The Brutality of T. W. Glasgow
After Olympia women organized against his domestic violence, a local man attempts a public defense, calling his wife 'deranged' and denying the physical abuse that witnesses reported.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
We received the following letter from T. W. Glasgow, with the request that we give it a place in our columns. We give it as showing the best defense he can make. He has acknowledged to us that he has on more than one occasion struck his wife, and practiced other brutalities. While we are opposed to anything like mob justice, the story told by himself—that part about the parental treatment he exercised towards his wife—is a series of cruelties which would cause the soul to boil for the administration of a coating of tar and feathers to the inhuman wretch.
ED. STANDARD: My attention has been called to an article in your paper, relating to the unhappy difficulties existing in my family. The ladies referred to have done me the honor to forward to me a copy of the resolutions adopted at their convention, with the names of those who have taken part. The light in which I have been represented concerning the abuse and unkind treatment of my wife and children by the public journals and the convention held by a portion of the ladies of Olympia spurs me to make a statement. This community is well aware that she has not been in her right mind in the last year. They know the attempts she has made to destroy her life. During her partial derangement, my whole attention has been devoted to her welfare night and day. In taking care of her I have been frequently compelled to use harsh means, but not with malice or hatred—only such means as a parent would use toward a child. As for knocking her down with sticks, dragging by the hair of her head and starving, I deny the allegations. I can show that my patience and perseverance for her welfare up to the last hour she was with me has been unprecedented.
“The story told by himself—that part about the parental treatment he exercised towards his wife—is a series of cruelties which would cause the soul to boil.”
Domestic violence in 1862 Olympia was often masked as a private 'family matter,' but this account shows the early emergence of organized civic resistance, as women in the community used public resolutions to intervene in neighbor abuse. Today, the rhetoric used by the perpetrator to pathologize his wife's trauma remains a chillingly recognizable tool of control used by abusers to deflect accountability.
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