All these developments Susan discussed with her father, for she frequently came home between lectures. He was a tower of strength to her. When she was disillusioned or when criticism and opposition were hard to bear, his sympathy and wise counsel never failed her. There was a strong bond of understanding and affection between them.
His sudden illness and death, late in November 1862, were a shock from which she had to struggle desperately to recover. Her life was suddenly empty. The farm home was desolate. She could not think of leaving her mother and her sister Mary there all alone. Nor could she count on help from Daniel or Merritt, both of whom were serving in the army in the West, Daniel, as a lieutenant colonel, and Merritt as a captain in the 7th Kansas Cavalry. For many weeks she had no heart for anything but grief. "It seemed as if everything in the world must stop."[146]
Not even President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, issued January 1, 1863, roused her. It took a letter from Henry Stanton from Washington to make her see that there was war work for her to do. He wrote her, "The country is rapidly going to destruction. The Army is almost in a state of mutiny for want of its pay and lack of a leader. Nothing can carry through but the southern Negroes, and nobody can marshal them into the struggle except the abolitionists.... Such men as Lovejoy, Hale, and the like have pretty much given up the struggle in despair. You have no idea how dark the cloud is which hangs over us.... We must not lay the flattering unction to our souls that the proclamation will be of any use if we are beaten and have a dissolution of the Union. Here then is work for you, Susan, put on your armor and go forth."[147]
A month later, Susan went to New York for a visit with Elizabeth Stanton, confident that if they counseled together, they could find a way to serve their country in its hour of need.
She was well aware that all through the country women were responding magnificently in this crisis, giving not only their husbands and sons to the war, but carrying on for them in the home, on the farm, and in business. Many were sewing and knitting for soldiers, scraping lint for hospitals, and organizing Ladies' Aid Societies, which, operating through the United States Sanitary Commission, the forerunner of the Red Cross, sent clothing and nourishing food to the inadequately equipped and poorly fed soldiers in the field. In the large cities women were holding highly successful "Sanitary Fairs" to raise funds for the Sanitary Commission. In fact, through the women, civilian relief was organized as never before in history. Individual women too, Susan knew, were making outstanding contributions to the war. Lucy Stone's sister-in-law, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell,[148] a friend and admirer of Florence Nightingale, was training much-needed nurses, while Dr. Mary Walker, putting on coat and trousers, ministered tirelessly to the wounded on the battlefield. Dorothea Dix, the one-time schoolteacher who had awakened the people to their barbarous treatment of the insane, had offered her services to the Surgeon-General and was eventually appointed Superintendent of Army Nurses, with authority to recruit nurses and oversee hospital housekeeping. Clara Barton, a government employee, and other women volunteers were finding their way to the front to nurse the wounded who so desperately needed their help; and Mother Bickerdyke, living with the armies in the field, nursed her boys and cooked for them, lifting their morale by her motherly, strengthening presence. Through the influence of Anna Ella Carroll, Maryland had been saved for the Union and she, it was said, was ably advising President Lincoln.
Susan herself had felt no call to nurse the wounded, although she had often skillfully nursed her own family; nor had she felt that her qualifications as an expert housekeeper and good executive demanded her services at the front to supervise army housekeeping. Instead she looked for some important task to which other women would not turn in these days when relief work absorbed all their attention. It was not enough, she felt, for women to be angels of mercy, valuable and well-organized as this phase of their work had become. A spirit of awareness was lacking among them, also a patriotic fervor, and this led her to believe that northern women needed someone to stimulate their thinking, to force them to come to grips with the basic issues of the war and in so doing claim their own freedom. Women, she reasoned, must be aroused to think not only in terms of socks, shirts, and food for soldiers or of bandages and nursing, but in terms of the traditions of freedom upon which this republic was founded. Women must have a part in molding public opinion and must help direct policy as Anna Ella Carroll was proving women could do. Here was the best possible training for prospective women voters. To all this Mrs. Stanton heartily agreed.
As they sat at the dining-room table with Mrs. Stanton's two daughters, Maggie and Hattie, all busily cutting linen into small squares and raveling them into lint for the wounded, they discussed the state of the nation. They were troubled by the low morale of the North and by the insidious propaganda of the Copperheads, an antiwar, pro-Southern group, which spread discontent and disrespect for the government. Profiteering was flagrant, and through speculation and war contracts, large fortunes were being built up among the few, while the majority of the people not only found their lives badly disrupted by the war but suffered from high prices and low wages. So far no decisive victory had encouraged confidence in ultimate triumph over the South. In newspapers and magazines, women of the North were being unfavorably compared with southern women and criticized because of their lack of interest in the war. Writing in the Atlantic Monthly, March, 1863, Gail Hamilton, a rising young journalist, accused northern women of failing to come up to the level of the day. "If you could have finished the war with your needles," she chided them, "it would have been finished long ago, but stitching does not crush rebellion, does not annihilate treason...."
Thinking along these same lines, Susan and Mrs. Stanton now decided to go a step further. They would act to bring women abreast of the issues of the day, Susan with her flare for organizing women, Mrs. Stanton with her pen and her eloquence. They would show women that they had an ideal to fight for. They would show them the uselessness of this bloody conflict unless it won freedom for all of the slaves. Freedom for all, as a basic demand of the republic, would be their watchword. Men were forming Union Leagues and Loyal Leagues to combat the influence of secret antiwar societies, such as the Knights of the Golden Circle. "Why not organize a Women's National Loyal League?" Susan and Mrs. Stanton asked each other.
They talked their ideas over first with the New York abolitionists, then with Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and his dashing young friend, Theodore Tilton, and with Robert Dale Owen, now in the city as the recently appointed head of the Freedman's Inquiry Commission. These men were in touch with Charles Sumner and other antislavery members of Congress. All agreed that the Emancipation Proclamation must be implemented by an act of Congress, by an amendment to the Constitution, and that public opinion must be aroused to demand a Thirteenth Amendment. If women would help, so much the better.