over all the country. The people
are lulled to sleep over the most startling propositions, by insidious
whisperings that President Lincoln originated or approved them. Almost
every reconstruction plan is sent over the wires "sugar-coated" with,
"President Johnson, in this, is but carrying out the spirit and purpose
of Mr. Lincoln!" And there is no disguising or denying the fact, that
the people are today accepting, and that too without questioning, the
anti-negro reorganization plans already inaugurated, because of these
wily, insinuating appeals to their reverence for the memory of their
sacred dead.

If the four years' administration of Abraham Lincoln taught the American
people any one lesson above another, it was that they must think and
speak and proclaim, and that he, as President, was bound to execute
their will, not his own. And if Lincoln were alive today, he would say
as he did four years ago, "I wait the voice of the people." The stern
logic of the events of today would guide him, not those of yesterday.
Therefore let us not be thrown off our watch by any of these appeals to
our reverence for the opinions and plans of our departed President. If
his freed spirit is permitted today to hover over each and all of the
vast gatherings of the loyal people throughout the nation, it is
beckoning every soul upward and onward in the path of equal justice to
all; it is urging the great heart of the nation to plant our new Union
on the everlasting rock of republicanism--universal freedom and
universal suffrage.

FOOTNOTES:

[134] Sidney Clark, of Lawrence.

[135] S. C. Pomeroy.

[136] James H. Lane.

CHAPTER XVI--PAGE 259.

ADDRESS TO CONGRESS.

_Adopted by the Eleventh National Woman's Rights Convention, held in New
York City, Thursday, May 10, 1866._

Prepared by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony.

_To the Senate and House of Representatives:_

We already have presented to your honorable body during this session
many petitions asking the enfranchisement of women; and now, from our
national convention, we again make our appeal and urge you to lay no
hand on that "pyramid of rights," the Constitution of the Fathers,
unless to add glory to its height and strength to its foundation.

We will not rehearse the oft-repeated arguments on the natural rights of
every citizen, pressed as they have been on the nation's conscience for
the last thirty years in securing freedom for the black race, and so