Women -- Suffrage -- History; Women -- Suffrage -- United States -- History; Women's rights -- History; Women's rights -- United States -- History
Is it not meet then, that on this one-hundredth anniversary of
American independence the daughters of revolutionary sires should
appeal to the sons to fulfill what the fathers promised but
failed to perform--should appeal to them as the constituted
executors of the father's will, to give full practical effect to
the self-evident truths, that "taxation without representation is
tyranny"--that "governments derive their just powers from the
consent of the governed"? With an evident common interest in all
the affairs of which government properly or improperly takes
cognizance, we claim enfranchisement on the broad ground of human
right, having proved the justice of our claim by the injustice
which has resulted to us and ours through our disfranchisement.
We ask enfranchisement in the abiding faith that with our
cooeperative efforts free government would attain to higher
averages of intelligence and virtue; with an innate conviction,
that the sequestration of rights in the homes of the republic
makes them baneful nurseries of the monopolies, rings, and
fraudulent practices that are threatening the national integrity;
and that so long as the fathers sequester the rights of the
mothers and train their sons to exercise, and the daughters to
submit to the exactions of usurped powers, our government offices
will be dens of thieves and the national honor trail in the dust;
and honest men come out from the fiery ordeals of faithful
service, denuded of the confidence and respect justly their due.
Give us liberty! We are mothers, wives, and daughters of freemen.
C. I. H. NICHOLS.
LONDON, Eng., July 4, 1876.
MY DEAR SUSAN: I sincerely thank you for your kind letter. Many
times I have thought of writing to you, but I knew your time was
too much taken up with the good cause to have any to spare for
private correspondence. Occasionally I am pleased to see a good
account of you and your doings in the Boston _Investigator_. Oh,
how I wish I could be with you on this more than ordinarily
interesting and important occasion; or that I could at least send
my sentiments and views on human rights, which I have advocated
for over forty years, to the convention.
This being the centenary day of the proclamation of American
independence, I must write a few lines, if but to let the friends
know that though absent in body I am with you in the cause for
which, in common with you, I have labored so long, and I hope not
labored in vain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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