"In this city," she reported to Mrs. Stanton, "there are four thousand ex-Missouri slaves who have sought refuge here within the three past years." Making it her business to learn what was being done to help them and educate them, she visited their schools, their Sunday schools, and the Colored Home, and gave much of her time to them. To encourage them to demand their rights, she organized an Equal Rights League among them. This was one thing she could do, even if she could not plead for Negro suffrage in Daniel's newspaper.[165]
Then one breath-taking piece of news followed another—Lee's surrender, April 9, 1865, and in less than a week, Lincoln's assassination, his death, and Andrew Johnson's succession to the Presidency.
Susan looked upon Lincoln's assassination and death as an act of God. She wrote to Mrs. Stanton, "Was there ever a more terrific command to a Nation to 'stand still and know that I am God' since the world began? The Old Book's terrible exhibitions of God's wrath sink into nothingness. And this fell blow just at the very hour he was declaring his willingness to consign those five million faithful, brave, and loving loyal people of the South to the tender mercies of the ex-slave lords of the lash."[166]
She longed "to go out and do battle for the Lord once more," but when she could have expressed her opinions at the big mass meeting held in memory of Lincoln, she remained silent. "My soul was full," she confessed to Mrs. Stanton, "but the flesh not equal to stemming the awful current, to do what the people have called make an exhibition of myself. So quenched the spirit and came home ashamed of myself."
Then she added, "Dear-a-me—how overfull I am, and how I should like to be nestled into some corner away from every chick and child with you once more."
Disturbing news came from the East of dissension in the antislavery ranks, of Garrison's desire to dissolve the American Antislavery Society after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and of Phillips' insistence that it continue until freedom for the Negro was firmly established. While Garrison maintained that northern states, denying the ballot to the Negro, could not consistently make Negro suffrage a requirement for readmitting rebel states to the Union, Phillips demanded Negro suffrage as a condition of readmission. Immediately abolitionists took sides. Parker Pillsbury, Lydia and Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, the Stantons, and others lined up with Phillips, whose vehement and scathing criticism of reconstruction policies seemed to them the need of the hour. Susan also took sides, praising "dear ever glorious Phillips" and writing in her diary, "The disbanding of the American Antislavery Society is fully as untimely as General Grant's and Sherman's granting parole and pardon to the whole Rebel armies."[167]
To her friends in the East, she wrote, "How can anyone hold that Congress has no right to demand Negro suffrage in the returning Rebel states because it is not already established in all the loyal ones? What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago, had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote against admitting a new state with slavery, because it was not already abolished in all the old States? It is perfectly astounding, this seeming eagerness of so many of our old friends to cover up and apologize for the glaring hate toward the equal recognition of the manhood of the black race."[168]
She rejoiced when word came that the American Antislavery Society would continue under the presidency of Phillips, with Parker Pillsbury as editor of the Antislavery Standard; but she was saddened by the withdrawal of Garrison, whom she had idolized for so many years and whose editorials in the Liberator had always been her inspiration.[169]
As she read the weekly New York Tribune, which came regularly to Daniel, she grew more and more concerned over President Johnson's reconstruction policy and more and more convinced of the need of a crusade for political and civil rights for the Negro. Asked to deliver the Fourth of July oration at Ottumwa, Kansas, she decided to put into it all her views on the controversial subject of reconstruction.