Part 6

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."

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." 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."

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."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."

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.

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."

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."

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."

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?" 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."

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!"

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:

Judge William Hay of Saratoga Springs, New York.

Feb. 19, 1854, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.