The great success of this convention was due in large measure to the excellent arrangements made by the friends in Minneapolis, especially Dr. Ripley and Mrs. Martha A. Dorsett.
The association sent two delegates, Henry B. Blackwell and the Rev. Anna H. Shaw, to Washington, to urge upon the House Committee the duty of Congress to establish equal suffrage in the Territories. They were given a respectful hearing.
1886.—The Eighteenth annual meeting was held in Topeka, Kan., October 26-28. The morning and afternoon sessions were held in Music Hall. Above the platform hung the beautiful banner of the Minnesota W. S. A., sent by Dr. Martha G. Ripley, and at its side was a package of 7,000 leaflets for distribution contributed by Mrs. Cornelia C. Hussey of New Jersey, which were gladly taken for use in different States. The evening meetings assembled in the Hall of the House of Representatives, seating 1,200 persons; the floor and both galleries were crowded with the best citizens of Topeka; all the desks were taken out, making room for more chairs, and even then hundreds of people were turned away. Both halls were given free.
All the preparations had been admirably made by Mrs. Juliet N. Martin, Miss Olive P. Bray, Mrs. S. A. Thurston and other Topeka women, who had a collation spread in Music Hall for the delegates on their arrival. The press gave full and cordial reports. Lucy Stone wrote in the Woman's Journal:
We found the editors of the four daily papers all suffragists. Among these was Major J. K. Hudson, who took his first lessons in equal rights on the Anti-Slavery Bugle in Ohio and, reared among "Friends," was ready to continue the good service he has all along rendered. Here, too, we found our old co-worker, William P. Tomlinson, who at one time published the Anti-Slavery Standard for Wendell Phillips and the American Anti-Slavery Society, and who a little later, in his young prime, devoted his time, his money and his strength to the publication of the Woman's Advocate in New York, of which he was proprietor and editor. He is now editor of the Topeka Daily Democrat. Mr. B. P. Baker, now editor and proprietor of the Commonwealth, did good service to the woman suffrage cause in 1867 in the Topeka Record. Mr. McLennan, of the Journal, is also with us.
The whole convention was interspersed with ringing reminiscences of the heroic early history of Kansas. Mrs. S. N. Wood, who in the Border Ruffian days went through the enemy's lines and at great personal peril brought into beleaguered Lawrence the ammunition which enabled it to defend itself, came to the platform to add her good word for equal suffrage. It was a great pleasure to the officers of the association to meet her and the other early Kansas workers, many of whom, like Mrs. J. H. Slocum, of Emporia, were old personal friends.
Mrs. Anna C. Wait, president of the Kansas W. S. A. and editor of the Lincoln Beacon, gave the address of welcome in behalf of the suffragists. Referring to the first campaign for a woman suffrage amendment in 1867, when Lucy Stone and Henry B. Blackwell spoke in forty-two counties of Kansas, Mrs. Wait said: "Nineteen years ago when you came to Kansas you found no suffrage societies and even seven years ago you would have found none. To-day, in behalf of the State W. S. A. and its many flourishing auxiliaries, I welcome these dear friends who come to us from the rock-ribbed shores of the Atlantic, from the coast of the Pacific, from the lakes of the North and from the sunny South, a veritable gathering of the clans of freedom."
Major Hudson, in his address of welcome in behalf of the city, reviewed the history of woman suffrage in Kansas, paid a tribute to the work of the pioneer suffragists, and said:
We welcome you to Kansas, because it has been good battle-ground for the right.... We place the ballot in the hands of the foreigner who can not read or speak our language, and who knows nothing of our government; we enfranchised a slave race, most of whom can not read; and yet we deny to the women of America the ballot, which in their hands would be the strongest protection of this republic against the ignorance and vice of the great centers of our population. Give to woman the ballot, and you give her equal pay with men for the same work; you break down prejudice and open to her every vocation in which she is competent to engage; you do more—you give her an individuality, and equal right in life.
The president, the Hon. William Dudley Foulke, in his response to the welcome of the suffrage association said: "It gives us great pleasure to visit your beautiful city and fertile State. It gives us pleasure not because your State is fertile and your city beautiful but because it is in these Western States that there is most hope of the growth of the woman suffrage movement. The older States are what old age is in the human frame, something that is difficult to change; but where there is young blood there is hope and the progress of a new idea is more rapid."