On May 14, 1868, the American Equal Rights Association held its second anniversary in Cooper Institute.  Mrs. Stanton, who had a wholesome dread of anything disagreeable, was determined not to go, but Miss Anthony declared that to stay away would be showing the “white feather” and that, as their enemies had been many weeks working up a sentiment against them, their presence would prove they had nothing to fear.  When the convention assembled, Lucretia Mott, the president, being absent on account of the recent death of her husband, Colonel Higginson said to Miss Anthony:  “Now we want everything pleasant and peaceable here, do we not?” “Certainly,” she replied.  “Well then, we must have Lucy Stone open this meeting.”  “Why so,” asked Miss Anthony, “when Mrs. Stanton is first vice-president?  It would be not only an insult to her but a direct violation of parliamentary usage.  I shall never consent to it.”  Finding that, nevertheless, there was a scheme to carry out this plan, she put Mrs. Stanton on the alert and, as the officers filed on the platform, gave her a gentle push to the front, whereupon she opened the convention with the utmost suavity.

It was here that these pioneers of the movement for woman suffrage had the humiliation of hearing Frederick Douglass announce that it was women’s duty to take a back seat and wait till the negro was enfranchised before they put in their claim.  Rev. Olympia Brown and Lucy Stone both declared the Republican party false to its principles unless it protected women as well as colored men in their right to vote, and in his report on the Kansas campaign, Mr. Blackwell, after speaking of the splendid work of Lucy Stone, Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton and Miss Brown, said:  “Their eloquence and determination gave great promise of success; but, in an inopportune moment, Horace Greeley and others saw fit in the Constitutional Convention to report adversely to woman suffrage in New York, which influenced the sentiment in the younger western State and its enterprise was crushed.  Even the Republicans in Kansas set their faces against the extension of suffrage to women.”

Throughout the entire convention there was much resentment on the part of the women at the manner in which they had been abandoned in favor of the negro.  During the same week, at the anti-slavery meeting in Steinway Hall, Anna Dickinson, in the midst of an impassioned speech, declared:  “The position of the black woman today is no better than before her emancipation from slavery.  She has simply changed masters from a white owner to a black husband in many cases.”  She demanded freedom and franchise for woman as for man, irrespective of color; and, while giving Mr. Phillips credit for his years of service in the cause of woman, took occasion to enter her protest against the tenor of a portion of his morning address—­in effect, that woman’s rights must be set aside until the rights of the black man were fully secured.