1867 | Human Rights, Social Justice
Human Rights, Social Justice
Elizabeth Cady Stanton addresses the New York State Senate Judiciary Committee at Albany January 23 urging that women be permitted to vote for delegates to a convention that will rewrite the state constitution of 1777.
The Kansas legislature proposes an amendment enfranchising women and presents it to voters for ratification. Suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton persuade feminist Lucy Stone, now 49, and her husband, Henry Blackwell, to campaign for ratification and the couple enjoys some success in May. Anthony visits her brother at Leavenworth, Kansas, hears that a proposed Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution would guarantee voting rights to all male citizens 21 years of age or older, and rushes home to New York to agitate for removal of the word male, which has not heretofore appeared in the Constitution.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton launch their own woman suffrage effort in August, receiving aid from George Francis Train, a handsome, charming, and abstemious millionaire who has made a fortune in foreign ventures, harbors presidential aspirations, and supports women's rights (along with Irish independence, free trade, monetary inflation, and central banking) while opposing extension of the franchise to the illiterate. Attired always in purple gloves and full dress, Train pleads the case of woman suffrage to the New York State constitutional convention. Kansas voters defeat the proposed woman suffrage amendment, but Stanton obtains financing from Train and speaks at major cities en route home to New York (see The Revolution, 1868).
The Scottish Women's Suffrage Society holds its first meeting June 11.
Britain's Second Reform Bill extends suffrage (see 1832). Enacted August 15, it opens borough elections to all householders paying the poor rates and to all lodgers of 1 year's residence or more who pay annual rents of at least £10, opens county elections to owners of land that rents for at least £5 per year and to tenants who pay at least £12 per year. A bill that would extend voting rights to women fails, but by the turn of the century the land-owning aristocracy will have lost its age-old monopoly on political power not only in Britain but throughout the industrialized world (see 1905).
Economist-philosopher John Stuart Mill, now 61, argues in parliamentary debates preceding passage of the Reform Bill that giving even a minority of women the vote would be of benefit to all, but Caroline Norton does not support woman suffrage; although her divorce and custody battle led to passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act 10 years ago, she believes that women need special legal protection precisely because they are inferior. The Reform Bill passes with help from Liberal Henry Fawcett, 44, MP, who was blinded in an 1858 shooting accident but became professor of political economy at Cambridge in 1863 and this year marries physician Elizabeth Garrett's younger sister, Millicent, 20. He will support her woman-suffrage efforts.
The Knights of the White Camelia is organized in Louisiana; similar to the 2-year-old Ku Klux Klan, the new fraternal order will spread among white supremacists throughout the former Confederate states.
Lakota Sioux chief Red Cloud and his nephew Crazy Horse lead an attack of 1,500 to 2,000 tribesmen against a 31-man U.S. Army woodcutting detail sent out from Fort Phil Kearney August 2 in the foothills of the Big Horn Mountains (see 1866). In what will be remembered as the Wagon Box Fight (the troops have circled their wagon boxes), the captain in command of the detail has his men fire their newly-converted Springfield breech-loading rifles to fight off the attack, the Lakota have never before encountered rifles that can be reloaded so quickly, reinforcements arrive with a howitzer just in time from the fort five miles away, and the Lakota withdraw, having lost 50 to 60 braves by their own admission (the soldiers estimate that they have killed hundreds). Only three of the 32 men inside the wagon-box circle are dead (see Fort Laramie Treaty, 1868).
Congress appoints a commission to conclude peace treaties with Native American tribes. The legislators have declined to support a war of extermination proposed by Generals Sherman and Grant, and tribes on the southern plains have agreed to meet government representatives in a council arranged by Cherokee scout Jesse Chisholm and Delaware leader Black Beaver. The Medicine Lodge Treaties signed in late October with the Apache, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa set aside specific areas where the tribes remain free to pursue the diminishing herds of bison for as long as they survive, but they also affirm the federal government's claim to all the rest of the grasslands, thereby ending the Indians' nomadic life while permitting white settlers, ranchers, and railroad interests to move in. The government agrees to provide churches, schools, farming implements, food and clothing each year, and protection from white hunters, but many tribesmen will not remain on reservations, going on the warpath instead to fight incursions by whites (see 1868).