Esther Hobart Morris - Role in Suffragist Bill Questioned

Role in Suffragist Bill Questioned

A story arose from the canyon of South Pass City that celebrated Esther Hobart Morris as the "Mother of Woman Suffrage." Subsequently Morris became known as instigator and even co-author of Wyoming Territory's groundbreaking 1869 legislation written a year before she became justice of the peace by Civil War veteran and South Pass City resident William H. Bright. Yet critics claim the public record celebrating Morris as a suffrage leader is wrong.

The reports of Morris as suffragist goes back to South Pass City where she was said to have hosted a tea party for the electors and candidates for Wyoming's first territorial legislature. Popular accounts hold that Morris' purpose for the tea party was to ensure that the candidates committed to suffrage. Yet this party likely never happened. Nonetheless, the story seeped into the annals of history like a fine dust whose origin is unclear. Contemporary research, however, points to Morris' oldest son, later a Cheyenne newspaper editor, as at least one of the sources of the story. Indeed some say that he "concocted it". Other research leads to Morris' friend, Melville C. Brown, who was president of the 1889 Constitutional Convention in Cheyenne, claimed that Morris presented the suffrage bill to the legislature. Subsequently, Morris' son, Archibald, began referring to his mother in the Cheyenne Sun newspaper as the "Mother of Suffrage."

The tea party story might have faded quietly were it not for H. G. Nickerson. Nickerson, who discovered and opened the Bullion Mine in 1868 and later served as territorial legislator, wrote a letter to the Lander Wyoming State Journal. Nickerson's letter, published February 14, 1919, recounted the tea party and his attendance as a legislative candidate 50 years after the reported event. In a tip of the hat honoring Morris, Nickerson notes: "To Mrs. Esther Morris is due the credit and honor of advocating and originating woman's suffrage in the United States."

Nickerson's story gained widespread prominence after his friend Wyoming historian Grace Raymond Hebard (1861–1936) published the account in a 1920 pamphlet entitled "How Woman Suffrage Came to Wyoming (1869)". The pamphlet eventually became so widely distributed that students throughout the state's public schools read the story memorializing Morris's suffrage feats. Hebard spent many years advancing the claim, promoting Morris as an instigator and co-author of Wyoming's suffrage legislation.

This popular account of Morris' role in Wyoming's suffrage movement gained the permanence of stone after boosters placed a monument to Morris the suffragist in South Pass City.

In 1960, Wyoming further celebrated Morris as a key impetus of Wyoming suffrage by donating a life-sized bronze statue of her to the National Statuary Hall Collection in the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. Officiating at the Statuary Hall ceremony were Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Richard Arnold Mullens (1918–2010), the president at the time of the Wyoming State Society. Mullens was also a member of the first baseball team of the University of Wyoming Cowboys, a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War, and a business partner with Leonard Silverstein of a District of Columbia law firm specializing in tax law.

In 1963, Wyoming officials placed a replica of the nine-foot sculpture at the state capitol building in Cheyenne. An inscription hails Morris as the "Mother of Woman Suffrage." Furthermore, the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame in Fort Worth, Texas, inducted Morris in 2006, thus continuing the tale of the Wyoming justice as a suffrage pathbreaker. The Cowgirl Hall of Fame claims that her "influential efforts made it possible for women to vote in the Wyoming Territory in 1869."