thusiasm hour after hour, were the school in which woman's rights found its ready-made disciples. With such women as Frances D. Gage, Hannah Tracy Cutler, Josephine S. Gritting, J. Elizabeth Jones, Mariana Johnson, Emily Robinson, Maria Giddings, Betsey Cowles, Caroline M. Severance, Martha J. Tilden, Rebecca A. S. Janney, to listen to the exhaustive arguments on human rights, verily the seed fell on good ground, and the same justice, that in glowing periods was claimed for the black man, they now claimed for themselves, and compelled the law-makers of this State to give some consideration to the wrongs of woman.
Again, in 1850, Ohio held a Constitutional Convention, and these women, thoroughly awake to their rights, naturally thought, that if the fundamental laws of the State were to be revised and amended, it was a fitting time for them to ask to be recognized.
In 1851, Harriet Beecher Stowe commenced the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in the National Era, in Washington, D. C. which made Ohio, with its great river, classic soil, and quickened the pulsations of every woman's heart in the nation.
Reports of the New York Conventions, widely copied and ridiculed in leading journals, from Maine to Texas, struck the key-note for similar gatherings in several of the Northern States. Without the least knowledge of one another, without the least concert of action, women in Ohio, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts, sprang up as if by magic, and issued calls for similar conventions. The striking uniformity in their appeals, petitions, resolutions, and speeches; making the same complaints and asking the same redress for grievances, shows that all were moved by like influences. Those who made the demand for political freedom in 1848, in Europe as well as America, were about the same age. Significant facts to-show that new liberty for woman was one of the marked ideas of the century, and that as the chief factor in civilization, the time had come for her to take her appropriate place.
The actors in this new movement were not, as the London and New York journals said, "sour old maids," but happy wives and faithful mothers, who, in a higher development, demanded the rights and privileges befitting the new position. And if they may be judged by the vigor and eloquence of their addresses, and the knowledge of parliamentary tactics they manifested in their conventions, the world must accord them rare common-sense, good judgment, great dignity of character, and a clear comprehension of the principles of government. In order to show how well those who inaugurated this movement, understood the nature of our republican
