Lucy Stone, Her Memory is Safe: An Address Delivered in Washington, D.C., on February 16, 1894
LUCY STONE, HER MEMORY IS SAFE: AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED IN WASHINGTON, D.C., ON 16 FEBRUARY 1894
Boston , 24 March 1894. Other texts in (Warren, Ohio, 1894), 80-85;
Speech File, reel 16, frames 577-82, FD Papers, DLC.
Delegates attending the twenty-sixth annual convention of the National-Amer-
ican Woman Suffrage Association at Metzerott Hall in Washington, D.C.,
paused on the second day of their six-day meeting to memorialize leaders who
had recently died. Douglass joined Julia Ward Howe, Laura Clay, Josephine
K. Henry, Henry B. Blackwell, Susan B. Anthony, and others in eulogizing
Lucy Stone during the afternoon session on 16 February 1894. The “emotion
of the audience,” the Boston reported, “responded to the
tender words of the speakers.” Other than this speech, Douglass played a
minor role in the convention. Washington , 17 February 1894.
We do well to cherish and preserve the memory of the good men and
women who have filled up the measure of their years with effective service
to mankind and have passed away. In doing this we discharge a duty to the
living not less sacred than that we owe to the noble dead. We are all the
better to-day for devoting this hour to the memory of our dear departed co-
workers in the cause of liberty and of woman suffrage. We are not yet so
abundant in such workers as not to miss the presence and feel the loss of
those who have performed signal service in our cause.
Especially is it fitting that we pause for the moment and recall to
memory one so distinguished for service as she who was so lately with us
and who has been so recently and so suddenly called away. We can not soon
forget the voice, the face and form of the remarkable personage to whom
we so long looked, and never in vain, for wise counsel and noble inspira-
tion in work for advancement of woman.
There has been no time during the last thirty years that the name of
Lucy Stone has not been a tower of strength to the woman suffrage move-
ment. Though she had reached and passed her three-score and ten,1Ps. 90: 10. her
departure from us was felt as a surprise as well as a loss. When I saw her at
Chicago last summer2Douglass probably last saw Lucy Stone during the World's Congress of Representative Women held in conjunction with the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago in May 1893. Stone's lecture on “Woman's Progress" delivered there on 24 May was her final public address before her death on 18 October 1893. Chicago , 15, 16, 25 May 1893; New York , 17 May 1893; , 3: 106, 124 (July 1893); , 18: 80-81. she looked the picture of health, and gave promise of
much valuable service to the cause of woman. We have some consolation in
the fact that she lived to see the dawn of the triumph of the cause she had so
much at heart. We may also console ourselves by the thought that she did
her work so well in life that she has left behind her thousands upon thou-
sands of converts to take up that work and carry it on to success. In New
England especially, the scene of her labors, she has left a great crowd of
witnesses to the truth she served so faithfully, and which she endeavored so
wisely to organize into law for the better government of mankind.
I can add but little to what has already been said of the merits of Lucy
Stone. Her memory is safe in the hands of those who have spoken and shall
speak. They have stood nearer to her during her great life work than 1 have.
and knew her much better than I did. I knew her better in her earlier public
career and in her anti-slavery efforts than in her later life as a lecturer,
organizer and editor. In this last field of service I have seen her mainly from
a distance, and have had only a partial view of her devotion and efficiency
in that peculiar work, the work with which her name and memory will be
chiefly and forever associated. Her services are known and read of all men.
They have won for her a name and fame which time cannot dim and which
history will not allow to die. To appreciate the noble character of Lucy
Stone some account must be taken of the peculiar circumstances in which
she espoused the great cause for which she mainly employed her voice and
pen. It was not very popular at that time to advocate the right of suffrage for
woman.
But Lucy Stone was not a woman of one idea alone. She com-
prehended the claims of human liberty and human brotherhood on all their
many sides. She acknowledged manhood under whatever color or race it
might come. Her first work was for the anti-slavery cause. Here she gained
her first distinction as a public speaker. Were she here with us to-day, she
would resent with proper spirit the indignity offered at the Riggs House the
other day to a colored lady, an honored member of this Association.3The local press carried no reports of such an incident. The Riggs House hotel was the headquarters for delegates to the National-American Woman Suffrage Association annual convention in Washington, D.C., that year. Washington , 14 February 1894.
Lucy Stone came into the anti-slavery movement just at a time when
her presence and her work were most needed. It was an hour of moral
darkness and doubt. It was when slavery was in the prime of its power,
when the most extraordinary efforts were being made to put down the anti-slavery
agitation, and to suppress the anti-slavery sentiment of the country;
when the Whig party and the Democratic party had announced in their
platforms their purpose to accomplish this suppression at all hazards;4Douglass possibly alludes to the endorsements that both the Whig and Democratic party platforms of 1852 gave to the provisions of the Compromise of 1850, aimed at silencing sectional agitation over slavery. Johnson, , 1: 17-18, 21.
when the inhuman fugitive slave bill was in full force; when leading divines
and statesmen were endeavoring to reconcile the people of the North to the
infamous measure; when slave hunters were abroad in the land endeavoring
to recapture and return slaves to their masters, and when it seemed that the
cause of the slave must perish or be postponed to future generations, it was
then that Lucy Stone, with all the freshness of her youth, maidenly grace,
and heroic courage, stepped to the very front of our anti-slavery platform
and became one of our most attractive and effective advocates. Her advent,
like that of Mrs. Stowe’s5Harriet Beecher Stowe. great book, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” jointed well
with the extreme needs of the times. No one ever came into that movement
who at once arrested a more widespread attention than did Lucy Stone.
Calls came for her from all parts of the Northern States. She was every-
where in request. Everybody wanted to hear this new voice on the anti-
slavery question. Her responses to these calls were most generous and
successful. She was greeted everywhere by crowded houses. It was hers to
work in season and out of season, and she did it nobly and without grudg-
ing. I certainly deemed her advent among us a great accession to our anti-
slavery forces, and was much encouraged by her glorious presence in the
work of our emancipation. She not only instantly and broadly arrested
public attention to the anti-slavery question. but she retained for herself a
firm hold upon the public mind as long as she devoted her eloquence to this
reform.
Of her work in the cause of woman I leave others to speak more fully,
than I can. While I sincerely admire her work for woman suffrage, you will
pardon me if my tribute to her is mainly due for what she was and what she
did for the cause of the slave in the dark hours of his need. It was Lucy
Stone’s good fortune, while always earnest and uncompromising in her
advocacy either in the cause of woman or the cause of the slave, never to
create for herself any avoidable opposition, either by intemperance of
speech, personal peculiarities, or by the manner of her public addresses.
She had decided advantage both in voice and in person. To listen to her at
that time was like listening to delightful music. Her temper was even and
her spirit persuasive. She was not of those who measure their progress by
the resistance they meet in contending for the cause, though that at times is
an invaluable rule. My first acquaintance with her began more than forty
years ago when she and the late Miss Sally Holly6The daughter of Myron Holley, a founder of the Liberty party, Sallie Holley (1818-93) had been born in Canandaigua and raised on a farm near Rochester, New York. She attended Oberlin College and while there converted from political abolitionism to Garrisonianism as a result of attending a lecture by Abby Kelley Foster. After college graduation in 1851, Holley became an effective traveling lecturer for the American Anti-Slavery Society. During and after the Civil War she raised funds and gathered clothing to assist the newly emancipated southern slaves. In 1870, Holley joined Caroline F. Putnam, her close friend since college days, at Lottsburg, Virginia, where they operated a school for blacks for the remainder of their lives. John White Chadwick, (New York, 1899); Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, (New Haven, 1984), 149-55; James, , 2: 205-06. were acquiring a college
education at Oberlin, O. At that early day I found her endowed with the
idea of equal rights for woman, and what at that time pleased me most I
confess was this, I found her a radical abolitionist. From that day I have
never lost sight of Lucy Stone. Her figure in one or the other of these great
movements has been permanently in my mind. Few if any have done better
work for either cause than has Lucy Stone. As one of the millions, there-
fore, for whose freedom she nobly battled and for whom she stood with a
zeal as warm and a soul as strong as any of the brave men and women of our
anti-slavery phalanx, I am glad to be allowed an humble part in these
memorial services which are now and hereafter to form an interesting and
impressive chapter in the history of the woman suffrage movement in
America.
It is not alone on the goodness of any cause that men can safely
predicate success. Much depends upon the character and quality of the men
and women who are its advocates. The Redeemer must ever come from
above. Only the best of mankind can afford to support unpopular opinions.
The common sort will drift with the tide. No good cause can fail when
supported by such women as were Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelly, Angelina
Grimke, Lydia Maria Child, Maria W. Chapman, Thankful Southwick,
Sally Holley, Ernestine L. Rose,7Daughter of an orthodox rabbi from Piotrkow, Russian Poland, Ernestine Louise Siismondi Potowski Rose (1810-92) rebelled against parental authority and left home at sixteen. She traveled across Europe in intellectual circles and became a disciple of Robert Dale Owen's utopian plans. She married the wealthy English radical William E. Rose and the couple moved to New York City in 1836. Rose lectured at her own expense throughout the North on such topics as deism, free public schools, abolition, and women's rights. From 1837 to 1848 she led the campaign that ultimately won legal protection for the property rights of married women in New York. During the Civil War she actively worked for the National Women's Loyal League. Returning to Great Britain in 1869, Rose continued to lecture on behalf of numerous reform causes. Yuri Suhl, (New York, 1959); , 5: 322; , 158-9. E. Oakes Smith,8Born in North Yarmouth, Maine, Elizabeth Oakes Prince Smith (1806-93) married Portland journalist Seba Smith at age 16. Smith assisted her husband's writing and soon became the author of her own juvenile and adult fiction. After the Smiths moved to New York City in 1839, she gained entry to its elite literary and reform circles. In the 1850s Smith became an active campaigner for women 's rights both as a popular lyceum speaker and as the author of the tract (1851) and the novel (1854). After retiring from public lecturing at the time of the Civil War, she continued to write novels and poetry and in 1877 held the pastorate of an independent congregation in Canastota, New York. In 1878 Smith moved to Hollywood, North Carolina, where she continued to work actively for the women's rights and temperance causes. Mary Alice Wyman, (New York, 1927); , 3: 309-10; , 9: 171. Elizabeth P. Peabody,9A leading New England educator, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-94) had been born in Billerica, Massachusetts, and educated in a school operated by her mother in Salem, Massachusetts. She followed her mother into a teaching career and conducted a number of schools in Maine and Massachusetts, In the late 1820s, William Ellery Channing befriended Peabody and encouraged her study of philosophy, theology, and literature. From 1834 to 1836 she assisted Bronson Alcott in the direction of the controversial, avant-garde Temple School in Boston. During the 1830s, she became the close friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Horace Mann, the latter two, husbands of her sisters. From 1840 to 1850 she operated a bookstore in Boston that became the gathering point for members of the Transcendentalist circle when visiting that city. At the same time, Peabody became one of the first female publishers in the United States, bringing new works by Channing, Hawthorne, and Thoreau into print. Peabody devoted her later years to lecturing and writing primarily upon educational topics. She is generally credited with popularizing the institution of the kindergarten in the United States. Louise Hall Tharp, (Boston, 1950); Gladys Brooks, (New York, 1957); James, , 4: 31-34; , 3: 688; , 12: 350; , 14: 335-36.
and the noble and gifted Lucy Stone. Not only have we a glorious constella-
tion of women on the silent continent to assure us that our cause is good,
and that it must finally prevail, but we have such men as William Lloyd
Garrison, Wendell Phillips, William Henry Channing,10Nephew of William Ellery Channing, William Henry Channing (1810-84) was born in Boston and graduated from Harvard in 1829. He became a Unitarian minister in 1839 and preached in Cincinnati (1839-41), New York City (1843-45), Boston (1847-50), and Rochester a (1852-54). He was a leading American advocate of Fourierism, abolitionism, temperance, and women's rights. After 1854, Channing resided mainly in Great Britain, except during the early years of the Civil War when he was a Unitarian pastor in Washington, D.C. Octavius Brooks Frothingham, (Boston, 1886); , 1: 578; , 13: 595; , 4: 9-10. Francis Jackson,
Gerritt Smith, Samuel J. May, and Samuel E. Sewall, now no longer with
us in body, but in spirit and memory, to cheer us on in the good work of
lifting women in the fullest sense to the dignity of American liberty and
American citizenship.