After the election of Abraham Lincoln, Imboden ran unsuccessfully for a seat in Virginia's secession convention. A friend of former Virginia governor and prominent secessionist Henry A. Wise, Imboden was also among those who advocated immediate secession from the Union.

KELLY, James Kerr, a Senator from Oregon; born in Center County, Pa., February 16, 1819; attended the country schools and Milton and Lewisburg Academies; graduated from the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University) in 1839; studied law at Carlisle, Pa.; admitted to the bar in 1842 and commenced practice in Lewistown, Mifflin County, Pa.; deputy attorney general for Mifflin County, Pa.; went to the California gold fields in 1849, and later, in 1851, to Oregon Territory and settled in Portland, where he engaged in the practice of law; one of three commissioners for t

In 1851 Anthony met Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and over the next year the two women discovered the sort of liberating partnership they could forge. Their ideas were converging. Anthony had found women welcome in the temperance movement as long as they confined themselves to a separate sphere and did not expect an equal role with men, while Stanton had focused her attention on the need for women to reform law in their own interests, both to improve their conditions and to challenge the "maleness" of current law.