George & Eleanor (Read) Caldwell (Mohawk Street)

Susan B. Anthony first stayed at the home of her cousin Eleanor (Read) and George Caldwell during her tenure teaching at the Canajoharie Academy. As a conservative Democrat, George Caldwell introduced Anthony to local and statewide political debates, helping Anthony to define her own commitment to abolitionism.

While in teaching in Canajoharie, Susan B. Anthony stayed with family. Her mother’s brother Joshua Read lived across the river in Palatine Bridge and actually secured the teaching position for his niece. In her letters home, Anthony recounted her uncle’s position on slavery that northerners had no business interfering in the south’s institution of slavery. Read had himself owned a slave or two before it was abolished in New York State in 1827.

Susan B. Anthony’s family in Rochester hosted many anti-slavery meetings with other Quakers. They were sometimes joined by well-known abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. She also spent time in Albany with Lydia Mott, cousin to Lucretia Mott. Lydia was also an active abolitionist (many women involved with anti-slavery movement also became involved in women’s suffrage).

Anthony’s reluctance for marriage may have developed during her time in Canajoharie as result of Joseph Caldwell’s chauvinistic attitudes – she wrote her mother of an incident when Caldwell complained of a headache and when his wife, a pregnant Margaret (Read) Caldwell indicated that she’d had one for weeks, he countered that his was “a real headache, genuine pain, yours if sort a natural consequence” [Ann D. Gordon, ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton & Susan B. Anthony: In the School of Anti-Slavery 1840-1866 (1997)]. Sadly, Margaret Caldwell died a few weeks after that statement.