Esther Hobart Morris and Wyoming's First-in-the-Nation Women's Suffrage

Wyoming was the first U.S. territory or state to grant women full voting rights. The Wyoming Territorial Legislature passed the suffrage bill on December 6, 1869; Territorial Governor John A. Campbell signed it on December 10, 1869. Wyoming women voted in the September 1870 territorial elections, fifty years before the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The state has been known as the “Equality State” since.

The story of how this happened is more complicated and more interesting than most popular accounts suggest. The traditional account credits Esther Hobart Morris, a 55-year-old woman living in the mining camp of South Pass City, with personally persuading a Republican legislator to introduce the bill at a tea party in her home. The truth is messier and partially contested. What is not contested: Wyoming did it first, Morris became the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States, and the precedent set in 1869 helped drive the broader American suffrage movement for the next half-century.

This is the working biography of Esther Hobart Morris, the substantive history of Wyoming’s 1869 suffrage act, and the broader context of Wyoming women in territorial and state political life.

Esther Hobart McQuigg Slack Morris (1814-1902)

Born Esther Hobart McQuigg in Tioga County, New York, on August 8, 1814. Her parents were of moderate means; she received a basic education common to upstate New York girls of the period (reading, writing, basic arithmetic, household arts). She was orphaned by age 11 and was apprenticed to a millinery (hat-making) trade, which she practiced through her teens and twenties.

In 1841, age 27, she married Artemus Slack, a civil engineer working on the New York railroads. They had one son, Edward Archibald Slack, born 1845. Artemus died in 1843 of unspecified illness, leaving Esther a widow at 29 with substantial business affairs to settle (including land in Illinois that became the substance of a long legal struggle).

In 1845 Esther moved to Peru, Illinois, where she continued the millinery business and managed the Slack land affairs. In 1850 she married John Morris, an Englishman by birth who ran a general store in Peru. They had twin sons born in 1851, James and Robert.

In 1869 the Morris family moved to South Pass City, Wyoming Territory, where John had purchased a saloon. Esther was 55 years old. The family arrived in a mining camp of approximately 2,000 residents at 7,800 feet altitude on the Continental Divide, in country still under active dispute with Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho hunting parties.

South Pass City and the 1869 suffrage act

South Pass City was the largest community in what was then southwestern Wyoming Territory, a gold rush boomtown that had grown from nothing in 1867 to over 2,000 residents by 1869. The town hosted a saloon-and-mining culture typical of late-1860s frontier camps, plus an unusually well-organized Methodist church community and a small but active group of suffragists, including Morris.

The Wyoming Territorial Legislature met for its first session in October 1869 in Cheyenne. Among the legislators was William H. Bright, a Democrat from South Pass City who served as president of the Council (the upper house). Bright, age 39, had a personal commitment to women’s suffrage that historians have traced to several sources: his wife Julia Bright’s strong suffragist views, his observation of competent women managing affairs in the South Pass mining community, and his exposure to the broader 1860s suffrage movement (Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had been actively organizing women’s suffrage advocacy since 1848 and were nationally prominent by 1869).

Bright introduced the suffrage bill in the Council on November 27, 1869. The bill granted women the right to vote in territorial elections, the right to hold office, and the right to serve on juries. It passed the Council on a 6-2 vote, the House on a 7-4 vote, and was signed into law by Governor Campbell (a Republican) on December 10, 1869.

The political mechanics: Bright was a Democrat; the legislature was substantially Democratic; the governor was a Republican. Multiple legislators reportedly supported the bill expecting Governor Campbell would veto it, which would create useful Democratic political ammunition. Campbell did not veto; he signed. The bill became law.

Whether Morris personally persuaded Bright at a tea party in her home in autumn 1869 is the contested question. The traditional account (originating in a 1920 article by H.G. Nickerson, then promoted aggressively in the 1930s as part of the Wyoming centennial promotion of Morris) holds that Morris hosted Bright and 30-40 other South Pass residents at a political tea on September 2, 1869, where she personally requested Bright commit to introducing a suffrage bill if elected.

The modern scholarly consensus (T.A. Larson’s History of Wyoming, 1978; Michael Massie’s 1990 Annals of Wyoming article) is that the tea-party story has limited contemporary documentary support and was likely largely constructed in the 20th century to give Wyoming suffrage a clean origin myth. Bright’s wife Julia Bright was the more demonstrable influence on his commitment, and Bright himself never publicly credited Morris with the bill’s introduction during his lifetime.

What is not contested: Morris was a committed suffragist, was active in the South Pass City community, became the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States in 1870, and is appropriately honored as a foundational figure of Wyoming and American women’s suffrage regardless of the specific causation question for the 1869 bill.

The first woman judge (1870-1871)

In February 1870, the Sweetwater County justice of the peace at South Pass City resigned. The county commissioners appointed Esther Hobart Morris to fill the vacancy. She was sworn in on February 14, 1870.

This made Morris the first woman to hold judicial office in the United States.

She served from February 1870 through November 1871, a period of approximately 21 months. During her tenure she heard 26 cases including civil disputes, debt collection, public-order matters, and misdemeanor criminal cases. None of her decisions were overturned on appeal.

A widely-reported episode of her tenure: at her swearing-in, the outgoing male justice of the peace refused to turn over the docket book to a woman and resigned in protest of the appointment. Morris reportedly continued the docket without missing a day. The story is well-attested in local newspaper accounts of the period and is genuine.

In November 1871 she did not stand for re-appointment. She moved with her husband to Albany County in 1873 and remained politically active for the rest of her life, including hosting suffragist organizing meetings and corresponding with national suffrage leaders including Susan B. Anthony.

The 1890 statehood debate

When Wyoming applied for statehood in 1889, the U.S. Congress raised objections to Wyoming’s constitution because of the women’s suffrage provision (which had been included in the proposed state constitution as a continuation of the territorial law). Congressional opponents argued that admitting Wyoming with women’s suffrage would create constitutional precedent that would force national change.

The Wyoming Territorial Legislature responded with an unanimous resolution that has become a foundational document of Wyoming political identity:

“We may stay out of the Union for one hundred years, but we will come in with our women.”

The U.S. Congress voted to admit Wyoming with the suffrage provision intact. Wyoming became the 44th state on July 10, 1890, the first state in the Union with full women’s suffrage.

The 19th Amendment, granting women the vote nationally, was not ratified until August 18, 1920, fifty years and eight months after Wyoming’s territorial law.

Esther Morris’s later life and death

Morris remained politically and socially active in Wyoming through the 1880s and 1890s. She corresponded with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; she was a Wyoming delegate to the National Suffrage Association convention in Washington in 1895; she lived to see Wyoming admitted to the Union with women’s suffrage in place.

She died at her son Edward’s home in Cheyenne on April 2, 1902, at age 87. She is buried in Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne.

In 1955, the Wyoming Legislature voted to send Morris’s statue to the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall as one of Wyoming’s two contributions (the other is Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone). The statue, by sculptor Avard Fairbanks, was installed in 1960. A second copy stands at the Wyoming State Capitol in Cheyenne.

Nellie Tayloe Ross: first woman governor (1925-1927)

Wyoming’s pioneering position on women in politics extended into the 20th century with Nellie Tayloe Ross. Ross was born in Missouri in 1876, married William Bradford Ross in 1902, and moved to Cheyenne when William entered Wyoming politics. William was elected governor of Wyoming in 1922 as a Democrat in a Republican-dominated state.

William Bradford Ross died in office on October 2, 1924, of complications from an emergency appendix surgery. Wyoming Democratic Party leadership immediately approached Nellie about standing as the Democratic candidate for the November 4, 1924 special election to fill the unexpired term. She accepted.

She won the November 4, 1924 election, becoming the first woman elected governor of any U.S. state. (Miriam “Ma” Ferguson of Texas was elected governor on the same day, but Wyoming swore Ross in fifteen days before Texas swore Ferguson, making Ross the first to actually serve.)

Ross served from January 5, 1925 through January 3, 1927. She lost her bid for re-election in November 1926 in a Republican wave year. She continued in Democratic politics nationally and was appointed Director of the United States Mint by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1933, serving in that office for 20 years (1933-1953), the longest tenure in the office’s history.

Ross died in Washington in 1977 at age 101. She is buried at Lakeview Cemetery in Cheyenne, near Esther Morris.

Where to visit

South Pass City State Historic Site, in central Wyoming about 35 miles south of Lander. The original townsite preserved with multiple original buildings including the Sweetwater County courthouse (where Morris held court in 1870-71), the saloons, the assay office, and the homes. The site is large, walkable, and one of the better-preserved frontier mining-camp sites in the Mountain West. Open seasonally. Allow a half-day.

Esther Morris statue and gravesite, Cheyenne. The statue is on the Wyoming State Capitol grounds. The grave is at Lakeview Cemetery, also in Cheyenne.

The Wyoming State Museum, Cheyenne. Permanent women’s suffrage exhibition.

South Pass City sits at 7,800 feet on the Continental Divide — sun is intense, wind is constant, and the site is large enough to walk for two hours. An insulated water bottle and a wool layer for the inevitable afternoon chill are the practical minimum for a long visit.

Why Wyoming first

The traditional explanation for Wyoming’s 1869 suffrage act has emphasized:

• The political opportunism described above (Democrats expecting a Republican veto).
• The frontier-egalitarian culture of the territory (women in the West routinely managed property, ran businesses, and worked alongside men in ways uncommon in the East).
• A small population (Wyoming Territory had under 9,000 non-Indigenous residents in 1869), which made political experimentation lower-stakes.
• The desire for population growth (some Wyoming legislators reportedly believed suffrage would attract female migration to the territory).

The fuller story includes all of these plus the genuine commitment of individual legislators (especially William Bright), the active suffragist organizing in places like South Pass City, the broader 1860s national suffrage movement that had made the issue visible, and the willingness of Governor Campbell to sign rather than veto.

It also includes a fact that the standard narrative often skips: Wyoming Territory in 1869 had approximately 1,000 adult women and 8,000 adult men. Granting women the vote in this demographic context did not threaten the political status quo. The same legislators almost certainly would have voted differently if women had constituted half the electorate.

The Wyoming precedent nonetheless mattered. It demonstrated that women’s suffrage was workable. It gave the national movement a flag to rally around. It established a 50-year proof of concept that the 19th Amendment ultimately built on.

For a fuller picture of late-19th-century Wyoming political life, see also our pieces on Buffalo Bill, Tom Horn, and the Johnson County War.

Related reading on this site

• Cheyenne, Wyoming: the state capital and the Daddy of ‘Em All
• The Johnson County War: how Wyoming’s cattle barons lost the range
• Buffalo Bill Cody: the man who sold the West to the world
• Tom Horn: stock detective, hanged in Cheyenne 1903
• Lander, Wyoming: NOLS, Sinks Canyon, and the East Slope of the Wind Rivers
• Chief Washakie: the Eastern Shoshone leader who shaped Wyoming
• 9 Wyoming ghost towns worth the drive

Further reading

• T.A. Larson, History of Wyoming (University of Nebraska Press, 2nd edition 1978). The standard scholarly history. Treatment of suffrage is in Chapters 6 and 8.
• Michael A. Massie, “Reform Is Where You Find It: The Roots of Woman Suffrage in Wyoming,” Annals of Wyoming, Volume 62 (Spring 1990).
• Jennifer Helton, Wyoming Women’s Suffrage 1869-1925 (forthcoming University of Nebraska Press monograph).
• Library of Congress, Women of Protest digital collection.
• Wyoming State Archives, women’s suffrage collection.