A Centennial Call for Freedom
American independence at one hundred years, The New York Times wrote on Tuesday, July 4, 1876, was nothing short of “a complete century of trial.” In the years since the Declaration of Independence, America was transformed by forces large and small, visible and invisible, tragic and triumphant. The principles for which the fifty-six delegates of the Second Continental Congress had pledged their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor had stood the tests of time, albeit not without challenge.
By 1876, the country seemed to be speeding toward its zenith. America’s breathtaking infrastructural innovations in railroads, waterways, steel production, oil independence, and other technologies, not to mention the unprecedented nature and effects of economic growth, urbanization, and immigration, had by the late 19th century signaled “a nation transformed,” as one historian has described.
Politically, if not morally, America had witnessed long-awaited rectification, if only partly. In 1861, Lincoln marshaled America’s better angels to restore and preserve the permanency of the Union and the Constitution on no other principles than those of the Declaration, specifically the principle that “all men are created equal,” a phrase he repeated as often as one of faith recites the Psalmist.
It cost 600,000 lives, but the Union was preserved, the Constitution made supreme, slavery abolished, and the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments ratified, beginning the long process toward equal access to the ballot. The American ideals, in sum, were being realized—if not at breakneck speed, at least at a steady pace.
But there remained, after one hundred years, an issue that had yet to be resolved. “Remember the ladies,” Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, in March 1776, “[we] will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice, or representation.” The right of women to vote, save briefly in New Jersey, was not, in fact, remembered. Worse, the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, inserted the word “male” into the Constitution for the first time.
The year before, Iowa legislators resolved that “‘men’ in the [Declaration]… refers to the whole human race, regardless of nationality or sex,” and that “taxation and representation should be coextensive.” What of the “consent of the governed?” they asked. Yet by 1876, only the Wyoming and Utah territories granted full voting rights to women.
Thus, amidst the awesome festivities of the first-ever world’s fair in Philadelphia and surrounded by lively centennial celebrations of American independence, Susan B. Anthony and four other women decided to do something that Americans, as rambunctious relatives of the English, knew and did all too well: protest.
On the Fourth, after a descendant of Richard Henry Lee read the Declaration during the official program, Anthony marched up to the podium and presented a document to Vice President Thomas Ferry—“a declaration of rights from the women citizens of the United States,” Anthony said.
Perplexed, Ferry accepted it. Their “overt act” complete, the ladies retreated through the audience and handed copies of their declaration to astonished onlookers, after which they set themselves up at “a raised platform” in front of Independence Hall, where “Miss. Anthony read the Declaration” to a “thronging crowd.”
“Our faith is firm and unwavering in the sacred principles of human rights proclaimed in 1776,” Anthony declared. “Yet we cannot forget, even in this glad hour, that while all men of every race, and clime, and condition, have been invested with the full rights of citizenship under our hospitable flag, all women still suffer the degradation of disenfranchisement.”
America’s centennial, as the Times had written, was one of trial, marked, in Anthony’s approximation, by “a series of assumptions and usurpations of power over women, in direct opposition to the principles of just government.” Such principles were “the natural rights of each individual, the equality of these rights, that rights not delegated are retained, that no person can exercise the rights of others without delegated authority, that the non-use of rights does not destroy them.”
On the day of America’s centennial, the ladies arraigned the nation’s leaders and listed “articles of impeachment,” including the effective suspension of habeas corpus “in case of a married woman against her husband,” the denial of trial by a jury of a woman’s peers, unequal labor codes, and, most striking, taxation without representation, which ran counter to the very principle which had given birth to the United States.
“It was the boast of the founders,” Anthony said, “that the rights for which they contended were the rights of human nature,” adding, “if these rights are ignored in the case of one-half of the people, the nation is surely preparing for its downfall.” The subjugated status of half the country was “incompatible with the first principles of freedom.” Anthony concluded, “We ask justice, we ask equality.”
The great feminist historian Ellen Carol DuBois wrote that “for weeks after, women from all over… wrote to have their names and those of their friends and relatives added to the Declaration.” While newspapers covered the incident, they did so only modestly. It was, as another historian wrote, “a fleeting moment.” Not until 1920 and the 1960s would women truly see ideals realized.
Yet, on Tuesday, July 4, 1876, beneath the shade of an umbrella, in front of perhaps few people at a time, Anthony did what the courageous do and what change requires: she stood for what was right and cared little how many listened.
“It is from the numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped,” Robert Kennedy said in 1966. “Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
The question, then, is whether we are the ripple or the wall.