“A Crisis in Our Cause”: The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869

In “A Crisis in Our Cause”: The Fifteenth Amendment and the Newport Woman Suffrage Convention of August 1869,” Elizabeth C. Stevens details the painful rupture in the fledgling woman suffrage movement of the late 1860s by examining a suffrage convention held in Newport, R.I. in August 1869. Tensions between colleagues in the woman’s rights and abolitionist movements of the mid-nineteenth century over the pending passage of the Fifteenth Amendment boiled over into hostility and anger as plans for the convention evolved. Paulina Wright Davis, leader of the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, was at the forefront in organizing the convention at the behest of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Elizabeth C. Stevens is the editor of Newport History and the author of Elizabeth Buffum Chace and Lilllie Chace Wyman: A Century of Abolitionist, Suffragist and Woman’s Rights Activism