The national suffrage convention of 1850 was followed by an extraordinary outburst of agitation.  Pamphlets streamed from the press.  Petitions to legislative bodies were drafted, signed, and presented.  There were addresses by favorite orators like Garrison, Phillips, and Curtis, and lectures and poems by men like Emerson, Longfellow, and Whittier.  In 1853 the first suffrage paper was founded by the wife of a member of Congress from Rhode Island.  By this time the last barrier to white manhood suffrage in the North had been swept away and the woman’s movement was gaining momentum every year.

=The Suffrage Movement Checked by the Civil War.=—­Advocates of woman suffrage believed themselves on the high road to success when the Civil War engaged the energies and labors of the nation.  Northern women became absorbed in the struggle to preserve the union.  They held no suffrage conventions for five years.  They transformed their associations into Loyalty Leagues.  They banded together to buy only domestic goods when foreign imports threatened to ruin American markets.  They rolled up monster petitions in favor of the emancipation of slaves.  In hospitals, in military prisons, in agriculture, and in industry they bore their full share of responsibility.  Even when the New York legislature took advantage of their unguarded moments and repealed the law giving the mother equal rights with the father in the guardianship of children, they refused to lay aside war work for agitation.  As in all other wars, their devotion was unstinted and their sacrifices equal to the necessities of the hour.

=The Federal Suffrage Amendment.=—­Their plans and activities, when the war closed, were shaped by events beyond their control.  The emancipation of the slaves and their proposed enfranchisement made prominent the question of a national suffrage for the first time in our history.  Friends of the colored man insisted that his civil liberties would not be safe unless he was granted the right to vote.  The woman suffragists very pertinently asked why the same principle did not apply to women.  The answer which they received was negative.  The fourteenth amendment to the federal Constitution, adopted in 1868, definitely put women aside by limiting the scope of its application, so far as the suffrage was concerned, to the male sex.  In making manhood suffrage national, however, it nationalized the issue.

This was the signal for the advocates of woman suffrage.  In March, 1869, their proposed amendment was introduced in Congress by George W. Julian of Indiana.  It provided that no citizen should be deprived of the vote on account of sex, following the language of the fifteenth amendment which forbade disfranchisement on account of race.  Support for the amendment, coming from many directions, led the suffragists to believe that their case was hopeful.  In their platform of 1872, for example, the Republicans praised the women for their loyal devotion to freedom, welcomed them to spheres of wider usefulness, and declared that the demand of any class of citizens for additional rights deserved “respectful consideration.”