orld
began? The Old Book's terrible exhibitions of God's wrath sink into
nothingness. And this fell blow just at the very hour he was declaring
his willingness to consign those five million faithful, brave, and
loving loyal people of the South to the tender mercies of the ex-slave
lords of the lash."[166]

She longed "to go out and do battle for the Lord once more," but when
she could have expressed her opinions at the big mass meeting held in
memory of Lincoln, she remained silent. "My soul was full," she
confessed to Mrs. Stanton, "but the flesh not equal to stemming the
awful current, to do what the people have called make an exhibition of
myself. So quenched the spirit and came home ashamed of myself."

Then she added, "Dear-a-me--how overfull I am, and how I should like
to be nestled into some corner away from every chick and child with
you once more."

* * * * *

Disturbing news came from the East of dissension in the antislavery
ranks, of Garrison's desire to dissolve the American Antislavery
Society after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, and of
Phillips' insistence that it continue until freedom for the Negro was
firmly established. While Garrison maintained that northern states,
denying the ballot to the Negro, could not consistently make Negro
suffrage a requirement for readmitting rebel states to the Union,
Phillips demanded Negro suffrage as a condition of readmission.
Immediately abolitionists took sides. Parker Pillsbury, Lydia and
Lucretia Mott, Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, the Stantons,
and others lined up with Phillips, whose vehement and scathing
criticism of reconstruction policies seemed to them the need of the
hour. Susan also took sides, praising "dear ever glorious Phillips"
and writing in her diary, "The disbanding of the American Antislavery
Society is fully as untimely as General Grant's and Sherman's granting
parole and pardon to the whole Rebel armies."[167]

To her friends in the East, she wrote, "How can anyone hold that
Congress has no right to demand Negro suffrage in the returning Rebel
states because it is not already established in all the loyal ones?
What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago,
had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote
against admitting a new state with slavery, because it was not already
abolished in all the old States? It is perfectly astounding, this
seeming