A failure financially, their Washington venture was rich in experience. Susan took time out for sightseeing, visiting the "President's house" and Mt. Vernon, which to her surprise she found in a state of "delapidation and decay." "The mark of slavery o'ershadows the whole," she wrote in her diary. "Oh the thought that it was here that he whose name is the pride of this Nation, was the _Slave Master_."[51]
Again and again in the Capitol, she listened to heated debates on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, astonished at the eloquence and fervor with which the "institution of slavery" could be defended. Seeing slavery first-hand, she abhorred it more than ever and observed with dismay its degenerating influence on master as well as slave. She began to feel that even she herself might be undermined by it almost unwittingly and confessed to her diary, "This noon, I ate my dinner without once asking myself are these human beings who minister to my wants, Slaves to be bought and sold and hired out at the will of a master?... Even I am getting _accustomed_ to _Slavery_ ... so much so that I have ceased continually to be made to feel its blighting, cursing influence."[52]
* * * * *
A few months later, Susan and Ernestine were in Philadelphia at a national woman's rights convention, and when Ernestine was proposed for president, Susan had her first opportunity to champion her new friend. A foreigner and a free-thinker, Ernestine encountered a great deal of prejudice even among liberal reformers, and Susan was surprised at the strength of feeling against her. Impressed during their trip to Washington by Ernestine's essentially fine qualities and her value to the cause, Susan fought for her behind the scenes, insisting that freedom of religion or the freedom to have no religion be observed in woman's rights conventions, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Ernestine elected to the office she so richly deserved.
Freedom of religion or freedom to have no religion had become for Susan a principle to hold on to, as she listened at these early woman's rights meetings to the lengthy fruitless discussions regarding the lack of Scriptural sanction for women's new freedom. Usually a clergyman appeared on the scene, volubly quoting the Bible to prove that any widening of woman's sphere was contrary to the will of God. But always ready to refute him were Antoinette Brown, now an ordained minister, William Lloyd Garrison, and occasionally Susan herself. To the young Quaker broadened by her Unitarian contacts and unhampered by creed or theological dogma, such debates were worse than useless; they deepened theological differences, stirred up needless antagonisms, solved no problems, and wasted valuable time.
During this convention, she was one of the twenty-four guests in Lucretia Mott's comfortable home at 238 Arch Street. Every meal, with its stimulating discussions, was a convention in itself. Susan's great hero, William Lloyd Garrison, sat at Lucretia's right at the long table in the dining room, Susan on her left, and at the end of each meal, when the little cedar tub filled with hot soapy water was brought in and set before Lucretia so that she could wash the silver, glass, and fine china at the table, Susan dried them on a snowy-white towel while the interesting conversation continued. There was talk of woman's rights, of temperance, and of spiritualism, which was attracting many new converts. There were thrilling stories of the opening of the West and the building of transcontinental railways; but most often and most earnestly the discussion turned to the progress of the antislavery movement, to the infamous Kansas-Nebraska bill, to the New England Emigrant Aid Company,[53] which was sending free-state settlers to Kansas, to the weakness of the government in playing again and again into the hands of the proslavery faction. Most of them saw the country headed toward a vast slave empire which would embrace Cuba, Mexico, and finally Brazil; and William Lloyd Garrison fervently reiterated his doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders."
Before leaving home Susan had heard first-hand reports of the bitter bloody antislavery contest in Kansas from her brother Daniel, who had just returned from a trip to that frontier territory with settlers sent out by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Now talking with William Lloyd Garrison, she found herself torn between these two great causes for human freedom, abolition and woman's rights, and it was hard for her to decide which cause needed her more.
* * * * *
She had not, however, forgotten her unfinished business in New York State. The refusal of the legislature to amend the property laws had doubled her determination to continue circulating petitions until married women's civil rights were finally recognized. It took courage to go alone to towns where she was unknown to arrange for meetings on the unpopular subject of woman's rights. Not knowing how she would be received, she found it almost as difficult to return to such towns as Canajoharie where she had been highly respected as a teacher six years before. In Canajoharie, however, she was greeted affectionately by her uncle Joshua Read. He and his friends let her use the Methodist church for her lecture, and when the trustees of the academy urged her to return there to teach, Uncle Joshua interrupted with a vehement "No!" protesting that others could teach but it was Susan's work "to go around and set people thinking about the laws."[54]
Returning to the scene of her girlhood in Battenville and Easton, visiting her sisters Guelma and Hannah, and meeting many of her old friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief, not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that is made the modern test of Christianity."[55]
After eight strenuous months away from home, she was welcomed warmly by a family who believed in her work. She found abolition uppermost in everyone's mind. Her brother Merritt, fired by Daniel's tales of the West and the antislavery struggle in Kansas, was impatient to join the settlers there and could talk of nothing else. While he poured out the latest news about Kansas, he and a cousin Mary Luther helped Susan fold handbills for future woman's rights meetings. Susan listened eagerly and approvingly as he told of the 750 free-state settlers who during the past summer had gone out to Kansas, traveling up the Missouri on steamboats and over lonely trails in wagons marked "Kansas." Most of them were not abolitionists but men who wanted Kansas a free-labor state which they could develop with their own hard work. She heard of the ruthless treatment these "Yankee" settlers faced from the proslavery Missourians who wanted Kansas in the slavery bloc. There was bloodshed and there would be more. John Brown's sons had written from Kansas, "Send us guns. We need them more than bread."[56] Merritt was ready and eager to join John Brown.
The Anthony farm was virtually a hotbed of insurrection with Merritt planning resistance in Kansas and Susan reform in New York. Susan mapped out an ambitious itinerary, hoping to canvass with her petitions every county in the state. With her father as security, she borrowed money to print her handbills and notices, and then wrote Wendell Phillips asking if any money for a woman's rights campaign had been raised by the last national convention. He replied with his own personal check for fifty dollars. His generosity and confidence touched her deeply, for already he had become a hero to her second only to William Lloyd Garrison. This tall handsome intellectual, a graduate of Harvard and an unsurpassed orator, had forfeited friends, social position, and a promising career as a lawyer to plead for the slave. He was also one of the very few men who sympathized with and aided the woman's rights cause.
Horace Greeley too proved at this time to be a good friend, writing, "I have your letter and your programme, friend Susan. I will publish the latter in all our editions, but return your dollars."[57]
Her earnestness and ability made a great appeal to these men. They marveled at her industry. Thirty-four years old now, not handsome but wholesome, simply and neatly dressed, her brown hair smoothly parted and brought down over her ears, she had nothing of the scatterbrained impulsive reformer about her, and no coquetry. She was practical and intelligent, and men liked to discuss their work with her. William Henry Channing, admiring her executive ability and her plucky reaction to defeat, dubbed her the Napoleon of the woman's rights movement. Parker Pillsbury, the fiery abolitionist from New Hampshire, broad-shouldered, dark-bearded, with blazing eyes and almost fanatical zeal, had become her devoted friend. He liked nothing better than to tease her about her idleness and pretend to be in search of more work for her to do.