The Kansas Campaign of 1867

At the end of the Civil War, with the help from the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, slavery officially became outlawed in the United States. Now that millions of former slaves were now freed, many abolitionists turned to the women's suffrage movement. The women's suffrage movement began roughly in the 1840s with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 pushing the issues onto the radar to the rest of the nation, though mainly staying in New England areas. The start of the Civil War stunted progress for the women's movement and it wasn't until the war was over that progress for the movement began to pick up again. The woman behind the movement from the beginning was none other than Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with the help of several other women with whom she had met at Seneca Falls and other conferences. As the abolitionists turned into feminists at the end of the war, continuing to fight for a cause of equality all across the board, the more national conventions started to bring up the issues of women's equality.

In July of 1867, Stanton was invited to Kansas because the state had opened up to the people a proposition to allow voting to both women and free colored men.¹ She, along with several other Eastern women's suffrage speakers, was hoping that with the proposition being set up by the state government that it meant that more people would be open to the possibility of allowing women's equality. There was a large female population in Kansas as families moved out West to settle in the new territories as part of the “western fever”. This gave the feminists hope that since Kansas wasn't directly linked with the war, it would open up the issues to the other states should the proposition go through in Kansas, since the governor hoped that he could make Kansas a free state.² The speakers talked wherever they could, ranging from log cabin houses to large mills where people were packed into spaces as tightly as they could, for the next two to three months as the days until November  when the proposition was being decided on. Stanton writes in her biography that traveling and making these speeches were some of the hardest work that she had done, as they often lost their way since there were no roads, proper lodging was hard to come by, and crossing canons as some of the dangers to get to their next location. In a letter to Elizabeth Smith Miller in December 1867, Stanton states that she spoke to crowds in Kansas every day except for Sundays, at least two or three times.³

Despite Stanton and the other women's hard work in Kansas, the campaign and proposition eventually failed as the vote in November came to be that black voting would be allowed and women's was not. Stanton blames the Republican party for urging the women to be quiet in their national campaign and especially in Kansas. As a result of the ultimate failure of the Kansas campaign and the failure of submitting women's equality to the New York Constitution as well, Stanton states, “Heretofore, ranked with idiots, lunatics, and criminals in the Constitution, the negro has been the only respectable compreer we had; so pray do not separate us now for another twenty years, ere the constitutional door will again be opened.”⁴ What this means is that while slavery was still legal, women and slaves were on the same level regarding equality. Now that freed black males were given the right to vote after the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were passed, women were theoretically of lesser equality than slaves. Stanton's words say that if something wasn't done about women's rights right then, the opportunity to have something done about them would close before their eyes and they wouldn't have a chance to do anything for a long time. And as we know, women's suffrage was finally allowed in 1920 when women were finally able to vote. Throughout the rest of her life, along with other prominent women leaders, Stanton continued to fight for the feminist cause, until her death in 1902.

1Elizabath Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary, and reminiscences, Volume 1, (Arno and the New York Times, New York, 1969), 204.

2Elizabath Cady Stanton, Elizabeth Cady Stanton as revealed in her letters, diary, and reminiscences, Volume 2, (Arno and the New York Times, New York, 1969), 118.

3Ibid.

4Stanton, Volume 1, 213.