SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
FOUNDER OF THE FIRST WOMEN’S TEMPERANCE ORGANIZATION.
MONG the famous names of our time, history will, no doubt, record that of Susan B. Anthony with the greatest of reformers and progressive thinkers. Once held in derision, she now enjoys the reward of being esteemed and loved by her fellow men, while she is looked up to, by those of her own sex who believe in woman suffrage as one of the pioneers whose herculean efforts will eventually place the ballot in the hands of the women of the United States.
Miss Anthony was born in South Adams, Mass., February 15, 1820. She was brought up in New York under the most religious influence of a Baptist mother and a Quaker father. From her childhood her character has been strongly marked by individuality and native strength.
Mr. Anthony was a manufacturer and a wealthy man. He fitted his daughters and sons for teachers, and at the age of fifteen Susan began to teach in a Quaker family, her salary being one dollar per week and board. In 1837, a financial crash caused the failure of her father, who was, after this, aided in his efforts to retrieve his fortune by his children. Susan was particularly successful and progressive in her work, and identified herself actively with the New York Teachers’ Association, rendering herself conspicuous by pleading in the conventions for higher wages and equal rights for women in all the honors and responsibilities of the association. The women teachers throughout America owe her a debt of gratitude for their improved position and compensation to-day.
The subject of temperance also claimed Miss Anthony’s attention from the time of her childhood. In 1852, she organized the New York State Women’s Temperance Association, which was the first open temperance organization of women, and the foundation for the modern society known as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton was president, and Miss Anthony for several years secretary, of this first organization. It was in this work that Miss Anthony discovered the impotency of women to advance the cause of temperance without the ballot, and she at once became an ardent woman suffragist. She was also a pronounced and active abolitionist; and, during the war, with her friend and co-worker, Mrs. Stanton, and others, she presented a petition to Congress for the abolition of slavery, bearing nearly 400,000 signatures from all parts of the country. These petitions were so powerful in arousing the people, and also Congress, that Charles Sumner urged Miss Anthony to continue in the work. “Send on the petitions,” he wrote, “they furnish the only background for my demands.”
The most dramatic event of Miss Anthony’s life was her arrest and trial for voting at the presidential election of 1872. When asked by the judge, “You voted as a woman, did you not?” she replied, “No, sir, I voted as a citizen of the United States.” Before the date set for the trial Miss Anthony thoroughly canvassed her county and instructed the people in citizen’s rights, intending in this way to have the jurors, whoever they might be, well instructed in advance. To her chagrin change of venue was ordered to another county, setting the date three weeks ahead. Miss Anthony was equal to the emergency; in twenty-four hours dates were set and appointments made for a series of meetings in that county, and the country was thoroughly aroused in Miss Anthony’s behalf. The jury would no doubt have acquitted her, but the judge took the case out of their hands saying it was a question of law and not of fact, and pronounced Miss Anthony guilty and fined her $100.00 and costs. “I shall never pay a penny of this unjust claim,” she said. “Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” She intended to take the case to the Supreme Court, and further to help her cause did not desire to give bond, preferring to be imprisoned, but her counsel gave bond and thus frustrated her purpose of carrying it to the Supreme Court. The inspectors who received the ballot from her and her friends were fined and imprisoned, but were pardoned by President Grant. Miss Anthony steadfastly adhered to her vow and never paid the fine.
Miss Anthony has always been in great demand on the platform and has lectured in almost every city and hamlet in the North. She has made constitutional arguments before congressional committees and spoken impromptu in all sorts of places. Wherever a good word in introducing a speaker, or a short speech to awaken a convention, or a closing appeal to set people to work was needed she always knew how to say the right thing, and never wearied her audience. There was no hurry, no superfluity in her discourse, and it was equally devoid of sentiment or poetry. She was remarkably self-forgetful and devoted to the noblest principles. A fine sense of humor, however, pervaded her logical arguments. She had the happy faculty of disarming and winning her opponents. She possessed a most wonderful memory, carrying in her mind the legislative history of each state, the formation and progress of political parties, and the public history of prominent men in our national life, and in fact whatever has been done the world over to ameliorate the condition of women. She is said to be a most congenial and instructive companion, and her unfailing sympathy makes her as good a listener as talker.
It must be consolingly comforting and pleasant for this ardent worker, who has stemmed a violent tide of opposition throughout a long life, to have the tide of popular esteem turn so favorably toward her last years. Once it was the fashion of the press to ridicule and jeer, but at last the best reporters were sent to interview her and to put her sentiments before the world with the most respectful and laudatory personal comment. Society, too, threw open its doors, and into many distinguished gatherings she carried a refreshing breath of sincerity and earnestness. Her seventieth birthday was celebrated by the National Woman Suffrage Association with an outburst of gratitude which is perhaps unparalleled in the history of any living woman. In 1892 she was elected president of this association, at which time, though seventy-two years of age, she was still of undiminished vigor and activity. Standing at the head of this organization, of which she was forty years before among the founders, Susan B. Anthony is one of the most heroic figures in American history.
WOMAN’S RIGHT TO SUFFRAGE.
After its delivery, this address was printed and distributed in Monroe and Ontario counties prior to her trial, in June, 1873, the charge against her being that she had violated the law by voting in the presidential election in November, 1872. This address is necessarily argumentative; but it contains occasional passages which exhibit the power of her oratory.
Copied from an account of the trial published in Rochester, New York, 1874.
RIENDS AND FELLOW-CITIZENS: I stand before you to-night, under indictment for the alleged crime of having voted at the last Presidential election, without having a lawful right to vote. It shall be my work this evening to prove to you that in thus voting, I not only committed no crime, but, instead, simply exercised my citizen’s right, guaranteed to me and all United States citizens by the National Constitution, beyond the power of any State to deny.
The preamble of the federal constitution says:
“We, the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.”
It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people—women as well as men. And it is a downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government—the ballot.
The early journals of Congress show that when the committee reported to that body the original articles of confederation, the very first article which became the subject of discussion was that respecting equality of suffrage. Article IV. said:
“The better to secure and perpetuate mutual friendship and intercourse between the people of the different States of the Union, the free inhabitants of each of the States, (paupers, vagabonds and fugitives from justice excepted,) shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of the free citizens of the several States.”
Thus, at the very beginning, did the fathers see the necessity of the universal application of the great principle of equal rights to all—in order to produce the desired result—a harmonious union and a homogeneous people.
B. Gratz Brown, of Missouri, in the three days’ discussion in the United States Senate in 1866, on Senator Cowan’s motion to strike male from the District of Columbia suffrage bill, said:
“Mr. President, I say here on the floor of the American Senate, I stand for universal suffrage; and as a matter of fundamental principle, do not recognize the right of society to limit it on any ground of race or sex.”
Charles Sumner, in his brave protests against the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments, insisted that, so soon as by the thirteenth amendment the slaves became free men, the original powers of the United States Constitution guaranteed to them equal rights—the right to vote and to be voted for.
Article 1 of the New York State Constitution says:
“No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land or the judgment of his peers.”
And so carefully guarded is the citizen’s right to vote that the Constitution makes special mention of all who may be excluded. It says:
“Laws may be passed excluding from the right of suffrage all persons who have been or may be convicted of bribery, larceny or any infamous crime.”
“The law of the land” is the United States Constitution, and there is no provision in that document that can be fairly construed into a permission to the States to deprive any class of their citizens of their right to vote. Hence, New York can get no power from that source to disfranchise one entire half of her members. Nor has “the judgment of their peers” been pronounced against women exercising their right to vote; no disfranchised person is allowed to be judge or juror, and none but disfranchised persons can be women’s peers; nor has the Legislature passed laws excluding them on account of idiocy or lunacy; nor yet the courts convicted them of bribery, larceny or any infamous crime. Clearly, then, there is no constitutional ground for the exclusion of women from the ballot-box in the State of New York. No barriers whatever stand to-day between women and the exercise of their right to vote save those of precedent and prejudice.
For any State to make sex a qualification that must ever result in the disfranchisement of one entire half of the people is to pass a bill of attainder, or an ex post facto law, and is therefore a violation of the supreme law of the land. By it the blessings of liberty are forever withheld from women and their female posterity. To them this government has no just powers derived from the consent of the governed. To them this government is not a democracy. It is not a republic. It is an odious aristocracy; a hateful oligarchy of sex; the most hateful aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe; an oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor. An oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant, or even an oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex, which makes father, brothers, husband, sons the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household; which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects; carries dissension, discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.
Webster, Worcester and Bouvier all define a citizen to be a person, in the United States, entitled to vote and hold office.
Prior to the adoption of the thirteenth amendment, by which slavery was forever abolished, and black men transformed from property to persons, the judicial opinions of the country had always been in harmony with these definitions. To be a person was to be a citizen, and to be a citizen was to be a voter.
The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not. Being persons, then, women are citizens, and no State has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their [♦]privileges or immunities. Hence, every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is to-day null and void, precisely as is every one against negroes.
[♦] ‘priviliges’ replaced with ‘privileges’
