1. Anthony, Susan Brownell, 1820-1906.

[JK1899.A6L8 1975] 324'.3'0924 [B] 75-37764 ISBN 0-89201-017-7 Printed in the United States of America _To the young women of today_ PREFACE To strive for liberty and for a democratic way of life has always been a noble tradition of our country. Susan B. Anthony followed this tradition. Convinced that the principle of equal rights for all, as stated in the Declaration of Independence, must be expressed in the laws of a true republic, she devoted her life to the establishment of this ideal. Because she recognized in Negro slavery and in the legal bondage of women flagrant violations of this principle, she became an active, courageous, effective antislavery crusader and a champion of civil and political rights for women. She saw women's struggle for freedom from legal restrictions as an important phase in the development of American democracy. To her this struggle was never a battle of the sexes, but a battle such as any freedom-loving people would wage for civil and political rights. While her goals for women were only partially realized in her lifetime, she prepared the soil for the acceptance not only of her long-hoped-for federal woman suffrage amendment but for a worldwide recognition of human rights, now expressed in the United Nations Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. She looked forward to the time when throughout the world there would be no discrimination because of race, color, religion, or sex. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS "The letters of a person ...," said Thomas Jefferson, "form the only full and genuine journal of his life." Susan B. Anthony's letters, hundreds of them, preserved in libraries and private collections, and her diaries have been the basis of this biography, and I acknowledge my indebtedness to the following libraries and their helpful librarians: the American Antiquarian Society; the Bancroft Library of the University of California; the Boston Public Library; the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery; the Indiana State Library; the Kansas Historical Society; the Library of Congress; the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, which has been transferred to the Henry E. Huntington Library; the New York Public Library; the New York State Library; the Ohio State Library; the Radcliffe Women's Archives; the Seneca Falls Historical Society; the Smith College Library; the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Inc., Rochester, New York; the University of Rochester Library; the University of Kentucky Library; and the Vassar College Library. I am particularly indebted to Lucy E. Anthony, who asked me to write a biography of her aunt, lent me her aunt's diaries, and was most generous with her records and personal recollections. To her and to her sister, Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon, I am very grateful for photographs and for permission to quote from Susan B. Anthony's diaries and from her letters and manuscripts. Ida Husted Harper's _Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_, written in collaboration with Susan B. Anthony, and the _History of Woman Suffrage_, compiled by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, have been invaluable. As many of the letters and documents used in the preparation of these books were destroyed, they have preserved an important record of the work of Susan B. Anthony and of the woman's rights movement. I am especially grateful to Martha Taylor Howard for her unfailing interest and for the use of the valuable Susan B. Anthony Memorial Collection which she initiated and developed in Rochester, New York; and to Una R. Winter for her interest and for the use of her Susan B. Anthony Collection, most of which is now in the Henry E. Huntington Library. I thank Edna M. Stantial for permission to examine and quote from the Blackwell Papers; Anna Dann Mason for permission to read her reminiscences and the many letters written to her by Susan B. Anthony; Ellen Garrison for permission to quote from letters of Lucretia Mott and Martha C. Wright; Eleanor W. Thompson for copies of Susan B. Anthony's letters to Amelia Bloomer; Henry R. Selden II whose grandfather was Susan B. Anthony's lawyer during her trial for voting; Judge John Van Voorhis whose grandfather was associated with Judge Selden in Miss Anthony's defense; William B. Brown for information about the early history of Adams, Massachusetts, the Susan B. Anthony birthplace, and the Friends Meeting House in Adams; Dr. James Harvey Young for information about Anna E. Dickinson; Margaret Lutz Fogg for help in connection with the trial of Susan B. Anthony; Dr. Blake McKelvey, City Historian of Rochester; Clara Sayre Selden and Wheeler Chapin Case of the Rochester Historical Society; the grand-nieces of Susan B. Anthony, Marion and Florence Mosher; Matilda Joslyn Gage II; Florence L. C. Kitchelt; and Rose Arnold Powell. I thank _The Christian Science Monitor_ for permission to use portions of an article published on October 24, 1958. I am especially grateful to A. Marguerite Smith for her constructive criticism of the manuscript and her unfailing encouragement. ALMA LUTZ _Highmeadow_ _Berlin, New York_ TABLE OF CONTENTS QUAKER HERITAGE 1 WIDENING HORIZONS 15 FREEDOM TO SPEAK 28 A PURSE OF HER OWN 39 NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 56 THE TRUE WOMAN 67 THE ZEALOT 79 A WAR FOR FREEDOM 92 THE NEGRO'S HOUR 108 TIMES THAT TRIED WOMEN'S SOULS 125 HE ONE WORD OF THE HOUR 138 WORK, WAGES, AND THE BALLOT 149 THE INADEQUATE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT 159 A HOUSE DIVIDED 169 A NEW SLANT ON THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 180 TESTING THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 198 "IS IT A CRIME FOR A CITIZEN ... TO VOTE?" 209 SOCIAL PURITY 217 A FEDERAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT 226 RECORDING WOMEN'S HISTORY 235 IMPETUS FROM THE WEST 241 VICTORIES IN THE WEST 252 LIQUOR INTERESTS ALERT FOREIGN-BORN VOTERS AGAINST WOMAN SUFFRAGE 266 AUNT SUSAN AND HER GIRLS 274 PASSING ON THE TORCH 285 SUSAN B. ANTHONY OF THE WORLD 299 NOTES 311 BIBLIOGRAPHY 327 INDEX 335 TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS Susan B. Anthony at the age of thirty-five _Frontispiece_ (From a daguerrotype, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, N.Y.) Daniel Anthony, father of Susan B. Anthony 2 (From _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ by Ida Husted Harper) Lucy Read Anthony, mother of Susan B. Anthony 3 (From _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ by Ida Husted Harper) Susan B. Anthony Homestead, Adams, Massachusetts 5 (The Smith Studio, Adams, Massachusetts) Frederick Douglass 22 Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her "Bloomer costume" 27 (From _The Lily_) Lucy Stone 29 (From _Lucy Stone_ by Alice Stone Blackwell. Courtesy Little, Brown and Company) Susan B. Anthony at the age of thirty-four 31 (Courtesy Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc., Rochester, New York) James and Lucretia Mott 33 (From _James and Lucretia Mott_ by Anna D. Hallowell. Courtesy Houghton Mifflin Company) Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her son, Henry 40 Ernestine Rose 42 (From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage) Parker Pillsbury 49 (From _William Lloyd Garrison_ by His Children) Merritt Anthony 57 (Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon) Susan B. Anthony, 1856 68 (Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon) Lucy Stone and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell 72 (Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California) William Lloyd Garrison 86 (From _William Lloyd Garrison and His Times_ by Oliver Johnson) Susan B. Anthony 97 Daniel Anthony, brother of Susan B. Anthony 110 (Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon) Wendell Phillips 114 (From _William Lloyd Garrison_ by His Children) George Francis Train 132 (Courtesy New York Public Library) Anna E. Dickinson 144 (From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage) Paulina Wright Davis 165 Isabella Beecher Hooker 167 Victoria C. Woodhull 181 Susan B. Anthony, 1871 187 (Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon) Judge Henry R. Selden 203 (Courtesy Henry R. Selden II) "The Woman Who Dared" 206 (New York _Daily Graphic_, June 5, 1873) Aaron A. Sargent 229 (Courtesy Library of Congress) Clara Bewick Colby 232 (From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage) Matilda Joslyn Gage 236 (From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage) Anna Howard Shaw 248 (From a photograph by Mary Carnel) Harriot Stanton Blatch 250 (Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California) The Anthony home, Rochester, New York 255 (Courtesy Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc., Rochester, New York) Susan B. Anthony at her desk 257 (Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts) Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 259 Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 262 and Susan B. Anthony Ida Husted Harper 271 (Courtesy Library of Congress) Rachel Foster Avery 275 (Courtesy Library of Congress) Harriet Taylor Upton 276 (Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California) Carrie Chapman Catt 289 (Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts) Quotation in the handwriting of Susan B. Anthony 297 Susan B. Anthony at the age of eighty-five 301 (From a photograph by J. E. Hale) Susan B. Anthony, 1905 309 (From a photograph by Ellis) QUAKER HERITAGE "If Sally Ann knows more about weaving than Elijah," reasoned eleven-year-old Susan with her father, "then why don't you make her overseer?" "It would never do," replied Daniel Anthony as a matter of course. "It would never do to have a woman overseer in the mill." This answer did not satisfy Susan and she often thought about it. To enter the mill, to stand quietly and look about, was the best kind of entertainment, for she was fascinated by the whir of the looms, by the nimble fingers of the weavers, and by the general air of efficiency. Admiringly she watched Sally Ann Hyatt, the tall capable weaver from Vermont. When the yarn on the beam was tangled or there was something wrong with the machinery, Elijah, the overseer, always called out to Sally Ann, "I'll tend your loom, if you'll look after this." Sally Ann never failed to locate the trouble or to untangle the yarn. Yet she was never made overseer, and this continued to puzzle Susan.[1] The manufacture of cotton was a new industry, developing with great promise in the United States, when Susan B. Anthony was born on February 15, 1820, in the wide valley at the foot of Mt. Greylock, near Adams, Massachusetts. Enterprising young men like her father, Daniel Anthony, saw a potential cotton mill by the side of every rushing brook, and young women, eager to earn the first money they could call their own, were leaving the farms, for a few months at least, to work in the mills. Cotton cloth was the new sensation and the demand for it was steadily growing. Brides were proud to display a few cotton sheets instead of commonplace homespun linen. When Susan was two years old, her father built a cotton factory of twenty-six looms beside the brook which ran through Grandfather Read's meadow, hauling the cotton forty miles by wagon from Troy, New York. The millworkers, most of them young girls from Vermont, boarded, as was the custom, in the home of the millowner; Susan's mother, Lucy Read Anthony, although she had three small daughters to care for, Guelma, Susan, and Hannah, boarded eleven of the millworkers with only the help of a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for her after school hours. Lucy Anthony cooked their meals on the hearth of the big kitchen fireplace, and in the large brick oven beside it baked crisp brown loaves of bread. In addition, washing, ironing, mending, and spinning filled her days. But she was capable and strong and was doing only what all women in this new country were expected to do. She taught her young daughters to help her, and Susan, even before she was six, was very useful; by the time she was ten she could cook a good meal and pack a dinner pail. [Illustration: Daniel Anthony, father of Susan B. Anthony] * * * * * Hard work and skill were respected as Susan grew up in the rapidly expanding young republic which less than fifty years before had been founded and fought for. Settlers, steadily pushing westward, had built new states out of the wilderness, adding ten to the original thirteen. Everywhere the leaven of democracy was working and men were putting into practice many of the principles so boldly stated in the Declaration of Independence, claiming for themselves equal rights and opportunities. The new states entered the Union with none of the traditional property and religious limitations on the franchise, but with manhood suffrage and all voters eligible for office. The older states soon fell into line, Massachusetts in 1820 removing property qualifications for voters. Before long, throughout the United States, all free white men were enfranchised, leaving only women, Negroes, and Indians without the full rights of citizenship. [Illustration: Lucy Read Anthony, mother of Susan B. Anthony] Although women freeholders had voted in some of the colonies and in New Jersey as late as 1807,[2] just as in England in the fifteenth franchise had gradually found its way into the statutes, and women's rights as citizens were ignored, in spite of the contribution they had made to the defense and development of the new nation. However, European travelers, among them De Tocqueville, recognized that the survival of the New World experiment in government and the prosperity and strength of the people were due in large measure to the superiority of American women. A few women had urged their claims: Abigail Adams asked her husband, a member of the Continental Congress, "to remember the ladies" in the "new code of laws"; and Hannah Lee Corbin of Virginia pleaded with her brother, Richard Henry Lee, to make good the principle of "no taxation without representation" by enfranchising widows with property.[3] Yet the legal bondage of women continued to be overlooked. It seemed a less obvious threat to free institutions and democratic government than the Negro in slavery. In fact, Negro slavery presented a problem which demanded attention again and again, flaring up alarmingly in 1820, the year Susan B. Anthony was born, when Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state.[4] * * * * * These were some of the forces at work in the minds of Americans during Susan's childhood. Her father, a liberal Quaker, was concerned over the extension of slavery, and she often heard him say that he tried to avoid purchasing cotton raised by slave labor. This early impression of the evil of slavery was never erased. The Quakers' respect for women's equality with men before God also left its mark on young Susan. As soon as she was old enough she went regularly to Meeting with her father, for all of the Anthonys were Quakers. They had migrated to western Massachusetts from Rhode Island, and there on the frontier had built prosperous farms, comfortable homes, and a meeting house where they could worship God in their own way. Susan, sitting with the women and children on the hand-hewn benches near the big fireplace in the meeting house[5] which her ancestors had built, found peace and consecration in the simple unordered service, in the long reverent silence broken by both the men and the women in the congregation as they were led to say a prayer or give out a helpful message. Forty families now worshiped here, the women sitting on one side and the men on the other; but women took their places with men in positions of honor, Susan's own grandmother, Hannah Latham Anthony, an elder, sitting in the "high seat," and her aunt, Hannah Anthony Hoxie, preaching as the spirit moved her. With this valuation of women accepted as a matter of course in her church and family circle, Susan took it for granted that it existed everywhere. Although her father was a devout Friend, she discovered that he had the reputation of thinking for himself, following the "inner light" even when its leading differed from the considered judgment of his fellow Quakers. For this he became a hero to her, especially after she heard the romantic story of his marriage to Lucy Read who was not a Quaker. The Anthonys and the Reads had been neighbors for years, and Lucy was one of the pupils at the "home school" which Grandfather Humphrey Anthony had built for his children on the farm, under the weeping willow at the front gate. Daniel and Lucy were schoolmates until Daniel at nineteen was sent to Richard Mott's Friends' boarding school at Nine Partners on the Hudson. When he returned as a teacher, he found his old playmate still one of the pupils, but now a beautiful tall young woman with deep blue eyes and glossy brown hair. Full of fun, a good dancer, and always dressed in the prettiest clothes, she was the most popular girl in the neighborhood. Promptly Daniel Anthony fell in love with her, but an almost insurmountable obstacle stood in the way: Quakers were not permitted to "marry out of Meeting." This, however, did not deter Daniel. [Illustration: Susan B. Anthony Homestead, Adams, Massachusetts] It was harder for Lucy to make up her mind. She enjoyed parties, dances, and music. She had a full rich voice, and as she sat at her spinning wheel, singing and spinning, she often wished that she could "go into a ten acre lot with the bars down"[6] and let her voice out. If she married Daniel, she would have to give all this up, but she decided in favor of Daniel. A few nights before the wedding, she went to her last party and danced until four in the morning while Daniel looked on and patiently waited until she was ready to leave. For his transgression of marrying out of Meeting, Daniel had to face the elders as soon as he returned from his wedding trip. They weighed the matter carefully, found him otherwise sincere and earnest, and decided not to turn him out. Lucy gave up her dancing and her singing. She gave up her pretty bright-colored dresses for plain somber clothes, but she did not adopt the Quaker dress or use the "plain speech." She went to meeting with Daniel but never became a Quaker, feeling always that she could not live up to their strict standard of righteousness.[7] This was Susan's heritage--Quaker discipline and austerity lightened by her father's independent spirit and by the kindly understanding of her mother who had not forgotten her own fun-loving girlhood; an environment where men and women were partners in church and at home, where hard physical work was respected, where help for the needy and unfortunate was spontaneous, and where education was regarded as so important that Grandfather Anthony built a school for his children and the neighbors' in his front yard. Her childhood was close enough to the Revolution to make Grandfather Read's part in it very real and a source of great pride. Eagerly and often she listened to the story of how he enlisted in the Continental army as soon as the news of the Battle of Lexington reached Cheshire and served with outstanding bravery under Arnold at Quebec, Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, and Colonel Stafford at Bennington while his young wife waited anxiously for him throughout the long years of the war. * * * * * The wide valley in the Berkshire Hills where Susan grew up made a lasting impression on her. There was beauty all about her--the fruit trees blooming in the spring, the meadows white with daisies, the brook splashing over the rocks and sparkling in the summer sun, the flaming colors of autumn, the strength and companionship of the hills when the countryside was white with snow. She seldom failed to watch the sun set behind Greylock. Her father's cotton mill flourished. Regarded as one of the most promising, successful young men of the district, he soon attracted the attention of Judge John McLean, a cotton manufacturer of Battenville, New York, who, eager to enlarge his mills, saw in Daniel Anthony an able manager. Daniel, always ready to take the next step ahead, accepted McLean's offer, and on a sunny July day in 1826, Susan drove with her family through the hills forty-four miles to the new world of Battenville. Here in the home of Judge McLean, she saw Negroes for the first time, Negroes working to earn their freedom. Startled by their black faces, she was a little afraid, but when her father explained that in the South they could be sold like cattle and torn from their families, her fear turned to pity. At the district school, taught by a woman in summer and by a man in the winter, she learned to sew, spell, read, and write, and she wanted to study long division but the schoolmaster, unable to teach it, saw no reason why a woman should care for such knowledge. Her father, then realizing the need of better education for his five children, Guelma, Susan, Hannah, Daniel, and Mary, established a school for them in the new brick building where he had opened a store. Later on when their new brick house was finished, he set aside a large room for the school, and here for the first time in that district the pupils had separate seats, stools without backs, instead of the usual benches around the schoolroom walls. He engaged as teachers young women who had studied a year or two in a female seminary; and because female seminaries were rare in those days, women teachers with up-to-date training were hard to find. Only a few visionaries believed in the education of women. Nearby Emma Willard's recently established Troy Female Seminary was being watched with interest and suspicion. Mary Lyon, who had not yet founded her own seminary at Mt. Holyoke, was teaching at Zilpha Grant's school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and one of her pupils, Mary Perkins, came to Battenville to teach the Anthony children. Mary Perkins brought new methods and new studies to the little school. She introduced a primer with small black illustrations which fascinated Susan. She taught the children to recite poetry, drilled them regularly in calisthenics, and longed to add music as well, but Daniel Anthony forbade this, for Quakers believed that music might seduce the thoughts of the young. So Susan, although she often had a song in her heart, had to repress it and never knew the joy of singing the songs of childhood. Her father, looking upon the millworkers as part of his family, started an evening school for them, often teaching it himself or calling in the family teacher. He organized a temperance society among the workers, and all signed a pledge never to drink distilled liquor. When he opened a store in the new brick building, he refused to sell liquor, although Judge McLean warned him it would ruin his trade. Daniel Anthony went even further. He resolved not to serve liquor when the millworkers' houses were built and the neighbors came to the "raising." Again Judge McLean protested, feeling certain that the men and boys would demand their gin and their rum, but Susan and her sisters helped their mother serve lemonade, tea, coffee, doughnuts, and gingerbread in abundance. The men joked a bit about the lack of strong drink which they expected with every meal, but they did not turn away from the good substitutes which were offered and they were on hand for the next "raising." Hearing all of this discussed at home, Susan, again proud of her father, ardently advocated the cause of temperance. * * * * * The mill was still of great interest to her and she watched every operation closely in her spare time, longing to try her hand at the work. One day when a "spooler" was ill, Susan and her sister Hannah eagerly volunteered to take her place. Their father was ready to let them try, pleased by their interest and curious to see what they could do, but their mother protested that the mill was no place for children. Finally Susan's earnest pleading won her mother's reluctant consent, and the two girls drew lots for the job. It went to twelve-year-old Susan on the condition that she divide her earnings with Hannah. Every day for two weeks she went early to the mill in her plain homespun dress, her straight hair neatly parted and smoothed over her ears. Proudly she tended the spools. She was skillful and quick, and received the regular wage of $1.50 a week, which she divided with Hannah, buying with her share six pale blue coffee cups for her mother who had allowed her this satisfying adventure. A few weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Susan became a member of the Society of Friends which met in nearby Easton, New York, and learned to search her heart and ask herself, "Art thou faithful?" Parties, dancing, and entertainments were generally ruled out of her life as sinful, and rarely were a temptation, but occasionally her mother, remembering her own good times, let her and her sisters go to parties at the homes of their Presbyterian neighbors, and for this her father was criticized at Friends' Meeting. Condemning bright colors, frills, and jewelry as vain and worldly, Susan accepted plain somber clothing as a mark of righteousness, and when she deviated to the extent of wearing the Scotch-plaid coat which her mother had bought her, she wondered if the big rent torn in it by a dog might not be deserved punishment for her pride in wearing it. That same year, the family moved into their new brick house of fifteen rooms, with hard-finish plaster walls and light green woodwork, the finest house in that part of the country. Here Susan's brother Merritt was born the next April, and her two-year-old sister, Eliza, died. Susan, Guelma, and Hannah continued their studies longer than most girls in the neighborhood, for Quakers not only encouraged but demanded education for both boys and girls. As soon as Susan and her sister Guelma were old enough, they taught the "home" school in the summer when the younger children attended, and then went further afield to teach in nearby villages. At fifteen Susan was teaching a district school for $1.50 a week and board, and although it was hard for her to be away from home, she accepted it as a Friend's duty to provide good education for children. Now Presbyterian neighbors criticized her father, protesting that well-to-do young ladies should not venture into paid work. Daniel Anthony was now a wealthy man, his factory the largest and most prosperous in that part of the country, and he could afford more and better education for his daughters. He sent Guelma, the eldest, to Deborah Moulson's Friends' Seminary near Philadelphia, where for $125 a year "the inculcation of the principles of Humility, Morality, and Virtue" received particular attention; and when Guelma was asked to stay on a second year as a teacher, he suggested that Susan join her there as a pupil. * * * * * It was a long journey from Battenville to Philadelphia in 1837, and when Susan left her home on a snowy afternoon with her father, she felt as if the parting would be forever. Her first glimpse of the world beyond Battenville interested her immensely until her father left her at the seminary, and then she confessed to her diary, "Oh what pangs were felt. It seemed impossible for me to part with him. I could not speak to bid him farewell."[8] She tried to comfort herself by writing letters, and wrote so many and so much that Guelma often exclaimed, "Susan, thee writes too much; thee should learn to be concise." As it was a rule of the seminary that each letter must first be written out carefully on a slate, inspected by Deborah Moulson, then copied with care, inspected again, and finally sent out after four or five days of preparation, all spontaneity was stifled and her letters were stilted and overvirtuous. This censorship left its mark, and years later she confessed, "Whenever I take my pen in hand, I always seem to be mounted on stilts."[9] To her diary she could confide her real feelings--her discouragement over her lack of improvement and her inability to understand her many "sins," such as not dotting an _i_, too much laughter, or smiling at her friends instead of reproving them for frivolous conduct. She wrote, "Thought so much of my resolutions to do better in the future that even my dreams were filled with these desires.... Although I have been guilty of much levity and nonsensical conversation, and have also admitted thoughts to occupy my mind which should have been far distant from it, I do not consider myself as having committed any wilful offense but perhaps the reason I cannot see my own defects is because my heart is hardened."[10] The girls studied a variety of subjects, arithmetic, algebra, literature, chemistry, philosophy, physiology, astronomy, and bookkeeping. Men came to the school to conduct some of the classes, and Deborah Moulson was also assisted by several student teachers, one of whom, Lydia Mott, became Susan's lifelong friend. Susan worked hard, for she was a conscientious child, but none of her efforts seemed to satisfy Deborah Moulson, who was a hard taskmaster. Her reproofs cut deep, and once when Susan protested that she was always censured while Guelma was praised, Deborah Moulson sternly replied, "Thy sister Guelma does the best she is capable of, but thou dost not. Thou hast greater abilities and I demand of thee the best of thy capacity."[11] Mail from home was a bright spot, bringing into those busy austere days news of her friends, and when she read that one of them had married an old widower with six children, she reflected sagely, "I should think any female would rather live and die an old maid."[12] Then came word that her father's business had been so affected by the financial depression that the family would have to give up their home in Battenville. Sorrowfully she wrote in her diary, "O can I ever forget that loved residence in Battenville, and no more to call it home seems impossible."[13] It helped little to realize that countless other families throughout the country were facing the future penniless because banks had failed, mills were shut down, and work on canals and railroads had ceased. In April 1838, Daniel Anthony came to the seminary to take his daughters home. Susan felt keenly her father's sorrow over the failure of his business and the loss of the home he had built for his family, and she resolved at once to help out by teaching in Union Village, New York. In May 1838, she wrote in her diary, "On last evening ... I again left my home to mingle with strangers which seems to be my sad lot. Separation was rendered more trying on account of the embarrassing condition of our business affairs, an inventory was expected to be taken today of our furniture by assignees.... Spent this day in school, found it small and quite disorderly. O, may my patience hold out to persevere without intermission."[14] Her patience did hold out, and also her courage, as the news came from home telling her how everything had to be sold to satisfy the creditors, the furniture, her mother's silver spoons, their clothing and books, the flour, tea, coffee, and sugar in the pantries. She rejoiced to hear that Uncle Joshua Read from Palatine Bridge, New York, had come to the rescue, had bought their most treasured and needed possessions and turned them over to her mother. On a cold blustery March day in 1839, when she was nineteen, Susan moved with her family two miles down the Battenkill to the little settlement of Hardscrabble, later called Center Falls, where her father owned a satinet factory and grist mill, built in more prosperous times. These were now heavily mortgaged but he hoped to save them. They moved into a large house which had been a tavern in the days when lumber had been cut around Hardscrabble. It was disappointing after their fine brick house in Battenville, but they made it comfortable, and their love for and loyalty to each other made them a happy family anywhere. As it had been a halfway house on the road to Troy and travelers continued to stop there asking for a meal or a night's lodging, they took them in, and young Daniel served them food and nonintoxicating drinks at the old tavern bar. Susan, when her school term was over, put her energies into housework, recording in her diary, "Did a large washing today.... Spent today at the spinning wheel.... Baked 21 loaves of bread.... Wove three yards of carpet yesterday."[15] The attic of the tavern had been finished off for a ballroom with bottles laid under the floor to give a nice tone to the music of the fiddles, and now the young people of the village wanted to hold their dancing school there. Susan's father, true to his Quaker training, felt obliged to refuse, but when they came the second time to tell him that the only other place available was a disreputable tavern where liquor was sold, he relented a little, and talked the matter over with his wife and daughters. Lucy Anthony, recalling her love of dancing, urged him to let the young people come. Finally he consented on the condition that Guelma, Hannah, and Susan would not dance. They agreed. Every two weeks all through the winter, the fiddles played in the attic room and the boys and girls of the neighborhood danced the Virginia reel and their rounds and squares, while the three Quaker girls sat around the wall, watching and longing to join in the fun. Such frivolous entertainment in the home of a Quaker could not be condoned, and Daniel Anthony was not only severely censured by the Friends but read out of Meeting, "because he kept a place of amusement in his house." But he did not regret his so-called sin any more than he regretted marrying out of Meeting. He continued to attend Friends' Meeting, but grew more and more liberal as the years went by. At this time, like all Quakers, he refused to vote, not wishing in any way to support a government that believed in war, and this influenced Susan who for some years regarded voting as unimportant. He refused to pay taxes for the same reason, and she often saw him put his pocketbook on the table and then remark drily to the tax collector, "I shall not voluntarily pay these taxes. If thee wants to rifle my pocketbook, thee can do so."[16] * * * * * To help her father with his burden of debt was now Susan's purpose in life, and in the spring she again left the family circle to teach at Eunice Kenyon's Friends' Seminary in New Rochelle, New York. There were twenty-eight day pupils and a few boarders at the seminary, and for long periods while Eunice Kenyon was ill, Susan took full charge. She wrote her family all the little details of her life, but their letters never came often enough to satisfy her. Occasionally she received a paper or a letter from Aaron McLean, Judge McLean's grandson, who had been her good friend and Guelma's ever since they had moved to Battenville. His letters almost always started an argument which both of them continued with zest. After hearing the Quaker preacher, Rachel Barker, she wrote him, "I guess if you would hear her you would believe in a woman's preaching. What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficient for anything but domestic concerns."[17] When New Rochelle welcomed President Van Buren with a parade, bands playing, and crowds in the streets, this prim self-righteous young woman took no part in this hero worship, but gave vent to her disapproval in a letter to Aaron. Disturbed over the treatment Negroes received at Friends' Meeting in New Rochelle, she impulsively wrote him, "The people about here are anti-abolitionist and anti everything else that's good. The Friends raised quite a fuss about a colored man sitting in the meeting house, and some left on account of it.... What a lack of Christianity is this!"[18] Her school term of fifteen weeks, for which she was paid $30, was over early in September, just in time for her to be at home for Guelma's wedding to Aaron McLean, and afterward she stayed on to teach the village school in Center Falls. This made it possible for her to join in the social life of the neighborhood. Often the young people drove to nearby villages, twenty buggies in procession. On a drive to Saratoga, her escort asked her to give up teaching to marry him. She refused, as she did again a few years later when a Quaker elder tried to entice her with his fine house, his many acres, and his sixty cows. Although she had reached the age of twenty, when most girls felt they should be married, she was still particular, and when a friend married a man far inferior mentally, she wrote in her diary, "'Tis strange, 'tis passing strange that a girl possessed of common sense should be willing to marry a lunatic--but so it is."[19] During the next few years, both she and Hannah taught school almost continuously, for $2 to $2.50 a week. Time and time again Susan replaced a man who had been discharged for inefficiency. Although she made a success of the school, she discovered that she was paid only a fourth the salary he had received, and this rankled. Almost everywhere except among Quakers, she encountered a false estimate of women which she instinctively opposed. After spending several months with relatives in Vermont, where she had the unexpected opportunity of studying algebra, she stopped over for a visit with Guelma and Aaron in Battenville, where Aaron was a successful merchant. Eagerly she told them of her latest accomplishment. Aaron was not impressed. Later at dinner when she offered him the delicious cream biscuits which she had baked, he remarked with his most tantalizing air of male superiority, "I'd rather see a woman make biscuits like these than solve the knottiest problem in algebra." "There is no reason," she retorted, "why she should not be able to do both."[20] FOOTNOTES: [1] _Report of the International Council of Women_, 1888 (Washington, 1888), p. 163. [2] Charles B. Waite, "Who Were the Voters in the Early History of This Country?" _Chicago Law Times_, Oct., 1888. [3] Janet Whitney, _Abigail Adams_ (Boston, 1947), p. 129. In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, at the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, "In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors! Do not put such unlimited powers into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation." Ethel Armes, _Stratford Hall_ (Richmond, Va., 1936), pp. 206-209. [4] Under the Missouri Compromise, Maine was admitted as a free state, Missouri as a slave state, and slavery was excluded from all of the Louisiana Purchase, north of latitude 36°31'. [5] The meeting house, built in 1783, is still standing. It is owned by the town of Adams, and cared for by the Adams Society of Friends Descendants. Susan traced her ancestry to William Anthony of Cologne who migrated to England and during the reign of Edward VI, was made Chief Graver of the Royal Mint and Master of the Scales, holding this office also during the reign of Queen Mary and part of Queen Elizabeth's reign. In 1634, one of his descendants, John Anthony, settled in Rhode Island, and just before the Revolution, his great grandson, David, Susan's great grandfather, bought land near Adams, Massachusetts, then regarded as the far West. [6] Ida Husted Harper, _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ (Indianapolis, 1898), I, p. 10. [7] Daniel and Susannah Richardson Read gave Lucy and Daniel Anthony land for their home, midway between the Anthony and Read farms. Here Susan was born in a substantial two-story, frame house, built by her father. [8] Ms., Diary, 1837. [9] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 25. [10] Ms., Diary, Jan. 21, Feb. 10, 1838 [11] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 31. [12] Ms., Diary, Feb. 26, 1838. [13] _Ibid._, Feb. 6, 1838. [14] _Ibid._, May 7, 1838. [15] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 36. [16] _Ibid._, p. 37. [17] _Ibid._, p. 40. [18] _Ibid._, p. 39. [19] _Ibid._ [20] _Ibid._, pp. 43-44. WIDENING HORIZONS Unable to recoup his business losses in Center Falls and losing even the satinet factory, Susan's father had looked about in Virginia and Michigan as well as western New York for an opportunity to make a fresh start. A farm on the outskirts of Rochester looked promising, and with the money which Lucy Anthony had inherited from Grandfather Read and which had been held for her by Uncle Joshua Read, the first payment had been made on the farm by Uncle Joshua, who held it in his name and leased it to Daniel.[21] Had it been turned over to Susan's mother, it would have become Daniel Anthony's property under the law and could have been claimed by his creditors. Only Susan, Merritt, and Mary climbed into the stage with their parents, early in November 1845, on the first lap of their journey to their new home, near Rochester, New York. Guelma and Hannah[22] were both married and settled in homes of their own, and young Daniel, clerking in Lenox, had decided to stay behind. After a visit with Uncle Joshua at Palatine Bridge, they boarded a line boat on the Erie Canal, taking with them their gray horse and wagon; and surrounded by their household goods, they moved slowly westward. Standing beside her father in the warm November sunshine, Susan watched the strong horses on the towpath, plodding patiently ahead, and heard the wash of the water against the prow and the noisy greeting of boat horns. As they passed the snug friendly villages along the canal and the wide fertile fields, now brown and bleak after the harvest, she wondered what the new farm would be like and what the future would bring; and at night when the lights twinkled in the settlements along the shore, she thought longingly of her old home and the sisters she had left behind. After a journey of several days, they reached Rochester late in the afternoon. Her father took the horse and wagon off the boat, and in the chill gray dusk drove them three miles over muddy roads to the farm. It was dark when they arrived, and the house was cold, empty, and dismal, but after the fires were lighted and her mother had cooked a big kettle of cornmeal mush, their spirits revived. Within the next few days they transformed it into a cheerful comfortable home. The house on a little hill overlooked their thirty-two acres. Back of it was the barn, a carriage house, and a little blacksmith shop.[23] Looking out over the flat snowy fields toward the curving Genesee River and the church steeples in Rochester, Susan often thought wistfully of the blue hills around Center Falls and Battenville and of the good times she had had there. The winter was lonely for her in spite of the friendliness of their Quaker neighbors, the De Garmos, and the Quaker families in Rochester who called at once to welcome them. Her father found these neighbors very congenial and they readily interested him in the antislavery movement, now active in western New York. Within the next few months, several antislavery meetings were held in the Anthony home and opened a new world to Susan. For the first time she heard of the Underground Railroad which secretly guided fugitive slaves to Canada and of the Liberty party which was making a political issue of slavery. She listened to serious, troubled discussion of the annexation of Texas, bringing more power to the proslavery block, which even the acquisition of free Oregon could not offset. She read antislavery tracts and copies of William Lloyd Garrison's _Liberator_, borrowed from Quaker friends; and on long winter evenings, as she sat by the fire sewing, she talked over with her father the issues they raised. When spring came and the trees and bushes leafed out, she took more interest in the farm, discovering its good points one by one--the flowering quince along the driveway, the pinks bordering the walk to the front door, the rosebushes in the yard, and cherry trees, currant and gooseberry bushes in abundance. Her father planted peach and apple orchards and worked the "sixpenny farm,"[24] as he called it, to the best of his ability, but the thirty-two acres seemed very small compared with the large Anthony and Read farms in the Berkshires, and he soon began to look about for more satisfying work. This he found a few years later with the New York Life Insurance Company, then developing its business in western New York. Very successful in this new field, he continued in it the rest of his life, but he always kept the farm for the family home. * * * * * The first member of the family to leave the Rochester farm was Susan. The cherry trees were in bloom when she received an offer from Canajoharie Academy to teach the female department. As Canajoharie was across the river from Uncle Joshua Read's home in Palatine Bridge and he was a trustee of the academy, she read between the lines his kindly interest in her. He was an influential citizen of that community, a bank director and part owner of the Albany-Utica turnpike and the stage line to Schenectady. Accepting the offer at once, she made the long journey by canal boat to Canajoharie, and early in May 1846 was comfortably settled in the home of Uncle Joshua's daughter, Margaret Read Caldwell. She soon loved Margaret as a sister and was devoted to her children. None of her new friends were Quakers and she enjoyed their social life thoroughly, leaving behind her forever the somber clothing which she had heretofore regarded as a mark of righteousness. She began her school with twenty-five pupils and a yearly salary of approximately $110. This was more than she had ever earned before, and for the first time in her life she spent her money freely on herself. Her first quarterly examination, held before the principal, the trustees, and parents, established her reputation as a teacher, and in addition everyone said, "The schoolmarm looks beautiful."[25] She had dressed up for the occasion, wearing a new plaid muslin, purple, white, blue, and brown, with white collar and cuffs, and had hung a gold watch and chain about her neck. She wound the four braids of her smooth brown hair around her big shell comb and put on her new prunella gaiters with patent-leather heels and tips. She looked so pretty, so neat, and so capable that many of the parents feared some young man would fall desperately in love with her and rob the academy of a teacher. She did have more than her share of admirers. She soon saw her first circus and went to her first ball, a real novelty for the young woman who had sat demurely along the wall in the attic room of her Center Falls home while her more worldly friends danced. In spite of all her good times, she missed her family, but because of the long trip to Rochester, she did not return to the farm for two years. She spent her vacations with Guelma and Hannah, who lived only a few hours away, or in Albany with her former teacher at Deborah Moulson's seminary, Lydia Mott, a cousin by marriage of Lucretia Mott. In anticipation of a vacation at home, she wrote her parents, "Sometimes I can hardly wait for the day to come. They have talked of building a new academy this summer, but I do not believe they will. My room is not fit to stay in and I have promised myself that I would not pass another winter in it. If I must forever teach, I will seek at least a comfortable house to do penance in. I have a pleasant school of twenty scholars, but I have to manufacture the interest duty compels me to exhibit.... Energy and something to stimulate is wanting! But I expect the busy summer vacation spent with my dearest and truest friends will give me new life and fresh courage to persevere in the arduous path of duty. Do not think me unhappy with my fate, no not so. I am only a little tired and a good deal lazy. That is all. Do write very soon. Tell about the strawberries and peaches, cherries and plums.... Tell me how the yard looks, what flowers are in bloom and all about the farming business."[26] * * * * * During her visits in Albany with Lydia Mott, who was now an active abolitionist, Susan heard a great deal about antislavery work. At this time, however, Canajoharie took little interest in this reform movement, but temperance was gaining a foothold. Throughout the country, Sons of Temperance were organizing and women wanted to help, but the men refused to admit them to their organizations, protesting that public reform was outside women's sphere. Unwilling to be put off when the need was so great, women formed their own secret temperance societies, and then, growing bolder, announced themselves as Daughters of Temperance. Canajoharie had its Daughters of Temperance, and Susan, long an advocate of temperance, gladly joined the crusade, and made her first speech when the Daughters of Temperance held a supper meeting to interest the people of the village. Few women at this time could have been persuaded to address an audience of both men and women, believing this to be bold, unladylike, and contrary to the will of God; but the young Quaker, whose grandmother and aunts had always spoken in Meeting when the spirit moved them, was ready to say her word for temperance, taking it for granted that it was not only woman's right but her responsibility to speak and work for social reform. About two hundred people assembled for the supper, and entering the hall, Susan found it festooned with cedar and red flannel and to her amazement saw letters in evergreen on one of the walls, spelling out Susan B. Anthony. "I hardly knew how to conduct myself amidst so much kindly regard,"[27] she confided to her family. She had carefully written out her speech and had sewn the pages together in a blue cover. Now in a clear serious voice, she read its formal flowery sentences telling of the weekly meetings of "this now despised little band" which had awakened women to the great need of reform. "It is generally conceded," she declared, "that our sex fashions the social and moral state of society. We do not assume that females possess unbounded power in abolishing the evil customs of the day; but we do believe that were they en masse to discontinue the use of wine and brandy as beverages at both their public and private parties, not one of the opposite sex, who has any claim to the title of gentleman, would so insult them as to come into their presence after having quaffed of that foul destroyer of all true delicacy and refinement.... Ladies! There is no neutral position for us to assume...."[28] The next day the village buzzed with talk of the meeting; only a few criticized Susan for speaking in public, and almost all agreed that she was the smartest woman in Canajoharie. While she was busy with her temperance work, there were stirrings among women in other parts of New York State in the spring and early summer of 1848. Through the efforts of a few women who circulated petitions and the influence of wealthy men who saw irresponsible sons-in-law taking over the property they wanted their daughters to own, a Married Women's Property Law passed the legislature; this made it possible for a married woman to hold real estate in her own name. Heretofore all property owned by a woman at marriage and all received by gift or inheritance had at once become her husband's and he had had the right to sell it or will it away without her consent and to collect the rents or the income. The new law was welcomed in the Anthony household, for now Lucy Anthony's inheritance, which had bought the Rochester farm, could at last be put in her own name and need no longer be held for her by her brother. In the newspapers in July, Susan read scornful, humorous, and indignant reports of a woman's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York, at which women had issued a Declaration of Sentiments, announcing themselves men's equals. They had protested against legal, economic, social, and educational discriminations and asked for the franchise. A woman's rights convention in the 1840s was a startling event. Women, if they were "ladies" did not attend public gatherings where politics or social reforms were discussed, because such subjects were regarded as definitely out of their sphere. Much less did they venture to call meetings of their own and issue bold resolutions. Susan was not shocked by this break with tradition, but she did not instinctively come to the defense of these rebellious women, nor champion their cause. She was amused rather than impressed. Yet Lucretia Mott's presence at the convention aroused her curiosity. Among her father's Quaker friends in Rochester, she had heard only praise of Mrs. Mott, and she herself, when a pupil at Deborah Moulson's seminary, had been inspired by Mrs. Mott's remarks at Friends' Meeting in Philadelphia. So far Susan had encountered few barriers because she was a woman. She had had little personal contact with the hardships other women suffered because of their inferior legal status. To be sure, it had been puzzling to her as child that Sally Hyatt, the most skillful weaver in her father's mill, had never been made overseer, but the fact that her mother had not the legal right to hold property in her own name did not at the time make an impression upon her. Brought up as a Quaker, she had no obstacles put in the way of her education. She had an exceptional father who was proud of his daughters' intelligence and ability and respected their opinions and decisions. Her only real complaint was the low salary she had been obliged to accept as a teacher because she was a woman. She sensed a feeling of male superiority, which she resented, in her brother-in-law, Aaron McLean, who did not approve of women preachers and who thought it more important for a woman to bake biscuits than to study algebra. She met the same arrogance of sex in her Cousin Margaret's husband, but she had not analyzed the cause, or seen the need of concerted action by women. Returning home for her vacation in August, she found to her surprise that a second woman's rights convention had been held in Rochester in the Unitarian church, that her mother, her father, and her sister Mary, and many of their Quaker friends had not only attended, but had signed the Declaration of Sentiments and the resolutions, and that her cousin, Sarah Burtis Anthony, had acted as secretary. Her father showed so much interest, as he told her about the meetings, that she laughingly remarked, "I think you are getting a good deal ahead of the times."[29] She countered Mary's ardent defense of the convention with good-natured ridicule. The whole family, however, continued to be so enthusiastic over the meetings and this new movement for woman's rights, they talked so much about Elizabeth Cady Stanton "with her black curls and ruddy cheeks"[30] and about Lucretia Mott "with her Quaker cap and her crossed handkerchief of the finest muslin," both "speaking so grandly and looking magnificent," that Susan's interest was finally aroused and she decided she would like to meet these women and talk with them. There was no opportunity for this, however, before she returned to Canajoharie for another year of teaching. It proved to be a year of great sadness because of the illness of her cousin Margaret whom she loved dearly. In addition to her teaching, she nursed Margaret and looked after the house and children. She saw much to discredit the belief that men were the stronger and women the weaker sex, and impatient with Margaret's husband, she wrote her mother that there were some drawbacks to marriage that made a woman quite content to remain single. In explanation she added, "Joseph had a headache the other day and Margaret remarked that she had had one for weeks. 'Oh,' said the husband, 'mine is the real headache, genuine pain, yours is sort of a natural consequence.'"[31] Within a few weeks Margaret died. This was heart-breaking for Susan, and without her cousin, Canajoharie offered little attraction. Teaching had become irksome. The new principal was uncongenial, a severe young man from the South whose father was a slaveholder. Susan longed for a change, and as she read of the young men leaving for the West, lured by gold in California, she envied them their adventure and their opportunity to explore and conquer a whole new world. [Illustration: Frederick Douglass] * * * * * The peaches were ripe when Susan returned to the farm. The orchard which her father had planted, now bore abundantly. Restless and eager for hard physical work, she discarded the stylish hoops which impeded action, put on an old calico dress, and spent days in the warm September sunshine picking peaches. Then while she preserved, canned, and pickled them, there was little time to long for pioneering in the West. She enjoyed the active life on the farm for she was essentially a doer, most happy when her hands and her mind were busy. As she helped with the housework, wove rag carpet, or made shirts by hand for her father and brothers, she dreamed of the future, of the work she might do to make her life count for something. Teaching, she decided, was definitely behind her. She would not allow her sister Mary's interest in that career to persuade her otherwise, even if teaching were the only promising and well-thought-of occupation for women. Reading the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she was deeply stirred and looked forward romantically to some great and useful life work. The _Liberator_, with its fearless denunciation of Negro slavery, now came regularly to the Anthony home, and as she pored over its pages, its message fired her soul. Eagerly she called with her father at the home of Frederick Douglass, who had recently settled in Rochester and was publishing his paper, the _North Star_. Not only did she want to show friendliness to this free Negro of whose intelligence and eloquence she had heard so much, but she wanted to hear first-hand from him and his wife of the needs of his people. Almost every Sunday the antislavery Quakers met at the Anthony farm. The Posts, the Hallowells, the De Garmos, and the Willises were sure to be there. Sometimes they sent a wagon into the city for Frederick Douglass and his family. Now and then famous abolitionists joined the circle when their work brought them to western New York--William Lloyd Garrison, looking with fatherly kindness at his friends through his small steel-rimmed spectacles; Wendell Phillips, handsome, learned, and impressive; black-bearded, fiery Parker Pillsbury; and the friendly Unitarian pastor from Syracuse, the Reverend Samuel J. May. Susan, helping her mother with dinner for fifteen or twenty, was torn between establishing her reputation as a good cook and listening to the interesting conversation. She heard them discuss woman's rights, which had divided the antislavery ranks. They talked of their antislavery campaigns and the infamous compromises made by Congress to pacify the powerful slaveholding interests. Like William Lloyd Garrison, all of them refused to vote, not wishing to take any part in a government which countenanced slavery. They called the Constitution a proslavery document, advocated "No Union with Slaveholders," and demanded immediate and unconditional emancipation. All about them and with their help the Underground Railroad was operating, circumventing the Fugitive Slave Law and guiding Negro refugees to Canada and freedom. Amy and Isaac Post's barn, Susan knew, was a station on the Underground, and the De Garmos and Frederick Douglass almost always had a Negro hidden away. She heard of riots and mobs in Boston and Ohio; but in Rochester not a fugitive was retaken and there were no street battles, although the New York _Herald_ advised the city to throw its "nigger printing press"[32] into Lake Ontario and banish Douglass to Canada. As the Society of Friends in Rochester was unfriendly to the antislavery movement, Susan with her father and other liberal Hicksite Quakers left it for the Unitarian church. Here for the first time they listened to "hireling ministry" and to a formal church service with music. This was a complete break with what they had always known as worship, but the friendly Christian spirit expressed by both minister and congregation made them soon feel at home. This new religious fellowship put Susan in touch with the most advanced thought of the day, broke down some of the rigid precepts drilled into her at Deborah Moulson's seminary, and encouraged liberalism and tolerance. Although there had been austerity in the outward forms of her Quaker training, it had developed in her a very personal religion, a strong sense of duty, and a high standard of ethics, which always remained with her. It had fostered a love of mankind that reached out spontaneously to help the needy, the unfortunate, and the oppressed, and this now became the driving force of her life. It led her naturally to seek ways and means to free the Negro from slavery and to turn to the temperance movement to wipe out the evil of drunkenness. These were the days when the reformed drunkard, John B. Gough, was lecturing throughout the country with the zeal of an evangelist, getting thousands to sign the total-abstinence pledge. Inspired by his example, the Daughters of Temperance were active in Rochester. They elected Susan their president, and not only did she plan suppers and festivals to raise money for their work but she organized new societies in neighboring towns. Her more ambitious plans for them were somewhat delayed by home responsibilities which developed when her father became an agent of the New York Life Insurance Company. This took him away from home a great deal, and as both her brothers were busy with work of their own and Mary was teaching, it fell to Susan to take charge of the farm. She superintended the planting, the harvesting, and the marketing, and enjoyed it, but she did not let it crowd out her interest in the causes which now seemed so vital. Horace Greeley's New York _Tribune_ came regularly to the farm, for the Anthonys, like many others throughout the country, had come to depend upon it for what they felt was a truthful report of the news. In this day of few magazines, it met a real need, and Susan, poring over its pages, not only kept in touch with current events, but found inspiration in its earnest editorials which so often upheld the ideals which she felt were important. She found thought-provoking news in the full and favorable report of the national woman's rights convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1850. Better informed now through her antislavery friends about this new movement for woman's rights, she was ready to consider it seriously and she read all the stirring speeches, noting the caliber of the men and women taking part. Garrison, Phillips, Pillsbury, and Lucretia Mott were there, as well as Lucy Stone, that appealing young woman of whose eloquence on the antislavery platform Susan had heard so much, and Abby Kelley Foster, whose appointment to office in the American Antislavery Society had precipitated a split in the ranks on the "woman question." * * * * * A year later, when Abby Kelley Foster and her husband Stephen spoke at antislavery meetings in Rochester, Susan had her first opportunity to meet this fearless woman. Listening to Abby's speeches and watching the play of emotion on her eager Irish face under the Quaker bonnet, Susan wondered if she would ever have the courage to follow her example. Like herself, Abby had started as a schoolteacher, but after hearing Theodore Weld speak, had devoted herself to the antislavery cause, traveling alone through the country to say her word against slavery and facing not only the antagonism which abolition always provoked, but the unreasoning prejudice against public speaking by women, which was fanned into flame by the clergy. For listening to Abby Kelley, men and women had been excommunicated. Mobs had jeered at her and often pelted her with rotten eggs. She had married a fellow-abolitionist, Stephen Foster, even more unrelenting than she. Sensing Susan's interest in the antislavery cause and hoping to make an active worker of her, Abby and Stephen suggested that she join them on a week's tour, during which she marveled at Abby's ability to hold the attention and meet the arguments of her unfriendly audiences and wondered if she could ever be moved to such eloquence. Not yet ready to join the ranks as a lecturer, she continued her apprenticeship by attending antislavery meetings whenever possible and traveled to Syracuse for the convention which the mob had driven out of New York. Eager for more, she stopped over in Seneca Falls to hear William Lloyd Garrison and the English abolitionist, George Thompson, and was the guest of a temperance colleague, Amelia Bloomer, an enterprising young woman who was editing a temperance paper for women, _The Lily_. To her surprise Susan found Amelia in the bloomer costume about which she had read in _The Lily_. Introduced in Seneca Falls by Elizabeth Smith Miller, the costume, because of its comfort, had so intrigued Amelia that she had advocated it in her paper and it had been dubbed with her name. Looking at Amelia's long full trousers, showing beneath her short skirt but modestly covering every inch of her leg, Susan was a bit startled. Yet she could understand the usefulness of the costume even if she had no desire to wear it herself. In fact she was more than ever pleased with her new gray delaine dress with its long full skirt. Seneca Falls, however, had an attraction for Susan far greater than either William Lloyd Garrison or Amelia Bloomer, for it was the home of Elizabeth Cady Stanton whom she had longed to meet ever since 1848 when her parents had reported so enthusiastically about her and the Rochester woman's rights convention. Walking home from the antislavery meeting with Mrs. Bloomer, Susan met Mrs. Stanton. She liked her at once and later called at her home. They discussed abolition, temperance, and woman's rights, and with every word Susan's interest grew. Mrs. Stanton's interest in woman's rights and her forthright, clear thinking made an instant appeal. Never before had Susan had such a satisfactory conversation with another woman, and she thought her beautiful. Mrs. Stanton's deep blue eyes with their mischievous twinkle, her rosy cheeks and short dark hair gave her a very youthful appearance, and it was hard for Susan to realize she was the mother of three lively boys. Susan listened enthralled while Mrs. Stanton told how deeply she had been moved as a child by the pitiful stories of the women who came to her father's law office, begging for relief from the unjust property laws which turned over their inheritance and their earnings to their husbands. For the first time, Susan heard the story of the exclusion of women delegates from the World's antislavery convention in London, in 1840, which Mrs. Stanton had attended with her husband and where she became the devoted friend of Lucretia Mott. She now better understood why these two women had called the first woman's rights convention in 1848 at which Mrs. Stanton had made the first public demand for woman suffrage. [Illustration: Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her "Bloomer costume"] They talked about the bloomer costume which Mrs. Stanton now wore and about dress reform which at the moment seemed to Mrs. Stanton an important phase of the woman's rights movement, and she pointed out to Susan the advantages of the bloomer in the life of a busy housekeeper who ran up and down stairs carrying babies, lamps, and buckets of water. She praised the freedom it gave from uncomfortable stays and tight lacing, confident it would be a big factor in improving the health of women. Thoroughly interested, Susan left Seneca Falls with much to think about, but not yet converted to the bloomer costume, or even to woman suffrage. Of one thing, however, she was certain. She wanted this woman of vision and courage for her friend. FOOTNOTES: [21] Anthony Collection, Museum of Arts and Sciences, Rochester, New York. [22] Hannah Anthony married Eugene Mosher, a merchant of Easton, New York, on September 4, 1845. [23] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Memorial Collection, Rochester, New York. [24] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 48. [25] _Ibid._, p. 50. [26] May 28, 1848, Lucy E. Anthony Collection. [27] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 53. [28] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. [29] _Report of the International Council of Women_, 1888, p. 327. [30] To Nora Blatch, n.d., Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College Library, Poughkeepsie, New York. [31] Harper, _Anthony_, I. p. 52. [32] Amy H. Croughton, _Antislavery Days in Rochester_ (Rochester, N.Y., 1936). Anyone implicated in the escape of a slave was liable to $1000 fine, to the payment of $1000 to the owner of the fugitive, and to a possible jail sentence of six months. FREEDOM TO SPEAK Susan was soon rejoicing at the prospect of meeting Lucy Stone and Horace Greeley, the editor of the New York _Tribune_. Mrs. Stanton had invited her to Seneca Falls to discuss with them and other influential men and women the founding of a people's college. Unhesitatingly she joined forces with Mrs. Stanton and Lucy Stone to insist that the people's college be opened to women on the same terms as men. Lucy had proved the practicability of this as a student at Oberlin, the first college to admit women, and was one of the first women to receive a college degree. However, to suggest coeducation in those days was enough to jeopardize the founding of a college, and Horace Greeley stood out against them, his babylike face, fringed with throat whiskers, getting redder by the moment as he begged them not to agitate the question. The people's college did not materialize, but out of this meeting grew a friendship between Susan, Elizabeth Stanton, and Lucy Stone, which developed the woman's rights movement in the United States. Susan discovered at once that Lucy, like Mrs. Stanton, was an ardent advocate of woman's rights. Brought up in a large family on a farm in western Massachusetts where a woman's lot was an unending round of hard work with no rights over her children or property, Lucy had seen much to make her rebellious. Resolving to free herself from this bondage, she had worked hard for an education, finally reaching Oberlin College. Here she held out for equal rights in education, and now as she went through the country, pleading for the abolition of slavery, she was not only putting into practice woman's right to express herself on public affairs, but was scattering woman's rights doctrine wherever she went. Listening to this rosy-cheeked, enthusiastic young woman with her little snub nose and soulful gray eyes, Susan began to realize how little opposition in comparison she herself had met because she was a woman. Not only had her father encouraged her to become a teacher, but he had actually aroused her interest in such causes as abolition, temperance, and woman's rights, while both Lucy and Mrs. Stanton had met disapproval and resistance all the way. [Illustration: Lucy Stone] She found Lucy, as well as Mrs. Stanton, in the bloomer dress, praising its convenience. As Lucy traveled about lecturing, in all kinds of weather, climbing on trains, into carriages, and walking on muddy streets, she found it much more practical and comfortable than the fashionable long full skirts. Nevertheless, there was discomfort in being stared at on the streets and in the chagrin of her friends. This reform was much on their minds and they discussed it pro and con, for Mrs. Stanton was facing real persecution in Seneca Falls, with boys screaming "breeches" at her when she appeared in the street and with her husband's political opponents ridiculing her costume in their campaign speeches. Both women, however, felt it their duty to bear this cross to free women from the bondage of cumbersome clothing, hoping always that the bloomer, because of its utility, would win converts and finally become the fashion. Susan admired their courage, but still could not be persuaded to put on the bloomer. Fired with their zeal, she began planning what she herself might do to rouse women. The idea of a separate woman's rights movement did not as yet enter her mind. Her thoughts turned rather to the two national reform movements already well under way, temperance and antislavery. While a career as an antislavery worker appealed strongly to her, she felt unqualified when she measured herself with the courageous Grimké sisters from South Carolina, or with Abby Kelley Foster, Lucy Stone, and the eloquent men in the movement. She had made a place for herself locally in temperance societies, and she decided that her work was there--to make women an active, important part of this reform. That winter, as a delegate of the Rochester Daughters of Temperance, she went with high hopes to the state convention of the Sons of Temperance in Albany, where she visited Lydia Mott and her sister Abigail, who lived in a small house on Maiden Lane. Both Lydia and Abigail, because of their independence, interested Susan greatly. They supported themselves by "taking in" boarders from among the leading politicians in Albany. They also kept a men's furnishings store on Broadway and made hand-ruffled shirt bosoms and fine linen accessories for Thurlow Weed, Horatio Seymour, and other influential citizens. Their political contacts were many and important, and yet they were also among the very few in that conservative city who stood for temperance, abolition of slavery, and woman's rights. Their home was a rallying point for reformers and a refuge for fugitive slaves. It was to be a second home to Susan in the years to come. When Susan and the other women delegates entered the convention of the Sons of Temperance, they looked forward proudly, if a bit timidly, to taking part in the meetings, but when Susan spoke to a motion, the chairman, astonished that a woman would be so immodest as to speak in a public meeting, scathingly announced, "The sisters were not invited here to speak, but to listen and to learn."[33] This was the first time that Susan had been publicly rebuked because she was a woman, and she did not take it lightly. Leaving the hall with several other indignant women delegates, amid the critical whisperings of those who remained "to listen and to learn," she hurried over to Lydia's shop to ask her advice on the next step to be taken. Lydia, delighted that they had had the spirit to leave the meeting, suggested they engage the lecture room of the Hudson Street Presbyterian Church and hold a meeting of their own that very night. She went with them to the office of her friend Thurlow Weed, the editor of the _Evening Journal_, who published the whole story in his paper. [Illustration: Susan B. Anthony at the age of thirty-four] Well in advance of the meeting, Susan was at the church, feeling very responsible, and when she saw Samuel J. May enter, she was greatly relieved. He had read the notice in the _Evening Journal_ and persuaded a friend to come with him. To see his genial face in the audience gave her confidence, for he would speak easily and well if others should fail her. Only a few people drifted into the meeting, for the night was snowy and cold. The room was poorly lighted, the stove smoked, and in the middle of the speeches, the stovepipe fell down. Yet in spite of all this, a spirit of independence and accomplishment was born in that gathering and plans were made to call a woman's state temperance convention in Rochester with Susan in charge. All this Susan reported to her new friend, Elizabeth Stanton, who promised to help all she could, urging that the new organization lead the way and not follow the advice of cautious, conservative women. Susan agreed, and as a first step in carrying out this policy, she asked Mrs. Stanton to make the keynote speech of the convention. Soon the Woman's State Temperance Society was a going concern with Mrs. Stanton as president and Susan as secretary. There was no doubt about its leading the way far ahead of the rank and file of the temperance movement when Mrs. Stanton, with Susan's full approval, recommended divorce on the grounds of drunkenness, declaring, "Let us petition our State government so to modify the laws affecting marriage and the custody of children that the drunkard shall have no claims on wife and child."[34] Such independence on the part of women could not be tolerated, and both the press and the clergy ruthlessly denounced the Woman's State Temperance Society. Susan, however, did not take this too seriously, familiar as she was with the persecution antislavery workers endured when they frankly expressed their convictions. * * * * * Now recognized as the leader of women's temperance groups in New York, Susan traveled throughout the state, organizing temperance societies, getting subscriptions for Amelia Bloomer's temperance paper, _The Lily_, and attending temperance conventions in spite of the fact that she met determined opposition to the participation of women. Impressed by the success of political action in Maine, where in 1851 the first prohibition law in the country had been passed, she now signed her letters, "Yours for Temperance Politics."[35] She appealed to women to petition for a Maine law for New York and brought a group of women before the legislature for the first time for a hearing on this prohibition bill. Realizing then that women's indirect influence could be of little help in political action, she saw clearly that women needed the vote. However, it was the woman's rights convention in Syracuse, New York, in September 1852, which turned her thoughts definitely in the direction of votes for women. It was the first woman's rights gathering she had ever attended and she was enthusiastic over the people she met. She talked eagerly with the courageous Jewish lecturer, Ernestine Rose; with Dr. Harriot K. Hunt of Boston, one of the first women physicians, who was waging a battle against taxation without representation; with Clarina Nichols of Vermont, editor of the _Windham County Democrat_, and with Matilda Joslyn Gage, the youngest member of the convention. All of these became valuable, loyal friends in the years ahead. Susan renewed her acquaintance with Lucy Stone, and met Antoinette Brown who had also studied at Oberlin College and was now the first woman ordained as a minister. With real pleasure she greeted Mrs. Stanton's cousin, Gerrit Smith, now Congressman from New York, and his daughter, Elizabeth Smith Miller, the originator of the much-discussed bloomer. Best of all was her long-hoped-for meeting with James and Lucretia Mott and Lucretia's sister, Martha C. Wright. Only Paulina Wright Davis of Providence and Elizabeth Oakes Smith of Boston were disappointing, for they appeared at the meetings in short-sleeved, low-necked dresses with loose-fitting jackets of pink and blue wool, shocking her deeply intrenched Quaker instincts. Although she realized that they wore ultrafashionable clothes to show the world that not all woman's rights advocates were frumps wearing the hideous bloomer, she could not forgive them for what to her seemed bad taste. How could such women, she asked herself, hope to represent the earnest, hard-working women who must be the backbone of the equal rights movement? Always forthright, when a principle was at stake, she expressed her feelings frankly when James Mott, serving with her on the nominating committee, proposed Elizabeth Oakes Smith for president. His reply, that they must not expect all women to dress as plainly as the Friends, in no way quieted her opposition. To her delight, Lucretia Mott was elected, and her dignity and poise as president of this large convention of 2,000 won the respect even of the critical press. Susan was elected secretary and so clearly could her voice be heard as she read the minutes and the resolutions that the Syracuse _Standard_ commented, "Miss Anthony has a capital voice and deserves to be clerk of the Assembly."[36] [Illustration: James and Lucretia Mott] Not all of the newspapers were so friendly. Some labeled the gathering "a Tomfoolery convention" of "Aunt Nancy men and brawling women"; others called it "the farce at Syracuse,"[37] but for Susan it marked a milestone. Never before had she heard so many earnest, intelligent women plead so convincingly for property rights, civil rights, and the ballot. Never before had she seen so clearly that in a republic women as well as men should enjoy these rights. The ballot assumed a new importance for her. Her conversion to woman suffrage was complete. * * * * * This new interest in the vote was steadily nurtured by Elizabeth Stanton, whom Susan now saw more frequently. Whenever she could, Susan stopped over in Seneca Falls for a visit. Here she found inspiration, new ideas, and good advice, and always left the comfortable Stanton home ready to battle for the rights of women. While Susan traveled about, organizing temperance societies and attending conventions, Mrs. Stanton, tied down at home by a family of young children, wrote letters and resolutions for her and helped her with her speeches. Susan was very reluctant about writing speeches or making them. The moment she sat down to write, her thoughts refused to come and her phrases grew stilted. She needed encouragement, and Mrs. Stanton gave it unstintingly, for she had grown very fond of this young woman whose mental companionship she found so stimulating. During one of these visits, Susan finally put on the bloomer and cut her long thick brown hair as part of the stern task of winning freedom for women. It was not an easy decision and she came to it only because she was unwilling to do less for the cause than Mrs. Stanton or Lucy Stone. Comfortable as the new dress was, it always attracted unfavorable attention and added fuel to the fire of an unfriendly press. This fire soon scorched her at the World's Temperance convention in New York, where women delegates faced the determined animosity of the clergy, who held the balance of power and quoted the Bible to prove that women were defying the will of God when they took part in public meetings. Obliged to withdraw, the women held meetings of their own in the Broadway Tabernacle, over which Susan presided with a poise and confidence undreamed of a few months before. A success in every way, they were nevertheless described by the press as a battle of the sexes, a free-for-all struggle in which shrill-voiced women in the bloomer costume were supported by a few "male Betties." The New York _Sun_ spoke of Susan's "ungainly form rigged out in the bloomer costume and provoking the thoughtless to laughter and ridicule by her very motions on the platform."[38] Untruth was piled upon untruth until dignified ladylike Susan with her earnest pleasing appearance was caricatured into everything a woman should not be. Less courageous temperance women now began to wonder whether they ought to associate with such a strong-minded woman as Susan B. Anthony. There were rumblings of discontent when the Woman's State Temperance Society met in Rochester for its next annual convention in June 1853, and Susan and Mrs. Stanton were roundly criticized because they did not confine themselves to the subject of temperance and talked too much about woman's rights. Not only was Mrs. Stanton defeated for the presidency but the by-laws were amended to make men eligible as officers. Men had been barred when the first by-laws were drafted by Susan and Mrs. Stanton because they wished to make the society a proving ground for women and were convinced that men holding office would take over the management, and women, less experienced, would yield to their wishes. This now proved to be the case, as the men began to do all the talking, calling for a new name for the society and insisting that all discussion of woman's rights be ruled out. In the face of this clear indication of a determined new policy which few of the women wished to resist, Susan refused re-election as secretary and both she and Mrs. Stanton resigned. This was Susan's first experience with intrigue and her first rebuff by women whom she had sincerely tried to serve. Defeated, hurt, and uncertain, she poured out her disappointment in troubled letters to Elizabeth Stanton, who, with the steadying touch of an older sister, roused her with the challenge, "We have other and bigger fish to fry."[39] * * * * * A few months later, Susan was off on a new crusade as she attended the state teachers' convention in Rochester. Of the five hundred teachers present, two-thirds were women, but there was not the slightest recognition of their presence. They filled the back seats of Corinthian Hall, forming an inert background for the vocal minority, the men. After sitting through two days' sessions and growing more and more impatient as not one woman raised her voice, Susan listened, as long as she could endure it, to a lengthy debate on the question, "Why the profession of teacher is not as much respected as that of lawyer, doctor, or minister."[40] Then she rose to her feet and in a low-pitched, clear voice addressed the chairman. At the sound of a woman's voice, an astonished rustle of excitement swept through the audience, and when the chairman, Charles Davies, Professor of Mathematics at West Point, had recovered from his surprise, he patronizingly asked, "What will the lady have?" "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] [Illustration: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her son, Henry] 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. [Illustration: Ernestine Rose] 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. [Illustration: Parker Pillsbury] 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 Brontë_, 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 Grimké, many women in sanitoriums and some of the Lowell, Mass. mill workers. In Ohio, the bloomer was so popular that 60 women in Akron wore it at a ball, and in Battle Creek, Michigan, 31 attended a Fourth of July celebration in the bloomer. Amelia Bloomer, moving to the West wore it for eight years. Garrison, Phillips, and William Henry Channing disapproved of the bloomer costume, but Gerrit Smith continued to champion it and his daughter wore it at fashionable receptions in Washington during his term in Congress. [46] _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 608. [47] 1854 (copy), Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection. [48] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 111-112. [49] March 3, 1854 (copy), Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection. [50] Ms., Diary, March 24, 28, 1854. [51] _Ibid._, March 29, 1854. [52] _Ibid._, March 30, 1854. [53] The New England Emigrant Aid Company, headed by Eli Thayer of Worcester, was formed to send free-soil settlers to Kansas, offering reduced fare and farm equipment. Their first settlers reached Kansas in August, 1854, founding the town of Lawrence in honor of one of their chief patrons, the wealthy Amos Lawrence of Massachusetts. [54] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 121. [55] Diary, April 28, 1854. [56] Leonard C. Ehrlich, _God's Angry Man_ (New York, 1941), p. 57. [57] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 122. [58] Caroline Cowles Richards, _Village Life in America_ (New York, 1913), p. 49. [59] 1858, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection. [60] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 133. [61] _Ibid._ [62] Eliza J. Eddy's husband, James Eddy, took their two young daughters away from their mother and to Europe, causing her great anguish. This led her father, Francis Jackson, to give liberally to the woman's rights cause. Mrs. Eddy, herself, left a bequest of $56,000 to be divided between Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone. [63] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 131-133. [64] _Ibid._, p. 138. [65] _Ibid._, p. 139. [66] Jan. 18, 1856, Garrison Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College. [67] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 140-141. [68] May 25, 1856, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection. NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS Susan's thoughts during the summer of 1856 often strayed from woman's rights meetings toward Kansas, where her brother Merritt had settled on a claim near Osawatomie. Well aware of his eagerness to help John Brown, she knew that he must be in the thick of the bloody antislavery struggle. In fact the whole Anthony family had been anxiously waiting for news from Merritt ever since the wires had flashed word in May 1856 of the burning of Lawrence by proslavery "border ruffians" from Missouri and of John Brown's raid in retaliation at Pottawatomie Creek. Merritt had built a log cabin at Osawatomie. While Susan was at home in September, the newspapers reported an attack by proslavery men on Osawatomie in which thirty out of fifty settlers were killed. Was Merritt among them? Finally letters came through from him. Susan read and reread them, assuring herself of his safety. Although ill at the time, he had been in the thick of the fight, but was unharmed. Weak from the exertion he had crawled back to his cabin on his hands and knees and had lain there ill and alone for several weeks. Parts of Merritt's letters were published in the Rochester _Democrat_, and the city took sides in the conflict, some papers claiming that his letters were fiction. Susan wrote Merritt, "How much rather would I have you at my side tonight than to think of your daring and enduring greater hardships even than our Revolutionary heroes. Words cannot tell how often we think of you or how sadly we feel that the terrible crime of this nation against humanity is being avenged on the heads of our sons and brothers.... Father brings the _Democrat_ giving a list of killed, wounded, and missing and the name of our Merritt is not therein, but oh! the slain are sons, brothers, and husbands of others as dearly loved and sadly mourned."[69] With difficulty, she prepared for the annual woman's rights convention, for the country was in a state of unrest not only over Kansas and the whole antislavery question, but also over the presidential campaign with three candidates in the field. Even her faithful friends Horace Greeley and Gerrit Smith now failed her, Horace Greeley writing that he could no longer publish her notices free in the news columns of his _Tribune_, because they cast upon him the stigma of ultraradicalism, and Gerrit Smith withholding his hitherto generous financial support because woman's rights conventions would not press for dress reform--comfortable clothing for women suitable for an active life, which he believed to be the foundation stone of women's emancipation. [Illustration: Merritt Anthony] She watched the lively bitter presidential campaign with interest and concern. The new Republican party was in the contest, offering its first presidential candidate, the colorful hero and explorer of the far West, John C. Frémont. She had leanings toward this virile young party which stood firmly against the extension of slavery in the territories, and discussed its platform with Elizabeth and Henry B. Stanton, both enthusiastically for "Frémont and Freedom." Yet she was distrustful of political parties, for they eventually yielded to expediency, no matter how high their purpose at the start. Her ideal was the Garrisonian doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders" and "Immediate Unconditional Emancipation," which courageously faced the "whole question" of slavery. There was no compromise among Garrisonians. With the burning issue of slavery now uppermost in her mind, she began seriously to reconsider the offer she had received from the American Antislavery Society, shortly after her visit to Boston in 1855, to act as their agent in central and western New York. Unable to accept at that time because she was committed to her woman's rights program, she had nevertheless felt highly honored that she had been chosen. Still hesitating a little, she wrote Lucy Stone, wanting reassurance that no woman's rights work demanded immediate attention. "They talk of sending two companies of Lecturers into this state," she wrote Lucy, "wish me to lay out the route of each one and accompany one. They seem to think me possessed of a vast amount of executive ability. I shrink from going into Conventions where speaking is expected of me.... I know they want me to help about finance and that part I like and am good for nothing else."[70] She also had the farm home on her mind. With her father in the insurance business, her brothers now both in Kansas, her sister Mary teaching in the Rochester schools and "looking matrimonially-wise," and her mother at home all alone, Susan often wondered if it might not be as much her duty to stay there to take care of her mother and father as it would be to make a home comfortable for a husband. Sometimes the quietness of such a life beckoned enticingly. But after the disappointing November elections which put into the presidency the conservative James Buchanan, from whom only a vacillating policy on the slavery issue could be expected, she wrote Samuel May, Jr., the secretary of the American Antislavery Society, "I shall be very glad if I am able to render even the most humble service to this cause. Heaven knows there is need of earnest, effective radical workers. The heart sickens over the delusions of the recent campaign and turns achingly to the unconsidered _whole question_."[71] His reply came promptly, "We put all New York into your control and want your name to all letters and your hand in all arrangements." For $10 a week and expenses, Susan now arranged antislavery meetings, displayed posters bearing the provocative words, "No Union with Slaveholders," planned tours for a corps of speakers, among them Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, Parker Pillsbury, and two free Negroes, Charles Remond and his sister, Sarah. In debt from her last woman's rights campaign, she could not afford a new dress for these tours, but she dyed a dark green the merino which she had worn so proudly in Canajoharie ten years before, bought cloth to match for a basque, and made a "handsome suit." "With my Siberian squirrel cape, I shall be very comfortable," she noted in her diary.[72] She had met indifference and ridicule in her campaigns for woman's rights. Now she faced outright hostility, for northern businessmen had no use for abolition-mad fanatics, as they called anyone who spoke against slavery. Abolitionists, they believed, ruined business by stirring up trouble between the North and the South. Usually antislavery meetings turned into debates between speakers and audience, often lasting until midnight, and were charged with animosity which might flame into violence. All of the speakers lived under a strain, and under emotional pressure. Consequently they were not always easy to handle. Some of them were temperamental, a bit jealous of each other, and not always satisfied with the tours Susan mapped out for them. She expected of her colleagues what she herself could endure, but they often complained and sometimes refused to fulfill their engagements. When no one else was at hand, she took her turn at speaking, but she was seldom satisfied with her efforts. "I spoke for an hour," she confided to her diary, "but my heart fails me. Can it be that my stammering tongue ever will be loosed?" Lucy Stone, who spoke with such ease, gave her advice and encouragement. "You ought to cultivate your power of expression," she wrote. "The subject is clear to you and you ought to be able to make it so to others. It is only a few years ago that Mr. Higginson told me he could not speak, he was so much accustomed to writing, and now he is second only to Phillips. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"[73] In March 1857, the Supreme Court startled the country with the Dred Scott decision, which not only substantiated the claim of Garrisonians that the Constitution sanctioned slavery and protected the slaveholder, but practically swept away the Republican platform of no extention of slavery in the territories. The decision declared that the Constitution did not apply to Negroes, since they were citizens of no state when it was adopted and therefore had not the right of citizens to sue for freedom or to claim freedom in the territories; that the Missouri Compromise had always been void, since Congress did not have the right to enact a law which arbitrarily deprived citizens of their property. Reading the decision word for word with dismay and pondering indignantly over the cold letter of the law, Susan found herself so aroused and so full of the subject that she occasionally made a spontaneous speech, and thus gradually began to free herself from reliance on written speeches. She spoke from these notes: "Consider the fact of 4,000,000 slaves in a Christian and republican government.... Antislavery prayers, resolutions, and speeches avail nothing without action.... Our mission is to deepen sympathy and convert into right action: to show that the men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slave-owners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South. Therefore our work is to rouse the sleeping consciousness of the North....[74] "We ask you to feel as if you, yourselves, were the slaves. The politician talks of slavery as he does of United States banks, tariff, or any other commercial question. We demand the abolition of slavery because the slave is a human being and because man should not hold property in his fellowman.... We say disobey every unjust law; the politician says obey them and meanwhile labor constitutionally for repeal.... We preach revolution, the politicians, reform." Instinctively she reaffirmed her allegiance to the doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders," and she gloried in the courage of Garrison, Phillips, and Higginson, who had called a disunion convention, demanding that the free states secede. It was good to be one of this devoted band, for she sincerely believed that in the ages to come "the prophecies of these noble men and women will be read with the same wonder and veneration as those of Isaiah and Jeremiah inspire today."[75] She gave herself to the work with religious fervor. Even so, she could not make her antislavery meetings self-supporting, and at the end of the first season, after paying her speakers, she faced a deficit of $1,000. This troubled her greatly but the Antislavery Society, recognizing her value, wrote her, "We cheerfully pay your expenses and want to keep you at the head of the work." They took note of her "business enterprise, practical sagacity, and platform ability," and looked upon the expenditure of $1,000 for the education and development of such an exceptional worker as a good investment. This new experience was a good investment for Susan as well. She made many new friends. She won the further respect, confidence, and good will of men like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Francis Jackson. Her friendship with Parker Pillsbury deepened. "I can truly say," she wrote Abby Kelley Foster, "my spirit has grown in grace and that the experience of the past winter is worth more to me than all my Temperance and Woman's Rights labors--though the latter were the school necessary to bring me into the Antislavery work."[76] Only the crusading spirit of the "antislavery apostles"[77] and what to them seemed the desperate state of the nation made the hard campaigning bearable. The animosity they faced, the cold, the poor transportation, the long hours, and wretched food taxed the physical endurance of all of them. "O the crimes that are committed in the kitchens of this land!"[78] wrote Susan in her diary, as she ate heavy bread and the cake ruined with soda and drank what passed for coffee. A good cook herself, she had little patience with those who through ignorance or carelessness neglected that art. Equally bad were the food fads they had to endure when they were entertained in homes of otherwise hospitable friends of the cause. Raw-food diets found many devotees in those days, and often after long cold rides in the stagecoach, these tired hungry antislavery workers were obliged to sit down to a supper of apples, nuts, and a baked mixture of coarse bran and water. Nor did breakfast or dinner offer anything more. Facing these diets seemed harder for the men than for Susan. Repeatedly in such situations, they hurried away, leaving her to complete two-or three-day engagements among the food cranks. How she welcomed a good beefsteak and a pot of hot coffee at home after these long days of fasting! A night at home now was sheer bliss, and she wrote Lucy Stone, "Here I am once more in my own Farm Home, where my weary head rests upon my own home pillows.... I had been gone _Four Months_, scarcely sleeping the second night under the same roof."[79] It was good to be with her mother again, to talk with her father when he came home from work and with Mary who had not married after all but continued teaching in the Rochester schools. Guelma and her husband, Aaron McLean, who had moved to Rochester, often came out to the farm with their children. Turning for relaxation to work in the garden in the warm sun, Susan thought over the year's experience and planned for the future. "I can but acknowledge to myself that Antislavery has made me richer and braver in spirit," she wrote Samuel May, Jr., "and that it is the school of schools for the true and full development of the nobler elements of life. I find my raspberry field looking finely--also my strawberry bed. The prospect for peaches, cherries, plums, apples, and pears is very promising--Indeed all nature is clothed in her most hopeful dress. It really seems to me that the trees and the grass and the large fields of waving grain did never look so beautifully as now. It is more probable, however, that my soul has grown to appreciate Nature more fully...."[80] Susan needed that growth of soul to face the events of the next few years and do the work which lay ahead. The whole country was tense over the slavery issue, which could no longer be pushed into the background. On public platforms and at every fireside, men and women were discussing the subject. Antislavery workers sensed the gravity of the situation and felt the onrush of the impending conflict between what they regarded as the forces of good and evil--freedom and slavery. When the Republican leader, William H. Seward, spoke in Rochester, of "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces,"[81] he was expressing only what Garrisonian abolitionists, like Susan, always had recognized. In the West, a tall awkward country lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, debating with the suave Stephen A. Douglas, declared with prophetic wisdom, "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.... It will become all one thing or all the other.'"[82] 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] [Illustration: Susan B. Anthony, 1856] 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 _un_likeness 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. [Illustration: Lucy Stone and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell] 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. Susan and Mrs. Stanton had no patience with Horace Greeley's smug old-fashioned opinions on marriage and divorce. In fact these Greeley-Owen debates in the _Tribune_ were the direct cause of their decision to bring this subject before the convention, where they hoped for support from their liberal friends. They counted especially on Lucy Stone, who seemed to give her approval when she wrote, "I am glad you will speak on the divorce question, provided you yourself are clear on the subject. It is a great grave topic that one shudders to grapple, but its hour is coming.... God touch your lips if you speak on it."[110] Neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton shuddered to grapple with any subject which they believed needed attention. In fact, the discussion of marriage and divorce in woman's rights conventions had been on their minds for some time. Three years before Susan had written Lucy, "I have thought with you until of late that the Social Question must be kept separate from Woman's Rights, but we have always claimed that our movement was _Human Rights_, not Woman's specially.... It seems to me we have played on the surface of things quite long enough. Getting the right to hold property, to vote, to wear what dress we please, etc., are all to the good, but _Social Freedom_, after all, lies at the bottom of all, and unless woman gets that she must continue the slave of man in all other things."[111] * * * * * Consternation spread through the genial ranks of the convention as Mrs. Stanton now offered resolutions calling for more liberal divorce laws. Quick to sense the temper of an audience, Susan felt its resistance to being jolted out of the pleasant contemplation of past successes to the unpleasant recognition that there were still difficult ugly problems ahead. She was conscious at once of a stir of astonishment and disapproval when Mrs. Stanton in her clear compelling voice read, "Resolved, That an unfortunate or ill-assorted marriage is ever a calamity, but not ever, perhaps never a crime--and when society or government, by its laws or customs, compels its continuance, always to the grief of one of the parties, and the actual loss and damage of both, it usurps an authority never delegated to man, nor exercised by God, Himself...."[112] Listening to Mrs. Stanton's speech in defense of her ten bold resolutions on marriage and divorce, Susan felt that her brave colleague was speaking for women everywhere, for wives of the present and the future. As the hearty applause rang out, she concluded that even the disapproving admired her courage; but before the applause ceased, she saw Antoinette Blackwell on her feet, waiting to be heard. She knew that Antoinette, like Horace Greeley, preferred to think of all marriages as made in heaven, and true to form Antoinette contended that the marriage relation "must be lifelong" and "as permanent and indissoluble as the relation of parent and child."[113] At once Ernestine Rose came to the rescue in support of Mrs. Stanton. Then Wendell Phillips showed his displeasure by moving that Mrs. Stanton's resolutions be laid on the table and expunged from the record because they had no more to do with this convention than slavery in Kansas or temperance. "This convention," he asserted, "as I understand it, assembles to discuss the laws that rest unequally upon men and women, not those that rest equally on men and women."[114] Aghast at this statement, Susan was totally unprepared to have his views supported by that other champion of liberty, William Lloyd Garrison, who, however, did not favor expunging the resolutions from the record. It was incomprehensible to Susan that neither Garrison nor Phillips recognized woman's subservient status in marriage under prevailing laws and traditions, and she now stated her own views with firmness: "As to the point that this question does not belong to this platform--from that I totally dissent. Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally upon the sexes. By it, man gains all--woman loses all; tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him--meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her."[115] Warming to the subject, she continued, "By law, public sentiment, and religion from the time of Moses down to the present day, woman has never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man. And this very hour, by our statute books, by our so-called enlightened Christian civilization, she has no voice in saying what shall be the basis of the relation. She must accept marriage as man proffers it or not at all...." When finally the vote was taken, Mrs. Stanton's resolutions were laid on the table, but not expunged from the record, and the convention adjourned with much to talk about and think about for some time to come. The newspapers, of course, could not overlook such a piece of news as this heated argument on divorce in a woman's rights convention, and fanned the flames pro and con, most of them holding up Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton as dangerous examples of freedom for women. The Rev. A. D. Mayo, Unitarian clergyman of Albany, heretofore Susan's loyal champion, now made a point of reproving her. "You are not married," he declared with withering scorn. "You have no business to be discussing marriage." To this she retorted, "Well, Mr. Mayo, you are not a slave. Suppose you quit lecturing on slavery."[116] Both Susan and Mrs. Stanton, amazed at the opposition and the disapproval they had aroused, were grateful for Samuel Longfellow's comforting words of commendation[117] and for the letters of approval which came from women from all parts of the state. Most satisfying of all was this reassurance from Lucretia Mott, whose judgment they so highly valued: "I was rejoiced to have such a defense of the resolutions as yours. I have the fullest confidence in the united judgment of Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony and I am glad they are so vigorous in the work."[118] Hardest to bear was the disapproval of Wendell Phillips whom they both admired so much. Difficult to understand and most disappointing was Lucy Stone's failure to attend the convention or come to their defense. Thinking over this first unfortunate difference of opinion among the faithful crusaders for freedom to whom she had always felt so close in spirit, Susan was sadly disillusioned, but she had no regrets that the matter had been brought up, and she defied her critics by speaking before a committee of the New York legislature in support of a liberal divorce bill. Nor was she surprised when a group of Boston women, headed by Caroline H. Dall, called a convention which they hoped would counteract this radical outbreak in the woman's rights movement by keeping to the safe subjects of education, vocation, and civil position. Having learned by this time through the hard school of experience that the bona-fide reformer could not play safe and go forward, Susan thoughtfully commented, "Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences."[119] * * * * * The repercussions of the divorce debates were soon drowned out by the noise and excitement of the presidential campaign of 1860. With four candidates in the field, Breckenridge, Bell, Douglas, and Lincoln, each offering his party's solution for the nation's critical problems, there was much to think about and discuss, and Susan found woman's rights pushed into the background. At the same time antagonism toward abolitionists was steadily mounting for they were being blamed for the tensions between the North and the South. Dedicated to the immediate and unconditional emancipation of slavery, Susan saw no hope in the promises of any political party. Even the Republicans' opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories, which had won over many abolitionists, including Henry and Elizabeth Stanton, seemed to her a mild and ineffectual answer to the burning questions of the hour. For her to further the election of Abraham Lincoln was unthinkable, since he favored the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and had stated he was not in favor of Negro citizenship. At heart she was a nonvoting Garrisonian abolitionist and would not support a political party which in any way sanctioned slavery. Had she been eligible as a voter she undoubtedly would have refused to cast her ballot until a righteous antislavery government had been established. As she expressed it in a letter to Mrs. Stanton, she could not, if she were a man, vote for "the least of two evils, one of which the Nation must surely have in the presidential chair."[120] She saw no possibility at this time of wiping out slavery by means of political abolition, because in spite of the fact that slavery had for years been one of the most pressing issues before the American people, no great political party had yet endorsed abolition, nor had a single prominent practical statesman[121] advocated immediate unconditional emancipation. As the Liberty party experiment had proved, an abolitionist running for office on an antislavery platform was doomed to defeat. Therefore the gesture made in this critical campaign by a small group of abolitionists in nominating Gerrit Smith for president appeared utterly futile to Susan. Abolitionists, she believed, followed the only course consistent with their principles when they eschewed politics, abstained from voting, and devoted their energies with the fervor of evangelists to a militant educational campaign. So, whenever she could, she continued to hold antislavery meetings. "Crowded house at Port Byron," her diary records. "I tried to say a few words at opening, but soon curled up like a sensitive plant. It is a terrible martyrdom for me to speak."[122] Yet so great was the need to enlighten people on the evils of slavery that she endured this martyrdom, stepping into the breach when no other speaker was available. Taking as her subject, "What Is American Slavery?" she declared, "It is the legalized, systematic robbery of the bodies and souls of nearly four millions of men, women, and children. It is the legalized traffic in God's image."[123] She asked for personal liberty laws to protect the human rights of fugitive slaves, adding that the Dred Scott decision had been possible only because it reflected the spirit and purpose of the American people in the North as well as the South. She heaped blame on the North for restricting the Negro's educational and economic opportunities, for barring him from libraries, lectures, and theaters, and from hotels and seats on trains and buses. "Let the North," she urged, "prove to the South by her acts that she fully recognizes the humanity of the black man, that she respects his rights in all her educational, industrial, social, and political associations...." This was asking far more than the North was ready to give, but to Susan it was justice which she must demand. No wonder free Negroes in the North honored and loved her and expressed their gratitude whenever they could. "A fine-looking colored man on the train presented me with a bouquet," she wrote in her diary. "Can't tell whether he knew me or only felt my sympathy."[124] * * * * * The threats of secession from the southern states, which followed Lincoln's election, brought little anxiety to Susan or her fellow-abolitionists, for they had long preached, "No Union with Slaveholders," believing that dissolution of the Union would prevent further expansion of slavery in the new western territories, and not only lessen the damaging influence of slavery on northern institutions, but relieve the North of complicity in maintaining slavery. Garrison in his _Liberator_ had already asked, "Will the South be so obliging as to secede from the Union?" When, in December 1860, South Carolina seceded, Horace Greeley, who only a few months before had called the disunion abolitionists "a little coterie of common scolds," now wrote in the _Tribune_, "If the cotton states shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we insist in letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless."[125] [Illustration: William Lloyd Garrison] What abolitionists feared far more than secession was that to save the Union some compromise would be made which would fasten slavery on the nation. Susan agreed with Garrison when he declared in the _Liberator_, "All Union-saving efforts are simply idiotic. At last 'the covenant with death' is annulled, 'the agreement with Hell' broken--at least by the action of South Carolina and ere long by all the slave-holding states, for their doom is one."[126] Compromise, however, was in the air. The people were appalled and confused by the breaking up of the Union and the possibility of civil war, and the government fumbled. Powerful Republicans, among them Thurlow Weed, speaking for eastern financial interests, favored the Crittenden Compromise which would re-establish the Mason-Dixon line, protect slavery in the states where it was now legal, sanction the domestic slave trade, guarantee payment by the United States for escaped slaves, and forbid Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of Virginia and Maryland. Even Seward suggested a constitutional amendment guaranteeing noninterference with slavery in the slave states for all time. In such an atmosphere as this, Susan gloried in Wendell Phillips's impetuous declarations against compromise. While the whole country marked time, waiting for the inauguration of President Lincoln, abolitionists sent out their speakers, Susan heading a group in western New York which included Samuel J. May, Stephen S. Foster, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. "All are united," she wrote William Lloyd Garrison, "that good faith and honor demand us to go forward and leave the responsibility of free speech or its suppression with the people of the places we visit." Then showing that she well understood the temper of the times, she added, "I trust ... no personal harm may come to you or Phillips or any of the little band of the true and faithful who shall defend the right...."[127] Feeling was running high in Buffalo when Susan arrived with her antislavery contingent in January 1861, expecting disturbances but unprepared for the animosity of audiences which hissed, yelled, and stamped so that not a speaker could be heard. The police made no effort to keep order and finally the mob surged over the platform and the lights went out. Nevertheless, Susan who was presiding held her ground until lights were brought in and she could dimly see the milling crowd. In small towns they were listened to with only occasional catcalls and boos of disapproval, but in every city from Buffalo to Albany the mobs broke up their meetings. Even in Rochester, which had never before shown open hostility to abolitionists, Susan's banner, "No Union with Slaveholders" was torn down and a restless audience hissed her as she opened her meeting and drowned out the speakers with their shouting and stamping until at last the police took over and escorted the speakers home through the jeering crowds. All but Susan now began to question the wisdom of holding more meetings, but her determination to continue, and to assert the right of free speech, shamed her colleagues into acquiescence. Cayenne pepper, thrown on the stove, broke up their meeting at Port Byron. In Rome, rowdies bore down upon Susan, who was taking the admission fee of ten cents, brushed her aside, "big cloak, furs, and all,"[128] and rushed to the platform where they sang, hooted, and played cards until the speakers gave up in despair. Syracuse, well known for its tolerance and pride in free speech, now greeted them with a howling drunken mob armed with knives and pistols and rotten eggs. Susan on the platform courageously faced their gibes until she and her companions were forced out into the street. They then took refuge in the home of fellow-abolitionists while the mob dragged effigies of Susan and Samuel J. May through the streets and burned them in the square. Not even this kept Susan from her last advertised meeting in Albany where Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Gerrit Smith, and Frederick Douglass joined her. Here the Democratic mayor, George H. Thatcher, was determined to uphold free speech in spite of almost overwhelming opposition, and calling at the Delavan House for the abolitionists, safely escorted them to their hall. Then, with a revolver across his knees, he sat on the platform with them while his policemen, scattered through the hall, put down every disturbance; but at the end of the day, he warned Susan that he could no longer hold the mob in check and begged her as a personal favor to him to call off the rest of the meetings. She consented, and under his protection the intrepid little group of abolitionists walked back to their hotel with the mob trailing behind them. Looking back upon the tense days and nights of this "winter of mobs,"[129] Susan was proud of her group of abolitionists who so bravely had carried out their mission. In comparison, the Republicans had shown up badly, not a Republican mayor having the courage or interest to give them protection. In fact, she found little in the attitude of the Republicans to offer even a glimmer of hope that they were capable of governing in this crisis. Lincoln's inaugural address prejudiced her at once, for he said, "I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so."[130] To her the future looked dark when statesmen would save the Union at such a price. "No Compromise" was Susan's watchword these days, as a feminist as well as an abolitionist, even though this again set her at odds with Garrison and Phillips, the two men she respected above all others. They were now writing her stern letters urging her to reveal the hiding place of a fugitive wife and her daughter. Just before she had started on her antislavery crusade and while she was in Albany with Lydia Mott, a heavily veiled woman with a tragic story had come to them for help. She was the wife of Dr. Charles Abner Phelps, a highly respected member of the Massachusetts Senate, and the mother of three children. She had discovered, she told them, that her husband was unfaithful to her, and when she confronted him with the proof, he had insisted that she suffered from delusions and had her committed to an insane asylum. For a year and a half she had not been allowed to communicate with her children, but finally her brother, a prominent Albany attorney, obtained her release through a writ of habeas corpus, took her to his home, and persuaded Dr. Phelps to allow the children to visit her for a few weeks. Now she was desperate as she again faced the prospect of being separated from her children by Massachusetts law which gave even an unfaithful husband control of his wife's person and their children. Well aware of how often her friends of the Underground Railroad had defied the Fugitive Slave Law and hidden and transported fugitive slaves, Susan decided she would do the same for this cultured intelligent woman, a slave to her husband under the law. Without a thought of the consequences, she took the train on Christmas Day for New York with Mrs. Phelps and her thirteen-year-old daughter, both in disguise, hoping that in the crowded city they could hide from Dr. Phelps and the law. Arriving late at night, they walked through the snow and slush to a hotel, only to be refused a room because they were not accompanied by a gentleman. They tried another hotel, with the same result, and then Susan, remembering a boarding house run by a divorced woman she knew, hopefully rang her doorbell. She too refused them, claiming all her boarders would leave if she harbored a runaway wife. By this time it was midnight. Cold and exhausted, they braved a Broadway hotel, where they were told there was no vacant room; but Susan, convinced this was only an excuse, said as much to the clerk, adding, "You can give us a place to sleep or we will sit in this office all night." When he threatened to call the police, she retorted, "Very well, we will sit here till they come to take us to the station."[131] Finally he relented and gave them a room without heat. Early the next morning, Susan began making the rounds of her friends in search of shelter for Mrs. Phelps and her daughter, and finally at the end of a discouraging day, Abby Hopper Gibbons, the Quaker who had so often hidden fugitive slaves, took this fugitive wife into her home. Returning to Albany, Susan found herself under suspicion and threatened with arrest by Dr. Phelps and Mrs. Phelps's brothers, because she had broken the law by depriving a father of his child. Letters and telegrams, demanding that she reveal Mrs. Phelps's hiding place, followed her to Rochester and on her antislavery tour through western New York. Refusing to be intimidated, she ignored them all. When Garrison wrote her long letters in his small neat hand, begging her not to involve the woman's rights and antislavery movements in any "hasty and ill-judged, no matter how well-meant" action, it was hard for her to reconcile this advice with his impetuous, undiplomatic, and dangerous actions on behalf of Negro slaves. "I feel the strongest assurance," she told him, "that what I have done is wholly right. Had I turned my back upon her I should have scorned myself.... That I should stop to ask if my act would injure the reputation of any movement never crossed my mind, nor will I allow such a fear to stifle my sympathies or tempt me to expose her to the cruel inhuman treatment of her own household. Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman."[132] When later they met at an antislavery convention, Garrison, renewing his efforts on behalf of Dr. Phelps, put this question to Susan, "Don't you know that the law of Massachusetts gives the father the entire guardianship and control of the children?" "Yes, I know it," she answered. "Does not the law of the United States give the slaveholder the ownership of the slave? And don't you break it every time you help a slave to Canada? Well, the law which gives the father the sole ownership of the children is just as wicked and I'll break it just as quickly. You would die before you would deliver a slave to his master, and I will die before I will give up that child to its father." Susan escaped arrest as she thought she would, for Dr. Phelps could not afford the unfavorable publicity involved. He managed to kidnap his child on her way to Sunday School, but his wife eventually won a divorce through the help of her friends. The most trying part of this experience for Susan was the attitude of Garrison and Phillips, who, had now for the second time failed to recognize that the freedom they claimed for the Negro was also essential for women. They believed in woman's rights, to be sure, but when these rights touched the institution of marriage, their vision was clouded. Just a year before, they had fought Mrs. Stanton's divorce resolutions because they were unable to see that the existing laws of marriage did not apply equally to men and women. Now they sustained the father's absolute right over his child. What was it, Susan wondered, that kept them from understanding? Was it loyalty to sex, was it an unconscious clinging to dominance and superiority, or was it sheer inability to recognize women as human beings like themselves? "Very many abolitionists," she wrote in her diary, "have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights."[133] FOOTNOTES: [109] _History of Woman Suffrage_, I. p. 689. Henry Ward Beecher's speech, _The Public Function of Women_, delivered at Cooper Union, Feb. 2, 1860, was widely distributed as a tract. [110] April 16, 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress. [111] June 16, 1857, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection. [112] _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 717. [113] _Ibid._, p. 725. [114] _Ibid._, p. 732. [115] _Ibid._, p. 735. [116] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 196. [117] Elizabeth Cady Stanton, _Eighty Years and More_ (New York, 1898), p. 219. Samuel Longfellow whispered to Mrs. Stanton in the midst of the debate, "Nevertheless you are right and the convention will sustain you." [118] Harper, _Anthony_, I. p. 195. [119] _Ibid._, p. 197. [120] Aug. 25, 1860, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Vassar College Library. [121] Charles Sumner was the First prominent statesman to speak for emancipation, Oct., 1861, at the Massachusetts Republican Convention. [122] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 198. [123] Ms., Susan B. Anthony Papers, Library of Congress. [124] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 198. [125] Garrisons, _Garrison_, III, p. 504; Beards, _The Rise of American Civilization_, II, p. 63. [126] Garrisons, _Garrison_, III, p. 508. [127] Jan. 18, 1861, Antislavery Papers, Boston Public Library. [128] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 210. [129] Susan B. Anthony Scrapbook, 1861, Library of Congress. [130] Carl Sandburg, _Abraham Lincoln, The War Years_ (New York, 1939), I, p. 125. [131] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 202. Mrs. Phelps later found a more permanent home with the author, Elizabeth Ellet. [132] _Ibid._, pp. 203-204. [133] _Ibid._, p. 198. A WAR FOR FREEDOM Six more southern states, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, following the lead of South Carolina, seceded early in 1861 and formed the Confederate States of America. This breaking up of the Union disturbed Susan primarily because it took the minds of most of her colleagues off everything but saving the Union. Convinced that even in a time of national crisis, work for women must go on, she tried to prepare for the annual woman's rights convention in New York, but none of her hitherto dependable friends would help her. Nevertheless, she persisted, even after the fall of Fort Sumter and the President's call for troops. Only when the abolitionists called off their annual New York meetings did she reluctantly realize that woman's rights too must yield to the exigencies of the hour. Influenced by her Quaker background, she could not see war as the solution of this or any other crisis. In fact, the majority of abolitionists were amazed and bewildered when war came because it was not being waged to free the slaves. Looking to their leaders for guidance, they heard Wendell Phillips declare for war before an audience of over four thousand in Boston. Garrison, known to all as a nonresistant, made it clear that his sympathies were with the government. He saw in "this grand uprising of the manhood of the North"[134] a growing appreciation of liberty and free institutions and a willingness to defend them. Calling upon abolitionists to stand by their principles, he at the same time warned them not to criticize Lincoln or the Republicans unnecessarily, not to divide the North, but to watch events and bide their time, and he opposed those abolitionists who wanted to withhold support of the government until it stood openly and unequivocally for the Negro's freedom. From the front page of the _Liberator_, he now removed his slogan, "No Union with Slaveholders." Kindly placid Samuel J. May, usually against all violence, now compared the sacrifices of the war to the crucifixion, and to Susan this was blasphemy. Even Parker Pillsbury wrote her, "I am rejoicing over Old Abe, but my voice is still for war."[135] She was troubled, confused, and disillusioned by the attitude of these men and by that of most of her antislavery friends. Only very few, among them Lydia Mott, were uncompromising non-resistants. To one of them she wrote, "I have tried hard to persuade myself that I alone remained mad, while all the rest had become sane, because I have insisted that it is our duty to bear not only our usual testimony but one even louder and more earnest than ever before.... The Abolitionists, for once, seem to have come to an agreement with all the world that they are out of tune and place, hence should hold their peace and spare their rebukes and anathemas. Our position to me seems most humiliating, simply that of the politicians, one of expediency, not principle. I have not yet seen one good reason for the abandonment of all our meetings, and am more and more ashamed and sad that even the little Apostolic number have yielded to the world's motto--'the end justifies the means.'"[136] Now the farm home was a refuge. Her father, leaving her in charge, traveled West for his long-dreamed-of visit with his sons in Kansas, with Daniel R., now postmaster at Leavenworth, and with Merritt and his young wife, Mary Luther, in their log cabin at Osawatomie. As a release from her pent-up energy, Susan turned to hard physical work. "Superintended the plowing of the orchard," she recorded in her diary. "The last load of hay is in the barn; and all in capital order.... Washed every window in the house today. Put a quilted petticoat in the frame.... Quilted all day, but sewing seems no longer to be my calling.... Fitted out a fugitive slave for Canada with the help of Harriet Tubman."[137] Although she filled her days, life on the farm in these stirring times seemed futile to her. She missed the stimulating exchange of ideas with fellow-abolitionists and confessed to her diary, "The all-alone feeling will creep over me. It is such a fast after the feast of great presences to which I have been so long accustomed." The war was much on her mind. Eagerly she read Greeley's _Tribune_ and the Rochester _Democrat_. The news was discouraging--the tragedy of Bull Run, the call for more troops, defeat after defeat for the Union armies. General Frémont in Missouri freeing the slaves of rebels only to have Lincoln cancel the order to avert antagonizing the border states. "How not to do it seems the whole study of Washington," she wrote in her diary. "I wish the government would move quickly, proclaim freedom to every slave and call on every able-bodied Negro to enlist in the Union Army.... To forever blot out slavery is the only possible compensation for this merciless war."[138] To satisfy her longing for a better understanding of people and events, she turned to books, first to Elizabeth Barrett Browning's _Casa Guidi Windows_, which she called "a grand poem, so fitting to our terrible struggle," then to her _Sonnets from the Portuguese_, and George Eliot's popular _Adam Bede_, recently published. More serious reading also absorbed her, for she wanted to keep abreast of the most advanced thought of the day. "Am reading Buckle's _History of Civilization_ and Darwin's _Descent of Man_," she wrote in her diary. "Have finished _Origin of the Species_. Pillsbury has just given me Emerson's poems."[139] Eager to thrash out all her new ideas with Elizabeth Stanton, she went to Seneca Falls for a few days of good talk, hoping to get Mrs. Stanton's help in organizing a woman's rights convention in 1862; but not even Mrs. Stanton could see the importance of such work at this time, believing that if women put all their efforts into winning the war, they would, without question, be rewarded with full citizenship. Susan was skeptical about this and disappointed that even the best women were so willing to be swept aside by the onrush of events. Although opposed to war, Susan was far from advocating peace at any price, and was greatly concerned over the confusion in Washington which was vividly described in the discouraging letters Mrs. Stanton received from her husband, now Washington correspondent for the New York _Tribune_. Both she and Mrs. Stanton chafed at inaction. They had loyalty, intelligence, an understanding of national affairs, and executive ability to offer their country, but such qualities were not sought after among women. * * * * * In the spring of 1862, Susan helped Mrs. Stanton move her family to a new home in Brooklyn, and spent a few weeks with her there, getting the feel of the city in wartime. She then had the satisfaction of discovering that at least one woman was of use to her country, young eloquent Anna E. Dickinson.[140] Susan listened with pride and joy while Anna spoke to an enthusiastic audience at Cooper Union on the issues of the war. She took Anna to her heart at once. Anna's youth, her fervor, and her remarkable ability drew out all of Susan's motherly instincts of affection and protectiveness. They became devoted friends, and for the next few years carried on a voluminous correspondence. Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur also helped restore Susan's confidence in women during these difficult days when, forced to mark time, she herself seemed at loose ends. Visiting the Academy of Design, she studied "in silent reverential awe," the marble face of Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci, and declared, "Making that cold marble breathe and pulsate, Harriet Hosmer has done more to ennoble and elevate woman than she could possibly have done by mere words...." Of Rosa Bonheur, the first woman to venture into the field of animal painting, she said, "Her work not only surpasses anything ever done by a woman, but is a bold and successful step beyond all other artists."[141] This confidence was soon dispelled, however, when a letter came from Lydia Mott containing the crushing news that the New York legislature had amended the newly won Married Woman's Property Law of 1860, while women's attention was focused on the war, and had taken away from mothers the right to equal guardianship of their children and from widows the control of the property left at the death of their husbands. "We deserve to suffer for our confidence in 'man's sense of justice,'" she confessed to Lydia. " ... All of our reformers seem suddenly to have grown politic. All alike say, 'Have no conventions at this crisis!' Garrison, Phillips, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Stanton, etc. say, 'Wait until the war excitement abates....' I am sick at heart, but cannot carry the world against the wish and will of our best friends...."[142] Unable to arouse even a glimmer of interest in woman's rights at this time, Susan started off on a lecture tour of her own, determined to make people understand that this war, so abhorrent to her, must be fought for the Negroes' freedom. "I cannot feel easy in my conscience to be dumb in an hour like this," she explained to Lydia, adding, "It is so easy to feel your power for public work slipping away if you allow yourself to remain too long snuggled in the Abrahamic bosom of home. It requires great will power to resurrect one's soul.[143] "I am speaking now extempore," she continued, "and more to my satisfaction than ever before. I am amazed at myself, but I could not do it if any of our other speakers were listening to me. I am entirely off old antislavery grounds and on the new ones thrown up by the war." Feeling particularly close to Lydia at this time, she gratefully added, "What a stay, counsel, and comfort you have been to me, dear Lydia, ever since that eventful little temperance meeting in that cold, smoky chapel in 1852. How you have compelled me to feel myself competent to go forward when trembling with doubt and distrust. I can never express the magnitude of my indebtedness to you." In the small towns of western New York, people were willing to listen to Susan, for they were troubled by the defeats northern armies had suffered and by the appalling lack of unity and patriotism in the North. They were beginning to see that the problem of slavery had to be faced and were discussing among themselves whether Negroes were contraband, whether army officers should return fugitive slaves to their masters, whether slaves of the rebels should be freed, whether Negroes should be enlisted in the army. Susan had an answer for them. "It is impossible longer to hold the African race in bondage," she declared, "or to reconstruct this Republic on the old slaveholding basis. We can neither go back nor stand still. With the nation as with the individual, every new experience forces us into a new and higher life and the old self is lost forever. Hundreds of men who never thought of emancipation a year ago, talk it freely and are ready to vote for it and fight for it now.[144] "Can the thousands of Northern soldiers," she asked, "who in their march through Rebel States have found faithful friends and generous allies in the slaves ever consent to hurl them back into the hell of slavery, either by word, or vote, or sword? Slaves have sought shelter in the Northern Army and have tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Liberty. Will they return quietly to the plantation and patiently endure the old life of bondage with all its degradation, its cruelties, and wrong? No, No, there can be no reconstruction on the old basis...." Far less degrading and ruinous, she earnestly added, would be the recognition of the independence of the southern Confederacy. [Illustration: Susan B. Anthony] To the question of what to do with the emancipated slaves, her quick answer was, "Treat the Negroes just as you do the Irish, the Scotch, and the Germans. Educate them to all the blessings of our free institutions, to our schools and churches, to every department of industry, trade, and art. "What arrogance in _us_," she continued, "to put the question, What shall _we_ do with a race of men and women who have fed, clothed, and supported both themselves and their oppressors for centuries...." Often she spoke against Lincoln's policy of gradual, compensated emancipation, which to an eager advocate of "immediate, unconditional emancipation" seemed like weakness and appeasement. She had to admit, however, that there had been some progress in the right direction, for Congress had recently forbidden the return of fugitive slaves to their masters, had decreed immediate emancipation in the District of Columbia, and prohibited slavery in the territories. President Lincoln's promise of freedom on January 1, 1863, to slaves in all states in armed rebellion against the government, seemed wholly inadequate to her and to her fellow-abolitionists, because it left slavery untouched in the border states, but it did encourage them to hope that eventually Lincoln might see the light. Horace Greeley wrote Susan, "I still keep at work with the President in various ways and believe you will yet hear him proclaim universal freedom. Keep this letter and judge me by the event."[145] It troubled her that public opinion in the North was still far from sympathetic to emancipation. Northern Democrats, charging Lincoln with incompetence and autocratic control, called for "The Constitution as it is, the Union as it was." They had the support of many northern businessmen who faced the loss of millions of credit given to southerners and the support of northern workmen who feared the competition of free Negroes. They had elected Horatio Seymour governor of New York, and had gained ground in many parts of the country. A militant group in Ohio, headed by Congressman Vallandigham, continued to oppose the war, asking for peace at once with no terms unfavorable to the South. All these developments Susan discussed with her father, for she frequently came home between lectures. He was a tower of strength to her. When she was disillusioned or when criticism and opposition were hard to bear, his sympathy and wise counsel never failed her. There was a strong bond of understanding and affection between them. His sudden illness and death, late in November 1862, were a shock from which she had to struggle desperately to recover. Her life was suddenly empty. The farm home was desolate. She could not think of leaving her mother and her sister Mary there all alone. Nor could she count on help from Daniel or Merritt, both of whom were serving in the army in the West, Daniel, as a lieutenant colonel, and Merritt as a captain in the 7th Kansas Cavalry. For many weeks she had no heart for anything but grief. "It seemed as if everything in the world must stop."[146] Not even President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, roused her. It took a letter from Henry Stanton from Washington to make her see that there was war work for her to do. He wrote her, "The country is rapidly going to destruction. The Army is almost in a state of mutiny for want of its pay and lack of a leader. Nothing can carry through but the southern Negroes, and nobody can marshal them into the struggle except the abolitionists.... Such men as Lovejoy, Hale, and the like have pretty much given up the struggle in despair. You have no idea how dark the cloud is which hangs over us.... We must not lay the flattering unction to our souls that the proclamation will be of any use if we are beaten and have a dissolution of the Union. Here then is work for you, Susan, put on your armor and go forth."[147] * * * * * A month later, Susan went to New York for a visit with Elizabeth Stanton, confident that if they counseled together, they could find a way to serve their country in its hour of need. She was well aware that all through the country women were responding magnificently in this crisis, giving not only their husbands and sons to the war, but carrying on for them in the home, on the farm, and in business. Many were sewing and knitting for soldiers, scraping lint for hospitals, and organizing Ladies' Aid Societies, which, operating through the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, sent clothing and nourishing food to the inadequately equipped and poorly fed soldiers in the field. In the large cities women were holding highly successful "Sanitary Fairs" to raise funds for the Sanitary Commission. In fact, through the women, civilian relief was organized as never before in history. Individual women too, Susan knew, were making outstanding contributions to the war. Lucy Stone's sister-in-law, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell,[148] a friend and admirer of Florence Nightingale, was training much-needed nurses, while Dr. Mary Walker, putting on coat and trousers, ministered tirelessly to the wounded on the battlefield. Dorothea Dix, the one-time schoolteacher who had awakened the people to their barbarous treatment of the insane, had offered her services to the Surgeon-General and was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses, with authority to recruit nurses and oversee hospital housekeeping. Clara Barton, a government employee, and other women volunteers were finding their way to the front to nurse the wounded who so desperately needed their help; and Mother Bickerdyke, living with the armies in the field, nursed her boys and cooked for them, lifting their morale by her motherly, strengthening presence. Through the influence of Anna Ella Carroll, Maryland had been saved for the Union and she, it was said, was ably advising President Lincoln. Susan herself had felt no call to nurse the wounded, although she had often skillfully nursed her own family; nor had she felt that her qualifications as an expert housekeeper and good executive demanded her services at the front to supervise army housekeeping. Instead she looked for some important task to which other women would not turn in these days when relief work absorbed all their attention. It was not enough, she felt, for women to be angels of mercy, valuable and well-organized as this phase of their work had become. A spirit of awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this led her to believe that northern women needed someone to stimulate their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues of the war and in so doing claim their own freedom. Women, she reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts, and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the traditions of freedom upon which this republic was founded. Women must have a part in molding public opinion and must help direct policy as Anna Ella Carroll was proving women could do. Here was the best possible training for prospective women voters. To all this Mrs. Stanton heartily agreed. As they sat at the dining-room table with Mrs. Stanton's two daughters, Maggie and Hattie, all busily cutting linen into small squares and raveling them into lint for the wounded, they discussed the state of the nation. They were troubled by the low morale of the North and by the insidious propaganda of the Copperheads, an antiwar, pro-Southern group, which spread discontent and disrespect for the government. Profiteering was flagrant, and through speculation and war contracts, large fortunes were being built up among the few, while the majority of the people not only found their lives badly disrupted by the war but suffered from high prices and low wages. So far no decisive victory had encouraged confidence in ultimate triumph over the South. In newspapers and magazines, women of the North were being unfavorably compared with southern women and criticized because of their lack of interest in the war. Writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1863, Gail Hamilton, a rising young journalist, accused northern women of failing to come up to the level of the day. "If you could have finished the war with your needles," she chided them, "it would have been finished long ago, but stitching does not crush rebellion, does not annihilate treason...." Thinking along these same lines, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now decided to go a step further. They would act to bring women abreast of the issues of the day, Susan with her flare for organizing women, Mrs. Stanton with her pen and her eloquence. They would show women that they had an ideal to fight for. They would show them the uselessness of this bloody conflict unless it won freedom for all of the slaves. Freedom for all, as a basic demand of the republic, would be their watchword. Men were forming Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues to combat the influence of secret antiwar societies, such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. "Why not organize a Women's National Loyal League?" Susan and Mrs. Stanton asked each other. They talked their ideas over first with the New York abolitionists, then with Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and his dashing young friend, Theodore Tilton, and with Robert Dale Owen, now in the city as the recently appointed head of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission. These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other antislavery members of Congress. All agreed that the Emancipation Proclamation must be implemented by an act of Congress, by an amendment to the Constitution, and that public opinion must be aroused to demand a Thirteenth Amendment. If women would help, so much the better. Susan at once thought of petitions. If petitions had won the Woman's Property Law in New York, they could win the Thirteenth Amendment. The largest petition ever presented to Congress was her goal. * * * * * Carefully Susan and Mrs. Stanton worked over an _Appeal to the Women of the Republic_, sending it out in March 1863 with a notice of a meeting to be held in New York. It left no doubt in the minds of those who received it that women had a responsibility to their country beyond services of mercy to the wounded and disabled. From all parts of the country, women responded to their call. The veteran antislavery and woman's rights worker, Angelina Grimké Weld, came out of her retirement for the meeting. Ernestine Rose, the ever faithful, was on hand. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell were there, and the popular Hutchinson family, famous for their stirring abolition songs. They helped Susan and Mrs. Stanton steer the course of the meeting into the right channels, to show the women assembled that the war was being fought not merely to preserve the Union, but also to preserve the American way of life, based on the principle of equal rights and freedom for all, to save it from the encroachments of slavery and a slaveholding aristocracy. Susan proposed a resolution declaring that there can never be a true peace until the civil and political rights of all citizens are established, including those of Negroes and women. The introduction of the woman's rights issue into a war meeting with an antislavery program was vigorously opposed by women from Wisconsin, but the faithful feminists came to the rescue and the controversial resolution was adopted. Although she always instinctively related all national issues to woman's rights and vice versa, Susan did not allow this subject to overshadow the main purpose of the meeting. Instead she analyzed the issue of the war and reproached Lincoln for suppressing the fact that slavery was the real cause of the war and for waiting two long years before calling the four million slaves to the side of the North. "Every hour's delay, every life sacrificed up to the proclamation that called the slave to freedom and to arms," she declared, "was nothing less than downright murder by the government.... I therefore hail the day when the government shall recognize that it is a war for freedom."[149] A Women's National Loyal League was organized, electing Susan secretary and Mrs. Stanton president. They sent a long letter to President Lincoln thanking him for the Emancipation Proclamation, especially for the freedom it gave Negro women, and assuring him of their loyalty and support in this war for freedom. Their own immediate task, they decided, was to circulate petitions asking for an act of Congress to emancipate "all persons of African descent held in involuntary servitude." As Susan so tersely expressed it, they would "canvass the nation for freedom." * * * * * All the oratory over, Susan now undertook the hard work of making the Women's National Loyal League a success, assuming the initial financial burden of printing petitions and renting an office, Room 20, at Cooper Institute, where she was busy all day and where New York members met to help her. To each of the petitions sent out, she attached her battle cry, "There must be a law abolishing slavery.... Women, you cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be a power in the government is through the exercise of this one, sacred, constitutional 'right of petition,' and we ask you to use it now to the utmost...." She also asked those signing the petitions to contribute a penny to help with expenses and in this way she slowly raised $3,000.[150] At first the response was slow, although both Republican and antislavery papers were generous in their praise of this undertaking, but when the signed petitions began to come in, she felt repaid for all her efforts, and when the Hovey Fund trustees appropriated twelve dollars a week for her salary, the financial burden lifted a little. Yet it was ever present. For herself she needed little. She wrote her mother and Mary, "I go to a little restaurant nearby for lunch every noon. I always take strawberries with two tea rusks. Today I said, 'all this lacks is a glass of milk from my mother's cellar,' and the girl replied, 'We have very nice Westchester milk.' So tomorrow I shall add that to my bill of fare. My lunch costs, berries five cents, rusks five, and tomorrow the milk will be three."[151] The cost of postage mounted as the petitions continued to go out to all parts of the country. In dire need of funds, Susan decided to appeal to Henry Ward Beecher; and wearily climbing Columbia Heights to his home, she suddenly felt a strong hand on her shoulder and a familiar voice asking, "Well, old girl, what do you want now?" He took up a collection for her in Plymouth Church, raising $200. Gerrit Smith sent her $100, when she had hoped for $1,000, and Jessie Benton Frémont, $50. Before long, her "war of ideas" won the support of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, George William Curtis, and other popular lecturers who spoke for her at Cooper Union to large audiences whose admission fees swelled her funds; and eventually Senator Sumner, realizing how important the petitions could be in arousing public opinion for the Thirteenth Amendment, saved her the postage by sending them out under his frank.[152] She made her home with the Stantons, who had moved from Brooklyn to 75 West 45th Street, New York, and the comfortable evenings of good conversation and her busy days at the office helped mightily to heal her grief for her father. In the bustling life of the city she felt she was living more intensely, more usefully, as these critical days of war demanded. Henry Stanton, now an editorial writer for Greeley's _Tribune_, brought home to them the inside story of the news and of politics. All of them were highly critical of Lincoln, impatient with his slowness and skeptical of his plans for slaveholders and slaves in the border states. They questioned Garrison's wisdom in trusting Lincoln. Susan could not feel that Lincoln was honest when he protested that he did not have the power to do all that the abolitionists asked. "The pity is," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "that the vast mass of people really believe the man _honest_--that he believes he has not the power--I wish I could...."[153] New York seethed with unrest as time for the enforcement of the draft drew near. Indignant that rich men could avoid the draft by buying a substitute, workingmen were easily incited to riot, and the city was soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all Negroes and abolitionists were in danger. The Stanton home was in the thick of the rioting, and when Susan and Henry Stanton came home during a lull, they all decided to take refuge for the night at the home of Mrs. Stanton's brother-in-law, Dr. Bayard. Here they also found Horace Greeley hiding from the mob, for hoodlums were marching through the streets shouting, "We'll hang old Horace Greeley to a sour apple tree." The next morning Susan started for the office as usual, thinking the worst was over, but as not a single horsecar or stage was running, she took the ferry to Flushing to visit her cousins. Here too there was rioting, but she stayed on until order was restored by the army. She returned to the city to find casualties mounting to over a thousand and a million dollars' worth of property destroyed. Negroes had been shot and hung on lamp posts, Horace Greeley's _Tribune_ office had been wrecked and the homes of abolitionist friends burned. "These are terrible times," she wrote her family, and then went back to work, staying devotedly at it through all the hot summer months.[154] By the end of the year, she had enrolled the signatures of 100,000 men and women on her petitions, and assured by Senator Sumner that these petitions were invaluable in creating sentiment for the Thirteenth Amendment, she raised the number of signatures in the next few months to 400,000. In April 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate and the prospects for it in the House were good. This phase of her work finished, Susan disbanded the Women's National Loyal League and returned to her family in Rochester. * * * * * In despair over the possible re-election of Abraham Lincoln, Susan had joined Henry and Elizabeth Stanton in stirring up sentiment for John C. Frémont. Abolitionists were sharply divided in this presidential campaign. Garrison and Phillips disagreed on the course of action, Garrison coming out definitely for Lincoln in the _Liberator_, while Phillips declared himself emphatically against four more years of Lincoln. Susan, the Stantons, and Parker Pillsbury were among those siding with Phillips because they feared premature reconstruction under Lincoln. They cited Lincoln's Amnesty Proclamation as an example of his leniency toward the rebels. They saw danger in leaving free Negroes under the control of southerners embittered by war, and called for Negro suffrage as the only protection against oppressive laws. They opposed the readmission of Louisiana without the enfranchisement of Negroes. Lincoln, they knew, favored the extension of suffrage only to literate Negroes and to those who had served in the military forces. In fact, Lincoln held back while they wanted to go ahead under full steam and they looked to Frémont to lead them. Following the presidential campaign anxiously from Rochester, Susan wrote Mrs. Stanton, "I am starving for a full talk with somebody posted, not merely pitted for Lincoln...." The persistent cry of the _Liberator_ and the _Antislavery Standard_ to re-elect Lincoln and not to swap horses in midstream did not ring true to her. "We read no more of the good old doctrine 'of two evils choose neither,'" she wrote Anna E. Dickinson. She confessed to Anna, "It is only safe to seek and act the truth and to profess confidence in Lincoln would be a lie in me."[155] As the war dragged on through the summer without decisive victories for the North, Lincoln's prospects looked bleak, and to her dismay, Susan saw the chances improving for McClellan, the candidate of the northern Democrats who wanted to end the war, leave slavery alone, and conciliate the South. The whole picture changed, however, with the capture of Atlanta by General Sherman in September. The people's confidence in Lincoln revived and Frémont withdrew from the contest. One by one the anti-Lincoln abolitionists were converted; and Susan, anxiously waiting for word from Mrs. Stanton, was relieved to learn that she was not one of them, nor was Wendell Phillips whose judgment and vision both of them valued above that of any other man. With approval she read these lines which Phillips had just written Mrs. Stanton, "I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Mac's [McClellan's] election. I would cut oft my right hand before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election. I wholly distrust his fitness to settle this thing and indeed his purpose."[156] There is nothing to indicate any change of opinion on Susan's part regarding Lincoln's unfitness for a second term. That he was the lesser of two evils, she of course acknowledged. For her these pre-election days were discouraging and frustrating. She had very definite ideas on reconstruction which she felt in justice to the Negro must be carried out, and Lincoln did not meet her requirements. After Lincoln's re-election, she again looked to Wendell Phillips for an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed. "Phillips has just returned from Washington," Mrs. Stanton wrote her. "He says the radical men feel they are powerless and checkmated.... They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not say.... We say now, as ever, 'Give us immediately unconditional emancipation, and let there be no reconstruction except on the broadest basis of justice and equality!...' Phillips and a few others must hold up the pillars of the temple.... I cannot tell you how happy I am to find Douglass on the same platform with us. Keep him on the right track. Tell him in this revolution, he, Phillips, and you and I must hold the highest ground and truly represent the best type of the white man, the black man, and the woman."[157] Susan, holding "the highest ground," found it difficult to mark time until she could find her place in the reconstruction. "The work of the hour," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "is not alone to put down the Rebels in arms, but to educate Thirty Millions of People into the idea of a True Republic. Hence every influence and power that both men and women can bring to bear will be needed in the reconstruction of the Nation on the broad basis of justice and equality."[158] FOOTNOTES: [134] Garrisons, _Garrison_, IV, pp. 30-31. [135] Lydia Mott to W. L. Garrison, May 8, 1861, Boston Public Library; Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, p. 89. [136] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 215. [137] _Ibid._, p. 216. Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave, was often called the Moses of her people because she led so many of them into the promised land of freedom. [138] _Ibid._ [139] _Ibid._, p. 198. [140] Anna E. Dickinson was born in Philadelphia in 1842. The death of her father, two years later, left the family in straightened circumstances, and Anna, after attending a Friends school, began very early to support herself by copying in lawyers' offices and by working at the U.S. Mint. Speaking extemporaneously at Friends and antislavery meetings, she discovered she had a gift for oratory and was soon in demand as a speaker. [141] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 219. [142] April, 1862. _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 748. [143] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 218, 222. [144] _Emancipation, the Duty of Government_, Ms., Lucy E. Anthony Collection. Reading that General Grant had returned 13 slaves to their masters, an indignant Susan B. Anthony wrote Mrs. Stanton, "Such gratuitous outrage should be met with instant death--without judge or jury--if any offense may." Feb. 27, 1862, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress. [145] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 221. [146] Jan. 24, 1904, Anna Dann Mason Collection. [147] Harper, _Anthony_, p. 226. [148] The first woman in the United States to obtain a medical degree, 1849. [149] _History of Woman Suffrage_, II, pp. 57-58. [150] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230. Members of the Women's National Loyal League wore a silver pin showing a slave breaking his last chains and bearing the inscription, "In emancipation is national unity." Susan B. Anthony to Mrs. Drake, Sept. 18, 1863, Alma Lutz Collection. [151] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 234. [152] _Ibid._, To Samuel May, Jr., Sept. 21, 1863, Alma Lutz Collection. [153] April 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress. [154] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230. [155] June 12, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, July 1, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress. About this time, a friend of Susan B. Anthony's youth, now a widower living in Ohio in comfortable circumstances, unsuccessfully urged her to marry him. [156] Sept. 23, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress. [157] Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, pp. 103-104. [158] March 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress. THE NEGRO'S HOUR Susan's thoughts now turned to Kansas, as they had many times since her brothers had settled there. Daniel and Annie, his young wife from the East, urged her to visit them.[159] Daniel was well established in Kansas, the publisher of his own newspaper and the mayor of Leavenworth. He had served a little over a year in the Union army in the First Kansas Cavalry. She longed to see him and the West that he loved. Now for the first time she felt free to make the long journey, for her mother and Mary had sold the farm on the outskirts of Rochester and had moved into the city, buying a large red brick house shaded by maples and a beautiful horse chestnut. It had been a wrench for Susan to give up the farm with its memories of her father, but there were compensations in the new home on Madison Street, for Guelma, her husband, Aaron McLean, and their family lived with them there. Hannah and her family had also settled in Rochester, and when they bought the house next door, Susan had the satisfaction of living again in the midst of her family.[160] She was particularly devoted to Guelma's twenty-three-year-old daughter, Ann Eliza, whose "merry laugh" and "bright, joyous presence" brought new life into the household. Ann Eliza was a stimulating intelligent companion, and Susan looked forward to seeing many of her own dreams fulfilled in her niece. Then suddenly in the fall of 1864, Ann Eliza was taken ill, and her death within a few days left a great void.[161] In the midst of this sorrow, Daniel sent Susan a ticket and a check for a trip to Kansas. Hesitating no longer, she waited only until her "tip-top Rochester dressmaker" made up "the new, five-dollar silk" which she had bought in New York.[162] Before leaving for Kansas, in January, 1865, she pasted on the first page of her diary a clipping of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Something Left Undone," which seemed so perfectly to interpret her own feelings: Labor with what zeal we will Something still remains undone Something uncompleted still Waits the rising of the sun.... Till at length it is or seems Greater than our strength can bear As the burden of our dreams Pressing on us everywhere....[163] With "the burden of her dreams" pressing on her, Susan traveled westward. The future of the Negro was much on her mind, for the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had just been sent to the states for ratification. That it would be ratified she had no doubt, but she recognized the responsibility facing the North to provide for the education and rehabilitation of thousands of homeless bewildered Negroes trying to make their way in a still unfriendly world, and she looked forward to taking part in this work. Beyond Chicago, where she stopped over to visit her uncle Albert Dickinson and his family, her journey was rugged, and when she reached Leavenworth she reveled in the comfort of Daniel's "neat, little, snow-white cottage with green blinds." She liked Daniel's wife, Annie, at once, admired her gaiety and the way she fearlessly drove her beautiful black horse across the prairie. "They have a real 'Aunt Chloe' in the kitchen," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "and a little Darkie boy for errands and table waiter. I never saw a girl to match. The more I see of the race, the more wonderful they are to me."[164] There was always good companionship in Daniel's home, for friends from both the East and the West found it a convenient stopping place, and there was much discussion of politics, the Negro question, and the future of the West. Business was booming in Leavenworth, then the most thriving town between St. Louis and San Francisco. Eight years before, when Daniel had first settled there, it boasted a population of 4,000. Now it had grown to 22,000, was lighted with gas, and was building its business blocks of brick. As Susan drove through the busy streets with Annie, she saw emigrants coming in by steamer and train to settle in Kansas and watched for the covered wagons that almost every day stopped in Leavenworth for supplies before moving on to the far West. Driving over the wide prairie, sometimes a warm brown, then again white with snow under a wider expanse of deep blue sky than she had ever seen before, she relaxed as she had not in many a year and began to feel the call of the West. She even thought she might like to settle in Kansas until she was caught up by the sharp realization of how she would miss the stimulating companionship of her friends in the East. [Illustration: Daniel Anthony, brother of Susan B. Anthony] When Daniel was busy with his campaign for his second term as mayor, she helped him edit the _Bulletin_. He warned her not to fill his paper up with woman's rights, and in spite of his sympathy for the Negro, forbade her to advocate Negro suffrage in his paper. "I wish I could talk through it the things I'd like to say to the young martyr state ..." she wrote Mrs. Stanton. "The Legislature gave but six votes for Negro suffrage the other day.... The idea of Kansas refusing her loyal Negroes." Again and again she was shocked at the prejudice against Negroes in Kansas, as when Daniel employed a Negro typesetter and the printers, refusing to admit him to their union, went out on strike until he was discharged. "In this city," she reported to Mrs. Stanton, "there are four thousand ex-Missouri slaves who have sought refuge here within the three past years." Making it her business to learn what was being done to help them and educate them, she visited their schools, their Sunday schools, and the Colored Home, and gave much of her time to them. To encourage them to demand their rights, she organized an Equal Rights League among them. This was one thing she could do, even if she could not plead for Negro suffrage in Daniel's newspaper.[165] Then one breath-taking piece of news followed another--Lee's surrender, April 9, 1865, and in less than a week, Lincoln's assassination, his death, and Andrew Johnson's succession to the Presidency. Susan looked upon Lincoln's assassination and death as an act of God. She wrote to Mrs. Stanton, "Was there ever a more terrific command to a Nation to 'stand still and know that I am God' since the world began? The Old Book's terrible exhibitions of God's wrath sink into nothingness. And this fell blow just at the very hour he was declaring his willingness to consign those five million faithful, brave, and loving loyal people of the South to the tender mercies of the ex-slave lords of the lash."[166] She longed "to go out and do battle for the Lord once more," but when she could have expressed her opinions at the big mass meeting held in memory of Lincoln, she remained silent. "My soul was full," she confessed to Mrs. Stanton, "but the flesh not equal to stemming the awful current, to do what the people have called make an exhibition of myself. So quenched the spirit and came home ashamed of myself." Then she added, "Dear-a-me--how overfull I am, and how I should like to be nestled into some corner away from every chick and child with you once more." * * * * * Disturbing news came from the East of dissension in the antislavery ranks, of Garrison's desire to dissolve the American Antislavery Society after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and of Phillips' insistence that it continue until freedom for the Negro was firmly established. While Garrison maintained that northern states, denying the ballot to the Negro, could not consistently make Negro suffrage a requirement for readmitting rebel states to the Union, Phillips demanded Negro suffrage as a condition of readmission. Immediately abolitionists took sides. Parker Pillsbury, Lydia and Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, the Stantons, and others lined up with Phillips, whose vehement and scathing criticism of reconstruction policies seemed to them the need of the hour. Susan also took sides, praising "dear ever glorious Phillips" and writing in her diary, "The disbanding of the American Antislavery Society is fully as untimely as General Grant's and Sherman's granting parole and pardon to the whole Rebel armies."[167] To her friends in the East, she wrote, "How can anyone hold that Congress has no right to demand Negro suffrage in the returning Rebel states because it is not already established in all the loyal ones? What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago, had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote against admitting a new state with slavery, because it was not already abolished in all the old States? It is perfectly astounding, this seeming eagerness of so many of our old friends to cover up and apologize for the glaring hate toward the equal recognition of the manhood of the black race."[168] She rejoiced when word came that the American Antislavery Society would continue under the presidency of Phillips, with Parker Pillsbury as editor of the _Antislavery Standard_; but she was saddened by the withdrawal of Garrison, whom she had idolized for so many years and whose editorials in the _Liberator_ had always been her inspiration.[169] As she read the weekly New York _Tribune_, which came regularly to Daniel, she grew more and more concerned over President Johnson's reconstruction policy and more and more convinced of the need of a crusade for political and civil rights for the Negro. Asked to deliver the Fourth of July oration at Ottumwa, Kansas, she decided to put into it all her views on the controversial subject of reconstruction. Traveling by stage the 125 miles to Ottumwa, she found good company en route and "great talk on politics, Negro equality, and temperance," and thought the "grand old prairies ... perfectly splendid and the timber-skirted creeks ... delightful."[170] Before a large gathering of Kansas pioneers, many of whom had driven forty or fifty miles to hear her, she stood tall, straight, and earnest, as she reminded them of the noble heritage of Kansas, of the bloody years before the war when in the free-state fight, Kansas men and women "taught the nation anew" the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Lashing out with the vehemence of Phillips against President Johnson's reconstruction policy, she warned, "There has been no hour fraught with so much danger as the present.... To be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought victories and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of Negro disfranchisement ... would be a disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars...."[171] She then cited the results of the elections in Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee to prove her point that unless Negroes were given the vote, rebels would be put in office and a new code of laws apprenticing Negroes passed, establishing a new form of slavery. She urged her audience to be awake to the politicians who were using the peoples' reverence and near idolatry of Lincoln to push through anti-Negro legislation under the guise of carrying out his policies. Then putting behind her the prejudice and impatience with Lincoln which she had felt during his lifetime, she added, "If the administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American people one lesson above another, it was that they must think and speak and proclaim, and that he as their President was bound to execute their will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say as he did four years ago, 'I wait the voice of the people.'" In her special pleading for the Negro, she did not forget women. Calling attention to the fact that our nation had never been a true republic because the ballot was exclusively in the hands of the "free white male," she asked for a government "of the people," men and women, white and black, with Negro suffrage and woman suffrage as basic requirements. [Illustration: Wendell Phillips] So enthusiastic were the Republicans over her speech that they urged her to prepare it for publication, suggesting, however, that she delete the passage on woman suffrage. This was her first intimation that Republicans might balk at enfranchising women. So great had been women's contribution to the winning of the war and so indebted were the Republicans to women for creating sentiment for the Thirteenth Amendment, that she had come to expect, along with Mrs. Stanton, that the ballot would without question be given them as a reward. * * * * * It was soon obvious to Susan that politicians in the East as well as in Kansas were shying away from woman suffrage. Mrs. Stanton reported that even Wendell Phillips was backsliding, not wishing to campaign for Negro suffrage and woman suffrage at the same time. "While I could continue as heretofore, arguing for woman's rights, just as I do for temperance every day," he had written, "still I would not mix the movements.... I think such mixture would lose for the Negro far more than we should gain for the woman. I am now engaged in abolishing slavery in a land where the abolition of slavery means conferring or recognizing citizenship, and where citizenship supposes the ballot for all men."[172] Such reasoning filled Susan with despair, for she firmly believed that women who had been asking for full citizenship for seventeen years deserved precedence over the Negro. Mrs. Stanton agreed. To them, Negro suffrage without woman suffrage was unthinkable, an unbearable humiliation. Half of the Negroes were women, and manhood suffrage would fasten upon them a new form of slavery. How could Wendell Phillips, they asked each other, fail to recognize not only the timeliness of woman suffrage, but the fact that women were better qualified for the ballot than the majority of Negroes, who, because of their years in slavery, were illiterate and the easy prey of unscrupulous politicians? By all means enfranchise Negroes, they argued with him, but enfranchise women as well, and if there must be a limitation on suffrage, let it be on the basis of literacy, not on the basis of sex. Among Republican members of Congress and abolitionists, there was serious discussion of a Fourteenth Amendment to extend to the Negro civil rights and the ballot. Susan, reading about this in Kansas, and Mrs. Stanton, discussing it in New York with her husband, Wendell Phillips, and Robert Dale Owen, saw in such a revision of the Constitution a just and logical opportunity to extend woman's rights at the same time. Previously committed to state action on woman suffrage but only because it had then seemed the necessary first step, both women welcomed the more direct road offered by an amendment to the Constitution. Only they of all the old woman's rights workers were awake to this opportunity. Throughout the United States, people were thinking about the Constitution as Americans had not done since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Not only were amendments to the federal Constitution in the air, not only were rebel states being readmitted to the Union with new constitutions, but state constitutions in the North were being revised, and western territories sought statehood. In Susan's opinion the time was ripe to proclaim equal rights for all. This clearly was woman's hour. * * * * * "Come back and help," pleaded Elizabeth Stanton, who grew more and more alarmed as she saw all interest in woman suffrage crowded out of the minds of reformers by their zeal for the Negro. "I have argued constantly with Phillips and the whole fraternity, but I fear one and all will favor enfranchising the Negro without us. Woman's cause is in deep water.... There is pressing need of our woman's rights convention...."[173] Susan's spirits revived at the prospect of holding a woman's rights convention, and plans for the future began to take shape as she read the closing lines of Mrs. Stanton's letter: "I hope in a short time to be comfortably located in a new house where we will have a room ready for you.... I long to put my arms about you once more and hear you scold me for all my sins and shortcomings.... Oh, Susan, you are very dear to me. I should miss you more than any other living being on this earth. You are entwined with much of my happy and eventful past, and all my future plans are based on you as coadjutor. Yes, our work is one, we are one in aim and sympathy and should be together. Come home." Parker Pillsbury also added his plea, "Why have you deserted the field of action at a time like this, at an hour unparalleled in almost twenty centuries?... It is not for me to decide your field of labor. Kansas needed John Brown and may need you ... but New York is to revise her constitution next year and, if you are absent, who is to make the plea for woman?" Reading her newspaper a few days later, she found that the politicians had made their first move, introducing in the House of Representatives a resolution writing the word "male" into the qualifications of voters in the second section of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. She started at once for the East. * * * * * On the long journey back, in the heat of August, traveling by stage and railroad with many stops to make the necessary connections, Susan not only visited her many relatives who had moved to the West, but also called on antislavery and woman suffrage workers, and held meetings to plead for free schools for Negroes and for the ballot for Negroes and women. She found people relieved to have the war over and busy with their own affairs, but with prejudices smoldering. Public speaking was still an ordeal for her and she confessed to her diary, "Made a labored talk.... Had a struggle to get through with speech," and again, "Had a hard time. Thoughts nor words would come--Staggered through."[174] However, she was a determined woman. The message must be carried to the people and she would do it whether she suffered in the process or not. Late in September, she reached her own comfortable home in Rochester, but she had too much on her mind to stay there long, and within a few weeks was in New York with Elizabeth Stanton, deep in a serious discussion of how to create an overwhelming demand for woman suffrage at this crucial time. Again they decided to petition Congress, this time for the vote for both women and Negroes. Five years had now passed since the last national woman's rights convention, and the workers were scattered; some had lost interest and others thought only of the need of the Negro. Lucretia Mott, Lydia Mott, and Parker Pillsbury responded at once. Susan sought out Lucy Stone in spite of the differences that had grown up between them, and after talking with Lucy, confessed to herself that she had been unjustly impatient with her.[175] Hoping for aid from the Jackson or Hovey Fund, she went to New England to revive interest there and in Concord talked with the Emersons, Bronson Alcott, and Frank Sanborn. When she asked Emerson whether he thought it wise to demand woman suffrage at this time, he replied, "Ask my wife. I can philosophize, but I always look to her to decide for me in practical matters." Unhesitatingly Mrs. Emerson agreed with Susan that Congress must be petitioned immediately to enfranchise women either before Negroes were granted the vote or at the same time.[176] Even Wendell Phillips, who did not want to mix Negro and woman suffrage, gave Susan $500 from the Hovey Fund to finance the petitions, but many of the friends upon whom she had counted needed a verbal lashing to rouse them out of their apathy. Very soon she had to face the unpleasant fact that by pressing for woman suffrage now, she was estranging many abolitionists. Nevertheless she and Mrs. Stanton went ahead undaunted, determined that a petition for woman suffrage would go to Congress even if it carried only their own two signatures. However, petitions with many signatures were reaching Congress in January 1866--the very first demand ever made for Congressional action on woman suffrage. Senator Sumner, for whom women had rolled up 400,000 signatures for the Thirteenth Amendment, now presented under protest "as most inopportune" a petition headed by Lydia Maria Child, who for years had been his valiant aid in antislavery work; and Thaddeus Stevens, heretofore friendly to woman suffrage and ever zealous for the Negro, ignored a petition from New York headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.[177] By this time it was clear to Susan that since the two powerful Republicans, Senator Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, both basically friendly to woman suffrage, were determined to devote themselves wholly to Negro suffrage and to the extension of their party's influence, she could expect no help from lesser party members. Her only alternative was to appeal to the Democrats or to an occasional recalcitrant Republican, and she allowed nothing to stand in her way, not even the frenzied pleas of her abolitionist friends. She found James Brooks of New York, Democratic leader of the House, willing to present her petitions, and she made use of him, although he was regarded by abolitionists as a Copperhead and although he was now advocating conciliatory reconstruction for the South of which she herself disapproved. Other Democrats came to the rescue in the Senate as well as in the House--a few because they saw justice in the demands of the women, others because they believed white women should have political precedence over Negroes, and still others because they saw in their support of woman suffrage an opportunity to harass the Republicans. During 1866, petitions for woman suffrage with 10,000 signatures were presented by Democrats and irregular Republicans. In the meantime, conferences in New York with Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton were encouraging, and for a time Susan thought she had found an enthusiastic ally in Tilton, the talented popular young editor of the _Independent_. Theodore Tilton, with his long hair and the soulful face of a poet, with his eloquence as a lecturer and his flare for journalism, was at the height of his popularity. He had winning ways and was full of ideas. After the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, in December 1865, he had proposed that the American Antislavery Society and the woman's rights group merge to form an American Equal Rights Association which would fight for equal rights for all, for Negro and woman suffrage. Wendell Phillips he suggested for president, and the _Antislavery Standard_ as the paper of the new organization. This sounded reasonable and hopeful to Susan, and she hurried to Boston with a group from New York, including Lucy Stone, to consult Wendell Phillips and his New England colleagues. Wendell Phillips, however, was cool to the proposition, pointing out the necessity of amending the constitution of the American Antislavery Society before any such action could be taken. Never dreaming that he would actually oppose their plan, Susan expected this would be taken care of; but when she convened her woman's rights convention in New York in May 1866, simultaneously with that of the American Antislavery Society, she found to her dismay that no formal notice of the proposed union had been given to the members of the antislavery group and therefore there was no way for them to vote their organization into an Equal Rights Association. Not to be sidetracked, she then asked the woman's rights convention to broaden its platform to include rights for the Negro. To her this seemed a natural development as she had always thought of woman's rights as part of the larger struggle for human rights. "For twenty years," she declared, "we have pressed the claims of women to the right of representation in the government.... Up to this hour we have looked only to State action for the recognition of our rights; but now by the results of the war, the whole question of suffrage reverts back to the United States Constitution. The duty of Congress at this moment is to declare what shall be the basis of representation in a republican form of government. "There is, there can be, but one true basis," she continued. "Taxation and representation must be inseparable; hence our demand must now go beyond woman.... We therefore wish to broaden our woman's rights platform and make it in name what it has ever been in spirit, a human rights platform."[178] The women, so often accused in later years of fighting only for their own rights, had the courage at this time to attempt a practical experiment in generosity. Susan and Mrs. Stanton with all their hearts wanted this experiment to succeed, and yet as they resolved their woman's rights organization into the American Equal Rights Association, they were apprehensive. They did not have to wait long for disillusionment. Meeting Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton in the office of the _Antislavery Standard_ to plan a campaign for the Equal Rights Association, they discussed with them what should be done in New York, preparatory to the revision of the state constitution. Emphatically Wendell Phillips declared that the time was ripe for striking the word "white" out of the constitution, but not the word "male." That could come, he added, when the constitution was next revised, some twenty or thirty years later. To their astonishment, Theodore Tilton heartily agreed. Then he added, "The question of striking out the word 'male,' we as an equal rights association shall of course present as an intellectual theory, but not as a practical thing to be accomplished at this convention." Completely unprepared for such an attitude on Tilton's part, Susan retorted with indignation, "I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the black man and not for woman." Then telling the two men just what she thought of them for their betrayal of women, she swept out of the office to keep another appointment.[179] Equally exasperated with these men, Mrs. Stanton stayed on, hoping to heal the breach, but when Susan returned to the Stanton home that evening, she found her highly indignant, declaring she was through boosting the Negro over her own head. Then and there they vowed that they would devote themselves with all their might and main to woman suffrage and to that alone. * * * * * By this time, Congress had passed a civil rights bill over President Johnson's veto, conferring the rights of citizenship upon freedmen, and a Fourteenth Amendment to make these rights permanent was now before Congress. The latest developments regarding the various drafts of the Fourteenth Amendment were passed along to Susan and Mrs. Stanton by Robert Dale Owen. Senator Sumner, he reported, had yielded to party pressure and now supported the Fourteenth Amendment, although in the past he had always maintained such an amendment wholly unnecessary since there was already enough justice, liberty, and equality in the Constitution to protect the humblest citizen. Senator Sumner opposed and defeated a clause in the amendment referring to "race" and "color," words which had never previously been mentioned in the Constitution, but he raised no serious objection to the