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 woman'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 woman'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 their leaders for guidance, they heard Wendell Phillips declare for war before an audience of over four thousand in Boston. Garrison, known to all as a nonresistant, made it clear that his sympathies were with the government. He saw in "this grand uprising of the manhood of the North"[134] 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 bide their time, and he opposed those abolitionists who wanted to withhold support of the government until it stood openly and unequivocally 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."[135]

She was troubled, confused, and disillusioned by the attitude of these men and by that of most of her antislavery friends. Only very few, among them Lydia Mott, were uncompromising non-resistants. 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.'"[136]

Now the farm home was a refuge. Her father, leaving her in charge, traveled West for his long-dreamed-of visit with his sons in Kansas, with Daniel R., now postmaster at Leavenworth, and with Merritt and his young wife, Mary Luther, in their log cabin at Osawatomie. 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 today. 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."[137]

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 FrÉmont 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."[138]

To satisfy her longing for a better understanding of people and events, she turned to books, first to Elizabeth Barrett 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. "Am reading Buckle's 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."[139]

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.[140] 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 a voluminous correspondence.

Harriet Hosmer and Rosa Bonheur also helped restore Susan's confidence in women during these difficult days when, forced to mark time, she herself seemed at loose ends. Visiting the Academy of Design, she studied "in silent reverential awe," the marble face of Harriet Hosmer's Beatrice Cenci, and declared, "Making that cold marble breathe and pulsate, Harriet Hosmer has done more to ennoble and elevate woman than she could possibly have done by mere words...." Of Rosa Bonheur, 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."[141]

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 won Married Woman's Property Law of 1860, while women'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 'man'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 am sick at heart, but cannot carry the world against the wish and will of our best friends...."[142]

Unable to arouse even a glimmer of interest in woman'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 Negroes' 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 will power to resurrect one's soul.[143]

"I am speaking now extempore," 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 antislavery 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 can 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.[144]

"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 have 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, had decreed immediate emancipation in the District of Columbia, and prohibited slavery in the territories.

President Lincoln's promise of freedom on January 1, 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."[145]

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 Vallandigham, 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 counsel 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."[146]

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, "The country is rapidly going to destruction. The Army is almost in a state of mutiny for want of its 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 in 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."[147]

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,[148] 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 Bickerdyke, 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 claim 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 at 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 antiwar, 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 flare 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 antiwar 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 Freedman's Inquiry Commission. These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other antislavery 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 Women 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 antislavery and woman's rights worker, Angelina GrimkÉ 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 women 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 slaveholding 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 woman's rights issue into a war meeting with an antislavery 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 woman'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."[149]

A Women's National Loyal League was organized, electing Susan 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 "canvass the nation for freedom."

All the oratory over, Susan now undertook the hard work of making the Women'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.[150]

At first the response was slow, although both Republican and antislavery 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 twelve dollars 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 is a glass of milk from my mother's cellar,' and the girl replied, 'We have very nice Westchester milk.' So tomorrow I shall add that to my bill of fare. My lunch costs, berries five cents, rusks five, and tomorrow the milk will be three."[151]

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, "Well, old girl, what do you want now?" He took up a collection for her in Plymouth Church, raising $200. Gerrit Smith sent her $100, when she had hoped for $1,000, and Jessie Benton FrÉmont, $50. 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 in arousing public opinion for the Thirteenth Amendment, saved her the postage by sending them out under his frank.[152]

She made her home with the Stantons, who had moved from Brooklyn to 75 West 45th 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 has not the power—I wish I could...."[153]

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, workingmen were easily incited to riot, and the city was soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all 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 horsecar 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 lamp posts, 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.[154]

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. FrÉmont. 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 Stantons, 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 readmission 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 FrÉmont 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 Antislavery 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."[155]

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 FrÉmont 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's [McClellan's] election. I would cut oft 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."[156]

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 in justice 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 checkmated.... 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 Douglass 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."[157]

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 Thirty 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."[158]