How ‘Agitators’ for Women’s Suffrage Shaped Colorado’s 1876 Constitution

Photo: The third floor of the First National Bank building on 15th Street served as the chambers of Colorado’s 1876 constitutional convention. (Courtesy of Denver Public Library Special Collections, X-23704)

This story by Chase Woodruff appeared on Colorado Newsline on January 9, 2026.

Though Colorado was on the verge of statehood in early 1876, it wouldn’t have a Capitol building for almost another 20 years. It fell to John Taffe, the territorial secretary, to rent two large rooms at a Lawrence Street building owned by the Odd Fellows fraternal order, a space praised by the Denver Times as “the best ever obtained for the Legislature (and) not more than ordinarily expensive.”

There was relatively little business for the Legislature, which consisted of a 13-seat upper chamber called the Council and a 26-seat House of Representatives, to transact during its 40-day session.

The territorial government collected about $90,000 a year in tax revenue, which was doled out to institutions like the penitentiary in Cañon City, the Colorado School for the Deaf and the Blind, and two new public colleges established in 1874, the Colorado School of Mines and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Among the session’s more controversial proposals was a bill to appropriate funds for a delegation to be sent to the Centennial exhibition in Philadelphia later that year.

“If we had thirty or forty millions in our treasury we could as well splurge out with $20,000 as not. It would then be very well to send a committee of five or six who want to visit their friends in the east, and the Centennial, and have a good time at the expense of the territory,” a Denver correspondent wrote to the Pueblo Chieftain. “We are not yet financially situated to indulge in any very extravagant movements in a Centennial direction, or in any other direction.”

But in January 1876 there were, as the Chieftain put it, “three houses” in session in Denver, and the third and most important body met a few blocks away, at the corner of 15th and Blake streets, on the third floor of the First National Bank building. The chambers of Colorado’s constitutional convention were adorned for the occasion with American flags, landscapes of both Pikes Peak and Long’s Peak, and portraits of Washington, Lincoln, President Ulysses S. Grant and frontiersman Kit Carson.

In December the convention had organized itself into committees and hired its officers, including secretaries and sergeants-at-arms. The selection of Clay Forbes, a Black man, as the convention’s fireman, tasked with keeping the hall warm, was characterized by The Rocky Mountain News as “an earnest of a good bill of rights in the new constitution.” David F. Wilkins of Las Animas County was appointed as the convention’s Spanish interpreter, continuing a practice that had begun in the territorial assembly.

On January 8, Governor John Routt, the members of the three houses and other territorial leaders held a grand joint banquet at Denver’s Guard Hall, where nearly 300 guests paid three dollars apiece to enjoy “chef-d’oeuvres of French cookery” prepared by Jacques Charpiot, proprietor of the Cafe Denver.

“More elaborate preparation for satisfying the inner needs of man was probably never seen on such an extensive scale in the territory,” reported the News, “and the corps of waiters, who were to be the Ganymedes of the occasion, formed quite a small army.”

An anonymous correspondent in the Chieftain offered a somewhat less poetic account of banquet-goers who “shoveled good grub into the yawning caverns beneath their noses with their knives, thus endangering their heads.”

“Stomachs accustomed to bacon and beans and chili colorado yearned to be filled with the good things prepared by the Denver cooks,” said the Chieftain, “and some of those inured to the attacks of ten cent whisky gaped to receive the generous Jersey champagne which it was hoped would be forthcoming.”

Debate over women’s suffrage
County elections for delegates to the constitutional convention, held in October 1875, had given Republicans a comfortable 25-14 majority over Democrats. Territorial voters would get the final say on the constitution in a referendum later in 1876, but first the convention’s 39 delegates would hash out their disagreements — sometimes, but not always, along party lines — on matters including public education, taxation of church property, the means of selecting the state judiciary and much more.

But the issue that would attract more attention than any other was whether the 38th state’s constitution would be the first to guarantee women the right to vote. The women’s suffrage movement had made a crucial breakthrough in the Wyoming Territory in 1869, when the Legislature of Colorado’s northern neighbor had granted women the franchise and the right to hold public office.

With the constitutional assembly underway, a women’s suffrage convention was held at Denver’s Unity Church, at 17th and California streets, on Jan. 10 and 11, 1876. The timing was no accident: National suffrage groups were determined to seize the opportunity presented by the framing of a new state’s constitution, and the convention was organized by leading suffragists like Margaret W. Campbell of Massachusetts, who had arrived in Denver in December and would remain in Colorado for much of the year to advocate for the cause.

Letters addressed to Campbell in Denver from fellow suffragist Lucy Stone, editor of The Woman’s Journal, are preserved in the Library of Congress. Writing to Campbell ahead of the convention, Stone invoked the commemoration of the nation’s Centennial as she noted the framers of Colorado’s constitution had “the rare opportunity to achieve by peaceful means what our revolutionary fathers fought seven years to obtain.”

“If it was tyranny to tax the colonists a century ago and deny them representation, it is tyranny to do the same to women now,” Stone wrote. “No part of the constitution of Colorado in this Centennial year can be more appropriate, or have more historic credit a hundred years hence, than that part which shall secure for women the right to a voice in making the laws they will be required to obey.”

Some prominent Coloradans still treated such ideas with mocking contempt. A Chieftain correspondent, identified only as “H.,” denounced the “farcical drama” staged by the “disciples of Beecher,” a reference to the prominent family of abolitionists and suffragists.

“Let the devil hide his diminished head, the whole world is running to isms — dogmatism, atheism, pantheism, freeloveism, cannibalism, womansuffrageism, mormonism, spiritualism and a hundred other isms equally heathenish and fallacious,” they wrote.

In many circles, however, such attitudes were going out of fashion. It was more common for the influential men who published Colorado’s territorial newspapers, including William Byers of The Rocky Mountain News, to profess sympathy with the women’s suffrage movement while arguing that such “advanced ideas” were ahead of their time. Echoing arguments made in opposition to civil rights movements throughout American history, Byers urged the suffragists to “bide their time,” casting doubt on the electoral viability of a state constitution that granted women the vote.

“Haste must be made slowly in this matter. It will not do to cause the constitution to carry too heavy a load,” the News argued on January 8. “If weighed down with provisions, the justice and propriety of which are not recognized by the community as a class, but merely by a particular portion of perhaps partial revolutionary tendencies, the constitution will never become a fact.”

In another familiar complaint, an editorial in the Chieftain blamed Campbell and other “chronic agitators imported from the states” for stirring up trouble in the territory.

“The arguments urged in support of the measure may be true to a certain degree, and would doubtless be productive of much good if put in actual practice,” the Chieftain wrote. “But at the same time the impression seems to prevail, that female suffrage can wait a few years, or at least until other and more important questions are determined.”

The moderates got their wish. Colorado’s 1876 constitution granted women a limited right to vote in school board elections, but deferred the broader question of suffrage to the new state’s Legislature and the results of a future voter referendum. After several unsuccessful attempts, Colorado finally became the second state in the nation to adopt women’s suffrage in 1893.