USA > New York > History of the state of New York, political and governmental, Vol. II 1822-1864 > Part 23
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The Seneca Falls church was thus the cradle of the Woman's Rights movement. The cry of the new- fledged infant did not penetrate very far, and in most quarters where it was heard it evoked only sarcasm and banter. When Judge Cady heard of his daughter's part in the event, he reproached her by writing: "I wish you had waited until I was under the sod before you had done this foolish thing." Whereon she re-
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torted by citing from the lawbooks he had loaned her proofs of the injustice of American laws toward women ..
While Miss Anthony was not present at the Seneca Falls convention, her family were well represented there by her father and mother and by her sister Mary, a faithful colaborer in her life-work. Her serious con- nection with the movement did not begin until 1852. It was in that year that she first met Mrs. Stanton, and another of her fellow-reformers at the time was Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, who gave her name to the "bloomer" costume. Miss Anthony's activities had been along the lines of anti-slavery and prohibition. Her real debut as a Woman's Rights champion was at a national con- vention which the suffragists held in Syracuse in September, 1852. At the very beginning of this mem- orable session an incident occurred, as related by Ida Husted Harper in her biography of Miss Anthony, that was strikingly illustrative of her frankness and boldness. Among the candidates for the presidency of the convention was Eliza Oakes Smith, a fashionable literary woman of Boston, who had a strong backing for the honor. Mrs. Smith came to the convention appareled in a short-sleeved, low-necked white dress, rather gaudily ornamented. Miss Anthony was a member of the nominating committee, and when the name of Mrs. Smith was formally presented for the presidency the Rochester Quakeress promptly took the floor and declared that nobody who dressed as Mrs. Smith did could represent the earnest, solid, hard- working women of the country, for whom they were
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making the demand for equal rights. James Mott mildly replied that all women could not be expected to dress as plainly as the Friends. But Susan was obdurate, and she carried the committee with her in a revolt that ended with the selection of Lucretia Mott to preside. Other famous suffragists at the convention were Lucy Stone; the Rev. Antoinette Brown, the first woman ever ordained to preach; and Ernestine L. Rose, a beautiful Jewess and refugee from Poland; while in the male contingent Gerrit Smith was con- spicuous.
The Syracuse convention was simply an incident in a propaganda that was resolute enough, but as yet quite the reverse of formidable in the range of its influence. Like its Seneca Falls forerunner, it invited more satire and humor than words of approval. Two years later a State Suffrage convention assembled at Albany, at which Miss Anthony was the center of interest. By this time the State organization was bringing strong pressure to bear to induce the Legislature at Albany to broaden the personal and property rights of women by statute, and to submit a constitutional amendment giv- ing them the ballot. In the early months of 1855 Miss Anthony "stumped" the State in her devoted effort to kindle a public sentiment powerful enough to influence the Legislature. Her biographer, Mrs. Harper, de- scribes that campaign as a prodigy of physical endur- ance as well as of fervid and continuous appeal. From Christmas, 1854, to the following May 1 she canvassed fifty-four New York counties, addressing local con- ventions and conferences almost daily, facing in her
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circuit the rigors of winter together with prejudices and rebuffs that were even more chilling. But she continued her mission dauntlessly, and she gathered a harvest of 10,000 names to a petition praying for favorable legislative action. All her exertions were in vain; for the Legislature remained strongly and inflexibly hostile.
By this time all other political questions and minor reforms were passing into temporary eclipse as public interest in the anti-slavery issue intensified. After the outbreak of the Civil War the zeal of Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton, and their Suffrage sisters was largely diverted to the greater struggle, though Woman's Rights conventions, State and national, were still held intermittently. In the last two years of the civil con- flict the energies of the famous group of Suffrage leaders were enlisted in the Woman's National League, founded in February, 1863, largely through the efforts of the two women agitators, to urge upon Congress and the States the necessity of giving immediate and lasting force to Lincoln's Emancipation proclamation.
After the war was over the Woman's Rights crusade was quickened into new life by the steadily increasing public demand for the political and civil security of the southern freedmen. The Suffrage leaders, and particularly Miss Anthony, were convinced that Con- gress, in drafting and submitting the Fourteenth amendment, admitting colored men to citizenship, could not possibly resist an appeal for the inclusion of white women in the same proposed act of Federal grace. Such was their confident calculation; but they
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soon learned with amazement and disgust that the proposed Fourteenth amendment, far from conforming to their wishes, would actually place a fresh obstacle in their path by introducing the word "male" into the Constitution for the first time in connection with the requirements for citizenship. In other words, the very amendment that was intended to confer upon the eman- cipated slave the privilege of a citizen raised a fresh political discrimination against their sex. Their griev- ance was now more bitter than ever; for both branches of Congress deliberately voted down motions to strike the word "male" from the text of the amendment. In 1869, three years after the Fourteenth amendment was submitted, the agitation for the Fifteenth amendment gave the Suffragists a chance to retrieve their fortunes. They failed again; but very soon after the last of the war amendments was proposed by Congress, the inde- fatigable advocates of Suffrage, again led by Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony, produced another formid- able weapon of attack by organizing the National Woman Suffrage Association, with Mrs. Stanton as president.
The last and successful stage of the nearly eighty- year-old struggle for equal political rights for women in the national sphere was only incidentally related to the political history of New York State; and it there- fore need not be reviewed in this volume. But to complete the story of New York's share in the earlier campaigns for the cause, it is desirable to recall an event in that relation in which Miss Anthony con- spicuously figured.
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It was her defiant participation in a Presidential election by casting a full set of ballots in her home city of Rochester. On November 1, 1872, she went to the polling-place in her ward and registered as a voter, and four days later she succeeded in voting without interference. The registration officers mildly raised a question as to her right to qualify; but she promptly read to them the first section of the Fourteenth amend- ment, which ordains that "all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside"; and, further, "that no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." That settled the question, so far as the election officers were concerned; and Miss Anthony's three sisters, and ten other women of her ward, followed her example by registering and voting. But the Federal courts were not so chivalric as her neighbors, the custodians of the registry book and ballot-box. She was taken before a United States Com- missioner, and admitted to bail. In June, 1873, she was tried in Canandaigua, with Ward Hunt, Sr., Associate-Justice of the Supreme Court, on the bench. Henry R. Sheldon, a famous Rochester attorney, whose advice she had taken before voting, was her counsel. As there was no question about the facts, Justice Hunt, after listening to the legal arguments on both sides, directed the jury to bring in a verdict of guilty; and the following day he fined the spinster defendant $100 plus the cost of the prosecution. Justice Hunt's right
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to instruct and discharge the jury and his general pro- cedure in the case were afterward challenged before the Supreme Court, but his interpretation of the law was upheld by his associates.
The case aroused national interest and enhanced Miss Anthony's celebrity. She was thereafter, and up to the time of her death, recognized as the head-center of the whole crusade. She continued her labors with but little relaxation, addressing audiences on her favorite theme in practically every large city of the United States, east and west. At Washington in 1886 she led the attack for the passage of the Blair resolu- tion for the submission of the constitutional amend- ment which afterward bore her name. Its defeat left her still hopeful and resolute.
The first American commonwealth to establish equal rights for women was Wyoming, which as a Territory gave them the franchise in 1869, and upon its admis- sion to the Union in 1890 had the distinction of being the original Woman Suffragist State.
CHAPTER XXII THE FREE SOIL REVOLT
J OHN YOUNG was a man of an entirely different type from Silas Wright, William H. Seward, William L. Marcy, DeWitt Clinton, and others who had preceded him. Dr. Jabez D. Hammond, who knew him well and who wrote of him while he was Governor, declared that he had talents of a high order, industry, patient perseverance, and a profound knowl- edge of men, and was one of the ablest party leaders and most skillful managers of a popular body that ever entered the New York Assembly chamber. To this entirely just estimate we may add that Governor Young had the gifts of unfailing courtesy, of imperturbable coolness and calmness, and of convincing directness and clarity of speech. It is obvious, however, that a man might possess all these qualities and characteristics and yet fail to be either a great constructive statesman or a political leader capable of maintaining and advancing a personal position and influence once secured and of bending others to his interest.
His first message, sent on January 5, 1847, to the Sev- entieth Legislature (the last Legislature under the Con- stitution of 1821), was indicative of the man. It was scarcely one-third as long as any of Governor Wright's messages, or indeed as numerous others that had gone
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before, and contained no rhetorical passages, no essays upon the philosophy of government, no comments upon the national and international policies of the Federal government such as had filled many pages of former messages ; but was devoted to a concise consideration of the changes in State government that were imposed by the new Constitution and the measures necessary to ef- fect them. Of the Constitution itself the Governor did not altogether approve. It contained, he frankly said, some things to which he could not have assented if they had been presented separately to the people for ratifica- tion. But it had been submitted as a whole, to be accepted or rejected in its entirety, and its good features so far outweighed its bad that acceptance of it was right. "Most of its great leading features," he said, "breathe the spirit of the age and command not only the assent but the admiration of a vast majority of the electors of the State." He especially dwelt upon the felicitous transfer of the office-filling power from a few officials to the people themselves. Formerly, he said, elections were embittered and not unfrequently perverted by the consideration that upon the election of one officer de- pended the political advancement of thousands. This evil had been almost entirely eliminated by the new Constitution. The apprehension which many had felt and expressed concerning the election of Judges by popular vote he did not share, believing that the experi- ence of a few years would dispel it. He added these golden words :
"Any appointing power other than the people may be either cor- rupted or subjected, unconsciously, to interested and pernicious influ-
SUSAN B. ANTHONY
Susan B. Anthony, reformer; born, North Adams, Mass., February 15, 1820; Quaker; school teacher in New York state, 1835-50; first spoke at a temperance conference in Rochester, 1848; called a temperance convention at Albany, 1851 after having been refused the right to speak on account of her sex: organized the women's New York state temperance society in 1852; through her influence women were admitted to educa- tional and other conventions with the right to vote and hold places on committees; from 1857 was prominent in the anti- slavery agitation; in 1854-1855 organized meetings for equal suffrage for women in every county in New York state; in 1861 worked with and through the women's loyal legion to have the word "male" struck out of the 14th amendment; between 1870 and 1880 spoke more than 100 times a year in nearly every state in the Union urging equal suffrage; died in New York city, March 13, 1906.
ELIZABETH CADY STANTON
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, reformer; born, Johnstown. N. Y., November 12, 1815; married Henry Brewster Stanton, anti- slavery orator and politician; advocated national women's party in 1840; called the first woman's rights convention at Seneca Falls, N. Y., July, 1848; for 25 years addressed congress annually on the need for passing a suffrage amendment to the constitution of the United States; president national woman suffrage association, 1865-1893; died at New York City, October 26, 1902.
ANNA HOWARD SHAW
Anna Howard Shaw, clergyman and reformer; born at Newcastle-on-Tyne, England, February 14, 1847; came to America when 4 years old; graduated in theology and medicine from Boston university, 1885; licensed to preach in the methodist protestant church; was pastor of three different churches in Boston; prominent in the national woman suffrage association and was its president from 1886 to 1904; traveled through the country with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton working and speaking for suffrage; died Moylan, Pa., July 2, 1919.
MRS. CARRIE CHAPMAN CATT
Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt; born, Ripon, Wis .; studied law as a girl and taught school for several years, attaining the position of superintendent of schools; was state director and organizer of the Iowa woman suffrage association; has been president of the national woman suffrage association since 1916; has delivered lectures on suffrage in every state in the Union and every country in Europe.
HARRIET MAY MILLS
Harriet May Mills, lecturer and reformer; born at Syracuse, N. Y., August 9, 1857 ; her father, Dr. Charles De Verard Mills and her mother were deeply interested in the cause of abolition and of suffrage and their home was one of the stations of Gerrit Smith's "underground railroad"; graduated from Cornell uni- versity, 1879; organized the first Browning club in New York state and was widely known as a lecturer on Browning; began lecturing on suffrage in 1892 and accompanied Susan B. Anthony on her campaign in 1894; was the nominee of the democratic party for secretary of state and a delegate at large to the demo- cratic national convention at San Francisco in 1920.
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ences. Not so with the people. If they err to-day they will correct the error to-morrow."
Various suggestions and recommendations were made by the Governor for enactments concerning the new judiciary system, most of which were favorably acted on by the Legislature. The Court of Appeals was vested with power to review decisions of the Supreme Court and Court of Chancery which might be made in the six months interim between the going out of the old Court for the Correction of Errors and the establish- ment of the new courts ; the State was divided into eight Judicial districts, and a general Judiciary act was passed. A commission of three was appointed to "re- vise, reform, simplify, and abridge the rules and prac- tice, pleadings, forms, and proceedings" of the courts of record, and to report thereon to the Legislature for its approval. Arphaxad Loomis, Nicholas Hill, Jr., and David Graham were appointed, and on Mr. Hill's res- ignation soon afterward David Dudley Field was appointed in his place.
The Governor suggested that, since the Court of Chancery had been merged with the Supreme Court, the Justices in each district should be empowered to designate one of their number to hold special terms in equity, leaving to the other three the administration of cases under the common law. This suggestion the Leg- islature did not accept, but in the general Judiciary act it provided that the same Judge at the same term might exercise both legal and equitable jurisdiction. The curious recommendation made by the Governor, that a tax of one dollar be levied on each suit brought in the
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Supreme Court, to be applied to the salaries of the Jus- tices, was not approved by the Legislature, which fixed the salaries of the Justices at $2,500.
The new Constitution provided for further work on the canals, and the Governor urged prompt legislation to that end as a matter the propriety of which could no longer be disputed. Accordingly provision was made for the resumption of work on the Genesee Valley canal, the Black River canal, the Erie canal feeder, and the enlargement of the Erie canal itself. The Governor expressed deep regret that the new Constitution seri- ously hampered the prosecution of public works by im- posing novel restraints upon the Legislature and even denying the right of the people themselves to vote a single dollar unless by the same act a tax was imposed to pay principal and interest of the debt thus incurred. This, he thought, indicated "distrust of representative government," and he demanded to know what there was in the history of the State to warrant "this want of re- liance on the wisdom and stability of the people." Be- yond doubt, that passage in the Constitution was an in- congruous anomaly in a document generally devoted to the enlargement and vindication of popular rights and powers.
The Legislature provided for the organization of the First division of militia, and enacted a new general Militia law; provided for the organization of plank- road and turnpike companies, and for the incorporation of villages ; and ceded to the United States jurisdiction over land at Sackett's Harbor recently purchased by it for military purposes and authorized it to acquire any
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islands in the St. Lawrence River which it might need for beacon lights or other necessary purposes.
The Governor transmitted to the Legislature reso- lutions which had been adopted by the General Assem- bly of Virginia protesting against the famous Wilmot Proviso. That measure had been passed by the national House of Representatives in August, 1846, but was not acted upon by the Senate. It was again introduced into the House in February, 1847, and again passed by that body, only to meet with the same fate as before at the hands of the Senate. Now the New York Legis- lature, several weeks in advance of this second passage of the Proviso by the House, adopted resolutions most clearly and emphatically affirming the principle of that historic measure. Those resolutions, while urging that every citizen should loyally support the government in the Mexican War, declared that when the war was ended any act by which as a result of it territory should be acquired or annexed to the United States "should contain an unalterable fundamental article or provision whereby slavery or involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, should be forever excluded from the territory acquired or annexed." The resolutions were adopted in January, and in March following the national House of Representatives repassed the Wilmot Proviso couched in almost precisely the same words. Naturally, the Virginia resolutions protesting against the Proviso were not sympathetically received at Al- bany. But the concurrent resolutions of the Legislature of January, 1847, were repeated and reaffirmed by the next Legislature, just a year later.
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[1847
This Seventieth Legislature retained unchanged the former organization of the Senate, of which body Ira Harris became a member from the Third district. In the Assembly William C. Hasbrouck, of Orange county, was elected Speaker, and Philander B. Prindle was chosen Clerk. Samuel J. Tilden disappeared from the New York delegation, and Daniel E. Sickles came in his place. Henry W. Sage was a member from Tompkins county. The session adjourned on May 13 to reassemble September 8. On the latter date the Gov- ernor transmitted a brief message announcing the death of Silas Wright, which had occurred August 27 pre- ceding, and paying a fitting tribute to his memory. The session adjourned without day on December 15.
Political interest in 1847 was chiefly, however, con- cerned with events outside the Legislature, which cul- minated in an open breach between the two factions of the Democratic party. This had long been expected, but in connections having to do with State policies; it finally came over a national issue which for the time caused all State issues to drop out of sight. The Demo- cratic State convention met at Syracuse on September 7. The Hunkers had been the more active, or at any rate the more efficient, in the preliminary campaign, and had secured a strong majority of the delegates. But the Barnburners, under the lead of James S. Wads- worth, came to the convention with their hearts filled with grief over the death of Silas Wright and with in- exorable enmity toward those who, they felt, had be- trayed him to his defeat and untimely end.
As soon as the convention was organized a resolution
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was introduced embodying the principles of the Wil- mot Proviso and of the concurrent resolutions of the New York Legislature. This was supported by the Barnburners and opposed by the Hunkers. One of the former, arguing for the resolution, pleaded for its adop- tion as a tribute of justice to Silas Wright. "It is too late for that," replied a Hunker, sneeringly; "he is dead." At that, James S. Wadsworth sprang upon a table and defiantly thundered at the Hunker majority : "It may be too late to do justice to Silas Wright, but it is not too late to do justice to his assassins!" With those words he strode out of the hall, followed by every Barn- burner delegate. The Hunkers, remaining, laid on the table the Wilmot Proviso resolution, nominated candi- dates for State offices under the new Constitution, and adjourned.
The seceding Barnburners issued an address denounc- ing the Hunkers for defeating the anti-slavery resolu- tion through a fraudulent organization, and calling for a convention on October 26 to determine their future course. That convention, really a mass-meeting, was attended not only by the seceding delegates but by a host of anti-slavery Democrats from all over the State. These were chiefly the friends and followers of Martin Van Buren, and were supremely led by his gifted son, "Prince" John Van Buren. For the ex-President, hav- ing formerly played into the hands of the pro-slavery Democrats of the south, had now reversed his attitude and become a resolute Free Soiler. He had opposed the annexation of Texas and the Mexican War, and was now bitterly opposed to letting the southern leaders
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profit from those transactions by the extension of slave territory and especially by the introduction of slavery into what had thitherto been free country.
John Van Buren had acquired the nickname of "Prince" because, when he accompanied his father on the latter's brief mission to England, he had the honor of dancing with Princess (later Queen) Victoria. Like his father, he was a man of almost irresistible personal charm and high intellectual and social culture. He was a captivating orator, and as a lawyer ranked among the foremost at the bar of New York. In 1845 he became the last appointed Attorney-General of the State, and showed himself a not unworthy successor of the most distinguished men who had filled that office. It was almost a question whether he should be spoken of as the son of Martin Van Buren or the latter, for distinction, should be spoken of as the father of "Prince John."
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