July 22, 1869.
Fifteenth Amendment—Its Ludicrous Side.—Almost every question has its ludicrous side. The champions of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution present an illustration. Conceding woman's equal right to the ballot with man, they still resist her claims on the ground that this is not her hour, but man's hour. "The black man's hour." As though justice and right were determined by clocks and almanacs. And as though some sort of terrible crisis could not be urged always. Admitting even that in fitness for the franchise, the white women, especially of the North, are eminently superior to the average of Southern men, of any color, they still demand that woman's claim be postponed to their favorite Fifteenth Amendment, which presumes every man in the nation of whatever color, grade, or race, the superior of woman, however exalted by culture, by wealth, by refinement, by patriotism, or whatever virtues, gifts, or graces. An Amendment, it is called, while preparing the way to lift into lordship absolute, every man, however mean and vile, over every woman, however divine her character!
And then these "Amenders" presume to charge with "selfishness," "ignorance," "conservatism," and nobody knows what else, those who are laboring night and day, in season, out of season, and at all seasons, under a banner on which was inscribed at the formation of their Association, "Equal Rights to all citizens; especially the Right of Suffrage, irrespective of Race, Color or Sex." Without pretending that the Association, or any of its members, has violated, in letter or in spirit, a word of this constitutional pledge, leading Abolitionists are charging "injustice," "insincerity," and "treachery to the cause of liberty," on actors in the Equal Rights Association, besides ignorance, selfishness, and conservatism, because they will not turn aside from their holy purpose to promote a measure that basely, grossly insults one-half, and that the best half of the human race. Were the subject not too serious for mirth, such accusations, coming from such a source, would be simply ludicrous. As it is, many will laugh at such absurdity. The Fifteenth Amendment, at best, is but a trick, a device (as was the Fourteenth with its word male three times burned into a single period), of as corrupt and unprincipled a school of politicians as ever disgraced the name of legislation, to save themselves and their party in place and power. It is told us in all seriousness, that the word male is not in the Fifteenth Amendment, as though that atoned for its infamy, and rendered it worthy of woman's support. Why should the word male be in it? Three times solemnly muttered in the Fourteenth, it needed no repetition in the Fifteenth.
Another ludicrous view of this subject, is the zeal with which so many women are laboring to hoist all mandom into power over them. Power as omnipotent as ignorance, prejudice, and love of domination can possibly create. A little reflection, one would think, might show and satisfy the blindest that the opposition they encounter already is quite sufficient, without augmenting it a thousand fold, and anchoring it fast in the constitution of the country. True, they are assured by radical Republicans that as soon as the negro man is secured, the colored woman and the white woman also shall be equally distinguished. Had this age an Æsop, he would tell again his story of the goat and the fox at the bottom of the well. How to get out, of course, was the question. After long and anxious thought, a happy expedient struck the fox. "Do you, friend goat, rear yourself up against the wall, as near the top as possible, and from the tip of your horns I can spring out, and then it will be quite easy to pull you up by the horns also." No quicker spoken than done. Out leaped the fox, and was safe. Then the goat demanded his release, as promised. "You old fool!" answered Reynard! "Had you half as much brain as beard, you would know that I would never risk my life to save yours," and away he ran. The whole history of American politics is assurance, but pre-eminently so is the history of present parties, that a party victory would scarcely be risked to save all womankind from consuming fire. A very few such elections as the late one in Virginia, would subdue immensely the present Republican ardor on the colored man's rights.
But most ludicrous of all is it to hear old anti-slavery leaders and teachers referring to the past for defense of their present hostility, and challenging us to re-read that history and be ashamed of our present course. But when in the past did Wendell Phillips ever teach that a half loaf is better than no bread, if poisoned, or if it were snatched or stolen from a family of starving orphans? It was not in 1839, nor '49, nor '59, that he held or inculcated such a philosophy. The motto of the Anti-Slavery Standard was and is "Without Concealment—Without Compromise." Now under that sublime evangel women are instructed to bridge over the gulf to colored male enfranchisement with their own imperiled, nay, sacrificed equal rights. Better now the "half loaf," festering, putrid with the poison of compromise, than no bread! Better that the black man have his half loaf, though he steal it from his mother and sisters, more hungry, starving, and dying, than himself!
Oh, no! it was never so in the past. Terrible to conservatism as to slavery itself, was the mighty war-cry of the Abolitionists for twenty years. "No union with slaveholders!" No compromise with injustice for an election, or for an hour, not even for a good ultimate purpose! Colonization proposed a double purpose, the final extinction of slavery, and a meanwhile redemption of Africa from the midnight gloom and horror of heathenism. "Get thee behind me, Satan," was the thundering response and just rebuke of it by the Abolitionists! "Let us compromise with the South, and buy up their slaves," said Elihu Burritt and his overgrown mushroom convention, at Cleveland. "Our curse on your slave trade, foreign and domestic," was the answering response of the Garrisonian Invincibles. Many of the oldest leaders and officers of the society refused even to help an escaped slave-mother buy her children of her old master. "Let us form a Republican party," said foxy politicians, and fight the extension of slavery into Kansas, or any other new territory with ballot, bullet, and battle-axe, if need be, but leaving the damnable system in the States with its 4,000,000 of victims and their posterity still chained under constitutional guarantee and the army and navy of the nation. "No union with slaveholders," rung out the lips and lungs of the Abolitionists, in tones that shook the land from Maine to Mexico! "Fremont and Jessie" harnessed by constitutional compromise to the Juggernaut car of slavery, were not to be preferred by them to Beelzebub Buchanan himself. "No union with slave-holders," though Gabriel were candidate and chief captain of their hosts!
Now what do we behold? Wendell Phillips has shivered the English language all to pieces in attempts to describe the baseness and utter worthlessness of the Republican party. The president has sold "the poisonous porridge called his soul," to Virginia rebels and New York and Pennsylvania aristocrats and bondholders, and yet Mr. Phillips persists in demanding that woman lay her own right of suffrage at the presidential and Republican party feet, while they so mould and manipulate the black male element, as by it, if possible, to save themselves from utter rout and destruction. Thanks be to God, some of us learned the old anti-slavery lesson from Wendell Phillips better. And we dare take our appeal from the Wendell Phillips of to-day, to him of twenty years ago. And we do "dare to look our past history in the face." And moreover, we look with triumph, and with hearts swelling with fervent gratitude that our anti-slavery teachers schooled us so well. What is it but ludicrous (if mirth be possible on such a question) for those who are thus seeking the enfranchisement of but half of even the fragmentary colored race, to charge with selfishness, compromise, and treachery, the association, or any of its members, that are earnestly laboring to extend the ballot to every American citizen, irrespective of all distinctions of race, complexion or sex? Can such accusers look each other in the face and not laugh? Cato wondered that two augurs could meet with gravity. What would he do here? And still more preposterous, if not ludicrous, is it, when woman voluntarily stops and becomes the agent of her own degradation, and with her own hands builds barriers against her own advancement; piling up opposition, Pelion upon Ossa, when the majority against her, even in New York and New England, is already appalling? And then for us to be referred to the teachings and experiences of the past for lessons in compromise, cold, calculating compromise, such as Abolitionists ever blasted with the breath of their nostrils, and scourged from their presence with fiery indignation! The Equal Rights Association is not to be turned aside by any seductive devices from its high and holy purpose of enfranchisement for all American citizens, knowing no race, no color, no sex.
P. P.
Oct. 7, 1869.
Dear Revolution:—Pardon a few plain words from an earnest friend of human suffrage.
Your course opposing the Fifteenth Amendment and Political (combined with moral) Temperance action, seems to me absolutely suicidal, and must and will logically leave you to the tender mercies of negro-drivers or haters and rumsellers and their sympathizers. How much human suffrage can hope for at their hands, judge ye!
J. K. Phœnix.
P. S.—To say I am utterly astonished and grieved at The Revolution therein but feebly expresses my feelings. But we shall see what you will effect by it.
The Revolution criticises, "opposes," the fifteenth amendment, not for what it is, but for what it is not. Not because it enfranchises black men, but because it does not enfranchise all women, black and white. It is not the little good it proposes, but the greater evil it perpetuates that we deprecate. It is not that in the abstract we do not rejoice that black men are to become the equals of white men, but that we deplore the fact that two millions black women, hitherto the political and social equals of the men by their side, are to become subjects, slaves of these men. Our protest is not that all men are lifted out of the degradation of disfranchisement, but that all women are left in. The Revolution and the National Woman's Suffrage Association make woman's suffrage their test of loyalty, not negro suffrage, not Maine law or prohibition. Do you believe women should vote? is the one and only question in our catechism.
In this period of reconstruction the Woman Suffrage Associations sent their first delegates to National political conventions. The appointment of Susan B. Anthony to the Democratic Presidential Convention was a new and unlooked-for sensation.
The Revolution, New York, July 9, 1868.
Susan B. Anthony in Tammany Hall.—Our readers will remember, some time ago, it was announced in all the daily journals that Susan B. Anthony was appointed a delegate to the Democratic Convention, to represent the woman's suffrage movement in this country. She accordingly applied by letter for a hearing in the Convention. Her letter was presented to the Convention by the President, ex-Governor Horatio Seymour, read by the clerk in a loud, clear voice, received a most respectful and enthusiastic hearing, and was referred to the Committee on Resolutions.
As our readers would, no doubt, like to know what radical doctrines the Democratic party are now sufficiently developed to applaud, we give the letter below. Let no one say that our devotion to the education of this party for the last four years has been in vain:
Woman's Suffrage Association, 37 Park Row, }
Room 20, New York, July 4, 1868. }Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mrs. Horace Greeley, } Central Com.
Susan B. Anthony, Abby Hopper Gibbons, }To the President and Members of the National Democratic Convention:
Gentlemen:—I address you by letter to ask the privilege of appearing before you during the sittings of this Convention, to demand the enfranchisement of the women of America, the only class of citizens wholly unrepresented in the Government, the only class (not guilty of crime) taxed without representation, tried without a jury of their peers, governed without their consent. And yet in this class are found many of your most noble, virtuous, law-abiding citizens, who possess all the requisite qualifications of voters. Women have property and education. We are not "idiots, lunatics, paupers, criminals, rebels," nor do we "bet on elections." We lack, according to your constitutions, but one qualification—that of sex—which is insurmountable, and, therefore, equivalent to a deprivation of the suffrage; in other words, the "tyranny of taxation without representation."
We desire to lay before you this violation of the great fundamental principle of our Government for your serious consideration, knowing that minorities can be moved by principles as majorities are only by votes. Hence we look to you for the initiative step in the redress of our grievances.
The party in power have not only failed to heed our innumerable petitions, asking the right of suffrage, poured into Congress and State Legislatures, but they have submitted a proposition to the several States to insert the word "male" in the Federal Constitution, where it has never been, and thereby put up a new barrier against the enfranchisement of woman. This fresh insult to the women of the Republic, who so bravely shared the dangers and sacrifices of the late war, has roused us to more earnest and persistent efforts to secure those rights, privileges, and immunities that belong to every citizen under Government. As you hold the Constitution of the fathers to be a sacred legacy to us and our children forever, we ask you to save it from this desecration, which deprives one-half our citizens of the right of representation in the Government. Over this base proposition the nation has stood silent and indifferent. While the dominant party has with one hand lifted up two million black men and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship, with the other it has dethroned fifteen million white women—their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters—and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood.
We appeal to you, not only because you, being in a minority, are in a position to consider principles, but because you have been the party heretofore to extend the suffrage. It was the Democratic party that fought most valiantly for the removal of the "property qualification" from all white men, and thereby placed the poorest ditch-digger on a political level with the proudest millionaire. This one act of justice to workingmen has perpetuated your power, with but few interruptions, from that time until the war. And now you have an opportunity to confer a similar boon on the women of the country, and thus possess yourselves of a new talisman that will insure and perpetuate your political power for decades to come.
While the first and highest motive we would urge on you, is the recognition in all your action of the great principles of justice and equality that are the foundation of a republican government, it is not unworthy to remind you that the party that takes this onward step will reap its just reward. It needs but little observation to see that the tide of progress in all countries is setting toward the enfranchisement of woman, and that this advance step in civilization is destined to be taken in our day.
We conjure you, then, to turn from the dead questions of the past to the vital issues of the hour. The brute form of slavery ended with the war. The black man is a soldier and a citizen. He holds the bullet and the ballot in his own right hand. Consider his case settled. Those weapons of defense and self-protection can never be wrenched from him. Yours the responsibility now to see that no new chains be forged by bondholders and monopolists for enslaving the labor of the country.
The late war, seemingly in the interest of slavery, was fought by unseen hands for the larger liberties of the whole people. It was not a war between North and South, for the principle of class and caste knows neither latitude or longitude. It was a war of ideas—of Aristocracy and Democracy—of Capital and Labor—the same that has convulsed the race through the ages, and will continue to convulse future generations, until Justice and Equality shall reign upon the earth.
I desire, therefore, an opportunity to urge on this Convention the wisdom of basing its platform on universal suffrage as well as universal amnesty, from Maine to California, and thus take the first step toward a peaceful and permanent reconstruction.
In behalf of the Woman's Suffrage Association,
Susan B. Anthony.
Respectfully yours,
The comments of the daily city press[110] on this "innovation" were as varied as amusing. During the reading of this document, several members of the Equal Rights Association occupied conspicuous seats in the Convention. This was the first time in the history of that party that any effort had been made to secure the attendance of their mothers, wives, and daughters. But observing that women had been an element of enthusiasm in Republican meetings all through the war and the period of reconstruction, and seeing the improved tone and manner their presence had given to the speeches, and the general conduct of the proceedings, it was thought best to secure the same influence henceforth in Democratic conventions. The attempt at this time was quite satisfactory and successful. A large number of handsomely-dressed ladies helped to swell the immense audience that assembled in Tammany Hall, one of the most spacious and elegant auditoriums in the city, to be dedicated on that day, July 4th, 1868, to Democratic principles.
As there were strong hopes that that party was about to take some new departure; some onward step; even to nominate for their leader so radical a man as Salmon P. Chase, a large number of Radicals and Liberals were present. Had the Democrats made that nomination, and put a woman suffrage plank in their platform, they would probably have carried the election. But they timidly clung to their old moorings, nominated a man who had an unpopular war record, and submitted a platform without one vital principle with which to rouse the enthusiasm of the people.
Thus was the movement inaugurated of sending women as delegates to both Republican and Democratic Presidential conventions, giving rise to the agitation of the suffrage question on new platforms. With what success the example has been followed, the records from time to time fully show.
FOOTNOTES:
[108] Going over to the Copperheads.—As we have received several letters from radical friends, warning us that we are going over to the copperheads, for their comfort and instruction we will state some part of our political creed.