Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
History
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
the American Church and the American State:' and it was the unalterable
purpose of the Garrisonians to labor for the dissolution of the Union."
Freeman Clarke goes on to say: "Wendell Phillips said on one occasion,
'Thank God, I am not a citizen of the United States.' As late as 1861 he
declared the Union a failure, and argued for the dissolution of the Union
as 'the best possible method of abolishing slavery.' If the North had
agreed to disunion and had followed the advice of Phillips, 'To build a
bridge of gold to take the slave States out of the Union,' slavery would
probably be still existing in all the Southern States. At all events, it
was not abolished by those who wished for disunion, but by those who were
determined at all hazards and by every sacrifice to maintain the Union."
On April 8, 1839, Henry B. Stanton wrote to William Goodell as follows:
"At this very time, and mainly, too, in that part of the country where
political action has been most successful, and whence, from its promise of
soon being triumphant, great encouragement was derived by abolitionists
everywhere, a sect has arisen in our midst whose members regard it as of
religious obligation in no case to exercise the elective franchise. This
persuasion is part and parcel of the tenet which it is believed they have
embraced, that as Christians have the precepts of the gospel of Christ,
and the spirit of God to guide them, all human governments, as necessarily
including the idea of force to secure obedience, are not only superfluous,
but unlawful encroachments on the Divine government as ascertained from
the sources above mentioned. Therefore they refuse to do anything
voluntarily that would be considered as acknowledging the lawful existence
of human governments. Denying to civil governments the right to use force,
they easily deduce that family governments have no such right. They carry
out the 'non-resistant' theory. To the first ruffian who would demand our
purse or oust us from our house, they are to be unconditionally
surrendered unless moral suasion be found sufficient to induce him to
desist from his purpose. Our wives, our daughters, our sisters, our
mothers, we are to see set upon by the most brutal, without any effort on
our part except argument to defend them! And even they themselves are
forbidden to use in defence of their purity such powers as God has endowed
them with for its protection, if resistance should be attended with injury
or destruction to the assailant. In short, the 'no-government' doctrines,
as they are believed now to be embraced, seem to strike at the root of the
social structure, and tend, so far as I am able to judge of their
tendency, to throw society into entire confusion and to renew, under the
sanction of religion, scenes of anarchy and license that have generally
hitherto been the offspring of the rankest infidelity and irreligion."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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