often sheared, and the
flax which their own fingers had pulled, into cloth for the family
wardrobe."[55]

Thus in 1816 the manufactures of Indiana were chiefly in the hands of
its women. It is upon the industries of the country that a nation
thrives. Its manufactures build up its commerce and make its wealth.
From this source the Government derives the revenue which is the
life-blood circulating in its veins. Its strength and its perpetuity
alike depend upon its industries, and when we look upon the work of
women through all the years of the Republic, and remember their
patriotic self-devotion and self-sacrifice at every important crisis,
we are no less amazed at the ingratitude of the country for their
services in war than at its non-recognition of their existence as
wealth-producers, the elements which build up and sustain every
civilized people.

Viewing its early record, we are not surprised that Indiana claims to
have organized the first State Woman's Rights Society, though we are
somewhat astonished to know that at the time of the first Convention
held in Indianapolis, a husband of position locked his wife within the
house in order to prevent her presence thereat, although doubtless, as
men have often done before and since, he deemed it not out of the way
that he himself should be a listener at a meeting he considered it
contrary to family discipline that his wife should attend.

December 11, 1816, Indiana was admitted into the Union. William
Henry Harrison, who had been Governor of the Territory, and
Brigadier-General in the army, with the command of the Northwest
Territory, was afterward President of the United States. He
encountered the Indians led by Tecumseh at Tippecanoe, on the Wabash,
and after a terrible battle they fled. This was the origin of the
song, "Tippecanoe and Tyler too," that was sung with immense effect by
the Whigs all over the country in the presidential campaign of 1840,
when Harrison and Tyler were the candidates; and when women, for the
first time, attended political meetings.

Indiana, though one of the younger States, by her liberal and rational
legislation on the questions of marriage and divorce, has always been
the land of freedom for fugitives from the bondage and suffering of
ill-assorted unions. Many an unhappy wife has found a safe asylum on
the soil of that State. Her liberality on this question was no doubt
partly due to the influence of Robert Owen, who early settled at N