Woman's Suffrage and Seraph Cedenia Young
Valentine's Day 2020 will mark the sesquicentennial of the first time in modern history that women legally voted in the United States. On February 14, 1870, Seraph Young (1846-1938) became the first woman to cast a legal ballot in Salt Lake City's municipal elections. In honor of this, a new design for Utah license plates, featuring a purple "Utah Women: First to Vote, 1870" banner, was revealed on October 3, 2018.
Legal woman's suffrage in America actually began at the very end of colonial rule, but only in New Jersey. Women in New Jersey voted as early as 1776, a practice that was partially codified into law in 1790 when the Fifteenth General Assembly of New Jersey referred to voters as both "she" and "he". It was fully codified in 1797 when a law passed that specifically allowed women to vote. Unhappily, this right was rescinded ten years later by the Thirty-second General Assembly of the state, disenfranchising both women and African-Americans. No woman legally voted again for almost seven decades.
Here in Utah, Charlotte Ives Cobb, Brigham Young's step-daughter who grew up in the Lion House in the 1890s, reported that it was her mother, Augusta Adams Cobb (Brigham Young's second plural wife), a Boston-born abolitionist and feminist, who got Brigham Young to approve woman's suffrage in 1869. A bill was submitted to the Territorial Legislature proposing that women be granted the elective franchise. On February 10, 1870, a "committee of conference," consisting of eight legislators, was appointed to look at and amend the proposed bill as needed. The committee included Abraham O. Smoot (representing Utah and Wasatch Counties), George Q. Cannon (Great Salt Lake County), Leonard E. Harrington (Utah and Wasatch Counties), Erastus Snow (Washington and Kane Counties), John Taylor (Great Salt Lake County), Albert K. Thurber (Utah County), Albert P. Rockwood (Great Salt Lake County), and Jonathan C. Wright (Box Elder County). They met that afternoon "and agreed on certain amendments, and recommended the passage of the bill with the amendments." An Act Conferring Upon Women the Elective Franchise became law on February 12, 1870. The full text of the act says:
Sec. 1. Be it enacted by the Governor and Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah: That every woman of the age of twenty-one years who has resided in this Territory six months next preceding any general or special election, born or naturalized in the United States, or who is the wife, widow or daughter of a native-born or naturalized citizen of the United States, shall be entitled to vote at any election in this Territory.
Sec. 2. All laws or parts of laws conflicting with this Act are hereby repealed.
Seraph Cedenia Young was born in Winter Quarters, Nebraska in 1846. At just six months old, she and her parents, Brigham Hamilton Young (eponymous nephew of the Ole Boss himself) and Cedenia Clark, left Winter Quarters in June 1847 and arrived in Utah that October. Living with her parents, downtown on 200 South and working as a schoolteacher in Salt Lake, 23-year-old Seraph made history when she went to the Council House (then at the corner of Main Street and South Temple, now rebuilt on Capitol Hill) and voted in the Salt Lake municipal elections on the morning of February 14, 1870, the first of some 25 other women to do so. Later, on August 1, 1870, some two thousand Utah women voted in the territorial elections.
Although we know little about the life of this remarkable woman, we do know that two years later, Seraph Young married non-Mormon Civil War veteran and printer, Seth L. Ford, in 1872. He was operating printing presses at that time in both Salt Lake City and Half Moon Bay, just south of San Francisco. In horrible physical condition from surviving several battles in Tennessee and Alabama, Seth became blind by 1877 and paralyzed by 1880. The couple had three children in Utah and then moved to Erie County, New York, where Seth's extended family resided. Seraph apparently left the LDS Church, despite her family connection, and later moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Even with thirty grueling years of caring for her severely disabled husband, Seraph remained by his side until his death in 1910. Supported by his military pension, she lived in Baltimore until her death in 1938 and is now buried next to her husband in the Arlington National Cemetery. A painting of her voting in 1870 hangs in the Utah Capitol Building.