SUSAN B. ANTHONY¹Best known for her partnership with Elizabeth Cady Stanton during the late nineteenth-century woman suffrage campaign, Susan Brownell Anthony (1820–1906) first became an activist through the temperance and abolitionist movements in Canajoharie and Rochester, New York. She spent her childhood in eastern Massachusetts, where she attended Quaker schools and became a teacher. In 1845 she followed her family to western New York, where they had fled to escape financial difficulties and to join a radical branch of Hicksite Quakers that included the Posts, Hallowells, and Porters. Debates with Abigail Mott, whom she had met sometime before 1845, led Anthony to join the Unitarian Church shortly after her arrival in Rochester. Anthony continued to teach for another four years, but her involvement in the Daughters of Temperance and the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society soon occupied most of her time. By 1851 she also became interested in the women’s rights movement, and a mutual friend, Amelia Bloomer, introduced Anthony to Stanton. For the next half century, Anthony and Stanton tirelessly devoted themselves to the struggle for women’s access to education, professional careers, and politics. Between 1856 and 1866, however, Anthony continued to work for the end of slavery, serving as an agent for the American Anti-Slavery Society, organizing antislavery conventions in Rochester, and publishing a newspaper that endorsed suffrage for blacks and women. Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony, 3 vols. (Indianapolis, Ind., 1898–1908); Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, 6 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J., 1997–2013), 1: xxvi–xxviii; Blake McKelvey, “Susan B. Anthony,” RH, 7: 1–24 (April 1945); ANB (online). TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS

Syracuse, [N.Y.] 15 Dec[ember] 1866.

DEAR DOUGLASS

Not one line from you since you suddenly and mysteriously disappeared
at Albany²Douglass had attended the convention of the American Equal Rights Association in Albany’s Tweddle Hall on 20–21 November 1866. NASS, 3, 10, 17 November, 1 December 1866; New York Herald, 21, 22, November 1866.—but to the .

Douglass, Stanton & Anthony were appointed a Committee to go before our N. Y. State Legislature, to urge that body to adopt—or ratify
the proposed Constitutional Amendment³The American Equal Rights Association organized the Albany convention “to consider the question of so amending the Constitution as to secure the right of suffrage to all citizens, without distinction of race or sex.” The meeting brought together leading abolitionists such as Parker Pillsbury, Charles Remond, and Douglass, as well as prominent suffragists, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Susan B. Anthony. Douglass participated actively in the convention, but was reported as departing early on its second day for a speaking tour of western cities. The press reported that a committee comprising Stanton, Douglass, and Anthony was to be created “to protest against the adoption by the Legislature of the pending Constitutional Amendment.” The Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on 18 June 1866 and sent to the states for ratification, was opposed by a coalition of abolitionists because it failed to enfranchise women and black males. In December 1866, Douglass, along with other officers of the American Equal Rights Association, issued a memorial against ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as written. The Republican-controlled New York legislature, however, ratified the amendment on 10 January 1867. New York Herald, 22 November 1866; NASS, 3 November, 1, 22 December 1866; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 60–90.—also to that —the disenfranchised as well as the enfranchised shall for
delegates to the Constitutional Convention—⁴The New York State Constitution, adopted in 1846, required, beginning in 1866, a referendum by voters in order to call a new convention to revise or replace the existing constitution. The election held on 6 November 1866 resoundingly endorsed a new convention. The American Equal Rights Association organized chapters around the state and gathered petitions to the constitutional convention. Efforts to elect women and blacks to the convention, however, failed. Stanton made an address on 23 January 1867 to the judiciary committee of the New York State Constitutional Convention, and Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, and Stanton, for a second time, testified in June and July on behalf of universal adult suffrage. Douglass did not play an active role in this effort, since he was traveling the nation and delivering his “Sources of Danger to the Republic” lecture, attacking Andrew Johnson. Opposition from Horace Greeley, head of the convention’s suffrage committee, saw the rejection of woman suffrage by a lopsided 19–125 vote. A provision to end the property qualification of black male suffrage was included in the proposed constitution, but the legislature allowed this issue to be voted upon separately from the new constitution. In the end, both black suffrage and the new constitution were rejected by the voters in the 1869 New York state election. Stanton, Anthony, and Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, 2: 269–309; Phyllis F. Field, The Politics of Race in New York: The Struggle for Black Suffrage in the Civil War (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 169–77, 205; Dudden, Fighting Chance, 76, 101–03.

Will you go the —if so, which department will
you take;—we all think the appeals & arguments we may make there,
may, if we can only make them the right grand utterances, be made the
most powerful means of agitation of any possible thing we can do—to
prepare this —Mrs. Stanton, Parker Pillsbury⁵Parker Pillsbury (1809–98), an outspoken abolitionist orator, editor, and author, proved more demanding than Garrison himself regarding the need to rid abolitionism of tendencies toward compromise and expediency. An interest in theology and temperance led this onetime farmer to study at New Hampshire’s Gilmanton Theological Seminary. During an additional year of study at Andover, Pillsbury made the acquaintance of John A. Collins, who exposed him to the abolitionist movement. By 1840, Pillsbury’s sharp attacks on churches’ complicity with slavery had led to the revocation of his license to preach. For the next two decades, he lectured for the New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and American Anti-Slavery societies. He edited the Concord (N.H.) Herald of Freedom during the late 1840s and the National Anti-Slavery Standard in 1866. During the Civil War, Pillsbury criticized Union war aims, especially before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. In 1865 he broke with Garrison over the necessity for continued activity by the American Anti-Slavery Society. After the war, Pillsbury became active in the woman suffrage movement and the Free Religious Association. Stacey M. Robertson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionist, Male Feminist (Ithaca, N.Y., 2000); Carleton Mabee, Black Freedom: The Nonviolent Abolitionists from 1830 through the Civil War (London, 1970), 112, 221–23, 329; McPherson, Struggle for Equality, 59–60, 100–102, 305–07; Louis Filler, “Parker Pillsbury: An Anti-Slavery Apostle,” New England Quarterly, 19: 315–37 (September 1946); DAB, 14:608–09. and myself will
spend the , where we hope you will
be also—and sacredly devote the last of the old and the first of the new
year to the work—

What are your engagements, and will <you> give yourself to strike
this mighty blow upon our Legislature—

You will see our resolution—the Lawyers say, there is no escape from
it— Direct to Auburn—Care Martha B. Wright⁶Martha Coffin Pelham Wright (1806–75), women’s rights advocate, was born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Thomas and Anna (Folger) Coffin. Following her father’s death in 1815, she was educated in Quaker boarding schools in Philadelphia. In 1824 she married Peter Pelham, an army captain, and the couple moved to Florida. Two years later, she moved back to Philadelphia, widowed with an infant daughter. In 1829 she married a lawyer named David Wright. Over the next several years, she devoted her time and energy to giving birth and raising her seven children. In July 1848, Wright’s better-known abolitionist sister, Lucretia Coffin Mott, was visiting at her Auburn, New York, home when the two were invited to tea at a local Quaker woman’s home. The abolitionist Elizabeth Cady Stanton also attended the gathering, and this particular group of women essentially started the women’s rights movement. The famous Seneca Falls Convention, led by these women, was held six days after this initial meeting; at the time, Wright was forty-one years old and six months pregnant with her last child. During the 1850s, Wright devoted herself to women’s rights and abolitionism. Following the Civil War, she opposed any constitutional amendment that would support black male suffrage while keeping this right from women. In 1869, she joined Stanton and Susan B. Anthony in forming the National Woman Suffrage Association, which opposed the Fifteenth Amendment. In 1874 she served as the association’s president. She died the following year. Sherry H. Penney and James D. Livingston, A Very Dangerous Woman: Martha Wright and Women’s Rights (Amherst, Mass., 2004); ANB (online).—Decide soon—

Truly yours—

S. B. A.

ALS: General Correspondence File, reel 2, frames 227–29, FD Papers, DLC.