Northern states. The petition drive significantly assisted the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, which ended slavery. Anthony was the chief organizer of this effort, which involved recruiting and coordinating some 2000 petition collectors. The League provided the women's movement with a vehicle for combining the fight against slavery with the fight for women's rights by reminding the public that petitioning was the only political tool available to women at a time when only men were allowed to vote. With a membership of 5000, it helped develop a new generation of women leaders, providing experience and recognition for not only Stanton and Anthony but also newcomers like Anna Dickinson, a gifted teenaged orator. The League demonstrated the value of formal structure to a women's movement that had resisted being anything other than loosely organized up to that point. The widespread network of women activists who assisted the League expanded the pool of talent that was available to reform movements, including the women's suffrage movement, after the war. American Equal Rights Association Anthony stayed with her brother Daniel in Kansas for eight months in 1865 to assist with his newspaper. She headed back east after she learned that an amendment to the U.S. Constitution had been proposed that would provide citizenship for African Americans but would also for the first time introduce the word "male" into the constitution. Anthony supported citizenship for blacks but opposed any attempt to link it with a reduction in the status of women. Her ally Stanton agreed, saying "if that word 'male' be inserted, it will take us a century at least to get it out." Anthony and Stanton worked to revive the women's rights movement, which had become nearly dormant during the Civil War. In 1866, they organized the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since the Civil War began. Unanimously adopting a resolution introduced by Anthony, the convention voted to transform itself into the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights of all citizens, especially the right of suffrage. The leadership of the new organization included such prominent activists as Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, and Frederick Douglass. The AERA's drive for universal suffrage was resisted by some abolitionist leaders and their allies in the Republican Party. During the period before the 1867 convention to revise the New York state constitution, Horace Greeley, a prominent newspaper editor, told