Mrs. Hooker set about arranging a mass convention at her home in Hartford, Conn., and upon Miss Anthony's expressing some doubt as to being present, she wrote: "Here I am at work on a convention intended chiefly to honor Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton, and behold the Quakeress says maybe she can not come! I won't have the meeting if you are going to flunk. It has been a real consolation to me in this wearisome business to think you would for once be relieved from all responsibility and come as orator and guest. Don't fail me."
The convention, which closed October 29, was a great success and a State society was formed with a distinguished list of officers. The Hartford Post gave considerable space to Miss Anthony's address, saying:
Miss Anthony is a resolute, substantial woman of forty or fifty, exhibiting no signs of age or weariness. Her hair is dark, her head well formed, her face has an expression of masculine strength. If she were a man you would guess that she was a schoolmaster, or a quiet clergyman, or perhaps a business man and deacon. She pays no special attention to feminine graces, but is not ungraceful or unwomanly. In speaking her manner is self-possessed without ranting or unpleasant demonstrations, her tones slightly monotonous. Long experience has taught her a candid, kindly, sensible way of presenting her views, which wins the good will of her hearers whether they accept them or not. She said in part:
"How different is this from the assemblages that used to greet us who twenty years ago commenced to agitate the enfranchisement of woman. We begin to see the time, which we shall gladly welcome, when we shall not be needed at the front of the battle. Of late years, the country has been occupied in discussing the claim of man to hold property in his fellow-man, and has decided the question in the negative. Still another form of slavery remains to be disposed of; the old idea yet prevails that woman is owned and possessed by man, to be clothed and fed and cared for by his generosity. All the wrongs, arrogances and antagonisms of modern society grow out of this false condition of the relations between man and woman. The present agitation rises from a demand of the soul of woman for the right to own and possess herself. It is said that as a rule man does sufficiently provide for woman, and that she ought to remain content. The great facts of the world are at war with this assumption.
"For example, I see in the New York Herald 1,200 advertisements of people wanting work. Upon examination, 500 of them come from women and 300 more are from boarding-house keepers; and we may therefore say that eight of the twelve hundred advertisements are from women compelled to rely upon their own energies to gain their food and clothing. Every morning from 6 to 7 o'clock you may see on the Bowery and other great north and south avenues of New York, troops of young girls and women, with careworn or crime-stained faces, carrying their poor lunch half-concealed beneath a scanty shawl. If the facts were in accordance with the common theory, we should not see these myriads of women thus thrust out to get their living. Society must either provide great establishments maintained by taxation to care for women, or else the doors of all trades and callings must be thrown wide open to them.... This woman's movement promises an entire change of the conditions of wages and support. The status of woman can not be materially changed while the subsistence question remains as at present."
Miss Anthony was entertained at the home of Governor Jewell, afterwards Postmaster-General. One morning she went over to Mrs. Hooker's and found all her guests at the breakfast table, Henry Ward Beecher, Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Mrs. Severance, Mrs. Davis and others. She received a hearty welcome and Mrs. Hooker insisted she should sit down and have a cup of tea or coffee. Mr. Beecher joined in the entreaty, saying: "Now, Miss Anthony, you know you have to make a big speech today. When I want to be very effective and make people cry, I drink a cup of tea before speaking; when I want to be very clever and make them laugh, I drink coffee; but when I want them to cry half the time and laugh the other half, I take a cup of each."
In a letter to Miss Anthony after she returned home Mrs. Hooker said: "I am astonished at the praise I receive for my part in the convention, and humbled too, for I realize how worthy of all these pleasant and commendatory words you and others have been all these years, and what have you received—or rather what have you not received? Thank God, that is all over now and you are to have blue sky and clear sailing. It must be through suffering we enter the gates of peace." But the peace was a long way off and the hardest struggle was yet to come! A little later Mrs. Hooker wrote to a friend:
I can't tell you how my heart swells—but there is present within me one undercurrent of feeling that will come to the surface ever and anon, viz., the wonderful dignity, strength and purity of the early workers in this reform. I can't wait for history to do them justice; I want to make history today, and so far as in me lies I will do it. I have come in at the death and get a large share of the glory, and lo, here are these, a great company, who have been in the field for thirty years, and a whole generation has passed them by unrecognized. Every one here says, "Our noble friend Susan has carried the day right over the heads of all of us." Said one of our editors, Charles Dudley Warner, a man of finest taste and culture, when he had been praising the dignity and power of the whole platform: "Susan Anthony is my favorite. She was the only woman there who never once thought of herself. You could see in her every motion and in her very silence that the cause was all she cared for, self was utterly forgotten."
He had indeed struck the key note to Miss Anthony's strongest characteristic, utter forgetfulness of self, total self-abnegation, self-sacrifice without a consciousness that it was such. Mrs. Hooker's statement that she "had come in at the death" shows the strong faith of most of these early workers that it would be only a brief time until the rights they claimed would be recognized and granted; but she herself has labored faithfully yet another thirty years without breaking down the Chinese Wall of opposition.
One object of Mrs. Hooker in calling this Hartford convention was to see if she could not bring together what were now becoming known as "the New York and Boston wings of the suffrage party," but she comments: "We have decided to give up our attempts at reconciliation; we have neither time nor strength to spare, and if we had, they would probably fail."
In December Miss Anthony went to the Dansville Sanitarium for a few days and after her return, Dr. Kate Jackson, so widely known and loved, wrote her: "Since your visit here, through which I obtained somewhat of an insight into your struggles and labors, I have been in special sympathy with you. I do admire the liberal and comprehensive spirit which you and Mrs. Stanton show in allowing both sides of a question to be fairly discussed in your paper, and in giving any woman who does good work for her race in any field the credit for it, even though she may not exactly agree with you on all points. The spirit of exclusiveness is not calculated to push any reform among the masses.... Our house and hearts are always open to you. I want to send you something more than good wishes and so enclose a little New Year's gift to you, with my love and earnest prayers for your success."
The lovely Quaker, Sarah Pugh, wrote from Philadelphia:
Dear Susan: Not "Dear Madam," or "Respected Friend," according to our stately fashion, for my heart yearns too warmly toward thee and thy work for such formality. Would it were in my power to help thee more in thy onward way, for it must be onward even though opponents fill it with stumbling-blocks. Lucretia Mott is firm in her adherence to New York—not but that she can work, if the way offers, in all organizations which labor for the same end. My opinion of The Revolution may be expressed in what was said of another paper: "It fights no sham battles with enemies already defeated. It is true, good men and women not a few stumble at it, object to it and in some cases antagonize it, but nobody despises it. An affectation of contempt is not contempt."
Scores of similar letters were received from the early workers in the cause. It is unnecessary to enter further into a discussion of this division in the ranks of the advocates of woman suffrage. The conscientious historian must perform some unpleasant duties, hence it could not be passed without notice. The mass of correspondence on this question has been carefully sifted and that which would give pain to others, even though it would magnify the subject of this work, has been rigorously excluded. Most of the writers and those whom they criticised have ended their labors and passed from the scene of action. No good can be accomplished, either to the individuals or to the reform, by inflicting these personalities upon future generations. Among earnest, forceful,