ion to work in the garden in the warm sun, Susan
thought over the year's experience and planned for the future. "I can
but acknowledge to myself that Antislavery has made me richer and
braver in spirit," she wrote Samuel May, Jr., "and that it is the
school of schools for the true and full development of the nobler
elements of life. I find my raspberry field looking finely--also my
strawberry bed. The prospect for peaches, cherries, plums, apples, and
pears is very promising--Indeed all nature is clothed in her most
hopeful dress. It really seems to me that the trees and the grass and
the large fields of waving grain did never look so beautifully as now.
It is more probable, however, that my soul has grown to appreciate
Nature more fully...."[80]

Susan needed that growth of soul to face the events of the next few
years and do the work which lay ahead. The whole country was tense
over the slavery issue, which could no longer be pushed into the
background. On public platforms and at every fireside, men and women
were discussing the subject. Antislavery workers sensed the gravity of
the situation and felt the onrush of the impending conflict between
what they regarded as the forces of good and evil--freedom and
slavery. When the Republican leader, William H. Seward, spoke in
Rochester, of "an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring
forces,"[81] he was expressing only what Garrisonian abolitionists,
like Susan, always had recognized. In the West, a tall awkward country
lawyer, Abraham Lincoln, debating with the suave Stephen A. Douglas,
declared with prophetic wisdom, "'A house divided against itself
cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently
half slave and half free.... It will become all one thing or all the
other.'"[82]

So Susan believed, and she was doing her best to make it all free.
Not only was she holding antislavery meetings, making speeches, and
distributing leaflets whenever and wherever possible, but she was also
lobbying in Albany for a personal liberty bill to protect the slaves
who were escaping from the South. "Treason in the Capitol," the
Democratic press labeled efforts for a personal liberty bill, and as
Susan reported to William Lloyd Garrison,[83] even Republicans shied
away from it, many of them regarding Seward's "irrepressible conflict"
speech a sorry mistake. Such timidity and shilly-shallying were
repugnant to her. She could better understand the fervor of J