In dire need of funds, Susan decided to
appeal to Henry Ward Beecher; and wearily climbing Columbia Heights to
his home, she suddenly felt a strong hand on her shoulder and a
familiar voice asking, "Well, old girl, what do you want now?" He took
up a collection for her in Plymouth Church, raising $200. Gerrit Smith
sent her $100, when she had hoped for $1,000, and Jessie Benton
Fremont, $50. Before long, her "war of ideas" won the support of
Wendell Phillips, Frederick Douglass, Horace Greeley, George William
Curtis, and other popular lecturers who spoke for her at Cooper Union
to large audiences whose admission fees swelled her funds; and
eventually Senator Sumner, realizing how important the petitions could
be in arousing public opinion for the Thirteenth Amendment, saved her
the postage by sending them out under his frank.[152]

She made her home with the Stantons, who had moved from Brooklyn to 75
West 45th Street, New York, and the comfortable evenings of good
conversation and her busy days at the office helped mightily to heal
her grief for her father. In the bustling life of the city she felt
she was living more intensely, more usefully, as these critical days
of war demanded. Henry Stanton, now an editorial writer for Greeley's
_Tribune_, brought home to them the inside story of the news and of
politics. All of them were highly critical of Lincoln, impatient with
his slowness and skeptical of his plans for slaveholders and slaves in
the border states. They questioned Garrison's wisdom in trusting
Lincoln. Susan could not feel that Lincoln was honest when he
protested that he did not have the power to do all that the
abolitionists asked. "The pity is," she wrote Anna E. Dickinson, "that
the vast mass of people really believe the man _honest_--that he
believes he has not the power--I wish I could...."[153]

New York seethed with unrest as time for the enforcement of the draft
drew near. Indignant that rich men could avoid the draft by buying a
substitute, workingmen were easily incited to riot, and the city was
soon overrun by mobs bent on destruction. The lives of all Negroes and
abolitionists were in danger. The Stanton home was in the thick of the
rioting, and when Susan and Henry Stanton came home during a lull,
they all decided to take refuge for the night at the home of Mrs.
Stanton's brother-in-law, Dr. Bayard. Here they also found Horace
Greeley hiding from the mob, for hoodlums were marching through the