ife by utilizing the Anti-Masonic feeling. The party spread into
other middle states and into New England; in 1827 the N.Y.
leaders tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Henry Clay, though a
Mason, to renounce the order and become the party's candidate for
president. In 1831 the Anti-Masons nominated William Wirt of
Maryland, and in the election they secured the seven electoral
votes of Vermont. In the following year the organization grew
moribund, most of its members joining the Whigs. Its last act in
national politics was to nominate William Henry Harrison for
president in Nov. 1838.

Subsequently, Rochester became the centre of the Abolitionist movement
in New York State and for many years before the Civil War it was a busy
station on the "Underground railroad," by which fugitive slaves were
assisted in escaping to Canada. The fervor of the movement gave
prominence to Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), the mulatto orator and
editor, who established a newspaper in Rochester in 1847, and to whom a
monument has been erected near the approach of the New York Central
Station. The city was a gathering place for suffragists from the time
when Susan B. Anthony settled here in 1846.

Susan Brownell Anthony (1820-1906), born at Adams, Mass., was the
daughter of Quaker parents. Her family moved to N.Y. State where,
from the time she was 17 until she was 32, she taught school. She
took a prominent part in the Anti-slavery and Temperance
movements in New York, and after 1854 devoted herself almost
exclusively to the agitation for women's rights. She was
vice-president-at-large of the National Women's Suffragist
Association from 1869-1892, when she became president. She was
arrested and fined $100 (which she never paid) for casting a vote
at the presidential election in 1872. She contended that the 14th
Amendment entitled her to vote, and when she told the court she
would not pay her fine, the judge simply let her go. The case
created much comment.

In Rochester also lived the famous Fox Sisters, Margaret (1836-1893)
and Katharine, whose spiritualistic "demonstrations" became known in
1850 as the "Rochester Rappings." The city has been a centre for
American spiritualists ever since.

[Illustration: Kate Fox (_From a daguerreotype_)

The demonstrations of the famous Fox sisters began in the
following way: in 1847 the Fox family moved