Think of causing all this anguish and humiliation to a young girl because she did not know the rule for dotting an i!
2nd mo. 15th day.—This day I call myself eighteen. It seems impossible that I can be so old, and even at this age I find myself possessed of no more knowledge than I ought to have had at twelve. Dr. Allen, a Phrenologist, gave us a short lecture this morning and examined a few heads, mine among them. He described only the good organs and said nothing of the bad. I should like to know the whole truth.
Susan relates with a good deal of satisfaction that she has written a letter to a schoolmate at home, without putting it on the slate for the teacher to see. A few days later Deborah sends for her. She "went down with cheerfulness," but what was her astonishment to see Deborah with the intercepted letter open in her hand! Susan closes her account of the interview by saying, "Little did I think, when I was writing that letter, that I was committing such an enormous crime."
Learning that a young friend had married a widower with six children, she comments in her diary, "I should think any female would rather live and die an old maid." She has a cold and cough for which Deborah gives her a "Carthartick," followed by some "Laudanum in a silver spoon." "The beautiful spring weather," she says, "inhales me with fresh vigor." She sees some spiderwebs in the schoolroom and, her domestic habits asserting themselves, gets a broom and mounts the desks to sweep them down, "little thinking of the mortification and tears it was to occasion." Finally she steps upon Deborah's desk and breaks the hinges on the lid. That personage is informed by an assistant teacher and arrives on the scene:
"Deborah, I have broken your desk." She appeared not to notice me, walked over, examined the desk and asked the teacher who broke it. "What! Susan Anthony step on my desk! I would not have set a child upon it," she said, and much more which I can not write. "How came you to step on it?" she asked, but I was too full to speak and rushed from the room in tears. That evening, after we read in the Testament, she said that where there was no desire for moral improvement there would be no improvement in reading. There was one by the side of her who had not desired moral improvement and had made no advancement in Literature.
This deliberate cruelty to one whose heart was bursting with sorrow and regret! "Never will this day be forgotten," says the diary. In speaking of this incident Miss Anthony said: "Not once, in all the sixty years that have passed, has the thought of that day come to my mind without making me turn cold and sick at heart."
On one occasion when a composition had been severely criticised, Susan blazed forth the inquiry why she always was censured and her sister praised. "Because," was the reply, "thy sister Guelma does the best she is capable of, but thou dost not. Thou hast greater abilities and I demand of thee the best of thy capacity." Throughout this little record are continual expressions of the pain of separation from the dear home, of keen disappointment if the expected letter fails to come, and most affectionate references to the beloved parents, brothers and sisters. Even the austere Deborah is mentioned always with respect and kindness for, notwithstanding her frequent censure, she inspired the girls with love and reverence.
Subsequent events show that this lady was failing rapidly with consumption. Among the old letters, one from an assistant teacher to Daniel Anthony, dated 1839, a year after Susan left school, says: "The tender chord that so long confined our beloved Deborah to this world was broken on the 25th day of the 4th month, and we trust her happy spirit took its flight to realms of eternal felicity." Deborah Moulson was a cultured and estimable woman, but she represented the spirit of that age toward childhood, one of chilling severity and constant repression, when reproof was as liberally administered as praise was conscientiously withheld.
1. Sixty-five years later, this cousin, Nancy Howe Clark, aged eighty-seven, wrote Miss Anthony:
"The year I spent at your father's was the happiest of my whole long life. How well I remember the sweet voices saying 'Cousin Nancy,' and the affectionate way in which I was received by your dear father and mother. It had never been my fortune before to live in a household with an educated man at its head, and I felt a little shy of your father but soon found there was no occasion. Although it was a period of great financial depression, he always found time to be social and kindly in his family. He seemed to have an eye for everything, his business, the school and every good work. I considered your father and mother a model husband and wife and found it hard to leave such a loving home."
2. In later years the younger children were instructed on piano and violin, and he enjoyed nothing better than listening to them.
3. In reading them over, sixty years afterwards, she said mournfully, "That has been the way all my life. Whenever I take a pen in hand I always seem to be mounted on stilts." To those who are acquainted with her simple, straightforward style of speaking, this will seem hardly possible, yet it is probably one of the reasons which led her, very early in her public career, to abandon all attempts at written speeches.
Chapter III:
Financial Crash—The Teacher
(1838-1845)
The panic; father's letters; teaching at Union Village; the home sacrificed; life at Center Falls; more Quaker discipline; teaching at New Rochelle; Miss Anthony's letters on slavery, temperance, medical practice, Van Buren, etc.; teaching at Center Falls, Cambridge and Fort Edward; proposals of marriage; removal to Rochester, N. Y.
The prosperous days of the Anthonys were drawing to a close. All manufacturing industries of the country were in a ruinous state. The unsound condition of the banks with their depreciated and fluctuating currency had created financial chaos. Overproduction of cotton goods on a credit basis, inordinate speculation, reduction of duties on importations, produced the inevitable result, and the commercial world began to totter on its foundations. The final ruin is foreshadowed in the letters of Daniel Anthony. In one to his brother September 2, 1837, he says:
I am going next week on a tour of the eastern cities and when I return shall be prepared to face the situation. My goods at present will not sell for the actual cost of manufacturing. Van Buren's message has just made its appearance. It is opposed to banks and may operate unfavorably to business, but how it can be worse I don't know.
He writes from Washington to his wife, September 11:
I arrived last evening—came in R. Road cars from Baltimore, 39 miles, in two hours, over a barren and almost uncultivated tract of country. The public buildings and one street called Pennsylvania Avenue are all that are worth mention in this place.... As a specimen of some of the big finery in the town, I will name one room in Martin's [Van Buren's] house, 90 ft. by 42, the furniture of which cost $22,000.... Our Congressmen are some like other folks, they look out first for themselves. They have spent most of this day in debating whether they shall be paid in specie.... There are Black Folks in abundance here, but they don't act as if they were even under the pressure of hard times, much less the cruelties that we hear of slaves having to bear.
From New York he writes his brother:
Such times in everything that pertains to business never were known in this land before. To-day I have passed through Pine street and have not seen one single box or bale of goods of any kind whatever. Last year at this time a person could scarcely go through the street without clambering over goods of all descriptions. A truck cart loaded with merchandise is now a rare object. A bale of goods can not be sold at any price. The countenances of all our best business men are stretched out in a perpendicular direction and when the times will let them come back into human shape not even the wisest pretend to guess. Those that are out of all