In 1840, while on her honeymoon, Stanton had been excluded from the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention in London, and from then on, her commitment to abolition had included or been superseded by her commitment to women’s rights. Along with Susan B. Anthony, during the war she had established the Women’s National Loyal League, a political organization like the male-only Union League, which had been founded to preserve the Union, but had also gathered support for emancipation, the Republican Party, the Thirteenth Amendment, and equal rights.
Stanton and Anthony hadn’t met until 1851, when the two women quickly discovered that they complemented each other perfectly; they remained political partners in the fight for women’s suffrage and equal rights for fifty years. “I forged the thunderbolts,” said Stanton, “and she fired them.” Stanton possessed a tremendous legal intelligence, Anthony a Herculean endurance, especially for those long trips on the road, riding in sooty trains, eating bad food, sleeping on hard beds in faraway places.
“No matter what is done or is not done, how you are criticized or misunderstood, or what efforts are made to block your path,” Anthony counseled a new generation of women, “remember that the only fear you need have is the fear of not standing by the thing you believe to be right.” That encouragement meant a great deal to the 1,500 persons gathered in Washington to listen to Anthony’s last public speech, delivered on her last birthday, and hear her firmly declare, “Failure is impossible.” Not long after Anthony died, in 1906, at the age of eighty-six, Gertrude Stein called her “the mother of us all.”
Yet failure was very possible, and she’d become accustomed to it. Unlike Stanton, Anthony did not come from wealth; just the opposite. Born in western Massachusetts in 1820, she moved with her Quaker family to upstate New York, where her father managed a cotton mill. During the Panic of 1837, he lost his job and just about everything else. Anthony, who had been in school near Philadelphia, came home to support her large family (she had seven siblings) by teaching. In 1845, after her father’s financial condition had improved and he bought a farm, she moved with her family to Rochester, New York, where she continued to teach in one school after another, earning less money than the male instructors.
While in Rochester, Anthony met the abolitionists Amy and Isaac Post and Frederick Douglass, people who fought not just for abolition but for women’s rights and equality for all. As a temperance reformer, she learned early on that though women were invited to meetings, they were told not to speak. So she spoke. Barbed and sarcastic, she made her positions clear: respect for woman’s work, equal opportunity and equal pay, liberalized divorce laws, and the ballot. Because she was a merciless organizer, she circulated petitions, she scheduled meetings to coincide with legislative events, she wrote pamphlets and traveled from county to county and state to state; it was easy to spot her in her gold-framed spectacles. She preferred to be photographed only in profile because of a wandering eye; she was not conventionally pretty or conventionally charming or conventionally dependent on anything or anyone.
In the last few years, the matter of rights for black people, for Southern poor whites, and for ex-Confederates—but not for women—was on the table, and by the spring of 1866, the women’s cause, as Stanton had said, was in deep water. So Anthony and Stanton, along with their allies in the abolitionist movement—including Frederick Douglass, Henry Ward Beecher, and the radical editor Theodore Tilton—formed the American Equal Rights Association for white and black men and women to lobby the government for universal equal rights for all, male and female, black and white. Eloquent as ever, Douglass declared, “The right of woman to vote is as sacred in my judgment as that of man, and I am quite willing at any time to hold up both hands in favor of this right.”
The path to securing that right had just been made more difficult, though: the Fourteenth Amendment had introduced the category of “male” into the Constitution, where it had never been used before. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted,” Stanton gloomily warned, “it will take us at least a century to get it out.”
Why not guarantee voting rights to all adult persons—or, better yet, to citizens? she wanted to know. “The disfranchised all make the same demand, and the same logic and justice which secures suffrage for one class gives it to all,” Stanton explained. She and Anthony hoped to have another friend in the popular orator Anna Dickinson. Douglass credited Dickinson, along with Theodore Tilton, for articulating what would become the Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing black male suffrage, and she was also praised for educating the public about it. But Dickinson linked arms with moderate Republicans, who, along with many former abolitionists, unceremoniously reminded Stanton and Anthony that this was the “Negro’s hour.” This was the nation’s hour, Stanton replied.
Everyone walks through the door or no one walks through the door, she said. Wendell Phillips disagreed with Stanton. The spokesman for the independent voter, the disenfranchised, and the cause of black equality, Phillips was not ready to speak up for women; he reiterated that the ladies’ turn would come; they just needed to wait. He did not object to the enfranchisement of women per se, he said, but he thought that campaigning for “woman suffrage” (as it was called) undercut the case for black males. One reform at a time. Stanton was furious. “If the two millions of southern black women are not to be secured in their rights of person, property, wages, and children,” she said, “then their emancipation is but another form of slavery.”
Horace Greeley too, once a supporter of woman suffrage, took a step back. “The ballot and the bullet go together,” he said, waving Stanton away. “If you vote, are you ready to fight?”
Stanton answered, “Yes, we are ready to fight, sir, just as you did in the late war, by sending our substitutes.”
Greeley was silent but never for long. “Public sentiment,” the editor soon explained more temperately, “would not sustain an innovation so revolutionary and sweeping.” The Negro’s hour would swiftly pass if nothing were done; Stanton should know that. Charles Sumner felt the same way. Her timing was “most inopportune,” he coldly explained. He categorically refused to have a black male voting bill “clogged, burdened, or embarrassed” by the likes of woman suffrage. The war had been fought for the enfranchisement of black men, not for women. True, many former slaves were women. Since making her famous speech, known popularly as “Ain’t I a Woman?,” that marvelous orator Sojourner Truth had been the representative of all blacks and especially of women; true, there were free black women such as Frances Watkins Harper, whose speeches had kept morale high during the war. That was irrelevant now. This was the Negro’s hour, which was to say the black man’s hour, even if black women would be doubly disenfranchised.
In the spring of 1867, at the first anniversary of the American Equal Rights Association in New York City, George T. Downing, an entrepreneur and leading black activist, asked Mrs. Stanton if she really believed that black men shouldn’t have the vote until women did. Everyone should have the ballot, she replied; Reconstruction without universal suffrage did not interest her. Equal rights for all. Frankly, she continued, she didn’t trust the “colored man” to safeguard her, a woman’s, rights. “Degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are,” she explained. “I declare that we go into the kingdom together.”
Annoyed, Downing asked his question a different way: whether Mrs. Stanton would really reject half a good result—the enfranchising of men regardless of color—if women didn’t get the vote. Digging in her heels, she retorted with an argument that alienated some of her supporters, both then and now. “The wisest order of enfranchisement is to take the educated classes first,” she said. That is, why allow uneducated men to govern women? “Would Horace Greeley, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith or Theodore Tilton be willing to stand aside and trust their individual interests, and the whole welfare of the nation to the lowest strata of manhood?” she asked. “If not, why ask educated women, who love their country, who
desire to mould its institutions to the highest idea of justice and equality, who feel that their enfranchisement is of vital importance to this end, why ask them to stand aside while two million ignorant men are ushered into the halls of legislation?”
It was not her best moment. From the crowd, a woman’s voice shouted out, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”
WHILE THE MEMBERS of the American Equal Rights Association were meeting in New York, Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, were in Kansas stumping for universal suffrage. The Kansas legislature had proposed two separate but related referenda to the state Constitution: one would grant black men the vote by removing the word “white” from the Constitution; the other would grant the vote to women by removing the word “male.” If both referenda passed in the fall of 1867, impartial suffrage, as it was called, would prevail on the Kansas plains—and from there, the sky was the limit. “Success in Kansas means success everywhere,” cried Blackwell.
Canvassing the entire state in the winter and spring of 1867, Stone and Blackwell were bumping along in oxcarts and open wagons—with or without springs—and traveling for as many as forty miles a day. It was hard work, but their spirits were high. “We climb hills and dash down ravines, ford creeks, and ferry over rivers,” Blackwell cheerily exclaimed, “rattle across limestone ledges, struggle through muddy bottoms, fight the high winds on the high rolling upland prairies, and address the most astonishing (and astonished) audiences in the most extraordinary places.” Stone excitedly telegraphed the members of the American Equal Rights Association meeting back in New York: “Kansas rules the world!”
But all was not well. “A persistent effort has been made by the enemies of female suffrage,” commented a Kansas newspaper editor, “to get up a fight between that and negro suffrage.” Pitting women against black men seemed a ploy engineered by the enemies of both movements, even though, it was true, there was already friction between them, and Kansans who openly opposed giving the vote to women had already formed an anti-woman suffrage league. And that league sought help from the Republican State Committee, which sent out speakers to defeat the women—including one man who stood up at a woman suffrage meeting to ask whether men really wanted old maids to vote.
This sort of prejudice was not confined to Kansas. Women agitating for the right to vote had to be crabby spinsters without the power that was a woman’s true strength. “I do not believe in suffrage for women,” said Jessie Benton Frémont. “I think women in their present position manage men better.” Anyway, didn’t women acquire power from some separate and higher sphere? Wouldn’t voting therefore demean women? “As to woman’s rights, I have always found privileges much better things,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s sister chastised his daughter. “I do not like your saying that you ‘suppose many women would vote as well as most men,’ ” she continued. “It is placing women whose mental endowments make them the eminent and enviable few, put on a level with the herd of mediocre men.”
When Stone and Blackwell left Kansas and returned to the East, Olympia Brown, the country’s first female minister, took their place. So did Stanton and Anthony. They too traveled as many as twenty-five or thirty miles daily, speaking in every county and every school district, sometimes twice a day. They slept in farmhouses, drank sorghum instead of coffee, chewed moldy green biscuits, and hauled with them speeches, documents, tracts. Their male allies in the American Equal Rights Association—Phillips, Beecher, Tilton—did not join them. “I have often found men who, if you could believe their words, were ready to die for the negro,” Olympia Brown grimly reflected, “but would at the same time oppose bitterly any engagement of women’s opportunity or sphere.” Tilton offered to print only one editorial in The Independent. Beecher was busy writing a novel for which he had been paid a $30,000 advance. Phillips was on vacation. The men signed a petition on the women’s behalf; that was all.
Anthony tried Anna Dickinson. She was home in Philadelphia, sick. “If only Anna E. Dickinson could make ten or 15 of the strong points—we should feel sure,” Anthony tried again. Dickinson did not budge. Recalled the rueful Olympia Brown, “We had no party, no organization, no money.” Until, that is, the ostentatiously rich George Francis Train blew into town in October, offered to fund the campaign, hop on the Kansas trail, and save the day.
A colorful and very controversial man, the Boston-born Train had been orphaned at four years old, in 1833, after his father, mother, and three sisters had died of yellow fever. Raised by his grandparents in Waltham, Massachusetts, Train, as a boy, had heard the esteemed master of self-reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, deliver one of his rousing speeches, and taking to heart Emerson’s injunction to build your own world, he had gone to work for a relative in the shipping business in Liverpool. That didn’t satisfy him, so he made his way to the gold rush town of Melbourne, Australia, where he started his own firm, dispatched the first clipper ships to California, served champagne in his office, and frequently sent off vivid journalistic reports to the Boston Post about commerce—and about his travels to Java, Singapore, and Shanghai.
Back in America, after speculating in contraband cotton during the war, Train bought shares in the Union Pacific Railroad and concocted a system, which he called the Crédit Mobilier of America, to capitalize the Union Pacific and secure land rights from the government for its expansion. He grew even wealthier. By 1868, at the age of thirty-eight, he had built the Train Villa in Newport, Rhode Island. It contained several green-tinted billiard rooms, bowling alleys, sumptuously sculpted flower gardens, and a huge guesthouse for his father-in-law. He drew the line at the six carriages his family used when driving around town, which he considered wasteful. The upkeep of the showplace cost $2,000 a week. The Gilded Age was well under way.
And he was its barker, “an American in excess,” said a contemporary.
Part Emerson and part P. T. Barnum, Train possessed a gift for platform histrionics that turned staid New England rectitude on its head. Wearing lavender kid gloves, a blue dress coat with brass buttons, white vests, and shiny patent-leather shoes, he rambled, he clowned, he cajoled, he blustered, and he mesmerized his audience for as many as two and a half hours with his jokes and his causes: Irish home rule, soft (paper) money, eight-hour working days—and woman suffrage. He was a madman, a mountebank, a cracked crusader. He vied with Mark Twain for the stage—their names were occasionally confused, much to Twain’s annoyance. “The same God that made George Francis Train made also the mosquitoes and the rats,” Twain remarked. But Train believed himself destined to become president of the United States.
“He is a highly exaggerated type of our people and country,” an acquaintance said, “and has all the energy, boldness, independence, irrepressibleness, that are popularly supposed to belong to the Anglo-Saxon race.” True enough, Train was an American of his time and place. And accordingly, he was a robust racist. Years earlier, at Faneuil Hall, while Charles Sumner was praising Lincoln’s preliminary emancipation proclamation, Train interrupted to harangue Sumner, who, Train said, “could speak of nothing but the ‘sublime nigger.’ ”
Train thus seemed an unlikely—if not horrible—choice to help Stanton and Anthony in Kansas. But Stanton did not care if Train was a bigot or a boob. He put his money and his showmanship at suffrage’s disposal. “If the Devil steps forward to help,” she declared, “I shall say good fellow come on!” The Republicans had sabotaged women. Train understood that. “The Garrisons, Phillipses, Greeleys, and Beechers,” he sang, “False prophets, false guides, false teachers and preachers, / Left Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, Brown, and Stone / To fight the Kansas battles alone.”
Why, then, shouldn’t she seek help from Train? Stanton’s friends were appalled. Train was a Copperhead with a reputation as a huckster who entertained audiences by pandering to their basest fears, warning them that with black male Negro suffrage, “we shall see some white woman in a case of negro rape being tried by 12 negro jurymen.” Stanton replied, “Suppose George Francis Train had
devoted his time & money for three months to the negro as he has to the woman, would not the abolitionist on all sides be ready to eulogize & accept him, of course they would. Do they ignore everyone who is false to woman? By no means.” To her, those former abolitionists who hugged the higher law failed to admit how they’d been willing to compromise; let him who was without sin cast the first stone. “I would not talk of negroes or women,” she also pointed out. “I would talk of citizens. That is where Wendell Phillips failed; he should have passed from the abolitionist into the statesman, instead of falling back to the Republican platform.”
Though Train may have damaged the Kansas campaign, it’s likely that neither referendum would have won in any case, and neither did. “It was not the woman suffrage question that killed the negro question,” Susan B. Anthony summed up. “It was the Republican leaders—the Republican party leaders, who killed negro suffrage, and woman suffrage, too. Had these men been true and brave, had they been willing to have carried out their principles, and made an application of these principles to women as well as to the black men in the State of Kansas, neither the black man’s question nor the woman’s question would have been defeated.” As far as Anthony was concerned, the Republicans had thrown the black man overboard, and the female rats had known when to leave a sinking ship.
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