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Belva Lockwood

An Anti-War Candidate

"War is a relic of barbarism belonging to the past" read a plank of the Equal Right Party’s platform in 1884. While it was against the law for women to vote, there was nothing prohibiting them from running for office, so women’s rights advocates formed their own third party and ran Belva Lockwood, a well-known Washington attorney, for President. San Francisco newspaper editor Marietta Stow joined as her running mate. Fayetteville suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage supported the party, serving as one of the party’s two Electors-at-Large. First mocked by the public and press, the Equal Rights party campaign came to be grudgingly admired by both. In the middle of a particularly ugly mud-slinging campaign in which neither of the major party candidates raised issues of substance, “it is evident,” the Washington Evening Star editorialized, “that Mrs. Lockwood, if elected, will have a policy” which “will commend itself to all people of common sense.” That policy called for social justice -- “equal and exact justice for all citizens, regardless of sex, color or nationality” – combined with economic justice and an end to all business monopoly, “the tendency of which is to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.” Underlying every issue of justice, these social reformers asserted, rested the need for a nation of peace in a peaceful world. They proposed an international peace pact and mandatory, binding arbitration of all disputes between nations. A peace activist, Lockwood had authored the Sherman Resolution, a bill granting the President authority to mediate when war was imminent between two nations. Named later in her life to serve on the Nobel peace prize nominating committee, she opposed United States military intervention in Central and South America, advocating strengthened trade with the area instead.

An international peace agreement stood high on Lockwood's political agenda. War would no longer be an option if all the nations on earth agreed in advance to enter into negotiations when they had disputes among themselves. “We hope that with the experience this nation has had in the War of the Rebellion and in all the train of evils that has followed in its wake, we are educated out of war; and that reason and the pen will be the controlling influences of the future...We want great statesmen rather than great generals,” the Equal Rights party platform declared.

When she ran again in 1888 (after having garnered 4,149 popular votes and the entire electoral vote of Indiana in the 1884 election), Alfred H. Love of Philadelphia, President of the Universal Peace Union, was selected as Lockwood’s vice presidential running mate. That same year she brought a resolution to the International League of Press Clubs committing journalists to work in any international crisis for the peaceful solution of the difficulty. Her resolution passed in 1895.

As the American representative on the International Bureau of Peace -- founded in 1891 – and a delegate to many of the international peace congresses, Lockwood developed extensive international contacts. When French peace activists circulated a petition asking their government to respond to a U.S. Senate resolution urging the President to negotiate permanent arbitration treaties with France and England, Lockwood organized a meeting between the U.S. minister to France, the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and French officials to work out a treaty of mandatory arbitration for any conflict between the countries. The promising and favorable meeting, unfortunately, never resulted in the hoped-for treaty.

Despite setbacks, Lockwood believed that the strength internationally of the peace movement -- along with the personal evidence of war’s devastation -- meant that war would no longer be an option by the turn of the 20th century. “Reforms are slow,” she reflected after the 1884 election, “but they never go backwards. Their originators may die, but the reform will live to bless millions yet unborn.”

last updated April 2003