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And if the work of antislavery agitation, which it is undeniable leaves most men who earnestly engage in it with only half a country in their affections, if this work must be done, let others do it.
For $10 a week and expenses, Susan now arranged antislavery meetings, displayed posters bearing the provocative words, "No Union with Slaveholders," planned tours for a corps of speakers, among them Stephen and Abby Kelley Foster, Parker Pillsbury, and two free Negroes, Charles Remond and his sister, Sarah.
When Salmon P. Chase, Preston King, the Van Burens, John P. Hale, William Cullen Bryant, David Wilmot, and their like went out of their party, they left a vacancy which was never to be filled. It was perhaps an instinct rather than any clear spirit of prophecy which drove the antislavery Democrats away from their affiliations and kept the Whigs, for the moment, substantially together.
The work he did was that of unselfish devotion to an overmastering sense of justice. He labored for those in bonds, as bound with them. Faithful, as but few others were faithful, he worked in season and out of season for human freedom. After great effort, Mr. Garrison succeeded in establishing an antislavery society, and he was made its agent to lecture for the cause.
Susan's thoughts during the summer of 1856 often strayed from woman's rights meetings toward Kansas, where her brother Merritt had settled on a claim near Osawatomie. Well aware of his eagerness to help John Brown, she knew that he must be in the thick of the bloody antislavery struggle.
But antislavery sentiments were then regarded by many as traitorous heresies; and those who held them did not expect to win popularity. If the vote of the mill-girls had been taken, it would doubtless have been unanimous on the antislavery side. But those were also the days when a woman was not expected to give, or even to have, an opinion on subjects of public interest.
Large as the number of abolitionists became and bright as the future of their cause seemed, the more the antislavery men saw of the freedmen in congested districts, the more inclined the reformers were to think that instant abolition was an event which they "could not reasonably expect, and perhaps could not desire."
The old antislavery agitators were considered the most dangerous men in the republic, and I remember that a very distinguished minister once bitterly regretted the agitation on the evils of slavery, because he feared it would destroy the prospect for a revival of religion in the city where he lived.
Most of the antislavery forces concluded that it was necessary to put the Union above abolition. While the Constitution did not specifically mention slavery, it did legally recognize the institution in three places. First, there was a heated debate over the means of calculating representation to the House.
As the Liberty party experiment had proved, an abolitionist running for office on an antislavery platform was doomed to defeat. Therefore the gesture made in this critical campaign by a small group of abolitionists in nominating Gerrit Smith for president appeared utterly futile to Susan.
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