"A Pretender to Literature":

The Rise and Fall of a New Jersey Infidel

Abstract

The story of Tamar Davis from Allowaystown, New Jersey in Salem County, correspondent from 1851-1865 to the Boston Investigator—one of the earliest freethought magazines, shines a light on one of New Jersey’s most interesting forgotten writers, whose work always struck a nerve. This paper serves as a necessary addition to research on women in the freethought movement in America. As a self-described “infidel,” Davis railed against organized religion and intolerance against nonbelievers. She lamented in poems the injustices inflicted upon other liberal writers such as Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Thomas Paine. Her work, always controversial, also tackled prominent topics of her time such as the Maine Liquor Law, the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the American Civil War. At the time of her arrest for counterfeiting in 1860, major newspapers, including the Boston Herald, Philadelphia Public Ledger, and The Massachusetts Spy, lambasted her as an incompetent, illiterate, and intemperate writer. Davis, who was also a prolific fiction writer for Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper, would eventually be convicted of counterfeiting and die in 1865 at the age of 44. Ultimately, New Jersey’s most unusual skeptic has a story that must be told.