Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
completely segregated program. The rancor and the work prompted most of the women to leave at the end of the first quarter. A few ladies, including Lura, stayed for a year and then resigned. Only Lockwood and Lydia Hall, a government clerk who was also a member of the UFA, completed the course of study.
Despite the behavior of the male students, the two women finished their studies with the expectation of being granted a law degree. If officials had ever said otherwise, Lockwood did not let on, and she was furious when the faculty told the two women that because they had not studied long enough they were not going to receive diplomas, or be permitted on the stage with the men on graduation day.21 Lockwood was already giving legal advice to friends and neighbors and called the school’s decision “a heavy blow to my aspirations, as the diploma would have been the entering wedge into the court and saved me the weary contest which followed.”22 She knew that, as a matter of diploma privilege, the successful candidates of a graduating law class would be presented as a group for admission to the District of Columbia bar. Without their diplomas, she and Hall would be excluded, and would not become members of the bar.
Bar admission was a contentious issue in post–Civil War America. In the late eighteenth century, following the Revolutionary War, the American legal profession had begun—state by state, sometimes county by county—to shape a system of training and accreditation distinct from the one used in England. American lawyers settled upon apprenticeship, and later law schools, rather than replication of the ancient English “juridical universities,” the Inns of the Court and Chancery.23 The course of implementation of this American system was not smooth. Early law schools were founded and became insolvent; apprenticeships varied in length and quality of supervision. Legal knowledge was frequently considered to be insufficient, and practitioners bankrupt in their personal conduct. As a remedy, lawyers established bar associations hoping to regularize expectations concerning professional knowledge and moral character. This system of professional licensing became popular, although in some states legislators tried to limit the growth of such associations, describing them as undesirable protectionist leagues.24
Hall and Lockwood refused to be defeated by the denial of diploma privilege. In late April 1872 they turned to Francis Miller, a colleague from the Washington women’s suffrage movement, and asked him to press their cause before the local bar examination committee. As a result of his intercession, the committee agreed to administer oral tests to the two women, who appeared before a panel of local practitioners. The men tested the two women and declared each proficient in the law. Apparently without warning, however, anonymous members of the bar spoke against the admission of the women to the D.C. bar and successfully blocked their admission.25
For a time Lockwood yielded “quite ungracefully to the inevitable,” while Hall, a woman past forty, “solaced” herself by marrying and soon after left the city.26 Lockwood wrote caustically of Hall’s defection, saying she supposed her friend had become “merged” in her husband but that she would not be so easily squelched.27 After a respectable interval, Lockwood visited Miller and again requested that he nominate her for the bar. In late July the sympathetic attorney petitioned for her admission, and her application was referred, once more, to an examining committee. She said that the members came together “with evident reluctance,” administering an oral examination that lasted three days.28
Several weeks passed, days of unrelenting summer heat, but the committee did not submit the necessary evaluation. Lockwood filed a complaint with D.C. Supreme Court Justice David K. Cartter, but still nothing happened. Cartter may have requested a third committee, or he may have pressed the second group to make its report, reminding its members that the judges of his court recently had urged that the word “male” be struck from local bar qualifications.29 The applicant, full of fury, had nothing but stinging words for the men of Washington’s bar. They were, she said, old-time conservatives and culprits “opposed to innovation.”30 In the matter of sex, these men had created a protectionist league. Name calling, however, did not assuage her misery: she told friends that she felt “blocked” and “discouraged.” But she was also “the irrepressible Mrs. Lockwood,” who quickly declared that she “had not the remotest idea of giving up.”31 Becoming a lawyer was a dream that she had nurtured for a long time and, as one of Washington’s notorious women’s rights ladies, she felt great pressure not to look foolish. Ezekiel’s health was beginning to fail. That, too, weighed on her, making her all the more anxious to take over support of the household. But without bar membership she could do little more than file pension claims and chase small cases in police court. She wanted to establish a full general legal practice, and had come too far to let go of the idea that a qualified woman should have the same rights and privileges accorded men. At summer’s end, however, even the irrepressible Mrs. Lockwood seemed to have been stopped.
Fate stepped in when New York newspaper editor Theodore Tilton offered her a temporary job, one few women would consider. He wanted her to make a three-month tour of the South as a canvassing agent and correspondent for his newspaper, The Golden Age. She would travel alone, make her own arrangements, and be responsible for finding local informants. The trip would take her, a northerner, to some of the most socially conservative towns in America, where her solitary traveling, college education, and support of woman suffrage would mark her as a very different sort of person.
Tilton and Lockwood knew one another from suffrage circles. He was a respected journalist who, the year before, had started the newspaper he called “a free parliament,” open to all points of view.32 She had engaged him for a lecture sponsored by the Universal Franchise Association, and had met him again when she joined the loosely organized group supporting the presidential aspirations of New York publisher Victoria Woodhull.
In these meetings Lockwood must have impressed Tilton as someone who could handle a tough assignment. Despondent over her stalled legal career, she accepted his offer, saying she was “desperate enough for any adventure.”33 She also calculated that this trip might launch her as a journalist or lecturer, salaried work that could be combined with a legal career. Although technically not a law school graduate, Lockwood felt that her unique status as a woman attorney would play to her advantage. She had already drawn on this notoriety in the spring of 1872 when she delivered several paid lectures in upstate New York. Writing had long appealed to her and working for Tilton would give her the chance to break into journalism with a national paper.
Before she headed south, Tilton made another request: in addition to writing and canvassing for his paper, he asked if she would campaign for Horace Greeley, the presidential candidate backed by The Golden Age. Greeley, a well-known reformer and New York Tribune newspaper editor, had won the nomination of the newly formed Liberal Republican Party at its Cincinnati convention. He was a controversial candidate, criticized for his lack of experience in elective office, his support for a conciliatory policy toward the former Confederate states, and his refusal to endorse woman suffrage.34
Lockwood agreed to Tilton’s request despite her otherwise outspoken support for women’s right to vote. She did not discuss her reasons. Other reformers had already joined the Greeley camp. In addition to Tilton, who was managing the candidate’s campaign, the famous Anna Dickinson had abandoned the Republicans for the upstart editor. Senator Charles Sumner, the great voice of racial justice, also had endorsed Greeley. But woman suffrage leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton had not minced words when she said she would rather see “Beezlebub (sic) President than Greeley.”35
Funds were low in the Lockwood household, and she and Ezekiel were uncertain whether she would ever win the fight to become an attorney. Like other activists, she may have found it necessary to compromise her politics for financial reasons. After all, Stanton and Anthony had accepted funds for their newspaper from the notorious racist George Train. Trying to accommodate her commitment to women’s rights, during the tour she focused on Greeley’s “soft peace” proposals to end Radical Reconstruction and his long history as a temperance man and remained silent on the subject of his opposition to woman suffrage.
The trip began in late July. Lockwood was expected to solicit subscribers, to find opportunities to speak in support of the Greeley-Brown ticket (Benjamin Gratz Brown, governor of Missouri,