y. Making an attempt
for Smithsonian Hall, Ernestine was told it could not risk its
reputation by presenting a woman speaker.[50]

A failure financially, their Washington venture was rich in
experience. Susan took time out for sightseeing, visiting the
"President's house" and Mt. Vernon, which to her surprise she found in
a state of "delapidation and decay." "The mark of slavery o'ershadows
the whole," she wrote in her diary. "Oh the thought that it was here
that he whose name is the pride of this Nation, was the _Slave
Master_."[51]

Again and again in the Capitol, she listened to heated debates on the
Kansas-Nebraska bill, astonished at the eloquence and fervor with
which the "institution of slavery" could be defended. Seeing slavery
first-hand, she abhorred it more than ever and observed with dismay
its degenerating influence on master as well as slave. She began to
feel that even she herself might be undermined by it almost
unwittingly and confessed to her diary, "This noon, I ate my dinner
without once asking myself are these human beings who minister to my
wants, Slaves to be bought and sold and hired out at the will of a
master?... Even I am getting _accustomed_ to _Slavery_ ... so much so
that I have ceased continually to be made to feel its blighting,
cursing influence."[52]

* * * * *

A few months later, Susan and Ernestine were in Philadelphia at a
national woman's rights convention, and when Ernestine was proposed
for president, Susan had her first opportunity to champion her new
friend. A foreigner and a free-thinker, Ernestine encountered a great
deal of prejudice even among liberal reformers, and Susan was
surprised at the strength of feeling against her. Impressed during
their trip to Washington by Ernestine's essentially fine qualities and
her value to the cause, Susan fought for her behind the scenes,
insisting that freedom of religion or the freedom to have no religion
be observed in woman's rights conventions, and she had the
satisfaction of seeing Ernestine elected to the office she so richly
deserved.

Freedom of religion or freedom to have no religion had become for
Susan a principle to hold on to, as she listened at these early
woman's rights meetings to the lengthy fruitless discussions regarding
the lack of Scriptural sanction for women's new freedom. Usually a
clergyman appeared on the scene, volubly quoting the Bible to prove
that any widening of woman'