The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony Volume II Part 45

You have worked for the slave and for woman. Your fifty years shine about you and rest like a halo of glory around your head.... Fifty years today! When that half-century again rolls around, you and I will be in our graves and our names and work will stand back of us to all time. But into that future I look with prophetic eye to see woman no longer enslaved, and to find, not only on this continent, but over the world, as benefactor of the race, the name of Susan B. Anthony. Your affectionate friend,

MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE.

My good husband in writing from Toledo says: "Tell Susan that all the newspaper accounts taken together could not increase the pride which I have long felt in her pertinacious, obstinate, fault-finding, raspish, strong-minded, dogmatic and grand career. G.o.d bless her!" To all of which I subscribe most affectionately,

ELIZABETH R. TILTON.

... If your Bible says you are fifty, I will try to be as reverential as possible when next we meet. I wish you similar health and strength when you are seventy-five--you'll find no change in me. I send you by express today Whittier's poems. Ever affectionately,

ELLEN WRIGHT GARRISON.

All the people who know you and who don't know you were given opportunity to utter their good wishes, and poor me, wandering across these western s.p.a.ces, quite left out in the cold! Please ma'am, why did I know nothing of your reception till it was all over? I should have sent you what I now send--a gray silk gown, wherein you are to make yourself fine and grand, and a draft for $200 as a little nest-egg.

If I only had a happy ease with my pen, how glad I would have been to put on paper in glowing words just what I think of the faithful, unselfish, earnest, single-minded, courageous years, which my dear old Susan has given to the service of humanity. How, through poverty and persecution, evil tongues and slanderous words, ridicule and reproach, she has said, "Nothing shall daunt me; 'tis G.o.d's service;" and so speaking, has held fast the profession of her faith without wavering....

G.o.d bless her! G.o.d bless her! The tears come to my eyes as I write that benediction, and think how gently and earnestly men and women alike in time to come will repeat it when her name is mentioned; when those same men and women shall see her life and her work, not as now "through a gla.s.s darkly," but as those who gaze through the sunshine of truth.

Good-by, dear friend--many happy years for you, prays your loving

ANNA E. d.i.c.kINSON.

Accept the enclosed check for $50, not as a present, merely, but as a debt, honestly due, for "services rendered." Had there been no "agitation" for the last twenty years, resulting in so complete a "Revolution," we teachers might still be working for $1 per week and "boarding 'round." But thanks to your unfailing "persistency," and the faithfulness of your co-workers in speaking for a cla.s.s, the majority of whom dare not speak for themselves through fear of losing the little already gained, the salaries of all workingwomen have been largely increased.... So, if need be, fight as valiantly, dear sister, for the next twenty years as for the last, or at least till woman's right to a voice in the laws by which she is governed shall be acknowledged in every State and Territory of our country. Affectionately your sister,

MARY S. ANTHONY.

On this, your fiftieth birthday, permit me to present you my check for $50, as a slight and very inadequate expression of admiring grat.i.tude on my part for your twenty years of arduous and self-sacrificing labor in the cause of woman. What woman has gained already, and it is much, what I and others have been able to achieve in professional life, must be mainly ascribed to you, and such as you.... Your faithful friend and co-worker,

CLEMENCE S. LOZIER.

Although away here in Rome, I have kept track of your goings-on through The Revolution, which comes regularly.... I wish I could have been there to a.s.sist at the merrymaking. Miss Manning has kindly offered to take a little remembrance [an Etruscan gold and garnet pin] to you when she goes home, which you are to wear with that new silk dress. You see how selfish I am. I wish to compel you not only to think of me, but to a.s.sociate me in your mind with our peerless Anna, G.o.d bless the dear child! Ever affectionately,

KATE N. DOGGETT.

The presents received were too numerous to mention. From Mr. and Mrs.

Cheney, South Manchester, Conn., $50; Erie Co. (N. Y.) Suffrage a.s.sociation, $50; Henry Ward Beecher, the Tiltons, Frank D. Moulton, Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. S. C. Pomeroy, $25 each; Mr. and Mrs. Samuel E.

Sewall, $20; and from other friends, sums of ten, fifteen and twenty dollars, amounting in all to $1,000. In addition were a broche shawl from Mrs. Stanton, gold watch, chain and pin from Miss Sarah Johnston, pen-and-ink sketch from Eliza Greatorex, point and d.u.c.h.esse lace collars and handkerchiefs, sets of books, engravings, gold pens, pocket-books, travelling case, and floral offerings.

CHAPTER XXV--PAGE 435.

CONSt.i.tUTIONAL ARGUMENT.

_Delivered in twenty-nine of the post-office districts of Monroe, and twenty-one of Ontario, in Miss Anthony's canva.s.s of those counties prior to her trial in June, 1873._

_Friends and Fellow-Citizens:_--I stand before you under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus doing, I not only committed no crime, but instead simply exercised my citizen's right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Const.i.tution beyond the power of any State to deny.

Our democratic-republican government is based on the idea of the natural right of every individual member thereof to a voice and a vote in making and executing the laws. We a.s.sert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that government can give rights. No one denies that before governments were organized each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property. When 100 or 1,000,000 people enter into a free government, they do not barter away their natural rights; they simply pledge themselves to protect each other in the enjoyment of them through prescribed judicial and legislative tribunals. They agree to abandon the methods of brute force in the adjustment of their differences and adopt those of civilization.

Nor can you find a word in any of the grand doc.u.ments left us by the fathers which a.s.sumes for government the power to create or to confer rights. The Declaration of Independence, the United States Const.i.tution, the const.i.tutions of the several States and the organic laws of the Territories, all alike propose to _protect_ the people in the exercise of their G.o.d-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.

All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights. Among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these, governments are inst.i.tuted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

Here is no shadow of government authority over rights, or exclusion of any cla.s.s from their full and equal enjoyment. Here is p.r.o.nounced the right of all men, and "consequently," as the Quaker preacher said, "of all women," to a voice in the government. And here, in this first paragraph of the Declaration, is the a.s.sertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can "the consent of the governed" be given, if the right to vote be denied? Again:

Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to inst.i.tute a new government, laying its foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

Surely the right of the whole people to vote is here clearly implied; for however destructive to their happiness this government might become, a disfranchised cla.s.s could neither alter nor abolish it, nor inst.i.tute a new one, except by the old brute force method of insurrection and rebellion. One-half of the people of this nation today are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one. The women, dissatisfied as they are with this form of government, that enforces taxation without representation--that compels them to obey laws to which they never have given their consent--that imprisons and hangs them without a trial by a jury of their peers--that robs them, in marriage, of the custody of their own persons, wages and children--are this half of the people who are left wholly at the mercy of the other half, in direct violation of the spirit and letter of the declarations of the framers of this government, every one of which was based on the immutable principle of equal rights to all. By these declarations, kings, popes, priests, aristocrats, all were alike dethroned and placed on a common level, politically, with the lowliest born subject or serf. By them, too, men, as such, were deprived of their divine right to rule and placed on a political level with women. By the practice of these declarations all cla.s.s and caste distinctions would be abolished, and slave, serf, plebeian, wife, woman, all alike rise from their subject position to the broader platform of equality.

The preamble of the Federal Const.i.tution says:

We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Const.i.tution for the United States of America.

It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union. We formed it not to give the blessings of liberty but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people--women as well as men. It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government--the ballot.

The early journals of Congress show that, when the committee reported to that body the original articles of confederation, the very first one which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of suffrage. Article IV said:

The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse between the people of the different States of this Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted) shall be ent.i.tled to all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the several States.

Thus, at the very beginning, did the fathers see the necessity of the universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all, in order to produce the desired result--a harmonious union and a h.o.m.ogeneous people.

Luther Martin, attorney-general of Maryland, in his report to the legislature of that State of the convention which framed the United States Const.i.tution, said:

Those who advocated the equality of suffrage took the matter up on the original principles of government: that the reason why each individual man in forming a State government should have an equal vote, is because each individual, before he enters into government, is equally free and equally independent.

James Madison said:

Under every view of the subject, it seems indispensable that the ma.s.s of the citizens should not be without a voice in making the laws which they are to obey, and in choosing the magistrates who are to administer them.... Let it be remembered, finally, that it has ever been the pride and the boast of America that the rights for which she contended were the rights of human nature.

These a.s.sertions by the framers of the United States Const.i.tution of the equal and natural right of all the people to a voice in the government, have been affirmed and reaffirmed by the leading statesmen of the nation throughout the entire history of our government. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, said in 1866: "I have made up my mind that the elective franchise is one of the inalienable rights meant to be secured by the Declaration of Independence." B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three days' discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan's motion to strike "male" from the District of Columbia suffrage bill, said:

Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I stand for universal suffrage and as a matter of fundamental principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any ground of race or s.e.x. I will go farther and say that I recognize the right of franchise as being intrinsically a natural right. I do not believe that society is authorized to impose any limitations upon it that do not spring out of the necessities of the social state itself. Sir, I have been shocked, in the course of this debate, to hear senators declare this right only a conventional and political arrangement, a privilege yielded to you and me and others; not a right in any sense, only a concession! Mr. President, I do not hold my liberties by any such tenure. On the contrary, I believe that whenever you establish that doctrine, whenever you crystallize that idea in the public mind of this country, you ring the death-knell of American liberties.

Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, insisted that so soon as by the Thirteenth Amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Const.i.tution guaranteed to them equal rights--the right to vote and to be voted for. In closing one of his great speeches he said:

I do not hesitate to say that when the slaves of our country became "citizens" they took their place in the body politic as a component part of the "people," ent.i.tled to equal rights and under the protection of these two guardian principles: First, that all just governments stand on the consent of the governed; and second, that taxation without representation is tyranny; and these rights it is the duty of Congress to guarantee as essential to the idea of a republic.

The preamble of the const.i.tution of the State of New York declares the same purpose. It says: "We, the people of the State of New York, grateful to Almighty G.o.d for our freedom, in order to secure its blessings, do establish this const.i.tution." Here is not the slightest intimation either of receiving freedom from the United States Const.i.tution, or of the State's conferring the blessings of liberty upon the people; and the same is true of every other State const.i.tution. Each and all declare rights G.o.d-given, and that to secure the people in the enjoyment of their inalienable rights is their one and only object in ordaining and establishing government. All of the State const.i.tutions are equally emphatic in their recognition of the ballot as the means of securing the people in the enjoyment of these rights. Article I of the New York State const.i.tution says: