Members of the State

Between its formation in May of 1866 and the start of the New York constitutional convention, the AERA spent thirteen months campaigning for universal suffrage, “ma[king] a thorough canvass of the entire State, with lecturers, tracts and petitions” and convening forty-eight meetings in over thirty locations across the state.⁴ In these meetings, AERA speakers had two overlapping goals: to advocate for universal suffrage for the upcoming special election and to persuade the upcoming convention to bestow “the right of suffrage upon equal terms to both men and women.”⁵ There was some indication that the first goal was within reach. New York’s two previous special constitutional convention elections, in 1801 and 1821, had allowed all men to choose convention delegates regardless of their net worth, even though general elections had a property-based franchise. Because constitutional conventions reconstituted the whole political community and so required all of the community members’ consent, all men were permitted to participate. By the winter of 1866, most Republicans in the New York Senate and Assembly supported applying this same principle to African American men who did not meet the current $250 property restriction for general elections. The AERA noted these trends and thus pursued the special election as an opportunity for women, as well as African American men, to acquire a political voice.⁶

To claim that New York’s women had a right to select constitutional convention delegates, the AERA activists made arguments that echoed those of the congressional petition campaign, situating gender as incidental to American democratic citizenship. They claimed that because men and women were equally alike as citizens, they were entitled to the same rights. As Anthony argued, “If men will talk… of impartial suffrage, universal suffrage, we mean to have them understand that women are to be included in its impartiality and universality.”⁷ Fundamental law classified women as a part of “we, the people,” AERA activists argued; therefore, women were equally subject to and equally entitled to participate in the making of the laws of the state. For example, attendees at a Syracuse meeting on December 12, 1866, declared that because “women as well as men, are made to bear the burdens of, and to yield obedience to the government” they were equally entitled to the franchise.⁸ Auburn delegates resolved on January 7, 1867, that since

At a meeting in Troy, New York, on February 18, Anthony called the state to task for failing to implement its own democratic principles. Men and women were equally taxed, she argued, and so should be equally entitled to the franchise. “The property of women is assessed to pay for canals, for the support of militia, for bridges, railroads, and public works, and yet she has not a voice in aiding these enterprises or saying how they should be carried [out].”¹⁰ Anthony argued, as others had done before her, that America’s “second revolution” offered the nation a chance to fulfill the founders’ vision of equality and properly align America’s policies with its principles.

These general assertions, consistent with the suffragists’ immediate postwar strategy, sought to convince those New Yorkers attending AERA meetings that the ideas they already believed in and treasured could and should be applied to American women. And in some places, the arguments seemed to be working.¹¹ For example, the Yates County Chronicle reported of Stanton’s December twenty-third appearance in Penn Yan that her lecture “was attended by a very small audience, but was an excellent entertainment for each as did attend.… The cause [Stanton] supports is rapidly gaining adherents these days, and those who oppose it will soon be in the minority, unless they had better arguments against it than those heretofore in vogue.”¹² In an article published a few days after Stanton’s appearance, the paper declared female suffrage to be a good idea, despite the fears of the “fogies [who] tremble at the mention of this further step.” “We believe,” the Chronicle reported, that “the influence of women will be as salutary, as constitutional and as legitimate at the polls as at the fireside.”¹³

Although public support was essential to their movement, Stanton and her colleagues also needed to persuade New York’s political leadership that women should vote in the special election selecting convention delegates. Despite their general skepticism, New York’s legislators granted Elizabeth Cady Stanton a hearing before the state assembly on behalf of the AERA on January 23, 1867. Stanton began by claiming that because the state constitution was being revised, the political community of the state was being remade; therefore the voices of all its citizens were needed for that remaking. Further, she argued, women’s and poorer African Americans’ exclusion from the franchise violated article 1, section 1 of the existing New York Constitution which stated, “No member of this State shall be disfranchised or deprived of any of the rights or privileges secured to any citizen thereof, unless by the law of the land and the judgment of his peers.” Stanton asserted, “Now, women, and negroes not worth two hundred and fifty dollars, however weak and insignificant, are surely ‘members of the state.’” In fact, these two “minority” groups together, Stanton contended, constituted a majority: “On our republican theory that the majority governed, women and negroes should have a voice in the government of the State; and being taxed, should be represented.”¹⁴ Here Stanton echoed the ideas articulated in the upstate meetings and speeches and emphasizing the essential equality of all individuals. But she quickly moved beyond this basic claim.

Throughout the rest of the speech, Stanton argued that either men and women were the same citizens under the law, and therefore were entitled to the same right to the franchise, or they were so profoundly different that men could not adequately represent women and their interests, and women should therefore represent themselves. Either way, she claimed, women must have a voice in the government. For example, in her consideration of article 1, section 1, Stanton asserted, “The law of the land is equality. The question of disfranchisement has never been submitted to the judgment of [the peers of women and African Americans with little property]. A peer is an equal. The ‘white male citizen’ who so pompously parades himself in all our Codes and Constitutions, does not recognize women and negroes as his equals; therefore, his judgment in their case amounts to nothing.”¹⁵ If these groups were so unlike white men, then they needed political autonomy. Perhaps more disturbing to her listeners, Stanton declared that “women and neg roes constituting a majority of the people of the State, do not recognize a ‘white male’ minority as their rightful rulers.”¹⁶ That white male minority “have legislated as unjustly for women and negroes as have the nobles of England for their disfranchised classes.”¹⁷ “If the ‘white male’ will do all the voting,” she grumbled, “let him pay all the taxes.”¹⁸

Stanton recognized that in the current political climate, New York’s Republicans, at least, were seriously considering permitting African American men to represent themselves, particularly because of the change in southern freedmen’s status from dependent to independent taxpayers. “In demanding suffrage for the black man of the South, the dominant party recognizes the fact that as a freedman he is no longer a part of the family, therefore his master is no longer his representative, and as he will now be liable to taxation, he must also have representation.” New York also actively recognized the link between taxation and representation, Stanton claimed, because black men who had less than $250 could not vote and so were not taxed. But women, she noted, had never been exempt from taxation. “Is it on the ground of color or sex, that the black man finds greater favor in the eyes of the law than the daughters of the State?”¹⁹ Unfortunately for Stanton and the AERA, the answer was sex.

The privilege and power Reconstruction-era politicians were attributing to sex frustrated Stanton. In her speech to the legislature, this frustration showed, particularly in her sarcastic use of the term “white male.”²⁰ But Stanton also explicitly objected to New York’s white man’s government. The state’s constitution placed such emphasis on whiteness and manhood, she argued, that it enabled many “unfit” voters simply because they were white and male: “What an unspeakable privilege to have that precious jewel—the human soul—in the setting of white manhood, that thus it can pass through the prison, the asylum, the alms-house… and come forth undimmed to appear at the ballot-box at the earliest opportunity there to bury its crimes, its poverty, its moral and physical deformities all beneath the rights, privileges, and immunities of a citizen of the state.”²¹ Stanton also contended that the growing number of urban poor were also suspect voters, yet were permitted to vote simply because of their gender and race. “Just imagine the motley crew from the ten thousand dens of poverty and vice in our large cities, limping, raving, cringing, staggering up to the polls, while the loyal mothers of a million soldiers whose bones lay bleaching on every southern plain, stand outside sad and silent witness of the wholesale desecration of republican institutions.”²² Vehemently distancing herself (and other white women) from these unfit voters, she added, “I, for one, gentlemen, am not willing to be thus represented. I claim to understand the interest of the nation better than yonder pauper in your alms-house, than the unbalanced graduate from your asylum and prison.” She continued, “No wonder that with such voters, sex and color should be exalted above loyalty, virtue, wealth, and education.”²³

Unfortunately for Stanton and the AERA, the New York Legislature did not share her concern that gender and race were inappropriate measures of voting citizens. Instead, it reaffirmed the centrality of gender to politics by deciding in March to prohibit women from participating in the election to select convention delegates.²⁴ With this defeat, Stanton, Anthony and the other AERA activists turned their whole attention to the upcoming constitutional convention. They continued touring the state through the spring and into early summer, speaking on universal suffrage and gathering petition signatures. This campaign was fairly successful; the suffragists later claimed that the AERA had gathered about twenty thousand signatures for equal suffrage for black men and women to send to the convention.²⁵

Radical Transformations

Almost as soon as New York’s constitutional convention began on June 4, 1867, the delegates began to debate the connections between gender, race, and voting rights in the state. Women’s enfranchisement was in the forefront of these discussions: only seven days after the convention began, Ezra Graves, a delegate from the Twentieth Senate District, offered a resolution for the convention to appoint a committee to decide whether a special election should be held among the state’s women to determine whether they themselves wanted the ballot.²⁶ A more encouraging sign for the AERA was the early appearance of some of the suffrage petitions they had gathered during the spring tour. Longtime woman suffrage advocate George William Curtis presented the first petition on June 19, and more followed throughout the early weeks of the convention.²⁷ But for the AERA the best news was that the convention appointed Horace Greeley, the influential newspaper publisher and delegate at large from Westchester, to chair the committee on suffrage. Greeley, a former radical and a Republican, had in the past endorsed women’s rights as well as equal rights for African Americans.²⁸ Although there were some indications that he was becoming more conservative, since he supported the amnesty of all former Confederates and had posted bail for Jefferson Davis, his long record on equal rights seemed to situate him ideally to support the AERA’s goals.²⁹ When Greeley granted the AERA an early hearing before his suffrage committee, it looked as if there might actually be a chance for it to persuade the committee, and hence the convention, to eliminate any franchise exclusions based on gender or race.

On the evening of June 27 in the assembly chambers in Albany, Anthony and Stanton, as the representatives of the AREA, addressed “a very large audience” of convention delegates and interested onlookers. Their initial presentation reflected the AERA’s ongoing strategy of emphasizing the similarities between men and women and their equal entitlement to the ballot.³⁰ But in the question-and-answer session, Stanton’s critique of the link between manhood and the franchise came to full fruition. The first few questions, from Greeley and another Republican member of the suffrage committee, Stanton B. Hand, addressed the obligations of citizenship. Greeley and Hand asked whether women would accept all the duties that accompanied the privilege of voting, burdens heretofore undertaken only by men. Anthony replied that women would certainly accept jury duty. Hand followed this up by asking whether or not women would be willing to submit to a military draft if given the right to vote.³¹ Anthony’s response challenged the idea that military service was restricted to men alone: “Yes, I am opposed to war; but if it must be, let them both serve. Yes, sir, we are ready to submit to a draft.”³² Furthermore, Anthony argued, not only were women willing to serve, but they already had served in the Civil War, disguised as men. She cited numerous examples of women who had donned male dress and fought as soldiers during the war but were dismissed when their sex was revealed. These cases, Anthony argued, were evidence that women could and would assume the duties to the state that accompanied the franchise.³³

Here Anthony challenged the delegates’ assumption that manhood and military service were synonymous. If military service conveyed manhood, were the women who had served in the military now men? Although with this argument Anthony sought to separate the connections between manhood and military service, her example of women who donned a male identity in order to fight pointed the committee members to the gender transgression engaged in by these women, perhaps encouraging them to think of similar transgressions that could occur if women were enfranchised. Rather than demonstrating a logical inconsistency, as she had clearly hoped, Anthony instead may have confirmed the worst fears of the politicians who were closely associating political activity with manhood: that women’s enfranchisement would result in gender disruption.

Stanton’s reply to the same question characteristically took a more aggressive approach. Instead of basing her arguments on women who did serve in the military, she instead turned to men who did not. After Anthony answered Hand’s question, Greeley pushed the suffragists further on the idea of women’s military service, asking Stanton, “If you vote are you ready to fight?” She replied, “Yes… we are ready to fight sir, just as you did in the late war, by sending our substitutes.”³⁴ With this declaration Stanton pointed out a logical inconsistency to those who believed that military service conveyed manhood and manhood conveyed political power, observing that in New York the most politically powerful men, had not, for the most part, served in the military. Yet these men still voted. Stanton hoped that by making this argument she had delivered “a crushing blow,” as she called it in a letter to a friend describing the incident, to the delegates’ assumption that only men could vote.³⁵

But Stanton and Anthony’s efforts to disconnect manhood, suffrage, and military service fell on deaf ears. In fact, by the date of the AERA’s hearing, Greeley’s suffrage committee had already finished a report recommending that the convention not enfranchise women.³⁶ It declared that “adult rational manhood” was the best means of determining voters’ qualifications, so the ballot should be wielded by “every man of the age of twenty one years” who met residency requirements. Although this was troubling enough for the cause of woman suffrage, the report went further, explicitly rejecting the enfranchisement of women because it would “involv[e] transformations so radical in social and domestic life” that most people in New York would not accept them.³⁷ The report claimed that enfranchising women would cause a profound disruption in gender identity. It was a change “so openly at war with a distribution of duties and functions between the sexes as venerable and pervading as government itself.”³⁸

After the suffrage committee submitted its report, the question of New York’s franchise was turned over to the whole convention. Debates on the committee’s proposal indicate that the delegates fully supported its recommendation to maintain an all-male body politic. In particular, the convention’s Republican delegates situated the link between gender and the franchise at the heart of their arguments for granting black men the right to vote in New York, arguing that black men’s military service during the Civil War indicated their manhood and therefore their voting fitness. These arguments began with the committee’s report. To explain its recommendation to eliminate any distinction among male voters based on race, when he presented the suffrage report on June 28 Greeley argued that “whites and blacks were indiscriminately drafted and held for service to fill our State’s quotas in the war whereby the Republic was saved from disruption” and so should be equally enfranchised.³⁹ He was not alone in making this claim. Supporters of black male suffrage in the New York convention frequently argued that the Civil War had transformed black men from slaves and virtual children to men—connecting manhood, military service, and the franchise.⁴⁰

For example, on Saturday, July 13, 1867, Theodore Dwight, a Republican from the Nineteenth Senatorial District, made this argument by sharing a personal conversion story describing his first encounter with African American soldiers. He admitted that he had opposed the 1860 state referendum to enfranchise black men but that when he saw black soldiers, “men clad in the United States Uniform, standing erect with a manly port… I saw that… they thought the time had come when their race should show that they were men, and thus should be enfranchised. And from that hour, sir, I have felt that the negro was a man.”⁴¹ Dwight recognized that the soldiers he had seen were “go[ing] forth to protect me and my wife and children, and my friends and society, and above all his country.… And men who have done that for me I believe, sir, to be men. I have no doubt about it.”⁴²

Whether or not Dwight’s story was true or merely a clever use of narrative for partisan purposes, his notion that black soldiers were manly and therefore required the most important privilege that adhered to manhood—voting—was an idea shared by many of his fellow delegates. Like Dwight, the convention’s Republicans repeatedly argued in suffrage debates that voting eligibility should be determined only by adult male status, regardless of one’s race.⁴³ For example, on July 9, Jerome Fuller, a Republican from the Twenty-Eighth Senatorial District, argued that “the qualification for the elective franchise, undoubtedly, as a general proposition is manhood.”⁴⁴ On the same day of debate, Seth Wakeman, a Republican from the same district, stated, “I am disposed to base the right to vote upon manhood, without reference to color.… I must vote for the amendment… doing away with all property qualifications, for the white as well as for the colored man, and put each on his manhood.”⁴⁵ Even some Democrats recognized the connection between manhood and voting. Joseph Masten, Democrat-at-large, in debate called the vote a “manly privilege.”⁴⁶

This perception, of voting as a male privilege, was the essence of what Anthony and Stanton and the AERA sought to challenge. The two activists continued their attack on the link between manhood and voting in New York even after their appearance before the suffrage committee. On July 4, both women spoke at a massive rally for the AERA in Westchester, near Horace Greeley’s home.⁴⁷ In her speech Stanton continued to challenge the link between voting rights, manhood, and military service. This link did not exist, she argued, because she “presumed not a member in the Constitutional Convention had gone to the war, or could show the scar of a bullet received in battle. The ballot and the bullet certainly did not go together.”⁴⁸ By pointing out that convention members were men and voters but probably not veterans, Stanton critiqued the convention’s political leaders for not practicing what their party was preaching. It also demonstrated her developing ability to use social differences to argue for women’s enfranchisement. Clearly, only the wealthy could pay poorer men to fight in their place.⁴⁹ If the tie between military service, manhood, and voting rights was simply a formality that could be overcome by men with money, Stanton cleverly noted, that the wealthiest women with money could overcome such a formality just as easily.

But the convention’s delegates were not associating social class with suffrage; they were linking manhood to the ballot, and the AERA leaders’ attempts to challenge this link were not working. Therefore, in mid-July Stanton and Anthony tried a different line of attack. On July 16, the suffrage leaders persuaded George William Curtis, whom Anthony considered the best woman suffrage advocate at the convention, to present a particularly critical petition.⁵⁰ Unlike the many earlier AERA petitions submitted to the convention, this one gained significant public attention because of one particular signature. The petition came from “Mrs. Horace Greeley and other citizens of Westchester County, asking for equal suffrage for men and women.”⁵¹

As the convention was currently debating Horace Greeley’s suffrage committee report, recommending that New York not implement equal suffrage for men and women, Mrs. Horace Greeley’s petition caused quite an uproar. Greeley had not been informed that this petition was coming to the floor, and when its presentation occasioned “much amusement” in the rest of the convention, the ambushed Greeley became quite upset. When the convention adjourned for the day, the suffragists later recalled, he “had disappeared through some side door, and could not be found.”⁵² Greeley’s embarrassment was noted in all the major New York papers, providing the perfect opportunity for partisan ridicule.⁵³ The New York World headlined the incident in very large, bold print on the front page: “Mrs. Horace Greeley Petitioning for Female Suffrage” and reported that the petition’s “announcement created a general laughter in the convention at the expense of Greeley.”⁵⁴ The editors of the New York Herald wrote that the petition was “clearly a domestic protest against the tyranny of that gay deceiver Horace.” Later in the editorial, in the racist language typical of their party in this period, the Democratic editors stated that “there is room enough for the women on the broad platform of universal suffrage, and we have a poor idea of the manhood that would crowd these gentler ones away to make room for the niggers.”⁵⁵

Attacking Greeley personally was a deliberate political strategy. Stanton and Anthony had persuaded Mary Cheney Greeley to sign one of the AERA’s universal suffrage petitions early in their petitions drive. But by holding on to the petition until after Horace Greeley’s suffrage committee report had indicated his disfavor of the issue, they (through Curtis) ensured the petition would garner significant attention for their cause. Further, by presenting the petition from “Mrs. Horace Greeley” rather than from “Mrs. Mary Greeley,” as many women signed petitions at the time, the three sought to make clear exactly which Mrs. Greeley supported women’s enfranchisement.⁵⁶ Consequently, this petition emphasized the differences in opinion on woman suffrage within the Greeley household and exposed marital discord there for the entire state to see. It revealed that Horace Greeley did not control, or perhaps was not even aware of, his wife’s opinions. Most vital, however, it implied that Greeley was not an effective head of his household—that he simply could not control his wife.⁵⁷

Ridicule of Greeley’s manhood was not limited to the press—it also emerged in the convention itself. On July 18, during the debate on the suffrage committee’s proposal, George Curtis proposed removing the word “male” from the constitution’s suffrage provision.⁵⁸ This led the convention to explicitly debate woman suffrage on July 22–23, and again briefly on July 25.⁵⁹ On two different occasions during these debates, delegates obliquely referenced Greeley’s public embarrassment. The first came on July 22, five days after Mrs. Greeley’s petition was offered to the convention, when Marcus Bickford argued that if women voted, they would also then have the right to hold office. The election of women, Bickford argued, would result in a dramatic spectacle, “when the Speaker recognizes ‘the Lady from Westchester.’” The records of debate indicated that at this, the convention laughed.⁶⁰ Horace Greeley, as the most prominent representative from Westchester County, was likely Bickford’s target. Greeley, Bickford implied, was less than a man, either because his role could be readily supplanted by a woman or because Greeley himself was implied to be the lady in this scenario.

The second reference was more oblique. On July 25, one of the last days that woman suffrage itself was explicitly debated in the convention, the Democrat Erastus Brooks from the First Senatorial District argued that women did not wish to be enfranchised. “There are in this convention one hundred and sixty household gods, so to speak, representing our homes and firesides,” he stated. “All of these are represented by us in our respective heads of families. How many of these homes, how many of our wives and daughters and sisters desire to be intrusted with this right of franchise?”⁶¹ Only nine days before, at least one of the “household gods” of the convention, Horace Greeley, was shown to have a wife who did desire to be entrusted with the right.

The presentation of Mrs. Greeley’s petition as an attempt to challenge the connection between manhood and voting was unsuccessful and problematic. As an intentional strategy designed to point out logical inconsistencies in the link between manhood, political power, and the franchise, it instead played out as a personal attack. This made it seem more of an angry reaction born of spite, hurt, and feelings of betrayal than a reasoned political strategy. Further, it did not transform the opinions of delegates at New York’s constitutional convention. Instead, it may have played into their worst fears: that woman suffrage would result in domestic discord, undermining the natural authority of men as the heads of households, disrupting existing gender arrangements.

In the floor debates on woman suffrage, the delegates revealed their fear that women’s enfranchisement would transform gender relations and reaffirmed their faith in the link between gender and the franchise. For example, the Republican Horace Smith of the Fifteenth Senate District argued that suffrage was not a natural right for women because gender was not an “unjust or invidious distinction.” He stated that the Declaration of Independence “demands the same rights and privileges for the colored man that belong to the white man, other things being equal. But, sir, it does not ignore natural distinctions, nor does it involve necessarily an identity of sphere or sameness of functions.”⁶² Perceiving gender, but not race, as a natural distinction, Smith argued that “we demand the right of suffrage for colored men because they are men, and exclude women because they are women. The distinction,” he said, “depends upon sex and not upon color.”⁶³ In case there was any confusion, Smith repeated his assertion and reiterated his party’s position: “We claim the right of suffrage for colored men because they are men, the same measure of political rights for black as for white, under the principles of our government and the Declaration of Independence; but we object to women, both white and black, participating in government because they are women.”⁶⁴

Other delegates agreed with Smith and foresaw gender chaos if women voted. For example, John Francis, a Republican from the twelfth district, bemoaned the loss of sacred masculine space if women were permitted to vote: “Why, sir, if we admit this exercise of the franchise we are substantially told that the ladies shall wrangle at the bar, shout in the auction room, speculate at the Bourse, and be present at the bickering of the gold room.… There will be no door to office so concealed or jealously guarded upon which there will not be the gentle but peremptory knock of woman.”⁶⁵ Francis feared that the vote could enable women to break down the boundaries separating the gendered public and private spheres so valued by nineteenth-century Americans.

The Republican Francis Silvester agreed, but he feared women’s preemptory knock on the military’s door. Clearly influenced by Stanton and Anthony’s argument that enfranchised women would serve in the military, Silvester entertained his fellow delegates with a hypothetical scenario:

Although Silvester intended to amuse his colleagues, the problem of women joining the male sphere was far more worrisome to the delegates than choosing appropriate uniforms for feminine warriors. These warriors, by their very presence, would undermine military discipline and order. But Silvester also raised a specter of soldiers in drag, a fundamental transgression of the boundaries between masculine and feminine behavior and dress. Women voters would result in women soldiers, both trespassing in the male sphere and generating political and social chaos.

Silvester and Francis expressed a fear of gender disruption caused by women’s enfranchisement because for them voting was fundamentally defined as a male privilege, and manliness was fundamentally tied to voting. Giving women the vote would defeminize women, as Marcus Bickford inadvertently indicated by calling the suffragist and AERA leader Lucy Stone “Mr.” when she spoke before the convention on July 10.⁶⁷ But it would also feminize men. Acting on this fear, the convention overwhelmingly defeated Curtis’s proposal for enfranchising women, first by a vote of 133 to 9, then by a vote of 125 to 19.⁶⁸ Immediately before the final vote was taken, Horace Greeley rose and took the floor to explain his opposition to enfranchising women. In particular, he protested against the gender disruption that he felt would result: “I wish the women of this State to be heard as women, and not to be mixed up with and commingled with men in caucuses, on nominating committees, and at the polls, but allowed to have their views heard as women of the State.… I am very sure they will be heard as women.”⁶⁹

Ultimately, Stanton and the AERA could not persuade New York’s 1867 convention delegates that burying the woman in the citizen would not also bury all gendered distinctions; the delegates simply did not believe that citizenship was neutral ground into which gender identities could be buried. Despite this failure, the AERA’s attacks on manhood, military service, and Horace Greeley at the convention represented important attempts to seek an alternative argumentative framework outside the abolitionist/radical Republican alliance. By challenging the link between manhood and the franchise, Stanton and Anthony challenged the Republicans’ partisan rhetorical hegemony and foreshadowed their forthcoming split with the party of Lincoln. But within the partisan world of Reconstruction politics, there were limited alternatives to Republican alliances and rhetorical culture. To successfully navigate this world, the suffragists had to work within the constraints it imposed. Thus, in Kansas when they began looking away from the Republicans, the only remaining option was the other political party competing with the Republicans for institutional control—the Democrats.

Such a Fearful Deglutition

As New York was rejecting the AERA’s request for a revolution in voting rights in the summer of 1867, the organization was already looking to its next campaign.⁷⁰ In Kansas the Republican Party had placed a referendum for black suffrage onto the November ballot. More importantly for woman suffragists, the influential state senator Samuel N. Wood had persuaded his colleagues to add a referendum to enfranchise women to the same ballot. In the spring and summer, Wood extended invitations to several prominent eastern suffrage advocates to come to Kansas and stump for his referendum.⁷¹ The AERA sent Olympia Brown, Lucy Stone, and Henry Blackwell to speak for equal rights across the state.⁷² However, they found little support among many Kansas Republicans, some of whom, like the New York and congressional Republicans, feared that the association of woman suffrage and black male suffrage would defeat both. Consequently, most Kansas Republicans sought to distance the black suffrage campaign from woman suffrage. By early summer, Stone and Blackwell had returned to the East, discouraged by the lack of support they found in the state.⁷³ Upon further urging from Wood, Stanton and Anthony came to Kansas in September hoping to revive the lagging woman suffrage campaign.⁷⁴

They arrived in Kansas late in the game, but there was enough activity among Kansas Republicans to keep their hopes for success alive. Two prominent Republicans, Senator Samuel Pomeroy and the state’s ex-governor Charles Robinson, actively worked for universal suffrage: Robinson accompanied Stanton for the first few weeks of her state lecture tour, and Pomeroy prompted forty-four other politicians and editors to sign a document indicating their support for both suffrage referenda. In late September the eastern radical papers finally chimed in: Theodore Tilton’s Independent endorsed woman suffrage in Kansas. On October 1, the notable eastern radicals Benjamin Wade, Theodore Tilton, Wendell Phillips, Gerrit Smith, and Henry Ward Beecher published in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune a plea to Kansas voters to vote favorably on both referenda.⁷⁵

But this lukewarm support was far too little and way too late. Although officially the party declared itself neutral on women’s enfranchisement, permitting each party speaker to “express his individual opinion on all ‘side issues’” led many local Republicans to campaign actively against woman suffrage at Republican-sponsored events.⁷⁶ Some of these politicians, a supporter argued to the party’s state central committee “used ungentlemanly, indecent, and infamously defamatory language when alluding to a large and respectable portion of the women of Kansas, or to women now engaged in canvassing the State in favor of impartial suffrage.”⁷⁷ One group in Emporia even cited Greeley’s New York convention suffrage report as support for their opposition.⁷⁸ Even worse was the active negative campaigning engaged in by some party papers. Calling woman suffrage a “nauseating dose,” the editor of the Atchison Daily Champion suggested that “the stomach of our State… is, as yet, too tender and febrific to allow such a fearful deglutition.”⁷⁹ Other newspaper editors followed suit. Charles Eskridge of Emporia, who sought to leverage tensions between supporters of black men’s and women’s suffrage to take over the practically leaderless Kansas Republican Party, initiated a relentless press campaign that challenged the gender identity of supporters of women’s voting rights—calling one man a “poodle pup” and women “male women.”⁸⁰ Eskridge declared that the voting referenda would “bring about a conflict of races and sexes” and echoed the oft-expressed sentiment that enfranchising women would be the end of American society.⁸¹ Those who shared his views put this sentiment into action, forming an Anti-Female Suffrage State Committee to campaign actively against women’s rights.⁸² Divided and weak, the state party’s leadership refused to censure speakers who were attacking women activists, which some AERA supporters interpreted as a clear indication of a broad Republican hostility to their cause.⁸³ Feeling abandoned by local Republicans and frustrated by national radicals’ inaction and late action, some suffragists in Kansas started to look for a different constituency.

As early as 1866, woman suffrage supporters had sought support from the Democratic Party.⁸⁴ Early in the Kansas campaign, ex-governor Robinson discovered that some Democrats were “disposed to talk favorably of the male proposition,” meaning Wood’s referendum to remove the word “male” from the state constitution.⁸⁵ In an April 10 letter, Lucy Stone reported to Stanton that although the Republicans were setting aside woman suffrage, “the Democrats all over the State are preparing to take us up.”⁸⁶ Despite these hints of support, in September the Democrats officially rejected both suffrage referenda. Although some local Democrats continued to support woman suffrage, it was the appearance in late October of a well-known and popular figure associated with the Democrats—George Francis Train—that fueled the hopes and garnered the attention of the woman suffragists.⁸⁷ Train, a railroad financier wealthy enough to be funding his own private campaign for president, was an energetic and outlandish speaker who rarely restrained himself to one subject in his public speeches. Known for his impromptu short poems, called epigrams, that ridiculed prominent political figures, Train had been invited to stump Kansas in favor of woman suffrage by a state suffrage organization, as well as by Samuel Wood.⁸⁸ Although critical of both parties, Train had close ties to the Irish-American community, which guaranteed that wherever he went in Kansas, some Democrats at least would turn out to hear him speak.⁸⁹ His national reputation for eccentricity likewise ensured that wherever he went, hundreds of others would turn out simply for the spectacle.⁹⁰

Train’s appearance in Kansas to support woman suffrage was a surprise to Stanton and Anthony, but the two AERA leaders soon embraced him for the publicity, attention, and financial backing that he offered their cause.⁹¹ They also accepted his racism. For the last two weeks of the campaign, Anthony toured the state with Train, speaking on the same platform, as Train openly wielded racist arguments to support white women’s enfranchisement.⁹² This was not the first time the AERA leaders had turned to race to support their quest for partisan alliances. In the spring campaign, when Stone and the other AERA lecturers had sought Democratic partisan support, they argued for woman suffrage in racist terms that would appeal to Kansas’s Democrats. For example, Henry Blackwell circulated a pamphlet in April suggesting to the southern states that they could “counterbalance” the votes of the emancipated men the North was seeking to enfranchise with the ballots of “your four million Southern white women.” Adding white women’s votes to that of white men, Blackwell seemed to be suggesting, would be one way to maintain white supremacy in the face of northern pressure for racial equality.⁹³

In October, Train echoed these ideas, pitching woman suffrage to Democrats as a weapon for white supremacy. For example, in Johnson County he composed the following epigram:

Train’s intent was clear: unless Democrats enfranchised white women, black male voters would turn white women into slaves. He repeated this theme throughout his tour of Kansas, particularly emphasizing a race-based social hierarchy. In Leavenworth on October 15, he polled his audience: “All those in favor of lifting women up to the level of negroes politically, by giving them votes say aye. (Cries of aye, and laughter.).… Now then… all those in favor of placing the women below the negro politically… say aye. (No response.).”⁹⁵ In Ottawa, Train argued that an antiwoman suffrage Republican who intended “to vote for negro suffrage and against woman suffrage” was endangering white women: “Not satisfied with having your mother, your wife, your sisters, your daughters the equals politically of the negro—by giving him a vote and refusing it to woman; you wish to place your family politically still lower in the scale of citizenship and humanity.”⁹⁶ By emphasizing a social hierarchy, Train, like other Republicans and Democrats in Kansas, depicted the enfranchisement of black men and of white women as oppositional. This depiction and its accompanying tensions persisted throughout the rest of the Kansas campaign, as Republicans fragmented, as African American activists grew increasingly frustrated, and as Stanton and Anthony increasingly turned to the Democrats.⁹⁷

Defining white women’s rights and black men’s rights as oppositional benefited neither cause in Kansas. On November 5, Kansas voters rejected both referenda by a significant margin. Black male suffrage was defeated by a vote of 19,421 to 10,483, woman suffrage by 19,857 to 9,070. State and national Republican Party support failed to guarantee the passage of black suffrage; Train’s racist appeals failed to secure the Democrats for woman suffrage.⁹⁸ But in spite of this defeat, Stanton and Anthony did not end their association with Train. Instead, the two activists accepted his offer both to fund their return trip east and to finance a new suffrage newspaper they would edit and manage upon their return to New York. As Stanton later recalled, “We saw that our only chance was in getting the Democratic vote,” and Train, it seemed, was their ticket to the Democrats.⁹⁹

Stanton and Anthony’s continued connection with Train was troubling to many of their radical friends and erstwhile allies. William Lloyd Garrison was shocked that the two activists could “have taken such leave of good sense” to abandon the Republican Party fold for “that crack-brained harlequin and semi-lunatic, George Francis Train!” Train, Garrison said, “is as destitute of principle as he is of sense, and is fast gravitating toward a lunatic asylum. He may be of use in drawing an audience; but so would a kangaroo, a gorilla, or a hippopotamus.”¹⁰⁰ Despite a chorus of criticism like this, Train’s offer of a newspaper was too tempting to pass up. The historian Faye Dudden has argued that a woman suffrage newspaper offered Stanton and Anthony an independent and autonomous forum in which to express their views, but even more important, if successful and profitable it would provide them with a long-term, stable source of funding for suffrage activism.¹⁰¹ Train’s paper, the Revolution, also offered them a way to pursue new political alliances. In the next few years, their articles and editorials continued to appeal to Democrats, adopting Democratic arguments, rhetoric, and racism.

An Antidote to Political Arsenic

Although the Democrats in Kansas had made anemic overtures to woman suffrage supporters, they were not the first to do so. Throughout suffrage-related debates in the Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Congresses, numerous Democrats advocated white women’s enfranchisement both to oppose black suffrage and as a tool for maintaining the white man’s government. Many of these congressmen used white women’s voting status negatively to argue against the connection between citizenship and suffrage. In congressional debates on suffrage and representation in 1866, Democrats refuted the Republican Party assertions that the ballot was a right of citizenship by pointing to women’s disfranchised status. For example, the Representative John Chanler of New York argued, “The right to vote is not an inalienable right.… It is not a natural right at all.… Women, minors, and aliens are excluded from its exercise. Yet no disgrace attaches to them in being deprived of the privilege to vote, nor is any injustice committed on them. If the right to vote be, as asserted by some, an inalienable right, it naturally belongs to every human creature who lands on our shores, and should be granted to them without limitation of time or distinction of sex. This is denied by the friends of negro suffrage.”¹⁰² But excluding women from the franchise, Chanler claimed, “does not fix disgrace on the fair sex… it is rather an honor to them that they suffer this ‘constraint which sweetens liberty.’”¹⁰³

Most Democrats were not so bold as to argue that the lack of the ballot “sweetened liberty” for African American men. But, drawing on their long-held partisan tradition of using race to define themselves as a party and adopting their party’s traditional racist rhetoric, Democrats deemed African Americans to be racially inferior, morally depraved, and ignorant, unfit voters.¹⁰⁴ Manhood, they claimed, was insufficient to balance the natural and inherent disabilities of race. For example, on June 16, 1866, the Indiana representative William Niblack declared, “The negro race is inferior to the white race, and… anything like social or political equality between the two races is neither practicable nor desirable.”¹⁰⁵ Senator James Doolittle of Wisconsin echoed this argument, situating a race-based disability at the heart of his objection to enfranchising black men: “We are Caucasians and represent that race. From history, from our education, from our experience, every man of full age of the Caucasian race in this country, as a general rule is competent.… When a man tells me that the Africans in this country just set free on the plantations… are competent to exercise the right of suffrage and help shape the laws of this great Republic, he states what is perfectly abhorrent to my sense of justice, reason, or propriety.”¹⁰⁶

Doolittle’s association of whiteness with competence, and of African-Americans with incompetence, was echoed throughout Democratic suffrage arguments. By arguing that African Americans were inherently ignorant, Democrats could justify rejecting their enfranchisement because of the important responsibilities that accompanied political rights in a democracy. Indeed, the New Jersey representative Andrew Rodgers argued early in the Thirty-Ninth Congress that African Americans’ supposed ignorance was such an inherent impediment to suffrage that no country had ever allowed the black man to have the right to vote: “It has become a settled notion of the people… that the negro race were not sufficiently intelligent to exercise the right of suffrage, and they have not been allowed that right since the formation of the government.… The wisdom of more than five thousand years had refused to allow the political equality of the negro race as exercised by the white; and no civilized people of any country have allowed universal suffrage to the negro throughout their governments.”¹⁰⁷ Paralleling the circuitous argument made by Democrats that because women lacked the right to vote, voting was not a right of citizenship, Rodgers asserted that because black men had never had the right to vote, it therefore must not be a right to which they were entitled.

Depicting African American men as uneducated at best and inherently intellectually deficient at worst, Democrats drew on American fears about the safety of their democracy. Like the Republicans, congressional Democrats suggested that the ideological and physical safety of the nation was at stake in any change to the franchise. Unlike Republicans, however, Democrats claimed that danger resulted not from a denial of the ballot but from the extension of it. The Indiana representative Michael Kerr argued that not only was the nation’s safety threatened by African American men’s enfranchisement, but whiteness itself would be endangered by black voters: “We may thus, by the [enfranchisement of the freedmen], become substantially Africanized, Mexicanized, or Coolyized and all our glorious institutions and national and personal individuality give place to anarchy and weakness.”¹⁰⁸ National safety was of particular concern for Democrats in light of recent war and the fragile state of reunification. The newly reformed body politic, they argued, could not handle the dangerous political poison of black voters. As Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky asserted,

The American political republic, Democrats claimed, could not survive if its people did not share common interests or common abilities. But the most dangerous difference between people, Democrats such as Davis argued, was measured and determined by race.

Not only would the presence of African American men in the body politic threaten national safety, but, Democrats argued, black male voters would threaten the personal safety of individual Americans. In particular, they inverted Republican arguments that the physical safety of southern freedmen depended on their enfranchisement and asserted instead that the safety of white women and not that of black men was being determined in the enfranchisement debates. Drawing on (and simultaneously helping to reinforce) the myth of the black rapist, Democrats argued that enfranchisement would inappropriately empower African American men and give them license to perpetrate violence against southern white women.¹¹⁰ The first “fearful outrage” upon white womanhood that Democrats predicted was interracial marriage. Without legal distinctions between the political rights of men, they asserted, race mixture would inevitably result. Representative Rodgers, in February of 1866, stated that if the federal government mandated equal political and civil rights,

However frightened the Democrats were of interracial marriage, some professed to be even more worried that enfranchisement would empower black men to rape white women. For example, Senator Garrett Davis of Kentucky claimed that granting African American men equal citizenship rights would lead to greater numbers of assaults on white females: “A few weeks since, in Louisville, a negro man violated a girl of only eight years of age; and within a few days, in my county, a similar outrage was committed on a white girl ten years old, after which the black monster cut her throat and disemboweled her.”¹¹² If, as Davis alleged, such “monsters” were committing crimes while the death penalty for black rapists was on the law books, what possibilities could be imagined if those laws were removed by enfranchised black men? By arguing that white womanhood was endangered by black equality, either through voluntary miscegenation or rape, and by capitalizing on the stereotypes of vulnerable white womanhood and sexually predatory black men that were becoming increasingly potent in the post–Civil War period, Democrats applied already existing rhetoric that combined sexual meaning and a particular vision of gender and racial identity to discussions of public political rights.¹¹³

Yet although many Democrats used gendered stereotypes of both black men and white women to claim the sanctity of the white man’s government, a few sacrificed their adherence to traditional white gender roles and expanded their conceptualization of voting “men” to include white women. As Andrew Rodgers declared, Democrats believed that the government of the United States was “intended especially for the benefit of white men and white women, and not for those who belong to the negro, Indian, or mulatto race.”¹¹⁴ Those women, the Pennsylvania Democrat Benjamin Boyer argued, should have the right to vote: “If the negro has a natural right to vote because he is a human inhabitant of a community professing to be republican, then women should vote, for the same reason; and the New England States themselves are only pretend republics, because their women, who are in a considerable majority, are denied the right of suffrage. Some of the reformers do say that after the negro will come the women. But I protest against this inverse order of merit; and if both are to vote I claim precedence for the ladies.”¹¹⁵ The conservative Pennsylvania senator Edgar Cowan concurred, arguing that if African American men were to vote, then white women should be enfranchised as well.¹¹⁶

If, as Democrats had argued, the safety of the country was at stake if freed-men were enfranchised, Cowan posited white women voters as an antidote to the possible influence “dangerous blackness” would have at the polls. The whiteness of the female voters he sought was certainly deemed strong enough to counteract the influence of the gender that had heretofore rendered them unfit voters.

Even Republicans’ arguments about military service did not deter Democrats from arguing that white women were more qualified voters than black men. Following Republicans’ logic that black men’s military experiences entitled them to the ballot, some Democrats made the same claim for women. For example, New Jersey representative Rodgers argued that “if you have to have these men vote because they have fought in the Army, then I want all the women who went down into the Army to administer to the suffering soldiers to be equally entitled to vote.”¹¹⁸ With arguments like these, Democrats challenged the gendered association Republicans were making between African American men and voting rights, emphasizing instead the importance of whiteness as a determinant of political privilege. By consistently making white women the subjects of Republican claims, whether those claims were about citizenship, safety, or military service, Democrats created a racist political rhetorical culture that valued whiteness above all else in potential voters—even above gender. The themes developed in this culture offered a model for some woman suffrage activists to draw on as they sought to turn Democrats from rhetorical and theoretical advocates into actual allies.

Cast under the Heel of the Lowest Orders of Manhood

That most Democrats considered the idea of woman suffrage only as an unwanted yet necessary antidote to the political arsenic of the black male voter did not disturb Stanton and Anthony’s enthusiasm for new partisan allies in late 1867. Angry and frustrated with Republicans’ rejection in Congress, in New York, and in Kansas, the two suffragists stubbornly defended their new alliance, and Train had provided them with a public means in which to do so. In January of 1868, the three began publication of the Revolution.¹¹⁹ In its pages the two women, although never completely abandoning egalitarian and Republican-leaning arguments for woman suffrage, also began to wield overtly racist arguments that directly mirrored the Democrats’ arguments privileging white women’s enfranchisement. They sought to appeal to Democrats, Stanton wrote in the paper’s second issue, because “the party out of power is always in a position to carry principles to their logical conclusions, while the party in power, thinks only of what it can afford to do; hence, you can reason with minorities, while majorities are moved only by votes.”¹²⁰ To reason with the minority Democrats, Stanton and Anthony strategically used racism to advance white women’s claims to the ballot.

Most frequently, the racist statements in the Revolution claimed that the enfranchisement of African American men would rearrange the social hierarchy in America, placing white women beneath black men on a metaphorical ladder of political and social power. To reject this potential reordering, the articles’ authors, like the Democrats, deemed black men ignorant and unworthy of the power that enfranchisement would convey. For example, in a January 1868 editorial, Stanton declared, “To what a depth of degradation must the women of this nation have fallen to be willing to stand aside, silent and indifferent spectators in the reconstruction of the nation, while all the lower stratas [sic] of manhood are to legislate in their interests, political, religious, educational, social and sanitary, molding to their untutored will the institutions of a mighty continent.… What an insult to the women who have labored thirty years for the emancipation of the slave, now when he is their political equal, to propose to lift him above their heads.”¹²¹ In May 1868 she restated this argument more explicitly and in a more overtly racist way. To defend her decision to defect from the Republican Party and seek Democratic assistance, Stanton stated that she had done so because she saw “that the women of virtue, wealth, and character in this country were to be made the subjects of every vicious, ignorant, degraded type of manhood, [so] we unfurled a new banner to the breeze, ‘immediate and unconditional enfranchisement for women of the republic.’”¹²² By implying that black men were “vicious, ignorant, and degraded,” Stanton disputed both their fitness for the ballot and the justice in privileging their rights over the rights of upper-class, educated white women. Furthermore, she claimed that black men’s enfranchisement would give unqualified freedmen power over the rights and futures of wealthy white women. In February 1869, Stanton again rejected the precedence in enfranchisement that was being given to black men by Republicans, protesting that “suffering under the wrongs of Saxon men, you have added insult to injury by exalting another race above her head: slaves, ignorant, degraded, depraved, but yesterday crouching at your feet, outside the pale of political consideration, are to-day, by your edicts, made her rulers, judges, jurors, and lawgivers!”¹²³

Anthony also decried a race-based social hierarchy while directly appealing to the Democrats for support. In June she wrote an open letter to the Democratic Party requesting that it add woman suffrage to its 1868 national platform. In the letter she expressed indignation, which she fully expected Democrats to share, that black men had taken precedence within the Republican Party: “While the dominant party have with one hand lifted up TWO MILLION BLACK MEN and crowned them with the honor and dignity of citizenship, with the other they have dethroned FIFTEEN MILLION WHITE WOMEN—their own mothers and sisters, their own wives and daughters—and cast them under the heel of the lowest orders of manhood.”¹²⁴ By positioning African American men as the lowest order of manhood and implying that Republicans threatened white women’s status, Anthony sought Democratic support for returning the national gendered and racial social hierarchy to its prewar form. In all of these statements, Anthony and Stanton challenged the Republican Party’s emphasis on manhood, arguing that the Republican strategy would undermine the importance of race in national politics. These assertions were designed to resonate with the deepest fears of Democrats who relied on whiteness to construct their constituency, political culture, and partisan language.

Further echoing Democrats’ racist arguments, Stanton and Anthony suggested in the Revolution that because the majority of black men were so recently emerged from the ignorance and degradation of slavery, their enfranchisement would endanger the physical and ideological safety of the already embattled nation. White women voters, they argued, would protect the nation from the danger of governance by the “lowest stratum of manhood.”¹²⁵ For example, in April of 1868, Stanton argued that America’s free institutions had been weakened by the recent war and the challenges of Reconstruction and so required white women’s stabilizing influence:

Stanton used this metaphor to depict white women as not merely more educated than black men but more skilled in the maneuverings of government. Because of women’s skill, their suffrage would protect the nation from the danger of black men’s votes. “Universal suffrage is safe,” she said, “because you have the wealth, the virtue, the education of woman to outweigh ignorance, poverty, and vice. You have too, that peculiar elevating and civilizing power found in the difference of sex. But to extend suffrage to ignorant manhood, is to invert the natural order of things; it is to dethrone the Queen of the moral universe, and subjugate royalty to brute force.”¹²⁷

In claiming that women’s votes would protect the nation, Stanton’s language hinted at a more insidious argument made by the Democrats—that giving black men the ballot would result in the sexual endangerment of white women. A week after she made the argument about royalty and brute force in the Revolution, Stanton repeated this language in another coded attack on black men. This time, Congress came under fire for enfranchising black men in Washington, D.C. She stated that “in removing all political disabilities from the male citizens of the District, [Congress has] established… a government based on the aristocracy of sex… invading as it does our homes; desecrating our family altars; dividing those whom God has joined together… and subjugating, everywhere, moral power to brute force.”¹²⁸ The verbs she chose to use in these statements are particularly telling. While “desecrate” and “invade” are sufficiently suggestive, “subjugate” explicitly means to conquer, bring under the power of another, to make submissive, and to subdue.¹²⁹ In how many contexts could a black man subdue a white woman, making her submit to his will? In case this coded language was lost on some of her readers, in the same issue of the Revolution Stanton articulated her meaning is less ambiguous terms: “Just as the democratic cry of a ‘white man’s government,’ created the antagonism between the Irishman and the negro, which culminated in the New York riots of ’63, so the republican cry of ‘manhood suffrage’ creates an antagonism between black men and all women, that will culminate in fearful outrages on womanhood, especially in the Southern States.”¹³⁰

Just as Democrats were utilizing the myth of the black male rapist to define black men as unworthy voters, Stanton also drew on this racist bugaboo to create a reason for women’s voting that carried sufficient emotional power. She and Anthony had long understood that women’s claim to the ballot lacked the urgency that could be claimed by black southern men. But they demanded that woman suffrage receive equal attention, if not priority over the enfranchisement of those men. Without the immediate and palpable threat of violence against white women to push their suffrage claims, those claims lacked political and moral power. To give women’s enfranchisement emotional weight, Stanton fused the Republicans’ assertion that black men needed the right to vote as protection against the racist violence in the South with the Democrats’ claim that enfranchisement would result in sexual danger for white women. This argument, she hoped, would persuade Democrats to support white women’s enfranchisement if for no other reason than to protect white social and political power.

Then Stanton took her appeals to Democrats one step further. On October 1, 1868, she endorsed the policies and politics of the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Frank Blair, in the Revolution.¹³¹ In the early fall of 1868, Blair gave a campaign speech in Indianapolis that, Faye Dudden argues in Fighting Chance, Stanton found appealing. In this speech, Blair touched on all the ideas that she was promoting in her Revolution editorials. In particular, he used the Democrats’ most racist argument to reject black men’s enfranchisement, claiming that if they were empowered as voters, miscegenation and the rape of white women would result. A reporter for the Cincinnati Commercial noted that in the speech, Blair “drew a picture of the moral, political, and social evils which he believed would result from negro suffrage, especially the degradation of the female sex.”¹³² But white women’s vulnerability to sexual predation was not Blair’s only reference to women; he spent a considerable portion of his text reprimanding Republicans and radical abolitionists for abandoning the cause of white woman suffrage. In particular, and perhaps most interesting to Stanton, Blair pointed to Kansas as a key site of Republican betrayal, saying that “at the late election in Kansas, where the question of female suffrage and of negro suffrage were presented… the Radicals showed that they preferred to extend the right of suffrage to the brutal negro race, rather than to place the ballot in the hands of their own wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters.”¹³³ Later in the speech, he particularly praised the efforts of women’s rights activists who had been working “within a year or two past to obtain the right of suffrage,” efforts he attributed to “an instinctive dread of coming danger.”¹³⁴

Given the numerous disappointments and setbacks women’s rights advocates had had in the past few years, it had to gratify Stanton to see a major party candidate acknowledging the justice of women’s claims and recognizing that the Republicans had abandoned women’s rights in favor of, as Blair put it, “manhood suffrage, which… means suffrage for the negro man and disfranchisement for the white man.”¹³⁵ The fact that Blair was parroting the worst of Democratic Party racist propaganda about African Americans did not seem to bother Stanton; rather, she seemed willing to accept his assessments. In her endorsement, she noted, “If you would know, women of the republic, how little trust you can put even in the men of your own race, look at your statutes and constitutions, and see the barbarous laws for women. If Saxon men have legislated thus for their own mothers, wives, and daughters, what can we hope for at the hands of Chinese, Indians, and Africans?”¹³⁶

Stanton’s endorsement of Blair was the culmination of her efforts to appeal to Democrats. As she had done with congressional Democrats, she chose to interpret Blair’s race-baiting as a genuine expression of support for women’s rights. It is most likely, however, that he had no more interest in actually enfranchising women than did congressional Democrats in 1866. Instead, he advanced his own candidacy by using white women as both potential victims and voters, appealing to the party rank and file with its particular partisan rhetoric. Dudden has argued that Stanton’s acceptance of Blair’s claims, and her endorsement, was “political opportunism of the worst sort: ill-informed, ineffective, and unprincipled.”¹³⁷ It is hard to disagree with this assessment. However, it is also important to see Stanton’s endorsement of Blair as a continuation of her ongoing Democratic-leaning campaign hinted at in Congress and in New York, born in Kansas, and fully pursued in the Revolution. In this campaign, Stanton, and Anthony to a lesser degree, accepted Democratic rhetoric as political reality, sought allies among the Democratic camp, and appropriated Democratic partisan language to articulate white women’s claims to the ballot in what they hoped would be politically meaningful terms.¹³⁸

Every Argument for the Negro

On January 14, 1869, the Revolution published a letter from Stanton’s cousin Gerrit Smith declining Anthony’s request that he sign a new universal suffrage petition for Congress. Smith said he could not “sign a paper against the enfranchisement of the negro man.… The removal of the political disabilities of race is my first desire,—of sex, my second. If put on the same level and urged in the same connection neither will be soon accomplished.” The events in New York and Kansas of the previous two years had persuaded Smith, and most other abolitionists and Republicans, that associating woman suffrage with the enfranchisement of African American men would cause both to fail. Despite Smith’s reservations, after three frustrating years of outright rejection by Republicans in positions of national and local power, Stanton clearly had had enough. Angrily she declared in an editorial responding to Smith’s letter that “every argument for the negro is an argument for woman and no logician can escape it.¹³⁹ But by January of 1869 she had also amply demonstrated that in Reconstruction party politics every argument against “the Negro” could also be used as an argument for the woman.

Although Stanton and Anthony’s racist turn was acutely problematic, if not immoral, it does show the two suffragists navigating the complex waters of Reconstruction-era identity and partisan politics. As they watched Republicans use gender to delineate the limits of the polity, subsuming the racial identity of African American men in their manhood, they sought to do the opposite—to subsume white women’s gendered identity in their race and use whiteness to define the political community. Their ability and willingness to shift fluidly between the political rhetoric of the Republican and Democratic parties was a calculated political move designed to make white women’s claim to the ballot bear meaning in the intensely partisan world of nineteenth-century politics. This strategy—though elitist, controversial, nasty, and ultimately self-defeating—was a strategic choice that seemed reasonable to these suffrage activists given the constraints on their available political options. It was a calculated decision made by political actors attempting to navigate their complex partisan world. And like many political choices, it relied more on expediency than morality.

That Stanton and Anthony were willing to sacrifice the high ideals of the AERA so soon after its founding, to surrender the cause of universal suffrage and advocate exclusively for white women’s rights, is one of the ugliest moments in the early woman suffrage movement.¹⁴⁰ Their racist language caused an uproar among their fellow reformers and ultimately caused a schism in the woman suffrage movement, a division that set back the cause of women’s enfranchisement for decades. Worse, perhaps, it laid a foundation of inequality in the movement that would persist throughout the history of feminism.¹⁴¹