The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Volume II Part 43

Then will your honorable and honored representative say for you on the floor of the next Congress, as he has said here today in the shadow of these mighty oaks of your Neosho, "no reconstruction except on the basis of the ballot in every loyal hand, black and white." Then will your senator[135] echo your voice from his seat in the Capitol, as he did the other day in old, Faneuil Hall, when he said, "the price of our victories is lost unless we give the negro the homestead, the musket, and the ballot."

And then will your other senator,[136] who has not spoken since he, with his colleagues in the Senate, said, "colonize" the faithful, loyal blacks; since he said, admit Louisiana and Arkansas back into the Union on the vote of the merest minority of their freshly-oathed white men--then will he say "no reconstruction without negro suffrage." But, good people, I charge you, suffer not this man to return to his seat in the Senate, until he has not only repented and confessed, but given sure promise forever to forsake his old sins of "white suffrage" and "black colonization." You owe it to yourselves and your country to see that your entire representation in the next Congress is right on this one vital question of reunion. Tell your senator if he must advocate a cla.s.s and caste government in the rebel States, it must be loyal blacks, not disloyal whites. If he must colonize somebody, it must be the cowed, unconverted rebels, the anti-negro-equality white faces. Tell him henceforth to speak and vote to disfranchise, and drive out if need be, the persons who make war and oppress and outrage, and are resolved not to give "fair play" to peaceable, industrious citizens. You have but to speak and you will be obeyed, for it is the people's will, not that of their servants, which is law.

Now, a word on your State legislature: One of the first reports that met my ear on my arrival in your State last winter, was that the Republicans of Kansas, almost in a body, had voted against a bill for "negro suffrage," and that they voted thus for the reason that the question was introduced and urged by the opposition party of the State. My humble but earnest advice to you is that you permit those delegates who voted against right, against justice, against equality to all men, for so paltry a reason, henceforth to remain quietly at home. Teach them and all other aspirants for your suffrages that your representatives must speak and vote for the right, though the arch-demon from the pit below shall present the measure. That miserable political quibbling at Topeka last winter lost Kansas the place which of right belonged to her--that of being the first of the loyal States to give her freedmen their inalienable right to self-protection.

Our hope of salvation from the fatal errors that are now fastening themselves upon the plan and the policy of reorganization, lies in the prompt and right action of the coming Congress. The delegates from any and all of the rebel States, sent up to Washington by "free white loyal male" suffrages to knock for admission into the Union, must be sent home with instructions that no member will be admitted to Congress except he be elected by a majority of all the loyal men of the State, black as well as white. To the end that Congress may thus reject the amnestied white suffrage delegates, the people, all over the country, should unite in one mighty voice and demand that their representatives shall thus speak and thus vote. "The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." If we sleep now, all is lost; for on this one question of the negro hangs the future of our republic.

Since the firing of the first gun of the rebellion there has been no hour fraught with so much danger as is the present. To have been vanquished on the field of battle would have involved much of misery; but to be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought victories, and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of negro disfranchis.e.m.e.nt, negro serfdom, would be a defeat and disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars, equalled only by that which the Revolutionary fathers entailed upon their descendants by their fatal compromises with slavery. It would leave the final triumph of the great principles of republicanism, universal freedom and equality, "taxation and representation inseparable," the "consent of the governed," to be worked out and established in each of those old slave States, through a fearful re-enactment of the early struggles which you of Kansas so well remember.

If Congress shall admit the rebel representatives on the basis of white suffrage, those States will have added to their old representation the other two-fifths of what used to be "all other persons," which will give them an increase of fourteen votes in the House as a reward for their four years of fire and sword against the government. With this added power on the floor of Congress united to their political aiders and abettors from the Northern States, there is scarcely any project they may not be able to carry through in their own time and way. Nor is there room for a doubt, that it is the spirit and purpose of the slave oligarchy, whipped and cowed as they say by force of might, not right, to make a most desperate political fight to regain their old supremacy in the legislation of the country.

I base my estimate of the nature and intentions of the to-be-restored representation of the South, on the results of the elections already held in several of the rebel States, and from the efforts everywhere among the old planters again to reduce the black freedmen, as nearly as possible, to the status of slavery. In Virginia, the elections gave a legislature largely secession and almost wholly anti-negro. The planters have solemnly leagued themselves together to pay only five dollars per month to able field hands, each laborer to furnish his own clothes and pay his own doctor bills. This, too, when these same planters used to pay or receive for the hire of these same laborers, the sum of fifteen dollars and upwards. In South Carolina, Gen. Rufus Saxton reports that the old planters are actually driving the freedmen to work in the fields in chain gangs, and that the woods are strewn with the bodies of negroes shot dead in their efforts to escape the cruel torture. In Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the city election resulted in a secession mayor and common council. The only Union success I have noticed is that of Fernandina, Florida, and there the negroes were allowed to vote. Even the loyal State of Missouri saved her free const.i.tution by less than two thousand votes.

The result of white suffrage can not be other than the election of large majorities of anti-negro, if not absolutely secession State and National representatives. Tennessee, the President's own State, of the loyalty of whose people we have heard much, has adopted a free const.i.tution, and under it framed a new code of anti-negro laws; and we can hardly expect any rebel State to do better, for these new free State law-makers are the persecuted loyal men of Tennessee who have been outraged in their homes, hunted to the caves and mountains, or for a time driven out of the State altogether by the secessionists. One of these new free State laws says, the testimony of no "free colored person shall be received in court against any white person." By this enactment, the meanest white man may enter the home of the bravest black soldier, or wealthiest colored citizen, may murder his sons, ravish his wife and daughters, pillage and burn his house, commit any and every possible crime against him and his, and yet, if no human eye but his own, or that of his family, or his colored friends, witness the barbarisms, that black man, the father, the husband, the land-holder, outraged beyond measure, has no possible legal redress in the courts of Tennessee.

Then again, in case a free colored person is imprisoned and unable to pay his jail fees, he may be apprenticed out to labor until the sum be paid. And yet again, the courts may apprentice colored children as they see proper. The law does not even say friendless or orphan children. Is not that slavery under a new form? Thus, to leave those devoted black men's lives, liberties and property to be protected by white men, whose loyalty to the government is because it is a means to secure power to themselves, not from any love of its republican principles, is to doom them to all the ignominies and cruelties of slavery itself.

Let us not be deceived by the wicked wiles of politicians who tell us that President Johnson can not give the right to the ballot to the black loyalists of the South; for it is but the new "refuge of lies" to which slavery resorts. The same men told us that Lincoln had not the power to emanc.i.p.ate the slaves; that the government had no right to arm the negro, etc. If President Johnson has const.i.tutional authority, either civil or military, to take away a man's right to vote, as a punishment for disloyalty, he must have power to give a man the same right, as a reward for loyalty; if the President may disfranchise a rebel soldier in order to enable the loyal people of a State to organize a republican form of government, he may also enfranchise a Union soldier to accomplish the same purpose. If the President has not the right nor the power to give the ballot to any person not ent.i.tled to it under the old order of slavery, how will he organize South Carolina, by whose old const.i.tution no person was allowed to vote unless he owned ten slaves or was worth ten thousand dollars? Of course n.o.body owns ten slaves, and how many men, think you, who remained loyal at home, or how many returned soldiers or amnestied civilians have the requisite ten thousand dollars? In South Carolina, therefore, the President will be compelled to create voters; and, if he shall enfranchise any of the white non-voters, can he not also enfranchise the loyal black non-voters?

Let us watch and pray without ceasing. Let us hope that the day will dawn, and that soon, when law shall be found on the side of justice to the black race. These objectors never questioned McClellan's military right to put down slave insurrections with an "iron hand," or Halleck's infamous Order No. 3 to drive all negroes outside the military lines. It was only when Generals Fremont, Hunter and others declared the slaves free, that they might cripple the rebel armies and add them to our Union forces, that the cry of no law, no power was raised. Thus it is clear that the blindness and inability to find rightful authority, civil or military, first to emanc.i.p.ate, then to arm, and now to enfranchise the negroes, have the one source. Slavery perpetrated the "sum of all villainies" on the negroes, and then, to justify its wickedness, filled the whole land with atrocious lies of their depraved and degraded nature. The American people consented to the outrage; and their continued prejudice against that oppressed race but proves the adage, "we hate those whom we have injured."

Last of all comes the objection that the old masters will influence the vote of the negroes, and that, therefore, to enfranchise them will but give increased power to the old lords of the lash. Do not believe such nonsense. Think you, men who for four years have withstood every possible temptation and torture to induce them to fight for the slave oligarchy, can now be wheedled into voting for it? No, no. Those loyal, brave, black men who have known enough to fight on the right side will know enough to vote on the right side; and it is because the aiders and abettors of the old slave power believe and know that the negroes will be an invincible host on the side of equality, that they thus fear them.

We never from the beginning have had a genuine republican form of government in any State in the Union; for in no State have "the people"

ever been permitted to elect their representatives. Even in Ma.s.sachusetts and Vermont, the States nearest republican, only one-half of the people, the "male inhabitants," are allowed to vote. In other States it is only all "free white male persons," and in others still, all "free white male inhabitants owning so many slaves or so much property." It is not true therefore that _the people_ have ever exercised the right to prescribe the qualifications of voters or officers. From the beginning, Congress always has settled the question in its organic act. That of your own Territory read, "Every free, white, male inhabitant shall vote at the first election, and be eligible to any office within the Territory." Thus you see Congress, not you, the people, decided who should and who should not vote in Kansas. And when the delegates of the prescribed "free, white, male" order met in convention, they proved themselves nothing above human, very like the so-elected conventions of other States, and retained all legislative power within the limits of the original congressional permit. The same is true of the rebel States, in which the President now finds the people dest.i.tute of all civil government; when he specifies who may vote, when he excludes any cla.s.s from the ballot-box, he makes it impossible for "the people" to form a republican government.

When the loyal black men are not allowed their right to vote in the first election of the rebel States, their governments are thrown into the hands of a very small minority, and that too of very doubtful loyalty. The President by adhering to the old slave definition of "the people," rules that all our brave black Union soldiers and our best friends and allies, without whose aid we should still be struggling with rebels in arms, shall be subjects, not citizens, of the government they have rescued from the Confederate usurpers. It is not in human nature that a people fanatically believing themselves a superior race, and thereby rightful legislators over another and inferior race, shall execute justice and equality toward those whom they decree shall be "hewers of wood and drawers of water." No, the black man's guarantee to the protection of his inalienable rights to "life, liberty and property," is bound up in his right to the ballot.

When I speak of the inalienable rights of the negro, I do not forget that these belong equally to woman. Though the government shall be reconstructed on the basis of universal manhood suffrage, it yet will not be a true republic. Still one-half of the people will be in subjection to the other half, and the time will surely come when the whole question will have to be reopened and an accounting made with this other subject cla.s.s. There will have to be virtually another reconstruction, based on the duty of the national government to guarantee to every citizen the right of self-protection, and this right, for woman as for man, is vested in the ballot.

That this superior "white male" cla.s.s may not be trusted even to legislate for their own mothers, sisters, wives and daughters, the cruel statutes in nearly all the States, both slave and free, give ample proof. In scarcely a State has a married woman the legal right to the control of her person, to the earnings of her hands or brain, to the guardianship of her children, to sue or be sued, or to testify in the courts, and by these laws women have suffered wrongs and outrages second only to those of chattel slavery itself. If this be true, that this so-called superior cla.s.s can not legislate justice even to those nearest and dearest in their own hearts and homes, is it not a crime to place a separate race, one hated and despised, wholly at the will of that governing cla.s.s?

It must not be; and the one great work for the people at this hour, and every hour, between this and next December, is to agitate this question until the entire nation shall speak in tones not to be mistaken, which shall compel the coming Congress to refuse admission to every representative from the rebel States, who is sent there by the so-called "loyal white male" people.

"_No reorganization without Negro Suffrage_" is the word to send back to every rebel State. Until Congress shall define and settle this question, it can not in the future, as it has not in the past, perform its duty--guarantee a republican form of government in each of the States.

When Congress shall thus decide, there will be work to do in most of the loyal States. Let us all labor to that end.

Men and women of Kansas, what say you, shall new loyal States or old rebel States be admitted into the Union until they present const.i.tutions and laws truly republican, until they send representatives to Washington elected by a majority of all the people--white and black, men and women?

You say No; your blood-enriched prairies, your battle-fought ravines, your sacked and burned cities, say No; your martyred dead, your own immortal John Brown, their freed souls all gloriously marching on, say No!

My friends, there is one word more I must leave with you. There is yet another danger. The reverence, the almost idolatry of the American people for their martyred President, is being used and abused by the political managers at Washington, and over all the country. The people are lulled to sleep over the most startling propositions, by insidious whisperings that President Lincoln originated or approved them. Almost every reconstruction plan is sent over the wires "sugar-coated" with, "President Johnson, in this, is but carrying out the spirit and purpose of Mr. Lincoln!" And there is no disguising or denying the fact, that the people are today accepting, and that too without questioning, the anti-negro reorganization plans already inaugurated, because of these wily, insinuating appeals to their reverence for the memory of their sacred dead.

If the four years' administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American people any one lesson above another, it was that they must think and speak and proclaim, and that he, as President, was bound to execute their will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say as he did four years ago, "I wait the voice of the people." The stern logic of the events of today would guide him, not those of yesterday.

Therefore let us not be thrown off our watch by any of these appeals to our reverence for the opinions and plans of our departed President. If his freed spirit is permitted today to hover over each and all of the vast gatherings of the loyal people throughout the nation, it is beckoning every soul upward and onward in the path of equal justice to all; it is urging the great heart of the nation to plant our new Union on the everlasting rock of republicanism--universal freedom and universal suffrage.

FOOTNOTES:

[134] Sidney Clark, of Lawrence.

[135] S. C. Pomeroy.

[136] James H. Lane.

CHAPTER XVI--PAGE 259.

ADDRESS TO CONGRESS.

_Adopted by the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, held in New York City, Thursday, May 10, 1866._

Prepared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

_To the Senate and House of Representatives:_

We already have presented to your honorable body during this session many pet.i.tions asking the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women; and now, from our national convention, we again make our appeal and urge you to lay no hand on that "pyramid of rights," the Const.i.tution of the Fathers, unless to add glory to its height and strength to its foundation.

We will not rehea.r.s.e the oft-repeated arguments on the natural rights of every citizen, pressed as they have been on the nation's conscience for the last thirty years in securing freedom for the black race, and so grandly echoed on the floor of Congress during the past winter. We can not add one line or precept to the comprehensive speech recently made by Charles Sumner in the Senate, to prove that "no just government can be formed without the consent of the governed;" to prove the dignity, the education, the power, the necessity, the salvation of the ballot in the hand of every man and woman; to prove that a just government and a true church rest alike on the sacred rights of the individual.

As you are familiar with Sumner's speech on "Equal Rights to All," so convincing in facts, so clear in philosophy, and so elaborate in quotations from the great minds of the past, without reproducing the chain of argument, permit us to call your attention to a few of its unanswerable a.s.sertions regarding the ballot:

I plead now for the ballot, as the great guarantee, and the only sufficient guarantee--being in itself peacemaker, reconciler, schoolmaster and protector--to which we are bound by every necessity and every reason; and I speak also for the good of the States lately in rebellion, as well as for the glory and safety of the republic, that it may be an example to mankind.

Ay, sir, the ballot is the Columbiad of our political life, and every citizen who has it is a full-armed Monitor.

The ballot is schoolmaster. Reading and writing are of inestimable value, but the ballot teaches what these can not teach.

Plutarch records that the wise man of Athens charmed the people by saying that equality causes no war, and "both the rich and the poor repeated it."

The ballot is like charity, which never faileth, and without which man is only as sounding bra.s.s or a tinkling cymbal. The ballot is the one thing needful, without which rights of testimony and all other rights will be no better than cobwebs which the master will break through with impunity. To him who has the ballot all other things shall be given--protection, opportunity, education, a homestead. The ballot is like the horn of abundance, out of which overflow rights of every kind, with corn, cotton, rice and all the fruits of the earth. Or, better still, it is like the hand of the body, without which man, who is now only a little lower than the angels, must have continued only a little above the brutes. They are fearfully and wonderfully made; but as is the hand in the work of civilization, so is the ballot in the work of government. "Give me the ballot, and I can move the world."

Do you wish to see harmony truly prevail, so that industry, society, government, civilization, may all prosper, and the republic may wear a crown of true greatness? Then do not neglect the ballot.

Lamartine said, "Universal suffrage is the first truth and only basis of every national republic."

In regard to "taxation without representation," Mr. Sumner quotes from Lord c.o.ke:

The supreme power can not take from any man any part of his property without consent in person or by representation.

Taxes are not to be laid on the people, but by their consent in person or by representation.

I can see no reason to doubt but that the imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or on land or houses or ships, or real or personal, fixed or floating property in the colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the colonies, as British subjects and as men. I say men, for in a state of nature no man can take any property from me without my consent. If he does, he deprives me of my liberty and makes me a slave. The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to deprive them of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and if continued seems to be in effect an entire disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of every civil right. For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man's property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without his consent?

In demanding suffrage for the black man you recognize the fact that, as a freedman, he is no longer a "part of the family," and that therefore his master is no longer his representative; hence, as he will now be liable to taxation, he must also have representation. Woman, on the contrary, has never been such a "part of the family" as to escape taxation. Although there has been no formal proclamation giving her an individual existence, the single woman always has had the right to property and wages, the right to make contracts and do business in her own name. And even married women, by recent legislation, have been secured in these civil rights. Woman now holds a vast amount of the property in the country and pays her full proportion of taxes, revenue included. On what principle, then, do you deny her representation? By what process of reasoning was Charles Sumner able to stand up in the Senate, a few days after these sublime utterances, and rebuke 15,000,000 disfranchised tax-payers for the exercise of their mere right of pet.i.tion? If he felt that this was not the time for woman even to mention her right to representation, why did he not, in some of his splendid sentences, propose to release the wage-earning and property-owning women from the tyranny of taxation?

We propose no new theories. We simply ask that you secure the practical application of the immutable principles of our government to all, without distinction of race, color or s.e.x. And we urge our demand now, because you have now the opportunity and the power to take this onward step in legislation. The nations of the earth stand watching and waiting to see if our Revolutionary idea, "all men are created equal," can be realized in government. Crush not, we pray you, the myriad hopes which hang on our success. Peril not this nation with another b.l.o.o.d.y war. Men and parties must pa.s.s away, but justice is eternal; and only they who work in harmony with its laws are immortal. All who have carefully contrasted the speeches of this Congress with those made under the old regime of slavery, must have seen the added power and eloquence which greater freedom gives. But still you propose no action on your grand ideas. Your joint resolutions, your reconstruction reports, do not reflect your highest thought.

The Const.i.tution, as it stands, in basing representation on "respective numbers" covers a broader ground than any you have yet proposed. Is not the only amendment needed to Article 1, Section 3, to strike out the exceptions which follow "respective numbers?" And is it not your duty, by securing a republican form of government to every State, to see that these "respective numbers" are made up of enfranchised citizens, thus bringing your legislation up to the Const.i.tution--not the Const.i.tution down to your party possibilities? The only tenable ground of representation is universal suffrage, as it is only through universal suffrage that the principle of "equal rights to all" can be realized.

All prohibitions based on race, color, s.e.x, property or education are violations of the republican idea; and the various qualifications now proposed are but so many plausible pretexts to debar new cla.s.ses from the ballot-box. The limitations of property and intelligence, though unfair, can be met; as with freedom must come the repeal of statute laws that deny schools and wages to the negro, and time will make him a voter. But color and s.e.x! Neither time nor statutes can make black, white, or woman, man! You a.s.sume to be the representatives of 15,000,000 women--American citizens--who already possess every attainable qualification for the ballot. Women read and write, hold many offices under government, pay taxes and suffer the penalties of crime, and yet are denied individual representation.