Julia Evelina Smith and Abby Hadassah Smith

• Julia Evelina Smith
• Born: May 27, 1792
• Died: March 6, 1886

Suffragists, were the youngest of five daughters of Zephaniah Hollister Smith and Hannah Hadassah (Hickock) Smith. They were born and lived in Glastonbury, Connecticut, where their paternal ancestors had been settled for over a century; their mother’s family was from South Britain, Connecticut.

The Smiths were remarkable for their intelligence and independent ways. Zephaniah Smith resigned from the Congregationalist ministry and became a lawyer because he thought that preaching should not be a paid occupation. Hannah Smith had finely developed tastes and skills in the arts and humanities. Both were abolitionists, once inviting William Lloyd Garrison to hold a meeting on their lawn. Julia Smith, as a young woman, distributed the Charter Oak, an abolitionist newspaper.

For most of their lives Abby and Julia Smith lived quiet, rural lives, surviving their parents and three sisters. Then, in January 1874, they became involved in a dispute over taxation that raised them to national prominence. Five years earlier, they had attended a woman suffrage meeting in Hartford, Connecticut, where they were introduced to the issue of women’s rights. In 1873 Abbey Smith, after attending the first meeting of the Association for the Advancement of Women, in New York City, was so deeply impressed by the call for equal rights that she resolved to make an issue over the payment of local taxes. She and her sister agreed that they would not pay their property taxes until they had the right to vote on them.

In November 1873 they made this view known at a town meeting—traditionally an all-male arena. Five months later, when they tried to speak again and were refused, Abby Smith delivered her remarks from an oxcart outside the town hall. This speech made so great an impression that it was immediately published in The Hartford Courant. Its burden was that taxation without representation was immoral and illegal.

Over the next few years, the refusal to pay property taxes cost the sisters a valuable piece of land and several of their fine cows, which were seized and sold at auction. On a technicality, most of the property was recovered, although the final legal decision was not made until 1876. Meantime, they had attracted national attention for their stand on principle and soon received invitations to speak before suffrage meetings.

In January 1878 Julia Smith testified at a hearing of a Senate committee in Washington; in March Abby Smith addressed a committee of the Connecticut legislature. Julia, a biblical scholar, had a sharp sense of humor and an easy, informal speaking style. Abby was the more earnest and serious of the two, but she too had a keen wit that was often disguised in homely speech. At the 1876 Washington convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association, Abby Smith was asked to speak about her tax resistance and was queried especially about her cows. “There are but two of our cows left at present,” she replied, “Taxey and Votey. It is something a little peculiar that Taxey is very obtrusive; why I can scarcely step out of doors without being confronted by her, while Votey is quiet and shy, but she is growing more docile and domesticated every day, and it is my opinion that in a very short time, wherever you find Taxey there Votey will be also.”

Abby Smith died at home in 1878, at eighty-one. The next year her sister married Amos Andrew Parker of Fitzwilliam, New Hampshire, a retired judge. She spent the last years of her life in Hartford, where she died at ninety-three from the effects of a broken hip. She was buried in the family plot, with her sister, at Glastonbury.

The importance of the Smith sisters in American reform is well summed up in an obituary of Abby Smith that appeared in The Hartford Times. After noting that the sisters had neither sought nor avoided their “notoriety,” the writer observed that they had helped call public attention to the “anomalous condition of women under the law.” “It would be very hard,” the obituary continued, “for any man to argue successfully that he possessed any stronger natural claim to the suffrage than was possessed by these shrewd, energetic old ladies.”

The unpublished papers of the Smiths are in the Historical Society of Glastonbury; the Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford; and the Connecticut State Library, Hartford. Letters, documents, and newspaper accounts of the tax case were collected by Julia Smith in Abbey Smith and Her Cows, with a Report of the Law Case Decided contrary to Law (1877). Julia Smith also published her own translation of the Bible, from Greek, Latin, and Hebrew versions, in 1876. A good sketch of the Smiths is provided in in Notable American Women (1971). Additional material may be found in E. C. Stanton et al., eds., History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 3 (1886). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935). Obituaries appeared in the Woman’s Journal, August 3, 1878, and March 13, 1886; The Hartford Times, March 11, 1886; and The New York Times, July 25, 1878.