I hope in a short time to be comfortably located in a new house where we will have a room ready for you when you come East.  I long to put my arms around you once more and hear you scold me for my sins and short-comings.  Your abuse is sweeter to me than anybody else’s praise for, in spite of your severity, your faith and confidence shine through all.  O, Susan, you are very dear to me.  I should miss you more than any other living being from this earth.  You are intertwined with much of my happy and eventful past, and all my future plans are based on you as a coadjutor.  Yes, our work is one, we are one in aim and sympathy and we should be together.  Come home.

Miss Anthony’s own heart yearned to return, but the workers were so few in Kansas and so many in the Eastern States. that she scarcely knew where the call of duty was strongest.  At the close of the war her mind grasped at once the full import of the momentous questions which would demand settlement and she felt the necessity of placing herself in touch with those who would be most powerful in moulding public sentiment.  The threatened division in the Abolitionist ranks and the reported determination of Mr. Garrison to disband the Anti-Slavery Society, filled her with dismay and she sent back the strongest protests she could put into words: 

How can any one hold that Congress has no right to demand negro suffrage in the returning rebel States because it is not already established in all the loyal ones?  What would have been said of Abolitionists ten or twenty years ago, had they preached to the people that Congress had no right to vote against admitting a new State with slavery, because it was not already abolished in all the old States?  It is perfectly astounding, this seeming 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.  Well, you will be in New York to witness, perhaps, the disbanding of the Anti-Slavery Society—­and I shall be away out here, waiting anxiously to catch the first glimpse of the spirit of the meeting.  But Phillips will be glorious and genial to the end.  All through this struggle he has stood up against the tide, one of the few to hold the nation to its vital work—­its one necessity, moral as military—­absolute justice and equality for the black man.  I wish every ear in this country might listen to his word.

A letter from Mr. Phillips said:  “Thank you for your kind note.  I see you understand the lay of the land and no words are necessary between you and me.  Your points we have talked over.  If Garrison should resign, we incline to Purvis for president for many, many reasons.  We (Hovey Committee) shall aid in keeping our Standard floating till the enemy comes down.”  All the letters received by Miss Anthony during May and June were filled with the story of the dissension in the Anti-Slavery Society.