The first point, his emancipation, settled, the political status of the negro was next in order; and to this end various propositions were submitted to Congress.  But to demand his enfranchisement on the broad principle of natural rights was hedged about with difficulties, as the logical result of such action must be the enfranchisement of all ostracized classes; not only the white women of the entire country, but the slave women of the South.  Though our senators and representatives had an honest aversion to any proscriptive legislation against loyal women, in view of their varied and self-sacrificing work during the War, yet the only way they could open the constitutional door just wide enough to let the black man pass in was to introduce the word “male” into the national Constitution.  After the generous devotion of such women as Anna Carroll and Anna Dickinson in sustaining the policy of the Republicans, both in peace and war, they felt it would come with a bad grace from that party to place new barriers in woman’s path to freedom.  But how could the amendment be written without the word “male,” was the question.

Robert Dale Owen being at Washington, and behind the scenes at the time, sent copies of the various bills to the officers of the Loyal League, in New York, and related to us some of the amusing discussions.  One of the committee proposed “persons” instead of “males.”  “That will never do,” said another, “it would enfranchise wenches.”  “Suffrage for black men will be all the strain the Republican party can stand,” said another.  Charles Sumner said, years afterward, that he wrote over nineteen pages of foolscap to get rid of the word “male” and yet keep “negro suffrage” as a party measure intact; but it could not be done.

Miss Anthony and I were the first to see the full significance of the word “male” in the Fourteenth Amendment, and we at once sounded the alarm, and sent out petitions for a constitutional amendment to “prohibit the States from disfranchising any of their citizens on the ground of sex.”  Miss Anthony, who had spent the year in Kansas, started for New York the moment she saw the proposition before Congress to put the word “male” into the national Constitution, and made haste to rouse the women in the East to the fact that the time had come to begin vigorous work again for woman’s enfranchisement.

Leaving Rochester, October 11, she called on Martha Wright at Auburn; Phebe Jones and Lydia Mott at Albany; Mmes.  Rose, Gibbons, Davis, at New York city; Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell in New Jersey; Stephen and Abby Foster at Worcester; Mmes.  Severance, Dall, Nowell, Dr. Harriet K. Hunt, Dr. M.E.  Zackesewska, and Messrs. Phillips and Garrison in Boston, urging them to join in sending protests to Washington against the pending legislation.  Mr. Phillips at once consented to devote five hundred dollars from the “Jackson Fund” to commence the work.  Miss Anthony and I spent all our Christmas holidays in writing letters and addressing appeals and petitions to every part of the country, and, before the close of the session of 1865-66, petitions with ten thousand signatures were poured into Congress.