In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (29 page)

For the staff of the
Revolution
, however, it was a hospitable office. The floor was carpeted, the white walls were hung with photographs of Lucretia Mott and Mary Wollstonecraft, and the bookcase brimmed with tracts and books about women’s rights. The large first-floor room was divided by screens into offices. Pillsbury had his own room, and Stanton and Anthony shared the “inner sanctum.” There, according to one critic, they laid out a newspaper “charged to the muzzle with literary nitro-glycerine.”
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The first issue of the
Revolution
was published January 8, 1868. The six-page newspaper resembled a little magazine. Larger type and wider margins made it readable and attractive and filled the space usually sold to advertisers. The first four pages contained editorials and articles written by Stanton. She reported on the status of women tailors, divorce reform, suffrage in Colorado, European feminists, anything to do with women. Pillsbury covered political affairs, such as Johnson’s impeachment trial and the 1868 party conventions. Eventually others contributed, among them popular writers like Alice and Phoebe Cary, Mary Clemmer (Ames), Lillie Devereux Blake, and some “European correspondents.”

Page 5 was devoted to the views of George Francis Train favoring greenbacks, open immigration, organized labor, the abolition of standing armies, and penny ocean postage. Page 6 was a column of Wall Street rumors written by Train’s crony, David Meliss. Critics agreed that the last two pages were even more offensive than the editorial section. The paper was not unbiased. Its thrust was the elevation of women and the defeat of the Fifteenth Amendment. This position generated more opposition than Train’s economics and Stanton’s editorials combined.

Ten thousand copies of the first issue were distributed under the congressional frank of New York Democrat James Brooks, against whom Stanton had run in 1866. One reviewer considered the
Revolution
” plucky, keen, and wide awake although . . . not altogether to our taste.” Another found it “sharp and spicey.” But its editorials were condemned as demagogic, sarcastic, and irresponsible.
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Subscriptions peaked at three thousand, including one for the White House, but there were few renewals.

Circulation in the reform community was low. Stanton’s decision to remain in league with a man Garrison branded as a “ranting egotist and . . . blackguard” appalled the abolitionists. They sent one angry letter after another to the editor. With boldness that was becoming characteristic, Stanton reprinted many of these letters and then answered them point by point. To Thomas Wentworth Higginson she responded, “Time will show that Miss Anthony and myself are neither idiots or lunatics.” She reminded Gerrit Smith that “Tyranny on a southern plantation is far more easily seen by
white men in the North than the wrongs of women in their own households.” Privately she tried to make amends for these public attacks. “I admire you more than any living man,” she wrote to her cousin, “though you do persist in putting Sambo, Hans, Patrick and Yung Fung above your noblest countrymen.” Smith did not relent, and Stanton “never let him know I noticed his coldness.”
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She did not avoid confrontations. If she could not repair a broken relationship she tried to minimize the long-term damage and then ignored the problem.

The Train connection, unpopular editorial stands, and Stanton’s strict prohibitions against certain products cut advertising revenue as well as circulation figures. As senior editor, Stanton refused to run ads for patent medicines, the largest newspaper advertisers at that time. Typically skeptical of medicine and physicians, she was convinced that patent medicines were dangerous and that some were thinly disguised abortifacients. Stanton opposed abortion because it was dangerous for women. She found abortion and the related act of infanticide “disgusting and degrading crimes,” but she did not blame the women who committed them. Temporarily contradicting her own recognition of female sexuality Stanton believed that women were forced into these desperate measures by the uncontrolled sexual appetities of men.
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It was a subject she would expand upon in the 1870s.

With few subscriptions or advertisements, Stanton and Anthony became more dependent on Train for financial support. But soon after the first issue of the
Revolution
appeared, Train left for England. There his outspoken support of Irish rebels resulted in a one-year jail sentence. No longer able or willing to subsidize the paper, Train insisted that the women remove his name from the masthead, but they were reluctant to do so.
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For a while David Meliss underwrote the paper’s growing debt, but soon he too withdrew.

After two and a half years, the
Revolution
failed. In May 1870, for the consideration of one dollar, it was sold to Laura Curtis Bullard. Ironically, Mrs. Bullard’s large fortune had been made from the sale of a quack cure, Dr. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. For eighteen months the newspaper became a literary and society journal, until it was taken over by the
New York Christian Enquirer
. Paulina Wright Davis, and later Theodore Tilton, replaced Pillsbury as editor. Anthony was saddled with a closing debt of ten thousand dollars and despaired at the loss of her “firstborn.” Stanton, in contrast, refused to reflect on their failure or to share responsibility for the debt.
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The
Revolution
had only been in print five months when the American Equal Rights Association convened its annual meeting in May 1868. Outraged reformers seized this opportunity to attack Stanton and Anthony on
account of the Kansas defeat and their editorial demeanor. Henry Blackwell and Stephen Foster accused Anthony of using AERA funds to finance the Train lecture tour and the
Revolution
. Stunned by this smear, Anthony accounted for every penny spent in Kansas. Traveling without a subsidy, Stanton and Anthony had raised their own expenses and had spent them as they chose. Anthony’s financial statement satisfied the majority, but a residue of resentment and suspicion remained on both sides. The group then castigated both women for refusing to support the Fourteenth or Fifteenth amendments in their editorials.

The major battle of the convention was waged over the Fifteenth Amendment, granting suffrage to black males. Stanton and Anthony stubbornly refused to endorse voting rights for black men only. They insisted that the proposed wording be changed to include black and white women. Olympia Brown and Lucy Stone demanded an explanation of the male-only strategy but did not side with Stanton. Frederick Douglass, Stanton’s ally since Seneca Falls, now claimed that black male suffrage was more urgent than female suffrage because women were less vulnerable than blacks. “The government of this country loves women, but the Negro is loathed,” exclaimed Douglass. Black male suffrage was a matter of life and death; only the vote protected “unoffending” blacks from the Ku Klux Klan and the Regulators. Woman suffrage, Douglass concluded, “meets nothing but ridicule.”
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Stanton refused to accept these claims or to acknowledge that her position had no support. Blind to political reality, insensitive to the abolitionist position, Stanton and Anthony argued for the defeat of the Fifteenth Amendment altogether. Why should she support voting rights for black men, demanded Stanton, when she could not trust them to ensure hers? The vehemence and racial invective of Stanton’s arguments stunned the AERA audience. Although Stanton and Douglass were reelected vice-presidents and Anthony was returned to the executive committee of the AERA, Stanton recognized that she had very little influence within the Equal Rights Association.

In the summer of 1868 Stanton and Anthony decided upon a three-part suffrage strategy. They needed to identify supporters of women’s rights and suffrage, to draft a sixteenth amendment that would enfranchise women, and to organize women who shared their separate platform. Again Stanton moved from persuasion to political action and back again, keeping up constant pressure for suffrage. With limited resources, she used every means available to her.

To identify political allies, the women turned to the national party conventions meeting that summer. A written appeal from Stanton and Anthony to the Republican party was ignored. The same appeal to the Democrats
was met with an invitation to attend their convention. Stanton dispatched Anthony at once. The Democrats applauded Miss Anthony and seated her on the dais but jeered her proposal and relegated suffrage to a subcommittee. With a jibe at her spinster state, Greeley reported the incident. “Miss Susan B. Anthony has our sincere pity. She has been an ardent suitor of democracy, and they rejected her overtures . . . with screams of laughter.” The inaction of both national parties confirmed Stanton’s independent leanings. She had no lingering loyalties to the Republicans, the party of Henry’s enemies and hers. She called for a new party standing for “universal suffrage and anti-monopoly.”
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Stanton and Anthony did identify a core of congressional supporters. They worked with these men to introduce a woman suffrage amendment.

In October 1868 Stanton laid plans for a Washington meeting of the Woman Suffrage Association of America. She formed the new group to counter the American Equal Rights Association. Stanton had discussed her plans at a luncheon in New York City attended by Anthony, Stone, Mott, and Mott’s daughter. “Lizzie [Stanton] was like herself—full of spirits and so pleasant,” Mrs. Mott reported to her family, but the discussion was so intense that it made Mrs. Mott “ache all over.”
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With the exception of Stone, the group appointed itself a central committee of correspondence and issued a call for a January 1869 meeting. Increasingly annoyed at Stanton’s behavior, Stone returned to Boston. With Julia Ward Howe and Isabella Beecher Hooker, she formed the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association. Stone invited Mott to join but did not include Stanton or Anthony. Mrs. Mott refused their offer, finding it “too partisan.” Stanton accidentally received an invitation. “As I was invited to the convention by a mistake of yours,” she replied, “I might have made a mistake in going, but for your frankness in telling me that the committee did not desire my presence.”
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Stanton ignored the New England group and concentrated on the newborn Woman Suffrage Association of America. Women representing twenty state suffrage groups attended its first meeting in January 1869 in Washington, D.C.
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Republican Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, who had introduced woman suffrage in the Senate a month earlier, presided until the election of Lucretia Mott as president. Recently widowed, Mrs. Mott was as “calm, dignified, clear and forcible as ever,” at age seventy-six. Yet Mrs. Stanton was clearly the star of the convention. Novelist Grace Greenwood described her appeal in the
Philadelphia Press
.

Of all their speakers, she seemed to me to have the most weight. Her speeches are models of composition, clear, compact, elegant and logical. She makes her points with peculiar sharpness and certainty, and there is no denying or dodging her conclusions. . . . [She is] now impassioned,
now playful, now witty, now pathetic. . . . Mrs. Stanton has the best arts of the politician and the training of the jurist, added to the fiery, unresting spirit of the reformer. She has a rare talent for affairs, management, and mastership. Yet she is in an eminent degree womanly, having an almost regal pride of sex.
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At the first evening session Elizabeth Cady Stanton urged the “speedy adoption” of a sixteenth amendment to enfranchise women. Women must be made voters because a government based on the principle of “caste and class” could not stand, and a government without women was subject to the “male element of destructive force.” Stanton’s points indicated more feminist sensitivity than political sense.

When the meeting concluded, the women presented an appeal for woman suffrage in the District of Columbia to the congressional committee on District affairs. Two months later, in March 1869, Rep. George W. Julian, Republican of Indiana, offered a joint resolution in both houses, proclaiming that “The Right of Suffrage” must be guaranteed “equally without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on sex.”
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Immediately following Stanton’s first Washington convention, she and Anthony left on a two-month tour of the Midwest. Their purpose was to recruit followers among women who had no antislavery ties. Traveling in the new Pullman cars, they attended state suffrage meetings in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. They made friends with women who had been active in the Sanitary Commission and were now interested in suffrage.
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Counting the antislavery crusade of 1861, the Kansas campaign of 1867, and her publicity tour with Train, this was Stanton’s fourth public tour. Halfway through her itinerary, she became ill and returned to New Jersey.

Stanton recovered quickly enough to be the center of attention again at the May 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association. In Mrs. Mott’s absence, Stanton, as first vice-president, presided. Stephen Foster objected. He charged that Mrs. Stanton had “repudiated the principles of the society” and demanded that “those who prevented harmony within the group retire from prominence.”
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Stanton coolly ruled the Massachusetts delegate out of order. Challenged, her ruling was sustained. Henry Blackwell tried to restore peace. He reminded the membership that Train had withdrawn from the scene and that Stanton and Anthony had long been pro-Negro. Discussion of the Fifteenth Amendment opened the sore again. During the debate both Anthony and Stone supported female as well as black suffrage. Stanton, wielding the gavel, remained neutral. Foster, fed up, led a walkout of New England delegates.

Although Stanton had played no immediate part in these incidents, they were decisive for her. She realized that the Equal Rights Association would
never give woman suffrage priority. She was no longer willing to take second place. At the end of the AERA meeting, on May 11, 1869, Stanton invited all the women delegates to a reception at the Woman’s Bureau offices of the
Revolution
. Under the guise of a social gathering, she reorganized the rump group into the National Woman Suffrage Association. The group was “distinctively for woman’s suffrage” and ratification of a federal amendment. Disgruntled at the dominance of men in AERA meetings, the women agreed to disallow male members. Henry Stanton, who was in attendance, is credited with having suggested the step. Reportedly, he claimed that, “having been drilled for twenty years privately, he was convinced that women could do it better alone.”
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Elizabeth Cady Stanton was elected president, Elizabeth Smith Miller became treasurer, and Anthony led the executive committee of the new organization. Other members included stalwart Stanton friends Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, Ernestine Rose, Paulina W. Davis, Olympia Brown, Matilda Joslyn Gage, Anna Dickinson, and Mary Greeley. Lucy Stone and her Boston circle were noticeably absent.