CHAPTER XV.

"MALE" IN THE FEDERAL CONSTITUTION.

1865.

Soon after closing the league headquarters, Miss Anthony went to Auburn to attend the wedding of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, Jr., and Ellen, daughter of her dear friend Martha C. Wright and niece of Lucretia Mott, a union of two families very acceptable to the friends of both. From this scene of festivity she returned home to meet a fresh sorrow in the sudden death, almost at the hour of her arrival, of Ann Eliza, daughter of her eldest sister Guelma and Aaron McLean, the best beloved of all her nieces. She was twenty-three years old, beautiful and talented, a good musician and an artist of fine promise. In her Miss Anthony had centered many hopes and ambitions, and the letters show that she was always planning and working for her future as she would have done for that of a cherished daughter. She was laid to rest on the silver wedding anniversary of her parents. Miss Anthony writes: "She had ceased to be a child and had become the fullgrown woman, my companion and friend. I loved her merry laugh, her bright, joyous presence, and yet my loss is so small compared to the awful void in her mother's life that I scarcely dare mention it."

Months afterwards she wrote her sister Hannah: "Today I made a pilgrimage to Mount Hope. The last rays of red, gold and purple fringed the horizon and shone serenely on the mounds above our dear father and Ann Eliza. What a contrast in my feelings; for the one a subdued sorrow at the sudden ending of a life full-ripened, only that we would have basked in its sunshine a little longer; for the other a keen anguish over the untimely cutting off in the dawn of existence, with the hopes and longings but just beginning to take form, the real purpose of life yet dimly developed, a great nature but half revealed. The faith that she and all our loved and gone are graduated into a higher school of growth and progress is the only consolation for death."

At another time she wrote her brother: "This new and sorrowful reminder of the brittleness of life's threads should soften all our expressions to each other in our home circles and open our lips to speak only words of tenderness and approbation. We are so wont to utter criticisms and to keep silence about the things we approve. I wish we might be as faithful in expressing our likes as our dislikes, and not leave our loved ones to take it for granted that their good acts are noted and appreciated and vastly outnumber those we criticise. The sum of home happiness would be greatly multiplied if all families would conscientiously follow this method."

There were urgent appeals in these days from the lately-married brother and his wife for sister Susan to come to Kansas and, as no public work seemed to be pressing, she started the latter part of January, 1865. She stopped in Chicago to visit her uncle Albert Dickinson, was detained a week by heavy storms, and reached Leavenworth the last day of the month. Of her journey she wrote home:

I paid a dollar for a ride across the Mississippi on the ice. When we reached Missouri all was devastation. I asked the conductor if there were not a sleeper and he replied, "Our sleeping cars are in the ditch." Scarcely a train had been over the road in weeks without being thrown off the track. We were nineteen hours going the 200 miles from Quincy to St. Joe. Twelve miles out from the latter we had to wait for the train ahead of us to get back on the rails. I was desperate. Any decent farmer's pigpen would be as clean as that car. There were five or six families, each with half a dozen children, moving to Kansas and Nebraska, who had been shut up there for days. A hovel stood up the bank a little way and several of the men went there and washed their faces. After watching them enjoy this luxury for a while I finally rushed up myself and asked the woman in charge if she would sell me a cup of coffee. She grunted out yes, after some hesitation, and while she was making it, I washed my face and hands. When she handed me my drink she said, "This is no rye; it is real coffee." And so it was and I enjoyed it, brass spoon, thick, dingy, cracked cup and all.

This was Miss Anthony's first visit to Kansas and she found much to interest her in Leavenworth—caravans of emigrants long trains of supplies for the army, troops from the barracks crowds of colored refugees, the many features of frontier life so totally different from all she had seen and known in her eastern home. The prominence of her brother brought many distinguished visitors to his house, she enjoyed the long carriage drives and the days were filled with pleasant duties, so that she writes, "I am afraid I shall get into the business of being comfortable." On her birthday, February 15, the diary shows that she wagered a pair of gloves with the family physician that it would not rain before morning, and on the 16th is recorded: "The bell rang early this morning and a boy left a box containing a pair of gloves with the compliments of the doctor." In March one entry reads: "The new seamstress starts in pretty well but she can not sew nicely enough for the little clothes. We shall have to make those ourselves."

This life of ease proved to be of short duration. Her brother was renominated for mayor and plunged at once into the thick of a political campaign, while Miss Anthony went to the office to help manage his newspaper, limited only by his injunction "not to have it all woman's rights and negro suffrage." The labor, however, which she most enjoyed was among the colored refugees. Soon after the slaves were set free they flocked to Kansas in large numbers, and what should be done with this great body of uneducated, untrained and irresponsible people was a perplexing question. She went into the day schools, Sunday-schools, charitable societies and all organizations for their relief and improvement. The journal shows that four or five days or evenings every week were given to this work and that she formed an equal rights league among them. A colored printer was put into the composing-room, and at once the entire force went on strike. The diary declares "it is a burning, blistering shame," and relates her attempts to secure other work for him. She met at this time Hiram Revels, a colored Methodist preacher, afterwards United States senator from Mississippi.