The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2) / Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years

by Ida Husted Harper

To the Senate and House of Representatives:

We already have presented to your honorable body during this session many petitions asking the enfranchisement of women; and now, from our national convention, we again make our appeal and urge you to lay no hand on that "pyramid of rights," the Constitution of the Fathers, unless to add glory to its height and strength to its foundation.

We will not rehearse the oft-repeated arguments on the natural rights of every citizen, pressed as they have been on the nation's conscience for the last thirty years in securing freedom for the black race, and so grandly echoed on the floor of Congress during the past winter. We can not add one line or precept to the comprehensive speech recently made by Charles Sumner in the Senate, to prove that "no just government can be formed without the consent of the governed;" to prove the dignity, the education, the power, the necessity, the salvation of the ballot in the hand of every man and woman; to prove that a just government and a true church rest alike on the sacred rights of the individual.

As you are familiar with Sumner's speech on "Equal Rights to All," so convincing in facts, so clear in philosophy, and so elaborate in quotations from the great minds of the past, without reproducing the chain of argument, permit us to call your attention to a few of its unanswerable assertions regarding the ballot:

I plead now for the ballot, as the great guarantee, and the only sufficient guarantee—being in itself peacemaker, reconciler, schoolmaster and protector—to which we are bound by every necessity and every reason; and I speak also for the good of the States lately in rebellion, as well as for the glory and safety of the republic, that it may be an example to mankind.

Ay, sir, the ballot is the Columbiad of our political life, and every citizen who has it is a full-armed Monitor.

The ballot is schoolmaster. Reading and writing are of inestimable value, but the ballot teaches what these can not teach.

Plutarch records that the wise man of Athens charmed the people by saying that equality causes no war, and "both the rich and the poor repeated it."

The ballot is like charity, which never faileth, and without which man is only as sounding brass or a tinkling cymbal. The ballot is the one thing needful, without which rights of testimony and all other rights will be no better than cobwebs which the master will break through with impunity. To him who has the ballot all other things shall be given—protection, opportunity, education, a homestead. The ballot is like the horn of abundance, out of which overflow rights of every kind, with corn, cotton, rice and all the fruits of the earth. Or, better still, it is like the hand of the body, without which man, who is now only a little lower than the angels, must have continued only a little above the brutes. They are fearfully and wonderfully made; but as is the hand in the work of civilization, so is the ballot in the work of government. "Give me the ballot, and I can move the world."

Do you wish to see harmony truly prevail, so that industry, society, government, civilization, may all prosper, and the republic may wear a crown of true greatness? Then do not neglect the ballot.

Lamartine said, "Universal suffrage is the first truth and only basis of every national republic."

In regard to "taxation without representation," Mr. Sumner quotes from Lord Coke:

The supreme power can not take from any man any part of his property without consent in person or by representation.

Taxes are not to be laid on the people, but by their consent in person or by representation.

I can see no reason to doubt but that the imposition of taxes, whether on trade, or on land or houses or ships, or real or personal, fixed or floating property in the colonies, is absolutely irreconcilable with the rights of the colonies, as British subjects and as men. I say men, for in a state of nature no man can take any property from me without my consent. If he does, he deprives me of my liberty and makes me a slave. The very act of taxing, exercised over those who are not represented, appears to me to deprive them of one of their most essential rights as freemen, and if continued seems to be in effect an entire disfranchisement of every civil right. For what one civil right is worth a rush, after a man's property is subject to be taken from him at pleasure without his consent?

In demanding suffrage for the black man you recognize the fact that, as a freedman, he is no longer a "part of the family," and that therefore his master is no longer his representative; hence, as he will now be liable to taxation, he must also have representation. Woman, on the contrary, has never been such a "part of the family" as to escape taxation. Although there has been no formal proclamation giving her an individual existence, the single woman always has had the right to property and wages, the right to make contracts and do business in her own name. And even married women, by recent legislation, have been secured in these civil rights. Woman now holds a vast amount of the property in the country and pays her full proportion of taxes, revenue included. On what principle, then, do you deny her representation? By what process of reasoning was Charles Sumner able to stand up in the Senate, a few days after these sublime utterances, and rebuke 15,000,000 disfranchised tax-payers for the exercise of their mere right of petition? If he felt that this was not the time for woman even to mention her right to representation, why did he not, in some of his splendid sentences, propose to release the wage-earning and property-owning women from the tyranny of taxation?

We propose no new theories. We simply ask that you secure the practical application of the immutable principles of our government to all, without distinction of race, color or sex. And we urge our demand now, because you have now the opportunity and the power to take this onward step in legislation. The nations of the earth stand watching and waiting to see if our Revolutionary idea, "all men are created equal," can be realized in government. Crush not, we pray you, the myriad hopes which hang on our success. Peril not this nation with another bloody war. Men and parties must pass away, but justice is eternal; and only they who work in harmony with its laws are immortal. All who have carefully contrasted the speeches of this Congress with those made under the old regime of slavery, must have seen the added power and eloquence which greater freedom gives. But still you propose no action on your grand ideas. Your joint resolutions, your reconstruction reports, do not reflect your highest thought.

The Constitution, as it stands, in basing representation on "respective numbers" covers a broader ground than any you have yet proposed. Is not the only amendment needed to Article 1, Section 3, to strike out the exceptions which follow "respective numbers?" And is it not your duty, by securing a republican form of government to every State, to see that these "respective numbers" are made up of enfranchised citizens, thus bringing your legislation up to the Constitution—not the Constitution down to your party possibilities? The only tenable ground of representation is universal suffrage, as it is only through universal suffrage that the principle of "equal rights to all" can be realized. All prohibitions based on race, color, sex, property or education are violations of the republican idea; and the various qualifications now proposed are but so many plausible pretexts to debar new classes from the ballot-box. The limitations of property and intelligence, though unfair, can be met; as with freedom must come the repeal of statute laws that deny schools and wages to the negro, and time will make him a voter. But color and sex! Neither time nor statutes can make black, white, or woman, man! You assume to be the representatives of 15,000,000 women—American citizens—who already possess every attainable qualification for the ballot. Women read and write, hold many offices under government, pay taxes and suffer the penalties of crime, and yet are denied individual representation.