Shortly before the Republicans convened in Philadelphia in 1872 to renominate Ulysses S. Grant for President, Susan Brownell Anthony visited him at the White House. She told the President that her National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) wanted him to make votes for women a plank in his platform. Grant replied that he had “already done more for women than any other president.” He recognized the “right of women to be postmasters,” he said, and had named five thousand to the post, but he would make no promises about the party platform.

Anthony had never been comfortable playing the role of supplicant. The NWSA’s mottoes avoided any pleading tone: “Men—their rights and nothing more. Women—their rights and nothing less”; “Principle, not Policy. Justice, not favors.” But the suffragists believed that Republicans were their best bet in the upcoming election; Henry Wilson, who was to be Grant’s vice-presidential running mate, was less equivocal about women’s suffrage than Grant, while Horace Greeley, the probable Democratic candidate, was outspokenly against it.

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