One great charm in the convention was the presence of Lucretia Mott, calm, dignified, clear and forcible as ever. Though she is now seventy-six years old, she sat through all the sessions, and noted everything that was said and done. It was a satisfaction to us all that she was able to preside over the first National Woman"s Suffrage Convention ever held at the Capitol. Her voice is stronger and her step lighter than many who are her juniors by twenty years. She preached last Sunday in the Unitarian Church to the profit and pleasure of a highly cultivated and large audience. We were most pleased to meet ex-Governor Robinson, the first Governor of Kansas, in the convention. He says there is a fair prospect that an amendment to strike out the word "male"
from the Const.i.tution will be submitted again in that State, when, he thinks, it will pa.s.s without doubt. Mrs. Minor, President of the Woman"s Suffrage a.s.sociation of Missouri, and Mrs. Starrett of Lawrence, Kansas, gave us a pleasant surprise by their appearance at the convention. They took an active part in the deliberations, and spoke with great effect. Senator Wilson was present, though he did not favor us with a speech. We urged him to do so, but he laughingly said he had no idea of making himself a target for our wit and sarcasm. We asked him, as he would not speak, to tell us the "wise, systematic, and efficient way" of pressing woman"s suffrage. He replied, "You are on the right track, go ahead." So we have decided to move "on this line"
until the inauguration of the new administration, when, under the dynasty of the chivalrous soldier, "our ways will, no doubt, be those of pleasantness, and all our paths be peace." New Jersey was represented by Deborah Butler of Vineland, the only live spot in that benighted State, and we thought her speech quite equal to what we heard from Mr. Cattell in the Senate. During the evening sessions, large numbers of women from the several departments were attentive listeners. Lieutenant-Governor Root of Kansas read the bill now before Congress demanding equal pay for women in the several departments where they perform equal work with the men by their side. He offered a resolution urging Congress to pa.s.s the bill at once, that justice might be done the hundreds of women in the District, for their faithful work under government.
Mrs. Stanton"s speech the first evening of the convention gave a fair statement of the hostile feelings of women toward the amendments; we give the main part of it. Of all the other speeches, which were extemporaneous, only meagre and unsatisfactory reports can be found.
Mrs. STANTON said:--A great idea of progress is near its consummation, when statesmen in the councils of the nation propose to frame it into statutes and const.i.tutions; when Reverend Fathers recognize it by a new interpretation of their creeds and canons; when the Bar and Bench at its command set aside the legislation of centuries, and girls of twenty put their heels on the c.o.kes and Blackstones of the past.
Those who represent what is called "the Woman"s Rights Movement,"
have argued their right to political equality from every standpoint of justice, religion, and logic, for the last twenty years. They have quoted the Const.i.tution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bible, the opinions of great men and women in all ages; they have plead the theory of our government; suffrage a natural, inalienable right; shown from the lessons of history, that one cla.s.s can not legislate for another; that disfranchised cla.s.ses must ever be neglected and degraded; and that all privileges are but mockery to the citizen, until he has a voice in the making and administering of law. Such arguments have been made over and over in conventions and before the legislatures of the several States. Judges, lawyers, priests, and politicians have said again and again, that our logic was unanswerable, and although much nonsense has emanated from the male tongue and pen on this subject, no man has yet made a fair, argument on the other side. Knowing that we hold the Gibraltar rock of reason on this question, they resort to ridicule and petty objections.
Compelled to follow our a.s.sailants, wherever they go, and fight them with their own weapons; when cornered with wit and sarcasm, some cry out, you have no logic on your platform, forgetting that we have no use for logic until they give us logicians at whom to hurl it, and if, for the pure love of it, we now and then rehea.r.s.e the logic that is like a, b, c, to all of us, others cry out--the same old speeches we have heard these twenty years. It would be safe to say a hundred years, for they are the same our fathers used when battling old King George and the British Parliament for their right to representation, and a voice in the laws by which they were governed. There are no new arguments to be made on human rights, our work to-day is to apply to ourselves those so familiar to all; to teach man that woman is not an anomalous being, outside all laws and const.i.tutions, but one whose rights are to be established by the same process of reason as that by which he demands his own.
When our Fathers made out their famous bill of impeachment against England, they specified eighteen grievances. When the women of this country surveyed the situation in their first convention, they found they had precisely that number, and quite similar in character; and reading over the old revolutionary arguments of Jefferson, Patrick Henry, Otis, and Adams, they found they applied remarkably well to their case. The same arguments made in this country for extending suffrage from time to time, to white men, native born citizens, without property and education, and to foreigners; the same used by John Bright in England, to extend it to a million new voters, and the same used by the great Republican party to enfranchise a million black men in the South, all these arguments we have to-day to offer for woman, and one, in addition, stronger than all besides, the difference in man and woman. Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman"s thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.
The Republican party to-day congratulates itself on having carried the Fifteenth Amendment of the Const.i.tution, thus securing "manhood suffrage" and establishing an aristocracy of s.e.x on this continent. As several bills to secure Woman"s Suffrage in the District and the Territories have been already presented in both houses of Congress, and as by Mr. Julian"s bill, the question of so amending the Const.i.tution as to extend suffrage to all the women of the country has been presented to the nation for consideration, it is not only the right but the duty of every thoughtful woman to express her opinion on a Sixteenth Amendment. While I hail the late discussions in Congress and the various bills presented as so many signs of progress, I am especially gratified with those of Messrs. Julian and Pomeroy, which forbid any State to deny the right of suffrage to any of its citizens on account of s.e.x or color.
This fundamental principle of our government--the equality of all the citizens of the republic--should be incorporated in the Federal Const.i.tution, there to remain forever. To leave this question to the States and partial acts of Congress, is to defer indefinitely its settlement, for what is done by this Congress may be repealed by the next; and politics in the several States differ so widely, that no harmonious action on any question can ever be secured, except as a strict party measure. Hence, we appeal to the party now in power, everywhere, to end this protracted debate on suffrage, and declare it the inalienable right of every citizen who is amenable to the laws of the land, who pays taxes and the penalty of crime. We have a splendid theory of a genuine republic, why not realize it and make our government h.o.m.ogeneous, from Maine to California. The Republican party has the power to do this, and now is its only opportunity.
Woman"s Suffrage, in 1872, may be as good a card for the Republicans as Gen. Grant was in the last election. It is said that the Republican party made him President, not because they thought him the most desirable man in the nation for that office, but they were afraid the Democrats would take him if they did not. We would suggest, there may be the same danger of Democrats taking up Woman Suffrage if they do not. G.o.d, in his providence, may have purified that party in the furnace of affliction. They have had the opportunity, safe from the turmoil of political life and the temptations of office, to study and apply the divine principles of justice and equality to life; for minorities are always in a position to carry principles to their logical results, while majorities are governed only by votes. You see my faith in Democrats is based on sound philosophy. In the next Congress, the Democratic party will gain thirty-four new members, hence the Republicans have had their last chance to do justice to woman. It will be no enviable record for the Fortieth Congress that in the darkest days of the republic it placed our free inst.i.tutions in the care and keeping of every type of manhood, ignoring womanhood, all the elevating and purifying influences of the most virtuous and humane half of the American people....
I urge a speedy adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment for the following reasons:
1. A government, based on the principle of caste and cla.s.s, can not stand. The aristocratic idea, in any form, is opposed to the genius of our free inst.i.tutions, to our own declaration of rights, and to the civilization of the age. All artificial distinctions, whether of family, blood, wealth, color, or s.e.x, are equally oppressive to the subject cla.s.ses, and equally destructive to national life and prosperity. Governments based on every form of aristocracy, on every degree and variety of inequality, have been tried in despotisms, monarchies, and republics, and all alike have perished. In the panorama of the past behold the mighty nations that have risen, one by one, but to fall. Behold their temples, thrones, and pyramids, their gorgeous palaces and stately monuments now crumbled all to dust.
Behold every monarch in Europe at this very hour trembling on his throne. Behold the republics on this Western continent convulsed, distracted, divided, the hosts scattered, the leaders fallen, the scouts lost in the wilderness, the once inspired prophets blind and dumb, while on all sides the cry is echoed, "Republicanism is a failure," though that great principle of a government "by the people, of the people, for the people," has never been tried.
Thus far, all nations have been built on caste and failed. Why, in this hour of reconstruction, with the experience of generations before us, make another experiment in the same direction? If serfdom, peasantry, and slavery have shattered kingdoms, deluged continents with blood, scattered republics like dust before the wind, and rent our own Union asunder, what kind of a government, think you, American statesmen, you can build, with the mothers of the race crouching at your feet, while iron-heeled peasants, serfs, and slaves, exalted by your hands, tread our inalienable rights into the dust? While all men, everywhere, are rejoicing in new-found liberties, shall woman alone be denied the rights, privileges, and immunities of citizenship? While in England men are coming up from the coal mines of Cornwall, from the factories of Birmingham and Manchester, demanding the suffrage; while in frigid Russia the 22,000,000 newly-emanc.i.p.ated serfs are already claiming a voice in the government; while here, in our own land, slaves, but just rejoicing in the proclamation of emanc.i.p.ation, ignorant alike of its power and significance, have the ballot unasked, unsought, already laid at their feet--think you the daughters of Adams, Jefferson, and Patrick Henry, in whose veins flows the blood of two Revolutions, will forever linger round the campfires of an old barbarism, with no longings to join this grand army of freedom in its onward march to roll back the golden gates of a higher and better civilization? Of all kinds of aristocracy, that of s.e.x is the most odious and unnatural; invading, as it does, our homes, desecrating our family altars, dividing those whom G.o.d has joined together, exalting the son above the mother who bore him, and subjugating, everywhere, moral power to brute force.
Such a government would not be worth the blood and treasure so freely poured out in its long struggles for freedom....
2. I urge a Sixteenth Amendment, because "manhood suffrage" or a man"s government, is civil, religious, and social disorganization. The male element is a destructive force, stern, selfish, aggrandizing, loving war, violence, conquest, acquisition, breeding in the material and moral world alike discord, disorder, disease, and death. See what a record of blood and cruelty the pages of history reveal! Through what slavery, slaughter, and sacrifice, through what inquisitions and imprisonments, pains and persecutions, black codes and gloomy creeds, the soul of humanity has struggled for the centuries, while mercy has veiled her face and all hearts have been dead alike to love and hope! The male element has held high carnival thus far, it has fairly run riot from the beginning, overpowering the feminine element everywhere, crushing out all the diviner qualities in human nature, until we know but little of true manhood and womanhood, of the latter comparatively nothing, for it has scarce been recognized as a power until within the last century. Society is but the reflection of man himself, untempered by woman"s thought, the hard iron rule we feel alike in the church, the state, and the home. No one need wonder at the disorganization, at the fragmentary condition of everything, when we remember that man, who represents but half a complete being, with but half an idea on every subject, has undertaken the absolute control of all sublunary matters.
People object to the demands of those whom they choose to call the strong-minded, because they say, "the right of suffrage will make the women masculine." That is just the difficulty in which we are involved to-day. Though disfranchised we have few women in the best sense, we have simply so many reflections, varieties, and dilutions of the masculine gender. The strong, natural characteristics of womanhood are repressed and ignored in dependence, for so long as man feeds woman she will try to please the giver and adapt herself to his condition. To keep a foothold in society woman must be as near like man as possible, reflect his ideas, opinions, virtues, motives, prejudices, and vices. She must respect his statutes, though they strip her of every inalienable right, and conflict with that higher law written by the finger of G.o.d on her own soul. She must believe his theology, though it pave the highways of h.e.l.l with the skulls of new-born infants, and make G.o.d a monster of vengeance and hypocrisy. She must look at everything from its dollar and cent point of view, or she is a mere romancer. She must accept things as they are and make the best of them. To mourn over the miseries of others, the poverty of the poor, their hardships in jails, prisons, asylums, the horrors of war, cruelty, and brutality in every form, all this would be mere sentimentalizing. To protest against the intrigue, bribery, and corruption of public life, to desire that her sons might follow some business that did not involve lying, cheating, and a hard, grinding selfishness, would be arrant nonsense. In this way man has been moulding woman to his ideas by direct and positive influences, while she, if not a negation, has used indirect means to control him, and in most cases developed the very characteristics both in him and herself that needed repression. And now man himself stands appalled at the results of his own excesses, and mourns in bitterness that falsehood, selfishness and violence are the law of life. The need of this hour is not territory, gold mines, railroads, or specie payments, but a new evangel of womanhood, to exalt purity, virtue, morality, true religion, to lift man up into the higher realms of thought and action.
We ask woman"s enfranchis.e.m.e.nt, as the first step toward the recognition of that essential element in government that can only secure the health, strength, and prosperity of the nation.
Whatever is done to lift woman to her true position will help to usher in a new day of peace and perfection for the race. In speaking of the masculine element, I do not wish to be understood to say that all men are hard, selfish, and brutal, for many of the most beautiful spirits the world has known have been clothed with manhood; but I refer to those characteristics, though often marked in woman, that distinguish what is called the stronger s.e.x. For example, the love of acquisition and conquest, the very pioneers of civilization, when expended on the earth, the sea, the elements, the riches and forces of Nature, are powers of destruction when used to subjugate one man to another or to sacrifice nations to ambition. Here that great conservator of woman"s love, if permitted to a.s.sert itself, as it naturally would in freedom against oppression, violence, and war, would hold all these destructive forces in check, for woman knows the cost of life better than man does, and not with her consent would one drop of blood ever be shed, one life sacrificed in vain. With violence and disturbance in the natural world, we see a constant effort to maintain an equilibrium of forces. Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony, and beauty may reign supreme. There is a striking a.n.a.logy between matter and mind, and the present disorganization of society warns us, that in the dethronement of woman we have let loose the elements of violence and ruin that she only has the power to curb. If the civilization of the age calls for an extension of the suffrage, surely a government of the most virtuous, educated men and women would better represent the whole, and protect the interests of all than could the representation of either s.e.x alone. But government gains no new element of strength in admitting all men to the ballot-box, for we have too much of the man-power there already. We see this in every department of legislation, and it is a common remark, that unless some new virtue is infused into our public life the nation is doomed to destruction. Will the foreign element, the dregs of China, Germany, England, Ireland, and Africa supply this needed force, or the n.o.bler types of American womanhood who have taught our presidents, senators, and congressmen the rudiments of all they know?
3. I urge a Sixteenth Amendment because, when "manhood suffrage"
is established from Maine to California, woman has reached the lowest depths of political degradation. So long as there is a disfranchised cla.s.s in this country, and that cla.s.s its women, a man"s government is worse than a white man"s government with suffrage limited by property and educational qualifications, because in proportion as you multiply the rulers, the condition of the politically ostracised is more hopeless and degraded. John Stuart Mill, in his work on "Liberty," shows that the condition of one disfranchised man in a nation is worse than when the whole nation is under one man, because in the latter case, if the one man is despotic, the nation can easily throw him off, but what can one man do with a nation of tyrants over him? If American women find it hard to bear the oppressions of their own Saxon fathers, the best orders of manhood, what may they not be called to endure when all the lower orders of foreigners now crowding our sh.o.r.es legislate for them and their daughters. Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a monarchy and a republic, who can not read the Declaration of Independence or Webster"s spelling-book, making laws for Lucretia Mott, Ernestine L. Rose, and Anna E.
d.i.c.kinson. Think of jurors and jailors drawn from these ranks to watch and try young girls for the crime of infanticide, to decide the moral code by which the mothers of this Republic shall be governed? This manhood suffrage is an appalling question, and it would be well for thinking women, who seem to consider it so magnanimous to hold their own claims in abeyance until all men are crowned with citizenship, to remember that the most ignorant men are ever the most hostile to the equality of women, as they have known them only in slavery and degradation.
Go to our courts of justice, our jails and prisons; go into the world of work; into the trades and professions; into the temples of science and learning, and see what is meted out everywhere to women--to those who have no advocates in our courts, no representatives in the councils of the nation. Shall we prolong and perpetuate such injustice, and by increasing this power risk worse oppressions for ourselves and daughters? It is an open, deliberate insult to American womanhood to be cast down under the iron-heeled peasantry of the Old World and the slaves of the New, as we shall be in the practical working of the Fifteenth Amendment, and the only atonement the Republican party can make is now to complete its work, by enfranchising the women of the nation. I have not forgotten their action four years ago, when Article XIV., Sec. 2, was amended[113] by invidiously introducing the word "male" into the Federal Const.i.tution, where it had never been before, thus counting out of the basis of representation all men not permitted to vote, thereby making it the interest of every State to enfranchise its male citizens, and virtually declaring it no crime to disfranchise its women. As political sagacity moved our rulers thus to guard the interests of the negro for party purposes, common justice might have compelled them to show like respect for their own mothers, by counting woman too out of the basis of representation, that she might no longer swell the numbers to legislate adversely to her interests.
And this desecration of the last will and testament of the fathers, this retrogressive legislation for woman, was in the face of the earnest protests of thousands of the best educated, most refined and cultivated women of the North.
Now, when the attention of the whole world is turned to this question of suffrage, and women themselves are throwing off the lethargy of ages, and in England, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Russia are holding their conventions, and their rulers are everywhere giving them a respectful hearing, shall American statesmen, claiming to be liberal, so amend their const.i.tutions as to make their wives and mothers the political inferiors of unlettered and unwashed ditch-diggers, boot-blacks, butchers, and barbers, fresh from the slave plantations of the South, and the effete civilizations of the Old World? While poets and philosophers, statesmen and men of science are all alike pointing to woman as the new hope for the redemption of the race, shall the freest Government on the earth be the first to establish an aristocracy based on s.e.x alone? to exalt ignorance above education, vice above virtue, brutality and barbarism above refinement and religion? Not since G.o.d first called light out of darkness and order out of chaos, was there ever made so base a proposition as "manhood suffrage" in this American Republic, after all the discussions we have had on human rights in the last century. On all the blackest pages of history there is no record of an act like this, in any nation, where native born citizens, having the same religion, speaking the same language, equal to their rulers in wealth, family, and education, have been politically ostracised by their own countrymen, outlawed with savages, and subjected to the government of outside barbarians.
Remember the Fifteenth Amendment takes in a larger population than the 2,000,000 black men on the Southern plantation. It takes in all the foreigners daily landing in our eastern cities, the Chinese crowding our western sh.o.r.es, the inhabitants of Alaska, and all those western isles that will soon be ours. American statesmen may flatter themselves that by superior intelligence and political sagacity the higher orders of men will always govern, but when the ignorant foreign vote already holds the balance of power in all the large cities by sheer force of numbers, it is simply a question of impulse or pa.s.sion, bribery or fraud, how our elections will be carried. When the highest offices in the gift of the people are bought and sold in Wall Street, it is a mere chance who will be our rulers. Whither is a nation tending when brains count for less than bullion, and clowns make laws for queens? It is a startling a.s.sertion, but nevertheless true, that in none of the nations of modern Europe are the higher cla.s.ses of women politically so degraded as are the women of this Republic to-day. In the Old World, where the government is the aristocracy, where it is considered a mark of n.o.bility to share its offices and powers, women of rank have certain hereditary lights which raise them above a majority of the men, certain honors and privileges not granted to serfs and peasants. There women are queens, hold subordinate offices, and vote on many questions. In our Southern States even, before the war, women were not degraded below the working population. They were not humiliated in seeing their coachmen, gardeners, and waiters go to the polls to legislate for them; but here, in this boasted Northern civilization, women of wealth and education, who pay taxes and obey the laws, who in morals and intellect are the peers of their proudest rulers, are thrust outside the pale of political consideration with minors, paupers, lunatics, traitors, idiots, with those guilty of bribery, larceny, and infamous crimes.
Would those gentlemen who are on all sides telling the women of the nation not to press their claims until the negro is safe beyond peradventure, be willing themselves to stand aside and trust all their interests to hands like these? The educated women of this nation feel as much interest in republican inst.i.tutions, the preservation of the country, the good of the race, their own elevation and success, as any man possibly can, and we have the same distrust in man"s power to legislate for us, that he has in woman"s power to legislate wisely for herself.
4. I would press a Sixteenth Amendment, because the history of American statesmanship does not inspire me with confidence in man"s capacity to govern the nation alone, with justice and mercy. I have come to this conclusion, not only from my own observation, but from what our rulers say of themselves.
Honorable Senators have risen in their places again and again, and told the people of the wastefulness and corruption of the present administration. Others have set forth, with equal clearness, the ignorance of our rulers on the question of finance....
The following letters were received and read in the Convention:
NEW YORK, Jan. 14, 1869.
MRS. JOSEPHINE S. GRIFFING,--_Dear Madam_:--Your favor of the 6th inst. is received. Permit me to a.s.sure you it would give me great pleasure to be present at your important convention of the 19th, but indisposition will not allow me that gratification.
Looking at all the circ.u.mstances; the position, the epoch, and the efforts now being made to extend the right to the ballot, your Convention is perhaps the most important that was ever held.
It is a true maxim, that it is easier to do justice than injustice; to do right than wrong; and to do it at once, than by small degrees. How much better and easier it would have been for Congress, when they enfranchised all the men of the District of Columbia, had they included the women also; but better late than never. Let the National government, to which the States have a right to look for good example, do justice to woman now, and all the States will follow....
It was a terrible mistake and a fundamental error, based upon ignorance and injustice, ever to have introduced the word "male"
into the Federal Const.i.tution. The terms "male" and "female"
simply designate the physical or animal distinction between the s.e.xes, and ought be used only in speaking of the lower animals.
Human beings are men and women, possessed of human faculties and understanding, which we call mind; and mind recognizes no s.e.x, therefore the term "male," as applied to human beings--to citizens--ought to be expunged from the const.i.tution and laws as a last remnant of barbarism--when the animal, not mind, when might, not right, governed the world. Let your Convention, then, urge Congress to wipe out that purely animal distinction from the national const.i.tution. That n.o.ble instrument was destined to govern intelligent, responsible human beings--men and women--not s.e.x. The childish argument that all women don"t ask for the franchise would hardly deserve notice were it not sometimes used by men of sense. To all such I would say, examine ancient and modern history, yes, even of your own times, and you will find there never has been a time when all men of any country--white or black--have ever asked for a reform. Reforms have to be claimed and obtained by the few, who are in advance, for the benefit of the many who lag behind. And when once obtained and almost forced upon them, the ma.s.s of the people accept and enjoy their benefits as a matter of course. Look at the pet.i.tions now pouring into Congress for the franchise for women, and compare their thousands of signatures with the few isolated names that graced our first pet.i.tions to the Legislature of New York to secure to the married woman the right to hold in her own name the property that belonged to her, to secure to the poor, forsaken wife the right to her earnings, and to the mother the right to her children.
"All" the women did not ask for those rights, but all accepted them with joy and gladness when they were obtained; and so it will be with the franchise. But woman"s claim for the ballot does not depend upon the numbers that demand it, or would exercise the right; but upon precisely the same principles that man claims it for himself. Chase, Sumner, Stevens, and many of both Houses of Congress have, time after time, declared that the franchise means "Security, Education, Responsibility, Self-respect, Prosperity, and Independence." Taking all these a.s.sertions for granted and fully appreciating all their benefits, in the name of security, of education, of responsibility, of self-respect, of liberty, of prosperity and independence we demand the franchise for woman.
Please present this hastily-written contribution to your Convention with best wishes.
Yours, dear madam, very truly, ERNESTINE L. ROSE.
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON writes: Unable to attend the Convention, I can only send you my warm approval of it, and the object it is designed to promote. It is boastingly claimed in behalf of the Government of the United States that it is "of the people, by the people, and for the people." Yet reckoning the whole number at thirty-eight millions, no less than one-half--that is, nineteen millions--are political ciphers. A single male voter, on election day, outweighs them all!
AARON M. POWELL writes: I have no doubt that if a fair and honest vote can be had upon the question, submitted upon its own merits, in the Senate and House of Representatives, both the friends and opponents of the measure here, as in Great Britain when John Stuart Mill"s proposition was first voted upon in Parliament, will be surprised at the revelation of its real strength.
Mrs. CAROLINE H. DALL writes: It mitigates my regret in declining your invitation to remember that these are not the dark days of the cause.
Senator FOWLER, of Tenn., writes: It is not possible that the people who have so enlarged the boundaries of the political rights of another race just emerged from slavery, will fail to recognize the claims of the women of the United States to equal rights in all the relations of life.
WM. H. SYLVIS says: I am in favor of universal suffrage, universal amnesty, and universal liberty.
ABBY HOPPER GIBBONS says: My father, Isaac T. Hopper, was an advocate for woman and her work, he believed in her thoroughly.
His life long he was a.s.sociated with many of the best women of his day. With the help of good men, we shall ere long stand side by side with ballot in hand.
PAULINA WRIGHT DAVIS: If women are the only unrecognized cla.s.s as a part of the people, then woe to the nation! for there will be no n.o.ble mothers; frivolity, folly, and madness will seize them, for all inverted action of the faculties becomes intense in just the ratio of its earnestness.
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE writes: I am deeply interested in the work, and hopeful that a broader sphere is opening for woman, that as a cla.s.s they may be trained in early life more as men are in education and business.
Gen. OLIVER O. HOWARD answers: Please express to the Committee my thanks for the invitation. I should be pleased to accept, but a lecture engagement in the West will compel me to be absent from the city.
JAMES M. SCOVILL, of New Jersey, says: I deeply desire to come.
Go on in your great work. The Convention tells on the public mind.
GERRIT SMITH replies: I thank you for your invitation, though it is not in my power to attend the Convention. G.o.d hasten the day when the civil and political rights of woman shall be admitted to be equal to those of man.
SIMEON CORLEY, M.C., of South Carolina, writes: Having been an advocate of woman suffrage for a quarter of a century, I had the pleasure yesterday of enrolling my name and that of my wife on your list of delegates. To-day Hon. James H. Goss, M.C., of South Carolina, requested me to have you insert his name. I think you may safely count on the South Carolina delegation.
This Convention was the first public occasion when the women opposed to the XIV Amendment, measuring their logic with Republicans, Abolitionists, and colored men, ably maintained their position. The division of opinion was marked and earnest, and the debate was warm between Messrs. Dougla.s.s, Downing, Hinton, Dr. Purvis, and Edward M.
Davis on one side, and the ladies, with Robert Purvis[114] and Parker Pillsbury on the other. Edward M. Davis, the son-in-law of Lucretia Mott, was so hostile to the position of the women on the XIV Amendment that he refused to enroll his name as a member of the Convention.
Nevertheless, Mrs. Mott in the chair, allowed him to criticise most severely the resolutions and the position of those with whom she stood. She answered his attacks with her usual gentleness, and advocated the resolutions.[115] Robert Purvis, differing with his own son and other colored men, denounced their position with severity. Yet good feeling prevailed throughout, and the Convention adjourned in order and harmony.
The following objective view of the Convention, of the tone of the addresses, and the _personnel_ of the platform, from the pen of one of our distinguished literary women--Sarah Clarke Lippincott--will serve to show that the leaders in the suffrage movement were not the rude, uncultured women generally represented by the opposition, but in point of intelligence, refinement, appearance, and all the feminine virtues, far above the ordinary standard. For the honor of this grand reform, we record the compliments occasionally bestowed.