o lead them.

Following the presidential campaign anxiously from Rochester, Susan
wrote Mrs. Stanton, "I am starving for a full talk with somebody
posted, not merely pitted for Lincoln...." The persistent cry of the
_Liberator_ and the _Antislavery Standard_ to re-elect Lincoln and not
to swap horses in midstream did not ring true to her. "We read no more
of the good old doctrine 'of two evils choose neither,'" she wrote
Anna E. Dickinson. She confessed to Anna, "It is only safe to seek and
act the truth and to profess confidence in Lincoln would be a lie in
me."[155]

As the war dragged on through the summer without decisive victories
for the North, Lincoln's prospects looked bleak, and to her dismay,
Susan saw the chances improving for McClellan, the candidate of the
northern Democrats who wanted to end the war, leave slavery alone, and
conciliate the South. The whole picture changed, however, with the
capture of Atlanta by General Sherman in September. The people's
confidence in Lincoln revived and Fremont withdrew from the contest.
One by one the anti-Lincoln abolitionists were converted; and Susan,
anxiously waiting for word from Mrs. Stanton, was relieved to learn
that she was not one of them, nor was Wendell Phillips whose judgment
and vision both of them valued above that of any other man. With
approval she read these lines which Phillips had just written Mrs.
Stanton, "I would cut off both hands before doing anything to aid
Mac's [McClellan's] election. I would cut oft my right hand before
doing anything to aid Abraham Lincoln's election. I wholly distrust
his fitness to settle this thing and indeed his purpose."[156]

There is nothing to indicate any change of opinion on Susan's part
regarding Lincoln's unfitness for a second term. That he was the
lesser of two evils, she of course acknowledged. For her these
pre-election days were discouraging and frustrating. She had very
definite ideas on reconstruction which she felt in justice to the
Negro must be carried out, and Lincoln did not meet her requirements.

After Lincoln's re-election, she again looked to Wendell Phillips for
an adequate policy at this juncture, and she was not disappointed.
"Phillips has just returned from Washington," Mrs. Stanton wrote her.
"He says the radical men feel they are powerless and checkmated....
They turn to such men as Phillips to say what politicians dare not
say.... We say now, as ever, 'Give us immediately unconditional