ty they would naturally feel in seeing their slaves suddenly
made their political superiors, their rulers, law-makers, judges, and
jurors! They saw that with the incoming tide of ignorant voters from
Southern plantations and from the nations of the Old World, that the
Government needed the intelligent votes and moral influence of woman
to outweigh the ignorance and vice fast crowding round our polling
booths.

Seeing all this, they pressed with earnestness the well-considered
demand for woman's enfranchisement, not from any selfish or personal
considerations, but for the elevation of all womankind, and to
vindicate the principles that underlie republican government. They who
have the responsibility of action are usually more timid in counsel
than those who can exert only an indirect influence. Hence the
statesmen of that period did not dare to trust their own principles to
their logical results, and instead of the broad demand of equal rights
for all, they proposed reconstruction on the basis of "manhood
suffrage"; a half-way measure that satisfied nobody, glossed over by
the party in power as "universal suffrage," "equal suffrage,"
"impartial suffrage," until compelled to call the proposition by its
true name, "manhood suffrage."

Having served the Government during the war in such varied capacities,
and taken an active part in the discussion of its vital principles on
so many reform platforms, women naturally felt that in reconstruction
their rights as citizens should be protected and secured. They who had
so diligently rolled up petitions for the emancipation and
enfranchisement of the slaves now demanded the same liberties, not
only for the white women of the nation, but for the newly made
freed-women from Southern plantations, who had borne more grievous
burdens and endured keener sufferings in the flesh and far more
aggravating humiliations in spirit, than the man slave could ever
know. And yet Abolitionists who had drawn their most eloquent appeals
for emancipation from the hopeless degradation of woman in slavery,
ignored alike the African and the Saxon in reconstruction, and refused
to sign the petition for "woman suffrage." Even such just and liberal
men as Gerrit Smith and Wendell Phillips, in their haste to see the
consummation of the black man's freedom, to which they had devoted
their life-long efforts, lost sight of the ever-binding principles of
justice, and accepted an amendment to the National Consti