There had also been heartening signs in her own country, which she hoped were the preparation for more successful militancy to come. She had exulted in The Revolution in 1868 over the attempt of women to vote in Vineland, New Jersey. Encouraged by the enfranchisement of women in Wyoming in 1869, Mary Olney Brown and Charlotte Olney French had cast their votes in Washington Territory. A young widow, Marilla Ricker, had registered and voted in New Hampshire in 1870, claiming this right as a property holder, but her vote was refused. In 1871, Nannette B. Gardner and Catherine Stebbins in Detroit, Catherine V. White in Illinois, Ellen R. Van Valkenburg in Santa Cruz, California, and Carrie S. Burnham in Philadelphia registered and attempted to vote. Only Mrs. Gardner's vote was accepted. That same year, Sarah Andrews Spencer, Sarah E. Webster, and seventy other women marched to the polls to register and vote in the District of Columbia. Their ballots refused, they brought suit against the Board of Election Inspectors, carrying the case unsuccessfully to the Supreme Court of the United States.[289] Another test case based on the Fourteenth Amendment had also been carried to the Supreme Court by Myra Bradwell, one of the first women lawyers, who had been denied admission to the Illinois bar because she was a woman.

With the spotlight turned on the Fourteenth Amendment by these women, lawyers here and there throughout the country were discussing the legal points involved, many admitting that women had a good case. Even the press was friendly.

Susan had looked forward to claiming her rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments and was ready to act. She had spent the thirty days required of voters in Rochester with her family and as she glanced through the morning paper of November 1, 1872, she read these challenging words, "Now Register!... If you were not permitted to vote you would fight for the right, undergo all privations for it, face death for it...."[290]

This was all the reminder she needed. She would fight for this right. She put on her bonnet and coat, telling her three sisters what she intended to do, asked them to join her, and with them walked briskly to the barber shop where the voters of her ward were registering. Boldly entering this stronghold of men, she asked to be registered. The inspector in charge, Beverly W. Jones, tried to convince her that this was impossible under the laws of New York. She told him she claimed her right to vote not under the New York constitution but under the Fourteenth Amendment, and she read him its pertinent lines. Other election inspectors now joined in the argument, but she persisted until two of them, Beverly W. Jones and Edwin F. Marsh, both Republicans, finally consented to register the four women.

This mission accomplished, Susan rounded up twelve more women willing to register. The evening papers spread the sensational news, and by the end of the registration period, fifty Rochester women had joined the ranks of the militants.

On election day, November 5, 1872, Susan gleefully wrote Elizabeth Stanton, "Well, I have gone and done it!!—positively voted the Republican ticket—Strait—this A.M. at 7 o'clock—& swore my vote in at that.... All my three sisters voted—Rhoda deGarmo too—Amy Post was rejected & she will immediately bring action against the registrars.... Not a jeer not a word—not a look—disrespectful has met a single woman.... I hope the mornings telegrams will tell of many women all over the country trying to vote.... I hope you voted too."[291]

* * * * *

Election day did not bring the general uprising of women for which Susan had hoped. In Michigan, Missouri, Ohio, and Connecticut, as in Rochester, a few women tried to vote. In New York City, Lillie Devereux Blake and in Fayetteville, New York, Matilda Joslyn Gage had courageously gone to the polls only to be turned away. Elizabeth Stanton did not vote on November 5, 1872, and her lack of enthusiasm about a test case in the courts was very disappointing to Susan.

However, the fact that Susan B. Anthony had voted won immediate response from the press in all parts of the country. Newspapers in general were friendly, the New York Times boldly declaring, "The act of Susan B. Anthony should have a place in history," and the Chicago Tribune venturing to suggest that she ought to hold public office. The cartoonists, however, reveling in a new and tempting subject, caricatured her unmercifully, the New York Graphic setting the tone. Some Democratic papers condemned her, following the line of the Rochester Union and Advertiser which flaunted the headline, "Female Lawlessness," and declared that Miss Anthony's lawlessness had proved women unfit for the ballot.

Before she voted, Susan had taken the precaution of consulting Judge Henry R. Selden, a former judge of the Court of Appeals. After listening with interest to her story and examining the arguments of Benjamin Butler, Francis Minor, and Albert G. Riddle in support of the claim that women had a right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, he was convinced that women had a good case and consented to advise her and defend her if necessary. Judge Selden, now retired from the bench because of ill health, was practicing law in Rochester where he was highly respected. A Republican, he had served as lieutenant governor, member of the Assembly, and state senator. Susan had known him as one of the city's active abolitionists, a friend of Frederick Douglass who had warned him to flee the country after the raid on Harper's Ferry and the capture of John Brown. Such a man she felt she could trust.

All was quiet for about two weeks after the election and it looked as if the episode might be forgotten in the jubilation over Grant's election. Then, on November 18, the United States deputy marshal rang the doorbell at 7 Madison Street and asked for Miss Susan B. Anthony. When she greeted him, he announced with embarrassment that he had come to arrest her.

"Is this your usual manner of serving a warrant?" she asked in surprise.[292]

He then handed her papers, charging that she had voted in violation of Section 19 of an Act of Congress, which stipulated that anyone voting knowingly without having the lawful right to vote was guilty of a crime, and on conviction would be punished by a fine not exceeding $500, or by imprisonment not exceeding three years.

This was a serious development. It had never occurred to Susan that this law, passed in 1870 to halt the voting of southern rebels, could actually be applicable to her. In fact, she had expected to bring suit against election inspectors for refusing to accept the ballots of women. Now charged with crime and arrested, she suddenly began to sense the import of what was happening to her.

When the marshal suggested that she report alone to the United States Commissioner, she emphatically refused to go of her own free will and they left the house together, she extending her wrists for the handcuffs and he ignoring her gesture. As they got on the streetcar and the conductor asked for her fare, she further embarrassed the marshal by loudly announcing, "I'm traveling at the expense of the government. This gentleman is escorting me to jail. Ask him for my fare." When they arrived at the commissioner's office, he was not there, but a hearing was set for November 29.

On that day, in the office where a few years before fugitive slaves had been returned to their masters, Susan was questioned and cross-examined, and she felt akin to those slaves. Proudly she admitted that she had voted, that she had conferred with Judge Selden, that with or without his advice she would have attempted to vote to test women's right to the franchise.[293]

"Did you have any doubt yourself of your right to vote?" asked the commissioner.

"Not a particle," she replied.

On December 23, 1872, in Rochester's common council chamber, before a large curious audience, Susan, the other women voters, and the election inspectors were arraigned. People expecting to see bold notoriety-seeking women were surprised by their seriousness and dignity. "The majority of these law-breakers," reported the press, "were elderly, matronly-looking women with thoughtful faces, just the sort one would like to see in charge of one's sick-room, considerate, patient, kindly."[294]

The United States Commissioner fixed their bail at $500 each. All furnished bail but Susan, who through her counsel, Henry R. Selden, applied for a writ of habeas corpus, demanding immediate release and challenging the lawfulness of her arrest. When a writ of habeas corpus was denied and her bail increased to $1,000 by United States District Judge Nathan K. Hall, sitting in Albany, Susan was more than ever determined to resist the interference of the courts in her constitutional right as a citizen to vote. She refused to give bail, emphatically stating that she preferred prison.

Seeing no heroism but only disgrace in a jail term for his client and unwilling to let her bring this ignominy upon herself. Henry Selden chivalrously assured her that this was a time when she must be guided by her lawyer's advice, and he paid her bail. Ignorant of the technicalities of the law, she did not realize the far-reaching implications of this well-intentioned act until they left the courtroom and in the hallway met tall vigorous John Van Voorhis of Rochester who was working on the case with Judge Selden. With the impatience of a younger man, eager to fight to the finish, he exclaimed, "You have lost your chance to get your case before the Supreme Court by writ of habeas corpus!"[295]

Aghast, Susan rushed back to the courtroom, hoping to cancel the bond, but it was too late. Bitterly disappointed, she remonstrated with Henry Selden, but he quietly replied, "I could not see a lady I respected in jail." She never forgave him for this, in spite of her continued appreciation of his keen legal mind, his unfailing kindness, and his willingness to battle for women.

Within a few days she appeared before the Federal Grand Jury in Albany and was indicted on the charge that she "did knowingly, wrongfully and unlawfully vote for a Representative in the Congress of the United States...."[296] Her trial was set for the term of the United States District Court, beginning May 13, 1873, in Rochester, New York.



During these difficult days in Albany, Susan found comfort and courage, as in the past, in the friendliness of Lydia Mott's home. Here she planned the steps by which to win public approval and financial aid for her test case. She addressed the commission which was revising New York's constitution on woman's right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, pointing out that the law limiting suffrage to males was nullified by this new interpretation. Eager to spread the truth about her own legal contest, she distributed printed copies of Judge Selden's argument. Then traveling to New York and Washington, she personally presented copies to newspaper editors and Congressmen. To one of these men she wrote, "It is not for myself—but for all womanhood—yes and all manhood too—that I most rejoice in the appeal to the legal mind of the Nation. It is no longer whether women wish to vote, or men are willing, but it is woman's Constitutional right."[297]

* * * * *

In spite of the fact that Susan was technically in the custody of the United States Marshal, who objected to her leaving Rochester, she managed to carry out a full schedule of lectures in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, and also the usual annual Washington and New York woman suffrage conventions at which she told the story of her voting, her arrest, and her pending trial, and where she received enthusiastic support.

Because she wanted the people to understand the legal points on which she based her right to vote, Susan spoke on "The Equal Right of All Citizens to the Ballot" in every district in Monroe County. So thorough and convincing was she that the district attorney asked for a change of venue, fearing that any Monroe County jury, sitting in Rochester, would be prejudiced in her favor. When her case was transferred to the United States Circuit Court in Canandaigua, to be heard a month later, she immediately descended upon Ontario County with her speech, "Is It a Crime for a Citizen of the United States to Vote?" and Matilda Joslyn Gage joined her, speaking on "The United States on Trial, Not Susan B. Anthony."

On the lecture platform Susan wore a gray silk dress with a soft, white lace collar. Her hair, now graying, was smoothed back and twisted neatly into a tight knot. Everything about her indicated refinement and sincerity, and most of her audiences felt this.

"Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and vote in making and executing the laws," she declared as she looked into the faces of the men and women who had gathered to hear her, farmers, storekeepers, lawyers, and housewives, rich and poor, a cross section of America.

Repeating to them salient passages from the Declaration of Independence and the Preamble to the Constitution, she added, "It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens: but we the whole people, who formed this Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men."[298]

She asked, "Is the right to vote one of the privileges or immunities of citizens? I think the disfranchised ex-rebels, and the ex-state prisoners will agree with me that it is not only one of them, but the one without which all the others are nothing."[299]

Quoting for them the Fifteenth Amendment, she told them it had settled forever the question of the citizen's right to vote. The Fifteenth Amendment, she reasoned, applies to women, first because women are citizens and secondly because of their "previous condition of servitude." Defining a slave as a person robbed of the proceeds of his labor and subject to the will of another, she showed how state laws relating to married women had placed them in the position of slaves.

As she analyzed the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments and cited authorities for her conclusions, she left little doubt in the minds of those who heard her that women were persons and citizens whose privileges and immunities could not be abridged.

On this note she concluded: "We ask the juries to fail to return verdicts of 'guilty' against honest, law-abiding, tax-paying United States citizens for offering their votes at our elections ... We ask the judges to render true and unprejudiced opinions of the law, and wherever there is room for doubt to give its benefit on the side of liberty and equal rights to women, remembering that 'the true rule of interpretation under our national constitution, especially since its amendments, is that anything for human rights is constitutional, everything against human rights unconstitutional.' And it is on this line that we propose to fight our battle for the ballot—all peaceably, but nevertheless persistently through to complete triumph, when all United States citizens shall be recognized as equals before the law."

* * * * *

Speaking twenty-one nights in succession was arduous. "So few see or feel any special importance in the impending trial," she jotted down in her diary. In towns, such as Geneva, where she had old friends, like Elizabeth Smith Miller, she was assured of a friendly welcome and a good audience.[300]



As the collections, taken up after her lectures, were too small to pay her expenses, her financial problems weighed heavily. The notes she had signed for The Revolution were in the main still unpaid, and one of her creditors was growing impatient. She had recently paid her counsel, Judge Selden, $200 and John Van Voorhis, $75, leaving only $3.45 in her defense fund, but as usual a few of her loyal friends came to her aid, and both Judge Selden and John Van Voorhis, deeply interested in her courageous fight, gave most of their time without charge.[301]

If this campaign was a problem financially, it was a success in the matter of nation-wide publicity. The New York Herald exulted in hostile gibes at women suffrage and published fictitious interviews, ridiculing Susan as a homely aggressive old maid, but the New York Evening Post prophesied that the court decision would likely be in her favor. The Rochester Express championed her warmly: "All Rochester will assert—at least all of it worth heeding—that Miss Anthony holds here the position of a refined and estimable woman, thoroughly respected and beloved by the large circle of staunch friends who swear by her common sense and loyalty, if not by her peculiar views." In fact the consensus of opinion in Rochester was much like that of the woman who remarked, "No, I am not converted to what these women advocate. I am too cowardly for that; but I am converted to Susan B. Anthony."[302]

This, however, was far from the attitude of Lucy Stone's Woman's Journal, which had ignored Susan's voting in November 1872 because it was out of sympathy with this militant move and with her interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Later, as her case progressed in the courts, the Journal did give it brief notice as a news item, but in 1873 when it listed as a mark of honor the women who had worked wisely for the cause, Susan B. Anthony's name was not among them, and this did not pass unnoticed by Susan; nor did the fact that she was snubbed by the Congress of Women, meeting in New York and sponsored by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward Howe, and Maria Mitchell. This drawing away of women hurt her far more than newspaper gibes. In fact she was sadly disappointed in women's response to the herculean effort she was making for them.

Even more disconcerting was the adverse decision of the Supreme Court on the Myra Bradwell case, which at once shattered the confidence of most of her legal advisors. The court held that Illinois had violated no provision of the federal Constitution in refusing to allow Myra Bradwell to practice law because she was a woman and declared that the right to practice law in state courts is not a privilege or an immunity of a citizen of the United States, nor is the power of a state to prescribe qualifications for admission to the bar affected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, filing a dissenting opinion, lived up to Susan's faith in him, but Benjamin Butler wrote her, "I do not believe anybody in Congress doubts that the Constitution authorizes the right of women to vote, precisely as it authorizes trial by jury and many other like rights guaranteed to citizens. But the difficulty is, the courts long since decided that the constitutional provisions do not act upon the citizens, except as guarantees, ex proprio vigore, and in order to give force to them there must be legislation.... Therefore, the point is for the friends of woman suffrage to get congressional legislation."[303]

Susan, however, never wavered in her conviction that she as a citizen had a constitutional right to vote and that it was her duty to test this right in the courts.

FOOTNOTES:

[288] Ray Strachey, Struggle (New York, 1930), pp. 113-116.

[289] The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the decision of a lower court that without specific legislation by Congress, the 14th Amendment could not overrule the law of the District of Columbia which limited suffrage to male citizens over 21. History of Woman Suffrage, II, pp. 587-601.

[290] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 423.

[291] Nov. 5, 1872, Ida Husted Harper Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library. Miss Anthony had assured the election inspectors that she would pay the cost of any suit which might be brought against them for accepting women's votes.

[292] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 426. The Anthony home was then numbered 7 Madison Street.

[293] An Account of the Proceedings of the Trial of Susan B. Anthony on the Charge of Illegal Voting (Rochester, New York, 1874), p. 16.

[294] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 428.

[295] Ibid., p. 433.

[296] Trial, pp. 2-3.

[297] N.d., Susan B. Anthony Papers, New York Public Library.

[298] Trial, pp. 151, 153. Judge Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, Sec. 456: "The importance of examining the preamble for the purpose of expounding the language of a statute has long been felt and universally conceded in all juridical discussion." History of Woman Suffrage, II, p. 477.

[299] Harper, Anthony, II, pp. 978, 986-987.

[300] Ms., Diary, May 10, June 7, 1873.

[301] Suffrage clubs in New York, Buffalo, Chicago, and Milwaukee sent $50 and $100 contributions. Susan's cousin, Anson Lapham, cancelled notes for $4000 which she had signed while struggling to finance The Revolution. The women of Rochester rallied behind her, forming a Taxpayers' Association to protest taxation without representation.

[302] Harper, Anthony, II, pp. 994-995.

[303] Ibid., I, p. 429.



"IS IT A CRIME FOR A CITIZEN ... TO VOTE?"

Charged with the crime of voting illegally, Susan was brought to trial on June 17, 1873, in the peaceful village of Canandaigua, New York. Simply dressed and wearing her new bonnet faced with blue silk and draped with a dotted veil,[304] she stoically climbed the court-house steps, feeling as if on her shoulders she carried the political destiny of American women. With her were her counsel, Henry R. Selden and John Van Voorhis, her sister, Hannah Mosher, most of the women who had voted with her in Rochester, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, whose interest in this case was akin to her own.

In the courtroom on the second floor, seated behind the bar, Susan watched the curious crowd gather and fill every available seat. She wondered, as she calmly surveyed the all-male jury, whether they could possibly understand the humiliation of a woman who had been arrested for exercising the rights of a citizen. The judge, Ward Hunt, did not promise well, for he had only recently been appointed to the bench through the influence of his friend and townsman, Roscoe Conkling, the undisputed leader of the Republican party in New York and a bitter opponent of woman suffrage. She tried to fathom this small, white-haired, colorless judge upon whose fairness so much depended. Prim and stolid, he sat before her, faultlessly dressed in a suit of black broadcloth, his neck wound with an immaculate white neckcloth. He ruled against her at once, refusing to let her testify on her own behalf.

She was completely satisfied, however, as she listened to Henry Selden's presentation of her case. Tall and commanding, he stood before the court with nobility and kindness in his face and eyes, bringing to mind a handsome cultured Lincoln. So logical, so just was his reasoning, so impressive were his citations of the law that it seemed to her they must convince the jury and even the expressionless judge on the bench.

Pointing out that the only alleged ground of the illegality of Miss Anthony's vote was that she was a woman, Henry Selden declared, "If the same act had been done by her brother under the same circumstances, the act would have been not only innocent and laudable, but honorable; but having been done by a woman it is said to be a crime.... I believe this is the first instance in which a woman has been arraigned in a criminal court, merely on account of her sex."[305] He claimed that Miss Anthony had voted in good faith, believing that the United States Constitution gave her the right to vote, and he clearly outlined her interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, declaring that she stood arraigned as a criminal simply because she took the only step possible to bring this great constitutional question before the courts.

After he had finished, Susan followed closely for two long hours the arguments of the district attorney, Richard Crowley, who contended that whatever her intentions may have been, good or bad, she had by her voting violated a law of the United States and was therefore guilty of crime.

At the close of the district attorney's argument, Judge Hunt without leaving the bench drew out a written document, and to her surprise, read from it as he addressed the jury. "The right of voting or the privilege of voting," he declared, "is a right or privilege arising under the constitution of the State, not of the United States.[306]

"The Legislature of the State of New York," he continued, "has seen fit to say, that the franchise of voting shall be limited to the male sex.... If the Fifteenth Amendment had contained the word 'sex,' the argument of the defendant would have been potent.... The Fourteenth Amendment gives no right to a woman to vote, and the voting of Miss Anthony was in violation of the law....

"There was no ignorance of any fact," he added, "but all the facts being known, she undertook to settle a principle in her own person.... To constitute a crime, it is true, that there must be a criminal intent, but it is equally true that knowledge of the facts of the case is always held to supply this intent...."

Then hesitating a moment, he concluded, "Upon this evidence I suppose there is no question for the jury and that the jury should be directed to find a verdict of guilty."

Immediately Henry Selden was on his feet, addressing the judge, requesting that the jury determine whether or not the defendant was guilty of crime.

Judge Hunt, however, refused and firmly announced, "The question, gentlemen of the jury, in the form it finally takes, is wholly a question or questions of law, and I have decided as a question of law, in the first place, that under the Fourteenth Amendment which Miss Anthony claims protects her, she was not protected in a right to vote.

"And I have decided also," he continued, "that her belief and the advice which she took does not protect her in the act which she committed. If I am right in this, the result must be a verdict on your part of guilty, and therefore I direct that you find a verdict of guilty."

Again Henry Selden was on his feet. "That is a direction," he declared, "that no court has power to make in a criminal case."

The courtroom was tense. Susan, watching the jury and wondering if they would meekly submit to his will, heard the judge tersely order, "Take the verdict, Mr. Clerk."

"Gentlemen of the jury," intoned the clerk, "hearken to your verdict as the Court has recorded it. You say you find the defendant guilty of the offense whereof she stands indicted, and so say you all."

Claiming exception to the direction of the Court that the jury find a verdict of guilty in this a criminal case. Henry Selden asked that the jury be polled.

To this, Judge Hunt abruptly replied, "No. Gentlemen of the jury, you are discharged."

* * * * *

That night Susan recorded her estimate of Judge Hunt's verdict in her diary in one terse sentence, "The greatest outrage History ever witnessed."[307]

The New York Sun, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, and the Canandaigua Times were indignant over Judge Hunt's failure to poll the jury. "Judge Hunt," commented the Sun, "allowed the jury to be impanelled and sworn, and to hear the evidence; but when the case had reached the point of rendering the verdict, he directed a verdict of guilty. He thus denied a trial by jury to an accused party in his court; and either through malice, which we do not believe, or through ignorance, which in such a flagrant degree is equally culpable in a judge, he violated one of the most important provisions of the Constitution of the United States.... The privilege of polling the jury has been held to be an absolute right in this State and it is a substantial right ..."[308]

Claiming that the defendant had been denied her right of trial by jury. Henry Selden the next day moved for a new trial. Judge Hunt denied the motion, and, ordering the defendant to stand up, asked her, "Has the prisoner anything to say why sentence shall not be pronounced."[309]

"Yes, your honor," Susan replied, "I have many things to say; for in your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled underfoot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights, are all alike ignored...."

Impatiently Judge Hunt protested that he could not listen to a rehearsal of arguments which her counsel had already presented.

"May it please your honor," she persisted, "I am not arguing the question but simply stating the reasons why sentence cannot in justice be pronounced against me. Your denial of my citizen's right to vote is the denial of my right of consent as one of the governed, the denial of my right of representation as one of the taxed, the denial of my right to a trial by a jury of my peers ..."

"The Court cannot allow the prisoner to go on," interrupted Judge Hunt; but Susan, ignoring his command to sit down, protested that her prosecutors and the members of the jury were all her political sovereigns.

Again Judge Hunt tried to stop her, but she was not to be put off. She was pleading for all women and her voice rang out to every corner of the courtroom.

"The Court must insist," declared Judge Hunt, "the prisoner has been tried according to established forms of law."

"Yes, your honor," admitted Susan, "but by forms of law all made by men, interpreted by men, administered by men, in favor of men, and against women...."

"The Court orders the prisoner to sit down," shouted Judge Hunt. "It will not allow another word."

Unheeding, Susan continued, "When I was brought before your honor for trial, I hoped for a broad and liberal interpretation of the Constitution and its recent amendments, that should declare all United States citizens under its protecting aegis—that should declare equality of rights the national guarantee to all persons born or naturalized in the United States. But failing to get this justice—failing, even, to get a trial by a jury not of my peers—I ask not leniency at your hands—but rather the full rigors of the law."

Once more Judge Hunt tried to stop her, and acquiescing at last, she sat down, only to be ordered by him to stand up as he pronounced her sentence, a fine of $100 and the costs of prosecution.

"May it please your honor," she protested, "I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper—The Revolution ... the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government.... I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim that 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'"

Pouring cold water on this blaze of oratory. Judge Hunt tersely remarked that the Court would not require her imprisonment pending the payment of her fine.

This shrewd move, obviously planned in advance, made it impossible to carry the case to the United States Supreme Court by writ of habeas corpus.

* * * * *

That same afternoon, Susan was on hand for the trial of the three election inspectors. This time Judge Hunt submitted the case to the jury but with explicit instructions that the defendants were guilty. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and the inspectors, denied a new trial, were each fined $25 and costs. Two of them, Edwin F. Marsh and William B. Hall, refused to pay their fines and were sent to jail. Susan appealed on their behalf to Senator Sargent in Washington, who eventually secured a pardon for them from President Grant. He also presented a petition to the Senate, in January 1874, to remit Susan's fine, as did William Loughridge of Iowa to the House, but the judiciary committees reported adversely.

Because neither of these cases had been decided on the basis of national citizenship and the right of a citizen to vote, Susan was heartsick. To have them relegated to the category of election fraud was as if her high purpose had been trailed in the dust. Wishing to spread reliable information about her trial and the legal questions involved, she had 3,000 copies of the court proceedings printed for distribution.[310]

It was hard for her to concede that justice for women could not be secured in the courts, but there seemed to be no way in the face of the cold letter of the law to take her case to the Supreme Court of the United States. This would have been possible on writ of habeas corpus had Judge Hunt sentenced her to prison for failure to pay her fine, but this he carefully avoided.

Even that intrepid fighter, John Van Voorhis, could find no loophole, and another of her loyal friends in the legal profession, Albert G. Riddle, wrote her, "There is not, I think, the slightest hope from the courts and just as little from the politicians. They will never take up this cause, never! Individuals will, parties never—till the thing is done.... The trouble is that man can govern alone, and that, though woman has the right, man wants to do it, and if she wait for him to ask her, she will never vote.... Either man must be made to see and feel ... the need of woman's help in the great field of human government, and so demand it; or woman must arise and come forward as she never has, and take her place."[311]

The case of Virginia Minor of St. Louis still held out a glimmer of hope. She had brought suit against an election inspector for his refusal to register her as a voter in the presidential election of 1872, and the case of Minor vs. Happersett reached the United States Supreme Court in 1874. An adverse decision, on March 29, 1875, delivered by Chief Justice Waite, a friend of woman suffrage, was a bitter blow to Susan and to all those who had pinned their faith on a more liberal interpretation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

Carefully studying the decision, Susan tried to fathom its reasoning, so foreign to her own ideas of justice. "Sex," she read, "has never been made of one of the elements of citizenship in the United States.... The XIV Amendment did not affect the citizenship of women any more than it did of men.... The direct question is, therefore, presented whether all citizens are necessarily voters."[312]

She read on: "The Constitution does not define the privileges and immunities of citizens.... In this case we need not determine what they are, but only whether suffrage is necessarily one of them. It certainly is nowhere made so in express terms....

"When the Constitution of the United States was adopted, all the several States, with the exception of Rhode Island, had Constitutions of their own.... We find in no State were all citizens permitted to vote.... Women were excluded from suffrage in nearly all the States by the express provision of their constitutions and laws ... No new State has ever been admitted to the Union which has conferred the right of suffrage upon women, and this has never been considered valid objection to her admission. On the contrary ... the right of suffrage was withdrawn from women as early as 1807 in the State of New Jersey, without any attempt to obtain the interference of the United States to prevent it. Since then the governments of the insurgent States have been reorganized under a requirement that, before their Representatives could be admitted to seats in Congress, they must have adopted new Constitutions, republican in form. In no one of these Constitutions was suffrage conferred upon women, and yet the States have all been restored to their original position as States in the Union ... Certainly if the courts can consider any question settled, this is one....

"Our province," concluded Chief Justice Waite, "is to decide what the law is, not to declare what it should be.... Being unanimously of the opinion that the Constitution of the United States does not confer the right of suffrage upon any one, and that the Constitutions and laws of the several States which commit that important trust to men alone are not necessarily void, we affirm the judgment of the Court below."

"A states-rights document," Susan called this decision and she scored it as inconsistent with the policies of a Republican administration which, through the Civil War amendments, had established federal control over the rights and privileges of citizens. If the Constitution does not confer the right of suffrage, she asked herself, why does it define the qualifications of those voting for members of the House of Representatives? How about the enfranchisement of Negroes by federal amendment or the enfranchisement of foreigners? Why did the federal government interfere in her case, instead of leaving it in the hands of the state of New York?

Like most abolitionists, Susan had always regarded the principles of the Declaration of Independence as underlying the Constitution and as the essence of constitutional law. In her opinion, the interpretation of the Constitution in the Virginia Minor case was not only out of harmony with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence, but also contrary to the wise counsel of the great English jurist, Sir Edward Coke, who said, "Whenever the question of liberty runs doubtful, the decision must be given in favor of liberty."[313]

In the face of such a ruling by the highest court in the land, she was helpless. Women were shut out of the Constitution and denied its protection. From here on there was only one course to follow, to press again for a Sixteenth Amendment to enfranchise women.

FOOTNOTES:

[304] Ms., Diary, April 26, 1873.

[305] Trial, p. 17.

[306] Ibid., pp. 62-68.

[307] Ms., Diary, June 18, 1873.

[308] Susan B. Anthony Scrapbook, 1873, Library of Congress.

[309] Trial, pp. 81-85.

[310] This booklet also included the speeches of Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, delivered prior to the trial, and a short appraisal of the trial, Judge Hunt and the Right of Trial by Jury, by John Hooker, the husband of Isabella Beecher Hooker. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle called the booklet "the most important contribution yet made to the discussion of woman suffrage from a legal standpoint." The Woman's Suffrage Journal, IV, Aug. 1, 1873, p. 121, published in England by Lydia Becker, said: "The American law which makes it a criminal offense for a person to vote who is not legally qualified appears harsh to our ideas."

[311] Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 455-456.

[312] History of Woman Suffrage, II, pp. 737-739, 741-742.

[313] Trial, p. 191.



SOCIAL PURITY

Militancy among the suffragists continued to flare up here and there in resistance to taxation without representation. Abby Kelley Foster's home in Worcester was sold for taxes for a mere fraction of its worth, while in Glastonbury, Connecticut, Abby and Julia Smith's cows and personal property were seized for taxes. Both Dr. Harriot K. Hunt in Boston and Mary Anthony in Rochester continued their tax protests. Much as Susan admired this spirited rebellion, she recognized that these militant gestures were but flames in the wind unless they had behind them a well-organized, sustained campaign for a Sixteenth Amendment, and this she could not undertake until The Revolution debt was paid. Nor was there anyone to pinch-hit for her since Ernestine Rose had returned to England and Mrs. Stanton gave all her time to Lyceum lectures.

At the moment the prospect looked bleak for woman suffrage. In Congress, there was not the slightest hope of the introduction of or action on a Sixteenth Amendment. In the states, interest was kept alive by woman suffrage bills before the legislatures, and year by year, with more people recognizing the inherent justice of the demand, the margin of defeat grew smaller. Whenever these state contests were critical, Susan managed to be on hand, giving up profitable lecture engagements to speak without fees; in Michigan in 1874 and in Iowa in 1875, she made new friends for the cause but was unable to stem the tide of prejudice against granting women the vote. After the defeat in Michigan, she wrote in her diary, "Every whisky maker, vendor, drinker, gambler, every ignorant besotted man is against us, and then the other extreme, every narrow, selfish religious bigot."[314]

A new militant movement swept the country in 1874, starting in small Ohio towns among women who were so aroused over the evil influence of liquor on husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers, that they gathered in front of saloons to sing and pray, hoping to persuade drunkards to reform and saloon keepers to close their doors. Out of this uprising, the Women's Christian Temperance Union developed, and within the next few years was organized into a powerful reform movement by a young schoolteacher from Illinois, Frances E. Willard.

A lifelong advocate of temperance, Susan had long before reached the conclusion that this reform could not be achieved by a strictly temperance or religious movement, but only through the votes of women. Nevertheless, she lent a helping hand to the Rochester women who organized a branch of the W.C.T.U., but she told them just how she felt: "The best thing this organization will do for you will be to show you how utterly powerless you are to put down the liquor traffic. You can never talk down or sing down or pray down an institution which is voted into existence. You will never be able to lessen this evil until you have votes."[315]

As she traveled through the West for the Lyceum Bureau, she did what she could to stimulate interest in a federal woman suffrage amendment, speaking out of a full heart and with sure knowledge on "Bread and the Ballot" and "The Power of the Ballot," earning on the average $100 a week, which she applied to the Revolution debt.

Lyceum lecturers were now at the height of their popularity,—particularly in the West, where in the little towns scattered across the prairies there were few libraries and theaters, and the distribution of books, magazines, and newspapers in no way met the people's thirst for information or entertainment. Men, women, and children rode miles on horseback or drove over rough roads in wagons to see and hear a prominent lecturer. Susan was always a drawing card, for a woman on the lecture platform still was a novelty and almost everyone was curious about Susan B. Anthony. Many, to their surprise, discovered she was not the caricature they had been led to believe. She looked very ladylike and proper as she stood before them in her dark silk platform dress, a little too stern and serious perhaps, but frequently her face lighted up with a friendly smile. She spoke to them as equals and they could follow her reasoning. Her simple conversational manner was refreshing after the sonorous pretentious oratory of other lecturers.

Continuous travel in all kinds of weather was difficult. Branch lines were slow and connections poor. Often trains were delayed by blizzards, and then to keep her engagements she was obliged to travel by sleigh over the snowy prairies. There were long waits in dingy dirty railroad stations late at night. Even there she was always busy, reading her newspapers in the dim light or dashing off letters home on any scrap of paper she had at hand, thinking gratefully of her sister Mary who in addition to her work as superintendent of the neighborhood public school, supervised the household at 7 Madison Street. Hotel rooms were cold and drab, the food was uninviting, and only occasionally did she find to her delight "a Christian cup of coffee."[316] She often felt that the Lyceum Bureau drove her unnecessarily hard, routed her inefficiently, and profited too generously from her labors. Now and then she dispensed with their services, sent out her own circulars soliciting engagements, and arranged her own tours, proving to her satisfaction that a woman could be as businesslike as a man and sometimes more so.[317]

Weighed down by worry over the illness of her sisters, Guelma and Hannah, she felt a lack of fire and enthusiasm in her work. Anxiously she waited for letters from home, and when none reached her she was in despair. At such times, hotel rooms seemed doubly lonely and she reproached herself for being away from home and for putting too heavy a burden on her sister Mary. Yet there was nothing else to be done until the Revolution debt was paid, for some of her creditors were becoming impatient.

* * * * *

As often as possible Susan returned to Rochester to be with her family, and was able to nurse Guelma through the last weeks of her illness. Heartbroken when she died, in November 1873, she resolved to take better care of Hannah, sending her out to Colorado and Kansas for her health. She then tried to spend the summer months at home so that Mary could visit Hannah in Colorado and Daniel and Merritt in Kansas.

These months at home with her mother whom she dearly loved were a great comfort to them both. They enjoyed reading aloud, finding George Eliot's Middlemarch and Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter of particular interest as Susan was searching for the answers to many questions which had been brought into sharp focus by the Beecher-Tilton case, now filling the newspapers. Like everyone else, she read the latest developments in this tragic involvement of three of her good friends. She was especially concerned about Elizabeth and Theodore Tilton, in whose home she had so often visited and toward whom she felt a warm motherly affection. Her sympathy went out to Elizabeth Tilton, whose help and loyalty during the difficult days of The Revolution she never forgot. Although she had often differed with Theodore, whose quick changes of policy and temperament she could not understand, he had won her gratitude many times by befriending the cause. The same was true of Henry Ward Beecher, who had found time in his busy life to say a good word for woman's rights.

Susan was close to the facts, for in desperation a few years before, Elizabeth Tilton had confided in her. Unfortunately both Elizabeth and Theodore had made confidants of others less wise than Susan. Mrs. Stanton had passed the story along to Victoria Woodhull, who late in 1872 had revived her Weekly for a crusade on what she called "the social question" and had published her expose, "The Beecher-Tilton Scandal Case." As a result the lives of all involved were being ruined by merciless publicity.

The Beecher-Tilton story as it unfolded revealed three admirable people caught in a tangled web of human relationships. Henry Ward Beecher, for years a close friend and benefactor of his young parishioners, Theodore and Elizabeth Tilton, had been accused by Theodore of immoral relations with Elizabeth. Accusations and denials continued while intrigue and negotiations deepened the confusion. The whole matter burst into flame in 1874 in the trial of Henry Ward Beecher before a committee of Plymouth Church, which exonerated him. Reading Beecher's statement in her newspaper, Susan impulsively wrote Isabella Beecher Hooker, "Wouldn't you think if God ever did strike anyone dead for telling a lie, he would have struck then?"[318]

When early in 1875 the Beecher-Tilton case reached the courts in a suit brought by Theodore Tilton against Henry Ward Beecher for the alienation of his wife's affections, it became headline news throughout the country. The press, greedy for sensation, published anything and everything even remotely connected with the case. Reporters hounded Susan, who by this time was again lecturing in the West, and she seldom entered a train, bus, or hotel without finding them at her heels, as if by their very persistence they meant to force her to express her opinion regarding the guilt or innocence of Henry Ward Beecher. They never caught her off guard and she steadfastly refused to reveal to them, or to the lawyers of either side, who astutely approached her, the story which Elizabeth Tilton had told her in confidence. Yet in spite of her continued silence, she was twice quoted by the press, once through the impulsiveness of Mrs. Stanton, who expressed herself frankly at every opportunity, and again when the New York Graphic without Susan's consent published her letter to Mrs. Hooker.

The sympathy of the public was generally with Henry Ward Beecher, whose popularity and prestige were tremendous. A dynamic preacher, whose sermons drew thousands to his church and whose written word carried religion and comfort to every part of the country, he could not suddenly be ruined by the circulation of a scandal or even by a sensational trial. Behind him were all those who were convinced that the future of the Church and Morality demanded his vindication. On his side, also, as Susan well knew, was the powerful, behind-the-scenes influence of the financial interests who profited from Plymouth Church real estate, from the earnings of Beecher's paper, Christian Union, and from his book the Life of Christ, now in preparation and for which he had already been paid $20,000.

Susan and Mrs. Stanton paid the penalty of being on the unpopular side. When Elizabeth Tilton was not allowed to testify in her own defense, they accused Beecher and Tilton of ruthlessly sacrificing her to save their own reputations. In fact, Susan and Mrs. Stanton knew far too much about the case for the comfort of either Beecher or Tilton, and to discredit them, a whispering campaign, and then a press campaign was initiated against them. They and their National Woman Suffrage Association were again accused of upholding free love. Their previous association with Victoria Woodhull was held against them, as were the frank discussions of marriage and divorce published in The Revolution six years before.

Actually Susan's views on marriage were idealistic. "I hate the whole doctrine of 'variety' or 'promiscuity,'" she wrote John Hooker, the husband of her friend Isabella. "I am not even a believer in second marriages after one of the parties is dead, so sacred and binding do I consider the marriage relation."[319]

Although in public Susan uttered not one word relating to the guilt or innocence of Henry Ward Beecher, she did confide her real feelings to her diary. She believed that to save himself Beecher was withholding the explanation which the situation demanded. "It is almost an impossibility," she wrote in her diary, "for a man and a woman to have a close sympathetic friendship without the tendrils of one soul becoming fastened around the other, with the result of infinite pain and anguish." Then again she wrote, "There is nothing more demoralizing than lying. The act itself is scarcely so base as the lie which denies it."[320]

Susan's silence probably brought her more notoriety than anything she could have said on this much discussed subject, and it heightened her reputation for honesty and integrity. "Miss Anthony," commented the New York Sun, "is a lady whose word will everywhere be believed by those who know anything of her character." The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle had this to say: "Whether she will make any definite revelations remains to be seen, but whatever she does say will be received by the public with that credit which attaches to the evidence of a truthful witness. Her own character, known and honored by the country, will give importance to any utterances she may make."[321]

She was not called as a witness by either side during the 112 days of trial which ended in July 1875 with the jury unable to agree on a verdict.

* * * * *

Realizing that many taboos were being broken down by the lurid nation-wide publicity on the Beecher-Tilton case and that as a result people were more willing to consider subjects which hitherto had not been discussed in polite society, Susan began to plan a lecture on "Social Purity."

She was familiar with the public protest Englishwomen under the leadership of Josephine Butler were making against the state regulation of vice. Following with interest and admiration their courageous fight for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which placed women suspected of prostitution under police power, Susan found encouragement in the support these reformers had received from such men as John Stuart Mill and Jacob Bright. Such legislation, she resolved, must not gain a foothold in her country, because it not only disregarded women's right to personal liberty but showed a dangerous callousness toward men's share of responsibility for prostitution.

She was awake to the problems prostitution presented in cities like New York and Washington, its prevalence, the police protection it received, the political corruption it fostered and the reluctance of the public to face the situation, the majority of men regarding it as a necessity, and most women closing their eyes to its existence.

During the winter of 1875, while the Beecher-Tilton case was being tried in Brooklyn, she delivered her speech on "Social Purity" at the Chicago Grand Opera House, in the Sunday dime-lecture course, facing with trepidation the immense crowd which gathered to hear her. Even the daring Mrs. Stanton had warned her that she would never be asked to speak in Chicago again, and with this the manager of the Slayton Lecture Bureau agreed. But they were wrong. The people were hungry for the truth and for a constructive policy. In the past they had heard the "social evil" described and denounced in vivid thunderous words by eloquent men and by the dramatic Anna E. Dickinson. Now an earnest woman with graying hair, one of their own kind, talked to them without mincing matters, calmly and logically, and offered them a remedy.

Calling their attention to the daily newspaper reports of divorce and breach-of-promise suits, of wife murders and "paramour" shootings, of abortions and infanticide, she told them that the prevalence of these evils showed clearly that men were incapable of coping with them successfully and needed the help of women. She cited statistics, revealing 20,000 prostitutes in the city of New York, where a foundling hospital during the first six months of its existence rescued 1,300 waifs laid in baskets on its doorstep. She courageously mentioned the prevalence of venereal disease and spoke out against England's Contagious Diseases Acts which were repeatedly suggested for New York and Washington and which she described as licensed prostitution, men's futile and disastrous attempt to deal with social corruption.

Declaring that the poverty and economic dependence of women as well as the passions of men were the causes of prostitution, she quoted more statistics which showed a great increase in the poverty of women. Work formerly done in the household, she explained, was being gradually taken over by factories, with the result that women in order to earn a living had been forced to follow it out of the home and were supporting themselves wholly or in part at a wage inadequate to meet their needs. No wonder many were tempted by food, clothes, and comfortable shelter into an immoral life.

Her solution was "to lift this vast army of poverty-stricken women who now crowd our cities, above the temptation, the necessity, to sell themselves in marriage or out, for bread and shelter." "Women," she told them, "must be educated out of their unthinking acceptance of financial dependence on man into mental and economic independence. Girls like boys must be educated to some lucrative employment. Women like men must have an equal chance to earn a living."[322]

"Whoever controls work and wages," she continued, "controls morals. Therefore we must have women employers, superintendents, committees, legislators; wherever girls go to seek the means of subsistence, there must be some woman. Nay, more; we must have women preachers, lawyers, doctors—that wherever women go to seek counsel—spiritual, legal, physical—there, too, they will be sure to find the best and noblest of their own sex to minister to them."

Then she added, "Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.... Marriage never will cease to be a wholly unequal partnership until the law recognizes the equal ownership in the joint earnings and possessions."

She asked for the vote so that women would have the power to help make the laws relating to marriage, divorce, adultery, breach of promise, rape, bigamy, infanticide, and so on. These laws, she reminded them, have not only been framed by men, but are administered by men. Judges, jurors, lawyers, all are men, and no woman's voice is heard in our courts except as accused or witness, and in many cases the married woman is denied the right to testify as to her guilt or innocence.

Never before had the audience heard the case for social purity presented in this way and they listened intently. When the applause was subsiding, Susan saw Parker Pillsbury and Bronson Alcott, fellow-lecturers on the Lyceum circuit, coming toward her, smiling approval. They were generous in their praise, Bronson Alcott declaring, "You have stated here this afternoon, in a fearless manner, truths that I have hardly dared to think, much less to utter."[323]

She repeated this lecture in St. Louis, in Wisconsin, and in Kansas, and while most city newspapers, acknowledging the need of facing the issues, praised her courage, small-town papers were frankly disturbed by a spinster's public discussion of the "social evil," one paper observing, "The best lecture a woman can give the community ... on the sad 'evil' ... is the sincerity of her profound ignorance on the subject."[324]

* * * * *

Having bravely done her bit for social purity, Susan with relief turned again to her favorite lecture, "Bread and the Ballot." Her message fell on fertile ground. These western men and women saw justice in her reasoning. Having broken with tradition by leaving the East for the frontier, they could more easily drop old ways for new. Western men also recognized the influence for good that women had brought to lonely bleak western towns—better homes, cleanliness, comfort, then schools, churches, law and order—and many of them were willing to give women the vote. All they needed was prodding to translate that willingness into law.

As she continued her lecturing, she kept her watchful eye on her family and the annual New York and Washington conventions, attending to many of the routine details herself. Finally, on May 1, 1876, she recorded in her diary, "The day of Jubilee for me has come. I have paid the last dollar of the Revolution debt."[325]

Even the press took notice, the Chicago Daily News commenting, "By working six years and devoting to the purpose all the money she could earn, she has paid the debt and interest. And now, when the creditors of that paper and others who really know her, hear the name of Susan B. Anthony, they feel inclined to raise their hats in reverence."[326]

FOOTNOTES:

[314] Ms., Diary, Nov. 4, 1874.

[315] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 457. Frances Willard took her stand for woman suffrage in the W.C.T.U. in 1876.

[316] Ms., Diary, Sept., 1877.

[317] To James Redpath, Dec. 23, 1870, Alma Lutz Collection.

[318] New York Graphic, Sept. 12, 1874. Mrs. Hooker believed her half-brother guilty and repeatedly urged him to confess, assuring him she would join him in announcing "a new social freedom." Kenneth R. Andrews, Nook Farm (Cambridge, Mass., 1950), pp. 36-39. Rumors that Mrs. Hooker was insane were deliberately circulated.

[319] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 463.

[320] Ibid. Only a few entries relating to the Beecher-Tilton case remain in the Susan B. Anthony diaries, now in the Library of Congress, and the diary for 1875 is not there.

[321] Ibid., p. 462.

[322] Ibid., II, pp. 1007-1009.

[323] Ibid., I, p. 468.

[324] Ibid., p. 470. Miss Anthony interrupted her lecturing for nine weeks to nurse her brother Daniel after he had been shot by a rival editor in Leavenworth.

[325] Ibid., p. 472.

[326] Ibid., p. 473.



A FEDERAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT

Like everyone else in the United States in 1876, Susan now turned her attention to the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, which was proclaiming to the world the progress this new country had made. Susan pointed out, however, that one hundred years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, women were still deprived of basic citizenship rights.

As an afterthought, a Woman's Pavilion had been erected on the exposition grounds and exhibited here she found only women's contribution to the arts but nothing which would in any way show the part women had played in building up the country or developing industry. She longed to explain so that all could hear how the skilled work of women had contributed to the prosperous textile and shoe industries, to the manufacture of cartridges and Waltham watches, and countless other products. Could she have had her way, she would have made the Woman's Pavilion an eloquent appeal for equal rights, but unable to do this, she established a center of rebellion for the National Woman Suffrage Association at 1431 Chestnut Street, in parlors on the first floor. Here she spent many happy hours directing the work, often sleeping on the sofa so that she could work late and save money for the cause.

Philadelphia had always been a friendly city because of Lucretia Mott. Now Lucretia came almost daily to the women's headquarters, bringing a comforting sense of support, approval, and friendship. When Mrs. Stanton, free at last from her lecture engagements, joined them in June, Susan's happiness was complete and she confided to her diary, "Glad enough to see her and feel her strength come in."[327]

Susan and Mrs. Stanton now sent the Republican and Democratic national conventions well-written memorials pointing out the appropriateness of enfranchising women in this centennial year. But no woman suffrage plank was adopted by either party. Susan put Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Gage to work on a Women's Declaration of 1876, and so "magnificent" a document did they produce that she not only had many copies printed for distribution but had one beautifully engrossed on parchment for presentation to President Grant at the Fourth of July celebration in Independence Square.

Unable to secure permission to present this declaration, she made plans of her own. For herself, she managed to get a press card as reporter for her brother's paper, the Leavenworth Times. Mrs. Stanton and Lucretia Mott refused to attend the celebration, so indignant were they over the snubs women had received from the Centennial Commission, and they held a women's meeting at the First Unitarian Church. When at the last minute four tickets were sent Susan by the Centennial Commission, she gave them to the most militant of her colleagues, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake, Sarah Andrews Spencer, and Phoebe Couzins. With Susan in the lead, they pushed through the jostling crowd to Independence Square on that bright hot Fourth of July and were seated among the elect on the platform.

By this time they had learned that Thomas W. Ferry of Michigan, Acting Vice President, would substitute for President Grant at the ceremony. Because he was a good friend of woman suffrage, Phoebe Couzins made one more effort for orderly procedure, sending him a note asking for permission to present the Women's Declaration. This failed, and rather than take part in creating a disturbance, she withdrew, leaving her four friends on the platform.

"We ... sat there waiting ..." reported Mrs. Blake. "The heat was frightful.... Amid such a throng it was difficult to hear anything ... We decided that our presentation should take place immediately after Mr. Richard Lee of Virginia, grandson of the Signer, had read the Declaration of Independence. He read it from the original document, and it was an impressive moment when that time-honored parchment was exposed to the view of the wildly cheering crowd.... Mr. Lee's voice was inaudible, but at last I caught the words, 'our sacred honors,' and cried, 'Now is the time.'

"We all four rose, Miss Anthony first, next Mrs. Gage, bearing our engrossed Declaration, and Mrs. Spencer and myself following with hundreds of printed copies in our hands. There was a stir in the crowd just at the time, and General Hawley who had been keeping a wary eye on us, had relaxed his vigilance for a moment, as he signed to the band to resume playing. He did not see us advancing until we reached the Vice President's dais. There Miss Anthony, taking the parchment from Mrs. Gage, stepped forward and presented it to Mr. Ferry, saying, 'I present to you a Declaration of Rights from the women citizens of the United States.'"[328]

Nonplussed, Mr. Ferry bowed low and received the Declaration without a word. Then the four intrepid women filed out, distributing printed copies of their declaration while General Hawley boomed out, "Order! Order!"

Leaving the square and mounting a platform erected for musicians in front of Independence Hall, they waited until a curious crowd had gathered around them. Then while Mrs. Gage held an umbrella over Susan to shield her from the hot sun, she read the Women's Declaration in a loud clear voice that carried far.

"We do rejoice in the success, thus far, of our experiment of self-government," she began. "Our faith is firm and unwavering in the broad principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776, not only as abstract truths, but as the cornerstones of a republic. Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement."[329]

Then she enumerated women's grievances and the crowd applauded as she drove home point after point.

"Woman," she continued, "has shown equal devotion with man to the cause of freedom and has stood firmly by his side in its defense. Together they have made this country what it is.... We ask our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges.... We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever."

Stepping down from the platform into the applauding crowd which eagerly reached for printed copies of the declaration, she and her four companions hurried to the First Unitarian Church where an eager audience awaited their report and hailed their courage.



The New York Tribune, commenting on Susan's militancy, prophesied that it foreshadowed "the new forms of violence and disregard of order which may accompany the participation of women in active partisan politics."[330]

* * * * *

Nor was Congress impressed by Susan's centennial publicity demanding a federal woman suffrage amendment. She had gathered petitions from twenty-six states with 10,000 signatures which were presented to the Senate in 1877. The majority of the Senators found these petitions uproariously funny, and Susan in the visitors' gallery at the time of their presentation was infuriated by the mirth and disrespect of these men. "A few read the petitions as they would any other, with dignity and without comment," reported the popular journalist, Mary Clemmer, in her weekly Washington column, "but the majority seemed intensely conscious of holding something unutterably funny in their hands.... The entire Senate presented the appearance of a laughing school practicing sidesplitting and ear-extended grins." After a few humorous and sarcastic remarks the petitions were referred to the Committee on Public Lands. Only one Senator, Aaron A. Sargent of California, was "man enough and gentleman enough to lift the petitions from this insulting proposition.... He ... demanded for the petition of more than 10,000 women at least the courtesy which would be given any other."[331]

Although his words did not deter the Senators, Susan was proud of this tall vigorous white-haired Californian and grateful for his spontaneous support in this humiliating situation. He had been a trusted friend and counselor ever since she had shared with him and his family the long snowy journey from Nevada in 1872. She looked forward to the time when woman suffrage would have more such advocates in the Congress and when she would find there new faces and a more liberal spirit.

Disappointment only drove Susan into more intensive activity. Between lectures she now nursed her sister Hannah who was critically ill in Daniel's home in Leavenworth. After Hannah's death in May 1877, Susan worked off her grief in Colorado, where the question of votes for women was being referred to the people of the state.

The suffragists in Colorado were headed by Dr. Alida Avery, who had left her post as resident physician at the new woman's college, Vassar, to practice medicine in Denver. Making Dr. Avery's home her headquarters, Susan carried her plea for the ballot to settlements far from the railroads, traveling by stagecoach over rough lonely roads through magnificent scenery. Holding meetings wherever she could, she spoke in schoolhouses, in hotel dining rooms, and even in saloons, when no other place was available, and always she was treated with respect and listened to with interest. Occasionally only a mere handful gathered to hear her, but in Lake City she spoke to an audience of a thousand or more from a dry-goods box on the court-house steps. She was equal to anything, but the mining towns depressed her, for they were swarming with foreigners who had been welcomed as naturalized, enfranchised citizens and who almost to a man opposed extending the vote to women. This precedence of foreign-born men over American women was not only galling to her but menaced, she believed, the growth of American democracy.

Woman suffrage was defeated in Colorado in 1877, two to one. With the Chinese coming into the state in great numbers to work in the mines, the specter that stalked through this campaign was the fear of putting the ballot into the hands of Chinese women.

From Colorado, Susan moved on to Nebraska with a new lecture, "The Homes of Single Women." Although she much preferred to speak on "Woman and the Sixteenth Amendment" or "Bread and the Ballot," she realized that, in order to be assured of return engagements, she must occasionally vary her subjects, but she was unwilling to wander far afield while women's needs still were so great. By means of this new lecture she hoped to dispel the widespread, deeply ingrained fallacy that single women were unwanted helpless creatures wholly dependent upon some male relative for a home and support. Aware that this mistaken estimate was slowly yielding in the face of a changing economic order, she believed she could help lessen its hold by presenting concrete examples of independent self-supporting single women who had proved that marriage was not the only road to security and a home. She told of Alice and Phoebe Cary, whose home in New York City was a rendezvous for writers, artists, musicians, and reformers; of Dr. Clemence Lozier, the friend of women medical students; of Mary L. Booth, well established through her income as editor of Harper's Bazaar; and of her beloved Lydia Mott, whose home had been a refuge for fugitive slaves and reformers.[332]

In Nebraska, she made a valuable new friend for the cause, Clara Bewick Colby, whose zeal and earnest, intelligent face at once attracted her. Within a few years, Mrs. Colby established in Beatrice, Nebraska, a magazine for women, the Woman's Tribune, which to Susan's joy spoke out for a federal woman suffrage amendment.

Because Susan's contract with the Slayton Lecture Bureau allowed no break in her engagements, she was obliged to leave the Washington convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association in the hands of others in 1878. It was much on her mind as she traveled through Dakota, Minnesota, Missouri, and Kansas, and she sent a check for $100 to help with the expenses of the convention. Particularly on her mind was a federal woman suffrage amendment, for since 1869 when a Sixteenth Amendment enfranchising women had been introduced in Congress and ignored, no further efforts along that line had been made. Now good news came from Mrs. Stanton, who had attended the convention. She had persuaded Senator Sargent to introduce in the Senate, on January 10, 1878, a new draft of a Sixteenth Amendment, following the wording of the Fifteenth. It read, "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex."[333]



* * * * *

During the next few years the Sixteenth Amendment made little headway, although the complexion of Congress changed, the Democrats breaking the Republicans' hold and winning a substantial majority. Encouraging as was the more liberal spirit of the new Congress and the defeat of several implacable enemies, Susan found California's failure to return Senator Sargent an irreparable loss. In addition she now had to face a newly formed group of anti-suffragists under the leadership of Mrs. Dahlgren, Mrs. Sherman, and Almira Lincoln Phelps, who sang the refrain which Congressmen loved to hear, that women did not want the vote because it would wreck marriage and the home.

Hoping to counteract this adverse influence by increased pressure for the Sixteenth Amendment, Susan once more appealed for help to the American Woman Suffrage Association through her old friends, William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Garrison replied that her efforts for a federal amendment were premature and "would bring the movement into needless contempt." This she found strange advice from the man who had fearlessly defied public opinion to crusade against slavery. Wendell Phillips did better, writing, "I think you are on the right track—the best method to agitate the question, and I am with you, though between you and me, I still think the individual States must lead off, and that this reform must advance piecemeal, State by State. But I mean always to help everywhere and everyone."[334]

The American Association continued to follow the state-by-state method, and this holding back aroused Susan to the boiling point, for experience had taught her that in state elections woman suffrage faced the prejudiced opposition of an ever-increasing number of naturalized immigrants, who had little understanding of democratic government or sympathy with the rights of women. A federal amendment, on the other hand, depending for its adoption upon Congress and ratifying legislatures, was in the hands of a far more liberal, intelligent, and preponderantly American group. "We have puttered with State rights for thirty years," she sputtered, "without a foothold except in the territories."[335]

Year by year she continued her Washington conventions, convinced that these gatherings in the national capital could not fail to impress Congressmen with the seriousness of their purpose. As women from many states lobbied for the Sixteenth Amendment, reporting a growing sentiment everywhere for woman suffrage, as they received in the press respectful friendly publicity, Congressmen began to take notice. At the large receptions held at the Riggs House, through the generosity of the proprietors, Jane Spofford and her husband, Congressmen became better acquainted with the suffragists, finding that they were not cranks, as they had supposed, but intelligent women and socially charming.

Mrs. Stanton's poise as presiding officer and the warmth of her personality made her the natural choice for president of the National Woman Suffrage Association through the years. Her popularity, now well established throughout the country after her ten years of lecturing on the Lyceum circuit, lent prestige to the cause. To Susan, her presence brought strength and the assurance that "the brave and true word" would be spoken.[336] A new office had been created for Susan, that of vice-president at large, and in that capacity she guided, steadied, and prodded her flock.

The subjects which the conventions discussed covered a wide field going far beyond their persistent demands for a federal woman suffrage amendment. Not only did they at this time urge an educational qualification for voters to combat the argument that woman suffrage would increase the ignorant vote, but they also protested the counting of women in the basis of representation so long as they were disfranchised. They criticized the church for barring women from the ministry and from a share in church government. They took up the case of Anna Ella Carroll,[337] who had been denied recognition and a pension for her services to her country during the Civil War, and they urged pensions for all women who had nursed soldiers during the war. They welcomed to their conventions Mormon women from Utah who came to Washington to protest efforts to disfranchise them as a means of discouraging polygamy.

Susan injected international interest into these conventions by reading Alexander Dumas's arguments for woman suffrage, letters from Victor Hugo and English suffragists, and a report by Mrs. Stanton's son, Theodore, now a journalist, of the International Congress in Paris in 1878, which discussed the rights of women. Occasionally foreign-born women, now making new homes for themselves in this country, joined the ranks of the suffragists, and a few of them, like Madam Anneke and Clara Heyman from Germany contributed a great deal through their eloquence and wider perspective. These contacts with the thoughts and aspirations of men and women of other countries led Susan to dream of an international conference of women in the not too distant future.[338]

FOOTNOTES:

[327] Ms., Diary, June 18, 1876.

[328] Katherine D. Blake and Margaret Wallace, Champion of Women, The Life of Lillie Devereux Blake (New York, 1943), pp. 124-126.

[329] History of Woman Suffrage, III, pp. 31, 34. The Woman's Journal surprised Susan with a friendly editorial, "Good Use of the Fourth of July," written by Lucy Stone, July 15, 1876.

[330] History of Woman Suffrage, III, p. 43. The Philadelphia Press praised the Declaration of Rights and the women in the suffrage movement. The report of the New York Post was patronizingly favorable, pointing out the indifference of the public to the subject.

[331] Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 485-486.

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

[333] This amendment was re-introduced in the same form in every succeeding Congress until it was finally passed in 1919 as the Nineteenth Amendment. It was ratified by the states in 1920, 14 years after Susan B. Anthony's death. When occasionally during her lifetime it was called the Susan B. Anthony Amendment by those who wished to honor her devotion to the cause, she protested, meticulously giving Elizabeth Cady Stanton credit for making the first public demand for woman suffrage in 1848. She also made it clear that although she worked for the amendment long and hard, she did not draft it. After her death, during the climax of the woman suffrage campaign, these facts were overlooked by the younger workers who made a point of featuring the Susan B. Anthony Amendment, both because they wished to immortalize her and because they realized the publicity value of her name.

[334] Harper, Anthony, I, p. 484.

[335] History of Woman Suffrage, III, p. 66.

[336] Harper, Anthony, II, p. 544.

[337] History of Woman Suffrage, III, p. 153; II, pp. 3-12, 863-868; Sarah Ellen Blackwell, A Military Genius, Life of Anna Ella Carroll of Maryland (Washington, D.C., 1891), I, pp. 153-154.

[338] "Woman Suffrage as a Means of Moral Improvement and the Prevention of Crime" by Alexander Dumas, History of Woman Suffrage, III, p. 190. Theodore Stanton, foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, now lived in Paris.



RECORDING WOMEN'S HISTORY

Recording women's history for future generations was a project that had been in the minds of both Susan and Mrs. Stanton for a long time. Both looked upon women's struggle for a share in government as a potent force in strengthening democracy and one to be emphasized in history. Men had always been the historians and had as a matter of course extolled men's exploits, passing over women's record as negligible. Susan intended to remedy this and she was convinced that if women close to the facts did not record them now, they would be forgotten or misinterpreted by future historians. Already many of the old workers had died, Martha C. Wright, Lydia Mott, whom Susan had nursed in her last illness, Lucretia Mott, and William Lloyd Garrison. There was no time to be lost.[339]

In the spring of 1880, Susan's mother died, and it was no longer necessary for her to fit into her schedule frequent visits in Rochester. Her sister Mary, busy with her teaching, was sharing her home with her two widowed brothers-in-law and two nieces whose education she was supervising.[340] Mrs. Stanton had just given up the strenuous life of a Lyceum lecturer and welcomed work that would keep her at home. Susan, who had managed to save $4,500 out of her lecture fees, felt she could afford to devote at least a year to the history.

She now shipped several boxes of letters, clippings, and documents to the Stanton home in Tenafly, New Jersey.[341] As they planned their book, it soon became obvious that the one volume which they had hoped to finish in a few months would extend to two or three volumes and take many years to write. They called in Matilda Joslyn Gage to help them, and the three of them signed a contract to share the work and the profits.

The history presented a publishing problem as well as a writing ordeal, and Susan, interviewing New York publishers, found the subject had little appeal. Finally, however, she signed a contract with Fowler & Wells under which the authors agreed to pay the cost of composition, stereotyping, and engravings; and as usual she raised the necessary funds.[342]



Returning to Tenafly as to a second home, Susan usually found Mrs. Stanton beaming a welcome from the piazza and Margaret and Harriot running to the gate to meet her. The Stanton children were fond of Susan. It was a comfortable happy household, and Susan, thoroughly enjoying Mrs. Stanton's companionship, attacked the history with vigor. Sitting opposite each other at a big table in the sunny tower room, they spent long hours at work. Susan, thin and wiry, her graying hair neatly smoothed back over her ears, sat up very straight as she rapidly sorted old clippings and letters and outlined chapters, while Mrs. Stanton, stout and placid, her white curls beautifully arranged, wrote steadily and happily, transforming masses of notes into readable easy prose.[343]

Having sent appeals for information to colleagues in all parts of the country, Susan, as the contributions began to come in, struggled to decipher the often almost illegible, handwritten manuscripts, many of them careless and inexact about dates and facts. To their request for data about her, Lucy Stone curtly replied, "I have never kept a diary or any record of my work, and so am unable to furnish you the required dates.... You say 'I' must be referred to in the history you are writing.... I cannot furnish a biographical sketch and trust you will not try to make one. Yours with ceaseless regret that any 'wing' of suffragists should attempt to write the history of the other."[344]

The greater part of the writing fell upon Mrs. Stanton, but Matilda Joslyn Gage contributed the chapters, "Preceding Causes," "Women in Newspapers," and "Women, Church, and State." Susan carefully selected the material and checked the facts. She helped with the copying of the handwritten manuscript and with the proofreading. Believing that pictures of the early workers were almost as important for the History as the subject matter itself, she tried to provide them, but they presented a financial problem with which it was hard to cope, for each engraving cost $100.[345]

When the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage came off the press in May 1881, she proudly and lovingly scanned its 878 pages which told the story of women's progress in the United States up to the Civil War.

She was well aware that the History was not a literary achievement, but the facts were there, as accurate as humanly possible; all the eloquent, stirring speeches were there, a proof of the caliber and high intelligence of the pioneers; and out of the otherwise dull record of meetings, conventions, and petitions, a spirit of independence and zeal for freedom shone forth, highlighted occasionally by dramatic episodes. As Mrs. Stanton so aptly expressed it, "We have furnished the bricks and mortar for some future architect to rear a beautiful edifice."[346]

The distribution of the book was very much on Susan's mind, for she realized that it would not be in great demand because of its cost, bulk, and subject matter. Nor could she at this time present it to libraries, as she wished, for she had already spent her savings on the illustrations. "It ought to be in every school library," she wrote Amelia Bloomer, "where every boy and girl of the nation could see and read and learn what women have done to secure equality of rights and chances for girls and women...."[347]

So much material had been collected while Volume I was in preparation that both Susan and Mrs. Stanton felt they should immediately undertake Volume II. After a summer of lecturing to help finance its publication, Susan returned to Tenafly to the monotonous work of compilation. "I am just sick to death of it," she wrote her young friend Rachel Foster. "I had rather wash or whitewash or do any possible hard work than sit here and go there digging into the dusty records of the past—that is, rather make history than write it."[348]

Yet she never entirely gave up making history, for she was always planning for the future and Rachel Foster was now her able lieutenant, relieving her of details, doing the spade work for the annual Washington conventions, and arranging for an occasional lecture engagement. Susan would not leave Tenafly for a lecture fee of less than $50.

She took this intelligent young girl to her heart as she had Anna E. Dickinson in the past. Rachel, however, had none of Anna's dramatic temperament or love of the limelight, but in her orderly businesslike way was eager to serve Susan, whom she had admired ever since as a child she had heard her speak for woman suffrage in her mother's drawing room.

While Susan was pondering the ways and means of financing another volume of the History, the light broke through in a letter from Wendell Phillips, announcing the astonishing news that she and Lucy Stone had inherited approximately $25,000 each for "the woman's cause" under the will of Eliza Eddy, the daughter of their former benefactor, Francis Jackson. Although the legacy was not paid until 1885 because of litigation, its promise lightened considerably Susan's financial burden and she knew that Volumes II and III were assured. Her gratitude to Eliza Eddy was unbounded, and better still, she read between the lines the good will of Wendell Phillips who had been Eliza Eddy's legal advisor. That he, whom she admired above all men, should after their many differences still regard her as worthy of this trust, meant as much to her as the legacy itself.

In May 1882 she had the satisfaction of seeing the second volume of the History of Woman Suffrage in print, carrying women's record through 1875. Volume III was not completed until 1885.

Women's response to their own history was a disappointment. Only a few realized its value for the future, among them Mary L. Booth, editor of Harper's Bazaar. The majority were indifferent and some even critical. When Mrs. Stanton offered the three volumes to the Vassar College library, they were refused.[349] Nevertheless, every time Susan looked at the three large volumes on her shelves, she was happy, for now she was assured that women's struggle for citizenship and freedom would live in print through the years. To libraries in the United States and Europe, she presented well over a thousand copies, grateful that the Eliza Eddy legacy now made this possible.

* * * * *

In 1883, Susan surprised everyone by taking a vacation in Europe. Soon after Volume II of the History had been completed, Mrs. Stanton had left for Europe with her daughter Harriot.[350] Her letters to Susan reported not only Harriot's marriage to an Englishman, William Henry Blatch, but also encouraging talks with the forward-looking women of England and France whom she hoped to interest in an international organization. Repeatedly she urged Susan to join her, to meet these women, and to rest for a while from her strenuous labors. The possibility of forming an international organization of women was a greater attraction to Susan than Europe itself, and when Rachel Foster suggested that she make the journey with her, she readily consented.

"She goes abroad a republican Queen," observed the Kansas City Journal, "uncrowned to be sure, but none the less of the blood royal, and we have faith that the noblest men and women of Europe will at once recognize and welcome her as their equal."[351]

In London, Susan met Mrs. Stanton, "her face beaming and her white curls as lovely as ever." Then after talking with English suffragists and her two old friends, William Henry Channing and Ernestine Rose, now living in England, Susan traveled with Rachel through Italy, Switzerland, Germany, and France, where a whole new world opened before her. She thoroughly enjoyed its beauty; yet there was much that distressed her and she found herself far more interested in the people, their customs and living conditions than in the treasures of art. "It is good for our young civilization," she wrote Daniel, "to see and study that of the old world and observe the hopelessness of lifting the masses into freedom and freedom's industry, honesty and integrity. How any American, any lover of our free institutions, based on equality of rights for all, can settle down and live here is more than I can comprehend. It will only be by overturning the powers that education and equal chances ever can come to the rank and file. The hope of the world is indeed our republic...." To a friend she reported, "Amidst it all my head and heart turn to our battle for women at home. Here in the old world, with ... its utter blotting out of women as an equal, there is no hope, no possibility of changing her condition; so I look to our own land of equality for men, and partial equality for women, as the only one for hope or work."[352]

Back in London again, she allowed herself a few luxuries, such as an expensive India shawl and more social life than she had had in many a year, and she longed to have Mary enjoy it all with her. She visited suffragists in Scotland and Ireland as well as in England and occasionally spoke at their meetings.[353] Here as in America suffragists differed over the best way to win the vote, and even the most radical among them were more conservative and cautious than American women, but she admired them all and tried to understand the very different problems they faced. Gradually she interested a few of them in an international conference of women, and before she sailed back to America with Mrs. Stanton in November 1883, she had their promise of cooperation.