Part 6

On the stagecoach leaving Lake George on a particularly cold day, she found to her surprise a wealthy Quaker, whom she had met at the Albany convention, so solicitous of her comfort that he placed heated planks under her feet, making the long ride much more bearable. He turned up again, this time with his own sleigh, at the close of one of her meetings in northern New York, and wrapped in fur robes, she drove with him behind spirited gray horses to his sisters' home to stay over Sunday, and then to all her meetings in the neighborhood. It was pleasant to be looked after and to travel in comfort and she enjoyed his company, but when he urged her to give up the hard life of a reformer to become his wife, there was no hesitation on her part. She had dedicated her life to freeing women and Negroes and there could be no turning aside. If she ever married, it must be to a man who would encourage her work for humanity, a great man like Wendell Phillips, or a reformer like Parker Pillsbury.

Returning home in May 1855, she took stock of her accomplishments. She had canvassed fifty-four counties and sold 20,000 tracts. Her expenses had been $2,291 and she had paid her way by selling tracts and by a small admission charge for her meetings. She even had seventy dollars over and above all expenses. She promptly repaid the fifty dollars which Wendell Phillips had advanced, but he returned it for her next campaign.

However, her heart quailed at the prospect of another such winter, as she recalled the long, bitter-cold days of travel and the indifference of the women she was trying to help. Even the unfailing praise of her family and of Elizabeth Stanton, even the kindness and interest of the new friends she made paled into insignificance before the thought of another lone crusade. She was exhausted and suffering with rheumatic pains, and yet she would not rest, but prepared for an ambitious convention at Saratoga Springs, then the fashionable summer resort of the East.

She had braved this center of fashion and frivolity the year before with her message of woman's rights, and to her great surprise, crowds seeking entertainment had come to her meetings, their admission fees and their purchase of tracts making the venture a financial success. Here was fertile ground. Susan was counting on Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown to help her, for Elizabeth Stanton, then expecting her sixth baby, was out of the picture. Now, to her dismay, Lucy and Antoinette married the Blackwell brothers, Henry and Samuel.

Fearing that they too like Elizabeth Stanton would be tied down with babies and household cares, Susan saw a bleak lonely road ahead for the woman's rights movement. She did so want her best speakers and most valuable workers to remain single until the spade work for woman's rights was done. Almost in a panic at the prospect of being left to carry on the Saratoga convention alone, Susan wrote Lucy irritable letters instead of praising her for drawing up a marriage contract and keeping her own name. Later, however, she realized what it had meant for Lucy to keep her own name, and then she wrote her, "I am more and more rejoiced that you have declared by actual doing that a woman has a name and may retain it all through her life."[59]

So persistently did she now pursue Lucy and Antoinette that they both kept their promise to speak at the Saratoga convention, Lucy traveling all the way from Cincinnati where she was visiting in the Blackwell home. Lucy was loudly cheered by a large audience, eager to see this young woman whose marriage had attracted so much notice in the press. In fact Lucy Stone, who had kept her own name and who with her husband had signed a marriage protest against the legal disabilities of a married woman, was as much of a novelty in this fashionable circle as one of Barnum's high-priced curiosities.

Pleased at Lucy's reception, Susan surveyed the audience hopefully--handsome men in nankeen trousers, red waistcoats, white neckcloths, and gray swallowtail coats, sitting beside beautiful young women wearing gowns of bombazine and watered silk with wide hoop skirts and elaborately trimmed bonnets which set off their curls. To her delight, they also applauded Antoinette Brown Blackwell, the first woman minister they had ever seen, and Ernestine Rose with her appealing foreign accent. They clapped loudly when she herself asked them to buy tracts and contribute to the work.

Complimentary as this was, she did not flatter herself that they had endorsed woman's rights. That they had come to her meetings in large numbers while vacationing in Saratoga Springs, this was important. In some a spark of understanding glowed, and this spark would light others. They came from the South, from the West, and from the large cities of the East. There were railroad magnates among them, rich merchants, manufacturers, and politicians. Charles F. Hovey, the wealthy Boston dry-goods merchant, listened attentively to every word, and in the years that followed became a generous contributor to the cause.

* * * * *

Realizing how very tired she was and that she must feel more physically fit before continuing her work, Susan decided to take the water cure at her cousin Seth Rogers' Hydropathic Institute in Worcester, Massachusetts. This well-known sanitorium prescribed water internally and externally as a remedy for all kinds of ailments, and in an age when meals were overhearty, baths infrequent, and clothing tight and confining, the drinking of water, tub baths, showers, and wet packs had enthusiastic advocates. The soothing baths relaxed Susan and the leisure to read refreshed and strengthened her. She read, one after another, Carlyle's _Sartor Resartus_, George Sand's _Consuelo_, Madame de Stael's _Corinne_, then Frances Wright's _A Few Days in Athens_ and Mrs. Gaskell's _Life of Charlotte Brontë_, making notes in her diary (1855) of passages she particularly liked. She discussed current events with her cousin Seth on long drives in the country, finding him a delightful companion, well-read, understanding, and interested in people and causes. He took her to her first political meeting, where she was the only woman present and had a seat on the platform. It was one of the first rallies of the new Republican party which had developed among rebellious northern Whigs, Free-Soilers, and anti-Nebraska Democrats who opposed the extension of slavery. After listening to the speakers, among them Charles Sumner, she drew these conclusions: "Had the accident of birth given me place among the aristocracy of sex, I doubt not I should be an active, zealous advocate of Republicanism; unless perchance, I had received that higher, holier light which would have lifted me to the sublime height where now stand Garrison, Phillips, and all that small band whose motto is 'No Union with Slaveholders.'"[60]

After listening to the satisfying sermons of Thomas Wentworth Higginson at his Free Church in Worcester, she wrote in her diary, "It is plain to me now that it is not sitting under preaching I dislike, but the fact that most of it is not of a stamp that my soul can respond to."[61]

In September she interrupted "the cure" to attend a woman's rights meeting in Boston, and with Lucy Stone, Antoinette and Ellen Blackwell visited in the home of the wealthy merchant, Francis Jackson, making many new friends, among them his daughter, Eliza J. Eddy, whose unhappy marriage was to prove a blessing to the woman's rights cause.[62]

At tea at the Garrisons', she met many of the "distinguished" men and women she had "worshiped" from afar. She heard Theodore Parker preach a sermon which filled her soul, and with Mr. Garrison called on him in his famous library. "It really seemed audacious in me to be ushered into such a presence and on such a commonplace errand as to ask him to come to Rochester to speak in a course of lectures I am planning," she wrote her family, "but he received me with such kindness and simplicity that the awe I felt on entering was soon dissipated. I then called on Wendell Phillips in his sanctum for the same purpose. I have invited Ralph Waldo Emerson by letter and all three have promised to come. In the evening with Mr. Jackson's son James, Ellen Blackwell and I went to see _Hamlet_. In spite of my Quaker training, I find I enjoy all these worldly amusements intensely."[63]

* * * * *

In January 1856, Susan set out again on a woman's rights tour of New York State to gather more signatures for her petitions. This time she persuaded Frances D. Gage of Ohio, a temperance worker and popular author of children's stories, to join her. An easy extemporaneous speaker, Mrs. Gage was an attraction to offer audiences, who drove eight or more miles to hear her; and in the cheerless hotels at night and on the long cold sleigh rides from town to town, she was a congenial companion.

The winter was even colder and snowier than that of the year before. "No trains running," Susan wrote her family, "and we had a 36-mile ride in a sleigh.... Just emerged from a long line of snow drifts and stopped at this little country tavern, supped, and am now roasting over the hot stove."[64]

Confronted almost daily with glaring examples of the injustices women suffered under the property laws, she was more than ever convinced that her work was worth-while. "We stopped at a little tavern where the landlady was not yet twenty and had a baby, fifteen months old," she reported. "Her supper dishes were not washed and her baby was crying.... She rocked the little thing to sleep, washed the dishes and got our supper; beautiful white bread, butter, cheese, pickles, apple and mince pie, and excellent peach preserves. She gave us her warm room to sleep in.... She prepared a six o'clock breakfast for us, fried pork, mashed potatoes, mince pie, and for me at my special request, a plate of sweet baked apples and a pitcher of rich milk.... When we came to pay our bill, the dolt of a husband took the money and put it in his pocket. He had not lifted a finger to lighten that woman's burdens.... Yet the law gives him the right to every dollar she earns, and when she needs two cents to buy a darning needle she has to ask him and explain what she wants it for."[65]

When after a few weeks Mrs. Gage was called home by illness in her family, Susan appealed hopefully to Lucretia Mott's sister, Martha C. Wright, in Auburn, New York, "You can speak so much better, so much more wisely, so much more everything than I can." Then she added, "I should like a particular effort made to call out the Teachers, the Sewing Women, the Working Women generally--Can't you write something for your papers that will make them feel that it is for them that we work more than [for] the wives and daughters of the rich?"[66] Mrs. Wright, however, could help only in Auburn, and Susan was obliged to continue her scheduled meetings alone. She interrupted them only to present her petitions to the legislature.

The response of the legislature to her two years of hard work was a sarcastic, wholly irrelevant report issued by the judiciary committee some weeks later to a Senate roaring with laughter. In the Albany _Register_ Susan read with mounting indignation portions of this infuriating report: "The ladies always have the best places and the choicest tidbit at the table. They have the best seats in cars, carriages, and sleighs; the warmest place in winter, the coolest in summer. They have their choice on which side of the bed they will lie, front or back. A lady's dress costs three times as much as that of a gentleman; and at the present time, with the prevailing fashion, one lady occupies three times as much space in the world as a gentleman. It has thus appeared to the married gentlemen of your committee, being a majority ... that if there is any inequality or oppression in the case, the gentlemen are the sufferers. They, however, have presented no petitions for redress, having doubtless made up their minds to yield to an inevitable destiny."[67]

Why, Susan wondered sadly, were woman's rights only a joke to most men--something to be laughed at even in the face of glaring proofs of the law's injustice.

There was encouragement, however, in the letters which now came from Lucy Stone in Ohio: "Hurrah Susan! Last week this State Legislature passed a law giving wives equal property rights, and to mothers equal baby rights with fathers. So much is gained. The petitions which I set on foot in Wisconsin for suffrage have been presented, made a rousing discussion, and then were tabled with three men to defend them!... In Nebraska too, the bill for suffrage passed the House.... The world moves!"[68]

The world was moving in Great Britain as well, for as Susan read in her newspaper, women there were petitioning Parliament for married women's property rights, and among the petitioners were her well-beloved Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Gaskell, and Charlotte Cushman. Better still, Harriet Taylor, inspired by the example of woman's rights conventions in America, had written for the _Westminster Review_ an article advocating the enfranchisement of women.

All this reassured Susan, even if New York legislators laughed at her efforts.

FOOTNOTES:

[43] Judge William Hay of Saratoga Springs, New York.

[44] Feb. 19, 1854, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.

[45] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 116. Among those who wore the bloomer costume were Angelina and Sarah Grimké, many women in sanitoriums and some of the Lowell, Mass. mill workers. In Ohio, the bloomer was so popular that 60 women in Akron wore it at a ball, and in Battle Creek, Michigan, 31 attended a Fourth of July celebration in the bloomer. Amelia Bloomer, moving to the West wore it for eight years. Garrison, Phillips, and William Henry Channing disapproved of the bloomer costume, but Gerrit Smith continued to champion it and his daughter wore it at fashionable receptions in Washington during his term in Congress.

[46] _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 608.

[47] 1854 (copy), Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.

[48] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 111-112.

[49] March 3, 1854 (copy), Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.

[50] Ms., Diary, March 24, 28, 1854.

[51] _Ibid._, March 29, 1854.

[52] _Ibid._, March 30, 1854.

[53] The New England Emigrant Aid Company, headed by Eli Thayer of Worcester, was formed to send free-soil settlers to Kansas, offering reduced fare and farm equipment. Their first settlers reached Kansas in August, 1854, founding the town of Lawrence in honor of one of their chief patrons, the wealthy Amos Lawrence of Massachusetts.

[54] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 121.

[55] Diary, April 28, 1854.

[56] Leonard C. Ehrlich, _God's Angry Man_ (New York, 1941), p. 57.

[57] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 122.

[58] Caroline Cowles Richards, _Village Life in America_ (New York, 1913), p. 49.

[59] 1858, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.

[60] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 133.

[61] _Ibid._

[62] Eliza J. Eddy's husband, James Eddy, took their two young daughters away from their mother and to Europe, causing her great anguish. This led her father, Francis Jackson, to give liberally to the woman's rights cause. Mrs. Eddy, herself, left a bequest of $56,000 to be divided between Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone.

[63] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 131-133.

[64] _Ibid._, p. 138.

[65] _Ibid._, p. 139.

[66] Jan. 18, 1856, Garrison Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College.

[67] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 140-141.

[68] May 25, 1856, Blackwell Papers, Edna M. Stantial Collection.

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS

Susan's thoughts during the summer of 1856 often strayed from woman's rights meetings toward Kansas, where her brother Merritt had settled on a claim near Osawatomie. Well aware of his eagerness to help John Brown, she knew that he must be in the thick of the bloody antislavery struggle. In fact the whole Anthony family had been anxiously waiting for news from Merritt ever since the wires had flashed word in May 1856 of the burning of Lawrence by proslavery "border ruffians" from Missouri and of John Brown's raid in retaliation at Pottawatomie Creek.

Merritt had built a log cabin at Osawatomie. While Susan was at home in September, the newspapers reported an attack by proslavery men on Osawatomie in which thirty out of fifty settlers were killed. Was Merritt among them? Finally letters came through from him. Susan read and reread them, assuring herself of his safety. Although ill at the time, he had been in the thick of the fight, but was unharmed. Weak from the exertion he had crawled back to his cabin on his hands and knees and had lain there ill and alone for several weeks.

Parts of Merritt's letters were published in the Rochester _Democrat_, and the city took sides in the conflict, some papers claiming that his letters were fiction. Susan wrote Merritt, "How much rather would I have you at my side tonight than to think of your daring and enduring greater hardships even than our Revolutionary heroes. Words cannot tell how often we think of you or how sadly we feel that the terrible crime of this nation against humanity is being avenged on the heads of our sons and brothers.... Father brings the _Democrat_ giving a list of killed, wounded, and missing and the name of our Merritt is not therein, but oh! the slain are sons, brothers, and husbands of others as dearly loved and sadly mourned."[69]

With difficulty, she prepared for the annual woman's rights convention, for the country was in a state of unrest not only over Kansas and the whole antislavery question, but also over the presidential campaign with three candidates in the field. Even her faithful friends Horace Greeley and Gerrit Smith now failed her, Horace Greeley writing that he could no longer publish her notices free in the news columns of his _Tribune_, because they cast upon him the stigma of ultraradicalism, and Gerrit Smith withholding his hitherto generous financial support because woman's rights conventions would not press for dress reform--comfortable clothing for women suitable for an active life, which he believed to be the foundation stone of women's emancipation.

[Illustration: Merritt Anthony]

She watched the lively bitter presidential campaign with interest and concern. The new Republican party was in the contest, offering its first presidential candidate, the colorful hero and explorer of the far West, John C. Frémont. She had leanings toward this virile young party which stood firmly against the extension of slavery in the territories, and discussed its platform with Elizabeth and Henry B. Stanton, both enthusiastically for "Frémont and Freedom." Yet she was distrustful of political parties, for they eventually yielded to expediency, no matter how high their purpose at the start. Her ideal was the Garrisonian doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders" and "Immediate Unconditional Emancipation," which courageously faced the "whole question" of slavery. There was no compromise among Garrisonians.

With the burning issue of slavery now uppermost in her mind, she began seriously to reconsider the offer she had received from the American Antislavery Society, shortly after her visit to Boston in 1855, to act as their agent in central and western New York. Unable to accept at that time because she was committed to her woman's rights program, she had nevertheless felt highly honored that she had been chosen. Still hesitating a little, she wrote Lucy Stone, wanting reassurance that no woman's rights work demanded immediate attention. "They talk of sending two companies of Lecturers into this state," she wrote Lucy, "wish me to lay out the route of each one and accompany one. They seem to think me possessed of a vast amount of executive ability. I shrink from going into Conventions where speaking is expected of me.... I know they want me to help about finance and that part I like and am good for nothing else."[70]

She also had the farm home on her mind. With her father in the insurance business, her brothers now both in Kansas, her sister Mary teaching in the Rochester schools and "looking matrimonially-wise," and her mother at home all alone, Susan often wondered if it might not be as much her duty to stay there to take care of her mother and father as it would be to make a home comfortable for a husband. Sometimes the quietness of such a life beckoned enticingly. But after the disappointing November elections which put into the presidency the conservative James Buchanan, from whom only a vacillating policy on the slavery issue could be expected, she wrote Samuel May, Jr., the secretary of the American Antislavery Society, "I shall be very glad if I am able to render even the most humble service to this cause. Heaven knows there is need of earnest, effective radical workers. The heart sickens over the delusions of the recent campaign and turns achingly to the unconsidered _whole question_."[71]

His reply came promptly, "We put all New York into your control and want your name to all letters and your hand in all arrangements."

For $10 a week and expenses, Susan now arranged antislavery meetings, displayed posters bearing the provocative words, "No Union with Slaveholders," planned tours for a corps of speakers, among them Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, Parker Pillsbury, and two free Negroes, Charles Remond and his sister, Sarah.

In debt from her last woman's rights campaign, she could not afford a new dress for these tours, but she dyed a dark green the merino which she had worn so proudly in Canajoharie ten years before, bought cloth to match for a basque, and made a "handsome suit." "With my Siberian squirrel cape, I shall be very comfortable," she noted in her diary.[72]

She had met indifference and ridicule in her campaigns for woman's rights. Now she faced outright hostility, for northern businessmen had no use for abolition-mad fanatics, as they called anyone who spoke against slavery. Abolitionists, they believed, ruined business by stirring up trouble between the North and the South.

Usually antislavery meetings turned into debates between speakers and audience, often lasting until midnight, and were charged with animosity which might flame into violence. All of the speakers lived under a strain, and under emotional pressure. Consequently they were not always easy to handle. Some of them were temperamental, a bit jealous of each other, and not always satisfied with the tours Susan mapped out for them. She expected of her colleagues what she herself could endure, but they often complained and sometimes refused to fulfill their engagements.

When no one else was at hand, she took her turn at speaking, but she was seldom satisfied with her efforts. "I spoke for an hour," she confided to her diary, "but my heart fails me. Can it be that my stammering tongue ever will be loosed?"

Lucy Stone, who spoke with such ease, gave her advice and encouragement. "You ought to cultivate your power of expression," she wrote. "The subject is clear to you and you ought to be able to make it so to others. It is only a few years ago that Mr. Higginson told me he could not speak, he was so much accustomed to writing, and now he is second only to Phillips. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"[73]