Lucy Stone and her daughter, Alice Stone BlackwellLucy 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 tobe 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 thatI tooshall 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, theindependence 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'sAurora 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 workOf any honest creature, howbeit weakImperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,It is not gathered as a grain of sandTo enlarge the sum of human action usedFor carrying out God's end....... let us be content in work,To do the thing we can, and not presumeTo fret because it's little."[106]
"Be sure no earnest workOf any honest creature, howbeit weakImperfect, ill-adapted, fails so much,It is not gathered as a grain of sandTo enlarge the sum of human action usedFor carrying out God's end....... let us be content in work,To do the thing we can, and not presumeTo 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 dropsAt once below the dignity of man,Accepting serfdom. Free men freely work;Who ever fears God, fears to sit at ease."
"The honest earnest man must stand and work:The woman also, otherwise she dropsAt 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 complementOf his sex merely. You forget too muchThat every creature, female as the male,Stands single in responsible act and thought,As also in birth and death. Whoever saysTo a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,'Will get fair answers, if the work and loveBeing good of themselves, are good for her—the bestShe was born for."
"You misconceive the question like a man,Who sees a woman as the complementOf his sex merely. You forget too muchThat every creature, female as the male,Stands single in responsible act and thought,As also in birth and death. Whoever saysTo a loyal woman, 'Love and work with me,'Will get fair answers, if the work and loveBeing good of themselves, are good for her—the bestShe was born for."
Inspired byAurora 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 compatiblewith marriage, and she held up as an ideal the words which Elizabeth Barrett Browning put into the mouth of Aurora Leigh:
"The world waitsFor help. Beloved, let us work so well,Our work shall still be better for our loveAnd still our love be sweeter for our workAnd both, commended, for the sake of each,By all true workers and true lovers born."
"The world waitsFor help. Beloved, let us work so well,Our work shall still be better for our loveAnd still our love be sweeter for our workAnd 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 aweek 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-runhome 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.
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, bringingbefore 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 hisTribunehad 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 theTribune. 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 theTribunewere 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 hadbeen 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 wasHuman 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, butSocial 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 conventionthan 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 thisshe 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 antislaverymeetings. "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 hisLiberatorhad 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 commonscolds," now wrote in theTribune, "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]
William Lloyd GarrisonWilliam 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 theLiberator, "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 Congressto 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 atPort 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 asmuch 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 beforeyou 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]
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 theLiberator, 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'sTribuneand the RochesterDemocrat. 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'sCasa Guidi Windows, which she called "a grand poem, so fitting to our terrible struggle," then to herSonnets from the Portuguese, and George Eliot's popularAdam 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'sHistory of Civilizationand Darwin'sDescent of Man," she wrote in her diary. "Have finishedOrigin 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 YorkTribune. 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 listenedwith 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 snuggledin 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 canbe 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.