 CHAPTER VII. With a spirit of confidence inspired by her victory in New York State, Susan looked forward to the Tenth National Women's Rights Convention in New York City in May 1860. At this convention, she reported progress everywhere. $4,000 from the Jackson and Hovey funds had been spent in the successful New York campaign, and similar work was scheduled for Ohio. In Kansas, women had won from the Constitutional Convention Equal Rights and Privileges in State-controlled schools and in the management of the public schools, including the right to vote for members of school boards. Mothers had been granted equal rights with fathers in the control and custody of their children, and married women had been given property rights. In Indiana, Maine, Missouri, and Ohio, married women could now control their own earnings. Each year, we hail with pleasure, she continued, new accessions to our faith. Brave men and true from the higher walks of literature and art, from the bar, the bench, the pulpit, and legislative halls, are now ready to help women wherever she claims to stand. She was thinking of the aid given her by Andrew J. Colvin and Anson Bigum of the New York Legislature, of the young journalist George William Curtis, just recently speaking for women, of Samuel Longfellow at his first women's rights convention, and of the popular Henry Ward Beecher, who, just a few months before, had delivered his great women's rights speech, thereby identifying himself irrevocably with the cause. She announced with great satisfaction the news, which the papers had carried a few days before, that Matthew Vassar of Poughkeepsie had set aside $400,000 to found a college for women equal and all respects to Harvard and Yale. Progress and good feeling were in the air, and the speakers were not heckled as in past years by the rowdies who had made it a practice to follow abolitionists into women's rights meetings to bait them. Into this atmosphere of goodwill and rejoicing, Susan and Elizabeth Stanton now injected a more serious note, bringing before the convention the controversial question of marriage and divorce, which heretofore had been handled with kid gloves at all women's rights meetings, but which they sincerely believed demanded solution. Divorce had been much in the news, because several leading families in America and in England were involved in lawsuits complicated by stringent divorce laws, invariably the wife bore the burden of censure and hardship. For no matter how unprincipled her husband might be, he was entitled to her children and her earnings under the property laws at most states. In New York, efforts were now being made to gain support for a liberal divorce bill, patterned after the Indiana law, and a variety of proposals were before the legislature, making drunkenness, insanity, desertion, and cruel and abusive treatment grounds for divorce. Horace Greeley in his Tribune had been vigorously opposing a more liberal law for New York, while Robert Dale Owen of Indiana wrote in its defense, everywhere people were reading the Greeley Owen debates in the Tribune. Through his widely circulated paper, Horace Greeley had in a sense become an oracle for the people who felt he was safe and good, while Robert Dale Owen, because of his youthful association with the new harmony community and Francis Wright, was branded with radicalism, which even his valuable service in the Indiana legislature and his two terms in Congress could not blot out. Susan and Mrs. Stanton had no patience with Horace Greeley's smug, old-fashioned opinions on marriage and divorce. In fact, these Greeley Owen debates in the Tribune were the direct cause of their decision to bring this subject before the convention, where they hoped for support from their liberal friends. They counted especially on Lucy Stone, who seemed to give her approval when she wrote, I am glad you will speak on the divorce question, provided you yourself are clear on the subject. It is a great grave topic that one shudders to grapple, but its hour is coming. God touch your lips if you speak on it. Neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton shuddered to grapple with any subject which they believed needed attention. In fact, the discussion of marriage and divorce in women's rights conventions had been on their minds for some time. Three years before, Susan had written Lucy, I have thought with you, until of late, that the social question must be kept separate from women's rights, but we have always claimed that our movement was human rights, not women's especially. It seems to me we have played on the surface of things quite long enough. Getting the right to hold property, to vote, to wear what dress we please, etc., are all to the good, but social freedom after all lies at the bottom of all. And unless woman gets that, she must continue the slave of man in all other things. Consternation spread through the genial ranks of the convention, as Mrs. Stanton now offered resolutions calling for more liberal divorce laws. Quick to sense the temper of an audience, Susan felt its resistance to being jolted out of the pleasant contemplation of past successes to the unpleasant recognition that there were still difficult, ugly problems ahead. She was conscious at once of a stir of astonishment and disapproval when Mrs. Stanton, in her clear, compelling voice read, resolved that an unfortunate or ill assorted marriage is ever a calamity, but not ever, perhaps never a crime. And when society or government, by its laws or customs, compels its continuance, always to the grief of one of the parties, and the actual loss and damage of both, it usurps an authority never delegated to man, nor exercised by God himself. Listening to Mrs. Stanton's speech in defense of her ten bold resolutions on marriage and divorce, Susan felt that her brave colleague was speaking for women everywhere, for wives of the present and the future. As the hearty applause rang out, she concluded that even the disapproving admired her courage. But before the applause ceased, she saw Antoinette Blackwell on her feet, waiting to be heard. She knew that Antoinette, like Horace Greeley, preferred to think of all marriages as made in heaven, and true to form Antoinette contended that the marriage relation must be lifelong, and as permanent and indissoluble as the relation of parent and child. At once Ernestine Rose came to the rescue in support of Mrs. Stanton. Then Wendell Phillips showed his displeasure by moving that Mrs. Stanton's resolutions be laid on the table and expunged from the record, because they had no more to do with this convention than slavery in Kansas or Temperance. This convention, he asserted, as I understand it, assembles to discuss the laws that rest unequally upon men and women, not those that rest equally on men and women. Aghast at this statement, Susan was totally unprepared to have his view supported by that other champion of liberty, William Lloyd Garrison, who, however, did not favor expunging the resolutions from the record. It was incomprehensible to Susan that neither Garrison nor Phillips recognized women's subservient status in marriage under prevailing laws and traditions, and she now stated her own views with firmness. As to the point that this question does not belong to this platform? From that, I totally dissent. Marriage has ever been a one-sided matter, resting most unequally upon the sexes. By it, man gains all, woman loses all. Tyrant law and lust reign supreme with him, meek submission and ready obedience alone befit her. Warming to the subject she continued, by law, public sentiment and religion from the time of Moses down to the present day. Woman has never been thought of other than as a piece of property, to be disposed of at the will and pleasure of man. And this very hour, by our statute books, by our so-called enlightened Christian civilization, she has no voice in saying what shall be the basis of the relation. She must accept marriage as man proffers it, or not at all. When finally the vote was taken, Mrs. Stanton's resolutions were laid on the table, but not expunged from the record, and the convention adjourned with much to talk about and think about for some time to come. The newspapers, of course, could not overlook such a piece of news as this heated argument on divorce in a woman's rights convention, and fanned the flames pro and con, most of them holding up Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton as dangerous examples of freedom for women. The reverend A. D. Mayo, Unitarian clergyman of Albany, heretofore Susan's loyal champion, now made a point of reproving her. You are not married, he declared with withering scorn. You have no business to be discussing marriage. To this, she retorted. Well, Mr. Mayo, you are not a slave. Suppose you quit lecturing on slavery. Both Susan and Mrs. Stanton, amazed at the opposition and the disapproval they had aroused, were grateful for Samuel Longfellow's comforting words of commendation and for the letters of approval which came from women from all parts of the state. Most satisfying of all was this reassurance from Lucretia Mott, whose judgment they had so highly valued. I was rejoiced to have such a defense of the resolutions as yours. I have the fullest confidence in the united judgment of Elizabeth Stanton and Susan Anthony, and I am glad they are so vigorous in the work. Hardest to bear was the disapproval of Wendell Phillips, whom they both admired so much. Difficult to understand and most disappointing was Lucy Stone's failure to attend the convention or come to their defense. Thinking over this first unfortunate difference of opinion among the faithful crusaders for freedom, to whom she had always felt so close in spirit, Susan was sadly disillusioned. But she had no regrets that the matter had been brought up, and she defied her critics by speaking before a committee of the New York legislature in support of a liberal divorce bill. Nor was she surprised when a group of Boston women, headed by Caroline H. Dahl, called a convention which they hoped would counteract this radical outbreak in the women's rights movement by keeping to the safe subjects of education, vocation, and civil position. Having learned by this time through the hard school of experience that the bona fide reformer could not play safe and go forward, Susan thoughtfully commented, cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation and publicly and privately in season and out avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates and bear the consequences. The repercussions of the divorce debates were soon drowned out by the noise and excitement of the presidential campaign of 1860. With four candidates in the field, Breckinridge, Bell, Douglas, and Lincoln, each offering his party's solution for the nation's critical problems, there was much to think about and discuss, and Susan found women's rights pushed into the background. At the same time antagonism toward abolitionists was steadily mounting for they were being blamed for the tensions between the North and the South. Dedicated to the immediate and unconditional emancipation of slavery, Susan saw no hope in the promises of any political party. Even the Republicans' opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories, which had won over many abolitionists, including Henry and Elizabeth Stanton, seemed to her a mild and ineffectual answer to the burning questions of the hour. For her to further the election of Abraham Lincoln was unthinkable, since he favoured the enforcement of the fugitive slave law and had stated he was not in favour of Negro citizenship. At heart she was a non-voting Garrisonian abolitionist and would not support a political party which in any way sanctioned slavery. Had she been eligible as a voter, she undoubtedly would have refused to cast her ballot until a righteous anti-slavery government had been established. As she expressed it in a letter to Mrs. Stanton, she could not, if she were a man, vote for the least of two evils, one of which the nation must surely have in the presidential chair. She saw no possibility at this time of wiping out slavery by means of political abolition, because in spite of the fact that slavery had for years been one of the most pressing issues before the American people, no great political party had yet endorsed abolition, nor had a single prominent practical statesman advocated immediate unconditional emancipation. As the Liberty Party experiment had proved, an abolitionist running for office on an anti-slavery platform was doomed to defeat. Therefore the gesture made in this critical campaign by a small group of abolitionists and nominating Garrett Smith for president appeared utterly futile to Susan. Abolitionists, she believed, followed the only course consistent with their principles when they eschewed politics, abstained from voting, and devoted their energies with the fervor of evangelists to a militant educational campaign. So, whenever she could, she continued to hold anti-slavery meetings. Crowded house, a poor Byron, her diary records, I tried to say a few words at opening, but soon curled up like a sensitive plant. It is a terrible martyrdom for me to speak. Yet so great was the need to enlighten people on the evils of slavery that she endured this martyrdom, stepping into the breach when no other speaker was available. Taking as her subject, what is American slavery, she declared, it is the legalized, systematic robbery of the bodies and souls of nearly four millions of men, women, and children. It is the legalized traffic in God's image. She asked for personal liberty laws to protect the human rights of fugitive slaves, adding that the dread Scott decision had been possible only because it reflected the spirit and purpose of the American people in the North as well as the South. She heaped blame on the North for restricting the Negro's educational and economic opportunities, for barring him from libraries, lectures, and theaters, and from hotels and seats on trains and buses. Let the North, she urged, prove to the South by her acts that she fully recognizes the humanity of the black man, that she respects his rights in all her educational, industrial, social, and political associations. This was asking far more than the North was ready to give, but to Susan it was justice which she must demand. No wonder free Negroes in the North honored and loved her, and expressed their gratitude whenever they could. A fine-looking colored man on the train presented me with a bouquet, she wrote in her diary. Can't tell whether he knew me or only felt my sympathy. The threats of secession from the southern states, which followed Lincoln's election, brought little anxiety to Susan or her fellow abolitionists, for they had long preached no union with slaveholders, believing the dissolution of the union would prevent further expansion of slavery in the new Western territories, and not only lessen the damaging influence of slavery on Northern institutions, but relieve the North of complicity in maintaining slavery. Garrison, in his liberator, had already asked, will the South be so obliging as to secede from the union? When, in December 1860, South Carolina seceded, Horace Greeley, who only a few months before had called the disunion abolitionists a little coterie of common scolds, now wrote in the Tribune, if the cotton state shall decide that they can do better out of the union than in it, we insist in letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless. What abolitionists feared far more than secession was that to save the union some compromise would be made which would fasten slavery on the nation. Susan agreed with Garrison when he declared in the liberator, all union-saving efforts are simply idiotic. At last the covenant with death is annulled, the agreement with hell broken, at least by the action of South Carolina, an ear long by all the slave-holding states, for their doom is won. Compromise, however, was in the air. The people were appalled and confused by the breaking up of the union and the possibility of civil war, and the government fumbled. Powerful Republicans, among them Thurlow Weed, speaking for eastern financial interests, favored the Crittenden Compromise which would re-establish the Mason-Dixon line, protect slavery in the states where it was now legal, sanction the domestic slave trade, guarantee payment by the United States for escaped slaves, and forbid Congress to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia without the consent of Virginia and Maryland. Even Seward suggested a constitutional amendment guaranteeing non-interference with slavery in the slave states for all time. In such an atmosphere as this, Susan Gloried and Wendell Phillips impetuous declarations against compromise. While the whole country marked time waiting for the inauguration of President Lincoln, abolitionists sent out their speakers, Susan heading a group in western New York which included Samuel J. May, Stephen S. Foster, and Elizabeth Katie Stanton. All are united, she wrote William Lloyd Garrison, that good faith and honor demand us to go forward and leave the responsibility of free speech or its suppression with the people of the places we visit. Then showing that she well understood the temper of the times, she added, I trust no personal harm may come to you or Phillips or any of the little band of the true and faithful who shall defend the right. Feeling was running high in Buffalo when Susan arrived with her anti-slavery contingent in January 1861, expecting disturbances but unprepared for the animosity of audiences which hissed, yelled, and stamped so that not a speaker could be heard. The police made no effort to keep order, and finally the mob surged over the platform and the lights went out. Nevertheless Susan, who was presiding, held her ground until lights were brought in and she could dimly see the milling-crowd. In small towns they were listened to with only occasional cat-calls and booze of disapproval. But in every city, from Buffalo to Albany, the mobs broke up their meetings. Even in Rochester, which had never before shown open hostility to abolitionists, Susan's banner, no union with slave-holders, was torn down, and a restless audience hissed her as she opened her meeting and drowned out the speakers with their shouting and stamping until at last the police took over and escorted the speakers home through the jeering crowds. All but Susan now began to question the wisdom of holding more meetings, but her determination to continue and to assert the right of free speech shamed her colleagues into acquiescence. Cayam Pepper, thrown on the stove, broke up their meetings at Port Byron. In Rome, Rowdy's bored down upon Susan, who was taking the admission fee of ten cents, brushed her aside, big cloak, furs and all, and rushed to the platform where they sang, hooted, and played cards until the speakers gave up in despair. Syracuse, well known for its tolerance and pride in free speech, now greeted them with a howling drunken mob armed with knives and pistols and rotten eggs. Susan on the platform courageously faced their jibes, until she and her companions were forced out into the street. They then took refuge in the home of fellow abolitionists while the mob dragged effigies of Susan and Samuel J. May through the streets and burned them in the square. Not even this kept Susan from her last advertised meeting in Albany, where Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Garrett Smith, and Frederick Douglass joined her. Here the Democratic Mayor, George H. Thatcher, was determined to uphold free speech in spite of almost overwhelming opposition, and calling at the Delavan House for the abolitionists safely escorted them to their hall. Then, with a revolver across his knees, he sat on the platform with them while his policemen, scattered through the hall, put down every disturbance. But at the end of the day he warned Susan that he could no longer hold the mob in check and begged her as a personal favor to him to call off the rest of the meetings. She consented, and under his protection the intrepid little group of abolitionists walked back to their hotel with the mob trailing behind them. Looking back upon the tense days and nights of this winter of mobs, Susan was proud of her group of abolitionists who so bravely had carried out their mission. In comparison the Republicans had shown up badly, not a Republican Mayor having the courage or interest to give them protection. In fact she found little in the attitude of the Republicans to offer even a glimmer of hope that they were capable of governing in this crisis. Lincoln's inaugural address prejudiced her at once, for he said, I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. To her the future looked dark when statesmen would save the Union at such a price. No compromise was Susan's watchword these days, as a feminist, as well as an abolitionist, even though this again set her at odds with Garrison and Phillips, the two men she respected above all others. They were now writing her stern letters, urging her to reveal the hiding place of a fugitive wife and her daughter. Just before she had started on her anti-slavery crusade, and while she was in Albany with Lydia Mott, a heavily veiled woman with a tragic story had come to them for help. She was the wife of Dr. Charles Abner Phelps, a highly respected member of the Massachusetts Senate, and the mother of three children. She had discovered, she told them, that her husband was unfaithful to her, and when she confronted him with the proof, he had insisted that she suffered from delusions, and had her committed to an insane asylum. For a year and a half she had not been allowed to communicate with her children, but finally her brother, a prominent Albany attorney, obtained her release through a writ of habeas corpus, took her to his home, and persuaded Dr. Phelps to allow the children to visit her for a few weeks. Now she was desperate as she again faced the prospect of being separated from her children by Massachusetts law, which gave even an unfaithful husband control of his wife's person and their children. While aware of how often her friends of the underground railroad had defied the fugitive slave law and hidden and transported fugitive slaves, Susan decided she would do the same for this cultured intelligent woman, a slave to her husband under the law. Without a thought of the consequences, she took the train on Christmas Day for New York with Mrs. Phelps and her thirteen-year-old daughter, both in disguise, hoping that in the crowded city they could hide from Dr. Phelps and the law. Arriving late at night, they walked through the snow and slush to a hotel, only to be refused a room because they were not accompanied by a gentleman. They tried another hotel, with the same result. And then Susan, remembering a boarding-house run by a divorced woman she knew, hopefully rang her doorbell. She too refused them, claiming all her borders would leave if she harbored a runaway wife. By this time it was midnight. Cold and exhausted, they braved a Broadway hotel, where they were told there was no vacant room. But Susan, convinced this was only an excuse, said as much to the clerk, adding, You can give us a place to sleep, or we will sit in this office all night. When he threatened to call the police, she retorted, Very well. We will sit here till they come to take us to the station. Finally he relented, and gave them a room without heat. Early the next morning Susan began making the rounds of her friends, in search of shelter for Mrs. Phelps and her daughter. And finally, at the end of a discouraging day, Abby Hopper Gibbons, the Quaker who had so often hidden fugitive slaves, took this fugitive wife into her home. Returning to Albany, Susan found herself under suspicion, and threatened with arrest, by Dr. Phelps and Mrs. Phelps' brothers, because she had broken the law by depriving a father of his child. Letters and telegrams, demanding that she reveal Mrs. Phelps' hiding place, followed her to Rochester, and on her anti-slavery tour, through Western New York. Refusing to be intimidated, she ignored them all. When Garrison wrote her long letters, in his small, neat hand, begging her not to involve the women's rights and anti-slavery movements in any hasty and ill-judged, no matter how well meant, action, it was hard for her to reconcile this advice with his impetuous, undiplomatic, and dangerous actions on behalf of Negro slaves. I feel the strongest assurance, she told him, that what I have done is wholly right. Had I turned my back upon her, I should have scorned myself. That I should stop to ask if my act would injure the reputation of any movement never crossed my mind, nor will I allow such a fear to stifle my sympathies or tempt me to expose her to the cruel and human treatment of her own household. Trust me, that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman. When later they met at an anti-slavery convention, Garrison, renewing his efforts on behalf of Dr. Phelps, put this question to Susan, don't you know that the law of Massachusetts gives the father the entire guardianship and control of the children? Yes, I know what she answered. Does not the law of the United States give the slave-holder the ownership of the slave? And don't you break it every time you help a slave to Canada? Well, the law which gives the father the sole ownership of the children is just as wicked, and I'll break it just as quickly. You would die before you would deliver a slave to his master, and I will die before I will give up that child to its father. Susan escaped arrest, as she thought she would, for Dr. Phelps could not afford the unfavorable publicity involved. He managed to kidnap his child on her way to Sunday school, but his wife eventually won a divorce through the help of her friends. The most trying part of this experience for Susan was the attitude of Garrison and Phelps, who, had now for the second time, failed to recognize that the freedom they claimed for the Negro was also essential for women. They believed in women's rights, to be sure. But when these rights touched the institution of marriage, their vision was clouded. Just a year before, they had fought Mrs. Stanton's divorce resolutions because they were unable to see that the existing laws of marriage did not apply equally to men and women. Now they sustained the father's absolute right over his child. What was it, Susan wondered, that kept them from understanding? Was it loyalty to sex? Was it an unconscious clinging to dominance and superiority? Or was it sheer inability to recognize women as human beings like themselves? Very many abolitionists, she wrote in her diary, have yet to learn the ABC of women's rights. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Six more southern states, Georgia, Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas, following the lead of South Carolina, seceded early in 1861, and formed the Confederate States of America. This breaking up of the union disturbed Susan, primarily because it took the minds of most of her colleagues off everything but saving the union. Convinced that even in a time of national crisis, work for women must go on. She tried to prepare for the annual women's rights convention in New York. But none of her hitherto dependable friends would help her. Nevertheless, she persisted. Even after the fall of Fort Sumter and the President's call for troops, only when the abolitionists called off their annual New York meetings, did she reluctantly realize that women's rights too must yield to the exigencies of the hour. Influenced by her Quaker background, she could not see war as the solution of this or any other crisis. In fact, the majority of abolitionists were amazed and bewildered when war came, because it was not being waged to free the slaves. Looking to the leaders for guidance, they heard Wendell Phillips declare for war before an audience of over 4,000 in Boston. Garrison, known to all as a non-resistant, made it clear that his sympathies were with the government. He saw, in this grand uprising of the manhood of the North, a growing appreciation of liberty and free institutions and a willingness to defend them. Calling upon abolitionists to stand by their principles, he at the same time warned them not to criticize Lincoln or the Republicans unnecessarily, not to divide the North, but to watch events and by their time, and he opposed those abolitionists who wanted to withhold support of the government until it stood openly and equivocally for the Negro's freedom. From the front page of the Liberator, he now removed his slogan, No Union with Slaveholders. Kindly placid Samuel J. May, usually against all violence, now compared the sacrifices of the war to the crucifixion, and to Susan this was blasphemy. Even Parker Pillsbury wrote her, I am rejoicing over old Abe, but my voice is still for war. She was troubled, confused, and disillusioned by the attitude of these men, and by that of most of her anti-slavery friends. Only very few among them, Lydia Mott, were uncompromising non-resistance. To one of them, she wrote, I have tried hard to persuade myself that I alone remained mad while all the rest had become sane, because I have insisted that it is our duty to bear not only our usual testimony, but one even louder and more earnest than ever before. The abolitionists for once seem to have come to an agreement with all the world that they are out of tune and place. Hence, should hold their peace and spare their rebukes and anathemas. Our position to me seems most humiliating, simply that of the politicians, one of expediency, not principle. I have not yet seen one good reason for the abandonment of all our meetings, and am more and more ashamed and sad that even the little apostolic number have yielded to the world's motto, the end justifies the means. Now the farm-home was a refuge. Her father, leaving her in charge, travelled west for his long dream to visit with his sons in Kansas, with Daniel R., now Postmaster at Leavenworth, and with Merritt and his young wife, Mary Luther, and their log cabin at Osso Atomi. As a release from her pent-up energy, Susan turned to hard physical work. Superintended the plowing of the orchard, she recorded in her diary. The last load of hay is in the barn, and all in capital order. Washed every window in the house to-day, put a quilted petticoat in the frame, quilted all day, but sewing seems no longer to be my calling. Fitted out a fugitive slave for Canada with the help of Harriet Tubman. Although she filled her days, life on the farm in these stirring times seemed futile to her. She missed the stimulating exchange of ideas with fellow abolitionists and confessed to her diary. The all-alone feeling will creep over me. It is such a fast after the feast of great presences to which I have been so long accustomed. The war was much on her mind. Eagerly she read Greeley's Tribune and the Rochester Democrat. The news was discouraging. The tragedy of Bull Run. The call for more troops. Defeat after defeat for the Union armies. General Fremont in Missouri freeing the slaves of rebels only to have Lincoln cancel the order to avert antagonizing the border states. How not to do it seems the whole study of Washington, she wrote in her diary. I wish the government would move quickly, proclaim freedom to every slave, and call on every able-bodied Negro to enlist in the Union army. To forever blot out slavery is the only possible compensation for this merciless war. To satisfy her longing for a better understanding of people and events, she turned to books. First to Elizabeth Bear Browning's Casa Guidi Windows, which she called a grand poem so fitting to our terrible struggle. Then to her sonnets from the Portuguese and George Eliot's popular Adam Bede recently published. More serious reading also absorbed her for she wanted to keep abreast of the most advanced thought of the day. M. Reading buckles history of civilization and Darwin's Descent of Man, she wrote in her diary. Have finished Origin of the Species. Pillsbury has just given me Emerson's poems. Eager to thrash out all her new ideas with Elizabeth Stanton, she went to Seneca Falls for a few days of good talk, hoping to get Mrs. Stanton's help in organizing a woman's rights convention in 1862. But not even Mrs. Stanton could see the importance of such work at this time. Believing that if women put all their efforts into winning the war, they would, without question, be rewarded with full citizenship. Susan was skeptical about this and disappointed that even the best women were so willing to be swept aside by the onrush of events. Although opposed to war, Susan was far from advocating peace at any price and was greatly concerned over the confusion in Washington which was vividly described in the discouraging letters Mrs. Stanton received from her husband, now Washington Correspondent for the New York Tribune. Both she and Mrs. Stanton chafed at inaction. They had loyalty, intelligence, an understanding of national affairs, and executive ability to offer their country, but such qualities were not sought after among women. In the spring of 1862 Susan helped Mrs. Stanton move her family to a new home in Brooklyn and spent a few weeks with her there, getting the feel of the city in wartime. She then had the satisfaction of discovering that at least one woman was of use to her country, young, eloquent, Anna E. Dickinson. Susan listened with pride and joy while Anna spoke to an enthusiastic audience at Cooper Union on the issues of the war. She took Anna to her heart at once, Anna's youth, her fervor, and her remarkable ability drew out all of Susan's motherly instincts of affection and protectiveness. They became devoted friends and for the next few years carried on of alumnus correspondence. Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonhair also helped restore Susan's confidence in women during these difficult days, when forced to mark time she herself seemed at Lucennes. Visiting the Academy of Design, she studied in silent reverential awe the marble face of Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Senchi, and declared, making that cold marble breathe and pulsate, Harriet Hosmer has done more to a noble and elevate woman than she could possibly have done by mere words. Of Rosa Bonhair, the first woman to venture into the field of animal painting, she said, her work not only surpasses anything ever done by a woman, but is a bold and successful step beyond all other artists. This confidence was soon dispelled, however, when a letter came from Lydia Mott containing the crushing news that the New York legislature had amended the newly one married woman's property law of 1860, while woman's attention was focused on the war, and had taken away from mothers the right to equal guardianship of their children and from widows the control of the property left at the death of their husbands. We deserve to suffer for our confidence in men's sense of justice, she confessed to Lydia. All of our reformers seem suddenly to have grown politic. All alike, say, have no conventions at this crisis. Garrison, Phillips, Mrs. Mott, Mrs. Wright, Mrs. Stanton, etc., say, wait until the war excitement abates. I'm sick at heart, but cannot carry the world against the wish and will of our best friends. Unable to arouse even a glimmer of interest in women's rights at this time, Susan started off on a lecture tour of her own, determined to make people understand that this war, so abhorrent to her, must be fought for the Negro's freedom. I cannot feel easy in my conscience to be dumb in an hour like this, she explained to Lydia, adding, it is so easy to feel your power for public work slipping away if you allow yourself to remain too long snuggled in the Abrahamic bosom of home. It requires great willpower to resurrect one's soul. I am speaking now, extemporary, she continued, and more to my satisfaction than ever before. I am amazed at myself, but I could not do it if any of our other speakers were listening to me. I am entirely off old anti-slavery grounds and on the new ones thrown up by the war. Feeling particularly close to Lydia at this time, she gratefully added, what a stay, counsel and comfort you have been to me, dear Lydia, ever since that eventful little temperance meeting in that cold, smoky chapel in 1852. How you have compelled me to feel myself competent to go forward when trembling with doubt and distrust. I could never express the magnitude of my indebtedness to you. In the small towns of western New York, people were willing to listen to Susan, for they were troubled by the defeats northern armies had suffered, and by the appalling lack of unity and patriotism in the north. They were beginning to see that the problem of slavery had to be faced, and were discussing among themselves whether Negroes were contraband, whether army officers should return fugitive slaves to their masters, whether slaves of the rebels should be freed, whether Negroes should be enlisted in the army. Susan had an answer for them. It is impossible longer to hold the African race in bondage, she declared, or to reconstruct this republic on the old slaveholding basis. We can neither go back nor stand still. With the nation as with the individual, every new experience forces us into a new and higher life, and the old self is lost forever. Hundreds of men who never thought of emancipation a year ago talk it freely, and are ready to vote for it and fight for it now. Can the thousands of northern soldiers, she asked, who in their march through rebel states have found faithful friends and generous allies in the slaves ever consent to hurl them back into the hell of slavery, either by word or vote or sword? Slaves have sought shelter in the northern army and have tasted the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Liberty. Will they return quietly to the plantation and patiently endure the old life of bondage with all its degradation, its cruelties, and wrong? No, no, there can be no reconstruction on the old basis. Far less degrading and ruinous, she earnestly added, would be the recognition of the independence of the Southern Confederacy. To the question of what to do with the emancipated slaves, her quick answer was, treat the Negroes just as you do the Irish, the Scotch, and the Germans. Educate them to all the blessings of our free institutions, to our schools and churches, to every department of industry, trade, and art. What arrogance in us, she continued, to put the question, what shall we do with a race of men and women who had fed, clothed, and supported both themselves and their oppressors for centuries? Often she spoke against Lincoln's policy of gradual, compensated emancipation, which to an eager advocate of immediate, unconditional emancipation seemed like weakness and appeasement. She had to admit, however, that there had been some progress in the right direction, for Congress had recently forbidden the return of fugitive slaves to their masters, and had decreed immediate emancipation in the District of Columbia, and prohibited slavery in the territories. President Lincoln's promise of freedom on January 1st, 1863, to slaves in all states in armed rebellion against the government seemed wholly inadequate to her, and to her fellow abolitionists, because it left slavery untouched in the border states. But it did encourage them to hope that eventually Lincoln might see the light. Horace Greeley wrote, Susan, I still keep at work with the President in various ways, and believe you will yet hear him proclaim universal freedom. Keep this letter, and judge me by the event. It troubled her that public opinion in the North was still far from sympathetic to emancipation. Northern Democrats, charging Lincoln with incompetence and autocratic control, called for the Constitution as it is, the Union as it was. They had the support of many Northern businessmen who faced the loss of millions of credit given to Southerners, and the support of Northern workmen who feared the competition of free Negroes. They had elected Horatio Seymour, Governor of New York, and had gained ground in many parts of the country. A militant group in Ohio, headed by Congressman Valendingham, continued to oppose the war, asking for peace at once, with no terms unfavorable to the South. All these developments Susan discussed with her father, for she frequently came home between lectures. He was a tower of strength to her. When she was disillusioned, or when criticism and opposition were hard to bear, his sympathy and wise council never failed her. There was a strong bond of understanding and affection between them. His sudden illness and death, late in November 1862, were a shock from which she had to struggle desperately to recover. Her life was suddenly empty. The farm home was desolate. She could not think of leaving her mother and her sister Mary there all alone. Nor could she count on help from Daniel or Merritt, both of whom were serving in the Army in the West. Daniel, as a Lieutenant Colonel, and Merritt, as a Captain in the 7th Kansas Cavalry. For many weeks she had no heart for anything but grief. It seemed as if everything in the world must stop. Not even President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, roused her. It took a letter from Henry Stanton from Washington to make her see that there was war work for her to do. He wrote her, This country is rapidly going to destruction. The Army is almost in a state of mutiny for want of pay and lack of a leader. Nothing can carry through but the southern Negroes, and nobody can marshal them into the struggle, except the abolitionists. Such men as Lovejoy, Hale, and the like have pretty much given up the struggle and despair. You have no idea how dark the cloud is which hangs over us. We must not lay the flattering unction to our souls that the proclamation will be of any use if we are beaten and have a dissolution of the Union. Here, then, is work for you, Susan. Put on your armor and go forth. A month later Susan went to New York for a visit with Elizabeth Stanton, confident that if they counseled together they could find a way to serve their country in its hour of need. She was well aware that all through the country women were responding magnificently in this crisis, giving not only their husbands and sons to the war, but carrying on for them in the home, on the farm, and in business. Many were sewing and knitting for soldiers, scraping lint for hospitals, and organizing ladies' aid societies, which operating through the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, sent clothing and nourishing food to the inadequately equipped and poorly fed soldiers in the field. In the large cities, women were holding highly successful sanitary fairs to raise funds for the Sanitary Commission. In fact, through the women, civilian relief was organized as never before in history. Individual women, too, Susan knew, were making outstanding contributions to the war. Lucy Stone's sister-in-law, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, a friend and admirer of Florence Nightingale, was training much-needed nurses, while Dr. Mary Walker, putting on coat and trousers, ministered tirelessly to the wounded on the battlefield. Dorothea Dix, the one-time schoolteacher who had awakened the people to their barbarous treatment of the insane, had offered her services to the Surgeon General, and was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses, with authority to recruit nurses and oversee hospital housekeeping. Clara Barton, a government employee, and other women volunteers were finding their way to the front to nurse the wounded who so desperately needed their help. And Mother Bickerdijk, living with the armies in the field, nursed her boys and cooked for them, lifting their morale by her motherly, strengthening presence. Through the influence of Anna Ella Carroll, Maryland had been saved for the union, and she, it was said, was ably advising President Lincoln. Susan herself had felt no call to nurse the wounded, although she had often skillfully nursed her own family. Nor had she felt that her qualifications as an expert housekeeper and good executive demanded her services at the front to supervise army housekeeping. Instead she looked for some important task to which other women would not turn in these days when relief work absorbed all their attention. It was not enough, she felt, for women to be angels of mercy, valuable and well organized as this phase of their work had become. A spirit of awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this led her to believe that Northern women needed someone to stimulate their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues of the war, and in so doing claimed their own freedom. Women, she reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts, and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the traditions of freedom upon which this republic was founded. Women must have a part in molding public opinion, and must help direct policy, as Anna Ella Carroll was proving women could do. Here was the best possible training for prospective women voters. To all this Mrs. Stanton heartily agreed. As they sat in the dining-room table with Mrs. Stanton's two daughters, Maggie and Hattie, all busily cutting linen into small squares and raveling them into lint for the wounded, they discussed the state of the nation. They were troubled by the low morale of the North, and by the insidious propaganda of the Copperheads, an anti-war, pro-Southern group, which spread discontent and disrespect for the government. Profiteering was flagrant, and through speculation and war contracts large fortunes were being built up among the few, while the majority of the people not only found their lives badly disrupted by the war, but suffered from high prices and low wages. So far no decisive victory had encouraged confidence in ultimate triumph over the South. In newspapers and magazines, women of the North were being unfavorably compared with Southern women, and criticized because of their lack of interest in the war. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, March 1863, Gail Hamilton, a rising young journalist, accused Northern women of failing to come up to the level of the day. If you could have finished the war with your needles, she chided them. It would have been finished long ago. But stitching does not crush rebellion, does not annihilate treason. Thinking along these same lines, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now decided to go a step further. They would act to bring women abreast of the issues of the day. Susan, with her flair for organizing women, Mrs. Stanton with her pen and her eloquence. They would show women that they had an ideal to fight for. They would show them the uselessness of this bloody conflict unless it won freedom for all of the slaves. Freedom for all, as a basic demand of the Republic, would be their watchword. Men were forming union leagues and loyal leagues to combat the influence of secret anti-war societies, such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. Why not organize a women's national loyal league, Susan and Mrs. Stanton asked each other? They talked their ideas over first with the New York abolitionists, then with Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and his dashing young friend Theodore Tilton, and with Robert Dale Owen, now in the city as the recently appointed head of the Freedmen's Inquiry Commission. These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other anti-slavery members of Congress. All agreed that the emancipation proclamation must be implemented by an act of Congress, by an amendment to the Constitution, and that public opinion must be aroused to demand a thirteenth amendment. If women would help, so much the better. Susan at once thought of petitions. If petitions had won the woman's property law in New York, they could win the thirteenth amendment. The largest petition ever presented to Congress was her goal. Carefully, Susan and Mrs. Stanton worked over an appeal to the woman of the Republic, sending it out in March 1863 with a notice of a meeting to be held in New York. It left no doubt in the minds of those who received it that women had a responsibility to their country beyond services of mercy to the wounded and disabled. From all parts of the country women responded to their call. The veteran anti-slavery and women's rights worker Angelina Grimke-Weld came out of her retirement for the meeting. Ernestine Rose, the ever-faithful, was on hand. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell were there, and the popular Hutchinson family, famous for their stirring abolition songs. They helped Susan and Mrs. Stanton steer the course of the meeting into the right channels. To show the woman assembled that the war was being fought, not merely to preserve the union, but also to preserve the American way of life, based on the principle of equal rights and freedom for all. To save it from the encroachments of slavery and a slave-holding aristocracy. Susan proposed a resolution declaring that there can never be a true peace until the civil and political rights of all citizens are established, including those of Negroes and women. The introduction of the women's rights issue into a war meeting with an anti-slavery program was vigorously opposed by women from Wisconsin, but the faithful feminists came to the rescue and the controversial resolution was adopted. Although she always instinctively related all national issues to women's rights and vice-versa, Susan did not allow this subject to overshadow the main purpose of the meeting. Instead, she analyzed the issue of the war and reproached Lincoln for suppressing the fact that slavery was the real cause of the war and for waiting two long years before calling the four million slaves to the side of the North. Every hour's delay, every life sacrificed up to the proclamation that called the slave to freedom and to arms, she declared, was nothing less than downright murder by the government. I therefore hail the day when the government shall recognize that it is a war for freedom. A woman's national loyal league was organized, electing Susan's secretary and Mrs. Stanton President. They sent a long letter to President Lincoln thanking him for the emancipation proclamation, especially for the freedom it gave Negro women, and assuring him of their loyalty and support in this war for freedom. Their own immediate task, they decided, was to circulate petitions asking for an act of Congress to emancipate all persons of African descent held in involuntary servitude. As Susan so tersely expressed it, they would canvas the nation for freedom. All the oratory over, Susan now undertook the hard work of making the woman's national loyal league a success, assuming the initial financial burden of printing petitions and renting an office room 20 at Cooper Institute, where she was busy all day and where New York members met to help her. To each of the petitions sent out, she attached her battle cry. There must be a law abolishing slavery. Women, you cannot vote or fight for your country. Your only way to be a power in the government is through the exercise of this one sacred, constitutional right of petition, and we ask you to use it now to the utmost. She also asked those signing the petitions to contribute a penny to help with expenses, and in this way she slowly raised $3,000. At first the response was slow, although both Republican and anti-slavery papers were generous in their praise of this undertaking. But when the signed petitions began to come in, she felt repaid for all her efforts, and when the Hovey Fund trustees appropriated $12 a week for her salary, the financial burden lifted a little. Yet it was ever-present. For herself she needed little. She wrote her mother and Mary, I go to a little restaurant nearby for lunch every noon. I always take strawberries with two tea rusks. Today I said, all this lacks as a glass of milk from my mother's cellar. And the girl replied, we have very nice West Chester milk, so tomorrow I shall add that to my bill of fare. My lunch costs, buries five cents, rusks five, and tomorrow the milk will be three. The cost of postage mounted as the petitions continued to go out to all parts of the country. In dire need of funds Susan decided to appeal to Henry Ward Beecher, and wearily climbing Columbia Heights to his home. She suddenly felt a strong hand on her shoulder, and a familiar voice asking, Wello, girl, what do you want now? They took up a collection for her in Plymouth Church, raising two hundred dollars. Garrett Smith sent her one hundred dollars when she had hoped for one thousand dollars. And Jesse Benton Fremont fifty dollars. Before long her war of ideas won the support of Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, George William Curtis, and other popular lecturers who spoke for her at Cooper Union to large audiences whose admission fees swelled her funds, and eventually Senator Sumner realizing how important the petitions could be and arousing public opinion for the Thirteenth Amendment saved her the postage by sending them out under his frank. She made her home with the Stanton's, who had moved from Brooklyn to seventy-five West Forty-Fifth Street, New York, and the comfortable evenings of good conversation and her busy days at the office helped mightily to heal her grief for her father. In the bustling life of the city she felt she was living more intensely, more usefully, as these critical days of war demanded. Henry Stanton, now an editorial writer for Greeley's Tribune, brought home to them the inside story of the news and of politics. All of them were highly critical of Lincoln, impatient with his slowness and skeptical of his plans for slaveholders and slaves in the border states. They questioned Garrison's wisdom in trusting Lincoln. Susan could not feel that Lincoln was honest when he protested that he did not have the power to do all that the abolitionists asked. The pity is, she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, that the vast mass of people really believe the man honest, that he believes he is not the power I wish I could. New York seethed with unrest as time for the enforcement of the draft drew near. Indignant that rich men could avoid the draft by buying a substitute, working men were easily incited to riot and the city was soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all the Negroes and abolitionists were in danger. The Stanton home was in the thick of the rioting, and when Susan and Henry Stanton came home during a lull, they all decided to take refuge for the night at the home of Mrs. Stanton's brother-in-law, Dr. Bayard. Here they also found Horace Greeley hiding from the mob, for hoodlums were marching through the streets shouting, We'll hang old Horace Greeley to a sour apple tree. The next morning Susan started for the office as usual, thinking the worst was over, but as not a single horse-car or stage was running she took the ferry to Flushing to visit her cousins. Here too there was rioting, but she stayed on until order was restored by the army. She returned to the city to find casualties mounting to over a thousand and a million dollars worth of property destroyed. Negroes had been shot and hung on lampposts. Horace Greeley's Tribune office had been wrecked and the homes of abolitionist friends burned. These are terrible times, she wrote her family, and then went back to work, staying devotedly at it through all the hot summer months. By the end of the year she had enrolled the signatures of 100,000 men and women on her petitions, and assured by Senator Sumner that these petitions were invaluable in creating sentiment for the Thirteenth Amendment, she raised the number of signatures in the next few months to 400,000. In April 1864 the Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate and the prospects for it in the house were good. This phase of her work finished, Susan disbanded the Women's National Loyal League and returned to her family in Rochester. In despair over the possible re-election of Abraham Lincoln, Susan had joined Henry and Elizabeth Stanton in stirring up sentiment for John C. Fremont. Abolitionists were sharply divided in this presidential campaign. Garrison and Phillips disagreed on the course of action. Garrison coming out definitely for Lincoln in the Liberator, while Phillips declared himself emphatically against four more years of Lincoln. Susan, the Stanton's, and Parker Pillsbury were among those siding with Phillips because they feared premature reconstruction under Lincoln. They cited Lincoln's amnesty proclamation as an example of his leniency toward the rebels. They saw danger in leaving free Negroes under the control of Southerners embittered by war and called for Negro suffrage as the only protection against oppressive laws. They opposed the re-admission of Louisiana without the enfranchisement of Negroes. Lincoln they knew favored the extension of suffrage only to literate Negroes and to those who had served in the military forces. In fact, Lincoln held back while they wanted to go ahead under full steam and they looked to Fremont to lead them. Following the presidential campaign anxiously from Rochester, Susan wrote, Mrs. Stanton, I am starving for a full talk with somebody posted, not merely pitted for Lincoln. The persistent cry of the Liberator and the anti-slavery standard to re-elect Lincoln and not to swap horses in midstream did not ring true to her. We read no more of the good old doctrine of two evils choose neither, she wrote Anna E. Dickinson. She confessed to Anna, it is only safe to seek and act the truth and to profess confidence in Lincoln would be a lie in me. As the war dragged on through the summer without decisive victories for the North, Lincoln's prospects looked bleak. And to her dismay Susan saw the chances improving for McClellan, the candidate of the Northern Democrats who wanted to end the war, leave slavery alone and conciliate the South. The whole picture changed, however, with the capture of Atlanta by General Sherman in September. The people's confidence in Lincoln revived and Fremont withdrew from the contest. One by one the anti-Lincoln abolitionists were converted, and Susan, anxiously waiting for word from Mrs. Stanton, was relieved to learn that she was not one of them, nor was Wendell Phillips, whose judgment and vision both of them valued above that of any other man. With approval she read these lines which Phillips had just written Mrs. Stanton. I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid Mac, McClellan's, election. I would cut off my right hand before doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election. I wholly distrust his fitness to settle this thing, and indeed his purpose. There is nothing to indicate any change of opinion on Susan's part regarding Lincoln's unfitness for a second term. That he was the lesser of two evils she, of course, acknowledged. For her these pre-election days were discouraging and frustrating. She had very definite ideas on reconstruction which she felt injustice to the Negro must be carried out, and Lincoln did not meet her requirements. After Lincoln's re-election she again looked to Wendell Phillips for an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed. Phillips has just returned from Washington, Mrs. Stanton wrote her. He says the radical men feel they are powerless and check-mated. They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not say. We say now, as ever, give us immediately unconditional emancipation, and let there be no reconstruction except on the broadest basis of justice and equality. Phillips and a few others must hold up the pillars of the temple. I cannot tell you how happy I am to find Douglas on the same platform with us. Keep him on the right track. Tell him in this revolution he, Phillips, and you and I must hold the highest ground and truly represent the best type of the white man, the black man, and the woman. Susan, holding the highest ground, found it difficult to mark time until she could find her place in the reconstruction. The work of the hour, she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, is not alone to put down the rebels in arms, but to educate 30 millions of people into the idea of a true republic. Hence, every influence and power that both men and women can bring to bear will be needed in the reconstruction of the nation on the broad basis of justice and equality. End of Chapter 8