Horace Greeley never forgave Susan and Mrs. Stanton for humiliating him in the constitutional convention or for the headlines in the evening papers which coupled his adverse report with his wife's petition. When they met again in New York a few weeks later at one of Alice Cary's popular evening receptions, he ignored their friendly greeting and brusquely remarked, "You two ladies are the most maneuvering politicians in the State of New York."[192]
* * * * *
While Susan's work in New York State was at its height, appeals for help had reached her from Republicans in Kansas, where in November 1867 two amendments would be voted upon, enfranchising women and Negroes. Unable to go to Kansas herself at that time or to spare Elizabeth Stanton, she rejoiced when Lucy Stone consented to speak throughout Kansas and when she and Lucy, as trustees of the Jackson Fund, outvoting Wendell Phillips, were able to appropriate $1,500 for this campaign.
Lucy was soon sending enthusiastic reports to Susan from Kansas, where she and her husband, Henry Blackwell, were winning many friends for the cause. "I fully expect we shall carry the State," Lucy confidently wrote Susan. "The women here are grand, and it will be a shame past all expression if they don't get the right to vote.... But the Negroes are all against us.... These men _ought not to be allowed to vote before we do_, because they will be just so much dead weight to lift."[193]
One cloud now appeared on the horizon. Republicans in Kansas began to withdraw their support from the woman suffrage amendment they had sponsored. It troubled Lucy and Susan that the New York _Tribune_ and the _Independent_, both widely read in Kansas, published not one word favorable to woman suffrage, for these two papers with their influence and prestige could readily, they believed, win the ballot for women not only in Kansas but throughout the nation. Soon the temper of the Republican press changed from indifference to outright animosity, striking at Lucy and Henry Blackwell by calling them "free lovers," because Lucy was traveling with her husband as Lucy Stone and not as Mrs. Henry B. Blackwell. Still Lucy was hopeful, believing the Democrats were ready to take them up, but she reminded Susan, "It will be necessary to have a good force here in the fall, and you will have to come."
Never for a moment did the importance of this election in Kansas escape Susan, and her estimate of it was also that of John Stuart Mill, who wrote from England to the sponsor of the Kansas woman suffrage amendment, Samuel N. Wood, "If your citizens next November give effect to the enlightened views of your Legislature, history will remember one of the youngest states in the civilized world has been the first to adopt a measure of liberation destined to extend all over the earth and to be looked back to ... as one of the most fertile in beneficial consequences of all improvements yet effected in human affairs."[194]
Susan fully expected Kansas to pioneer for woman suffrage just as it had taken its stand against slavery when the rest of the country held back. Her first problem, however, was to raise the money to get herself and Elizabeth Stanton there. The grant from the Jackson Fund had been spent by the Blackwells and Olympia Brown of Michigan, who most providentially volunteered to continue their work when they returned to the East. Olympia Brown, recently graduated from Antioch College and ordained as a minister in the Universalist church, was a new recruit to the cause. Young and indefatigable, she reached every part of Kansas during the summer, driving over the prairies with the Singing Hutchinsons.[195]
Olympia Brown's valiant help made waiting in New York easier for Susan as she tried in every way to raise money. Further grants from the Jackson Fund were cut off by an unfavorable court decision; and the trustees of the Hovey Fund, established to further the rights of both Negroes and women, refused to finance a woman suffrage campaign in Kansas.
"We are left without a dollar," she wrote State Senator Samuel N. Wood. "Every speaker who goes to Kansas must _now pay her own_ expenses out of her own private purse, unless money should come from some unexpected source. I shall run the risk--as I told you--and draw upon almost my last hundred to go. I tell you this that you may not contract _debts_ under the impression that _our_ Association can pay for them--_for it cannot_."[196]
She did find a way to finance the printing of leaflets so urgently needed for distribution in Kansas. Soliciting advertisements up and down Broadway during the heat of July and August, she collected enough to pay the printer for 60,000 tracts, with the result that along with the dignified, eloquent speeches of Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Parker, George William Curtis, and John Stuart Mill went advertisements of Howe sewing machines, Mme. Demorest's millinery and patterns, Browning's washing machines, and Decker pianofortes to attract the people of Kansas.
* * * * *
With both New York and Kansas on her mind, Susan had had little time to be with her family, although she had often longed to slip out to Rochester for a visit with her mother and Guelma who had been ill for several months. Finally she spent a few days with them on her way to Kansas.
On the long train journey from Rochester to Kansas with such a congenial companion as Elizabeth Stanton, she enjoyed every new experience, particularly the new Palace cars advertised as the finest, most luxurious in the world, costing $40,000 each. The comfortable daytime seats transformed into beds at night and the meals served by solicitous Negro waiters were of the greatest interest to these two good housekeepers and the last bit of comfort they were to enjoy for many a day.
As soon as they reached Kansas, they set out immediately on a two-week speaking tour of the principal towns, and as usual Susan starred Mrs. Stanton while she herself acted as general manager, advertising the meetings, finding a suitable hall, sweeping it out if necessary, distributing and selling tracts, and perhaps making a short speech herself. The meetings were highly successful, but traveling by stage and wagon was rugged; most of the food served them was green with soda or floating in grease and the hotels were infested with bedbugs. Susan wrote her family of sleepless nights and of picking the "tormentors" out of their bonnets and the ruffles of their dresses.[197]
Occasionally there was an oasis of cleanliness and good food, as when they stopped at the railroad hotel in Salina and found it run by Mother Bickerdyke, who, marching through Georgia with General Sherman, had nursed and fed his soldiers. At such times Kansas would take on a rosy glow and Susan could report, "We are getting along splendidly. Just the frame of a Methodist Church with sidings and roof, and rough cottonwood boards for seats, was our meeting place last night ...; and a perfect jam it was, with men crowded outside at all the windows.... Our tracts do more than half the battle; reading matter is so very scarce that everybody clutches at a book of any kind.... All that great trunk full were sold and given away at our first 14 meetings, and we in return received $110 which a little more than paid our railroad fare--eight cents per mile--and hotel bills. Our collections thus far fully equal those at the East. I have been delightfully disappointed for everybody said I couldn't raise money in Kansas meetings."[198]
The reputation of both women preceded them to Kansas. Susan had to win her way against prejudice built up by newspaper gibes of past years which had caricatured her as a meddlesome reformer and a sour old maid, but gradually her friendliness, hominess, and sincerity broke down these preconceptions. Kansas soon respected this tall slender energetic woman who, as she overrode obstacles, showed a spirit akin to that of the frontiersman.
Mrs. Stanton, on the other hand, was welcomed at once with enthusiasm. The fact that she was the mother of seven children as well as a brilliant orator opened the way for her. She was good to look at, a queenly woman at fifty-two, with a fresh rosy complexion and carefully curled soft white hair. Her motherliness and refreshing sense of humor built up a bond of understanding with her audiences. People were eager to see her, hear her, talk with her, and entertain her.
This preference was obvious to Susan, but it aroused no jealousy. She sent Mrs. Stanton out through the state by mule team to all the small towns and settlements far from the railroad, along with their popular and faithful Republican ally, Charles Robinson, first Free State Governor of Kansas, counting on these two to build up good will. In the meantime, making her headquarters in Lawrence, she reorganized the campaign to meet the increasing opposition of the Republican machine, against which the continued support of a few prominent Kansas Republicans availed little. As the state was predominantly Republican, the prospects were gloomy, for the Democrats had not yet taken them up as Lucy Stone had predicted, but still opposed both the Negro and woman suffrage amendments. A new liquor law, which it was thought women would support, further complicated the situation, aligning the liquor interests and the German and Irish settlers solidly against votes for women.