for the North, Lincoln's prospects looked bleak, and to her dismay,
Susan saw the chances improving for McClellan, the candidate of the
northern Democrats who wanted to end the war, leave slavery alone, and
conciliate the South. The whole picture changed, however, with the
capture of Atlanta by General Sherman in September. The people's
confidence in Lincoln revived and Frémont withdrew from the contest.
One by one the anti-Lincoln abolitionists were converted; and Susan,
anxiously waiting for word from Mrs. Stanton, was relieved to learn
that she was not one of them, nor was Wendell Phillips whose judgment
and vision both of them valued above that of any other man. With
approval she read these lines which Phillips had just written Mrs.
Stanton, "I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid
Mac's [McClellan's] election. I would cut oft my right hand before
doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election. I wholly distrust
his fitness to settle this thing and indeed his purpose."[156]
There is nothing to indicate any change of opinion on Susan's part
regarding Lincoln's unfitness for a second term. That he was the
lesser of two evils, she of course acknowledged. For her these
pre-election days were discouraging and frustrating. She had very
definite ideas on reconstruction which she felt in justice to the
Negro must be carried out, and Lincoln did not meet her requirements.
After Lincoln's re-election, she again looked to Wendell Phillips for
an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed.
"Phillips has just returned from Washington," Mrs. Stanton wrote her.
"He says the radical men feel they are powerless and checkmated....
They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not
say.... We say now, as ever, 'Give us immediately unconditional
emancipation, and let there be no reconstruction except on the
broadest basis of justice and equality!...' Phillips and a few others
must hold up the pillars of the temple.... I cannot tell you how happy
I am to find Douglass on the same platform with us. Keep him on the
right track. Tell him in this revolution, he, Phillips, and you and I
must hold the highest ground and truly represent the best type of the
white man, the black man, and the woman."[157]
Susan, holding "the highest ground," found it difficult to mark time
until she could find her place in the reconstruction. "The work of the
hour," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "is not alone to put down the
Rebels in arms, but to educate Thirty Millions of People into the idea
of a True Republic. Hence every influence and power that both men and
women can bring to bear will be needed in the reconstruction of the
Nation on the broad basis of justice and equality."[158]
FOOTNOTES:
[134] Garrisons, _Garrison_, IV, pp. 30-31.
[135] Lydia Mott to W. L. Garrison, May 8, 1861, Boston Public
Library; Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, p. 89.
[136] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 215.
[137] _Ibid._, p. 216. Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave, was often
called the Moses of her people because she led so many of them into
the promised land of freedom.
[138] _Ibid._
[139] _Ibid._, p. 198.
[140] Anna E. Dickinson was born in Philadelphia in 1842. The death of
her father, two years later, left the family in straightened
circumstances, and Anna, after attending a Friends school, began very
early to support herself by copying in lawyers' offices and by working
at the U.S. Mint. Speaking extemporaneously at Friends and antislavery
meetings, she discovered she had a gift for oratory and was soon in
demand as a speaker.
[141] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 219.
[142] April, 1862. _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 748.
[143] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 218, 222.
[144] _Emancipation, the Duty of Government_, Ms., Lucy E. Anthony
Collection. Reading that General Grant had returned 13 slaves to their
masters, an indignant Susan B. Anthony wrote Mrs. Stanton, "Such
gratuitous outrage should be met with instant death--without judge or
jury--if any offense may." Feb. 27, 1862, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Papers, Library of Congress.
[145] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 221.
[146] Jan. 24, 1904, Anna Dann Mason Collection.
[147] Harper, _Anthony_, p. 226.
[148] The first woman in the United States to obtain a medical degree,
1849.
[149] _History of Woman Suffrage_, II, pp. 57-58.
[150] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230. Members of the Women's National
Loyal League wore a silver pin showing a slave breaking his last
chains and bearing the inscription, "In emancipation is national
unity." Susan B. Anthony to Mrs. Drake, Sept. 18, 1863, Alma Lutz
Collection.
[151] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 234.
[152] _Ibid._, To Samuel May, Jr., Sept. 21, 1863, Alma Lutz
Collection.
[153] April 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress.
[154] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230.
[155] June 12, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, July 1, 1864, Anna
E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress. About this time, a friend of
Susan B. Anthony's youth, now a widower living in Ohio in comfortable
circumstances, unsuccessfully urged her to marry him.
[156] Sept. 23, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.
[157] Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, pp. 103-104.
[158] March 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress.
THE NEGRO'S HOUR
Susan's thoughts now turned to Kansas, as they had many times since
her brothers had settled there. Daniel and Annie, his young wife from
the East, urged her to visit them.[159] Daniel was well established in
Kansas, the publisher of his own newspaper and the mayor of
Leavenworth. He had served a little over a year in the Union army in
the First Kansas Cavalry. She longed to see him and the West that he
loved.
Now for the first time she felt free to make the long journey, for her
mother and Mary had sold the farm on the outskirts of Rochester and
had moved into the city, buying a large red brick house shaded by
maples and a beautiful horse chestnut. It had been a wrench for Susan
to give up the farm with its memories of her father, but there were
compensations in the new home on Madison Street, for Guelma, her
husband, Aaron McLean, and their family lived with them there. Hannah
and her family had also settled in Rochester, and when they bought the
house next door, Susan had the satisfaction of living again in the
midst of her family.[160]
She was particularly devoted to Guelma's twenty-three-year-old
daughter, Ann Eliza, whose "merry laugh" and "bright, joyous presence"
brought new life into the household. Ann Eliza was a stimulating
intelligent companion, and Susan looked forward to seeing many of her
own dreams fulfilled in her niece. Then suddenly in the fall of 1864,
Ann Eliza was taken ill, and her death within a few days left a great
void.[161]
In the midst of this sorrow, Daniel sent Susan a ticket and a check
for a trip to Kansas. Hesitating no longer, she waited only until her
"tip-top Rochester dressmaker" made up "the new, five-dollar silk"
which she had bought in New York.[162]
Before leaving for Kansas, in January, 1865, she pasted on the first
page of her diary a clipping of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
"Something Left Undone," which seemed so perfectly to interpret her
own feelings:
Labor with what zeal we will
Something still remains undone
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun....
Till at length it is or seems
Greater than our strength can bear
As the burden of our dreams
Pressing on us everywhere....[163]
With "the burden of her dreams" pressing on her, Susan traveled
westward. The future of the Negro was much on her mind, for the
Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had just been sent to the
states for ratification. That it would be ratified she had no doubt,
but she recognized the responsibility facing the North to provide for
the education and rehabilitation of thousands of homeless bewildered
Negroes trying to make their way in a still unfriendly world, and she
looked forward to taking part in this work.
Beyond Chicago, where she stopped over to visit her uncle Albert
Dickinson and his family, her journey was rugged, and when she reached
Leavenworth she reveled in the comfort of Daniel's "neat, little,
snow-white cottage with green blinds." She liked Daniel's wife, Annie,
at once, admired her gaiety and the way she fearlessly drove her
beautiful black horse across the prairie. "They have a real 'Aunt
Chloe' in the kitchen," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "and a little Darkie
boy for errands and table waiter. I never saw a girl to match. The
more I see of the race, the more wonderful they are to me."[164]
There was always good companionship in Daniel's home, for friends from
both the East and the West found it a convenient stopping place, and
there was much discussion of politics, the Negro question, and the
future of the West. Business was booming in Leavenworth, then the most
thriving town between St. Louis and San Francisco. Eight years before,
when Daniel had first settled there, it boasted a population of 4,000.
Now it had grown to 22,000, was lighted with gas, and was building its
business blocks of brick. As Susan drove through the busy streets with
Annie, she saw emigrants coming in by steamer and train to settle in
Kansas and watched for the covered wagons that almost every day
stopped in Leavenworth for supplies before moving on to the far West.
Driving over the wide prairie, sometimes a warm brown, then again
white with snow under a wider expanse of deep blue sky than she had
ever seen before, she relaxed as she had not in many a year and began
to feel the call of the West. She even thought she might like to
settle in Kansas until she was caught up by the sharp realization of
how she would miss the stimulating companionship of her friends in the
East.
[Illustration: Daniel Anthony, brother of Susan B. Anthony]
When Daniel was busy with his campaign for his second term as mayor,
she helped him edit the _Bulletin_. He warned her not to fill his
paper up with woman's rights, and in spite of his sympathy for the
Negro, forbade her to advocate Negro suffrage in his paper.
"I wish I could talk through it the things I'd like to say to the
young martyr state ..." she wrote Mrs. Stanton. "The Legislature gave
but six votes for Negro suffrage the other day.... The idea of Kansas
refusing her loyal Negroes."
Again and again she was shocked at the prejudice against Negroes in
Kansas, as when Daniel employed a Negro typesetter and the printers,
refusing to admit him to their union, went out on strike until he was
discharged.
"In this city," she reported to Mrs. Stanton, "there are four thousand
ex-Missouri slaves who have sought refuge here within the three past
years." Making it her business to learn what was being done to help
them and educate them, she visited their schools, their Sunday
schools, and the Colored Home, and gave much of her time to them. To
encourage them to demand their rights, she organized an Equal Rights
League among them. This was one thing she could do, even if she could
not plead for Negro suffrage in Daniel's newspaper.[165]
Then one breath-taking piece of news followed another--Lee's
surrender, April 9, 1865, and in less than a week, Lincoln's
assassination, his death, and Andrew Johnson's succession to the
Presidency.
Susan looked upon Lincoln's assassination and death as an act of God.
She wrote to Mrs. Stanton, "Was there ever a more terrific command to
a Nation to 'stand still and know that I am God' since the world
began? The Old Book's terrible exhibitions of God's wrath sink into
nothingness. And this fell blow just at the very hour he was declaring
his willingness to consign those five million faithful, brave, and
loving loyal people of the South to the tender mercies of the ex-slave
lords of the lash."[166]
She longed "to go out and do battle for the Lord once more," but when
she could have expressed her opinions at the big mass meeting held in
memory of Lincoln, she remained silent. "My soul was full," she
confessed to Mrs. Stanton, "but the flesh not equal to stemming the
awful current, to do what the people have called make an exhibition of
myself. So quenched the spirit and came home ashamed of myself."
Then she added, "Dear-a-me--how overfull I am, and how I should like
to be nestled into some corner away from every chick and child with
you once more."
* * * * *
Disturbing news came from the East of dissension in the antislavery
ranks, of Garrison's desire to dissolve the American Antislavery
Society after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and of
Phillips' insistence that it continue until freedom for the Negro was
firmly established. While Garrison maintained that northern states,
denying the ballot to the Negro, could not consistently make Negro
suffrage a requirement for readmitting rebel states to the Union,
Phillips demanded Negro suffrage as a condition of readmission.
Immediately abolitionists took sides. Parker Pillsbury, Lydia and
Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, the Stantons,
and others lined up with Phillips, whose vehement and scathing
criticism of reconstruction policies seemed to them the need of the
hour. Susan also took sides, praising "dear ever glorious Phillips"
and writing in her diary, "The disbanding of the American Antislavery
Society is fully as untimely as General Grant's and Sherman's granting
parole and pardon to the whole Rebel armies."[167]
To her friends in the East, she wrote, "How can anyone hold that
Congress has no right to demand Negro suffrage in the returning Rebel
states because it is not already established in all the loyal ones?
What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago,
had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote
against admitting a new state with slavery, because it was not already
abolished in all the old States? It is perfectly astounding, this
seeming eagerness of so many of our old friends to cover up and
apologize for the glaring hate toward the equal recognition of the
manhood of the black race."[168]
She rejoiced when word came that the American Antislavery Society
would continue under the presidency of Phillips, with Parker Pillsbury
as editor of the _Antislavery Standard_; but she was saddened by the
withdrawal of Garrison, whom she had idolized for so many years and
whose editorials in the _Liberator_ had always been her
inspiration.[169]
As she read the weekly New York _Tribune_, which came regularly to
Daniel, she grew more and more concerned over President Johnson's
reconstruction policy and more and more convinced of the need of a
crusade for political and civil rights for the Negro. Asked to deliver
the Fourth of July oration at Ottumwa, Kansas, she decided to put into
it all her views on the controversial subject of reconstruction.
Traveling by stage the 125 miles to Ottumwa, she found good company
en route and "great talk on politics, Negro equality, and temperance,"
and thought the "grand old prairies ... perfectly splendid and the
timber-skirted creeks ... delightful."[170]
Before a large gathering of Kansas pioneers, many of whom had driven
forty or fifty miles to hear her, she stood tall, straight, and
earnest, as she reminded them of the noble heritage of Kansas, of the
bloody years before the war when in the free-state fight, Kansas men
and women "taught the nation anew" the principles of the Declaration
of Independence. Lashing out with the vehemence of Phillips against
President Johnson's reconstruction policy, she warned, "There has been
no hour fraught with so much danger as the present.... 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 ...
would be a disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath
to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars...."[171]
She then cited the results of the elections in Virginia, South
Carolina, and Tennessee to prove her point that unless Negroes were
given the vote, rebels would be put in office and a new code of laws
apprenticing Negroes passed, establishing a new form of slavery.
She urged her audience to be awake to the politicians who were using
the peoples' reverence and near idolatry of Lincoln to push through
anti-Negro legislation under the guise of carrying out his policies.
Then putting behind her the prejudice and impatience with Lincoln
which she had felt during his lifetime, she added, "If the
administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American people one
lesson above another, it was that they must think and speak and
proclaim, and that he as their 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.'"
In her special pleading for the Negro, she did not forget women.
Calling attention to the fact that our nation had never been a true
republic because the ballot was exclusively in the hands of the "free
white male," she asked for a government "of the people," men and
women, white and black, with Negro suffrage and woman suffrage as
basic requirements.
[Illustration: Wendell Phillips]
So enthusiastic were the Republicans over her speech that they urged
her to prepare it for publication, suggesting, however, that she
delete the passage on woman suffrage. This was her first intimation
that Republicans might balk at enfranchising women. So great had been
women's contribution to the winning of the war and so indebted were
the Republicans to women for creating sentiment for the Thirteenth
Amendment, that she had come to expect, along with Mrs. Stanton, that
the ballot would without question be given them as a reward.
* * * * *
It was soon obvious to Susan that politicians in the East as well as
in Kansas were shying away from woman suffrage. Mrs. Stanton reported
that even Wendell Phillips was backsliding, not wishing to campaign
for Negro suffrage and woman suffrage at the same time. "While I could
continue as heretofore, arguing for woman's rights, just as I do for
temperance every day," he had written, "still I would not mix the
movements.... I think such mixture would lose for the Negro far more
than we should gain for the woman. I am now engaged in abolishing
slavery in a land where the abolition of slavery means conferring or
recognizing citizenship, and where citizenship supposes the ballot for
all men."[172]
Such reasoning filled Susan with despair, for she firmly believed that
women who had been asking for full citizenship for seventeen years
deserved precedence over the Negro. Mrs. Stanton agreed. To them,
Negro suffrage without woman suffrage was unthinkable, an unbearable
humiliation. Half of the Negroes were women, and manhood suffrage
would fasten upon them a new form of slavery. How could Wendell
Phillips, they asked each other, fail to recognize not only the
timeliness of woman suffrage, but the fact that women were better
qualified for the ballot than the majority of Negroes, who, because of
their years in slavery, were illiterate and the easy prey of
unscrupulous politicians? By all means enfranchise Negroes, they
argued with him, but enfranchise women as well, and if there must be a
limitation on suffrage, let it be on the basis of literacy, not on the
basis of sex.
Among Republican members of Congress and abolitionists, there was
serious discussion of a Fourteenth Amendment to extend to the Negro
civil rights and the ballot. Susan, reading about this in Kansas, and
Mrs. Stanton, discussing it in New York with her husband, Wendell
Phillips, and Robert Dale Owen, saw in such a revision of the
Constitution a just and logical opportunity to extend woman's rights
at the same time. Previously committed to state action on woman
suffrage but only because it had then seemed the necessary first step,
both women welcomed the more direct road offered by an amendment to
the Constitution. Only they of all the old woman's rights workers were
awake to this opportunity.
Throughout the United States, people were thinking about the
Constitution as Americans had not done since the Bill of Rights was
ratified in 1791. Not only were amendments to the federal Constitution
in the air, not only were rebel states being readmitted to the Union
with new constitutions, but state constitutions in the North were
being revised, and western territories sought statehood. In Susan's
opinion the time was ripe to proclaim equal rights for all. This
clearly was woman's hour.
* * * * *
"Come back and help," pleaded Elizabeth Stanton, who grew more and
more alarmed as she saw all interest in woman suffrage crowded out of
the minds of reformers by their zeal for the Negro. "I have argued
constantly with Phillips and the whole fraternity, but I fear one and
all will favor enfranchising the Negro without us. Woman's cause is in
deep water.... There is pressing need of our woman's rights
convention...."[173]
Susan's spirits revived at the prospect of holding a woman's rights
convention, and plans for the future began to take shape as she read
the closing lines of Mrs. Stanton's letter: "I hope in a short time to
be comfortably located in a new house where we will have a room ready
for you.... I long to put my arms about you once more and hear you
scold me for all my sins and shortcomings.... Oh, Susan, you are very
dear to me. I should miss you more than any other living being on this
earth. You are entwined with much of my happy and eventful past, and
all my future plans are based on you as coadjutor. Yes, our work is
one, we are one in aim and sympathy and should be together. Come
home."
Parker Pillsbury also added his plea, "Why have you deserted the field
of action at a time like this, at an hour unparalleled in almost
twenty centuries?... It is not for me to decide your field of labor.
Kansas needed John Brown and may need you ... but New York is to
revise her constitution next year and, if you are absent, who is to
make the plea for woman?"
Reading her newspaper a few days later, she found that the politicians
had made their first move, introducing in the House of Representatives
a resolution writing the word "male" into the qualifications of voters
in the second section of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. She
started at once for the East.
* * * * *
On the long journey back, in the heat of August, traveling by stage
and railroad with many stops to make the necessary connections, Susan
not only visited her many relatives who had moved to the West, but
also called on antislavery and woman suffrage workers, and held
meetings to plead for free schools for Negroes and for the ballot for
Negroes and women. She found people relieved to have the war over and
busy with their own affairs, but with prejudices smoldering. Public
speaking was still an ordeal for her and she confessed to her diary,
"Made a labored talk.... Had a struggle to get through with speech,"
and again, "Had a hard time. Thoughts nor words would come--Staggered
through."[174] However, she was a determined woman. The message must
be carried to the people and she would do it whether she suffered in
the process or not.
Late in September, she reached her own comfortable home in Rochester,
but she had too much on her mind to stay there long, and within a few
weeks was in New York with Elizabeth Stanton, deep in a serious
discussion of how to create an overwhelming demand for woman suffrage
at this crucial time. Again they decided to petition Congress, this
time for the vote for both women and Negroes. Five years had now
passed since the last national woman's rights convention, and the
workers were scattered; some had lost interest and others thought only
of the need of the Negro. Lucretia Mott, Lydia Mott, and Parker
Pillsbury responded at once. Susan sought out Lucy Stone in spite of
the differences that had grown up between them, and after talking with
Lucy, confessed to herself that she had been unjustly impatient with
her.[175]
Hoping for aid from the Jackson or Hovey Fund, she went to New England
to revive interest there and in Concord talked with the Emersons,
Bronson Alcott, and Frank Sanborn. When she asked Emerson whether he
thought it wise to demand woman suffrage at this time, he replied,
"Ask my wife. I can philosophize, but I always look to her to decide
for me in practical matters." Unhesitatingly Mrs. Emerson agreed with
Susan that Congress must be petitioned immediately to enfranchise
women either before Negroes were granted the vote or at the same
time.[176]