I arrived last evening—­came in R. Road cars from Baltimore, 39 miles, in two hours, over a barren and almost uncultivated tract of country.  The public buildings and one street called Pennsylvania Avenue are all that are worth mention in this place....  As a specimen of some of the big finery in the town, I will name one room in Martin’s [Van Buren’s] house, 90 ft. by 42, the furniture of which cost $22,000....  Our Congressmen are some like other folks, they look out first for themselves.  They have spent most of this day in debating whether they shall be paid in specie....  There are Black Folks in abundance here, but they don’t act as if they were even under the pressure of hard times, much less the cruelties that we hear of slaves having to bear.

From New York he writes his brother: 

Such times in everything that pertains to business never were known in this land before.  To-day I have passed through Pine street and have not seen one single box or bale of goods of any kind whatever.  Last year at this time a person could scarcely go through the street without clambering over goods of all descriptions.  A truck cart loaded with merchandise is now a rare object.  A bale of goods can not be sold at any price.  The countenances of all our best business men are stretched out in a perpendicular direction and when the times will let them come back into human shape not even the wisest pretend to guess.  Those that are out of all speculative and ever-changing business may consider themselves in a Paradismal state.

In the spring of 1838 he writes to Guelma and Susan, at that time twenty and eighteen years of age, to know if they feel that they possibly can go alone from Philadelphia to New York, where he will join them and bring them home; but evidently they decide they can not, for Susan’s journal speaks of “the happy moment when they run to the gate to meet him.”  On the journey he tells them that his business is ruined, they can not return to school and will have to give up their beautiful and beloved new home.  In recalling those times Miss Anthony says that never in all her long life did she see such agony as her father passed through during the dreadful days which followed.  All that he had accumulated in a lifetime of hard work and careful planning was swept away, and there was scarcely a spot of solid ground upon which he could plant his feet to begin the struggle once more.

In her diary, speaking of an aunt who sympathizes with them and says it will be hard to give up going with the people they have been accustomed to, Susan observes, “I do not think that losing our property will cause us ever to mingle with low company.”  She is now somewhat uncertain about taking up teaching permanently, fearing she will “lose the habit of using the plain language;” but May 22, 1838, she writes at Union Village, now Greenwich: