U.S. Passport of Sara J. Clarke (aka Grace Greenwood and Sara Lippincott) by United States Department of State - 1852: 1852-1853 Passport to Europe

Miss Sara Jane Clarke (aka Grace Greenwood and Sara Lippincott)

U.S. Passport issued April 7, 1852

signed Daniel Webster, U.S. Secretary of State

Passport No. 2801

"I the undersigned Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby request all whom it may concern to permit safely and freely to pass Miss Sara Jane Clarke, a Citizen of the United States and in case of need to give her all lawful Aid and Protection…"

signed: "Given under my hand and the impression of the Seal of the Department of State at, City of Washington, April 7, 1852 in the 76th year of the Independence of the United States Daniel Webster (manuscript)"

Document Description:

U.S. Passport No. 2801 of Sara Jane Clarke, dated April 7, 1852, black and white illustrated lithograph printed on honey comb textured cream paper with manuscript ink text infill, attached to a bound book of approximately 66 individual, double sided unnumbered pages. The U.S. Passport itself bears ink stamps of the United States and foreign legations in its margin. The pages of the attached book bear ink stamps and notes of European legations from June of 1852 to possibly July of 1853. There are approximately 33 double-sided pages with ink stamps of European and the American legation and 33 double-sided blank, unused pages.

The book attached to the U.S. Passport is bound with green leather wraparound covers embossed in gold lettering "MISS S. J. CLARKE" and "PASSEPORT". The inside back cover is faced with red silk. The U.S. Passport is glued onto the book's inside front cover. The book closes with a leather latch and loop.

The graphic art on the U.S. Passport consists of a standing eagle, facing front and holding in its beak the strap of a musical instrument, a lyre on which is written the motto in Latin "Nunc Sidera Ducit". 1./ The eagle looks to his left. No printer or artist are identified. The seal was designed by John Quincy Adams as his personal seal in London in 1816. 2/ The eagle holds Orpheus' lyre, a magical source of harmony, which for Adams symbolizes Union. The stars on the lyre and eagle denote the Lyra constellation. The thirteen stars surrounding the eagle and framing the composition amid rays of light represent the thirteen American states. The motto thus applied refers to the united American states in harmony and union, as well as America itself as a leading force leading harmony domestically and America as a force for harmony worldwide. More than being symbolic, the 19th c. bearer of this State Department passport might also suppose himself or herself an ambassador of American values.

The seal of the U.S. Department of State of an American eagle facing front and turning his head to his right appears at the line of Daniel Webster's manuscript signature as Secretary of State.

condition: as found, very good, both U.S. Passport, green leather covers embossed with gold letters, and book of consular stamps, three small pieces of older tape on original fold lines of passport.

Dimensions of U.S. Passport: 16 1/8" x 9 ¾" sheet size

Dimensions of Book: 5 1/8" x 3 ½" x ¼"

Description:

Who is Sara Jane Clarke? This 1852 U.S. Passport was issued in the name of American author, journalist, suffragist, and abolitionist Sara Jane Clarke, who at the age of 28 was already a professional writer and published American book author writing under the name Grace Greenwood. Her purpose for obtaining a passport for travel to Europe was professional. Her year long travels through Europe were at the request of her employer, the abolitionist American newspaper the National Era. Her travel letters under the authorship of Grace Greenwood were for the newspaper to use. After returning from this lengthy visit to cultural and historic sites of Europe and to meet with artists and intellectuals of her time, Sara Clarke published the contents of her travel diary in a book titled Haps and Mishap of A Tour in Europe under her professional pen name "Grace Greenwood". The opening chapter for the journey over explains that Greenwood took with her Harriet Beecher Stowe's recently published Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). The book's Boston publisher, Ticknor, Reed, and Fields were Grace Greenwood's regular book publisher and friends, to whom she dedicates the book: "To my publishers and my dear friends, William D. Ticknor and James T. Fields, of Boston, and to their friend and mine, Francis Bennoch, of London, I gratefully and heartily dedicate this volume." 3./ Grace Greenwood was a pioneer author, journalist and political advocate writing and working in the vanguard of professional women activists and writers in 19th c. America.

Born in Pompey, New York in 1824, Sara Jane Clarke was a prolific professional writer in her teens for magazines and newspapers who published her fiction, poetry and popular columns. The subject matter of her early articles and books was not overtly political and expressed interests and concerns that drew a large and growing readership of children and adults primarily but not exclusively female. By 1850, Greenwood had published her first book, Greenwood Leaves, a collection of her published magazine pieces and by 1851 her second, History of My Pets. These books were published under her assumed pen name, Grace Greenwood which some surmise she adopted from her secondary school's name, Greenwood Academy. In 1849, Grace Greenwood moved to Washington, D.C. to become the associate editor of the Godey's Book. Greenwood published an abolitionist essay in the National Era while writing for Godey's. The paper's owner fired Greenwood.

Grace Greenwood was hired in 1852 as a reporter by the abolitionist National Era newspaper of Washington, D.C. and she also wrote for the Saturday Evening Post in Washington. She introduced the byline "Washington Letters" that continued for five decades. Please see The Library Company of Philadelphia's series on 19th c. American published women writers, and in particular about Grace Greenwood. Her professional life as a journalist and political reporter extended to the late 1880's in Washington, D.C. writing for the New York Tribune and The New York Times. Greenwood's professional life was disrupted but not derailed in the 1850's by a difficult marriage in 1853 to Leander K. Lippincott (no relation to the publisher by that name) with whom she lived in Philadelphia and published a children's magazine The Little Pilgrim. He owned certain of her copyrights, including that of Haps and Mishaps for which this passport is the itinerary, and he ultimately fled the United States under a cloud of suspicion for financial crimes.4/ Sara Lippincott raised their daughter Annie Grace Lippincott on her own as single, professional writer. She also continued to publish under her married name, Sara Lippincott, and continued to write professionally for over forty-five years for publications that included the Saturday Evening Post, the Ladies Home Journal and the New York Independent. 5/

Grace Greenwood was one of the earliest American women journalists admitted to the Congressional Press Gallery to report on actions of Congress. In 1869, she again moved to Washington and resumed her work as a political journalist with the New York Tribune and the The New York Times. In 1870, Grace Greenwood gained permission to report from the Congressional Press Gallery as a political correspondent, one of perhaps only two women reporters to do so. In 1880, the Congressional Press Gallery, that had only been open to a small number of women correspondents, was again closed to women reporters in 1880 for forty years! It is likely not a coincidence that this forty-year span coincided with unsuccessful attempts by suffragists and their representatives to amend the U.S. Constitution to grant women the constitutional right to vote.

An advocate for the suffragist movement in the 1850's, first as Sara Greenwood and later also as Sara Lippincott, she also worked on assignments as a writer and speaker for suffragist organizations. A prolific author, Greenwood also continued to write and publish books with Tichnor and Fields. Nathaniel Hawthorne, also a client of Tichnor and Fields, was greatly annoyed by the suffragist movement and women writers who were publishing articles and books on the suffragist movement and every other topic, contemptuously referring to suffragist writers, including Grace Greenwood specifically as "that damned mob of scribbling women". 6/

Despite a lifetime career as a published writer and journalist, Sara Lippincott has received almost no recognition by the major newspapers for which she wrote political pieces, including the New Tribune and The New York Times. How ironic, and telling that in this year of the 100 hundredth anniversary of American women obtaining the U.S. Constitutional right to vote The New York Times, her former employer, failed to identify or feature Grace Greenwood, or as she became known, Sara Lippincott as one of the pioneer women's political journalists of the 19th century.

Sara Jane Clarke's 1852 U.S. Passport is the legal document that records her professional travels through Europe. This U.S Passport is also the table of contents for Haps and Mishaps, the personal travel diary from this trip filled with her thoughts and observations. Sara Jane Clarke's passport is redolent with meaning, including that a 19th c. woman of demonstrated talent, discipline and early success chose not to write under her own name. Sara Jane Clarke's 1852 first trip abroad represent her expanding professional horizons that were national, international and as well intellectual, personal and historic.

_______________________________________________________________

Notes:

1./ Andrew Oliver provides original source material for the Latin phrase "Nunc Sidera Ducit" taken from a poem about Orpheus and his Lyre by Manilius, author of Astronomicon, I, 322, ff. and from Adams' diaries for that story's later interpretation by John Quincy Adams for his 1816 design of a new personal seal. When John Quincy Adams became U.S Secretary of State in 1817 he instructed that this seal with the Eagle, Lyre, motto and stars become the seal of the United States State Department for use on its passports, a practice that continued until 1865. That seal design is the design on Sara Jane Clarke's 1852 U.S. Passport.

2./ Understanding Adams' literary and poetic source for the Latin motto Nunc Sidera Ducit and the symbolic meaning of the elements of art in his seal – centered on the Lyre of Orpheus - adds several dimensions to our understanding of the passport and its art. Greek mythology credited Orpheus and his lyre with having the ability to soothe the demons of the underworld, to quiet wild beasts and warring men on earth, and in the heavens upon the lyre's ascension as a constellation after Orpheus' death, to bring the planets into the harmony of the spheres. Adams quotes Manilius in his diary and translates the passage containing the Latin motto on the seal. Adams explains: "I have assumed the American Eagle as the bearer of the Lyre. The thirteen original Stars form a border round the Seal. The Stars marked upon the Lyre and on the wings of the Eagle are placed in the relative positions as they may be seen by the naked eye in the Constellation of Lyra. The motto from Manilius [Nunc Sidera Ducit] is upon the Lyre itself. The moral application of the emblem is that the same power of harmony which originally produced the institutions of civil government to regulate the Association of individual men now presides in the federal association of the American states. That Harmony is the Soul of their combination…The Lesson of the emblem is Union."

3./ The Oxford University Press describes Mr. Bennoch (1812-1890) as a patron of authors and literature and a friend of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mary Russell Mitford.

4./. The copyright to Haps and Mishaps, published in 1853 after Sara Greenwood's year long trip to Europe, is in the name of Leander K. Lippincott. A close reading of Haps and Mishaps reveals her deep unhappiness.

5./ Jenny McPhee, web blog, www.jennymcphee.com, June 2013, citing Phillip Gura Truth's Ragged Edge: The Rise of the American Novel about Nathaniel Hawthorne criticizing American women writers and sending letters to people in the book field, and to William Ticknor in particular where he singled out Grace Greenwood. For the complete quotation by Hawthorne, from Truth's Ragged Edge, which has a wonderfully modern ring: "America is now wholly given over to a d[amned] mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public is occupied with their trash."

This topic is taken up by Paul Christian Jones, who explains that Grace Greenwood wrote two letters to book collector DeWitt Miller following the publication in 1903 of Julian Hawthorne's biography of his father. Apparently Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was in England in 1852 at the same time as Grace Greenwood, wrote letters to Miller and others with personal attacks of Greenwood. When she learned of these letters, she responded in writing to Miller as well as publicly, characterizing Nathaniel Hawthorne's personal attacks and narrative as untrue. Greenwood's public rebuttal of Hawthorne's criticism and personal attacks on contemporary women writers stands possibly alone in defense of herself and American women writers of this era.

6./ In 1904, while living with her daughter in New Rochelle, New York, Grace Greenwood died at age 79.

Bibliography:

Jones, Paul Christian

"A Scribbling Woman's Rebuttal: Grace Greenwood Responds to the Hawthornes"

National Hawthorne Review, Fall 2013, vol. 39, No.2.

Library Company of Philadelphia. www.LibraryCompany.org

Portraits of American Women Writers That Appeared in Print Before 1861.

Oliver, Andrew

The Adams Papers, Portraits of John Quincy Adams and His Wife

Belknap Press of Harvard University Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts 1970

Patterson, Richard S. and Dougall, Richardson

The Eagle and The Shield, A History of the Great Seal of the United States

Office of the Historian, Department of State, under the auspices of the American Revolution Bicentennial Administration

Washington, 1976