Higginson at his Free Church in Worcester, she wrote in her diary, "It
is plain to me now that it is not sitting under preaching I dislike,
but the fact that most of it is not of a stamp that my soul can
respond to."[61]
In September she interrupted "the cure" to attend a woman's rights
meeting in Boston, and with Lucy Stone, Antoinette and Ellen Blackwell
visited in the home of the wealthy merchant, Francis Jackson, making
many new friends, among them his daughter, Eliza J. Eddy, whose
unhappy marriage was to prove a blessing to the woman's rights
cause.[62]
At tea at the Garrisons', she met many of the "distinguished" men and
women she had "worshiped" from afar. She heard Theodore Parker preach
a sermon which filled her soul, and with Mr. Garrison called on him in
his famous library. "It really seemed audacious in me to be ushered
into such a presence and on such a commonplace errand as to ask him to
come to Rochester to speak in a course of lectures I am planning," she
wrote her family, "but he received me with such kindness and
simplicity that the awe I felt on entering was soon dissipated. I then
called on Wendell Phillips in his sanctum for the same purpose. I have
invited Ralph Waldo Emerson by letter and all three have promised to
come. In the evening with Mr. Jackson's son James, Ellen Blackwell and
I went to see _Hamlet_. In spite of my Quaker training, I find I enjoy
all these worldly amusements intensely."[63]
* * * * *
In January 1856, Susan set out again on a woman's rights tour of New
York State to gather more signatures for her petitions. This time she
persuaded Frances D. Gage of Ohio, a temperance worker and popular
author of children's stories, to join her. An easy extemporaneous
speaker, Mrs. Gage was an attraction to offer audiences, who drove
eight or more miles to hear her; and in the cheerless hotels at night
and on the long cold sleigh rides from town to town, she was a
congenial companion.
The winter was even colder and snowier than that of the year before.
"No trains running," Susan wrote her family, "and we had a 36-mile
ride in a sleigh.... Just emerged from a long line of snow drifts and
stopped at this little country tavern, supped, and am now roasting
over the hot stove."[64]
Confronted almost daily with glaring examples of the injustices women
suffered under the property laws, she was more than ever convinced
that her work was worth-while. "We stopped at a little tavern where
the landlady was not yet twenty and had a baby, fifteen months old,"
she reported. "Her supper dishes were not washed and her baby was
crying.... She rocked the little thing to sleep, washed the dishes and
got our supper; beautiful white bread, butter, cheese, pickles, apple
and mince pie, and excellent peach preserves. She gave us her warm
room to sleep in.... She prepared a six o'clock breakfast for us,
fried pork, mashed potatoes, mince pie, and for me at my special
request, a plate of sweet baked apples and a pitcher of rich milk....
When we came to pay our bill, the dolt of a husband took the money and
put it in his pocket. He had not lifted a finger to lighten that
woman's burdens.... Yet the law gives him the right to every dollar
she earns, and when she needs two cents to buy a darning needle she
has to ask him and explain what she wants it for."[65]
When after a few weeks Mrs. Gage was called home by illness in her
family, Susan appealed hopefully to Lucretia Mott's sister, Martha C.
Wright, in Auburn, New York, "You can speak so much better, so much
more wisely, so much more everything than I can." Then she added, "I
should like a particular effort made to call out the Teachers, the
Sewing Women, the Working Women generally--Can't you write something
for your papers that will make them feel that it is for them that we
work more than [for] the wives and daughters of the rich?"[66] Mrs.
Wright, however, could help only in Auburn, and Susan was obliged to
continue her scheduled meetings alone. She interrupted them only to
present her petitions to the legislature.
The response of the legislature to her two years of hard work was a
sarcastic, wholly irrelevant report issued by the judiciary committee
some weeks later to a Senate roaring with laughter. In the Albany
_Register_ Susan read with mounting indignation portions of this
infuriating report: "The ladies always have the best places and the
choicest tidbit at the table. They have the best seats in cars,
carriages, and sleighs; the warmest place in winter, the coolest in
summer. They have their choice on which side of the bed they will lie,
front or back. A lady's dress costs three times as much as that of a
gentleman; and at the present time, with the prevailing fashion, one
lady occupies three times as much space in the world as a gentleman.
It has thus appeared to the married gentlemen of your committee, being
a majority ... that if there is any inequality or oppression in the
case, the gentlemen are the sufferers. They, however, have presented
no petitions for redress, having doubtless made up their minds to
yield to an inevitable destiny."[67]
Why, Susan wondered sadly, were woman's rights only a joke to most
men--something to be laughed at even in the face of glaring proofs of
the law's injustice.
There was encouragement, however, in the letters which now came from
Lucy Stone in Ohio: "Hurrah Susan! Last week this State Legislature
passed a law giving wives equal property rights, and to mothers equal
baby rights with fathers. So much is gained. The petitions which I set
on foot in Wisconsin for suffrage have been presented, made a rousing
discussion, and then were tabled with three men to defend them!... In
Nebraska too, the bill for suffrage passed the House.... The world
moves!"[68]
The world was moving in Great Britain as well, for as Susan read in
her newspaper, women there were petitioning Parliament for married
women's property rights, and among the petitioners were her
well-beloved Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Mrs.
Gaskell, and Charlotte Cushman. Better still, Harriet Taylor, inspired
by the example of woman's rights conventions in America, had written
for the _Westminster Review_ an article advocating the enfranchisement
of women.
All this reassured Susan, even if New York legislators laughed at her
efforts.
FOOTNOTES:
[43] Judge William Hay of Saratoga Springs, New York.
[44] Feb. 19, 1854, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.
[45] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 116. Among those who wore the bloomer
costume were Angelina and Sarah Grimké, many women in sanitoriums and
some of the Lowell, Mass. mill workers. In Ohio, the bloomer was so
popular that 60 women in Akron wore it at a ball, and in Battle Creek,
Michigan, 31 attended a Fourth of July celebration in the bloomer.
Amelia Bloomer, moving to the West wore it for eight years. Garrison,
Phillips, and William Henry Channing disapproved of the bloomer
costume, but Gerrit Smith continued to champion it and his daughter
wore it at fashionable receptions in Washington during his term in
Congress.
[46] _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 608.
[47] 1854 (copy), Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.
[48] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 111-112.
[49] March 3, 1854 (copy), Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial
Collection.
[50] Ms., Diary, March 24, 28, 1854.
[51] _Ibid._, March 29, 1854.
[52] _Ibid._, March 30, 1854.
[53] The New England Emigrant Aid Company, headed by Eli Thayer of
Worcester, was formed to send free-soil settlers to Kansas, offering
reduced fare and farm equipment. Their first settlers reached Kansas
in August, 1854, founding the town of Lawrence in honor of one of
their chief patrons, the wealthy Amos Lawrence of Massachusetts.
[54] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 121.
[55] Diary, April 28, 1854.
[56] Leonard C. Ehrlich, _God's Angry Man_ (New York, 1941), p. 57.
[57] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 122.
[58] Caroline Cowles Richards, _Village Life in America_ (New York,
1913), p. 49.
[59] 1858, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.
[60] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 133.
[61] _Ibid._
[62] Eliza J. Eddy's husband, James Eddy, took their two young
daughters away from their mother and to Europe, causing her great
anguish. This led her father, Francis Jackson, to give liberally to
the woman's rights cause. Mrs. Eddy, herself, left a bequest of
$56,000 to be divided between Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone.
[63] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 131-133.
[64] _Ibid._, p. 138.
[65] _Ibid._, p. 139.
[66] Jan. 18, 1856, Garrison Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith
College.
[67] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 140-141.
[68] May 25, 1856, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.
NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS
Susan's thoughts during the summer of 1856 often strayed from woman's
rights meetings toward Kansas, where her brother Merritt had settled
on a claim near Osawatomie. Well aware of his eagerness to help John
Brown, she knew that he must be in the thick of the bloody antislavery
struggle. In fact the whole Anthony family had been anxiously waiting
for news from Merritt ever since the wires had flashed word in May
1856 of the burning of Lawrence by proslavery "border ruffians" from
Missouri and of John Brown's raid in retaliation at Pottawatomie
Creek.
Merritt had built a log cabin at Osawatomie. While Susan was at home
in September, the newspapers reported an attack by proslavery men on
Osawatomie in which thirty out of fifty settlers were killed. Was
Merritt among them? Finally letters came through from him. Susan read
and reread them, assuring herself of his safety. Although ill at the
time, he had been in the thick of the fight, but was unharmed. Weak
from the exertion he had crawled back to his cabin on his hands and
knees and had lain there ill and alone for several weeks.
Parts of Merritt's letters were published in the Rochester _Democrat_,
and the city took sides in the conflict, some papers claiming that his
letters were fiction. Susan wrote Merritt, "How much rather would I
have you at my side tonight than to think of your daring and enduring
greater hardships even than our Revolutionary heroes. Words cannot
tell how often we think of you or how sadly we feel that the terrible
crime of this nation against humanity is being avenged on the heads of
our sons and brothers.... Father brings the _Democrat_ giving a list
of killed, wounded, and missing and the name of our Merritt is not
therein, but oh! the slain are sons, brothers, and husbands of others
as dearly loved and sadly mourned."[69]
With difficulty, she prepared for the annual woman's rights
convention, for the country was in a state of unrest not only over
Kansas and the whole antislavery question, but also over the
presidential campaign with three candidates in the field. Even her
faithful friends Horace Greeley and Gerrit Smith now failed her,
Horace Greeley writing that he could no longer publish her notices
free in the news columns of his _Tribune_, because they cast upon him
the stigma of ultraradicalism, and Gerrit Smith withholding his
hitherto generous financial support because woman's rights conventions
would not press for dress reform--comfortable clothing for women
suitable for an active life, which he believed to be the foundation
stone of women's emancipation.
[Illustration: Merritt Anthony]
She watched the lively bitter presidential campaign with interest and
concern. The new Republican party was in the contest, offering its
first presidential candidate, the colorful hero and explorer of the
far West, John C. Frémont. She had leanings toward this virile young
party which stood firmly against the extension of slavery in the
territories, and discussed its platform with Elizabeth and Henry B.
Stanton, both enthusiastically for "Frémont and Freedom." Yet she was
distrustful of political parties, for they eventually yielded to
expediency, no matter how high their purpose at the start. Her ideal
was the Garrisonian doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders" and
"Immediate Unconditional Emancipation," which courageously faced the
"whole question" of slavery. There was no compromise among
Garrisonians.
With the burning issue of slavery now uppermost in her mind, she began
seriously to reconsider the offer she had received from the American
Antislavery Society, shortly after her visit to Boston in 1855, to act
as their agent in central and western New York. Unable to accept at
that time because she was committed to her woman's rights program, she
had nevertheless felt highly honored that she had been chosen. Still
hesitating a little, she wrote Lucy Stone, wanting reassurance that no
woman's rights work demanded immediate attention. "They talk of
sending two companies of Lecturers into this state," she wrote Lucy,
"wish me to lay out the route of each one and accompany one. They seem
to think me possessed of a vast amount of executive ability. I shrink
from going into Conventions where speaking is expected of me.... I
know they want me to help about finance and that part I like and am
good for nothing else."[70]
She also had the farm home on her mind. With her father in the
insurance business, her brothers now both in Kansas, her sister Mary
teaching in the Rochester schools and "looking matrimonially-wise,"
and her mother at home all alone, Susan often wondered if it might not
be as much her duty to stay there to take care of her mother and
father as it would be to make a home comfortable for a husband.
Sometimes the quietness of such a life beckoned enticingly. But after
the disappointing November elections which put into the presidency the
conservative James Buchanan, from whom only a vacillating policy on
the slavery issue could be expected, she wrote Samuel May, Jr., the
secretary of the American Antislavery Society, "I shall be very glad
if I am able to render even the most humble service to this cause.
Heaven knows there is need of earnest, effective radical workers. The
heart sickens over the delusions of the recent campaign and turns
achingly to the unconsidered _whole question_."[71]
His reply came promptly, "We put all New York into your control and
want your name to all letters and your hand in all arrangements."
For $10 a week and expenses, Susan now arranged antislavery meetings,
displayed posters bearing the provocative words, "No Union with
Slaveholders," planned tours for a corps of speakers, among them
Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, Parker Pillsbury, and two free
Negroes, Charles Remond and his sister, Sarah.
In debt from her last woman's rights campaign, she could not afford a
new dress for these tours, but she dyed a dark green the merino which
she had worn so proudly in Canajoharie ten years before, bought cloth
to match for a basque, and made a "handsome suit." "With my Siberian
squirrel cape, I shall be very comfortable," she noted in her
diary.[72]
She had met indifference and ridicule in her campaigns for woman's
rights. Now she faced outright hostility, for northern businessmen had
no use for abolition-mad fanatics, as they called anyone who spoke
against slavery. Abolitionists, they believed, ruined business by
stirring up trouble between the North and the South.
Usually antislavery meetings turned into debates between speakers and
audience, often lasting until midnight, and were charged with
animosity which might flame into violence. All of the speakers lived
under a strain, and under emotional pressure. Consequently they were
not always easy to handle. Some of them were temperamental, a bit
jealous of each other, and not always satisfied with the tours Susan
mapped out for them. She expected of her colleagues what she herself
could endure, but they often complained and sometimes refused to
fulfill their engagements.
When no one else was at hand, she took her turn at speaking, but she
was seldom satisfied with her efforts. "I spoke for an hour," she
confided to her diary, "but my heart fails me. Can it be that my
stammering tongue ever will be loosed?"
Lucy Stone, who spoke with such ease, gave her advice and
encouragement. "You ought to cultivate your power of expression," she
wrote. "The subject is clear to you and you ought to be able to make
it so to others. It is only a few years ago that Mr. Higginson told me
he could not speak, he was so much accustomed to writing, and now he
is second only to Phillips. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"[73]
In March 1857, the Supreme Court startled the country with the Dred
Scott decision, which not only substantiated the claim of
Garrisonians that the Constitution sanctioned slavery and protected
the slaveholder, but practically swept away the Republican platform of
no extention of slavery in the territories. The decision declared that
the Constitution did not apply to Negroes, since they were citizens of
no state when it was adopted and therefore had not the right of
citizens to sue for freedom or to claim freedom in the territories;
that the Missouri Compromise had always been void, since Congress did
not have the right to enact a law which arbitrarily deprived citizens
of their property.
Reading the decision word for word with dismay and pondering
indignantly over the cold letter of the law, Susan found herself so
aroused and so full of the subject that she occasionally made a
spontaneous speech, and thus gradually began to free herself from
reliance on written speeches. She spoke from these notes: "Consider
the fact of 4,000,000 slaves in a Christian and republican
government.... Antislavery prayers, resolutions, and speeches avail
nothing without action.... Our mission is to deepen sympathy and
convert into right action: to show that the men and women of the North
are slaveholders, those of the South slave-owners. The guilt rests on
the North equally with the South. Therefore our work is to rouse the
sleeping consciousness of the North....[74]
"We ask you to feel as if you, yourselves, were the slaves. The
politician talks of slavery as he does of United States banks, tariff,
or any other commercial question. We demand the abolition of slavery
because the slave is a human being and because man should not hold
property in his fellowman.... We say disobey every unjust law; the
politician says obey them and meanwhile labor constitutionally for
repeal.... We preach revolution, the politicians, reform."
Instinctively she reaffirmed her allegiance to the doctrine, "No Union
with Slaveholders," and she gloried in the courage of Garrison,
Phillips, and Higginson, who had called a disunion convention,
demanding that the free states secede. It was good to be one of this
devoted band, for she sincerely believed that in the ages to come "the
prophecies of these noble men and women will be read with the same
wonder and veneration as those of Isaiah and Jeremiah inspire
today."[75]
She gave herself to the work with religious fervor. Even so, she could
not make her antislavery meetings self-supporting, and at the end of
the first season, after paying her speakers, she faced a deficit of
$1,000. This troubled her greatly but the Antislavery Society,
recognizing her value, wrote her, "We cheerfully pay your expenses and
want to keep you at the head of the work." They took note of her
"business enterprise, practical sagacity, and platform ability," and
looked upon the expenditure of $1,000 for the education and
development of such an exceptional worker as a good investment.
This new experience was a good investment for Susan as well. She made
many new friends. She won the further respect, confidence, and good
will of men like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Francis
Jackson. Her friendship with Parker Pillsbury deepened. "I can truly
say," she wrote Abby Kelley Foster, "my spirit has grown in grace and
that the experience of the past winter is worth more to me than all my
Temperance and Woman's Rights labors--though the latter were the
school necessary to bring me into the Antislavery work."[76]
Only the crusading spirit of the "antislavery apostles"[77] and what
to them seemed the desperate state of the nation made the hard
campaigning bearable. The animosity they faced, the cold, the poor
transportation, the long hours, and wretched food taxed the physical
endurance of all of them. "O the crimes that are committed in the
kitchens of this land!"[78] wrote Susan in her diary, as she ate heavy
bread and the cake ruined with soda and drank what passed for coffee.
A good cook herself, she had little patience with those who through
ignorance or carelessness neglected that art. Equally bad were the
food fads they had to endure when they were entertained in homes of
otherwise hospitable friends of the cause. Raw-food diets found many
devotees in those days, and often after long cold rides in the
stagecoach, these tired hungry antislavery workers were obliged to sit
down to a supper of apples, nuts, and a baked mixture of coarse bran
and water. Nor did breakfast or dinner offer anything more. Facing
these diets seemed harder for the men than for Susan. Repeatedly in
such situations, they hurried away, leaving her to complete two-or
three-day engagements among the food cranks. How she welcomed a good
beefsteak and a pot of hot coffee at home after these long days of
fasting!
A night at home now was sheer bliss, and she wrote Lucy Stone, "Here
I am once more in my own Farm Home, where my weary head rests upon my
own home pillows.... I had been gone _Four Months_, scarcely sleeping
the second night under the same roof."[79]
It was good to be with her mother again, to talk with her father when
he came home from work and with Mary who had not married after all but
continued teaching in the Rochester schools. Guelma and her husband,
Aaron McLean, who had moved to Rochester, often came out to the farm
with their children.
Turning for relaxation to work in the garden in the warm sun, Susan
thought over the year's experience and planned for the future. "I can
but acknowledge to myself that Antislavery has made me richer and
braver in spirit," she wrote Samuel May, Jr., "and that it is the
school of schools for the true and full development of the nobler
elements of life. I find my raspberry field looking finely--also my
strawberry bed. The prospect for peaches, cherries, plums, apples, and
pears is very promising--Indeed all nature is clothed in her most
hopeful dress. It really seems to me that the trees and the grass and
the large fields of waving grain did never look so beautifully as now.
It is more probable, however, that my soul has grown to appreciate
Nature more fully...."[80]
Susan needed that growth of soul to face the events of the next few
years and do the work which lay ahead. The whole country was tense
over the slavery issue, which could no longer be pushed into the
background. On public platforms and at every fireside, men and women
were discussing the subject. Antislavery workers sensed the gravity of
the situation and felt the onrush of the impending conflict between
what they regarded as the forces of good and evil--freedom and
slavery. When the Republican leader, William H. Seward, spoke in
Rochester, of "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring
forces,"[81] he was expressing only what Garrisonian abolitionists,
like Susan, always had recognized. In the West, a tall awkward country
lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, debating with the suave Stephen A. Douglas,
declared with prophetic wisdom, "'A house divided against itself
cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently
half slave and half free.... It will become all one thing or all the
other.'"[82]