Knowlton Biography Chapter 27
Twenty-seven: Prosecuted in Lowell
I had ample notice it was commenced, and with all ease might have evaded it; but I felt I ought to contend for my rights. It was brought in the name of a person wholly unknown to most of those to whom I enquired, and others informed me that he is an intemperate and worthless fellow. He was put in motion by a hypocritical, weathercock doctor of then orthodox pretensions, who has since left the place, the feelings of the people towards him, being several degrees below zero.
While he was standing trial in Taunton, Charles learned that charges had been filed against him in Lowell, Massachusetts. Lowell was a textile-manufacturing city north of Boston, with a growing population of poor workers—many of them interested in Knowlton’s message of self-determination and his practical advice on planning their families. Charles hadn’t actually sold any books in Lowell, but he had circulated a prospectus describing Fruits of Philosophy in detail. He petitioned the court, explaining that his trail in Taunton would soon be finished, and was allowed to give a hundred dollar bond to delay his arraignment in Lowell. When he presented himself at the Lowell court, Charles learned that the criminal complaint against him was that he’d offered a copy of Fruits of Philosophy to a local doctor, to get his opinion of the book. Although the complaint didn’t claim he had sold even a single book, the judge set Charles’s bail at one thousand dollars. His bail was set so high, Charles said, “evidently with a design and expectation, as I was a stranger in the place, of having me suffer much before trial.”
The judge set Knowlton’s trial date for more than three months later, apparently hoping he would be unable to make bail and would suffer for quite a while before he was even tried. Luckily for Charles, he wasn’t as much of a stranger in Lowell as the judge believed. Knowlton’s supporters started a collection to free the victim of censorship. “Thanks to the noble spirits of Lowell,” Charles said, the judge “soon found himself sorely disappointed” in his attempt to jail the author of Fruits of Philosophy before his trial.
From the beginning of their struggle in Lowell, it was clear to Charles and his supporters they were fighting not only for reproductive freedom, but for the freedom of the press. The editorial pages of freethought papers all over the northeast began to carry news of Knowlton’s trial. Since most freethinkers were also agitators for workers’ rights, many papers were quick to identify the suppression of Fruits of Philosophy as another battle in the ongoing class-war between the rich and the poor. “Who has Dr. Knowlton injured?” asked one editor:
No one. Is his book an obscene book? It is not even pretended. We might pronounce almost every medical work obscene with the same degree of propriety…What then has he done? He has made the knowledge too cheap; and that is not the worst of it, he has permitted common people, people who can be benefited by the knowledge to have access to it. It will spoil the trade of the great and the rich. Poor people will not raise so many children to be slaves to their more wealthy neighbors when they know that they can limit their number to suit their own circumstances without denying themselves any of the pleasures and enjoyments of a married state.
Readers of these freethought papers—unlike today, in early nineteenth-century America there were dozens of freethought papers and thousands of readers—got the point, and responded. “The Fruits of Philosophy,” one letter to the editor declared, “was designed to save young people and particularly the female sex, so that they need not be afraid to marry on account of poverty in the first place; and that they need not be burdened with more children than they can comfortably support and educate in the second.” In addition to book orders, Charles started receiving occasional cash donations from “friends of liberty of opinion and of the press.”
By prosecuting its author, his enemies were publicizing Fruits of Philosophy more extensively than Charles could ever have afforded to do. Charles received a transcript from a freethought society in Pittsburgh that had met and passed:
Sundry Resolves expressive of their just and utter detestation of all foul and coercive measures to muzzle the press, and to suppress the diffusion of scientific knowledge of practical utility; and also expressive of their favorable opinion of him as “a man of science, and a philanthropist;” and of their intention “to use their influence to make his writings known in the western country.”
Unfortunately, the opinions of freethinkers couldn’t quickly turn the tide of public prejudice or redirect court decisions, even in the early nineteenth century when freethinkers were much more visible and vocal in American society than they are today. Knowlton’s trial was held at the criminal court in Cambridge, a hundred miles from his home in Ashfield. Charles hired a local lawyer named Mann, who advised him to plead guilty. “Guilty of what?” Charles asked. “Why, guilty of selling the book,” said Mann.
Charles objected that he hadn’t actually sold a book in Lowell when he was indicted, but that “I had just as lief plead guilty of selling or publishing that book, as if it were the bible or any other book—what I contend for is, that it is a good book, and such as I have a right to publish.” As he had in his Worcester body-snatching trial, Charles wanted to discuss the bigger issue: his right to publish and sell Fruits of Philosophy, not the charge that he had.
“All that,” answered the lawyer, “can just as well be plead afterwards.”
Charles was surprised by Mann’s advice, but “understood him as if he had said, you will stand the same chance to be acquitted to plead this afterwards.” He entered a plea of guilty, and discovered that he was not going to be allowed to argue for the legality of the book. The trial was over. Charles was found guilty of selling Fruits of Philosophy in Lowell, just as he’d been convicted in Taunton. But this time, Knowlton was sentenced to three months in prison, and hard labor. “Whether this last was designed as punishment or as favor,” Charles said, “I do not know; but being of rather a slender constitution, and for years subject to some disease of the heart, I could have dispensed with this part of the sentence very cheerfully.”