Syracuse University Library
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Gerrit Smith Broadside and Pamphlet Collection

Woman suffrage above human law : letter from Gerrit Smith [to Susan B. Anthony].

Smith, Gerrit, 1797-1874.

Digital Edition.

This digitization project was supported by Regional Bibliographic Databases and Interlibrary Resources Sharing Program funds, awarded by the New York State Library.

Call number: Smith 577

WOMAN SUFFRAGE ABOVE HUMAN LAW.

Letter from Gerrit Smith.

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PETERBORO, August 15th 1873.

SUSAN B. ANTHONY,

DEAR FRIEND,

I have your letter. So you have not paid your fine; are not able to pay it; and are not willing to pay it! I send you herein the money to pay it. If you shall still decline doing so, then use the money, at your own discretion, to promote the cause of woman suffrage.

I trust that you feel kindly toward Judge Hunt. He is an honest man and an able judge. He would oppress no person - emphatically, no woman. It was a light fine that he imposed upon you. Moreover, he did not require you to be imprisoned until it was paid. In taking your case out of the hands of the jury, he did what he believed he had a perfect right to do; and what (provided there was no fact to be passed upon) he had precedents for doing.

And yet Judge Hunt erred - erred as, but too probably, every other judge would, in like circumstances, have erred. At the hazard of being called, for the ten thousandth time, a visionary and a fanatic for holding opinions, which, though they will be entirely welcome to the more enlightened future sense of men, are as entirely repugnant to their present sense, I venture to say that the judge erred in allowing himself to look into the constitution. Indeed, yours was a case, that neither called for, nor even, permitted, the opening of any law-book whatever. You have not forgotten how frequently, in the days of slavery the constitution was quoted in behalf of the abomination. As if that paper had been drawn up and agreed upon by both the blacks and the whites, instead of the whites only ; and as if slavery protected the rights of the slave instead of annihilating them. I thank God, that I was withheld from the great folly and great sin of acknowledging a law for slavery - a law for any piracy - least of all, for the superlative piracy. Nor have you forgotten how incessantly, in the late war, our enemies, Northern as well as Southern, were calling for this observance of the constitution. As if the purpose of that paper was to serve those whose parricidal hands were at the throat of our nation. I recall but one instance in which I was ever reconciled to profanity. It was when, during the war, I was witnessing a heated conversation between a patriotic republican and a rabid secession democrat. The republican was arguing that the Government should put forth all its powers to suppress the rebellion. At this stage the democrat thrust in the stereotyped rebel phrase: "but only according to the constitution." This interruption provoked the republican to exclaim, as he hurried on: "damn the constitution !" The oath so happily helped to express my own feeling, that I had no more heart to censure it than the recording angel had to preserve the record of Uncle Toby's famous oath.

And, now in your case, is another wrongful use of the constitution. The instrument is cited against woman, as if she had united with man in making it, and was, therefore, morally bound by the flagrant usurpation, and legally concluded by it. Moreover, an excuse for turning the constitution against her is that doing so deprives her of nothing but the pastime of dropping in a box a little piece of paper. Nevertheless, this dropping, inasmuch as it expresses her choice of the guardians of her person and property, is her great natural right to provide for the safety of her life and of the means to sustain it. She has no rights whatever, and she lives upon mere privileges and favors, if others may usurp her rights. In fact she lies at the mercy of men, if men only may choose into whose hands to put the control of her person and property.

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I do not forget that there are women, who do not wish the concession of their right to vote. There were slaves so debased by slavery, as not to wish to be set free. Hardly more to be, pitied were those slaves than are these ladies, who are so perverted and befooled by their ludyism as to shrink from the vulgarity of voting. hat these ladies lack is more hard sense and less soft sense; more robustness and less namby-pambyness; more sympathy with the toiling masses of women; and less aristocratic self-idolatry. That if these ladies who abdicate their rights and cast themselves with such graceful helplessness on the chivalry of men, can do without the ballot, nevertheless of their sisters, who earn their living and move in the humbler walks of life, the ballot is the supreme need.

I do not complain of Judge Hunt's interpretations of the constitution on the suffrage question. I do not complain of his refusing to accept the constitutional recognition of woman's right to vote, though that right seems to lie on the I very surface of the constitution amongst her rights of citizenship. Nor do I complain of his passing by this recognition to dig down into the constitution for proofs of there being two kinds of citizens - one that can vote and one that cannot vote. What I complain of is that he did not hold as void, instead of arguing them to be valid, any words in the instrument which seemed to him to favor the disfranchisement of woman and consequent robbery and destruction of her rights. That I complain of is that, instead of his conscientious regard for his oath, lie was not prepared to ignore and scout all human law so far as it is antagonistic to natural law and natural rights.

Judges can properly look into constitutions for the highest authoritative regulations of the exercise of natural rights, but not for the rights themselves. Of course, they are no more to look into them for the denial than for the creation of those rights. As they are infinitely above and infinitely anterior to all constitutions, they can neither be made nor unmade, created nor destroyed, by constitutions. Constitutions are the source of conventional rights - but not of the rights with which the are born. All admit that a statute is not conclusive, and that what in it violates the constitution is to be rejected. So also should all admit that the constitution is not conclusive and that what in it violates natural law or natural rights should likewise be rejected. constitutional revision follows up statutory law and the revision of nature or God's revision follows up constitutions. In short, the great desideratum at this point is the acknowledgment of our courts that the constitution is not the end of the law; and that an appeal lies from it as well as from a statute. The appeal from the statute is to the constitution; and the appeal from the constitution is to the law of our being and to Him who is the source of all law. If we refuse to confess this, we virtually confess that we are atheists. Every man in the land, who held that the proslavery construction of the constitution was a finality, was a practical atheist. Hence not only our politicians but our priests also were guilty, in their recognition of this finality, of setting the constitution above God and of shutting Him out of His own world.

In a Speech made in the year 1835, on the occasion of the driving out by a mob from Utica to Peterboro of a State Anti-Slavery Convention is the following passage:

"I love the free and happy form of civil government under which I live: not because it confers new rights on me. My rights all spring from an infinitely nobler source - from the favor and grace of God. Our political and constitutional rights, so called, are but the natural and inherent rights of man, asserted, carried out and secured by modes of human contrivance. To no human charter am I indebted for my rights. They pertain to my original constitution. The con-

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stitutions of my nation and state create none of my rights. They do, at the most, but recognize what it was not theirs to give."

Far more striking and instructive however than this is the following extract from a Speech made a year or two ago in the Spanish Parliament:

"Natural rights dwell essentially in the individual, and are derived directly from his own moral nature. They are therefore, so to speak, unlegislatable, since they do not arise from the law, do not depend on the law, and not depending on the law, cannot be abiogated by the law. Born of the organic constitution of the individual, with the individual they live and die, unless a tyrannical, unrighteous and iniquitous law tears them from him, and then he will have the right to protest forever against this wrong and the iniquity of the law, and to rise against it whenever he can. tell, my lords, the inalienable rights of the Cubans have been torn from them by unrighteous, tyrannical and iniquitous laws."

Would that judge Hunt and all our judges might, ere long, take the ground of this sublimely eloquent Spaniard, that natural rights are "unlegislatable" ! The grand revolutionary step would be such a recognition of the dignity and indestructibleness of human rights, as would invest them with a new sacredness and lift up man to a far higher plane than he has ever occupied. Would that all our judges might thus confess their paramount allegiance to natural law at whatever expense to constitutional or other conventional law! The people, instead of forsaking them for this reason, would, because of its mightily educating power upon them, hail this great advance in judicial wisdom and grandeur.

Let us be thankful that, now and then in the ages, men arise, who have outgrown usurping human law. Brougham had outgrown it, when, in his unsurpassed burst of eloquence, he exclaimed: "Talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves, I acknowledge not, the property. In vain you tell me of laws that sanction such a claim. There is a law above all the enactments of human codes. It is the law written by the finger of God upon the heart of man." Mansfield had outgrown what was accepted as law when he set free the slave Somerset. It is the Broughams and Mansfields, who, snapping these cords of spurious law which hold men down, lift them up, by their wise and brave utterances, into the liberty and blessedness of true law. Would that my much esteemed friend, Judge Hunt, had so far outgrown bad law and grown into good law, as to have pronounced, at your trial, the disinthralment of woman, and thus have set the name of Hunt in immortality by the side of the names of Brougham and Mansfield and others, who have had the wisdom and the courage to thrust aside false paper law and install in its place that sovereign law, which is written upon the heart and upon the very foundations of human being ! He does not doubt that they did right. He honors them for hav ing done as they did. Nor can he doubt that to deny to woman all part in the making and executing of laws under which her life and property may be taken from her is a crime against her, which no paper law can sanction and which God's law must condemn. Why, then, did he not clasp hands with those few advanced men who, superior to their times and defiant of contradiction, made their names mighty and immortal by holding great natural rights to be

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law and the great wrongs of those rights to be no law! The simple reason is that, in his judgment, the time had not yet come for doing this great justice to woman; that the people were not yet ripe for it - not yet tired even of the dramshop, brothel and gambling-hell, which lack woman's votes to sweep them away. Alas, that the Judge failed to improve his grand opportunity to shorten this time and prepare the people for this great justice! Our old abolitionists would wait neither for time nor for the people. Would that Judge Hunt's heart had been fired with an impatience for doing justice to dear woman as intense and holy as was that of the old abolitionists for the freedom of the slave !

This worship of the constitution ! - how blinding and belittling! I would that every judge, who tends to this weakness (and nearly every judge, yes, and nearly every other person tends to it) might find his steps arrested by the warning example of Daniel Webster. This preeminently intellectual man, whom nature had fitted to soar in the high sphere of absolute and everlasting law, had so shrivelled his soul by his worship of the constitution, that he came, at last, to desire no other inscription on his gravestone than his shameless confession of such base worship. And all this, notwithstanding the constitution was in his eye the great bulwark of slavery!

Be of good courage and good cheer, my brave and faithful sister! I trust, our country is on the eve of great and blessed changes. Cuba, geographically and commercially a part of our own country, and yet land of slavery and slaughter and of horrors unequalled on the broad earth, will not much longer appeal in vain to our sympathies. Her nearly four hundred thousand slaves will soon be free. The whole people of this surpassingly beautiful and fertile island will soon be delivered from the rule of barbarous and brutal Spain. Again, the accursed dramshops, whence comes so large a share of all our wickedness and of all our woes, would soon be overthrown, if the friends of temperance would but be so wise, as to address themselves to this one work, and leave what remains of their desire to the power of time and moral influence. Further, our great State having begun the good work, equal civil rights will soon be accorded to the black man, every where. Best of all, the ballot cannot much longer be withheld from woman. Men are fast coming to see that it belongs to her as fully as to themselves, and that the country is in perishing need of her wielding it. If the silly portion of our ladies will but cease from their silly apprehension that the plan is to make them vote whether they will or no, and also cease from their ignorant and childish admissions that they already have all the rights they want - then will the American women quickly - be enfranchised, and their nation will rapidly achieve a far higher civilization than it is possible for any nation to arrive at, which is guilty of the folly and the sin of clothing man with all political power and reducing woman to a political cypher.

Cordially yours,

GERRIT SMITH.