The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Volume I Part 20

[Autograph:

Faithfully yours, Robert Dale Owen]

During all this work of the Loyal League, Miss Anthony found her strongest and staunchest support in Robert Dale Owen, who was then in New York by appointment of President Lincoln as chairman of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission. She was also in constant communication with Senator Charles Sumner, who was most anxious that the work should be hastened. The blank pet.i.tions were sent in great sacks to him at Washington, and distributed under his "frank" to all parts of the Union. On February 9, 1864, he presented in the Senate the first installment. The pet.i.tions from each State were tied by themselves in a large bundle and endorsed with the number of signatures. Two able-bodied negroes carried them into the Senate chamber, and Mr.

Sumner presented them, saying in part:

These pet.i.tions are signed by 100,000 men and women, who unite in this unparalleled number to support their prayer. They are from all parts of the country and from every condition of life.... They ask nothing less than universal emanc.i.p.ation, and this they ask directly at the hands of Congress. It is not for me to a.s.sign reasons which the army of pet.i.tioners has forborne to a.s.sign; but I may not improperly add that, naturally and obviously, they all feel in their hearts, what reason and knowledge confirm, not only that slavery is the guilty origin of the rebellion, but that its influence everywhere, even outside the rebel States, has been hostile to the Union, always impairing loyalty and sometimes openly menacing the national government. The pet.i.tioners know well that to save the country from peril, especially to save the national life, there is no power in the ample a.r.s.enal of self-defense which Congress may not grasp; for to Congress under the Const.i.tution, belongs the prerogative of the Roman Dictator to see that the republic receives no detriment. Therefore to Congress these pet.i.tioners now appeal.

After an earnest discussion by the Senate the pet.i.tion was referred to the Select Committee on Slavery and Freedom, whose chairman was Thomas D. Eliot, of Ma.s.sachusetts. Immediately afterwards several thousand more blank pet.i.tions were sent out, accompanied by a second appeal which closed: "Shall we not all join in one loud, earnest, effectual prayer to Congress, which will swell on its ear like the voice of many waters, that this b.l.o.o.d.y, desolating war shall be arrested and ended by the immediate and final removal by statute law and amended Const.i.tution, of that crime and curse which alone has brought it upon us?"

[Autograph: Charles Sumner]

In answer to an invitation to be present at the first anniversary of the Women's National Loyal League, Senator Sumner wrote:

I can not be with you for my post of duty is here. I am grateful to your a.s.sociation for what you have done to arouse the country to insist on the extinction of slavery. Now is the time to strike and no effort should be spared. The good work must be finished, and to my mind nothing seems to be done, while anything remains to be done. There is one point to which attention must be directed. No effort should be spared to castigate and blast the whole idea of _property in man_, which is the corner-stone of the rebel pretension and the constant a.s.sumption of the partisans of slavery, or of its lukewarm opponents. Let this idea be trampled out and there will be no sympathy with the rebellion, and there will be no such abomination as slave-hunting, which is beyond question the most execrable feature of slavery itself.

As Miss Anthony herself had asked so many favors of Wendell Phillips, she thought it would be a good idea to have Mrs. Stanton invite him to make an address at this anniversary; but he was not in the least deceived, as his reply shows:

DEAR MRS. STANTON: Your S.B.A. thinks she is very cunning. As if I did not see a huge p.u.s.s.y under that meal! She has been so modest, humble, ashamed, reluctant, apologetic, contrite, self-accusing whenever the last ten years she has asked me to do anything, go anywhere, speak on any topic! Now she makes you pull the chestnuts out of the fire and thinks I do not see her waiting behind. Ah, the hand is the hand of Esau, the voice is the voice of Jacob, wicked, sly, skulking, mystifying Jacob. Why don't "secretaries" write the official letters? How much they leave the "president" to do!

Naughty idlers, those secretaries! Well, let me thank Miss Secretary Anthony for her gentle consideration; then let me say I'll try to speak, as you say, fifteen minutes.... Remember me defiantly to S.B.A.

In the midst of all this correspondence came a letter from a sweetheart of her girlhood, now a prominent officeholder in Ohio, stating that he was a widower but would not long remain one if his old friend would take pity upon him. It is sincerely to be hoped that the secretary of the Loyal League found time at least to have one of her clerks answer this epistle.

The meeting was held in the Church of the Puritans, May 12, 1864, and soul-stirring speeches were made by Phillips, Mrs. Rose, Lucretia Mott, George Thompson, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony. The report of the executive committee showed that a debt of $5,000, including $1,000 for postage alone, had been paid; that 25,000 blank pet.i.tions had been sent out; that the league now numbered 5,000 members, and that branch Loyal Leagues had been formed in many cities. Strong resolutions were adopted demanding not only emanc.i.p.ation but enfranchis.e.m.e.nt for the negroes.

The entire proceedings of the convention ill.u.s.trated how thoroughly the leading women of the country understood the political situation, how broad and comprehensive was their grasp of public affairs, and with what a patriotic and self-sacrificing spirit they performed their part of the duties imposed by the great Civil War.

By August, 1864, the signatures to the pet.i.tions had reached almost 400,000. Again and again Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson had written Miss Anthony that these pet.i.tions formed the bulwark of their demand for congressional action to abolish slavery. Public sentiment on this point had now become emphatic, the Senate had pa.s.sed the bill for the prohibition of slavery, and the intention of the House of Representatives was so apparent that it did not seem necessary to continue the pet.i.tions. The headquarters in Cooper Inst.i.tute were closed, and the magnificent work, which from this center had radiated throughout the country, found its reward in the proposition by Congress, on February 1, 1865, for Amendment XIII to the Federal Const.i.tution:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

The faithful, untiring, persistent chief of this Women's National Loyal League was Susan B. Anthony, whose only material reminder of that great achievement for the freedom of the slave is the arm-chair in which, for the past thirty-five years, she has sat and conducted her vast correspondence in the interest of liberty for the half of humanity still in bondage; yet in the blessed thought that her efforts were an important factor in securing freedom for millions of her fellow-creatures, she has been rewarded a thousandfold. But what words can express her sense of humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully still held her unworthy a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the n.o.ble women of the nation, the negro men just emerged from slavery and not only totally illiterate but also densely ignorant of every public question?

[Autograph: Elizabeth Blackwell]

There never can be an adequate portrayal of the services rendered by the women of this country during the Civil War, but none will deny that, according to their opportunities, they were as faithful and self-sacrificing as were the men. A comparison of values is impossible, but women's labors supplemented those of men, and together they wrought out the freedom of the slave and the salvation of the Union. Among the great body of women, a few stand out in immortal light. The plan of the vital campaign of the Tennessee, one of the great strategic movements of history, was made by Anna Ella Carroll. The work of Dorothea Dix, government superintendent of women nurses, with its onerous and important duties, needs no eulogy. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, fresh from England and an intimacy with Florence Nightingale, originated the Sanitary Commission. No name is held in more profound reverence than that of Clara Barton, for her matchless services upon the battlefield among the dead and dying. To Josephine S. Griffing belongs the full credit of founding the Freedmen's Bureau, which played so valuable a part in the help and protection of the newly emanc.i.p.ated negroes. Who of all the public speakers rendered greater aid to the Union than the inspired Anna d.i.c.kinson? Yet not one of these ever received the slightest official recognition from the government. In the cases of Miss Carroll, Dr. Blackwell and Mrs. Griffing, the honors and the profits all were absorbed by men. Neither Dorothea Dix nor Clara Barton ever asked for a pension. All of these women at the close of the war appealed for the right of suffrage, a voice in the affairs of government; but such appeals were and still are treated with contemptuous denial. The situation was thus eloquently summed up by that woman statesman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton:

The lessons of the war were not lost on the women of this nation; through varied forms of suffering and humiliation, they learned that they had an equal interest with men in the administration of the government, alike enjoying its blessings or enduring its miseries. When in the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of the black men they saw another ignorant cla.s.s of voters placed above their heads, and beheld the danger of a distinctively "male" government, forever involving the nations of the earth in war and violence; and demanded for the protection of themselves and children, that woman's voice should be heard and her opinions in public affairs be expressed by the ballot, they were coolly told that the black man had earned the right to vote, that he had fought and bled and died for his country.

[Footnote 32: See Appendix for this address.]

[Footnote 33: She was a.s.sisted from time to time by Mrs. Stanton, Lucy Stone, Charlotte B. Wilbour, Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, Mary F. Gilbert, Frances V. Hallock, Mattie Griffith (Brown), Rebecca Shepard (Putnam), and Frances M. Russell, all donating their services. The bookkeeper and the clerks were paid small salaries from the office receipts.]

CHAPTER XV.

"MALE" IN THE FEDERAL CONSt.i.tUTION.

1865.

Soon after closing the league headquarters, Miss Anthony went to Auburn to attend the wedding of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Jr., and Ellen, daughter of her dear friend Martha C. Wright and niece of Lucretia Mott, a union of two families very acceptable to the friends of both. From this scene of festivity she returned home to meet a fresh sorrow in the sudden death, almost at the hour of her arrival, of Ann Eliza, daughter of her eldest sister Guelma and Aaron McLean, the best beloved of all her nieces. She was twenty-three years old, beautiful and talented, a good musician and an artist of fine promise. In her Miss Anthony had centered many hopes and ambitions, and the letters show that she was always planning and working for her future as she would have done for that of a cherished daughter. She was laid to rest on the silver wedding anniversary of her parents. Miss Anthony writes: "She had ceased to be a child and had become the fullgrown woman, my companion and friend. I loved her merry laugh, her bright, joyous presence, and yet my loss is so small compared to the awful void in her mother's life that I scarcely dare mention it."

Months afterwards she wrote her sister Hannah: "Today I made a pilgrimage to Mount Hope. The last rays of red, gold and purple fringed the horizon and shone serenely on the mounds above our dear father and Ann Eliza. What a contrast in my feelings; for the one a subdued sorrow at the sudden ending of a life full-ripened, only that we would have basked in its sunshine a little longer; for the other a keen anguish over the untimely cutting off in the dawn of existence, with the hopes and longings but just beginning to take form, the real purpose of life yet dimly developed, a great nature but half revealed. The faith that she and all our loved and gone are graduated into a higher school of growth and progress is the only consolation for death."

At another time she wrote her brother: "This new and sorrowful reminder of the brittleness of life's threads should soften all our expressions to each other in our home circles and open our lips to speak only words of tenderness and approbation. We are so wont to utter criticisms and to keep silence about the things we approve. I wish we might be as faithful in expressing our likes as our dislikes, and not leave our loved ones to take it for granted that their good acts are noted and appreciated and vastly outnumber those we criticise. The sum of home happiness would be greatly multiplied if all families would conscientiously follow this method."

There were urgent appeals in these days from the lately-married brother and his wife for sister Susan to come to Kansas and, as no public work seemed to be pressing, she started the latter part of January, 1865.

She stopped in Chicago to visit her uncle Albert d.i.c.kinson, was detained a week by heavy storms, and reached Leavenworth the last day of the month. Of her journey she wrote home:

I paid a dollar for a ride across the Mississippi on the ice. When we reached Missouri all was devastation. I asked the conductor if there were not a sleeper and he replied, "Our sleeping cars are in the ditch." Scarcely a train had been over the road in weeks without being thrown off the track. We were nineteen hours going the 200 miles from Quincy to St. Joe. Twelve miles out from the latter we had to wait for the train ahead of us to get back on the rails. I was desperate. Any decent farmer's pigpen would be as clean as that car. There were five or six families, each with half a dozen children, moving to Kansas and Nebraska, who had been shut up there for days. A hovel stood up the bank a little way and several of the men went there and washed their faces. After watching them enjoy this luxury for a while I finally rushed up myself and asked the woman in charge if she would sell me a cup of coffee. She grunted out yes, after some hesitation, and while she was making it, I washed my face and hands. When she handed me my drink she said, "This is no rye; it is real coffee." And so it was and I enjoyed it, bra.s.s spoon, thick, dingy, cracked cup and all.

This was Miss Anthony's first visit to Kansas and she found much to interest her in Leavenworth--caravans of emigrants long trains of supplies for the army, troops from the barracks crowds of colored refugees, the many features of frontier life so totally different from all she had seen and known in her eastern home. The prominence of her brother brought many distinguished visitors to his house, she enjoyed the long carriage drives and the days were filled with pleasant duties, so that she writes, "I am afraid I shall get into the business of being comfortable." On her birthday, February 15, the diary shows that she wagered a pair of gloves with the family physician that it would not rain before morning, and on the 16th is recorded: "The bell rang early this morning and a boy left a box containing a pair of gloves with the compliments of the doctor." In March one entry reads: "The new seamstress starts in pretty well but she can not sew nicely enough for the little clothes. We shall have to make those ourselves."

This life of ease proved to be of short duration. Her brother was renominated for mayor and plunged at once into the thick of a political campaign, while Miss Anthony went to the office to help manage his newspaper, limited only by his injunction "not to have it all woman's rights and negro suffrage." The labor, however, which she most enjoyed was among the colored refugees. Soon after the slaves were set free they flocked to Kansas in large numbers, and what should be done with this great body of uneducated, untrained and irresponsible people was a perplexing question. She went into the day schools, Sunday-schools, charitable societies and all organizations for their relief and improvement. The journal shows that four or five days or evenings every week were given to this work and that she formed an equal rights league among them. A colored printer was put into the composing-room, and at once the entire force went on strike. The diary declares "it is a burning, blistering shame," and relates her attempts to secure other work for him. She met at this time Hiram Revels, a colored Methodist preacher, afterwards United States senator from Mississippi.

During these months she was in constant receipt of letters pressing her to return to the East. Phillips said: "Come back, there is work for you here." From Lydia Mott came the pathetic cry: "Our old fraternity is no more; we are divided, bodily and spiritually, and I seem to grow more isolated every day." Pillsbury wrote: "We do not know much now about one another. We called a meeting of the Hovey Committee and only Whipple and I were present. Why have you deserted the field of action at a time like this, at an hour unparalleled in almost twenty centuries? If you watch our papers you must have observed that with you gone, our forces are scattered until I can almost truly say with him of old, 'I only am left.' It is not for me to decide your field of labor.

Kansas needed John Brown and may need you. It is no doubt missionary ground and, wherever you are, I know you will not be idle; but New York is to revise her const.i.tution next year and, if you are absent, who is to make the plea for woman?" Mrs. Stanton insisted that she should not remain buried in Kansas and concluded a long letter:

I hope in a short time to be comfortably located in a new house where we will have a room ready for you when you come East. I long to put my arms around you once more and hear you scold me for my sins and short-comings. Your abuse is sweeter to me than anybody else's praise for, in spite of your severity, your faith and confidence shine through all. O, Susan, you are very dear to me. I should miss you more than any other living being from this earth.

You are intertwined with much of my happy and eventful past, and all my future plans are based on you as a coadjutor. Yes, our work is one, we are one in aim and sympathy and we should be together.

Come home.

Miss Anthony's own heart yearned to return, but the workers were so few in Kansas and so many in the Eastern States. that she scarcely knew where the call of duty was strongest. At the close of the war her mind grasped at once the full import of the momentous questions which would demand settlement and she felt the necessity of placing herself in touch with those who would be most powerful in moulding public sentiment. The threatened division in the Abolitionist ranks and the reported determination of Mr. Garrison to disband the Anti-Slavery Society, filled her with dismay and she sent back the strongest protests she could put into words:

How can any one hold that Congress has no right to demand negro suffrage in the returning rebel States because it is not already established in all the loyal ones? What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago, had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote against admitting a new State with slavery, because it was not already abolished in all the old States? It is perfectly astounding, this seeming eagerness of so many of our old friends to cover up and apologize for the glaring hate toward the equal recognition of the manhood of the black race. Well, you will be in New York to witness, perhaps, the disbanding of the Anti-Slavery Society--and I shall be away out here, waiting anxiously to catch the first glimpse of the spirit of the meeting. But Phillips will be glorious and genial to the end.

All through this struggle he has stood up against the tide, one of the few to hold the nation to its vital work--its one necessity, moral as military--absolute justice and equality for the black man.

I wish every ear in this country might listen to his word.

A letter from Mr. Phillips said: "Thank you for your kind note. I see you understand the lay of the land and no words are necessary between you and me. Your points we have talked over. If Garrison should resign, we incline to Purvis for president for many, many reasons. We (Hovey Committee) shall aid in keeping our Standard floating till the enemy comes down." All the letters received by Miss Anthony during May and June were filled with the story of the dissension in the Anti-Slavery Society.

It is not a part of this work to go into the merits of that discussion.

In brief, Mr. Garrison and his followers believed that, with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, slavery was forever abolished in the United States and there was no further need of the Anti-Slavery Society which he himself had founded. Phillips and his following held that "no emanc.i.p.ation can be effectual and no freedom real, unless the negro has the ballot and the States are prohibited from enacting laws making any distinction among their citizens on Account of race or color." There were minor differences of opinion respecting men and measures, but the above are the fundamental points which led to the first breach that had occurred for a quarter of a century in the ranks of the great anti-slavery leaders, who had borne a persecution never equalled in the history of our country. It resulted, at the May Anniversary in New York, in Garrison's declining a re-election to the presidency of the society, which he had held for thirty-two years, and in the election of Phillips.

Those most intimately connected with Miss Anthony sustained the position of Mr. Phillips--Mrs. Stanton, Parker Pillsbury, Robert Purvis, Charles Remond, Stephen Foster, Lucretia and Lydia Mott, Anna d.i.c.kinson, Sarah Pugh--and she herself was his staunchest defender.

Believing as strongly as she did that the suffrage is the very foundation of liberty, that without it there can be no real freedom for either man or woman, she could not have done otherwise, and yet, so great was her reverence and affection for Mr. Garrison, it was with the keenest regret she found herself no longer able to follow him. She writes: "I am glad I was spared from witnessing that closing scene. It will be hard beyond expression to leave him out of our councils, but he never will be out of our sympathies. I hope you will refrain from all personalities. Pro-slavery signs are too apparent and too dangerous at this hour for us to stop for personal adjustments. To go forward with the great work pressing upon the society, without turning to the right or the left, is the one wise course."

Parker Pillsbury was made editor of the Standard in place of Oliver Johnson, and was a.s.sisted by George W. Smalley, who had married an adopted daughter of Wendell Phillips. Mr. Pillsbury wrote Miss Anthony soon after the anniversary:

We could not see how the colored race were to be risked, shut up in the States with their old masters, whom they had helped to conquer and out of whose defeat their freedom had come; so we voted to keep the machinery in gear until better a.s.surances were given of a free future than we yet possess. We have offended some by our course. I am sorry, but it was Mr. Garrison who taught me to be true to myself. To my mind, suffrage for the negro is now what immediate emanc.i.p.ation was thirty years ago. If we emanc.i.p.ate from slavery and leave the European doctrine of serfdom extant, even in the mildest form, then the colored race, or we, or perhaps both, have another war in store. And so my work is not done till the last black man can declare in the full face of the world, "I am a man and a brother."

In June, as the expected little stranger had arrived safe, Miss Anthony accepted an invitation to deliver the Fourth of July address at Ottumwa, and then went through her inevitable agony whenever she had a speech to prepare. She took the stage for Topeka, finding among her fellow-pa.s.sengers her relative, Major Scott Anthony, with Mr.

b.u.t.terfield of the Overland Dispatch, and the long, hot, dusty ride was enlivened by an animated discussion of the political questions of the day. During this drive over the unbroken prairies, she made the prediction that, given a few decades of thrift, they would be dotted with farms, orchards and villages and the State would be a paradise.

Miss Anthony was among the first of the Abolitionists to declare that the negroes must have the suffrage, one of the most unpopular ideas ever broached, and she writes: "As fearless, radical and independent as my brother is, he will not allow my opinions on this subject to go into his paper." At Topeka she spoke to a large audience in the Methodist church on this question. In order to reach Ottumwa she had to ride 125 miles by stage in the heat of July, and her expenses were considerable.

No price had been guaranteed for her address, but she learned to her surprise that she was expected to make it a gratuitous offering, as was the custom on account of the poverty of the people. They came from miles around and were enthusiastic over her speech on "President Johnson's Mississippi Reconstruction Proclamation." The Republicans insisted that she should put her notes in shape for publication, but urged her to leave out the paragraph on woman suffrage.[34]

The other speakers were Sidney Clark, M.C., and a professor from Lawrence University. They were entertained by a prominent official who had just built a new house, the upper story of which was unfinished. It was divided into three rooms by hanging up army blankets, and each of the orators was a.s.signed to one of these apartments. Miss Anthony was so exhausted from the long stage-ride, the speaking and the heat, that she scarcely could get ready for bed, but no sooner had she touched the pillow than she was a.s.sailed by a species of animals noted for the welcome they extended to travellers in the early history of Kansas. Her dilemma was excruciating. Should she lie still and be eaten alive, or should she get up, strike a light and probably rouse the honorable gentlemen on the other side of the army blankets? A few minutes decided the question; she slipped out of bed, lighted her tallow dip and reconnoitered. Then she blew out her light, and sat by the window till morning.