Читать книгу Belva Lockwood - Jill Norgren - Страница 11

We cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship, under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disfranchisement.

Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States

by the National Woman Suffrage Association, July 4, 1876

On July 4, 1876, Richard Henry Lee stood in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall and read aloud the Declaration of Independence. As he sat down Susan B. Anthony, barred from participating in the centennial celebration, rose from her seat and marched past foreign guests and American officials to the speaker’s stand, where she thrust a copy of the “Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States by the National Woman Suffrage Association” into the hands of President Grant’s representative. Followed by a small group of supporters, Anthony retraced her steps while scattering copies of the offending document among the invited guests. As the women had planned, she then mounted a platform erected at the front of Independence Hall. With Matilda Gage holding an umbrella to protect her friend from the intense noonday sun, she read the declaration “to an immense concourse of people.”¹

The hour was sorely needed political theater. After repeated defeats in legislatures and in the courts, the cause of woman suffrage had stalled. NWSA members had hoped to revive interest on the occasion of the nation’s hundredth birthday by issuing an attention-grabbing declaration. They had asked for, and had been denied, a place on the official centennial program. General Joseph Hawley, president of the organizing committee, told the NWSA that their “slight request,” if granted, “would be the event of the day—the topic of discussion to the exclusion of all others.”²

Lockwood waited for Anthony a few blocks away at the First Unitarian Church, where the Nationals had arranged to hold their own celebration of the nation’s birthday. She had signed the declaration and now sat at the front of the church, one of several speakers scheduled to tell a warmly approving audience about “the tyranny and injustice of the nation toward one-half its people.”³

In its official record, the editors of the History of Woman Suffrage proclaimed the meeting a great success. Still, the fact remained that, despite a great deal of lobbying, public demonstration, and a test of woman’s disfranchisement that had been heard by the U.S. Supreme Court, in July 1876 Americans showed little inclination to tackle the question of women’s rights. Equality challenged settled arrangements with which most citizens were content to live.

If, in 1876, Americans were satisfied with the arrangements that disadvantaged women it was not because the notorious suffrage ladies of Lockwood’s acquaintance had not done everything in their power to educate them, and to change the law. And in a startling declaration on April 2, 1870, one of the most notorious announced herself as a candidate in the 1872 presidential campaign. Her name was Victoria Wood-hull, and she wanted to create a new reform party that would challenge the power and corruption of the Republicans.

Like Lockwood, Woodhull was a work in progress. At the age of fifteen, she had stepped out of a chaotic childhood into a hard-luck marriage to an alcoholic. In her twenties, however, encouraged by her sister Tennie Claflin’s success as a spiritual medium, and urged forward by James Harvey Blood, her second husband, Woodhull became a medical clairvoyant.

The sisters were good at their vocations, earning substantial fees. In 1867 they decided to move to New York City, where they hoped to solicit the backing of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. In the spring of 1868, the sisters presented him with engraved business cards. Beauty, brains, and business credentials won them his immediate attention, and the three formed an extraordinary relationship that brought the two women fame, wealth, and, for Victoria, the opportunity to speak forcefully on the subject of woman’s unequal status.

Woodhull made her first recorded visit to a woman suffrage convention in January 1869. She traveled to Washington, D.C., where she listened to Senator Pomeroy argue that the existing Constitution granted to all citizens, including women, the right to vote. In the months that followed she heard about Francis and Virginia Minor, two activists from St. Louis who, like Pomeroy, were making the case that women already had the right to vote and that no amendment specifically to guarantee woman suffrage was necessary. The Minors contended that if, under the U.S. Constitution, women had not always been entitled to elective franchise, the recently ratified Fourteenth Amendment enfranchised them as a right of national citizenship. In stating that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” were “citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” the Fourteenth Amendment established a national definition of citizenship that, when joined to subsequent clauses prohibiting states from making or enforcing “any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States,” forbade the denial of suffrage.

Most suffrage women knew nothing about Woodhull until early 1870 when the New York newspapers and Stanton and Anthony’s suffrage paper, Revolution, began covering Woodhull, Claflin & Co., America’s first female stockbrokers, a business established with Vanderbilt’s help.⁴ Woodhull worked quietly in the first months of 1870, pulling together a team of advisors that included Blood, radical philosopher Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Massachusetts congressman Benjamin Butler. In April, pronouncing herself “the most prominent representative of the only unrepresented class in the republic,” she declared herself a presidential candidate, saying, “While others of my sex devoted themselves to a crusade against the laws that shackle the women of the country, I asserted my individual independence.…I proved it by successfully engaging in business.…I boldly entered the arena of politics.…I therefore claim the right to speak for the unenfranchised women of the country.”⁵

Woodhull was the first woman to enter an American presidential race. Suffrage activists were electrified by her decision, but nervous about her radical social views. She supported sweeping change in relations between capital and labor as well as between the sexes. Reporters charged her with advocating free love. She made no effort to hide her personal and political philosophies, voicing them in Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, the newspaper that she had established, which covered finance, culture, and politics. Woodhull used the publication to promote her candidacy and to write about women’s rights, including the argument made by the Minors and her own view that suffrage was a civil right of all citizens.⁶

Late in 1870 Woodhull traveled to Washington, prepared to test her ability to influence the suffrage debate. She had learned from her friend Benjamin Butler that Julian’s Sixteenth Amendment bill, viewed as a pesky piece of business, would never come out of committee. The news pleased her because, like the Minors, Woodhull thought that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments made a woman suffrage amendment superfluous. She had come to Washington to argue that Congress now only needed to pass “enabling legislation” similar to the Enforcement Act of May 31, 1870 (prohibiting state officials from discriminating against voters on the basis of race).⁷

Woodhull presented this written argument in “The Memorial of Victoria C. Woodhull.” Four days before Christmas, members of the House and Senate received copies of the document along with the request that the question of a declaratory bill be referred to each chamber’s judiciary committee. And then, in a blunt test of her star power, the publicity-savvy candidate arranged to make a personal plea for action before the House Judiciary Committee. Woodhull’s January 11, 1871, appearance, organized with the help of Butler, was a coup for her, and for the suffrage movement. Despite the increasing frequency with which women lobbied members of Congress, as Lockwood had done in support of the Arnell bill, women’s public testimony in one of the Capitol’s smoky committee rooms remained unusual.

Lockwood, invited to be present along with other leaders from the UFA, was fascinated by Woodhull’s argument.⁸ She listened a second time when Woodhull crossed town and repeated her presentation before delegates attending a national woman suffrage convention. The delegates agreed to make the Minor-Woodhull position their “New Departure.” The new strategy had considerable appeal with its call for direct action rather than a long, uncertain wait for a woman suffrage amendment. An agenda took shape that emphasized passage of enabling legislation, efforts to register and vote, and court challenges when local officials refused to register women or to accept their ballots.

Lockwood immediately saw the possibility of using the Woodhull-Minor theory of woman suffrage to influence Senate debate on a new District of Columbia governance bill. Only days after Woodhull’s presentation, in collaboration with UFA colleagues Caroline B. Winslow and Susan A. Edson, she prepared two memorials intended to convince members of Congress that District women had the right to vote. They had met defeat in 1867 when the universal suffrage bill was voted down. Now, however, they had the carefully constructed New Departure argument to work with.⁹

It is likely that Lockwood, having just entered law school, authored most of the text. In the first memorial she argued that the original Constitution and Bill of Rights gave women the right to vote although she acknowledged that the constitutional text was ambiguous. She told the senators that they could not know the intentions of the Framers, and must construe the rights and obligations of citizenship from the document’s language. She then repeated the much-observed fact that the Constitution, as originally written, contained no “negative declaration,” no language that prohibited women from voting. Therefore, she wrote, any state or territorial government, or Congress on behalf of the District of Columbia, could enact declaratory legislation granting women the right to vote. Wyoming had done so and, in 1870, so had the territorial government of Utah. Like any good lawyer, she did not rest her case on one theory. American constitutional law, she observed, now embraced the additional guarantees of the Fourteenth and Fifteen Amendments, which must be read to include women in the national community of citizens entitled to vote, and to be protected in that right by the federal government.¹⁰

A second memorial outlined the cultural and political reasons for woman suffrage. Answering opponents who misrepresented man’s greater position outside of the home, and contributions in war, Lockwood and her colleagues described woman’s role as producer and taxpayer, and as a class that suffers under the “responsibilities and dangers of maternity.”¹¹ Yet, despite these contributions to society the law treats her as “a mere chattel.” Countering the nineteenth-century belief that women lacked the ability to reason, and thus to participate responsibly in the political life of the country, the memorial insisted that “[w]oman possesses the faculty of government, and cannot be deprived of its advantages without damage to the body politic.” Pursuing this utilitarian political argument, they concluded the sober but hopeful lecture: “Man, deprived of female society degenerates rapidly, as may be seen in all communities composed of men alone. Doubtless the same would be true of woman. A perfect government can only come of a perfect manhood and womanhood with their efforts united for the common good.”

Senator Pomeroy, honorary UFA president, arranged for the memorials to be introduced into the record on January 23, but Congress could not be persuaded to side with the women, and the attempt to win “impartial suffrage” in the District of Columbia failed. On February 27, 1871, the new law, locally referred to as the Organic Act, went into effect, with District voting still limited to men.¹² Perhaps inspired by Woodhull’s candidacy, Lockwood responded to this defeat by trying to win a delegate’s position at the nominating convention that was to select a District representative to sit in the Congress. She delivered a short speech and came within one vote of winning a place.¹³

While women in the territories of Wyoming and Utah had won the right to vote from their territorial governments, the experience of the women of Washington in the struggle for suffrage was far more typical. In general, there was little progress in the matter of woman suffrage. Julian’s Sixteenth Amendment bill was dead in committee, and the declaratory act strategy had resulted in little gain. On January 30, 1871, a majority of the House Committee on the Judiciary, having considered Woodhull’s “Memorial,” issued a report that rejected the Minor-Woodhull argument in its entirety. Chairman John A. Bingham of Ohio wrote that neither the Fourteenth nor the Fifteenth Amendment granted women the right to vote and that, therefore, “it is not competent for the Congress of the United States to establish by law the right to vote without regard to sex in the several States of the Union.”¹⁴ It was the opinion of the committee that women could expect to be enfranchised only when public opinion deemed reform advisable and the people altered state constitutions and laws, or “if established in the courts.”¹⁵

The failure of the federal enabling legislation strategy left movement leaders with little choice but to test the power of “New Departure” theory in the courts. In January 1871 Washington lawyer Albert G. Riddle, a staunch supporter of woman suffrage, told NWSA members that he would handle a test case of women’s right to vote, appealing, if necessary, to the U.S. Supreme Court.¹⁶ The National put out the message that women should attempt to register and to vote. “This action,” said the NWSA principals, “not only serves the purpose of agitation of the whole question of suffrage, but it puts upon men, our brothers, the onus of refusing the votes of their fellow citizens, and compels them to show just cause for such proceeding.”¹⁷

Washington women settled on a twofold test of their rights. They would appear before D.C. election officials and attempt to register and, on a local election day in April, they would try to vote. They believed that if the authorities refused to register them as voters, or to let them cast official ballots, they would have grounds for a test of their constitutional rights in a court of law.

On April 14, 1871, the late edition of the D.C. Evening Star announced that earlier in the day “a number of ladies of this District” had entered the City Hall. Once inside, the racially mixed group of women presented a petition to the president of the Board of Registration asking that their names be registered as qualified voters in the Territory of the District of Columbia.¹⁸ It was the second time that week that suffrage women had appeared before the members of the board, seeking to register for an upcoming election. On this afternoon, Lockwood led the “advance guard” of men and women.¹⁹ Her friend, Mary Walker, walked beside her. The two women, neither averse to publicity, carried bouquets, ready to bestow flowers on any board member who was prepared to approve the registration of women. Ezekiel stood behind his wife along with a Who’s Who of Washington’s professional and activist women. Frederick Douglass joined the demonstration. The suffragists crowded around the registration desks for two hours, taking down the names of the registrars and making speeches. At four o’clock the women received permission separately to approach the registrars. Dozens did so and, one by one, each application was rejected on the grounds that “under the law [Section 7 of the Organic Act] of the Territory [the District] none but males are entitled to register.”²⁰

The women had marched on City Hall, in part, to orchestrate an event that, by provoking the attention of the press, would keep the issue of woman suffrage alive and before the public. The Evening Star, loyal to the aspirations of women, was respectful, while articles published by the National Republican sported complaint and sarcasm.²¹

To recruit additional supporters and maintain the interest of the press, the women organized an information and strategy meeting. Notices were placed in the Washington newspapers inviting “Ladies of the District” to attend a gathering on April 18 at the Ladies Department of the business college run by activist Sara Spencer and her husband.²² Sara Spencer opened the meeting by introducing A. G. Riddle. Washington was a small town, and it is likely that most of the people in the room knew him. Riddle, a former congressman, began with words of encouragement and then outlined the legal issues. He asserted that in returning their applications to the protesters, the Board of Registration had not only violated their constitutional rights but had also, he believed, committed a breach of the 1870 Enforcement Act. The act, passed out of concern for the political rights of freedmen, permitted an applicant who had been prohibited from registering to vote to go to the polls on Election Day with an affidavit stating that there had been wrongful action by the registrars. Riddle now urged the women to take copies of the affidavit that he had prepared, and to present themselves at their proper voting districts at the election on April 20.

Spencer and Lockwood each knew women who had been fired by the federal government after participating in the April 14 demonstration at City Hall.²³ And while the women had protested at City Hall as a group, their lawyer was now asking the would-be voters to go out on their own to their respective polling places. Despite the honored place of voting in the United States, polling was often carried out in taverns and other places considered inappropriate for women. Politicians spoke about “[h]igh party excitement” that led to violence and rude speech at the polls.²⁴ Ironically, men’s election day behavior had become part of the argument against women’s right to vote. One husband insisted that the polls were so vile that he would not go there to vote.²⁵

Lockwood and her friends considered the possibility of heckling and violence, and decided they were willing to risk public ridicule. Sara Spencer made the practical suggestion that in each precinct as many ladies as possible get together “and present themselves as a body.”²⁶ Riddle was relieved. He wanted at least some women to present themselves at the polls so that he would have two possible lawsuits, one against the Board of Registration for its refusal to register the women, and a second to challenge the anticipated rejection by the judges of election of the protesters’ ballots.

On April 20, the women headed out to their precincts, hoping to join local men in voting for the District’s delegate to Congress and member of D.C.’s governing council. Lockwood went to her polling place in the 12th District. The presiding official would not take her ballot but she stayed long enough to deliver a speech in support of women’s rights.²⁷ As agreed among the women at their earlier meeting, she departed after saying, “I have done my duty.”²⁸ She then accompanied her friend Lydia Hall to the 15th District, where her ballot was also refused.²⁹ The following day the National Republican praised the citizens of Washington for the chivalry that they showed in the face of “the unwomanly conduct of the applicants,” whose action, wrote the editor, had been premeditated, “with the avowed object of testing in a court of law, the right to vote.”³⁰

Within days Riddle and his law partner, Francis Miller, had filed two cases at the District of Columbia Supreme Court: Sara J. Spencer vs. Martin et al.(The Board of Registration) and Sarah E. Webster vs. Griffin et al.(The Judges of Election).³¹ Writs were served and pleadings entered. Money damages as provided by law were asked for each woman.³² Although the lawyers acted quickly, the case was given a court date for mid-September. Meanwhile, Lockwood and her friends resumed their political appeals, this time to local officials. On July 14, 1871, Lockwood appeared before the District Committee of the House of Delegates on Laws and the Judiciary. She wrote Mary Walker, temporarily out of town, with an account of the meeting where the proposed equal pay bill for women employees of the District, as well as possible changes to the Organic Act, were to be discussed. The meeting had gone well. She had delivered a short speech and, by her reckoning, “completely annihilated the 7th Sec. [the males-only clause] of the Organic Act.”³³ The committee members had not been argumentative and, after listening to Lockwood’s talk, two representatives had come out in support of woman suffrage. The Morning Chronicle echoed the sentiments of her letter, describing Lockwood as having “marked ability and an earnest eloquence.”³⁴

This talk introduced themes that would become standard fare in Lockwood’s lectures and sidewalk stumping. She quoted from English law and precedent and then recounted women’s accomplishments, one moment drawing on the examples of Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, and Joan of Arc while in her next breath praising American women professionals. She said that women were recognized as citizens and that true government depends upon self-government by each individual. Lockwood not only advocated women’s right to vote but also prophesied the contributions women would make if elected to legislatures, where they would bring “their peculiar wisdom to bear upon the law.”³⁵ The Morning Chronicle gave the talk a “good report,” after which friends suggested that it be published. Lockwood did this, writing Walker that she had “two thousand struck.”³⁶

Summer over, the District Supreme Court resumed its business, hearing argument the second week of September in the Spencer and Webster cases. Riddle acknowledged the problematic language of the Organic Act’s seventh section (“all male citizens shall be entitled to vote”) but argued that “the language of the statute does not exclude women…that in the presence of the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which confers elective franchise upon ‘all persons,’ this word ‘male’ is as if unwritten, and that the statute, constitutionally, reads, ‘That all citizens shall be entitled to vote.’”³⁷ The Organic Act did not comport with the law of the Constitution.

Riddle also advanced what had become the standard natural rights argument that consent of the governed preceded the creation of the Republic. “I contend,” he said, “that under our system the right to vote is a natural right [that] supposes that all joined in and consented to the government.”³⁸ Returning to the force of the Fourteenth as well as Fifteenth Amendment, he argued that the first section of the Fourteenth removed “all hindrance” to the exercise of suffrage, while the Fifteenth “is a solemn mandate to all concerned not to deny this [suffrage] right.”³⁹ The two amendments, he continued, harmonized and supported the women’s claim that they were entitled to vote.

The members of the District of Columbia Supreme Court, however, did not agree. Writing in the manner of a gentle father lecturing his child, District Supreme Court Chief Justice Cartter told the women plaintiffs that he and his colleagues on the bench had “listened patiently and with interest to ingenious argument…but have failed to be convinced of the correctness of the position.”⁴⁰ He dismissed the natural rights argument as likely to involve the destruction of civil government and concluded that Congress, as the legislative power of the District, was within its rights in not issuing a declaratory act enfranchising the women of Washington. It was the opinion of the court that the women would have to return to Congress to win the right that body had patently denied in 1867 and, again, in February 1871: “The constitutional capability of becoming a voter created by this [Fourteenth] Amendment lies dormant, as in the case of an infant, until made effective by legislative action. Congress, the legislative power of this jurisdiction, as yet, has not seen fit to carry the inchoate right into effect, as is apparent in the law regulating the franchise of this District.”⁴¹ Cartter denied the suits and assigned court costs against the women.

The outcome was not unanticipated and did not discourage other members of the NWSA from similar challenges. Woodhull, the flamboyant rising star of the suffrage movement, repeated the dare in the November 1871 New York City elections. Susan B. Anthony went to the polls in November 5, 1872, cast a ballot, and two weeks later was arrested by a United States marshal for “knowingly voting without having a lawful right to vote.”⁴² Federal authorities hoped to intimidate Anthony, who, refusing to be quieted, traveled throughout New York State criticizing the Republican Party for blocking the popular democratic movements excited by emancipation and black manhood suffrage.⁴³

In this hostile climate, the Washington women were fortunate to have the services of male attorneys who were willing to risk professional reputations as well as public notoriety. The number of women lawyers in the United States could be counted on one hand, but Riddle and Miller appeared to be the ideal surrogates. They worked closely with their UFA clients, and when the disappointing Cartter decision was handed down in September 1871, they requested a rehearing.

When they were refused the two men filed an appeal with the United States Supreme Court, and on February 23, 1872, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase announced that the Court would hear the appeal. It appeared that through Spencer and Webster the high court would address the question of women’s right to vote and that Riddle and Miller would be associated with a landmark decision. But the Spencer-Webster cases were never argued. Records show that the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, as ordered by Chase, sent the trial transcript to the high court. And then the attorneys on one, or both, sides failed to appear for argument, not once, but twice. As a result, on October 16, 1874, Morrison R. Waite, the new chief justice, issued a short memorandum: “This is the second term at which this case has been called for argument, and…neither party is now prepared to argue the same.”⁴⁴ He ordered that the cases be dismissed.

What happened to keep Riddle and Miller from appearing at the U.S. Supreme Court? In 1871 the Spencer-Webster cases advanced cutting-edge legal theory and offered the first opportunity for the Supreme Court of the United States to address the question of woman suffrage. The women of the District continued to anticipate their day in court, reasoning that Riddle and Miller, having already argued before Cartter, were fully prepared to make the appeal at the high court. Given the importance of the issue of voting rights, and the expectations of their clients, it is difficult to believe that the attorneys stepped aside or back. But it appears that this is what they did.