ve at
death, for the care and protection of minor children, was also
repealed. This cowardly act of the Legislature of 1862[175] is the
strongest possible proof of woman's need of the ballot in her own
hand for protection. Had she possessed the power to make and unmake
legislators, no State Assembly would have dared thus to rob the mother
of her natural rights. But without the suffrage she was helpless.
While, in her loyalty to the Government and her love to humanity, she
was encouraging the "boys in blue" to fight for the freedom of the
black mothers of the South, these dastardly law-makers, filled with
the spirit of slaveholders, were stealing the children and the
property of the white mothers in the Empire State!

When Susan B. Anthony heard of the repeal of 1862, she was filled with
astonishment, and wrote thus to Miss Lydia Mott:

DEAR LYDIA:--Your startling letter is before me. I knew some
weeks ago that that abominable thing was on the calendar, with
some six or eight hundred bills _before it_, and hence felt sure
it would not come up this winter, and that in the meantime we
should sound the alarm. Well, well; while the old guard sleep the
young "devils" are wide-awake, and we deserve to suffer for our
confidence in "man's sense of justice," and to have all we have
gained thus snatched from us. But nothing short of this can rouse
our women again to action. All our reformers seem suddenly to
have grown politic. All alike say, "Have no conventions at this
crisis"! Garrison, Phillips, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Wright Mrs. Stanton,
etc., say, "Wait until the war excitement abates"; which is to
say, "Ask our opponents if they think we had better speak, or,
rather, if they do not think we had better remain silent." I am
sick at heart, but I can not carry the world against the wish and
the will of our best friends. But what can we do now, when even
the motion to retain the mother's joint guardianship is voted,
down? Twenty thousand petitions rolled up for that--a hard year's
work!--the law secured!--the echoes of our words of gratitude in
the capitol have scarce died away, and now all is lost!

And, worse still, in 1871,[176] after the black man was not only
emancipated, but enfranchised, by the Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments, which, overriding State Constitution and statute law,
abolished the property qualification for col