At Bloomington, when I had presented its merits in contrast with existing legal provisions, a venerable man in the audience rose and remarked that the Hon. James H. Lane, in addressing them a few days before, denied that the provision regarding Common Schools meant anything more than equal educational privileges, and that the Courts would so decide. That it would never do to allow women to vote, for only vile women would go to the polls. And now, added the old gentleman, "I would like to hear what Mrs. Nichols has to say on this point?" Taking counsel only of my indignation, I replied: "Mrs. Nichols has to say, that vile men who seek out vile women elsewhere, may better meet them at the polls under the eyes of good men and good women:" and dropped into my seat 'mid a perfect storm of applause, in which women joined as heartily as men.
Policy restrained the few Republican members who had voted against the provisions[24] from open opposition, and the more that everywhere Democrats, whom I appealed to as "friends in political disguise," treated me with marked courtesy; often contributing to my expenses. One such remarked, "There, Mrs. Nichols, is a Democratic half-dollar; I like your Woman's Rights."
At Troy, Don. Co., sitting behind the closed shutters of an open window, I heard outside a debate between Republicans and Democrats. One of the latter, an ex-Secretary of the Territory, at one time acting Governor, and a member of the Constitutional Convention, who had dwelt much on the superior prerogatives of the Anglo-Saxon race, was saying, "You go for political equality with the negro; we Democrats won't stand that, it would demoralize the white man." On my way to lecture in the evening, a friend forewarned me that the ex-Secretary, with two or three of his political stripe, had engaged a shrewd Democratic lawyer, by getting him half drunk, to reply to me. So when in my concluding appeal I turned as usual to the Democrats, I narrated the above incident and bowed smilingly to the ex-Secretary, with whom I was acquainted, and said, "Gentlemen who turn up their 'Anglo-Saxon' noses at the idea of 'political equality with the negro,' as demoralizing to the white man, forget that in all these years the white woman has been 'on a political equality with the negro'; they forget, that in keeping their own mothers, wives and daughters in the negro pew, to save them from demoralization by political equality with the white man, they are paying themselves a sorry compliment." The drunken lawyer was quietly hustled out by his friends, the Democrats themselves joining the audience in expressions of respect at the close of my lecture. But these from hundreds of telling incidents must suffice to initiate you in the spirit of that ever memorable campaign.
In 1854, when I was about leaving Vermont for Kansas, an earnest friend of our cause protested that I was "going to bury myself in Kansas, just as I had won an influence and awakened a public sentiment that assured the success of our demand for equal rights." I replied that it was a thousand times more difficult to procure the repeal of unjust laws in an old State, than the adoption of just laws in the organization of a new State. That I could accomplish more for woman, even the women of the old States, and with less effort, in the new State of Kansas, than I could in conservative old Vermont, whose prejudices were so much stronger than its convictions, that justice to women must stand a criminal trial in every Court of the State to win, and then pay the costs.
My husband went to Kansas for a milder climate; my sons to make homes under conditions better suited than the old States to their tastes and means. I went to work for a Government of "equality, liberty, fraternity," in the State to be.
I had learned from my experience with the legal fraternity, that as a profession they were dead-weights on our demands, and the reason why. When pressed to logical conclusions, which they were always quick to see, and in fair proportion to admit, were in our favor, they almost invariably retreated under the plea that the reforms we asked "being fundamental, would destroy the harmony of the statutes!" And I had come to the conclusion that it would cost more time and effort to disrupt the woman's "disabilities" attachment from the legal and political harmonicons of the old States, than it would to secure vantage ground for legal and political equality in the new. I believed then and believe now that Woman Suffrage would have received a majority vote in Kansas if it could have been submitted unembarrassed by the possibility of its being made a pretext for keeping Kansas out of the Union. And but for Judge Kingman, I believe it would have received the vote of a majority in convention. He played upon the old harmonicon, "organic law," and "the harmony of the statutes."
My pleas before the Constitutional Convention and the people, were for equal legal and political rights for women. In detail I asked:
1st. Equal educational rights and privileges in all the schools and institutions of learning fostered or controlled by the State.
2d. An equal right in all matters pertaining to the organization and conduct of the Common Schools.