Part 10

There are two great sword-fisheries in the world, one on the coast of New England, and the other in the waters about Sicily. The former gives employment, in different years, to from twenty to forty vessels, and from sixty to one hundred and twenty men; the latter to over three hundred boats and seventeen hundred men. In Italy the annual product of the fishery amounts to about 320,000 pounds, while in New England, counting the fish taken incidentally by halibut and mackerel vessels, the yield is at least 1,000,000 pounds.

The apparatus used in killing sword-fish is very simple. It consists of the “pulpit” or “cresembo,” a frame for the support of the harpooneer as he stands upon the end of the bow-sprit, the “lily iron” or “Indian dart,” which is attached by a long line to a keg serving as a buoy, and is thrust into the fish by means of a pole about sixteen feet in length. As the vessel cruises over the schooling grounds a lookout is stationed at the masthead, whose keen eye descries the tell-tale dorsal fins at a distance of two or three miles. By voice and gesture he directs the course of the vessel until the skipper can see the fish from his station in the pulpit. There is no difficulty in approaching the fish with a large vessel, although they will not suffer a small boat to come near them. When the fish is from six to ten feet in front of the vessel, it is struck. The harpoon is never thrown, the pole being too long. The dart penetrates the back of the fish, close to the side of the high dorsal fin, and immediately detaches itself from the pole, which is withdrawn. The dart having been fastened, the line is allowed to run out as far as the fish will carry it, and is then passed into a small boat, which is towing at the stern. Two men jump into this and pull in upon the line until the fish is brought in alongside.

The pursuit of the sword-fish is much more exciting than ordinary fishing, for it resembles the pursuit of large animals upon land. There is no slow and careful baiting and patient waiting, and no disappointment caused by the capture of worthless “bait-stealers.” The game is seen and followed, outwitted by wary tactics, and killed by strength of arm and skill. The sword-fish sometimes proves a powerful antagonist, and sends his pursuers’ vessel into harbor, leaking and almost sinking from injuries which he has inflicted. I have known a vessel to be struck by wounded sword-fish as many as twenty times in one season. There is even the spice of personal danger to give savor to the chase. One of the crew of a Connecticut schooner was severely wounded by a beak thrust through the oak floor of the boat in which he was standing, and penetrating two inches into his naked heel. A strange fascination draws men to this pursuit when they have once learned its charm. An old sword-fisherman, with an experience of twenty years, told me that when he was on the fishing ground he fished all night in his dreams, and that many a time he had bruised his hands and rubbed the skin off his knuckles by striking them against the ceiling of his bunk when he raised his arms to thrust the harpoon into imaginary monster sword-fishes.

* * * * *

The home and its apartments should not be treated as a dead thing, where we make best arrangement of its fittings, and there leave it. It must grow in range and in expression with our necessities, and diverging, and developing tastes. The best of decorators can not put that last finish which must come from home hands. It is a great canvas always on the easel before us—growing in its power to interest every day and year—never getting its last touches—never quite ready to be taken down and parted with. No home should so far out-top the tastes of its inmates that they can not somewhere and somehow deck it with the record of their love and culture. It is an awful thing to live in a house where no new nail can be driven in the wall, and no tray of wild flowers, or of wood-mosses be set upon a window sill. The ways are endless, in short, in which a house can be endowed with that home atmosphere which shall be redolent of the tastes of its inmates.—_Donald G. Mitchell._

ECCENTRIC AMERICANS.

By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.

IX.—A PIONEER ECCENTRIC WOMAN.

This artificial arrangement called society seems to be possible only upon unreal standards of truth and morality; it has a system of “white lies”—as if any lie _could_ be white and true. It is because children haven’t learned the difference between real truth and the “play truth” of the world that they are such a holy terror in society. We have to squelch their questionings and hide our blushes. Children and fools—distinguished puritans!—always tell the truth, we say, and confess our false lives in the saying; but occasionally one who is not a fool, but who preserves a child’s truth, comes into this masquerade of life and insists on recognizing the real persons behind the masks. Heavens, what a disturbance! Put him out! He’s an Eccentric.

Give one of these uncomfortable persons the clairvoyant insight into character and motives and the clear-speaking tongue or pen; put him on a higher moral plane than society about him travels, and two things will likely come to pass, viz.: martyrdom for himself and an uplift for his neighbors. Such a touch for truth, such a power to convey it, such a purpose had Jane Grey Swisshelm, and it’s safe to say that she has put more people to bed with uncomfortable bed-fellows in the shape of smarting consciences than any other woman of her time.

She was a rare combination of feminine and masculine qualities. Timid and courageous; yielding to kindness, hard as steel on questions of principle; domestic in all her tastes, public in all her life; slight of form and sickly by heredity, for fifty years she “endured hardship as a good soldier.” To a fanatical religious nature and a wonderfully analytical mind, she brought that childlikeness of conscience, and with a rare command of language for a weapon, she became a moral blizzard in a half century of upheaval in our political elements.

No one, I think, can read her autobiography without the conviction that this life of controversy was foreign to her nature, that the pugnacious pen was forced into her hand when it would have preferred to wield the pencil of the artist, or even the distaff in a happy home. She was thus forced aside from her natural course by an incompatible theology and an incompatible marriage. Benevolence was her mastering trait, but her hard theology gave no exercise to it. Perhaps better to say in her own words, she “obeyed the higher law of kindness under protest of her Calvinistic conscience.” Her religion taught her that everything that she liked to do and enjoyed in the doing, was, by that token, sinful; and her husband and his family by thwarting her in all such enjoyments, unconsciously executing her theology against herself, set her upon expiating her sinfulness by engaging in the most disagreeable and trying work that she could find. Men and women before her have sought “in the world’s broad field of battle” relief from disappointment of the heart’s wishes, but few have put on the armor to punish themselves for not enjoying that disappointment. It is, therefore, to the crucial tenets of her Calvanistic faith and the exorbitant demands of her conscience that we owe the great work Mrs. Swisshelm did in the cause of humanity. What it cost her only God and herself know; but we are not without evidence that she got some recompense as she went along, in achievements which must have been grateful to the heroic side of her nature.

For in the veins of this slight girl ran the blood of a race of heroes and martyrs—a family which fetched its line direct from signers of The Solemn League and Covenant. “My kith and kin,” she says, “had died at the stake, bearing testimony against popery and prelacy; had fought on those fields where Scotchmen charged in solid columns, singing psalms.” She hated the devil of her theology, because she considered him a sneak, “but I never was afraid of him,” she says—a statement we can well believe of one who at the age of six watched an alleged haunted place by night to catch a ghost. She never knew the time when she did not believe the cast-iron creed of her ancestors; read her Bible, understood all of Dr. Black’s metaphysical sermons, and was converted before her third year, and completed her theological education before she completed her twelfth year. Truly she “had no childhood,” as she says.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1815, she married at the age of sixteen a too-well-to-do farmer, and spent most of her life in the country. “I spent my best years cooking cabbage,” she says. She taught school much of the first ten years of her married life. She found her pen-power and her work in 1844, at the age of twenty-nine. Mrs. Swisshelm was one of the first, if not the very first, American woman to enter the field of political journalism. At this day, when all the avenues of literature throng with gifted women, when no considerable daily paper is without female contributors and staff writers, and some of our best magazines are conducted by women, it is hard to appreciate what it cost a timid, devout woman like Mrs. Swisshelm to take that step in 1844; it was in her mind voluntary consecration to martyrdom. This call came to her during an illness brought on by an attack on her by her husband and his mother, so outrageous that she had fled wildly to the woods, and been taken up and cared for by kindly neighbors. Her afflictions came to her as chastisements for not remembering those in bonds as bound with them; specifically for assisting to build a church for the “Black-gagites.” She wrote her first attack in an anti-slavery cause, propped up in bed, and it was in verse. She states the situation:

No woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be brought upon me. But what matter? I had no children to disgrace, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be spared better than I. No Western Pennsylvania woman had ever broken out of woman’s sphere. All lived in the very center of that sacred inclosure, making fires by which husbands, brothers and sons sat reading the news; each one knowing that she had a soul, because the preacher who made his bread and butter by saving it had been careful to inform her of its existence as preliminary to her knowledge of the indispensable nature of his services.

Her articles created a sensation, and no wonder that they did. For, although she had but little literary culture, she had simplicity and intensity. Her style was modeled on the English of the Bible (which she says was for years the only book that she allowed herself to read, in her dread of becoming wiser than her plodding husband), and on this sturdy stem she grafted the simple, homely, direct illustrations of the rural folk around her. Thus, it arrested the attention of learned and unlettered alike. But there was more than phraseology in her power. She was as intensely in earnest as if she were herself in bonds—that is what “remembering them as bound with them” means. She was one of a few who _meant it_; one of the kind of “fools” that “hear His word and _do_ it.” McDuffee, when he heard that Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang the first seceder, said: “Yes, and he’s just dashed fool enough to do it.” She felt that two races, the white and the black, were to be rescued from the curse of slavery; and for such a cause it was with her as “Hosea Bigelow” says, “P’izen-mad, pig-headed fightin’.” She had been reared an abolitionist, and that which was bred in the bone had been converted into a clear, blazing passion by a year’s residence in Kentucky (1832), where she witnessed scenes, the narration of which make that awful chapter in her biography entitled “Habitations of Horrible Cruelty.” She says:

For years there had run through my head the words: “Open thy mouth for the dumb, plead the cause of the poor and needy.” From first to last my articles were as direct and personal as Nathan’s reproof to David. Every man who went to the war (_i. e._, against Mexico), or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the whole list of crimes of which slavery was a synonym. Each one seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul made bare and his idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule, odium, solemn denunciation, old truths from the Bible and history, and the opinions of good men. I had a reckless abandon, for had I not thrown myself into the breach to die there, and would I not sell my life at its full value?

I think this keen sense for the weak places in men’s character and reasoning, and her reckless assaults thereon were what made her so formidable. She always struck for the heart, and rarely missed her aim. “Exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized forte,” she says. With what disregard of everything she rode after the oriflamme of humanity let her tell:

Hon. Gabriel Adams had taken me by the hand at father’s funeral, led me to a stranger and introduced me as: “The child I told you of, but eight years old, her father’s nurse and comforter.” He had smoothed my hair and told me not to cry; God would bless me for being a good child. He was a member of the session when I joined the church; his voice in prayer had smoothed mother’s hard journey through the dark valley; and now, as mayor of the city he had ordered it illuminated in honor of the battle of Buena Vista, and this, too, on Saturday evening, when the unholy glorification extended into the Sabbath. Measured by the standard of his profession as an elder in the church whose highest judicatory had pronounced slavery and Christianity incompatible, no one was more vulnerable than he, and of none was I so unsparing, yet as I wrote, the letter was blistered with tears; but his oft repeated comment was: “Jane is right,” and he went out of his way to take my hand and say: “You were right.”

Samuel Black, a son of my pastor, dropped his place as leader of the Pittsburgh bar and rushed to the war. My comments were thought severe, even for me; yet the first intimation I had that I had not been cast aside as a monster, came from his sister, who sent me a message that her father, her husband and herself, approved my criticism. Samuel returned with a colonel’s commission, and one day I was about to pass him without recognition, where he stood on the pavement talking to two other lawyers, when he stepped before me and held out his hand. I drew back, and he said:

“Is it possible you will not take my hand?”

I looked at it, then into his manly, handsome face, and answered:

“_There is blood on it!_ The blood of women and children slain at their own altars, on their own hearthstones, that you might spread the glorious American institution of woman whipping and baby stealing.”

“Oh,” he exclaimed, “This is too bad! I swear to you I never killed a woman or a child.”

“Then you did not fight in Mexico, did not help to bombard Buena Vista.”

His friends joined him and insisted that I did the Colonel great wrong, when he looked squarely into my face, and, holding out his hand, said:

“For the sake of the old church, for the sake of the old man, for the sake of the old times, give me your hand.”

I laid it in his, and hurried away, unable to speak, for he was the most eloquent man in Pennsylvania. He fell at last at the head of his regiment, while fighting in the battle of Fair Oaks, for the freedom he had betrayed in Mexico.

Her destructive attack on the private character of Daniel Webster, in 1850, also illustrates her reckless courage and her sagacity. She was in Washington pending the fugitive slave bill. Webster was supporting the measure—a damaging defection from the anti-slavery side, because of his supposed moral as well as intellectual greatness. Mrs. S. discovered “that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell—that his life was full of rottenness. Then I knew why I had come to Washington.” She put the facts into one short paragraph, and published it in her own paper, against the advice of all her friends, and even of such stanch anti-slavery men as Giddings, Julian, and Dr. Snodgrass. They said it was true, and no one would dare to deny it; yet no one had dared to make it public; the publication would ruin her and her influence. She said: “The cause of the slave hangs on the issue in Congress, and Mr. Webster’s influence is against him; his influence would be less if the public knew just what he is. I will publish it and let God take care of the consequences.” Eccentric conduct, surely! It was published, and it did bring ruin—but on Daniel Webster, instead of Jane Grey Swisshelm. It killed Webster’s influence with the conscientious part of the Whig party, and probably gave the _coup de grace_ to his presidential prospects. She was long known as “the woman who killed Webster.”

It was in 1847 that Mrs. Swisshelm took the decisive plunge by founding the Pittsburgh _Saturday Visiter_. The sensation created by this unprecedented appearance of politics in petticoats she characteristically describes:

It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did the American eagle catch sight of it than he swooned and fell off his perch. Democratic roosters straightened out their necks and ran screaming with terror. Whig ’coons scampered up trees and barked furiously. The world was falling, and every one had “heard it, saw it, and felt it.”

It appeared that on some inauspicious morning each one of three-fourths of the secular editors from Maine to Georgia had gone to his office suspecting nothing, when from some corner of his exchange list there sprang upon him such a horror as he had little thought to see. A woman had started a political paper! A woman! Could he believe his eyes? A woman! Instantly he sprang to his feet and clutched his pantaloons, shouted to the assistant editor, when he, too, read and grasped frantically at his cassimeres, called to the reporters and press-men and typos and devils, who all rushed in, heard the news, seized their nether garments and joined the general chorus, “My breeches! oh, my breeches!” Here was a woman resolved to steal their pantaloons, their trousers, and when these were gone they might cry, “Ye have taken away my gods, and what have I more?” The imminence of the peril called for prompt action, and with one accord they shouted, “On to the breach, in defense of our breeches! Repel the invader or fill the trenches with our noble dead!”

“That woman shall not have _my_ pantaloons,” cried the editor of the big city daily; “nor my pantaloons,” said the editor of the dignified weekly; “nor my pantaloons,” said he who issued manifestoes but once a month; “nor mine,” “nor mine,” “nor mine,” chimed in the small fry of the country towns.

Even the religious press could not get past the tailor shop, and “Pantaloons” was the watchword all along the line. George D. Prentice took up the cry, and gave the world a two-third column leader on it, stating explicitly, “She is a man all but the pantaloons.” I wrote to him, asking a copy of the article, but received no answer, when I replied in rhyme to suit his case:

“Perhaps you have been busy Horsewhipping Sal or Lizzie, Stealing some poor man’s baby, Selling its mother, may be. You say—and you are witty— That I—and ’tis a pity— Of manhood lack but dress; But you lack manliness, A body clean and new, A soul within it, too. Nature must change her plan Ere you can be a man.”

Mrs. Swisshelm was scourged into the woman’s rights agitation as she had been into the anti-slavery struggle, by her own troubles, brought on her again by her husband.

The house left to her by her parents she wished to sell. Under the laws of Pennsylvania a wife could not alone give title, and her husband in this case refused to sign the deed unless the purchase money were given to him to be put into improvements on his mother’s estate, where all his wife’s earnings had so far been put out of her reach. Upon the death of her mother, whom she idolized and had nursed tenderly for some weeks against the opposition of her husband, the latter filed a claim against the mother’s estate for his wife’s wages as nurse. Of these applications of the law she writes:

I do not know why I should have been so utterly overwhelmed by this proposal to execute a law passed by Christian legislators for the government of a Christian people, a law which had never been questioned by any nation or state or church, and was in full force all over the world. Why should the discovery of its existence curdle my blood, stop my heart-beats, and send a flush of burning shame from forehead to finger-tips? Why blame him for acting in harmony with the canons of every Christian church? Was it any fault of his that “all that she (the wife) can acquire by her labor, service, or act during coverture belongs to the husband?” Certainly not!

It occurred to me that all the advances made by humanity had been through the pressure of injustice, and that the screws had been turned on me that I might do something to right the great wrong which forbade married women to own property. So, instead of spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for the heart of that great tyranny. I studied the laws under which I lived and began a series of letters on the subject of married women’s rights to hold property.

The result of the agitation thus begun was an amendment to the statute in 1848, securing to married women the right to hold property. The predictions of evils to follow from this introduction of “an apple of discord into every family,” made by sage and serious men then, sound marvellously like some of the warnings we hear from objectors to woman suffrage now. But Mrs. Swisshelm refused to join the organized suffrage movement, and had many hot debates with its organs as to method, not as to principles; she herself, curiously enough, predicted evils to flow from woman suffrage, similar to those her critics had predicted would flow from granting property rights.

She opposed the Washingtonian temperance movement, scornfully rejecting the plan of reforming drunkards by coddling them; waged warfare against the encroachments of the Church of Rome; and on more than one occasion successfully resisted the tyranny of trade unions. To defeat the latter she herself learned and taught other women the art typographic, and became independent. It is a notable fact that she was driven into this contention, also, by her own troubles with union printers. She seems to have been generally a conscript, not often a volunteer to fight, but the result always was to advance the interests of oppressed classes more than her own interests. It was to establish a precedent in behalf of other female correspondents that she applied for and secured a seat in the reporter’s gallery in the Capitol, Washington, being the first woman who ever sat there. She was then (1850), as for many years before and after, a correspondent of the New York _Tribune_.

In 1847, after twenty years of vain efforts to “live up to the lights” of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Swisshelm and her husband parted, she taking their only child and going to Minnesota to live with her sister.