galized, systematic robbery of the bodies and
souls of nearly four millions of men, women, and children. It is the
legalized traffic in God's image."[123]

She asked for personal liberty laws to protect the human rights of
fugitive slaves, adding that the Dred Scott decision had been possible
only because it reflected the spirit and purpose of the American
people in the North as well as the South. She heaped blame on the
North for restricting the Negro's educational and economic
opportunities, for barring him from libraries, lectures, and theaters,
and from hotels and seats on trains and buses.

"Let the North," she urged, "prove to the South by her acts that she
fully recognizes the humanity of the black man, that she respects his
rights in all her educational, industrial, social, and political
associations...."

This was asking far more than the North was ready to give, but to
Susan it was justice which she must demand. No wonder free Negroes in
the North honored and loved her and expressed their gratitude whenever
they could. "A fine-looking colored man on the train presented me with
a bouquet," she wrote in her diary. "Can't tell whether he knew me or
only felt my sympathy."[124]

* * * * *

The threats of secession from the southern states, which followed
Lincoln's election, brought little anxiety to Susan or her
fellow-abolitionists, for they had long preached, "No Union with
Slaveholders," believing that dissolution of the Union would prevent
further expansion of slavery in the new western territories, and not
only lessen the damaging influence of slavery on northern
institutions, but relieve the North of complicity in maintaining
slavery. Garrison in his _Liberator_ had already asked, "Will the
South be so obliging as to secede from the Union?" When, in December
1860, South Carolina seceded, Horace Greeley, who only a few months
before had called the disunion abolitionists "a little coterie of
common scolds," now wrote in the _Tribune_, "If the cotton states
shall decide that they can do better out of the Union than in it, we
insist in letting them go in peace. The right to secede may be a
revolutionary one, but it exists nevertheless."[125]

[Illustration: William Lloyd Garrison]

What abolitionists feared far more than secession was that to save the
Union some compromise would be made which would fasten slavery on the
nation. Susan agreed with Garrison when he declared i