, she
had felt free to spend them as she thought best. This obviously
satisfied the majority, many of whom expressed appreciation of her
year of hard work for the cause. She later wrote Thomas Wentworth
Higginson, "Even if not one old friend had seemed to have remembered
the past and it had been swallowed up, overshadowed by the Train
cloud, I should still have rejoiced that I have done the work--for no
_human_ prejudice or power can rob me of the joy, the compensation, I
have stored up therefrom. That it is wholly spiritual, I need but tell
you that this day, I have not two hundred dollars more than I had the
day I entered upon the public work of woman's rights and
antislavery."[215]

What troubled her most at these meetings was not the animosity
directed against her by Henry Blackwell and Lucy Stone, but the
assertion, made by Frederick Douglass and agreed to by all the men
present, that Negro suffrage was more urgent than woman suffrage. When
Lucy Stone came to the defense of woman suffrage in a speech whose
content and eloquence Susan thought surpassed that of "any other
mortal woman speaker," she was willing to forgive Lucy anything, and
wrote Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "I want you to _know_ that it is
impossible for me to lay a straw in the way of anyone who _personally
wrongs me_, if only that one will work nobly in the _cause_ in their
own way and time. They may try to hinder my success but I _never_
theirs."

Realizing that it would be futile for her to spend any more time
trying to persuade the American Equal Rights Association to help her
with her woman suffrage campaign, she now formed a small committee of
her own, headed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It included Elizabeth Smith
Miller, the liberal wealthy daughter of Gerrit Smith, Abby Hopper
Gibbons, the Quaker philanthropist and social worker; and Mary Cheney
Greeley, the wife of Horace Greeley, who, in spite of the fact that
her husband now opposed woman suffrage, continued to take her stand
for it. This committee, with _The Revolution_ as its mouthpiece, was
soon acting as a clearing house for woman suffrage organizations
throughout the country and called itself the Woman's Suffrage
Association of America.

To the national Republican convention in Chicago which nominated
General Grant for President, these women sent a carefully worded
memorial asking that the rights of women be recognized in the
reconstruction. It was ignored. Thereupon Susan turned