Ecstatic Nation

by Brenda Wineapple

  In other words, there was plenty of blame to go around.

  WITH TRAIN COVERING their expenses, Anthony and Stanton went back east, delivering speeches all the way from Omaha to Boston. Once in New York, they launched a weekly newspaper, The Revolution, again with Train’s money, to be edited by the abolitionist Parker Pillsbury. Train’s subsidy didn’t last long, but his racism continued to alienate former friends and delight enemies.

  Still, Anthony and Stanton had refused to denounce him. Nor did they, as it turned out, move from suffrage to statesmanship. Their rhetoric was disconcerting, patronizing, xenophobic. In St. Louis, Anthony told an audience, “When you propose to elevate the lowest and most degraded classes of men to an even platform with white men—with cultivated, educated, wealthy white men of the State—it is certainly time for you to begin to think at least whether it might not be proper to lift the wives, daughters, and mothers of your State to an even pedestal.” The next year, Stanton said without compunction, “Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Yung Tung, who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster’s spelling book, making laws for Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble.

  “Would these gentlemen who, on all sides, are telling us ‘to wait until the negro is safe’ be willing to stand aside and trust all their interests in hands like these?”

  Such an argument played into the hands of the most bigoted of the Democrats, for sure, but Stanton and Anthony were angry, resentful, indignant. Frederick Douglass tried to smooth out relations with them in New York in the spring of 1869. Speaking before a crowd in Steinway Hall at the American Equal Rights Association annual meeting, he affirmed his friendship for Stanton and his respect for her—there was no greater advocate of equal rights, he said—but he just could not embrace her use of such unfortunate terms as “Sambo.”

  Moreover, he could not see how anyone could pretend that giving the vote to women was as urgent as it was to black men. “When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans,” he said, “when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms, and their brains dashed out upon the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.”

  The leonine-headed Douglass ardently made his points. Then a woman shouted from the back of the hall, “Is that not all true about black women?”

  “Yes, yes, yes; it is true of the black woman,” he answered, “but not because she is a woman, but because she is black.”

  Such was the argument, the quandary, the political koan: was it fair, right, practical to put black men ahead of women, all women, if one had to choose? Did one have to choose? Could fairness, justice, and expedience be separated? Should they? The dilemma split men and women of goodwill, it ruffled feathers and assumptions. Clara Barton, who had worked without stop during the war and afterward, taking medicine and succor and information to the wounded and their families, believed women should vote, yet she too felt obliged to put black men ahead of women; how not? There were “thousands of hungry Negroes men & women & children at our doors,” she explained, “thousands upon thousands waiting in fear, trembling and uncertainty all through the South, surrounded by an enemy as implacable as death, and cold as the grave.” To her, giving the black men the vote might stop the brutal murders and beatings inflicted on the entire black population.

  Then there was, yet again, the matter of politics. In 1868 General Grant had been elected president, but he’d won by only 300,000 votes. Both moderate and Radical Republicans saw the Democratic handwriting on the wall. If they did not pass federal legislation to secure the black man the vote, the Republicans would lose elections—and fail to complete the work that the war had begun: not just to save the Union but to reconstruct it. The ladies had to wait, and ladies, ladylike, should do so.

  THOUGH THE PASSAGE of the Fifteenth Amendment in 1870 did enfranchise the black man—“The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude”—the amendment said nothing about protecting or enforcing that right. It did not prevent any state from adopting restrictions that might deprive the freedman of his ability to cast his ballot. Nor did its language acknowledge the terrorist techniques, the murders, the beatings, and the threats already used to frighten black voters in the South. The freedman could be asked whether he owned property, whether he could read or write, whether he knew how many bubbles were contained in a bar of soap. Yet Wendell Phillips, for one, realized that a broader amendment was further than most people were willing to go. Compromising, Phillips urged his radical friends not to oppose the Fifteenth Amendment if for no other reason than as an act of common political sense.

  After the Fifteenth Amendment passed both houses, establishing the right to vote “regardless of race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” the American Anti-Slavery Society disbanded. In May 1870 Congress did try to look after the black voter with an enforcement bill aimed to safeguard him and his right to vote, and Phillips promised he’d keep up the good fight to ensure black men their rights. And to work for women.

  But because the Fifteenth Amendment had excluded them, Elizabeth Cady Stanton denounced it as enacting what she called “an aristocracy of sex.” The amendment might be hailed as creating a national citizenship—a national citizen—in a unified nation, but women had been specifically discounted by that body politic. She and Anthony therefore moved in a different direction that, though it included the ballot, also projected a reconstructed American society: where women and men could be treated equally, where women could earn the same wages for the same work, where they could go to college if they wanted or, as Margaret Fuller had put it so many years before, become sea captains if they wished.

  For a short time, they embraced the National Labor Union, a reform organization founded in 1866, and hoped that together they might work outside the Republican Party and outside the Democratic Party too, if necessary, and link up with working-class women. “We think our national life does not depend on any party but on the safety, sobriety and education of its citizens,” Stanton declared. In addition, she and Anthony organized the New York–based National Woman Suffrage Association, with herself as its initial president and its membership mainly educated (white) women.

  Its membership did not include Lucy Stone. She disagreed with Stanton, disliked Anthony, and hated to discuss such distracting topics as labor laws or divorce, especially before black men had the vote. Yet she too was an indefatigable activist, the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a bachelor’s degree—at Oberlin College—and a superlative organizer and marvelous orator with a low, pleasing voice. She had insisted on keeping her name in marriage—she had consulted Salmon Chase about the legal ramifications—but she was more conservative on social issues than either Stanton or Anthony. She believed that changing the divorce laws, for instance, would permit men to abandon women. And she’d been completely scandalized by Stanton and Anthony’s alliance with George Francis Train.

  Calculating the harm done by Train’s involvement in woman suffrage and, worse, by Stanton’s opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment, and furious when she learned that the National Woman Suffrage Association had been formed behind her back, as it seemed to her, Stone established a dissident movement, initially in New England, that included the notables of the abolition movement, such as William Lloyd Garrison and Thomas Higginson as well as the lively journalist Mary Livermore and new convert Julia Ward Howe, still famous as the author of the “Battle-hymn of the Republic.” That was the core of the American Woman Suffrage Association. As its executive committee disingenuously said, it had been organ
ized “without depreciating the value of Associations already existing.” But its very existence did deprecate Stanton and Anthony.

  Unlike the rival organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association did not push for restructuring the relationship between men and women; ultimately and despite their very real, deep, and utter commitment to woman suffrage and civil rights, those liberal white men and women were reformers, not radicals. They wanted to create a broad-based national alliance focusing mainly on the ballot box and steering clear of such polemical topics as divorce, prostitution, contraception, and women’s control over their own bodies. Yet the two groups did share a great deal, as Theodore Tilton knew, and in the spring of 1870, when he proposed their merger, many well-known white and black advocates of woman suffrage such as Lucretia Mott, Gerrit Smith, Samuel May, and Harriet Tubman met the proposal with what seemed like relief. But James Redpath, the veteran of Bleeding Kansas who now ran a Boston lecture agency, wryly noted, “The attempt to reform reformers is a hopeless one.” Whittier too was dubious. No good comes of meddling, he reminded Tilton; that was too bad, he continued, since all the strife just made sport for the Philistines.

  Whittier and Redpath turned out to be right. The Boston secessionists, as Stanton privately called Stone’s group, would never agree to any merger, and as it happened the two factions wouldn’t unite for another twenty years. For his pains, Tilton was called a busybody. And the Philistines did in fact begin to gather, particularly once the accusation of free love was hurled at the woman’s movement—which made Stone all the more eager to separate herself from the National Woman Suffrage Association.

  The question batted about ever since was whether the rupture in the suffrage movement cost women the vote, which they would not receive for another fifty years. Perhaps; but the call for equal rights for women, like so much other reform, had already lost steam in the aftermath of war. Higginson, who had joined the Boston group, might foolishly call the nineteenth the woman’s century, and Tilton may have declared in The Independent that after abolition, woman suffrage was the next great movement, but the fact was that people were tired of causes, tired of speeches, tired of platforms and planks. The hour was not the Negro’s or the woman’s; it belonged to retrenchment.

  Men who supported women’s suffrage were called long-haired “Aunt Nancys.” “The Revolution,” carped one journalist, “is edited by two old and ugly ladies, Mr. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Mrs. Parker Pillsbury, and published by Mr. Susan B. Anthony.”

  Yet a black man voting seemed a far less dumbfounding spectacle than a woman doing so. Stanton was not wrong about this; the so-called aristocracy of sex did exist. Since free black men had been walking on the streets of Boston, New York, and Brattleboro, riding the streetcars in Washington, working on the docks of Baltimore and San Francisco, the idea of those men voting, despite the color of their skin, was not as alarming as that of a woman with political power. They were, after all, men. So Stanton tried to reassure the critics. Giving women the ballot did not sully women, demoralize marriage, or wreck the home, she said; it did not render men an appendage of the dinner pot and washtub. But not many people wanted to listen.

  WOMEN ALREADY POSSESSED the right to vote: so said Mrs. Satan, an extraordinary individual from Ohio who, married at fifteen to an alcoholic, was a faith healer, a fortune-teller, a vagabond, a seller of patent medicines and contraception, a stockbroker, and the mother of two. With insouciance, she declared, “A woman is just as capable of making a living as a man”—and just as capable of running a banking house as selling ribbons and thread. It was Thomas Nast who caricatured Victoria Woodhull as Mrs. Satan, the female devil; that’s how powerful, for a brief time, she seemed.

  Neither maternal and brainy like Elizabeth Cady Stanton nor a small workhorse like Lucy Stone, Victoria Claflin Woodhull was another grandiose American, excessive and homegrown: she was a proud, sexy, modern woman who resembled the dynamo that Henry Adams would later use to represent the era and not the Virgin with which he romanticized it. “In this age of rapid thought and action, of telegraphs and railways,” acknowledged Susan B. Anthony, “the old stage coach won’t do.” Woodhull was a steam engine, slick and smart and determined to get wherever she wanted to go. She also had the help, she said, of friendly spirits—one of whom, the Greek orator Demosthenes, provided her with stock tips.

  While Theodore Tilton was ineffectually trying to arrange a marriage between the two suffrage groups, Woodhull said she was running for president of the United States, and she wasn’t joking any more than George Francis Train had been; the United States seemed up for grabs. Like Train, Woodhull was no stranger either to controversy or dissent or self-invention. She and her attractive sister Tennessee “Tennie” had already opened a brokerage firm on Wall Street, presumably with the financial assistance of the powerful, lonely tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, who reputedly visited Woodhull to make contact with the spirit world.

  To Isabella Beecher Hooker, a sister of the Reverend Beecher, Woodhull seemed “heaven sent for the rescue of woman from her pit of subjection.” When the more squeamish took offense at Woodhull’s cheek, Elizabeth Cady Stanton told Lucretia Mott, “We have had enough women sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical prating about purity.” If Victoria Woodhull be brash, so be it; if she be crucified, Stanton said, it wouldn’t be by women: “Let men drive the spikes.” Which they would—with Woodhull’s help.

  In the winter of 1871, the glamorous, wealthy Woodhull delivered a paper, reputedly written by Benjamin Butler, in Washington that claimed that women already had the right to vote. Butler, who had labeled the hostile women of New Orleans prostitutes, was the Republican congressman of uncertain reputation who had spearheaded the impeachment charges against Johnson and, after the death of Thaddeus Stevens, had assumed the Radicals’ mantle. Brilliant if often unscrupulous, meretricious, and untrustworthy, he may also have been Woodhull’s lover. In any case, he was her advocate and helped her snag a face-to-face meeting with the House Judiciary Committee; Woodhull was the very first woman to appear there.

  She was modishly clad in a navy blue cloth jacket and skirt and a steeple-crowned hat with a “brigandish dash to it,” as a journalist reported. Thanks to the Fourteenth Amendment, Woodhull cogently argued, woman could vote; the Fourteenth Amendment had declared all persons born or naturalized in the United States to be citizens, and all citizens have a constitutional right to vote protected by that amendment. Under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, the thirty-two-year-old Woodhull continued, women were citizens, and no distinction between citizens was made on account of sex. It was a good argument.

  The Judiciary Committee wouldn’t touch it and decided instead that such issues should be settled by the courts and the states, not by the federal government. The buck was passed, ironically so; the committee invoked the doctrine of states’ rights, which had become Reconstruction’s fallback strategy. Yet if the issue lay dormant, Woodhull was not without recourse. She and her sister were publishing Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, a newspaper—reportedly funded by Commodore Vanderbilt—to discuss politics, finance, and women’s rights. It serialized a novel by George Sand, published the first U.S. edition of The Communist Manifesto in 1871, and talked about abortion, divorce, prostitution, and free love with a brashness that reached far beyond the radicalism of The Revolution, which was broke and would soon cease publication. A cross between a scandal sheet, a penny dreadful, a revolutionary tract, and a literary and political journal of serious intent, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly had within its first year a circulation of 20,000. Detractors said there was nothing in it but “the fraudulent, the rotten, the mushroom and the speculative.”

  In addition to the paper, Woodhull had Woodhull. A confident, galvanizing speaker in the manner of Anna Dickinson, whether addressing congressmen or a large crowd, she appeared composed, well dressed, well spoken. Her comportment, in fact, surprised those who came to gawk at the lascivious radical who was acqu
iring a controversial reputation as a free-loving renegade so outré that some women would not share a stage with her at a women’s suffrage meeting. Yet she gamely expounded her views. “She who marries for support and not for love, is a lazy pauper, coward, and prostitute,” she wrote. Women, she said, should be able to control their own bodies. Women should be able to love whom they pleased. “To love is a right higher than Constitution or laws,” she proclaimed. Invoking the language of higher laws, she claimed sexual freedom to be the new abolition. “Sexual freedom means the abolition of prostitution both in and out of marriage,” she said, “the emancipation of woman from sexual slavery and her coming into ownership and control of her own body.”

  Actually, the doctrine of the higher law had already reentered the public conversation in similar dress when Henry Ward Beecher himself had been accused of endorsing it after he had presided at the deathbed wedding of Abby Sage McFarland and her lover, Albert Richardson. A war correspondent, Richardson had been shot at close range in the Tribune office by Daniel McFarland, Abby McFarland’s abusive husband, whom she’d divorced in Indiana. But since New York State did not recognize Indiana’s so-called quickie divorces, Abby McFarland was a bigamist in the eyes of the press and Beecher an enabler, a man as guilty of a crime as she was. “Beecherism—or the higher law,” sneered The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, “means merely that each man is to believe and do in all things about as he feels like doing, regardless of all recognized moral codes or legal provisions.”