In January the brother Daniel R. came East for his beautiful young bride, and the mother from her quiet farm-nook sends her petition to New York.  She can not manage the “infare” unless Susan comes home and helps.  So she drops the affairs of government long enough to skim across the State and lend a hand in preparing for this interesting event, and then back again to her incessant drudgery, made doubly hard by financial anxiety.

[Autograph: 

  Faithfully yours,
  Robert Dale Owen]

During all this work of the Loyal League, Miss Anthony found her strongest and staunchest support in Robert Dale Owen, who was then in New York by appointment of President Lincoln as chairman of the Freedman’s Inquiry Commission.  She was also in constant communication with Senator Charles Sumner, who was most anxious that the work should be hastened.  The blank petitions were sent in great sacks to him at Washington, and distributed under his “frank” to all parts of the Union.  On February 9, 1864, he presented in the Senate the first installment.  The petitions from each State were tied by themselves in a large bundle and endorsed with the number of signatures.  Two able-bodied negroes carried them into the Senate chamber, and Mr. Sumner presented them, saying in part: 

These petitions are signed by 100,000 men and women, who unite in this unparalleled number to support their prayer.  They are from all parts of the country and from every condition of life....  They ask nothing less than universal emancipation, and this they ask directly at the hands of Congress.  It is not for me to assign reasons which the army of petitioners has forborne to assign; but I may not improperly add that, naturally and obviously, they all feel in their hearts, what reason and knowledge confirm, not only that slavery is the guilty origin of the rebellion, but that its influence everywhere, even outside the rebel States, has been hostile to the Union, always impairing loyalty and sometimes openly menacing the national government.  The petitioners know well that to save the country from peril, especially to save the national life, there is no power in the ample arsenal of self-defense which Congress may not grasp; for to Congress under the Constitution, belongs the prerogative of the Roman Dictator to see that the republic receives no detriment.  Therefore to Congress these petitioners now appeal.

After an earnest discussion by the Senate the petition was referred to the Select Committee on Slavery and Freedom, whose chairman was Thomas D. Eliot, of Massachusetts.  Immediately afterwards several thousand more blank petitions were sent out, accompanied by a second appeal which closed:  “Shall we not all join in one loud, earnest, effectual prayer to Congress, which will swell on its ear like the voice of many waters, that this bloody, desolating war shall be arrested and ended by the immediate and final removal by statute law and amended Constitution, of that crime and curse which alone has brought it upon us?”