As I mentioned in my last post, I am transcribing the portion of Susan B. Anthony’s diary in which Anthony details her trip to Washington, D.C., and thereabouts in 1854 with fellow women’s rights activist Ernestine Rose. As before, the entries are followed by my notations.
March 22
Rainy & snowy this A.M. Mr. & Mrs. Davis left the St. Charles. Went to Carusi’s Saloon but Mrs. R. adjourned the meeting until Friday the 24. Called in Mrs. Thompson’s room, had a pleasant chat, then returned to our room & prepared notices for the several Papers for Friday evening meeting. In the A.M. called on Mr. Thompson a young lawyer from South Carolina to get Law Books. He looked surprised that a woman should desire to look over the musty Law Books.
March 23
Cloudy in the A.M, bright about noon, showers in the P.M. & a wind & rain storm in the fore part of evening & clear at 9 o’clock. Visited the printing offices, The Evening Star, the only paper that has charged us for insertion of notices & the only one that reported Mrs. R.’s speech. Most of the Editors seem kind & polite, willing to publish all the articles I gave them. At 1 o’clock went to the Capitol listened to three speeches from Southern men—Millson of Va., Hunt of La. & Breckinridge of Kentucky. The 1st in favor of the original Nebraska Bill, but opposed to the Badger amendment, the 2nd opposed to the Bill, out & out, on the ground that it is a violation of Good Faith, as plighted in the Missouri Compromise. The 3rd in favor of the Bill, an eloquent speaker, & had he had truth for his foundation principle, his speech would have been a most powerful one, his face had a fine expression, how hateful is slavery, that it prostrates such nobility of Soul to so base ends.
Mrs. R & myself dined at Gerrit Smith’s. Dr. Jones & wife of Syracuse and Mr. Flagely [sic] & wife of Lockport were also there. Mrs. Smith’s sister Tallman of Rochester & brother Fitzhugh were there—passed the evening very pleasantly.
Notes:
Mr. Davis was Thomas Davis of Providence, Rhode Island, who was then serving in the Senate. He was the second husband of Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis, who was prominent in the women’s movement. In 1853, she had begun publishing The Una, focused on women’s rights. Anthony and Davis had gotten off to a rather awkward start in September 1852 when Anthony, attending her first national women’s rights petition, argued that Davis’s friend Elizabeth Oakes Smith, who like Davis had arrived at the convention in a fashionable gown, should not preside over the convention because “nobody who dressed as she did could represent the earnest, solid, hard-working of the country.”
As later entries make clear, Susan B. Anthony and Ernestine Rose were also staying at the St. Charles Hotel. Located on Pennsylvania Avenue and Third Street (near the present-day National Gallery of Art), it was close to the Capitol, and a number of politicians lived there while Congress was in session. The building, later known as the Capital Hotel, was torn down in 1926. During its demolition, lurid stories circulated about slaves being held in pens in its basement, although members of the Association of Oldest Inhabitants of the District of Columbia disputed the story.
Mr. Thompson was likely Michael Thompson, He was still a bachelor in 1854 (he would marry in 1855), so Mrs. Thompson perhaps was his visiting mother or unrelated to him. Thompson was locked up in Old Capitol Prison in 1861-62 for communicating with the Confederacy, mysteriously vanished from D.C. in 1878, and surfaced in Honolulu in the 1880s. Ernestine Rose liked to recall that when visiting South Carolina in 1847, she had spoken to a young lawyer who boasted that the South could get along fine without the North. Was Mr. Thompson the same young lawyer?
Established in 1852, the Evening Star was therefore a relatively new newspaper at the time. To the sorrow of many in Washington, it shut down in 1981.
The three “Southern men” were John Singleton Millson, Theodore Gaillard Hunt, and John Cabell Breckinridge. The best known of the three is Breckinridge, who served as Vice President during James Buchanan’s administration and unsuccessfully ran for President in 1860. The Badger amendments did not concern mammals (sadly) but were proposed by Senator George E. Badger of North Carolina.
“Mr. Flagely” may be Representative Thomas Thorn Flagler, who lived in Lockport, New York, and was serving in Congress at the time. By the same token, Jones could be Daniel Terryll Jones, a physician from Baldwinsville, New York, who was also serving in Congress.
The sister of Ann Smith that Anthony refers to was Mary Eleanor Fitzhugh Talman. Ann Smith had several brothers alive at the time.