[168] Mrs. Frances Fort Brown of Nashville left a bequest of $3,000 to the National American Woman Suffrage Association and its board of officers appropriated enough of it to pay the expenses of this suit.
[169] The History is indebted for this chapter to Mrs. Margaret Ervin Ford, president of the State Equal Suffrage Association.
[170] Mrs. C. B. Allen organized the Memphis Woman's Party within the State Association and became its president and Mrs. Ford organized it in Chattanooga with over 400 members, was elected president and ward organization started there. Nashville had the first through ward organization, due to Miss Matilda Porter.
[171] The lists of the many officers of the association during the years are unavoidably too imperfect to be used without doing injustice to those omitted. In Mrs. Ford's strong desire to give full credit to all the men and women who were actively connected with the work for woman suffrage in Tennessee she sent lists so long that the lack of space made it absolutely necessary to omit them.—Ed.
[172] The gold pen used by Governor Roberts in signing the bill was one used by Dr. John W. Wester when drafting the first anti-liquor bill ever introduced in the Tennessee Legislature, in December, 1841. With it also Governor Rye signed the Lookout Mountain Suffrage Bill. It belongs to Mrs. Ford, grand-daughter of Dr. Wester.
[173] Anti-suffragists from all over the State bombarded Governor Roberts with threats of defeat for reelection should he persist in pushing ratification, many of whom were his strongest friends and supporters. At the special elections during the summer held to fill vacancies in the Legislature several suffragists were elected, among them M. H. Copenhaver, who took the seat of Senator J. Parks Worley, arch enemy of suffrage. T. K. Riddick, a prominent lawyer, made the race in order to lead the fight for ratification in the House. Representative J. Frank Griffin made a flying trip from San Francisco to cast his vote for it.
[174] Mrs. Catt, Mrs. Upton and Miss Shuler did no lobbying in the State House.
[175] After Mrs. Catt returned to New York she said: "Never in the history of politics has there been such a nefarious lobby as labored to block the ratification in Nashville. In the short time that I spent in the capital I was more maligned, more lied about, than in the thirty previous years I worked for suffrage. I was flooded with anonymous letters, vulgar, ignorant, insane. Strange men and groups of men sprang up, men we had never met before in the battle. Who were they? We were told, this is the railroad lobby, this is the steel lobby, these are the manufacturers' lobbyists, this is the remnant of the old whiskey ring. Even tricksters from the U. S. Revenue Service were there operating against us, until the President of the United States called them off.... They appropriated our telegrams, tapped our telephones, listened outside our windows and transoms. They attacked our private and public lives. I had heard of the 'invisible government.' Well, I have seen it work and I have seen it sent into oblivion."
[176] Burn's vote so angered the opposition that they attempted to fasten a charge of bribery on him. On a point of personal privilege he made a statement to the House which was spread upon the Journal. After indignantly denying the charge he said: "I changed my vote in favor of ratification because I believe in full suffrage as a right; I believe we had a moral and legal right to ratify; I know that a mother's advice is always safest for her boy to follow and my mother wanted me to vote for ratification. I appreciated the fact that an opportunity such as seldom comes to mortal man—to free 17,000,000 women from political slavery—was mine. I desired that my party in both State and Nation might say it was a Republican from the mountains of East Tennessee, purest Anglo-Saxon section in the world, who made woman suffrage possible, not for any personal glory but for the glory of his party."
[Lack of space prevents giving the names of the immortal 49, which were sent with the chapter.]