In Her Own Right : The Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (3 page)

Like many great men, Stanton thought of herself in historic and heroic terms. She expected to be recalled as a “foremother” rather than be forgotten.
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She carefully constructed her dual public image as matriarch and revolutionary, equally expert on the domestic or political front. One of the most important aspects of her self-definition was her name. She insisted on being addressed by her full name, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which she considered
her own name, representing her own self. Except for letters to her children, she always signed all three names, even in correspondence with her closest friends. In return, Stanton was addressed less formally. To her best friend and cousin, Elizabeth Smith Miller, Stanton was “Johnson” to the other’s “Julius” in a long standing imitation of a Christy minstrel team.
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Anthony always called her “Mrs. Stanton,” although she was addressed as “Dear Susan.” To other intimates Stanton was “Libby.” Her husband Henry sometimes called her “Lizzy Lee.” Only her enemies, in an effort to remind her of her traditional domestic status, called her Mrs. Henry B. Stanton.
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Rather than defer to the prescribed form, Stanton combined her family and married names. The idea had been recommended by Henry’s friend Theodore Weld, whom the couple visited shortly after their marriage in 1840. It did not become an established practice for another year. By 1847, before she had spoken out on any other women’s issue, Mrs. Stanton was defending her right to her own name. As she explained in an argument with an acquaintance:

I have very serious objections . . . to being called Henry. Ask our colored brethren if there is nothing to a name. Why are the slaves nameless unless they take that of their master? Simply because they have no independent existence. They are mere chattels, with no civil or social rights. Even so with women. The custom of calling women Mrs. John This and Mrs. Tom That and colored men Sambo and Zip Coon is founded on the principle that white men are the lords of all. I cannot acknowledge this principle as just; therefore I cannot bear the name of another.
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The emphasis on independence and individual rights and the extrapolation from her position to the position of other women would become characteristic of Stanton’s developing feminist ideology. As well as defining the “self sovereign,” she was defining herself. As Stanton concluded at the end of her life, “I became a very extraordinary woman, the first of the ‘new women.’”
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In Her Own Right

Elizabeth Cady Stanton was born into the first family of Johnstown, New York. Located forty miles northwest of Albany, the town of one thousand was the seat of Fulton County. It was an intellectual and industrial center in the early nineteenth century. The Cayadutta River at the north end of the village supplied power for factories making gloves and steel springs. Named for Sir William Johnson, an Englishman who had bought the site from the Indians before the Revolution, the town overlooked the Mohawk Valley. It was splendid in autumn and snowbound in winter.
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The Cady mansion, at the corner of Main and Market streets, dominated the east end of the town square. In position and proportion it equaled the church, the courthouse, and the jail. The first Cady home on the site, a two-story white frame colonial building, was Stanton’s birthplace. That house was later torn down by her father and replaced with a “severely square grey brick mansion.” A visitor described it in 1854 as “an elegant great house . . . [full of] beautiful things and tasteful environments.” The impressive entry hall featured a divided staircase, and all the rooms were well proportioned and high ceilinged.
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The house was large enough to accommodate the numerous children, law students, and servants in livery who made up the Cady ménage. At one time the Cadys employed twelve servants, including two black men and a boy, four nurses, a laundress, a cook with a drunken father, and assorted maids.
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Reigning over this large household was Elizabeth’s mother, Margaret Livingston Cady. The Livingston name tied her to the old Dutch aristocracy in New York, although her parents were Canadians and only collaterally connected to their wealthy Hudson Valley relations. At the outbreak
of the Revolutionary War, her father, Col. James Livingston, raised a regiment of Americans and fought at Quebec and Saratoga. The commander of a battalion under Benedict Arnold, he frustrated the treason attempt of Arnold and Gen. John André and fired on the
Vulture
. Returning to Saratoga after the war, he served on the first board of regents of the state university and in the state assembly. His daughter Margaret, the sixth of nine children, was born in 1785. In 1801, at age sixteen, she married Daniel Cady of Johnstown.
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Nearly six feet tall, a daring horsewoman, strong willed and self-reliant, Margaret Livingston Cady was formidable. Twelve years younger and several inches taller than her husband, she was the only person in the household not in awe of him. She refused to move to a country estate and be isolated from friends in town, she defied his ban on rocking chairs, and she disagreed with his opposition to abolition and women’s rights. She was no less independent in the community. At one time Mrs. Cady insisted that the votes of female parishioners be counted in the election of a new pastor. According to her granddaughter, Mrs. Cady preferred “diplomacy to open warfare.” She expected “to mold people and circumstances” to get her own way.
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Margaret Cady combined these dominant characteristics with an attractive demeanor. An acquaintance found her “very refined, a lady-like, loving, spirited woman; . . . [a] genteel mistress [with a] cordial smile [and] gentle sweet voice.” Her grandchildren remembered her as vibrant, interesting, and indulgent. She allowed them to read aloud while sitting on the dining room sideboard, treated them to treasures from a special drawer, and encouraged them to express and defend their opinions, as she did. One of them concluded that Grandmother Cady was “freer and finer” without her husband or family “weaving nets of convention about her.”
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No similarly vivid portrait of Margaret Cady ever appears in Stanton’s autobiography.

In contrast to his wife, Daniel Cady was conventional in sentiment and conservative in politics. He was a self-made man who, through cunning and connections, had become one of the wealthiest landowners in the state. Born in 1773, he farmed with his father in Canaan, New York. Apprenticed as a shoemaker, he was blinded in one eye in a cobbling accident; he also tried school teaching and studied law before moving to Johnstown in 1799. Two years later he married Margaret Livingston. Her sister Elizabeth had married Peter Smith, John Jacob Astor’s partner in the fur trade. Cady became his brother-in-law’s attorney and advised him on real estate investments. As a result he had the means and opportunity to purchase land
throughout New York State. By the time Elizabeth was born, Daniel Cady was a wealthy landowner and a prominent citizen.

In 1808 Daniel Cady was elected to the state legislature. He served until 1814, when he was elected to Congress. Like most Federalists, he was overwhelmingly defeated in 1816. He ran again for Congress in 1832 and lost by thirty votes in the second Jackson landslide. In the interim his reputation as an expert in equity and real estate law attracted young men from across the country to clerk in his Johnstown office, including four of his five future sons-in-law. For many years he served as a circuit court judge, traveling with “
Coke on Littleton
in one of his saddlebags and a change of linen in the other.”
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In 1847 Judge Cady was elected associate justice of the New York Supreme Court for the Fourth District. Reelected for an eight-year term in 1849, he served until 1855, when he was eighty-two years old and deaf. He died in October 1859.

Short, intellectual, and austere, Daniel Cady was described by a guest as “a John Quincy Adams type of man,” tough minded and taciturn. He was a strict Presbyterian who worried about salvation. He read legal texts in their original languages and owned an extensive library. In an era of reform enthusiasms, the only kind of improvements he discussed were the agricultural experiments that he practiced on his outlying farms. Although he became a rich man, he opposed the concentration of wealth in the upper class. To his even richer brother-in-law he declared, “It is not consistent with the well-being of society that a man and his posterity should for many generations go on rapidly accumulating property: should it be permitted . . . the great mass of mankind would become slaves.”
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The Cadys had eleven children, five boys and six girls. Six of them died before adulthood, and no more than six children were alive at one time. The boisterousness of a big family was quieted by the deaths of so many children. The frequency of children dying in early nineteenth-century families did not diminish the tragedy. In 1814, the year he was elected to Congress, Daniel Cady lost two sons, first an eight-year-old and then an infant, both named for him. As the bereaved father confided to his brother-in-law, “Such is the fleeting nature of the treasures of this world—one moment they are objects of our warmest affections and at the next the source of bitterest anguish.” In lieu of sons, Judge Cady devoted himself to his law clerks, sons-in-law, and grandsons. Three of his daughters named their sons Daniel Cady, and to each of them the judge willed a horse and a farm. To the first grandson to pass the bar examination, he promised his law library.
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Elizabeth was the Cadys’ seventh child and middle daughter, born November 12, 1815. Her oldest sister, Tryphena, had been born in 1804 and
named for Grandmother Cady. Family accounts depict the adult Tryphena as tall, handsome, and severe, a woman of “striking executive ability” who managed the family’s investments and served as her father’s executor. She was an active Presbyterian, the trustee of a private school, and a founder of the Woman’s Homeopathic School and Hospital in New York. Married but childless, Tryphena was too fastidious and disapproving to warrant much affection from her numerous nieces and nephews. Although initially interested in temperance, she did not pursue other reforms. She “wept” over her sister’s involvement with women’s rights.
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Yet Tryphena Cady Bayard was a strong-willed, independent, intelligent woman whose financial interests were exceptional among her contemporaries.

The next Cady daughter, Harriet, born in 1810, was the beautiful sister—petite, “delicate as a cameo,” and so fragile that she never had any systematic schooling. As a result, she insisted on paying for the Vassar education of Stanton’s daughters. Haddie married her cousin, Daniel Cady Eaton, a wealthy New York City merchant, and had two children. She attended the Seneca Falls women’s rights meeting in 1848 and signed its Declaration of Sentiments, but her husband made her remove her name. During Elizabeth’s bloomer period, the fashion-conscious Haddie was so humiliated that she refused to write or visit, and her ever upright husband sent furious letters to Seneca Falls. After her husband’s death, Haddie lived with Tryphena.
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The two youngest daughters were closer to Elizabeth in age and interests. Margaret was born in 1817. Catherine’s birth in 1819 was the first event Elizabeth claimed to remember. She recalled overhearing a neighbor bemoan the birth of another girl. Like Elizabeth, both Madge and Cate attended Emma Willard’s seminary in Troy, New York, married men who had studied law with their father, bore five children, and participated in and contributed to the women’s movement. Margaret’s husband, Duncan McMartin, moved to Iowa after the Civil. War and ran a two-thousand-acre experimental farm. Catherine’s husband, Samuel Wilkeson, was a judge, a newspaper man, and an active Republican. The Wilkesons lived successively in Albany, Buffalo, Washington, and New York City.
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Of the Cadys’ five sons, four died in childhood. Only Eleazar reached manhood. As Elizabeth recalled, her brother was “a fine manly fellow, the very apple of my father’s eye.” He graduated from Union College in 1826. A few weeks later, after a short illness, he died. He was twenty years old. The whole family was stunned. Judge Cady, who had been away from home, returned to find Eleazar dead. Heartbroken at the loss of his last son, the grief-stricken father kept an uninterrupted vigil by the casket. After the funeral he made daily, tearful visits to the grave. “It was easily seen,” Elizabeth wrote later, “that while my father was kind to us all, the one son
filled a larger place in his affections and future plans than the five daughters together.”
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The loss of all of his sons must have been acutely painful to a father who had worked so hard to establish a name, a reputation, and an estate to pass on. Until passage of the New York State Married Women’s Property Act in 1848, daughters could not inherit or hold property in their own right. Eventually all of the Cady daughters inherited sizable fortunes, but none could fulfill the expectations of achievement Judge Cady reserved for his sons.

Then over forty, Mrs. Cady had not been pregnant (or carried a pregnancy to term) for seven years. Nonetheless, she bore one more child. The infant, named Eleazar, died in 1828, before he was a year old. Exhausted by eleven births, depressed by the deaths of all her sons, defeated in her attempt to produce another son, Margaret Cady retired temporarily into ill health and inactivity.

The responsibility for the remaining girls was given to Tryphena. She also filled her mother’s role by giving the family a son, in the form of a son-in-law. Within six months of Eleazar’s death, she had married his classmate and close friend, Edward Bayard. He and his brother Henry, sons of a United States senator from Wilmington, Delaware, read law with Judge Cady. As Edward and Tryphena became acting parents for the younger children, he earned the family’s affection. In the mid-1830s the Bayards moved to Seneca Falls, west of Syracuse, and later to New York City. Bayard gave up law for medicine and became one of the country’s leading homeopaths.
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