The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty YearsHarper, Ida Husted
History
The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (Volume 2 of 2): Including Public Addresses, Her Own Letters and Many From Her Contemporaries During Fifty Years
Harper, Ida Husted
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
She lectured in Memorial Hall, St. Louis, March 5,[47] and a brilliant
reception was given her at the Lindell Hotel. On March 9, she spoke at
Jefferson City, where the Daily Tribune contained a full synopsis of her
address, beginning as follows: "The hall of the House of Representatives
was crowded last night as never before, with ladies and gentlemen--State
officials, members of the general assembly, clerks of the departments
and of the legislature, and all the students from Lincoln Institute....
Miss Anthony was received with applause, and plunged at once into the
subject which for many years has made her name a household word in every
English-speaking country on the globe."
Leavenworth was in the midst of an exciting municipal campaign and
Colonel Anthony had been nominated for mayor by the Republicans. Miss
Anthony made a number of speeches, at Chickering Hall, the Conservatory
of Music, the different churches, meetings of colored people, etc. The
night of the last great rally she writes in her diary: "It does seem as
if the cause of law and order and temperance ought to win, but the
saloon element resorts to such tricks that honest people can not match
them." So it seemed in this case, and Colonel Anthony was defeated. The
Republicans, both men and women, were divided amongst themselves with
the usual results.
Her grief over the untimely death of Susie B. was still fresh, and in a
letter to a friend who had just suffered a great bereavement, she said:
"It is a part of the inevitable and the living can not do otherwise than
submit, however rebellious they may feel; but we will clutch after the
loved ones in spite of all faith and all philosophy. By and by, when one
gets far enough away from the hurt of breaking the branch from its tree,
there does, there must, come a sweet presence of the spirit of the loved
and gone that soothes the ache of the earlier days. That every one has
to suffer from the loss of loving and loved ones, does not make our
anguish any the less."
To the sorrowing father she wrote after she returned home: "Can you not
feel when you look at those lonely mounds, that the spirits, the part of
them that made life, are not there but in your own home, in your own
heart, ever present? It surely is more blessed to have loved and lost
than never to have loved.... Which of us shall follow them first we can
not tell, but if it should be I, lay my body away without the
heartbreak, the agony that must come when the young go. Try to believe
that all is well, that however misunderstood or misunderstanding, all
there is clear to the enlarged vision. Whenever I have suffered from the
memory of hasty or unkind words to those who have gone, my one comfort
always has been in the feeling that their spirits still live and are so
much finer that they understand and forgive."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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