BLACKWELL FAMILY LUCY STONE Subject file Biographical Papers (general)Oct 8, 1893. Yesterday she spoke of the first National Woman's Rights Convention. She said she remembered at the close of one session of an Anti-Slavery Convention, notice was given from the platform that persons interested in calling a woman's rights convention would meet directly after; and nine women went down together into a little dingy room. "It was between daylight and dark", she said several times. She did not remember exactly who the women were; Harriet Hunt was one, and she thinks Paulina Davis was another. In the Liberator for that year, she thinks the names could be found. She did a great deal herself about getting up the meeting; and Paulina Davis did a good deal -- a great deal", writing in all directions. (Harriet K. Hunt, Eliza. J. Kenney, Lucy Stone, Abby Kelly Foster, Paulina Wright Davis, Dora Taft, (Father Taylor's daughter) and Eliza J. Taft. - - - From Mass. in the Woman Suffrage Movement. p. 20)[*Jan 17, 1882*] How Mamma began to take money for her woman's rights lectures. She was speaking for the antislavery society, which paid her $6.00 a week. She always put in a word here & there for women while she talked for the negroes, & no objection was made. But when (Hiram?) Powers' Grk Slave was on exhibition in Boston, she went up to see it, early in the morning, when no one else was there. It was almost the first life-size statuary she had seen, tho' she had seen that in the Athenaeum. took her to see it, with Aunt Nettie. The Grk Slave was a wonderful thing, she says. It stood up against a green canvas background, with the hands tied & head turned away; & mother looked at it, & it took hold of her "like Sampson on the gates of Gaza". That night there was an antislavery meeting; & she poured out all she had in her heart about the Grk Slave- "the chained hands, so emblematic of women." She poured it out all burning, & it was very eloquent; she was excited herself by herown words. But after the meeting Mr. Samuel May came to her & said, "That was very beautiful that you said about the GS," & he praised her [it] her speech very much, "but you must not talk woman's rights in antislavery meetings. The people come to hear antislavery, not woman's rights; & it isn't right." Mamma listened, & stood awhile, & then said "I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. You are right; it isn't right; but I can't help it. So I will not [go] travel for the antislavery society any more. I will go on my own hook, & then I can speak for the women or the negroes as I like." The antislavery people were very sorry. Mother was the only woman speaker they had who went around with them all the time, "and I was young enough & enthusiastic enough to be a great help to them." They reminded her that she couldn't [giv] have woman's rights meetings Sundays, & said if she would speak for them Saturday nights & Sundays, they would pay her $4.00 per week, & she could speak on woman's rights the rest of the time. So she did, & arranged her own meetings in neighboring towns & villages to where the antislavery meetings were, so that she could flit around to them without much expense. She had never taken any fee at the door at woman's rights meetings, having the Quaker feeling that it was wrong to make people pay for hearing the truth, or to take pay for telling it. *"It was a conscientious feeling; I think it was an ignorant one." Besides, she wanted everybody to hear. But she had a meeting in Salem, & her gown and cloak were shabby, and she had only 50 cents in her purse. She says she could have worn the cloak another winter; it would have been warm enough; but it didn't look well. The Hutchinsons were to sing in Salem the same evening, & one of them--she thinks it was John--came to her and proposed that they should unite their entertainment, they singing before & after her lecture, & giving her a certain % of the profits. John said, "You are a fool [to refuse] not to take a fee at the door, when crowds of people come to hear you, & would come just the same if they had to pay." And mother agreed to unite her lecture with their singing. Then Mrs. C. I. H. Nichols of Brattleboro, who had "gone through all the hells" with a husband who knocked her down, dragged her by the hair, &c &c., [told] wrote to Mamma that she would get her up a meeting in Brattleboro, & charge ninepence at the door, & give her whatever there was over the expenses. And mother reflected that what people gave in collections, they gave for the cause, & she couldn't appropriate that to herself; & she needed a dress & cloak. Also, "I shall never marry, & when I am old I want some place to lay my head besides the poorhouse." So she agreed to Mrs. Nichols's offer, & a great crowd came to hear her at Brattleboro, & the hall was full. They cleared $17. besides expenses, & with that & the money remaining from the Salem meeting, mother bought herself a dress & cloak.After that she took pay at the door; & as she had to have strangers take it, they stole a great deal from her; but she cleared $3000. that winter, & that winter & the next cleared $6600 & something. She went all around, in Me., N.H., Vt., Del. & Tenn, & Toronto & Canada, where they paid her $50. per lecture; & to Louisville & St. Louis. [*Jan 17, '82*] [*Early lectures -- how she began to charge a door-fee.*]Sep. 22, 1893. At the Louisville meetings (1853 or 54) she stayed at the Galt House, and Dr. Bill an influential citizen, and Geo. D. Prentice, editor of the Courier, came to see her to see what sort of person she was. "And when they found I wasn't a windmill, but was a person with an earnest purpose, they accepted me, and went out and made the Courier do its best to help by advertising the meetings, etc" On the occasion of this call, they asked her if she believed in the inspiration of the Bible, and she said, "Why, not altogether; probably about as much as you do. You do not believe the whole of it, do you?" They were much tickled by this. Prentice praised her very much in the Courier, and he urged her strongly to extend her lecture tour through the South, clear to New Orleans. He said, "You will find that what I have said of you in the Courier has opened the door for you everywhere." Sept. 22, 1893. In St. Louis (about 1852 or '53) she gave her three lectures on Woman's Rights, to immense audiences, and was invited to stay and give another on temperance. (Mrs. Frances D. Gage and her sons were active in getting up the meetings and selling tickets, and Dr. McDowell, dean of the Medical College, seconding her.) In the interviewing time, Mamma was taken for a ride around the city, and saw lots of horrid little places with the signs up "Negroes bought and sold," mixed up with signs "Hot Tom and Jerry," "Irish Punch," etc., and all mixed up together in her mind. She thinks the great audiences came at first attracted by curiosity because she wore a bloomer, but before she had been speaking five minutes, "all their curiosity and leer died out of their faces, and they took up the interest" of the thing she was talking about. They came four nights in succession, and packed the hall as much, on the fourthnight as on any, and clapped her as she came on. In the course of her address, she was thinking of the slaveholding. She was intending to end a sentence with the words "rum and rumsellers," instead of which, without meaning to, she said "rum and slaveholders," the sound of the word caught her ear and recalled her to herself, and she saw the flash go over all the faces. She stopped, and for half a minute you might have heard a pin drop. Then she said, "I said slaveholders, I meant to have said rumsellers. But while I was thinking of the ruin that comes to you by your rumselling, I could not forget the deeper ruin that comes to you buy your slave-holding; and in spite of myself, the word slipped out." The audience clapped, "They thought it was good pluck, but it was only commonsense. Truth is always commonsense." After the meeting Dr. McDowell came to her for fear she might be attacked; but instead the people came around her with broad smiles, saying, "You thought you wouldn't go away without giving us a slap, didn't you?" She said, "No, it was not meant for a slap; it was just as I told you." And they believed her. She cleared $700 from the four meetings; $600 from the three on Woman's Rights at Louisville, (where she heard the donkey bray, and thought it was a slave being beaten); and she would have cleared more, but that the men whom she had to hire (strangers)to take the tickets, cheated her she was told. The three meetings at Louisville were the same kind of packed ones nights after night. After the meeting at St. Louis, Dr. McDowell went into a drug store and found all the men there talking of the lecture, and expressing various opinions. One man said Mamma was a public character and no better than she should be. Dr. McDowellwas very mad. He put his hands on the counter and said; "You are young, and I am old, but if you say that word again, I'll come over the counter and knock your teeth down your throat." He did not say it again. Dr. McDowell championed her warmly in every way, and implored her, without avail, to lengthen her short skirts. At a meeting (antislavery), she thinks in Conn. Parker Pillsbury was speaking, and she was sitting in one of the front benches waiting her turn to speak, when a man threw a hymn book at her. It struck her on the back of the neck with such violence that for a moment she was stunned, and her head went round and round. She said nothing, and in a moment was all right again. Mr. Pillsbury said if they had any other argument that wouldn't use that— or words to that effect. Mamma thinks she didn't allude to it in her own speech. Oct. 8, 1893. Mr. Bonditch came to see Mamma, with his wife. Mamma told him how glad she was for his help to the suffrage cause at a time when it had not many prominent people to help it. She told how Emanuel Scherb, in the early days, found her working for it almost alone and she was a country girl, and nobody knew her, and she was not anybody in particular, and she said to Wendell Phillips, "Why do you let Lucy Stone do this? Why don't you get Edward Everett?" And she said it was so much to her, when Mrs. Howe with all she stood for, joined the movement. Mamma said it was like "the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." Mr. Bowditch cried so he could hardly talk to her, and kissed her hand repeatedly, and came away. He told me he was ashamed to have "made such a botch of it," but he remembered her as ayoung girl in antislavery conventions, and he had known her all her life. I started to tell her of some remarkable cures Mrs. Wentworth said she knew had been accomplished by Dr. J. Heber Smith, but Mamma stopped me and said, "I am not going to be cured; I don't want to be cured; and the kindest thing you can do is to let me pass on. It costs too much to be cured -- in suffering to myself." Adeline Howland and Sarah Henshaw called to see her. They said they wished she could have lived to see the granting of suffrage. She said: "Oh! I shall know it. I think I shall know it in the next world (or on the other side). If I do not, the people on this side will know it." One of them said how well Mr. Blackwell had done for her as the N. E. Agricultural Fair, and she said, "He always does. Dear Mr. Blackwell! How he has helped!" She said everyone was very good to her. Mrs. Pratt called, and when I took her up Mother said to her almost immediately, "I am hoping to pass away very soon." Mrs. Pratt told her she must have courage. She said, "Oh it isn't courage. But it is done. I like to go to the other side; I have not the least fear of it." In the afternoon Hattie Turner came. Something was said about wishing she might be there when suffrage was carried. She said, "Perhaps I shall know it where I am; and if not, I shall be doing something better. I haven't a fear, or a dread, or a doubt."Oct. 5, 1891. At breakfast Mother told how she once went to lecture at Hinsdale, Mass., away up among the hills. Samuel May, who arranged her lectures, had written to the Unitarian minister there, asking him to give notice of the meeting. When mother got there she went to him, and found him utterly opposed. He said he had not given the notice, and would not give any notice. So Mamma went and put up her own posters, and then went from house to house telling everybody about the meeting and asking them to come. She worked all day with nothing to eat -- had not time to stop to eat -- and then toiled up the long hill to the hotel. The wife of the hotel-keeper was overworked and tired, with two or three little children clinging to her. She was entirely an "under dog." Mother told her she must have some supper before her lecture, but to get her whatever she could get most easily; that she was hungry enough to eat anything; and that she would take care of the children for her while she was getting supper. The woman was relieved to have the children off her hands for a little while, and the children were delighted to come to Mamma, and she told them stories all the time that supper was getting. The woman chopped up meat and potatoes and made hash for her; but in the hurry she forgot to take out of the chopping bowl the dish-cloth with which she had wiped it, and the cloth was chopped up with the hash. The first mouthful mother took, she found the dish- towel in it, and it turned her stomach and she could not eat any more. So she went to her lecture fasting. The boys threw paper wads at first; but it was a good meeting, and she got some subscribers for the Anti-Slavery Standard who continued to take it as long as it was published. After her meeting she came back to the hotel, but in the room next hers, separated only by a door, was a party of young men carousing; and she, though not young, being new to the world, felt as if she were not safe so near a party of roisterers, and lay and listened all night to their carryings-on, unable to sleep. Thenext day she went on to the little town of Dalton, and again she had to put up her own posters. As she was going to post some on a bridge, a lot of boys had followed her, thinking it a great lark and a most improper thing for a woman to be lecturing and putting up posters, and filled (like the Unitarian minister at Hinsdale) with the bitter opposition to antislavery which pervaded pretty much everybody in New England. So the boys came after her, intending to tear down her posters. And she turned around and told them what slavery meant -- making men work without paying for it, and selling boys like them on the auction-block, etc., until "I got them all on my side," she said; and they let her posters alone. The meeting that evening was in the town hall, and it was dirty and disagreeable, with a great yawning fire-place, paper strewn about the floor, boys throwing wads and men swearing. She does not remember what sort of meeting they had, but remembers vividly the unpleasant look of the hall at the beginning. She always things of these adventures when she goes through these places on the railroad.Nov. 20, 1885-- Mother went over to Cambridge, to-day, to attend a reception given by her friend, Mrs. A. M. Mosher, to the French authoress "Henry Gréville" -- Mme. Durand. She was introduced to the lady (who is short, fat, and very voluble she says) as the "great leader of the woman's rights." Mme. Durand exclaimed, "Have you that courage? Then I shake hands with you again!" and shook hands with her with great emphasis, and said, "It is the gravest question. On the continent the women will not be ready for it for twenty years, but you are ready for it, and you ought to have it," or something to that effect. Mother met her again in the course of the evening, and Mme. Durand at once renewed the subject of the political rights of women. Mother told her it took no great courage to advocate the question now; that was many years ago; now it had become rather popular, "although," she said, looking around the room full of Cambridge folk, "there a good many people in this room who do not believe in it." "So much the worse for them!" said Mme. Durand emphatically. Mother was much pleased with her, and especially to find her "loaded to the muzzle" on our question.Sept. 30, 1893. In the year Mamma was married the case of Margaret Garner was tried in Cincinnati. Margaret was a slave; had escaped with her children. When she found they were about to be recaptured, she tried to kill her children, and succeeded in killing one (Mamma thinks two) of the little girls, saying the boys could get along better in slavery, but her girls should never suffer as she had. Mamma visited her in prison; she was a beautiful woman, chestnut-colored, with wonderful eyes, and good features. "I can see her now, just as she looked." Mamma talked with her and sympathized with her, and asked her among other things, in case she should be taken back into slavery, if she had a knife. This was overheard. At the trial, Mamma spoke; and she was asked whether it was true that she had offered Margaret a knife. Mamma answered: "I did ask her if she had a knife. If I were a slave, as she is a slave, with the law against me, and society against me, and the church against me, and with no death- dealing weapon at hand, I would with my own teeth tear open my veins, and send my soul back to God who gave it." Margaret's master was in court, and sweated severely while Mother was speaking, and promised afterwards that she should have her freedom, but she should have it according to law. She was bound and put on board the boat that carried her down the Ohio River. Her baby was on her lap. The boat gave a lurch, and she let the baby roll right off her lap into the river, without an effort to save it. Her master did not free her. Later, her husband wrote to Mother that she was dead, and had escaped at last. A book has been published within a year or two, which contains this story. Papa knows what book it is.Nov. 20, 1885. Mother went over to Cambridge to-day, to attend a reception given by her friend Mrs. A. M. Mosher to the French authoress, "Henry Greville" - Mme. Durand. She was introduced to the lady (who is short, fat, and very voluble, she says) as the "great leader of the women's rights." Mme. Durand exclaimed "Have you that courage? Then I shake hands with you again!" and shook hands with her with great emphasis, and said, "It is the gravest question. On the continent the women will not be ready for it for twenty years, but you are ready for it, and you ought to have it," or something to that effect. Mother met her again in the course of the evening, and Mme. Durand at once renewed the subject of the political rights of women. Mother told her it took no great courage to advocate the question now; that was many years ago; now it had become rather popular; "Although," she said, looking around the room full of Cambridge folk "there are a good many people in this room who do not believe in it." So much the worse for them!" said Mme. Durand emphatically. Mother was much pleased with her, and especially to find her "loaded to the muzzle" on our question.May 13, 1883 Alice Stone Blackwell writes in a letter: ----"The Canada women have just been given the right to vote, and Mamma has her heart in her throat, and feels as if her eyes had seen the glory of the coming of the the Lord, or begun to see it."Memo of Boston Migration, 1869 (H.B. Blackwell's writing - I.P-B.) In 1869, having earned by activities of fifteen years, in real estate, book publishing, and sugar refining, a modest pecuniary independence, Mrs. Stone and her husband removed from New Jersey to Boston. Among other reasons for so doing were the attachment they felt for the many dear friends with whom she had been intimately associated in her early anti-slavery and woman's rights labors from 1847 to 1855. Those eight years had witnessed her struggles with poverty and prejudice, and her triumphant achievement of a national reputation. In New England dwelt the Garrisons, the Mays, Wendell Phillips, T. W. Higginson, the Sewalls, the Drapers, the Earles of Worcester, the Whites of Northampton, Francis Jackson, Theordore D. Weld, the Sisters Grimke, and a host of tried and true friends throughout Massachusetts and New England. Including the Chases of Rhode Island, the Burrs and Sheldons of Connectiuct. Thousands had been aroused and converted by her wonderful eloquence, and Boston was reorganized as the natural center for the establishment of a weekly paper representing the demand of women for equality in the home, the State, and Nation. During the Spring and Summer of 1869 by correspondence she had gathered representative suffragists from the eastern, middle and western States to the memorable Convention at Cleveland, Ohio, which organized on a representative basis the American Women Suffrage Association. The field in New York City was already pre-empted by The Revolution newspaper started by Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton with money supplied by George Francis Train and of workers gathered at short notice from suffragists attending the closing sessions of the Equal Rights Association. The adoption of the 15th Amendment had settled for a time the race question by making thefreedmen voters while ignoring women in the reconstruction. Henceforth the two questions would cease to be associated in the public mind and a national organization for woman suffrage was felt to be necessary. At the Cleveland Convention Mrs. Livermore and Lucy Stone formed what proved to be a life-long co-operation, the Chicago Agitator, already started with several hundred subscribers, to be merged in the Woman's Journal and Mrs. Livermore to come East and become its managing Editor. From that Convention Lucy returned to Massachusetts and by personal effort secured subscriptions to a joint stock corporation with a capital of ten thousand dollars. In the first number of the Woman's Journal, issued Jan. 8, 1870, Lucy Stone's editorial was one the "Legal Right of Mother's to Their Children." It was the beginning of a battle for woman's equality in the home, which lasted more than 30 years and which was not achieved until several years after her decease. We copy this editorial entire because it is full of that exquisite motherliness which was Lucy's special characteristic. (Here the recital ends. I.P.B.) abruptly.[*Memoir - ASB*] [*1869*] May 8, 1891 Aprapo of a letter from Mrs. Virginia D. Young describing an interview with the editor of the Charlestown News and Courier, which touched and pleased her, Mother told how in 1869? [1867] at the time of the suffrage amendment campaign in Kansas, where they hoped so much to carry it, she went to Horace Greeley and pleaded with him with all her might to come out for it in the Tribune, for the Tribune was then all immense power, and was taken everywhere in Kansas. She pleaded with him, presenting her cause with such earnestness that the tears stood in her eyes. Mr. Greeley said, "When you have been whipped as many times as I have, you won't cry about it." "All the same, when he was whipped afterwards, he not only cried about it, but he broke his heart and died," Mamma said. He would not do what she wished, but he indicated a space about a finger's length and said: "You may have a space of that length in the Tribune as often as you like," to say what she pleased. But of course, that was nothing like having the whole great weight of the paper cast for it editorially, she said. The tears stood in her eyes in telling me about it.