HOME LIFE--THE REUNION--THE WOMAN.
1897.
The unsurpassed powers of endurance, which have enabled Miss Anthony to
work without ceasing for more than sixty years, are due to her perfect
physical condition. She comes of a long-lived race, in which
centenarians have been not unusual. Her paternal grandfather lived past
the age of ninety-seven, able to oversee his farm to the very last; the
grandmother lived beyond sixty-seven; both the maternal grandparents
died in their eighty-fourth year; her father at sixty-nine, and her
mother at eighty-six. She never has abused her inheritance of a fine,
strong constitution. Travelling so much of the time, she has not been
able to observe regular hours and, being usually entertained in private
families, has not had a choice of food, but nevertheless, as far as
possible, she has observed the laws of health which she made for herself
in youth.
She never fails to take each morning, regardless of the weather, a cold
sponge bath from head to foot, followed by a brisk rubbing, which puts
the skin in excellent condition. She has a good appetite, drinks tea and
coffee moderately and eats always the simplest food, cereals, bread and
butter, vegetables, eggs, milk, a little meat once a day, plenty of
fruit at every meal, whatever is in season, and never can be tempted by
rich salads, desserts or fancy dishes. Whenever it is possible she rests
a short time after each meal, and lies down for an hour during the
afternoon, even if she can not sleep; retires at nine or ten and rises
at six or seven. She travels by night, when convenient, as she thus can
avoid much of the fatigue of the journey. When travelling in the daytime
she reads very little, never writes or dictates letters on the train, as
many busy people do, but makes herself comfortable and dozes and rests.
An invariable rule, with which nothing is allowed to interfere, is
plenty of fresh air and exercise, and she regards these as the
mainspring of her long years of health and activity. If she has been on
the cars all day, she walks from the station to her stopping-place.
After a speech, she walks home. When in Rochester she often writes until
nearly 10 o'clock at night, then puts on a long cloak, ties a scarf over
her head, goes out to the mail box, and walks eight or ten blocks,
returning in a warm glow; gives herself a thorough rubbing, and is ready
for a night's rest in a room where the window is open at all seasons.
The policemen are accustomed to the late pedestrian and often speak a
word of greeting as she passes. It is not an unusual thing for her to
take up a broom, when it has been snowing all the evening, and sweep the
walks around and in front of the house, just before going to bed. While
not an adherent of any special "sciences" or "cures," she believes
thoroughly in not dwelling upon either mental or bodily ills; giving
disagreeable things and people only such attention as is absolutely
necessary, and then putting them out of mind; observing the laws of
hygiene with regard to the body and then banishing it also from the
thoughts. Over and above all else is she an advocate of work, employment
for mind and body, as a means of salvation.
In dress Miss Anthony is extremely particular. She considers it poor
economy to wear cheap material, always buys the best fabrics, linings
and trimmings, and employs a competent dressmaker. She has one gown a
year and often this is a present from some loving friend. While she
wears only black silk or satin in public, she loves color and her house
dress is usually maroon or soft cardinal. Her laces and few pieces of
jewelry are gifts from women. The slender little ring, worn on the
"wedding finger," was placed there thirty years ago by her devoted
friend, Dr. Clemence Lozier. She never in a lifetime has changed the
style of wearing her hair, once dark brown, glossy and abundant, now
thin and fine and shining like spun silver, which is always evenly
parted, combed over the ears and coiled low at the back, thus showing
the fine contour of her head. In all the details of the toilet she is
most fastidious, and a rent, a missing button or a frayed edge is
considered almost an unpardonable sin.
Miss Anthony attends Unitarian church but retains her membership in the
Society of Quakers. On the rare occasions when she needs a physician,
she consults some woman of the homeopathic school, but she is opposed to
much medicine, believing that proper diet and exercise are the best cure
for most maladies. Although pleased always to welcome callers, she makes
few visits, except to the faithful friends of olden times whose names so
often have been mentioned in these pages. She finds the days all too
short and too few for the great work whose demands increase with every
year. While Miss Anthony feels an abiding interest in household affairs,
the details and management necessarily devolve upon her sister Mary, who
also looks carefully after the finances, to see that the modest income
is not all appropriated to the cause of woman suffrage. In matters of a
material nature she is the needed complement to the life of her gifted
sister. On all vital questions, suffrage, religion, the various reforms,
the two are in perfect accord and, as they sit together in the quiet
home for the usual twilight chat before the lamps are lighted, there is
none of that dwelling in the past, to which old people are so prone, but
all is of the present, the live topics of the day, and the plans and
hopes which they share alike.
The Anthony home in Rochester stands in Madison street, one of the
nicely paved, well-shaded avenues in the western part of that beautiful
city. It is a plain, substantial two-and-a-half story brick house of
thirteen rooms, with modern conveniences, and belongs to Miss Mary. It
is furnished with Quakerlike simplicity but with everything necessary to
make life comfortable. In the front parlor are piano, easy chairs and
many pictures and pieces of bric-a-brac, given by friends. Over the
mantel hangs a fine, large painting of the Yosemite, presented to Miss
Anthony in 1896 by William Keith, the noted artist of California.
Beneath it stand three fine photographs, Mary Wollstonecraft, Lucretia
Mott and Frederick Douglass. Between the windows is the very mahogany
table upon which were written the call and resolutions for the first
woman's rights convention ever held--the gift of Mrs. Stanton. In the
back parlor the most conspicuous object is the library table strewn with
the papers and magazines which come by every mail. This is surrounded
with arm-chairs, tempting one to pause awhile and enjoy this luxury of
literature. On one side are the bookcases, and on the walls large
engravings of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and a handsome
copy of Murillo's Madonna, while in one corner stands the mother's
spinning-wheel. Opening out of this room is Miss Mary's study, the big
desk filled with work pertaining to the Political Equality Club of 200
members, whose efficient president she has been for a number of years;
and here she spends several hours every day looking after her own work
and relieving her sister of a part of hers. There is a sewing-machine
here also, and a big, old-fashioned haircloth sofa, suggesting a nap and
a dream of bygone days.
In the dining-room is a handsomely carved mahogany sideboard, a family
heirloom, containing china and silver which belonged to mother and
grandmother, and here hang very old steel engravings of Washington and
Lincoln. The large, light kitchen, with its hard coal range, is a
favorite apartment, and Miss Anthony especially enjoys sitting there in
a low rocking-chair while she reads the morning paper. The front room
upstairs, with little dressing-room attached, is the guest chamber. It
contains a great chest of drawers, a dressing-table and mirror which
were part of the mother's wedding outfit over eighty years ago, a
mahogany bedstead and a modern writing-desk and rocking-chairs. On the
walls are several paintings, the work of loved hands long since at rest,
and two engravings, over one hundred years old, such as used to hang in
every Abolitionist's parlor in early days. They are copies of paintings
by G. Morland, engraved in 1794, by "J. R. Smith, King St., Covent
Garden, engravers to H. R. H. the Prince of Wales." One is entitled
"African Hospitality," and represents a ship wrecked off the coast of
Africa with the white passengers rescued and tenderly cared for by the
natives; the other is named "The Slave Trade," and shows these same
negroes loaded with chains and driven aboard ship by the white men whom
they had saved. These pictures have little meaning to the present
generation, but one can imagine how they must have fired the hearts of
those who were laboring to eradicate the curse of slavery from the
nation.
Back of the guest chamber, in this interesting home, is Miss Mary's
sleeping-room, with quaint old furniture and family pictures; then the
maid's room, another guest chamber and, in the southwest corner, next
the bathroom, the pleasant bedroom of Miss Anthony with the pictures of
those she loves best, and the dresser littered with the little toilet
articles of which she is very fond. The most attractive room in the
house, naturally, is Miss Anthony's study in the south wing on the
second floor. It is light and sunshiny and has an open gas fire. Looking
down from the walls are Benjamin Lundy, Garrison, Phillips, Gerrit
Smith, Frances Wright, Ernestine L. Rose, Abby Kelly Foster, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Lucy Stone, Lydia Maria Child and, either singly or in
groups, many more of the great reformers of the past and present
century. On one side are the book shelves, with cyclopedia, histories
and other volumes of reference; on another an inviting couch, where the
busy worker may drop down for a few moment's repose of mind and body. By
one window is the typewriter, and by the other the great desk weighted
with letters and documents.
Each morning, as soon as the postman arrives, Miss Anthony sits down at
her desk and, going over the piles of letters, puts to one side those
which can wait, dictates replies to those requiring the longest answers
and, while they are being typewritten, plunges with her pen into the
rest. Many hours every day and often into the night she writes steadily,
but the pile never diminishes. As president of the National-American
Association not only must she direct the work for suffrage, which is
being carried on in all parts of the country to a much greater extent
than the public imagines, but she also must keep in touch with the
hundreds of individuals each of whom is helping in a quiet but effective
way. There are few days that do not bring requests from libraries,
associations, colleges, high schools or clubs for literature and other
information concerning woman suffrage, which is now the subject of
debate from the great universities down to the cross roads schoolhouse.
In past years libraries have been very deficient in matter upon this
question because there was no general call for it, but now the demand is
so large that it scarcely can be supplied, and all instinctively turn to
Miss Anthony for information.
Some idea has been given of the scope of her correspondence of a public
nature, but it hardly would be possible to describe the private letters.
Standing for half a century as the friend and defender of women, and
known so widely through her travels and newspaper notices, she is
overwhelmed with appeals for advice and assistance. From the number of
wives, and husbands also, who pour the tale of their domestic grievances
into her ears, she would be fully justified in believing marriage a
failure. She is daily requested to sign petitions for every conceivable
purpose, and begged for letters of recommendation by people of whom she
never heard. Women entreat her to obtain positions for their husbands
and children and to help themselves get pensions, or damages, or wages
out of which they have been defrauded. Girls and boys want advice about
their plans for the future. Women, and men too, without education or
experience, insist upon being placed as speakers on the suffrage
platform. Authors send books asking for a review. People write of their
business ventures, their lawsuits, their surgical operations, their
diseases and those of all their family, and of every imaginable
household matter. Scores of letters ask for a "word of greeting" on all
sorts of occasions. Editors of papers and pamphlets, advocating every
ology and ism under the sun, send them with the entreaty that she will
examine and express an opinion, each insisting that "it will take only
a few hours of her time." She is besieged to dress dolls and make aprons
for fairs, to write her name upon pieces to be used for quilts and
cushions, and to furnish scraps of her gowns for the same purpose.
Babies are named for her and she is asked to send a letter of
acknowledgment and a little keepsake. Requests for autographs outnumber
the days of the year.
She is constantly importuned to examine MSS., and not only to do this
but to secure a publisher. During the year 1897 one man sent an article
of sixty-eight closely typewritten pages of legal cap, asking that she
give it a careful reading, revise it, and send it where it would be
published; and no postage stamps accompanied this nervy request. A woman
whose grammar and rhetoric were most defective announced that she had
written a book called "The Intemperate Life of my Father;" also two
stories and a play. She would send all of them to Miss Anthony, to 'fix
up just as if they were her own and help her sell them; she wanted the
proceeds to assist her brothers who had failed in business.' It is a
common occurrence for persons to ask, without so much as enclosing a
stamp, that she prepare an address on woman suffrage and send for them
to read as their own production. One enthusiastic poem begins:
"When the grain is ripe we will gather the sheaves,
And weave a crown for your brow of laurel leaves."
A man from the great Northwest sends a long article entitled, "Sun and
Moon Bathed in Blood! Ring, Ring the Bells!" desiring that it be put in
the "index of the biography," meaning the appendix. One writes: "You are
said to be very good about assisting helpless girls; now you could not
find one more helpless than I am;" and then requests that she select,
have made and pay for a school outfit for her. Another has a great
scheme for starting a "workingwoman's home" and wants Miss Anthony to
furnish the money. The list might be extended almost indefinitely and,
while one is amused and disgusted by turns, there are among this vast
correspondence many letters which touch the heart. During the tariff
debate in Congress in 1897 a paragraph was widely published that a tax
was to be placed on tea, and this note, evidently written by a child,
was received: "My mamma goes out to work while I go to school and she
loves her cup of tea. Our groceryman tells us we will have to pay more
for it now. I have heard how good you are to the poor, do please spare
time to write to the President and ask him not to make our tea dearer.
Tell him to put the tax on beer and whiskey."
Miss Anthony is very conscientious about answering letters, too much so,
her friends think, for she is a slave to her correspondence. Sometimes,
however, she reaches the point of exasperation, as when she opened eight
pages of a faintly written scrawl beginning, "My heart goes out to you
in sympathy." "Well, I wish it would go out in blacker ink," she
exclaimed, and threw it into the waste-basket. Invitations to lecture
and to attend all sorts of gatherings pour in, and she often says to the
younger workers, "If I might but transfer them to you, how much good you
could accomplish." Every mail brings also loving and appreciative
letters which illuminate the whole day, take the sting out of the unkind
ones and lighten the burdens never entirely lifted. The women who have
come into the work in late years continually ask, "How have you borne it
so long?" Sometimes when their own endurance ceases they write her that
they will have to resign, and she makes answer: "If all the young women
fail, then the octogenarian must work the harder till a new reserve
comes to the rescue;" and of course they are ashamed and redouble their
labors to show their loyalty.
With all her hours of toil she is never satisfied with what she has
accomplished, but always feels that she might have done a little more,
that something or somebody has been neglected. In looking over the
mention made in these chapters of a few of the most valuable gifts and
noteworthy letters, she said with sadness: "And no notice has been taken
of the hundreds of little tokens of affection which cost far more of
sacrifice on the part of the givers, and of the thousands of letters
from obscure but faithful women, without which I never could have had
the courage to do my work."
[Illustration: THE ANTHONY FAMILY AT THE REUNION, ADAMS, MASS., JULY 30,
1897.]
While Miss Anthony has remained at home more days in 1897 than in any
previous year for half a century it has been one of the busiest in
regard to letter-writing. It is the dream of her life to raise a
permanent fund to be placed in the hands of trustees, after the manner
of the famous Peabody fund, the income to be used to further the cause
of woman suffrage. To accomplish this she is exerting her strongest
powers of appeal. During all these years of labor for humanity she has
had to beg practically every dollar she has used, and she longs to
relieve the workers of the future from this drudgery and humiliation, by
providing an assured income, so they may not be obliged to expend half
their time and strength in obtaining the money with which to do the
work. In addition to this Standing Fund, she is endeavoring also to
secure enough money for the early establishment of a Press Bureau for
the purpose of taking up and answering, day by day, the false statements
made in regard to woman suffrage, its ultimate aims and actual results;
to furnish news and arguments where they are desired; and to enlist the
support of the press for this question, which is now acknowledged to be
one of the leading issues of the day.
The event of 1897 which gave Miss Anthony more pleasure than all others,
in fact one of the happiest incidents of her life, was the Anthony
Reunion at Adams, Mass., the last of July. The Historical and Scientific
Society of Berkshire had for many years held an annual meeting at some
one of the historic spots for which that county is especially noted. In
1895 this had been held in the dooryard of the old Anthony homestead,
and she had been invited to be present, but was otherwise engaged. It
had been the custom to eulogize her highly at these gatherings but it
was determined that now she must come and speak for herself, therefore
the invitation was repeated for 1896, but then she was in California. In
1897 the letter from the president, A. L. Perry, said: "The present
writing is to give you a formal and official invitation, in the name of
the people of the entire county, whose representatives we are, to be
present and participate in our next meeting. You may be sure of a warm
welcome from your old neighbors who remain, and from the generation of
Berkshire people, men and women, now on the stage."
The meeting was to be held in Lee, and she wrote that if they would
again hold it at the old Anthony homestead she would put aside
everything else and come. She soon received this answer from Rev. A. B.
Whipple: "It gives me pleasure, as vice-president of the Berkshire
Historical Society, to inform you that we have decided to gratify your
'bit of sentiment' as well as our own inclination to meet again 'in that
old dooryard,' to do you honor as one of the natives of Berkshire whose
historic lives are finding a deserved and permanent record in our
society."
Miss Anthony ever wanted her friends to share in her joys and was
anxious that everybody should know her friends, so she wrote that she
would like to have the Berkshire people hear Miss Shaw and others among
the noted speakers. After some exchange of letters the officers of the
society requested her to take charge of the program of the day, and
promised to second all her arrangements. As she always combined business
with pleasure she appointed a meeting of the national suffrage committee
that week, and thus brought to Adams her "body guard," Miss Shaw, Miss
Blackwell, Mrs. Catt, Mrs. Avery, Mrs. Upton[132] and, by invitation,
Mrs. Sewall, Mrs. Colby and Mrs. Harper. She had decided also to have at
this time a family reunion, and for many weeks had been writing far and
wide to the Anthonys, the Laphams, the Reads and the Richardsons,
bidding all come to Adams on the 29th of July, and as a result the "Old
Hive" swarmed as it never had done, even in the early days. She went on
a week ahead and joined forces with her cousin, Mrs. Fannie Bates, who
lived in the house. Albert Anthony, another cousin and near neighbor,
put himself, his horses and vehicles at their service; other relatives
came to their assistance, beds were set up, provisions laid in; and for
a week fifteen people picnicked in the old homestead. The overflow was
received in the hospitable homes of other relatives in the neighborhood,
and even Hotel Greylock, in the village, was pressed into service to
entertain the guests, who came from Kansas, Illinois, New York,
Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New Hampshire and other States.
The suffrage committee meetings were held during several days and
evenings preceding the Historical Society celebration. It was a picture
always to be remembered, that group of distinguished women, standing at
the very head of the greatest progressive movement of the age, gathered
in serious conclave in those old-fashioned, low-ceiled rooms built over
a century ago, concocting schemes which would have filled their Quaker
owners with holy horror. It seemed almost as if they would come back
from the dim past to ask what it all meant. And yet, when one recalled
that the Quakers never commanded their women to keep silence in the
meeting house, but recognized their full equality there and elsewhere,
and stood for liberty in a world given over to religious and political
tyranny, it seemed indeed most fitting that the representatives of this
great association for securing freedom to all, should come together
under the roof of one of these old Friends. One felt as if the ancient
door-latch should lift, and Aunt Hannah, the wise and gentle Quaker
preacher, should glide in and take her seat among these other women whom
the Spirit also had moved. But the most remarkable feature of this
unique occasion was that the woman presiding over the deliberations of
this body of reformers, should have carried on her childish games in
this very room, seventy-five years before, and listened with awe to
parents and grandparents as they discussed the burning questions of
intemperance, slavery and religious intolerance.
An unseasonable storm of several days' duration had made it necessary to
transfer the meeting of the Historical Society to the pavilion in
Plunkett's Park. The ladies of Adams and vicinity, with Mrs. Susan
Anthony Brown at their head, had prepared a bountiful luncheon for the
officers of the society and the fifty invited guests, and here, at noon
on July 29, Miss Anthony sat at the upper end of the long table with
Rev. Anna Shaw on one hand and Rev. A. B. Whipple on the other. At the
conclusion of the luncheon, the officers and speakers took seats on the
stage in the large pavilion, which soon was filled with an audience that
had come from Williamstown, North Adams, Pittsfield, Great Barrington,
Lee and other surrounding towns. The Adams Freeman said: "If the group
of women speakers were brilliant, the audience that honored them, while
less so perhaps in renown, was equal in intellectual attainments. It was
a cultured assembly, including the most progressive people of
Berkshire."[133]
[Illustration: AT THE OLD HOMESTEAD, JULY 30, 1897.]
In a few words of welcome Rev. Louis Zahner, the Episcopal minister,
spoke of the Anthony family as having laid the foundations of the
schools, the industries and the prosperity of Adams, and of the
community's indebtedness to them for the best it has today. Mr. Whipple,
in a cordial address, then introduced Miss Anthony and placed the
meeting in her charge. Can any pen describe her pride and happiness in
returning thus to the loved home of her birth and childhood, to meet
this warm and appreciative welcome and to introduce in turn her cabinet
of eminent women?
After relating some very interesting recollections of her ancestors and
of early events, which were especially appreciated by the old residents,
she introduced Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt, who said in the course of a
graceful address:
There is no citizen of this great nation who would not be delighted
with the privilege of visiting these Berkshire hills, famed for
their beauty, but it is not because of this that most of us have
made this pilgrimage to Adams; rather have we come with much of
that spirit which led the thousands upon thousands of Christians in
the early centuries to Jerusalem, or which later prompted thousands
of Mohammedans to make their pilgrimage to the city of Mecca. We
have come to Adams because it is the birthplace of the greatest
woman of our time.
Many centuries ago, on the 15th of February, there was born a man
whose name is familiar to every school-child throughout the
civilized world, and yet that man never knew a happy day. He was
reviled, persecuted, martyred, tried, condemned, and died sorrowful
and broken-hearted. And what was his offense? He declared that this
earth turned upon its axis and that it moved around the sun. There
were no newspapers in that day, but every pulpit thundered its
denunciation against the great Galileo. When he was condemned to
die he was compelled to renounce this belief, but under his breath
he said, "The world does move!" A century after he had gone, not a
pulpit in Christendom, not a scholar, was there but knew that he
had told the truth.
It is a curious coincidence that upon the anniversary of the
birthday of Galileo there was born Susan B. Anthony. She also
perceived a great truth and the world did not agree with her. It
reviled her for the belief she had propounded, but in this century
she never renounced that belief, but thundered back to the pulpit
and to the newspapers that the world does move and the time will
come when women shall be free; the time will come when they shall
have every right, every privilege, every liberty which any man
enjoys.... We, today, are making the first pilgrimage to the
birthplace of Susan B. Anthony, but I prophesy that in another
quarter of a century there will be many pilgrimages hither, and no
child will be so illiterate as not to know that in this county it
was this greatest of American women was born.
Mrs. Rachel Foster Avery followed with an entertaining account of her
trip abroad with Miss Anthony and the latter's utter indifference to the
titles of the nobility. As she never could get them right she discarded
all of them and insisted on calling everybody plain "Mr." and "Mrs." She
then related this incident:
We had in our party for a few weeks a couple of English ladies.
When driving in Rome, one of them, a great dame of noble lineage,
was admiring an old palace belonging to some very ancient Roman
family and made the statement that this same family owned five
other famous palaces in Italy. Miss Anthony seemed to be making a
mental calculation, and finally said with enthusiasm, "What a
magnificent orphan asylum that would make."
"Why, Miss Anthony, do you mean that you would actually turn the
home of this old family into an orphan asylum?"
"Yes," said she, "I think about 700 of these little ragamuffins
could be put in there. Think of the streets just full of them, and
all these big houses vacant! I don't see a better use to which
these old palaces could be put."
Mrs. Upton in her bright, humorous way related some amusing stories
which she had heard from her ancestors, who were born in Berkshire, and
adroitly turned them into an argument for woman suffrage. A beautiful
poem was read, entitled "Pioneers," dedicated to Miss Anthony by her old
friend John M. Thayer, of Rochester. Col. D. R. Anthony created great
mirth by telling among other stories that eighty years ago his father
had a cotton mill of twenty-six looms; one day all of them suddenly
stopped and, rushing out to ascertain the cause, he found that his wife,
in rinsing her mop in the stream, had stopped the power which moved the
machinery! He then referred to the Plunkett factories with 2,600 looms,
and the other great mills of Adams, as illustrating the progress of the
century. In an address which glowed with beauty and eloquence, Mrs. May
Wright Sewall thus compared Miss Anthony's character with the scenes
amidst which she was born:
We, who own and follow our general, know that she goes where
Liberty leads, where Justice calls, where Love whispers his divine
commands; and we have found in her the gravity of your stately
mountains, the yearning for freedom of your lofty hills lifted
toward the sky spaces. We have found in her the impetuosity of your
mountain streams, which, fretting against narrow bounds, broke
through them, widening and widening ever the channel of the life of
American womanhood; and so we, who love appropriateness, gaze with
delight upon this scenery, the environment of her infancy and the
nurturing influence of her childhood, as a fine illustration of the
eternal fitness of things.
One of the most exquisite addresses of the day was made by Mrs. Clara B.
Colby, who said in part:
Miss Anthony's love of justice links her with the divine. This has
been her impelling motive, and her patient endurance has been the
secret of her success. No matter how keen might have been her sense
of the injustice done to women, no matter how courageously she
might have set out to right the wrong, had she lacked endurance,
she had never been the one to lead us to victory. As justice is the
root of the tree of character, and patience the stalk from which
all growth proceeds, so tenderness is the outflowering of the
divinity within. By her tenderness Miss Anthony has made herself
loved where she might have only been honored.
It was perhaps the drop hardest to swallow from the cup of
bitterness which was ever pressed to the lips of the early woman
suffragists, that they were destroyers of the home. To Miss
Anthony, the home and kindred-lover--homeless only for the sake of
the homes of the mother-half of the race--this must have been
especially hard to bear. There are such all over the land where she
has been a tender and sympathetic friend and where she is enshrined
in the hearts of the homekeepers.... Thus Miss Anthony,
justice-loving, patient and tender, has erected for herself a
lasting monument in the hearts of the women of this nation. May the
time be long deferred when she shall pass from the leadership of
her now triumphant host, but when that day comes, let there be, as
she has enjoined upon us, no tears, but only glad thankfulness for
a great life-work wrought in courage, fidelity and tenderness.
Mrs. Colby urged the Historical Society to purchase the old homestead,
if possible, as a depository not only for relics of the Anthony family
but for mementoes of suffrage work and workers. No report ever can give
an adequate idea of the eloquence of Anna Shaw, so artistically
diversified by delicious bits of humor and keen points of satire. A
portion of her address was as follows:
Amidst all the eulogy which has surrounded Miss Anthony this
afternoon, her brother said to me, "Don't you think they will turn
Susan's head?" I answered, "No, she has had so many years of
misrepresentation and abuse that if they keep on eulogizing her as
long as she lives, it won't balance the other side." There is no
danger in this world that the leader of an unpopular cause ever
will die of overpraise, for, in America as in Jerusalem, the
prophets of God have always been received with stones. We who know
her best love her most, and to me the truest and deepest love of my
existence, since my mother entered the life beyond, is that which I
cherish for Susan B. Anthony.
The remonstrants today tell us that our movement will destroy the
affectionate tenderness of the womanly nature and unsex woman until
she becomes a weak man. I believe in men, and I do not believe that
all the love, the tenderness, the power to sacrifice is feminine. I
believe that the love of man is as true and deep and tender as the
love of woman. I will not accept the theory that "man is the head"
and "woman is the heart." I believe that when God created head and
heart for the human race He divided them equally and gave man his
part and woman hers, and both have kept their own all the way down
the centuries.
The part of Miss Anthony's life which is dearest to us is that into
which she has admitted the few who belong to the sacred inner
circle, who have seen her toil, her suffering, her soul's anguish
and travail for the freedom, the larger growth, the diviner
possibilities of womanhood; and if there is any evidence that
living in the world, working for its uplift, does not destroy this
trait in human character, it is shown in the life of Miss Anthony.
There is no human being whom I have ever known who had more
tenderness for the erring and greater willingness to overlook the
frailties of human life. In this she shows that contact with the
most disagreeable side of the reformer's work, makes the real woman
not less but more womanly. I believe that if the principles which
she advocates, the ideals for which she stands, were embodied in
all womankind, we would have a motherhood diviner than any this
world has ever known, a motherhood such as God had in his thought
when he created woman to be the mother of the race....
It is not a name we love today, it is not a person we revere, but a
great, an ideal life of a woman who has battled with the world, who
has been misunderstood, who has borne its scorn, who has been
ostracised, and who, in the midst of all, has kept her life sweet,
her heart young, her love tender; and when the best thing shall be
said of her which men and women can say, it will be--she was true,
she was noble, she was woman.
The day after the meeting of the Historical Society, occurred the
Anthony Reunion at the old homestead, when eighty of the clan sat down
at the long tables spread in grandfather's room, the keeping-room and
the weaving-room; and what a dinner the famous cooks of the
Anthony-Lapham-Read-Richardson families had prepared for this great
occasion! Not the least important features were the eighteen apple-pies
eaten with the world-renowned Berkshire cheese; and then the sweet bread
and butter, the fried chicken, the baked beans, the rich preserves and
cream, the delicious cake--but why attempt to describe a New England
dinner prepared by New England women? Those who have eaten know what it
is; those who have not, can not be made to understand.
Where Susan B. Anthony sat was the head of the table; at her right hand,
the brother Daniel R.; at her left, the brother Merritt; and close by,
the quiet, smiling sister Mary; and then all along down the line, the
cousins, the nephews, the nieces, three and four generations, who had
joined so heartily with her for the success of this rare occasion.
Before the dinner began, Miss Anthony asked that, in accordance with the
custom of their ancestors, there might be a moment of silent thanks; and
at the close of the meal, when the chatter and mirth were stilled, she
arose and in touching words paid tribute to the loved and gone who once
blessed these rooms by their presence. She then called upon the
representatives of the different branches, old and young, who, in prose
or poetry, with wit or pathos, made delightful response.
[Illustration: THE QUAKER MEETING HOUSE, ADAMS, MASS. 150 YEARS OLD.
SEVERAL MEMBERS OF THE ANTHONY FAMILY IN THE GROUP OF PIONEERS.]
After all had finished they adjourned to the dooryard and a reception
commenced which even the roomy old house could not have accommodated.
For several hours a long line of carriages wound up the hill--the people
of Adams and vicinity coming to pay respect to their illustrious
townswoman and her relatives and friends. The immediate members of the
family were photographed in a group on the old porch, as was also the
dinner party gathered in the historic dooryard. The mountain air was
sweet and invigorating, and the view in every direction most enchanting.
A more picturesque spot scarcely can be imagined: in front, the long
range of Berkshire hills, a spur of the Green mountains of Vermont whose
faint outlines are visible in the distance; at the back, glorious "Old
Greylock," the highest peak in the State; at the right, the steep,
winding road leading down to the village a mile below, through a ravine
perfectly bewildering in its beauty of overhanging trees, moss-grown
rocks and fern-bordered brook tumbling over the massive boulders in its
rapid descent to join the Hoosac; and then united they flow through the
pretty town of Adams, turning the countless wheels of the great mills
and factories.
The next day after the reunion a merry party of thirty, the guests of a
cousin, William Anthony, started in two great coaches, each drawn by six
horses, for the all-day trip to the top of Mount Greylock. The gayest
and happiest of them all was Miss Anthony, with her red shawl over her
shoulders, and her heart as light as when she used to climb these
mountainsides, a little, barefooted girl, more than seventy years ago.
Several days thereafter were spent visiting the pleasant homes of the
relatives, and going with her friends to point out the various places of
interest. Every spot connected with her early life was as sacred to them
as it was dear to her. Together they went to the deserted Quaker meeting
house, a century and a half old, and were shown the very spot where sat
the grandfather, the father, mother and little ones; and the raised
bench occupied by the grandmother, who was a "high-seat Quaker," and
Aunt Hannah Hoxie, the preacher. They strolled through the little
graveyard, with its lines of unmarked mounds. They visited the site of
the old mill, built by Daniel Anthony at the very beginning of the
manufacturing industry, where now only a few sunken stones mark the
foundation. They rested beneath the great trees which stand like
sentinels in front of the girlhood home of the mother, the house long
since crumbled away. They gazed curiously at the ancient Bowen's Tavern,
the favorite stopping-place of the mountaineers in early days.
And then they went with Miss Anthony into her own old home. They stepped
reverently into the very room where she was born. They climbed to the
garret and she pointed out the exact spot by the tiny window where she
used to sit with her simple playthings. They stood with her by the
little stream which still ran merrily through the dooryard, and listened
with misty eyes as she recalled many touching incidents of days long
past; but, however her own heart might have ached with tender
recollections, there were no words of vain longing, no useless tears for
those who had fulfilled their mission and passed away, leaving to her
their legacy of hope and courage and determination. Strong, brave and
cheerful, she honored the memory of the dead in showing herself by her
works to be the worthy descendant of a noble race. And here, where the
story of this pure, single-hearted, self-sacrificing life began, it
shall be ended.
* * * * *
The usual fate of reformers is "praise when the ear has grown too dull
to hear, fame when the heart it should have thrilled is numb." Seldom it
is, indeed, that they live to see the fulfillment of the end for which
they labored, and even recognition usually is deferred until it can be
given only to a memory, but there are a few happy exceptions. While true
reformers seek no personal reward, those who love them rejoice when they
are spared to receive the honors they have earned. Susan B. Anthony's
self-imposed task, for almost half a century, has been to secure equal
rights for women--social, civil and political. When she began her
crusade, woman in social life was "cabin'd, cribb'd, confined," to an
extent which scarcely can be conceived by the present independent and
self-reliant generation; in law she was but little better than a slave;
in politics, a mere cipher. Today in society she has practically
unlimited freedom; in the business world most of the obstacles have been
removed; the laws, although still unjust in many respects, have been
revolutionized in her favor; in four States women have the full
franchise, in one the municipal ballot, in twenty-five a vote on school
questions, and in four others some form of suffrage; while in each
campaign their recognition as a political factor grows more marked. Miss
Anthony's part in securing these concessions may be judged from the
record of these pages. She is the only woman who has given her whole
time and effort to this one end, with no division of interest in behalf
of husband and children, no diversion of other public questions. Is
there an example in all history of either man or woman who devoted half
a century of the hardest, most persistent labor for one reform?
"Of the dead naught shall be spoken except good," is a rule so
universally observed that post mortem compliments have little weight,
but when beautiful things are said of those who still live and toil,
they are full of meaning. Not only is it a delight to her
contemporaries, but it will be a pleasure to future generations who
shall read her history, that Miss Anthony lived to receive her meed of
appreciation. While not all of even the enlightened minds of today have
progressed far enough to accept her doctrine of perfect equality, which
will be universally admitted by the next generation, there are few who
do not recognize and honor the splendid character of the woman and the
service she has rendered. Just as these closing words are being written,
the State superintendent of public works, George W. Aldridge, announces
that he has ordered her face to be carved in the Capitol at Albany, one
of the magnificent public buildings of the world. Here, wrought in
imperishable stone, amidst those of the country's greatest warriors and
statesmen, it will look down forever upon that grand staircase whose
marble steps were so many times pressed by her weary feet, as she made
her annual pilgrimage to plead for liberty.
The sweetest strains in this great oratorio are the tributes of women
voicing their love and gratitude. They come from those in all the walks
of life, and a distinguishing feature is that they who have known her
longest and best are most loyal and devoted. The secret of this is
perfectly expressed by May Wright Sewall, when she says:
Mortals with all their consciousness of their own infirmities are
exacting of one another. It is a proof of the infinite
possibilities involved in the human soul, and a foundation for the
infinite hope which sustains us, that we are satisfied with nothing
less than perfection in other people. Is a woman great? To please
us she must be also good. Is a woman both great and good? We are
not satisfied unless she be likewise loving and lovable. No one can
come near to the life of Miss Anthony without realizing how
responsive she is to personal needs; how lively in her sympathies;
how instinctive her outreaching of the helping hand. The same
fidelity and single-minded loyalty which have characterized her
public career, distinguish her in all private relations. Others may
forget us in our griefs, she never forgets. Others may forget us in
our pleasures, she never forgets.
It is indeed true that Miss Anthony never forgets. In her letters to
hundreds of people, she recollects always to send a message to the
different members of the family, to refer to some agreeable incident of
their acquaintance, and to express either pleasure or regret over
personal affairs which any one else would have failed to remember amidst
such a pressure of work and responsibility.
After an unbroken friendship of twenty-five years, Frances E. Willard,
herself one of the grandest women of the century, paid this beautiful
tribute in December, 1897:
Ever since I "came to myself" my love and loyalty have enveloped
the name, Susan B. Anthony. I look upon her as that figure full of
courage, resource and dignity which will yet be enshrined in the
admiring affection of the whole republic, even as it already has
been for so long in that of thoughtful women. Others have done
nobly and we count over their names with devout remembrance and
gratitude, but Susan B. Anthony by reason of her heroic
self-sacrifice, her lonely life, her changeless devotion, her
disregard for money and position, her concentration of purpose and
universal good will, has made for herself a place on the highest
pedestal in America's pantheon of women.
We do not forget "the slings and arrows" of the earlier time, now
that she is justly honored in these years of greater intelligence
and progress; we do not forget that high sense of personal
integrity which led her to pay off the debts on The Revolution,
although no legal obligation rested upon her to do so; we do not
forget her testing of an unjust law in the great "case" in
Rochester; we do not forget that (jointly with her great associate,
Mrs. Stanton) she prepared for us that invaluable historic record
of the suffrage movement from its earliest inception; we do not
forget the untiring labors which have carried her, from youth to
age, into every nook and corner of the Union; and many of us are
cognizant of unnumbered acts of personal kindness toward women in
need who cherish her as if she were their sister or their mother.
Although the press once misrepresented her, it would hardly venture
to do so now, for her standing with the public is such that not to
know Miss Anthony argues one's self unknown, and to vilify her
argues one's self a villain.
Blessed Sister Susan, accept the homage of one whom you have
cheered and comforted, and who rejoices to believe that the loving
friendship begun here shall grow and deepen in the bright light of
that happier world where there is no injustice, and where we have
abundant reason to believe that women will stand on a plane of
perfect equality.
A number of years ago, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in her own unsurpassed
beauty of language, said:
I will attempt no analysis of one as dear to me as those of my own
household. In an intimate friendship of many years, without a break
or shadow; in daily consultation, sometimes for months together
under the same roof, often in circumstances of great trial and
perplexity, I can truly say that Susan B. Anthony is the most
charitable, self-reliant, magnanimous human being that I ever knew.
As I recall the honesty and heroism of her public life; her
tenderness and generous self-sacrifice to friends in private; her
spontaneous good will towards her worst enemies, a new hope kindles
within me for womankind--a hope that by giving some high purpose to
their lives, all women may be lifted above the petty envy,
jealousy, malice and discontent that now poison so many hearts
which might, in healthy action, overflow with love and helpfulness
to all humanity. Miss Anthony's grand life is a lesson to all
unmarried women, showing that the love-element need not be wholly
lost if it is not centered on husband and children. To live for a
principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are
to be lifted up--to be wedded to an idea--may be, after all, the
holiest and happiest of marriages.
In the twilight of age, when Mrs. Stanton prepared for future
generations the Reminiscences of her life and work of fourscore years,
she wrote to her old friend: "The current of our lives has run in the
same channel so long it can not be separated, and my book is as much
your story as, I doubt not, yours is mine;" and when it was ended she
placed upon it the inscription, "I dedicate this volume to Susan B.
Anthony, my steadfast friend for half a century."
Steadfast! No other word so fitly defines the keystone of the arch of
noble attributes upon which this heroic life is founded--as constant to
a principle as to a friendship. There is nothing of the martyr in Miss
Anthony's nature and she refuses to consider herself in the light of a
vicarious sacrifice. "I do not look back upon a hard life," she says; "I
have been continually at work because I enjoyed being busy. Had this
never-ending toil made me wretched in mind or body, I have no doubt that
in some way I should have gotten out of it." "What thanks did you
receive for the stand you made?" once was asked her. "I had my own
thanks for retaining my self-respect," was the reply. Again one
inquired, "Did you not grow discouraged in those olden times?" "Never,"
she answered; "I knew that my cause was just, and I was always in good
company." Her character, instead of growing embittered by the hard
experiences of early days, has been sweetened and strengthened by the
high moral purpose which has dominated her life. She is a philanthropist
in her love of mankind and her work for humanity, but she is governed by
philosophy rather than emotion, ever examining causes and effects by the
pure light of reason and logic.
Susan B. Anthony has been called the Napoleon of the woman suffrage
movement and, in the planning of campaigns and the boldness and daring
of carrying them forward, there may be the qualities of that famous
general, but in character and principles the comparison fails utterly.
She has been termed the Gladstone among women, and in statesmanlike
ability and long years of distinguished service, there may be points of
resemblance, but she would repudiate the sacrifice of justice to party
expediency, oftentimes charged against the noted English politician. It
has been said that she has been the great Liberator of women, as Lincoln
was of the negroes. There is indeed something in her countenance and
manner which reminds one of Lincoln, the same unconscious dignity, the
same rugged endurance, the same strong, resolute face, softened by lines
of weariness and care and spiritualized by an expression of infinite
patience and indescribable pathos. She has not, however, the
conservatism, the forbearance, the reverence for existing laws and
constitutions, which made Lincoln slow to act and tolerant almost to the
point of criticism.
She has been described as being to the cause of woman's emancipation,
what Garrison was to that of the slave. She has, perhaps, more of the
characteristics of Garrison than of the other three conspicuous figures
of the century. His motto, "No Compromise," has been her watchword. Like
Garrison, she strikes a body-blow straight from the shoulder. She
recognizes no such word as expediency and accepts no halfway measures.
Theoretically a non-resistant, she fights to the last ditch and never
accepts a defeat as final. She has the natural gift of selecting always
the strongest word, and the power of carrying conviction to her
audience. She is conventional in outward observances, but most radical
in thought and speech. She detests all forms of cruelty and oppression,
but it is the action, not the person, that she censures, and she is most
charitable in excuses for the faults and failings of others. She bears
the ills of life with cheerful fortitude, and accepts the blessings with
fine humility. There is no need of comparison. She has her own strong
individuality, which has made its indelible impress upon history and
secured for her a place among the immortals. Now, in life's evening, her
world is illumined with the beauty of a sunset undimmed by clouds--and
as she contemplates the infinite, she takes no heed of the gathering
darkness of night, but looking into a clear sky beholds only the
ineffable glory of other spheres.
FOOTNOTES:
[132] Miss Laura Clay and Mrs. Catharine Waugh McCulloch, the national
auditors, were unable to be present.
[133] There were present also reporters from the New York Sun, New York
World, Springfield Republican, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, and
other papers.
APPENDIX.
CHAPTER XIV--PAGE 229.
ADDRESS TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN.
_Adopted by the Women's National Loyal League, May 14, 1863._
... We ask not for ourselves or our friends redress of specific
grievances or posts of honor or emolument. We speak from no
considerations of mere material gain; but, inspired by true patriotism,
in this dark hour of our nation's destiny, we come to pledge the loyal
women of the Republic to freedom and our country. We come to strengthen
you with earnest words of sympathy and encouragement. We come to thank
you for your proclamation, in which the nineteenth century seems to echo
back the Declaration of Seventy-six. Our fathers had a vision of the
sublime idea of liberty, equality and fraternity; but they failed to
climb the heights which with anointed eyes they saw. To us, their
children, belongs the work to build up the living reality of what they
conceived and uttered. It is not our mission to criticise the past.
Nations, like individuals, must blunder and repent. It is not wise to
waste our energy in vain regret, but from each failure we should rise up
with renewed conscience and courage for nobler action. The follies and
faults of yesterday we cast aside as the old garments we have outgrown.
Born anew to freedom, slave creeds and codes and constitutions all now
must pass away. "For men do not put new wine into old bottles, else the
bottles break and the wine runneth out and the bottles perish; but they
put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved."
Our special thanks are due to you, that by your proclamation 2,000,000
women are freed from the foulest bondage humanity ever suffered. Slavery
for man is bad enough, but the refinements of cruelty ever must fall on
the mothers of the oppressed race, defrauded of all the rights of the
family relation and violated in the most holy instincts of their nature.
A mother's life is bound up in that of her child. There center all her
hopes and ambitions. But the slave-mother in her degradation rejoices
not in the future promise of her daughter, for she knows by experience
what her sad fate must be. No pen can describe the unutterable agony of
that mother whose past, present and future all are wrapped in darkness;
who knows the crown of thorns she wears must press her daughter's brow;
who knows the wine-press she treads those tender feet must tread alone.
For, by the law of slavery, "the child follows the condition of the
mother."
By your act, the family, that great conservator of national virtue and
strength, has been restored to millions of humble homes around whose
altars coming generations shall magnify and bless the name of Abraham
Lincoln. By a mere stroke of the pen you have emancipated millions from
a condition of wholesale concubinage. We now ask you to finish the work
by declaring that nowhere under our national flag shall the motherhood
of any race plead in vain for justice and protection. So long as one
slave breathes in this republic, we drag the chain with him. God has so
linked the race, man to man, that all must rise or fall together. Our
history exemplifies this law. It was not enough that we at the North
abolished slavery for ourselves, declared freedom of speech and press,
built churches, colleges and free schools, studied the science of
morals, government and economy, dignified labor, amassed wealth,
whitened the sea with our commerce and commanded the respect and
admiration of the nations of the earth--so long as the South, by the
natural proclivities of slavery, was sapping the very foundations of our
national life....
You are the first President ever borne on the shoulders of freedom into
the position you now fill. Your predecessors owed their elevation to the
slave oligarchy, and in serving slavery they did but obey their masters.
In your election, northern freemen threw off the yoke, and with you
rests the responsibility that our necks never shall bow again. At no
time in the annals of the nation has there been a more auspicious moment
to retrieve the one false step of the fathers in their concessions to
slavery. The Constitution has been repudiated and the compact broken by
the southern traitors now in arms. The firing of the first gun on Sumter
released the North from all constitutional obligations to slavery. It
left the government, for the first time in our history, free to carry
out the declaration of our Revolutionary fathers, and made us in fact
what we ever have claimed to be, a nation of freemen.
"The Union as it was"--a compromise between barbarism and
civilization--can never be restored, for the opposing principles of
freedom and slavery can not exist together. Liberty is life, and every
form of government yet tried proves that slavery is death. In obedience
to this law, our republic, divided and distracted by the collisions of
class and caste, is tottering to its base and can be reconstructed only
on the sure foundation of impartial freedom to all. The war in which we
are involved is not the result of party or accident, but a forward step
in the progress of the race never to be retraced. Revolution is no time
for temporizing or diplomacy. In a radical upheaving the people demand
eternal principles on which to stand.
Northern power and loyalty never can be measured until the purpose of
the war be liberty to man; for a lasting enthusiasm ever is based on a
grand idea, and unity of action demands a definite end. At this time our
greatest need is not men or money, valiant generals or brilliant
victories, but a _consistent policy_, based on the principle that "all
governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."
The nation waits for you to say that there is no power under our
declaration of rights nor under any laws, human or divine, by which free
men can be made slaves; and therefore that your pledge to the slaves is
irrevocable, and shall be redeemed.
If it be true, as it is said, that northern women lack enthusiasm in
this war, the fault rests with those who have confused and confounded
its policy. The pages of history glow with instances of self-sacrifice
by women in the hour of their country's danger. Fear not that the
daughters of this republic will count any sacrifice too great to insure
the triumph of freedom. Let the men who wield the nation's power be
wise, brave and magnanimous, and its women will be prompt to meet the
duties of the hour with devotion and heroism.
When Fremont on the western breeze proclaimed a day of jubilee to the
bondmen within our gates, the women of the nation echoed back a loud
amen. When Hunter freed a million men and gave them arms to fight our
battles, justice and mercy crowned that act and tyrants stood appalled.
When Butler, in the chief city of the southern despotism, hung a traitor
we felt a glow of pride; for that one act proved that we had a
government and one man brave enough to administer its laws. And when
Burnside would banish Vallandigham to the Dry Tortugas, let the sentence
be approved and the nation will ring with plaudits. Your proclamation
gives you immortality. Be just, and share your glory with men like these
who wait to execute your will.
On behalf of the Women's National Loyal League,
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, _President_.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY, _Secretary_.
CHAPTER XV--PAGE 247.
RECONSTRUCTION.
_Address Delivered at Ottumwa, Kansas, July 4, 1865._
_Mr. President, and Men and Women of Kansas:_
It is a pleasure to me, beyond the reach of words, to be with you today.
I accepted the invitation of your committee that I might feast my eyes
on your grand prairies, ever fringed with the darker green of their
timber-skirted creeks and rivers. I came here on this 89th anniversary
of our National Independence, that I might look into the honest, earnest
faces of the men and the women who, ten years ago, taught the nation
anew, that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Through all this
glorious decade of heroic struggle, my interests, my sympathies, my
affections have been bound up with yours; for, during and since the
cruel outrages of the summer of 1856, my two and only brothers have
stood shoulder to shoulder with the freedom-loving, freedom-voting,
freedom-fighting men of Kansas. And, as I have waited the telegraphic
word that trembled along the western wires, telling of your successes
and your defeats, it has ever been with bated breath lest those of my
own home circle, too, should be numbered among the slain. Therefore,
though not here in person through all these trial years, in spirit I
have been with you, in your privations and hardships, in your sufferings
and sacrifices to make freedom and free institutions the sure
inheritance of Kansas and the nation.
You have already listened to the grand old Declaration of the Fathers of
1776. You have heard the true words of your representative to the next
Congress.[134] His manly utterances here today give you assurance that
he will faithfully reflect the highest and truest sentiments of his
constituency. Men and women of Kansas, I congratulate you, that you have
in this chosen agent a man who will speak and vote on the vital
questions to come before the next Congress from the standpoint of human
equality.
It is my purpose to call your attention to the recent declarations of
our President to our "erring sister States" of the South. I ask you
specially to note his proclamation to Mississippi. After pointing out
that the Constitution of the United States guarantees to every State in
the Union a republican form of government, and that the late rebellion
has deprived the people of Mississippi of all civil government, he
continues:
Now, therefore, in obedience to the high and solemn duties imposed
upon me by the Constitution of the United States, and for the
purpose of enabling the loyal people of said State to organize a
State government, whereby justice may be established, domestic
tranquillity insured, and loyal citizens protected in all their
rights of life, liberty, and property, I, Andrew Johnson, President
of the United States, and Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy
of the United States, do hereby appoint William L. Sharkey
Provisional Governor of the State of Mississippi, whose duty it
shall be, at the earliest practicable period, to prescribe such
rules and regulations as may be necessary and proper for convening
a convention, composed of delegates to be chosen by that portion of
the people of said State who are loyal to the United States, and no
others, for the purpose of altering or amending the constitution
thereof; and with authority to exercise, within the limits of said
State, all the powers necessary and proper to enable such loyal
people of the State of Mississippi to restore said State to its
constitutional relations to the Federal government, and to present
such republican form of State government as will entitle the State
to the guarantee of the United States therefor, and its people to
protection by the United States against invasion, insurrection, and
domestic violence: Provided, That in any election that may be
hereafter held for choosing delegates to any State Convention as
aforesaid, no person shall be qualified as an elector, or shall be
eligible as a member of such convention, unless he shall have
previously taken and subscribed the oath of amnesty, as set forth
in the President's proclamation of May 29, A. D. 1865, _and is a
voter qualified as prescribed by the Constitution and laws of the
State, of Mississippi, in force immediately before the ninth (9th)
of January, A. D. 1861, the date of the so-called ordinance of
secession_; and the said convention, when convened, or the
Legislature that may be thereafter assembled, will prescribe the
qualifications of electors, and the eligibility of persons to hold
office under the Constitution and laws of the State, a power the
people of the several States composing the Federal Union have
rightfully exercised from the origin of the government to the
present time.
The President says he finds the people of Mississippi "deprived of all
civil government" by the revolutionary progress of the rebellion;
therefore he appoints a provisional governor, to call an election of the
loyal people for delegates to a convention to alter or amend the
constitution that was in force prior to the rebellion. He does this "for
the purpose of enabling the loyal people of said State to organize a
State government whereby justice may be established, domestic
tranquillity insured, and loyal citizens protected in all their rights
of life, liberty and property." To this laudable end he instructs the
governor, who is his military agent, to allow no man to vote or to be
voted for, unless he shall have previously taken and subscribed to the
oath of amnesty of May 29, 1865, _and is a voter by the old constitution
and laws of the slaveholding State of Mississippi_. By this ordering,
the President makes it impossible for the great mass of the loyal people
to have a voice in organizing the new government. He re-establishes
precisely the same basis of class representation that worked out the
ruin of the old State government. Not to mention the loyal women, who
make fully one-half of the loyal people, he shuts out all the loyal
black men, with all the loyal poor white men, who were not allowed to
vote under the old regime of slavery.
Thus, by this initiative step, the President makes it inevitable that
the rebuilding of the government shall be controlled by the ex-rebels;
the men who have fought desperately for four years to overthrow the
federal government; the men who hate republicanism; the men who love and
are determined to enjoy aristocracy. The loyal white men there, who have
stood firmly and truly by the government through all the cruel
persecutions of this bloody rebellion, are today a most powerless and
pitiable minority; and yet the President tells this little handful that
their only hope of organizing a genuine republican form of government
lies in their ability to outvote the vast horde of disloyal civilians
and pardoned, but not penitent, returned rebel soldiers. Such an
offence against white loyalty is enough to make the very stones cry out.
But what shall we say of the other and deeper crime against the
thousands of loyal black soldiers, who have fought bravely for us from
the hour we permitted them to shoulder the musket; against the entire
slave population, who have welcomed our Yankee soldiers, been faithful
spies and guides to our armies, nursed our sick and wounded, relieved
and rescued our starving prisoners, and in every conceivable way and
manner given "aid and comfort" to our Union cause? I tell you, men and
women of Kansas, no tongue can speak the ingratitude, the injustice, the
shame and outrage of a proposition thus to leave those true and faithful
freedmen to the cruel legislation of their old tyrants and oppressors,
made tenfold more their enemies, because of their attachment and service
to the government which they themselves have failed to destroy. Think of
it, to thrust four million loyal people under the political heel of
eight millions, almost to a man, disloyal!
I am sure you, who have given the best blood of Kansas to put down the
slaveholders' rebellion against the rightful rule of the majority, will
never by your silence give seeming consent to a reorganization of those
rebel States on any basis save that of the ballot to all loyal citizens,
black and white. You will never consent that loyal Union soldiers and
friends, for no crime but the color of their skin, shall be made
subjects, if not slaves, to disloyal rebel soldiers and enemies, with no
virtue but that of belonging to the "governing race," as the President's
North Carolina appointee calls the white faces. No, no, you will make
these grand old prairies ring with your thunder-toned protests until
they shall be felt and feared in the legislative halls at Washington.
Then will your honorable and honored representative say for you on the
floor of the next Congress, as he has said here today in the shadow of
these mighty oaks of your Neosho, "no reconstruction except on the basis
of the ballot in every loyal hand, black and white." Then will your
senator[135] echo your voice from his seat in the Capitol, as he did the
other day in old, Faneuil Hall, when he said, "the price of our
victories is lost unless we give the negro the homestead, the musket,
and the ballot."
And then will your other senator,[136] who has not spoken since he, with
his colleagues in the Senate, said, "colonize" the faithful, loyal
blacks; since he said, admit Louisiana and Arkansas back into the Union
on the vote of the merest minority of their freshly-oathed white
men--then will he say "no reconstruction without negro suffrage." But,
good people, I charge you, suffer not this man to return to his seat in
the Senate, until he has not only repented and confessed, but given sure
promise forever to forsake his old sins of "white suffrage" and "black
colonization." You owe it to yourselves and your country to see that
your entire representation in the next Congress is right on this one
vital question of reunion. Tell your senator if he must advocate a class
and caste government in the rebel States, it must be loyal blacks, not
disloyal whites. If he must colonize somebody, it must be the cowed,
unconverted rebels, the anti-negro-equality white faces. Tell him
henceforth to speak and vote to disfranchise, and drive out if need be,
the persons who make war and oppress and outrage, and are resolved not
to give "fair play" to peaceable, industrious citizens. You have but to
speak and you will be obeyed, for it is the people's will, not that of
their servants, which is law.
Now, a word on your State legislature: One of the first reports that met
my ear on my arrival in your State last winter, was that the Republicans
of Kansas, almost in a body, had voted against a bill for "negro
suffrage," and that they voted thus for the reason that the question was
introduced and urged by the opposition party of the State. My humble but
earnest advice to you is that you permit those delegates who voted
against right, against justice, against equality to all men, for so
paltry a reason, henceforth to remain quietly at home. Teach them and
all other aspirants for your suffrages that your representatives must
speak and vote for the right, though the arch-demon from the pit below
shall present the measure. That miserable political quibbling at Topeka
last winter lost Kansas the place which of right belonged to her--that
of being the first of the loyal States to give her freedmen their
inalienable right to self-protection.
Our hope of salvation from the fatal errors that are now fastening
themselves upon the plan and the policy of reorganization, lies in the
prompt and right action of the coming Congress. The delegates from any
and all of the rebel States, sent up to Washington by "free white loyal
male" suffrages to knock for admission into the Union, must be sent home
with instructions that no member will be admitted to Congress except he
be elected by a majority of all the loyal men of the State, black as
well as white. To the end that Congress may thus reject the amnestied
white suffrage delegates, the people, all over the country, should unite
in one mighty voice and demand that their representatives shall thus
speak and thus vote. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." If we
sleep now, all is lost; for on this one question of the negro hangs the
future of our republic.
Since the firing of the first gun of the rebellion there has been no
hour fraught with so much danger as is the present. To have been
vanquished on the field of battle would have involved much of misery;
but to be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought
victories, and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of negro
disfranchisement, negro serfdom, would be a defeat and disaster, a
cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a
legacy of wars and rumors of wars, equalled only by that which the
Revolutionary fathers entailed upon their descendants by their fatal
compromises with slavery. It would leave the final triumph of the great
principles of republicanism, universal freedom and equality, "taxation
and representation inseparable," the "consent of the governed," to be
worked out and established in each of those old slave States, through a
fearful re-enactment of the early struggles which you of Kansas so well
remember.
If Congress shall admit the rebel representatives on the basis of white
suffrage, those States will have added to their old representation the
other two-fifths of what used to be "all other persons," which will give
them an increase of fourteen votes in the House as a reward for their
four years of fire and sword against the government. With this added
power on the floor of Congress united to their political aiders and
abettors from the Northern States, there is scarcely any project they
may not be able to carry through in their own time and way. Nor is there
room for a doubt, that it is the spirit and purpose of the slave
oligarchy, whipped and cowed as they say by force of might, not right,
to make a most desperate political fight to regain their old supremacy
in the legislation of the country.
I base my estimate of the nature and intentions of the to-be-restored
representation of the South, on the results of the elections already
held in several of the rebel States, and from the efforts everywhere
among the old planters again to reduce the black freedmen, as nearly as
possible, to the status of slavery. In Virginia, the elections gave a
legislature largely secession and almost wholly anti-negro. The planters
have solemnly leagued themselves together to pay only five dollars per
month to able field hands, each laborer to furnish his own clothes and
pay his own doctor bills. This, too, when these same planters used to
pay or receive for the hire of these same laborers, the sum of fifteen
dollars and upwards. In South Carolina, Gen. Rufus Saxton reports that
the old planters are actually driving the freedmen to work in the fields
in chain gangs, and that the woods are strewn with the bodies of negroes
shot dead in their efforts to escape the cruel torture. In Murfreesboro,
Tennessee, the city election resulted in a secession mayor and common
council. The only Union success I have noticed is that of Fernandina,
Florida, and there the negroes were allowed to vote. Even the loyal
State of Missouri saved her free constitution by less than two thousand
votes.
The result of white suffrage can not be other than the election of large
majorities of anti-negro, if not absolutely secession State and National
representatives. Tennessee, the President's own State, of the loyalty of
whose people we have heard much, has adopted a free constitution, and
under it framed a new code of anti-negro laws; and we can hardly expect
any rebel State to do better, for these new free State law-makers are
the persecuted loyal men of Tennessee who have been outraged in their
homes, hunted to the caves and mountains, or for a time driven out of
the State altogether by the secessionists. One of these new free State
laws says, the testimony of no "free colored person shall be received in
court against any white person." By this enactment, the meanest white
man may enter the home of the bravest black soldier, or wealthiest
colored citizen, may murder his sons, ravish his wife and daughters,
pillage and burn his house, commit any and every possible crime against
him and his, and yet, if no human eye but his own, or that of his
family, or his colored friends, witness the barbarisms, that black man,
the father, the husband, the land-holder, outraged beyond measure, has
no possible legal redress in the courts of Tennessee.
Then again, in case a free colored person is imprisoned and unable to
pay his jail fees, he may be apprenticed out to labor until the sum be
paid. And yet again, the courts may apprentice colored children as they
see proper. The law does not even say friendless or orphan children. Is
not that slavery under a new form? Thus, to leave those devoted black
men's lives, liberties and property to be protected by white men, whose
loyalty to the government is because it is a means to secure power to
themselves, not from any love of its republican principles, is to doom
them to all the ignominies and cruelties of slavery itself.
Let us not be deceived by the wicked wiles of politicians who tell us
that President Johnson can not give the right to the ballot to the black
loyalists of the South; for it is but the new "refuge of lies" to which
slavery resorts. The same men told us that Lincoln had not the power to
emancipate the slaves; that the government had no right to arm the
negro, etc. If President Johnson has constitutional authority, either
civil or military, to take away a man's right to vote, as a punishment
for disloyalty, he must have power to give a man the same right, as a
reward for loyalty; if the President may disfranchise a rebel soldier in
order to enable the loyal people of a State to organize a republican
form of government, he may also enfranchise a Union soldier to
accomplish the same purpose. If the President has not the right nor the
power to give the ballot to any person not entitled to it under the old
order of slavery, how will he organize South Carolina, by whose old
constitution no person was allowed to vote unless he owned ten slaves or
was worth ten thousand dollars? Of course nobody owns ten slaves, and
how many men, think you, who remained loyal at home, or how many
returned soldiers or amnestied civilians have the requisite ten thousand
dollars? In South Carolina, therefore, the President will be compelled
to create voters; and, if he shall enfranchise any of the white
non-voters, can he not also enfranchise the loyal black non-voters?
Let us watch and pray without ceasing. Let us hope that the day will
dawn, and that soon, when law shall be found on the side of justice to
the black race. These objectors never questioned McClellan's military
right to put down slave insurrections with an "iron hand," or Halleck's
infamous Order No. 3 to drive all negroes outside the military lines. It
was only when Generals Fremont, Hunter and others declared the slaves
free, that they might cripple the rebel armies and add them to our Union
forces, that the cry of no law, no power was raised. Thus it is clear
that the blindness and inability to find rightful authority, civil or
military, first to emancipate, then to arm, and now to enfranchise the
negroes, have the one source. Slavery perpetrated the "sum of all
villainies" on the negroes, and then, to justify its wickedness, filled
the whole land with atrocious lies of their depraved and degraded
nature. The American people consented to the outrage; and their
continued prejudice against that oppressed race but proves the adage,
"we hate those whom we have injured."
Last of all comes the objection that the old masters will influence the
vote of the negroes, and that, therefore, to enfranchise them will but
give increased power to the old lords of the lash. Do not believe such
nonsense. Think you, men who for four years have withstood every
possible temptation and torture to induce them to fight for the slave
oligarchy, can now be wheedled into voting for it? No, no. Those loyal,
brave, black men who have known enough to fight on the right side will
know enough to vote on the right side; and it is because the aiders and
abettors of the old slave power believe and know that the negroes will
be an invincible host on the side of equality, that they thus fear them.
We never from the beginning have had a genuine republican form of
government in any State in the Union; for in no State have "the people"
ever been permitted to elect their representatives. Even in
Massachusetts and Vermont, the States nearest republican, only one-half
of the people, the "male inhabitants," are allowed to vote. In other
States it is only all "free white male persons," and in others still,
all "free white male inhabitants owning so many slaves or so much
property." It is not true therefore that _the people_ have ever
exercised the right to prescribe the qualifications of voters or
officers. From the beginning, Congress always has settled the question
in its organic act. That of your own Territory read, "Every free, white,
male inhabitant shall vote at the first election, and be eligible to any
office within the Territory." Thus you see Congress, not you, the
people, decided who should and who should not vote in Kansas. And when
the delegates of the prescribed "free, white, male" order met in
convention, they proved themselves nothing above human, very like the
so-elected conventions of other States, and retained all legislative
power within the limits of the original congressional permit. The same
is true of the rebel States, in which the President now finds the people
destitute of all civil government; when he specifies who may vote, when
he excludes any class from the ballot-box, he makes it impossible for
"the people" to form a republican government.
When the loyal black men are not allowed their right to vote in the
first election of the rebel States, their governments are thrown into
the hands of a very small minority, and that too of very doubtful
loyalty. The President by adhering to the old slave definition of "the
people," rules that all our brave black Union soldiers and our best
friends and allies, without whose aid we should still be struggling with
rebels in arms, shall be subjects, not citizens, of the government they
have rescued from the Confederate usurpers. It is not in human nature
that a people fanatically believing themselves a superior race, and
thereby rightful legislators over another and inferior race, shall
execute justice and equality toward those whom they decree shall be
"hewers of wood and drawers of water." No, the black man's guarantee to
the protection of his inalienable rights to "life, liberty and
property," is bound up in his right to the ballot.
When I speak of the inalienable rights of the negro, I do not forget
that these belong equally to woman. Though the government shall be
reconstructed on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, it yet will
not be a true republic. Still one-half of the people will be in
subjection to the other half, and the time will surely come when the
whole question will have to be reopened and an accounting made with this
other subject class. There will have to be virtually another
reconstruction, based on the duty of the national government to
guarantee to every citizen the right of self-protection, and this right,
for woman as for man, is vested in the ballot.
That this superior "white male" class may not be trusted even to
legislate for their own mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, the cruel
statutes in nearly all the States, both slave and free, give ample
proof. In scarcely a State has a married woman the legal right to the
control of her person, to the earnings of her hands or brain, to the
guardianship of her children, to sue or be sued, or to testify in the
courts, and by these laws women have suffered wrongs and outrages second
only to those of chattel slavery itself. If this be true, that this
so-called superior class can not legislate justice even to those nearest
and dearest in their own hearts and homes, is it not a crime to place a
separate race, one hated and despised, wholly at the will of that
governing class?
It must not be; and the one great work for the people at this hour, and
every hour, between this and next December, is to agitate this question
until the entire nation shall speak in tones not to be mistaken, which
shall compel the coming Congress to refuse admission to every
representative from the rebel States, who is sent there by the so-called
"loyal white male" people.
"_No reorganization without Negro Suffrage_" is the word to send back to
every rebel State. Until Congress shall define and settle this question,
it can not in the future, as it has not in the past, perform its
duty--guarantee a republican form of government in each of the States.
When Congress shall thus decide, there will be work to do in most of the
loyal States. Let us all labor to that end.
Men and women of Kansas, what say you, shall new loyal States or old
rebel States be admitted into the Union until they present constitutions
and laws truly republican, until they send representatives to Washington
elected by a majority of all the people--white and black, men and women?
You say No; your blood-enriched prairies, your battle-fought ravines,
your sacked and burned cities, say No; your martyred dead, your own
immortal John Brown, their freed souls all gloriously marching on, say
No!
My friends, there is one word more I must leave with you. There is yet
another danger. The reverence, the almost idolatry of the American
people for their martyred President, is being used and abused by the
political managers at Washington, and over all the country. The people
are lulled to sleep over the most startling propositions, by insidious
whisperings that President Lincoln originated or approved them. Almost
every reconstruction plan is sent over the wires "sugar-coated" with,
"President Johnson, in this, is but carrying out the spirit and purpose
of Mr. Lincoln!" And there is no disguising or denying the fact, that
the people are today accepting, and that too without questioning, the
anti-negro reorganization plans already inaugurated, because of these
wily, insinuating appeals to their reverence for the memory of their
sacred dead.
If the four years' administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American
people any one lesson above another, it was that they must think and
speak and proclaim, and that he, as President, was bound to execute
their will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say
as he did four years ago, "I wait the voice of the people." The stern
logic of the events of today would guide him, not those of yesterday.
Therefore let us not be thrown off our watch by any of these appeals to
our reverence for the opinions and plans of our departed President. If
his freed spirit is permitted today to hover over each and all of the
vast gatherings of the loyal people throughout the nation, it is
beckoning every soul upward and onward in the path of equal justice to
all; it is urging the great heart of the nation to plant our new Union
on the everlasting rock of republicanism--universal freedom and
universal suffrage.
FOOTNOTES:
[134] Sidney Clark, of Lawrence.
[135] S. C. Pomeroy.
[136] James H. Lane.
CHAPTER XVI--PAGE 259.
ADDRESS TO CONGRESS.
_Adopted by the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, held in New
York City, Thursday, May 10, 1866._
Prepared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.
_To the Senate and House of Representatives:_
We already have presented to your honorable body during this session
many petitions asking the enfranchisement of women; and now, from our
national convention, we again make our appeal and urge you to lay no
hand on that "pyramid of rights," the Constitution of the Fathers,
unless to add glory to its height and strength to its foundation.
We will not rehearse the oft-repeated arguments on the natural rights of
every citizen, pressed as they have been on the nation's conscience for
the last thirty years in securing freedom for the black race, and so
grandly echoed on the floor of Congress during the past winter. We can
not add one line or precept to the comprehensive speech recently made by
Charles Sumner in the Senate, to prove that "no just government can be
formed without the consent of the governed;" to prove the dignity, the
education, the power, the necessity, the salvation of the ballot in the
hand of every man and woman; to prove that a just government and a true
church rest alike on the sacred rights of the individual.
As you are familiar with Sumner's speech on "Equal Rights to All," so
convincing in facts, so clear in philosophy, and so elaborate in
quotations from the great minds of the past, without reproducing the
chain of argument, permit us to call your attention to a few of its
unanswerable assertions regarding the ballot:
I plead now for the ballot, as the great guarantee, and the only
sufficient guarantee--being in itself peacemaker, reconciler,
schoolmaster and protector--to which we are bound by every
necessity and every reason; and I speak also for the good of the
States lately in rebellion, as well as for the glory and safety of
the republic, that it may be an example to mankind.
Ay, sir, the ballot is the Columbiad of our political life, and
every citizen who has it is a full-armed Monitor.
The ballot is schoolmaster. Reading and writing are of inestimable
value, but the ballot teaches what these can not teach.
Plutarch records that the wise man of Athens charmed the people by
saying that equality causes no war, and "both the rich and the poor
repeated it."
The ballot is like charity, which never faileth, and without which
man is only as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The ballot is
the one thing needful, without which rights of testimony and all
other rights will be no better than cobwebs which the master will
break through with impunity. To him who has the ballot all other
things shall be given--protection, opportunity, education, a
homestead. The ballot is like the horn of abundance, out of which
overflow rights of every kind, with corn, cotton, rice and all the
fruits of the earth. Or, better still, it is like the hand of the
body, without which man, who is now only a little lower than the
angels, must have continued only a little above the brutes. They
are fearfully and wonderfully made; but as is the hand in the work
of civilization, so is the ballot in the work of government. "Give
me the ballot, and I can move the world."
Do you wish to see harmony truly prevail, so that industry,
society, government, civilization, may all prosper, and the
republic may wear a crown of true greatness? Then do not neglect
the ballot.
Lamartine said, "Universal suffrage is the first truth and only
basis of every national republic."
In regard to "taxation without representation," Mr. Sumner quotes from
Lord Coke:
The supreme power can not take from any man any part of his
property without consent in person or by representation.
Taxes are not to be laid on the people, but by their consent in
person or by representation.
I can see no reason to doubt but that the imposition of taxes,
whether on trade, or on land or houses or ships, or real or
personal, fixed or floating property in the colonies, is absolutely
irreconcilable with the rights of the colonies, as British subjects
and as men. I say men, for in a state of nature no man can take any
property from me without my consent. If he does, he deprives me of
my liberty and makes me a slave. The very act of taxing, exercised
over those who are not represented, appears to me to deprive them
of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and if continued
seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil
right. For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man's
property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without his
consent?
In demanding suffrage for the black man you recognize the fact that, as
a freedman, he is no longer a "part of the family," and that therefore
his master is no longer his representative; hence, as he will now be
liable to taxation, he must also have representation. Woman, on the
contrary, has never been such a "part of the family" as to escape
taxation. Although there has been no formal proclamation giving her an
individual existence, the single woman always has had the right to
property and wages, the right to make contracts and do business in her
own name. And even married women, by recent legislation, have been
secured in these civil rights. Woman now holds a vast amount of the
property in the country and pays her full proportion of taxes, revenue
included. On what principle, then, do you deny her representation? By
what process of reasoning was Charles Sumner able to stand up in the
Senate, a few days after these sublime utterances, and rebuke 15,000,000
disfranchised tax-payers for the exercise of their mere right of
petition? If he felt that this was not the time for woman even to
mention her right to representation, why did he not, in some of his
splendid sentences, propose to release the wage-earning and
property-owning women from the tyranny of taxation?
We propose no new theories. We simply ask that you secure the practical
application of the immutable principles of our government to all,
without distinction of race, color or sex. And we urge our demand now,
because you have now the opportunity and the power to take this onward
step in legislation. The nations of the earth stand watching and waiting
to see if our Revolutionary idea, "all men are created equal," can be
realized in government. Crush not, we pray you, the myriad hopes which
hang on our success. Peril not this nation with another bloody war. Men
and parties must pass away, but justice is eternal; and only they who
work in harmony with its laws are immortal. All who have carefully
contrasted the speeches of this Congress with those made under the old
regime of slavery, must have seen the added power and eloquence which
greater freedom gives. But still you propose no action on your grand
ideas. Your joint resolutions, your reconstruction reports, do not
reflect your highest thought.
The Constitution, as it stands, in basing representation on "respective
numbers" covers a broader ground than any you have yet proposed. Is not
the only amendment needed to Article 1, Section 3, to strike out the
exceptions which follow "respective numbers?" And is it not your duty,
by securing a republican form of government to every State, to see that
these "respective numbers" are made up of enfranchised citizens, thus
bringing your legislation up to the Constitution--not the Constitution
down to your party possibilities? The only tenable ground of
representation is universal suffrage, as it is only through universal
suffrage that the principle of "equal rights to all" can be realized.
All prohibitions based on race, color, sex, property or education are
violations of the republican idea; and the various qualifications now
proposed are but so many plausible pretexts to debar new classes from
the ballot-box. The limitations of property and intelligence, though
unfair, can be met; as with freedom must come the repeal of statute laws
that deny schools and wages to the negro, and time will make him a
voter. But color and sex! Neither time nor statutes can make black,
white, or woman, man! You assume to be the representatives of 15,000,000
women--American citizens--who already possess every attainable
qualification for the ballot. Women read and write, hold many offices
under government, pay taxes and suffer the penalties of crime, and yet
are denied individual representation.
For twenty years we have labored to bring the statute-laws of the
several States into harmony with the broad principles of the
Constitution, and have been so far successful that in many of them
little remains to be done except to secure the right of suffrage. Hence,
our prompt protest against the propositions before Congress to introduce
the word "male" into the Federal Constitution, which, if successful,
would sanction all State action in withholding the ballot from woman. As
the only way in which disfranchised citizens can appear before you, we
availed ourselves of the sacred right of petition; and, as our
representatives, it was your duty to give those petitions a respectful
reading and a serious consideration. How a Republican Senate failed in
that duty, is already inscribed on the page of history. Some tell us it
is not judicious to press the claims of women now; that this is not the
time. Time? When you propose legislation so fatal to the best interests
of woman and the nation, shall we be silent until after the deed is
done? No! As we love justice, we must resist tyranny. As we honor the
position of American senator, we must appeal from the politician to the
man.
With man, woman shared the dangers of the Mayflower on a stormy sea, the
dreary landing on Plymouth Rock, the rigors of New England winters and
the privations of a seven years' war. With him she bravely threw off the
British yoke, felt every pulsation of his heart for freedom, and
inspired the glowing eloquence which maintained it through the century.
With you, we have just passed through the agony and death, the
resurrection and triumph of another revolution, doing all in our power
to mitigate its horrors and gild its glories. And now, think you, we
have no souls to fire, no brains to weigh your arguments; that, after
education such as this, we can stand silent witnesses while you sell our
birthright of liberty to save from a timely death an effete political
organization? No, as we respect womanhood, we must protest against this
desecration of the magna charta of American liberties; and with an
importunity not to be repelled, our demand must ever be, "No compromise
of human rights"--"No admission to the Constitution of inequality of
rights or disfranchisement on account of color or sex."
In the oft-repeated experiments of class and caste, who can number the
nations that have risen but to fall? Do not imagine you come one line
nearer the demand of justice by enfranchising but another shade of
manhood; for, in denying representation to woman, you still cling to the
same false principle on which all the governments of the past have been
wrecked. The right way, the safe way, is so clear, the path of duty is
so straight and simple, that we who are equally interested with
yourselves in the result, conjure you to act not for the passing hour,
not with reference to transient benefits, but to do now the one grand
deed which shall mark the zenith of the century--proclaim Equal Eights
to All. We press our demand for the ballot at this time in no narrow,
captions or selfish spirit; from no contempt of the black man's claims,
nor antagonism to you who, in the progress of civilization, are now the
privileged order; but from the purest patriotism, for the highest good
of every citizen, for the safety of the republic, and as a glorious
example to the nations of the earth.
CHAPTER XX--PAGE 342.
MISS ANTHONY'S FIFTIETH BIRTHDAY.
_February 15, 1870._
Careful readers of the Tribune have probably succeeded in discovering
that we have not always been able to applaud the course of Miss Susan B.
Anthony. Indeed, we have often felt, and sometimes said, that her
methods were as unwise as we thought her aims undesirable. But through
these years of disputation and struggling, she has thoroughly impressed
friends and enemies alike with the sincerity and earnestness of her
purposes....
Fifty years ago the full moon of suffrage rose in the small, red and
wrinkled countenance of the infant Susan B. Anthony. "Agitation is the
word," says Miss Anthony, in these her later years. Agitation was
probably the word then, as a happy family surrounded the cradle of the
boisterous phenomenon. Miss Anthony has compressed into her half-century
a deal of work, talk, hurry and resolution. Beginning with the women's
temperance conventions in 1848, she has strewn the gliding years with
organizations, societies, conventions innumerable, to the wonderment, if
not always to the admiration, of an observant world. "Through all these
years," remarks Mrs. Henry B. Stanton, "Miss Anthony was the connecting
link between me and the outer world--the reform scout who went to see
what was going on in the enemy's camp, and returned with maps and
observations to plan the mode of attack." It has been intimated that
Miss Anthony has not remained sweet Dian's votary, in maiden meditation
fancy free, because nobody asked her to change her name and station.
Many victims, we are told, are carrying crushed hearts and blighted
hopes through life, and all because of the unrelenting cruelty exercised
by this usually good-humored woman towards the whole male sex.--The
Tribune.
* * * * *
Miss Anthony bears her fifty summers lightly. Whatever our sentiments
may be as to the cause she advocates, we do full justice to her
resistless energy and activity and unswerving fidelity to her
principles. Charming and cordial in her manners, with kind words for
all, she welcomed every guest last evening and made them at ease.--The
Times.
* * * * *
It was regarded last night, and was a topic of conversation, that the
public announcement that Miss Anthony was fifty years old was one more
of the courageous things for which her life has been distinguished.
Battling with the wrong and striving for the right has not left so rigid
a mark of the progress of time upon her features as to prevent her
keeping up a little fiction about being fair and forty. Miss Anthony
prefers the truth, and she says that the register in the family Bible
supports the assertion that a half-century of rolling years have passed
before her.--The Herald.
* * * * *
Miss Anthony looked her very best last night, and let the truth be said,
even should it be followed by persecuting proposals from the bachelors,
she didn't look much more than five-and-twenty. The genial salutations
and happy surroundings of the hour effaced for the time those lines
which care and labor and fifty years will make, however pure the soul
within. Miss Anthony was happy and she looked it.... She wears her years
and honors well. May we live till the celebration of her centenary, and
she read the report thereof next day in the columns of the Evening
Mail.--The Mail.
* * * * *
In these latter days the aspirations and activities of woman are greatly
quickened, and her day of pure and perfect freedom seems near at hand.
When the year of jubilee shall at last ring in, no name will be more
highly honored than that of Miss Susan B. Anthony; and her honors have
been well deserved. Early and late, in season and out, in places high
and low, all over this broad land, by voice and pen, has she labored
with unflagging zeal for the exalted liberty of woman.... Men who have
honored mothers, pure sisters, devoted wives and loving daughters, owe
to Miss Anthony a heavy debt of gratitude for her life-work in behalf of
women.--The Globe.
* * * * *
Miss Anthony's reception has been one of the events of the week.... Men
who have expended about half of the time and half of the energy in the
business of money-making which Miss Anthony has expended in benefiting
the race, have become millionaires, and have been held up to the rising
generation as examples of energy and industry worthy of imitation.
Bronzes have been erected and numerous biographies written to do them
honor. Had Miss Anthony labored for herself as devotedly as she has for
others, she would no doubt have received the usual reward in greenbacks;
and but for the fact of her being a woman, might have had a bronze
erected in her honor.--The Courier.
* * * * *
It is not always true that "the good die young," for Miss Susan B.
Anthony has lived to celebrate her fiftieth birthday.... Right glad are
we that the anniversary was observed with due pomp and circumstance. No
kindly tribute to great moral worth is too good for this good woman. As
one of the chief heroines of our generation, she abundantly deserves all
the honors which were paid her on that festal night. There are many
public-spirited workers in our busy land; many noble souls who have
devoted their life-long energies to the elevation of their
fellow-beings; many moral pioneers, who, when they die, will leave the
world better than they found it; and conspicuous among these is the
staunch, unwearied and indomitable woman who, at the end of half a
century of life, can remember but few idle or wasted days. If Miss
Anthony's persevering efforts in behalf of her sex are not worthy of
generous praise, then there is no just fame due to a brave career. If
her methods have sometimes lacked soundness of judgment, they have never
lacked nobility of purpose. There exists a peculiar, invaluable and
time-honored class of plain and substantial women who are said to be "as
honest as the day is long;" and Susan B. Anthony is the queen of this
royal race. Dauntless and tireless as the sterner sex, sympathetic and
tender as the gentler, we sometimes think that she is both man and woman
in one. She is one of the sterling characters of our day. The whole
people ought to rejoice that such a woman was born, has lived and still
toils.--The Independent.
* * * * *
Out of scores of letters received space allows the reproduction of but a
few:
* * * * *
I shall always be present in sympathy with any number of people who will
express their admiration of the sterling traits which adorn the life and
character of the lady who now passes the fiftieth anniversary of her
most devoted and unselfish life. I am glad to tender the legal
representative of a dollar for each of these years, with the confident
assurance of the early triumph of that cause to which her life has been
singularly devoted. This greenback is no surer of being redeemed in gold
than is my confidence in the golden era of legal enfranchisement for
woman!... Long before Miss Anthony sees her "threescore and ten," the
political equality of all American citizens will be fully established.
With sentiments of the highest esteem, I am, very cordially and truly,
S. C. POMEROY.
* * * * *
... God bless her, and may she live many happy, joyous years! That she
and her noble co-workers are soon to see the complete triumph of the
woman's cause I firmly believe. And when in after years the great
benefactors of this century are sought for, Susan B. Anthony's name will
be found occupying one of the highest niches in the temple of honest
fame. Truly yours,
J. P. ROOT. [Lieutenant-Governor of Kansas.]
* * * * *
... Enclosed is a check for $50, one for each year of your life. Will
agree to give you the same pro rata sum on your one hundredth, birthday.
With love, your brother,
D. R. ANTHONY.
* * * * *
There will be among those who sympathize with and rejoice in your
labors, no lack of testimony tonight to their persistency and value; but
from one who deplores both, you will perhaps be willing to hear a
hearty, cordial, admiring expression of the regard he is nevertheless
forced to cherish for the sincerity and the unmistakably disinterested
devotion which has marked your long and hopeful work in the cause you
hold so dear and serve so faithfully. I can not wish you the success you
seek--let me give you this better wish, that the anniversary your
friends celebrate tonight may never bring fewer tokens of regard than
now, and never find you seeming less the faithful worker "of cheerful
yesterdays and confident tomorrows." With renewed congratulations I am,
very cordially yours,
WHITELAW REID.
* * * * *
I could not be where I longed to be last evening, where I could look
upon the toilworn face of the true, tried and never found wanting--the
one of all others who has borne the heat of the day, and that without
wilting or complaining ever hopeful and ever pursuing "the even tenor of
her way." Absence shall not keep from thee my mite, and how I wish it
were ten, yes, twenty times as much, but here it is with my love,
respect and genuine friendship. Be of brave heart and believe that I am
thy fast friend,
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS.
* * * * *
Yours is a "golden wedding" indeed--for the fiftieth anniversary of a
life that has been wedded to a great cause is a far more glorious golden
wedding than those which generally go by that name. Accept my heartiest
wishes for your welfare and for the success of your novel celebration.
Heretofore the privilege of growing old and possessing common sense has
belonged exclusively to the other sex. Sincerely yours,
FRANCES ELLEN BURR.
* * * * *
Please accept the enclosed check of $50, as a slight token of regard
from our absent trio. As I hardly need tell you, the lion's share of
this birthday gift is sent by my father, but neither mother nor I will
admit that in the unsubstantial, and yet I hope not valueless part of
the offering, the personal regard and appreciation of your noble work
for woman which accompany it, our contribution is any less than his. I
remain yours very truly,
LAURA CURTIS BULLARD.
* * * * *
You have worked for the slave and for woman. Your fifty years shine
about you and rest like a halo of glory around your head.... Fifty years
today! When that half-century again rolls around, you and I will be in
our graves and our names and work will stand back of us to all time. But
into that future I look with prophetic eye to see woman no longer
enslaved, and to find, not only on this continent, but over the world,
as benefactor of the race, the name of Susan B. Anthony. Your
affectionate friend,
MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE.
* * * * *
My good husband in writing from Toledo says: "Tell Susan that all the
newspaper accounts taken together could not increase the pride which I
have long felt in her pertinacious, obstinate, fault-finding, raspish,
strong-minded, dogmatic and grand career. God bless her!" To all of
which I subscribe most affectionately,
ELIZABETH R. TILTON.
* * * * *
... If your Bible says you are fifty, I will try to be as reverential as
possible when next we meet. I wish you similar health and strength when
you are seventy-five--you'll find no change in me. I send you by express
today Whittier's poems. Ever affectionately,
ELLEN WRIGHT GARRISON.
* * * * *
All the people who know you and who don't know you were given
opportunity to utter their good wishes, and poor me, wandering across
these western spaces, quite left out in the cold! Please ma'am, why did
I know nothing of your reception till it was all over? I should have
sent you what I now send--a gray silk gown, wherein you are to make
yourself fine and grand, and a draft for $200 as a little nest-egg.
If I only had a happy ease with my pen, how glad I would have been to
put on paper in glowing words just what I think of the faithful,
unselfish, earnest, single-minded, courageous years, which my dear old
Susan has given to the service of humanity. How, through poverty and
persecution, evil tongues and slanderous words, ridicule and reproach,
she has said, "Nothing shall daunt me; 'tis God's service;" and so
speaking, has held fast the profession of her faith without wavering....
God bless her! God bless her! The tears come to my eyes as I write that
benediction, and think how gently and earnestly men and women alike in
time to come will repeat it when her name is mentioned; when those same
men and women shall see her life and her work, not as now "through a
glass darkly," but as those who gaze through the sunshine of truth.
Good-by, dear friend--many happy years for you, prays your loving
ANNA E. DICKINSON.
* * * * *
Accept the enclosed check for $50, not as a present, merely, but as a
debt, honestly due, for "services rendered." Had there been no
"agitation" for the last twenty years, resulting in so complete a
"Revolution," we teachers might still be working for $1 per week and
"boarding 'round." But thanks to your unfailing "persistency," and the
faithfulness of your co-workers in speaking for a class, the majority of
whom dare not speak for themselves through fear of losing the little
already gained, the salaries of all workingwomen have been largely
increased.... So, if need be, fight as valiantly, dear sister, for the
next twenty years as for the last, or at least till woman's right to a
voice in the laws by which she is governed shall be acknowledged in
every State and Territory of our country. Affectionately your sister,
MARY S. ANTHONY.
* * * * *
On this, your fiftieth birthday, permit me to present you my check for
$50, as a slight and very inadequate expression of admiring gratitude on
my part for your twenty years of arduous and self-sacrificing labor in
the cause of woman. What woman has gained already, and it is much, what
I and others have been able to achieve in professional life, must be
mainly ascribed to you, and such as you.... Your faithful friend and
co-worker,
CLEMENCE S. LOZIER.
* * * * *
Although away here in Rome, I have kept track of your goings-on through
The Revolution, which comes regularly.... I wish I could have been there
to assist at the merrymaking. Miss Manning has kindly offered to take a
little remembrance [an Etruscan gold and garnet pin] to you when she
goes home, which you are to wear with that new silk dress. You see how
selfish I am. I wish to compel you not only to think of me, but to
associate me in your mind with our peerless Anna, God bless the dear
child! Ever affectionately,
KATE N. DOGGETT.
* * * * *
The presents received were too numerous to mention. From Mr. and Mrs.
Cheney, South Manchester, Conn., $50; Erie Co. (N. Y.) Suffrage
Association, $50; Henry Ward Beecher, the Tiltons, Frank D. Moulton,
Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. S. C. Pomeroy, $25 each; Mr. and Mrs. Samuel E.
Sewall, $20; and from other friends, sums of ten, fifteen and twenty
dollars, amounting in all to $1,000. In addition were a broche shawl
from Mrs. Stanton, gold watch, chain and pin from Miss Sarah Johnston,
pen-and-ink sketch from Eliza Greatorex, point and duchesse lace collars
and handkerchiefs, sets of books, engravings, gold pens, pocket-books,
travelling case, and floral offerings.
CHAPTER XXV--PAGE 435.
CONSTITUTIONAL ARGUMENT.
_Delivered in twenty-nine of the post-office districts of Monroe, and
twenty-one of Ontario, in Miss Anthony's canvass of those counties prior
to her trial in June, 1873._
_Friends and Fellow-Citizens:_--I stand before you under indictment for
the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election,
without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening
to prove to you that in thus doing, I not only committed no crime, but
instead simply exercised my citizen's right, guaranteed to me and all
United States citizens by the National Constitution beyond the power of
any State to deny.
Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural
right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making
and executing the laws. We assert the province of government to be to
secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights. We throw
to the winds the old dogma that government can give rights. No one
denies that before governments were organized each individual possessed
the right to protect his own life, liberty and property. When 100 or
1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away
their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each
other in the enjoyment of them through prescribed judicial and
legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force
in the adjustment of their differences and adopt those of civilization.
Nor can you find a word in any of the grand documents left us by the
fathers which assumes for government the power to create or to confer
rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution,
the constitutions of the several States and the organic laws of the
Territories, all alike propose to _protect_ the people in the exercise
of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.
All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. To secure these, governments are instituted
among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the
governed.
Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, or exclusion of
any class from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is pronounced the
right of all men, and "consequently," as the Quaker preacher said, "of
all women," to a voice in the government. And here, in this first
paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of
all to the ballot; for how can "the consent of the governed" be given,
if the right to vote be denied? Again:
Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends,
it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to
institute a new government, laying its foundations on such
principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them
shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Surely the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly implied;
for however destructive to their happiness this government might become,
a disfranchised class could neither alter nor abolish it, nor institute
a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and
rebellion. One-half of the people of this nation today are utterly
powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write
there a new and a just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with
this form of government, that enforces taxation without
representation--that compels them to obey laws to which they never have
given their consent--that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a
jury of their peers--that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of
their own persons, wages and children--are this half of the people who
are left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of
the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this
government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of
equal rights to all. By these declarations, kings, popes, priests,
aristocrats, all were alike dethroned and placed on a common level,
politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, men,
as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule and placed on a
political level with women. By the practice of these declarations all
class and caste distinctions would be abolished, and slave, serf,
plebeian, wife, woman, all alike rise from their subject position to the
broader platform of equality.
The preamble of the Federal Constitution says:
We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more
perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity,
provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and
secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do
ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of
America.
It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor we, the male
citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. We formed it
not to give the blessings of liberty but to secure them; not to the half
of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole
people--women as well as men. It is downright mockery to talk to women
of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the
only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican
government--the ballot.
The early journals of Congress show that, when the committee reported to
that body the original articles of confederation, the very first one
which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of
suffrage. Article IV said:
The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and
intercourse between the people of the different States of this
Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States (paupers,
vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be entitled to
all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the
several States.
Thus, at the very beginning, did the fathers see the necessity of the
universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all, in
order to produce the desired result--a harmonious union and a
homogeneous people.
Luther Martin, attorney-general of Maryland, in his report to the
legislature of that State of the convention which framed the United
States Constitution, said:
Those who advocated the equality of suffrage took the matter up on
the original principles of government: that the reason why each
individual man in forming a State government should have an equal
vote, is because each individual, before he enters into government,
is equally free and equally independent.
James Madison said:
Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the
mass of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the
laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who
are to administer them.... Let it be remembered, finally, that it
has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights
for which she contended were the rights of human nature.
These assertions by the framers of the United States Constitution of the
equal and natural right of all the people to a voice in the government,
have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation
throughout the entire history of our government. Thaddeus Stevens, of
Pennsylvania, said in 1866: "I have made up my mind that the elective
franchise is one of the inalienable rights meant to be secured by the
Declaration of Independence." B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three
days' discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan's
motion to strike "male" from the District of Columbia suffrage bill,
said:
Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I
stand for universal suffrage and as a matter of fundamental
principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any
ground of race or sex. I will go farther and say that I recognize
the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right. I do
not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations
upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social
state itself. Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this
debate, to hear senators declare this right only a conventional and
political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and
others; not a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President,
I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I
believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you
crystallize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring
the death-knell of American liberties.
Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments, insisted that so soon as by the Thirteenth
Amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United
States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights--the right to vote
and to be voted for. In closing one of his great speeches he said:
I do not hesitate to say that when the slaves of our country became
"citizens" they took their place in the body politic as a component
part of the "people," entitled to equal rights and under the
protection of these two guardian principles: First, that all just
governments stand on the consent of the governed; and second, that
taxation without representation is tyranny; and these rights it is
the duty of Congress to guarantee as essential to the idea of a
republic.
The preamble of the constitution of the State of New York declares the
same purpose. It says: "We, the people of the State of New York,
grateful to Almighty God for our freedom, in order to secure its
blessings, do establish this constitution." Here is not the slightest
intimation either of receiving freedom from the United States
Constitution, or of the State's conferring the blessings of liberty upon
the people; and the same is true of every other State constitution. Each
and all declare rights God-given, and that to secure the people in the
enjoyment of their inalienable rights is their one and only object in
ordaining and establishing government. All of the State constitutions
are equally emphatic in their recognition of the ballot as the means of
securing the people in the enjoyment of these rights. Article I of the
New York State constitution says:
No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of the
rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the
law of the land, or the judgment of his peers.
So carefully guarded is the citizen's right to vote, that the
constitution makes special mention of all who may be excluded. It says:
"Laws may be passed excluding from the right of suffrage all persons who
have been or may be convicted of bribery, larceny or any infamous
crime."
In naming the various employments which shall not affect the residence
of voters, Section 3, Article II, says "that neither being kept in any
almshouse, or other asylum, at public expense, nor being confined in any
public prison, shall deprive a person of his residence," and hence of
his vote. Thus is the right of voting most sacredly hedged about. The
only seeming permission in the New York State constitution for the
disfranchisement of women is in Section 1, Article II, which says:
"Every male citizen of the age of twenty-one years, etc., shall be
entitled to vote."
But I submit that in view of the explicit assertions of the equal right
of the whole people, both in the preamble and previous article of the
constitution, this omission of the adjective "female" should not be
construed into a denial; but instead should be considered as of no
effect. Mark the direct prohibition, "No member of this State shall be
disfranchised, unless by the law of the land, or the judgment of his
peers." "The law of the land" is the United States Constitution; and
there is no provision in that document which can be fairly construed
into a permission to the States to deprive any class of citizens of
their right to vote. Hence New York can get no power from that source to
disfranchise one entire half of her members. Nor has "the judgment of
their peers" been pronounced against women exercising their right to
vote; no disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror--and none
but disfranchised persons can be women's peers. Nor has the legislature
passed laws excluding women as a class on account of idiocy or lunacy;
nor have the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny or any infamous
crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the
exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No
barriers whatever stand today between women and the exercise of their
right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice, which refuse to
expunge the word "male" from the constitution.
The clauses of the United States Constitution cited by our opponents as
giving power to the States to disfranchise any classes of citizens they
please, are contained in Sections 2 and 4, Article I. The second says:
The House of Representatives shall be composed of members chosen
every second year by the people of the several States; and the
electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for
electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislature.
This can not be construed into a concession to the States of the power
to destroy the right to become an elector, but simply to prescribe what
shall be the qualifications, such as competency of intellect, maturity
of age, length of residence, that shall be deemed necessary to enable
them to make an intelligent choice of candidates. If, as our opponents
assert, it is the duty of the United States to protect citizens in the
several States against higher or different qualifications for electors
for representatives in Congress than for members of the Assembly, then
it must be equally imperative for the national government to interfere
with the States, and forbid them from arbitrarily cutting off the right
of one-half the people to become electors altogether. Section 4 says:
The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and
representatives shall be prescribed in each State by the
legislature thereof; but Congress may at any time, by law, make or
alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing
senators.
Here is conceded to the States only the power to prescribe times, places
and manner of holding the elections; and even with these Congress may
interfere in all excepting the mere place of choosing senators. Thus,
you see, there is not the slightest permission for the States to
discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote. Surely,
to regulate can not be to annihilate; to qualify can not be wholly to
deprive. To this principle every true Democrat and Republican said amen,
when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches from
1865 to 1869 for equal rights to all; and when, in 1871, I asked that
senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to
protect women in their right to vote--as he had done for black men--he
handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period,
and said:
Put "sex" where I have "race" or "color," and you have here the
best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a
doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will
never vote for a Sixteenth Amendment to guarantee it to them. I
voted for both the Fourteenth and Fifteenth under protest; would
never have done it but for the pressing emergency of that hour;
would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to
protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should
have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly-made
freedmen had neither the intelligence, wealth nor time to await
that slow process. Women do possess all these in an eminent degree,
and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them
establish the powers of our American magna charta to protect every
citizen of the republic.
But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner's counsel I went to
the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen's right to vote,
the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them--they appealed to me,
and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally. Putting sex
where he did color, Senator Sumner would have said:
Qualifications can not be in their nature permanent or
insurmountable. Sex can not be a qualification any more than size,
race, color or previous condition of servitude. A permanent or
insurmountable qualification is equivalent to a deprivation of the
suffrage. In other words, it is the tyranny of taxation without
representation, against which our Revolutionary mothers, as well as
fathers, rebelled.
For any State to make sex a qualification, which must ever result in the
disfranchisement of one entire half of the people, is to pass a bill of
attainder, an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the
supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever
withheld from women and their female posterity. For them, this
government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed.
For them this government is not a democracy; it is not a republic. It is
the most odious aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe.
An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of
learning, where the educated govern the ignorant; or even an oligarchy
of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this
oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the
oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every
household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects--carries
discord and rebellion into every home of the nation. This most odious
aristocracy exists, too, in the face of Section 4, Article IV, which
says: "The United States shall guarantee to every State in the Union a
republican form of government."
What, I ask you, is the distinctive difference between the inhabitants
of a monarchical and those of a republican form of government, save that
in the monarchical the people are subjects, helpless, powerless, bound
to obey laws made by political superiors; while in the republican the
people are citizens, individual sovereigns, all clothed with equal power
to make and unmake both their laws and law-makers? The moment you
deprive a person of his right to a voice in the government, you degrade
him from the status of a citizen of the republic to that of a subject.
It matters very little to him whether his monarch be an individual
tyrant, as is the Czar of Russia, or a 15,000,000 headed monster, as
here in the United States; he is a powerless subject, serf or slave; not
in any sense a free and independent citizen.
It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns _he, his_ and _him_
in all the constitutions and laws, is proof that only men were meant to
be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the
letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the
other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from
taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the
violation of laws. There is no _she_ or _her_ or _hers_ in the tax laws,
and this is equally true of all the criminal laws.
Take for example the civil rights law which I am charged with having
violated; not only are all the pronouns in it masculine, but everybody
knows that it was intended expressly to hinder the rebel men from
voting. It reads, "If any person shall knowingly vote without _his_
having a lawful right." It was precisely so with all the papers served
on me the United States marshal's warrant, the bail-bond, the petition
for habeas corpus, the bill of indictment--not one of them had a
feminine pronoun; but to make them applicable to me, the clerk of the
court prefixed an "s" to the "he" and made "her" out of "his" and "him;"
and I insist if government officials may thus manipulate the pronouns to
tax, fine, imprison and hang women, it is their duty to thus change them
in order to protect us in our right to vote.
So long as any classes of men were denied this right, the government
made a show of consistency by exempting them from taxation. When a
property qualification of $250 was required of black men in New York,
they were not compelled to pay taxes so long as they were content to
report themselves worth less than that sum; but the moment the black
man died and his property fell to his widow or daughter, the black
woman's name was put on the assessor's list and she was compelled to pay
taxes on this same property. This also is true of ministers in New York.
So long as the minister lives, he is exempted from taxation on $1,500 of
property, but the moment the breath leaves his body, his widow's name
goes on the assessor's list and she has to pay taxes on the $1,500. So
much for special legislation in favor of women!
In all the penalties and burdens of government (except the military)
women are reckoned as citizens, equally with men. Also, in all the
privileges and immunities, save those of the jury and the ballot-box,
the foundation on which rest all the others. The United States
government not only taxes, fines, imprisons and hangs women, but it
allows them to pre-empt lands, register ships and take out passports and
naturalization papers. Not only does the law permit single women and
widows the right of naturalization, but Section 2 says, "A married woman
may be naturalized without the concurrence of her husband;" (I wonder
the fathers were not afraid of creating discord in the families of
foreigners;) and again:
When an alien, having complied with the law and declared his
intention to become a citizen, dies before he is actually
naturalized, his widow and children shall be considered citizens,
entitled to all rights and privileges as such, on taking the
required oath.
If a foreign born woman by becoming a naturalized citizen is entitled to
all the rights and privileges of citizenship, do not these include the
ballot which would have belonged to her husband? If this is true of a
naturalized woman, is it not equally true of one who is native born?
The question of the masculine pronouns--yes, and nouns too--was settled
by the United States Supreme Court, in the case of Silver _versus_ Ladd,
December, 1868. The court said:
In construing a benevolent statute of the government, made for the
benefit of its own citizens, inviting and encouraging them to
settle on its distant public lands, the words "single man" and
"unmarried man" may, especially if aided by the context and other
parts of the statute, be taken in a generic sense. Held,
accordingly, that the Fourth Section of the Act of Congress, of
September 21, 1850, granting by way of donation lands in Oregon
Territory to every white settler or occupant, American half-breed
Indians included, embraced within the term single man an unmarried
woman.
Though the words persons, people, inhabitants, electors, citizens, are
all used indiscriminately in the national and State constitutions, there
was always a conflict of opinion, prior to the war, as to whether they
were synonymous terms, but whatever room there was for doubt, under the
old regime, the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment settled that
question forever in its first sentence:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject
to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and
of the State wherein they reside.
The second settles the equal status of all citizens:
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the
privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor
shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property
without due process of law, or deny to any person within its
jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? I
scarcely believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say
they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens, and no State has
a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, which shall
abridge their privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination
against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is
today null and void, precisely as is every one against negroes.
Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I
think the disfranchised ex-rebels and ex-State prisoners all will agree
that it is not only one of them, but the one without which all the
others are nothing. Seek first the kingdom of the ballot and all things
else shall be added, is the political injunction.
Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define citizen to be a person, in the
United States, entitled to vote and hold office. Prior to the adoption
of the Thirteenth Amendment, by which slavery was forever abolished and
black men transformed from property to persons, the judicial opinions of
the country had always been in harmony with this definition: In order to
be a citizen one must be a voter. Associate-Justice Washington, in
defining the privileges and immunities of the citizen, more than fifty
years ago, said: "They include all such privileges as are fundamental in
their nature; and among them is the right to exercise the elective
franchise, and to hold office." Even the Dred Scott decision, pronounced
by the Abolitionists and Republicans infamous because it virtually
declared "black men had no rights white men were bound to respect," gave
this true and logical conclusion, that to be one of the people was to be
a citizen and a voter.
Chief-Justice Daniels said:
There is not, it is believed, to be found in the theories of
writers on government, or in any actual experiment heretofore made,
an exposition of the term citizen which has not been considered as
conferring the actual possession and enjoyment of an entire
equality of privileges, civil and political.
Associate-Justice Taney said:
The words "people of the United States" and "citizens" are
synonymous terms, and mean the same thing. They both describe the
political body, who, according to our republican institutions, form
the sovereignty, and who hold the power and conduct the government
through their representatives. They are what we familiarly call
"the sovereign people," and every citizen is one of this people,
and a constituent member of this sovereignty.
Thus does Judge Taney's decision, which was so terrible a ban to the
black man while he was a slave, now that he is a person and no longer
property, pronounce him a citizen, possessed of entire equality of
privileges, civil and political; and not only the black man, but the
black woman, and all women. It was not until after the abolition of
slavery, by which the negroes became free men and hence citizens, that
any contrary opinion was rendered. U. S. Attorney-General Bates then
said:
The Constitution uses the word "citizen" only to express the
political quality, [not equality, mark,] of the individual in his
relation to the nation; to declare that he is a member of the body
politic, and bound to it by the reciprocal obligations of
allegiance on the one side and protection on the other. The
phrase, "a citizen of the United States," without addition or
qualification, means neither more nor less than a member of the
nation.
Then, to be a citizen of this republic is no more than to be a subject
of an empire. You and I, and all true and patriotic citizens, must
repudiate this base conclusion. We all know that American citizenship,
without addition or qualification, means the possession of equal rights,
civil and political. We all know that the crowning glory of every
citizen of the United States is that he can either give or withhold his
vote from every law and every legislator under the government.
Did "I am a Roman citizen" mean nothing more than that I am a "member"
of the body politic of the republic of Rome, bound to it by the
reciprocal obligations of allegiance on the one side and protection on
the other? When you, young man, shall travel abroad, among the
monarchies of the old world, and there proudly boast yourself an
"American citizen," will you thereby declare yourself neither more nor
less than a "member" of the American nation?
This opinion of Attorney-General Bates, that a black citizen was not a
voter, given merely to suit the political exigency of the Republican
party in that transition hour between emancipation and enfranchisement,
was no less infamous, in spirit or purpose, than was the decision of
Judge Taney, that a black man was not one of the people, rendered in the
interest and at the behest of the old Democratic party in its darkest
hour of subjection to the slave power. Nevertheless, all of the adverse
arguments, congressional reports and judicial opinions, thus far, have
been based on this purely partisan, time-serving decision of General
Bates, that the normal condition of the citizen of the United States is
that of disfranchisement; that only such classes of citizens as have had
special legislative guarantee have a legal right to vote.
If this decision of Attorney-General Bates was infamous, as against
black men, but yesterday plantation slaves, what shall we pronounce upon
Judge Bingham, in the House of Representatives, and Carpenter, in the
Senate of the United States, for citing it against the women of the
entire nation, vast numbers of whom are the peers of those honorable
gentlemen themselves in morals, intellect, culture, wealth, family,
paying taxes on large estates, and contributing equally with them and
their sex, in every direction, to the growth, prosperity and well-being
of the republic? And what shall be said of the judicial opinions of
Judges Cartter, Jameson, McKay and Sharswood, all based upon this
aristocratic, monarchial idea of the right of one class to govern
another?
I am proud to mention the names of the two United States judges who have
given opinions honorable to our republican idea, and honorable to
themselves--Judge Howe, of Wyoming Territory, and Judge Underwood, of
Virginia. The former gave it as his opinion a year ago, when the
legislature seemed likely to revoke the law enfranchising the women of
that Territory that, in case they succeeded, the women would still
possess the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. The latter, in
noticing the recent decision of Judge Cartter, of the Supreme Court of
the District of Columbia, denying to women the right to vote under the
Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, says:
If the people of the United States, by amendment of their
Constitution, could expunge, without any explanatory or assisting
legislation, an adjective of five letters from all State and local
constitutions, and thereby raise millions of our most ignorant
fellow-citizens to all of the rights and privileges of electors,
why should not the same people, by the same amendment, expunge an
adjective of four letters from the same State and local
constitutions, and thereby raise other millions of more educated
and better informed citizens to equal rights and privileges,
without explanatory or assisting legislation?
If the Fourteenth Amendment does not secure to all citizens the right to
vote, for what purpose was that grand old charter of the fathers
lumbered with its unwieldy proportions? The Republican party, and Judges
Howard and Bingham, who drafted the document, pretended it was to do
something for black men; and if that something were not to secure them
in their right to vote and hold office, what could it have been? For by
the Thirteenth Amendment black men had become people, and hence were
entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the government,
precisely as were the women of the country and foreign men not
naturalized. According to Associate-Justice Washington, they already
had:
Protection of the government, the enjoyment of life and liberty,
with the right to acquire and possess property of every kind, and
to pursue and obtain happiness and safety, subject to such
restraints as the government may justly prescribe for the general
welfare of the whole; the right of a citizen of one State to pass
through or to reside in any other State for the purpose of trade,
agriculture, professional pursuit, or otherwise; to claim the
benefit of the writ of habeas corpus, to institute and maintain
actions of any kind in the courts of the State; to take, hold, and
dispose of property, either real or personal, and an exemption from
higher taxes or impositions than are paid by the other citizens of
the State.
Thus, you see, those newly-freed men were in possession of every
possible right, privilege and immunity of the government, except that of
suffrage, and hence needed no constitutional amendment for any other
purpose. What right in this country has the Irishman the day after he
receives his naturalization papers that he did not possess the day
before, save the right to vote and hold office? The Chinamen now
crowding our Pacific coast are in precisely the same position. What
privilege or immunity has California or Oregon the right to deny them,
save that of the ballot? Clearly, then, if the Fourteenth Amendment was
not to secure to black men their right to vote it did nothing for them,
since they possessed everything else before. But if it was intended to
prohibit the States from denying or abridging their right to vote, then
it did the same for all persons, white women included, born or
naturalized in the United States; for the amendment does not say that
all male persons of African descent, but that all persons are citizens.
The second section is simply a threat to punish the States by reducing
their representation on the floor of Congress, should they disfranchise
any of their male citizens, and can not be construed into a sanction to
disfranchise female citizens, nor does it in any wise weaken or
invalidate the universal guarantee of the first section.
However much the doctors of the law may disagree as to whether people
and citizens, in the original Constitution, were one and the same, or
whether the privileges and immunities in the Fourteenth Amendment
include the right of suffrage, the question of the citizen's right to
vote is forever settled by the Fifteenth Amendment. "The right of
citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged
by the United States, or by any State, on account of race, color or
previous condition of servitude." How can the State deny or abridge the
right of the citizen, if the citizen does not possess it? There is no
escape from the conclusion that to vote is the citizen's right, and the
specifications of race, color or previous condition of servitude can in
no way impair the force of that emphatic assertion that the citizen's
right to vote shall not be denied or abridged.
The political strategy of the second section of the Fourteenth Amendment
failing to coerce the rebel States into enfranchising their negroes, and
the necessities of the Republican party demanding their votes throughout
the South to ensure the re-election of Grant in 1872, that party was
compelled to place this positive prohibition of the Fifteenth Amendment
upon the United States and all the States thereof.
If once we establish the false principle that United States citizenship
does not carry with it the right to vote in every State in this Union,
there is no end to the petty tricks and cunning devices which will be
attempted to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of
suffrage. It will not always be the men combining to disfranchise all
women; native born men combining to abridge the rights of all
naturalized citizens, as in Rhode Island. It will not always be the rich
and educated who may combine to cut off the poor and ignorant; but we
may live to see the hard-working, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and
native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of
numbers, combine and amend State constitutions so as to disfranchise the
Vanderbilts, the Stewarts, the Conklings and the Fentons. It is a poor
rule that won't work more ways than one. Establish this precedent, admit
the State's right to deny suffrage, and there is no limit to the
confusion, discord and disruption that may await us. There is and can be
but one safe principle of government--equal rights to all.
Discrimination against any class on account of color, race, nativity,
sex, property, culture, can but embitter and disaffect that class, and
thereby endanger the safety of the whole people. Clearly, then, the
national government not only must define the rights of citizens, but
must stretch out its powerful hand and protect them in every State in
this Union.
If, however, you will insist that the Fifteenth Amendment's emphatic
interdiction against robbing United States citizens of their suffrage
"on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude," is a
recognition of the right of either the United States or any State to
deprive them of the ballot for any or all other reasons, I will prove to
you that the class of citizens for whom I now plead are, by all the
principles of our government and many of the laws of the States,
included under the term "previous condition of servitude."
Consider first married women and their legal status. What is servitude?
"The condition of a slave." What is a slave? "A person who is robbed of
the proceeds of his labor; a person who is subject to the will of
another." By the laws of Georgia, South Carolina and all the States of
the South, the negro had no right to the custody and control of his
person. He belonged to his master. If he were disobedient, the master
had the right to use correction. If the negro did not like the
correction and ran away, the master had the right to use coercion to
bring him back. By the laws of almost every State in this Union today,
North as well as South, the married woman has no right to the custody
and control of her person. The wife belongs to the husband; and if she
refuse obedience he may use moderate correction, and if she do not like
his moderate correction and leave his "bed and board," the husband may
use moderate coercion to bring her back. The little word "moderate," you
see, is the saving clause for the wife, and would doubtless be
overstepped should her offended husband administer his correction with
the "cat-o'-nine-tails," or accomplish his coercion with blood-hounds.
Again the slave had no right to the earnings of his hands, they belonged
to his master; no right to the custody of his children, they belonged to
his master; no right to sue or be sued, or to testify in the courts. If
he committed a crime, it was the master who must sue or be sued. In many
of the States there has been special legislation, giving married women
the right to property inherited or received by bequest, or earned by the
pursuit of any avocation outside the home; also giving them the right to
sue and be sued in matters pertaining to such separate property; but not
a single State of this Union has ever secured the wife in the enjoyment
of her right to equal ownership of the joint earnings of the marriage
copartnership. And since, in the nature of things, the vast majority of
married women never earn a dollar by work outside their families, or
inherit a dollar from their fathers, it follows that from the day of
their marriage to the day of the death of their husbands not one of them
ever has a dollar, except it shall please her husband to let her have
it.
In some of the States, also, laws have been passed giving to the mother
a joint right with the father in the guardianship of the children.
Twenty-five years ago, when our woman's rights movement commenced, by
the laws of all the States the father had the sole custody and control
of the children. No matter if he were a brutal, drunken libertine, he
had the legal right, without the mother's consent, to apprentice her
sons to rumsellers or her daughters to brothel-keepers. He even could
will away an unborn child from the mother. In most of the States this
law still prevails, and the mothers are utterly powerless.
I doubt if there is, today, a State in this Union where a married woman
can sue or be sued for slander of character, and until recently there
was not one where she could sue or be sued for injury of person. However
damaging to the wife's reputation any slander may be, she is wholly
powerless to institute legal proceedings against her accuser unless her
husband shall join with her; and how often have we heard of the husband
conspiring with some outside barbarian to blast the good name of his
wife? A married woman can not testify in courts in cases of joint
interest with her husband.
A good farmer's wife in Illinois, who had all the rights she wanted, had
had made for herself a full set of false teeth. The dentist pronounced
them an admirable fit, and the wife declared it gave her fits to wear
them. The dentist sued the husband for his bill; his counsel brought the
wife as witness; the judge ruled her off the stand, saying, "A married
woman can not be a witness in matters of joint interest between herself
and her husband." Think of it, ye good wives, the false teeth in your
mouths are a joint interest with your husbands, about which you are
legally incompetent to speak! If a married woman is injured by
accident, in nearly all of the States it is her husband who must sue,
and it is to him that the damages will be awarded. In Massachusetts a
married woman was severely injured by a defective sidewalk. Her husband
sued the corporation and recovered $13,000 damages, which belong to him
absolutely, and whenever that unfortunate wife wishes a dollar of that
money she must ask her husband for it; and if he be of a niggardly
nature, she will hear him say, every time, "What have you done with the
twenty-five cents I gave you yesterday?" Isn't such a position
humiliating enough to be called "servitude?" That husband sued and
obtained damages for the loss of the services of his wife, precisely as
he would have done had it been his ox, cow or horse; and exactly as the
master, under the old regime, would have recovered for the services of
his slave.
I submit the question, if the deprivation by law of the ownership of
one's own person, wages, property, children, the denial of the right as
an individual to sue and be sued and testify in the courts, is not a
condition of servitude most bitter and absolute, even though under the
sacred name of marriage? Does any lawyer doubt my statement of the legal
status of married women? I will remind him of the fact that the common
law of England prevails in every State but two in this Union, except
where the legislature has enacted special laws annulling it. I am
ashamed that not one of the States yet has blotted from its statute
books the old law of marriage, which, summed up in the fewest words
possible, is in effect "husband and wife are one, and that one the
husband."