Part 21

She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family, "I miss Mrs. Stanton. Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, instead of merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant scintillations as they emanate from her never-exhausted magazine. There is no alternative—whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully, because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her."

Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada where she also had lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1, 1872, "6 months of constant travel, full 8000 miles, 108 lectures. The year's work full 13,000 miles travel—170 meetings." On the train she met the new California Senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey during which the train was stalled in deep snow drifts. "This is indeed a fearful ordeal, fastened here ... midway of the continent at the top of the Rocky mountains," she recorded. "The railroad has supplied the passengers with soda crackers and dried fish.... Mrs. Sargent and I have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing mothers." The Sargents had brought their own food for the journey and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent believed heartily in woman's rights, and Senator Sargent in his campaign for the Senate had boldly announced his endorsement of woman suffrage.

This friendly attitude among western men toward votes for women was the most encouraging development in Susan's long uphill fight. These men, looking upon women as partners who had shared with them the dangers and hardships of the frontier, recognized at once the justice of woman suffrage and its benefit to the country.

Susan traveled directly from Nevada to Washington instead of breaking her journey by a visit with her brothers in Kansas, as she had hoped to do. She even omitted Rochester so that she might be in time for the national woman suffrage convention in Washington in January 1872, for which Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Stanton were preparing. She found Victoria Woodhull with them, her presence provoking criticism and dissension.

Impulsively she came to Victoria's defense at the convention: "I have been asked by many, 'Why did you drag Victoria Woodhull to the front?' Now, bless your souls, she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington with a powerful argument. She presented her Memorial to Congress and it was a power.... She had an interview with the judiciary committee. We could never secure that privilege. She was young, handsome, and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after."

"I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew Mrs. Woodhull's antecedents," she continued. "I said I didn't and that I did not care any more for them than I do about those of the members of Congress.... I have been asked along the Pacific coast, 'What about Woodhull? You make her your leader?' Now we don't make leaders; they make themselves."

Victoria, however, did not prove to be the leading light of this convention, although she made one of her stirring fiery speeches calling upon her audience to form an Equal Rights party and nominate her for President of the United States. By this time, Susan had concluded that Victoria Woodhull for President did not ring true and she would have nothing to do with her self-inspired candidacy. Quickly she steered the convention away from Victoria Woodhull for President toward the consideration of the more practical matter of woman's right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.

This time it was Susan, not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. "At the close of the war," Susan reminded the Senators, "Congress lifted the question of suffrage for men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State. When the Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed ... we rushed to you with petitions praying you not to insert the word 'male' in the second clause. Our best friends ... said to us: 'The insertion of that word puts no new barrier against women; therefore do not embarrass us but wait until we get the Negro question settled.' So the Fourteenth Amendment with the word 'male' was adopted.

"When the Fifteenth was presented without the word 'sex,'" she continued, "we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends declared that the absence of the word was no hindrance to us, and again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war, saying, 'After we have enfranchised the Negro, we will take up your case.'

"Have they done as they promised?" she asked. "When we come asking protection under the new guarantees of the Constitution, the same men say to us ... to wait the action of Congress and State legislatures in the adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall make null and void the word 'male' in the Fourteenth and supply the want of the word 'sex' in the Fifteenth. Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon yourselves or any class of men would have caused rebellion and in the end a bloody revolution...."

Unconvinced of the urgency or even the desirability of votes for women, the Senate judiciary committee promptly issued an adverse report, but Susan was assured that her cause had a few persistent supporters in Congress when Benjamin Butler presented petitions to the House for a declaratory act for the Fourteenth Amendment and Congressman Parker of Missouri introduced a bill granting women the right to vote and hold office in the territories.

Susan now turned to the more sympathetic West to take her plea for woman suffrage directly to the people. Speaking almost daily in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, she had little time to think of the work in the East; the glamor of Victoria Woodhull faded, and she realized that her own hard monotonous spade work would in the long run do more for the cause than the meteoric rise of a vivid personality who gave only part of herself to the task.

When letters came from Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker showing plainly that they were falling in with Victoria's plans to form a new political party, Susan at once dashed off these lines of warning: "We have no element out of which to make a political party, because there is not a man who would vote a woman suffrage ticket if thereby he endangered his Republican, Democratic, Workingmen's, or Temperance party, and all our time and words in that direction are simply thrown away. My name must not be used to call any such meeting."

Then she added, "Mrs. Woodhull has the advantage of us because she has the newspaper, and she persistently means to run our craft into her port and none other. If she were influenced by women spirits ... I might consent to be a mere sail-hoister for her; but as it is she is wholly owned and dominated by men spirits and I spurn the whole lot of them...."

A few weeks later, as she looked over the latest copy of Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, she was horrified to find her name signed to a call to a political convention sponsored by the National Woman Suffrage Association. Immediately she telegraphed Mrs. Stanton to remove her name and wrote stern indignant letters begging her and Mrs. Hooker not to involve the National Association in Victoria Woodhull's presidential campaign. Although she herself had often called for a new political party while she was publishing The Revolution, she was practical enough to recognize that a party formed under Victoria Woodhull's banner was doomed to failure.

Returning to New York, she found both Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker still completely absorbed in Victoria's plans. Bringing herself up to date once more on the latest developments in the colorful life of Victoria Woodhull, she found that she had been lecturing on "The Impending Revolution" to large enthusiastic audiences and that she had again been called into court by her family. Goaded to defiance by an increasingly virulent press, Victoria had also begun to blackmail suffragists who she thought were her enemies, among them Mrs. Bullard, Mrs. Blake, and Mrs. Phelps. This made Susan take steps at once to free the National Association of her influence.

When Victoria Woodhull, followed by a crowd of supporters, sailed into the first business session of the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York, announcing that the People's convention would hold a joint meeting with the suffragists, Susan made it plain that they would do nothing of the kind, as Steinway Hall had been engaged for a woman suffrage convention. With relief, she watched Victoria and her flock leave for a meeting place of their own. Disgruntled at what she called Susan's intolerance, Mrs. Stanton then asked to be relieved of the presidency. Elected to take her place, Susan was now free to cope with Victoria, should this again become necessary.

Not to be outmaneuvered by Susan, Victoria made a surprise appearance near the end of the evening session and moved that the convention adjourn to meet the next morning in Apollo Hall with the people's convention. Quickly one of her colleagues seconded the motion. Susan refused to put this motion, standing quietly before the excited audience, stern and somber in her steel-gray silk dress. Beside her on the platform, Victoria, intense and vivid, put the motion herself, and it was overwhelmingly carried by her friends scattered among the suffragists. Declaring this out of order because neither Victoria nor many of those voting were members of the National Association, Susan in her most commanding voice adjourned the convention to meet in the same place the next morning. Victoria, however, continued her demands until Susan ordered the janitor to turn out the lights. Then the audience dispersed in the darkness.

With these drastic measures, Susan rescued the National Woman Suffrage Association from Victoria Woodhull, who had her own triumph later at Apollo Hall, where, surrounded by wildly cheering admirers, she was nominated for President of the United States by the newly formed Equal Rights party.

Reading about Victoria's nomination in the morning papers, Susan breathed a prayer of gratitude for a narrow escape, recording in her diary, "There never was such a foolish muddle—all come of Mrs. S. [Stanton] consulting and conceding to Woodhull & calling a People's Con[vention].... All came near being lost.... I never was so hurt with the folly of Stanton.... Our movement as such is so demoralized by letting go the helm of ship to Woodhull—though we rescued it—it was as by a hair breadth escape." She was surprised to find no condemnation of her actions in Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly but only the implication that the suffragists were too slow for Victoria's great work.

The attitude of some of the leading suffragists toward Victoria Woodhull remained a problem. Fortunately Mrs. Stanton came back into line, but both Mrs. Hooker and Mrs. Davis seemed bound to drift under Victoria's influence, and the promising young lawyer, Belva Lockwood, campaigned for the Equal Rights party and its candidate Victoria Woodhull.

While Victoria Woodhull's fortunes were speedily dropping from the sublime heights of a presidential nomination to the humiliation of financial ruin, the loss of her home, and the suspended publication of her Weekly, Susan was knocking at the doors of the Republican and Democratic national conventions. She had previously appealed to the liberal Republicans, among whose delegates were her old friends George W. Julian, B. Gratz Brown, and Theodore Tilton, but they had ignored woman suffrage and had nominated for President, Horace Greeley, now a persistent opponent of votes for women. The Democrats did no better. Faced with Grant as the strong Republican nominee, they too nominated Horace Greeley with B. Gratz Brown as his running mate, hoping by this coalition to achieve victory. The Republicans, still unwilling to go the whole way for woman suffrage by giving it the recognition of a plank in their platform, did, however, offer women a splinter at which Susan grasped eagerly because it was the first time an important, powerful political party had ever mentioned women in their platform.

"The Republican party," read the splinter, "is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause of freedom; their admission to wider fields of usefulness is received with satisfaction; and the honest demands of any class of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration."

Thankful to have escaped involvement with Victoria Woodhull and her Equal Rights party just at this time when the Republicans were ready to smile upon women, Susan basked in an aura of respectability thrown around her by her new political allies. She was even hopeful that the two woman-suffrage factions could now forget their differences and work together for "the living, vital issue of today—freedom to women."

She at once began speaking for the Republican party, looking forward to carrying the discussion of woman suffrage into every school district and every ward meeting. In the beginning the Republicans were generous with funds, giving her $1,000 for women's meetings in New York, Philadelphia, Rochester, and other large cities. For speakers she sought both Lucy Stone and Anna E. Dickinson, but Lucy made it plain in letters to Mrs. Stanton that she would take no part in Republican rallies conducted by Susan, and Anna responded with a torrent of false accusations. Only Mary Livermore of the American Association consented to speak at Susan's Republican rallies; but with Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Olympia Brown to call upon, Susan did not lack for effective orators.

In an Appeal to the Women of America, financed by the Republicans and widely circulated, she urged the election of Grant and Wilson and the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom she described as women's most bitter opponent. "Both by tongue and pen," she declared, "he has heaped abuse, ridicule, and misrepresentation upon our leading women, while the whole power of the Tribune had been used to crush our great reform...."

Beyond this she was unwilling to go in criticizing her one-time friend. In fact her sense of fairness recoiled at the ridicule and defamation heaped upon Horace Greeley in the campaign. "I shall not join with the Republicans," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "in hounding Greeley and the Liberals with all the old war anathemas of the Democracy.... My sense of justice and truth is outraged by the Harper's cartoons of Greeley and the general falsifying tone of the Republican press. It is not fair for us to join in the cry that everybody who is opposed to the present administration is either a Democrat or an apostate."

Susan sensed a change in the Republicans' attitude toward women, as they grew increasingly confident of victory. Not only did they refuse further financial aid, but criticized Susan roundly because in her speeches she emphasized woman suffrage rather than the virtues of the Republican party. She ignored their complaints, and wrote Mrs. Stanton, "If you are willing to go forth ... saying that you endorse the party on any other point ... than that of its recognition of woman's claim to vote, I am not...."

FOOTNOTES:

A former Congressman from Ohio, a personal friend of Senator Benjamin Wade who was a loyal friend of woman suffrage.

The Revolution, V, March 19, 1870, pp. 154-155, 159.

Clipping from Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, Susan B. Anthony Scrapbook, Library of Congress.

Emanie, Sachs, The Terrible Siren (New York, 1928), p. 87. After hearing Victoria Woodhull speak at a woman suffrage meeting in Philadelphia, Lucretia Mott wrote her daughters, March 21, 1871, "I wish you could have heard Mrs. Woodhull ... so earnest yet modest and dignified, and so full of faith that she is divinely inspired for her work. The 30 or 40 persons present were much impressed with her work and beautiful utterances." Garrison Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

May 20, 1871, Ida Husted Harper Collection, Henry E. Huntington Library.

The Golden Age, Dec., 1871.

Harper, Anthony, I, p. 388.

Ibid., pp. 389-390.

Ibid., pp. 391-394. Laura Fair, who reportedly had been the mistress of Alexander P. Crittenden for six years, was acquitted of his murder on the grounds that his death was not due to her pistol shot but to a disease from which he was suffering. Julia Cooley Altrocchi, The Spectacular San Franciscans (New York, 1949).

Ms., Diary, July 13-23, 1871.

Harper, Anthony, I, p. 396.

Ibid.

Ms., Diary, Oct. 13, 1871.

Harper, Anthony, I, p. 403.

Ms., Diary, Dec. 15, 1871.

Harper, Anthony, I, p. 396.

Ms., Diary, Jan. 2, 1872.

Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly, Jan. 23, 1873.

Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 410-411.

Ibid., p. 413.

Ms., Diary, May 8, 10, 12, 1872.

Harper, Anthony, I, pp. 416-417.

Ms., Diary, Sept. 21, 1872. Lucy Stone wrote in the Woman's Journal, July 27, 1872, "We are glad that the wing of the movement to which these ladies belong have decided to cast in their lot with the Republican party. If they had done so sooner, it would have been better for all concerned...."

History of Woman Suffrage, II, p. 519. The Republicans financed a paper, Woman's Campaign, edited by Helen Barnard, which published some of Susan's speeches and which Susan for a time hoped to convert into a woman suffrage paper.

Harper, Anthony, I, p. 422.

Ibid.

TESTING THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT

Susan preached militancy to women throughout the presidential campaign of 1872, urging them to claim their rights under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments by registering and voting in every state in the Union.

Even before Francis Minor had called her attention to the possibilities offered by these amendments, she had followed with great interest a similar effort by Englishwomen who, in 1867 and 1868, had attempted to prove that the "ancient legal rights of females" were still valid and entitled women property holders to vote for representatives in Parliament, and who claimed that the word "man" in Parliamentary statutes should be interpreted to include women. In the case of the 5,346 householders of Manchester, the court held that "every woman is personally incapable" in a legal sense. This legal contest had been fully reported in The Revolution, and disappointing as the verdict was, Susan looked upon this attempt to establish justice as an indication of a great awakening and uprising among women.

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

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

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