The Road to Seneca Falls

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the First Woman's Rights Convention

Judith Wellman

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780252092824
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Feminists from 1848 to the present have rightly viewed the Seneca Falls convention as the birth of the women's rights movement in the United States and beyond. In The Road To Seneca Falls, Judith Wellman offers the first well documented, full-length account of this historic meeting in its contemporary context. The convention succeeded by uniting powerful elements of the antislavery movement, radical Quakers, and the campaign for legal reform under a common cause. Wellman shows that these three strands converged not only in Seneca Falls, but also in the life of women's rights pioneer Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It is this convergence, she argues, that foments one of the greatest rebellions of modern times.Rather than working heavy-handedly downward from their official "Declaration of Sentiments, " Wellman works upward from richly detailed documentary evidence to construct a complex tapestry of causes that lay behind the convention, bringing the struggle to life. Her approach results in a satisfying combination of social, community, and reform history with individual and collective biographical elements. The Road to Seneca Falls challenges all of us to reflect on what it means to be an American trying to implement the belief that "all men and women are created equal, " both then and now. A fascinating story in its own right, it is also a seminal piece of scholarship for anyone interested in history, politics, or gender.

PART 1

The Context:
Converging Paths

CHAPTER 1

Elizabeth Cady Stanton:
Growing Up, 1815–35

In July 1848, at the Seneca Falls convention, Elizabeth Cady Stanton began her life’s work as a public agitator for the rights of women. What Stanton was and would become had its roots in her childhood. She grew up in a world where wealth was based on land; where people recognized their places in an orderly, communal world; and where her neighbors continued to value citizens who placed the good of the whole group above their own personal gain. Such a community was predominantly hierarchical, but people balanced their strong sense of hierarchy with a corresponding sense of mutual responsibility.

In 1815, the year Stanton was born, the northeastern U.S. country stood poised between two ways of life. Fading into the past was a world dominated by slow communications, by local allegiances, and most of all by the land. More than 90 percent of Americans were farmers. Looming ahead lay a period of change so rapid that even historians, normally the most cautious of observers, would label this a time of revolutions—in transportation, industry, city growth, family life, and personal values. Transportation, restricted in 1815 primarily to country roads, turnpikes, and sailing ships, would be revolutionized, first by the construction of canals and then by the application of steam power on both water and land. Manufacturing, still mainly small-scale, local, and organized into a craft-apprenticeship system in 1815, would be transformed by new machines, new systems of transportation, new sources of workers, and new markets into a factory-oriented, industrialized economy. Americans, drawn by opportunities for trade and manufacture in new urban areas, would move from farms into cities in what would become proportionally the largest rural-urban migration in the country’s history.

Moving physically, Americans would also face major changes in traditional social structures and traditional values. Old systems of order based on hierarchy and deference would crack. People would salvage what they could of old ideas, and they would weave them into safety nets to bridge the chasm between the old order and an often threatening new world.

At the time of her birth, Elizabeth Cady’s family reaffirmed its commitment to values that were, even then, growing out of fashion. As society changed dramatically in almost every way, the Cady family did not. In a time of industrialization, they continued to invest in farmland. In a time of urbanization, they stayed in the country. As others began to have fewer children, Elizabeth’s parents continued to produce offspring, ten in all. As ideas of free will began to dominate Protestant religious expression, the Cadys clung to their Calvinist belief in predestination. As voters abandoned the old Federalist Party, Elizabeth’s father retained his commitment to it. By almost every measure, the Cady family found itself out of step with the new world.

Because of this pronounced conservatism, few would have predicted that Elizabeth Cady would grow up to be a reformer. Stanton herself recognized the irony of it. As a judge, her father was, she remembered, “a conservative of the conservatives.” Her mother, born into the landed Livingston family, was “blue-blooded socially as well as physically.” “When I became an Abolitionist and a woman suffragist,” Stanton recalled, “I outraged the family traditions.”¹

Certainly, Stanton’s economic and cultural background seemed antithetical to her reform ideals. What interest had her mother’s family, the Scottish and Dutch Livingstons from the Hudson Valley, in woman’s rights? They were, after all, landed gentry, the aristocrats of New York. Her father identified even more strongly with conservative values. As a Congregationalist-Presbyterian in religion and a Federalist turned Whig in politics, he upheld a hierarchical order in society and found himself completely at odds with his daughter’s adult commitment to abolitionism and woman’s rights.

Yet strands in this family culture intertwined to support Stanton’s reform interests. While Stanton’s family was part of an elite, their status as one of the first families was based only partly on wealth. Although Daniel Cady was at the top of the social scale, he was virtually a self-made man. What identified this family as “blue-blooded” and “conservative” was not so much the amount of money they held as the fact that their resources were based on land and the law rather than on manufacturing. Their money did not compare with that of rich urban families, nor did it rival the fortune they might have made by investing in canals, railroads, or factories.²

More importantly, both parents shared a commitment to republican ideals and the American revolutionary tradition. They balanced a sense of order and community responsibility with ideals of liberty and independence. Her mother brought stories of parents and grandparents honored for their service in the revolutionary cause. Her father provided her with a clear personal example of republican values. Honest, incorruptible, and unassuming in his dealings with highborn and poor alike, oriented all his life toward community service and personal benevolence, Daniel Cady balanced material success against spiritual and civic virtue. Money was less important to him than character. He judged himself a success not because he was wealthy but because he was a man of integrity, respected by his fellow citizens.

Finally, Margaret Livingston Cady emerged from a family who showed relative respect for woman’s property rights. In Margaret’s family, Scottish Livingstons had intermarried with Hudson River Dutch families, and their descendants inherited a tradition of Dutch law, based on Roman rather than English tradition, which gave women rights to hold property.

Within the Cady family, Elizabeth’s parents seemed almost polar opposites. Daniel was slight of build, brilliant, extremely conscientious, and painfully shy. Contemporaries would call him “one of the most generous and gifted men of his time,” a man of “sweetness” and “refinement,” “exalted worth and strict integrity,” and “unsurpassed ability.” Said one colleague and former student, “his name has been for years, throughout the State, almost a synonym for ‘honest man,’ a bye-word by which to denote uprightness and purity of character.”³ His daughter Elizabeth echoed these contemporary descriptions. He was, she wrote, a man of “firm character and unimpeachable integrity,” yet “sensitive and modest to a painful degree,” “truly great and good,—an ideal judge; and to his sober, taciturn, and majestic bearing, he added the tenderness, purity, and refinement of a true woman.”⁴

Margaret Livingston, Stanton’s mother, was quite different. She was almost six feet tall, extremely sociable, and (so her daughter remembered) stern—an imposing, dominant, and vivacious figure who controlled the Cady household with a firm hand. Stanton would later describe her as “the soul of independence and self-reliance,—cool in the hour of danger, and never knowing fear,” “inclined to a stern military rule of the household,—a queenly and magnificent sway.” At the time of Elizabeth’s birth, wrote another commentator, Margaret Livingston Cady was “a young lady of high spirit, dash, and vivacity,” qualities she retained until her death.⁵

In later life, Elizabeth Cady Stanton always emphasized her father’s formative influence. Like her father, she pursued intellectual interests, legal studies, and persuasive public speaking. In personality, however, although she did not acknowledge it, Elizabeth more closely resembled her mother—lively, sociable, fun loving, and efficient. And like her mother, she would derive much of her adult sense of identity from her role as mother of a large family. Much of her success as a public figure would come, in fact, because Elizabeth made motherhood, normally a private role, the basis of her public career.

Johnstown, the village in which Daniel and Margaret spent most of their lives, had an ethnically diverse population. English, German, Scots Highlanders, Dutch, and New Englanders farmed the land. More than five hundred African Americans, many of them enslaved, also lived in Montgomery County. Interspersed among these newcomers, Mohawk people retained remnants of their homelands. Local people still pointed out “a few hundred acres of excellent meadow” as the former home of Hendrick, a famous Mohawk sachem. As a child, Stanton would hear Iroquois legends told by the Presbyterian minister. Ethnic divisions remained prominent for many years. One observer noted in 1802 that Montgomery County “appears to be a perfect Babel, as to language. . . . The articulation even of New-England people, is injured by their being intermingled with the Dutch, Irish, and Scotch.” Its five churches served different ethnic groups. Even the shape of the village reflected its ethnic origins. Its town square suggested New England influences, but many dwellings still incorporated Dutch and German patterns. Long double houses opened directly onto the street from the broad side, with small porches in front and gardens and porches toward the rear. As one visitor noted in 1830, most of the houses were “neatly painted white with green venetian shutters, which gives the whole town a charm and prettiness of appearance.”⁶

Within the context of this ethnically and racially diverse population, Johnstown developed as a prominent legal and cultural center. At the center of the village stood the courthouse and jail. Built in 1772, they reflected the village’s importance as the county seat for Tryon County, which encompassed all of New York west of Albany. Daniel Cady added his name to the long list of eminent jurors who debated their cases here. The two-story academy, built in 1798, was one of the best secondary schools in the state of New York. Observers described Johnstown at the end of the eighteenth century as “a marked intellectual center,” “the most important place in the State west of Albany.”⁷

The Cady children grew up in the middle of the village, bounded by home and courthouse, church and school. Elizabeth Cady’s maternal grandparents, James and Elizabeth Simpson Livingston, were the first to climb the hills north of the broad Mohawk Valley. As land agent and merchant, James supported his growing family on what he described as “comparatively . . . small” means. When Elizabeth Simpson Livingston died on June 10, 1800, at age forty-nine, she left James alone to cope with a household containing five children under fifteen; two enslaved people; and two young women, including their fifteen-year-old daughter Margaret.⁸

Elizabeth Cady’s father, Daniel Cady, was born in Chatham, New York, in 1773 and came to Johnstown in 1798. Although he grew up in eastern New York, Daniel shared the political and religious values of his transplanted Yankee neighbors and kin. Church, state, and family all stood for right order and proper authority.⁹ He shared with the Federalists a strong sense of community responsibility and moral concern, buttressed by his religious upbringing. Presbyterians and Congregationalists shared a belief that “no mortal man [or woman] and no human institution can be regarded as infallible,” and that, therefore, “the church must be limited in power.” Individual conscience acted as a centripetal force, eroding attempts to centralize human institutions. Daniel Cady embodied this commitment to conscience and passed it on to his daughter Elizabeth. It would be the wellspring of her own commitment to woman’s rights.¹⁰

Daniel Cady was community minded, but he was also personally ambitious. He tried out careers as a shoemaker and teacher before he finally settled on the law. In 1795, when he was about twenty-two years old, he became an attorney in his own right. In 1798, he moved to Johnstown. On July 15, 1801, twenty-eight-year-old Daniel Cady married sixteen-year-old Margaret Livingston. After a brief career as a Federalist member of the U.S. House of Representatives (1815–17), he retreated to his law practice and his family. “There were but two places in which he felt at ease,” wrote his daughter Elizabeth, “in the courthouse and at his own fireside.” Margaret, outgoing, gregarious, balanced Daniel’s shyness, and Daniel’s tenderness modified Margaret’s inclination to control those around her. For the rest of her life, she and Daniel would nourish their children in the home that became the emotional center of both their lives. Within their household, Margaret Livingston Cady presided over their growing family. People recognized her central importance by referring to this household as “Mrs. Cady’s.”¹¹

Daniel Cady had come to Johnstown with very little capital, but he amassed a considerable fortune from land speculation. He thought of himself, justifiably, as “much of a financier,” and he owned farms and undeveloped tracts all over central New York. Throughout his life, he loved farming, especially “the reclaiming of waste lands.”¹² Cady made his most important mark not in land speculation or politics, however, but in the law. He earned a distinguished reputation, rivaling that of the best-known lawyers of his time. At his death, he was hailed as “the very image and personification of justice,” “a model lawyer and a model man.”¹³

Every week, in all kinds of weather, the Cady family also attended church. “When the thermometer was twenty degrees below zero on the Johnstown Hills,” Stanton recalled, “we trudged along through the snow, foot-stoves in hand, to the cold hospitalities of the Lord’s House, there to be chilled to the very core by listening to sermons on ‘predestination,’ ‘justification by faith,’ and ‘eternal damnation.’” As one of Cady’s former law students recalled, “probably there has scarcely been a Sabbath during the sixty years that he has resided in this village, when he was at home, that has not seen him [and his family] in his place in the house of worship.” Founded in the 1740s by supporters of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the church was still called the Scottish Presbyterian Church. On ceremonial occasions, many members wore kilts and held communion in the Scottish way, seated around a common table. As late as 1830, one visitor could hardly understand Rev. Mair’s sermon, so thick was his Scottish accent. Neither the building nor the serv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Prologue
• Part 1: The Context: Converging Paths
• Part 2: The Movements: Parallel Paths
• Part 3: The Event: Converging Paths
• Notes
• Index