on the merits of women's suffrage between himself and Eliza W. Farnham. Looking back more than forty years later, the second volume of the History of Woman Suffrage (1887) remembered that the lecture "roused considerable discussion..., was extensively copied, and... had a wide, silent influence, preparing the way for action. It was a scathing satire, and men felt the rebuke." For twenty years following his work with Brother Jonathan magazine, Neal wrote about women almost exclusively in fiction but only occasionally about feminist issues in periodicals. He mused about crossdressing and the performative nature of gender in "Masquerading" (1864), "one of the most interesting essays of his career". He followed this with two women's rights essays for the American Phrenological Journal (1867), the women's rights chapter of his autobiography (1869), and twelve articles in The Revolution (1868–1870). Neal became prominently involved as an organizer in the women's suffrage movement following the Civil War, finding influence in local, regional, and national organizations. When the American Equal Rights Association split in 1869 over the Fifteenth Amendment, Neal regretted the division of efforts, but lent his support to the subsequent National Woman Suffrage Association because of its insistence upon immediate suffrage for all women. He cofounded the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, organized Portland's first public meeting on women's suffrage in 1870, and cofounded Maine's first statewide Woman Suffrage Association in 1873. Slavery Neal was "resolutely and heartily opposed to slavery", interpreting the ideals of the Declaration of Independence to mean that "the slaves in America were created free... Ergo—They may abolish the government, which, by keeping them as they are kept, has 'violated its trust. In reaction to widespread rape of enslaved women, he reported that "white fathers... are guilty of selling their own flesh and blood to bondage... In the Southern States of America, where coloured women are sought after, purchased, and cohabited with by white men... because the profit of the master is in direct proportion to the fruitfulness of the slave." Believing that "sudden emancipation of the whole [enslaved population], at once, is impossible" and that it would perpetuate Black Americans' status as "a much-to-be-dreaded caste" in the US, he supported "gradual emancipation [which] has done well in the New England states; and in New York." Because New England had "nothing to lose by emancipation; but rather...much to gain by it; since the value of white labour