Read In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton for Free Online Page B

first meeting in January 1869 in Washington, D.C. 46 Republican Samuel Pomeroy of Kansas, who had introduced woman suffrage in the Senate a month earlier, presided until the election of Lucretia Mott as president. Recently widowed, Mrs. Mott was as “calm, dignified, clear and forcible as ever,” at age seventy-six. Yet Mrs. Stanton was clearly the star of the convention. Novelist Grace Greenwood described her appeal in the
Philadelphia Press
.
Of all their speakers, she seemed to me to have the most weight. Her speeches are models of composition, clear, compact, elegant and logical. She makes her points with peculiar sharpness and certainty, and there is no denying or dodging her conclusions. . . . [She is] now impassioned,now playful, now witty, now pathetic. . . . Mrs. Stanton has the best arts of the politician and the training of the jurist, added to the fiery, unresting spirit of the reformer. She has a rare talent for affairs, management, and mastership. Yet she is in an eminent degree womanly, having an almost regal pride of sex. 47
     
    At the first evening session Elizabeth Cady Stanton urged the “speedy adoption” of a sixteenth amendment to enfranchise women. Women must be made voters because a government based on the principle of “caste and class” could not stand, and a government without women was subject to the “male element of destructive force.” Stanton’s points indicated more feminist sensitivity than political sense.
    When the meeting concluded, the women presented an appeal for woman suffrage in the District of Columbia to the congressional committee on District affairs. Two months later, in March 1869, Rep. George W. Julian, Republican of Indiana, offered a joint resolution in both houses, proclaiming that “The Right of Suffrage” must be guaranteed “equally without any distinction or discrimination whatever founded on sex.” 48
    Immediately following Stanton’s first Washington convention, she and Anthony left on a two-month tour of the Midwest. Their purpose was to recruit followers among women who had no antislavery ties. Traveling in the new Pullman cars, they attended state suffrage meetings in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. They made friends with women who had been active in the Sanitary Commission and were now interested in suffrage. 49 Counting the antislavery crusade of 1861, the Kansas campaign of 1867, and her publicity tour with Train, this was Stanton’s fourth public tour. Halfway through her itinerary, she became ill and returned to New Jersey.
    Stanton recovered quickly enough to be the center of attention again at the May 1869 meeting of the American Equal Rights Association. In Mrs. Mott’s absence, Stanton, as first vice-president, presided. Stephen Foster objected. He charged that Mrs. Stanton had “repudiated the principles of the society” and demanded that “those who prevented harmony within the group retire from prominence.” 50 Stanton coolly ruled the Massachusetts delegate out of order. Challenged, her ruling was sustained. Henry Blackwell tried to restore peace. He reminded the membership that Train had withdrawn from the scene and that Stanton and Anthony had long been pro-Negro. Discussion of the Fifteenth Amendment opened the sore again. During the debate both Anthony and Stone supported female as well as black suffrage. Stanton, wielding the gavel, remained neutral. Foster, fed up, led a walkout of New England delegates.
    Although Stanton had played no immediate part in these incidents, they were decisive for her. She realized that the Equal Rights Association wouldnever give woman suffrage priority. She was no longer willing to take second place. At the end of the AERA meeting, on May 11, 1869, Stanton invited all the women delegates to a reception at the Woman’s Bureau offices of the
Revolution
. Under the guise of a social gathering, she reorganized the rump group into the National Woman Suffrage Association. The group was