Susan B. Anthony Part 12

A month later, Susan went to New York for a visit with Elizabeth Stanton, confident that if they counseled together, they could find a way to serve their country in its hour of need.

She was well aware that all through the country women were responding magnificently in this crisis, giving not only their husbands and sons to the war, but carrying on for them in the home, on the farm, and in business. Many were sewing and knitting for soldiers, sc.r.a.ping lint for hospitals, and organizing Ladies' Aid Societies, which, operating through the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, sent clothing and nourishing food to the inadequately equipped and poorly fed soldiers in the field. In the large cities women were holding highly successful "Sanitary Fairs" to raise funds for the Sanitary Commission. In fact, through the women, civilian relief was organized as never before in history. Individual women too, Susan knew, were making outstanding contributions to the war. Lucy Stone's sister-in-law, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell,[148] a friend and admirer of Florence Nightingale, was training much-needed nurses, while Dr. Mary Walker, putting on coat and trousers, ministered tirelessly to the wounded on the battlefield. Dorothea Dix, the one-time schoolteacher who had awakened the people to their barbarous treatment of the insane, had offered her services to the Surgeon-General and was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses, with authority to recruit nurses and oversee hospital housekeeping. Clara Barton, a government employee, and other women volunteers were finding their way to the front to nurse the wounded who so desperately needed their help; and Mother Bickerd.y.k.e, living with the armies in the field, nursed her boys and cooked for them, lifting their morale by her motherly, strengthening presence. Through the influence of Anna Ella Carroll, Maryland had been saved for the Union and she, it was said, was ably advising President Lincoln.

Susan herself had felt no call to nurse the wounded, although she had often skillfully nursed her own family; nor had she felt that her qualifications as an expert housekeeper and good executive demanded her services at the front to supervise army housekeeping. Instead she looked for some important task to which other women would not turn in these days when relief work absorbed all their attention. It was not enough, she felt, for women to be angels of mercy, valuable and well-organized as this phase of their work had become. A spirit of awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this led her to believe that northern women needed someone to stimulate their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues of the war and in so doing claim their own freedom. Women, she reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts, and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the traditions of freedom upon which this republic was founded. Women must have a part in molding public opinion and must help direct policy as Anna Ella Carroll was proving women could do. Here was the best possible training for prospective women voters. To all this Mrs.

Stanton heartily agreed.

As they sat at the dining-room table with Mrs. Stanton's two daughters, Maggie and Hattie, all busily cutting linen into small squares and raveling them into lint for the wounded, they discussed the state of the nation. They were troubled by the low morale of the North and by the insidious propaganda of the Copperheads, an antiwar, pro-Southern group, which spread discontent and disrespect for the government. Profiteering was flagrant, and through speculation and war contracts, large fortunes were being built up among the few, while the majority of the people not only found their lives badly disrupted by the war but suffered from high prices and low wages. So far no decisive victory had encouraged confidence in ultimate triumph over the South. In newspapers and magazines, women of the North were being unfavorably compared with southern women and criticized because of their lack of interest in the war. Writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_, March, 1863, Gail Hamilton, a rising young journalist, accused northern women of failing to come up to the level of the day. "If you could have finished the war with your needles," she chided them, "it would have been finished long ago, but st.i.tching does not crush rebellion, does not annihilate treason...."

Thinking along these same lines, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now decided to go a step further. They would act to bring women abreast of the issues of the day, Susan with her flare for organizing women, Mrs. Stanton with her pen and her eloquence. They would show women that they had an ideal to fight for. They would show them the uselessness of this b.l.o.o.d.y conflict unless it won freedom for all of the slaves. Freedom for all, as a basic demand of the republic, would be their watchword.

Men were forming Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues to combat the influence of secret antiwar societies, such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. "Why not organize a Women's National Loyal League?"

Susan and Mrs. Stanton asked each other.

They talked their ideas over first with the New York abolitionists, then with Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and his dashing young friend, Theodore Tilton, and with Robert Dale Owen, now in the city as the recently appointed head of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission.

These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other antislavery members of Congress. All agreed that the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation must be implemented by an act of Congress, by an amendment to the Const.i.tution, and that public opinion must be aroused to demand a Thirteenth Amendment. If women would help, so much the better.

Susan at once thought of pet.i.tions. If pet.i.tions had won the Woman's Property Law in New York, they could win the Thirteenth Amendment. The largest pet.i.tion ever presented to Congress was her goal.

Carefully Susan and Mrs. Stanton worked over an _Appeal to the Women of the Republic_, sending it out in March 1863 with a notice of a meeting to be held in New York. It left no doubt in the minds of those who received it that women had a responsibility to their country beyond services of mercy to the wounded and disabled.

From all parts of the country, women responded to their call. The veteran antislavery and woman's rights worker, Angelina Grimke Weld, came out of her retirement for the meeting. Ernestine Rose, the ever faithful, was on hand. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell were there, and the popular Hutchinson family, famous for their stirring abolition songs. They helped Susan and Mrs. Stanton steer the course of the meeting into the right channels, to show the women a.s.sembled that the war was being fought not merely to preserve the Union, but also to preserve the American way of life, based on the principle of equal rights and freedom for all, to save it from the encroachments of slavery and a slaveholding aristocracy. Susan proposed a resolution declaring that there can never be a true peace until the civil and political rights of all citizens are established, including those of Negroes and women. The introduction of the woman's rights issue into a war meeting with an antislavery program was vigorously opposed by women from Wisconsin, but the faithful feminists came to the rescue and the controversial resolution was adopted.

Although she always instinctively related all national issues to woman's rights and vice versa, Susan did not allow this subject to overshadow the main purpose of the meeting. Instead she a.n.a.lyzed the issue of the war and reproached Lincoln for suppressing the fact that slavery was the real cause of the war and for waiting two long years before calling the four million slaves to the side of the North.

"Every hour's delay, every life sacrificed up to the proclamation that called the slave to freedom and to arms," she declared, "was nothing less than downright murder by the government.... I therefore hail the day when the government shall recognize that it is a war for freedom."[149]

A Women's National Loyal League was organized, electing Susan secretary and Mrs. Stanton president. They sent a long letter to President Lincoln thanking him for the Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, especially for the freedom it gave Negro women, and a.s.suring him of their loyalty and support in this war for freedom. Their own immediate task, they decided, was to circulate pet.i.tions asking for an act of Congress to emanc.i.p.ate "all persons of African descent held in involuntary servitude." As Susan so tersely expressed it, they would "canva.s.s the nation for freedom."

All the oratory over, Susan now undertook the hard work of making the Women's National Loyal League a success, a.s.suming the initial financial burden of printing pet.i.tions and renting an office, Room 20, at Cooper Inst.i.tute, where she was busy all day and where New York members met to help her. To each of the pet.i.tions sent out, she attached her battle cry, "There must be a law abolishing slavery....

Women, you cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be a power in the government is through the exercise of this one, sacred, const.i.tutional 'right of pet.i.tion,' and we ask you to use it now to the utmost...." She also asked those signing the pet.i.tions to contribute a penny to help with expenses and in this way she slowly raised $3,000.[150]

At first the response was slow, although both Republican and antislavery papers were generous in their praise of this undertaking, but when the signed pet.i.tions began to come in, she felt repaid for all her efforts, and when the Hovey Fund trustees appropriated twelve dollars a week for her salary, the financial burden lifted a little.

Yet it was ever present. For herself she needed little. She wrote her mother and Mary, "I go to a little restaurant nearby for lunch every noon. I always take strawberries with two tea rusks. Today I said, 'all this lacks is a gla.s.s of milk from my mother's cellar,' and the girl replied, 'We have very nice Westchester milk.' So tomorrow I shall add that to my bill of fare. My lunch costs, berries five cents, rusks five, and tomorrow the milk will be three."[151]

The cost of postage mounted as the pet.i.tions continued to go out to all parts of the country. In dire need of funds, Susan decided to appeal to Henry Ward Beecher; and wearily climbing Columbia Heights to his home, she suddenly felt a strong hand on her shoulder and a familiar voice asking, "Well, old girl, what do you want now?" He took up a collection for her in Plymouth Church, raising $200. Gerrit Smith sent her $100, when she had hoped for $1,000, and Jessie Benton Fremont, $50. Before long, her "war of ideas" won the support of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Dougla.s.s, Horace Greeley, George William Curtis, and other popular lecturers who spoke for her at Cooper Union to large audiences whose admission fees swelled her funds; and eventually Senator Sumner, realizing how important the pet.i.tions could be in arousing public opinion for the Thirteenth Amendment, saved her the postage by sending them out under his frank.[152]

She made her home with the Stantons, who had moved from Brooklyn to 75 West 45th Street, New York, and the comfortable evenings of good conversation and her busy days at the office helped mightily to heal her grief for her father. In the bustling life of the city she felt she was living more intensely, more usefully, as these critical days of war demanded. Henry Stanton, now an editorial writer for Greeley's _Tribune_, brought home to them the inside story of the news and of politics. All of them were highly critical of Lincoln, impatient with his slowness and skeptical of his plans for slaveholders and slaves in the border states. They questioned Garrison's wisdom in trusting Lincoln. Susan could not feel that Lincoln was honest when he protested that he did not have the power to do all that the abolitionists asked. "The pity is," she wrote Anna E. d.i.c.kinson, "that the vast ma.s.s of people really believe the man _honest_--that he believes he has not the power--I wish I could...."[153]

New York seethed with unrest as time for the enforcement of the draft drew near. Indignant that rich men could avoid the draft by buying a subst.i.tute, workingmen were easily incited to riot, and the city was soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all Negroes and abolitionists were in danger. The Stanton home was in the thick of the rioting, and when Susan and Henry Stanton came home during a lull, they all decided to take refuge for the night at the home of Mrs.

Stanton's brother-in-law, Dr. Bayard. Here they also found Horace Greeley hiding from the mob, for hoodlums were marching through the streets shouting, "We'll hang old Horace Greeley to a sour apple tree."

The next morning Susan started for the office as usual, thinking the worst was over, but as not a single horsecar or stage was running, she took the ferry to Flushing to visit her cousins. Here too there was rioting, but she stayed on until order was restored by the army. She returned to the city to find casualties mounting to over a thousand and a million dollars' worth of property destroyed. Negroes had been shot and hung on lamp posts, Horace Greeley's _Tribune_ office had been wrecked and the homes of abolitionist friends burned. "These are terrible times," she wrote her family, and then went back to work, staying devotedly at it through all the hot summer months.[154]

By the end of the year, she had enrolled the signatures of 100,000 men and women on her pet.i.tions, and a.s.sured by Senator Sumner that these pet.i.tions were invaluable in creating sentiment for the Thirteenth Amendment, she raised the number of signatures in the next few months to 400,000.

In April 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment pa.s.sed the Senate and the prospects for it in the House were good. This phase of her work finished, Susan disbanded the Women's National Loyal League and returned to her family in Rochester.

In despair over the possible re-election of Abraham Lincoln, Susan had joined Henry and Elizabeth Stanton in stirring up sentiment for John C. Fremont. Abolitionists were sharply divided in this presidential campaign. Garrison and Phillips disagreed on the course of action, Garrison coming out definitely for Lincoln in the _Liberator_, while Phillips declared himself emphatically against four more years of Lincoln. Susan, the Stantons, and Parker Pillsbury were among those siding with Phillips because they feared premature reconstruction under Lincoln. They cited Lincoln's Amnesty Proclamation as an example of his leniency toward the rebels. They saw danger in leaving free Negroes under the control of southerners embittered by war, and called for Negro suffrage as the only protection against oppressive laws.

They opposed the readmission of Louisiana without the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of Negroes. Lincoln, they knew, favored the extension of suffrage only to literate Negroes and to those who had served in the military forces. In fact, Lincoln held back while they wanted to go ahead under full steam and they looked to Fremont to lead them.

Following the presidential campaign anxiously from Rochester, Susan wrote Mrs. Stanton, "I am starving for a full talk with somebody posted, not merely pitted for Lincoln...." The persistent cry of the _Liberator_ and the _Antislavery Standard_ to re-elect Lincoln and not to swap horses in midstream did not ring true to her. "We read no more of the good old doctrine 'of two evils choose neither,'" she wrote Anna E. d.i.c.kinson. She confessed to Anna, "It is only safe to seek and act the truth and to profess confidence in Lincoln would be a lie in me."[155]

As the war dragged on through the summer without decisive victories for the North, Lincoln's prospects looked bleak, and to her dismay, Susan saw the chances improving for McClellan, the candidate of the northern Democrats who wanted to end the war, leave slavery alone, and conciliate the South. The whole picture changed, however, with the capture of Atlanta by General Sherman in September. The people's confidence in Lincoln revived and Fremont withdrew from the contest.

One by one the anti-Lincoln abolitionists were converted; and Susan, anxiously waiting for word from Mrs. Stanton, was relieved to learn that she was not one of them, nor was Wendell Phillips whose judgment and vision both of them valued above that of any other man. With approval she read these lines which Phillips had just written Mrs.

Stanton, "I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Mac's [McClellan's] election. I would cut oft my right hand before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election. I wholly distrust his fitness to settle this thing and indeed his purpose."[156]

There is nothing to indicate any change of opinion on Susan's part regarding Lincoln's unfitness for a second term. That he was the lesser of two evils, she of course acknowledged. For her these pre-election days were discouraging and frustrating. She had very definite ideas on reconstruction which she felt in justice to the Negro must be carried out, and Lincoln did not meet her requirements.

After Lincoln's re-election, she again looked to Wendell Phillips for an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed.

"Phillips has just returned from Washington," Mrs. Stanton wrote her.

"He says the radical men feel they are powerless and checkmated....

They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not say.... We say now, as ever, 'Give us immediately unconditional emanc.i.p.ation, and let there be no reconstruction except on the broadest basis of justice and equality!...' Phillips and a few others must hold up the pillars of the temple.... I cannot tell you how happy I am to find Dougla.s.s on the same platform with us. Keep him on the right track. Tell him in this revolution, he, Phillips, and you and I must hold the highest ground and truly represent the best type of the white man, the black man, and the woman."[157]

Susan, holding "the highest ground," found it difficult to mark time until she could find her place in the reconstruction. "The work of the hour," she wrote Anna E. d.i.c.kinson, "is not alone to put down the Rebels in arms, but to educate Thirty Millions of People into the idea of a True Republic. Hence every influence and power that both men and women can bring to bear will be needed in the reconstruction of the Nation on the broad basis of justice and equality."[158]

FOOTNOTES:

[134] Garrisons, _Garrison_, IV, pp. 30-31.

[135] Lydia Mott to W. L. Garrison, May 8, 1861, Boston Public Library; Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, p. 89.

[136] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 215.

[137] _Ibid._, p. 216. Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave, was often called the Moses of her people because she led so many of them into the promised land of freedom.

[138] _Ibid._

[139] _Ibid._, p. 198.

[140] Anna E. d.i.c.kinson was born in Philadelphia in 1842. The death of her father, two years later, left the family in straightened circ.u.mstances, and Anna, after attending a Friends school, began very early to support herself by copying in lawyers' offices and by working at the U.S. Mint. Speaking extemporaneously at Friends and antislavery meetings, she discovered she had a gift for oratory and was soon in demand as a speaker.

[141] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 219.

[142] April, 1862. _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 748.

[143] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 218, 222.

[144] _Emanc.i.p.ation, the Duty of Government_, Ms., Lucy E. Anthony Collection. Reading that General Grant had returned 13 slaves to their masters, an indignant Susan B. Anthony wrote Mrs. Stanton, "Such gratuitous outrage should be met with instant death--without judge or jury--if any offense may." Feb. 27, 1862, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[145] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 221.

[146] Jan. 24, 1904, Anna Dann Mason Collection.