It is impossible to know exactly how many names women sent to Congress because the volume of petitions received by Congress became so immense that many were destroyed. Stories about the massive piles of petitions have become archival legends. Gilbert Barnes wrote that at one time there were several truckloads of petitions “stored here and there about the Capitol.” The current whereabouts of these petitions are unknown. Barnes also reported that C. H. Van Tyne, who composed a guide to the National Archives, used to tell his classes at the University of Michigan that during a visit to the Capitol, he came upon a caretaker fueling a stove with antislavery petitions. The caretaker reportedly said there were so many of these bundles of paper that he figured those he burned would never be missed. Whether this tale is truth or fancy, I found amidst the hundreds of folders of petitions a note from the clerk indicating that large numbers of petitions had been carted out of the depository. There were so many antislavery petitions, he scrawled in 1864, “that they have been removed to the Store Room.” Fortunately he provided a state-by-state inventory of the number of signatures on the petitions that were removed. According to his calculations, the displaced petitions bore more than 90,000 names.²

Because so many documents are missing, it is impossible to know for certain how many antislavery memorials were sent to Congress by women, but it is possible to estimate. Based on the fact that from 1837 to 1863 women signed petitions at the conservative rate of 15,000 per year (the number sent in 1836 before the petition campaign was formally organized), the total number of female signatures gathered from 1831 to 1863 would amount to well over three quarters of a million. But this figure is assuredly too small, for women’s petitioning increased dramatically after 1836. If even half as many women who signed petitions during 1837 did so from 1838 to 1863, the total number of female signatures gathered from 1836 to 1863 would amount to almost 3 million. This total does not include the more than 65,000 female signatures gathered by the Woman’s National Loyal League in 1864 to secure passage of the Thirteenth Amendment.

But the number of signatures alone does not tell the full story of the impact of women’s antislavery petitioning. When they sent 15,000 signatures in 1835 and 1836, women swelled to a flood what was previously a trickle of memorials submitted almost exclusively by men. As day after day petitions continued to flow into the House, representatives became increasingly irritated and finally, in June 1836, passed the gag rule. The rule provided just the issue abolitionists needed to expand their appeal among the public by linking the popular right of petition with the unpopular cause of immediate abolitionism. It provided evidence, moreover, for abolitionists’ claim that the South was conspiring to destroy northerners’ civil rights in order to perpetuate the peculiar institution. Whether or not they were genuinely concerned about the plight of the slave, more northerners became sympathetic to abolitionism when the gag rule demonstrated that slavery threatened their own civil rights.³

Another important effect of women’s efforts was that they enabled abolitionists to send enough petitions to Congress to provoke senators and representatives to debate the question of slavery, a feat petitioning by men alone had failed to accomplish. According to William Lee Miller, the debates in the House over the right of petition were nothing less than “a nation-defining argument between . . . two parts of the founders’ legacy”: human slavery and human freedom. Not only did the petitions lead Congress to discuss slavery, but the debate over slavery and suppressing petitions stirred indignation and discussion of antislavery issues among the public at large. The congressional debate over slavery, concluded an 1836 report of the Starksborough (Vermont) Anti-Slavery Society, was “extending an irresistible moral influence” over the entire nation. “Wherever the reports of the proceedings in Congress are circulated and read,” the Vermont abolitionists explained, “there will be a knowledge of the doings in relation to those petitions extended; and this circumstance will serve to stir up the spirit of inquiry in relation to our objects, our principles, and measures, in many places where the merits of the Anti-Slavery Society have heretofore been but little known.”⁴

Petitioning also enabled abolitionists to reach people who would remain untouched by other forms of abolitionist rhetoric. Indeed, the petitions were probably read by more people—congressmen, abolitionists, and members of the public to whom appeals were made for signatures—than were any other form of antislavery literature. Unlike antislavery lectures, newspapers, and pamphlets, which often reached only persons already converted to the cause, petitions brought abolitionists into contact with “the pro-slavery, the indifferent, with those who are as much as ourselves opposed to slavery, . . . so that many who would not otherwise think at all about it are induced to give it a little place in their minds.” The strategy of discussing slavery face-to-face allowed petition circulators to speak with people who would never go to hear an abolitionist lecturer and who could not read an abolitionist tract. Often the signing of petitions resulted in the formation of a new antislavery society. One abolitionist explained that a signature on a petition served a “three-fold purpose” in converting people to abolitionism: “You not only gain the person’s name, but you excite inquiry in her mind and she will excite it in others; thus the little circle imperceptibly widens until it may embrace a whole town.”⁵

After 1863 and well into the twentieth century, millions of women petitioned Congress on issues such as granting pensions to Civil War nurses, aiding freedwomen and -men, outlawing lynching, controlling the sale of alcohol, attacking and defending Mormon polygamy, and demanding suffrage for women. Recognition of the numerous issues for which women petitioned after the Civil War as well as the magnitude of their efforts not only sheds light on women’s use of this right but also disproves David C. Frederick’s claim that congressional reaction to the antislavery petition campaign so weakened the right of petition that “never again would any group exercise the right of petition on so grand a scale to engage in a dialogue with Congress on an important social issue.”⁷

On the contrary, women played a major role in mass petition campaigns that significantly influenced, for example, Congress’s decision to take action against polygamists. When in 1898 Brigham H. Roberts, a reputed polygamist, was elected to Congress, hundreds of thousands of women petitioned against his seating and for a constitutional amendment outlawing polygamy. Organizations such as the Women’s Board of Home Missions of the Presbyterian Church, the National Congress of Mothers, the National Council for Women, and the American Female Guardian Society were especially active in the campaign. Mrs. R. H. Murray, Mrs. Alex Watson, and dozens of other members of the Woman’s Missionary Society of the Central Presbyterian Church of Michigan, for example, called on the Fifty-sixth Congress to propose an amendment to the Constitution that would define legal marriage to be “monogamic” and to make “polygamy, under whatever guise or pretense, a crime against the United States, punishable by severe penalties.” Likewise the Woman’s Home Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Philadelphia Conference, “urgently” petitioned Congress to “secure, as soon as possible, an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, forever prohibiting the practice of polygamy and polygamous cohabitation in any part of the United States.”⁸

The petition drive demanding that Congress deny Roberts his seat garnered 7 million signatures from both women and men. According to the New York Evening Journal, which played an active role in the campaign, women jostled in the House galleries to witness presentation of the petition, which was laid on the Speaker’s desk in twenty-eight rolls, each two feet in diameter, wrapped together in an American flag. The mass petition won its goal, for the House voted by a great majority to exclude Roberts. The New York Times concluded that “the vast mob” of women who “bawled for the shutting out of Roberts” had won their way.⁹

Women also played leading roles in petition drives to educate the public about lynching and to press for federal antilynching laws. In 1892, a year in which 230 blacks were lynched, Ida B. Wells set in motion an antilynching campaign and urged others to join her. The next year prominent African American leaders Mary Church Terrell, Frederick Douglass, Francis J. Grimké, and Walter H. Brooks joined other blacks in signing a petition asking senators to instruct the Judiciary Committee to grant a hearing on “the lawless outrages committed in some of the Southern States upon persons accused of crime, but who are denied the ordinary means of establishing their innocence by due process of law.” Exactly six months after reception of the petition, Republican congressman Henry W. Blair of New Hampshire introduced a joint resolution to provide $25,000 to investigate lynching and all alleged rape cases since 1884 that had resulted in unlawful violence against the accused “by whipping, lynching, or otherwise.” Despite the fact that on four separate occasions Blair presented petitions from African Americans in support of his resolution, it was strenuously opposed by southern members and expired in committee. In 1900 more than 2,400 men and women of Massachusetts, members of the National Afro-American Council, petitioned the House of Representatives requesting a bill that would make lynching a federal crime and require the president to send national troops to rescue any person from the hands of a mob in any state of the Union. On January 20 Representative George H. White, a black Republican of North Carolina, introduced the first federal antilynching bill, which deemed all parties tried and convicted of “participating, aiding, and abetting” lynching guilty of treason against the U.S. government and punishable by death. Despite a national petition campaign to support the bill, it languished in the Judiciary Committee. ¹⁰

Neglect of the bill did not end antilynching petitioning, which was re-ignited in 1917 by a bloody race riot in East Saint Louis, Illinois, that left thirty-nine African Americans dead. Among the outpouring of petitions to Congress was that of the 368 members of the Young Ladies Protective League of Washington, D.C., who petitioned against “the outrages perpetrated upon American citizens in East St. Louis” and who requested Congress to punish those guilty of the “massacre” and, furthermore, to make lynching a federal crime punishable by death. The next year Representative Leonidas C. Dyer, a Missouri Republican, introduced a bill that imposed heavy penalties on counties where lynchings occurred. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was largely responsible for organizing lobbying efforts, including petitioning, to support the Dyer bill. Although the House approved the Dyer bill three times, southern Democrats repeatedly blocked its passage in the Senate, claiming that the measure would violate states’ rights. In the end no federal legislation against lynching was ever passed, but the frequency of lynching declined gradually after 1920. Yet lynching persisted, and both blacks and whites continued to petition Congress on the subject through 1944.¹¹

In addition to social reforms such as antipolygamy and antilynching efforts, women initiated mass petition campaigns to agitate for the right to vote. The decision to employ petitioning as a major means of persuasion was based on suffrage leaders’ years of experience in the antislavery and temperance movements in which they had gained organizational skills and had become accustomed to public activism. The Declaration of Sentiments of the 1848 Woman’s Rights Convention, modeled on the American Declaration of Independence and the 1833 Declaration of Sentiments of the American Anti-Slavery Society, specifically listed petitioning among its principal means of agitation. The women and men present at the convention pledged that in order to win for women all the rights and privileges of citizens, they would “employ agents, circulate tracts, petition the state and national legislatures, and endeavor to enlist the pulpit and press in our behalf.” During the 1840s and 1850s women organized several petition campaigns aimed at state legislatures. In 1846 New York women petitioned their state legislature for the right to vote. In 1850 the women’s rights convention held in Worcester, Massachusetts, implemented a systematic petition campaign in eight states, and the powerful orator Lucy Stone implored delegates to diligently circulate petitions. In 1854 Susan B. Anthony headed a campaign in New York state that circulated petitions requesting that women be granted the right to control their own wages, to maintain custody of their children after divorce, and to vote. With their efforts further coordinated by sixty “captains,” one in each county, the women succeeded in gathering more than 10,000 signatures in the course of a few months.¹²

Yet it was not until after the Civil War that women’s rights advocates began to petition Congress. Believing optimistically that women’s contributions to abolitionism and the Union war effort had demonstrated female patriotism, feminist leaders fully expected radical Republicans to introduce a measure calling for universal suffrage. But their hopes were dashed in December 1865 with the presentation of the Fourteenth Amendment. The amendment mandated that any state that denied suffrage to male citizens—meaning men born or naturalized in the United States and having reached the age of twenty-one years—would lose representation in Congress proportionate to the number of male citizens denied the right to vote. While it required Confederate states to grant the vote to black men before those states would be readmitted to the Union, the amendment strengthened the disfranchisement of women by guaranteeing suffrage only to male citizens, thus implying a separate form of citizenship for females. If the Fourteenth Amendment were to pass as written, Stanton and Anthony foresaw, it would take another constitutional amendment to secure for women the right to vote in federal elections. “If that word ‘male’ be inserted,” Stanton predicted, “it will take us a century at least to get it out.”¹³

Women’s rights leaders reacted to introduction of the Fourteenth Amendment by calling for unification of the black suffrage and woman suffrage movements and by starting a petition campaign for universal suffrage. Stanton and Anthony composed a form titled “A Petition for Universal Suffrage,” which asked Congress to “prohibit the several States from disenfranchising any of their citizens on the ground of sex” and implied that women were more deserving of the vote than slaves by characterizing the signers as “intelligent, virtuous, native-born American citizens” who were continually denied political recognition.¹⁴ Stanton wrote a letter published on January 2, 1866, to the National Anti-Slavery Standard denouncing the Fourteenth Amendment as an attempt by Republicans “to turn the wheels of civilization backward.” The audacity of the measure, she declared, “should rouse every woman in the nation to a prompt exercise of the only right she has in the Government, the right of petition.” By the end of the 1865-66 congressional session, solicitors had collected 10,000 signatures for the petition, which was presented in the Senate by Senator Gratz Brown, a Democrat from Missouri.¹⁵ Another mass effort was organized in May 1868 by the American Equal Rights Association, which was formed in 1866 at the first women’s rights convention since the Civil War and whose primary goal was to win universal suffrage. The printed petitions put into circulation by the association requested Congress to pass “an Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, prohibiting all political distinction on account of Sex.” Notwithstanding these efforts, when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in June 1868, it extended the vote to black males but not to women.¹⁶

Those seeking suffrage for women continued to use petitioning to achieve their goal. On November 10, 1876, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) published An Appeal to the Women of the United States for a Sixteenth Amendment, which resembled appeals issued by female abolitionists during the 1830s.¹⁷ Besides urging men and women to sign a petition entreating Congress “to adopt measures for so amending the Constitution as to prohibit the several States from Disenfranchising United States Citizens on account of Sex,” the Appeal provided instructions for circulating the petition—instructions quite similar to those attached to antislavery petitions some four decades earlier. State societies were to “send out petitions to reliable friends in every county, urging upon all thoroughness and haste.” After the petitions were returned to state organizers, Stanton instructed, “they should be pasted together, neatly rolled up, the number of signatures marked on the outside, with the name of the State,” and forwarded to the chairman of the association’s congressional committee in Washington, D.C.¹⁸

In response to the Appeal, during the first half of January 1876 petitions poured in from twenty-two states at the rate, according to the NWSA, of a thousand names per day. The signatures were divided into columns based on sex to emphasize that men as well as women supported woman suffrage. Not only did men sign these petitions, but in spite of Stanton’s racist rhetoric of the late 1860s, among the masses of petitions there is one from the District of Columbia signed by Frederick Douglass Jr., Mrs. Frederick Douglass Jr., and some thirty other “colored” citizens, as they identified themselves. The signers, of whom eighteen were women, according to Rosalyn Terborg-Penn, probably belonged to the African American elite living in the affluent Anacostia section of Washington, D.C. In all, more than 10,000 names were presented to Congress during January and February 1876. The following year the NWSA issued a letter “To the Friends of Woman Suffrage” to put into motion another campaign to amass “NEW MAMMOTH PETITIONS TO THE FORTY-FIFTH CONGRESS.” Members of both the NWSA and the American Woman Suffrage Association gathered signatures, which were presented in February 1878.¹⁹

The 1876 petition campaign was unsuccessful in winning a constitutional amendment granting women the franchise, and women would continue to organize, propagandize, and petition into the twentieth century in hopes of winning the ballot. In 1890 the NWSA and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged into a single organization, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which thereafter spearheaded the suffrage campaign. At its 1908 annual convention the association voted to launch a campaign to collect a million signatures on a petition to Congress for a woman suffrage amendment to the Constitution. When the petition was presented in the spring of 1910, it bore the names of more than 404,000 Americans. Although the association fell short of reaching its goal of 1 million names, it was an impressive accomplishment nonetheless, especially during a period of the woman suffrage movement known as “the doldrums.” Suffragists undertook another petition drive in 1913, at which time they also organized pilgrimages to bring the petitions to Washington, D.C., from the localities in which they originated. The effort culminated on July 31, 1913, with an automobile procession to the Capitol and presentation of suffrage petitions bearing 200,000 names to a group of senators. Two years later suffragists succeeded in collecting a half-million signatures. On May 9, 1915, after a rally at a Washington theater and a march to the Capitol, a delegation presented the petition to President Woodrow Wilson. The last great suffrage parade, held in New York City on October 27, 1917, featured some 2,500 women waving placards that enumerated the signatures of more than 1 million women to a suffrage petition.²⁰

On January 10, 1918, the House of Representatives voted in favor of the woman suffrage amendment. But just when the franchise seemed within reach, it was snatched away by the Senate, which failed to pass the measure by two votes, even after an eloquent plea by President Wilson. On February 10, 1919, despite the fact that twenty-four state legislatures had memorialized Congress expressing their support, the woman suffrage amendment was again defeated in the Senate, this time by only one vote. In hopes of securing victory during the next session, suffrage workers called on civic, church, labor, education, and farm organizations to send Congress resolutions in support of woman suffrage. The effort produced more than 500 resolutions urging congressmen to grant women the right to vote. Like the abolition petitions of bygone years, the resolutions became so numerous and so irritating that an old ruling was revived prohibiting the printing of such material in the Congressional Record.

Nonetheless, the flood of petitions along with other lobbying efforts convinced enough congressmen that public sentiment supported woman suffrage, and in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment was approved by Congress, ratified by the states, and signed into law. The fact that petitioning played a major role in suffragists’ strategy to win the vote confirmed the advice Stanton had given almost forty-five years earlier. Women, she had written, could best secure the ballot by exercising the one right they surely possessed: the right of petition. Although “our petitions . . . by the tens of thousands, are piled up in the national archives, unheeded and ignored,” Stanton assured women that “yet it is possible to roll up such a mammoth petition, borne into Congress on the shoulders of stalwart men, that we can no longer be neglected or forgotten.”²¹