Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, HumanitarianLutz, Alma
History
Susan B. Anthony: Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian
Lutz, Alma
Anthony, Susan B. (Susan Brownell), 1820-1906
She made her home with the Stantons, who had moved from Brooklyn to 75
West 45th Street, New York, and the comfortable evenings of good
conversation and her busy days at the office helped mightily to heal
her grief for her father. In the bustling life of the city she felt
she was living more intensely, more usefully, as these critical days
of war demanded. Henry Stanton, now an editorial writer for Greeley's
_Tribune_, brought home to them the inside story of the news and of
politics. All of them were highly critical of Lincoln, impatient with
his slowness and skeptical of his plans for slaveholders and slaves in
the border states. They questioned Garrison's wisdom in trusting
Lincoln. Susan could not feel that Lincoln was honest when he
protested that he did not have the power to do all that the
abolitionists asked. "The pity is," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "that
the vast mass of people really believe the man _honest_--that he
believes he has not the power--I wish I could...."[153]
New York seethed with unrest as time for the enforcement of the draft
drew near. Indignant that rich men could avoid the draft by buying a
substitute, workingmen were easily incited to riot, and the city was
soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all Negroes and
abolitionists were in danger. The Stanton home was in the thick of the
rioting, and when Susan and Henry Stanton came home during a lull,
they all decided to take refuge for the night at the home of Mrs.
Stanton's brother-in-law, Dr. Bayard. Here they also found Horace
Greeley hiding from the mob, for hoodlums were marching through the
streets shouting, "We'll hang old Horace Greeley to a sour apple
tree."
The next morning Susan started for the office as usual, thinking the
worst was over, but as not a single horsecar or stage was running, she
took the ferry to Flushing to visit her cousins. Here too there was
rioting, but she stayed on until order was restored by the army. She
returned to the city to find casualties mounting to over a thousand
and a million dollars' worth of property destroyed. Negroes had been
shot and hung on lamp posts, Horace Greeley's _Tribune_ office had
been wrecked and the homes of abolitionist friends burned. "These are
terrible times," she wrote her family, and then went back to work,
staying devotedly at it through all the hot summer months.[154]
By the end of the year, she had enrolled the signatures of 100,000 men
and women on her petitions, and assured by Senator Sumner that these
petitions were invaluable in creating sentiment for the Thirteenth
Amendment, she raised the number of signatures in the next few months
to 400,000.
In April 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate and the
prospects for it in the House were good. This phase of her work
finished, Susan disbanded the Women's National Loyal League and
returned to her family in Rochester.
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Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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