was worth little among the men of the temperance movement, for once again, they excluded women, Brown specifically. Horace Greeley sarcastically reported on September 7, 1853:
This convention has completed three of its four business sessions, and the results may be summed up as follows:
First Day—Crowding a woman off the platform
Second Day—Gagging her
Third Day—Voting that she shall stay gagged.
Having thus disposed of the main question, we presume the incidentals will be finished this morning.
The following Sunday evening, however, Brown preached to a New York City audience of 5,000. Even more significantly, the next week simple farm folk quietly registered their disagreement with the temperance leaders: on September 15, the First Congregational Church of Wayne County, New York, ordained Rev. Antoinette Brown. She was the first woman to be an official minister of a church in a mainstream American denomination.
In the weeks that followed, many expressed respect for her and the other women, including Susan B. Anthony, who were so unchivalrously turned away from the convention. Pointing out that Brown had been duly elected as a delegate by not merely one, but two, temperance organizations, more liberal ministers took on their colleagues: “If any man says that Antoinette Brown forced the subject of ‘Woman’s Rights’ on that Temperance Convention,” Rev. William Henry Channing fumed, “he lies. She never dreamed of asking any privilege as a woman; she stood there in her right as a delegate.” Rev. Channing denounced his fellow pastors, calling them “Reverend for what?” He cited an onlooker at the temperance rally who inquired, “Are those men drunk?”
Attendees in front of the Crystal Palace at the World’s Fair in New York City in 1853, when women and other activists gathered for a world temperance convention. (Wikimedia/Karl Gildemeister)
In addition to the uproarious temperance meeting, abolitionists and other supporters of controversial causes held meetings. By the end of the week, the right-wing newspapers of the city had rallied the men who felt threatened by all this change. Unfortunately, the last of these meetings was on women’s rights. As so many people were in New York for other events, this gathering, although not the official annual convention, attracted the greatest crowd thus far: 11 states were represented, as well as England and Germany. Even with a 25-cent admission, every one of the 3,000 seats in the Broadway Tabernacle was sold out—but not everyone was there to be enlightened.
The event went down in feminist history as “The Mob Convention.” By “hissing, yelling, stamping, and all manner of unseemly interruptions,” men in the audience thwarted the convention’s speakers. William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and other men were attacked in the same way that the women were. Determined orators took on the mob and persisted in rising above the din, occasionally with success. “Never before,” said Horace Greeley’s editorial, “have we heard Antoinette Brown, Mrs. Rose, and Lucy Stone speak with such power…. When Lucy Stone closed the discussion with some pungent, yet pathetic, remarks on the opposition…it was evident that if any rowdies had an ant-hole in the bottom of his boot, he would inevitably have sunk through it and disappeared forever.”
The rowdies, however, did not disappear. They were there again the next day, and this time, Sojourner Truth took them on. In the words of her New York women’s rights colleagues, she personified the mob’s “two most hated elements,” for “she was black and she was a woman, and all the insults that could be cast upon color and sex were hurled at her; but there she stood, calm and dignified, a grand, wise woman.” When “the terrible turmoil” abated a bit, Sojourner Truth’s powerful voice rolled out:
Is it not good for me to come and draw forth a spirit, to see what kind of spirit people are of? I see that some of you have got the spirit of a goose, and some have got the spirit of a snake…. I was a slave in the State of New York, and now I am a good citizen of this State…. I know it [makes you] feel like hissing…to see a colored woman get up and tell you…about Woman’s Rights. We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we’d ever get up again, and now I am here….
We’ll have our rights; see if we don’t; and you can’t stop us from them; see if you can. You may hiss as much as you like, but it is coming.
New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley (Library of Congress)
The mob quieted briefly to satisfy their curiosity about German Mathilde Anneke, who recently fled from the repressive aftermath of the 1848 revolutions in Europe. Ernestine Rose translated for her, and when she told the audience that Anneke “could hardly express her astonishment at what she witnessed” in the hall because it contradicted “what she had heard so much of freedom in America,” the tumult again erupted, proving her point. Rose called for the police, saying that “we have a right to this protection, for we pay our money for it.” She pointed out that the mayor had “promised to see that our meetings should not be disturbed,” but no police came.
As translator, Rose took over the platform from President Lucretia Mott, who, consistent with Quaker principles, refused to bring in the police. In the end, Dr. Harriot K. Hunt shouted out a resolution thanking Lucretia Mott “for the grace, firmness, ability, and courtesy” that Mott had demonstrated in the “arduous” task of presiding, and the convention adjourned. That it was a pious woman in Quaker dress who was so abused by these political thugs did not pass unnoticed, and, in the eyes of many, the mob’s behavior backfired. “If it had been their earnest desire to strengthen the cause of Woman’s Rights,” Horace Greeley said later, “they could not have done the work half so effectively. Nothing is so good for a weak and unpopular movement as this sort of opposition.” William Cullen Bryant, famed poet and editor of The Evening Post, also spoke out “against mob law and for the rights of woman.” In the end, the “spirit of a snake” whiplashed and bit its own tail.
Upper-class life was becoming sufficiently genteel in the 1850s that wealthy families began taking summer vacations, a phenomenon that would not extend to most people until the next century. A new railroad network in this decade made travel something to be desired instead of merely endured, and Southerners especially began leaving the heat, humidity, and frequently fatal mosquitoes of plantation life for the cool lakes and mountains of the North. New York’s Saratoga Springs was one of the nation’s first resort towns, and, in the summer of 1854, Susan B. Anthony demonstrated her savvy by going where the affluent and influential were likely to be. She wanted to use “the fashionable season” to reach “a new class of hearers.”
Initially, things did not go well for the would-be lecturer. Anthony acknowledged that she had “but little experience as a speaker,” and worse, someone stole her purse. She had no money to pay the printer for the flyers she ordered to advertise the event, and some of the scheduled speakers sent last-minute cancellations. In this unhappy situation, she came upon vacationer Matilda Joslyn Gage, whom Anthony had met when they both were newcomers at the Syracuse convention. Gage provided the money that Anthony lacked and even overcame her terror of speaking to join the platform. They both were favorably reviewed in the press that followed—along with great detail on Gage’s stylish clothes.
For the rest of the decade, women’s rights advocates would spend some of each summer in Saratoga. Anthony honed her fundraising and networking skills there. In 1855, for example, she “announced that woman’s rights tracts…were for sale at the door” after the speeches, and she told the audience that “they must take The Una.” Even though she was disappointed that The Woman’s Advocate confined itself to economic issues and did not endorse suffrage,
