Eliza Tibbets - Biography - Southern United States

Southern United States

After the United States Civil War Eliza Lovell married a third time, to merchant Luther C. Tibbets. He was an abolitionist, like Riverside city founders John Wesley North and James Porter Greves. Judge John Wesley North, while a staunch temperance-minded abolitionist in Tennessee was ostracized after he talked a crowd out of lynching a black man. Dr. Greves worked at Beaumont, South Carolina, the 'colony of freedmen' in South Carolina until his health failed. The Tibbetses moved into the South in Tennessee with dreams of building a more racially tolerant society there and were driven out by unwelcoming locals. In 1867 they moved to Fredericksburg, Virginia, and opened a local store. Luther campaigned for office as a Radical Republican and attempted to create an integrated community outside Fredericksburg. When they were driven from Frederickburg, the mother of a young African-American girl convinced them to take her child with them.

In Washington, D.C. Eliza and Luther Tibbets worked with Josephine S. Griffings, Congressman Benjamin F. Butler and other progressives on universal suffrage, freedmen's rights and other social issues. After Luther left in 1870, Tibbets continued her activism, especially in the area of woman suffrage. Woman suffrage activists were then using an ingenious legal argument, claiming that the U.S. Constitution already enfranchised women citizens. For a brief time in 1870s citizens of the District of Columbia were enfranchised. DC woman suffrage activists argued that they were "citizens" and therefore enfranchised under that law. In 1871 seventy women tested the law in Washington, D.C. They marched to the registrar's office to register to vote, but were repulsed. Frederick Douglass accompanied the group which included Tibbets, Belva Lockwood, the first woman admitted to the Supreme Court Bar, educator Sara Spencer, Dr. Susan A. Edson, physician to President Garfield, pioneer Julia Archibald Holmes, author E. D. E. N. Southworth, and founder of the Freedman's Bureau, Josephine S. Griffing. At the election, they attempted to vote, but were again refused. Their test cases, Spencer v. Board of Registration, and Webster v. Judges of Election were heard in the Supreme court of the District of Columbia. Women throughout the United States, including Susan B. Anthony and Virginia Minor demonstrated in this way, testing the law with civil disobedience. In the Minor v. Happersett decision of 1875, however, the Court formally dissociated citizenship from voting rights.