Meanwhile the petitions asking Congress to include women in the proposed Fourteenth Amendment were rapidly pushed, and as soon as ten or twelve thousand names were secured they were sent at once to Washington, as the resolution was then under discussion.  And here came the revelation which had been for some time foreshadowed—­the Republicans refused to champion this cause!  From the founding of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, women had been always its most loyal supporters, bearing their share of the odium and persecution of early days.  When the Republican party was formed, the leading women of the country had allied themselves with it and given faithful service during the long, dark years which followed.  All the Abolitionists and prominent Republicans had upheld the principle of equal rights to all, and now, when the test came, they refused to recognize the claims of woman!  Some of the senators and representatives declined to present the petitions sent from their own districts; others offered them merely as petitions for “universal suffrage,” carefully omitting the word “woman” and trusting that it would be inferred they meant suffrage for the negro men.

Even Charles Sumner, who so many times had acknowledged his indebtedness to Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton and the other women who were now asking for their rights, presented a petition from Massachusetts, headed by Lydia Maria Child, with the declaration that he did it under protest and that it was “most inopportune.”  Mrs. Child was the first and one of the ablest editors of the Anti-Slavery Standard, and had battled long and earnestly for the freedom of the slave at the cost of her literary popularity; but now when she asked that she might receive the rights of citizenship at least at the same time they were conferred upon the freedman, her plea was declared “most inopportune.”

The Democrats in Congress, who never had favored or assisted in any way the so-called woman’s rights doctrines, seized upon this opportunity to harass the Republicans and defeat negro suffrage.  They not only presented the women’s petitions but made long and eloquent speeches in their favor, using with telling force against the Republicans their own oft-repeated arguments for equal rights to all.  In the midst of this agitation, the District of Columbia Suffrage Bill being under discussion, Edgar Cowan, a Pennsylvania Democrat, moved to strike out the word “male,” and thus precipitated a debate which occupied three entire days in the Senate.  Among the Republicans Benjamin F. Wade and B. Gratz Brown made splendid arguments for woman suffrage and announced their votes in favor of the measure.  Senator Wilson, from Massachusetts, declared himself ready at any and all times to vote for a separate bill enfranchising women, but opposed to connecting it with negro suffrage.  The vote in the Senate to strike the word “male” from the proposed bill resulted:  yeas, 9; nays, 47; in the House, yeas, 49; nays, 74—­68 not voting.  A number of members in both Houses who believed in woman suffrage voted “no” because they preferred to sacrifice the women rather than the negroes.[39]