She could certainly support the drive to end slavery, however, which the war had made into a realistic possibility. In 1863, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony organized the Women's Loyal National League, the first national women's political organization in the U.S. It collected nearly 400,000 signatures on petitions to abolish slavery in the largest petition drive in the nation's history up to that time. Despite her reduced public activity, Stone agreed to preside over the League's founding convention, and she later agreed to manage its office for two weeks to give Anthony a badly-needed break. She declined, however, to go on lecture tours for the League. Henry Blackwell had for years worked with real estate investments. In 1864, amid wartime inflation, his investments began to pay off handsomely. Stone was enormously relieved to have the family freed from the debts that had been contracted to buy investment property. This major improvement in the family's finances enabled Blackwell to scale back his business efforts and devote more of his time to social reform activities. Beginning to ease back into public activity, Stone embarked on a lecture tour on women's rights in New York and New England in the autumn of 1865. She was still experiencing periods of self-doubt a year later, but, with Blackwell's encouragement, she traveled with him on a joint lecture tour in 1866. Slavery was abolished in December 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which raised questions about the future role of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS). In January 1866, Stone and Anthony traveled to an AASS meeting in Boston to propose a merger of the anti-slavery and women's movements into one that would campaign for equal rights for all citizens. The AASS, preferring to focus on the rights of African Americans, especially the newly freed slaves, rejected their proposal. In May 1866, Anthony and Stanton organized the Eleventh National Women's Rights Convention, the first since before the Civil War began. In a move similar to the proposal that had been made earlier to anti-slavery forces, the convention voted to transform itself into a new organization called the American Equal Rights Association (AERA), whose purpose was to campaign for the equal rights for all, especially the right of suffrage. Stone did not attend the AERA's founding convention, most likely for fear of the recent cholera outbreak in New York City, the meeting's location. She was nevertheless elected to the new organization's executive committee.