Susan B. Anthony Part 28

FOOTNOTES:

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

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

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

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

[318] New York _Graphic_, Sept. 12, 1874. Mrs. Hooker believed her half-brother guilty and repeatedly urged him to confess, a.s.suring him she would join him in announcing "a new social freedom." Kenneth R.

Andrews, Nook Farm (Cambridge, Ma.s.s., 1950), pp. 36-39. Rumors that Mrs. Hooker was insane were deliberately circulated.

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

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

[321] _Ibid._, p. 462.

[322] _Ibid._, II, pp. 1007-1009.

[323] _Ibid._, I, p. 468.

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

[325] _Ibid._, p. 472.

[326] _Ibid._, p. 473.

A FEDERAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT

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

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

Philadelphia had always been a friendly city because of Lucretia Mott.

Now Lucretia came almost daily to the women's headquarters, bringing a comforting sense of support, approval, and friends.h.i.+p. When Mrs.

Stanton, free at last from her lecture engagements, joined them in June, Susan's happiness was complete and she confided to her diary, "Glad enough to see her and feel her strength come in."[327]

Susan and Mrs. Stanton now sent the Republican and Democratic national conventions well-written memorials pointing out the appropriateness of enfranchising women in this centennial year. But no woman suffrage plank was adopted by either party. Susan put Mrs. Stanton and Mrs.

Gage to work on a Women's Declaration of 1876, and so "magnificent" a doc.u.ment did they produce that she not only had many copies printed for distribution but had one beautifully engrossed on parchment for presentation to President Grant at the Fourth of July celebration in Independence Square.

Unable to secure permission to present this declaration, she made plans of her own. For herself, she managed to get a press card as reporter for her brother's paper, the Leavenworth _Times_. Mrs.

Stanton and Lucretia Mott refused to attend the celebration, so indignant were they over the snubs women had received from the Centennial Commission, and they held a women's meeting at the First Unitarian Church. When at the last minute four tickets were sent Susan by the Centennial Commission, she gave them to the most militant of her colleagues, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Lillie Devereux Blake, Sarah Andrews Spencer, and Phoebe Couzins. With Susan in the lead, they pushed through the jostling crowd to Independence Square on that bright hot Fourth of July and were seated among the elect on the platform.

By this time they had learned that Thomas W. Ferry of Michigan, Acting Vice President, would subst.i.tute for President Grant at the ceremony.

Because he was a good friend of woman suffrage, Phoebe Couzins made one more effort for orderly procedure, sending him a note asking for permission to present the Women's Declaration. This failed, and rather than take part in creating a disturbance, she withdrew, leaving her four friends on the platform.

"We ... sat there waiting ..." reported Mrs. Blake. "The heat was frightful.... Amid such a throng it was difficult to hear anything ...

We decided that our presentation should take place immediately after Mr. Richard Lee of Virginia, grandson of the Signer, had read the Declaration of Independence. He read it from the original doc.u.ment, and it was an impressive moment when that time-honored parchment was exposed to the view of the wildly cheering crowd.... Mr. Lee's voice was inaudible, but at last I caught the words, 'our sacred honors,'

and cried, 'Now is the time.'

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

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

Order!"

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

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

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

"Woman," she continued, "has shown equal devotion with man to the cause of freedom and has stood firmly by his side in its defense.

Together they have made this country what it is.... We ask our rulers, at this hour, no special favors, no special privileges.... We ask justice, we ask equality, we ask that all civil and political rights that belong to the citizens of the United States be guaranteed to us and our daughters forever."

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: Aaron A. Sargent]

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

Nor was Congress impressed by Susan's centennial publicity demanding a federal woman suffrage amendment. She had gathered pet.i.tions from twenty-six states with 10,000 signatures which were presented to the Senate in 1877. The majority of the Senators found these pet.i.tions uproariously funny, and Susan in the visitors' gallery at the time of their presentation was infuriated by the mirth and disrespect of these men. "A few read the pet.i.tions as they would any other, with dignity and without comment," reported the popular journalist, Mary Clemmer, in her weekly Was.h.i.+ngton column, "but the majority seemed intensely conscious of holding something unutterably funny in their hands....

The entire Senate presented the appearance of a laughing school practicing sidesplitting and ear-extended grins." After a few humorous and sarcastic remarks the pet.i.tions were referred to the Committee on Public Lands. Only one Senator, Aaron A. Sargent of California, was "man enough and gentleman enough to lift the pet.i.tions from this insulting proposition.... He ... demanded for the pet.i.tion of more than 10,000 women at least the courtesy which would be given any other."[331]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Ill.u.s.tration: Clara Bewick Colby]