What Hath God Wrought (123 page)

The United States over which Zachary Taylor would preside was vastly larger in area and population than it had been in 1815, richer, and more powerful. While more diverse socially, economically, and culturally, it was also much better integrated by transportation and communication. Increased speeds amazed everyone. The sailing ship
Rainbow
arrived in New York harbor on April 17, 1846, only seventy-five days after leaving Canton, China. The diarist Philip Hone commented, “Everything goes fast now-a-days; the winds, even begin to improve upon the speed which they have hitherto maintained; everything goes ahead but good manners and sound principles, and they are in a fair way to be driven from the track.”
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Hone was by no means alone in wondering if the rapid pace of change threatened cherished values. Yet some aspects of American life demonstrated uniformity and durability. Indeed, many of the innovations had been produced in response to widespread popular eagerness to participate in the market economy, and this eagerness showed no sign of abating. America’s national identity had weathered crises, its economy had recovered from panics, and its political system had successfully managed repeated peaceful transfers of power. The rise of mass political parties and popular voting for presidential electors had proved compatible with stability and made the white male republic incrementally more democratic. But white male supremacy still prevailed everywhere. Only a few courageous voices demanded the abolition of slavery; even fewer ones criticized gender discrimination. The admission of Iowa and Wisconsin to statehood, balancing Texas and Florida, preserved for a little while longer the carefully contrived sectional equality that had existed in the Senate ever since the Missouri Compromise. In reality, however, North and South found themselves more divided than ever by the institution of chattel slavery, now defended more stridently than it had been in 1815. Finally, the Christian religion remained an enduring element of imponderable magnitude in American life and thought, simultaneously progressive and conservative, a source of both social reform and divisive controversy.

Of all the many revolutions in 1848, the most momentous for future human history was plotted by five women at Jane Hunt’s tea table in Waterloo, New York, on the eleventh of July. The others present looked up to fifty-five-year-old Lucretia Coffin Mott, a well-known abolitionist speaker and traveling Quaker evangelist. Mott supported the Hicksite branch of Quakerism and sympathized with their most radical offshoot, called the Progressive Friends. She had grown up in the Nantucket whaling community where women managed affairs while their menfolk spent years at a time away at sea. Lucretia and her husband, James, a successful Philadelphia merchant who shared her commitment to humanitarian reform, had come to western New York to visit Lucretia’s sister Martha Coffin Wright and to check out the Seneca Nation’s first constitutional convention. Thanks partly to the support of white Quakers, the Seneca had successfully defied the process of Indian Removal and remained in western New York.
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The youngest of Jane Hunt’s guests and the only non-Quaker in the room, a witty, energetic thirty-two-year-old, provided the spark that ignited the plan. Elizabeth Cady Stanton combined the social skills of her mother, who came from New York’s landed elite, with the intellectual brilliance of her father, a distinguished judge. She felt the discontents of educated women who found the (new) role of middle-class homemaker confining. She persuaded the other four that they should call a “Women’s Rights Convention” to meet on July 19 and 20 in the Wesleyan Methodist Church of nearby Seneca Falls, a venue sympathetic to radical causes. They sent announcements to the local papers, which appeared between July 11 and 14. A few days later, Cady Stanton (who made a point of preserving her maiden name along with her married one) sat at another tea table, this time in the home of Mary Ann M’Clintock (or McClintock), to lead in drafting the document for the convention to consider. This mahogany table now rests, appropriately, in the Smithsonian Institution. The document produced at it brilliantly adapted Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence of 1776 to the revolutionary needs of 1848, defining the program of feminism for the rest of the nineteenth century.
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The nineteenth of July dawned a bright summer day in the Finger Lakes region. Good weather had ripened the hay crop. Farms harvesting it would require the labor of all family members. Despite this and the short notice of the meeting, wagons and buggies converged on the little Methodist church. About three hundred people showed up, some of them children and men. The organizers adapted their plans and decided to let the men stay. Deferring to the custom that women did not chair meetings with men present, Lucretia Mott turned the gavel over to her husband. Discussion, spirited and conducted at a high intellectual level, followed. At a candlelight session in the evening, Lucretia Mott spoke on the relationship of women’s rights to the larger reform agenda, including temperance, antislavery, and the peace movement.

The next day, Elizabeth Cady Stanton insisted that the resolutions passed at the convention, like the Declaration of Sentiments, should highlight the demand for the right to vote. Many present disagreed, feeling the suffrage cause hopeless or (as Lucretia Mott privately termed it), “ridiculous.” The strongest supporters of women’s rights hitherto had been Garrisonian abolitionists who believed it sinful for anyone to vote, regardless of gender. Elizabeth’s own husband, Henry, though an abolitionist and a supporter of women’s rights in the past, declared himself “thunderstruck” when he learned of her intention to press the suffrage issue. Perhaps fearing for his future in politics, he left town rather than attend the convention with her. On the other hand, the black abolitionist editor Frederick Douglass, who had come from Rochester, spoke strongly in favor of the suffrage demand. The resolution “that it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the franchise” passed by a bare majority.
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At the end of the two-day conference, attendees had the opportunity to sign the Declaration of Sentiments and the supporting resolutions. One hundred people—sixty-eight women and thirty-two men—did so. Lucretia Mott’s name led the list. About two-thirds of the signatories were townsfolk, the rest from farming families. The signers included a nineteen-year-old farmer’s daughter named Charlotte Woodward, who had driven the family wagon forty miles to come; she sewed gloves in a factory but hoped to become a typesetter in a printshop (then a male preserve) because she loved books. During the nationwide uproar that followed, when newspapers all over the country reported the women’s rights convention and many of them deplored and mocked it, some of the signers came back to scratch out their names. Charlotte Woodward let hers stand. In 1920, at the first presidential election following ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment that guaranteed the right to vote regardless of sex, she alone of all the signers remained alive to cast her ballot. One who did not sign in 1848 was Amelia Bloomer, editor of the local temperance newspaper. She soon came around to support the movement, however, opened up her paper to articles by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and designed the garments for which she became famous, intended to provide women more freedom of movement than conventional fashions permitted.
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Lucretia Mott felt women’s ordination to the ministry a more urgent need than the suffrage; she herself had been recorded (the Quaker term) as a minister at the age of twenty-eight. Although female exhorters, deaconesses, and missionaries were not unusual, few denominations ordained women clergy.
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Hindsight shows that women gained civic voting rights faster than they did clerical ordination. Nevertheless, Mott’s sense of priority reflected the importance of religion to social reform in nineteenth-century America and the role of the churches as forums in the debates over women’s rights, as in those over slavery. Early feminists tended to come from those denominations that practiced the greatest degree of gender equality—Quakers and Unitarians—and often quoted Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Lucy Stone explained away St. Paul’s admonition “Let your women keep silence in the churches” (I Corinthians 14:34) as applicable only to the poorly educated women of ancient Corinth, who had been wasting the congregation’s time asking questions they should have asked their husbands at home.
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The Second Great Awakening had proclaimed that everyone, male or female, must assume responsibility for his or her own salvation, a message that could empower women. Some feminists claimed that rights for women would hasten the millennium.
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Disputes over slavery and women’s rights disturbed several religious denominations in the Finger Lakes area. The Wesleyan Methodist Church, where the women’s rights convention met, had been founded in 1843 by abolitionists who felt it impossible to continue as members of a national Methodist Church that included slaveholders. That year the abolitionist-feminist Abigail Kelley gave a controversial lecture series in Seneca Falls (starting in the home of a local merchant-politician and moving to the Baptist church) in which she encouraged people of conscience to desert churches lacking in antislavery zeal. Also in 1843 the Millerite movement arrived in town, preaching the imminent Second Coming and provoking other individual secessions. At least a quarter of the signers of the Seneca Falls Declaration belonged to the recently organized Congregational Friends Meeting, an offshoot of Hicksite Quakerism strongly committed to female equality and the abolition of slavery. Sometimes feminism accompanied a rejection of Calvinist theology; it did so in the case of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, reared in Old School Presbyterianism, attracted by Finney’s revivals, but now attending Trinity Episcopal Church in Seneca Falls. In later life, she would devote considerable attention to constructing a feminist theology; her attacks on traditional male-centered religion would alienate her from more orthodox Christian women’s suffragists.
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The Presbyterian congregation in Seneca Falls followed the doctrines of the New School; its minister, Horace Bogue, supported the American Colonization Society. This put him on a collision course with his spirited parishioner Rhoda Bement, an abolitionist. Bement attended Abby Kelley’s lectures and heard her denounce Bogue’s version of antislavery as sinfully inadequate. As a teetotal abstainer, Bement also refused to partake of the communion wine. After the two exchanged heated words, Bogue charged Bement with “unchristian conduct” in a church trial that tested the limits of female assertiveness. Following her conviction in January 1844, the Bements refused to repent, quit the Presbyterian Church, and joined the Wesleyan Methodists. The episode typified a time and place where competing religious views and their social implications commanded serious attention. Women’s rights advocates provoked similar confrontations in other towns and other churches, asserting the primacy of individual conscience over institutional structures in ways reminiscent of the original Protestant Reformation.
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The Seneca Falls “convention” (as its organizers somewhat presumptuously called their local meeting) was no isolated event, but took place within a context of ferment. Even its demand for suffrage had precedent. The male abolitionist Gerrit Smith, friend and cousin of Cady Stanton, had spoken in favor of women’s suffrage at a recent Liberty Party gathering in Buffalo. Samuel J. May, minister of the Unitarian church in Syracuse, had preached in favor of it as early as 1846. That same year six rural women in Jefferson County had petitioned the New York legislature for equal civil and political rights with men.
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Two weeks after the Seneca Falls gathering, another women’s rights meeting assembled at the Unitarian church of Rochester; those attending included a Hicksite Quaker named Daniel Anthony, whose daughter Susan B. would become the most famous of suffrage leaders. At Rochester, a woman presided. Other gatherings followed. At Salem, Ohio, the women enforced a rule against men speaking, collected eight thousand signatures calling for the suffrage, and dispatched them to the newly elected Ohio state constitutional convention (with no effect). The first truly national women’s rights convention met in the textile mill town of Worcester, Massachusetts, in October 1850, with African Americans among the participants. Women’s rights took its place as part of a nexus of causes that overlapped extensively in their support, including abolition, temperance, and opposition to Indian Removal, capital punishment, and the war with Mexico.
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