Susan's thoughts now turned to Kansas, as they had many times since her brothers had settled there. Daniel and Annie, his young wife from the East, urged her to visit them.[159] Daniel was well established in Kansas, the publisher of his own newspaper and the mayor of Leavenworth. He had served a little over a year in the Union army in the First Kansas Cavalry. She longed to see him and the West that he loved.

Now for the first time she felt free to make the long journey, for her mother and Mary had sold the farm on the outskirts of Rochester and had moved into the city, buying a large red brick house shaded by maples and a beautiful horse chestnut. It had been a wrench for Susan to give up the farm with its memories of her father, but there were compensations in the new home on Madison Street, for Guelma, her husband, Aaron McLean, and their family lived with them there. Hannah and her family had also settled in Rochester, and when they bought the house next door, Susan had the satisfaction of living again in the midst of her family.[160]

She was particularly devoted to Guelma's twenty-three-year-old daughter, Ann Eliza, whose "merry laugh" and "bright, joyous presence" brought new life into the household. Ann Eliza was a stimulating intelligent companion, and Susan looked forward to seeing many of her own dreams fulfilled in her niece. Then suddenly in the fall of 1864, Ann Eliza was taken ill, and her death within a few days left a great void.[161]

In the midst of this sorrow, Daniel sent Susan a ticket and a check for a trip to Kansas. Hesitating no longer, she waited only until her "tip-top Rochester dressmaker" made up "the new, five-dollar silk" which she had bought in New York.[162]

Before leaving for Kansas, in January, 1865, she pasted on the first page of her diary a clipping of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Something Left Undone," which seemed so perfectly to interpret her own feelings:

With "the burden of her dreams" pressing on her, Susan traveled westward. The future of the Negro was much on her mind, for the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery had just been sent to the states for ratification. That it would be ratified she had no doubt, but she recognized the responsibility facing the North to provide for the education and rehabilitation of thousands of homeless bewildered Negroes trying to make their way in a still unfriendly world, and she looked forward to taking part in this work.

Beyond Chicago, where she stopped over to visit her uncle Albert Dickinson and his family, her journey was rugged, and when she reached Leavenworth she reveled in the comfort of Daniel's "neat, little, snow-white cottage with green blinds." She liked Daniel's wife, Annie, at once, admired her gaiety and the way she fearlessly drove her beautiful black horse across the prairie. "They have a real 'Aunt Chloe' in the kitchen," she wrote Mrs. Stanton, "and a little Darkie boy for errands and table waiter. I never saw a girl to match. The more I see of the race, the more wonderful they are to me."[164]

There was always good companionship in Daniel's home, for friends from both the East and the West found it a convenient stopping place, and there was much discussion of politics, the Negro question, and the future of the West. Business was booming in Leavenworth, then the most thriving town between St. Louis and San Francisco. Eight years before, when Daniel had first settled there, it boasted a population of 4,000. Now it had grown to 22,000, was lighted with gas, and was building its business blocks of brick. As Susan drove through the busy streets with Annie, she saw emigrants coming in by steamer and train to settle in Kansas and watched for the covered wagons that almost every day stopped in Leavenworth for supplies before moving on to the far West. Driving over the wide prairie, sometimes a warm brown, then again white with snow under a wider expanse of deep blue sky than she had ever seen before, she relaxed as she had not in many a year and began to feel the call of the West. She even thought she might like to settle in Kansas until she was caught up by the sharp realization of how she would miss the stimulating companionship of her friends in the East.

When Daniel was busy with his campaign for his second term as mayor, she helped him edit the Bulletin. He warned her not to fill his paper up with woman's rights, and in spite of his sympathy for the Negro, forbade her to advocate Negro suffrage in his paper.

"I wish I could talk through it the things I'd like to say to the young martyr state ..." she wrote Mrs. Stanton. "The Legislature gave but six votes for Negro suffrage the other day.... The idea of Kansas refusing her loyal Negroes."

Again and again she was shocked at the prejudice against Negroes in Kansas, as when Daniel employed a Negro typesetter and the printers, refusing to admit him to their union, went out on strike until he was discharged.

"In this city," she reported to Mrs. Stanton, "there are four thousand ex-Missouri slaves who have sought refuge here within the three past years." Making it her business to learn what was being done to help them and educate them, she visited their schools, their Sunday schools, and the Colored Home, and gave much of her time to them. To encourage them to demand their rights, she organized an Equal Rights League among them. This was one thing she could do, even if she could not plead for Negro suffrage in Daniel's newspaper.[165]

Then one breath-taking piece of news followed another—Lee's surrender, April 9, 1865, and in less than a week, Lincoln's assassination, his death, and Andrew Johnson's succession to the Presidency.

Susan looked upon Lincoln's assassination and death as an act of God. She wrote to Mrs. Stanton, "Was there ever a more terrific command to a Nation to 'stand still and know that I am God' since the world began? The Old Book's terrible exhibitions of God's wrath sink into nothingness. And this fell blow just at the very hour he was declaring his willingness to consign those five million faithful, brave, and loving loyal people of the South to the tender mercies of the ex-slave lords of the lash."[166]

She longed "to go out and do battle for the Lord once more," but when she could have expressed her opinions at the big mass meeting held in memory of Lincoln, she remained silent. "My soul was full," she confessed to Mrs. Stanton, "but the flesh not equal to stemming the awful current, to do what the people have called make an exhibition of myself. So quenched the spirit and came home ashamed of myself."

Then she added, "Dear-a-me—how overfull I am, and how I should like to be nestled into some corner away from every chick and child with you once more."

Disturbing news came from the East of dissension in the antislavery ranks, of Garrison's desire to dissolve the American Antislavery Society after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and of Phillips' insistence that it continue until freedom for the Negro was firmly established. While Garrison maintained that northern states, denying the ballot to the Negro, could not consistently make Negro suffrage a requirement for readmitting rebel states to the Union, Phillips demanded Negro suffrage as a condition of readmission. Immediately abolitionists took sides. Parker Pillsbury, Lydia and Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, the Stantons, and others lined up with Phillips, whose vehement and scathing criticism of reconstruction policies seemed to them the need of the hour. Susan also took sides, praising "dear ever glorious Phillips" and writing in her diary, "The disbanding of the American Antislavery Society is fully as untimely as General Grant's and Sherman's granting parole and pardon to the whole Rebel armies."[167]

To her friends in the East, she wrote, "How can anyone hold that Congress has no right to demand Negro suffrage in the returning Rebel states because it is not already established in all the loyal ones? What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago, had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote against admitting a new state with slavery, because it was not already abolished in all the old States? It is perfectly astounding, this seeming eagerness of so many of our old friends to cover up and apologize for the glaring hate toward the equal recognition of the manhood of the black race."[168]

She rejoiced when word came that the American Antislavery Society would continue under the presidency of Phillips, with Parker Pillsbury as editor of the Antislavery Standard; but she was saddened by the withdrawal of Garrison, whom she had idolized for so many years and whose editorials in the Liberator had always been her inspiration.[169]

As she read the weekly New York Tribune, which came regularly to Daniel, she grew more and more concerned over President Johnson's reconstruction policy and more and more convinced of the need of a crusade for political and civil rights for the Negro. Asked to deliver the Fourth of July oration at Ottumwa, Kansas, she decided to put into it all her views on the controversial subject of reconstruction.

Traveling by stage the 125 miles to Ottumwa, she found good company en route and "great talk on politics, Negro equality, and temperance," and thought the "grand old prairies ... perfectly splendid and the timber-skirted creeks ... delightful."[170]

Before a large gathering of Kansas pioneers, many of whom had driven forty or fifty miles to hear her, she stood tall, straight, and earnest, as she reminded them of the noble heritage of Kansas, of the bloody years before the war when in the free-state fight, Kansas men and women "taught the nation anew" the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Lashing out with the vehemence of Phillips against President Johnson's reconstruction policy, she warned, "There has been no hour fraught with so much danger as the present.... To be foiled now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought victories and to re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of Negro disfranchisement ... would be a disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars...."[171]

She then cited the results of the elections in Virginia, South Carolina, and Tennessee to prove her point that unless Negroes were given the vote, rebels would be put in office and a new code of laws apprenticing Negroes passed, establishing a new form of slavery.

She urged her audience to be awake to the politicians who were using the peoples' reverence and near idolatry of Lincoln to push through anti-Negro legislation under the guise of carrying out his policies. Then putting behind her the prejudice and impatience with Lincoln which she had felt during his lifetime, she added, "If the administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American people one lesson above another, it was that they must think and speak and proclaim, and that he as their President was bound to execute their will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say as he did four years ago, 'I wait the voice of the people.'"

In her special pleading for the Negro, she did not forget women. Calling attention to the fact that our nation had never been a true republic because the ballot was exclusively in the hands of the "free white male," she asked for a government "of the people," men and women, white and black, with Negro suffrage and woman suffrage as basic requirements.

So enthusiastic were the Republicans over her speech that they urged her to prepare it for publication, suggesting, however, that she delete the passage on woman suffrage. This was her first intimation that Republicans might balk at enfranchising women. So great had been women's contribution to the winning of the war and so indebted were the Republicans to women for creating sentiment for the Thirteenth Amendment, that she had come to expect, along with Mrs. Stanton, that the ballot would without question be given them as a reward.

It was soon obvious to Susan that politicians in the East as well as in Kansas were shying away from woman suffrage. Mrs. Stanton reported that even Wendell Phillips was backsliding, not wishing to campaign for Negro suffrage and woman suffrage at the same time. "While I could continue as heretofore, arguing for woman's rights, just as I do for temperance every day," he had written, "still I would not mix the movements.... I think such mixture would lose for the Negro far more than we should gain for the woman. I am now engaged in abolishing slavery in a land where the abolition of slavery means conferring or recognizing citizenship, and where citizenship supposes the ballot for all men."[172]

Such reasoning filled Susan with despair, for she firmly believed that women who had been asking for full citizenship for seventeen years deserved precedence over the Negro. Mrs. Stanton agreed. To them, Negro suffrage without woman suffrage was unthinkable, an unbearable humiliation. Half of the Negroes were women, and manhood suffrage would fasten upon them a new form of slavery. How could Wendell Phillips, they asked each other, fail to recognize not only the timeliness of woman suffrage, but the fact that women were better qualified for the ballot than the majority of Negroes, who, because of their years in slavery, were illiterate and the easy prey of unscrupulous politicians? By all means enfranchise Negroes, they argued with him, but enfranchise women as well, and if there must be a limitation on suffrage, let it be on the basis of literacy, not on the basis of sex.

Among Republican members of Congress and abolitionists, there was serious discussion of a Fourteenth Amendment to extend to the Negro civil rights and the ballot. Susan, reading about this in Kansas, and Mrs. Stanton, discussing it in New York with her husband, Wendell Phillips, and Robert Dale Owen, saw in such a revision of the Constitution a just and logical opportunity to extend woman's rights at the same time. Previously committed to state action on woman suffrage but only because it had then seemed the necessary first step, both women welcomed the more direct road offered by an amendment to the Constitution. Only they of all the old woman's rights workers were awake to this opportunity.

Throughout the United States, people were thinking about the Constitution as Americans had not done since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791. Not only were amendments to the federal Constitution in the air, not only were rebel states being readmitted to the Union with new constitutions, but state constitutions in the North were being revised, and western territories sought statehood. In Susan's opinion the time was ripe to proclaim equal rights for all. This clearly was woman's hour.

"Come back and help," pleaded Elizabeth Stanton, who grew more and more alarmed as she saw all interest in woman suffrage crowded out of the minds of reformers by their zeal for the Negro. "I have argued constantly with Phillips and the whole fraternity, but I fear one and all will favor enfranchising the Negro without us. Woman's cause is in deep water.... There is pressing need of our woman's rights convention...."[173]

Susan's spirits revived at the prospect of holding a woman's rights convention, and plans for the future began to take shape as she read the closing lines of Mrs. Stanton's letter: "I hope in a short time to be comfortably located in a new house where we will have a room ready for you.... I long to put my arms about you once more and hear you scold me for all my sins and shortcomings.... Oh, Susan, you are very dear to me. I should miss you more than any other living being on this earth. You are entwined with much of my happy and eventful past, and all my future plans are based on you as coadjutor. Yes, our work is one, we are one in aim and sympathy and should be together. Come home."

Parker Pillsbury also added his plea, "Why have you deserted the field of action at a time like this, at an hour unparalleled in almost twenty centuries?... It is not for me to decide your field of labor. Kansas needed John Brown and may need you ... but New York is to revise her constitution next year and, if you are absent, who is to make the plea for woman?"

Reading her newspaper a few days later, she found that the politicians had made their first move, introducing in the House of Representatives a resolution writing the word "male" into the qualifications of voters in the second section of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment. She started at once for the East.

On the long journey back, in the heat of August, traveling by stage and railroad with many stops to make the necessary connections, Susan not only visited her many relatives who had moved to the West, but also called on antislavery and woman suffrage workers, and held meetings to plead for free schools for Negroes and for the ballot for Negroes and women. She found people relieved to have the war over and busy with their own affairs, but with prejudices smoldering. Public speaking was still an ordeal for her and she confessed to her diary, "Made a labored talk.... Had a struggle to get through with speech," and again, "Had a hard time. Thoughts nor words would come—Staggered through."[174] However, she was a determined woman. The message must be carried to the people and she would do it whether she suffered in the process or not.

Late in September, she reached her own comfortable home in Rochester, but she had too much on her mind to stay there long, and within a few weeks was in New York with Elizabeth Stanton, deep in a serious discussion of how to create an overwhelming demand for woman suffrage at this crucial time. Again they decided to petition Congress, this time for the vote for both women and Negroes. Five years had now passed since the last national woman's rights convention, and the workers were scattered; some had lost interest and others thought only of the need of the Negro. Lucretia Mott, Lydia Mott, and Parker Pillsbury responded at once. Susan sought out Lucy Stone in spite of the differences that had grown up between them, and after talking with Lucy, confessed to herself that she had been unjustly impatient with her.[175]

Hoping for aid from the Jackson or Hovey Fund, she went to New England to revive interest there and in Concord talked with the Emersons, Bronson Alcott, and Frank Sanborn. When she asked Emerson whether he thought it wise to demand woman suffrage at this time, he replied, "Ask my wife. I can philosophize, but I always look to her to decide for me in practical matters." Unhesitatingly Mrs. Emerson agreed with Susan that Congress must be petitioned immediately to enfranchise women either before Negroes were granted the vote or at the same time.[176]

Even Wendell Phillips, who did not want to mix Negro and woman suffrage, gave Susan $500 from the Hovey Fund to finance the petitions, but many of the friends upon whom she had counted needed a verbal lashing to rouse them out of their apathy. Very soon she had to face the unpleasant fact that by pressing for woman suffrage now, she was estranging many abolitionists. Nevertheless she and Mrs. Stanton went ahead undaunted, determined that a petition for woman suffrage would go to Congress even if it carried only their own two signatures.

However, petitions with many signatures were reaching Congress in January 1866—the very first demand ever made for Congressional action on woman suffrage. Senator Sumner, for whom women had rolled up 400,000 signatures for the Thirteenth Amendment, now presented under protest "as most inopportune" a petition headed by Lydia Maria Child, who for years had been his valiant aid in antislavery work; and Thaddeus Stevens, heretofore friendly to woman suffrage and ever zealous for the Negro, ignored a petition from New York headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.[177]

By this time it was clear to Susan that since the two powerful Republicans, Senator Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, both basically friendly to woman suffrage, were determined to devote themselves wholly to Negro suffrage and to the extension of their party's influence, she could expect no help from lesser party members. Her only alternative was to appeal to the Democrats or to an occasional recalcitrant Republican, and she allowed nothing to stand in her way, not even the frenzied pleas of her abolitionist friends. She found James Brooks of New York, Democratic leader of the House, willing to present her petitions, and she made use of him, although he was regarded by abolitionists as a Copperhead and although he was now advocating conciliatory reconstruction for the South of which she herself disapproved. Other Democrats came to the rescue in the Senate as well as in the House—a few because they saw justice in the demands of the women, others because they believed white women should have political precedence over Negroes, and still others because they saw in their support of woman suffrage an opportunity to harass the Republicans. During 1866, petitions for woman suffrage with 10,000 signatures were presented by Democrats and irregular Republicans.

In the meantime, conferences in New York with Henry Ward Beecher and Theodore Tilton were encouraging, and for a time Susan thought she had found an enthusiastic ally in Tilton, the talented popular young editor of the Independent. Theodore Tilton, with his long hair and the soulful face of a poet, with his eloquence as a lecturer and his flare for journalism, was at the height of his popularity. He had winning ways and was full of ideas. After the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, in December 1865, he had proposed that the American Antislavery Society and the woman's rights group merge to form an American Equal Rights Association which would fight for equal rights for all, for Negro and woman suffrage. Wendell Phillips he suggested for president, and the Antislavery Standard as the paper of the new organization.

This sounded reasonable and hopeful to Susan, and she hurried to Boston with a group from New York, including Lucy Stone, to consult Wendell Phillips and his New England colleagues. Wendell Phillips, however, was cool to the proposition, pointing out the necessity of amending the constitution of the American Antislavery Society before any such action could be taken. Never dreaming that he would actually oppose their plan, Susan expected this would be taken care of; but when she convened her woman's rights convention in New York in May 1866, simultaneously with that of the American Antislavery Society, she found to her dismay that no formal notice of the proposed union had been given to the members of the antislavery group and therefore there was no way for them to vote their organization into an Equal Rights Association. Not to be sidetracked, she then asked the woman's rights convention to broaden its platform to include rights for the Negro. To her this seemed a natural development as she had always thought of woman's rights as part of the larger struggle for human rights.

"For twenty years," she declared, "we have pressed the claims of women to the right of representation in the government.... Up to this hour we have looked only to State action for the recognition of our rights; but now by the results of the war, the whole question of suffrage reverts back to the United States Constitution. The duty of Congress at this moment is to declare what shall be the basis of representation in a republican form of government.

"There is, there can be, but one true basis," she continued. "Taxation and representation must be inseparable; hence our demand must now go beyond woman.... We therefore wish to broaden our woman's rights platform and make it in name what it has ever been in spirit, a human rights platform."[178]

The women, so often accused in later years of fighting only for their own rights, had the courage at this time to attempt a practical experiment in generosity. Susan and Mrs. Stanton with all their hearts wanted this experiment to succeed, and yet as they resolved their woman's rights organization into the American Equal Rights Association, they were apprehensive.

They did not have to wait long for disillusionment. Meeting Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton in the office of the Antislavery Standard to plan a campaign for the Equal Rights Association, they discussed with them what should be done in New York, preparatory to the revision of the state constitution. Emphatically Wendell Phillips declared that the time was ripe for striking the word "white" out of the constitution, but not the word "male." That could come, he added, when the constitution was next revised, some twenty or thirty years later. To their astonishment, Theodore Tilton heartily agreed. Then he added, "The question of striking out the word 'male,' we as an equal rights association shall of course present as an intellectual theory, but not as a practical thing to be accomplished at this convention." Completely unprepared for such an attitude on Tilton's part, Susan retorted with indignation, "I would sooner cut off my right hand than ask for the ballot for the black man and not for woman." Then telling the two men just what she thought of them for their betrayal of women, she swept out of the office to keep another appointment.[179]

Equally exasperated with these men, Mrs. Stanton stayed on, hoping to heal the breach, but when Susan returned to the Stanton home that evening, she found her highly indignant, declaring she was through boosting the Negro over her own head. Then and there they vowed that they would devote themselves with all their might and main to woman suffrage and to that alone.

By this time, Congress had passed a civil rights bill over President Johnson's veto, conferring the rights of citizenship upon freedmen, and a Fourteenth Amendment to make these rights permanent was now before Congress. The latest developments regarding the various drafts of the Fourteenth Amendment were passed along to Susan and Mrs. Stanton by Robert Dale Owen. Senator Sumner, he reported, had yielded to party pressure and now supported the Fourteenth Amendment, although in the past he had always maintained such an amendment wholly unnecessary since there was already enough justice, liberty, and equality in the Constitution to protect the humblest citizen. Senator Sumner opposed and defeated a clause in the amendment referring to "race" and "color," words which had never previously been mentioned in the Constitution, but he raised no serious objection to the introduction of the word "male" as a qualification for suffrage, which was also unprecedented. That he tried time and time again to avoid the word "male" when he was redrafting the amendment or that Thaddeus Stevens tried to substitute "legal voters" for "male citizens" was no comfort to Susan and Mrs. Stanton, as they saw the Fourteenth Amendment writing discrimination against women into the federal Constitution for the first time.[180]

As they carefully read over the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment, which conferred citizenship on every person born or naturalized in the United States, women's rights seemed assured:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Then in the controversial second section which provided the penalty of reduction of representation in Congress for states depriving Negroes of the ballot, they saw themselves written out of the Constitution by the words, "male inhabitants" and "male citizens," used to define legal voters. It was baffling to be kept from their goal by a single word in a provision which at best was the unsatisfactory compromise arrived at by radical and conservative Republicans and which sincere abolitionists felt was unfair to the Negro. That it was unfair to women, there was no doubt.

With determination, Susan and Mrs. Stanton fought this injustice. Were they not "persons born ... in the United States," they asked. Were they forever to be regarded as children or as lower than persons, along with criminals, idiots, and the insane? Were women not counted in the basis of representation and should they not have a voice in the election of those representatives whose office their numbers helped to establish?

As Susan studied the Constitution, she saw that the question of suffrage had up to this time been left to the states and that there were no provisions defining suffrage or citizenship or limiting the right of suffrage. Only now was the precedent being broken by the Fourteenth Amendment which conferred citizenship on Negroes and limited suffrage to males. How could this be constitutional, she reasoned, when the first lines of the Constitution read, "We, the people of the United States, in order to ... establish justice ... and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." Of course "the people" must include women, if the English language meant what it said.

The Fourteenth Amendment with the limiting word "male" was passed by Congress and referred to the states for ratification in June 1866. As never before, Susan felt the curse of the tradition of the unimportance of women. Once more politicians and reformers had ignored women's inherent rights as human beings. In spite of women's intelligence and their wartime service to their country, no statesman of power or vision felt it at all necessary to include women under the Fourteenth Amendment's broad term of "persons." Yet according to statements made in later years by John A. Bingham and Roscoe Conkling, both sponsors of the amendment and concerned with its drafting, the possibility was considered of protecting corporations and the property of individuals from the interference of state and municipal legislation, through the federal control extended by this amendment. At any rate, they wrought well for the corporations which have received abundant protection under the Fourteenth Amendment, along with all male citizens, while women were left outside the pale.[181]

Tactfully the Republicans explained to women that even Negro suffrage could not be definitely spelled out in the Fourteenth Amendment, if it were to be accepted by the people; and added that Negro suffrage was all the strain that the Republican party could bear at this time; but neither Susan nor Mrs. Stanton were fooled by this sophistry. They knew that Republican politicians saw in the Negro vote in the South the means of keeping their party in power for a long time to come, and could entirely overlook justice to Negro women since they were assured of enough votes without them. The women of the North need not be considered, since they had nothing to offer politically. They would vote, it was thought, just as their husbands voted.

Completely deserted by all their former friends in the Republican party, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now made use of an irregular Republican, Senator Cowan of Pennsylvania, whom the abolitionists had labeled "the watchdog of slavery." When Benjamin Wade's bill "to enfranchise each and every male person" in the District of Columbia "without any distinction on account of color or race," was discussed on the Senate floor in December 1866, Senator Cowan offered an amendment striking out the word "male" and thus leaving the door open for women. He stated the case for woman suffrage well and with eloquence, and although he was accused of being insincere and wishing merely to cloud the issue, he forced the Republicans to show their hands. In the three-day debate which followed, Senator Wilson of Massachusetts declared emphatically that he was opposed to connecting the two issues, woman and Negro suffrage, but would at any time support a separate bill for woman's enfranchisement. Senator Pomeroy of Kansas objected to jeopardizing the chances of Negro suffrage by linking it with woman suffrage, but Senator Wade of Ohio boldly expressed his approval of woman suffrage, even casting a vote for Senator Cowan's amendment, as did B. Gratz Brown of Missouri. In the final vote, nine votes were counted for woman suffrage and thirty-seven against.[182]

Susan recorded even this defeat as progress, for woman suffrage had for the first time been debated in Congress and prominent Senators had treated it with respect. The Republican press, however, was showing definite signs of disapproval, even Horace Greeley's New York Tribune. Almost unbelieving, she read Greeley's editorial, "A Cry from the Females," in which he said, "Talk of a true woman needing the ballot as an accessory of power when she rules the world with the glance of an eye." With the Democratic press as always solidly against woman suffrage and the Antislavery Standard avoiding the subject as if it did not exist, no words favorable to votes for women now reached the public.[183]

It was hard for Susan to forgive the Antislavery Standard for what she regarded as a breach of trust. Financed by the Hovey Fund, it owed allegiance, she believed, to women as well as the Negro. In protest Parker Pillsbury resigned his post as editor, but among the leading men in the antislavery ranks, only he, Samuel J. May, James Mott, and Robert Purvis, the cultured, wealthy Philadelphia Negro, were willing to support Susan and Mrs. Stanton in their campaign for woman suffrage at this time. The rest aligned themselves unquestioningly with the Republicans, although in the past they had always been distrustful of political parties.

Discouraging as this was for Susan, their influence upon the antislavery women was far more alarming. These women one by one temporarily deserted the woman's rights cause, persuaded that this was the Negro's hour and that they must be generous, renounce their own claims, and work only for the Negroes' civil and political rights. Less than a dozen remained steadfast, among them Lucretia Mott, Martha C. Wright, Ernestine Rose, and for a time Lucy Stone, who wrote John Greenleaf Whittier in January 1867, "You know Mr. Phillips takes the ground that this is 'the Negro's hour,' and that the women, if not criminal, are at least, not wise to urge their own claim. Now, so sure am I that he is mistaken and that the only name given, by which the country can be saved, is that of WOMAN, that I want to ask you ... to use your influence to induce him to reconsider the position he has taken. He is the only man in the nation to whom has been given the charm which compels all men, willing or unwilling, to listen when he speaks ... Mr. Phillips used to say, 'take your part with the perfect and abstract right, and trust God to see that it shall prove expedient.' Now he needs someone to help him see that point again."[184]