cies.
Then putting behind her the prejudice and impatience with Lincoln
which she had felt during his lifetime, she added, "If the
administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American people one
lesson above another, it was that they must think and speak and
proclaim, and that he as their President was bound to execute their
will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say as he
did four years ago, 'I wait the voice of the people.'"

In her special pleading for the Negro, she did not forget women.
Calling attention to the fact that our nation had never been a true
republic because the ballot was exclusively in the hands of the "free
white male," she asked for a government "of the people," men and
women, white and black, with Negro suffrage and woman suffrage as
basic requirements.

[Illustration: Wendell Phillips]

So enthusiastic were the Republicans over her speech that they urged
her to prepare it for publication, suggesting, however, that she
delete the passage on woman suffrage. This was her first intimation
that Republicans might balk at enfranchising women. So great had been
women's contribution to the winning of the war and so indebted were
the Republicans to women for creating sentiment for the Thirteenth
Amendment, that she had come to expect, along with Mrs. Stanton, that
the ballot would without question be given them as a reward.

* * * * *

It was soon obvious to Susan that politicians in the East as well as
in Kansas were shying away from woman suffrage. Mrs. Stanton reported
that even Wendell Phillips was backsliding, not wishing to campaign
for Negro suffrage and woman suffrage at the same time. "While I could
continue as heretofore, arguing for woman's rights, just as I do for
temperance every day," he had written, "still I would not mix the
movements.... I think such mixture would lose for the Negro far more
than we should gain for the woman. I am now engaged in abolishing
slavery in a land where the abolition of slavery means conferring or
recognizing citizenship, and where citizenship supposes the ballot for
all men."[172]

Such reasoning filled Susan with despair, for she firmly believed that
women who had been asking for full citizenship for seventeen years
deserved precedence over the Negro. Mrs. Stanton agreed. To them,
Negro suffrage without woman suffrage was unthinkable, an unbearable
humiliation. Half of the Negroes were women, and manh