MADAM: In redemption of my promise to tell you the fate of the woman's rights petition to our Legislature, I have the honor to inform you that it was virtually rejected, being laid on the table. I interested a distinguished member of our Senate in its presentation and, in addition, wrote a letter which under ordinary circumstances would have insured its respectful consideration. But after your petition was forwarded came the treasonable and murderous invasion of John Brown. The atrocity of this act, countenanced as it manifestly was by a great party at the North, has extinguished our last spark of fraternal feeling. Whilst we are all living under a Constitution which secures to us our right to our slaves, the results of which are in truth more beneficial to the whole North, and especially to the New England States, than to us, you are secretly plotting murderous inroads into our peaceful country and endeavoring to incite our slaves to cut the throats of our wives and children. Can you believe that this state of things can last? We now look upon you as our worst enemies and are ready to separate from you. Measures are in progress as far as practicable to establish non-intercourse with you and to proscribe all articles of northern manufacture or origin, including New England teachers. We can live without you; it remains to be seen how you will get along without us. You will probably find that fanaticism is not an element of national wealth or conducive to the happiness or comfort of the people.
In conclusion, let me assure you this is written more in sorrow than in anger. I am not a politician and have always been a strenuous friend of the Union. I am now in favor of a separation, unless you immediately retrace your steps and give the necessary guarantees by the passage of appropriate laws that you will faithfully abide by the compromises of the Constitution, by which alone the slaveholding States can with honor or safety remain in the Union. But that this will be done, I have very little hope, as "madness seems to rule the hour;" and as you have thus constituted yourselves our enemies, you must not be surprised at finding that we are yours.
[26] A critic said of this: "It is the most faultless presentation of the question to which I have listened. Mr. Curtis takes the broadest view of the subject, his logic in its sweep is convincing as demonstration itself. His satire is cutting, but not bitter; his wit keen as a Damascus blade. He came out bravely for the suffrage." For forty years the advocates of equal rights have been using this lecture as one of their strongest documents.
[27] By an odd coincidence, while this chapter was being written a letter came to Miss Anthony from Dean M. Jenkins, of Detroit, which said: "Enclosed please find my check to help on the good work to which you have devoted your life. You see I have almost pardoned you for saying, 'I have never quite forgiven you for marrying Helen Philleo and taking her away from the suffrage work.' In place of one worker you now have four. Mrs. Jenkins made a convert of me. Our daughter, Mrs. Spalding, is as earnest a worker for the suffrage cause as her mother, and our son is a defender of his mother's principles...."
[28] He had become temporarily insane on account of the persecution he suffered in connection with the John Brown raid.
CHAPTER XII.
RIFT IN COMMON LAW—DIVORCE QUESTION.
1860.
During the first decade of its history the movement toward securing a larger liberty for women was known by the comprehensive term "woman's rights." At its inception, under the English common law which everywhere prevailed, woman was legally a part of man's belongings, one of his chattels. Restrained by custom from speaking in public or expressing herself through the newspapers, she had been silent under the oppression of ages. When at length she found her voice there were so many wrongs to be righted that she scarcely knew which first should receive attention. Those early meetings could not be called woman suffrage conventions, for many who advocated all the other reforms which they considered either disbelieved in or were indifferent to the franchise. It was only the Anthonys, Stantons, Stones, Roses, Garrisons, Phillips of this great movement for woman's liberty who were philosophical enough to see that the right of suffrage was the underlying principle of the whole question; so it was not for many years, not until practically all other demands had been granted, that they were finally resolved into a suffrage organization, pure and simple. At the beginning of 1860 the laws relating to women, as briefly stated by the great jurist, David Dudley Field, were as follows: