Free American Blood by Jason Manning Page B

young woman as beautiful and desirable as Sarah Bledsoe? Unfortunately, she was still fuming about the scene in the dining room.
    "Oh, he can be so insufferable at times!" she said.
    "Your father? Perhaps you should have forewarned him. I think your rather novel ideas came as a real shock to him."
    "I don't know why you are trying to defend him. Doesn't their talk about the war offend you?"
    "Well, I—"
    "Doesn't it bother you that they consider Mexico so backward, so benighted, that they use that very thing as an excuse for their aggression and greed and this ridiculous notion that it is their God-given duty to spread the light of American liberty and justice from Santa Fe to Campeche?"
    "I didn't hear—"
    "Doesn't it concern you that if men like President Polk have their way, all of Mexico will be absorbed into the United States?"
    Delgado stopped walking and turned to her with an amused smile curling the corners of his mouth.
    "At the risk of encouraging you to think me a ne'er-do-well," he said, "the outcome is of no concern to me, except as it affects my family."
    "I pity you," she replied. "You are a man with no opinions on matters of importance." She walked on without him.
    Delgado followed, searching carefully for the right words with which to redeem himself. In the near distance a carriage clattered down Laurel Avenue, the shod hooves of its horses clip-clopping on the paving stones. In the far distance a steamboat's bell rang out.
    "I am of the opinion," he said sincerely, "that you are the most beautiful and fascinating woman I have ever had the privilege to meet, Miss Bledsoe."
    "Surely, I am not the first woman to whom you have spoken those very words," she replied, but she could not completely disguise her pleasure at the compliment.
    "That is my opinion, and to me you are a matter of the utmost importance. Let's talk about you, Sarah, and not about me, or the war."
    "For one thing, I am proud of my country. I don'twant you to think otherwise. Which is why I feel so strong about slavery and the rights of women."
    "So you are an abolitionist to boot."
    "I am," she declared defiantly. "There is a link between the oppression of slaves and the oppression of women. Neither can be reconciled with the founding principles of this republic."
    "Common law is against you, I'm afraid. William Blackstone himself wrote that in marriage a husband and wife are as one person under the law. The very being of the woman is suspended
by
the law. She has no rights to marital property, which are held wholly in the husband's name, and without property she cannot participate in the body politic. Civic virtue rests in the independent citizen, and personal independence is linked to individual ownership of property. It has always been so. John Adams said that political rights are tied to property rights. Only property ownership allows the economic and moral independence necessary for virtuous citizens." Delgado shrugged. "So, if a woman owns no property . . . I am not saying I believe this to be true, or just. But those are the facts."
    "Oh, really? So women are excluded from the rights of citizenship—along with children, criminals, and the insane? Our government was instituted to derive its just powers from the consent of the governed. Am I not one of those governed? Then it is only right that I be permitted to consent."
    Delgado laughed, delighted. "You are a remarkable person, Sarah. Your poor father thought he was sending you to the seminary to learn to be a proper young lady."
    Sarah smiled. "The headmistress gave me acopy of Margaret Fuller's book,
Women in the Nineteenth Century
. She made me promise, if ever I should be asked, not to tell anyone where I had gotten it. I'm not sure why she chose me. But the book changed my life. It proves that women have their own identity and deserve social independence, the ability to grow as an intellect and, as a soul, to live freely."
    "That sounds positively transcendental."
    She took