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[Illustration: Susan B. Anthony. (Signed: Affectionately Yours Susan B. Anthony)]


  THE HISTORY

  OF

  WOMAN SUFFRAGE


  EDITED BY


  SUSAN B. ANTHONY &
      IDA HUSTED HARPER


  ILLUSTRATED WITH COPPERPLATE AND PHOTOGRAVURE
  ENGRAVINGS


  _IN FOUR VOLUMES_


  VOL. IV.


  1883-1900


  "PERFECT EQUALITY OF RIGHTS FOR WOMAN, CIVIL, LEGAL
  AND POLITICAL"


  SUSAN B. ANTHONY
  17 MADISON STREET, ROCHESTER, N. Y.


  COPYRIGHT, 1902, BY SUSAN B. ANTHONY


  THE HOLLENBECK PRESS
  INDIANAPOLIS




* * * * Make me respect my material so much that I dare not slight my
work. Help me to deal very honestly with words and with people,
because they are both alive. Show me that, as in a river, so in
writing, clearness is the best quality, and a little that is pure is
worth more than much that is mixed. Teach me to see the local color
without being blind to the inner light. Give me an ideal that will
stand the strain of weaving into human stuff on the loom of the real.
Keep me from caring more for books than for folks, for art than for
life. Steady me to do my full stint of work as well as I can, and when
that is done, stop me, pay me what wages thou wilt, and help me to say
from a quiet heart a grateful Amen.

                                             HENRY VAN <DW18>.




PREFACE


After the movement for woman suffrage, which commenced about the
middle of the nineteenth century, had continued for twenty-five years,
the feeling became strongly impressed upon its active promoters, Miss
Susan B. Anthony and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, that the records
connected with it should be secured to posterity. With Miss Anthony,
indeed, the idea had been ever present, and from the beginning she had
carefully preserved as far as possible the letters, speeches and
newspaper clippings, accounts of conventions and legislative and
congressional reports. By 1876 they were convinced through various
circumstances that the time had come for writing the history. So
little did they foresee the magnitude which this labor would assume
that they made a mutual agreement to accept no engagements for four
months, expecting to finish it within that time, as they contemplated
nothing more than a small volume, probably a pamphlet of a few hundred
pages. Miss Anthony packed in trunks and boxes the accumulations of
the years and shipped them to Mrs. Stanton's home in Tenafly, N. J.,
where the two women went cheerfully to work.

Mrs. Stanton was the matchless writer, Miss Anthony the collector of
material, the searcher of statistics, the business manager, the keen
critic, the detector of omissions, chronological flaws and
discrepancies in statement such as are unavoidable even with the most
careful historian. On many occasions they called to their aid for
historical facts Mrs. Matilda Joslyn Gage, one of the most logical,
scientific and fearless writers of her day. To Mrs. Gage Vol. I of the
History of Woman Suffrage is wholly indebted for the first two
chapters--Preceding Causes and Woman in Newspapers, and for the last
chapter--Woman, Church and State, which she later amplified in a book;
and Vol. II for the first chapter--Woman's Patriotism in the Civil
War.

When the allotted time had expired the work had far exceeded its
original limits and yet seemed hardly begun. Its authors were amazed
at the amount of history which already had been made and still more
deeply impressed with the desirability of preserving the story of the
early struggle, but both were in the regular employ of lecture bureaus
and henceforth could give only vacations to the task. They were
entirely without the assistance of stenographers and typewriters, who
at the present day relieve brain workers of so large a part of the
physical strain. A labor which was to consume four months eventually
extended through ten years and was not completed until the closing
days of 1885. The pamphlet of a few hundred pages had expanded into
three great volumes of 1,000 pages each, and enough material remained
unused to fill another.[1]

It was almost wholly due to Miss Anthony's clear foresight and
painstaking habits that the materials were gathered and preserved
during all the years, and it was entirely owing to