Susan's thoughts during the summer of 1856 often strayed from woman's rights meetings toward Kansas, where her brother Merritt had settled on a claim near Osawatomie. Well aware of his eagerness to help John Brown, she knew that he must be in the thick of the bloody antislavery struggle. In fact the whole Anthony family had been anxiously waiting for news from Merritt ever since the wires had flashed word in May 1856 of the burning of Lawrence by proslavery "border ruffians" from Missouri and of John Brown's raid in retaliation at Pottawatomie Creek.

Merritt had built a log cabin at Osawatomie. While Susan was at home in September, the newspapers reported an attack by proslavery men on Osawatomie in which thirty out of fifty settlers were killed. Was Merritt among them? Finally letters came through from him. Susan read and reread them, assuring herself of his safety. Although ill at the time, he had been in the thick of the fight, but was unharmed. Weak from the exertion he had crawled back to his cabin on his hands and knees and had lain there ill and alone for several weeks.

Parts of Merritt's letters were published in the Rochester Democrat, and the city took sides in the conflict, some papers claiming that his letters were fiction. Susan wrote Merritt, "How much rather would I have you at my side tonight than to think of your daring and enduring greater hardships even than our Revolutionary heroes. Words cannot tell how often we think of you or how sadly we feel that the terrible crime of this nation against humanity is being avenged on the heads of our sons and brothers.... Father brings the Democrat giving a list of killed, wounded, and missing and the name of our Merritt is not therein, but oh! the slain are sons, brothers, and husbands of others as dearly loved and sadly mourned."[69]

With difficulty, she prepared for the annual woman's rights convention, for the country was in a state of unrest not only over Kansas and the whole antislavery question, but also over the presidential campaign with three candidates in the field. Even her faithful friends Horace Greeley and Gerrit Smith now failed her, Horace Greeley writing that he could no longer publish her notices free in the news columns of his Tribune, because they cast upon him the stigma of ultraradicalism, and Gerrit Smith withholding his hitherto generous financial support because woman's rights conventions would not press for dress reform—comfortable clothing for women suitable for an active life, which he believed to be the foundation stone of women's emancipation.

She watched the lively bitter presidential campaign with interest and concern. The new Republican party was in the contest, offering its first presidential candidate, the colorful hero and explorer of the far West, John C. FrÉmont. She had leanings toward this virile young party which stood firmly against the extension of slavery in the territories, and discussed its platform with Elizabeth and Henry B. Stanton, both enthusiastically for "FrÉmont and Freedom." Yet she was distrustful of political parties, for they eventually yielded to expediency, no matter how high their purpose at the start. Her ideal was the Garrisonian doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders" and "Immediate Unconditional Emancipation," which courageously faced the "whole question" of slavery. There was no compromise among Garrisonians.

With the burning issue of slavery now uppermost in her mind, she began seriously to reconsider the offer she had received from the American Antislavery Society, shortly after her visit to Boston in 1855, to act as their agent in central and western New York. Unable to accept at that time because she was committed to her woman's rights program, she had nevertheless felt highly honored that she had been chosen. Still hesitating a little, she wrote Lucy Stone, wanting reassurance that no woman's rights work demanded immediate attention. "They talk of sending two companies of Lecturers into this state," she wrote Lucy, "wish me to lay out the route of each one and accompany one. They seem to think me possessed of a vast amount of executive ability. I shrink from going into Conventions where speaking is expected of me.... I know they want me to help about finance and that part I like and am good for nothing else."[70]

She also had the farm home on her mind. With her father in the insurance business, her brothers now both in Kansas, her sister Mary teaching in the Rochester schools and "looking matrimonially-wise," and her mother at home all alone, Susan often wondered if it might not be as much her duty to stay there to take care of her mother and father as it would be to make a home comfortable for a husband. Sometimes the quietness of such a life beckoned enticingly. But after the disappointing November elections which put into the presidency the conservative James Buchanan, from whom only a vacillating policy on the slavery issue could be expected, she wrote Samuel May, Jr., the secretary of the American Antislavery Society, "I shall be very glad if I am able to render even the most humble service to this cause. Heaven knows there is need of earnest, effective radical workers. The heart sickens over the delusions of the recent campaign and turns achingly to the unconsidered whole question."[71]

His reply came promptly, "We put all New York into your control and want your name to all letters and your hand in all arrangements."

For $10 a week and expenses, Susan now arranged antislavery meetings, displayed posters bearing the provocative words, "No Union with Slaveholders," planned tours for a corps of speakers, among them Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, Parker Pillsbury, and two free Negroes, Charles Remond and his sister, Sarah.

In debt from her last woman's rights campaign, she could not afford a new dress for these tours, but she dyed a dark green the merino which she had worn so proudly in Canajoharie ten years before, bought cloth to match for a basque, and made a "handsome suit." "With my Siberian squirrel cape, I shall be very comfortable," she noted in her diary.[72]

She had met indifference and ridicule in her campaigns for woman's rights. Now she faced outright hostility, for northern businessmen had no use for abolition-mad fanatics, as they called anyone who spoke against slavery. Abolitionists, they believed, ruined business by stirring up trouble between the North and the South.

Usually antislavery meetings turned into debates between speakers and audience, often lasting until midnight, and were charged with animosity which might flame into violence. All of the speakers lived under a strain, and under emotional pressure. Consequently they were not always easy to handle. Some of them were temperamental, a bit jealous of each other, and not always satisfied with the tours Susan mapped out for them. She expected of her colleagues what she herself could endure, but they often complained and sometimes refused to fulfill their engagements.

When no one else was at hand, she took her turn at speaking, but she was seldom satisfied with her efforts. "I spoke for an hour," she confided to her diary, "but my heart fails me. Can it be that my stammering tongue ever will be loosed?"

Lucy Stone, who spoke with such ease, gave her advice and encouragement. "You ought to cultivate your power of expression," she wrote. "The subject is clear to you and you ought to be able to make it so to others. It is only a few years ago that Mr. Higginson told me he could not speak, he was so much accustomed to writing, and now he is second only to Phillips. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"[73]

In March 1857, the Supreme Court startled the country with the Dred Scott decision, which not only substantiated the claim of Garrisonians that the Constitution sanctioned slavery and protected the slaveholder, but practically swept away the Republican platform of no extention of slavery in the territories. The decision declared that the Constitution did not apply to Negroes, since they were citizens of no state when it was adopted and therefore had not the right of citizens to sue for freedom or to claim freedom in the territories; that the Missouri Compromise had always been void, since Congress did not have the right to enact a law which arbitrarily deprived citizens of their property.

Reading the decision word for word with dismay and pondering indignantly over the cold letter of the law, Susan found herself so aroused and so full of the subject that she occasionally made a spontaneous speech, and thus gradually began to free herself from reliance on written speeches. She spoke from these notes: "Consider the fact of 4,000,000 slaves in a Christian and republican government.... Antislavery prayers, resolutions, and speeches avail nothing without action.... Our mission is to deepen sympathy and convert into right action: to show that the men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slave-owners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South. Therefore our work is to rouse the sleeping consciousness of the North....[74]

"We ask you to feel as if you, yourselves, were the slaves. The politician talks of slavery as he does of United States banks, tariff, or any other commercial question. We demand the abolition of slavery because the slave is a human being and because man should not hold property in his fellowman.... We say disobey every unjust law; the politician says obey them and meanwhile labor constitutionally for repeal.... We preach revolution, the politicians, reform."

Instinctively she reaffirmed her allegiance to the doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders," and she gloried in the courage of Garrison, Phillips, and Higginson, who had called a disunion convention, demanding that the free states secede. It was good to be one of this devoted band, for she sincerely believed that in the ages to come "the prophecies of these noble men and women will be read with the same wonder and veneration as those of Isaiah and Jeremiah inspire today."[75]

She gave herself to the work with religious fervor. Even so, she could not make her antislavery meetings self-supporting, and at the end of the first season, after paying her speakers, she faced a deficit of $1,000. This troubled her greatly but the Antislavery Society, recognizing her value, wrote her, "We cheerfully pay your expenses and want to keep you at the head of the work." They took note of her "business enterprise, practical sagacity, and platform ability," and looked upon the expenditure of $1,000 for the education and development of such an exceptional worker as a good investment.

This new experience was a good investment for Susan as well. She made many new friends. She won the further respect, confidence, and good will of men like William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and Francis Jackson. Her friendship with Parker Pillsbury deepened. "I can truly say," she wrote Abby Kelley Foster, "my spirit has grown in grace and that the experience of the past winter is worth more to me than all my Temperance and Woman's Rights labors—though the latter were the school necessary to bring me into the Antislavery work."[76]

Only the crusading spirit of the "antislavery apostles"[77] and what to them seemed the desperate state of the nation made the hard campaigning bearable. The animosity they faced, the cold, the poor transportation, the long hours, and wretched food taxed the physical endurance of all of them. "O the crimes that are committed in the kitchens of this land!"[78] wrote Susan in her diary, as she ate heavy bread and the cake ruined with soda and drank what passed for coffee. A good cook herself, she had little patience with those who through ignorance or carelessness neglected that art. Equally bad were the food fads they had to endure when they were entertained in homes of otherwise hospitable friends of the cause. Raw-food diets found many devotees in those days, and often after long cold rides in the stagecoach, these tired hungry antislavery workers were obliged to sit down to a supper of apples, nuts, and a baked mixture of coarse bran and water. Nor did breakfast or dinner offer anything more. Facing these diets seemed harder for the men than for Susan. Repeatedly in such situations, they hurried away, leaving her to complete two-or three-day engagements among the food cranks. How she welcomed a good beefsteak and a pot of hot coffee at home after these long days of fasting!

A night at home now was sheer bliss, and she wrote Lucy Stone, "Here I am once more in my own Farm Home, where my weary head rests upon my own home pillows.... I had been gone Four Months, scarcely sleeping the second night under the same roof."[79]

It was good to be with her mother again, to talk with her father when he came home from work and with Mary who had not married after all but continued teaching in the Rochester schools. Guelma and her husband, Aaron McLean, who had moved to Rochester, often came out to the farm with their children.

Turning for relaxation to work in the garden in the warm sun, Susan thought over the year's experience and planned for the future. "I can but acknowledge to myself that Antislavery has made me richer and braver in spirit," she wrote Samuel May, Jr., "and that it is the school of schools for the true and full development of the nobler elements of life. I find my raspberry field looking finely—also my strawberry bed. The prospect for peaches, cherries, plums, apples, and pears is very promising—Indeed all nature is clothed in her most hopeful dress. It really seems to me that the trees and the grass and the large fields of waving grain did never look so beautifully as now. It is more probable, however, that my soul has grown to appreciate Nature more fully...."[80]

Susan needed that growth of soul to face the events of the next few years and do the work which lay ahead. The whole country was tense over the slavery issue, which could no longer be pushed into the background. On public platforms and at every fireside, men and women were discussing the subject. Antislavery workers sensed the gravity of the situation and felt the onrush of the impending conflict between what they regarded as the forces of good and evil—freedom and slavery. When the Republican leader, William H. Seward, spoke in Rochester, of "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces,"[81] he was expressing only what Garrisonian abolitionists, like Susan, always had recognized. In the West, a tall awkward country lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, debating with the suave Stephen A. Douglas, declared with prophetic wisdom, "'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.... It will become all one thing or all the other.'"[82]

So Susan believed, and she was doing her best to make it all free. Not only was she holding antislavery meetings, making speeches, and distributing leaflets whenever and wherever possible, but she was also lobbying in Albany for a personal liberty bill to protect the slaves who were escaping from the South. "Treason in the Capitol," the Democratic press labeled efforts for a personal liberty bill, and as Susan reported to William Lloyd Garrison,[83] even Republicans shied away from it, many of them regarding Seward's "irrepressible conflict" speech a sorry mistake. Such timidity and shilly-shallying were repugnant to her. She could better understand the fervor of John Brown although he fought with bullets.

Yet John Brown's fervor soon ended in tragedy, sowing seeds of fear, distrust, and bitter partisanship in all parts of the country. When, in October 1859, the startling news reached Susan of the raid on Harper's Ferry and the capture of John Brown, she sadly tried to piece together the story of his failure. She admired and respected John Brown, believing he had saved Kansas for freedom. That he had further ambitious plans was common knowledge among antislavery workers, for he had talked them over with Gerrit Smith, Frederick Douglass, and the three young militants, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Frank Sanborn, and Samuel Gridley Howe. Somehow these plans had failed, but she was sure that his motives were good. He was imprisoned, accused of treason and murder, and in his carpetbag were papers which, it was said, implicated prominent antislavery workers. Now his friends were fleeing the country, Sanborn, Douglass, and Howe. Gerrit Smith broke down so completely that for a time his mind was affected. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, defiant and unafraid, stuck by John Brown to the end, befriending his family, hoping to rescue him as he had rescued fugitive slaves.

Scanning the Liberator for its comment on John Brown, Susan found it colored, as she had expected, by Garrison's instinctive opposition to all war and bloodshed. He called the raid "a misguided, wild, apparently insane though disinterested and well-intentioned effort by insurrection to emancipate the slaves of Virginia," but even he added, "Let no one who glories in the Revolutionary struggle of 1776 deny the right of the slaves to imitate the example of our fathers."[84]

Behind closed doors and in public meetings, abolitionists pledged their allegiance to John Brown's noble purpose. He had wanted no bloodshed, they said, had no thought of stirring up slaves to brutal revenge. The raid was to be merely a signal for slaves to arise, to cast off slavery forever, to follow him to a mountain refuge, which other slave insurrections would reinforce until all slaves were free. To him the plan seemed logical and he was convinced it was God-inspired. To some of his friends it seemed possible—just a step beyond the Underground Railroad and hiding fugitive slaves. To Susan he was a hero and a martyr.

Southerners, increasingly fearful of slave insurrections, called John Brown a cold-blooded murderer and accused Republicans—"black Republicans," they classed them—of taking orders from abolitionists and planning evil against them. To law-abiding northerners, John Brown was a menace, stirring up lawlessness. Seward and Lincoln, speaking for the Republicans, declared that violence, bloodshed, and treason could not be excused even if slavery was wrong and Brown thought he was right. All saw before them the horrible threat of civil war.

During John Brown's trial, his friends did their utmost to save him. The noble old giant with flowing white beard, who had always been more or less of a legend, now to them assumed heroic proportions. His calmness, his steadfastness in what he believed to be right captured the imagination.

The jury declared him guilty—guilty of treason, of conspiring with slaves to rebel, guilty of murder in the first degree. The papers carried the story, and it spread by word of mouth—the story of those last tense moments in the courtroom when John Brown declared, "It is unjust that I should suffer such a penalty. Had I interferred ... in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the so-called great, or in behalf of any of their friends ... it would have been all right.... I say I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interferred as I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong but right. Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done...."[85]

He was sentenced to die.

Susan, sick at heart, talked all this over with her abolitionist friends and began planning a meeting of protest and mourning in Rochester if John Brown were hanged. She engaged the city's most popular hall for this meeting, never thinking of the animosity she might arouse, and as she went from door to door selling tickets, she asked for contributions for John Brown's destitute family. She tried to get speakers from among respected Republicans to widen the popular appeal of the meeting, but her diary records, "Not one man of prominence in religion or politics will identify himself with the John Brown meeting."[86] Only a Free Church minister, the Rev. Abram Pryn, and the ever-faithful Parker Pillsbury were willing to speak.

There was still hope that John Brown might be saved and excitement ran high. Some like Higginson, unwilling to let him die, wanted to rescue him, but Brown forbade it. Others wanted to kidnap Governor Wise of Virginia and hold him on the high seas, a hostage for John Brown. Wendell Phillips was one of these. Parker Pillsbury, sending Susan the latest news from "the seat of war" and signing his letter, "Faithfully and fervently yours," wrote, "My voice is against any attempt at rescue. It would inevitably, I fear, lead to bloodshed which could not compensate nor be compensated. If the people dare murder their victim, as they are determined to do, and in the name of the law ... the moral effect of the execution will be without a parallel since the scenes on Calvary eighteen hundred years ago, and the halter that day sanctified shall be the cord to draw millions to salvation."[87]

On Friday, December 2, 1859, John Brown was hanged. Through the North, church bells tolled and prayers were said for him. Everywhere people gathered together to mourn and honor or to condemn. In New York City, at a big meeting which overflowed to the streets, it was resolved "that we regard the recent outrage at Harper's Ferry as a crime, not only against the State of Virginia, but against the Union itself...." In Boston, however, Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke to a tremendous audience of "the new saint, than whom none purer or more brave was ever led by love of man into conflict and death ... who will make the gallows glorious," and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow recorded in his diary, "This will be a great day in our history; the date of a new revolution." Far away in France, Victor Hugo declared, "The eyes of Europe are fixed on America. The hanging of John Brown will open a latent fissure that will finally split the union asunder.... You preserve your shame, but you kill your glory."[88]

In Rochester, three hundred people assembled. All were friends of the cause and there was no unfriendly disturbance to mar the proceedings. Susan presided and Parker Pillsbury, in her opinion, made "the grandest speech of his life," for it was the only occasion he ever found fully wicked enough to warrant "his terrific invective."[89]

Thus these two militant abolitionists, Susan B. Anthony and Parker Pillsbury, joined hundreds of others throughout the nation in honoring John Brown, sensing the portent of his martyrdom and prophesying that his soul would go marching on.