naomi Craig, retired pastor of Sheldon Street Church in Providence, told him he should have chosen Bannister, a successful businesswoman who fought for equal pay for black Civil War soldiers and founded the Home for Aged Colored Women, now known as the Bannister Nursing Care Center.

Craig noted Bannister was a descendant of blacks and American Indians, saying, "We should have had a woman who was Indian to tie us back to the beginning."

"Don't we have to go to our roots to start?" Craig asked, suggesting Chace as the second choice.

"We appreciate your input," Inman responded. "It was a real tough decision."

The 24-member Commission to Memorialize the Contributions of All Rhode Island Women narrowed a field of 36 nominees to three finalists before Inman made the final choice. Inman, a former eighth-grade social studies teacher, said he was familiar with all three finalists and, before doing further research, was predisposed toward one of them. Though he wouldn't say which one, he said, "Anne Hutchinson would have been a good choice, but she spent a limited amount of time in Rhode Island."

He said he decided on Chace after getting input from the commission, talking to experts and reading up on each finalist. "The multitude of things she did was what sold me," he said.

Inman emphasized that he wants to make this an "annual undertaking," involving new rounds of nominations, so that other women can be honored for their contributions to Rhode Island. "This is a beginning and not an end," he said.

The commission will consider asking the General Assembly for public funds for future projects, but no decision has been made, said Inman's press secretary, Raymond J. Sullivan Jr. Inman said nominations would probably remain limited to women who have died, but the commission could change that criterion in the future.

The commission is searching for a sculptor to complete the bust by March, to coincide with Women's History Month. Plans call for putting the sculpture in a second-floor hallway, in an empty alcove across from the Governor's State Room.

More Women in R.I. history