the following months, Blackwell and Stone continued organizing a woman suffrage movement separate from the AERA and its auxiliaries. In November 1868 they helped found a New England Woman Suffrage Association and in December they helped organize state societies in Rhode Island and New Hampshire. Believing their best chance for winning an amendment to a state constitution lay in Massachusetts, Blackwell spearheaded a movement to form Liberty Leagues across the state – local organizations of male suffragists who pledged to vote only for pro-woman suffrage candidates to the legislature. After passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, Congressional Republicans began drafting a Fifteenth Amendment to explicitly prohibit states from denying the vote to black men. Again Blackwell and Stone traveled to Washington to lobby for the inclusion of woman suffrage, and again their efforts failed. Meanwhile, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony mounted a campaign opposing any suffrage amendment that did not enfranchise women – seen by many as overt opposition to the Fifteenth Amendment. Disagreement over that amendment divided the May 1869 convention of the AERA. The convention rejected resolutions opposing the Fifteenth Amendment, and when Stanton and Anthony then proposed that the AERA reorganize as a woman suffrage society, the convention accepted Stone's motion that it wait until after ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment so as not to give the appearance of opposition. Nevertheless, two days later Stanton and Anthony formed the National Woman Suffrage Association, which immediately came out as opposed to the Fifteenth Amendment. With no notice having been given that such a society was to be formed, their critics thus excluded, and no representation from state and local woman suffrage associations then in existence, many long-time suffragists did not view the organization as legitimately "national." The New England Woman Suffrage Association appointed a committee, headed by Stone, to call a convention to form a "truly national" woman suffrage organization with delegates from each state. The American Woman Suffrage Association was formed by a national convention meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, on October 24 and 25, 1869. Blackwell drafted its constitution and was elected recording secretary. The Woman's Journal The New England Woman Suffrage Association also established the Woman's Journal, a weekly woman suffrage newspaper that became the organ of the American, New England, and Massachusetts woman suffrage associations. Henry Blackwell donated the first $1,000 of the $10,000 raised to start the paper, was one of three trustees