Former slave Frederick Douglass rebuked her in his abolitionist newspaper, accusing her of achieving success by putting her anti-slavery principles aside and speaking only of women's rights. Douglass later found Stone at fault for speaking at a whites-only Philadelphia lecture hall, but Stone insisted that she had replaced her planned speech that day with an appeal to the audience to boycott the facility. It took years before the two were reconciled. On October 14, 1853, following the National Woman's Rights Convention held in Cleveland, Ohio, Stone and Lucretia Mott addressed Cincinnati's first women's rights meeting, arranged by Henry Blackwell, a local businessman from a family of capable women, who had taken an interest in Stone. After that successful meeting, Stone accepted Blackwell's offer to arrange a lecture tour for her in the western states – considered then to be those west of Pennsylvania and Virginia. Over the following thirteen weeks, Stone gave over forty lectures in thirteen cities, during which a report to the "New York Tribune" said she was stirring the West on women's rights "as it is seldom stirred on any subject whatsoever." After four lectures in Louisville, Stone was begged to repeat the entire course and told she was having more effect there than she could have anywhere else. An Indianapolis newspaper reported that Stone "set about two-thirds of the women in the town crazy after women's rights and placed half the men in a similar predicament." St. Louis papers said her lectures attracted the largest crowds ever assembled there, filling the city's largest auditorium beyond its capacity of two thousand. Chicago papers praised her lectures as the best of the season, and said they were inspiring discussion and debate in the city's homes and meeting places. When Stone headed home in January, 1854, she left behind incalculable influence. From 1854 through 1858, Stone lectured on women's rights in Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ontario. Elizabeth Cady Stanton would later write that "Lucy Stone was the first speaker who really stirred the nation's heart on the subject of woman's wrongs." In addition to being the women's rights movement's most prominent spokesperson, Lucy Stone led the movement's petitioning efforts. She initiated petition efforts in New England and several other states and assisted the petitioning efforts of state and local organizations in New York, Ohio, and Indiana. After petitioning the Massachusetts legislature from 1849 through 1852 for the right of women to vote and serve in public office,  Stone aimed her 1853 petitions at the convention that would meet on May 4, 1853, to revise the state constitution.