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.
[Illustration: Merritt Anthony]
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."