Belva Lockwood. Jill Norgren
Georgia, and then swept across Alabama and Mississippi, turning north into Tennessee. From Memphis, she traveled to Nashville, and then went north again to Louisville, Kentucky, on to Indianapolis, east to Columbus, Ohio, and, finally, home to Washington through West Virginia and past Harper’s Ferry. The trip and the work provided her with an apprenticeship in the rigors of travel and the basics of grass roots campaigning.
In each new town, Lockwood would arrive, visit the owner or editor of the local newspaper (seeking an endorsement for Greeley and information about the community), sell pictures of the candidates, and canvass informally for the Greeley-Brown ticket. Where possible, she gave a campaign speech. In some towns the local press mocked her. The editor of the Republican-controlled New Bern, North Carolina, Times offered up an extravagant denunciation, telling his readers that this newcomer was a “women rights mulatto Democrat Greeleyocrat Spiritualist free-love agent.”36
Elsewhere, however, she was shown considerable courtesy. In Huntsville, Alabama, she was offered the use of the courthouse for her campaign talk, causing the northern suffrage newspaper, The Woman’s Journal, to remark that the revolution was still going on.37 The Huntsville audience had never before heard a woman speak in public. Lockwood reported that they listened with interest and respect and that she was later received by the town’s prominent citizens. In other states she met with governors and mayors. If these officials thought a northern woman touring the South for Greeley a bit “mad,” they kept it to themselves.38
Tilton published a dozen of Belva’s articles. They were travel accounts in the style made popular by Dickens, de Tocqueville, and Fanny Trollope in their antebellum romps across America. But unlike the Europeans Lockwood had a campaign to report, requiring that she mix the pleasantries of travel with political observation. In Raleigh she described maturing corn and full-blooming cotton fields, scarce money, and a dull economy. Everywhere, she revealed her good feelings for the people of the South. In North Carolina she was happy to find “almost every white man and woman are for Greeley.” He had been an enemy during the war and she thought it “magnanimous” that these Americans were now willing to support him.39 Given that she was an emissary of the “reconciliation” candidate, this was the appropriate stance to adopt, an attitude that was also consistent with her own deepening opposition to war and conflict. She also reported on the “colored voters” who, she wrote, having heard the inflammatory scare talk of Republican politicians, could be expected to support Grant.40
Tilton published her most interesting article, “Southern Immigration,” in mid-October. Written in Memphis, and very much mirroring Greeley’s reconciliation and migration policies, the entire column was a plea for northerners to invest in, and move to, the South, particularly the fertile country she had just crossed on the Memphis and Charleston Railroad. These states, she wrote, “cry out for capital and labor.”41 They were “desolated and impoverished” by the war but have rich natural resources. “It is false!” she told her readers, for northerners to believe that they are not wanted, or would not be safe in the South. She acknowledged the Ku Klux Klan’s six-year reign of terror but argued that violent incidents were now isolated and exaggerated, and that “the spirit of a whole people” could not be judged by exceptional instances of wrongdoing: “Southerners are not all doves and lambs, but they are not hyenas, nor are they donkeys.”42
While Greeley’s name was never mentioned, the logic of his “soft peace” policy flowed naturally from Lockwood’s argument, and from her closing words: “There are as many true-hearted men and women, in proportion to the population at the South as in the North. Human nature is the same here as in the North. Kindness begets kindness, and charity leads to charity. The issues of the war are settled. Why not come together…Americans once more.”43 “Southern Immigration” was the most political column that Lockwood contributed to The Golden Age, safe in its support of Greeley but disappointing in its failure to explain that a tense, and not infrequently violent, struggle for control raged across much of the former Confederacy six years after the armistice.44 She consciously chose to present an optimistic picture, failing to discuss the growing exclusion of freedmen from the polls and betting on hard work and market forces to revive the South and promote well-being for former slaves. She did not avoid the discussion of race but was cautious, perhaps feeling herself insufficiently knowledgeable to say more, or concerned about contradicting Greeley in some way.
In November Lockwood completed the tour, saying little more about the campaign and nothing about the women’s issues that were otherwise so important to her. Back in Washington, however, she forced the issue, presenting Tilton with a column devoted to the accomplishments of the professional women of the capital. In “Women of Washington” she identified and praised women who dared to think and act on their convictions, an “advance guard” in public opinion.45 She named doctors, teachers, writers, journalists, and government clerks. She denounced as ridiculous the idea that the few American women who had been permitted to train as physicians were “unsexed” because of exposure to dissecting rooms and hospital wards. Without raising the question of suffrage, Lockwood made her point: Washington (and by implication, the nation) was full of ordinary women and extraordinary women—educated, sensible, independent—deserving of the vote.
After incumbent Ulysses S. Grant was declared president, Lockwood decided to resume her effort to obtain a law school diploma. She applied to matriculate in the law program at Georgetown College but was bluntly notified by officials that the school was not a coeducational institution.46 After this rebuff, she began to attend lectures at Howard University’s law school but then stopped, saying that “the fight was getting monotonous and decidedly one-sided.”47
Lockwood presented the fight as one-sided but, in fact, the men of Washington were divided over the question of women’s rights. Debate of various franchise bills, the fair employment legislation sponsored by Arnell, and male membership in the UFA attested to support of women’s aspirations and rights in certain quarters. This included a number of the judges of Washington’s lowest courts. Lockwood had been giving legal advice and occasionally arguing in court. The first notice of this lawyering appeared in one of Lura’s column’s for the Lockport Daily Journal, where she reported that “Mrs. Lockwood” had appeared in early February 1872 at a District court “as attorney for her husband, and plead [sic] and won her suit amid many congratulations.”48 In a later account Lockwood wrote that when she had “ventured to bring suit on a contract in a justice court” the procedure was considered so “novel” that it was telegraphed all over the country by the Associated Press.49 Practical, persuasive, and likable, she had won to her cause several men of the bench: the justices of the peace in the District, Judge William B. Snell of the Police Court, and Judge Abram B. Olin of the Probate Court had notified her that she would be recognized as counsel in the trial of any case in their courts.50
This encouragement pleased her, but it was not enough. She wanted her degree. Only after she held a diploma could she make the point that women were entitled to, and could succeed at, equal educational and professional opportunities. In the late summer of 1873 Lockwood decided to renew the fight with officials of the National University, an institution, she later wrote, that “shut up like an oyster” after admitting her and one or two African-American men.51 Instead of petitioning the university’s chancellor or faculty, she wrote to President Grant, who, by virtue of his political office, was president, ex officio, of National University. Two letters went out on September 3 under her signature. In one, presumably the first to be written, she documented the facts of her case, and the “manifest injustice” experienced by the fifteen women matriculants. The tone reflected a sober supplicant while the text observed the rules of decorum:
Sept. 3, 1873
Dear Sir:.…Sometime in February 1871 I was invited to enter this Institution as a student…and to use my influence to induce other ladies to join, with the assurance, that if faithful to the recitations, we should receive diplomas at the same time with a class of young men.…We went regularly to the recitations, and for two or three times were admitted to the lectures, when this means of knowledge was denied us, without any explanation being given.…[O]nly two, Miss Lydia S. Hall (now Mrs. Graffam)