Belva Lockwood

The Woman Who Would Be President

Jill Norgren

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780814758519
• eBook ISBN: 9780814758618
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Foreword by U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

A legal historian recounts the influential life of women's rights activist Belva Lockwood, the first woman to practice at the bar of the Supreme Court

In Belva Lockwood: The Woman Who Would Be President, prize-winning legal historian Jill Norgren recounts, for the first time, the life story of one of the nineteenth century's most surprising and accomplished advocates for women's rights. As Norgren shows, Lockwood was fearless in confronting the male establishment, commanding the attention of presidents, members of Congress, influential writers, and everyday Americans. Obscured for too long in the historical shadow of her longtime colleague, Susan B. Anthony, Lockwood steps into the limelight at last in this engaging new biography.

Born on a farm in upstate New York in 1830, Lockwood married young and reluctantly became a farmer's wife. After her husband's premature death, however, she earned a college degree, became a teacher, and moved to Washington, DC with plans to become an attorney-an occupation all but closed to women. Not only did she become one of the first female attorneys in the U.S., but in 1879 became the first woman ever allowed to practice at the bar of the Supreme Court.

In 1884 Lockwood continued her trailblazing ways as the first woman to run a full campaign for the U.S. Presidency. She ran for President again in 1888. Although her candidacies were unsuccessful (as she knew they would be), Lockwood demonstrated that women could compete with men in the political arena. After these campaigns she worked tirelessly on behalf of the Universal Peace Union, hoping, until her death in 1917, that she, or the organization, would win the Nobel Peace Prize.

Belva Lockwood deserves to be far better known. As Norgren notes, it is likely that Lockwood would be widely recognized today as a feminist pioneer if most of her personal papers had not been destroyed after her death. Fortunately for readers, Norgren shares much of her subject's tenacity and she has ensured Lockwood's rightful place in history with this meticulously researched and beautifully written book.

1

Early a Widow

I ask no favors for my sex.…All I ask our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us stand upright on that ground which God designed for us to occupy.

Sarah Grimké, women’s rights advocate, 1837

Belva’s mother, Hannah, was a Greene. Family histories describe the Greenes as descended from Magna Carta barons. An early forefather, John, is said to have sailed from England in the 1630s to the British West Indies, found it “Godless,” and shipped out for the Massachusetts Bay colony.¹ He and others from whom Hannah was descended were also said to be followers of the religious dissidents Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson.

Sometime after the War of Independence, Belva’s branch of the Greene family began a journey westward. A son of this clan, William, took his wife and children as far as Washington County, New York. Hannah, the youngest of six children, was born there in 1812. In 1814, wanting better farmland, William joined family members in another trek to the far western corner of New York State, where several of the men had purchased property from the Holland Land Company.

Hannah’s family settled in a frontier region some twenty-odd miles east of Niagara Falls. This had long been the land of the Iroquois Nation (Seneca), but in 1669 the French explorer, Robert Cavelier de La Salle, had established a post on what was then called the Niagara Frontier, and was followed by French traders and missionaries. In 1759 English forces expanded into the area following their capture of Fort Niagara. Later yet, warfare and politics placed the region in the hands of the United States, which sold much of it to financier Robert Morris. Seeking quick profits, he arranged the sale of a million and a half acres of western New York to Dutch bankers who capitalized the Holland Land Company, one of the many speculative investment groups that carved up the late-eighteenth-century frontier. Using newspaper ads, handbills, and tavern talk, company agents put out the word that good land was available on liberal terms of credit. Special incentives were established to encourage extended families, or networks of friends, to make the move together.² Buoyed by dreams, Hannah Greene’s family became a client of the Holland Land Company, and after that, farmers and manufacturers of potash.³

Belva’s father, Lewis J. Bennett, was also born in Washington County, New York. His people were Scots. Late in life Belva proudly wrote to a niece that Lewis’s ancestor Nathan High fought in the Revolution, “so we have a part in the foundation of the Govt.”⁴ Lewis was five years older than Hannah. It is possible that the Greenes and Bennetts moved west to Niagara County at the same time, but Bennett lore was scarce; Belva always knew more about her mother’s people.

The Greenes claimed their lands from the Holland Company and started the hard work of clearing acreage. They sowed wheat, corn, and barley. Dairy farms were started, and then fruit orchards. Next came the gristmills and sawmills, powered by the plentiful local stream water. Rising from this industry were clusters of small farming communities. Royalton, in the southeastern corner of Niagara County, was one such village. The first town meeting was called within a few years of the Greenes’—now spelled “Green” by some—arrival. Hannah’s father, a respected Baptist elder, was elected to the post of inspector while Solomon Richardson, husband of Hannah’s older sister, Ruth, took up duties as constable.⁵ Royalton looked to its civic organization none too soon. A rural community needed law and order, roads and schools, and a sensible plan for dealing with the blessings, and problems, of the Erie Canal.

In 1814, when the Greens emigrated west, it took weeks to cross New York State. To obtain goods from the port city of New York, or to sell farm produce, or timber, from the center of the state required long, arduous, and expensive journeys across bad roads, and then ship passage on the Hudson River. Market expansion and westward movement cried out for a quick and inexpensive means of connecting the Atlantic Coast to the Great Lakes. Spurred on by future governor DeWitt Clinton, the New York State legislature agreed to support the building of an “artificial river.”⁶

Begun in 1817, and completed in 1825, the Erie Canal transformed the landscape and economy of northern New York. Hundreds of laborers and artisans flooded the route of the planned waterway, and remained after the canal was completed. They brought new cultures and a stronger cash economy. Water-powered manufacturing spread from the path of the canal, as did villages and towns servicing the needs of merchants and travelers. At Lockport a series of locks had been built to breach the Niagara escarpment, permitting the canal to continue west to Buffalo. When the canal opened in 1825, Lockport’s population equaled that of Rochester and Buffalo. It was a bustling hub whose cosmopolitan resources nourished the residents of surrounding villages like Royalton.

Hannah Green married Lewis Bennett at Royalton on December 11, 1827. She was fifteen; the groom, twenty. It appears that the newlyweds lived with a maternal aunt and her husband, the John Layton family. Belva and her older sister, Rachel, were born at the Laytons’, and it is probable that Lewis Bennett labored for Layton and neighboring farmers.⁷ Lewis never succeeded as a farmer. He moved his family around the county for twenty years, owning property briefly but never prospering.⁸

The five Bennett children, Rachel, Belva, Warren, Cyrene, and Inverno, born between 1828 and 1841, shared a close relationship with one another and the numerous members of Hannah’s extended family who lived nearby. Belva had mixed feelings about a childhood in which her accomplishments and ambitions were not particularly valued. She complained that she did the work of a boy caring for the farm animals but did not get proper credit.⁹ She chafed when her father did not encourage her schoolwork because of her sex. But she had a strong ego and later remembered personal feats of running, rowing, jumping, and horseback riding that she immodestly described as “proverbial.”¹⁰

The Bennett children attended country schools near Royalton when they were not needed for farm work. Belva was a good student and at fourteen was offered an instructor’s position by the local school board. With the family in need of money, she ended her formal education and took up the life of a rural schoolteacher. She boarded with the parents of her students and had her first taste of independence—and sex prejudice. As a female instructor, she received less than half the salary paid to her male counterparts. She called this treatment “odious, an indignity not to be tamely borne,” complaining to the wife of a local minister who counseled her that such was the way of the world.¹¹ As the daughter of a poor family she had little choice but to accept the pay that was offered.

While teaching Belva began to imagine a life different from that of her mother and aunts—the life of a great man. She asked her father’s permission to go back to school, but Lewis refused her request. He was a man of limited means and did not believe that women needed a higher education.¹² Defeated, his daughter did what was expected of her: on November 8, 1848, at the home of her parents, Belva Bennett, eighteen years old, married Uriah McNall.¹³

In her fifties Belva recalled the decision to marry: “The daughter of a poor farmer, I followed the well-trodden road, and was united in marriage to a promising young farmer of my neighborhood.”¹⁴ Uriah was twenty-two. His father, John, had come to Royalton from Canada and was one of the most respected men in Niagara County. The senior Mc-Nall farmed, ran the red brick tavern at McNall’s Corners, and shouldered his share of civic responsibilities, serving for many years as justice of the peace and town supervisor.¹⁵ His son was a sober young man. Belva had married well. By the new year, she and Uriah were settled on land a few miles north of their families, near the village of Gasport, where they farmed and operated a sawmill.¹⁶

Uriah and Belva married four months after the revolutionary stirrings of women, in July 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York. Here, ninety miles from the home of the newlyweds, sixty-eight women led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and thirty-two men, including Frederick Douglass and James Mott, signed a “Declaration of Sentiments.” The short document, echoing the natural-law language of the Declaration of Independence, proclaimed the patient suffering of women denied an equal station in life by the government under which they lived. The facts submitted “to a candid world” included the denial of their right to vote, submission to laws in whose making they had no voice, a double standard in matters of morality, and limited access to education and well-paying employment. The declaration took particular care to spell out the abuse of women in marriage, condemning a system of law that gave husbands the power to deprive their wives of liberty, property, and wages.

Upstate New York newspapers reported on the extraordinary gathering, and it is likely that Belva, who loved to read newspapers, had seen the document. She thought about these provocative issues and later wrote that Uriah had joined with an unconventional wife who found contemporary marital customs loathsome. She believed that the marriage of an ordinary woman, clearly not including herself in that category, “is the end of her personality, or her individuality of thought and action.” A woman, she said, “is known by her husband’s name, takes his standing in society, receives only his friends, is represented by him, and becomes a sort of domestic nonentity, reflecting, if anything, her husband’s religious, moral, and political views, and rising or falling in the world as his star shall go up or down.”¹⁷ She resisted this “ordinary” life by reading widely and producing articles for literary magazines and local newspapers. She proudly described her interest in books and writing as “unwomanly habits.”¹⁸

As Mrs. McNall, Belva had little time to find the permanent direction of her domestic star. Not long into their marriage, Uriah was injured in a mill accident that weakened his health. By the spring of 1853, four and a half years after their wedding, the young husband was dead. He left behind his 22-year-old bride and a three-year-old daughter, Lura, born July 31, 1849. He owned real estate, most probably mortgaged, valued at slightly less than three thousand dollars.¹⁹

Had Uriah not died, Belva’s life might have followed a course similar to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who, as mothers of small children, stormed the world using household writing tables. Tragedy, however, freed Belva McNall from these constraints, stealing from her the comforts of a settled arrangement and challenging her to act on long-buried ambitions. Initially, her husband’s death and the responsibility of caring for Lura made her indecisive. She contemplated the conventional possibilities: retreat to the home of her parents or her in-laws, engage in farm work, and undergo an appropriate period of mourning, perhaps followed by remarriage, even though she later revealed that after Uriah’s death she wanted to become independent, to throw off “a woman’s shackles,” but was ridiculed by friends.²⁰ For a short while she “submitted,” made no decisions, found life “aimless and monotonous,” then, finally, determined to “take destiny into [her] own hands.”²¹ Her first step was to return to school, believing that education would be the road to independence.

Drawing on the limited capital left in Uriah’s estate, she enrolled at neighboring Gasport Academy. Her purpose was “to fit myself for some active employment whereby I could earn a livelihood for myself and child.”²² She was twenty-three and thought her plan reasonable but encountered “impudent” criticism from neighbors who commented that her behavior was “unheard of and unusual,” snidely questioning what the young widow expected to make of herself.²³ Her father joined this chorus of nay-sayers: quoting St. Paul, he insisted that her desire for education was improper and unwomanly.²⁴

Belva had yielded at eighteen but now she persisted. She finished the academic term and asked the school trustees for a job teaching the winter session, when boys typically enrolled and men taught. The trustees replied that a male instructor had been engaged. Then, fate stepped in. The teacher was fired and the trustees asked the young widow if she would take over his class, which she did, bringing Lura to school each day.²⁵ She taught several short terms, saving enough money to move forward with a truly subversive scheme: Lura would be given over to the care of her parents, who were about to move to Illinois, while she pursued a ladies’ seminary degree. Years later Belva admitted that all of her friends and advisers objected to this idea, and that she “was compelled to use a good deal of strategy to prevent an open rupture.”²⁶ But she prevailed. In September 1854 she packed her modest and much-mended wardrobe and in the company of two young women companions undertook the sixty-mile trip east to Genesee Wesleyan Seminary in Lima, New York. This was her first journey, and it was, she wrote, “a matter of a good deal of moment.”²⁷

Belva arrived at Lima and enrolled at the Methodist seminary in a program that offered a “ladylike” curriculum for young women, as well as preparatory work for young men hoping to matriculate at Genesee College, which shared its campus. When she learned that the college was engaged in the radical experiment of coeducation, she applied to transfer after presenting herself to an examining board.²⁸ She believed that the more demanding curriculum as well as the prestige of a college degree was an opportunity she could not afford to lose, one that would “gratify” the ambitions of her youth.²⁹ She gave up a lady’s “finishing” in music and the arts and, without consulting her family, began Gene-see’s “Scientific Course,” a program in politics and science. Her transfer earned a “half remonstrance” from the preceptress of the seminary, who told her she could expect to be a more highly cultured person if she stayed with the ladies’ program.³⁰ The president of the college welcomed her, but did not hide his concern that she, a poor single mother, would not finish the longer course of study.

The Genesee program imposed a strict code of behavior, one that emphasized long hours of study and rote classroom recitation. The cloistered students wer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Prologue and Acknowledgments
• 1 Early a Widow
• 2 In Search of a New Identity
• 3 Apprenticeship
• 4 Becoming a Lawyer
• 5 Notorious Ladies
• 6 A Tougher Fight
• 7 Woman Lawyer
• 8 The Practice of Law
• 9 Lady Lobbyist
• 10 Lockwood for President
• 11 Life on the Platform
• 12 Lay Down Your Arms!
• 13 The Power of Association
• 14 Pushing for Place
• 15 AWorld’s Fair and a Million-Dollar Case
• 16 Aging Soldiers of Cause
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author