n to continue circulating petitions until
married women's civil rights were finally recognized. It took courage
to go alone to towns where she was unknown to arrange for meetings on
the unpopular subject of woman's rights. Not knowing how she would be
received, she found it almost as difficult to return to such towns as
Canajoharie where she had been highly respected as a teacher six years
before. In Canajoharie, however, she was greeted affectionately by her
uncle Joshua Read. He and his friends let her use the Methodist church
for her lecture, and when the trustees of the academy urged her to
return there to teach, Uncle Joshua interrupted with a vehement "No!"
protesting that others could teach but it was Susan's work "to go
around and set people thinking about the laws."[54]

Returning to the scene of her girlhood in Battenville and Easton,
visiting her sisters Guelma and Hannah, and meeting many of her old
friends, Susan realized as never before how completely she had
outgrown her old environment. In her enthusiasm for her new work, she
exposed "many of her heresies," and when her friends labeled William
Lloyd Garrison an agnostic and rabble rouser, she protested that he
was the most Christlike man she had ever known. "Thus it is belief,
not Christian benevolence," she confided to her diary in 1854, "that
is made the modern test of Christianity."[55]

After eight strenuous months away from home, she was welcomed warmly
by a family who believed in her work. She found abolition uppermost in
everyone's mind. Her brother Merritt, fired by Daniel's tales of the
West and the antislavery struggle in Kansas, was impatient to join the
settlers there and could talk of nothing else. While he poured out the
latest news about Kansas, he and a cousin Mary Luther helped Susan
fold handbills for future woman's rights meetings. Susan listened
eagerly and approvingly as he told of the 750 free-state settlers who
during the past summer had gone out to Kansas, traveling up the
Missouri on steamboats and over lonely trails in wagons marked
"Kansas." Most of them were not abolitionists but men who wanted
Kansas a free-labor state which they could develop with their own hard
work. She heard of the ruthless treatment these "Yankee" settlers
faced from the proslavery Missourians who wanted Kansas in the slavery
bloc. There was bloodshed and there would be more. John Brown's sons
had written from Kansas, "Send us guns. We need them more th