l be applied toward securing
woman's rights," etc. Mr. Pillsbury told the Hovey Committee last
winter, after abolition was proclaimed, that he could not in
conscience accept his salary from them as editor of the Standard
for another year unless it should advocate woman's claims equally
with those of the negro.

In her diary she writes: "Even Charles Sumner bends to the spirit of
compromise and presents a constitutional amendment which concedes the
right to disfranchise law-abiding, tax-paying citizens." Robert Purvis
again expressed his cordial sympathy: "I am heartily with you in the
view 'that the reconstruction of the Union is a work of greater
importance than the restoration of the rebel States;' and that it
should be in accordance with the true republican idea of the personal
rights of all our citizens, without regard to sex or color. If the
settlement of this question upon the comprehensive basis of equal
rights and impartial justice to all should require the postponement of
the enfranchisement of the colored man, I am willing for the delay,
though it should take a decade of years to 'fight it out on that
line.'" Mr. Purvis frequently said in the debates of those days that he
would rather his son never should be enfranchised than that his
daughter never should be, as she bore the double disability of sex and
color and, by every principle of justice, should be the first to be
protected.

As the struggle for the enfranchisement of the negro grew more intense,
and the entire burden of it fell upon the Republican party, its members
became more and more insistent that the women should not jeopardize the
claims of the colored man by pressing their own. Miss Anthony, Mrs.
Stanton and a few others of the stronger and more independent women
declared they would not suffer in silence the injustice and insult of
having this great body of ignorant men granted the political rights
which were denied intelligent women; nor would they submit without
protest to having a million ballots added to the mass which already
were sure to be cast against the enfranchisement of women if ever the
question came to a popular vote. As a result of their stand for
justice, they found themselves utterly deserted by all the great
leaders with whom they had labored so earnestly and harmoniously for
many years--Garrison, Phillips, Greeley, Curtis, Tilton, Higginson,
Douglass, Gerrit Smith. Of all the old Abolitionists only four--