Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  454 “If the two millions”: Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1815–1897), 110.

  454 “The ballot and the bullet”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences, vol. 2, 116.

  454 “Public sentiment”: “The State Constitutional Convention,” National Anti-Slavery Standard, July 6, 1867.

  454 “most inopportune”: Quoted in David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 577.

  454 “clogged, burdened”: Quoted in ibid., 282.

  455 “Degraded, oppressed himself”: Quoted in Stanton and Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, 63.

  455 “The wisest order”: Ibid., 65.

  455 “Shame! Shame! Shame”: Quoted in ibid., 66.

  456 “Success in Kansas”: Quoted in DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 80.

  456 “We climb hills”: Quoted in Andrea Moore Kerr, Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 124.

  456 “Kansas rules the world”: Stanton and Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, 67.

  456 “A persistent effort”: Quoted in Faye E. Dudden, Fighting Chance: The Struggle over Woman Suffrage and Black Suffrage in Reconstruction America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 125.

  456 “I do not believe”: Quoted in Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as Revealed in Her Letters, Diary, and Reminiscences, vol. 2, 112.

  457 “As to woman’s rights”: Elizabeth Hawthorne to Una Hawthorne, May 11, 1866, Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley.

  457 “I have often found”: Olympia Brown Willis, Acquaintances Old and New, among Reformers (Milwaukee: S. E. Tate, 1911), 30.

  457 “If only Anna E. Dickinson”: Matthew Gallman, America’s Joan of Arc: The Life of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 86.

  457 “We had no party”: Willis, Acquaintances Old and New among Reformers, 73.

  458 “an American in excess”: Junius Henri Browne, The Great Metropolis: A Mirror of New York (Hartford: American Publishing Co., 1869), 630.

  458 “The same God that made”: Quoted in an important overview provided in Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2011), 88.

  459 “He is a highly exaggerated”: Browne, The Great Metropolis, 630.

  459 “could speak of nothing”: Quoted in Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 84.

  459 “If the Devil steps forward”: Quoted in Stanton and Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, 117.

  459 “The Garrisons, Phillipses”: Quoted in Willis, Acquaintances Old and New, 70.

  459 “we shall see some”: Quoted in Jean H. Baker, Sisters: The Lives of America’s Suffragists (New York: Hill & Wang, 2005), 34.

  459 “Suppose George Francis Train”: Stanton and Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, 127.

  460 “It was not”: Quoted in ibid., 108.

  460 As far as Anthony was concerned: Ibid., 114.

  460 “When you propose”: Quoted in ibid., 111.

  460 “Think of Patrick”: Ibid., 196.

  461 “When women, because”: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan Brownell Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage, eds., The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2 (Rochester, N.Y.: Charles Mann, 1871), 382.

  462 “thousands of hungry Negroes”: Quoted in Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life, 126.

  462 Nor did its language: Regarding the bubbles in a bar of soap and other terrorist techniques, see Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), x.

  463 “an aristocracy of sex”: Quoted, e.g., in Stansell, The Feminist Promise, 105.

  463 “We think our national life”: Quoted in DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 118.

  464 “without depreciating”: Quoted in Stanton and Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, 256.

  464 “The attempt to reform”: Quoted in “The Enfranchisement of Women,” The Independent, March 30, 1870.

  465 “The Revolution”: Quoted in Stacey Robertson, “ ‘Aunt Nancy Men’: Parker Pillsbury, Masculinity, and Women’s Rights Activism in the Nineteenth-Century United States,” American Studies 37 (Fall 1996), 33.

  466 “A woman is just as capable”: “The Queens of Finance,” New York Herald, Jan. 22, 1870. My discussion of Woodhull draws on, among other sources, Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, The History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 2, as well as the fine work of Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Victoria Woodhull, Anthony Comstock, and the Conflict over Sex in the 1870s,” The Journal of American History 87 (September 2000), 403–34, and that of Lois Beachy Underhill, The Woman Who Ran for President: The Many Lives of Victoria Woodhull (Bridgehampton, N.Y.: Bridge Works Publishing Co., 1995). In addition, I have consulted the excellent T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), which scrupulously debunks theories, often taken as fact, regarding the relationship between Woodhull and Vanderbilt. Also, Barbara Goldsmith’s sympathetic study of Woodhull, Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), though less reliable, is useful, and she draws on the excellent study of women’s rights and spiritualism, Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989).

  466 “In this age”: Quoted in Mary Gabriel, Notorious Victoria: The Life of Victoria Woodhull, Uncensored (Chapel Hill, N.C.: Algonquin Books, 1998), 80.

  466 “heaven sent for the rescue”: Quoted in Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (New York: Doubleday, 2007), 412.

  467 “We have had enough”: Quoted in Stanton and Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, 428.

  467 “brigandish dash to it”: Quoted in Gabriel, Notorious Victoria, 72.

  468 “the fraudulent”: Quoted in Madeleine Stern, We the Women: Career Firsts of Nineteenth-Century Women (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 261.

  468 “She who marries”: Quoted in Amanda Frisken, Victoria Woodhull’s Sexual Revolution: Political Theater and the Popular Press in Nineteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 27.

  468 “To love is a right”: See Victoria Woodhull, “Speech on the Principles of Social Freedom,” in Victoria Woodhull Reader, ed. Madeleine B. Stern (Weston, Mass.: M & S Press, 1974), 23.

  468 “Sexual freedom means”: Quoted in Goldsmith, Other Powers, 274.

  469 “Beecherism—or the higher law”: Quoted in Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America, 389.

  469 “Be not deceived”: Quoted in Stanton and Anthony, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 2, 347; see also “The Feud in the Woman’s Rights Camp,” The Nation 11 (Nov. 24, 1870), 346.

  469 “I have asked for equality”: Quoted in Goldsmith, Other Powers, 274.

  469 “All laws shall be”: Quoted in ibid., 275.

  470 “Sooner or later”: “The Woodhull Revolution,” Chicago Tribune, Feb. 20, 1872, 4.

  470 “those respectable women”: “The Free-Love Ticket,” San Francisco Chronicle, May 14, 1872, 2.

  471 “cuts the very ground”: Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Writings of Harriet Beecher Stowe, vol. 12: My Wife and I (Cambridge, Mass.: Riverside Press, 1895), 281.

  471 “Two of your sisters”: Victoria Woodhull, Letter to Henry Ward Beecher, reprinted in Theodore Tilton v. Henry Ward Beecher, Verbatim Report (New York: George W. Smith and Co., 1875), 829.

  471 “One man”: “Mrs. Woodhull and Her Critics,” The New York Times, May 22, 1871, 5.

  471 “Such a book is a tomb”: Quo
ted in Goldsmith, Other Powers, 289.

  473 “all the agitation”: Kerr, Lucy Stone, 172.

  473 “My one wish”: Ibid., 168.

  473 “Died of Free Love”: Quoted in Goldsmith, Other Powers, 303–4.

  CHAPTER 21: RUNNING FROM THE PAST

  475 Anthony’s subsequent arrest: The best summary of this movement, including the fact that two hundred black women, dressed as men, also went to the polls in Johnson County, North Carolina, can be found in Christine Stansell, The Feminist Promise: 1792 to the Present (New York: Modern Library, 2010), 101–3.

  476 “one of the most stupendous”: Quoted in Adam Tuchinsky, Horace Greeley’s New-York Tribune: Civil War–Era Socialism and the Crisis of Free Labor (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2009), 213.

  476 “best men”: “Speech of Carl Schurz,” in Proceedings of the Liberal Republican Convention, in Cincinnati, May lst, 2d and 3d, 1872 (New York: Baker & Godwin, 1872), 12.

  476 “What is the chief end”: Quoted in Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1966), 96.

  476 “saturated in corruption”: Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 937.

  477 “The power of ‘Rings’ ”: James Russell Lowell, Letters of James Russell Lowell, vol. 2, ed. Charles Eliot Norton (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1894), 27.

  477 “suggested survival from”: Henry Adams, “The Great Gold Conspiracy,” in Adams, Historical Essays (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1891), 32, 324.

  478 “noisy, boastful”: Ibid., 324.

  478 “Grant rarely met”: Jean Edward Smith, Grant (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 483; this biography of Grant is far more sympathetic to Grant than that of William McFeely, whose prizewinning Grant: A Biography first appeared in 1981 and is quoted below.

  479 “Letter delivered all right”: Most of the summary of this fiasco is from “Gold Panic Investigation,” CG, 41st Congress, 2nd Session, House Report 31 (serial set 1436), 168–69, 444, 174, 230–33.

  479 “Tell your husband”: Ibid., 157. See also William S. McFeely, Grant: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), 325–26.

  480 “Wall Street still panting”: George Templeton Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 4, ed. Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas (New York: Macmilllan, 1952), 255.

  480 “Railroad Kings”: Ibid., 256.

  480 “law, custom, decency”: Adams, “The New York Gold Conspiracy,” Historical Essays, 365.

  481 “a Fanatic”: Quoted in David Herbert Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), 382.

  481 “most extravagant hostility”: Ibid., 384.

  481 “nothing but money making”: Ibid., 385.

  481 “man of huge”: Ibid.

  482 “What I desired above all”: Quoted in Josiah Bunting III, Ulysses S. Grant: The American Presidents Series: The 18th President, 1869–1877 (New York: Times Books, 2004), 104.

  483 “the steamy pursuit of empire”: McFeely, Grant, 339. For the theory about black labor, see Smith, Grant, 499–508.

  483 “had no faith”: Quoted in Charles Eliot Norton, Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, vol. 2, ed. Sara Norton and M. A. DeWolfe Howe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 43.

  484 “an Administration man”: Quoted in Donald, Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man, 436.

  485 “entirely honest”: Quoted in ibid., 445.

  485 “yearn for the protection”: Ulysses S. Grant, “Second Annual Message to Congress,” Dec. 5, 1870, in A Compilation of Messages and Papers of the Presidents, ed. James D. Richardson, vol. 7 (1898), 99.

  485 “settle the unhappy condition”: Ibid., 100.

  485 “seek the blessings”: Ibid., 100.

  485 “Porto Rico and Cuba”: Ibid., 100.

  485 “a free exercise”: Ibid., 96.

  485 He too repeated: CG, 41st Congress, 3rd Session, pt. 1, Dec. 21, 1870, 227–30.

  486 “I lit my youthful candle”: CG, 41st Congress, 3rd Session, pt. 1, Dec. 21, 1870, 239.

  487 “that empire is”: “Prophetic Voices about America: A Monograph,” The Atlantic Monthly 20 (September 1867), 279.

  487 “Canada and Nova Scotia”: Ibid., 283.

  487 “the day will come”: Ibid., 298.

  487 “the name of the Republic”: Ibid., 306.

  487 “quite compatible with”: Quoted in Carl Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 2, ed. Frederic Bancroft (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1913), 78.

  488 “mixed Latin”: Ibid., 94.

  488 “assimilation downward”: Ibid., 95.

  488 “Here are the believers”: W. C. Church, “Nebulae, Nebulae,” The Galaxy 14 (September 1872), 434.

  489 However, though Greeley publicized: “Amnesty—Personal Security,” New-York Tribune, March 16, 1871, 4.

  490 “Those loyal men”: “Mr. Elliott on the Ku-Klux Outrages,” New-York Tribune, March 21, 1871, 1.

  491 “insane”: Quoted in Eric Foner, Reconstruction, 1863–1877: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 456.

  491 “Though rejoiced at”: Quoted in ibid., 458.

  492 “The Northern mind”: Quoted in Richard Zuczek, “The Federal Government’s Attack on the Ku Klux Klan: A Reassessment,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 97 (January 1996), 59.

  493 “mass of ignorance and barbarism”: “Notes from Washington,” New-York Tribune, March 5, 1872, 2.

  493 “Of all the mistakes”: Quoted in Richard A. Gerber, “Liberal Republicanism, Reconstruction, and Social Order: Samuel Bowles as a Test Case,” New England Quarterly 45 (September 1972), 404.

  494 “Before the law”: Quoted in Alice Fahs and Joan Waugh, eds., The Memory of the Civil War in American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 171.

  494 “Liberal Republicanism”: Quoted in James M. McPherson, “Grant or Greeley? The Abolitionist Dilemma in the Election of 1872,” American Historical Review 71 (October 1865), 59.

  494 “What the South wants”: “Civilization at the South,” New-York Tribune, March 23, 1872, 4.

  494 “The increase in”: “State of the South,” Chicago Tribune, April 10, 1872, 4.

  495 “I don’t pretend”: Quoted in CG, 42nd Congress, 2nd Session, 973.

  497 it was also said: See Richard N. Current, “Carpetbaggers Reconsidered,” in Reconstruction: An Anthology of Revisionist Writings, eds. Kenneth M. Stampp and Leon F. Litwack (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969), 238.

  498 “he would not hesitate”: Ulysses S. Grant, The Papers of Ulysses S. Grant, vol. 23, ed. John Simon (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 272.

  498 “New Departure”: The term was coined without reference, it seems, to the women’s movement.

  499 “I cannot become President”: Quoted in Matthew T. Downey, “Horace Greeley and the Politicians: The Liberal Republican Convention in 1872,” Journal of American History 53 (March 1967), 733.

  500 “I don’t know”: Quoted in Schurz, Speeches, Correspondence and Political Papers of Carl Schurz, vol. 2, 376.

  500 “a successful piece”: Quoted in Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Horace Greeley: Nineteenth-Century Crusader (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953), 406.

  500 “a few wry faces”: Strong, The Diary of George Templeton Strong, vol. 4, 431.

  500 “Mere coldness and hardness”: Ibid., 420.

  501 “Sir, I sound the cry”: Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner, vol. 14 (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1883), 471.

  501 “What could lead you”: Quoted in James M. McPherson, “Grant or Greeley?,” 57.

  501 “first in nepotism”: Charles Sumner, The Works of Charles Sumner, vol. 15 (Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1883), 168.

  501 “I regret his late speech”: John B. Pickard, ed., The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mas
s.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 271.

  501 “The colored man”: Ibid., 276.

  501 “Nearly all that legislation”: Ibid., 276.

  502 “The Republican party”: Quoted in Smith, Grant, 550.

  502 “You tell us that”: Quoted in Foner, Reconstruction, 506.

  502 “We hold our rights”: Quoted in Philip Dray, Capitol Men: The Epic Story of Reconstruction through the Lives of the First Black Congressmen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008), 125.

  503 Southerners did not resent: See George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, vol. 1 (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1905), 284.

  503 “They receive money”: Charles Francis Adams, Jr., “Railroad Inflation,” North American Review 108 (January 1869), 148.

  504 “I did not ask”: Franklin Pierce, inaugural address, in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, vol. 7, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1898), 223.

  504 “I have done more”: Quoted in Van Deusen, Horace Greeley, 423.

  CHAPTER 22: WESTWARD THE COURSE OF EMPIRE

  506 “The Western spirit”: Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1982), 149.

  506 “hewn out of rock”: Francis Parkman, The Oregon Trail and the Conspiracy of Pontiac, ed. William Taylor (New York: Library of America, 1991), 389.

  506 “will sweep from the face”: Ibid., 90.

  506 “learn the arts”: Ibid., 389.

  507 “solid personality”: Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Library of America, 1982), 952.

  507 “This is what the scamps”: Quoted in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 16, Journal 10, ed. Bradford Torrey (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 89. See also the very fine Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 174.

  508 He also hired: An important comparison between the work of Carleton Watkins and Timothy O’Sullivan, and the implication for the commercial development of postwar America, can be found in Joel Snyder, “Territorial Expansion,” in Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 175–201.