Looking back upon the tense days and nights of this "winter of mobs,"[129] Susan was proud of her group of abolitionists who so bravely had carried out their mission. In comparison, the Republicans had shown up badly, not a Republican mayor having the courage or interest to give them protection. In fact, she found little in the attitude of the Republicans to offer even a glimmer of hope that they were capable of governing in this crisis. Lincoln's inaugural address prejudiced her at once, for he said, "I have no purpose directly or indirectly to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists. I believe I have no lawful right to do so and I have no inclination to do so."[130] To her the future looked dark when statesmen would save the Union at such a price.
"No Compromise" was Susan's watchword these days, as a feminist as well as an abolitionist, even though this again set her at odds with Garrison and Phillips, the two men she respected above all others. They were now writing her stern letters urging her to reveal the hiding place of a fugitive wife and her daughter. Just before she had started on her antislavery crusade and while she was in Albany with Lydia Mott, a heavily veiled woman with a tragic story had come to them for help. She was the wife of Dr. Charles Abner Phelps, a highly respected member of the Massachusetts Senate, and the mother of three children. She had discovered, she told them, that her husband was unfaithful to her, and when she confronted him with the proof, he had insisted that she suffered from delusions and had her committed to an insane asylum. For a year and a half she had not been allowed to communicate with her children, but finally her brother, a prominent Albany attorney, obtained her release through a writ of habeas corpus, took her to his home, and persuaded Dr. Phelps to allow the children to visit her for a few weeks. Now she was desperate as she again faced the prospect of being separated from her children by Massachusetts law which gave even an unfaithful husband control of his wife's person and their children.
Well aware of how often her friends of the Underground Railroad had defied the Fugitive Slave Law and hidden and transported fugitive slaves, Susan decided she would do the same for this cultured intelligent woman, a slave to her husband under the law. Without a thought of the consequences, she took the train on Christmas Day for New York with Mrs. Phelps and her thirteen-year-old daughter, both in disguise, hoping that in the crowded city they could hide from Dr. Phelps and the law. Arriving late at night, they walked through the snow and slush to a hotel, only to be refused a room because they were not accompanied by a gentleman. They tried another hotel, with the same result, and then Susan, remembering a boarding house run by a divorced woman she knew, hopefully rang her doorbell. She too refused them, claiming all her boarders would leave if she harbored a runaway wife. By this time it was midnight. Cold and exhausted, they braved a Broadway hotel, where they were told there was no vacant room; but Susan, convinced this was only an excuse, said as much to the clerk, adding, "You can give us a place to sleep or we will sit in this office all night." When he threatened to call the police, she retorted, "Very well, we will sit here till they come to take us to the station."[131] Finally he relented and gave them a room without heat. Early the next morning, Susan began making the rounds of her friends in search of shelter for Mrs. Phelps and her daughter, and finally at the end of a discouraging day, Abby Hopper Gibbons, the Quaker who had so often hidden fugitive slaves, took this fugitive wife into her home.