nine years, it is safe to say there is not one citizen of the Territory—­man or woman—­who desires good order, good laws and good government, who would be willing to see it abolished.  Woman’s influence in the government of our Territory is a terror only to evil-doers, and they, and they only, are the ones who desire its repeal.  Such base slanders as the specimen you sent me excite in the minds of Wyoming citizens only feelings of disgust and contempt for the author, and wonder at the ignorance of any one who is gullible enough to believe them.

In August she received a letter from Lucy Stone, asking if she had been correctly reported by the papers as saying that “the suffragists would advocate any party which would declare for woman suffrage,” to which she replied: 

I answer “yes,” save that I used the pronoun “I” instead of the word “suffragists.”  I spoke for myself alone, because I know many of our women are so much more intensely Republican or Democratic, Hard-Money or Green-back, Prohibition or License, than they are “Equal Rights for All,” that now, as in the past, they will hold the question of woman’s enfranchisement in abeyance, while they give their money and their energies to secure the success of one or another of the contending parties, even though it wholly ignore their just claim to a voice in the government.  It is not that I have no opinions or preferences on the many grave questions which distract and divide the parties; but it is that, in my judgment, the right of self-government for one-half the people is of far more vital consequence to the nation than any or all other questions.

This has been my position ever since the abolition of slavery, by which the black race were raised from chattels to citizens, and invested also with civil rights equally with the cultured, tax-paying, white women of the country.  Have you forgotten the cry “This is the negro’s hour,” which came back to us in 1866, when we urged the Abolitionists to make common cause with us and demand suffrage as a right for all United States citizens, instead of asking it simply as an expediency for only another class of men?  Do you not remember, too how the taunt “false to the negro” was flung into the face of every one of us who insisted that it was “humanity’s hour,” and that to talk of “freedom without the ballot” was no less “mockery” to woman than to the negro?

If, in those most trying reconstruction years, I could not subordinate the fundamental principle of “Equal Rights for All” to Republican party necessity for negro suffrage—­if, in that fearful national emergency, I would not sacrifice the greater to the less—­I surely can not and will not today hold any of the far less important party questions paramount to that most sacred principle of our republic.  So long as you and I and all women are political slaves, it ill becomes us to meddle with the weightier discussions