The two days at Seneca Falls, hour by hour
Seneca Falls names the two days of meetings held at the Wesleyan Chapel in Seneca Falls, New York, on 19 and 20 July 1848, which began with an advertisement placed about a fortnight earlier and ended with one hundred signatures on the Declaration of Sentiments.
The two days ran to a shape any reader will recognize from a convention: a notice, an opening session, a document read aloud, resolutions put one at a time, an argument over one of them, and a signing.
The advertisement, and the fortnight before
The advertisement went into the Seneca County Courier at about a fortnight's notice, and a good deal about the convention follows from that. A meeting called in two weeks by a notice in a village paper draws the people who can reach it: neighbors, Quaker families from the surrounding country, antislavery organizers already on the local circuit. It does not draw a national delegation, because there was no time to assemble one and no organization to assemble it with. Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who had met at the World Anti-Slavery Convention in London in 1840 when the delegates refused to seat the women sent to it, called the meeting with a small group of others.
The notice also set the terms of the two days: the first session was for women, and the second was open to the public generally, men included. That arrangement was not an eccentricity. A mixed public meeting run by women was, in 1848, the contentious thing, and the organizers dealt with the difficulty by scheduling around it rather than by pretending it was not there.
The first day, 19 July 1848
The first day was the session the notice reserved for women, and it was where the Declaration of Sentiments was brought before the meeting. The Declaration had been drafted beforehand and modeled deliberately on the Declaration of Independence, so that its list of grievances ran in the same form and to the same cadence as the document every person in the chapel already knew. Reading it aloud was an argument before a word of debate had been spoken: the form of the thing carried the claim.
The line the notice drew between the sessions turned out to be a formal one rather than a wall. By the close of the second day, thirty two men had signed the Declaration alongside sixty eight women, which is a fact about the whole convention and not only about its second half.
The second day, 20 July 1848, open to men
The second day was the open session, and it is the day the convention did its decisive business. The Declaration was read again, discussed and amended, and then the eleven resolutions were put to the meeting. They were put separately, one after another, which is exactly why the record can say which of them the convention agreed on and which it did not. Ten of the eleven carried unanimously. A convention that had voted its resolutions as a block would have left no trace of the disagreement, and the single most informative fact about Seneca Falls would have been lost.
| Stage | When | What was done |
|---|---|---|
| The notice | About a fortnight before | An advertisement in the Seneca County Courier calls the convention |
| First session | 19 July 1848 | The session reserved by the notice for women; the Declaration of Sentiments is brought forward |
| Second session | 20 July 1848 | Open to the public generally; the Declaration is read, discussed and amended |
| The resolutions | 20 July 1848 | Eleven put separately; ten carry unanimously |
| The ninth resolution | 20 July 1848 | Debated, spoken for by Frederick Douglass, carried by a narrow margin |
| The signing | 20 July 1848 | One hundred signatures: sixty eight women and thirty two men |
The debate on the ninth resolution
The ninth resolution was the one that divided the room, and it read:
Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
Frederick Douglass spoke for it, in a meeting where a number of those present wanted it dropped. The objection was tactical rather than hostile. The other ten resolutions asked for changes in property law, in education, in access to the professions and in the legal standing of married women, and every one of those could be argued as reform. A demand for the ballot was a demand for political power, and the people who wanted the ninth withdrawn judged that it would make the other ten look ridiculous and cost them the argument they thought they could win.
The resolution carried by a narrow margin. It is the only one of the eleven that did not carry unanimously, and it is the one the next seventy two years of American campaigning were built on, ending with the Nineteenth Amendment, which Congress passed on 4 June 1919 and which was certified on 26 August 1920.
The signing, and what the signatures were worth
One hundred people signed the Declaration of Sentiments before the convention closed: sixty eight women and thirty two men. Signing was not a formality. The names were printed and the meeting was reported, much of the reporting hostile, so anyone whose name appeared had attached themselves in public to a document arguing that the government of the country rested on the consent of only half its adults.
The two days produced no law and changed nothing in the statute book of New York or of any other state. What they produced was a text with names attached to it and a procedural record showing which parts of it the signers were sure about and which part they were not. Susan B. Anthony, the name most often attached to the American campaign for the vote, made her own decisive move much later, voting in Rochester on 5 November 1872 and standing trial for it before Justice Ward Hunt in June 1873. Sojourner Truth spoke at the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio on 29 May 1851, less than three years after Seneca Falls, in a speech that survives in two texts which do not agree with one another.