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Chapter One Awakening On a summerlike day in May 1840, a young couple climbed aboard the Montreal in New York Harbor for their honeymoon voyage to the United Kingdom. The Montreal was a packet ship, a 542-ton workhorse that plied the Atlantic six times a year between the busy ports of England and New York. Its three masts, each bearing triplets of giant sails and miles of line rigged along the crossbars, towered above the deck as the crew loaded the hold below. Captain Seth Griffing and his first mate made their final preparations as passengers bade farewell to family and friends. The bride raced her brother-in-law around the ship in a last-minute game of tag, her wavy chestnut hair bouncing as she ran. “I had a desperate chase after him all over the vessel, but in vain,” she later recalled.1 The game made them laugh and eased the pain of separation. The bride and groom would be gone for seven months. Travel to Europe would become a well-worn path for many American newlyweds eager to see the cultural tapestry of the Old World, but this couple was different. Henry and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were embarking on a mission to confront the greatest moral evil of the age—slavery. Over the next several years, as Elizabeth would observe the struggle to liberate slaves, and awaken to her own subordination, slowly, tentatively, and with a good dose of self-doubt, she would join others to confront the laws and traditions that restricted women—norms embedded so deeply in American life that they seemed like “common sense.” But first she had to imagine a different world. The Stantons had married after a whirlwind courtship. Elizabeth was a Cady—the most prominent family in Johnstown, New York, a prosperous town a day’s ride northwest of Albany. Her mother Margaret was an American aristocrat, the tall, refined daughter of Colonel James Livings- ton, a Revolutionary War hero who had thwarted Benedict Arnold’s attempt to deliver West Point to the British. Elizabeth admired her mother,