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]
FOOTNOTES:
[134] Garrisons, _Garrison_, IV, pp. 30-31.
[135] Lydia Mott to W. L. Garrison, May 8, 1861, Boston Public Library; Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, p. 89.
[136] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 215.
[137] _Ibid._, p. 216. Harriet Tubman, a fugitive slave, was often called the Moses of her people because she led so many of them into the promised land of freedom.
[138] _Ibid._
[139] _Ibid._, p. 198.
[140] Anna E. Dickinson was born in Philadelphia in 1842. The death of her father, two years later, left the family in straightened circumstances, and Anna, after attending a Friends school, began very early to support herself by copying in lawyers' offices and by working at the U.S. Mint. Speaking extemporaneously at Friends and antislavery meetings, she discovered she had a gift for oratory and was soon in demand as a speaker.
[141] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 219.
[142] April, 1862. _History of Woman Suffrage_, I, p. 748.
[143] Harper, _Anthony_, I, pp. 218, 222.
[144] _Emancipation, the Duty of Government_, Ms., Lucy E. Anthony Collection. Reading that General Grant had returned 13 slaves to their masters, an indignant Susan B. Anthony wrote Mrs. Stanton, "Such gratuitous outrage should be met with instant death--without judge or jury--if any offense may." Feb. 27, 1862, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.
[145] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 221.
[146] Jan. 24, 1904, Anna Dann Mason Collection.
[147] Harper, _Anthony_, p. 226.
[148] The first woman in the United States to obtain a medical degree, 1849.
[149] _History of Woman Suffrage_, II, pp. 57-58.
[150] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230. Members of the Women's National Loyal League wore a silver pin showing a slave breaking his last chains and bearing the inscription, "In emancipation is national unity." Susan B. Anthony to Mrs. Drake, Sept. 18, 1863, Alma Lutz Collection.
[151] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 234.
[152] _Ibid._, To Samuel May, Jr., Sept. 21, 1863, Alma Lutz Collection.
[153] April 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress.
[154] Harper, _Anthony_, I, p. 230.
[155] June 12, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, July 1, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress. About this time, a friend of Susan B. Anthony's youth, now a widower living in Ohio in comfortable circumstances, unsuccessfully urged her to marry him.
[156] Sept. 23, 1864, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Library of Congress.
[157] Stanton and Blatch, _Stanton_, II, pp. 103-104.
[158] March 14, 1864, Anna E. Dickinson Papers, Library of Congress.
THE NEGRO'S HOUR
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:
Labor with what zeal we will Something still remains undone Something uncompleted still Waits the rising of the sun....
Till at length it is or seems Greater than our strength can bear As the burden of our dreams Pressing on us everywhere....[163]
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.
[Illustration: Daniel Anthony, brother of Susan B. Anthony]
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.