African Americans’ Conventions

Drawing on a long heritage of organized black resistance, in the antebellum period northern African Americans engaged in varied forms of public political action to protest their disfranchisement.¹⁴ Some community organizations sent petitions and memorials to legislatures and constitutional conventions, particularly in the later decades of the antebellum period. For example, of three petitions sent to New York’s 1821 constitutional convention, one requested a provision to prevent the legislature from passing discriminatory legislation. In 1846, of sixty-some petitions sent to the convention, at least two requested the equal enfranchisement of African Americans. Pennsylvania’s 1837–38 convention likewise received suffrage petitions and memorials from African Americans.¹⁵

Although petitions were essential means of protest, conventions were the most visible public actions free blacks took in the antebellum period.¹⁶ In local, state, and national meetings activists protested the American Colonization Society’s (ACS) plan to forcibly “return” free African Americans to Africa; advocated education, moral reform, and temperance as effective means of self-improvement and community uplift; considered voluntary emigration to Canada; agitated against slavery; and claimed equal civil and political rights for African Americans.¹⁷ Led by some of the most prominent northern African American activists—James Forten, Rev. Richard Allen, Junius C. Morel, James Pennington, and Benjamin Paschal—conventions offered a forum for black activists separate from, although generally allied with, the abolition movement. At a point when some white abolitionists supported the ACS or demonstrated a racist perspective that neglected northern black communities’ needs, this separate forum provided African American activists an essential “base for social protest.”¹⁸ Between 1830 and 1835, six consecutive national meetings were held in Philadelphia and New York. By 1836, however, the convention movement had split on issues of strategy. New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians and older and younger activists disagreed primarily about connections to white organizations and the efficacy of moral reform.¹⁹

In part because of these disagreements, between 1836 and 1843 no national conventions were held. But African Americans in New York, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Michigan held five statewide conventions, where younger activists such as Robert Purvis, Frederick Douglass, Charles L. Remond, and Henry Highland Garnett moved into leadership positions.²⁰ These leaders helped reenergize the national convention movement in 1843, holding twelve annual meetings before the Civil War. These conventions shifted their focus from improving the black community to changing African Americans’ legal and social status.²¹ This reflected alterations in national political culture: by 1840 tensions around slavery and race in the United States were increasing, and black voters had been disfranchised in most states. In response, delegates to black conventions became more radicalized, demanding immediate emancipation and political and legal rights for African Americans.

Delegates to the state and national conventions held in the 1830s and 1840s spent a significant portion of their time making recommendations for improving northern African Americans’ social condition in hopes that social “elevation” would lead whites to view them as legitimate political actors. The conventions pointed to three key modes by which northern free blacks could become elevated: temperance, education, and occupational improvement. By regulating what they did in northern society, delegates to these conventions argued, African Americans could advance socially and claim political rights. For example, at the first national convention in Philadelphia in 1830, the African Methodist Episcopal senior bishop and convention organizer Richard Allen declared to the “Free People of these United States” that “we have been led to the following conclusions: that our forlorn and deplorable situation earnestly and loudly demand [sic.] of us to devise and pursue all legal means for the speedy elevation of ourselves and brethren to the scale and standing of men.”²²

Many conventions in the 1830s contended that temperance was a key means of this elevation to manhood. For example, at the second national convention in Philadelphia in 1831, the committee on the “condition of the free people of colour of the United States” reported that “Education, Temperance, and Economy, are best calculated to promote the elevation of mankind to a proper rank and standing among men, as they enable him to discharge all those duties enjoined on him by his Creator.”²³ The delegates to the 1843 Michigan state convention argued that it would “promote… Education, Temperance, Industry, and Morality among our people; and by our correct, upright and manly stand in the defense of our liberties, prove to our oppressors, and the world, that we are determined to be free.”²⁴

Although temperance was one thing that activists claimed northern African Americans could do to gain equality, most antebellum conventions argued that the surest path to equality was education.²⁵ For example, New York’s 1851 convention members contended that although education was important for African Americans’ own enlightenment and rights, it could also enable black northerners to uplift all of humanity: “In order that the general welfare of the colored people be improved… it’s all important that they become educated; without education we cannot hope to be emancipated from… the cruel and malicious system of prejudice and caste. By education… all members of the great human family shall have accorded to them their full and complete rank… regardless of any outward circumstances as denote birth or country.”²⁶ With education, particularly in schools “where manhood is acknowledged as an equal inheritance,” African Americans could achieve their political goals.²⁷ For as Illinois convention delegates declared in 1856, “knowledge is power.”²⁸

But knowledge and education would not be enough, convention delegates recognized, if African Americans did not achieve economic independence. Echoing the Jeffersonian-era romanticization of the yeoman farmer, the delegates in the 1840s conventions viewed the acquisition and cultivation of landed property as the best way for African Americans to become autonomous freemen. At the national convention in Troy, New York, in 1847, the committee on agriculture argued that farming was the best way that a man could achieve the respect of others. For, it claimed, “the farmer is an independent man…. He may do without what men of trade and traffic have to dispose of… but they cannot do without what he produces.… Without him, they have neither house, home, food, nor clothing.²⁹ To African Americans defined by their white northern neighbors as powerless dependents, the idea not only of being free from reliance on others but of being relied on was plainly appealing. Agricultural independence, the delegates to the convention in Philadelphia in 1841 argued, also offered a means for battling racial prejudice, which, they contended in their address, resulted from whites’ distaste for blacks’ urban dependence: “By settling in the country, and becoming independent farmers, we would escape almost entirely that prejudice which operates so injuriously against us in the cities.… A full suit of black is universally considered the most rich and magnificent that can possibly be worn. Hence prejudice is not against color, but against condition; therefore improve the condition, and you destroy the prejudice.”³⁰

Throughout all the conventions in this period, northern African American activists argued that they were entitled to equality not only because they pledged to abandon alcohol, pursue education, or become productive farmers, but because they had already taken action that reflected their citizenship. They argued that African Americans both belonged to and had served the state as founders, as taxpayers, and most critically, as members of the military. At New York’s earliest black state convention in 1840, the delegates claimed membership in the northern political community because “We are the descendants of some of the earliest settlers of the State.… Our fathers were among those, who, with sinewy frame and muscular arm, went forth to humble that wilderness in its native pride. Since that time, our fathers, and we ourselves, have lent our best strength in cultivating the soil, in developing its vast resources, and contributing to its wealth and importance.”³¹ The delegates also claimed they had served the state by protecting it during the American Revolution and the War of 1812.

By ignoring this service and requiring black voters to own property, the delegates argued, New York’s state constitution made black men “aliens and strangers… a disfranchised class in the very land where lie the bones of our fathers—the land whose liberties they helped achieve by patriotic services and whose soil is enriched by their purest and noblest blood.”³³ Other state and national conventions also noted black men’s military service as a justification for their enfranchisement. Like black New Yorkers in 1840, the delegates to Michigan’s convention in 1843 highlighted service in the American Revolution and the War of 1812: “During the Revolution, the white and black soldiers fought and messed together without hesitation. The records of that period clearly prove that the blacks rushed forth to the conflict, and poured out their blood with as much bravery as their white fellow soldiers.” Black soldiers, they argued, “under the command of General Jackson in the Southern Army, and especially at the battle of New Orleans, distinguished themselves as valiant soldiers, fighting in defense of their country’s honor.”³⁴ Black men’s defense of the nation-state, the delegates claimed, entitled them to the rights and blessings of citizenship.

The American Revolution pointed to another way that black men served the state: financially. Convention delegates such as those in Cleveland in 1848 often referenced the rallying cry of the Revolution: “we firmly believe with the Fathers of ’76 that ‘taxation and representation ought to go together.’” Therefore, the Cleveland delegates argued, “we are very much in doubt as to the propriety of our paying any tax upon which representation is based, until we are permitted to be represented.”³⁵ This idea was echoed in later conventions as well. The address written at the 1853 Rochester national convention also suggested that the financial service African Americans had offered the state justified their enfranchisement: “We ask that (in as much as we are, in common with other American citizens, supporters of the State, subject to its laws, interested in its welfare, eligible to be called upon to defend it in time of war, contributors to its wealth in time of peace) the complete and unrestricted right of suffrage, which is essential to the dignity even of the white man, be extended to the Free Colored man also.”³⁶ Black men served the state and paid its taxes; therefore, they were entitled to all the rights of men.

But over the course of the 1840s and ’50s, states increasingly based suffrage rights on who a citizen was rather than on what he did. African American convention delegates adapted their arguments accordingly. For example, the 1848 Pennsylvania convention’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of Pennsylvania” urged activists to abandon moral and social uplift because it did not matter what actions black men took since it was not their “impiety,… ignorance,… immorality, or [their] wicked customs and habits that place[d them] without the pale of constitutional landmarks.” It was instead, their “complexion alone.”³⁷ The “Appeal” continued:

Unlike earlier convention delegates who denied that color had political meaning, these authors recognized that white Americans’ ideas about race alone accounted for the political oppression of African Americans. Black men’s actions mattered far less than their identities, and only by improving the “white man’s heart” and not the “black man’s mind” could suffrage rights be achieved and political manhood restored to African American men.³⁹

As the conventions’ suffrage language evolved in the late 1840s, the delegates increasingly adopted arguments that either combined calls for virtuous action with arguments based on identity or rejected the notion that any actions African Americans could take, aside from political agitation, would lead to enfranchisement. With this change, the delegates started to focus more on gender. Conventions in the 1830s had used gendered language occasionally—the 1830 and 1831 national conventions adopted the term “freemen” to identify the possessors of rights—but these early conventions typically used this gendered language to refer to all people.⁴⁰ For example, the 1832 “Address to the Free Colored Inhabitants of these United States” used the term “manhood,” but only to refer to the black community’s growth: “How beautiful must the prospect be of the philanthropist, to view us, the children of persecution, grown to manhood, associating… to devise plans and means for our moral elevation.”⁴¹ Here “manhood” connoted maturity, or adulthood. Moreover, as a rule, these early conventions also used more neutral terms when discussing rights, referring to the rights of “people” and “citizens” rather than “men.”

But by the later 1840s and ’50s, the African Americans that activists depicted in conventions as having served the state as soldiers and taxpayers, those fathers whose “sinewy frame” and “muscular arms” helped “penetrate” the virginal forests of New York and whose “bravery,” “honor,” and “valor” served the fledgling new nation to fight the British in the Revolution and in the War of 1812, were all clearly imagined as men. The default agriculturalist who would pursue independence through professional development, and hence equality through personal uplift, was likewise envisioned by the convention delegates as male. In addition to making these implicit assumptions, when activists at the state and national conventions discussed voting rights explicitly, they conformed to nineteenth-century social practice and identified suffrage as an exclusive right of men. For example, in the 1845 “Address to the People of New York” delegates argued that “when you have taken away an individual’s right to vote… when a distinct class of the community… are wholly and forever disfranchised and excluded… they have lost… their panoply of manhood.”⁴² Pennsylvania’s 1848 state convention delegates wrote to their fellow disfranchised African Americans that the state’s “constitution, by disfranchising us, while it claims to be republican, has stricken a blow at our manhood, and not only ours, but a majority of those who people this globe. We intend suing for our rights as men.”⁴³ The address urged black Pennsylvanians to “be careful to present a manly bearing by the exercise of politeness and good manners” in order to appear as reliable voters to whites. But more affirmatively, it urged its readers to “reject every attempt to dethrone the dignity of our manhood so long as the spirits of freedom runs [sic] in our veins.”⁴⁴

Black men’s convention delegates often characterized their own actions in gendered terms, identifying as manly the work to pursue their rights. New York’s first state convention in 1840 addressed its fellow “colored citizens” and urged them to “put forth our own exertions” and to “redeem” themselves through “manly effort.”⁴⁵ Whereas they contended that the only way rights would be achieved was if the whole black community, young and old, men and women, worked together, the primary message conveyed was gendered: “We invoke the entire people, in their strength and manliness, to put forth intelligent, and well directed effort in this matter.”⁴⁶ The delegates to Illinois’s first state convention in 1853 declared that though they had long endured the oppression whites imposed on African Americans, “we have now resolved to come forward; and, like men, speak and act for ourselves.”⁴⁷ Social protest was defined by delegates as a way for African American men to claim their own political manhood. When that status was finally recognized by whites, the abolitionist orator Charles Remond argued at the 1858 Massachusetts convention, “a more manly set of men than we are cannot be found.”⁴⁸ Defining their own political actions as gendered allowed African American activists to claim an identity that carried with it political privilege in the antebellum white man’s government.

Every Woman’s Rights

African American activists’ claim to the ballot as a gendered political right left little room for women. However, African American women were dedicated and active partners in the antebellum work of “racial uplift.”⁴⁹ Although many black women engaged in behind-the-scenes activist work through churches and sex-segregated ladies’ auxiliary organizations, others—such as the abolitionists Margaretta and Charlotte Forten, Sarah M. Douglass, Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Sojourner Truth—helped to bring the question of women’s rights to the fore of racial justice organizations.⁵⁰ They were aided by many individual black male activists, including Robert Purvis, Charles Langston, William Howard Day, Martin Delaney, and Frederick Douglass, who all actively pursued women’s rights. Moreover, in the 1830s and ’40s, women were often present as observers at African Americans’ national and state conventions.⁵¹ A few women were also permitted to address the early conventions. In 1848, the National Convention of Colored Freedmen voted to admit women as delegates and included women’s rights in their activist agendas.⁵² Women also formed both a core constituency and an activist cohort in antebellum abolition organizations, as well as serving as effective fundraisers.⁵³ William Lloyd Garrison and his followers in the mostly white-led abolition organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society, advocated for women’s equal participation and leadership in the society in the 1840s, and subsequently some women were admitted as delegates to its conventions and as full members of the organization.⁵⁴

Despite significant overlap in constituency and personnel and the inclusion of some women in reform organizations, women’s equality was not welcomed by all activists. In 1840 the American Anti-Slavery Society split in part because of disagreements among the members about women’s role in the movement.⁵⁵ But the historian Bruce Dorsey argues that this schism was not precisely about women but was more about how abolitionists defined manhood in relation to their own public political life. For those white reformers who left the society, such as the brothers Lewis and Arthur Tappan, women’s leadership in the abolition movement threatened their understanding of their own manhood and challenged men’s exclusive access to the power of the ballot.⁵⁶ Some antebellum African American rights activists also rejected women’s rights as they declared their own manhood. To many northern black activists it felt essential to claim for themselves the distinctions between men and women that white society denied to the enslaved and failed to recognize among the free.⁵⁷ Although women were often welcome at black men’s conventions—such as the ladies who had “arranged, in an adjoining hall, a table loaded with the most palatable refreshments” at New York’s 1858 Troy convention—increasingly women’s claims for equality were not.⁵⁸ Three years earlier, the Troy delegates had struck “the name of Miss Barbary Anna Stewart… from the roll” because “several gentleman object[ed] to it on the ground that this is not a Woman’s Rights Convention.”⁵⁹ By the late 1850s, as sectional and racial tensions flared, women’s rights, as the historian Martha Jones argues, “were put out of the realm of black politics.”⁶⁰

Over the course of the 1850s, increasingly confined by the communities and movements that had brought them to activism—whether abolition, African American rights, partisan politics, temperance, radical Quakerism, legal reform, or protests against Indian removal—women’s rights advocates developed their own movement for equality.⁶¹ As was the case for African American activists, conventions formed the core of the early women’s movement. After the first local meeting in Seneca Falls in 1848, there were numerous other local and state women’s rights meetings, as well as ten annual national conventions, held in various northern cities between 1850 and 1860.⁶² These conventions grappled with a wide range of issues that the delegates felt reinforced gender-based oppression, from divorce to education to dress reform. The convention delegates sought ways for women to empower themselves and seek autonomy. Alongside calls for open education, equal wages, and married women’s property rights, the convention delegates routinely objected to women’s disfranchisement. But voting rights were not central to the antebellum women’s rights movement; women’s enfranchisement was an idea so radical that many felt that pursuing it could damage the broader cause of women’s equality. As they were organizing the Seneca Falls convention, the Quaker abolitionist Lucretia Mott told Elizabeth Cady Stanton that asking for the ballot would make their nascent movement seem “ridiculous.” Stanton’s abolitionist husband, Henry, agreed and refused to attend the convention because he felt the call for suffrage would “turn the proceedings into a farce.”⁶³ Stanton persisted, but at the convention itself although most delegates willingly conceded that women’s disfranchisement was a fundamental cause of their legal and social inequality, many felt that claiming the ballot would be too scandalous.⁶⁴ Only when Frederick Douglass spoke in its favor did the convention narrowly agree to include the ballot in the list of women’s demands.⁶⁵ Despite the controversy, within the next few years some women’s rights groups began to pursue enfranchisement actively. In the 1840s and ’50s, activists organized major petition drives for suffrage in Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, Ohio, and Vermont. Ohio’s activists sent eight thousand signatures to the 1850 state constitutional convention requesting that the delegates remove the word “male” from the constitution’s suffrage provision. Other petitions were sent to state legislatures. None of these efforts were particularly successful; Ohio’s convention voted seventy-two to two to keep the word “male.”⁶⁶

Despite these setbacks, the delegates to almost every antebellum national women’s rights convention raised the issue of the ballot. But unlike the activists at African Americans’ conventions, women’s rights advocates could not fully appropriate current mainstream suffrage rhetoric to make their claims. Consequently, their speeches did not echo the service- and manhood-based political arguments being made in state constitutional revision and African American conventions.⁶⁷ Instead, some delegates, particularly in the earlier years, argued that qualities attributed to women’s gender identity—their morality and their “civilizing” natures—would be beneficial to both politics and the state. More frequently, though, delegates appealed to gender-neutral principles of equality consistent with the American political tradition.

This rhetoric served a few critical purposes: it included women in the national political heritage and adapted the malleable democratic political constructs of the framers for women’s purposes. Further, it facilitated alliances with other reformers because claims of universal equality were more likely to resonate with abolitionists and African American activists than were claims derived specifically from women’s identities, particularly given how controversial the “woman question” was in reforming circles.⁶⁸ In addition, because political connections to abolitionists and African American activists were essential to the development of the antebellum women’s movement, creating rhetorical space for all disfranchised Americans in women’s rights arguments was an important strategic choice, even if it had limited success in the pre–Civil War years.⁶⁹

Like the delegates to African American conventions, the women’s rights convention delegates argued that women’s actions were essential for their own empowerment. Women must claim the ballot, they asserted, directly through political engagement or indirectly through employment and education. For example, in her 1850 presidential address to the first national women’s rights convention, Paulina Wright Davis said that “equality before the law, and the right of the governed to choose their governors are [benefits]… enjoyed exclusively by the sex that in the battlefield and the public forum has wrenched them from the old time tyrannies. They are yet denied to Woman, because she has not yet so asserted or won them for herself.”⁷⁰ At the following year’s national meeting, the renowned orator Lucy Stone also suggested that women’s actions could result in their empowerment, if not enfranchisement. “I want every one of you to feel that this work rests upon us,” she said. “Instead of asking, ‘give us this, or give us that,’ let us just get up and take it.” Her audience responded with “loud cheers.”⁷¹ These women, while certainly seeking to energize their activist community, were also articulating a theory of rights acquisition that was consistent with that of other activists and politicians in the period. Just as the constitutional convention delegates and African American activists had argued for an expanded franchise based on the actions of the disfranchised, so too did women’s rights activists. As the call for the third national convention in Syracuse in 1852 said, “Let woman no longer supinely endure the evils she may escape, but with her own right hand carve out for herself a higher, nobler destiny than has heretofore been hers.”⁷²

Although women’s actions might result in their empowerment, antebellum women’s rights activists knew they had to address contemporary arguments that defined women as unsafe and inappropriate voters. To do so, the convention speakers argued primarily that the fundamental principles of the American democracy entitled female citizens to vote. By adopting this argument, they connected women to the broader political community and insisted that the category “citizen” was gender-neutral. For example, in her 1850 address to the Worcester convention, Davis argued that among the many ways to ask for the ballot, women “could plead our common humanity, and claim an equal justice. We might say that the natural right of self-government is so clearly due to every human being alike, that it needs no argument to prove it.”⁷³ Her fellow convention delegate, Mrs. Abby H. Price, of Hope-dale, Massachusetts, made a similar argument, claiming that men and women

Price’s adoption of the language of the Declaration of Independence was surely no accident. And it was echoed throughout the conventions. Wendell Phillips’s 1851 speech offered a resolution explicitly quoting the Declaration’s fundamental principle that all men are created equal but yet critiquing Americans for their heretofore biased interpretation of the term “men”: “We charge that man with gross dishonesty or ignorance who shall contend that ‘men,’ in the memorable document from which we quote, does not stand for the human race; that ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are the ‘inalienable rights’ of half only of the human species.”⁷⁵ The following year Ernestine Rose, a Polish-Jewish immigrant and one of the staunchest antebellum advocates of women’s enfranchisement, echoed this language, arguing,

The traditional American political principle that delegates relied on most to contend for women’s enfranchisement was the link between taxation and representation. Like African American activists and advocates of universal white male suffrage, delegates to the antebellum women’s rights conventions pointed out the fundamental injustice of denying any taxpayer the right to elect her representatives. This argument was particularly wielded at the 1852 third national convention in Syracuse, after the convention’s business committee reported a resolution declaring “the right of every woman holding property, and as a citizen also of this Republic, to resist taxation, till such time as she is fully represented at the Ballot Box.”⁷⁷ Lucy Stone defended this resolution fervently. “Resist,” she said, “let the case be tried in the courts; be your own lawyers; base your cause on the admitted, self-evident truth, that ‘taxation and representation are inseparable.’… We want, that our men friends, who are so justly proud of their ‘Declaration of Independence,’ should make their practice consistent with it.”⁷⁸ Even Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at home in Seneca Falls pregnant with her fourth son, sent a letter for Susan B. Anthony to read in support of the resolution.⁷⁹ Stanton urged women to have courage and act to defend this principle:

This push for women to protest taxation never gained much ground, most likely because in 1851 only three states permitted married women to own property: New York, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.⁸¹ But regardless of how effective tax protest was as a plan of action, linking taxation and the ballot for women was a useful and frequently adopted rhetorical strategy. In contending that women paid taxes to the state and hence required a say in the selection of their representation, delegates laid claim to women’s service to the state. Although they did not adopt the service argument as explicitly as did constitutional convention delegates and African American activists, the claim that women served the state as taxpayers let activists make an explicit connection between women’s public service and their political rights. For example, the Ohio delegate J. Elizabeth Jones declared in her 1852 speech to the Syracuse convention that she “wanted what the men were most unwilling to grant—the right to vote.… This we claim on the ground of humanity; and on the ground that taxation and representation go together.”⁸²

But this was not the only way women’s rights activists addressed the link between service and suffrage. Recognizing that state lawmakers in the 1820s had justified expanding the ballot on the basis of poor white men’s military service, women’s rights activists could not ignore this variation of American democratic theory. Opponents of women’s enfranchisement claimed that because women did not perform military service, they should not vote. Some women’s rights activists rebutted this argument by countering that some women did serve in the military. For example, in his 1852 letter to the Syracuse convention, John Neal of Portland, Maine, addressed this issue. “What are the duties,” he asked, “which a woman, admitted to all the rights of citizenship, would not be able to discharge?” Some might suggest that “‘she could not enter the militia.’ I deny this; for women are found in all the armies of the earth—shamefully disguised, to be sure, and acting as men; not only in the ranks, but as leaders.”⁸³ But Neal did not stop there. He also dissociated military service from the ballot, arguing that because not all men served in the military, there was an imperfect correlation between martial commitment and political rights. “The aged, the wealthy, the learned, and the weak and sickly, among men, are all excused from serving in the militia,” he noted, “and, if not within certain ages, and able bodied, they are not even required to furnish a substitute. If men may escape themselves, why not exempt women, for correspondent reasons?”⁸⁴

Military service was not the only way women acted as citizens. Many convention delegates argued that republican motherhood already linked women to the state.⁸⁵ The “heaviest burthens of citizenship,” Neal noted, women “already bear. Being the mothers of all who claim to be citizens, from the mightiest to the lowliest.”⁸⁶ Other convention speakers argued that women’s domestic duties were also patriotic service essential to the America democracy. At the 1851 national convention, Clarina Howard Nichols contended that motherhood was the primary ground for women’s claim to equality.⁸⁷ “As a mother I may speak to you, freemen, fathers, of the rights of my sons.… It is in behalf of our sons, the future men of the Republic, as well as for our daughters, its future mothers that we claim the full development of our energies by education and legal protection in the control of all the issues and profits of ourselves, called property.”⁸⁸ As for suffrage, Nichols claimed that these sons of good mothers would share their power, and so she “looked forward” to offering “greater admiration [to] sons who, in the good time coming, will have won for themselves the unappropriated glory of having given justice to the physically weak.”⁸⁹ Good republican sons, raised by empowered and equal republican mothers, these delegates asserted, would grant equality to women and align the nation’s government with its unfulfilled democratic ideology.

Although motherhood was valuable to the state, some convention delegates argued that women’s greater duty to the nation was to bring women’s special morality to the unruly world of nineteenth-century American politics.⁹⁰ Unable to claim that manhood entitled women to the ballot, these delegates argued instead that the particular morality attributed to women would bring domestic order and ethical values to politics. This reflected one of antebellum women’s rights advocates’ central theories—that by separating men’s and women’s activities and responsibilities, Americans had created an imbalance in human affairs that could be remedied only by women’s equality. For example, in her letter to the 1852 Syracuse convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued that America’s “isolation of the sexes, in all departments, in the business and pleasure of life, is an evil greatly to be deplored.”⁹¹ Ernestine Rose put it best in 1852, arguing that “‘the benefit of society,’ calls for woman’s ‘purifying influence’.… Let woman then be with him wherever duty calls her, and she will soon cleanse the Legislative Halls.”⁹²

Womanhood may not have had the political clout that manhood had in American political rhetoric, but it nonetheless offered women’s rights advocates a way to give women’s unique gendered social roles political value and to protest the white man’s government. Delegates to women’s conventions understood clearly that state constitutional conventions had deliberately chosen to exclude women from politics. In the 1852 Syracuse convention, Paulina Wright Davis argued that the purpose of gender-based language in state constitutions was to create a male polity: “When the Rhode Island Convention to alter the Constitution, was sitting, in the draft they said, ‘all citizens’; but they discovered afterwards that the word male, was not inserted, and they immediately put it in, intending of course, to exclude women.”⁹³ Despite activists’ resolve to ensure that “the word ‘male’… be stricken from every State Constitution,” they were not successful in any state before the Civil War.⁹⁴ After 1860, they stopped trying; women’s rights activists ceased annual conventions to devote their collective energies to the antislavery cause. This, and the all-consuming and more urgent nature of civil war, pushed the cause of women’s equality from national consciousness, if not from the minds and hearts of women’s rights activists.

Our Rights as Men

Although the Civil War put an obstacle in the path toward women’s political equality, it offered new opportunities for African American men. In addition to ending slavery and bringing African American rights to the fore-front of the national political agenda, the war enabled a new generation of African Americans to serve the state. The Union’s initial reluctance to arm black men only heightened the significance of their service when the federal government finally overturned the 1792 Militia Act and enlisted African Americans in 1862–63.⁹⁵ This enlistment forged a new connection between African American men and the nation.⁹⁶ By inducting black men into the military, the United States government legitimated and sanctioned their services, acknowledged their status as citizens with duties to the state, and thus rendered service-based arguments for enfranchisement more potent.

Throughout the war years, in at least five separate political conventions, African American activists expressed their faith that a key outcome of the war would be legal and political equality for all races.⁹⁷ In these conventions, the speakers, resolutions, and official public statements often focused on black men’s military service, which, they argued, explicitly entitled them to equal rights at the war’s end. Linking this service to that of their Revolutionary forefathers, the Bostonian John Rock, a delegate to the 1864 national convention, declared that “everywhere where our men have faced the foe, they have nobly written with their blood the declaration of their right to have their names recorded on the pages of history among the true patriots of this American Revolution for Liberty.”⁹⁸ The convention’s public statement, the “Declaration of Wrongs and Rights,” extolled the military service of black soldiers who, it noted, had faced greater challenges than white servicemen. “When the nation in her trial hour called her sable sons to arms, we gladly went to fight her battles: but were denied the pay accorded to others, until public opinion demanded it; and then it was tardily granted.… We have fought where victory gave us no glory, and where captivity meant cool murder on the field, by fire, sword, and halter; and yet no black man ever flinched.”⁹⁹

Through their unflinching service, wartime convention delegates argued, black soldiers refuted the Dred Scott v. Sanford decision, which held that African Americans were not citizens.¹⁰⁰ By serving the state and shedding blood for its sake, black soldiers had earned full and equal citizenship in the national political community. As John Q. Allen, a Philadelphia delegate to Pennsylvania’s 1865 state equal rights convention, put it, he “hoped that the blood of the Negro, shed upon the fields of this rebellion, would prove sufficient to wash away the obstacles which prevent us from the enjoyment of our political rights.”¹⁰¹ One of the national convention’s resolutions made the link between service and citizenship quite explicit: “As citizens of the Republic, we claim the rights of other citizens. We claim… that proper rewards should be given to our services, and that the immunities and privileges of all other citizens and defenders of the nation’s honor should be conceded to us.… These… we deem to be our rights as men, as patriots, as citizens, and as children of the common Father.”¹⁰²

Military service had also shattered the prewar link between race and the franchise. In light of black men’s participation in the Civil War, the 1865 Pennsylvania convention delegates collectively declared that “it cannot be true that color renders us ineligible to bear arms and to exercise the right of suffrage.”¹⁰³ Since the Union had overlooked race during enlistment, it must now surely overlook race for enfranchisement. National delegates in 1864 put this point very explicitly:

John Rock argued that black soldiers had exhibited “moral heroics” when they rejected unequal pay for their military service; they “bore [the insult] manfully, [living] to see the right triumph.”¹⁰⁵ Through military valor in the face of danger and resistance to racist policy, black soldiers had, delegates contended, “vindicate[d] our manhood.”¹⁰⁶ And so after the war they “fully expected that [black men would] remain in the full enjoyment of enfranchised manhood, and its dignities.”¹⁰⁷ Although black men had served the state in its time of need, it was finally their gender—their manhood—that fully entitled them to all of the rights of men in the postwar American democracy. The right to vote was theirs, African American activists declared, because “we are men and want to be as free in our native country as other men.”¹⁰⁸

The Educator of the Race

As black men fought in the war and agitated for their manhood and the ballot, northern women activists also engaged in political action to support the war.¹⁰⁹ Although they could not serve the state as soldiers, women’s rights activists joined many northern white women to form “loyalty” organizations designed to combat conservative northerners’ calls for peace without abolition.¹¹⁰ In April 1863, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony issued a call for a new loyalty group that emphasized “patriotism over partisanship, unqualified condemnation of northern traitors and… unconditional support of the Union.”¹¹¹ Although early in the war they had eschewed women’s rights agitation in favor of abolition, the two activists hoped that this group would offer a new forum for advocating women’s political engagement and rights.¹¹² As Anthony wrote to her fellow abolitionist Amy Kirby Post, the Women’s Loyal National League would provide “an opportunity for Woman to speak her thought on the War.”¹¹³ Anthony later said, “The hour is fully come when woman shall… assume her God-given responsibilities, and make herself what she is clearly designed to be, the educator of the race.”¹¹⁴

Although some members, with Anthony, saw women’s political action as the organization’s most critical responsibility, it soon became clear that the league would instead use women’s energies primarily to advance abolition; five of the seven resolutions proposed at the league’s first meeting on May 14, 1863, dealt with slavery in some form. In light of this, William Lloyd Garrison’s description of the meeting to his wife as “a dead failure… in fact… a woman’s rights convention,” seems exaggerated.¹¹⁵ By the May 14 business meeting, women’s rights had been sidelined and abolition codified as the league’s primary goal. To achieve this goal, the league’s executive committee decided the best course of action was to petition Congress for a constitutional amendment emancipating all enslaved persons.¹¹⁶ Petitioning was not a new strategy for activists. Throughout the antebellum period women had sent numerous petitions to national and state governments for many purposes, from opposition to Indian removal and slavery to women’s property rights and temperance laws. Through this direct relationship to the state, women defined themselves as legitimate political actors.¹¹⁷ Drawing on their experience in these campaigns, throughout the summer of 1863 Loyal League members circulated the antislavery petition, gathering signatures and cultivating connections with both national and local antislavery and women’s rights reform organizations.¹¹⁸

The Loyal League’s petition campaign was by any measure quite successful. The league managed to collect over four hundred thousand signatures by the end of the Thirty-Eighth Congress’s first session in July 1864. And unlike some antebellum antislavery petitions, the women’s petitions were referred to committee rather than tabled, ensuring a degree of influence on congressional deliberations.¹¹⁹ The league’s petitions were so critical that the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner later credited the organization with having had a significant impact on the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment ending slavery.¹²⁰

While this petition drive aided the antislavery effort and sustained the shaky connection between abolitionists and women’s rights activists, one of its most critical results was to pull Stanton, who was elected president of the Loyal League, and Anthony, its secretary, into the realm of congressional politics.¹²¹ Though both women had been long engaged in political agitation and counted the nation’s premier radicals and abolitionists among their friends and correspondents, with the Loyal League Stanton and Anthony began to interact with national politicians in a sustained and formal way, especially as antislavery congressmen aided and accepted the Loyal League’s petitions.¹²² Sumner, in particular, became an important ally of the league, using his franking privilege to help distribute its petitions via mail and presenting the petitions to the Senate starting on February 9, 1864.¹²³ In this way the Loyal League and Radical Republicans crafted a mutually beneficial relationship: the league received financial assistance and in return produced a massive number of petitions that could be presented at critical moments in policy debates. Most important for the later movement, however, the Loyal League’s leadership gained valuable national political experience. Stanton privately acknowledged this, proclaiming the league to be “the first and only organization of women for the declared purpose of influencing politics. In petitioning Congress for an act of emancipation… [we] have thus made ourselves a power for freedom with the people and with their representatives.”¹²⁴ Stanton had high hopes for how women would use that power in the future.

The Negro’s Hour

Just as African American activists saw hope for a race-neutral franchise after the war and turned their activist energies toward this goal, Anthony and Stanton hoped both that a gender-neutral franchise would result from the postwar political reconstruction and that their promising new political relationships would help facilitate this change. As early as 1863, Stanton demonstrated her faith that women’s wartime work would be rewarded in the new government: “By our earnestness and zeal in the exercise of this one right,” Stanton declared of the right to petition, “let us prove ourselves worthy to make larger demands in the readjustment of the new government.”¹²⁵ As the war ended and Reconstruction began, Stanton began advocating for a postwar government based on a united, equal power of all men and women that would eliminate what she called the “class legislation” that had restricted suffrage to white men.¹²⁶ Many of her radical colleagues were starting to agree—but only when it came to the political participation of all men.

Throughout the summer of 1865, abolitionists, radicals, and politicians were seriously discussing enfranchising African American men. This seemed to Stanton and Anthony to be a positive sign for the cause of women’s rights.¹²⁷ The Republicans they had worked with so successfully in the Loyal League petition campaign had swept the northern elections in 1864, raising hopes that the party would remake the government along egalitarian lines.¹²⁸ However, woman suffrage was simply not the central concern of abolitionists, politicians, or the American public. Not even all the activists who had supported antebellum women’s rights were willing to take up the cause of woman suffrage after the war. Many actively rejected associating woman’s enfranchisement with the enfranchisement of African American men, fearing that linking the two would ensure that black men would be denied the ballot. The white man’s government, it seemed to them, could be challenged on only one front at a time.

The most publicized rejection of women’s rights occurred at the thirty-second annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society on May 10, 1865, when Wendell Phillips, the newly elected president of the society, denounced outright any connection between woman suffrage and black male suffrage. Though he had been an active participant in the antebellum women’s rights movement, in his inaugural address Phillips directly rejected women’s enfranchisement. As he declared his support for a constitutional amendment prohibiting states from making “any distinction in the civil privileges… on account of race color or condition,” Phillips rejected women’s voting rights as inopportune: “I hope in time to… add to that clause ‘sex.’ But this hour belongs to the negroes. As Abraham Lincoln said: ‘One war at a time.’ So I say one question at a time. This hour belongs to the negro.”¹²⁹

Throughout the winter of 1865–66, Stanton and Anthony privately pushed Phillips to change his position, but he remained adamant. He told Stanton in a January 14 letter, “I’m fully willing to ask for women’s vote now & will never so ask for negro voting as to put one single obstacle in the way of her getting it. But, I shall not do much or go out of my way or spend money or time on it [woman suffrage] largely, deeming the old rule of ‘one thing at a time’ wise—& this time is the negro’s.”¹³⁰ That Philips, who only fourteen years earlier had declared that women had a definitive right to access the ballot, offered this rejection was a substantial blow to Stanton’s and Anthony’s hopes of a common radical movement for a truly universal suffrage.¹³¹

Phillips was not alone in thinking that a movement for women’s voting rights was less than ideal. The abolitionist Lucy McKim Garrison declared it “out of time.”¹³² Even the women’s rights pioneer Lucretia Mott felt the same, writing to her sister, Martha Coffin Wright, that woman suffrage “as a general move… would be in vain, while the all-absorbing negro question is up.”¹³³ Radicals such as Phillips, Garrison, and Mott, who viewed expanding the southern franchise as the best way both to preserve the peace and protect the civil rights of the newly emancipated, felt that associating universal male suffrage with such a controversial issue as woman suffrage would doom both issues to defeat. Most African American activists, who had already focused their movement on black men’s rights, likewise demonstrated little interest in merging their cause with women’s rights.

Because ideas about manhood had become so central to the way African American activists designed their own suffrage activism during the war, abolitionist organizations transitioning into equal rights advocacy after the war could not advocate women’s enfranchisement without undermining their primary rhetorical tool. Moreover, women’s wartime activism, unlike black men’s military efforts, did not resonate with long-standing democratic theory that grounded men’s connections to the state in their performance of military duty. Women could not claim that they had died for the state; they could not claim they had earned their manhood in battle. Women simply could not argue that their gender identity entitled them to the franchise. This would have significant consequences for the postwar polity. As Reconstruction commenced and members of Congress started to build a new American voting polity, they likewise viewed it as the negro’s hour, eschewing a broad expansion of the franchise based on democratic principles in favor of an identity-based ballot tied explicitly to the rights of men.