Susan B. Anthony

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Here in the home of Judge McLean, she saw Negroes for the first time,
Negroes working to earn their freedom. Startled by their black faces,
she was a little afraid, but when her father explained that in the
South they could be sold like cattle and torn from their families, her
fear turned to pity.

At the district school, taught by a woman in summer and by a man in
the winter, she learned to sew, spell, read, and write, and she wanted
to study long division but the schoolmaster, unable to teach it, saw
no reason why a woman should care for such knowledge. Her father, then
realizing the need of better education for his five children, Guelma,
Susan, Hannah, Daniel, and Mary, established a school for them in the
new brick building where he had opened a store. Later on when their
new brick house was finished, he set aside a large room for the
school, and here for the first time in that district the pupils had
separate seats, stools without backs, instead of the usual benches
around the schoolroom walls. He engaged as teachers young women who
had studied a year or two in a female seminary; and because female
seminaries were rare in those days, women teachers with up-to-date
training were hard to find. Only a few visionaries believed in the
education of women. Nearby Emma Willard's recently established Troy
Female Seminary was being watched with interest and suspicion. Mary
Lyon, who had not yet founded her own seminary at Mt. Holyoke, was
teaching at Zilpha Grant's school in Ipswich, Massachusetts, and one
of her pupils, Mary Perkins, came to Battenville to teach the Anthony
children. Mary Perkins brought new methods and new studies to the
little school. She introduced a primer with small black illustrations
which fascinated Susan. She taught the children to recite poetry,
drilled them regularly in calisthenics, and longed to add music as
well, but Daniel Anthony forbade this, for Quakers believed that music
might seduce the thoughts of the young. So Susan, although she often
had a song in her heart, had to repress it and never knew the joy of
singing the songs of childhood.

Her father, looking upon the millworkers as part of his family,
started an evening school for them, often teaching it himself or
calling in the family teacher. He organized a temperance society among
the workers, and all signed a pledge never to drink distilled liquor.
When he opened a store in the new brick building, he refused to sell
liquor, although Judge McLean warned him it would ruin his trade.
Daniel Anthony went even further. He resolved not to serve liquor when
the millworkers' houses were built and the neighbors came to the
"raising." Again Judge McLean protested, feeling certain that the men
and boys would demand their gin and their rum, but Susan and her
sisters helped their mother serve lemonade, tea, coffee, doughnuts,
and gingerbread in abundance. The men joked a bit about the lack of
strong drink which they expected with every meal, but they did not
turn away from the good substitutes which were offered and they were
on hand for the next "raising." Hearing all of this discussed at home,
Susan, again proud of her father, ardently advocated the cause of
temperance.

* * * * *

The mill was still of great interest to her and she watched every
operation closely in her spare time, longing to try her hand at the
work. One day when a "spooler" was ill, Susan and her sister Hannah
eagerly volunteered to take her place. Their father was ready to let
them try, pleased by their interest and curious to see what they could
do, but their mother protested that the mill was no place for
children. Finally Susan's earnest pleading won her mother's reluctant
consent, and the two girls drew lots for the job. It went to
twelve-year-old Susan on the condition that she divide her earnings
with Hannah. Every day for two weeks she went early to the mill in her
plain homespun dress, her straight hair neatly parted and smoothed
over her ears. Proudly she tended the spools. She was skillful and
quick, and received the regular wage of $1.50 a week, which she
divided with Hannah, buying with her share six pale blue coffee cups
for her mother who had allowed her this satisfying adventure.

A few weeks before her thirteenth birthday, Susan became a member of
the Society of Friends which met in nearby Easton, New York, and
learned to search her heart and ask herself, "Art thou faithful?"
Parties, dancing, and entertainments were generally ruled out of her
life as sinful, and rarely were a temptation, but occasionally her
mother, remembering her own good times, let her and her sisters go to
parties at the homes of their Presbyterian neighbors, and for this her
father was criticized at Friends' Meeting. Condemning bright colors,
frills, and jewelry as vain and worldly, Susan accepted plain somber
clothing as a mark of righteousness, and when she deviated to the
extent of wearing the Scotch-plaid coat which her mother had bought
her, she wondered if the big rent torn in it by a dog might not be
deserved punishment for her pride in wearing it.

That same year, the family moved into their new brick house of fifteen
rooms, with hard-finish plaster walls and light green woodwork, the
finest house in that part of the country. Here Susan's brother Merritt
was born the next April, and her two-year-old sister, Eliza, died.

Susan, Guelma, and Hannah continued their studies longer than most
girls in the neighborhood, for Quakers not only encouraged but
demanded education for both boys and girls. As soon as Susan and her
sister Guelma were old enough, they taught the "home" school in the
summer when the younger children attended, and then went further
afield to teach in nearby villages. At fifteen Susan was teaching a
district school for $1.50 a week and board, and although it was hard
for her to be away from home, she accepted it as a Friend's duty to
provide good education for children. Now Presbyterian neighbors
criticized her father, protesting that well-to-do young ladies should
not venture into paid work.

Daniel Anthony was now a wealthy man, his factory the largest and most
prosperous in that part of the country, and he could afford more and
better education for his daughters. He sent Guelma, the eldest, to
Deborah Moulson's Friends' Seminary near Philadelphia, where for $125
a year "the inculcation of the principles of Humility, Morality, and
Virtue" received particular attention; and when Guelma was asked to
stay on a second year as a teacher, he suggested that Susan join her
there as a pupil.

* * * * *

It was a long journey from Battenville to Philadelphia in 1837, and
when Susan left her home on a snowy afternoon with her father, she
felt as if the parting would be forever. Her first glimpse of the
world beyond Battenville interested her immensely until her father
left her at the seminary, and then she confessed to her diary, "Oh
what pangs were felt. It seemed impossible for me to part with him. I
could not speak to bid him farewell."[8] She tried to comfort herself
by writing letters, and wrote so many and so much that Guelma often
exclaimed, "Susan, thee writes too much; thee should learn to be
concise." As it was a rule of the seminary that each letter must first
be written out carefully on a slate, inspected by Deborah Moulson,
then copied with care, inspected again, and finally sent out after
four or five days of preparation, all spontaneity was stifled and her
letters were stilted and overvirtuous. This censorship left its mark,
and years later she confessed, "Whenever I take my pen in hand, I
always seem to be mounted on stilts."[9]

To her diary she could confide her real feelings--her discouragement
over her lack of improvement and her inability to understand her many
"sins," such as not dotting an _i_, too much laughter, or smiling at
her friends instead of reproving them for frivolous conduct. She
wrote, "Thought so much of my resolutions to do better in the future
that even my dreams were filled with these desires.... Although I have
been guilty of much levity and nonsensical conversation, and have also
admitted thoughts to occupy my mind which should have been far distant
from it, I do not consider myself as having committed any wilful
offense but perhaps the reason I cannot see my own defects is because
my heart is hardened."[10]

The girls studied a variety of subjects, arithmetic, algebra,
literature, chemistry, philosophy, physiology, astronomy, and
bookkeeping. Men came to the school to conduct some of the classes,
and Deborah Moulson was also assisted by several student teachers, one
of whom, Lydia Mott, became Susan's lifelong friend. Susan worked
hard, for she was a conscientious child, but none of her efforts
seemed to satisfy Deborah Moulson, who was a hard taskmaster. Her
reproofs cut deep, and once when Susan protested that she was always
censured while Guelma was praised, Deborah Moulson sternly replied,
"Thy sister Guelma does the best she is capable of, but thou dost not.
Thou hast greater abilities and I demand of thee the best of thy
capacity."[11]

Mail from home was a bright spot, bringing into those busy austere
days news of her friends, and when she read that one of them had
married an old widower with six children, she reflected sagely, "I
should think any female would rather live and die an old maid."[12]

Then came word that her father's business had been so affected by the
financial depression that the family would have to give up their home
in Battenville. Sorrowfully she wrote in her diary, "O can I ever
forget that loved residence in Battenville, and no more to call it
home seems impossible."[13] It helped little to realize that countless
other families throughout the country were facing the future penniless
because banks had failed, mills were shut down, and work on canals and
railroads had ceased. In April 1838, Daniel Anthony came to the
seminary to take his daughters home.

Susan felt keenly her father's sorrow over the failure of his business
and the loss of the home he had built for his family, and she resolved
at once to help out by teaching in Union Village, New York. In May
1838, she wrote in her diary, "On last evening ... I again left my
home to mingle with strangers which seems to be my sad lot. Separation
was rendered more trying on account of the embarrassing condition of
our business affairs, an inventory was expected to be taken today of
our furniture by assignees.... Spent this day in school, found it
small and quite disorderly. O, may my patience hold out to persevere
without intermission."[14]

Her patience did hold out, and also her courage, as the news came from
home telling her how everything had to be sold to satisfy the
creditors, the furniture, her mother's silver spoons, their clothing
and books, the flour, tea, coffee, and sugar in the pantries. She
rejoiced to hear that Uncle Joshua Read from Palatine Bridge, New
York, had come to the rescue, had bought their most treasured and
needed possessions and turned them over to her mother.

On a cold blustery March day in 1839, when she was nineteen, Susan
moved with her family two miles down the Battenkill to the little
settlement of Hardscrabble, later called Center Falls, where her
father owned a satinet factory and grist mill, built in more
prosperous times. These were now heavily mortgaged but he hoped to
save them. They moved into a large house which had been a tavern in
the days when lumber had been cut around Hardscrabble. It was
disappointing after their fine brick house in Battenville, but they
made it comfortable, and their love for and loyalty to each other made
them a happy family anywhere. As it had been a halfway house on the
road to Troy and travelers continued to stop there asking for a meal
or a night's lodging, they took them in, and young Daniel served them
food and nonintoxicating drinks at the old tavern bar.

Susan, when her school term was over, put her energies into housework,
recording in her diary, "Did a large washing today.... Spent today at
the spinning wheel.... Baked 21 loaves of bread.... Wove three yards
of carpet yesterday."[15]

The attic of the tavern had been finished off for a ballroom with
bottles laid under the floor to give a nice tone to the music of the
fiddles, and now the young people of the village wanted to hold their
dancing school there. Susan's father, true to his Quaker training,
felt obliged to refuse, but when they came the second time to tell him
that the only other place available was a disreputable tavern where
liquor was sold, he relented a little, and talked the matter over with
his wife and daughters. Lucy Anthony, recalling her love of dancing,
urged him to let the young people come. Finally he consented on the
condition that Guelma, Hannah, and Susan would not dance. They agreed.
Every two weeks all through the winter, the fiddles played in the
attic room and the boys and girls of the neighborhood danced the
Virginia reel and their rounds and squares, while the three Quaker
girls sat around the wall, watching and longing to join in the fun.

Such frivolous entertainment in the home of a Quaker could not be
condoned, and Daniel Anthony was not only severely censured by the
Friends but read out of Meeting, "because he kept a place of amusement
in his house." But he did not regret his so-called sin any more than
he regretted marrying out of Meeting. He continued to attend Friends'
Meeting, but grew more and more liberal as the years went by. At this
time, like all Quakers, he refused to vote, not wishing in any way to
support a government that believed in war, and this influenced Susan
who for some years regarded voting as unimportant. He refused to pay
taxes for the same reason, and she often saw him put his pocketbook on
the table and then remark drily to the tax collector, "I shall not
voluntarily pay these taxes. If thee wants to rifle my pocketbook,
thee can do so."[16]

* * * * *

To help her father with his burden of debt was now Susan's purpose in
life, and in the spring she again left the family circle to teach at
Eunice Kenyon's Friends' Seminary in New Rochelle, New York. There
were twenty-eight day pupils and a few boarders at the seminary, and
for long periods while Eunice Kenyon was ill, Susan took full charge.

She wrote her family all the little details of her life, but their
letters never came often enough to satisfy her. Occasionally she
received a paper or a letter from Aaron McLean, Judge McLean's
grandson, who had been her good friend and Guelma's ever since they
had moved to Battenville. His letters almost always started an
argument which both of them continued with zest. After hearing the
Quaker preacher, Rachel Barker, she wrote him, "I guess if you would
hear her you would believe in a woman's preaching. What an absurd
notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficient
for anything but domestic concerns."[17]

When New Rochelle welcomed President Van Buren with a parade, bands
playing, and crowds in the streets, this prim self-righteous young
woman took no part in this hero worship, but gave vent to her
disapproval in a letter to Aaron.

Disturbed over the treatment Negroes received at Friends' Meeting in
New Rochelle, she impulsively wrote him, "The people about here are
anti-abolitionist and anti everything else that's good. The Friends
raised quite a fuss about a colored man sitting in the meeting house,
and some left on account of it.... What a lack of Christianity is
this!"[18]

Her school term of fifteen weeks, for which she was paid $30, was over
early in September, just in time for her to be at home for Guelma's
wedding to Aaron McLean, and afterward she stayed on to teach the
village school in Center Falls. This made it possible for her to join
in the social life of the neighborhood. Often the young people drove
to nearby villages, twenty buggies in procession. On a drive to
Saratoga, her escort asked her to give up teaching to marry him. She
refused, as she did again a few years later when a Quaker elder tried
to entice her with his fine house, his many acres, and his sixty cows.
Although she had reached the age of twenty, when most girls felt they
should be married, she was still particular, and when a friend married
a man far inferior mentally, she wrote in her diary, "'Tis strange,
'tis passing strange that a girl possessed of common sense should be
willing to marry a lunatic--but so it is."[19]

During the next few years, both she and Hannah taught school almost
continuously, for $2 to $2.50 a week. Time and time again Susan
replaced a man who had been discharged for inefficiency. Although she
made a success of the school, she discovered that she was paid only a
fourth the salary he had received, and this rankled.

Almost everywhere except among Quakers, she encountered a false
estimate of women which she instinctively opposed. After spending
several months with relatives in Vermont, where she had the unexpected
opportunity of studying algebra, she stopped over for a visit with
Guelma and Aaron in Battenville, where Aaron was a successful
merchant. Eagerly she told them of her latest accomplishment. Aaron
was not impressed. Later at dinner when she offered him the delicious
cream biscuits which she had baked, he remarked with his most
tantalizing air of male superiority, "I'd rather see a woman make
biscuits like these than solve the knottiest problem in algebra."

"There is no reason," she retorted, "why she should not be able to do
both."[20]

FOOTNOTES:

[1] _Report of the International Council of Women_, 1888 (Washington,
1888), p. 163.

[2] Charles B. Waite, "Who Were the Voters in the Early History of
This Country?" _Chicago Law Times_, Oct., 1888.

[3] Janet Whitney, _Abigail Adams_ (Boston, 1947), p. 129. In 1776,
Abigail Adams wrote her husband, John Adams, at the Continental
Congress in Philadelphia, "In the new code of laws which I suppose it
will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the
ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors!
Do not put such unlimited powers into the hands of husbands. Remember
all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and
attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a
rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we
have no voice or representation." Ethel Armes, _Stratford Hall_
(Richmond, Va., 1936), pp. 206-209.

[4] Under the Missouri Compromise, Maine was admitted as a free state,
Missouri as a slave state, and slavery was excluded from all of the
Louisiana Purchase, north of latitude 36 deg.31'.

[5] The meeting house, built in 1783, is still standing. It is owned
by the town of Adams, and cared for by the Adams Society of Friends
Descendants. Susan traced her ancestry to William Anthony of Cologne
who migrated to England and during the reign of Edward VI, was made
Chief Graver of the Royal Mint and Master of the Scales, holding this
office also during the reign of Queen Mary and part of Queen
Elizabeth's reign. In 1634, one of his descendants, John Anthony,
settled in Rhode Island, and just before the Revolution, his great
grandson, David, Susan's great grandfather, bought land near Adams,
Massachusetts, then regarded as the far West.

[6] Ida Husted Harper, _The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony_
(Indianapolis, 1898), I, p. 10.

[7] Daniel and Susannah Richardson Read gave Lucy and Daniel Anthony
land for their home, midway between the Anthony and Read farms. Here
Susan was born in a substantial two-story, frame house, built by her
father.

[8] Ms., Diary, 1837.

[9] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 25.

[10] Ms., Diary, Jan. 21, Feb. 10, 1838

[11] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 31.

[12] Ms., Diary, Feb. 26, 1838.

[13] _Ibid._, Feb. 6, 1838.

[14] _Ibid._, May 7, 1838.

[15] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 36.

[16] _Ibid._, p. 37.

[17] _Ibid._, p. 40.

[18] _Ibid._, p. 39.

[19] _Ibid._

[20] _Ibid._, pp. 43-44.

WIDENING HORIZONS

Unable to recoup his business losses in Center Falls and losing even
the satinet factory, Susan's father had looked about in Virginia and
Michigan as well as western New York for an opportunity to make a
fresh start. A farm on the outskirts of Rochester looked promising,
and with the money which Lucy Anthony had inherited from Grandfather
Read and which had been held for her by Uncle Joshua Read, the first
payment had been made on the farm by Uncle Joshua, who held it in his
name and leased it to Daniel.[21] Had it been turned over to Susan's
mother, it would have become Daniel Anthony's property under the law
and could have been claimed by his creditors.

Only Susan, Merritt, and Mary climbed into the stage with their
parents, early in November 1845, on the first lap of their journey to
their new home, near Rochester, New York. Guelma and Hannah[22] were
both married and settled in homes of their own, and young Daniel,
clerking in Lenox, had decided to stay behind.

After a visit with Uncle Joshua at Palatine Bridge, they boarded a
line boat on the Erie Canal, taking with them their gray horse and
wagon; and surrounded by their household goods, they moved slowly
westward. Standing beside her father in the warm November sunshine,
Susan watched the strong horses on the towpath, plodding patiently
ahead, and heard the wash of the water against the prow and the noisy
greeting of boat horns. As they passed the snug friendly villages
along the canal and the wide fertile fields, now brown and bleak after
the harvest, she wondered what the new farm would be like and what the
future would bring; and at night when the lights twinkled in the
settlements along the shore, she thought longingly of her old home and
the sisters she had left behind.

After a journey of several days, they reached Rochester late in the
afternoon. Her father took the horse and wagon off the boat, and in
the chill gray dusk drove them three miles over muddy roads to the
farm. It was dark when they arrived, and the house was cold, empty,
and dismal, but after the fires were lighted and her mother had cooked
a big kettle of cornmeal mush, their spirits revived. Within the next
few days they transformed it into a cheerful comfortable home.

The house on a little hill overlooked their thirty-two acres. Back of
it was the barn, a carriage house, and a little blacksmith shop.[23]
Looking out over the flat snowy fields toward the curving Genesee
River and the church steeples in Rochester, Susan often thought
wistfully of the blue hills around Center Falls and Battenville and of
the good times she had had there.

The winter was lonely for her in spite of the friendliness of their
Quaker neighbors, the De Garmos, and the Quaker families in Rochester
who called at once to welcome them. Her father found these neighbors
very congenial and they readily interested him in the antislavery
movement, now active in western New York. Within the next few months,
several antislavery meetings were held in the Anthony home and opened
a new world to Susan. For the first time she heard of the Underground
Railroad which secretly guided fugitive slaves to Canada and of the
Liberty party which was making a political issue of slavery. She
listened to serious, troubled discussion of the annexation of Texas,
bringing more power to the proslavery block, which even the
acquisition of free Oregon could not offset. She read antislavery
tracts and copies of William Lloyd Garrison's _Liberator_, borrowed
from Quaker friends; and on long winter evenings, as she sat by the
fire sewing, she talked over with her father the issues they raised.

When spring came and the trees and bushes leafed out, she took more
interest in the farm, discovering its good points one by one--the
flowering quince along the driveway, the pinks bordering the walk to
the front door, the rosebushes in the yard, and cherry trees, currant
and gooseberry bushes in abundance. Her father planted peach and apple
orchards and worked the "sixpenny farm,"[24] as he called it, to the
best of his ability, but the thirty-two acres seemed very small
compared with the large Anthony and Read farms in the Berkshires, and
he soon began to look about for more satisfying work. This he found a
few years later with the New York Life Insurance Company, then
developing its business in western New York. Very successful in this
new field, he continued in it the rest of his life, but he always kept
the farm for the family home.

* * * * *

The first member of the family to leave the Rochester farm was Susan.
The cherry trees were in bloom when she received an offer from
Canajoharie Academy to teach the female department. As Canajoharie was
across the river from Uncle Joshua Read's home in Palatine Bridge and
he was a trustee of the academy, she read between the lines his kindly
interest in her. He was an influential citizen of that community, a
bank director and part owner of the Albany-Utica turnpike and the
stage line to Schenectady. Accepting the offer at once, she made the
long journey by canal boat to Canajoharie, and early in May 1846 was
comfortably settled in the home of Uncle Joshua's daughter, Margaret
Read Caldwell.

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