Yours, ever yours,
Theodore Tilton.
In 1862, as the previous year, Miss Anthony was determined to hold a National Woman's Rights Convention in New York, but her efforts met with no favorable response and so, for the second time, she was obliged to give up the annual protest which seemed to her a sacred duty. She did not then acknowledge, nor has she ever admitted, that there is any question of more vital importance than that relating to the freedom of woman. Defeated here she decided to start out again in the anti-slavery lecture field, since, as she wrote her friend Lydia: "It is so easy to feel your power for public work slipping away if you allow yourself to remain too long snuggled in the Abrahamic bosom of home. It requires great will-force to resurrect one's soul." In her tour she visited Adams, accompanied by her loved niece, Ann Eliza McLean, and wrote back an amusing account of how she lectured the male relatives for requiring their women folks to use worn-out cook-stoves, broken kitchen utensils and all sorts of inconvenient things in the household. While there she went with a large party of relatives over the mountains to see the wonderful Hoosac Tunnel, now well under way. One day she spoke to an audience on the very top of the Green mountains. On this trip, having for a rarity a little leisure, she visited the art galleries of New York and wrote:
My very heart of hearts has been made to rejoice in the work of two of earth's noblest women—Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur. Twice have I visited the Academy of Design and there have I sat in silent, reverential awe, with eyes intent upon the marble face of Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci. I have no power to express my hope, my joy, my renewed faith in womanhood. In the accomplishment of that grand work of the sculptor's chisel, making that cold marble breathe and pulsate, Harriet Hosmer has done more to ennoble and elevate woman than she possibly could have done by mere words, it matters not how Godlike; though I would not ignore true words, for it is these which rouse to action the latent powers of the Harriet Hosmers.... Even the rude and uncultivated seem awed into silence when they come into the presence of that sleeping, but speaking purity. Rosa Bonheur is the first woman who has dared venture into the field of animal painting, and her work not only surpasses anything ever done by a woman, but is a bold and successful step beyond all other artists. Mark another significant fact: The three greatest productions of art during the past three years are by women—Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, Rosa Bonheur's Horse Fair and Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci—and these triumphs are in three of its most difficult and exalted departments.
In April she took Mrs. Stanton's four boys from Seneca Falls to New York, and cared for them while the family were removing to that city. In May she attended the New York Anniversary and the New England convention in Boston, and on the Fourth of July the celebration at Framingham, and during this time gave many addresses on anti-slavery. When in Boston she had a delightful visit with the Garrisons, and called on Mrs. Phillips with Mrs. Garrison, one of the few persons admitted to the invalid's seclusion.
While all the women were giving themselves, body and soul, to the great work of the war, the New York Legislature, April 10, 1862, finding them off guard, very quietly amended the law of 1860 and took away from mothers the lately-acquired right to the equal guardianship of their children. They also repealed the law which secured to the widow the control of the property for the care of minor children. Thus at one blow were swept away the results of nearly a decade of hard work on the part of women, and wives and mothers were left in almost the same position as under the old common law. Had one woman been a member of the Legislature, such an act never would have been possible; but the little band who for ten years had watched and toiled to protect the interests of their sex, were in the sanitary commission, the hospitals, at the front, on the platform in the interest of the Union, or at home doing the work of those who had gone into the army, and this was their reward! Miss Anthony's anger and sorrow were intense when she heard of the repeal of the laws which she had spent seven long years to obtain, tramping through cold and heat to roll up petitions and traversing the whole State of New York in the dead of winter to create public sentiment in their favor. In her anguish she wrote Lydia Mott:
Your startling letter is before me. I knew some weeks ago that abominable thing was on the calendar, with some six or eight hundred bills before it, and hence felt sure it would not come up this winter, and that in the meantime we should sound the alarm. Well, well; while the old guard sleep the "young devils" are wide awake, and we deserve to suffer for our confidence in "man's sense of justice;" but nothing short of this could rouse our women again to action. All our reformers seem suddenly to have grown politic. All alike say: "Have no conventions at this crisis; wait until the war excitement abates;" which is to say: "Ask our opponents if they think we had better speak, or rather if they do not think we had better remain silent." I am sick at heart, but I can not carry the world against the wish and will of our best friends. What can we do now when even the motion to retain the mother's joint guardianship is voted down? Twenty thousand petitions rolled up for that—a hard year's work—the law secured—the echoes of our words of gratitude in the Capitol scarcely died away, and now all is lost!
This year began the acquaintance with Anna Dickinson, whose letters are as refreshing as a breeze from the ocean:
The sunniest of sunny mornings to you, how are you today? Well and happy, I hope. To tell the truth I want to see you very much indeed, to hold your hand in mine, to hear your voice, in a word, I want you—I can't have you? Well, I will at least put down a little fragment of my foolish self and send it to look up at you.... I work closely and happily at my preparations for next winter—no, for the future—nine hours a day, generally; but I never felt better, exercise morning and evening, and never touch book or paper after gaslight this warm weather; so all those talks of yours were not thrown away upon me.
What think you of the "signs of the times?" I am sad always, under all my folly;—this cruel tide of war, sweeping off the fresh, young, brave life to be dashed out utterly or thrown back shattered and ruined! I know we all have been implicated in the "great wrong," yet I think the comparatively innocent suffer today more than the guilty. And the result—will the people save the country they love so well, or will the rulers dig the nation's grave?
Will you not write to me, please, soon? I want to see a touch of you very much.
Very affectionately yours,
Anna E. Dickinson
Early in September Greeley writes her: "I still keep at work with the President in various ways and believe you will yet hear him proclaim universal freedom. Keep this letter and judge me by the event."
Miss Anthony thus lectures Mrs. Stanton because she has a teacher and educates her children at home: "I am still of the opinion that whatever the short-comings of the public schools your children would be vastly more profited in them, side by side with the very multitude with whom they must mingle as soon as school days are over. Any and every private education is a blunder, it seems to me. I believe those persons stronger and nobler who have from childhood breasted the commonalty. If children have not the innate strength to resist evil, keeping them apart from what they must inevitably one day meet, only increases their incompetency."
In the summer of 1862 Miss Anthony attended her last State Teachers' Convention, which was held in Rochester, where she began her labors in this direction. In 1853 she had forced this body to grant her a share in their deliberations, the first time a woman's voice had been heard. For ten years she never had missed an annual meeting, keeping up her membership dues and allowing no engagement to interfere. Year after year she had followed them up, insisting that in the conventions women teachers should hold offices, serve on committees and exercise free speech; demanding that they should be eligible to all positions in the schools with equal pay for equal work; and