In her special pleading for the Negro, she did not forget women. Calling attention to the fact that our nation had never been a true republic because the ballot was exclusively in the hands of the "free white male," she asked for a government "of the people," men and women, white and black, with Negro suffrage and woman suffrage as basic requirements. [Illustration: Wendell Phillips] So enthusiastic were the Republicans over her speech that they urged her to prepare it for publication, suggesting, however, that she delete the passage on woman suffrage. This was her first intimation that Republicans might balk at enfranchising women. So great had been women's contribution to the winning of the war and so indebted were the Republicans to women for creating sentiment for the Thirteenth Amendment, that she had come to expect, along with Mrs. Stanton, that the ballot would without question be given them as a reward. * * * * * It was soon obvious to Susan that politicians in the East as well as in Kansas were shying away from woman suffrage. Mrs. Stanton reported that even Wendell Phillips was backsliding, not wishing to campaign for Negro suffrage and woman suffrage at the same time. "While I could continue as heretofore, arguing for woman's rights, just as I do for temperance every day," he had written, "still I would not mix the movements.... I think such mixture would lose for the Negro far more than we should gain for the woman. I am now engaged in abolishing slavery in a land where the abolition of slavery means conferring or recognizing citizenship, and where citizenship supposes the ballot for all men."[172] Such reasoning filled Susan with despair, for she firmly believed that women who had been asking for full citizenship for seventeen years deserved precedence over the Negro. Mrs. Stanton agreed. To them, Negro suffrage without woman suffrage was unthinkable, an unbearable humiliation. Half of the Negroes were women, and manhood suffrage would fasten upon them a new form of slavery. How could Wendell Phillips, they asked each other, fail to recognize not only the timeliness of woman suffrage, but the fact that women were better qualified for the ballot than the majority of Negroes, who, because of their years in slavery, were illiterate and the easy prey of unscrupulous politicians? By all means enfranchise Negroes, they argued with him, but enfranchise women as well, and if there must be a limitation on suffrage, let it be on the basis of literacy, not on the basis of sex.