ll agreed that the Emancipation Proclamation
must be implemented by an act of Congress, by an amendment to the
Constitution, and that public opinion must be aroused to demand a
Thirteenth Amendment. If women would help, so much the better.

Susan at once thought of petitions. If petitions had won the Woman's
Property Law in New York, they could win the Thirteenth Amendment. The
largest petition ever presented to Congress was her goal.

* * * * *

Carefully Susan and Mrs. Stanton worked over an _Appeal to the Women
of the Republic_, sending it out in March 1863 with a notice of a
meeting to be held in New York. It left no doubt in the minds of those
who received it that women had a responsibility to their country
beyond services of mercy to the wounded and disabled.

From all parts of the country, women responded to their call. The
veteran antislavery and woman's rights worker, Angelina Grimke Weld,
came out of her retirement for the meeting. Ernestine Rose, the ever
faithful, was on hand. Lucy Stone and Antoinette Brown Blackwell were
there, and the popular Hutchinson family, famous for their stirring
abolition songs. They helped Susan and Mrs. Stanton steer the course
of the meeting into the right channels, to show the women assembled
that the war was being fought not merely to preserve the Union, but
also to preserve the American way of life, based on the principle of
equal rights and freedom for all, to save it from the encroachments of
slavery and a slaveholding aristocracy. Susan proposed a resolution
declaring that there can never be a true peace until the civil and
political rights of all citizens are established, including those of
Negroes and women. The introduction of the woman's rights issue into a
war meeting with an antislavery program was vigorously opposed by
women from Wisconsin, but the faithful feminists came to the rescue
and the controversial resolution was adopted.

Although she always instinctively related all national issues to
woman's rights and vice versa, Susan did not allow this subject to
overshadow the main purpose of the meeting. Instead she analyzed the
issue of the war and reproached Lincoln for suppressing the fact that
slavery was the real cause of the war and for waiting two long years
before calling the four million slaves to the side of the North.
"Every hour's delay, every life sacrificed up to the proclamation that
called the slave to freedom and