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Susan B. Anthony — A Shared Moral World

Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906) was a cousin to this family on three separate lines. The Smiths [link: Caleb Smith], the Palmers [link: Gilbert Palmer], the Rogers [link: Wing Rogers], and the Anthonys had intermarried across generations, as Quaker families often did.

Start with Mary Palmer Smith (1788–1875) and Barak Smith (1787–1868) [link: Mary and Barak Smith]. Mary and Susan’s father were second cousins, which made Susan a third cousin to Mary and Barak’s children.

Barak’s side of the family carried the other two connections, one through the Smiths [link: Caleb Smith] and one through the Rogers [link: Wing Rogers]. It was a complex web.

Susan B. Anthony was born in Adams, Massachusetts, into a Quaker congregation that met regularly with the Danby Quakers, who were sixty miles north. Friends from both towns traveled to one another’s meetings and married across them.

In 1826, both families left. Barak and Mary packed up their six children and moved west into New York, settling in Collins, in the southwestern corner of the state. That same year, the Anthonys left Adams and did the same. Susan was six years old. Her family eventually settled near Rochester, on Lake Ontario. The two families lived about eighty miles apart.

They joined a migration already underway. Quakers had been moving into western New York since the 1790s, and by the 1820s their meetings stretched across the region. The Smiths and the Anthonys were not in the same congregation, but they belonged to the same New York Yearly Meeting, the statewide body that set policy for all Friends in the state.

Quakers everywhere held to the inner light: the belief that God speaks directly to every person, and that no one’s light burns brighter than another’s. Western New York Friends acted on it more forcefully than most. They fought slavery, sheltered people escaping it, campaigned for temperance, and helped convene the first women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls in 1848.

Few carried that conviction further than Susan B. Anthony. She was gathering antislavery petitions by seventeen. She spent the next six decades organizing, speaking, and traveling for abolition and then for women’s suffrage. In 1872 she cast a ballot she was not permitted to cast, and a court convicted her for it. She refused to pay the fine. She died in 1906, fourteen years before American women won the vote.

Barak and Mary acted on the same conviction quietly. On their farm in Collins, they hid people escaping slavery. [link: Fighting Slavery] The Anthonys and this family were cousins by blood and by faith. [Fewer than 426 words]

The Family Connection

Start with two Lapham sisters. Hannah Lapham (1773–1841) married into the Anthony family and became Susan B. Anthony’s paternal grandmother. Her sister Phebe Lapham (1759–1819) married Ebenezer Smith (1749–1826) of Danby, brother of Nathan Smith [link: Caleb Smith], making that branch of the Smiths second cousins to Anthony. A third sister, Lydia Lapham (1751–1832), married Stephen Rogers (1749–1826), brother of Wing Rogers [link: Wing Rogers], connecting the Rogers line the same way.

The Palmers connect through the sisters’ mother’s side. Hannah Sherman (1726–1797), mother of the three Lapham sisters, had a sister, Mary Sherman (1748–1835), who married Gilbert Palmer [link: Gilbert Palmer]. Their daughter was Mary Palmer Smith (1788–1875) [link: Mary and Barak Smith].

Sources

The Anthony-Lapham-Sherman-Palmer connections are documented by family genealogist Clarance Maris Smith. On the Quaker activist world of western New York, and Susan B. Anthony’s place in it, see Nancy A. Hewitt, Radical Friend: Amy Kirby Post and Her Activist Worlds (UNC Press, 2018). The National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester, New York is at susanb.org.