Susan B. Anthony

A >> Alma Lutz >> Susan B. Anthony

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29

Transcriber's Note:

Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the copyright on
this publication was renewed.

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other
inconsistencies. Text that has been changed to correct an obvious
error is noted at the end of this ebook.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY

REBEL, CRUSADER, HUMANITARIAN

BY ALMA LUTZ

ZENGER PUBLISHING CO. INC. BOX 9883, WASHINGTON DC 20015

[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony]

Alma Lutz was born and brought up in North Dakota, graduated from the
Emma Willard School and Vassar College, and attended the Boston
University School of Business Administration. She has written numerous
articles and pamphlets and for many years has been a contributor to
_The Christian Science Monitor_. Active in organizations working for
the political, civil, and economic rights of women, she has also been
interested in preserving the records of women's role in history and
serves on the Advisory Board of the Radcliffe Women's Archives. Miss
Lutz is the author of _Emma Willard, Daughter of Democracy_ (1929),
_Created Equal, A Biography of Elizabeth Cady Stanton_ (1940),
_Challenging Years, The Memoirs of Harriot Stanton Blatch_, with
Harriot Stanton Blatch (1940), and the editor of _With Love Jane,
Letters from American Women on the War Fronts_ (1945).

(C) 1959 by Alma Lutz
Member of the Authors League of America

Published by arrangement with
Beacon Press
All rights reserved.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lutz, Alma.
Susan B. Anthony: rebel, crusader, humanitarian.

Reprint of the ed. published by Beacon Press, Boston.
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Anthony, Susan Brownell, 1820-1906.
[JK1899.A6L8 1975] 324'.3'0924 [B] 75-37764
ISBN 0-89201-017-7

Printed in the United States of America

_To the young women of today_

PREFACE

To strive for liberty and for a democratic way of life has always been
a noble tradition of our country. Susan B. Anthony followed this
tradition. Convinced that the principle of equal rights for all, as
stated in the Declaration of Independence, must be expressed in the
laws of a true republic, she devoted her life to the establishment of
this ideal.

Because she recognized in Negro slavery and in the legal bondage of
women flagrant violations of this principle, she became an active,
courageous, effective antislavery crusader and a champion of civil and
political rights for women. She saw women's struggle for freedom from
legal restrictions as an important phase in the development of
American democracy. To her this struggle was never a battle of the
sexes, but a battle such as any freedom-loving people would wage for
civil and political rights.

While her goals for women were only partially realized in her
lifetime, she prepared the soil for the acceptance not only of her
long-hoped-for federal woman suffrage amendment but for a worldwide
recognition of human rights, now expressed in the United Nations
Charter and the Declaration of Human Rights. She looked forward to the
time when throughout the world there would be no discrimination
because of race, color, religion, or sex.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

"The letters of a person ...," said Thomas Jefferson, "form the only
full and genuine journal of his life." Susan B. Anthony's letters,
hundreds of them, preserved in libraries and private collections, and
her diaries have been the basis of this biography, and I acknowledge
my indebtedness to the following libraries and their helpful
librarians: the American Antiquarian Society; the Bancroft Library of
the University of California; the Boston Public Library; the Henry E.
Huntington Library and Art Gallery; the Indiana State Library; the
Kansas Historical Society; the Library of Congress; the Susan B.
Anthony Memorial Collection of the Los Angeles Public Library, which
has been transferred to the Henry E. Huntington Library; the New York
Public Library; the New York State Library; the Ohio State Library;
the Radcliffe Women's Archives; the Seneca Falls Historical Society;
the Smith College Library; the Susan B. Anthony Memorial Inc.,
Rochester, New York; the University of Rochester Library; the
University of Kentucky Library; and the Vassar College Library.

I am particularly indebted to Lucy E. Anthony, who asked me to write a
biography of her aunt, lent me her aunt's diaries, and was most
generous with her records and personal recollections. To her and to
her sister, Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon, I am very grateful for photographs
and for permission to quote from Susan B. Anthony's diaries and from
her letters and manuscripts.

Ida Husted Harper's _Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_, written in
collaboration with Susan B. Anthony, and the _History of Woman
Suffrage_, compiled by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony,
Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husted Harper, have been invaluable. As
many of the letters and documents used in the preparation of these
books were destroyed, they have preserved an important record of the
work of Susan B. Anthony and of the woman's rights movement.

I am especially grateful to Martha Taylor Howard for her unfailing
interest and for the use of the valuable Susan B. Anthony Memorial
Collection which she initiated and developed in Rochester, New York;
and to Una R. Winter for her interest and for the use of her Susan B.
Anthony Collection, most of which is now in the Henry E. Huntington
Library.

I thank Edna M. Stantial for permission to examine and quote from the
Blackwell Papers; Anna Dann Mason for permission to read her
reminiscences and the many letters written to her by Susan B. Anthony;
Ellen Garrison for permission to quote from letters of Lucretia Mott
and Martha C. Wright; Eleanor W. Thompson for copies of Susan B.
Anthony's letters to Amelia Bloomer; Henry R. Selden II whose
grandfather was Susan B. Anthony's lawyer during her trial for voting;
Judge John Van Voorhis whose grandfather was associated with Judge
Selden in Miss Anthony's defense; William B. Brown for information
about the early history of Adams, Massachusetts, the Susan B. Anthony
birthplace, and the Friends Meeting House in Adams; Dr. James Harvey
Young for information about Anna E. Dickinson; Margaret Lutz Fogg for
help in connection with the trial of Susan B. Anthony; Dr. Blake
McKelvey, City Historian of Rochester; Clara Sayre Selden and Wheeler
Chapin Case of the Rochester Historical Society; the grand-nieces of
Susan B. Anthony, Marion and Florence Mosher; Matilda Joslyn Gage II;
Florence L. C. Kitchelt; and Rose Arnold Powell.

I thank _The Christian Science Monitor_ for permission to use portions
of an article published on October 24, 1958.

I am especially grateful to A. Marguerite Smith for her constructive
criticism of the manuscript and her unfailing encouragement.

ALMA LUTZ

_Highmeadow_
_Berlin, New York_

TABLE OF CONTENTS

QUAKER HERITAGE 1

WIDENING HORIZONS 15

FREEDOM TO SPEAK 28

A PURSE OF HER OWN 39

NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS 56

THE TRUE WOMAN 67

THE ZEALOT 79

A WAR FOR FREEDOM 92

THE NEGRO'S HOUR 108

TIMES THAT TRIED WOMEN'S SOULS 125

HE ONE WORD OF THE HOUR 138

WORK, WAGES, AND THE BALLOT 149

THE INADEQUATE FIFTEENTH AMENDMENT 159

A HOUSE DIVIDED 169

A NEW SLANT ON THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 180

TESTING THE FOURTEENTH AMENDMENT 198

"IS IT A CRIME FOR A CITIZEN ... TO VOTE?" 209

SOCIAL PURITY 217

A FEDERAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE AMENDMENT 226

RECORDING WOMEN'S HISTORY 235

IMPETUS FROM THE WEST 241

VICTORIES IN THE WEST 252

LIQUOR INTERESTS ALERT FOREIGN-BORN VOTERS AGAINST WOMAN
SUFFRAGE 266

AUNT SUSAN AND HER GIRLS 274

PASSING ON THE TORCH 285

SUSAN B. ANTHONY OF THE WORLD 299

NOTES 311

BIBLIOGRAPHY 327

INDEX 335

TABLE OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Susan B. Anthony at the age of thirty-five _Frontispiece_
(From a daguerrotype, courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, N.Y.)

Daniel Anthony, father of Susan B. Anthony 2
(From _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ by
Ida Husted Harper)

Lucy Read Anthony, mother of Susan B. Anthony 3
(From _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_ by
Ida Husted Harper)

Susan B. Anthony Homestead, Adams, Massachusetts 5
(The Smith Studio, Adams, Massachusetts)

Frederick Douglass 22

Elizabeth Cady Stanton in her "Bloomer costume" 27
(From _The Lily_)

Lucy Stone 29
(From _Lucy Stone_ by Alice Stone Blackwell. Courtesy Little,
Brown and Company)

Susan B. Anthony at the age of thirty-four 31
(Courtesy Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc., Rochester, New York)

James and Lucretia Mott 33
(From _James and Lucretia Mott_ by Anna D. Hallowell.
Courtesy Houghton Mifflin Company)

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her son, Henry 40

Ernestine Rose 42
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)

Parker Pillsbury 49
(From _William Lloyd Garrison_ by His Children)

Merritt Anthony 57
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)

Susan B. Anthony, 1856 68
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)

Lucy Stone and her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell 72
(Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
San Marino, California)

William Lloyd Garrison 86
(From _William Lloyd Garrison and His Times_ by Oliver
Johnson)

Susan B. Anthony 97

Daniel Anthony, brother of Susan B. Anthony 110
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)

Wendell Phillips 114
(From _William Lloyd Garrison_ by His Children)

George Francis Train 132
(Courtesy New York Public Library)

Anna E. Dickinson 144
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)

Paulina Wright Davis 165

Isabella Beecher Hooker 167

Victoria C. Woodhull 181

Susan B. Anthony, 1871 187
(Courtesy Mrs. Ann Anthony Bacon)

Judge Henry R. Selden 203
(Courtesy Henry R. Selden II)

"The Woman Who Dared" 206
(New York _Daily Graphic_, June 5, 1873)

Aaron A. Sargent 229
(Courtesy Library of Congress)

Clara Bewick Colby 232
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)

Matilda Joslyn Gage 236
(From _History of Woman Suffrage_ by Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage)

Anna Howard Shaw 248
(From a photograph by Mary Carnel)

Harriot Stanton Blatch 250
(Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
San Marino, California)

The Anthony home, Rochester, New York 255
(Courtesy Susan B. Anthony Memorial, Inc., Rochester, New York)

Susan B. Anthony at her desk 257
(Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts)

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton 259

Elizabeth Smith Miller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 262
and Susan B. Anthony

Ida Husted Harper 271
(Courtesy Library of Congress)

Rachel Foster Avery 275
(Courtesy Library of Congress)

Harriet Taylor Upton 276
(Courtesy Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery,
San Marino, California)

Carrie Chapman Catt 289
(Courtesy Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College,
Northampton, Massachusetts)

Quotation in the handwriting of Susan B. Anthony 297

Susan B. Anthony at the age of eighty-five 301
(From a photograph by J. E. Hale)

Susan B. Anthony, 1905 309
(From a photograph by Ellis)

QUAKER HERITAGE

"If Sally Ann knows more about weaving than Elijah," reasoned
eleven-year-old Susan with her father, "then why don't you make her
overseer?"

"It would never do," replied Daniel Anthony as a matter of course. "It
would never do to have a woman overseer in the mill."

This answer did not satisfy Susan and she often thought about it. To
enter the mill, to stand quietly and look about, was the best kind of
entertainment, for she was fascinated by the whir of the looms, by the
nimble fingers of the weavers, and by the general air of efficiency.
Admiringly she watched Sally Ann Hyatt, the tall capable weaver from
Vermont. When the yarn on the beam was tangled or there was something
wrong with the machinery, Elijah, the overseer, always called out to
Sally Ann, "I'll tend your loom, if you'll look after this." Sally Ann
never failed to locate the trouble or to untangle the yarn. Yet she
was never made overseer, and this continued to puzzle Susan.[1]

The manufacture of cotton was a new industry, developing with great
promise in the United States, when Susan B. Anthony was born on
February 15, 1820, in the wide valley at the foot of Mt. Greylock,
near Adams, Massachusetts. Enterprising young men like her father,
Daniel Anthony, saw a potential cotton mill by the side of every
rushing brook, and young women, eager to earn the first money they
could call their own, were leaving the farms, for a few months at
least, to work in the mills. Cotton cloth was the new sensation and
the demand for it was steadily growing. Brides were proud to display a
few cotton sheets instead of commonplace homespun linen.

When Susan was two years old, her father built a cotton factory of
twenty-six looms beside the brook which ran through Grandfather Read's
meadow, hauling the cotton forty miles by wagon from Troy, New York.
The millworkers, most of them young girls from Vermont, boarded, as
was the custom, in the home of the millowner; Susan's mother, Lucy
Read Anthony, although she had three small daughters to care for,
Guelma, Susan, and Hannah, boarded eleven of the millworkers with
only the help of a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for her after
school hours. Lucy Anthony cooked their meals on the hearth of the big
kitchen fireplace, and in the large brick oven beside it baked crisp
brown loaves of bread. In addition, washing, ironing, mending, and
spinning filled her days. But she was capable and strong and was doing
only what all women in this new country were expected to do. She
taught her young daughters to help her, and Susan, even before she was
six, was very useful; by the time she was ten she could cook a good
meal and pack a dinner pail.

[Illustration: Daniel Anthony, father of Susan B. Anthony]

* * * * *

Hard work and skill were respected as Susan grew up in the rapidly
expanding young republic which less than fifty years before had been
founded and fought for. Settlers, steadily pushing westward, had built
new states out of the wilderness, adding ten to the original thirteen.
Everywhere the leaven of democracy was working and men were putting
into practice many of the principles so boldly stated in the
Declaration of Independence, claiming for themselves equal rights and
opportunities. The new states entered the Union with none of the
traditional property and religious limitations on the franchise, but
with manhood suffrage and all voters eligible for office. The older
states soon fell into line, Massachusetts in 1820 removing property
qualifications for voters. Before long, throughout the United States,
all free white men were enfranchised, leaving only women, Negroes, and
Indians without the full rights of citizenship.

[Illustration: Lucy Read Anthony, mother of Susan B. Anthony]

Although women freeholders had voted in some of the colonies and in
New Jersey as late as 1807,[2] just as in England in the fifteenth
franchise had gradually found its way into the statutes, and women's
rights as citizens were ignored, in spite of the contribution they had
made to the defense and development of the new nation. However,
European travelers, among them De Tocqueville, recognized that the
survival of the New World experiment in government and the prosperity
and strength of the people were due in large measure to the
superiority of American women. A few women had urged their claims:
Abigail Adams asked her husband, a member of the Continental Congress,
"to remember the ladies" in the "new code of laws"; and Hannah Lee
Corbin of Virginia pleaded with her brother, Richard Henry Lee, to
make good the principle of "no taxation without representation" by
enfranchising widows with property.[3]

Yet the legal bondage of women continued to be overlooked. It seemed a
less obvious threat to free institutions and democratic government
than the Negro in slavery. In fact, Negro slavery presented a problem
which demanded attention again and again, flaring up alarmingly in
1820, the year Susan B. Anthony was born, when Missouri was admitted
to the Union as a slave state.[4]

* * * * *

These were some of the forces at work in the minds of Americans during
Susan's childhood. Her father, a liberal Quaker, was concerned over
the extension of slavery, and she often heard him say that he tried to
avoid purchasing cotton raised by slave labor. This early impression
of the evil of slavery was never erased.

The Quakers' respect for women's equality with men before God also
left its mark on young Susan. As soon as she was old enough she went
regularly to Meeting with her father, for all of the Anthonys were
Quakers. They had migrated to western Massachusetts from Rhode Island,
and there on the frontier had built prosperous farms, comfortable
homes, and a meeting house where they could worship God in their own
way. Susan, sitting with the women and children on the hand-hewn
benches near the big fireplace in the meeting house[5] which her
ancestors had built, found peace and consecration in the simple
unordered service, in the long reverent silence broken by both the men
and the women in the congregation as they were led to say a prayer or
give out a helpful message. Forty families now worshiped here, the
women sitting on one side and the men on the other; but women took
their places with men in positions of honor, Susan's own grandmother,
Hannah Latham Anthony, an elder, sitting in the "high seat," and her
aunt, Hannah Anthony Hoxie, preaching as the spirit moved her. With
this valuation of women accepted as a matter of course in her church
and family circle, Susan took it for granted that it existed
everywhere.

Although her father was a devout Friend, she discovered that he had
the reputation of thinking for himself, following the "inner light"
even when its leading differed from the considered judgment of his
fellow Quakers. For this he became a hero to her, especially after she
heard the romantic story of his marriage to Lucy Read who was not a
Quaker. The Anthonys and the Reads had been neighbors for years, and
Lucy was one of the pupils at the "home school" which Grandfather
Humphrey Anthony had built for his children on the farm, under the
weeping willow at the front gate. Daniel and Lucy were schoolmates
until Daniel at nineteen was sent to Richard Mott's Friends' boarding
school at Nine Partners on the Hudson. When he returned as a teacher,
he found his old playmate still one of the pupils, but now a beautiful
tall young woman with deep blue eyes and glossy brown hair. Full of
fun, a good dancer, and always dressed in the prettiest clothes, she
was the most popular girl in the neighborhood. Promptly Daniel Anthony
fell in love with her, but an almost insurmountable obstacle stood in
the way: Quakers were not permitted to "marry out of Meeting." This,
however, did not deter Daniel.

[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony Homestead, Adams, Massachusetts]

It was harder for Lucy to make up her mind. She enjoyed parties,
dances, and music. She had a full rich voice, and as she sat at her
spinning wheel, singing and spinning, she often wished that she could
"go into a ten acre lot with the bars down"[6] and let her voice out.
If she married Daniel, she would have to give all this up, but she
decided in favor of Daniel. A few nights before the wedding, she went
to her last party and danced until four in the morning while Daniel
looked on and patiently waited until she was ready to leave.

For his transgression of marrying out of Meeting, Daniel had to face
the elders as soon as he returned from his wedding trip. They weighed
the matter carefully, found him otherwise sincere and earnest, and
decided not to turn him out. Lucy gave up her dancing and her singing.
She gave up her pretty bright-colored dresses for plain somber
clothes, but she did not adopt the Quaker dress or use the "plain
speech." She went to meeting with Daniel but never became a Quaker,
feeling always that she could not live up to their strict standard of
righteousness.[7]

This was Susan's heritage--Quaker discipline and austerity lightened
by her father's independent spirit and by the kindly understanding of
her mother who had not forgotten her own fun-loving girlhood; an
environment where men and women were partners in church and at home,
where hard physical work was respected, where help for the needy and
unfortunate was spontaneous, and where education was regarded as so
important that Grandfather Anthony built a school for his children and
the neighbors' in his front yard. Her childhood was close enough to
the Revolution to make Grandfather Read's part in it very real and a
source of great pride. Eagerly and often she listened to the story of
how he enlisted in the Continental army as soon as the news of the
Battle of Lexington reached Cheshire and served with outstanding
bravery under Arnold at Quebec, Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga, and
Colonel Stafford at Bennington while his young wife waited anxiously
for him throughout the long years of the war.

* * * * *

The wide valley in the Berkshire Hills where Susan grew up made a
lasting impression on her. There was beauty all about her--the fruit
trees blooming in the spring, the meadows white with daisies, the
brook splashing over the rocks and sparkling in the summer sun, the
flaming colors of autumn, the strength and companionship of the hills
when the countryside was white with snow. She seldom failed to watch
the sun set behind Greylock.

Her father's cotton mill flourished. Regarded as one of the most
promising, successful young men of the district, he soon attracted the
attention of Judge John McLean, a cotton manufacturer of Battenville,
New York, who, eager to enlarge his mills, saw in Daniel Anthony an
able manager. Daniel, always ready to take the next step ahead,
accepted McLean's offer, and on a sunny July day in 1826, Susan drove
with her family through the hills forty-four miles to the new world of
Battenville.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29