At the close of the Washington convention the advocates of woman suffrage honestly believed that the battle was almost won.  They felt sure Congress would pass the enabling act, permitting them to exercise the right that they claimed to be conferred by the Fourteenth Amendment, in which claim they were sustained by some of the best constitutional lawyers in the country.  The agricultural committee room in the Capitol was placed at the disposal of the national woman suffrage committee, who put Josephine S. Griffing in charge.  The latter part of January she wrote: 

Our room is thronged.  Yesterday and today no less than twelve wives of members of Congress were here and large numbers of the aristocratic women of Washington.  Blanche Butler Ames assures me that all her sympathies are with us.  President Grant’s sister, Mrs. Cramer, has been here and given her name, saying that Mrs. Grant sent her regards and sympathized with our movement, and that she had refused from principle to sign Mrs. Sherman’s protest....  The daily press is on its knees and is publishing long editorials in our favor.  You ask if this is a Republican dodge.  I do not know.  I feel as Douglass did, ready to welcome the bolt from heaven or hell that shivers the chains.  If the Republicans hope to save their lives by our enfranchisement, let them live.

Mrs. Hooker wrote from Washington:  “Everything conspires to bring about the early confirmation of our hopes.  Republicans are discovering that without this new, live issue, they are dead, and once more party necessity is to be God’s opportunity.  Let us, who know so many good men and true who are in this party, be thankful that through it, rather than through the Democratic, deliverance is to come, for to owe gratitude to a pro-slavery party would nearly choke my thanksgiving.”

To this Mrs. Stanton replied:  “That is not the point, but which party, as a party, has the best record on our question.  For four years I have chafed under the Republican maneuvering to keep us still.  Let me call your attention to my speech on the Fifteenth Amendment, in which I said ’this is a new stab at womanhood, to result in deeper degradation to her than she has ever known before.’...  Sometimes I exclaim in agony, ‘Can nothing raise the self-respect of women?’ I despise the Republican party for the political serfdom we suffer today, under the heel of every foreign lord and lackey who treads our soil.  If all of you have turned to such idols, I will go alone to Jerusalem.”

When the judiciary committee made its adverse report[57] which was merely that Congress had not the power to act, most of the friends were not discouraged but believed another committee would decide differently.  Mrs. Hooker, however, was at the boiling point of indignation over the report and reversed her decision in regard to the Republican party, writing:  “Thank God! that party is dead; every one here knows it,