On the strength of Hancock's perfectly non-committal interview and Garfield's frank letter, several of the prominent Democratic women rushed into a campaign for that party, whereupon Miss Anthony called them down in vigorous language. After expressing her indignation at the many false newspaper reports of her correspondence and interview with General Garfield, she said:
He has always stood ready to aid us in getting our demand before Congress, and was one of the three who reported in favor of a special woman suffrage committee in the House the last session. He has actually done a thousand things a thousand times more friendly to woman suffrage than Hancock now talks of doing. Then, again, Hancock has given us no public statement that, if elected, he will recommend a Sixteenth Amendment in his inaugural; and in his letter of acceptance he said nothing more that can be twisted into suffrage for women than Garfield did in his, and there is no more in the Democratic platform that can be thus construed than there is in the Republican.
I never intended that the National Association should accept any sort of "under the ink or between the lines" as favorable pledges; and before I shall consent to put my name to any document favoring either candidate, I must see in black and white, in the candidate's own pen tracks, something to warrant such favoring. Mere gallantry will not do.
During the campaign which followed, neither she nor the other leading women of the country did any public work, and both parties lost the splendid services which would have been gladly rendered had they recognized the simple principle of justice. When the success of Garfield was practically assured, Miss Anthony wrote to a friend on the evening of election day: "I am fairly holding my breath tonight, waiting for the morning reports, as I feel it will be an overwhelming triumph for the Republican party. If their majority should be immense, perhaps it will give them courage and strength to speak for woman—and so let us hope and hope on."
As Mrs. Stanton's health forbade her going on the lecture platform in the autumn of 1880, and as Miss Anthony had now enough money ahead to dare claim a little leisure from public work, they decided to settle down to the serious business of writing the History of Woman Suffrage. For this purpose Miss Anthony went to Tenafly in October and ensconced herself in Mrs. Stanton's cosy home among the "blue hills of Jersey." The work already was advanced far enough to show that it could not possibly be restricted to the one volume into which it had enlarged from the 500-page pamphlet at first intended, and the task loomed up in an appalling manner. Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, the generous patron of so many progressive movements, gave Miss Anthony $1,000 for immediate expenses and so they went on with the work, delving among old papers and letters, compiling, cutting, pasting, writing and re-writing, sending over and over to the women of different States for local history, going into New York again and again to see the publishers, and performing all the drudgery demanded by such an undertaking, which can be appreciated only by the few who have experienced it.
Miss Anthony hated this kind of work and it was torture for her to give up her active life and sit poring over the musty records of the past. Her diary contains the usual impatient expressions of this feeling, and in her letters to friends she says: "O, how tired and sick I am of boning down to facts and figures perpetually, and how I long to be set free from what to me has been a perfect prison for the last six months!" She stuck to it with Spartan heroism, however, knowing that otherwise it never would be done, but she was not unwilling occasionally to sally forth and fill a lecture engagement or attend a convention. At the Rhode Island annual meeting she made the principal address, and the next day went, with Mrs. J. Ellen Foster, to Danbury, Mass., to call on John G. Whittier. Almost his first words were, "And so our dear Lucretia Mott is gone!" She had died the evening before, November 11, aged nearly eighty-eight.
Miss Anthony had expected her death, but was inexpressibly grieved to lose from out her life that sweet presence which had been an inspiration for thirty years, whose staunch support had never failed, even when friends were fewest and fortune at its lowest ebb. In times of greatest perplexity she could slip down to the Philadelphia home for sympathy and encouragement, and there was always a corner in the pocketbook from which a contribution came when it was most needed. If ever any human character was without a flaw it was that of Lucretia Mott. Her motto was "Truth for authority, not authority for truth." She faded away like a spirit and her dying words, whispered many times during the last day or two, were, "O, let me go, let this little standard bearer go!" For freedom, for peace, for temperance, for equality, she was indeed the standard bearer through all her long and beautiful life.
On election day, prompted no doubt by the unconquered and unconquerable Miss Anthony, Mrs. Stanton made an effort to vote. This act created much excitement and called forth columns of comment in the newspapers, to the great amusement of the two conspirators in their quiet retreat.
Toward the end of 1880, Miss Anthony wrote to the treasurer, Mrs. Spofford, asking if she did not think it would be best to omit the National Convention of 1881, giving as reasons that there had been such a surfeit of conventions during the past year and that she was very busy with the History. Mrs. Spofford was much surprised, for Miss Anthony never had been known to yield in the matter of holding this annual meeting, even when all others were opposed, but she advised against postponement and by the next mail received this reply:
I feel exactly as you do about having the convention. I have never for a moment felt ready not to hold it. I wrote you under Mrs. Stanton's orders not to tell you how I felt, as that would be sure to influence you. Now I have read her your letter and told her my determination was to go ahead. She won't promise to attend, she never does, but I never fail to take her with me when I am on the spot, as I shall be when the time comes next January. So you may save us each a bedroom away up, no matter how lofty—you know I love the fresh air of the high heavens. Don't give yourself one moment's uneasiness in regard to the convention. I am going to set about it and am bound to make it one of the best, if not the best ever held in Washington, and you shall have Mrs. Stanton too, unless I miss my guess.
At the same time came the following from Mrs. Stanton: "Your kind invitation I fully appreciate, and feel that the pleasure of seeing you is one of the compensations of these conventions, which I dread more than I can tell. But Susan says truly that when she is at hand, she always dragoons me into what she considers my duty, so I never venture to say what I will or will not do. Although I have solemnly vowed I will go nowhere this winter, I should not be surprised if I found myself in Lincoln Hall the middle of January."