In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (7 page)

Elizabeth and her brother-in-law remained intimate friends. Ten years older than Elizabeth, Bayard had been her confidant and counselor for more than a decade. Then their relationship changed. Bayard, still married to Tryphena, proposed to Elizabeth. According to family sources, Bayard had fallen in love with Elizabeth and in 1838 urged that they run away. She refused him, and Bayard never allowed himself to be alone with her again. There is no record of her reaction, but she always referred to him in warm and generous terms. When Bayard died in 1889, Stanton wrote her daughter that she owed much of her childhood happiness to him. In a family
scrapbook, her daughter wrote under his photograph, “Perhaps the most formative influence in the life of Elizabeth Cady.”
²⁷

After 1838, Elizabeth Cady increased her visits to her cousin Gerrit Smith and his family in Peterboro, New York. The Smith household was dominated by enthusiasm for political reforms, especially abolition. Whereas Judge Cady forbade any discussion of abolition, Elizabeth’s cousin Gerrit Smith was one of the most prominent and important abolitionists of the antebellum period. Smith introduced Elizabeth to all the current causes and celebrities.

Smith’s mother was Margaret Cady’s oldest sister, Elizabeth Livingston. His father, Peter Smith, was John Jacob Astor’s partner and Daniel Cady’s client. Born in Utica, New York, in 1797, Gerrit Smith had graduated from Hamilton College in 1818. His first wife died six months after they were married in 1819. He married Ann (Nancy) Fitzhugh in 1822 and fathered four children. His oldest daughter, Elizabeth Smith Miller, became Elizabeth Cady’s best friend. When his father was declared incompetent, Gerrit Smith took over the family fortune and increased it. Eventually he owned land in Michigan, Virginia, Vermont, and in all but six counties of New York. One of the wealthiest men in the country, he was a philanthropist who contributed much of his money to reform causes. Gerrit Smith died in New York City in 1874, attended by Edward Bayard.
²⁸

Caught up in the revival spirit and encouraged by his beautiful and devout second wife, Smith experienced a conversion in 1825.
²⁹
He rededicated himself, his money, and his nervous energy to benevolence. He supported the Sunday school movement, the American Bible Society, the Tract Society, the Home Missionary Society, prison reform, dress reform, equal rights for women, and the Greek and Irish revolutions; he was vice-president of the American Peace Society. He opposed capital punishment, drinking, smoking, and the eating of meat.

As an abolitionist he founded a seminary where Negro students could prepare for the ministry and a manual labor school for free blacks whom he brought to Peterboro. Originally an advocate of colonization, Smith became an “immediatist,” demanding an immediate end to slavery after the antiabolition riots in Utica in 1835. He joined the American Anti-Slavery Society and served as president of the New York chapter from 1836 to 1839. His mansion was a station on the underground railroad. In response to violent public hostility to his position, he became even more radical and outspoken. Smith was one of the Secret Six who bought the arms for John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859.
³⁰

As a leader of political abolitionists after 1840, Smith pursued a dismally unsuccessful political career. A founder of the Liberty party, he was defeated as its candidate for governor in 1840 and for president in 1848.
He was elected to Congress in 1852 but, frustrated by the resistance to abolition, he resigned after eighteen months. He was defeated again in 1858 in a second gubernatorial try as a Republican.

Six feet tall and weighing over two hundred pounds, with a mellow voice and full beard, Smith was erudite, urbane, gracious, and generous. But he was also, in the view of one biographer, a “strange, erratic individual . . . hypochondriac, compulsive, almost childlike, . . . given to unpredictable moods, now melancholy, now irascible, now charming and gregarious.” Terrified of being found guilty of conspiracy after John Brown was hanged, Smith committed himself temporarily to an insane asylum.
³¹
Until political disagreements divided them in later years, Elizabeth Cady saw only the gentle, good-humored enthusiast.

Smith’s sincere if unorthodox Christianity appealed to Elizabeth. His position on abolition had forced him to withdraw from the Presbyterian church because it did not condemn slaveholding as sinful. In 1843 he established a local nondenominational abolitionist church. A plaque engraved “God Is Love” hung over the Smiths’ bedroom door: that sentiment set a tone of practical Christianity for their household. Although they owned the village of Peterboro, the Smiths lived simply. Stanton remembered that her cousin “would have nothing in his home which would make his humblest visitor feel out of place.”
³²
Throughout his life Smith worked for many religious reforms, ultimately refusing to accept the Bible as infallible truth. His individual Christianity presented Elizabeth with another foil for Finney.

At Peterboro in the late 1830s Elizabeth Cady met male and female abolitionist agents, runaway slaves, Oneida Indians, members of the old Dutch aristocracy, temperance advocates, politicians, reformers of every kind and conviction. “Every member of their household is an abolitionist, even to the coachman,” she reported. Her visits made her receptive to the reform spirit. She was challenged to think about issues that were never discussed in her own home, and she thrived on the arguments and exchange of ideas. “It was in such company and varied discussions on every possible phase of political, religious and social life that I spent weeks every year. . . . The rousing arguments at Peterboro made social life seem tame and profitless elsewhere, and the youngest of us felt that the conclusions reached in this school of philosophy were not to be questioned.” Even from the perspective of sixty years, Mrs. Stanton credited Gerrit Smith with giving her “a new inspiration in life and . . . new ideas of individual rights.”
³³

Inspiration did not provoke action. Elizabeth Cady did not join any of Gerrit Smith’s crusades. To do so would have required flaunting her father’s social code at a time when she was still dependent on him. The contrast between the conservative opinions in Johnstown and the open-minded
attitudes prevalent at Seneca Falls and Peterboro created another set of choices, as her education and conversion crisis had. In different ways both Bayard and Smith were active reformers. They approved and encouraged reform activity and attitudes in Elizabeth. But neither overcame the influence of her parents or proposed an alternative course for her to follow. Rather than make any choices, she accommodated herself to each environment and made no commitments. She was not yet ready to act on what she had absorbed.

Peterboro provided more than intellectual stimulation. Days of debate and “hot discussion” frequently ended with hayrides and dancing. As Stanton recalled, “[We] youngsters frequently put the lessons of freedom and individual rights [we] heard so much of into practice, and relieved [our] brains from the constant strain of argument on first principles by the wildest hilarity in dancing, all kinds of games, and practical jokes carried beyond all bounds of propriety.”
³⁴

It was at Peterboro that Elizabeth Cady fell in love with Henry Stanton, a renowned abolitionist agent. Like Bayard, Henry Stanton was ten years older than she was. Like Finney, he was a forceful speaker. Like Smith, he was a celebrated abolitionist. In addition, he was tall, handsome, dynamic, and a genuine hero. He had faced down mobs and converted angry crowds. To her he was a “brave knight,” vanquishing the forces of evil. The couple met in October 1839, when both were guests of the Smiths. For several weeks Henry spoke at Madison County antislavery gatherings; Elizabeth was in the audience, spellbound. Although she thought he was engaged to someone else, she accepted an invitation to go riding. On horseback, he unexpectedly proposed, and she accepted.
³⁵
They were two magnetic personalities, passionately attracted to one another.

Born in 1805 to a Connecticut woolen manufacturer and a Mayflower descendant, Stanton had moved to upstate New York in 1826, after his father went bankrupt.
*
He worked first in a canal office and then for Thurlow Weed’s newspaper. As a reward for helping elect Weed to the state assembly, Stanton was named deputy clerk for Monroe County (Rochester). In October 1830 Stanton heard Finney preach at the Rochester Revival and was converted. Recruited by his friend Theodore Weld, another Finney convert, Stanton decided to prepare for the ministry at the Lane Theological Seminary in Cincinnati.
³⁶

Under the weak leadership of Lyman Beecher, Lane Seminary soon became
a center of abolitionist controversy. Until the 1830s most antislavery sentiment in the United States favored the colonization of Negroes, returning slaves to Africa or elsewhere. The American Colonization Society, founded in 1817, was another agency in the moral reform network. The younger reformers, veterans of revivals, believed that slaveholding was sinful and pressed for “immediate” emancipation. The creation of the underground railroad, the publication of the
Liberator
by William Lloyd Garrison, the organization of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the nullification crisis, and Nat Turner’s rebellion all increased the tension surrounding the abolition issue in the 1830s. When Lane students held a debate on the seizure of fugitive slaves in the summer of 1832, Henry Stanton was the only speaker to defend the North against the requirement of returning runaways to the South.
³⁷

At the same time, Theodore Weld, by then a Lane professor and a dedicated abolitionist, organized the students to work and “mingle” in the black community. The debate incident, coupled with Weld’s “social intercourse” with Negroes, outraged and offended the trustees. They believed that the activities of the students might incite a riot in the city. In the fall of 1834 the trustees ordered the student antislavery society to disband and forbade any further activity or discussion. In response, Weld and Stanton led a walkout of fifty “Lane rebels.” They founded their own institution at Oberlin, where they insisted on the admission of Negroes and women, a voice in faculty appointments, and the selection of Charles Grandison Finney as president.
³⁸

Neither Weld nor Stanton stayed on at Oberlin. Their antislavery activities had brought them to the attention of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and they were hired as agents. In May 1835 Stanton became one of the Band of Seventy, an abolition strike force like Finney’s Holy Band of revival preachers. The abolitionists adopted many revival tactics: crisscrossing the Northeast, issuing tracts, collecting petitions, holding conventions, speaking outdoors, organizing whole communities, not moving on until they could leave a core of converts behind to promote their cause. An agent’s existence was arduous, full of hardship and danger. During these years mobs pummeled Stanton with verbal and physical abuse that only reaffirmed his commitment to abolition.

As the Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society had announced, “We shall send forth agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance, of warning, of entreaty, and of rebuke.” An eloquent speaker, a lucid writer, a skilled organizer, Henry Stanton soon distinguished himself. He was assigned to Massachusetts and joined the executive committee of the national society as secretary.
³⁹
Initially a protégé of William Lloyd Garrison, Stanton eventually broke with his mentor over the necessity for
political action and the role of women in abolition societies. Stanton advocated an elective strategy but opposed giving women voting rights within abolition societies because it would open the political abolitionists to ridicule.

In proposing marriage, Henry Stanton offered Elizabeth an alliance of affection and abolitionism. He assumed that she shared his political beliefs and would make abolition her life’s work, because it was his. In Elizabeth, Henry had another convert. He thought he was rescuing her from “a giddy whirl of fashionable follies” and directing her energies into reform. “It pains me,” he wrote to Gerrit Smith during their engagement, “to see a person of so superior a mind and enlarged heart doing nothing for the wicked world’s salvation.”
⁴⁰
With the ardor of an evangelist, Henry offered Elizabeth a means to salvation and fulfillment. Like Bayard and Smith, he encouraged her to expand her role and to enlarge her sphere.

When Henry proposed, Elizabeth Cady was almost twenty-four years old. It had been seven years since she had left school. During that period her primary occupation had been visiting. Although she enjoyed the camaraderie of the law students, she did not marry one of them, as did her sisters. Perhaps there were already signs of her strong will and intellectual independence. Despite her cheerful manner and her father’s money, she was older than most young women when they married. Had she not married Henry, there is no indication that she would have undertaken any other occupation. At Johnstown, Troy, and Peterboro, she had had opportunities to observe women as matriarchs, community leaders, teachers, administrators, religious converts, and social reformers, as well as in lower-class employments. Academic and athletic achievement had given her a sense of self-confidence. She was encouraged to undertake unusual activities for a girl, but no alternative occupations were suggested by her models or mentors. Like most of her peers, she sought occupation and identity in marriage rather than in independent action.

In Henry Stanton, Elizabeth found a combination of the elements she had found most appealing in the other men in her life. He was older, handsome, intelligent, engaging, eloquent, dominant, masculine, demanding, charming, and a good dancer. He was at the center of the circle of reformers at Peterboro. He was committed to a moral cause. And he was either not aware of or not alarmed by her strengths.

By marrying, Elizabeth Cady would escape girlhood and become an adult female. Socially, becoming a matron had higher status than remaining a spinster. Legally, she assumed a subordinate position. She was transferred from the protection of her father to the custody of her husband. Familiar as she was with law and custom, she did not anticipate that she might be
entering bondage. She looked forward to marriage as an independent state, a shared adventure. Lingering at Peterboro in the autumn of 1839, the engaged couple planned the kind of life they would lead. Wrote Elizabeth Cady Stanton in retrospect, “It seemed to me that I never had so much happiness crowded into one short month.”
⁴¹