eagerness of so many of our old friends to cover up and
apologize for the glaring hate toward the equal recognition of the
manhood of the black race."[168]

She rejoiced when word came that the American Antislavery Society
would continue under the presidency of Phillips, with Parker Pillsbury
as editor of the _Antislavery Standard_; but she was saddened by the
withdrawal of Garrison, whom she had idolized for so many years and
whose editorials in the _Liberator_ had always been her
inspiration.[169]

As she read the weekly New York _Tribune_, which came regularly to
Daniel, she grew more and more concerned over President Johnson's
reconstruction policy and more and more convinced of the need of a
crusade for political and civil rights for the Negro. Asked to deliver
the Fourth of July oration at Ottumwa, Kansas, she decided to put into
it all her views on the controversial subject of reconstruction.

Traveling by stage the 125 miles to Ottumwa, she found good company
en route and "great talk on politics, Negro equality, and temperance,"
and thought the "grand old prairies ... perfectly splendid and the
timber-skirted creeks ... delightful."[170]

Before a large gathering of Kansas pioneers, many of whom had driven
forty or fifty miles to hear her, she stood tall, straight, and
earnest, as she reminded them of the noble heritage of Kansas, of the
bloody years before the war when in the free-state fight, Kansas men
and women "taught the nation anew" the principles of the Declaration
of Independence. Lashing out with the vehemence of Phillips against
President Johnson's reconstruction policy, she warned, "There has been
no hour fraught with so much danger as the present.... To be foiled
now in gathering up the fruits of our blood-bought victories and to
re-enthrone slavery under the new guise of Negro disfranchisement ...
would be a disaster, a cruelty and crime, which would surely bequeath
to coming generations a legacy of wars and rumors of wars...."[171]

She then cited the results of the elections in Virginia, South
Carolina, and Tennessee to prove her point that unless Negroes were
given the vote, rebels would be put in office and a new code of laws
apprenticing Negroes passed, establishing a new form of slavery.

She urged her audience to be awake to the politicians who were using
the peoples' reverence and near idolatry of Lincoln to push through
anti-Negro legislation under the guise of carrying out his poli