The next morning Susan started for the office as usual, thinking the worst was over, but as not a single horsecar or stage was running, she took the ferry to Flushing to visit her cousins. Here too there was rioting, but she stayed on until order was restored by the army. She returned to the city to find casualties mounting to over a thousand and a million dollars' worth of property destroyed. Negroes had been shot and hung on lamp posts, Horace Greeley's _Tribune_ office had been wrecked and the homes of abolitionist friends burned. "These are terrible times," she wrote her family, and then went back to work, staying devotedly at it through all the hot summer months.[154]
By the end of the year, she had enrolled the signatures of 100,000 men and women on her petitions, and assured by Senator Sumner that these petitions were invaluable in creating sentiment for the Thirteenth Amendment, she raised the number of signatures in the next few months to 400,000.
In April 1864, the Thirteenth Amendment passed the Senate and the prospects for it in the House were good. This phase of her work finished, Susan disbanded the Women's National Loyal League and returned to her family in Rochester.
In despair over the possible re-election of Abraham Lincoln, Susan had joined Henry and Elizabeth Stanton in stirring up sentiment for John C. Frémont. Abolitionists were sharply divided in this presidential campaign. Garrison and Phillips disagreed on the course of action, Garrison coming out definitely for Lincoln in the _Liberator_, while Phillips declared himself emphatically against four more years of Lincoln. Susan, the Stantons, and Parker Pillsbury were among those siding with Phillips because they feared premature reconstruction under Lincoln. They cited Lincoln's Amnesty Proclamation as an example of his leniency toward the rebels. They saw danger in leaving free Negroes under the control of southerners embittered by war, and called for Negro suffrage as the only protection against oppressive laws. They opposed the readmission of Louisiana without the enfranchisement of Negroes. Lincoln, they knew, favored the extension of suffrage only to literate Negroes and to those who had served in the military forces. In fact, Lincoln held back while they wanted to go ahead under full steam and they looked to Frémont to lead them.