When no one else was at hand, she took her turn at speaking, but she was seldom satisfied with her efforts. "I spoke for an hour," she confided to her diary, "but my heart fails me. Can it be that my stammering tongue ever will be loosed?"
Lucy Stone, who spoke with such ease, gave her advice and encouragement. "You ought to cultivate your power of expression," she wrote. "The subject is clear to you and you ought to be able to make it so to others. It is only a few years ago that Mr. Higginson told me he could not speak, he was so much accustomed to writing, and now he is second only to Phillips. 'Go thou and do likewise.'"[73]
In March 1857, the Supreme Court startled the country with the Dred Scott decision, which not only substantiated the claim of Garrisonians that the Constitution sanctioned slavery and protected the slaveholder, but practically swept away the Republican platform of no extention of slavery in the territories. The decision declared that the Constitution did not apply to Negroes, since they were citizens of no state when it was adopted and therefore had not the right of citizens to sue for freedom or to claim freedom in the territories; that the Missouri Compromise had always been void, since Congress did not have the right to enact a law which arbitrarily deprived citizens of their property.
Reading the decision word for word with dismay and pondering indignantly over the cold letter of the law, Susan found herself so aroused and so full of the subject that she occasionally made a spontaneous speech, and thus gradually began to free herself from reliance on written speeches. She spoke from these notes: "Consider the fact of 4,000,000 slaves in a Christian and republican government.... Antislavery prayers, resolutions, and speeches avail nothing without action.... Our mission is to deepen sympathy and convert into right action: to show that the men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slave-owners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South. Therefore our work is to rouse the sleeping consciousness of the North....[74]
"We ask you to feel as if you, yourselves, were the slaves. The politician talks of slavery as he does of United States banks, tariff, or any other commercial question. We demand the abolition of slavery because the slave is a human being and because man should not hold property in his fellowman.... We say disobey every unjust law; the politician says obey them and meanwhile labor constitutionally for repeal.... We preach revolution, the politicians, reform."