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As “social questions and needs forced themselvesupon me, and as I began to realize thatnothing human is foreign to the home and itsinterests,” Caroline later explained, she soughtout opportunities to write book reviews andcover lecture-circuit speakers for the Clevelandnewspapers. In addition to supplementingT.C.’s sometimes spotty income, these activitiesintroduced the couple to the country’s leadingabolitionists, many of them from Massachusetts.It was no accident that the abolition movementhad found its most eloquent proponents in andaround Boston. “The brand of reformed Protestantismthe Puritans brought with them fromEngland . . . had within it a strain of intense politicalactivism,” historian George McKenna hasargued. This dormant impulse had reemergedin the 1830s and 1840s in an array of NewEngland-led reform movements, ranging fromvegetarianism to prisoners’ rights. The contemporaryinheritors of the Puritan vision of Americaas a city upon a hill wanted to do more thanimprove the personal conduct of others, however.They sought to abolish customs and institutionsthat they considered sinful. Chief among theirtargets was slavery, defended by white southernersas “our peculiar institution.” 15When movement speakers came to Cleveland,they often stayed with T.C. and Caroline, whoenjoyed long evenings of intense conversationwith the likes of Garrison, the lawyer WendellPhillips, the educator Bronson Alcott, and thepoet Ralph Waldo Emerson. At one encounter,Caroline shared with Alcott her “inextinguishablelonging to exchange Ohio for Massachusetts,as a place of residence, in order to gain theadvantage of Harvard [University] for my sonsand of the best schools for my daughter.” Shewanted to gratify her own intellectual needs, aswell. Cleveland simply “did not offer the kindof companionship” that she had come to crave.Only by moving to Boston could she satisfy, shetold Alcott, her “desire to ‘touch, if only with theextremest flounce, the circle’ of noble women.”The father of four daughters—one of whom,Louisa May Alcott, would go on to immortalizeher childhood in the 1868 novel Little Women—replied that if Caroline wished to live in Bostonfor its “broader and finer atmosphere,” she wouldnot be disappointed, but he warned her that herdesire to “meet easily the wise women in literature,reform work, and so on, would not be realized,for they were widely scattered in differentcircles, churches and suburbs.” Caroline’s zealous,if still embryonic, argument that “it mightnot be impossible to bring these noble womentogether on some common ground of fellowshipand service” eventually brought Alcott around.But she had little hope of persuading her husbandto remove to Boston as long as he was gainfullyemployed in Cleveland. 16The Severances did make one decisive break inthe early years of their marriage. Persuaded thatthey “could no longer sit conscientiously undera preacher, or in a fellowship, where the goldenrule of Christianity was not recognized as applicableto all men, whatever the color of their skin,or crinkle, or non-crinkle of their hair,” they abandonedthe faith of T.C.’s foster mother, a founderof Cleveland’s First Presbyterian Church. Theyoung couple began to assemble on Sundays witha small group of progressive Christians who were“less anxious about salvation than . . . about doingsome good for our fellow man.” The independentcongregation evolved into Cleveland’s first Unitarianchurch. T.C. and Caroline also worked toadvance temperance, dietary reform, and the “freesoil” movement, which opposed the expansion ofslavery into new states and territories. 17The Severances attended their first women’srights conference in 1851. It was held in nearbyAkron, Ohio, three years after the movement tosecure the political, legal, and social equality ofwomen was launched at a similar conference inSeneca Falls, New York. In Akron, former slaveCalifornia History • volume 88 number 1 2010