“I am heartily with you in the view ’that the reconstruction of the Union is a work of greater importance than the restoration of the rebel States;’ and that it should be in accordance with the true republican idea of the personal rights of all our citizens, without regard to sex or color.  If the settlement of this question upon the comprehensive basis of equal rights and impartial justice to all should require the postponement of the enfranchisement of the colored man, I am willing for the delay, though it should take a decade of years to ’fight it out on that line.’” Mr. Purvis frequently said in the debates of those days that he would rather his son never should be enfranchised than that his daughter never should be, as she bore the double disability of sex and color and, by every principle of justice, should be the first to be protected.

As the struggle for the enfranchisement of the negro grew more intense, and the entire burden of it fell upon the Republican party, its members became more and more insistent that the women should not jeopardize the claims of the colored man by pressing their own.  Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton and a few others of the stronger and more independent women declared they would not suffer in silence the injustice and insult of having this great body of ignorant men granted the political rights which were denied intelligent women; nor would they submit without protest to having a million ballots added to the mass which already were sure to be cast against the enfranchisement of women if ever the question came to a popular vote.  As a result of their stand for justice, they found themselves utterly deserted by all the great leaders with whom they had labored so earnestly and harmoniously for many years—­Garrison, Phillips, Greeley, Curtis, Tilton, Higginson, Douglass, Gerrit Smith.  Of all the old Abolitionists only four—­Samuel J. May, Robert Purvis, Parker Pillsbury and Stephen S. Foster—­remained loyal to their standard.  There was not one of the men repudiating them who did not believe thoroughly in the principle of woman’s full right to the ballot.  The women simply were sacrificed to political expediency; set aside without a moment’s hesitation in obedience to the party shibboleth.  “This is the negro’s hour!”

[Footnote 36:  See Appendix for this address.]

[Footnote 37:  ’WHEREAS, by the war, society is once more resolved into its original elements, and in the reconstruction of our government we again stand face to face with the broad question of natural rights, all associations based on special claims for special classes are too narrow and partial for the hour; therefore, from the baptism of a second Revolution, purified and exalted by suffering, seeing with a holier vision that the peace, prosperity and perpetuity of the republic rest on Equal Rights to All, we, today assembled in our Eleventh National Woman’s Rights Convention, bury the woman in the citizen, and our organization in that of the American Equal Rights Association.