One cloud now appeared on the horizon. Republicans in Kansas began to withdraw their support from the woman suffrage amendment they had sponsored. It troubled Lucy and Susan that the New York Tribune and the Independent, both widely read in Kansas, published not one word favorable to woman suffrage, for these two papers with their influence and prestige could readily, they believed, win the ballot for women not only in Kansas but throughout the nation. Soon the temper of the Republican press changed from indifference to outright animosity, striking at Lucy and Henry Blackwell by calling them "free lovers," because Lucy was traveling with her husband as Lucy Stone and not as Mrs. Henry B. Blackwell. Still Lucy was hopeful, believing the Democrats were ready to take them up, but she reminded Susan, "It will be necessary to have a good force here in the fall, and you will have to come."
Never for a moment did the importance of this election in Kansas escape Susan, and her estimate of it was also that of John Stuart Mill, who wrote from England to the sponsor of the Kansas woman suffrage amendment, Samuel N. Wood, "If your citizens next November give effect to the enlightened views of your Legislature, history will remember one of the youngest states in the civilized world has been the first to adopt a measure of liberation destined to extend all over the earth and to be looked back to ... as one of the most fertile in beneficial consequences of all improvements yet effected in human affairs."[194]
Susan fully expected Kansas to pioneer for woman suffrage just as it had taken its stand against slavery when the rest of the country held back. Her first problem, however, was to raise the money to get herself and Elizabeth Stanton there. The grant from the Jackson Fund had been spent by the Blackwells and Olympia Brown of Michigan, who most providentially volunteered to continue their work when they returned to the East. Olympia Brown, recently graduated from Antioch College and ordained as a minister in the Universalist church, was a new recruit to the cause. Young and indefatigable, she reached every part of Kansas during the summer, driving over the prairies with the Singing Hutchinsons.[195]
Olympia Brown's valiant help made waiting in New York easier for Susan as she tried in every way to raise money. Further grants from the Jackson Fund were cut off by an unfavorable court decision; and the trustees of the Hovey Fund, established to further the rights of both Negroes and women, refused to finance a woman suffrage campaign in Kansas.
"We are left without a dollar," she wrote State Senator Samuel N. Wood. "Every speaker who goes to Kansas must now pay her own expenses out of her own private purse, unless money should come from some unexpected source. I shall run the risk—as I told you—and draw upon almost my last hundred to go. I tell you this that you may not contract debts under the impression that our Association can pay for them—for it cannot."[196]
She did find a way to finance the printing of leaflets so urgently needed for distribution in Kansas. Soliciting advertisements up and down Broadway during the heat of July and August, she collected enough to pay the printer for 60,000 tracts, with the result that along with the dignified, eloquent speeches of Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Parker, George William Curtis, and John Stuart Mill went advertisements of Howe sewing machines, Mme. Demorest's millinery and patterns, Browning's washing machines, and Decker pianofortes to attract the people of Kansas.
With both New York and Kansas on her mind, Susan had had little time to be with her family, although she had often longed to slip out to Rochester for a visit with her mother and Guelma who had been ill for several months. Finally she spent a few days with them on her way to Kansas.
On the long train journey from Rochester to Kansas with such a congenial companion as Elizabeth Stanton, she enjoyed every new experience, particularly the new Palace cars advertised as the finest, most luxurious in the world, costing $40,000 each. The comfortable daytime seats transformed into beds at night and the meals served by solicitous Negro waiters were of the greatest interest to these two good housekeepers and the last bit of comfort they were to enjoy for many a day.
As soon as they reached Kansas, they set out immediately on a two-week speaking tour of the principal towns, and as usual Susan starred Mrs. Stanton while she herself acted as general manager, advertising the meetings, finding a suitable hall, sweeping it out if necessary, distributing and selling tracts, and perhaps making a short speech herself. The meetings were highly successful, but traveling by stage and wagon was rugged; most of the food served them was green with soda or floating in grease and the hotels were infested with bedbugs. Susan wrote her family of sleepless nights and of picking the "tormentors" out of their bonnets and the ruffles of their dresses.[197]