After Lincoln's re-election, she again looked to Wendell Phillips for an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed. "Phillips has just returned from Washington," Mrs. Stanton wrote her. "He says the radical men feel they are powerless and checkmated.... They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not say.... We say now, as ever, 'Give us immediately unconditional emancipation, and let there be no reconstruction except on the broadest basis of justice and equality!...' Phillips and a few others must hold up the pillars of the temple.... I cannot tell you how happy I am to find Douglass on the same platform with us. Keep him on the right track. Tell him in this revolution, he, Phillips, and you and I must hold the highest ground and truly represent the best type of the white man, the black man, and the woman."[157]
Susan, holding "the highest ground," found it difficult to mark time until she could find her place in the reconstruction. "The work of the hour," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "is not alone to put down the Rebels in arms, but to educate Thirty Millions of People into the idea of a True Republic. Hence every influence and power that both men and women can bring to bear will be needed in the reconstruction of the Nation on the broad basis of justice and equality."[158]
THE NEGRO'S HOUR
Susan's thoughts now turned to Kansas, as they had many times since her brothers had settled there. Daniel and Annie, his young wife from the East, urged her to visit them.[159] Daniel was well established in Kansas, the publisher of his own newspaper and the mayor of Leavenworth. He had served a little over a year in the Union army in the First Kansas Cavalry. She longed to see him and the West that he loved.
Now for the first time she felt free to make the long journey, for her mother and Mary had sold the farm on the outskirts of Rochester and had moved into the city, buying a large red brick house shaded by maples and a beautiful horse chestnut. It had been a wrench for Susan to give up the farm with its memories of her father, but there were compensations in the new home on Madison Street, for Guelma, her husband, Aaron McLean, and their family lived with them there. Hannah and her family had also settled in Rochester, and when they bought the house next door, Susan had the satisfaction of living again in the midst of her family.[160]
She was particularly devoted to Guelma's twenty-three-year-old daughter, Ann Eliza, whose "merry laugh" and "bright, joyous presence" brought new life into the household. Ann Eliza was a stimulating intelligent companion, and Susan looked forward to seeing many of her own dreams fulfilled in her niece. Then suddenly in the fall of 1864, Ann Eliza was taken ill, and her death within a few days left a great void.[161]
In the midst of this sorrow, Daniel sent Susan a ticket and a check for a trip to Kansas. Hesitating no longer, she waited only until her "tip-top Rochester dressmaker" made up "the new, five-dollar silk" which she had bought in New York.[162]
Before leaving for Kansas, in January, 1865, she pasted on the first page of her diary a clipping of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "Something Left Undone," which seemed so perfectly to interpret her own feelings: