With Ernestine Rose, Susan now headed for Washington. These two women had been drawn together by common interests ever since they had met in Syracuse in 1852. Susan was not frightened, as many were, by Ernestine's reputed atheism. She appreciated Ernestine's intelligence, her devotion to woman's rights, and her easy eloquence. Conscious of her own limitations as an orator, she recognized her need of Ernestine for the many meetings she planned for the future.
As they traveled to Washington together, she learned more about this beautiful, impressive, black-haired Jewess from Poland, who was ten years her senior. The daughter of a rabbi, Ernestine had found the limitations of orthodox religion unbearable for a woman and had left her home to see and learn more of the world in Prussia, Holland, France, Scotland, and England. She had married an Englishman sympathetic to her liberal views, and together they had come to New York where she began her career as a lecturer in 1836 when speaking in public branded women immoral. She spoke easily and well on education, woman's rights, and the evils of slavery. Her slight foreign accent added charm to her rich musical voice, and before long she was in demand as far west as Ohio and Michigan. With a colleague as experienced as Ernestine, Susan dared arrange for meetings even in the capital of the nation.
Washington was tense over the slavery issue when they arrived, and Ernestine's friends warned her not to mention the subject in her lectures. Unheeding she commented on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, but the press took no notice and her audiences showed no signs of dissatisfaction. In fact, two comparatively unknown women, billed to lecture on the "Educational and Social Rights of Women" and the "Political and Legal Rights of Women," attracted little attention in a city accustomed to a blaze of Congressional oratory. Hoping to draw larger audiences and to lend dignity to their meetings, Susan asked for the use of the Capitol on Sunday, but was refused because Ernestine was not a member of a religious society. Making an attempt for Smithsonian Hall, Ernestine was told it could not risk its reputation by presenting a woman speaker.[50]
A failure financially, their Washington venture was rich in experience. Susan took time out for sightseeing, visiting the "President's house" and Mt. Vernon, which to her surprise she found in a state of "delapidation and decay." "The mark of slavery o'ershadows the whole," she wrote in her diary. "Oh the thought that it was here that he whose name is the pride of this Nation, was the Slave Master."[51]
Again and again in the Capitol, she listened to heated debates on the Kansas-Nebraska bill, astonished at the eloquence and fervor with which the "institution of slavery" could be defended. Seeing slavery first-hand, she abhorred it more than ever and observed with dismay its degenerating influence on master as well as slave. She began to feel that even she herself might be undermined by it almost unwittingly and confessed to her diary, "This noon, I ate my dinner without once asking myself are these human beings who minister to my wants, Slaves to be bought and sold and hired out at the will of a master?... Even I am getting accustomed to Slavery ... so much so that I have ceased continually to be made to feel its blighting, cursing influence."[52]
A few months later, Susan and Ernestine were in Philadelphia at a national woman's rights convention, and when Ernestine was proposed for president, Susan had her first opportunity to champion her new friend. A foreigner and a free-thinker, Ernestine encountered a great deal of prejudice even among liberal reformers, and Susan was surprised at the strength of feeling against her. Impressed during their trip to Washington by Ernestine's essentially fine qualities and her value to the cause, Susan fought for her behind the scenes, insisting that freedom of religion or the freedom to have no religion be observed in woman's rights conventions, and she had the satisfaction of seeing Ernestine elected to the office she so richly deserved.
Freedom of religion or freedom to have no religion had become for Susan a principle to hold on to, as she listened at these early woman's rights meetings to the lengthy fruitless discussions regarding the lack of Scriptural sanction for women's new freedom. Usually a clergyman appeared on the scene, volubly quoting the Bible to prove that any widening of woman's sphere was contrary to the will of God. But always ready to refute him were Antoinette Brown, now an ordained minister, William Lloyd Garrison, and occasionally Susan herself. To the young Quaker broadened by her Unitarian contacts and unhampered by creed or theological dogma, such debates were worse than useless; they deepened theological differences, stirred up needless antagonisms, solved no problems, and wasted valuable time.
During this convention, she was one of the twenty-four guests in Lucretia Mott's comfortable home at 238 Arch Street. Every meal, with its stimulating discussions, was a convention in itself. Susan's great hero, William Lloyd Garrison, sat at Lucretia's right at the long table in the dining room, Susan on her left, and at the end of each meal, when the little cedar tub filled with hot soapy water was brought in and set before Lucretia so that she could wash the silver, glass, and fine china at the table, Susan dried them on a snowy-white towel while the interesting conversation continued. There was talk of woman's rights, of temperance, and of spiritualism, which was attracting many new converts. There were thrilling stories of the opening of the West and the building of transcontinental railways; but most often and most earnestly the discussion turned to the progress of the antislavery movement, to the infamous Kansas-Nebraska bill, to the New England Emigrant Aid Company,[53] which was sending free-state settlers to Kansas, to the weakness of the government in playing again and again into the hands of the proslavery faction. Most of them saw the country headed toward a vast slave empire which would embrace Cuba, Mexico, and finally Brazil; and William Lloyd Garrison fervently reiterated his doctrine, "No Union with Slaveholders."
Before leaving home Susan had heard first-hand reports of the bitter bloody antislavery contest in Kansas from her brother Daniel, who had just returned from a trip to that frontier territory with settlers sent out by the New England Emigrant Aid Company. Now talking with William Lloyd Garrison, she found herself torn between these two great causes for human freedom, abolition and woman's rights, and it was hard for her to decide which cause needed her more.