and win a verdict of "just and womanly." Mrs. Nichols hoped
no further than that. She did not expect conservative Vermont to yield
at once for what she asked, as she stood alone with her paper among
the press; and there was no other advocate in the State to take the
field.

[24] The head and front of the opposition was Judge Kingman, Chairman
of the Judiciary Committee, to which, with the Committee on Elections,
my petition was referred. He wrote the Report against granting our
demand, and of those who signed it all but (Gen.) Blunt and himself
were Democrats. The report was adopted by a solid vote of the
Democrats (16), and enough Republicans to make a majority. Thirty-six
Republicans and 16 Democrats comprised the whole delegation. If my
memory is not at fault, 27 Republicans voted in caucus for the
provisions which were ultimately carried in our behalf, which was a
majority of the whole Convention. In caucus a majority were in favor
of political rights; but only a minority, from conviction that Woman
Suffrage would prevent admission to the Union, would vote it in
Convention.

CHAPTER VIII.

MASSACHUSETTS.

Women in the Revolution--Anti-Tea Leagues--Phillis
Wheatley--Mistress Anne Hutchinson--Heroines in the Slavery
Conflict--Women Voting under the Colonial Charter--Mary Upton
Ferrin Petitions the Legislature in 1848--Woman's Rights
Conventions in 1850, '51--Letter of Harriet Martineau from
England--Letter of Jeannie Deroine from a Prison Cell in
Paris--Editorial from _The Christian Inquirer_--_The Una_, edited
by Paulina Wright Davis--Constitutional Convention in
1853--Before the Legislature in 1857--Harriet K. Hunt's Protest
against Taxation--Lucy Stone's Protest against the Marriage
Laws--Boston Conventions--Theodore Parker on Woman's Position.

During the Revolutionary period, the country was largely indebted to
the women of Massachusetts. Their patriotism was not only shown in the
political plans of Mercy Otis Warren,[25] and the sagacious counsels
of Abigail Smith Adams, but by the action of many other women whose
names history has not preserved. It was a woman who sent Paul Revere
on his famous ride from Boston to Concord, on the night of April 18,
1775, to warn the inhabitants of the expected invasion of the British
on the morrow. The church bells pealing far and near on the midnight
air, roused tired sleepers hurriedly to arm themselves aga