Miss Anthony remained in Washington till April 14, managing her forces like an experienced general until the last gun had been fired. When she returned home ready to begin work on the History, she found to her amazement that the officer who had been charged with preparing the report of the Sixteenth National Suffrage Convention, a woman of great literary ability, had given it up in despair, declaring that it would be utterly impossible to make anything creditable out of such a mass of unsatisfactory material, most of which would have to be entirely re-written. Miss Anthony did not stop to sit down and weep, but wrote her at once to send to Rochester every document she had in her possession. Then, taking all of them to Mrs. Stanton, who had gone to her old paternal home at Johnstown, they arranged, edited, re-wrote and put into shape the conglomerate of letters, speeches, etc., and in less than two weeks prepared and sent to the printer the most complete report ever made of a National convention.[22] The middle of May, after two years' interruption, Miss Anthony and Mrs. Stanton set themselves diligently to finish the third volume of the History of Woman Suffrage, all the boxes and trunks of material having been shipped from Tenafly. Although submerged in the avalanche of old documents, Miss Anthony's mind was full of current events. She writes in her journal June 2: "I wait with bated breath the news from Oregon, where today the men are voting on the question of woman's enfranchisement. My heart almost stands stills. I hope against hope, but still I hope." When the news of the defeat comes, she says: "Dear Mrs. Duniway, with all that debt left on her shoulders, which she assumed to carry on the campaign! I felt so agonized for her that on the very day of election I rushed to the bank and sent her $100. We must not leave her to carry it alone, after all her brave work. I have written a dozen letters to friends asking them to give her assistance. I feel like a lion champing the bars of his cage, shut up here digging and delving among the records of the past when I long to be out doing the work of the present." In a letter received from Senator Palmer at this time he says: