As the war ended and Reconstruction began, leaders of the suffrage movement, including Stanton and her indefatigable collaborator, Susan B. Anthony, were optimistic about its prospects. (Anthony, also a Quaker and a former teacher from western Massachusetts and upstate New York, had begun working with Stanton in 1851.) The public embrace of democracy was as broad as it ever had been; the war and the plight of the freedmen had energized the language of universal rights; and the Republican Party, home of the staunchest advocates of civil and political rights, was firmly in power. What the suffragists anticipated was a rising tide of prodemocratic sentiment that would lift women, as well as African Americans, into the polity. We intend, declared Stanton, “to avail ourselves of the strong arm and the blue uniform of the black soldier to walk in by his side.” Suffragists also felt that their claim to the franchise had been strengthened by the energetic support women had lent to the war effort: such activities presumably had neutralized the oft-repeated argument that women should not vote because they did not bear arms. As one supporter noted,
True, the women did not go to the battle-field, with muskets and bayonets in their hands, and fight to put down the rebellion; but they did render services at home during the war equally as valuable as fighting, and highly auxiliary to the success of the Union Army. . . . They did their full share in saving the Republic.10
Yet the suffragists were doomed—or at least slated—to be disappointed. Within a few months of the war’s end, Republican leaders and male abolitionists began to signal their lack of enthusiasm for coupling women’s rights to black rights. “One question at a time,” intoned Wendell Phillips. “This hour belongs to the negro.” The Fourteenth Amendment, drafted in late 1865 and ratified in 1866, disheartened suffragists and made clear that the Republican Party could not be counted on to promote suffrage for women. While offering strong, if indirect, federal support to black enfranchisement, the amendment undercut the claims of women by adding the word male to its pathbreaking guarantee of political rights. Although well aware of the strategic concerns that prompted such language, Stanton, in a prescient warning, declared that “if that word ‘male’ be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out.”11
Offended by the text of the Fourteenth Amendment and feeling betrayed by their former abolitionist allies, suffragists launched an energetic campaign to fuse the causes of women and blacks in the name of equal rights. Stanton, in a speech delivered in 1867, flatly rejected not only the “principle” that suffrage was a “gift of society” (which she claimed would “take us back to monarchies and despotisms”) but the notion that “women and negroes” ought to be enfranchised “as women and negroes, and not as citizens of a republic.” Similarly, Henry Ward Beecher, a staunch supporter of women’s rights, urged “not that women have the right of suffrage—not that China-men or Irishmen have the right of suffrage—and that native born Yankees have the right of suffrage—but that suffrage is the inherent right of mankind.” Stanton, Beecher, and their allies campaigned vigorously to achieve universal suffrage through both state constitutional reforms and the federal government.12
Meanwhile, the number of Republicans committed to enfranchising the freedmen was growing rapidly, but many of these men, whatever their personal convictions, feared that this goal would be jeopardized by simultaneously pursuing the controversial cause of women’s suffrage. Republican leaders, even Radicals, sought to separate the issues, to enfranchise blacks first and women later. The result of this divergence of strategy and principle was a growing, often hostile schism between the two movements: some abolitionists and African Americans actively opposed the drive for woman suffrage, while many feminists denigrated the abilities and qualifications of African Americans. Stanton herself objected to having “the colored man enfranchised before the women . . . I would not trust him with all my rights; degraded, oppressed himself, he would be more despotic with the governing power than even our Saxon rulers are.” At a New York Constitutional Convention, one delegate opposed a law allowing “the black men of the South, fresh from the chains of slavery, to go to the ballot-box and vote on all the great questions involving the interests of this nation, while you deny the same right to educated, patriotic women.” This schism led Stanton and some of her allies into a brief flirtation with the Democratic Party, which had a more prosuffrage track record than the Republicans on issues other than race; it was played out with particular clarity—and destructive force—in Kansas, where separate referenda were placed before the electorate by the legislature in 1867. While many Republicans campaigned not only for black suffrage but against enfranchising women, some advocates of female suffrage, including Anthony, allied themselves with overtly racist Democrats who opposed black enfranchisement. The upshot was the popular defeat of both African-American and woman suffrage.13
During this same period, Stanton, Anthony, and other suffragists also sought to build an alliance with the fledgling postwar labor reform movement, centered around the National Labor Union (NLU). The equal rights vision of many suffrage advocates meshed well with the broad, class-based politics of the NLU, a multifaceted organization founded in 1866 that appeared to have picked up the mantle of reform discarded by the Republicans. But the alliance proved to be short-lived, if not stillborn. Middle-class suffragists such as Stanton, believing as they did in the reconciliation of capital and labor, never fully grasped the sense of class antagonism that informed the NLU’s politics and program. At the same time, the trade unions of the NLU, seeking to protect the jobs of their own members, remained antagonistic to the entry of women into their trades. By the early 1870s, a series of small but grating conflicts had undermined the possibility of substantial collaboration.14
With the passage and ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1869 and 1870, the causes of black (male) and women’s suffrage were decisively severed. Discrimination against African-American men was constitutionally prohibited, bringing the national drive for suffrage expansion to a close and leaving the status of women at best unchanged; indeed, arguably, women were worse off, because the Fifteenth Amendment appeared to implicitly condone political discrimination based on sex. After twenty years, the drive for women’s suffrage had failed, and the political crisis of Reconstruction had, in the form of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, erected new constitutional obstacles to enfranchisement.
The defeat of this initial mobilization stemmed from constraints of ideology and partisan politics. Although support for female suffrage had grown rapidly and many thousands of men and women had publicly endorsed the cause in petitions and meetings, there was still substantial resistance to the proposition that women could be participants in the public sphere. Despite the movement’s pointed arguments and visibility, little had occurred to shatter the traditional consensus that had kept women out of the polity in the first place. The surge in democratic sentiments, so palpable at midcentury and so fervently embraced by some Republicans during Reconstruction, had its limits: the nation’s political leaders, almost certainly reflecting the views of a majority of their constituents, declined to promote women’s suffrage, just as they had backed away from more inclusive versions of the Fifteenth Amendment. There may well have been, as one delegate to the Illinois Constitutional Convention of 1869-1870 declared, “a wonderful revolution taking place in the minds of all the people of the country with reference to the right of suffrage.” But that revolution was beginning to stall, even as the delegate was speaking. “Equal rights” was a powerful slogan, but a minority view. As important, the political contingencies that drove Republicans to endorse black suffrage were lacking in the case of women. Women did not seem (to men) to be endangered by their inability to vote, and nowhere did the enfranchisement of women seem likely to vest Republicans or Democrats with any discernible partisan advantage.15
Citizenship and Taxes
In the wake of their political defeats in Congress and within the Republican Party, some suffragists turned briefly to a legal
strategy for gaining the right to vote. The strategy was suggested by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which declared that “all persons” born or naturalized in the United States were citizens of the nation and the state in which they resided. Women, as “persons,” were unquestionably citizens, and the franchise, suffragists maintained, was an intrinsic feature of citizenship: the Constitution, therefore, already guaranteed women the right to vote in federal elections. As was frequently pointed out, various dictionaries, including Webster’s, actually defined an American citizen as someone entitled to vote and hold office. Susan B. Anthony gave this equation a broadly political, if ambivalently egalitarian, rationale: If we once establish the false principle, that United States citizenship does not carry with it the right to vote in every State in this Union, there is no end to the petty freaks and cunning devices that will be resorted to, to exclude one and another class of citizens from the right of suffrage . . . it will not always be the rich and educated who may combine to cut off the poor and ignorant; but we may live to see the poor, hard-working, uncultivated day laborers, foreign and native born, learning the power of the ballot and their vast majority of numbers, combine and amend State constitutions so as to disfranchise the Vanderbilts and the A. T. Stewarts, the Conklings and Fentons. . . . Establish this precedent, admit the right of the States to deny suffrage, and there is no power to foresee the confusion, discord, and disruption that may await us. There is, and can be, but one safe principle of government—equal rights to all.16
This view was activated into legal combat when women in several locales (including Anthony) went to the polls and either voted or, if refused the ballot, filed suit to exercise a right that they claimed they already possessed. The most consequential of these legal actions (because it went to the Supreme Court) proved to be a suit brought by Virginia Minor and her lawyer husband, Francis, in 1872 against a St. Louis registrar who had prevented her from registering to vote. The Minors maintained that the Missouri Constitution and its voter registration law, which restricted the ballot to men, violated the U.S. Constitution in at least two ways: they infringed on Virginia Minor’s right of free speech, which was protected by the First Amendment, and they contravened the Fourteenth Amendment’s command that states not abridge the “privileges or immunities” of citizens of the United States. Voting, the Minors claimed, was one of those privileges. Although the argument was a coherent one, the justices of the Supreme Court unanimously disagreed. Upholding a lower court decision, they ruled in 1875 that suffrage was not coextensive with citizenship and thus that states possessed the authority to decide which citizens could and could not vote. Bringing an end to debates that had surfaced periodically for decades, the Court formally ratified the severance of national citizenship from suffrage that the late-eighteenth-century authors of the Constitution had devised as a solution to their own political problems. In so doing, and in reiterating the principle that suffrage was a state rather than a federal matter, the Court was bolting the gates on the simplest and shortest road to female suffrage.17
The rulings in the women’s suffrage cases did not take place in a legal or political vacuum: lurking in the background was the apprehension that the franchise was already too broad. This apprehension fostered resistance to claims that voting was a national right and colored legal arguments assigning the federal government only a narrow role in shaping the franchise. In rebuffing the claims of women in Washington, D.C., for example, a federal judge in 1871 observed that the breadth of the franchise in the cities was producing “political profligacy and violence verging upon anarchy.” Categorically rejecting the proposition that there existed a natural or constitutional right to the franchise, the judge noted that “the fact that the practical working of the assumed right would be destructive of civilization is decisive that the right does not exist.” In taking this approach, the judges in Minor v. Happersett and similar cases were self-consciously laying the legal groundwork for decisions that would limit the ability of the federal government to prevent racial discrimination in the South as well as discrimination against workers and immigrants in the North.18
Suffragists took another legal tack as well: they promoted tax rebellions among female property owners in the late 1860s and early 1870s. In scattered locales throughout the country, women refused to pay their taxes as long as they were prevented from voting, insisting that it was unconstitutional to impose the obligations of citizenship on them while they were deprived of political rights. “No taxation without representation” remained a resonant slogan, which activists buttressed with research demonstrating that women in fact paid a sizable portion of the taxes in many municipalities. The depth of feeling about this incongruence between the tax and voter rolls was made clear in the small town of Glastonbury, Connecticut, where two elderly sisters, Abby Hadassah Smith and Julia Evelina Smith, announced in 1869 that they would refuse to pay taxes on their farm until the town permitted them to vote. As historian Linda Kerber has recounted, the Smith sisters—educated, single women with abolitionist backgrounds and some involvement in the suffrage movement—dug in their heels for years, forcing the tax assessor to go to their home and seize their cows to pay off their overdue taxes. Although a series of court battles that dragged on for a decade resulted in a technical victory for the women, they were never enfranchised, and the Connecticut courts—like their counterparts elsewhere—gave little credence to the claim that taxpaying and voting had to go hand in hand.19
Although it would take another half century for women to acquire the right to vote, the optimism that suffrage advocates felt in the 1860s was realistically grounded in their own ideological vision and political experience. Supporters of women’s suffrage sincerely and deeply believed not only in the rightness of their cause but in the power of their simple egalitarian arguments: women were capable adult citizens and as such ought to be able to choose the lawmakers and laws that governed them. These suffragists, moreover, lived in an era when a righteous cause—the abolition of slavery—had triumphed over ferocious, entrenched opposition. They had witnessed not only the end of slavery but also an extraordinary transformation of popular views and laws regarding black suffrage: within a decade, an idea supported only by those on the fringes of politics had acquired the backing of the Republican Party and then been embedded in the Constitution. Suffragists thus had good reason to believe that profound ideological and political changes could not only happen, but happen quickly, particularly in the overheated climate of sectional conflict and war; if one accepted the premise that voting was a right, natural or otherwise, it was not a long leap from black to women’s suffrage.20
What Stanton and Anthony and their allies could not have foreseen, however, was that the mid-nineteenth-century wave of prodemocratic sentiment already had crested. It would not continue to swell, sweeping away all obstacles to an expanded suffrage. An antidemocratic undertow had already begun during the Know-Nothing agitation, and by the late 1860s it was growing stronger. Black suffrage triumphed—albeit temporarily—not because the polity had become convinced of the virtues of equal rights or universal suffrage but due to the unique political exigencies of Reconstruction and the political goals of the Republican Party. Since these singular conditions did not create comparable pressures to enfranchise women, the drive for suffrage fell short, leaving the issue stranded on shore just as the tides of democracy began to recede.
Regrouping
We do not concur with those who predict that the question of Suffrage for women will speedily demand public action or engross public attention . . .
—New York Times, 8 MARCH 1869
The question of woman suffrage is, in my opinion, one of the most important of the political problems of this century.
—MR. EWING, OHIO CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1874
Our political system is based upon the doctrine that the right of self-government is inherent in the people. . . . Women are a portion of the people, and possess all the inherent rights whi
ch belong to humanity. They, therefore, have the right to participate in the government.
—MR. SEARS, OHIO CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1874
I deny, Mr. Chairman, that there is one scintilla of truth in the assertion that woman is oppressed. Men shield and protect and defend her as a being better than themselves. . . . The male, at least in all species which form unions of any degree of permanence . . . defends and protects the female and her young ones. Thus, if a herd of elephants is menaced, the most powerful tuskers take their station on the side where danger appears. . . . If bisons are attacked by wolves, the bulls form a circle. . . . A gorilla will encounter any danger in defense of his mate.
—MR. CAPLES, CALIFORNIA CONSTITUTIONAL CONVENTION, 1879
The defeats of the late 1860s left the movement for women’s suffrage divided but unbowed. Ironically, perhaps, the political debates of Reconstruction had served to magnify the importance of the right to vote: while pressing the cause of black suffrage, Republican Charles Sumner, for example, had declared that the ballot was “the great guarantee and the only sufficient guarantee” of human rights. Advocates of women’s rights increasingly agreed with Sumner, and they remained determined that women soon would acquire this “Columbiad of our political life.” For the next two decades, against the backdrop of a changing political climate and an increasingly industrial society, these advocates pursued their goal through diverse means in Washington and in the states.21
The Right to Vote Page 27