Part 26

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."

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.

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 introduction of the word "male" as a qualification for suffrage, which was also unprecedented. That he tried time and time again to avoid the word "male" when he was redrafting the amendment or that Thaddeus Stevens tried to substitute "legal voters" for "male citizens" was no comfort to Susan and Mrs. Stanton, as they saw the Fourteenth Amendment writing discrimination against women into the federal Constitution for the first time.

As they carefully read over the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which conferred citizenship on every person born or naturalized in the United States, women's rights seemed assured:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Then in the controversial second section which provided the penalty of reduction of representation in Congress for states depriving Negroes of the ballot, they saw themselves written out of the Constitution by the words, "male inhabitants" and "male citizens," used to define legal voters. It was baffling to be kept from their goal by a single word in a provision which at best was the unsatisfactory compromise arrived at by radical and conservative Republicans and which sincere abolitionists felt was unfair to the Negro. That it was unfair to women, there was no doubt.

With determination, Susan and Mrs. Stanton fought this injustice. Were they not "persons born ... in the United States," they asked. Were they forever to be regarded as children or as lower than persons, along with criminals, idiots, and the insane? Were women not counted in the basis of representation and should they not have a voice in the election of those representatives whose office their numbers helped to establish?

As Susan studied the Constitution, she saw that the question of suffrage had up to this time been left to the states and that there were no provisions defining suffrage or citizenship or limiting the right of suffrage. Only now was the precedent being broken by the Fourteenth Amendment which conferred citizenship on Negroes and limited suffrage to males. How could this be constitutional, she reasoned, when the first lines of the Constitution read, "We, the people of the United States, in order to ... establish justice ... and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Of course "the people" must include women, if the English language meant what it said.

The Fourteenth Amendment with the limiting word "male" was passed by Congress and referred to the states for ratification in June 1866. As never before, Susan felt the curse of the tradition of the unimportance of women. Once more politicians and reformers had ignored women's inherent rights as human beings. In spite of women's intelligence and their wartime service to their country, no statesman of power or vision felt it at all necessary to include women under the Fourteenth Amendment's broad term of "persons." Yet according to statements made in later years by John A. Bingham and Roscoe Conkling, both sponsors of the amendment and concerned with its drafting, the possibility was considered of protecting corporations and the property of individuals from the interference of state and municipal legislation, through the federal control extended by this amendment. At any rate, they wrought well for the corporations which have received abundant protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, along with all male citizens, while women were left outside the pale.

Tactfully the Republicans explained to women that even Negro suffrage could not be definitely spelled out in the Fourteenth Amendment, if it were to be accepted by the people; and added that Negro suffrage was all the strain that the Republican party could bear at this time; but neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton were fooled by this sophistry. They knew that Republican politicians saw in the Negro vote in the South the means of keeping their party in power for a long time to come, and could entirely overlook justice to Negro women since they were assured of enough votes without them. The women of the North need not be considered, since they had nothing to offer politically. They would vote, it was thought, just as their husbands voted.

Completely deserted by all their former friends in the Republican party, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now made use of an irregular Republican, Senator Cowan of Pennsylvania, whom the abolitionists had labeled "the watchdog of slavery." When Benjamin Wade's bill "to enfranchise each and every male person" in the District of Columbia "without any distinction on account of color or race," was discussed on the Senate floor in December 1866, Senator Cowan offered an amendment striking out the word "male" and thus leaving the door open for women. He stated the case for woman suffrage well and with eloquence, and although he was accused of being insincere and wishing merely to cloud the issue, he forced the Republicans to show their hands. In the three-day debate which followed, Senator Wilson of Massachusetts declared emphatically that he was opposed to connecting the two issues, woman and Negro suffrage, but would at any time support a separate bill for woman's enfranchisement. Senator Pomeroy of Kansas objected to jeopardizing the chances of Negro suffrage by linking it with woman suffrage, but Senator Wade of Ohio boldly expressed his approval of woman suffrage, even casting a vote for Senator Cowan's amendment, as did B. Gratz Brown of Missouri. In the final vote, nine votes were counted for woman suffrage and thirty-seven against.

Susan recorded even this defeat as progress, for woman suffrage had for the first time been debated in Congress and prominent Senators had treated it with respect. The Republican press, however, was showing definite signs of disapproval, even Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Almost unbelieving, she read Greeley's editorial, "A Cry from the Females," in which he said, "Talk of a true woman needing the ballot as an accessory of power when she rules the world with the glance of an eye." With the Democratic press as always solidly against woman suffrage and the Antislavery Standard avoiding the subject as if it did not exist, no words favorable to votes for women now reached the public.

It was hard for Susan to forgive the Antislavery Standard for what she regarded as a breach of trust. Financed by the Hovey Fund, it owed allegiance, she believed, to women as well as the Negro. In protest Parker Pillsbury resigned his post as editor, but among the leading men in the antislavery ranks, only he, Samuel J. May, James Mott, and Robert Purvis, the cultured, wealthy Philadelphia Negro, were willing to support Susan and Mrs. Stanton in their campaign for woman suffrage at this time. The rest aligned themselves unquestioningly with the Republicans, although in the past they had always been distrustful of political parties.

Discouraging as this was for Susan, their influence upon the antislavery women was far more alarming. These women one by one temporarily deserted the woman's rights cause, persuaded that this was the Negro's hour and that they must be generous, renounce their own claims, and work only for the Negroes' civil and political rights. Less than a dozen remained steadfast, among them Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Ernestine Rose, and for a time Lucy Stone, who wrote John Greenleaf Whittier in January 1867, "You know Mr. Phillips takes the ground that this is 'the Negro's hour,' and that the women, if not criminal, are at least, not wise to urge their own claim. Now, so sure am I that he is mistaken and that the only name given, by which the country can be saved, is that of WOMAN, that I want to ask you ... to use your influence to induce him to reconsider the position he has taken. He is the only man in the nation to whom has been given the charm which compels all men, willing or unwilling, to listen when he speaks ... Mr. Phillips used to say, 'take your part with the perfect and abstract right, and trust God to see that it shall prove expedient.' Now he needs someone to help him see that point again."

FOOTNOTES:

Daniel R. Anthony married Anna Osborne of Edgartown, Martha's Vineyard, in 1864.

Before buying the house on Madison Street, then numbered 7, Mrs. Anthony and Mary lived for a time at 69 North Street, Rochester. Hannah and Eugene Mosher bought the adjoining house on Madison Street in 1866. Aaron McLean took over his father-in-law's profitable insurance business.

Harper, Anthony, I, p. 241.

Feb. 14, 1865, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

Ms., Diary, April 27, 1862.

Feb. 14, 1862, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

Ibid.