In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (22 page)

Both Henry and Elizabeth Stanton rejoiced in a Republican victory. They greeted rumors of Southern secession with enthusiasm. Making plans for a family Thanksgiving, Elizabeth wrote her sons at school, “I suppose it is the last time we shall be compelled to insult the Good Father by thanking him that we are a slave holding Republic; I hope and look for dissolution.” Eventually the abolitionists would become disenchanted with Lincoln’s lack of resolve about ending slavery. Anthony already found him “weak and trembling.”
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But in the flush of victory the Stantons were optimistic.
Henry was appointed to a committee to assign New York patronage and began to maneuver for his own promotion.

Elizabeth was swept up in pro-abolition, anti-Southern sentiment. In January 1861 she joined a tour of abolition speakers across upstate New York from Lockport to Albany. Designed to rally antislavery sentiment, pressure Lincoln, and alarm the South, it was Stanton’s first public tour. Anthony had organized the troupe, which included Lucretia Mott, Martha Wright, Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, Samuel May, and Stephen Foster. They were met with angry mobs, who feared the possibility of waging war over slavery. The situation was so volatile that mayors along the route viewed the speakers as a threat to public safety. They assigned extra police or refused to open halls to them.
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Henry, a veteran of earlier antislavery mobs, was alarmed. “In the present temper of the public mind, it is of no use to try to hold Abolition meetings in large cities,” he wrote Elizabeth from Washington. “I think you risk your lives. . . . [The] mobcrats would as soon kill you as not.” At Henry’s request that she be less reckless, Elizabeth retired from the circuit temporarily, rejoining it in Albany. While there, she and Mrs. Mott testified on behalf of the Ramsey divorce reform bill.
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In the antislavery meetings she changed her subject from abolition to the abolitionists’ right of free speech. Looking back on their experience, Anthony remembered 1861 as “the winter of mobs.”
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Although Mrs. Stanton had ventured farther afield and been more outspoken on more subjects in 1860 than during the 1850s, she was still tethered to her home and children. In 1861 Wendell Phillips, as trustee of the Hovey Fund, had offered her a three-month European tour to lecture on women’s rights. The invitation was his attempt to make amends after the divorce debate. Stanton longed to go, writing to Anthony:

I would consider it a religious duty to accept this invitation to go abroad as a means of intellectual and spiritual development. It would give me new life and inspiration. I would leave my children with you without the least hesitation. I have more than once doubted the wisdom of sacrificing myself to them as I have done. Oh, what a harvest would three months of travel, reading and society be for me! The thought of it renews every impulse of my soul, but I fear the cup of bliss is not for me. Oh, Susan, how I long to leap into new conditions, but I can only work and wait.
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Stanton reluctantly refused. She could not yet shrug off her maternal bonds.

There were many uncertainties in Stanton’s life in the spring of 1861. The state of the union was equally unsettled. Seven Southern states had seceded and elected Jefferson Davis provisional president. Lincoln had been inaugurated and war loomed. Stanton’s sons were old enough for army service. Two of her nephews had already run away to enlist; one was to
die in combat. The Stantons were still living in Seneca Falls. Henry’s hopes for an appointment by the Republicans had so far been disappointed. In the interim, as a Washington correspondent for Greeley’s
New York Tribune
, Henry had watched Lincoln being sworn in, interviewed Stephen Douglas, and witnessed the arrival of the first army volunteers in the capital city in April. As he wrote Elizabeth, “Me thinks above the general din I hear Old John Brown knocking on the lid of his coffin and shouting, ‘let me out, let me out!!’ “
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Henry’s chances for an appointment were tied to Lincoln’s cabinet choices. As a delegate who preferred Chase but had voted for Seward, Henry was characteristically caught in the middle. Lincoln brought all his rivals into the cabinet, giving Seward the State Department, Bates the attorney generalship, and Chase the Treasury. Henry coveted the job of solicitor of the treasury, but that plum went to Edward Jordan, an Ohio newspaper editor and attorney who had helped Chase carry the state for Lincoln. Nor was Henry given the deputy solicitor post. After months of finagling, letter writing, meeting, and conniving, Henry was finally given a minor Treasury position, as deputy collector of the Customs House in New York City. The contest over federal jobs in the New York Port Authority had pitted Chase’s cronies in the Treasury Department against Seward’s closest adviser and Henry’s first mentor, Thurlow Weed. Once again Henry was distrusted by both sides. By the time the appointment was announced in August 1861, Henry was fifty-six years old and grateful for any opportunity.
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The job required a move to New York City. Eager to leave Seneca Falls, Mrs. Stanton looked forward to the change. Although she would make almost annual pilgrimages to Johnstown, Peterboro, Geneva, and Rochester, she returned to Seneca Falls only once after 1862, when she was paid to speak there.
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For Stanton, Seneca Falls was both a physical and psychological landmark. It was there that Edward Bayard had proposed, that she had broken her engagement to Henry, that she first spoke in public, that she convened the first women’s rights convention, first demanded the right to vote, first appeared in print, first donned the bloomers, first met Susan B. Anthony, and first developed and articulated the tenets of her feminist ideology. Yet in Seneca Falls she was unable to resolve the conflicting demands of private and public life. Not until the children were older and she had left Seneca Falls would she be able to fulfill her own expectations of a life devoted to women’s rights agitation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton moved to New York City in the spring of 1862. Like Boston, New York was bustling with activity and bursting with energy. Stanton was invigorated by the move and by the war spirit invading the city. As a political abolitionist, she was eager to support a war to end slavery. “The war is music to my ears,” she wrote. “It is a simultaneous chorus for freedom.”
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By supporting the Union, Stanton believed feminists would earn the gratitude of both abolitionists and Republicans and be rewarded with suffrage. She did not anticipate any alternate outcome, so she dedicated herself to equal rights for Negroes and women.

Henry had been deputy collector of the Port Authority since August 1861. With Anthony’s assistance, Stanton moved first to a house in Brooklyn and then into a brownstone at 75 West 45th Street. Anthony had her own room in each of the Stantons’ subsequent households. With her sisters Tryphena Bayard and Harriet Eaton living nearby and many of her reform colleagues in the city on business, Mrs. Stanton established herself easily.

In a city teeming with soldiers, freed blacks, draft resisters, and displaced Southerners, the war seemed more immediate than in sleepy Seneca Falls. Battle news and casualty lists were posted outside the telegraph office, where crowds gathered daily. Even at home the military mood pervaded. Stanton reported to her cousin that the “war’s spirit” had a direct influence on her “domestic system.” The boys were “drilling every evening in the gymnasium,” while the girls skated and played outdoors. All the children took school “in homeopathic doses.” “I place the gymnasium above the meeting house,” Stanton concluded. “I have great respect for saints with strong bodies.”
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War dominated the Stanton household. Henry’s job at the Customs House was to supervise and secure the port against smugglers and shippers of Southern goods. Neil, the oldest son, had no desire to enroll in the Union Army and eventually joined his father’s staff as a clerk. His brother Henry, not yet eighteen, was eager to enlist. Elizabeth tried to arrange a West Point appointment for him from Seward. “The boy has the essential elements of a hero in him, and as all his proclivities are to the army,” she wrote to the secretary of state; “I desire that he should have a scientific military education.” Before Seward had a chance to reply, young Henry had run away and volunteered. A son in uniform made the war even more personal for Stanton and her family. She proudly counted herself as “one of the mothers of the Republic,” willing to sacrifice her son for the cause.
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In the summer of 1863 the war came too close to home. Draft rioters burned a black orphanage one block from the Stantons’ brownstone, sacked the offices of the
Tribune
, and hanged innocent freedmen. When the mob surged past her house, Stanton sent the servants and children to the fourth floor to escape through the skylight if necessary. She remained at the door, mentally preparing a speech to expel the ruffians. Unexpectedly her oldest and youngest boys were swept up in the crowd on the street. Typically Neil rescued himself by deceit, asking the rowdies to join him in a saloon, “to drink to Jeff Davis.” Bobby was later found happily throwing stones at a burning building. Everyone spent the night at Tryphena and Edward Bayard’s home and sought refuge the next day in Johnstown. From there Stanton reported the incident to Gerrit and Ann Smith.

Last Thursday I escaped from the horrors of the most brutal mob I ever witnessed, and brought my children here for safety. The riot raged in our neighborhood through the first two days of the trouble. . . . Greeley was at Bayard’s a day and night for safety, and we all stayed there thinking that, as Henry, Susan and I were so identified with reform and reformers, we might at any moment be subjects of vengeance. . . . But a squad of police and two companies of soldiers soon came up and a bloody fray took place near us which quieted the neighborhood.
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Like antiabolition mobs, the draft rioters seemed to intensify antislavery commitment, including Stanton’s.

Stanton’s belligerence galled Anthony, who opposed the war. She thought it was not being fought to free the slaves but to maintain union with slaveholders. Like Mott, Anthony was a pacifist. But her primary objection was that the war would interrupt and reverse the progress being made on behalf of women’s rights. Already the New York legislature had gutted the Married Women’s Property Act passed in 1860. A newly elected, conservative Assembly had taken away the right of mothers to equal guardianship of their children and eliminated the right of widows to control property
left at the death of their husbands. Anthony was outraged. It angered her that few of their former allies even noticed this setback, swept up as they were in the war. Writing to James Mott’s sister Lydia, she confessed: “All of our reformers seem suddenly to have grown politic. All alike say, ‘Have no conventions at this crisis!’ Garrison, Phillips, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Stanton, etc. say, ‘Wait until the war excitement abates.’ I am sick at heart, but cannot carry the world against the wish and will of our best friends.” To Martha Wright, Anthony complained, “I have not yet seen
one good reason
for the abandonment of all our meetings, and am . . . more and more ashamed and sad . . . that the means must be sacrificed to the end.” The practical Martha responded that it was foolish to call a meeting “when the nation’s whole heart and soul are engrossed with this momentous crisis and . . . when nobody will listen.”
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Unlike Anthony, Stanton gave the war priority. She understood that women’s rights could not compete for public attention with war and emancipation. While she accepted the facts of Anthony’s analysis about war as a setback, Stanton drew another conclusion. She believed that if women aided the war effort wholeheartedly, their good efforts would be rewarded with equal citizenship and suffrage. Indeed, Stanton was so sure that women would soon enter politics that she worried about their lack of preparation. Anthony was unconvinced and pessimistic. She had no confidence in “man’s sense of justice” and remained skeptical and critical.
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This disagreement over policy was the first major conflict between Stanton and Anthony. Each woman was hurt and angered by the other’s recalcitrance. Anthony’s refusal to accept Stanton’s conclusion and her tenacious counterarguments made Stanton truculent. Her attitude is apparent in her letters to Anthony. “No person is able to understand all the difficulties of another’s position, therefore do not read me off your books because I cannot do all that to you seems feasible.” In the end Anthony’s analysis proved correct and Stanton’s wrong. Stanton admitted her error in her autobiography. “When the best of men asked us to be silent on our question during the war, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement. To this proposition my friend, Susan B. Anthony, never consented, but was compelled to yield because no one stood with her. I was convinced at the time that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure it was a blunder.”
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Women’s war work was not rewarded, but neither would Anthony’s singleminded strategy have succeeded.

Although they could not agree on feminist tactics, as abolitionists Stanton and Anthony were allied. Both spoke and wrote for the abolition cause. Both believed that the war must end slavery. Both were critical of Lincoln’s hesitation to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. As Stanton admitted
to Martha Wright, “The administration is too slow and politic to suit my straightforward ideas of justice and vengeance.”
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Both Stanton and Anthony believed that black slaves and freedmen deserved citizenship and suffrage, just as women did.

Although Elizabeth Cady Stanton identified herself as an abolitionist, ending slavery had never been her priority. She was comfortable with the blacks she had known as a child and as an adult. Several of the Cady family servants were black; they had supervised her childhood adventures and protected her from parental discipline. Throughout upstate New York, communities of freed blacks had settled, including those in Peterboro, who were employed and educated by Gerrit Smith. Stanton’s memory of meeting a runaway slave in Cousin Gerrit’s attic hideaway was vivid. The girl was almost Elizabeth’s age and had scars from the lash.
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In London in 1840 and in Seneca Falls in 1848 black men had supported women’s rights. Henry and all his friends were abolitionists, and it was assumed that she shared her husband’s commitment.