Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

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MEMOIRS OF AN EDITOR

upper left-hand corner, I edited for years without ever
beholding the author thereof.
One of the finest, of the elder boys, remembered yet.
with respectful affection, was Henry B. Stanton, of the
Abolition cause and husband of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,
pioneer woman suffragist. Mir. Stanton used to write on
Empire State politics, a subject upon which his information was uncommon. It seemed to me that he must
have known personally every politician, national, State,
or local, not only of New York but also of New England,
New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, from the time of De Witt
Clinton and Silas Wright down to that of Horatio Seymour and Roscoe Conkling. I was proud to be working
alongside a confrere who at my own age had been apprentice with Thurlow Weed on the dingy little Monroe County
Telegraph, fifty years before then. The association linked
me comfortably with the patriarchs of my new profession.
Stanton had known New York City when its population
was a hundred and fifty thousand. He had seen Sam Patch
make his fatal [jump at Genesee Falls in 1829. He had
made speeches in sixteen presidential campaigns. He had
been Democrat, Free Soiler, Republican, Democrat again
in sympathy with Tilden's ideas. For years he was
one of the foremost anti-slavery speakers, here and in
Great Britain, and sometimes he spoke at the risk of his
life; in the "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power" Henry
Wilson credits Stanton with having been mobbed 200
times. I don't remember ever hearing the veteran agitator dwell with particular enthusiasm on that other great
cause in which his wife so prominently figured, but have
no particular reason for assuming that his heart beat less
warmly for the enfranchisement of woman than for the

emancipation of the slave.
One day the slowly, dryly speaking old gentleman, then
well on to eighty but looking sixty, came to my desk and
asked: