In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (33 page)

Both Henry Stanton and Susan Anthony spent the summer of 1872 engaged in presidential politics. Henry joined forces with Liberal Republicans and supported his former employer and Elizabeth’s enemy, Horace Greeley. Henry believed Greeley would complete reconstruction with less sectional hostility and less violence against the Negro than Grant and the regular Republicans.
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Needless to say, Greeley did not favor female suffrage. His defeat was assured when he was endorsed by the Democrats.

Unable to support Greeley and eager to separate herself and the suffragists from Woodhull, Anthony appealed to the regular Republicans. Meeting in Philadelphia, the Republicans did not endorse suffrage, but they did include the first reference to women in a major party platform: “The Republican Party is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause of freedom; their admission to wider fields of usefulness is received with satisfaction, and the honest demands of any class of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration.” Stanton referred to the Republican plank as the “Philadelphia splinter,” which the party soon whittled to a “toothpick.” She agreed to accept it as “our choice lay between that and nothing.” In appreciation of the Republican acknowledgment, Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, an officer of the National from upstate New York, issued an endorsement of Grant. In return the Republicans appropriated funds to circulate the women’s appeal and organize women to campaign for Grant. Mrs. Stanton eventually joined in supporting Grant, declaring that she would rather “see Beelzebub president than Greeley.” When Greeley dropped dead three weeks after the election, Stanton regretted their past animosity. But by then she had more to occupy her than an old enemy.
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Although they had disavowed Woodhull, both Stanton and Anthony accepted
the logic of the new departure strategy. On her own, Anthony decided to test their conviction that women already had the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment. Nationally, between 1871 and 1872, nearly one hundred fifty women tried to vote. Anthony’s case was the most famous. Joined by three of her sisters and twelve other Rochester matrons, all of them Quakers, Susan B. Anthony cast a ballot in the 1872 election. The poll officials were unprepared for such flagrant lawbreaking and did not know what to do, so the ladies walked home unmolested. “I have gone and done it!!” Anthony crowed to an unenthusiastic Stanton.
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As Anthony had hoped, she was singled out for prosecution. She was charged with “knowingly, wrongfully, and unlawfully voting,” a federal offense.

Confronted by Miss Anthony’s widely publicized act of defiance, the Republican establishment sought to avoid a Supreme Court decision on her case. Having retained superior legal advice even before she had voted, Anthony had her defense ready. Speaking in every county surrounding Rochester before the trial, she claimed that she had voted in good faith since she considered herself legally entitled to do so; therefore, she should not be found guilty of criminal action or intent. The trial was set for June 17, 1873, in the local district court. The prosecution obtained a change of venue and moved the trial to the next district.

Unorthodox procedure marked this unusual case. It was the first trial of a recently appointed judge, Ward Hunt, a protégé of Republican boss Roscoe Conkling. When Anthony’s attorney called on her to testify, the judge sustained the claim that she was incompetent, as a woman, to speak for herself. Yet her testimony, given during a pretrial hearing, was allowed. Finally Judge Hunt directed the jury to find the defendant guilty, because “under the Fourteenth Amendment . . . Miss Anthony . . . was not protected in a right to vote.” Pleas for a jury poll, a new trial, and an appeal were denied.

Asked if she had anything to say, Anthony denounced the judge, jury, court, and trial in blistering terms. When Hunt was finally able to silence her, he sentenced her to a hundred dollar fine. Anthony retorted that she would never pay even one dollar. Rather than order Anthony jailed until she paid the fine, Hunt once again ignored accepted procedures. If she had been jailed, her attorney could have appealed the case directly to the Supreme Court on a writ of
habeas corpus
. Out of jail, Anthony could take her case no further. She never paid the fine, and she was never arrested. Eventually the Grant administration quietly pardoned all sixteen women and the election inspectors who had allowed them to vote.
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Anthony was understandably indignant at the outcome of her trial and dismayed that she could not rouse Stanton’s sympathy. While Anthony was preparing her case, Stanton was away lecturing. She passed near Rochester
to visit her family in Peterboro and Johnstown but did not stop to see her friend or attend the trial. Nor did Anthony visit Tenafly. As Stanton observed in a letter, “If our friendship were not cemented with long years of faith and trust, it could not stand the rough handling we give it.”
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After the verdict was rendered Stanton went so far as to defend the judge. “Perhaps I do not comprehend your point of indignation,” she remarked rudely in midsummer, and then retreated. “It is difficult to be indignant with the thermometer at ninety degrees.” But she was not indifferent. She was, she explained, always in a “chronic state of rebellion.”

The insult of being tried by men—judges, jurors, lawyers, all men—for violating the laws and constitution of men, made for the subjugation of my whole sex; to be publicly impaled by the unwavering finger of scorn, by party, press and pulpit, so far transcends a petty verdict of butchers, cab-drivers and ploughboys, in a given case, that my continuous wrath against the whole dynasty of tyrants in our political, religious, and social life has not left one stagnant drop of blood in my veins to rouse for any single act of insult.
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Again and again Stanton expressed her anger in anti-male, nativist, racist terms. She had no model for this kind of behavior among the reformers who did not condone blatantly racist rhetoric, although they shared many of her xenophobic prejudices. Her rhetoric seemed better suited to the Know-Nothings, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic political party. More important, disapproval of her language by friends or enemies did not outweigh her own convictions. She had moved beyond the bounds imposed by previous political models and continued to rant. She justified her attacks by claiming that it was the votes of immigrant males that defeated suffrage referenda.

With her past legal training, Stanton followed another voting rights case,
Minor
v.
Happersett
, with keen interest. Virginia Minor, president of the Missouri Woman Suffrage Association, and her husband Francis, a St. Louis attorney, sued the registrar, Renée Happersett, for refusing to allow Mrs. Minor to vote in the election of 1872. The Minors based their suit on the new departure theory, a concept they had originated in 1869. Stanton had published their idea in the
Revolution
and used the idea as the basis of her 1870 speech, upon which Woodhull had expanded in 1871. The Minors claimed that a state could not deny woman suffrage, a national right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

After losing in the lower courts, the couple appealed to the Supreme Court. In a unanimous decision handed down in October 1874, the Court upheld the lower court.
Minor
v.
Happersett
held that the Constitution did not automatically confer the right to vote on those who were citizens: suffrage was not “co-extensive” with citizenship. States could withhold suffrage from
women, the court continued, just as they could deny it to children or criminals.
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While Stanton watched these developments in the
Anthony
and
Minor
cases, she kept her distance in Tenafly or on the lecture circuit. She was still annoyed at Anthony’s handling of the Woodhull incident. Now the problem arose again. Throughout the period of Anthony’s trial, Woodhull involved them both in a scandal that intrigued the nation for three years.

Soon after the May 1872 meeting, Victoria Woodhull had been arrested for passing obscene material through the mails. The charge referred to a
Weekly
article in which Woodhull had defended her unusual domestic arrangements. Scandalmongers cried bigamy, and Woodhull returned their fire, charging hypocrisy in high places. She was evicted from her home, jailed for six months, and forced to suspend publication of her paper, but she did not give up. In a September speech in Boston, Woodhull accused Henry Ward Beecher of having an affair with one of his parishioners. The woman in question was Elizabeth Tilton, a Sunday school teacher at Beecher’s Plymouth Church in Brooklyn and the wife of his protégé, the editor Theodore Tilton. Woodhull demanded a public confession of adultery by Beecher. Her invective “poured out like a stream of flame,” but the newspapers refused to print the story.
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Undaunted and out of jail, Woodhull resumed publication of the
Weekly
in order to publish the Beecher story herself. Her melodramatic prose detailed the story of Mrs. Tilton’s seduction by the sensual minister. Demand for the November 1872 issue of the
Weekly
was so great that it sold for forty dollars a copy. Whether in an effort to legitimize her story or to discredit her former ally, Woodhull named Elizabeth Cady Stanton as her source.

Returning from her autumn tour, Stanton found “half a bushel of letters asking me about Mrs. Woodhull” and “stuck them all in the fire.”
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Stanton was not the only person who knew about Beecher’s affair with Mrs. Tilton. She and Laura Bullard had heard the story from the wronged husband, who had also told Victoria Woodhull, with whom he was infatuated. Elizabeth Tilton had told her mother, who gossiped, and Anthony, who did not. The rumor spread among reformers and journalists but was silenced out of deference to the popular, powerful preacher. The irony of the situation did not escape the feminists, among them Isabella Beecher Hooker, who believed that her half-brother was guilty. For all her faults, Woodhull was being jailed and tormented for the same kind of behavior in which Beecher indulged without shame and without rebuke. It was a classic example of the double standard of Victorian morality.

Although Stanton claimed to have been misquoted, she never denied
Woodhull’s story. Her animosity toward the Beecher family was such that Stanton may have been pleased to have the scandal aired.
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Anthony was not pleased and blamed it all on Stanton’s indiscretion. In self-defense, Stanton wrote Anthony: “I had supposed you knew enough of papers to trust a friend of twenty years’ knowledge before them. . . . You do not monopolize, dear Susan, all the honor there is among womankind. I shall not run before I am sent, but when the time comes, I shall prove myself as true as you. No, I do not propose to shelter a man when a woman’s liberty is at stake.”
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Anthony’s rigid self-righteousness galled Stanton.

Henry Ward Beecher was a formidable opponent for Woodhull. Equally egotistic and powerfully connected, he destroyed her. Through three years of investigations and trials, he maintained a dignified demeanor and denied all charges. He dismissed the Claflin sisters as “two prostitutes.” Woodhull was vilified by Beecher’s friends in the press and taunted in public. Next Beecher eliminated Tilton. He had him removed from the editorship of a paper Beecher subsidized, encouraged him to write a flattering biography of Mrs. Woodhull, and then charged that Tilton had been compromised by his subject. Elizabeth Tilton was pressured by Beecher into denying the two-year affair entirely and then later instructed to claim that she had forced her affections on the minister.

Throughout these maneuvers Beecher found the cold silence of the suffragists damaging to his defense, so he set out to discredit them, too. Beecher attacked his more conservative half-sister, Mrs. Hooker, on grounds of instability verging on insanity. Worried that Stanton and Anthony both knew too much and might be called to testify against him, Beecher and his friends launched a campaign against them in the press. The women were identified as allies of Woodhull and advocates of free love. Libby Miller was prompted to ask Stanton what her position was. She replied:

You ask if I believe in “free love.” If by “free love” you mean promiscuity, I do not. I believe in monogamic marriage, and for men as well as women. Everything short of this makes a mongrel, sensual, discordant progeny. . . . I do not believe in man having a wife for breeding purposes and an affinity [mistress] for spiritual and intellectual intercourse. Soulunion should precede and exalt physical union. Without sentiment, affection, imagination, what better would we be in procreation than the beasts? If by “free love” you mean woman’s right to give her body to the man she loves and no other, to become a mother or not as her desire, judgment and conscience may dictate, to be the absolute sovereign of herself, then I do believe in freedom of love. The next step of civilization will bring woman to this freedom.
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Henry Ward Beecher was tried twice. First a church board that he had appointed investigated the charges, and pronounced Beecher innocent. Then a civil court heard a suit brought by Tilton in 1875. The civil trial dragged
on for 112 days, each heralded by sensational headlines. Elizabeth Tilton was not allowed to testify. The jury was unable to reach a verdict, and the case was dismissed. Most of the public believed Beecher innocent, and his popularity as a preacher soared. Woodhull also survived the scandal. Eager to sever their connection, Commodore Vanderbilt established her in England, where she married a wealthy landowner. Theodore Tilton, financially ruined by legal fees, spent the rest of his life in Paris. His wife died in obscurity and poverty.
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Stanton and the women’s movement also survived, but they were not unscathed. Throughout the trials reporters hounded Stanton and Anthony. Anthony refused to make any comment, but Stanton was unable to endure Beecher’s hypocrisy. She believed that both Victoria Woodhull and Elizabeth Tilton had been sacrificed to save his reputation. She was disgusted by Beecher’s triumph and incensed by the slanderous attacks on the suffragists aroused by the case. When a reporter from the
Brooklyn Argus
camped on her Tenafly doorstep, she invited him in. She was eager to tell all she knew, including some indiscreet references to what Anthony knew. When Anthony saw the story in print, she was once again outraged. Stanton apologized immediately, but did not back down.