Volume II Part 139 (1/2)
Sincerely yours, SUSAN B. ANTHONY.
WOMAN SUFFRAGE ABOVE HUMAN LAW.
LETTER FROM GERRIT SMITH.
PETERBORO, August 15, 1873
SUSAN B. ANTHONY--DEAR FRIEND: I have your letter. So you have not paid your fine; are not able to pay it; and are not willing to pay it!
I send you herein the money to pay it. If you shall still decline doing so, then use the money at your own discretion, to promote the cause of woman suffrage.
I trust that you feel kindly toward Judge Hunt. He is an honest man and an able judge. He would oppress no person--emphatically, no woman.
It was a light fine that he imposed upon you. Moreover, he did not require you to be imprisoned until it was paid. In taking your case out of the bands of the jury, he did what he believed he had a perfect right to do; and what [HAND] provided there was no fact to be pa.s.sed upon) he had precedents for doing. And yet Judge Hunt erred--erred as, but too probably, every other judge would, in like circ.u.mstances, have erred. At the hazard of being called, for the ten thousandth time, a visionary and a fanatic for holding opinions which, though they will be entirely welcome to the more enlightened future sense of men, are as entirely repugnant to their present sense, I venture to say that the Judge erred in allowing himself to look into the Const.i.tution. Indeed, yours was a case that neither called for nor permitted the opening of any law-book whatever. You have not forgotten how frequently, in the days of slavery, the Const.i.tution was quoted in behalf of the abomination. As if that paper had been drawn up and agreed upon by both the blacks and the whites, instead of the whites only; and as if slavery protected the rights of the slave instead of annihilating them. I thank G.o.d that I was withheld from the great folly and great sin of acknowledging a law for slavery--a law for any piracy--least of all for the superlative piracy. Nor have you forgotten how incessantly, in the late war, our enemies, Northern as well as Southern, were calling for this observance of the Const.i.tution. As if the purpose of that paper was to serve those whose parricidal hands were at the throat of our Nation. I recall but one instance in which I was ever reconciled to profanity. It was when, during the war, I was witnessing a heated conversation between a patriotic Republican and a rabid secession Democrat. The Republican was arguing that the Government should put forth all its powers to suppress the rebellion. At this stage the Democrat thrust in the stereotyped rebel phrase: ”but only according to the Const.i.tution.”
This interruption provoked the Republican to exclaim, as he hurried on, ”d.a.m.n the Const.i.tution!” The oath so happily helped to express my own feeling that I had no more heart to censure it than the recording angel had to preserve the record of Uncle Toby's famous oath.
And now, in your case, is another wrongful use of the Const.i.tution.
The instrument is cited against woman, as if she had united with man in making it, and was, therefore, morally bound by the flagrant usurpation, and legally concluded by it. Moreover, an excuse for turning the Const.i.tution against her is that doing so deprives her of nothing but the pastime of dropping in a box a little piece of paper.
Nevertheless, this dropping, inasmuch as it expresses her choice of the guardians of her person and property, is her great natural right to provide for the safety of her life and of the means to sustain it.
She has no rights whatever, and she lives upon mere privileges and favors, if others may usurp her rights. In fact she lies at the mercy of men, if men only may choose into whose hands to put the control of her person and property.... I do not complain of Judge Hunt's interpretations of the Const.i.tution on the suffrage question. I do not complain of his refusing to accept the const.i.tutional recognition of woman's right to vote, though that right seems to lie on the very surface of the Const.i.tution amongst her rights of citizens.h.i.+p. Nor do I complain of his pa.s.sing by this recognition to dig down into the Const.i.tution for proofs of there being two kinds of citizens--one that can vote and one that can not vote. What I complain of is that he did not hold as void, instead of arguing them to be valid, any words in the instrument which seemed to him to favor the disfranchis.e.m.e.nt of woman and consequent robbery and destruction of her rights. What I complain of is that, instead of his conscientious regard for his oath, he was not prepared to ignore and scout all human law so far as it is antagonistic to natural law and natural rights....
How striking and instructive is the following extract from a speech made a year or two ago in the Spanish Parliament: ”Natural rights dwell essentially in the individual, and are derived directly from his own moral nature. They are therefore, so to speak, unlegislatable, since they do not arise from the law, do not depend on the law, and, not depending on the law, can not be abrogated by the law. Born of the organic const.i.tution of the individual, with the individual they live and die, unless a tyrannical, unrighteous, and iniquitous law tears them from him, and then he will have the right to protest forever against this wrong and the iniquity of the law, and to rise against it whenever he can. Well, my lords, the inalienable rights of the Cubans have been torn from them by unrighteous, tyrannical, and iniquitous laws.” Would that Judge Hunt and all our judges might, ere long, take the ground of this sublimely eloquent Spaniard, that natural rights are ”unlegislatable”.... Would that my much esteemed friend, Judge Hunt, had so far outgrown bad law and grown into good law, as to have p.r.o.nounced at your trial the disenthralment of woman, and thus have set the name of Hunt in immortality by the side of the names of Brougham and Mansfield, and others who have had the wisdom and the courage to thrust aside false paper law and install in its place that sovereign law which is written upon the heart and upon the very foundations of human being! He does not doubt that they did right. He honors them for having done as they did. Nor can he doubt that to deny to woman all part in the making and executing of laws under which her life and property may be taken from her is a crime against her, which no paper law can sanction and which G.o.d's law must condemn.... This wors.h.i.+p of the Const.i.tution!--how blinding and belittling! I would that every judge who tends to this weakness (and nearly every judge, yes, and nearly every other person tends to it) might find his steps arrested by the warning example of Daniel Webster. This pre-eminently intellectual man, whom nature had fitted to soar in the high sphere of absolute and everlasting law, had so shrivelled his soul by his wors.h.i.+p of the Const.i.tution that he came, at last, to desire no other inscription on his grave-stone than his shameless confession of such base wors.h.i.+p. And all this, notwithstanding the Const.i.tution was, in his eye, the great bulwark of slavery!
Be of good courage and good cheer, my brave and faithful sister! I trust our country is on the eve of great and blessed changes.... Best of all, the ballot can not much longer be withheld from woman. Men are fast coming to see that it belongs to her as fully as to themselves, and that the country is in peris.h.i.+ng need of her wielding it. If the silly portion of our ladies will but cease from their silly apprehension that the plan is to _make_ them vote whether they will or no, and also cease from their ignorant and childish admissions that they already have all the rights they want--then will the American women quickly be enfranchised, and their nation will rapidly achieve a far higher civilization than it is possible for any nation to arrive at which is guilty of the folly and the sin of clothing man with all political power and reducing women to a political cipher.
Cordially yours, GERRIT SMITH.
WAs.h.i.+NGTON NOTES.
BY GRACE GREENWOOD.
When I said that in the dull languor of our summer collapse we felt none of your fierce Northern excitements, I should have excepted the Anthony suffrage case. That touched nearly if not deeply. The ark of the holy political covenant resting here--the sacred mules that draw it being stabled in the Capitol for half a year at a time--the woman who has laid unsanctified hands upon it, is naturally regarded with peculiar horror. I did not take exception to the _Times'_ article of June 19th on this case. It was mild and courteous in tone, and the view taken of the XIV. Amendment plea seems to me the only sound one.
I certainly do not want to get into your political preserves by any quibble or dodge. I want my right there freely granted and guaranteed, and will be politely treated when I come, or I won't stay. The promised land of justice and equality is not to be reached by a short cut. I fear we have a large part of the forty years of struggle and zigzaging before us yet. I am pretty sure our Moses has not appeared.
I think he will be a woman. Often the way seems dark, as well as long, when I see so much fooling with the great question of woman's claims to equal educational advantages with men; to just remuneration for good work, especially in teaching, and fair credit for her share in the patriotic and benevolent enterprises of the age. I do not say that equal pay for equal services will never be accorded to woman, even in the civil service, till she has the ballot to back her demand; but that is the private opinion of many high Government officials. I do not say that woman's right to be represented, as well as taxed, will never be recognized as a logical practical result of the democratic principle till the Democrats come in power. But it may be so. The Gospel was first offered to the Jews, but first accepted by the Gentiles.
In your article, fair as it was in spirit, you failed to touch upon two points which struck me rather painfully. It seems that Judge Hunt, after p.r.o.nouncing a learned, and, I suppose, a sound opinion, peremptorily ordered the jury to bring the defendant in guilty. Now, could not twelve honest, intelligent jurymen be trusted to defend their birthright against one woman? Why such zeal, such more than Roman sternness? Again, in the trial of the inspectors of election, why were both judge and jurymen so merciful? No verdict of guilty was ordered, and the council of twelve who had seen fit to punish Miss Anthony by a fine of $100 and costs, merely mulcted in the modest sum of $25, each defenseless defendant sinning against light. Was it that they considered in their manly clemency the fact that women have superior facilities for earning money, or did they give heed to the old, old excuse, ”The woman tempted me, and I did register”?
It surely is strange that such severe penalties should be visited on a woman, for a first and only indiscretion in the suffrage line, when a man may rise up on election morning and go forth, voting and to vote.
If he be of an excitable and mercurial nature, one of the sort of citizens which sweet Ireland empties on us by the county, he may sportively flit about among the polls, from ward to ward, of the metropolis, and no man says to him nay; he may even travel hilariously from city to city, with free pa.s.ses and free drinks--who treats Miss Anthony?--making festive calls, and dropping ballots for cards, and no disturbance comes of it--he is neither fined nor confined. So, it would seem, ”a little voting is a dangerous thing.”
Say what you will, the whole question of woman's status in the State and the Church, in society and the family, is full of absurd contradictions and monstrous anomalies. We are so responsible, yet irresponsible--we are idols, we are idiots--we are everything, we are nothing. We are the Caryatides, rearing up the entablature of the temple of liberty we are never allowed to enter. We may plot against a government, and hang for it; but if we help to found and sustain a government by patriotic effort and devotion, by toil and hards.h.i.+p, by courage, loyalty, and faith, by the sacrifice of those nearest and dearest to us, and then venture to clutch at the crumbs that fall from the table where our Masters Jonathan, Patrick, Hans, and Sambo sit at feast, you arrest us, imprison us, try us, fine us, and then add injury to insult, by calling us old, ugly, and fanatical.
One is forcibly reminded of the sermon of the colored brother on woman, the heads of which discourse were: ”Firstly. What am woman?
Secondly. Whar did she come from? Thirdly. Who does she belong to?
Fourthly. Which way am she gwine to?”