The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Volume II Part 17

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph: "John G Whittier"]

My heart honors, loves and blesses you. Every woman's would if she only knew you. You'll have a statue some day in the Capitol at Washington, but your best monument is built already in your countrywomen's hearts. G.o.d bless you, brave and steadfast elder sister! Accept this as the only valentine I ever wrote. May you live a hundred years and vote the last twenty-five, is the wish and prediction of your loyal sister,

FRANCES E. WILLARD.

Miss Anthony's sole and effective fidelity to the cause of the equal rights of her s.e.x is worthy of the highest honor, and I know that it will be eloquently and fitly acknowledged at the dinner, which I trust will be in every way successful. Very respectfully yours,

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

It is a grief to me that I can not be present to honor the birthday of our dear Susan B. Anthony; long life to her! I should have been delighted to respond to the toast proposed, and to bear my heartfelt tribute of respect and love for the true and unselfish reformer, to whom women are no more indebted than are men. "Time shall embalm and magnify her name." Very sincerely yours,

WM. LLOYD GARRISON.

I know her great earnestness in every righteous cause, especially that most righteous of all, woman suffrage, which I hope may receive a new impulse from your gathering. As I grow older I feel a.s.sured, year by year, that the granting of suffrage to women will remedy many evils which now are attendant on popular government; and if we are to despair of that cause we must despair of the final establishment of justice as the controlling power in the political affairs of mankind. I am faithfully yours,

GEORGE F. h.o.a.r.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph: "Yours Sincerely, T B Reed"]

I can not venture to promise to be present at the dinner to be given to Miss Anthony, but I should be sorry to lose an opportunity to express my admiration of her life and character. In themselves they are ample refutation of the charges made by the unthinking that partic.i.p.ation in public affairs would make women unwomanly. If any system of subjection has enabled any woman to preserve more thoroughly the respect and affectionate regard of all her friends than has Miss Anthony amid the struggles of an active and strenuous life I have yet to learn of it. With sincere hope that she may have many years still left to her, I am yours sincerely,

THOMAS B. REED.

I think I express the feeling of most if not all the workers in our cause when I say that the women of America owe more to Susan B.

Anthony than to any other woman living. While Mrs. Stanton has been the standard bearer of liberty, announcing great principles, Miss Anthony has been the power which has carried those principles on toward victory and impressed them upon the hearts of the people.

Yours truly,

OLYMPIA BROWN.

May you live many years longer to enjoy the results of your herculean work, and score as many triumphs in the future as you have in the past. On the morning of the 15th some flowers will be sent you with my love. I wish they were as imperishable as your name and fame. Affectionately,

MRS. JOHN A. LOGAN.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph: "Affectionately, Mrs. John A Logan"]

How good to have lived through the laugh of the world into its smiles of welcome and honor--how much better to have reached these with a heart gentle and humble like hers--how best of all to care, as she must, scarce a rush for the personal honor and accept it only as an honor to the cause for which she has given so many of the seventy years. Truly yours,

W. C. AND MARY LEWIS GANNETT.

With the hope that you may live to one hundred or until, like ancient Simeon, you behold what you hope for, I am yours very truly,

T. W. PALMER.

My wife and I send you our hearty congratulations on your birthday.

May you have many happy returns of the day, with increasing honor and affection from your numerous friends, amongst whom we hope you will let us count ourselves. Yours very truly,

CHARLES NORDHOFF.

I congratulate you with all my heart upon your health and happiness on this your seventieth birthday, and wish to say that I believe no woman lives in the United States who has done more for her s.e.x, and for ours as well, than yourself. The great advancement of women, not alone in the direction of suffrage, but in every field of labor and every department of the better and n.o.bler life of manhood and womanhood, during the past generation, has sprung from the work which you inaugurated years ago. Mrs. Carpenter joins me in congratulations and good wishes. Very truly yours,

FRANK G. CARPENTER.

Cordial greetings were received from Neal Dow and Senator Dawes, and letters and telegrams came from distinguished individuals and societies in every State and from many foreign countries. Over 200 of these are preserved among other mementoes of this occasion. Among the telegrams were these, representing the great labor organization of the country:

We congratulate you on the seventieth anniversary of a useful and successful life. May you enjoy many years of health and happiness.

HANNAH POWDERLY, T. V. POWDERLY.

May your n.o.ble, self-sacrificing life be spared to partic.i.p.ate in your heart's dearest wish--woman's full emanc.i.p.ation.

LEONORA M. BARRY, _Grand Organizer K. of L._

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph: "Faithfully yours, Clara Bewick Colby."]

Mrs. Colby issued a birthday edition of the Woman's Tribune containing a history of Miss Anthony's trial, a fine biographical sketch written by herself and many beautiful tributes from other friends, among them this from Laura M. Johns: "Always to efface herself and her own interests and to put the cause to the fore; to be striving to place a crown upon some other brow; to be receiving and giving, but never retaining; ever enriching the work but never herself; to be busy through weariness and difficulty and resting only in a change of labor; to bear the stinging hail of ridicule which fell on this movement, and to receive with surprised tears the flowers that bloomed in her th.o.r.n.y path; to be in the heat of the noonday harvest field at seventy, with years of activity and usefulness still remaining to add to her glorious life and crown it with such dignity as belongs to few--this is the story of Susan B.

Anthony."

Miss Anthony carried in her arms seventy pink carnations with the card, "For she's the pink o' womankind and blooms without a peer," from Miss c.u.mmings, of Washington. Flowers were sent in profusion, and there was no end of lovely little remembrances of jewelry, water colors, books, portfolios, card cases, handkerchiefs, fans, satin souvenirs, fancy-work, the gifts of loving women in all parts of the country.[53]

The evening was one of the proudest and happiest of a life which, although filled with toil and hardship, had been brightened, as had that of few other women, with the bountiful tributes and testimonials not only of personal friends but of people in all parts of the world who knew of her only through her work for humanity. The next day she sat down to Sunday dinner at a table which, thanks to Mrs. Spofford's thoughtfulness, had been arranged especially for the occasion, surrounded by twenty-five of her own relatives who had come to Washington to celebrate her birthday.

Among many newspaper editorials upon this celebration, an extract from the Boston Traveller, which bears the impress of the gifted Lilian Whiting, may be taken as an example of the general sentiment:

Without any special relay of theories on the subject, Miss Susan B.

Anthony discovered early in life the secret of imperishable youth and constantly increasing happiness--a secret that may be translated as personal devotion to a n.o.ble purpose. To devote one's self to something higher than self--this is the answer of the ages to those who would find the source of immortal energy and enjoyment. It is a statement very simply and easily made but involving all the philosophy of life. Miss Anthony recognized it intuitively. She translated it into action with little consciousness of its value as a theory; but it is the one deepest truth in existence, and one which every human soul must sometime or somewhere learn.

On February 15, 1820, when Susan B. Anthony was born, Emerson was a youth of seventeen; Henry Ward Beecher was a child of seven and Harriet Beecher Stowe a year his junior; Wendell Phillips was nine, Whittier thirteen, and Wm. Lloyd Garrison fifteen years of age.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was four years old, and Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe and James Russell Lowell were Miss Anthony's predecessors in this world only by one or two years. Margaret Fuller was ten, Abraham Lincoln was eleven, and thus, between 1803-20, inclusive, were born a remarkable group of people--a galaxy whose influence on their century has been unequalled in any age or in any country, since that of Pericles and his a.s.sociates in the golden age of Greece. It is only now, as the work of these immortals begins to a.s.sume something of the definite outline of completeness; as some results of the determining forces for which this great galaxy has stood, begin to be discerned, that we can adequately recognize how important to the century their lives have been. There are undoubtedly high spirits sent to earth with a definite service to render to their age and generation; a service that prepares the way for the next ascending round on the great cycle of progress, and it is no exaggeration to say that Susan B. Anthony is one of these....

[Ill.u.s.tration: Autograph: "I am always faithfully yours, Lilian Whiting."]

Even brief quotations must be omitted for want of s.p.a.ce, but this from the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, Charles E. Fitch, editor, is ent.i.tled to a place as the sentiment in the city where Miss Anthony had made her home for nearly half a century:

The occasion is a notable one. It is in honor of one of the n.o.blest women of her time. The day is past when Susan B. Anthony is met with ridicule. She is honored everywhere. Consistent earnestness will, at the last if not at the first, command respect. Slowly but surely, Miss Anthony has won that respect from her countrymen. The cause of the emanc.i.p.ation of women, for which she has labored so long and so zealously, is not yet triumphant, nor is it probable that she will live to see woman suffrage the rule of the land; but at threescore years and ten, she may freely cherish the faith that it is a conquering cause, destined some day to be vindicated in the organic law of the separate American commonwealths and the Federal union.

But it is not alone for the service which Miss Anthony has rendered to the cause of woman suffrage that she is highly honored. She is honored because of her womanhood, because she has ever been brave without conceit and earnest without pretense, because she has the heart to sympathize with suffering humanity in its various phases, and the will to redress human wrongs. She has revealed a true n.o.bility of soul, and has ever been patient under abuse and misrepresentation. She has allied herself with all good causes, and has been the friend of those struggling against the dominion of appet.i.te as well as of those who have sought to free themselves from political thralldom. She has earned the esteem even of those who were diametrically opposed to her views. Within the movements which she has urged, she has been an administrator rather than an orator, although on occasions her speech has been informed with the eloquence of conviction. In private life she has constrained affection by a gentleness with which the world would hardly credit her; but those who best know her, best know also the gracious womanhood which ill.u.s.trates itself in acts of unselfishness and beneficence.