In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (28 page)

Unable to win suffrage for women at the federal level or in the federal city, Stanton and Anthony spent 1867 trying to assure it at the state level, in New York and in Kansas. The revision of the New York state constitution provided the women with an opportunity to present their case on home ground. Already well known in Albany, Stanton and Anthony used all the tactics that they had perfected in the past. In January, Stanton addressed the Judiciary Committee. She argued that the committee had the power to allow women to vote for and serve as delegates to the constitutional convention. Members objected that few women besides Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony seemed to desire the vote. Stanton countered by asking if they had asked urchins if they wanted common schools, drunkards
if they wanted temperance, or slaveholders if they wanted emancipation?
²¹

Failing to persuade the committee, Stanton asked for and was granted a public hearing at the convention in June. Meanwhile Stanton and Anthony organized a statewide petition drive, collecting the signatures of women who did want to vote. One signer was Margaret Cady of Johnstown, Stanton’s mother. They also circulated ten thousand copies of John Stuart Mill’s speech to Parliament advocating woman suffrage and tried to raise fifteen hundred dollars for expenses.
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In June 1867 Stanton appeared before the suffrage subcommittee of the constitutional convention, which was chaired by Horace Greeley. Greeley interrupted her testimony by asking why women should have the ballot if they could not defend it with a bullet? Stanton retorted, too flippantly, “We are ready to fight, Sir, just as you did in the late war, by sending our substitutes.” Insulted once, Greeley was even more offended when Stanton presented the petitions. She read out the full name of the first signer of each petition until she came to Mary Cheney Greeley, whom Stanton identified instead as “Mrs. Horace Greeley.”
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Afterwards Stanton believed that Greeley had been so annoyed by her trick that he saw to it that her amendment was defeated. The committee report recommended only universal manhood suffrage. “We are satisfied that public sentiment does not demand and would not sustain an innovation so revolutionary and sweeping, so openly at war with a distribution of duties and functions between the sexes, . . . and involving transformations so radical in social and domestic life,” concluded his report.
²⁴

Stanton also believed that Greeley ordered his staff at the
Tribune
to cover her activities as briefly as possible and to refer to her only as “Mrs. Henry B. Stanton.” Although there is no recorded connection, it was at this time that Henry moved from the
Tribune
to the editorial pages of the
New York Sun
. In losing “the friendship of Horace Greeley and the support of the
New York Tribune
,” Stanton concluded, militant women had lost “our most powerful and faithful allies,” as well as suffrage in New York State.
²⁵
But she never apologized or attempted to make amends with her first editor and old friend.

The split between reformers evident in New York was intensified in Kansas. There the legislature had put two propositions on the ballot: one offered to remove the word “male” from the state’s voting requirements, thus enfranchising women; the other would add the word “Negro,” thus allowing black suffrage. In November 1867 Kansans could express an opinion on both female and Negro suffrage. The case for black suffrage was made by most abolitionists, some Republicans, and three Eastern
newspapers with wide Kansas circulations—Greeley’s
Tribune
, Tilton’s
Independent
, and Phillips’s
Anti-Slavery Standard
, financed by the Hovey Fund. None of these supported woman suffrage.
²⁶

To make the case for women, state senator Samuel Wood and former governor Charles Robinson invited well-known women’s rights advocates, including Stanton, Anthony, and Stone, to come to Kansas. Unable to accept Wood’s appeal because of the New York constitutional convention, Anthony urged Lucy Stone and her husband, Henry Blackwell, to go ahead without her or Mrs. Stanton. Stone accepted the assignment. Together Anthony and Stone overrode Wendell Phillips’s objections and used fifteen hundred dollars from the Jackson Fund to cover the expenses of Stone and Blackwell, who canvassed the state during the spring of 1867. Their letters, full of optimism about the outcome in Kansas, were read at the May meeting of the American Equal Rights Association in New York. They urged Stanton and Anthony to hurry west. The two women finally arrived in September and stayed until the election. According to colleagues and critics alike, they determined the outcome in Kansas.

Kansas was Stanton’s first extended outing and her first trip west. Anthony set up headquarters in Leavenworth, near her brother’s home. To cover more territory, she and Stanton toured the state separately. Mrs. Stanton, usually escorted by Robinson, spoke two or three times a day and at least once on Sundays. The speakers frequently faced harassment on the hustings. Reactions of the men in the audiences ranged from hostile to humorous, but the women seemed more sympathetic. No longer subsidized by the Jackson Fund, Stanton and Anthony had the added embarrassment of passing the hat to pay their expenses.

Pioneer conditions prevailed. Stanton traveled by buckboard “to the very verge of civilization, wherever two dozen voters could be assembled, . . . We spoke in log cabins, in depots, unfinished school houses, churches, hotels, barns, and in the open air.” As she exclaimed to her cousin, “Oh, Julius, the dirt, the food!!”
²⁷
Mrs. Stanton longed for hot baths, clean beds, butter on her biscuits, and cream in her coffee. But she accepted the discomforts with her usual good humor and was widely accepted. Her respectable appearance, her maternal manner, her quick wit, her genuine pleasure in the prairie, and her appreciation for its pioneers endeared her to the public.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton survived Kansas and felt invigorated. “It gave me added self respect,” she wrote to her sisters, “to know that I could endure such hardships and fatigue with a great deal of cheerfulness.” She came to the conclusion that she was “well born” and “put together with unusual wisdom” by her parents.
²⁸
Initially worried about the outcome, Stanton had survived physical hardship and political adversity. The experience enhanced
her self-confidence. She felt capable of taking on any other challenge because she had learned that she could endure harassment and hardship.

Had Stanton and Anthony been more realistic about the political climate of the country in 1867, they might have been able to predict the outcome of the Kansas referendum. Kansas was a Republican state whose Republican machine opposed woman suffrage. The women lost, tallying less than one-third of the votes cast. Despite support from Republican politicians and the press, black suffrage was also defeated. Before woman suffrage was enacted as a constitutional amendment in 1920, there would be fifty-six such state referenda; Kansas was only the first.
²⁹

Eastern reformers blamed the double defeat in Kansas on George Francis Train,
*
an eccentric Democrat who seemed to have captivated Stanton and Anthony. Their association with Train, a “copperhead” dandy and speculator, triggered the final split between the two women and their former colleagues. Tall, handsome, wealthy, and eloquent, Train was a flamboyant young man with presidential ambitions. He was in Kansas to test his dramatic appeal and his even more unusual platform. As sincere as a showman could be, Train espoused women’s rights, an eight-hour work day, paper currency, and free trade, but he vehemently opposed black suffrage.

The women were dazzled by Train’s charm and audacity. On the hustings the three of them were a spectacle: Train in a colored waistcoat, patent leather boots, and lavender gloves, spewing epigrams; Stanton, round and pleasant in dusty black silk and lace, alternating between wit and logic; Anthony, tall and austere, in a severe habit, scolding the audience for its shortsightedness. They did not appear together often in Kansas, but when they did their effect was such that legends arose.

The strange misalliance was based on a shared commitment to women’s rights and “educated suffrage,” positions on which Stanton agreed with Train. She also wanted to exclude blacks and immigrants from citizenship unless women were enfranchised at the same time. She did not like being put in an inferior legal position when she considered herself a superior person. In fact, she began to think of herself as extraordinary. She modified her basic republican ideology of the natural rights of all citizens. She continued to believe that equal educational opportunity for women, blacks, immigrants, and others would create an equal citizenry, but in the meantime she elevated superior womanhood and derided “Sambo.”

Already embarrassed by Stanton’s educated suffrage rhetoric, the reform community was outraged by her condemnation of the Republican party. Her critics claimed that by associating with a Democrat like Train she had alienated the Republicans and lost Kansas. Stanton and Anthony refused to believe that their connection with Train had undercut the effort and in the end lost the campaign. They blamed the defeat on the Republican party for failing to support universal suffrage. Robinson believed that the cause was “indebted to Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” but he dismissed “the noise and bluster of a
bombastes furiousi
[Train] or the driving and scolding of anyone [Anthony].”
³⁰
Although woman suffrage would soon be popular in the West it was premature and unsophisticated to expect to win in Kansas.

What made Train even more appealing to Stanton and Anthony than his politics was his money. In the midst of the Kansas campaign he had promised them a newspaper of their own. He arranged for them to publicize it with a sixteen-city lecture tour on their return east and paid all the bills for their trip. Stanton was so caught up with Train that when their tour brought her close to Libby Miller’s upstate New York home, she had to apologize for not stopping. She could not alter her itinerary because she was “fastened to the tail of a comet.”
³¹
Other reformers thought she had tied herself to the devil, disguised as George Train.

Lucy Stone was convinced that Stanton had sold her soul. Reading newspaper reports of the unlikely alliance, Stone vehemently denied any connection between Train and the American Equal Rights Association, which had sponsored, but not subsidized, Stanton and Anthony in Kansas. “Mr. Train is a lunatic, wild and ranting,” she wrote afterwards. “[His] presence as an advocate of woman suffrage was enough to condemn it in the minds of all persons not already convinced.” She condemned Anthony for making a “spectacle” of herself. “It seems to me that she is hardly less crazy than he is.” William Lloyd Garrison chastised them directly, writing Anthony:

In all friendliness, and with the highest regard for the woman’s rights movement, I cannot refrain from expressing my regret and astonishment that you and Mrs. Stanton should have taken such leave of good sense as to be traveling companions and associate lecturers with that crack-brained harlequin and semi-lunatic, George Francis Train. . . . You will only subject yourselves to merited ridicule and condemnation, and turn the movement which you aim to promote into unnecessary contempt. . . . The colored people and their advocates have not a more abusive assailant than . . . Train. He is as destitute of principle as he is of sense, and is fast gravitating toward a lunatic asylum. He may be of use in drawing an audience, but so would a kangaroo, a gorilla or a hippopotamus.
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Such criticism made Stanton and Anthony more stubborn and less discriminating about Train’s flaws. “Mr. Train is a pure, high toned man,
without a vice,” Stanton wrote to Martha Wright in defense. “He has some extravagances and idiosyncracies, but he is willing to devote energy and money to our cause when no other man is.” Soon she would say, regarding Train, “It would be right and wise to accept aid from the devil himself, provided he did not tempt us to lower our standard.”
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Train met Stanton’s single standard for loyalty and friendship: he supported woman suffrage. She would not abandon him.

Unlike Republicans or abolitionists, Stanton shared many of Train’s opinions. His attention was flattering and his bad boy charm may have reminded her of Neil. But it was his promise of a newspaper that Stanton found most seductive. Having antagonized the editor of the
Anti-Slavery Standard
(Wendell Phillips) and alienated the editor of the
Tribune
(Horace Greeley), Stanton was no longer assured coverage of her activities or publication of her speeches. Since the end of the war she had been trying to find the means to establish her own journal. She had even solicited funds for the project but to no avail. Now, with Train’s help, she had her forum.

When Elizabeth Cady Stanton returned from her whirlwind tour, she plunged into publication of the
Revolution
. The paper had been christened by Train in the heat and dust of the Kansas campaign. Its motto was “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.” The name suited Stanton’s vision of her own newspaper.

The establishing of woman on her rightful throne is the greatest revolution the world has ever known or will know. To bring it about is no child’s play. You and I have not forgotten the conflict of the last 20 years—the unmixed bitterness of our cup. . . . A journal called the
Rosebud
might answer for those who come with kid gloves and perfumes to lay immortal wreaths on the monuments which in sweat and tears others have hewn and built; but for us . . . there is no name like the
Revolution
.
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The division of labor in the
Revolution
offices suited the principals. Anthony managed the office, paid the bills, and hired the printers out of funds supplied by Train. Stanton became the senior editor and primary author of every inch of column. They were joined by Parker Pillsbury as coeditor.
*
Having served as an editor of the
Anti-Slavery Standard
, he was the only participant with any previous editorial experience. They established their first office at the headquarters of the American Equal Rights Association in New York City; the AERA quickly withdrew. After a year the
Revolution
staff moved to rent-free space in the Woman’s Bureau, a large townhouse owned by Elizabeth B. Phelps at 49 East 23d Street. Mrs. Phelps’s
ambition was to create a gathering place for like-minded women. Unfortunately, to protest the occupancy of the
Revolution
, no other women’s group would hold meetings there.
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