A New Slant on the Fourteenth Amendment
While Susan was lecturing in the West, hoping to earn enough to pay off The Revolution’s debt, she was pondering a new approach to the enfranchisement of women which had been proposed by Francis Minor, a St. Louis attorney and the husband of her friend, Virginia Minor.
Francis Minor contended that while the Constitution gave the states the right to regulate suffrage, it nowhere gave them the power to prohibit it, and he believed that this conclusion was strengthened by the Fourteenth Amendment which provided that “no State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States.”
To claim the right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment made a great appeal to both Susan and Elizabeth Stanton. Susan published Francis Minor’s arguments in The Revolution and also his suggestion that some woman test this interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment by attempting to vote at the next election; while Mrs. Stanton used this new approach as the basis of her speech before a Congressional committee in 1870.
With such a fresh and thrilling project to develop, Susan looked forward to the annual woman suffrage convention to be held in Washington in January 1871. So heavy was her lecture schedule that she reluctantly left preparations for the convention in the willing hands of Isabella Beecher Hooker, who was confident she could improve on Susan’s meetings and guide the woman’s rights movement into more ladylike and aristocratic channels, winning over scores of men and women who hitherto had remained aloof. At the last moment, however, she appealed in desperation to Susan for help, and Susan, canceling important lecture engagements, hurried to Washington. Here she found the newspapers full of Victoria C. Woodhull and her Memorial to Congress on woman suffrage, which had been presented by Senator Harris of Louisiana and Congressman Julian of Indiana. Capitalizing on the new approach to woman suffrage, Mrs. Woodhull based her arguments on the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, praying Congress to enact legislation to enable women to exercise the right to vote vested in them by these amendments. A hearing was scheduled before the House judiciary committee the very morning the convention opened.
Convinced that she and her colleagues must attend that hearing, Susan consulted with her friends in Congress and overrode Mrs. Hooker’s hesitancy about associating their organization with so questionable a woman as Victoria Woodhull. She engaged a constitutional lawyer, Albert G. Riddle,262 to represent the 30,000 women who had petitioned Congress for the franchise. Then she and Mrs. Hooker attended the hearing and asked for prompt action on woman suffrage. This was the first Congressional hearing on federal enfranchisement. Previous hearings had considered trying the experiment only in the District of Columbia.
Susan had never before seen Victoria Woodhull. Early in 1870, however, she had called at the brokerage office which Victoria and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, had opened in New York on Broad Street. The press had been full of amused comments regarding the lady bankers, and Susan had wanted to see for herself what kind of women they were. Here she met and talked with Tennessee Claflin, publishing their interview in The Revolution, and also an advertisement of Woodhull, Claflin & Co., Bankers and Brokers.263
About six weeks later, these prosperous “lady brokers” had established their own paper, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, an “Organ of Social Regeneration and Constructive Reform,” but Susan had barely noticed its existence, so burdened had she been by the impending loss of her own paper and by pressing lecture engagements. She was therefore unaware that this new weekly explored a field wider than finance, advocating as well woman suffrage and women’s advancement, spiritualism, radical views on marriage, love, and sex, and the nomination of Victoria C. Woodhull for President of the United States.
Now in a committee room of the House of Representatives, Susan listened carefully as the dynamic beautiful Victoria Woodhull read her Memorial and her arguments to support it, in a clear well-modulated voice. Simply dressed in a dark blue gown, with a jaunty Alpine hat perched on her curls, she gave the impression of innocent earnest youth, and she captivated not only the members of the judiciary committee, but the more critical suffragists as well. For the moment at least she seemed an appropriate colleague of the forthright crusader, Susan B. Anthony, and her fashionable friends, Isabella Beecher Hooker and Paulina Wright Davis. They invited Victoria and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, to their convention, and asked her to repeat her speech for them.
At this convention Susan, encouraged by the favorable reception among politicians of the Woodhull Memorial, mapped out a new and militant campaign, based on her growing conviction that under the Fourteenth Amendment women’s rights as citizens were guaranteed. She urged women to claim their rights as citizens and persons under the Fourteenth Amendment, to register and prepare to vote at the next election, and to bring suit in the courts if they were refused.
So enthusiastic had been the reception of this new approach to woman suffrage, so favorable had been the news from those close to leading Republicans, that Susan was unprepared for the adverse report of the judiciary committee on the Woodhull Memorial. She now studied the favorable minority report issued by Benjamin Butler of Massachusetts and William Loughridge of Iowa. Their arguments seemed to her unanswerable; and hurriedly and impulsively in the midst of her western lecture tour, she dashed off a few lines to Victoria Woodhull, to whom she willingly gave credit for bringing out this report. “Glorious old Ben!” she wrote. “He surely is going to pronounce the word that will settle the woman question, just as he did the word ’contraband’ that so summarily settled the Negro question.... Everybody here chimes in with the new conclusion that we are already free.”264
Far from New York where Victoria’s activities were being aired by the press, Susan thought of her at this time only in connection with the Memorial and its impact on the judiciary committee. To be sure, she heard stories crediting Benjamin Butler with the authorship of the Woodhull Memorial, and rumors reached her of Victoria’s unorthodox views on love and marriage and of her girlhood as a fortune teller, traveling about like a gypsy and living by her wits. Even so, Susan was ready to give Victoria the benefit of the doubt until she herself found her harmful to the cause, for long ago she had learned to discount attacks on the reputations of progressive women. In fact, Victoria Woodhull provided Susan and her associates with a spectacular opportunity to prove the sincerity of their contention that there should not be a double standard of morals—one for men and another for women.
Returning to New York in May 1871, to a convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Susan found that Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Stanton, and Mrs. Davis had invited Victoria Woodhull to address that convention and to sit on the platform between Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Stanton.
Through them and others more critical, Susan was brought up to date on the sensational story of Victoria Woodhull, who had been drawing record crowds to her lectures and whose unconventional life continuously provided reporters with interesting copy. Victoria’s home at 15 East Thirty-eighth Street, resplendent and ornate with gilded furniture and bric-a-brac, housed not only her husband, Colonel Blood, and herself but her divorced husband and their children as well, and also all of her quarrelsome relatives. Here many radicals, social reformers, and spiritualists gathered, among them Stephen Pearl Andrews, who soon made use of Victoria and her Weekly to publicize his dream of a new world order, the Pantarchy, as he called it. Victoria, herself, was an ardent spiritualist, controlled by Demosthenes of the spirit world to whom she believed she owed her most brilliant utterances and by whom she was guided to announce herself as a presidential candidate in 1872. Needless to say, with such a background, Victoria Woodhull became a very controversial figure among the suffragists.
In New York only a few days, it was hard for Susan to separate fact from fiction, truth from rumor and animosity. Even Demosthenes did not seem too ridiculous to her, for many of her most respected friends were spiritualists. Nor did Victoria’s presidential aspirations trouble her greatly. Presidential candidates had been nothing to brag of, and willingly would she support the right woman for President. If Victoria lived up to the high standard of the Woodhull Memorial, then even she might be that woman. After all, it was an era of radical theories and Utopian dreams, of extravagances of every sort. Almost anything could happen.
Whatever doubts the suffragists may have had when they saw Victoria Woodhull on the platform at the New York meeting of the National Association, she swept them all along with her when, as one inspired, she made her “Great Secession” speech. “If the very next Congress refuses women all the legitimate results of citizenship,” she declared, “we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government.... We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the South. We are plotting revolution; we will overthrow this bogus Republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead....”265
Susan, who felt deeply her right to full citizenship, who herself had talked revolution, and who had so often listened to the extravagant antislavery declarations of William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Parker Pillsbury, was not offended by these statements. She was, however, troubled by the attitude of the press, particularly of the Tribune which labeled this gathering the “Woodhull Convention” and accused the suffragists of adopting Mrs. Woodhull’s free-love theories.
Having experienced so recently the animosity stirred up by her alliance with George Francis Train, Susan resolved to be cautious regarding Victoria Woodhull and was beginning to wonder if Victoria was not using the suffragists to further her own ambitions. Yet many trusted friends, who had talked with Mrs. Woodhull far more than she had the opportunity to do, were convinced that she was a genius and a prophet who had risen above the sordid environment of her youth to do a great work for women and who had the courage to handle subjects which others feared to touch.
Free love, for example, Susan well knew was an epithet hurled indiscriminately at anyone indiscreet enough to argue for less stringent divorce laws or for an intelligent frank appraisal of marriage and sex. Was it for this reason, Susan asked herself, that Mrs. Woodhull was called a “free-lover,” or did she actually advocate promiscuity?
With these questions puzzling her, she left for Rochester and the West. Almost immediately the papers were full of Victoria Woodhull and her family quarrels which brought her into court. This was a disillusioning experience for the National Woman Suffrage Association which had so recently featured Victoria Woodhull as a speaker, and Susan began seriously to question the wisdom of further association with this strange controversial character. Nevertheless, Victoria still had her ardent defenders among the suffragists, particularly Isabella Beecher Hooker and Paulina Wright Davis. Even the thoughtful judicious Martha C. Wright wrote Mrs. Hooker at this time, “It is not always ’the wise and prudent’ to whom the truth is revealed; tho’ far be it from me to imply aught derogatory to Mrs. Woodhull. No one can be with her, see her gentle and modest bearing and her spiritual face, without feeling sure that she is a true woman, whatever unhappy surroundings may have compromised her. I have never met a stranger toward whom I felt more tenderly drawn, in sympathy and love.”266
Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke her mind in Theodore Tilton’s new paper, The Golden Age: “Victoria C. Woodhull stands before us today a grand, brave woman, radical alike in political, religious and social principles. Her face and form indicate the complete triumph in her nature of the spiritual over the sensuous. The processes of her education are little to us; the grand result everything.”267
Victoria was in dire need of defenders, for the press was venomous, goading her on to revenge. Susan, now traveling westward, lecturing in one state after another, thinking of ways to interest the people in woman suffrage, was too busy and too far away to follow Victoria Woodhull’s court battles.
Mrs. Stanton met Susan in Chicago late in May 1871, to join her on a lecture tour of the far West. Together they headed for Wyoming and Utah, eager to set foot in the states which had been the first to extend suffrage to women. The long leisurely days on the train gave these two old friends, Susan now fifty-one and Mrs. Stanton, fifty-six, ample time to talk and philosophize, to appraise their past efforts for women, and plan their speeches for the days ahead. While their main theme would always be votes for women, they decided that from now on they must also arouse women to rebel against their legal bondage under the “man marriage,” as they called it, and to face frankly the facts about sex, prostitution, and the double standard of morals. In Utah, in the midst of polygamy fostered by the Mormon Church, they would encounter still another sex problem.
After an enthusiastic welcome in Denver, they moved on to Laramie, Wyoming, where one hundred women greeted them as the train pulled in. From this first woman suffrage state, Susan exultingly wrote, “We have been moving over the soil, that is really the land of the free and the home of the brave.... Women here can say, ‘What a magnificent country is ours, where every class and caste, color and sex, may find freedom....’”268
They reached Salt Lake City just after the Godbe secession by which a group of liberal Mormons abandoned polygamy. As guests of the Godbes for a week, they had every opportunity to become acquainted with the Mormons, to observe women under polygamy, and to speak in long all-day sessions to women alone.
Susan tried to show her audiences in Utah that her point of attack under both monogamy and polygamy was the subjection of women, and that to remedy this the self-support of women was essential. In Utah she found little opportunity for women to earn a living for themselves and their children, as there was no manufacturing and there were no free schools in need of teachers. “Women here, as everywhere,” she declared, “must be able to live honestly and honorably without the aid of men, before it can be possible to save the masses of them from entering into polygamy or prostitution, legal or illegal.”269
Some of Susan’s’ critics at home felt she was again besmirching the suffrage cause by setting foot in polygamous Utah, but this was of no moment to her, for she saw the crying need of the right kind of missionary work among Mormon women, “no Phariseeism, no shudders of Puritanic horror,... but a simple, loving fraternal clasp of hands with these struggling women” to encourage them and point the way.
Hearing that Susan and Mrs. Stanton were in the West en route to California, Leland Stanford, Governor of California and president of the recently completed Central Pacific Railway, sent them passes for their journey. They reached San Francisco with high hopes that they could win the support of western men for their demand for woman suffrage under the Fourteenth Amendment. Their welcome was warm and the press friendly. An audience of over 1,200 listened with real interest to Mrs. Stanton. Then the two crusaders made a misstep. Eager to learn the woman’s side of the case in the recent widely publicized murder of the wealthy attorney, Alexander P. Crittenden, by Laura Fair, they visited Laura Fair in prison. Immediately the newspapers reported this move in a most critical vein, with the result that an uneasy audience crowded into the hall where Susan was to speak on “The Power of the Ballot.” As she proceeded to prove that women needed the ballot to protect themselves and their work and could not count on the support and protection of men, she cited case after case of men’s betrayal of women. Then bringing home her point, she declared with vigor, “If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight.”270
Boos and hisses from every part of the hall greeted this statement; but Susan, trained on the antislavery platform to hold her ground whatever the tumult, waited patiently until this protest subsided, standing before the defiant audience, poised and unafraid. Then, in a clear steady voice, she repeated her challenging words. This time, above the hisses, she heard a few cheers, and for the third time she repeated, “If all men had protected all women as they would have their own wives and daughters protected, you would have no Laura Fair in your jail tonight.”
Now the audience, admiring her courage, roared its applause. “I declare to you,” she concluded, “that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and here I take my stand.”
Reading the newspapers the next morning, she found herself accused not only of defending Laura Fair, but of condoning the murder of Crittenden. This story was republished throughout the state and eagerly picked up by New York newspapers.
As it was now impossible for her or for Mrs. Stanton to draw a friendly audience anywhere in California, they took refuge in the Yosemite Valley for the next few weeks. Susan was inconsolable. These slanders on top of the loss of The Revolution and the split in the suffrage ranks seemed more than she could bear. “Never in all my hard experience have I been under such fire,” she confided to her diary. “The clouds are so heavy over me.... I never before was so cut down.”271
Not until she had spent several days riding horseback in the Yosemite Valley on “men’s saddles” in “linen bloomers,” over long perilous exhausting trails, did the clouds begin to lift. Gradually the beauty and grandeur of the mountains and the giant redwoods brought her peace and refreshment, putting to flight “all the old six-days story and the 6,000 jeers.”
Bearing the brunt of the censure in California, Susan expected Mrs. Stanton to come to her defense in letters to the newspapers. When she did not do so, Susan was deeply hurt, for in the past she had so many times smoothed the way for her friend. Even now, on their return to San Francisco, where she herself did not yet dare lecture, she did her best to build up audiences for Mrs. Stanton and to get correct transcripts of her lectures to the papers. Disillusioned and heartsick, she was for the first time sadly disappointed in her dearest friend.
Moving on to Oregon to lecture at the request of the pioneer suffragist, Abigail Scott Duniway, she wrote Mrs. Stanton, who had left for the East, “As I rolled on the ocean last week feeling that the very next strain might swamp the ship, and thinking over all my sins of omission and commission, there was nothing undone which haunted me like the failure to speak the word at San Francisco again and more fully. I would rather today have the satisfaction of having said the true and needful thing on Laura Fair and the social evil, with the hisses and hoots of San Francisco and the entire nation around me, than all that you or I could possibly experience from their united eulogies with that one word unsaid.”272
So far Susan’s western trip had netted her only $350. This was disappointing in so far as she had counted upon it to reduce substantially her Revolution debt. She now hoped to build her earnings up to $1,000 in Oregon and Washington. Everywhere in these two states people took her to their hearts and the press with a few exceptions was complimentary. The beauty of the rugged mountainous country compensated her somewhat for the long tiring stage rides over rough roads and for the cold uncomfortable lonely nights in poor hotels. Only occasionally did she enjoy the luxury of a good cup of coffee or a clean bed in a warm friendly home.
At first in Oregon she was apprehensive about facing an audience because of her San Francisco experience, and she wrote Mrs. Stanton, “But to the rack I must go, though another San Francisco torture be in store for me.”273 She spoke on “The Power of the Ballot,” on women’s right to vote under the Fourteenth Amendment, on the need of women to be self-supporting, and clearly and logically she marshaled her facts and her arguments. Occasionally she obliged with a temperance speech, or gathered women together to talk to them about the social evil, relieved when they responded to this delicate subject with earnestness and gratitude. Practice soon made her an easy, extemporaneous speaker. Yet she was only now and then satisfied with her efforts, recording in her diary, “Was happy in a real Patrick Henry speech.”274
The proceeds from her lectures were disappointing, as money was scarce in the West that winter, and she had just decided to return to the East to spend Christmas with her mother and sisters when she was urged to accept lecture engagements in California. Putting her own personal longings behind her, she took the stage to California, sitting outside with the driver so that she could better enjoy the scenery and learn more about the people who had settled this new lonely overpowering country. “Horrible indeed are the roads,” she wrote her mother, “miles and miles of corduroy and then twenty miles... of black mud.... How my thought does turn homeward, mother.”275
This time she was warmly received in San Francisco. The prejudice, so vocal six months before, had disappeared. “Made my Fourteenth Amendment argument splendidly,” she wrote in her diary. “All delighted with it and me—and it is such a comfort to have the friends feel that I help the good work on.”276
She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family, “I miss Mrs. Stanton. Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, instead of merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant scintillations as they emanate from her never-exhausted magazine. There is no alternative—whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully, because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her.”277
Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada where she also had lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1, 1872, “6 months of constant travel, full 8000 miles, 108 lectures. The year’s work full 13,000 miles travel—170 meetings.” On the train she met the new California Senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey during which the train was stalled in deep snow drifts. “This is indeed a fearful ordeal, fastened here... midway of the continent at the top of the Rocky mountains,” she recorded. “The railroad has supplied the passengers with soda crackers and dried fish.... Mrs. Sargent and I have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing mothers.”278 The Sargents had brought their own food for the journey and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent believed heartily in woman’s rights, and Senator Sargent in his campaign for the Senate had boldly announced his endorsement of woman suffrage.
This friendly attitude among western men toward votes for women was the most encouraging development in Susan’s long uphill fight. These men, looking upon women as partners who had shared with them the dangers and hardships of the frontier, recognized at once the justice of woman suffrage and its benefit to the country.
Susan traveled directly from Nevada to Washington instead of breaking her journey by a visit with her brothers in Kansas, as she had hoped to do. She even omitted Rochester so that she might be in time for the national woman suffrage convention in Washington in January 1872, for which Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Stanton were preparing. She found Victoria Woodhull with them, her presence provoking criticism and dissension.
Impulsively she came to Victoria’s defense at the convention: “I have been asked by many, ‘Why did you drag Victoria Woodhull to the front?’ Now, bless your souls, she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington with a powerful argument. She presented her Memorial to Congress and it was a power.... She had an interview with the judiciary committee. We could never secure that privilege. She was young, handsome, and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after.”279
“I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew Mrs. Woodhull’s antecedents,” she continued. “I said I didn’t and that I did not care any more for them than I do about those of the members of Congress.... I have been asked along the Pacific coast, ‘What about Woodhull? You make her your leader?’ Now we don’t make leaders; they make themselves.”
Victoria, however, did not prove to be the leading light of this convention, although she made one of her stirring fiery speeches calling upon her audience to form an Equal Rights party and nominate her for President of the United States. By this time, Susan had concluded that Victoria Woodhull for President did not ring true and she would have nothing to do with her self-inspired candidacy. Quickly she steered the convention away from Victoria Woodhull for President toward the consideration of the more practical matter of woman’s right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
This time it was Susan, not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. “At the close of the war,” Susan reminded the Senators, “Congress lifted the question of suffrage for men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State. When the Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed... we rushed to you with petitions praying you not to insert the word ‘male’ in the second clause. Our best friends... said to us: ‘The insertion of that word puts no new barrier against women; therefore do not embarrass us but wait until we get the Negro question settled.’ So the Fourteenth Amendment with the word ‘male’ was adopted.280
“When the Fifteenth was presented without the word ‘sex,’” she continued, “we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends declared that the absence of the word was no hindrance to us, and again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war, saying, ‘After we have enfranchised the Negro, we will take up your case.’
“Have they done as they promised?” she asked. “When we come asking protection under the new guarantees of the Constitution, the same men say to us... to wait the action of Congress and State legislatures in the adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall make null and void the word ‘male’ in the Fourteenth and supply the want of the word ‘sex’ in the Fifteenth. Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon yourselves or any class of men would have caused rebellion and in the end a bloody revolution....”
Unconvinced of the urgency or even the desirability of votes for women, the Senate judiciary committee promptly issued an adverse report, but Susan was assured that her cause had a few persistent supporters in Congress when Benjamin Butler presented petitions to the House for a declaratory act for the Fourteenth Amendment and Congressman Parker of Missouri introduced a bill granting women the right to vote and hold office in the territories.
Susan now turned to the more sympathetic West to take her plea for woman suffrage directly to the people. Speaking almost daily in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, she had little time to think of the work in the East; the glamor of Victoria Woodhull faded, and she realized that her own hard monotonous spade work would in the long run do more for the cause than the meteoric rise of a vivid personality who gave only part of herself to the task.
When letters came from Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker showing plainly that they were falling in with Victoria’s plans to form a new political party, Susan at once dashed off these lines of warning: “We have no element out of which to make a political party, because there is not a man who would vote a woman suffrage ticket if thereby he endangered his Republican, Democratic, Workingmen’s, or Temperance party, and all our time and words in that direction are simply thrown away. My name must not be used to call any such meeting.”281
Then she added, “Mrs. Woodhull has the advantage of us because she has the newspaper, and she persistently means to run our craft into her port and none other. If she were influenced by women spirits... I might consent to be a mere sail-hoister for her; but as it is she is wholly owned and dominated by men spirits and I spurn the whole lot of them....”
A few weeks later, as she looked over the latest copy of Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, she was horrified to find her name signed to a call to a political convention sponsored by the National Woman Suffrage Association. Immediately she telegraphed Mrs. Stanton to remove her name and wrote stern indignant letters begging her and Mrs. Hooker not to involve the National Association in Victoria Woodhull’s presidential campaign. Although she herself had often called for a new political party while she was publishing The Revolution, she was practical enough to recognize that a party formed under Victoria Woodhull’s banner was doomed to failure.
Returning to New York, she found both Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker still completely absorbed in Victoria’s plans. Bringing herself up to date once more on the latest developments in the colorful life of Victoria Woodhull, she found that she had been lecturing on “The Impending Revolution” to large enthusiastic audiences and that she had again been called into court by her family. Goaded to defiance by an increasingly virulent press, Victoria had also begun to blackmail suffragists who she thought were her enemies, among them Mrs. Bullard, Mrs. Blake, and Mrs. Phelps. This made Susan take steps at once to free the National Association of her influence.
When Victoria Woodhull, followed by a crowd of supporters, sailed into the first business session of the National Woman Suffrage Association in New York, announcing that the People’s convention would hold a joint meeting with the suffragists, Susan made it plain that they would do nothing of the kind, as Steinway Hall had been engaged for a woman suffrage convention. With relief, she watched Victoria and her flock leave for a meeting place of their own. Disgruntled at what she called Susan’s intolerance, Mrs. Stanton then asked to be relieved of the presidency. Elected to take her place, Susan was now free to cope with Victoria, should this again become necessary.
Not to be outmaneuvered by Susan, Victoria made a surprise appearance near the end of the evening session and moved that the convention adjourn to meet the next morning in Apollo Hall with the people’s convention. Quickly one of her colleagues seconded the motion. Susan refused to put this motion, standing quietly before the excited audience, stern and somber in her steel-gray silk dress. Beside her on the platform, Victoria, intense and vivid, put the motion herself, and it was overwhelmingly carried by her friends scattered among the suffragists. Declaring this out of order because neither Victoria nor many of those voting were members of the National Association, Susan in her most commanding voice adjourned the convention to meet in the same place the next morning. Victoria, however, continued her demands until Susan ordered the janitor to turn out the lights. Then the audience dispersed in the darkness.
With these drastic measures, Susan rescued the National Woman Suffrage Association from Victoria Woodhull, who had her own triumph later at Apollo Hall, where, surrounded by wildly cheering admirers, she was nominated for President of the United States by the newly formed Equal Rights party.
Reading about Victoria’s nomination in the morning papers, Susan breathed a prayer of gratitude for a narrow escape, recording in her diary, “There never was such a foolish muddle—all come of Mrs. S. [Stanton] consulting and conceding to Woodhull & calling a People’s Con[vention].... All came near being lost.... I never was so hurt with the folly of Stanton.... Our movement as such is so demoralized by letting go the helm of ship to Woodhull—though we rescued it—it was as by a hair breadth escape.” She was surprised to find no condemnation of her actions in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly but only the implication that the suffragists were too slow for Victoria’s great work.282
The attitude of some of the leading suffragists toward Victoria Woodhull remained a problem. Fortunately Mrs. Stanton came back into line, but both Mrs. Hooker and Mrs. Davis seemed bound to drift under Victoria’s influence, and the promising young lawyer, Belva Lockwood, campaigned for the Equal Rights party and its candidate Victoria Woodhull.
While Victoria Woodhull’s fortunes were speedily dropping from the sublime heights of a presidential nomination to the humiliation of financial ruin, the loss of her home, and the suspended publication of her Weekly, Susan was knocking at the doors of the Republican and Democratic national conventions. She had previously appealed to the liberal Republicans, among whose delegates were her old friends George W. Julian, B. Gratz Brown, and Theodore Tilton, but they had ignored woman suffrage and had nominated for President, Horace Greeley, now a persistent opponent of votes for women. The Democrats did no better. Faced with Grant as the strong Republican nominee, they too nominated Horace Greeley with B. Gratz Brown as his running mate, hoping by this coalition to achieve victory. The Republicans, still unwilling to go the whole way for woman suffrage by giving it the recognition of a plank in their platform, did, however, offer women a splinter at which Susan grasped eagerly because it was the first time an important, powerful political party had ever mentioned women in their platform.
“The Republican party,” read the splinter, “is mindful of its obligations to the loyal women of America for their noble devotion to the cause of freedom; their admission to wider fields of usefulness is received with satisfaction; and the honest demands of any class of citizens for equal rights should be treated with respectful consideration.”283
Thankful to have escaped involvement with Victoria Woodhull and her Equal Rights party just at this time when the Republicans were ready to smile upon women, Susan basked in an aura of respectability thrown around her by her new political allies. She was even hopeful that the two woman-suffrage factions could now forget their differences and work together for “the living, vital issue of today—freedom to women.”
She at once began speaking for the Republican party, looking forward to carrying the discussion of woman suffrage into every school district and every ward meeting. In the beginning the Republicans were generous with funds, giving her $1,000 for women’s meetings in New York, Philadelphia, Rochester, and other large cities. For speakers she sought both Lucy Stone and Anna E. Dickinson, but Lucy made it plain in letters to Mrs. Stanton that she would take no part in Republican rallies conducted by Susan, and Anna responded with a torrent of false accusations.284 Only Mary Livermore of the American Association consented to speak at Susan’s Republican rallies; but with Mrs. Stanton, Mrs. Gage, and Olympia Brown to call upon, Susan did not lack for effective orators.
In an Appeal to the Women of America, financed by the Republicans and widely circulated, she urged the election of Grant and Wilson and the defeat of Horace Greeley, whom she described as women’s most bitter opponent. “Both by tongue and pen,” she declared, “he has heaped abuse, ridicule, and misrepresentation upon our leading women, while the whole power of the Tribune had been used to crush our great reform....”285
Beyond this she was unwilling to go in criticizing her one-time friend. In fact her sense of fairness recoiled at the ridicule and defamation heaped upon Horace Greeley in the campaign. “I shall not join with the Republicans,” she wrote Mrs. Stanton, “in hounding Greeley and the Liberals with all the old war anathemas of the Democracy.... My sense of justice and truth is outraged by the Harper’s cartoons of Greeley and the general falsifying tone of the Republican press. It is not fair for us to join in the cry that everybody who is opposed to the present administration is either a Democrat or an apostate.”286
Susan sensed a change in the Republicans’ attitude toward women, as they grew increasingly confident of victory. Not only did they refuse further financial aid, but criticized Susan roundly because in her speeches she emphasized woman suffrage rather than the virtues of the Republican party. She ignored their complaints, and wrote Mrs. Stanton, “If you are willing to go forth... saying that you endorse the party on any other point... than that of its recognition of woman’s claim to vote, I am not....”287