t the
duties of the hour with devotion and heroism.

When Fremont on the western breeze proclaimed a day of jubilee to the
bondmen within our gates, the women of the nation echoed back a loud
amen. When Hunter freed a million men and gave them arms to fight our
battles, justice and mercy crowned that act and tyrants stood appalled.
When Butler, in the chief city of the southern despotism, hung a traitor
we felt a glow of pride; for that one act proved that we had a
government and one man brave enough to administer its laws. And when
Burnside would banish Vallandigham to the Dry Tortugas, let the sentence
be approved and the nation will ring with plaudits. Your proclamation
gives you immortality. Be just, and share your glory with men like these
who wait to execute your will.

On behalf of the Women's National Loyal League,

ELIZABETH CADY STANTON, _President_.
SUSAN B. ANTHONY, _Secretary_.

CHAPTER XV--PAGE 247.

RECONSTRUCTION.

_Address Delivered at Ottumwa, Kansas, July 4, 1865._

_Mr. President, and Men and Women of Kansas:_

It is a pleasure to me, beyond the reach of words, to be with you today.
I accepted the invitation of your committee that I might feast my eyes
on your grand prairies, ever fringed with the darker green of their
timber-skirted creeks and rivers. I came here on this 89th anniversary
of our National Independence, that I might look into the honest, earnest
faces of the men and the women who, ten years ago, taught the nation
anew, that "resistance to tyrants is obedience to God." Through all this
glorious decade of heroic struggle, my interests, my sympathies, my
affections have been bound up with yours; for, during and since the
cruel outrages of the summer of 1856, my two and only brothers have
stood shoulder to shoulder with the freedom-loving, freedom-voting,
freedom-fighting men of Kansas. And, as I have waited the telegraphic
word that trembled along the western wires, telling of your successes
and your defeats, it has ever been with bated breath lest those of my
own home circle, too, should be numbered among the slain. Therefore,
though not here in person through all these trial years, in spirit I
have been with you, in your privations and hardships, in your sufferings
and sacrifices to make freedom and free institutions the sure
inheritance of Kansas and the nation.

You have already listened to the grand old Declaration of the