"I wish, sir, to speak to the subject under discussion," she bravely replied.

Turning to the men in the front row, Professor Davies then asked, "What is the pleasure of the convention?"

"I move that she be heard," shouted an unexpected champion. Another seconded the motion. After a lengthy debate during which Susan stood patiently waiting, the men finally voted their approval by a small majority, and Professor Davies, a bit taken aback, announced, "The lady may speak."

"It seems to me, gentlemen," Susan began, "that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which you complain. Do you not see that so long as society says woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? And this, too, is the reason that teaching is a less lucrative profession; as here men must compete with the cheap labor of woman. Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you. Would you make it more lucrative, increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen."

For a moment after this bombshell, there was complete silence. Then three men rushed down the aisle to congratulate her, telling her she had pluck, that she had hit the nail on the head, but the women near by glanced scornfully at her, murmuring, "Who can that creature be?"

Susan, however, had started a few women thinking and questioning, and the next morning, Professor Davies, resplendent in his buff vest and blue coat with brass buttons, opened the convention with an explanation. "I have been asked," he said, "why no provisions have been made for female lecturers before this association and why ladies are not appointed on committees. I will answer." Then, in flowery metaphor, he assured them that he would not think of dragging women from their pedestals into the dust.

"Beautiful, beautiful," murmured the women in the back rows, but Mrs. Northrup of Rochester offered resolutions recognizing the right of women teachers to share in all the privileges and deliberations of the organization and calling attention to the inadequate salaries women teachers received. These resolutions were kept before the meeting by a determined group and finally adopted. Susan also offered the name of Emma Willard as a candidate for vice-president, thinking the successful retired principal of the Troy Female Seminary, now interested in improving the public schools, might also be willing to lend a hand in improving the status of women in this educational organization. Mrs. Willard, however, declined the nomination, refusing to be drawn into Susan's rebellion.[41] Susan, nevertheless, left the convention satisfied that she had driven an entering wedge into Professor Davies' male stronghold, and she continued battering at this stronghold whenever she had an opportunity. She meant to put women in office and to win approval for coeducation and equal pay.

* * * * *

Teachers' conventions, however, were only a minor part of her new crusade, plans for which were still simmering in her mind and developing from day to day. Going back to many of the towns where she had held temperance meetings, she found that most of the societies she had organized had disbanded because women lacked the money to engage speakers or to subscribe to temperance papers. If they were married, they had no money of their own and no right to any interest outside their homes, unless their husbands consented.

Discouraged, she wrote in her diary, "As I passed from town to town I was made to feel the great evil of woman's entire dependency upon man for the necessary means to aid on any and every reform movement. Though I had long admitted the wrong, I never until this time so fully took in the grand idea of pecuniary and personal independence. It matters not how overflowing with benevolence toward suffering humanity may be the heart of woman, it avails nothing so long as she possesses not the power to act in accordance with these promptings. Woman must have a purse of her own, and how can this be, so long as the Wife is denied the right to her individual and joint earnings. Reflections like these, caused me to see and really feel that there was no true freedom for Woman without the possession of all her property rights, and that these rights could be obtained through legislation only, and so, the sooner the demand was made of the Legislature, the sooner would we be likely to obtain them."[42]

FOOTNOTES:

[33] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 65.

[34] The Lily, May, 1852.

[35] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, History of Woman Suffrage (New York, 1881), I, p. 489.

[36] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 77.

[37] Ibid., p. 78.

[38] Ibid., p. 90.

[39] Theodore Stanton and Harriot Stanton Blatch, Eds., Elizabeth Cady Stanton, As Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences (New York, 1922), II, p. 52.

[40] Aug., 1853, Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 98-99; History of Woman Suffrage, I, pp. 513-515.

[41] Susan B. Anthony Scrapbook, Library of Congress.

[42] Ms., Diary, 1853.



A PURSE OF HER OWN

The next important step in winning further property rights for women, it seemed to Susan, was to hold a woman's rights convention in the conservative capital city of Albany. This was definitely a challenge and she at once turned to Elizabeth Stanton for counsel. Somehow she must persuade Mrs. Stanton to find time in spite of her many household cares to prepare a speech for the convention and for presentation to the legislature. As eager as Susan to free women from unjust property laws, Mrs. Stanton asked only that Susan get a good lawyer, and one sympathetic to the cause, to look up New York State's very worst laws affecting women.[43] She could think and philosophize while she was baking and sewing, she assured Susan, but she had no time for research. Susan produced the facts for Mrs. Stanton, and while she worked on the speech, Susan went from door to door during the cold blustery days of December and January 1854 to get signatures on her petitions for married women's property rights and woman suffrage. Some of the women signed, but more of them slammed the door in her face, declaring indignantly that they had all the rights they wanted. Yet at this time a father had the legal authority to apprentice or will away a child without the mother's consent and an employer was obliged by law to pay a wife's wages to her husband.

In spite of the fact that the bloomer costume made it easier for her to get about in the snowy streets, she now found it a real burden because it always attracted unfavorable attention. Boys jeered at her and she was continually conscious of the amused, critical glances of the men and women she met. She longed to take it off and wear an inconspicuous trailing skirt, but if she had been right to put it on, it would be weakness to take it off. By this time Elizabeth Stanton had given it up except in her own home, convinced that it harmed the cause and that the physical freedom it gave was not worth the price. "I hope you have let down a dress and a petticoat," she now wrote Susan. "The cup of ridicule is greater than you can bear. It is not wise, Susan, to use up so much energy and feeling in that way. You can put them to better use. I speak from experience."[44]



Lucy Stone too was wavering and was thinking of having her next dress made long. The three women corresponded about it, and Lucy as well as Mrs. Stanton urged Susan to give up the bloomer. With these entreaties ringing in her ears, Susan set out for Albany in February 1854 to make final arrangements for the convention. On the streets in Albany, in the printing offices, and at the capitol, men stared boldly at her, some calling out hilariously, "Here comes my bloomer." She endured it bravely until her work was done, but at night alone in her room at Lydia Mott's she poured out her anguish in letters to Lucy. "Here I am known only," she wrote, "as one of the women who ape men—coarse, brutal men! Oh, I can not, can not bear it any longer."[45]

Even so she did not let down the hem of her skirt, but wore her bloomer costume heroically during the entire convention, determined that she would not be stampeded into a long skirt by the jeers of Albany men or the ridicule of the women. However, she made up her mind that immediately after the convention she would take off the bloomer forever. She had worn it a little over a year. Never again could she be lured into the path of dress reform.

The Albany Register scoffed at the "feminine propagandists of woman's rights" exhibiting themselves in "short petticoats and long-legged boots."[46] Nevertheless, the convention aroused such genuine interest that evening meetings were continued for two weeks, featuring as speakers Ernestine Rose, Antoinette Brown, Samuel J. May, and William Henry Channing, the young Unitarian minister from Rochester; and when the men appeared on the platform, the audience called for the women.

Susan could not have asked for anything better than Elizabeth Stanton's moving plea for property rights for married women and the attention it received from the large audience in the Senate Chamber. Her heart swelled with pride as she listened to her friend, and so important did she think the speech that she had 50,000 copies printed for distribution.

To back up Mrs. Stanton's words with concrete evidence of a demand for a change in the law, Susan presented petitions with 10,000 signatures, 6,000 asking that married women be granted the right to their wages and 4,000 venturing to be recorded for woman suffrage.

Enthusiastic over her Albany success, she impetuously wrote Lucy Stone, "Is this not a wonderful time, an era long to be remembered?"[47]

Although the legislature failed to act on the petitions, she knew that her cause had made progress, for never before had women been listened to with such respect and never had newspapers been so friendly. She cherished these words of praise from Lucy, "God bless you, Susan dear, for the brave heart that will work on even in the midst of discouragement and lack of helpers. Everywhere I am telling people what your state is doing, and it is worth a great deal to the cause. The example of positive action is what we need."[48]

* * * * *

Susan continued her "example of positive action," this time against the Kansas-Nebraska bill, pending in Congress, which threatened repeal of the Missouri Compromise by admitting Kansas and Nebraska as territories with the right to choose for themselves whether they would be slave or free. "I feel that woman should in the very capitol of the nation lift her voice against that abominable measure," she wrote Lucy Stone, with whom she was corresponding more and more frequently. "It is not enough that H. B. Stowe should write."[49] Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had been published in 1852 and during that year 300,000 copies were sold.



With Ernestine Rose, Susan now headed for Washington. These two women had been drawn together by common interests ever since they had met in Syracuse in 1852. Susan was not frightened, as many were, by Ernestine's reputed atheism. She appreciated Ernestine's intelligence, her devotion to woman's rights, and her easy eloquence. Conscious of her own limitations as an orator, she recognized her need of Ernestine for the many meetings she planned for the future.

As they traveled to Washington together, she learned more about this beautiful, impressive, black-haired Jewess from Poland, who was ten years her senior. The daughter of a rabbi, Ernestine had found the limitations of orthodox religion unbearable for a woman and had left her home to see and learn more of the world in Prussia, Holland, France, Scotland, and England. She had married an Englishman sympathetic to her liberal views, and together they had come to New York where she began her career as a lecturer in 1836 when speaking in public branded women immoral. She spoke easily and well on education, woman's rights, and the evils of slavery. Her slight foreign accent added charm to her rich musical voice, and before long she was in demand as far west as Ohio and Michigan. With a colleague as experienced as Ernestine, Susan dared arrange for meetings even in the capital of the nation.

Washington was tense over the slavery issue when they arrived, and Ernestine's friends warned her not to mention the subject in her lectures. Unheeding she commented on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, but the press took no notice and her audiences showed no signs of dissatisfaction. In fact, two comparatively unknown women, billed to lecture on the "Educational and Social Rights of Women" and the "Political and Legal Rights of Women," attracted little attention in a city accustomed to a blaze of Congressional oratory. Hoping to draw larger audiences and to lend dignity to their meetings, Susan asked for the use of the Capitol on Sunday, but was refused because Ernestine was not a member of a religious society. Making an attempt for Smithsonian Hall, Ernestine was told it could not risk its reputation by presenting a woman speaker.[50]

A failure financially, their Washington venture was rich in experience. Susan took time out for sightseeing, visiting the "President's house" and Mt. Vernon, which to her surprise she found in a state of "delapidation and decay." "The mark of slavery o'ershadows the whole," she wrote in her diary. "Oh the thought that it was here that he whose name is the pride of this Nation, was the Slave Master."[51]

Again and again in the Capitol, she listened to heated debates on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, astonished at the eloquence and fervor with which the "institution of slavery" could be defended. Seeing slavery first-hand, she abhorred it more than ever and observed with dismay its degenerating influence on master as well as slave. She began to feel that even she herself might be undermined by it almost unwittingly and confessed to her diary, "This noon, I ate my dinner without once asking myself are these human beings who minister to my wants, Slaves to be bought and sold and hired out at the will of a master?... Even I am getting accustomed to Slavery ... so much so that I have ceased continually to be made to feel its blighting, cursing influence."[52]

* * * * *

A few months later, Susan and Ernestine were in Philadelphia at a national woman's rights convention, and when Ernestine was proposed for president, Susan had her first opportunity to champion her new friend. A foreigner and a free-thinker, Ernestine encountered a great deal of prejudice even among liberal reformers, and Susan was surprised at the strength of feeling against her. Impressed during their trip to Washington by Ernestine's essentially fine qualities and her value to the cause, Susan fought for her behind the scenes, insisting that freedom of religion or the freedom to have no religion be observed in woman's rights conventions, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Ernestine elected to the office she so richly deserved.

Freedom of religion or freedom to have no religion had become for Susan a principle to hold on to, as she listened at these early woman's rights meetings to the lengthy fruitless discussions regarding the lack of Scriptural sanction for women's new freedom. Usually a clergyman appeared on the scene, volubly quoting the Bible to prove that any widening of woman's sphere was contrary to the will of God. But always ready to refute him were Antoinette Brown, now an ordained minister, William Lloyd Garrison, and occasionally Susan herself. To the young Quaker broadened by her Unitarian contacts and unhampered by creed or theological dogma, such debates were worse than useless; they deepened theological differences, stirred up needless antagonisms, solved no problems, and wasted valuable time.

During this convention, she was one of the twenty-four guests in Lucretia Mott's comfortable home at 238 Arch Street. Every meal, with its stimulating discussions, was a convention in itself. Susan's great hero, William Lloyd Garrison, sat at Lucretia's right at the long table in the dining room, Susan on her left, and at the end of each meal, when the little cedar tub filled with hot soapy water was brought in and set before Lucretia so that she could wash the silver, glass, and fine china at the table, Susan dried them on a snowy-white towel while the interesting conversation continued. There was talk of woman's rights, of temperance, and of spiritualism, which was attracting many new converts. There were thrilling stories of the opening of the West and the building of transcontinental railways; but most often and most earnestly the discussion turned to the progress of the antislavery movement, to the infamous Kansas-Nebraska bill, to the New England Emigrant Aid Company,[53] which was sending free-state settlers to Kansas, to the weakness of the government in playing again and again into the hands of the proslavery faction. Most of them saw the country headed toward a vast slave empire which would embrace Cuba, Mexico, and finally Brazil; and William Lloyd Garrison fervently reiterated his doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders."

Before leaving home Susan had heard first-hand reports of the bitter bloody antislavery contest in Kansas from her brother Daniel, who had just returned from a trip to that frontier territory with settlers sent out by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Now talking with William Lloyd Garrison, she found herself torn between these two great causes for human freedom, abolition and woman's rights, and it was hard for her to decide which cause needed her more.

* * * * *

She had not, however, forgotten her unfinished business in New York State. The refusal of the legislature to amend the property laws had doubled her determination to continue circulating petitions until married women's civil rights were finally recognized. It took courage to go alone to towns where she was unknown to arrange for meetings on the unpopular subject of woman's rights. Not knowing how she would be received, she found it almost as difficult to return to such towns as Canajoharie where she had been highly respected as a teacher six years before. In Canajoharie, however, she was greeted affectionately by her uncle Joshua Read. He and his friends let her use the Methodist church for her lecture, and when the trustees of the academy urged her to return there to teach, Uncle Joshua interrupted with a vehement "No!" protesting that others could teach but it was Susan's work "to go around and set people thinking about the laws."[54]

Returning to the scene of her girlhood in Battenville and Easton, visiting her sisters Guelma and Hannah, and meeting many of her old friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made the modern test of Christianity."[55]

After eight strenuous months away from home, she was welcomed warmly by a family who believed in her work. She found abolition uppermost in everyone's mind. Her brother Merritt, fired by Daniel's tales of the West and the antislavery struggle in Kansas, was impatient to join the settlers there and could talk of nothing else. While he poured out the latest news about Kansas, he and a cousin Mary Luther helped Susan fold handbills for future woman's rights meetings. Susan listened eagerly and approvingly as he told of the 750 free-state settlers who during the past summer had gone out to Kansas, traveling up the Missouri on steamboats and over lonely trails in wagons marked "Kansas." Most of them were not abolitionists but men who wanted Kansas a free-labor state which they could develop with their own hard work. She heard of the ruthless treatment these "Yankee" settlers faced from the proslavery Missourians who wanted Kansas in the slavery bloc. There was bloodshed and there would be more. John Brown's sons had written from Kansas, "Send us guns. We need them more than bread."[56] Merritt was ready and eager to join John Brown.

The Anthony farm was virtually a hotbed of insurrection with Merritt planning resistance in Kansas and Susan reform in New York. Susan mapped out an ambitious itinerary, hoping to canvass with her petitions every county in the state. With her father as security, she borrowed money to print her handbills and notices, and then wrote Wendell Phillips asking if any money for a woman's rights campaign had been raised by the last national convention. He replied with his own personal check for fifty dollars. His generosity and confidence touched her deeply, for already he had become a hero to her second only to William Lloyd Garrison. This tall handsome intellectual, a graduate of Harvard and an unsurpassed orator, had forfeited friends, social position, and a promising career as a lawyer to plead for the slave. He was also one of the very few men who sympathized with and aided the woman's rights cause.

Horace Greeley too proved at this time to be a good friend, writing, "I have your letter and your programme, friend Susan. I will publish the latter in all our editions, but return your dollars."[57]

Her earnestness and ability made a great appeal to these men. They marveled at her industry. Thirty-four years old now, not handsome but wholesome, simply and neatly dressed, her brown hair smoothly parted and brought down over her ears, she had nothing of the scatterbrained impulsive reformer about her, and no coquetry. She was practical and intelligent, and men liked to discuss their work with her. William Henry Channing, admiring her executive ability and her plucky reaction to defeat, dubbed her the Napoleon of the woman's rights movement. Parker Pillsbury, the fiery abolitionist from New Hampshire, broad-shouldered, dark-bearded, with blazing eyes and almost fanatical zeal, had become her devoted friend. He liked nothing better than to tease her about her idleness and pretend to be in search of more work for her to do.

* * * * *

So impatient was Susan to begin her New York State campaign that she left home on Christmas Day to hold her first meeting on December 26, 1854, at Mayville in Chatauqua County. The weather was cold and damp, but the four pounds of candles which she had bought to light the court house flickered cheerily while the small curious audience, gathered from several nearby towns, listened to the first woman most of them had ever heard speak in public. She would be, they reckoned, worth hearing at least once.

Traveling from town to town, she held meetings every other night. Usually the postmasters or sheriffs posted her notices in the town square and gave them to the newspapers and to the ministers to announce in their churches. Even in a hostile community she almost always found a gallant fair-minded man to come to her aid, such as the hotel proprietor who offered his dining room for her meetings when the court house, schoolhouse, and churches were closed to her, or the group of men who, when the ministers refused to announce her meetings, struck off handbills which they distributed at the church doors at the close of the services. The newspapers too were generally friendly.

As men were the voters with power to change the laws, she aimed to attract them to her evening meetings, and usually they came, seeking diversion, and listened respectfully. Some of them scoffed, others condemned her for undermining the home, but many found her reasoning logical and by their questions put life into the meetings. A few even encouraged their wives to enlist in the cause.

The women, on the other hand, were timid or indifferent, although she pointed out to them the way to win the legal right to their earnings and their children. It was difficult to find among them a rebellious spirit brave enough to head a woman's rights society.

"Susan B. Anthony is in town," wrote young Caroline Cowles, a Canandaigua school girl, in her diary at this time. "She made a special request that all seminary girls should come to hear her as well as all the women and girls in town. She had a large audience and she talked very plainly about our rights and how we ought to stand up for them and said the world would never go right until the women had just as much right to vote and rule as the men.... When I told Grandmother about it, she said she guessed Susan B. Anthony had forgotten that St. Paul said women should keep silence. I told her, no, she didn't, for she spoke particularly about St. Paul and said if he had lived in these times ... he would have been as anxious to have women at the head of the government as she was. I could not make Grandmother agree with her at all."[58]

Many of the towns Susan visited were not on a railroad. Often after a long cold sleigh ride she slept in a hotel room without a fire; in the morning she might have to break the ice in the pitcher to take the cold sponge bath which nothing could induce her to omit since she had begun to follow the water cure, a new therapeutic method then in vogue.

For a time Ernestine Rose came to her aid and it was a relief to turn over the meetings to such an accomplished speaker. But for the most part Susan braved it alone. Steadily adding names to her petitions and leaving behind the leaflets which Elizabeth Stanton had written, she aroused a glimmer of interest in a new valuation of women.



On the stagecoach leaving Lake George on a particularly cold day, she found to her surprise a wealthy Quaker, whom she had met at the Albany convention, so solicitous of her comfort that he placed heated planks under her feet, making the long ride much more bearable. He turned up again, this time with his own sleigh, at the close of one of her meetings in northern New York, and wrapped in fur robes, she drove with him behind spirited gray horses to his sisters' home to stay over Sunday, and then to all her meetings in the neighborhood. It was pleasant to be looked after and to travel in comfort and she enjoyed his company, but when he urged her to give up the hard life of a reformer to become his wife, there was no hesitation on her part. She had dedicated her life to freeing women and Negroes and there could be no turning aside. If she ever married, it must be to a man who would encourage her work for humanity, a great man like Wendell Phillips, or a reformer like Parker Pillsbury.

Returning home in May 1855, she took stock of her accomplishments. She had canvassed fifty-four counties and sold 20,000 tracts. Her expenses had been $2,291 and she had paid her way by selling tracts and by a small admission charge for her meetings. She even had seventy dollars over and above all expenses. She promptly repaid the fifty dollars which Wendell Phillips had advanced, but he returned it for her next campaign.

However, her heart quailed at the prospect of another such winter, as she recalled the long, bitter-cold days of travel and the indifference of the women she was trying to help. Even the unfailing praise of her family and of Elizabeth Stanton, even the kindness and interest of the new friends she made paled into insignificance before the thought of another lone crusade. She was exhausted and suffering with rheumatic pains, and yet she would not rest, but prepared for an ambitious convention at Saratoga Springs, then the fashionable summer resort of the East.

She had braved this center of fashion and frivolity the year before with her message of woman's rights, and to her great surprise, crowds seeking entertainment had come to her meetings, their admission fees and their purchase of tracts making the venture a financial success. Here was fertile ground. Susan was counting on Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown to help her, for Elizabeth Stanton, then expecting her sixth baby, was out of the picture. Now, to her dismay, Lucy and Antoinette married the Blackwell brothers, Henry and Samuel.

Fearing that they too like Elizabeth Stanton would be tied down with babies and household cares, Susan saw a bleak lonely road ahead for the woman's rights movement. She did so want her best speakers and most valuable workers to remain single until the spade work for woman's rights was done. Almost in a panic at the prospect of being left to carry on the Saratoga convention alone, Susan wrote Lucy irritable letters instead of praising her for drawing up a marriage contract and keeping her own name. Later, however, she realized what it had meant for Lucy to keep her own name, and then she wrote her, "I am more and more rejoiced that you have declared by actual doing that a woman has a name and may retain it all through her life."[59]

So persistently did she now pursue Lucy and Antoinette that they both kept their promise to speak at the Saratoga convention, Lucy traveling all the way from Cincinnati where she was visiting in the Blackwell home. Lucy was loudly cheered by a large audience, eager to see this young woman whose marriage had attracted so much notice in the press. In fact Lucy Stone, who had kept her own name and who with her husband had signed a marriage protest against the legal disabilities of a married woman, was as much of a novelty in this fashionable circle as one of Barnum's high-priced curiosities.

Pleased at Lucy's reception, Susan surveyed the audience hopefully—handsome men in nankeen trousers, red waistcoats, white neckcloths, and gray swallowtail coats, sitting beside beautiful young women wearing gowns of bombazine and watered silk with wide hoop skirts and elaborately trimmed bonnets which set off their curls. To her delight, they also applauded Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman minister they had ever seen, and Ernestine Rose with her appealing foreign accent. They clapped loudly when she herself asked them to buy tracts and contribute to the work.

Complimentary as this was, she did not flatter herself that they had endorsed woman's rights. That they had come to her meetings in large numbers while vacationing in Saratoga Springs, this was important. In some a spark of understanding glowed, and this spark would light others. They came from the South, from the West, and from the large cities of the East. There were railroad magnates among them, rich merchants, manufacturers, and politicians. Charles F. Hovey, the wealthy Boston dry-goods merchant, listened attentively to every word, and in the years that followed became a generous contributor to the cause.

* * * * *

Realizing how very tired she was and that she must feel more physically fit before continuing her work, Susan decided to take the water cure at her cousin Seth Rogers' Hydropathic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. This well-known sanitorium prescribed water internally and externally as a remedy for all kinds of ailments, and in an age when meals were overhearty, baths infrequent, and clothing tight and confining, the drinking of water, tub baths, showers, and wet packs had enthusiastic advocates. The soothing baths relaxed Susan and the leisure to read refreshed and strengthened her. She read, one after another, Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, George Sand's Consuelo, Madame de Stael's Corinne, then Frances Wright's A Few Days in Athens and Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, making notes in her diary (1855) of passages she particularly liked. She discussed current events with her cousin Seth on long drives in the country, finding him a delightful companion, well-read, understanding, and interested in people and causes. He took her to her first political meeting, where she was the only woman present and had a seat on the platform. It was one of the first rallies of the new Republican party which had developed among rebellious northern Whigs, Free-Soilers, and anti-Nebraska Democrats who opposed the extension of slavery. After listening to the speakers, among them Charles Sumner, she drew these conclusions: "Had the accident of birth given me place among the aristocracy of sex, I doubt not I should be an active, zealous advocate of Republicanism; unless perchance, I had received that higher, holier light which would have lifted me to the sublime height where now stand Garrison, Phillips, and all that small band whose motto is 'No Union with Slaveholders.'"[60]

After listening to the satisfying sermons of Thomas Wentworth 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 Grimke, 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.



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. Fremont. 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 "Fremont 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]

So Susan believed, and she was doing her best to make it all free. Not only was she holding antislavery meetings, making speeches, and distributing leaflets whenever and wherever possible, but she was also lobbying in Albany for a personal liberty bill to protect the slaves who were escaping from the South. "Treason in the Capitol," the Democratic press labeled efforts for a personal liberty bill, and as Susan reported to William Lloyd Garrison,[83] even Republicans shied away from it, many of them regarding Seward's "irrepressible conflict" speech a sorry mistake. Such timidity and shilly-shallying were repugnant to her. She could better understand the fervor of John Brown although he fought with bullets.

Yet John Brown's fervor soon ended in tragedy, sowing seeds of fear, distrust, and bitter partisanship in all parts of the country. When, in October 1859, the startling news reached Susan of the raid on Harper's Ferry and the capture of John Brown, she sadly tried to piece together the story of his failure. She admired and respected John Brown, believing he had saved Kansas for freedom. That he had further ambitious plans was common knowledge among antislavery workers, for he had talked them over with Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, and the three young militants, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frank Sanborn, and Samuel Gridley Howe. Somehow these plans had failed, but she was sure that his motives were good. He was imprisoned, accused of treason and murder, and in his carpetbag were papers which, it was said, implicated prominent antislavery workers. Now his friends were fleeing the country, Sanborn, Douglass, and Howe. Gerrit Smith broke down so completely that for a time his mind was affected. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, defiant and unafraid, stuck by John Brown to the end, befriending his family, hoping to rescue him as he had rescued fugitive slaves.

Scanning the Liberator for its comment on John Brown, Susan found it colored, as she had expected, by Garrison's instinctive opposition to all war and bloodshed. He called the raid "a misguided, wild, apparently insane though disinterested and well-intentioned effort by insurrection to emancipate the slaves of Virginia," but even he added, "Let no one who glories in the Revolutionary struggle of 1776 deny the right of the slaves to imitate the example of our fathers."[84]

Behind closed doors and in public meetings, abolitionists pledged their allegiance to John Brown's noble purpose. He had wanted no bloodshed, they said, had no thought of stirring up slaves to brutal revenge. The raid was to be merely a signal for slaves to arise, to cast off slavery forever, to follow him to a mountain refuge, which other slave insurrections would reinforce until all slaves were free. To him the plan seemed logical and he was convinced it was God-inspired. To some of his friends it seemed possible—just a step beyond the Underground Railroad and hiding fugitive slaves. To Susan he was a hero and a martyr.

Southerners, increasingly fearful of slave insurrections, called John Brown a cold-blooded murderer and accused Republicans—"black Republicans," they classed them—of taking orders from abolitionists and planning evil against them. To law-abiding northerners, John Brown was a menace, stirring up lawlessness. Seward and Lincoln, speaking for the Republicans, declared that violence, bloodshed, and treason could not be excused even if slavery was wrong and Brown thought he was right. All saw before them the horrible threat of civil war.

During John Brown's trial, his friends did their utmost to save him. The noble old giant with flowing white beard, who had always been more or less of a legend, now to them assumed heroic proportions. His calmness, his steadfastness in what he believed to be right captured the imagination.

The jury declared him guilty—guilty of treason, of conspiring with slaves to rebel, guilty of murder in the first degree. The papers carried the story, and it spread by word of mouth—the story of those last tense moments in the courtroom when John Brown declared, "It is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interferred ... in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends ... it would have been all right.... I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interferred as I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong but right. Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done...."[85]

He was sentenced to die.

Susan, sick at heart, talked all this over with her abolitionist friends and began planning a meeting of protest and mourning in Rochester if John Brown were hanged. She engaged the city's most popular hall for this meeting, never thinking of the animosity she might arouse, and as she went from door to door selling tickets, she asked for contributions for John Brown's destitute family. She tried to get speakers from among respected Republicans to widen the popular appeal of the meeting, but her diary records, "Not one man of prominence in religion or politics will identify himself with the John Brown meeting."[86] Only a Free Church minister, the Rev. Abram Pryn, and the ever-faithful Parker Pillsbury were willing to speak.

There was still hope that John Brown might be saved and excitement ran high. Some like Higginson, unwilling to let him die, wanted to rescue him, but Brown forbade it. Others wanted to kidnap Governor Wise of Virginia and hold him on the high seas, a hostage for John Brown. Wendell Phillips was one of these. Parker Pillsbury, sending Susan the latest news from "the seat of war" and signing his letter, "Faithfully and fervently yours," wrote, "My voice is against any attempt at rescue. It would inevitably, I fear, lead to bloodshed which could not compensate nor be compensated. If the people dare murder their victim, as they are determined to do, and in the name of the law ... the moral effect of the execution will be without a parallel since the scenes on Calvary eighteen hundred years ago, and the halter that day sanctified shall be the cord to draw millions to salvation."[87]

On Friday, December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged. Through the North, church bells tolled and prayers were said for him. Everywhere people gathered together to mourn and honor or to condemn. In New York City, at a big meeting which overflowed to the streets, it was resolved "that we regard the recent outrage at Harper's Ferry as a crime, not only against the State of Virginia, but against the Union itself...." In Boston, however, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke to a tremendous audience of "the new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of man into conflict and death ... who will make the gallows glorious," and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recorded in his diary, "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution." Far away in France, Victor Hugo declared, "The eyes of Europe are fixed on America. The hanging of John Brown will open a latent fissure that will finally split the union asunder.... You preserve your shame, but you kill your glory."[88]

In Rochester, three hundred people assembled. All were friends of the cause and there was no unfriendly disturbance to mar the proceedings. Susan presided and Parker Pillsbury, in her opinion, made "the grandest speech of his life," for it was the only occasion he ever found fully wicked enough to warrant "his terrific invective."[89]

Thus these two militant abolitionists, Susan B. Anthony and Parker Pillsbury, joined hundreds of others throughout the nation in honoring John Brown, sensing the portent of his martyrdom and prophesying that his soul would go marching on.

FOOTNOTES:

[69] Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 144-145. As John Brown visited Frederick Douglass in Rochester, it is possible that Susan B. Anthony had met him.

[70] Oct. 19, 1856, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.

[71] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 148.

[72] Ibid., p. 151; also quotation following.

[73] Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone (Boston, 1930), pp. 197-198.

[74] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress.

[75] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 152.

[76] April 20, 1857, Abby Kelley Foster Papers, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts.

[77] Parker Pillsbury, The Acts of the Antislavery Apostles (Concord, N.H., 1883).

[78] Harper, Anthony, I. p. 160.

[79] March 22, 1858, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.

[80] N.d., Alma Lutz Collection.

[81] Charles A. and Mary B. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1930), II, p. 9.

[82] A. M. Schlesinger and H. C. Hockett, Land of the Free (New York, 1944), p. 297.

[83] March 19, 1859, Antislavery Papers, Boston Public Library.

[84] Francis Jackson, William Lloyd II, and Wendell Phillips Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879 (New York, 1889), III, p. 486.

[85] Ibid., p. 490.

[86] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 181.

[87] Ibid., p. 180.

[88] Henrietta Buckmaster, Let My People Go (New York, 1941), p. 269; Ehrlich, God's Angry Man, pp. 344-345, 350.

[89] Susan B. Anthony Scrapbook, Library of Congress. In 1890, after visiting the John Brown Memorial at North Elbe, New York, Susan B. Anthony wrote: "John Brown was crucified for doing what he believed God commanded him to do, 'to break the yoke and let the oppressed go free,' precisely as were the saints of old for following what they believed to be God's commands. The barbarism of our government was by so much the greater as our light and knowledge are greater than those of two thousand years ago." Harper, Anthony, II, p. 708.



THE TRUE WOMAN

Susan's preoccupation with antislavery work did not lessen her interest in women's advancement. Her own expanding courage and ability showed her the possibilities for all women in widened horizons and activities. These possibilities were the chief topic of conversation when she and Elizabeth Stanton were together. With Mrs. Stanton's young daughters, Margaret and Harriot, in mind, they were continually planning ways and means of developing the new woman, or the "true woman" as they liked to call her; and one of these ways was physical exercise in the fresh air, which was almost unheard of for women except on the frontier.

Taking off her hoops and working in the garden in the freedom of her long calico dress, Susan was refreshed and exhilarated. "Uncovered the strawberry and raspberry beds ..." her diary records. "Worked with Simon building frames for the grapevines in the peach orchards.... Set out 18 English black currants, 22 English gooseberries and Muscatine grape vines.... Finished setting out the apple trees & 600 blackberry bushes...."[90]

She knew how little this strengthening work and healing influence touched the lives of most women. Hemmed in by the walls of their homes, weighed down by bulky confining clothing, fed on the tradition of weakness, women could never gain the breadth of view, courage, and stamina needed to demand and appreciate emancipation. She thought a great deal about this and how it could be remedied, and wrote her friend, Thomas Wentworth Higginson "The salvation of the race depends, in a great measure, upon rescuing women from their hot-house existence. Whether in kitchen, nursery or parlor, all alike are shut away from God's sunshine. Why did not your Caroline Plummer of Salem, why do not all of our wealthy women leave money for industrial and agricultural schools for girls, instead of ever and always providing for boys alone?"[91]

An exceptional opportunity was now offered Susan—to speak on the controversial subject of coeducation before the State Teachers' Association, which only a few years before had been shocked by the sound of a woman's voice. Deeply concerned over her ability to write the speech, she at once appealed to Elizabeth Stanton, "Do you please mark out a plan and give me as soon as you can...."[92]



Busy with preparations for woman's rights meetings in popular New York summer resorts, Saratoga Springs, Lake George, Clifton Springs, and Avon, she grew panicky at the prospect of her impending speech and dashed off another urgent letter to Mrs. Stanton, underlining it vigorously for emphasis: "Not a word written ... and mercy only knows when I can get a moment, and what is worse, as the Lord knows full well, is, that if I get all the time the world has—I can't get up a decent document.... It is of but small moment who writes the Address, but of vast moment that it be well done.... No woman but you can write from my standpoint for all would base their strongest argument on the unlikeness of the sexes....

"Those of you who have the talent to do honor to poor, oh how poor womanhood have all given yourselves over to baby-making and left poor brainless me to battle alone. It is a shame. Such a lady as I might be spared to rock cradles, but it is a crime for you and Lucy and Nette."[93]

On a separate page she outlined for Mrs. Stanton the points she wanted to make. Her title was affirmative, "Why the Sexes Should be Educated Together." "Because," she reasoned, "by such education they get true ideas of each other.... Because the endowment of both public and private funds is ever for those of the male sex, while all the Seminaries and Boarding Schools for Females are left to maintain themselves as best they may by means of their tuition fees—consequently cannot afford a faculty of first-class professors.... Not a school in the country gives to the girl equal privileges with the boy.... No school requires and but very few allow the girls to declaim and discuss side by side with the boys. Thus they are robbed of half of education. The grand thing that is needed is to give the sexes like motives for acquirement. Very rarely a person studies closely, without hope of making that knowledge useful, as a means of support...."[94]

Mrs. Stanton wrote her at once, "Come here and I will do what I can to help you with your address, if you will hold the baby and make the puddings."[95] Gratefully Susan hurried to Seneca Falls and together they "loaded her gun," not only for the teachers' convention but for all the summer meetings.

Addressing the large teachers' meeting in Troy, Susan declared that mental sex-differences did not exist. She called attention to the ever-increasing variety of occupations which women were carrying on with efficiency. There were women typesetters, editors, publishers, authors, clerks, engravers, watchmakers, bookkeepers, sculptors, painters, farmers, and machinists. Two hundred and fifty women were serving as postmasters. Girls, she insisted, must be educated to earn a living and more vocations must be opened to them as an incentive to study. "A woman," she added, "needs no particular kind of education to be a wife and mother anymore than a man does to be a husband and father. A man cannot make a living out of these relations. He must fill them with something more and so must women."[96]

Her advanced ideas did not cause as much consternation as she had expected and she was asked to repeat her speech at the Massachusetts teachers' convention; but the thoughts of many in that audience were echoed by the president when he said to her after the meeting, "Madam, that was a splendid production and well delivered. I could not have asked for a single thing different either in matter or manner; but I would rather have followed my wife or daughter to Greenwood cemetery than to have had her stand here before this promiscuous audience and deliver that address."[97]

It was one thing to talk about coeducation but quite another to offer a resolution putting the New York State Teachers' Association on record as asking all schools, colleges, and universities to open their doors to women. This Susan did at their next convention, and while there were enough women present to carry the resolution, most of them voted against it, listening instead to the emotional arguments of a group of conservative men who prophesied that coeducation would coarsen women and undermine marriage. Nor did she forget the Negro at these conventions, but brought much criticism upon herself by offering resolutions protesting the exclusion of Negroes from public schools, academies, colleges, and universities.

Such controversial activities were of course eagerly reported in the press, and Henry Stanton, reading his newspaper, pointed them out to his wife, remarking drily, "Well, my dear, another notice of Susan. You stir up Susan and she stirs up the world."[98]

* * * * *

The best method of arousing women and spreading new ideas, Susan decided, was holding woman's rights conventions, for the discussions at these conventions covered a wide field and were not limited merely to women's legal disabilities. The feminists of that day extolled freedom of speech, and their platform, like that of antislavery conventions, was open to anyone who wished to express an opinion. Always the limited educational opportunities offered to women were pointed out, and Oberlin College and Antioch, both coeducational, were held up as patterns for the future. Resolutions were passed, demanding that Harvard and Yale admit women. Women's low wages and the very few occupations open to them were considered, and whether it was fitting for women to be doctors and ministers. At one convention Lucy Stone made the suggestion that a prize be offered for a novel on women, like Uncle Tom's Cabin, to arouse the whole nation to the unjust situation of women whose slavery, she felt, was comparable to that of the Negro. At another, William Lloyd Garrison maintained that women had the right to sit in the Congress and in state legislatures and that there should be an equal number of men and women in all national councils. Inevitably Scriptural edicts regarding woman's sphere were thrashed out with Antoinette Brown, in her clerical capacity, setting at rest the minds of questioning women and quashing the protests of clergymen who thought they were speaking for God. Usually Ernestine Rose was on hand, ready to speak when needed, injecting into the discussions her liberal clear-cut feminist views. Nor was the international aspect of the woman's rights movement forgotten. The interest in Great Britain in the franchise for women of such men as Lord Brougham and John Stuart Mill was reported as were the efforts there among women to gain admission to the medical profession. Distributed widely as a tract was the "admirable" article in the Westminster Review, "The Enfranchisement of Women," by Harriet Taylor, now Mrs. John Stuart Mill.

In New York, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana, where state conventions were held annually, women carried back to their homes and their friends new and stimulating ideas. National conventions, which actually represented merely the northeastern states and Ohio and occasionally attracted men and women from Indiana, Missouri, and Kansas, were scheduled by Susan to meet every year in New York, simultaneously with antislavery conventions. Thus she was assured of a brilliant array of speakers, for the Garrisonian abolitionists were sincere advocates of woman's rights.

Both Elizabeth Stanton and Lucy Stone were a great help to Susan in preparing for these national gatherings for which she raised the money. Elizabeth wrote the calls and resolutions, while Lucy could not only be counted upon for an eloquent speech, but through her wide contacts brought new speakers and new converts to the meetings. However, national woman's rights conventions would probably have lapsed completely during the troubled years prior to the Civil War, had it not been for Susan's persistence. She was obliged to omit the 1857 convention because all of her best speakers were either having babies or were kept at home by family duties. Lucy's baby, Alice Stone Blackwell, was born in September 1857, then Antoinette Brown's first child, and Mrs. Stanton's seventh.



Impatient to get on with the work, Susan chafed at the delay and when Lucy wrote her, "I shall not assume the responsibility for another convention until I have had my ten daughters,"[99] Susan was beside herself with apprehension. When Lucy told her that it was harder to take care of a baby day and night than to campaign for woman's rights, she felt that Lucy regarded as unimportant her "common work" of hiring halls, engaging speakers, and raising money. This rankled, for although Susan realized it was work without glory, she did expect Lucy to understand its significance.

Mrs. Stanton sensed the makings of a rift between Susan and these young mothers, Lucy and Antoinette, and knowing from her own experience how torn a woman could be between rearing a family and work for the cause, she pleaded with Susan to be patient with them. "Let them rest a while in peace and quietness, and think great thoughts for the future," she wrote Susan. "It is not well to be in the excitement of public life all the time. Do not keep stirring them up or mourning over their repose. You need rest too. Let the world alone a while. We cannot bring about a moral revolution in a day or a year."[100]

But Susan could not let the world alone. There was too much to be done. In addition to her woman's rights and antislavery work, she gave a helping hand to any good cause in Rochester, such as a protest meeting against capital punishment, a series of Sunday evening lectures, or establishing a Free Church like that headed by Theodore Parker in Boston where no one doctrine would be preached and all would be welcome. There were days when weariness and discouragement hung heavily upon her. Then impatient that she alone seemed to be carrying the burden of the whole woman's rights movement, she complained to Lydia Mott, "There is not one woman left who may be relied on. All have first to please their husbands after which there is little time or energy left to spend in any other direction.... How soon the last standing monuments (yourself and myself, Lydia) will lay down the individual 'shovel and de hoe' and with proper zeal and spirit grasp those of some masculine hand, the mercies and the spirits only know. I declare to you that I distrust the powers of any woman, even of myself to withstand the mighty matrimonial maelstrom!"[101]

To Elizabeth Stanton she confessed, "I have very weak moments and long to lay my weary head somewhere and nestle my full soul to that of another in full sympathy. I sometimes fear that I too shall faint by the wayside and drop out of the ranks of the faithful few."[102]

* * * * *

Susan thought a great deal about marriage at this time, about how it interfered with the development of women's talents and their careers, how it usually dwarfed their individuality. Nor were these thoughts wholly impersonal, for she had attentive suitors during these years. Her diary mentions moonlight rides and adds, "Mr.—walked home with me; marvelously attentive. What a pity such powers of intellect should lack the moral spine."[103] Her standards of matrimony were high, and she carefully recorded in her diary Lucretia Mott's wise words, "In the true marriage relation, the independence of the husband and wife is equal, their dependence mutual, and their obligations reciprocal."[104]

Marriage and the differences of the sexes were often discussed at the many meetings she attended, and when remarks were made which to her seemed to limit in any way the free and full development of woman, she always registered her protest. She had no patience with any unrealistic glossing over of sex attraction and spurned the theory that woman expressed love and man wisdom, that these two qualities reached out for each other and blended in marriage. Because she spoke frankly for those days and did not soften the impact of her words with sentimental flowery phrases, her remarks were sometimes called "coarse" and "animal," but she justified them in a letter to Mrs. Stanton, who thought as she did, "To me it [sex] is not coarse or gross. If it is a fact, there it is."[105]

She was reading at this time Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, called by Ruskin the greatest poem in the English language, but criticized by others as an indecent romance revolting to the purity of many women. Susan had bought a copy of the first American edition and she carried it with her wherever she went. After a hard active day, she found inspiration and refreshment in its pages. No matter how dreary the hotel room or how unfriendly the town, she no longer felt lonely or discouraged, for Aurora Leigh was a companion ever at hand, giving her confidence in herself, strengthening her ambition, and helping her build a satisfying, constructive philosophy of life. On the flyleaf of her worn copy, which in later years she presented to the Library of Congress, she wrote, "This book was carried in my satchel for years and read and reread. The noble words of Elizabeth Barrett, as Wendell Phillips always called her, sunk deep into my heart. I have always cherished it above all other books. I now present it to the Congressional Library with the hope that women may more and more be like Aurora Leigh."

The beauty of its poetry enchanted her, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's feminism found an echo in her own. She pencil-marked the passages she wanted to reread. When her "common work" of hiring halls and engaging speakers seemed unimportant and even futile, she found comfort in these lines:

"Be sure no earnest work Of any honest creature, howbeit weak Imperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much, It is not gathered as a grain of sand To enlarge the sum of human action used For carrying out God's end.... ... let us be content in work, To do the thing we can, and not presume To fret because it's little."[106]

Glorying in work, she read with satisfaction:

"The honest earnest man must stand and work: The woman also, otherwise she drops At once below the dignity of man, Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work; Who ever fears God, fears to sit at ease."

Could she have written poetry, these words, spoken by Aurora, might well have been her own:

"You misconceive the question like a man, Who sees a woman as the complement Of his sex merely. You forget too much That every creature, female as the male, Stands single in responsible act and thought, As also in birth and death. Whoever says To a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,' Will get fair answers, if the work and love Being good of themselves, are good for her—the best She was born for."

Inspired by Aurora Leigh, Susan planned a new lecture, "The True Woman," and as she wrote it out word for word, her thoughts and theories about women, which had been developing through the years, crystallized. In her opinion, the "true woman" could no more than Aurora Leigh follow the traditional course and sacrifice all for the love of one man, adjusting her life to his whims. She must, instead, develop her own personality and talents, advancing in learning, in the arts, in science, and in business, cherishing at the same time her noble womanly qualities. Susan hoped that some day the full development of woman's individuality would be compatible with marriage, and she held up as an ideal the words which Elizabeth Barrett Browning put into the mouth of Aurora Leigh:

"The world waits For help. Beloved, let us work so well, Our work shall still be better for our love And still our love be sweeter for our work And both, commended, for the sake of each, By all true workers and true lovers born."

She expressed this hope in her own practical words to Lydia Mott: "Institutions, among them marriage, are justly chargeable with many social and individual ills, but after all, the whole man or woman will rise above them. I am sure my 'true woman' will never be crushed or dwarfed by them. Woman must take to her soul a purpose and then make circumstances conform to this purpose, instead of forever singing the refrain, 'if and if and if.'"[107]

* * * * *

Late in 1858, Susan received a letter from Wendell Phillips which put new life into all her efforts for women. He wrote her that an anonymous donor had given him $5,000 for the woman's rights cause and that he, Lucy Stone, and Susan had been named trustees to spend it wisely and effectively.

The man who felt that the woman's rights cause was important enough to rate a gift of that size proved to be wealthy Francis Jackson of Boston, in whose home Susan had visited a few years before with Lucy and Antoinette. Jubilant over the prospects, she at once began to make plans. She wanted to use all of the fund for lectures, conventions, tracts, and newspaper articles; Lucy thought part of the money should be spent to prove unconstitutional the law which taxed women without representation and Antoinette was eager for a share to establish a church in which she could preach woman's rights with the Gospel.

Both Wendell Phillips and Lucy Stone agreed that Susan should have $1,500 for the intensive campaign she had planned for New York, and for once in her life she started off without a financial worry, with money in hand to pay her speakers. She held meetings in all of the principal towns of the state, making them at least partially pay for themselves. Her lecturers each received $12 a week and she kept a like amount for herself, for planning the tour, organizing the meetings, and delivering her new lecture, "The True Woman."

"I am having fine audiences of thinking men and women," she wrote Mary Hallowell. "Oh, if we could but make our meetings ring like those of the antislavery people, wouldn't the world hear us? But to do that we must have souls baptized into the work and consecrated to it."[108]

Some souls were deeply stirred by the woman's rights gospel. One of these was the wealthy Boston merchant, Charles F. Hovey, who in his will left $50,000 in trust to Wendell Phillips, William Lloyd Garrison, Parker Pillsbury, Abby Kelley Foster, and others, to be spent for the "promotion of the antislavery cause and other reforms," among them woman's rights, and not less than $8,000 a year to be spent to promote these reforms. With all this financial help available, Susan expected great things to happen.

* * * * *

During the winter of 1860 while the legislature was in session, Susan spent six weeks in Albany with Lydia Mott, and day after day she climbed the long hill to the capitol to interview legislators on amendments to the married women's property laws. When these amendments were passed by the Senate, Assemblyman Anson Bingham urged her to bring their mutual friend, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, to Albany to speak before his committee to assure passage by the Assembly.

Once again Susan hurried to Seneca Falls, and unpacking her little portmanteau stuffed with papers and statistics, discussed the subject with Mrs. Stanton in front of the open fire late into the night. Then the next morning while Mrs. Stanton shut herself up in the quietest room in the house to write her speech, Susan gave the children their breakfast, sent the older ones off to school, watched over the babies, prepared the desserts, and made herself generally useful. By this time the children regarded her affectionately as "Aunt Thusan," and they knew they must obey her, for she was a stern disciplinarian whom even the mischievous Stanton boys dared not defy.

These visits of Susan's were happy, satisfying times for both these young women. A few days' respite from travel in a well-run home with a friend she admired did wonders for Susan, giving her perspective on the work she had already done and courage to tackle new problems, while for Mrs. Stanton this short period of stimulating companionship and freedom from household cares was a godsend. "Miss Anthony" had long ago become Susan to Elizabeth, but Susan all through her life called her very best friend "Mrs. Stanton," playfully to be sure, but with a remnant of that formality which it was hard for her to cast off.

The speech was soon finished. Mrs. Stanton's imagination, fired by her sympathetic understanding of women's problems, had turned Susan's cold hard facts into moving prose, while Susan, the best of critics, detected every weak argument or faltering phrase. They both felt they had achieved a masterpiece.

Mrs. Stanton delivered this address before a joint session of the New York legislature in March 1860. Susan beamed with pride as she watched the large audience crowd even the galleries and heard the long loud applause for the speech which she was convinced could not have been surpassed by any man in the United States.

The next day the Assembly passed the Married Women's Property Bill, and when shortly it was signed by the governor, Susan and Mrs. Stanton scored their first big victory, winning a legal revolution for the women of New York State. This new law was a challenge to women everywhere. Under it a married woman had the right to hold property, real and personal, without the interference of her husband, the right to carry on any trade or perform any service on her own account and to collect and use her own earnings; a married woman might now buy, sell, and make contracts, and if her husband had abandoned her or was insane, a convict, or a habitual drunkard, his consent was unnecessary; a married woman might sue and be sued, she was the joint guardian with her husband of her children, and on the decease of her husband the wife had the same rights that her husband would have at her death.

Susan did not then realize the full significance of what she had accomplished—that she had unleashed a new movement for freedom which would be the means of strengthening the democratic government of her country.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 173-174, 198.

[91] Ibid., p. 160.

[92] May 26, 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College Library.

[93] Ibid., June 5, 1856. Antoinette Brown Blackwell was often called Nette.

[94] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress.

[95] 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[96] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. A notation on this ms. reads, "Written by Elizabeth Cady Stanton—Delivered by Susan B. Anthony."

[97] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 143.

[98] Stanton and Blatch, Stanton, II, p. 71.

[99] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 162.

[100] June 10, 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[101] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 171.

[102] Sept. 27, 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[103] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 175.

[104] Ms., Diary, 1855.

[105] Sept. 27, 1857, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[106] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (New York, 1857), p. 316; quotations following, pp. 53-54, pp. 364-365.

[107] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 170.

[108] Ibid., p. 177. Mary Hallowell, a liberal Rochester Quaker, always interested in Susan B. Anthony and her work.



THE ZEALOT

With a spirit of confidence inspired by her victory in New York State, Susan looked forward to the tenth national woman's rights convention in New York City in May 1860. At this convention she reported progress everywhere. Four thousand dollars from the Jackson and Hovey funds had been spent in the successful New York campaign, and similar work was scheduled for Ohio. In Kansas, women had won from the constitutional convention equal rights and privileges in state-controlled schools and in the management of the public schools, including the right to vote for members of school boards; mothers had been granted equal rights with fathers in the control and custody of their children, and married women had been given property rights. In Indiana, Maine, Missouri, and Ohio, married women could now control their own earnings.

"Each year we hail with pleasure," she continued, "new accessions to our faith. Brave men and true from the higher walks of literature and art, from the bar, the bench, the pulpit, and legislative halls are now ready to help woman wherever she claims to stand." She was thinking of the aid given her by Andrew J. Colvin and Anson Bingham of the New York legislature, of the young journalist, George William Curtis, just recently speaking for women, of Samuel Longfellow at his first woman's rights convention, and of the popular Henry Ward Beecher who, just a few months before, had delivered his great woman's rights speech, thereby identifying himself irrevocably with the cause. She announced with great satisfaction the news, which the papers had carried a few days before, that Matthew Vassar of Poughkeepsie had set aside $400,000 to found a college for women equal in all respects to Harvard and Yale.[109]

Progress and good feeling were in the air, and the speakers were not heckled as in past years by the rowdies who had made it a practice to follow abolitionists into woman's rights meetings to bait them. Into this atmosphere of good will and rejoicing, Susan and Elizabeth Stanton now injected a more serious note, bringing before the convention the controversial question of marriage and divorce which heretofore had been handled with kid gloves at all woman's rights meetings, but which they sincerely believed demanded solution.

* * * * *

Divorce had been much in the news because several leading families in America and in England were involved in lawsuits complicated by stringent divorce laws. Invariably the wife bore the burden of censure and hardship, for no matter how unprincipled her husband might be, he was entitled to her children and her earnings under the property laws of most states.

In New York efforts were now being made to gain support for a liberal divorce bill, patterned after the Indiana law, and a variety of proposals were before the legislature, making drunkenness, insanity, desertion, and cruel and abusive treatment grounds for divorce. Horace Greeley in his Tribune had been vigorously opposing a more liberal law for New York, while Robert Dale Owen of Indiana wrote in its defense. Everywhere people were reading the Greeley-Owen debates in the Tribune. Through his widely circulated paper, Horace Greeley had in a sense become an oracle for the people who felt he was safe and good; while Robert Dale Owen, because of his youthful association with the New Harmony community and Frances Wright, was branded with radicalism which even his valuable service in the Indiana legislature and his two terms in Congress could not blot out.