With each alarming report from the South, the importance of black suffrage rose, while women’s claims languished. The Fourteenth Amendment, passed in 1866 and ratified in 1868, was a compromise between moderates and radicals: Federal power would defend the freedpeople’s civil rights but stopped short of guaranteeing the vote. But there was no mistaking the direction: Section Two instituted penalties designed to punish states that abrogated the voting rights of any adult male inhabitant.
It was the first time the word “male” appeared in the Constitution. In a nation where now neither lack of property nor race disqualified one from voting, womanhood stood as a primary marker of disenfranchisement. The Loyal League women were firm supporters of black manhood suffrage, but this they had not expected. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted [into the Constitution], it will take us at least a century to get it out,” Stanton balefully predicted. She supported the amendment but wanted the language changed to “persons.” Although she would have mentioned the one-hundred-year time line for dramatic effect, she turned out to be on the mark. Women got the vote in 1920, but not until the 1970s did the Supreme Court apply the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee to women.11
As participants in the AERA, women’s rights leaders worked on the assumption that a grateful nation would abolish the markers of prejudice and “bury the woman & the negro in the citizen,” as Stanton predicted to Sojourner Truth. Aiming for the lofty heights of gender-neutral citizens, they shucked the “woman” in women’s rights, not because it was “odious,” Martha Wright stressed, countering a charge that was sometimes made: No, every good cause was odious at one time, she observed wisely. It was because the war had transformed them, put flesh on their gender-neutral citizenly personae. “We take the new name for the broader work, because we see it is no longer woman’s province to be merely a humble petitioner for redress of grievances, but that she must now enter into the fullness of her mission, that of helping to make the laws, and administer justice.”12
The political situation was supercharged, but at first old alliances held firm. Frederick Douglass once again lent his moral authority to the women’s cause. At one tense meeting, he and Stanton stood together as they had twenty years before at Seneca Falls—this time to oppose Henry Blackwell, Lucy Stone’s husband and a man no one much liked or trusted. Blackwell proposed that equal rights forces endorse an educational qualification for voters, a provision that, Stanton pointed out, would disenfranchise the former slaves. Douglass followed up on her sharp rebuttal, arguing that voting required “no qualification beyond that of common humanity, manhood and womanhood,” and pointedly contrasting the loyalty of uneducated freedpeople with the treason of Confederate officers educated at West Point.13
The problem was that only a few Republicans in Congress showed any interest in universal suffrage. When Sumner dutifully introduced a petition for women’s suffrage to the Senate in 1866, he nullified his own gesture by instructing his colleagues to pay it no mind: “I do not think this a proper time for the consideration of that question.”14 The women picked up a few Democrats, but the support was cynical. Democrats seized on votes for women as a ploy to undercut black suffrage by holding up the demonstrably most ridiculous element of universal suffrage to public view: If you give the vote to black men, well then (ha ha) why not give it to women?15
Pushed aside by black manhood suffrage, the women turned more oppositional and partial. Ignored despite their best efforts, they drew for the first time a distinction between the freedmen, whom they defined as privileged males, and themselves, victims of male despotism. The freedwomen were eerily absent in their counterarguments, as they were in most deliberations. Northern champions of emancipation were fixated on the stature of black soldiers, and in the South, evolving discussions within the freedpeople’s communities also made the ex-soldiers paramount representatives of their communities. There was no group of prominently placed black women in the AERA to press home the capabilities and needs of the freedwomen. Sojourner Truth, one exception, pointed to the road not taken: “There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women.” Truth minced no words to the men in the audience, black and white: “You have been having our rights so long that you think, like a slaveholder, that you own us.”16
This was all in the background of the infamous Kansas campaign of summer and fall 1867, when Stanton and Anthony turned against the Republican Party and took up with the flamboyant Democratic businessman and political hopeful George Francis Train. The rupture in Kansas caused a schism in the ranks that lasted for twenty years. In Kansas, a new state constitution was up for a vote, with separate amendments to be approved for black male suffrage and women’s suffrage. The vote had national importance: Republicans feared that the Democrats would make a strong comeback in the 1868 presidential election, and were counting on free states to ensure black manhood suffrage. Looking to make black suffrage palatable, Kansas Republicans distanced themselves from women’s suffrage. Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell traveled to the state first for the AERA to stump for women’s suffrage and found a mixed situation: enthusiasm among white voters in strongholds of antislavery sentiment, but opposition from free blacks and white Republicans elsewhere.17
When Stanton and Anthony went to Kansas to help, no one had any reason to expect anything except a common effort with the other two AERA representatives. Stone and Blackwell had also broken ranks with Republicans by wooing Democrats, and Stanton and Anthony joined in, looking for support wherever it cropped up. But they went very far indeed, stunning friends and colleagues when they fell in with George Train, a rich, publicity-hungry entrepreneur from the political demimonde. In an era that abounded in loose fish and fast fish, Train was at the head of the school. A character out of a rags-to-riches tale, he started out as a shipping clerk in Boston and rose to make a fortune in Anglo-American-Australian commerce. That summer, he was operating as advance man for the Credit Mobilier venture to extend the Union Pacific railroad westward—an investment scheme that would end up as one of the great scams of a scandal-ridden era. But to Boston abolitionists, Train was already known as the despicable heckler carted off to jail in 1862 after he tried to incite a racist mob to attack Charles Sumner at a speech celebrating President Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. During the war, Train moved in the shady region between Peace Democrats and Copperheads; in Kansas he pitched himself as a Unionist who opposed emancipation. This was not the company Stanton and Anthony usually kept.18
Train was an outsize borderline personality and over-the-top self-promoter. Mark Twain, who made the man the subject of one of his send-ups of the era’s bombast and opportunism, quipped that “the same God that made George Francis Train made also the mosquitoes and the rats” and inquired if there was “ever such a world of egotism stuffed into one carcass before?”19 Train wanted a stage respectable enough that he could attract serious attention but loose enough that the venue would not cramp his style. In Stanton and Anthony’s errand he spied opportunity. Charged with egomaniacal energy, he mysteriously and incredibly entranced two middle-aged women who were not given to naïveté, especially about the male sex.20 The trio made up a women’s suffrage entourage, with Train tossing the issue into his fantasies of running for president as third-party champion of the ten-hour day, Irish freedom from British rule, greenbacks, and free land. Rambling on cheerfully and disjointedly, Train seems to have transfixed audiences with the sheer fascination of watching a man hold a conversation solely with himself as he ricocheted from one topic to another, interrupting the boat ride of consciousness downstream when he hauled up every now and then to deliver his slogan “Woman first and negro last” or a little ditty mocking the “nig.”21
Neither measure on the Kansas ballot passed, and neither attracted much support. The loss confirmed Republican fears that women’s suffrage would doom black men’s enfranchisement.22 But the defeat hardly bothered Stanton and Anthony. On t
he contrary, their spirits lifted. Freedom to make their own choices and mistakes redoubled their energy. They thrived in the Western setting, surrounded by new companions, including Train, “the most wonderful man of the century,” Stanton effused; she felt as if she were “fastened to the tail of a comet.”23
They were far away from the confounding and burdensome debates of the past two years, the conflicted choices, the rock-ribbed, stiff-necked, high-minded colleagues, the necessity of compromising and giving ground, the chronic irritation that came from working with the same people for years—in sum, the burdens of political negotiations when you have a weak hand. In defeat they were happy and excited. “I feel as if I had just begun to live,” marveled Stanton, who toyed with moving her family to Kansas and getting away from it all. Anthony bubbled with plans: “I want to get canvassers for our paper—women who can lecture for woman—go into the manufacturing villages—hold free meetings—show the factory girls their need of the ballot & then at the close of meeting solicit subscriptions,” and so on.24
Friends back home were horrified. Garrison shot off a letter blasting their association with a “ranting egotist and low blackguard … fast gravitating toward a lunatic asylum”—a charge that hovered around Train until his death. Frederick Douglass could not stomach their tolerance for Train’s racial slurs on the platform. Others questioned their use of AERA money—insulting, since Susan B. Anthony held the purse strings and her thrift and honesty were well-known, but more understandable given that they traveled with a dubious character who made a point of throwing money around.25
Bonds this old were not easily broken, and the AERA stayed together for more than a year. Tensions worsened as the opposition between universal manhood suffrage and universal suffrage hardened. Douglass tried to sustain his commitment to women’s suffrage but the danger of the freedpeople’s situation consumed him. In 1869, with the Fifteenth Amendment before the states for ratification, anger exploded. Douglass charged at the AERA convention that opponents of the amendment—with Stanton and Anthony the most prominent—were indifferent to the emergency in the South. “With us, the matter is a question of life and death, at least, in fifteen States of the Union,” he perorated in trademark august style.
When women, because they are women, are hunted down through the cities of New York and New Orleans; when they are dragged from their houses and hung upon lampposts; 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 burned 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.26
Yet the matter was not as simple as Douglass would have it, not at the time nor in retrospect. Even Douglass, so eloquent, could not bring the room around to his position that day, so difficult was the choice of supporting an amendment that was plainly insufficient as the only measure that could be won. Someone from the crowd brought the discussion back down from the oratorical heights with the question “Is that not true about black women?” “Yes, yes, yes,” Douglass countered—with, we might guess, the impatience of knocking away a nagging contradiction. “It is true of the black woman, but not because she is a woman, but because she is black.”27
Douglass was the one speaker to address the menace at hand, the epidemic of violence in the South, most visibly in the Memphis and New Orleans riots. In this he was at odds with his women’s rights colleagues, who seem to have seen the freedpeople as rhetorical ciphers, not living Americans. They were not without contacts with the emancipated slaves—Northern women reformers white and black did relief work in the freedpeople’s camps. But the freedwomen’s fierce battles to reassemble their families and negotiate fair wage contracts with former masters who owned the land; to keep children out of semi-peonage indenture arrangements with those same men; to defend themselves against white violence, which came in many forms; to establish schools and literacy classes and churches—these did not draw the attention of Northern reform women.28
The reformer mind was accustomed to dealing in abstractions, not specifics. Even Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, herself African-American and a champion of black women, rose at the moment of the face-off over the Fourteenth Amendment to move the chess pieces of race and sex around the board: “The white women all go for sex,” she charged, “letting race occupy a minor position.”29 The political distance conferred by linguistic generalities handicapped Northern reformers in general and white women in particular. Stanton, who often sailed aloft in abstractions, once criticized an adversary’s mind as being limited to “the region of facts” and incapable of making generalizations. But in 1868–69, Stanton, along with the others, would have done well to spend more time in the region of facts.30
Facts or no facts, for those who believed women’s suffrage could not be set aside, the way forward was the way out. In 1869, Stanton and Anthony formed a new organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), based in New York City, and severed their ties to the antislavery leadership. Supporters introduced a Sixteenth Amendment to Congress to enfranchise women. The AERA dissolved. Those loyal to the Republican Party formed the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), led by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell and based in Boston. More accommodating to women’s suffrage as a second priority and favoring a states’ rights approach to winning the vote, the AWSA drew women from the ranks of former New England abolitionists. The NWSA depended on a more geographically dispersed membership and younger women and men, many of them in the West and Midwest, who had reform proclivities but little direct experience of antislavery politics.31
The break has long been described as between a group committed to the freedpeople’s cause and a racist, all-white Stanton-Anthony faction, but the judgment is facile and ignores the facts.32 Neither Stanton, Anthony, nor the NWSA opposed black manhood suffrage. Nor were the lines so neatly drawn. Prominent African-American supporters and advocates of women’s rights—Harriet and Robert Purvis, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Charles Lenox Remond, and Sojourner Truth—tended to refrain from taking sides, some showing up in NWSA actions after the fracas subsided.33 Nor were the Bostonians such principled defenders of the freedmen. Henry Blackwell, a moving force in the AWSA, had already in 1867 come up with his “statistical argument” to attract white Southern support, which promised to restore “the political supremacy of your white race.” Shot down by Stanton and Douglass when he floated it in the AERA, he pursued it in the AWSA for years to come. It was Blackwell’s idea, not Stanton and Anthony’s, that became the basis for the “Southern strategy” in the 1890s, when suffragists tried unsuccessfully to woo Jim Crow support by showing that women’s votes would double the white vote in the South.34
For Stanton and Anthony, it was the caste system of sexual privilege that was appalling, not black manhood suffrage per se: the replacement of the white man’s democracy with “an aristocracy of sex,” Anthony explained in an 1869 letter to The New York Times. They denounced the antidemocratic rationales that underlay this great democratic triumph, the reasoning that held that the exclusion of one half of the adult population was unimportant, simply because of their sex. Yet despite their principled allegiance to popular democracy, it is also true that this was the moment when Elizabeth Cady Stanton exploded with racist and nativist gibes, inveighing in public and private against ignorant degraded Negro and foreign men who got to vote instead of noble “Anglo-Saxon” educated women (as one critic objected at a meeting, you would think there were no ignorant American-born men). For a time, she tossed around a standard quartet of caricatures—Patrick (Irish), Sambo (black), Hans (German), and Yung Tung (Chinese)—to demonstrate how outrageous it was that men such as these were voting rather than distinguished women.35 But in time, the epithets dropped away. Over the next two decades, Stanton was more likely to resort to generalized denunciations of the lower orders and immigrants than she was to der
ide black men. She never again understood women’s cause to be merged with that of African-Americans. But she maintained that the fundamental problem was that democracy was so limited, not that black men voted.36
In the aftermath of the split, Stanton’s anger was at once political and personal, poured into scornful cynicism about close male colleagues. She had discovered how little loyal women’s efforts really mattered to them. The abolitionists’ towering sense of superiority enraged her as only intimates can enrage. Of Edward Davis (Lucretia Mott’s son-in-law) and Wendell Phillips, a longtime friend, she dissected the combination of condescension and moralism: “To have E.M.D. [Davis] pounce on one like a shark, with sarcasm & logic & ridicule all mixed up & simmered down to gall and bitterness, to have W.P. [Phillips] withdraw his velvet paw as if you were unworthy to touch the hem of his garment, it is enough to raise one’s blood to the white heat of rebellion against any ‘white male’ on the continent.” It is one of the few times that Stanton, who had always lambasted man in the abstract, blamed men she knew (and loved) personally for the wrongs of women. “When I think of all the wrongs that have been heaped upon womankind,” she concluded, “I am ashamed that I am not forever in a condition of chronic wrath.”37
As for Frederick Douglass, after that dramatic 1869 public rebuke to Stanton and Anthony, he returned to unequivocal support for women’s suffrage. He remained their colleague for the rest of his long life. Even in 1870, amid the joyous celebrations among blacks North and South that greeted the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment, Douglass advised African-American women to prepare themselves to be ready to vote when the hoped-for Sixteenth Amendment became law, the very amendment that Stanton and Anthony had introduced.38
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