‘ [375] individual capacity’].1 This would have been very kind— flattering in the extreme, even—if there had not been a motive for it. It was the winding — up of their efforts to remove that argument against their decision [pointing to Mr. Garrison] out of the gallery. But they might as well have expected to remove the pillars upon which the gallery stood. They could not argue away what they had done; they could not argue “the seal off the bond.”‘Several went up to welcome Garrison and party, and some tried to introduce them to our new-organized meeting, but were hushed. Wendell Phillips tried to read their credentials,3 but was put down with a kind4 of promise that he should have a hearing the next day.’ Thus Mrs. Mott, in her diary, on June 18. On5 June 19: ‘Wendell Phillips again tried to introduce Garrison and company, without success; some angry debate. We all felt discouraged.’ June 20: ‘Amelia6 Opie stopped us to speak as we went into the meeting, and said, “You are held in high estimation, and have raised yourselves by coming.” 7 Lady Byron sat ’
This text is part of:
2 (Ms.)
3 Ante, p. 351. These explicitly deprecated the making any sexual distinction in organizing the Convention.
4 Memorial of G. Bradburn, p. 77.
5 Life, p. 156.
6 Ibid.
7 While it cannot be believed, from what has gone before, that the female delegates would under any circumstances have been admitted, the exclusion of Lucretia Mott and other female American Friends was a darling object with the guiding spirits of the Convention. William Howitt wrote to the former on June 27, 1840: ‘I heard of the circumstance of your exclusion at a distance, and immediately said— “Excluded on the ground that they are women?” No, that is not the real cause—there is something behind. Who and what are these female delegates? Are they orthodox in religion? The answer was, “No, they are considered to be of the Hicksite party of Friends.” My reply was, “That is enough—there lies the real cause, and there needs no other.” The influential Friends in the Convention would never for a moment tolerate their presence there, if they could prevent it. They hate them because they have dared to call in question their sectarian dogmas and assumed authority, and they have taken care to brand them in the eyes of the Calvinistic Dissenters, who form another large and influential portion of the Convention, as Unitarians—in their eyes the most odious of heretics'’ (Lib. 10.139). See, for this Friendly persecution of co-sectaries, Lib. 10.198, and the “Life and Letters of J. And L. Mott” passim.
The Century Company. , 1885-1889.
Tufts University provided support for entering this text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.