and was strengthened and encouraged by the lofty and enthusiastic addresses and the renewed expressions of friendship and fealty to herself.
The work of securing the petitions was rapidly and energetically pushed during the winter and spring of 1864. Miss Anthony gave all her time to the office.2 During the year and a half of her arduous labors, she received from the Hovey Committee $12 a week. As she boarded with Mrs. Stanton at a reduced price she managed to keep her expenses within this limit. She writes home: "I go to a restaurant near by for lunch every noon. I take always strawberries with two tea-rusks. Today I said, 'All this lacks is a glass of milk from my mother's cellar,' and the girl replied, 'We have very nice Westchester county milk.' So tomorrow I shall add that to my bill of fare. My lunch costs, berries, five cents, rusks five, and tomorrow the milk will be three." There is reason to believe, however, that she often would have been glad to afford a second dish of strawberries.
The Hovey Committee sent $155, Gerrit Smith $200, Schieffelin Brothers, Druggists, $100, and Jessie Benton Fremont, $50. In her great need of funds, Miss Anthony decided to appeal to Henry Ward Beecher and she relates how, as she was wearily climbing Columbia Heights to his home, she felt a hand on her shoulder and heard a hearty voice say: "Well, old girl, what do you want now?" It was Mr. Beecher himself who, the moment she explained her mission, said: "I'll take up a collection in Plymouth church next Sunday." The result of this was $200. The carefully kept books still in existence show that when the accounts of the league were closed, there was a deficit of $4.72 to settle all indebtedness, and this Miss Anthony paid out of her own pocket!
In January the brother Daniel R. came East for his beautiful young bride, and the mother from her quiet farm-nook sends her petition to New York. She can not manage the "infare" unless Susan comes home and helps. So she drops the affairs of government long enough to skim across the State and lend a hand in preparing for this interesting event, and then back again to her incessant drudgery, made doubly hard by financial anxiety.
During all this work of the Loyal League, Miss Anthony found her strongest and staunchest support in Robert Dale Owen, who was then in New York by appointment of President Lincoln as chairman of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission. She was also in constant communication with Senator Charles Sumner, who was most anxious that the work should be hastened. The blank petitions were sent in great sacks to him at Washington, and distributed under his "frank" to all parts of the Union. On February 9, 1864, he presented in the Senate the first installment. The petitions from each State were tied by themselves in a large bundle and endorsed with the number of signatures. Two able-bodied negroes carried them into the Senate chamber, and Mr. Sumner presented them, saying in part:
These petitions are signed by 100,000 men and women, who unite in this unparalleled number to support their prayer. They are from all parts of the country and from every condition of life.... They ask nothing less than universal emancipation, and this they ask directly at the hands of Congress. It is not for me to assign reasons which the army of petitioners has forborne to assign; but I may not improperly add that, naturally and obviously, they all feel in their hearts, what reason and knowledge confirm, not only that slavery is the guilty origin of the rebellion, but that its influence everywhere, even outside the rebel States, has been hostile to the Union, always impairing loyalty and sometimes openly menacing the national government. The petitioners know well that to save the country from peril, especially to save the national life, there is no power in the ample arsenal of self-defense which Congress may not grasp; for to Congress under the Constitution, belongs the prerogative of the Roman Dictator to see that the republic receives no detriment. Therefore to Congress these petitioners now appeal.
After an earnest discussion by the Senate the petition was referred to the Select Committee on Slavery and Freedom, whose chairman was Thomas D. Eliot, of Massachusetts. Immediately afterwards several thousand more blank petitions were sent out, accompanied by a second appeal which closed: "Shall we not all join in one loud, earnest, effectual prayer to Congress, which will swell on its ear like the voice of many waters, that this bloody, desolating war shall be arrested and ended by the immediate and final removal by statute law and amended Constitution, of that crime and curse which alone has brought it upon us?"
In answer to an invitation to be present at the first anniversary of the Women's National Loyal League, Senator Sumner wrote:
I can not be with you for my post of duty is here. I am grateful to your association for what you have done to arouse the country to insist on the extinction of slavery. Now is the time to strike and no effort should be spared. The good work must be finished, and to my mind nothing seems to be done, while anything remains to be done. There is one point to which attention must be directed. No effort should be spared to castigate and blast the whole idea of property in man, which is the corner-stone of the rebel pretension and the constant assumption of the partisans of slavery, or of its lukewarm opponents. Let this idea be trampled out and there will be no sympathy with the rebellion, and there will be no such abomination as slave-hunting, which is beyond question the most execrable feature of slavery itself.
As Miss Anthony herself had asked so many favors of Wendell Phillips, she thought it would be a good idea to have Mrs. Stanton invite him to make an address at this anniversary; but he was not in the least deceived, as his reply shows:
DEAR MRS. STANTON: Your S.B.A. thinks she is very cunning. As if I did not see a huge pussy under that meal! She has been so modest, humble, ashamed, reluctant, apologetic, contrite, self-accusing whenever the last ten years she has asked me to do anything, go anywhere, speak on any topic! Now she makes you pull the chestnuts out of the fire and thinks I do not see her waiting behind. Ah, the hand is the hand of Esau, the voice is the voice of Jacob, wicked, sly, skulking, mystifying Jacob. Why don't "secretaries" write the official letters? How much they leave the "president" to do! Naughty idlers, those secretaries! Well, let me thank Miss Secretary Anthony for her gentle consideration; then let me say I'll try to speak, as you say, fifteen minutes.... Remember me defiantly to S.B.A.
In the midst of all this correspondence came a letter from a sweetheart of her girlhood, now a prominent officeholder in Ohio, stating that he was a widower but would not long remain one if his old friend would take pity upon him. It is sincerely to be hoped that the secretary of the Loyal League found time at least to have one of her clerks answer this epistle.
The meeting was held in the Church of the Puritans, May 12, 1864, and soul-stirring speeches were made by Phillips, Mrs. Rose, Lucretia Mott, George Thompson, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony. The report of the executive committee showed that a debt of $5,000, including $1,000 for postage alone, had been paid; that 25,000 blank petitions had been sent out; that the league now numbered 5,000 members, and that branch Loyal Leagues had been formed in many cities. Strong resolutions were adopted demanding not only emancipation but enfranchisement for the negroes. The entire proceedings of the convention illustrated how thoroughly the leading women of the country understood the political situation, how broad and comprehensive was their grasp of public affairs, and with what a patriotic and self-sacrificing spirit they performed their part of the duties imposed by the great Civil War.
By August, 1864, the signatures to the petitions had reached almost 400,000. Again and again Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson had written Miss Anthony that these petitions formed the bulwark of their demand for congressional action to abolish slavery. Public sentiment on this point had now become emphatic, the Senate had passed the bill for the prohibition of slavery, and the intention of the House of Representatives was so apparent that it did not seem necessary to continue the petitions. The headquarters in Cooper Institute were closed, and the magnificent work, which from this center had radiated throughout the country, found its reward in the proposition by Congress, on February 1, 1865, for Amendment XIII to the Federal Constitution:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist in the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
The
