Lydia Mott containing the crushing news that the New York legislature
had amended the newly won Married Woman's Property Law of 1860, while
women's attention was focused on the war, and had taken away from
mothers the right to equal guardianship of their children and from
widows the control of the property left at the death of their
husbands.
"We deserve to suffer for our confidence in 'man's sense of justice,'"
she confessed to Lydia. " ... All of our reformers seem suddenly to
have grown politic. All alike say, 'Have no conventions at this
crisis!' Garrison, Phillips, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Stanton,
etc. say, 'Wait until the war excitement abates....' I am sick at
heart, but cannot carry the world against the wish and will of our
best friends...."[142]
Unable to arouse even a glimmer of interest in woman's rights at this
time, Susan started off on a lecture tour of her own, determined to
make people understand that this war, so abhorrent to her, must be
fought for the Negroes' freedom. "I cannot feel easy in my conscience
to be dumb in an hour like this," she explained to Lydia, adding, "It
is so easy to feel your power for public work slipping away if you
allow yourself to remain too long snuggled in the Abrahamic bosom of
home. It requires great will power to resurrect one's soul.[143]
"I am speaking now extempore," she continued, "and more to my
satisfaction than ever before. I am amazed at myself, but I could not
do it if any of our other speakers were listening to me. I am entirely
off old antislavery grounds and on the new ones thrown up by the war."
Feeling particularly close to Lydia at this time, she gratefully
added, "What a stay, counsel, and comfort you have been to me, dear
Lydia, ever since that eventful little temperance meeting in that
cold, smoky chapel in 1852. How you have compelled me to feel myself
competent to go forward when trembling with doubt and distrust. I can
never express the magnitude of my indebtedness to you."
In the small towns of western New York, people were willing to listen
to Susan, for they were troubled by the defeats northern armies had
suffered and by the appalling lack of unity and patriotism in the
North. They were beginning to see that the problem of slavery had to
be faced and were discussing among themselves whether Negroes were
contraband, whether army officers should return fugitive slaves to
their masters, whether slaves of the rebels should be freed, whether
Negroes should be enlisted in the army.
Susan had an answer for them. "It is impossible longer to hold the
African race in bondage," she declared, "or to reconstruct this
Republic on the old slaveholding basis. We can neither go back nor
stand still. With the nation as with the individual, every new
experience forces us into a new and higher life and the old self is
lost forever. Hundreds of men who never thought of emancipation a year
ago, talk it freely and are ready to vote for it and fight for it
now.[144]
"Can the thousands of Northern soldiers," she asked, "who in their
march through Rebel States have found faithful friends and generous
allies in the slaves ever consent to hurl them back into the hell of
slavery, either by word, or vote, or sword? Slaves have sought shelter
in the Northern Army and have tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree
of Liberty. Will they return quietly to the plantation and patiently
endure the old life of bondage with all its degradation, its
cruelties, and wrong? No, No, there can be no reconstruction on the
old basis...." Far less degrading and ruinous, she earnestly added,
would be the recognition of the independence of the southern
Confederacy.
[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony]
To the question of what to do with the emancipated slaves, her quick
answer was, "Treat the Negroes just as you do the Irish, the Scotch,
and the Germans. Educate them to all the blessings of our free
institutions, to our schools and churches, to every department of
industry, trade, and art.
"What arrogance in _us_," she continued, "to put the question, What
shall _we_ do with a race of men and women who have fed, clothed, and
supported both themselves and their oppressors for centuries...."
Often she spoke against Lincoln's policy of gradual, compensated
emancipation, which to an eager advocate of "immediate, unconditional
emancipation" seemed like weakness and appeasement. She had to admit,
however, that there had been some progress in the right direction, for
Congress had recently forbidden the return of fugitive slaves to their
masters, had decreed immediate emancipation in the District of
Columbia, and prohibited slavery in the territories.
President Lincoln's promise of freedom on January 1, 1863, to slaves
in all states in armed rebellion against the government, seemed wholly
inadequate to her and to her fellow-abolitionists, because it left
slavery untouched in the border states, but it did encourage them to
hope that eventually Lincoln might see the light. Horace Greeley wrote
Susan, "I still keep at work with the President in various ways and
believe you will yet hear him proclaim universal freedom. Keep this
letter and judge me by the event."[145]
It troubled her that public opinion in the North was still far from
sympathetic to emancipation. Northern Democrats, charging Lincoln with
incompetence and autocratic control, called for "The Constitution as
it is, the Union as it was." They had the support of many northern
businessmen who faced the loss of millions of credit given to
southerners and the support of northern workmen who feared the
competition of free Negroes. They had elected Horatio Seymour governor
of New York, and had gained ground in many parts of the country. A
militant group in Ohio, headed by Congressman Vallandigham, continued
to oppose the war, asking for peace at once with no terms unfavorable
to the South.
All these developments Susan discussed with her father, for she
frequently came home between lectures. He was a tower of strength to
her. When she was disillusioned or when criticism and opposition were
hard to bear, his sympathy and wise counsel never failed her. There
was a strong bond of understanding and affection between them.
His sudden illness and death, late in November 1862, were a shock from
which she had to struggle desperately to recover. Her life was
suddenly empty. The farm home was desolate. She could not think of
leaving her mother and her sister Mary there all alone. Nor could she
count on help from Daniel or Merritt, both of whom were serving in the
army in the West, Daniel, as a lieutenant colonel, and Merritt as a
captain in the 7th Kansas Cavalry. For many weeks she had no heart for
anything but grief. "It seemed as if everything in the world must
stop."[146]
Not even President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued January
1, 1863, roused her. It took a letter from Henry Stanton from
Washington to make her see that there was war work for her to do. He
wrote her, "The country is rapidly going to destruction. The Army is
almost in a state of mutiny for want of its pay and lack of a leader.
Nothing can carry through but the southern Negroes, and nobody can
marshal them into the struggle except the abolitionists.... Such men
as Lovejoy, Hale, and the like have pretty much given up the struggle
in despair. You have no idea how dark the cloud is which hangs over
us.... We must not lay the flattering unction to our souls that the
proclamation will be of any use if we are beaten and have a
dissolution of the Union. Here then is work for you, Susan, put on
your armor and go forth."[147]
* * * * *
A month later, Susan went to New York for a visit with Elizabeth
Stanton, confident that if they counseled together, they could find a
way to serve their country in its hour of need.
She was well aware that all through the country women were responding
magnificently in this crisis, giving not only their husbands and sons
to the war, but carrying on for them in the home, on the farm, and in
business. Many were sewing and knitting for soldiers, scraping lint
for hospitals, and organizing Ladies' Aid Societies, which, operating
through the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the
Red Cross, sent clothing and nourishing food to the inadequately
equipped and poorly fed soldiers in the field. In the large cities
women were holding highly successful "Sanitary Fairs" to raise funds
for the Sanitary Commission. In fact, through the women, civilian
relief was organized as never before in history. Individual women too,
Susan knew, were making outstanding contributions to the war. Lucy
Stone's sister-in-law, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell,[148] a friend and
admirer of Florence Nightingale, was training much-needed nurses,
while Dr. Mary Walker, putting on coat and trousers, ministered
tirelessly to the wounded on the battlefield. Dorothea Dix, the
one-time schoolteacher who had awakened the people to their barbarous
treatment of the insane, had offered her services to the
Surgeon-General and was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army
Nurses, with authority to recruit nurses and oversee hospital
housekeeping. Clara Barton, a government employee, and other women
volunteers were finding their way to the front to nurse the wounded
who so desperately needed their help; and Mother Bickerdyke, living
with the armies in the field, nursed her boys and cooked for them,
lifting their morale by her motherly, strengthening presence. Through
the influence of Anna Ella Carroll, Maryland had been saved for the
Union and she, it was said, was ably advising President Lincoln.
Susan herself had felt no call to nurse the wounded, although she had
often skillfully nursed her own family; nor had she felt that her
qualifications as an expert housekeeper and good executive demanded
her services at the front to supervise army housekeeping. Instead she
looked for some important task to which other women would not turn in
these days when relief work absorbed all their attention. It was not
enough, she felt, for women to be angels of mercy, valuable and
well-organized as this phase of their work had become. A spirit of
awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this
led her to believe that northern women needed someone to stimulate
their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues
of the war and in so doing claim their own freedom. Women, she
reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts,
and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the
traditions of freedom upon which this republic was founded. Women must
have a part in molding public opinion and must help direct policy as
Anna Ella Carroll was proving women could do. Here was the best
possible training for prospective women voters. To all this Mrs.
Stanton heartily agreed.
As they sat at the dining-room table with Mrs. Stanton's two
daughters, Maggie and Hattie, all busily cutting linen into small
squares and raveling them into lint for the wounded, they discussed
the state of the nation. They were troubled by the low morale of the
North and by the insidious propaganda of the Copperheads, an antiwar,
pro-Southern group, which spread discontent and disrespect for the
government. Profiteering was flagrant, and through speculation and war
contracts, large fortunes were being built up among the few, while the
majority of the people not only found their lives badly disrupted by
the war but suffered from high prices and low wages. So far no
decisive victory had encouraged confidence in ultimate triumph over
the South. In newspapers and magazines, women of the North were being
unfavorably compared with southern women and criticized because of
their lack of interest in the war. Writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_,
March, 1863, Gail Hamilton, a rising young journalist, accused
northern women of failing to come up to the level of the day. "If you
could have finished the war with your needles," she chided them, "it
would have been finished long ago, but stitching does not crush
rebellion, does not annihilate treason...."
Thinking along these same lines, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now decided to
go a step further. They would act to bring women abreast of the issues
of the day, Susan with her flare for organizing women, Mrs. Stanton
with her pen and her eloquence. They would show women that they had an
ideal to fight for. They would show them the uselessness of this
bloody conflict unless it won freedom for all of the slaves. Freedom
for all, as a basic demand of the republic, would be their watchword.
Men were forming Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues to combat the
influence of secret antiwar societies, such as the Knights of the
Golden Circle. "Why not organize a Women's National Loyal League?"
Susan and Mrs. Stanton asked each other.
They talked their ideas over first with the New York abolitionists,
then with Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and his dashing young
friend, Theodore Tilton, and with Robert Dale Owen, now in the city as
the recently appointed head of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission.
These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other antislavery
members of Congress. All agreed that the Emancipation Proclamation
must be implemented by an act of Congress, by an amendment to the
Constitution, and that public opinion must be aroused to demand a
Thirteenth Amendment. If women would help, so much the better.
Susan at once thought of petitions. If petitions had won the Woman's
Property Law in New York, they could win the Thirteenth Amendment. The
largest petition ever presented to Congress was her goal.
* * * * *
Carefully Susan and Mrs. Stanton worked over an _Appeal to the Women
of the Republic_, sending it out in March 1863 with a notice of a
meeting to be held in New York. It left no doubt in the minds of those
who received it that women had a responsibility to their country
beyond services of mercy to the wounded and disabled.
From all parts of the country, women responded to their call. The
veteran antislavery and woman's rights worker, Angelina Grimké Weld,
came out of her retirement for the meeting. Ernestine Rose, the ever
faithful, was on hand. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell were
there, and the popular Hutchinson family, famous for their stirring
abolition songs. They helped Susan and Mrs. Stanton steer the course
of the meeting into the right channels, to show the women assembled
that the war was being fought not merely to preserve the Union, but
also to preserve the American way of life, based on the principle of
equal rights and freedom for all, to save it from the encroachments of
slavery and a slaveholding aristocracy. Susan proposed a resolution
declaring that there can never be a true peace until the civil and
political rights of all citizens are established, including those of
Negroes and women. The introduction of the woman's rights issue into a
war meeting with an antislavery program was vigorously opposed by
women from Wisconsin, but the faithful feminists came to the rescue
and the controversial resolution was adopted.
Although she always instinctively related all national issues to
woman's rights and vice versa, Susan did not allow this subject to
overshadow the main purpose of the meeting. Instead she analyzed the
issue of the war and reproached Lincoln for suppressing the fact that
slavery was the real cause of the war and for waiting two long years
before calling the four million slaves to the side of the North.
"Every hour's delay, every life sacrificed up to the proclamation that
called the slave to freedom and to arms," she declared, "was nothing
less than downright murder by the government.... I therefore hail the
day when the government shall recognize that it is a war for
freedom."[149]
A Women's National Loyal League was organized, electing Susan
secretary and Mrs. Stanton president. They sent a long letter to
President Lincoln thanking him for the Emancipation Proclamation,
especially for the freedom it gave Negro women, and assuring him of
their loyalty and support in this war for freedom. Their own immediate
task, they decided, was to circulate petitions asking for an act of
Congress to emancipate "all persons of African descent held in
involuntary servitude." As Susan so tersely expressed it, they would
"canvass the nation for freedom."
* * * * *
All the oratory over, Susan now undertook the hard work of making the
Women's National Loyal League a success, assuming the initial
financial burden of printing petitions and renting an office, Room 20,
at Cooper Institute, where she was busy all day and where New York
members met to help her. To each of the petitions sent out, she
attached her battle cry, "There must be a law abolishing slavery....
Women, you cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be
a power in the government is through the exercise of this one, sacred,
constitutional 'right of petition,' and we ask you to use it now to
the utmost...." She also asked those signing the petitions to
contribute a penny to help with expenses and in this way she slowly
raised $3,000.[150]
At first the response was slow, although both Republican and
antislavery papers were generous in their praise of this undertaking,
but when the signed petitions began to come in, she felt repaid for
all her efforts, and when the Hovey Fund trustees appropriated twelve
dollars a week for her salary, the financial burden lifted a little.
Yet it was ever present. For herself she needed little. She wrote her
mother and Mary, "I go to a little restaurant nearby for lunch every
noon. I always take strawberries with two tea rusks. Today I said,
'all this lacks is a glass of milk from my mother's cellar,' and the
girl replied, 'We have very nice Westchester milk.' So tomorrow I
shall add that to my bill of fare. My lunch costs, berries five cents,
rusks five, and tomorrow the milk will be three."[151]
The cost of postage mounted as the petitions continued to go out to
all parts of the country. In dire need of funds, Susan decided to
appeal to Henry Ward Beecher; and wearily climbing Columbia Heights to
his home, she suddenly felt a strong hand on her shoulder and a
familiar voice asking, "Well, old girl, what do you want now?" He took
up a collection for her in Plymouth Church, raising $200. Gerrit Smith
sent her $100, when she had hoped for $1,000, and Jessie Benton
Frémont, $50. Before long, her "war of ideas" won the support of
Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, George William
Curtis, and other popular lecturers who spoke for her at Cooper Union
to large audiences whose admission fees swelled her funds; and
eventually Senator Sumner, realizing how important the petitions could
be in arousing public opinion for the Thirteenth Amendment, saved her
the postage by sending them out under his frank.[152]
She made her home with the Stantons, who had moved from Brooklyn to 75
West 45th Street, New York, and the comfortable evenings of good
conversation and her busy days at the office helped mightily to heal
her grief for her father. In the bustling life of the city she felt
she was living more intensely, more usefully, as these critical days
of war demanded. Henry Stanton, now an editorial writer for Greeley's
_Tribune_, brought home to them the inside story of the news and of
politics. All of them were highly critical of Lincoln, impatient with
his slowness and skeptical of his plans for slaveholders and slaves in
the border states. They questioned Garrison's wisdom in trusting
Lincoln. Susan could not feel that Lincoln was honest when he
protested that he did not have the power to do all that the
abolitionists asked. "The pity is," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "that
the vast mass of people really believe the man _honest_--that he
believes he has not the power--I wish I could...."[153]
New York seethed with unrest as time for the enforcement of the draft
drew near. Indignant that rich men could avoid the draft by buying a
substitute, workingmen were easily incited to riot, and the city was
soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all Negroes and
abolitionists were in danger. The Stanton home was in the thick of the
rioting, and when Susan and Henry Stanton came home during a lull,
they all decided to take refuge for the night at the home of Mrs.
Stanton's brother-in-law, Dr. Bayard. Here they also found Horace
Greeley hiding from the mob, for hoodlums were marching through the
streets shouting, "We'll hang old Horace Greeley to a sour apple
tree."
The next morning Susan started for the office as usual, thinking the
worst was over, but as not a single horsecar or stage was running, she
took the ferry to Flushing to visit her cousins. Here too there was
rioting, but she stayed on until order was restored by the army. She
returned to the city to find casualties mounting to over a thousand
and a million dollars' worth of property destroyed. Negroes had been
shot and hung on lamp posts, Horace Greeley's _Tribune_ office had
been wrecked and the homes of abolitionist friends burned. "These are
terrible times," she wrote her family, and then went back to work,
staying devotedly at it through all the hot summer months.[154]
By the end of the year, she had enrolled the signatures of 100,000 men
and women on her petitions, and assured by Senator Sumner that these
petitions were invaluable in creating sentiment for the Thirteenth
Amendment, she raised the number of signatures in the next few months
to 400,000.
In April 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate and the
prospects for it in the House were good. This phase of her work
finished, Susan disbanded the Women's National Loyal League and
returned to her family in Rochester.
* * * * *
In despair over the possible re-election of Abraham Lincoln, Susan had
joined Henry and Elizabeth Stanton in stirring up sentiment for John
C. Frémont. Abolitionists were sharply divided in this presidential
campaign. Garrison and Phillips disagreed on the course of action,
Garrison coming out definitely for Lincoln in the _Liberator_, while
Phillips declared himself emphatically against four more years of
Lincoln. Susan, the Stantons, and Parker Pillsbury were among those
siding with Phillips because they feared premature reconstruction
under Lincoln. They cited Lincoln's Amnesty Proclamation as an example
of his leniency toward the rebels. They saw danger in leaving free
Negroes under the control of southerners embittered by war, and called
for Negro suffrage as the only protection against oppressive laws.
They opposed the readmission of Louisiana without the enfranchisement
of Negroes. Lincoln, they knew, favored the extension of suffrage only
to literate Negroes and to those who had served in the military
forces. In fact, Lincoln held back while they wanted to go ahead under
full steam and they looked to Frémont to lead them.
Following the presidential campaign anxiously from Rochester, Susan
wrote Mrs. Stanton, "I am starving for a full talk with somebody
posted, not merely pitted for Lincoln...." The persistent cry of the
_Liberator_ and the _Antislavery Standard_ to re-elect Lincoln and not
to swap horses in midstream did not ring true to her. "We read no more
of the good old doctrine 'of two evils choose neither,'" she wrote
Anna E. Dickinson. She confessed to Anna, "It is only safe to seek and
act the truth and to profess confidence in Lincoln would be a lie in
me."[155]