This time she was warmly received in San Francisco. The prejudice, so vocal six months before, had disappeared. "Made my Fourteenth Amendment argument splendidly," she wrote in her diary. "All delighted with it and me--and it is such a comfort to have the friends feel that I help the good work on."[276]
She was gaining confidence in herself and wrote her family, "I miss Mrs. Stanton. Still I can not but enjoy the feeling that the people call on me, and the fact that I have an opportunity to sharpen my wits a little by answering questions and doing the chatting, instead of merely sitting a lay figure and listening to the brilliant scintillations as they emanate from her never-exhausted magazine. There is no alternative--whoever goes into a parlor or before an audience with that woman does it at a cost of a fearful overshadowing, a price which I have paid for the last ten years, and that cheerfully, because I felt our cause was most profited by her being seen and heard, and my best work was making the way clear for her."[277]
Starting homeward through Wyoming and Nevada where she also had lecture engagements, she wrote in her diary on January 1, 1872, "6 months of constant travel, full 8000 miles, 108 lectures. The year's work full 13,000 miles travel--170 meetings." On the train she met the new California Senator, Aaron A. Sargent, his wife Ellen, and their children. A warm friendship developed on this long journey during which the train was stalled in deep snow drifts. "This is indeed a fearful ordeal, fastened here ... midway of the continent at the top of the Rocky mountains," she recorded. "The railroad has supplied the passengers with soda crackers and dried fish.... Mrs. Sargent and I have made tea and carried it throughout the train to the nursing mothers."[278] The Sargents had brought their own food for the journey and shared it with Susan. This and the good conversation lightened the ordeal for her, especially as both Senator and Mrs. Sargent believed heartily in woman's rights, and Senator Sargent in his campaign for the Senate had boldly announced his endorsement of woman suffrage.
This friendly attitude among western men toward votes for women was the most encouraging development in Susan's long uphill fight. These men, looking upon women as partners who had shared with them the dangers and hardships of the frontier, recognized at once the justice of woman suffrage and its benefit to the country.
* * * * *
Susan traveled directly from Nevada to Washington instead of breaking her journey by a visit with her brothers in Kansas, as she had hoped to do. She even omitted Rochester so that she might be in time for the national woman suffrage convention in Washington in January 1872, for which Mrs. Hooker, Mrs. Davis, and Mrs. Stanton were preparing. She found Victoria Woodhull with them, her presence provoking criticism and dissension.
Impulsively she came to Victoria's defense at the convention: "I have been asked by many, 'Why did you drag Victoria Woodhull to the front?' Now, bless your souls, she was not dragged to the front. She came to Washington with a powerful argument. She presented her Memorial to Congress and it was a power.... She had an interview with the judiciary committee. We could never secure that privilege. She was young, handsome, and rich. Now if it takes youth, beauty, and money to capture Congress, Victoria is the woman we are after."[279]
"I was asked by an editor of a New York paper if I knew Mrs. Woodhull's antecedents," she continued. "I said I didn't and that I did not care any more for them than I do about those of the members of Congress.... I have been asked along the Pacific coast, 'What about Woodhull? You make her your leader?' Now we don't make leaders; they make themselves."
Victoria, however, did not prove to be the leading light of this convention, although she made one of her stirring fiery speeches calling upon her audience to form an Equal Rights party and nominate her for President of the United States. By this time, Susan had concluded that Victoria Woodhull for President did not ring true and she would have nothing to do with her self-inspired candidacy. Quickly she steered the convention away from Victoria Woodhull for President toward the consideration of the more practical matter of woman's right to vote under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
This time it was Susan, not Victoria, who was granted a hearing before the Senate judiciary committee. "At the close of the war," Susan reminded the Senators, "Congress lifted the question of suffrage for men above State power, and by the amendments prohibited the deprivation of suffrage to any citizen by any State. When the Fourteenth Amendment was first proposed ... we rushed to you with petitions praying you not to insert the word 'male' in the second clause. Our best friends ... said to us: 'The insertion of that word puts no new barrier against women; therefore do not embarrass us but wait until we get the Negro question settled.' So the Fourteenth Amendment with the word 'male' was adopted.[280]
"When the Fifteenth was presented without the word 'sex,'" she continued, "we again petitioned and protested, and again our friends declared that the absence of the word was no hindrance to us, and again begged us to wait until they had finished the work of the war, saying, 'After we have enfranchised the Negro, we will take up your case.'
"Have they done as they promised?" she asked. "When we come asking protection under the new guarantees of the Constitution, the same men say to us ... to wait the action of Congress and State legislatures in the adoption of a Sixteenth Amendment which shall make null and void the word 'male' in the Fourteenth and supply the want of the word 'sex' in the Fifteenth. Such tantalizing treatment imposed upon yourselves or any class of men would have caused rebellion and in the end a bloody revolution...."
Unconvinced of the urgency or even the desirability of votes for women, the Senate judiciary committee promptly issued an adverse report, but Susan was assured that her cause had a few persistent supporters in Congress when Benjamin Butler presented petitions to the House for a declaratory act for the Fourteenth Amendment and Congressman Parker of Missouri introduced a bill granting women the right to vote and hold office in the territories.
* * * * *
Susan now turned to the more sympathetic West to take her plea for woman suffrage directly to the people. Speaking almost daily in Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, and Illinois, she had little time to think of the work in the East; the glamor of Victoria Woodhull faded, and she realized that her own hard monotonous spade work would in the long run do more for the cause than the meteoric rise of a vivid personality who gave only part of herself to the task.
When letters came from Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker showing plainly that they were falling in with Victoria's plans to form a new political party, Susan at once dashed off these lines of warning: "We have no element out of which to make a political party, because there is not a man who would vote a woman suffrage ticket if thereby he endangered his Republican, Democratic, Workingmen's, or Temperance party, and all our time and words in that direction are simply thrown away. My name must not be used to call any such meeting."[281]
Then she added, "Mrs. Woodhull has the advantage of us because she has the newspaper, and she persistently means to run our craft into her port and none other. If she were influenced by women spirits ... I might consent to be a mere sail-hoister for her; but as it is she is wholly owned and dominated by _men_ spirits and I spurn the whole lot of them...."
A few weeks later, as she looked over the latest copy of _Woodhull & Claflin's Weekly_, she was horrified to find her name signed to a call to a political convention sponsored by the National Woman Suffrage Association. Immediately she telegraphed Mrs. Stanton to remove her name and wrote stern indignant letters begging her and Mrs. Hooker not to involve the National Association in Victoria Woodhull's presidential campaign. Although she herself had often called for a new political party while she was publishing _The Revolution_, she was practical enough to recognize that a party formed under Victoria Woodhull's banner was doomed to failure.
Returning to New York, she found both Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Hooker still completely absorbed in Victoria's plans. Bringing herself up to date once more on the latest developments in the colorful life of Victoria Woodhull, she found that she had been lecturing on "The Impending Revolution" to large enthusiastic audiences and that she had again been called into court by her family. Goaded to defiance by an increasingly virulent press, Victoria had also begun to blackmail suffragists who she thought were her enemies, among them Mrs. Bullard, Mrs. Blake, and Mrs. Phelps. This made Susan take steps at once to free the National Association of her influence.