Susan B. Anthony

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* * * * *

A month later, Susan went to New York for a visit with Elizabeth
Stanton, confident that if they counseled together, they could find a
way to serve their country in its hour of need.

She was well aware that all through the country women were responding
magnificently in this crisis, giving not only their husbands and sons
to the war, but carrying on for them in the home, on the farm, and in
business. Many were sewing and knitting for soldiers, scraping lint
for hospitals, and organizing Ladies' Aid Societies, which, operating
through the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the
Red Cross, sent clothing and nourishing food to the inadequately
equipped and poorly fed soldiers in the field. In the large cities
women were holding highly successful "Sanitary Fairs" to raise funds
for the Sanitary Commission. In fact, through the women, civilian
relief was organized as never before in history. Individual women too,
Susan knew, were making outstanding contributions to the war. Lucy
Stone's sister-in-law, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell,[148] a friend and
admirer of Florence Nightingale, was training much-needed nurses,
while Dr. Mary Walker, putting on coat and trousers, ministered
tirelessly to the wounded on the battlefield. Dorothea Dix, the
one-time schoolteacher who had awakened the people to their barbarous
treatment of the insane, had offered her services to the
Surgeon-General and was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army
Nurses, with authority to recruit nurses and oversee hospital
housekeeping. Clara Barton, a government employee, and other women
volunteers were finding their way to the front to nurse the wounded
who so desperately needed their help; and Mother Bickerdyke, living
with the armies in the field, nursed her boys and cooked for them,
lifting their morale by her motherly, strengthening presence. Through
the influence of Anna Ella Carroll, Maryland had been saved for the
Union and she, it was said, was ably advising President Lincoln.

Susan herself had felt no call to nurse the wounded, although she had
often skillfully nursed her own family; nor had she felt that her
qualifications as an expert housekeeper and good executive demanded
her services at the front to supervise army housekeeping. Instead she
looked for some important task to which other women would not turn in
these days when relief work absorbed all their attention. It was not
enough, she felt, for women to be angels of mercy, valuable and
well-organized as this phase of their work had become. A spirit of
awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this
led her to believe that northern women needed someone to stimulate
their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues
of the war and in so doing claim their own freedom. Women, she
reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts,
and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the
traditions of freedom upon which this republic was founded. Women must
have a part in molding public opinion and must help direct policy as
Anna Ella Carroll was proving women could do. Here was the best
possible training for prospective women voters. To all this Mrs.
Stanton heartily agreed.

As they sat at the dining-room table with Mrs. Stanton's two
daughters, Maggie and Hattie, all busily cutting linen into small
squares and raveling them into lint for the wounded, they discussed
the state of the nation. They were troubled by the low morale of the
North and by the insidious propaganda of the Copperheads, an antiwar,
pro-Southern group, which spread discontent and disrespect for the
government. Profiteering was flagrant, and through speculation and war
contracts, large fortunes were being built up among the few, while the
majority of the people not only found their lives badly disrupted by
the war but suffered from high prices and low wages. So far no
decisive victory had encouraged confidence in ultimate triumph over
the South. In newspapers and magazines, women of the North were being
unfavorably compared with southern women and criticized because of
their lack of interest in the war. Writing in the _Atlantic Monthly_,
March, 1863, Gail Hamilton, a rising young journalist, accused
northern women of failing to come up to the level of the day. "If you
could have finished the war with your needles," she chided them, "it
would have been finished long ago, but stitching does not crush
rebellion, does not annihilate treason...."

Thinking along these same lines, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now decided to
go a step further. They would act to bring women abreast of the issues
of the day, Susan with her flare for organizing women, Mrs. Stanton
with her pen and her eloquence. They would show women that they had an
ideal to fight for. They would show them the uselessness of this
bloody conflict unless it won freedom for all of the slaves. Freedom
for all, as a basic demand of the republic, would be their watchword.
Men were forming Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues to combat the
influence of secret antiwar societies, such as the Knights of the
Golden Circle. "Why not organize a Women's National Loyal League?"
Susan and Mrs. Stanton asked each other.

They talked their ideas over first with the New York abolitionists,
then with Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and his dashing young
friend, Theodore Tilton, and with Robert Dale Owen, now in the city as
the recently appointed head of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission.
These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other antislavery
members of Congress. All agreed that the Emancipation Proclamation
must be implemented by an act of Congress, by an amendment to the
Constitution, and that public opinion must be aroused to demand a
Thirteenth Amendment. If women would help, so much the better.

Susan at once thought of petitions. If petitions had won the Woman's
Property Law in New York, they could win the Thirteenth Amendment. The
largest petition ever presented to Congress was her goal.

* * * * *

Carefully Susan and Mrs. Stanton worked over an _Appeal to the Women
of the Republic_, sending it out in March 1863 with a notice of a
meeting to be held in New York. It left no doubt in the minds of those
who received it that women had a responsibility to their country
beyond services of mercy to the wounded and disabled.

From all parts of the country, women responded to their call. The
veteran antislavery and woman's rights worker, Angelina Grimke Weld,
came out of her retirement for the meeting. Ernestine Rose, the ever
faithful, was on hand. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell were
there, and the popular Hutchinson family, famous for their stirring
abolition songs. They helped Susan and Mrs. Stanton steer the course
of the meeting into the right channels, to show the women assembled
that the war was being fought not merely to preserve the Union, but
also to preserve the American way of life, based on the principle of
equal rights and freedom for all, to save it from the encroachments of
slavery and a slaveholding aristocracy. Susan proposed a resolution
declaring that there can never be a true peace until the civil and
political rights of all citizens are established, including those of
Negroes and women. The introduction of the woman's rights issue into a
war meeting with an antislavery program was vigorously opposed by
women from Wisconsin, but the faithful feminists came to the rescue
and the controversial resolution was adopted.

Although she always instinctively related all national issues to
woman's rights and vice versa, Susan did not allow this subject to
overshadow the main purpose of the meeting. Instead she analyzed the
issue of the war and reproached Lincoln for suppressing the fact that
slavery was the real cause of the war and for waiting two long years
before calling the four million slaves to the side of the North.
"Every hour's delay, every life sacrificed up to the proclamation that
called the slave to freedom and to arms," she declared, "was nothing
less than downright murder by the government.... I therefore hail the
day when the government shall recognize that it is a war for
freedom."[149]

A Women's National Loyal League was organized, electing Susan
secretary and Mrs. Stanton president. They sent a long letter to
President Lincoln thanking him for the Emancipation Proclamation,
especially for the freedom it gave Negro women, and assuring him of
their loyalty and support in this war for freedom. Their own immediate
task, they decided, was to circulate petitions asking for an act of
Congress to emancipate "all persons of African descent held in
involuntary servitude." As Susan so tersely expressed it, they would
"canvass the nation for freedom."

* * * * *

All the oratory over, Susan now undertook the hard work of making the
Women's National Loyal League a success, assuming the initial
financial burden of printing petitions and renting an office, Room 20,
at Cooper Institute, where she was busy all day and where New York
members met to help her. To each of the petitions sent out, she
attached her battle cry, "There must be a law abolishing slavery....
Women, you cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be
a power in the government is through the exercise of this one, sacred,
constitutional 'right of petition,' and we ask you to use it now to
the utmost...." She also asked those signing the petitions to
contribute a penny to help with expenses and in this way she slowly
raised $3,000.[150]

At first the response was slow, although both Republican and
antislavery papers were generous in their praise of this undertaking,
but when the signed petitions began to come in, she felt repaid for
all her efforts, and when the Hovey Fund trustees appropriated twelve
dollars a week for her salary, the financial burden lifted a little.
Yet it was ever present. For herself she needed little. She wrote her
mother and Mary, "I go to a little restaurant nearby for lunch every
noon. I always take strawberries with two tea rusks. Today I said,
'all this lacks is a glass of milk from my mother's cellar,' and the
girl replied, 'We have very nice Westchester milk.' So tomorrow I
shall add that to my bill of fare. My lunch costs, berries five cents,
rusks five, and tomorrow the milk will be three."[151]

The cost of postage mounted as the petitions continued to go out to
all parts of the country. In dire need of funds, Susan decided to
appeal to Henry Ward Beecher; and wearily climbing Columbia Heights to
his home, she suddenly felt a strong hand on her shoulder and a
familiar voice asking, "Well, old girl, what do you want now?" He took
up a collection for her in Plymouth Church, raising $200. Gerrit Smith
sent her $100, when she had hoped for $1,000, and Jessie Benton
Fremont, $50. Before long, her "war of ideas" won the support of
Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, George William
Curtis, and other popular lecturers who spoke for her at Cooper Union
to large audiences whose admission fees swelled her funds; and
eventually Senator Sumner, realizing how important the petitions could
be in arousing public opinion for the Thirteenth Amendment, saved her
the postage by sending them out under his frank.[152]

She made her home with the Stantons, who had moved from Brooklyn to 75
West 45th Street, New York, and the comfortable evenings of good
conversation and her busy days at the office helped mightily to heal
her grief for her father. In the bustling life of the city she felt
she was living more intensely, more usefully, as these critical days
of war demanded. Henry Stanton, now an editorial writer for Greeley's
_Tribune_, brought home to them the inside story of the news and of
politics. All of them were highly critical of Lincoln, impatient with
his slowness and skeptical of his plans for slaveholders and slaves in
the border states. They questioned Garrison's wisdom in trusting
Lincoln. Susan could not feel that Lincoln was honest when he
protested that he did not have the power to do all that the
abolitionists asked. "The pity is," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "that
the vast mass of people really believe the man _honest_--that he
believes he has not the power--I wish I could...."[153]

New York seethed with unrest as time for the enforcement of the draft
drew near. Indignant that rich men could avoid the draft by buying a
substitute, workingmen were easily incited to riot, and the city was
soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all Negroes and
abolitionists were in danger. The Stanton home was in the thick of the
rioting, and when Susan and Henry Stanton came home during a lull,
they all decided to take refuge for the night at the home of Mrs.
Stanton's brother-in-law, Dr. Bayard. Here they also found Horace
Greeley hiding from the mob, for hoodlums were marching through the
streets shouting, "We'll hang old Horace Greeley to a sour apple
tree."

The next morning Susan started for the office as usual, thinking the
worst was over, but as not a single horsecar or stage was running, she
took the ferry to Flushing to visit her cousins. Here too there was
rioting, but she stayed on until order was restored by the army. She
returned to the city to find casualties mounting to over a thousand
and a million dollars' worth of property destroyed. Negroes had been
shot and hung on lamp posts, Horace Greeley's _Tribune_ office had
been wrecked and the homes of abolitionist friends burned. "These are
terrible times," she wrote her family, and then went back to work,
staying devotedly at it through all the hot summer months.[154]

By the end of the year, she had enrolled the signatures of 100,000 men
and women on her petitions, and assured by Senator Sumner that these
petitions were invaluable in creating sentiment for the Thirteenth
Amendment, she raised the number of signatures in the next few months
to 400,000.

In April 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate and the
prospects for it in the House were good. This phase of her work
finished, Susan disbanded the Women's National Loyal League and
returned to her family in Rochester.

* * * * *

In despair over the possible re-election of Abraham Lincoln, Susan had
joined Henry and Elizabeth Stanton in stirring up sentiment for John
C. Fremont. Abolitionists were sharply divided in this presidential
campaign. Garrison and Phillips disagreed on the course of action,
Garrison coming out definitely for Lincoln in the _Liberator_, while
Phillips declared himself emphatically against four more years of
Lincoln. Susan, the Stantons, and Parker Pillsbury were among those
siding with Phillips because they feared premature reconstruction
under Lincoln. They cited Lincoln's Amnesty Proclamation as an example
of his leniency toward the rebels. They saw danger in leaving free
Negroes under the control of southerners embittered by war, and called
for Negro suffrage as the only protection against oppressive laws.
They opposed the readmission of Louisiana without the enfranchisement
of Negroes. Lincoln, they knew, favored the extension of suffrage only
to literate Negroes and to those who had served in the military
forces. In fact, Lincoln held back while they wanted to go ahead under
full steam and they looked to Fremont to lead them.

Following the presidential campaign anxiously from Rochester, Susan
wrote Mrs. Stanton, "I am starving for a full talk with somebody
posted, not merely pitted for Lincoln...." The persistent cry of the
_Liberator_ and the _Antislavery Standard_ to re-elect Lincoln and not
to swap horses in midstream did not ring true to her. "We read no more
of the good old doctrine 'of two evils choose neither,'" she wrote
Anna E. Dickinson. She confessed to Anna, "It is only safe to seek and
act the truth and to profess confidence in Lincoln would be a lie in
me."[155]

As the war dragged on through the summer without decisive victories
for the North, Lincoln's prospects looked bleak, and to her dismay,
Susan saw the chances improving for McClellan, the candidate of the
northern Democrats who wanted to end the war, leave slavery alone, and
conciliate the South. The whole picture changed, however, with the
capture of Atlanta by General Sherman in September. The people's
confidence in Lincoln revived and Fremont withdrew from the contest.
One by one the anti-Lincoln abolitionists were converted; and Susan,
anxiously waiting for word from Mrs. Stanton, was relieved to learn
that she was not one of them, nor was Wendell Phillips whose judgment
and vision both of them valued above that of any other man. With
approval she read these lines which Phillips had just written Mrs.
Stanton, "I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid
Mac's [McClellan's] election. I would cut oft my right hand before
doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election. I wholly distrust
his fitness to settle this thing and indeed his purpose."[156]

There is nothing to indicate any change of opinion on Susan's part
regarding Lincoln's unfitness for a second term. That he was the
lesser of two evils, she of course acknowledged. For her these
pre-election days were discouraging and frustrating. She had very
definite ideas on reconstruction which she felt in justice to the
Negro must be carried out, and Lincoln did not meet her requirements.

After Lincoln's re-election, she again looked to Wendell Phillips for
an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed.
"Phillips has just returned from Washington," Mrs. Stanton wrote her.
"He says the radical men feel they are powerless and checkmated....
They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not
say.... We say now, as ever, 'Give us immediately unconditional
emancipation, and let there be no reconstruction except on the
broadest basis of justice and equality!...' Phillips and a few others
must hold up the pillars of the temple.... I cannot tell you how happy
I am to find Douglass on the same platform with us. Keep him on the
right track. Tell him in this revolution, he, Phillips, and you and I
must hold the highest ground and truly represent the best type of the
white man, the black man, and the woman."[157]

Susan, holding "the highest ground," found it difficult to mark time
until she could find her place in the reconstruction. "The work of the
hour," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "is not alone to put down the
Rebels in arms, but to educate Thirty Millions of People into the idea
of a True Republic. Hence every influence and power that both men and
women can bring to bear will be needed in the reconstruction of the
Nation on the broad basis of justice and equality."[158]

FOOTNOTES:

[134] Garrisons, _Garrison_, IV, pp. 30-31.

[135] Lydia Mott to W. L. Garrison, May 8, 1861, Boston Public
Library; Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, p. 89.

[136] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 215.

[137] _Ibid._, p. 216. Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave, was often
called the Moses of her people because she led so many of them into
the promised land of freedom.

[138] _Ibid._

[139] _Ibid._, p. 198.

[140] Anna E. Dickinson was born in Philadelphia in 1842. The death of
her father, two years later, left the family in straightened
circumstances, and Anna, after attending a Friends school, began very
early to support herself by copying in lawyers' offices and by working
at the U.S. Mint. Speaking extemporaneously at Friends and antislavery
meetings, she discovered she had a gift for oratory and was soon in
demand as a speaker.

[141] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 219.

[142] April, 1862. _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 748.

[143] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 218, 222.

[144] _Emancipation, the Duty of Government_, Ms., Lucy E. Anthony
Collection. Reading that General Grant had returned 13 slaves to their
masters, an indignant Susan B. Anthony wrote Mrs. Stanton, "Such
gratuitous outrage should be met with instant death--without judge or
jury--if any offense may." Feb. 27, 1862, Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Papers, Library of Congress.

[145] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 221.

[146] Jan. 24, 1904, Anna Dann Mason Collection.

[147] Harper, _Anthony_, p. 226.

[148] The first woman in the United States to obtain a medical degree,
1849.

[149] _History of Woman Suffrage_, II, pp. 57-58.

[150] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230. Members of the Women's National
Loyal League wore a silver pin showing a slave breaking his last
chains and bearing the inscription, "In emancipation is national
unity." Susan B. Anthony to Mrs. Drake, Sept. 18, 1863, Alma Lutz
Collection.

[151] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 234.

[152] _Ibid._, To Samuel May, Jr., Sept. 21, 1863, Alma Lutz
Collection.

[153] April 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress.

[154] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230.

[155] June 12, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, July 1, 1864, Anna
E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress. About this time, a friend of
Susan B. Anthony's youth, now a widower living in Ohio in comfortable
circumstances, unsuccessfully urged her to marry him.

[156] Sept. 23, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of
Congress.

[157] Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, pp. 103-104.

[158] March 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress.

THE NEGRO'S HOUR

Susan's thoughts now turned to Kansas, as they had many times since
her brothers had settled there. Daniel and Annie, his young wife from
the East, urged her to visit them.[159] Daniel was well established in
Kansas, the publisher of his own newspaper and the mayor of
Leavenworth. He had served a little over a year in the Union army in
the First Kansas Cavalry. She longed to see him and the West that he
loved.

Now for the first time she felt free to make the long journey, for her
mother and Mary had sold the farm on the outskirts of Rochester and
had moved into the city, buying a large red brick house shaded by
maples and a beautiful horse chestnut. It had been a wrench for Susan
to give up the farm with its memories of her father, but there were
compensations in the new home on Madison Street, for Guelma, her
husband, Aaron McLean, and their family lived with them there. Hannah
and her family had also settled in Rochester, and when they bought the
house next door, Susan had the satisfaction of living again in the
midst of her family.[160]

She was particularly devoted to Guelma's twenty-three-year-old
daughter, Ann Eliza, whose "merry laugh" and "bright, joyous presence"
brought new life into the household. Ann Eliza was a stimulating
intelligent companion, and Susan looked forward to seeing many of her
own dreams fulfilled in her niece. Then suddenly in the fall of 1864,
Ann Eliza was taken ill, and her death within a few days left a great
void.[161]

In the midst of this sorrow, Daniel sent Susan a ticket and a check
for a trip to Kansas. Hesitating no longer, she waited only until her
"tip-top Rochester dressmaker" made up "the new, five-dollar silk"
which she had bought in New York.[162]

Before leaving for Kansas, in January, 1865, she pasted on the first
page of her diary a clipping of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
"Something Left Undone," which seemed so perfectly to interpret her
own feelings:

Labor with what zeal we will
Something still remains undone
Something uncompleted still
Waits the rising of the sun....

Till at length it is or seems
Greater than our strength can bear
As the burden of our dreams
Pressing on us everywhere....[163]

With "the burden of her dreams" pressing on her, Susan traveled
westward. The future of the Negro was much on her mind, for the
Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had just been sent to the
states for ratification. That it would be ratified she had no doubt,
but she recognized the responsibility facing the North to provide for
the education and rehabilitation of thousands of homeless bewildered
Negroes trying to make their way in a still unfriendly world, and she
looked forward to taking part in this work.

Beyond Chicago, where she stopped over to visit her uncle Albert
Dickinson and his family, her journey was rugged, and when she reached
Leavenworth she reveled in the comfort of Daniel's "neat, little,
snow-white cottage with green blinds." She liked Daniel's wife, Annie,
at once, admired her gaiety and the way she fearlessly drove her
beautiful black horse across the prairie. "They have a real 'Aunt
Chloe' in the kitchen," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "and a little Darkie
boy for errands and table waiter. I never saw a girl to match. The
more I see of the race, the more wonderful they are to me."[164]

There was always good companionship in Daniel's home, for friends from
both the East and the West found it a convenient stopping place, and
there was much discussion of politics, the Negro question, and the
future of the West. Business was booming in Leavenworth, then the most
thriving town between St. Louis and San Francisco. Eight years before,
when Daniel had first settled there, it boasted a population of 4,000.
Now it had grown to 22,000, was lighted with gas, and was building its
business blocks of brick. As Susan drove through the busy streets with
Annie, she saw emigrants coming in by steamer and train to settle in
Kansas and watched for the covered wagons that almost every day
stopped in Leavenworth for supplies before moving on to the far West.
Driving over the wide prairie, sometimes a warm brown, then again
white with snow under a wider expanse of deep blue sky than she had
ever seen before, she relaxed as she had not in many a year and began
to feel the call of the West. She even thought she might like to
settle in Kansas until she was caught up by the sharp realization of
how she would miss the stimulating companionship of her friends in the
East.

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