In March, 1854, after getting back into long skirts, Miss Anthony decided to go to Washington with Mrs. Rose, and see how the propaganda of equal rights would be received at the capital of the nation.  This was her first visit to that city and she enjoyed it, but the meetings were not a financial success.  Great prejudice existed against Mrs. Rose on account of her alleged infidelity, there was no interest in the question of woman’s rights, and Washington was not a good field for lectures of any sort, Congress furnishing all the oratory for which the public cared.  The papers were kind about publishing notices, but with the exception of the Star, gave no reports.  Chaplain Milburn refused to let them have the Representative chamber for a Sunday lecture, “because Mrs. Rose was not a member of any church.”  Miss Anthony replied that “our country stood for religious as well as civil liberty.”  He acknowledged the truth of this but still refused the use of the room.  Then they applied to Professor Henry for permission to speak in the hall of the Smithsonian Institute, and he told them that “it was necessary to avoid the discussion of any exciting questions there, and it would disturb the harmony of feeling for a woman to speak, so he hoped they would not ask permission of the board of regents.”  They had several good audiences, however, while in the city, made many warm friends and were handsomely entertained at the home of Gerrit Smith, then in Congress.

They went to Alexandria and to Baltimore, where they had much better houses, but everywhere were warned not to touch on the question of slavery.  Miss Anthony was terribly disgusted with the general shiftlessness she saw about the hotels and boarding-houses, and was in a state of pent-up indignation to see on every hand the evils of slavery and not be allowed to lift her voice against them, but later writes in her journal:  “This noon I ate my dinner without once asking myself, ’Are these human beings who minister to my wants slaves who can be bought and sold?’ Yes, even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such.  O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!” The landlord failing to have her called in time for the train, she complains: 

There is no promptness, no order, no system down here.  The institution of slavery is as ruinous to the white man as to the black....  Three northern servants, engineered by a Yankee boarding-house keeper, would do more work than a dozen of these slaves.  The free blacks, who receive wages, do no more than the others.  Such is the effect of slavery upon labor.  I can understand why northern men make the most exacting overseers; they require an amount of work from the slave equal to what they would from the paid white laborer of the north.

From Baltimore Miss Anthony went to Philadelphia,