Democrats shouldn’t repeat mistakes from Kansas’ 1860s battles over suffrage

T.A. Barnhart

The following piece was written by Diane Eickoff for the Kansas City Star. Diane is my sister-in-law, married to my brother Aaron, the tv writer for the Star. Diane is an author and editor, and "Revolutionary Heart," her acclaimed biography of Clarina Nichols, a sadly underknown leader of the suffrage and abolition movements, was developed in conjunction with her portrayal of Nichols for the Kansas Territorial Sesquicentennial Chautauqua . "Revolutionary Heart" is self-published by Diane and Aaron and is in a second printing from Quindaro Press.

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As the primary season nears its end, Democrats should be feeling joy at having settled on a historic candidate. But many are beset with hard feelings instead. Supporters and opponents of the African-American male contender and his white female rival have raised divisive issues, ones that tap into racial and gender resentments among the voters. Many in the party now fear these unhealed wounds will damage their nominee in the fall campaign.

While a painful scenario to consider, it would only be the latest addition to a sad chapter in American politics. The race-gender clash is almost as old as Kansas, and claimed its first victims in a bruising suffrage campaign held here after the Civil War.

In February 1867, the Kansas legislature passed two amendments. One gave African-American men the vote, the other granted suffrage to all women. Both amendments needed a majority vote from the white male electorate to become law. The election was set for November.

At first, prospects were bright for the passage of both acts, which would make Kansas the first state with "universal suffrage." Women's rights leaders flocked here to join Clarina Nichols, who had laid the groundwork for suffrage a decade earlier.

As the campaign rolled into summer, however, underlying tensions bubbled up. Republican Party leaders, who supported black male suffrage, claimed that the women’s suffrage campaign was hurting their cause. This was the "Negro’s hour," they declared — time to enfranchise those men who fought bravely for the Union Army during the Civil War.

The white middle-class supporters of women's suffrage felt betrayed. They had supported antislavery politics even longer than they had agitated for their own rights. They set aside their own agendas during the Civil War with the understanding that afterward, the Republicans would champion their cause. Instead, party leaders told them to wait; worse, they now claimed women's suffrage would undermine the African American cause.

By the time Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton arrived in Kansas in the fall of 1867, both campaigns were in disarray. Newspaper writers furnished voters with reasons why neither group should win suffrage:

If black men gained the vote, large numbers of African-Americans would swarm Kansas. Women's suffrage would increase support for temperance and dry up the liquor supply. It was too soon to usher either group into full political citizenship. Such an "experiment" should be tried in more established states.

Anthony and Stanton made a fateful decision. Short on cash and desperate to win, they teamed with a wealthy racist copperhead named Francis Train, who bankrolled their campaign and engaged in vicious verbal assaults on black people. Anthony and Stanton rationalized this misalliance, saying that supporters of black male suffrage denigrated female suffragists. While true, this did not justify a racist response.

In November, the white male electorate soundly turned back both amendments.

The 1867 universal suffrage campaign showed how two disenfranchised groups could be pitted against each other to deny progress to either one. It was a lesson the supporters of status-quo politics would apply again and again in the future. Are we finally ready to turn the page?

Diane Eickhoff is the author of “Revolutionary Heart: The Life of Clarina Nichols and the Pioneering Crusade for Women’s Rights.” She lives in Kansas City.

By T.A. Barnhart May 28, 2008