The repercussions of the divorce debates were soon drowned out by the noise and excitement of the presidential campaign of 1860. With four candidates in the field, Breckenridge, Bell, Douglas, and Lincoln, each offering his party's solution for the nation's critical problems, there was much to think about and discuss, and Susan found woman's rights pushed into the background. At the same time antagonism toward abolitionists was steadily mounting for they were being blamed for the tensions between the North and the South.
Dedicated to the immediate and unconditional emancipation of slavery, Susan saw no hope in the promises of any political party. Even the Republicans' opposition to the extension of slavery in the territories, which had won over many abolitionists, including Henry and Elizabeth Stanton, seemed to her a mild and ineffectual answer to the burning questions of the hour. For her to further the election of Abraham Lincoln was unthinkable, since he favored the enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law and had stated he was not in favor of Negro citizenship.
At heart she was a nonvoting Garrisonian abolitionist and would not support a political party which in any way sanctioned slavery. Had she been eligible as a voter she undoubtedly would have refused to cast her ballot until a righteous antislavery government had been established. As she expressed it in a letter to Mrs. Stanton, she could not, if she were a man, vote for "the least of two evils, one of which the Nation must surely have in the presidential chair."[120]
She saw no possibility at this time of wiping out slavery by means of political abolition, because in spite of the fact that slavery had for years been one of the most pressing issues before the American people, no great political party had yet endorsed abolition, nor had a single prominent practical statesman[121] advocated immediate unconditional emancipation. As the Liberty party experiment had proved, an abolitionist running for office on an antislavery platform was doomed to defeat. Therefore the gesture made in this critical campaign by a small group of abolitionists in nominating Gerrit Smith for president appeared utterly futile to Susan. Abolitionists, she believed, followed the only course consistent with their principles when they eschewed politics, abstained from voting, and devoted their energies with the fervor of evangelists to a militant educational campaign.
So, whenever she could, she continued to hold antislavery meetings. "Crowded house at Port Byron," her diary records. "I tried to say a few words at opening, but soon curled up like a sensitive plant. It is a terrible martyrdom for me to speak."[122] Yet so great was the need to enlighten people on the evils of slavery that she endured this martyrdom, stepping into the breach when no other speaker was available. Taking as her subject, "What Is American Slavery?" she declared, "It is the legalized, systematic robbery of the bodies and souls of nearly four millions of men, women, and children. It is the legalized traffic in God's image."[123]
She asked for personal liberty laws to protect the human rights of fugitive slaves, adding that the Dred Scott decision had been possible only because it reflected the spirit and purpose of the American people in the North as well as the South. She heaped blame on the North for restricting the Negro's educational and economic opportunities, for barring him from libraries, lectures, and theaters, and from hotels and seats on trains and buses.
"Let the North," she urged, "prove to the South by her acts that she fully recognizes the humanity of the black man, that she respects his rights in all her educational, industrial, social, and political associations...."
This was asking far more than the North was ready to give, but to Susan it was justice which she must demand. No wonder free Negroes in the North honored and loved her and expressed their gratitude whenever they could. "A fine-looking colored man on the train presented me with a bouquet," she wrote in her diary. "Can't tell whether he knew me or only felt my sympathy."[124]