Everybody's burdens were laid upon Miss Anthony's shoulders. In looking over the mass of correspondence it seems as if each writer wanted something and looked to her to supply it. All expected her to take the lead, to do the planning, to bear the responsibility, and usually she was equal to the demand, but even her brave spirit could not resist an occasional groan on the pages of the diary. When a new accession to the ranks, from whom she expected great assistance, wrote, "I do not know how to plan but tell me what to do and I will obey," she says, "My heart sinks within me; so few seem to use their brain-power on ways and means." And again: "This drain of helpless women, able and willing to work but utterly ignorant of how to do it, wears me out body and soul." She was greatly distressed because so many of the younger women were frequently incapacitated by illness, and writes: "O, the weak-bodied girls of the present generation, they make me heart-sick!"
But never did the women themselves know of these feelings. To the younger ones she wrote: "Don't give up 'beat' at any of those places till I have dropped my plummet into them.... Your young shoulders will have to learn to bear the crotchets of all sorts of people and not bend or break under them.... Put all the blame on me; they may abuse me but not you.... It makes my heart ache every minute to see you so tired.... Vent all your ill-feelings on me but keep sweet as June roses to everybody else. It does not pay to lose your temper.... You will have to learn to let people pile injustice on you and then trust to time to right it all." If on rare occasions she spoke a word of censure, it was followed by a letter in the next mail, full of sorrow and repentance. She always signed herself, even in the darkest hours, "Yours with love and hope." Beautiful optimism, sublime courage!
Sunday, February 3, 1884, Miss Anthony read in the morning papers of the sudden death of Wendell Phillips. He had been to her always the one being without a peer, the purest, sweetest, best of men. The news overwhelmed her with grief and she wrote at once to Robert Purvis:
How cut down I am at the telegram, "Wendell Phillips is dead," and I know you are equally so. I hope you can go on to Boston to the funeral, and help tenderly to lay away that most precious human clay. Who shall say the fitting word for Wendell Phillips at this last hour as lovingly and beautifully as he has done so many, many times for the grand men and women who have gone before him? There seem none left but you and Parker Pillsbury to pour out your souls' dearest love in his memory. Would that I had the tongue of an angel and could go and bear my testimony to the grandeur of that noblest of God's works! I can think of no one who can rightly and fully estimate that glorious character. What a sad hour for his beloved wife! He said to me on my last visit: "My one wish has come to be that I may live to bury Ann." He doubtless knew of his impending disease of the heart. On whose shoulders will fall the mantle of Wendell Phillips? When will the children of men ever listen to such a matchless voice? How poor the world seems! In sorrow I am with you.
She could not stay away and, inclement as was the weather, went to Boston three days later to look for the last time upon the loved face.
At the request of many ladies in Washington the National Convention was held in March, instead of earlier in the winter, to avoid the social distractions which always precede the Lenten season. The ladies were pleasantly received by President Arthur.[19] This was an exceptionally brilliant convention, a noteworthy feature being the large number of letters containing the greetings of the distinguished men and women of Great Britain, whom Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton had met and interested during their trip abroad. The following was read from Matthew Simpson, senior bishop in the Methodist church, among his last public utterances, as he died a few months later:
For more than thirty years I have been in favor of suffrage for woman. I was led to this position, not by the consideration of the question of natural rights or of alleged injustice or of inequality before the law, but by what I believed would be her influence on the great moral questions of the day. Were the ballot in the hands of women, I am satisfied that the evils of intemperance would be greatly lessened; and I fear, without that ballot, we shall not succeed against the saloons and kindred evils in large cities. You will doubtless have many obstacles placed in your way; there will be many conflicts to sustain; but I have no doubt that the coming years will see the triumph of your cause, and that our higher civilization and morality will rejoice in the work which enlightened women will accomplish.[20]
Both Senate and House committees granted hearings, and eloquent addresses were made by delegates from many States. Miss Anthony said in part:
This is the fifteenth year we have appeared before Congress in person, and the nineteenth by petitions, asking national protection for women in the exercise of their right to vote. In the winter of 1865 and 1866 we sent your honorable body a ten-thousand prayer, asking you not to put "male" in the second section of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment; and again we appealed to you by thousands of petitions that you would add "sex" after "race or color" in the Fifteenth, but all to no avail. Then by an eighty-thousand petition in 1871 we demanded the enactment of a declaratory law that women had the right to vote under the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment. This, too, was denied us, not only by Congress but by the Supreme Court, which held that the framers of the amendment had only "colored men" in their thought, therefore none others could come within its purview. From 1876 to the present we have from year to year poured into Congress hundreds of thousands of petitions asking you to take the initiative step for another amendment which shall specifically prohibit the disfranchisement of women.
But, you say, why do you not go to your several States to secure this right? I answer, because we have neither the women nor the money to make the canvasses of the thirty-eight States, school district by school district, to educate each individual man out of the old belief that woman was created to be his subject. Four State legislatures submitted the question of striking "male" from their constitutions—Kansas, Michigan, Colorado and Nebraska—and we made the best canvass of each which was possible for a disfranchised class outside of all political help. Negro suffrage was again and again overwhelmingly voted down in various States; and you know, gentlemen, that if the negro had never had the ballot until the majority of white men, particularly the foreign born, had voted "yes," he would have gone without it until the crack of doom. It was because of this prejudice of the unthinking majority that Congress submitted the question of the negro's enfranchisement to the legislatures of the several States, to be adjudicated by the educated, broadened representatives of the people. We now appeal to you to lift the decision of our question from the vote of the populace to that of the legislatures, that thereby you may be as considerate and just to the women of this nation as you were to the freedmen.
Every new privilege granted to woman has been by the legislatures. The liberal laws for married women, the right of the wife to own and control her inherited property and separate earnings, the right of women to vote at school elections in a dozen States, full suffrage in two Territories, all have been gained through the legislatures. Had any one of these beneficent propositions been submitted to the vote of the rank and file do you believe a majority would have placed their sanction upon it? I do not; and I beg you, Mr. Chairman and gentlemen of the committee, that you will at once recommend to the House the submission of the proposition now before you, and thus place the decision of this great constitutional question of the right of one-half the people of this republic to a voice in the government, with the legislatures of the several States. You need not fear that our enfranchisement will come too suddenly or too soon by this method. After the proposition shall have passed Congress by the requisite two-thirds vote, it may require five, ten or twenty years to secure its ratification by the necessary three-fourths of the State legislatures; but, once submitted by Congress, it always will stand until ratified by the States.
It takes all too many of us women from our homes and from the works of charity and education in our respective localities, even to come to Washington, session after session, until Congress shall have submitted the proposition, and then to go from legislature to legislature, urging its adoption. But when you insist that we shall beg at the feet of each individual voter of every one of the States, native and foreign, black and white, learned and ignorant, you doom us to incalculable hardships and sacrifices, and to most exasperating insults and humiliations. I pray you to save us from the fate of waiting and working for our freedom until we shall have educated the ignorant masses of men to consent to give their wives and sisters equality of rights with themselves. You surely will not compel us to await the enlightenment of all the freedmen of this nation and the newly-made voters from the monarchial governments of the old world!
Liberty for one's self is a natural instinct possessed alike by all men, but to be willing to accord liberty to another is the result of education, of self-discipline, of the practice of the golden rule. Therefore we ask that the question of equality of rights to women shall be decided by the picked men of the nation in Congress, and the picked men of the several States in their respective legislatures.