siding over a
convention with an ease, grace and dignity that might be envied by the
most experienced legislator in the country."[13] Susan B. Anthony and
Martha C. Wright were the secretaries. Delegates were present from
Canada and eight different States. Letters were received from Angelina
Grimke Weld, William Henry Channing and others; Horace Greeley sent
much good advice; Garrison wrote: "You have as noble an object in view,
aye and as Christian a one too, as ever was advocated beneath the sun.
Heaven bless all your proceedings." Rev. A.D. Mayo said in a long
letter:

I have never questioned what I believed to be the central principle
of the reform in which you are engaged. I believe that every mature
soul is responsible directly to God, not only for its faith and
opinions, but for its details of life. The assertion that woman is
responsible to man for her belief or conduct, in any other sense
than man is responsible to woman, I reject, not as a believer in
any theory of "woman's rights," but as a believer in that religion
which knows neither male nor female in its imperative demand upon
the individual conscience.

George W. Johnson, of Buffalo, chairman of the State committee of the
Liberty party, sent $10 and these vigorous sentiments: "Woman has,
equally with man, the inalienable right to education, suffrage, office,
property, professions, titles and honors--to life, liberty and the
pursuit of happiness. False to our sex, as well as her own, and false
to herself and her God, is the woman who approves, or who submits
without resistance or protest, to the social and political wrongs
imposed upon her in common with her sex throughout the world." Mrs.
Stanton's letter, read with hearty approval by Miss Anthony, raised the
usual breeze in the convention. She suggested three points:

Should not all women, living in States where they have the right to
hold property, refuse to pay taxes so long as they are
unrepresented in the government?... Man has pre-empted the most
profitable branches of industry, and we demand a place at his side;
to this end we need the same advantages of education, and we
therefore claim that the best colleges of the country be opened to
us.... In her present ignorance, woman's religion, instead of
making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great
principles of right and justice, has made her bondage but more