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, Council Bill 70, in early December 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 the candidates for the legislature to back the bill at a tea party in her home. There is no record that the party happened. 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. She was orphaned at 11 and apprenticed to a seamstress, then became a successful milliner (hat-maker) and businesswoman. As a young woman she was active in the anti-slavery movement.

In 1841, age 27, she married Artemus Slack, a civil engineer. Their son, Edward Archibald (“Archy”) Slack, was born a year later. Within a few years Artemus was dead, leaving Esther to settle his estate, which included land in Illinois, at a time when women were barred from owning or inheriting property.

She moved to Peru, Illinois, to settle that estate. In 1850 she married John Morris, a local merchant, and had twin sons, Robert and Edward.

In 1869 the Morris family moved to South Pass City, Wyoming Territory, where John opened a saloon. Esther was 55 years old. South Pass City was a gold-rush camp laid out in 1867, near the Continental Divide at about 7,800 feet, and it peaked around 1870.

South Pass City and the 1869 suffrage act

South Pass City was a gold-rush boomtown in the Sweetwater Mining District, with the saloon-and-mining culture typical of late-1860s frontier camps. In 1870 it was still a camp made up mostly of men who spent most of their social time in saloons.

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). Sweetwater County had seven candidates for its three Council seats; Bright finished third with 747 votes and won one of them.

Bright introduced the suffrage bill in the Council. It gave women the right to vote and to hold office. It passed the Council 6-2 and the House 7-4, and Governor Campbell (a Republican) signed it into law on December 10, 1869.

The political mechanics: Bright was a Democrat; every member of both houses was a Democrat; 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 1869 is the contested question. The story first appeared about 1919, seventeen years after her death, when the South Pass pioneer and Fremont County legislator Herman G. Nickerson published his account in the Lander-based Wyoming State Journal. In it Morris hosted “about forty ladies and gentlemen” and extracted promises from the council candidates, Bright and Nickerson himself, to introduce a suffrage bill. The University of Wyoming historian Grace Raymond Hebard spread the story widely, and in 1920 the two put up a marker at South Pass City calling Morris the “author of female suffrage in Wyoming.”

The historians who have checked it (T.A. Larson in his History of Wyoming; Rick Ewig in the Annals of Wyoming in 2006) find no contemporary record of the tea party or of any meeting between Morris and Bright before the election. Nickerson’s account even gets the race wrong: he presents it as a two-man contest for one seat, when seven candidates ran for three. Morris herself gave the credit away. In an 1871 letter read to a national suffrage convention she wrote that “to William H. Bright belongs the honor of presenting the woman suffrage bill.”

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 early 1870 the justice of the peace at South Pass City resigned, and Esther Hobart Morris was appointed to fill the vacancy, less than a year after she arrived in town.

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

She served eight and a half months and heard nearly thirty cases. Wyoming’s territorial secretary, Edwin M. Lee, later wrote that her court sessions were “characterized by a degree of gravity and decorum rarely exhibited in the judicature of border precincts.” Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper covered her first day in April 1870, describing her calico gown and green ribbons before calling her the “terror of all rogues.”

In January 1871 she was invited to a national woman suffrage convention in Washington. She did not go, but sent a letter to Isabella Beecher Hooker that was read to the convention, calling her appointment “a test of a woman’s ability to hold public office.”

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.

Wyoming’s answer, as the story is told, was a telegram to Washington:

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

The telegram itself has never come to light, and both its wording and its sender vary from one account to the next. The sentiment stuck regardless, and it has become part of Wyoming’s political identity.

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

By 1890 Morris was well known in Wyoming as an advocate of woman suffrage. At the statehood celebrations that July she presented the flag of the new state to Governor Francis Warren on behalf of the women of Wyoming. In 1895, at 80, she was elected a delegate to the national suffrage convention in Cleveland.

She died in Cheyenne in April 1902, at 87, and is buried in Lakeview Cemetery there.

In 1953 Wyoming’s U.S. senator, Lester Hunt, proposed a statue of Morris for the National Statuary Hall Collection; it became one of Wyoming’s two (the other is Chief Washakie of the Eastern Shoshone). The statue, by sculptor Avard Fairbanks, was installed in 1960. A duplicate was dedicated in front of the Wyoming State Capitol in Cheyenne in 1963, and since the 2019 renovation it has stood inside, in the Capitol Extension.

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 by fewer than 1,400 votes. 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, the same cemetery as Esther Morris. A bronze statue of Ross stands on Cheyenne’s Capitol Avenue beside the Hathaway Building, a short walk from the Capitol where she served, one of dozens of bronze sculptures added to the corridor in recent years.

Where to visit

South Pass City State Historic Site, in central Wyoming about 35 miles south of Lander. The restored townsite has family cabins, a hotel and restaurant, the jail, and other historic buildings. The grounds are open sunrise to sunset, year-round, weather permitting; staffed buildings keep a summer season. Allow a half-day.

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

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 (the 1870 census counted 9,118 people in the whole territory), 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 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: women were a small minority of the territory. The 1870 census counted 1,347 native-born women, 741 of them under 21, and WyoHistory estimates that only about 600 women were eligible to vote that year. Granting them the vote did not threaten the political status quo, and the same legislators may well have voted differently if women had been 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.
• Rick Ewig, “Did She Do That? Examining Esther Morris’ Role in the Passage of the Suffrage Act,” Annals of Wyoming 78, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 26-34.
• Library of Congress, Women of Protest digital collection.
• Wyoming State Archives, women’s suffrage collection.