Garrison in confidence that she and Blackwell could live on their income and thus "cheerfully give" their time and effort to the Woman's Journal. Blackwell continued to dabble in business that interested him. In 1871 he was part of a presidential committee sent to Santo Domingo to explore commercial ramifications of a possible annexation, and even after annexation failed he continued to promote a model commercial base in the country. Blackwell continued to be keenly interested in developing a successful alternative to cane sugar as a means of combating slavery in the West Indies. After obtaining a patent for a new refining method, he established the Maine Sugar Beet Company in 1878. Although early in its operation he telegraphed Stone: "Beet sugar manufacture a success. Slavery in Cuba is doomed," he and his partners found it impossible to obtain the quantity of sugar beets to keep the enterprise going, and shut the operation down in 1882. Work for Woman Suffrage In the early years of Blackwell's marriage to Lucy Stone, he assisted her work whenever his business schedule permitted. In 1855, he lectured with her in and around Cincinnati during the summer, helped her manage the National Woman's Rights Convention held in Cincinnati that fall, and arranged winter lecture engagements for her in Wisconsin, Indiana, and Ohio. In 1856, he lectured with her in the region around their summer residence in Viroqua, Wisconsin. In the winter of 1857, when the tax bill came for their newly purchased house in Orange, New Jersey, Stone refused to pay on the basis of "no taxation without representation." After submitting to a public auction of household items to pay the tax and attendant court costs, Blackwell and Stone lectured together in Orange on "Taxation without Representation." It was in these February 1858 speeches that Blackwell first argued that woman suffrage was politically expedient no matter a party's principles or goals: Enfranchising women, he said, would allow Republicans to more than double their influence toward abolishing slavery, the American Party to double the number of native-born voters, and Democrats to give votes to labor. Reconstruction issues In 1866, the National Woman's Rights Convention, meeting for the first time since before the Civil War, voted itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA) to work for universal suffrage – the vote for both blacks and women. Blackwell served as secretary of this organization during its three-year