Susan B. Anthony Part 23

Moving on to Oregon to lecture at the request of the pioneer suffragist, Abigail Scott Duniway, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, who had left for the East, "As I rolled on the ocean last week feeling that the very next strain might swamp the ship, and thinking over all my sins of omission and commission, there was nothing undone which haunted me like the failure to speak the word at San Francisco again and more fully. I would rather today have the satisfaction of having said the true and needful thing on Laura Fair and the social evil, with the hisses and hoots of San Francisco and the entire nation around me, than all that you or I could possibly experience from their united eulogies with that one word unsaid."[272]

So far Susan's western trip had netted her only $350. This was disappointing in so far as she had counted upon it to reduce substantially her _Revolution_ debt. She now hoped to build her earnings up to $1,000 in Oregon and Washington. Everywhere in these two states people took her to their hearts and the press with a few exceptions was complimentary. The beauty of the rugged mountainous country compensated her somewhat for the long tiring stage rides over rough roads and for the cold uncomfortable lonely nights in poor hotels. Only occasionally did she enjoy the luxury of a good cup of coffee or a clean bed in a warm friendly home.

At first in Oregon she was apprehensive about facing an audience because of her San Francisco experience, and she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "But to the rack I must go, though another San Francisco torture be in store for me."[273] She spoke on "The Power of the Ballot," on women's right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, on the need of women to be self-supporting, and clearly and logically she marshaled her facts and her arguments. Occasionally she obliged with a temperance speech, or gathered women together to talk to them about the social evil, relieved when they responded to this delicate subject with earnestness and grat.i.tude. Practice soon made her an easy, extemporaneous speaker.

Yet she was only now and then satisfied with her efforts, recording in her diary, "Was happy in a real Patrick Henry speech."[274]

The proceeds from her lectures were disappointing, as money was scarce in the West that winter, and she had just decided to return to the East to spend Christmas with her mother and sisters when she was urged to accept lecture engagements in California. Putting her own personal longings behind her, she took the stage to California, sitting outside with the driver so that she could better enjoy the scenery and learn more about the people who had settled this new lonely overpowering country. "Horrible indeed are the roads," she wrote her mother, "miles and miles of corduroy and then twenty miles ... of black mud.... How my thought does turn homeward, mother."[275]

This time she was warmly received in San Francisco. The prejudice, so vocal six months before, had disappeared. "Made my Fourteenth Amendment argument splendidly," she wrote in her diary. "All delighted with it and me--and it is such a comfort to have the friends feel that I help the good work on."[276]

She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family, "I miss Mrs. Stanton. Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, instead of merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant scintillations as they emanate from her never-exhausted magazine.

There is no alternative--whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully, because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her."[277]

Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada where she also had lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1, 1872, "6 months of constant travel, full 8000 miles, 108 lectures. The year's work full 13,000 miles travel--170 meetings." On the train she met the new California Senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey during which the train was stalled in deep snow drifts. "This is indeed a fearful ordeal, fastened here ... midway of the continent at the top of the Rocky mountains," she recorded. "The railroad has supplied the pa.s.sengers with soda crackers and dried fish.... Mrs. Sargent and I have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing mothers."[278] The Sargents had brought their own food for the journey and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent believed heartily in woman's rights, and Senator Sargent in his campaign for the Senate had boldly announced his endors.e.m.e.nt of woman suffrage.

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

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

Impulsively she came to Victoria's defense at the convention: "I have been asked by many, 'Why did you drag Victoria Woodhull to the front?'

Now, bless your souls, she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington with a powerful argument. She presented her Memorial to Congress and it was a power.... She had an interview with the judiciary committee. We could never secure that privilege. She was young, handsome, and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after."[279]

"I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew Mrs.

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

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

This time it was Susan, not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. "At the close of the war," Susan reminded the Senators, "Congress lifted the question of suffrage for men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State. When the Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed ... we rushed to you with pet.i.tions praying you not to insert the word 'male' in the second clause. Our best friends ... said to us: 'The insertion of that word puts no new barrier against women; therefore do not embarra.s.s us but wait until we get the Negro question settled.' So the Fourteenth Amendment with the word 'male' was adopted.[280]

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

"Have they done as they promised?" she asked. "When we come asking protection under the new guarantees of the Const.i.tution, the same men say to us ... to wait the action of Congress and State legislatures in the adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall make null and void the word 'male' in the Fourteenth and supply the want of the word 's.e.x' in the Fifteenth. Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon yourselves or any cla.s.s of men would have caused rebellion and in the end a b.l.o.o.d.y revolution...."

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

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

When letters came from Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker showing plainly that they were falling in with Victoria's plans to form a new political party, Susan at once dashed off these lines of warning: "We have no element out of which to make a political party, because there is not a man who would vote a woman suffrage ticket if thereby he endangered his Republican, Democratic, Workingmen's, or Temperance party, and all our time and words in that direction are simply thrown away. My name must not be used to call any such meeting."[281]

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading about Victoria's nomination in the morning papers, Susan breathed a prayer of grat.i.tude for a narrow escape, recording in her diary, "There never was such a foolish muddle--all come of Mrs. S.

[Stanton] consulting and conceding to Woodhull & calling a People's Con[vention].... All came near being lost.... I never was so hurt with the folly of Stanton.... Our movement as such is so demoralized by letting go the helm of ship to Woodhull--though we rescued it--it was as by a hair breadth escape." She was surprised to find no condemnation of her actions in _Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly_ but only the implication that the suffragists were too slow for Victoria's great work.[282]

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

While Victoria Woodhull's fortunes were speedily dropping from the sublime heights of a presidential nomination to the humiliation of financial ruin, the loss of her home, and the suspended publication of her _Weekly_, Susan was knocking at the doors of the Republican and Democratic national conventions. She had previously appealed to the liberal Republicans, among whose delegates were her old friends George W. Julian, B. Gratz Brown, and Theodore Tilton, but they had ignored woman suffrage and had nominated for President, Horace Greeley, now a persistent opponent of votes for women. The Democrats did no better.

Faced with Grant as the strong Republican nominee, they too nominated Horace Greeley with B. Gratz Brown as his running mate, hoping by this coalition to achieve victory. The Republicans, still unwilling to go the whole way for woman suffrage by giving it the recognition of a plank in their platform, did, however, offer women a splinter at which Susan grasped eagerly because it was the first time an important, powerful political party had ever mentioned women in their platform.

"The Republican party," read the splinter, "is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their n.o.ble devotion to the cause of freedom; their admission to wider fields of usefulness is received with satisfaction; and the honest demands of any cla.s.s of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration."[283]

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

She at once began speaking for the Republican party, looking forward to carrying the discussion of woman suffrage into every school district and every ward meeting. In the beginning the Republicans were generous with funds, giving her $1,000 for women's meetings in New York, Philadelphia, Rochester, and other large cities. For speakers she sought both Lucy Stone and Anna E. d.i.c.kinson, but Lucy made it plain in letters to Mrs. Stanton that she would take no part in Republican rallies conducted by Susan, and Anna responded with a torrent of false accusations.[284] Only Mary Livermore of the American a.s.sociation consented to speak at Susan's Republican rallies; but with Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Olympia Brown to call upon, Susan did not lack for effective orators.

In an _Appeal to the Women of America_, financed by the Republicans and widely circulated, she urged the election of Grant and Wilson and the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom she described as women's most bitter opponent. "Both by tongue and pen," she declared, "he has heaped abuse, ridicule, and misrepresentation upon our leading women, while the whole power of the _Tribune_ had been used to crush our great reform...."[285]

Beyond this she was unwilling to go in criticizing her one-time friend. In fact her sense of fairness recoiled at the ridicule and defamation heaped upon Horace Greeley in the campaign. "I shall not join with the Republicans," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "in hounding Greeley and the Liberals with all the old war anathemas of the Democracy.... My sense of justice and truth is outraged by the Harper's cartoons of Greeley and the general falsifying tone of the Republican press. It is not fair for us to join in the cry that everybody who is opposed to the present administration is either a Democrat or an apostate."[286]

Susan sensed a change in the Republicans' att.i.tude toward women, as they grew increasingly confident of victory. Not only did they refuse further financial aid, but criticized Susan roundly because in her speeches she emphasized woman suffrage rather than the virtues of the Republican party. She ignored their complaints, and wrote Mrs.

Stanton, "If you are willing to go forth ... saying that you endorse the party on any other point ... than that of its recognition of woman's claim to vote, _I_ am not...."[287]

FOOTNOTES:

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

[263] _The Revolution_, V, March 19, 1870, pp. 154-155, 159.

[264] Clipping from _Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly_, Susan B. Anthony Sc.r.a.pbook, Library of Congress.

[265] Emanie, Sachs, _The Terrible Siren_ (New York, 1928), p. 87.

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

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

[267] _The Golden Age_, Dec., 1871.

[268] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 388.

[269] _Ibid._, pp. 389-390.