enthusiastic upon this subject and also over Mrs. Stanton, Lucretia
Mott and other prominent women who had taken part. Her cousin, Sarah
Anthony Burtis, had acted as secretary of the convention.
In 1849 Mrs. Mott published her admirable Discourse on Woman in answer
to a lyceum lecture by Richard H. Dana ridiculing the idea of civil and
political rights for women. In 1847 Frederick Douglass had brought his
family to Rochester and established his paper, the North Star. As soon
as Miss Anthony reached home she was taken by her father to call on
Douglass, and this was the beginning of another friendship which was to
last a lifetime.
The year 1849 saw the whole country in a state of great unrest and
excitement. Eighty thousand men had gone to California in search of
gold. Telegraphs and railroads were being rapidly constructed, thus
bringing widely separated localities into close communication. The
unsettled condition of Europe and the famine in Ireland had turned
toward America that tremendous tide of immigration which this year had
risen to 300,000. The admission of Texas into the Union had
precipitated the full force of the slavery question. Old parties were
disintegrating and sectional lines becoming closely drawn. New
territories were knocking at the door of the Union and the whole nation
was in a ferment as to whether they should be slave or free. Threats of
secession were heard in both the North and the South. A spirit of
compromise finally prevailed and deferred the crisis for a decade, but
the agitation and unrest continued to increase. The Abolitionists were
still a handful of radicals, repudiated alike by the Free Soil Whigs
and Free Soil Democrats. Slavery, as an institution, had not yet become
a political issue, but only its extension into the territories.
Such, in brief, was the situation at the beginning of 1850. It was a
period of grave apprehension on the part of older men and women, of
intense aggressiveness with the younger, who were eager for action. It
|