Opportunity to campaign for this amendment was now offered Susan and Elizabeth Stanton as they addressed a series of conventions in Ohio, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri. Press notices were good, a Milwaukee paper describing Susan as "an earnest enthusiastic, fiery woman—ready, apt, witty and what a politician would call sharp ... radical in the strongest sense," making "radical everything she touches."[234] She found woman suffrage sentiment growing by leaps and bounds in the West and western men ready to support a federal woman suffrage amendment.
With a lighter heart than she had had in many a day and with new subscriptions to The Revolution, Susan returned to New York. She moved the Revolution office to the first floor of the Women's Bureau, a large four-story brownstone house at 49 East Twenty-third Street, near Fifth Avenue, which had been purchased by a wealthy New Yorker, Mrs. Elizabeth Phelps, who looked forward to establishing a center where women's organizations could meet and where any woman interested in the advancement of her sex would find encouragement and inspiration. Susan's hopes were high for the Women's Bureau, and in this most respectable, fashionable, and even elegant setting, she expected her Revolution, in spite of its inflammable name, to live down its turbulent past and win new friends and subscribers.[235]
She made one last effort to resuscitate the American Equal Rights Association, writing personal letters to old friends, urging that past differences be forgotten and that all rededicate themselves to establishing universal suffrage by means of the Sixteenth Amendment. She was optimistic as she prepared for a convention in New York, particularly as one obstacle to unity had been removed. George Francis Train had voluntarily severed all connections with The Revolution to devote himself to freeing Ireland. She soon found, however, that the misunderstandings between her and her old antislavery friends were far deeper than George Francis Train, although he would for a long time be blamed for them. The Fifteenth Amendment was still a bone of contention and The Revolution's continued editorials against it widened the breach.
The fireworks were set off in the convention of the American Equal Rights Association by Stephen S. Foster, who objected to the nomination of Susan and Mrs. Stanton as officers of the Association because they had in his opinion repudiated its principles. When asked to explain further, he replied that not only had they published a paper advocating educated suffrage while the Association stood for universal suffrage but they had shown themselves unfit by collaboration with George Francis Train who ridiculed Negroes and opposed their enfranchisement.
Trying to pour oil on the troubled waters, Mary Livermore, the popular new delegate from Chicago, asked whether it was quite fair to bring up George Francis Train when he had retired from The Revolution.
To this Stephen Foster sternly replied, "If The Revolution which has so often endorsed George Francis Train will repudiate him because of his course in respect to the Negro's rights, I have nothing further to say. But they do not repudiate him. He goes out; but they do not cast him out."[236]
"Of course we do not," Susan instantly protested.
Mr. Foster then objected to the way Susan had spent the funds of the Association, accusing her of failing to keep adequate accounts.
This she emphatically denied, explaining that she had presented a full accounting to the trust fund committee, that it had been audited, and she had been voted $1,000 to repay her for the amount she had personally advanced for the work.