Note 62 — Chapter XXIX
Reading edition
Historical Society Rooms, 140-42 Dearborn Ave., Chicago, May 19, 1880.
Mrs. E. C. Stanton, President National Woman Suffrage Association, 476 West Lake street:
Dear Madam: I write you in behalf of the Chicago Historical Society, and with the hope that you will obligingly secure for and present to this society a full manuscript record of the mass-meeting to be held in Farwell Hall in this city, June 2, 1880, duly signed by its officers. We hope too you will do the society the great favor to deposit in its archives all the letters and postals which you may receive in response to your invitations to attend that meeting.
This meeting may be an important one and long to be remembered. It is hard to measure the possibilities of 1880. I hope this meeting will mark an epoch in American history equal to the convention held in Independence Hall in 1776. How valuable would be the attested manuscript record of that convention and the correspondence connected therewith! The records of the Farwell-hall meeting may be equally valuable one hundred years hence. Please let the records be kept in the city in which the convention or mass-meeting is held.
I am a Republican. I hope the party to which I belong will be consistent. On the highest stripe of its banner is inscribed "Freedom and Equal Rights." I hope the party will not be so inconsistent as to refuse to the "better half" of the people of the United States the rights enjoyed by the liberated slaves at the South.
The leaders should not be content to suffer it to be so, but should work with a will to make it so. I have but little confidence in the sincerity of the man who will shout himself hoarse about "shot guns" and "intimidation" at the South, when ridicule and sneers come from his "shot gun" pointed at those who advocate the doctrine that our mothers, wives and sisters are as well qualified to vote and hold official position as the average Senegambian of Mississippi.
We should be glad to have you and your friends call at these rooms, which are open and free for all.
A. D. Hager, Librarian.
Very Respectfully,