Esther Hobart Morris (1814-1902)

Life began to change for American women on December 10, 1869, otherwise commemorated as “Wyoming Day.” On that day the governor of Wyoming territory, John Campbell, signed the first law in America that granted women the right to vote. The bill itself was born of a simple dinner party at a “shack” belonging to the newest resident of South Pass, Wyoming, Mrs. Esther Hobart Morris (1814-1902), a native of New York and recent transplant from Illinois, and her husband.

After Morris’s first husband died she was denied a claim to property he left her in Illinois. She remarried and she and her new husband, John Morris, struck out for the new Wyoming Territory seeking gold. Esther Morris brought her experience working with abolition and women’s rights movement from New York, and a new awareness of what it really meant to realize women’s rights as a result of her denied claim in Illinois. She is quoted as saying she arrived in Wyoming with the “words of Susan B. Anthony” ringing in her ears.

Now picture this: A rugged mountain pass and a row of shacks surrounded by a vast tent city. This accounted for the largest town in Wyoming in 1869, South Pass City, and for that reason candidates flooded this town of 3,000 residents, most of whom lived in tents. One night that fall every single candidate for election showed up at a dinner party at the shack belonging to the Morris family. Esther Morris held court and made such a persuasive case for women’s suffrage that every candidate there agreed to support it if elected.

This statue of Esther Hobart Morris graces the entrance to the Capital Building in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

William H. Bright was the man elected as president of the Council and he is the one who, after carefully securing enough pledges to make sure it passed, introduced the bill to the legislature. But of course that was not the end of the story. A major opponent emerged, Mr. Ben Sheeks, and he attempted to kill the bill the same way politicians try to kill bills today: by adding ridiculous amendments. In Mr. Sheeks case he attempted such trickery as proposing that the word “women “be struck from the bill, among other ridiculous amendments. Despite these efforts, however, the bill passed and was sent to the only elected Republican in the state, Governor John Campbell.

Governor Campbell was lobbied heavily by both sides, including many women. By all accounts he struggled with the decision and went back and forth between supporting the bill and opposing it. According to a book on the history of the women’s suffrage movement written by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler, Governor Campbell was eventually persuaded by the lingering memory of a women’s right’s convention he witnessed as a boy in Ohio. To wit:

In that memory he saw himself and other young boys, nineteen years before… stealing into the back seats of the Second Baptist Church in Salem, Ohio, his birthplace. The attraction was a Woman’s Rights Convention which the entire village agreed was an unheard of innovation… The convention was the first in the State and differed in one respect from others at that period. It was entirely officered by women and “not a man was allowed to sit on the platform, speak or vote.” The women issued an “address to Ohio women,” a “memorial to the State Constitutional Convention” about to sit, and passed 22 resolutions, “covering the whole range of woman’s political, religious, civil and social rights.” …. When it was over, the men who had been in attendance met together and “endorsed all the ladies had said and done.”

Apparently this memory was powerful impetus and caused Governor Campbell to do the right thing, which he did, signing the bill into law on December 10, 1869. The bill had far-reaching consequences. Women’s suffragists finally had a victory and women could vote in at least one place in America. December 10^th thereafter became known as “Wyoming Day.” Shortly after passage of the bill, Esther Morris was appointed the first female Justice of the Peace in the country. As a result of passage of this bill, Wyoming is also known as the first state to allow female jurors.

Sources:

Woman suffrage and politics; the inner story of the suffrage movement, by Carrie Chapman Catt and Nettie Rogers Shuler (Chapter 6, pages 74-81)

Women of the West Museum: Esther Hobart Morris