Part 27

They visited the hospitals with proper diet for the sick and wounded, sought out the dungeons of the provost and the crowded holds of the prison-ships, with food and medicine in their hands and heroic words on their lips. They unsparingly condemned coldness or backwardness in the nation’s cause, and young girls refused the suits of lovers till they had obeyed the call of their country for military service. They received their beloved dead, slain in battle, and forbore to weep, although their hearts were breaking. They even hushed the bitter resentment of their souls, which had been aroused by British invasion, and gave Christian burial to their enemies, who, but for them, at times would not have received it. They trained their little children to the same uncomplaining patience, the same steely endurance, and the same heroic love of liberty which fired their own hearts, until boys and girls gloried in danger and privation. What wonder that the heroes of the Revolutionary War proved invincible!

John Adams, the second President of the Republic, knew the women of the Revolution well, and was able to measure a superior woman wherever he found her, and to estimate her influence. His own wife, Mrs. Abigail Adams, was the personal friend of Mrs. Mercy Warren, and every whit her peer. Her husband was proud to acknowledge her as his equal in all save early education, which was accorded him in large measure and wholly denied her, as she never attended school a day in her life. In one of his letters to his wife Mr. Adams comments on the futile efforts of the British General Howe to obtain possession of Philadelphia, which the colonists foiled for a long time. He writes her, “I do not believe General Howe has a very great woman for a wife. A smart wife would have put Howe in possession of Philadelphia a long time ago.”

In the winter of 1780, the resources of the country touched their lowest point, and allowed but the scantiest supply of food and clothing for any one. British cruisers on the coast destroyed every hope of aid from the merchant vessels, and the cup of misfortune pressed to the lips of the struggling colonists overflowed with bitterness. Even the ability of the wealthiest and most generous was exhausted by the repeated drafts made on them. So great was the need of the army, that General Steuben, who had been aid-de-camp to the king of Prussia, and had learned the art of war from the renowned Frederic the Great, declared that “there was not a commander in all Europe who could keep his troops together a week in such suffering and destitution.”

But when all despaired the women rallied. All else was temporarily forgotten. The women of Philadelphia went forth from house to house, soliciting money, or whatever could be converted into money. They asked for cloth, garments, and food. Rich women stripped themselves of jewels that were heirlooms in their families, pillaged their parlors of antique bric-a-brac, with the hope that it might find purchasers, and emptied their purses of the last penny they possessed. More than seventy-five hundred dollars in specie were collected, when hard money was at its highest value. One woman cut five hundred pairs of pantaloons with her own hand, and superintended their manufacture. Mrs. Bache, a daughter of Dr. Franklin, was a leading spirit in these patriotic efforts. When a company of French noblemen called on her, she conducted them to her parlor, and showed them a pile of twenty-two hundred shirts for the army, collected by herself, each one marked with the name of the woman who had cut and made it.

Nor was this a mere spasm of helpfulness, that soon died out in forgetfulness and inaction. All through that dreary winter women continued their visits to Washington’s camp, fortifying the men with their own inflexible spirit, and tiding them over this darkest passage in their experience, with steady streams of beneficence. They always went laden with comforts for the needy and the sick, and were prepared to serve as cook or seamstress, amanuensis or nurse, equally prompt with hymn or story, Bible-reading or prayer, as occasion demanded.

While the colonial women were a mighty bulwark of strength to the struggling men of the embryo nation, some of them were unforgetful of their own rights, and in advance of the formation of the new government asked for recognition. Abigail Smith Adams, the wife of John Adams of Massachusetts, was a woman of strong convictions, and of large intellectual abilities. She wrote her husband, in March, 1776, then at the Colonial Congress in Philadelphia, and urged the claims of her sex upon his attention, demanding for them representation when the government was organized. She wrote as follows:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency; and in the new code of laws, which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, _I desire that you will remember the women, and be more generous and honorable to them than your ancestors_. Do not put such unlimited power in the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.

“If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and _will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice nor representation_. That your sex is tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy, willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why then not put it out of the power of the vicious and lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity? Superior men of all ages abhor those customs which treat us as the vassals of your sex.”

When the Constitution of the United States was framed without any recognition of the rights of women, the disappointment of Mrs. Adams almost culminated in indignation. She felt most keenly the discrimination of the law against her sex, and wrote her husband again, as follows:

“I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies, for while you are proclaiming peace and good-will to all men, emancipating all nations, you insist on retaining absolute power over wives. But you must remember that absolute power, like most other things which are very bad, is most likely to be broken.”

She was especially solicitous that there should be equal advantages of education for boys and girls. “If we mean to have heroes,” she writes, “statesmen, and philosophers, we should have learned women.” And again, “If you complain of lack of education for sons, what shall I say in regard to daughters who every day experience the want of it!”

Nor were the women of the South forgetful of their rights, and at an early day they also put in a demand for political equality. The counties of Mecklenburg and Rowan in North Carolina blazed with the fiery patriotism of their women. And in their defiant conversations with British officers, who were quartered in the houses of the wealthiest and most intelligent of these Southern matrons, as also in their debates with the men of their own community, officers, judges, and clergymen, they unhesitatingly declared their right to legal equality with men, in the new government, whenever laws should be formulated for the infant republic.

Two years after the Declaration of Independence was adopted, the sister of General Richard Henry Lee, Mrs. Hannah Lee Corbin of Virginia, wrote to her brother, declaring that women should be allowed the franchise, if they paid taxes. He replied that in Virginia women already had the right to vote, and “it is on record that women in Virginia did exercise the right of voting at an early day.” On the second day of July, 1776, the right to vote was secured to the women of New Jersey, and they exercised it for over thirty years. Our country began its very existence burdened with the protests of our great fore-mothers against violation of the immortal principles which were its corner-stone. “All just governments derive their powers from the consent of the governed,” was the startling announcement the Fathers thundered into the ears of the monarchs of the old world. And many of their wives and daughters contended, with invincible logic, that this axiom included women as well as men.

The long struggle of American women for education, opportunity, and political equality which has since followed, dates, therefore, from the hour of the nation’s birth. It is the legitimate outcome of American ideas, for which the nation contended for nearly a century. Absorbed in severe pioneer work, inevitable to life in the wilderness, and denied education themselves, the first care of our revolutionary mothers was for the literary and religious instruction of their children. As far back as the year 1700, a woman, one Bridget Graffort, had given the first lot of ground for a public school-house, although at that time, and for long years after, no provision whatever was made for the education of girls. There was a bitter prejudice against educated and literary women in the early days of our history. And even after five colleges had been founded for young men,—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, and William and Mary, Virginia,[162]—a young woman was regarded as well educated who could “read, write, and cipher.”

If, however, school privileges were denied them, the education of the early American women proceeded, through the very logic of events. In laying the foundations of the new government all questions were discussed that touched human interests, not only publicly but privately—from the pulpit, and around the fireside. Women listened to them, and took part in them. The famous book of Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” was published in London in 1790, and found its way into American circles. It received the unsparing condemnation meted out to all efforts put forth in advance of the age, for the world has always stoned its prophets. It demanded for women every opportunity accorded to man, and the same rights in representation, before the law, in the courts, and in the world of work. Torrents of the vilest abuse were heaped on the author, and formed the answer vouchsafed by the public. It educated not a few women, however, who in turn preached the same gospel, and made for women the same demands.

In 1831 the first real grapple began with American slavery, through the establishment of the _Liberator_ by William Lloyd Garrison. He flung out his banner, which he never lowered, demanding immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves of the South, and after a struggle of forty years, his demand was granted. Slavery was fastened on our coast long before the birth of the republic. In the century before 1776, three and a quarter millions of negroes had been taken by Great Britain from African shores for her various colonies in the new world. And at the close of the Revolutionary War, when the population was but three millions, six hundred thousand of these were black slaves, even then a menace to the peace of the nation. Against the protests of some of the noblest and wisest of the revolutionary patriots slavery, was introduced into the National Constitution in 1787, and was fastened on the national life.

The aggressions of the slaveocracy during the first half century of our national existence alarmed the non-slaveholding portion of the country. And almost at the same time, in the progress of civilization, the era was reached when the enlightened conscience of the civilized world demanded the abolition of slavery. Slowly routed from the dominions of other nations by the manumission of the bondmen, or the purchase of their freedom, slavery seemed at last to have intrenched itself on American soil, and to dominate American civilization. A struggle with it was inevitable. Some of the grandest men and women of the nation entered the lists against it, for the early Abolitionists were remarkable people. It is only necessary to mention the names of some of the leaders in that holy war, to summon up visions of manly beauty and womanly grace, men and women endowed with ability, culture, character, refinement, courage, and social charm. Their public speech blazed with remorseless moral logic, and thrilled with matchless eloquence, so that crowds flocked to hear them, wherever they spoke. Garrison and Phillips, Sumner and Parker, Birney and Pierpont, Gerrit Smith and Theodore Weld—what men of their day surpassed them in manliness, moral force, and persuasive and convincing speech? They were supplemented and complemented by noble women, unlike them, and yet every whit their peers—Maria Weston Chapman and Lydia Maria Child, Sarah and Angelina Grimké, Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelly, Helen Garrison and Ann Greene Phillips.[163]

Mrs. Chapman and Mrs. Child put to the service of the great reform pens tipped with flame, and wielded with consummate energy and skill. And the Grimké sisters, who had manumitted their slaves in Charleston, S. C., and come North to advocate Antislavery doctrines, with Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelly, entranced large audiences with their eloquent discourse, and roused the dormant moral sense of their hearers into protest against the colossal sin of the nation. Conservatives in church and state were alarmed. War was declared against the eloquent women, and it was decided that they should be silenced, and not allowed to act or vote in the business meetings of the Antislavery Society. This brought about a division in the organization before it had reached its first decade.

A double battle was now forced on the Garrisonian Abolitionists—a battle for the rights of woman as well as for the freedom of the slave. The doctrine of human rights was discussed anew, broadly and exhaustively, and it was demonstrated that the rights of man and woman were identical. Antislavery platforms resounded with the demand that liberty, justice, and equality be accorded to women, and the anti-slavery press teemed with arguments for women’s rights, which are repeated in the woman suffrage meetings of the present time.

In 1840 a “World’s Antislavery Convention” was held in London, and all Antislavery organizations throughout the world were invited to join in it, through their delegates. Several American societies accepted the invitation, and elected delegates, six or eight of whom were women, Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Wendell Phillips among them. The excitement caused by their presence in London was intense, for the English Abolitionists were very conservative, and never dreamed of inviting women to sit in their Convention. And these women who had come among them had rent the American Antislavery Societies in twain, had been denounced from the pulpit, anathematized by the press, and mobbed by the riffraff of the streets. “They who have turned the world upside down have come hither also,” was the affrighted cry, nor was the alarm of the English Abolitionists lessened when they saw that those of the women delegates who were not Quakers, clad in the traditional garb of that sect, were young, cultivated, and refined.

A long and acrimonious debate followed on the admission of the women, during which many of the men delegates from America showed the white feather and sided with the English opposition. Again the tyranny of sex was combated, and the doctrine of woman’s equality with man enunciated, and again the battle for woman’s rights was fought with moral force and logical correctness, as it had been in America the year before. Some of the noblest women of England were in attendance as listeners and spectators,—Elizabeth Fry and Lady Byron, Mrs. Anna Jameson and Mary Howitt,—and, judging by later events, the lesson was not lost upon them. When the vote was taken, the women delegates were excluded by a large majority. William Lloyd Garrison did not arrive in London until after the rejection of the women. When he was informed of the decision of the Convention he refused to take his seat with the delegates. And throughout the ten days’ sessions he maintained absolute silence, remaining in the gallery as a spectator. Only one other of the delegates joined him, Nathaniel P. Rogers of Concord, New Hampshire, an editor of an Antislavery paper.

The London Convention marked the beginning of a new era in the woman’s cause. Hitherto, the agitation of the question of woman’s equal rights had been incidental to the prosecution of other work. Now the time had come when a movement was needed to present the claims of woman in a direct and forcible manner, and to take issue with the legal and social order which denied her the rights of human beings, and held her in everlasting subjection. At the close of the exasperating and insulting debates of the “World’s Antislavery Convention,” Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton agreed to hold a Woman’s Rights Convention on their return to America, and to begin in earnest the education of the people on the question of woman’s enfranchisement. Mrs. Stanton had attended the Convention as a bride, her husband having been chosen a delegate.

Accordingly the first Woman’s Rights Convention of the world was called at Seneca Falls, New York, on the 19th and 20th of July, 1848. It was attended by crowds of men and women, and the deepest interest was manifested in the proceedings. “Demand the uttermost,” said Daniel O’Connell, “and you will get something.” The leaders in the new movement, Lucretia Mott and Mrs. Stanton, with their husbands, and Frederick Douglass, acted on this advice. They demanded in unambiguous terms all that the most radical friends of woman have ever claimed: “equal rights in colleges and universities, trades and professions; the right to vote; to share in all political offices, honors, and emoluments; to complete equality in marriage; equal rights in property, in wages for equal work, and in minor children; to make contracts; to sue and be sued; to personal freedom; and to serve on juries, especially when women were tried.”

The Convention adjourned to meet in Rochester, New York, August 2, 1848. There were the same crowds in attendance, the same deep interest, and the same earnest debates and discussions as had characterized the meeting at Seneca Falls. Women soon adapted themselves to the situation, increased in efficiency and courage, participated in the debates, and elected a woman president, in spite of the ridicule occasioned by the suggestion. She discharged the duties of the office admirably, and the ridicule was soon merged in applause. A third Convention was held at Salem, Ohio, in 1850; a fourth in Akron, Ohio, in 1851; a fifth in Massillon, Ohio, in 1852; another at Ravenna, Ohio, in 1853, and others rapidly followed. The advocates of woman suffrage increased in number and ability. Superior women, whose names have become historic, espoused the cause—Frances D. Gage, Hannah Tracy Cutler, Jane G. Swisshelm, Caroline M. Severance, Celia C. Burr, who later became Mrs. C. C. Burleigh, Josephine S. Griffing, Antoinette L. Brown, Lucy Stone, Susan B. Anthony, Paulina W. Davis, Caroline H. Dall, Elizabeth Oakes Smith, Ernestine L. Rose, Mrs. C. H. Nichols, Dr. Harriot K. Hunt; the roll-call was a brilliant one, representing an unusual versatility of culture and ability.

The First National Woman Suffrage Convention was held in Worcester, Massachusetts, October 23 and 24, 1850. It was more carefully planned than any that had yet been held. Nine States were represented. The arrangements were perfect—the addresses and papers were of the highest character—the audiences were at a white heat of enthusiasm. The number of cultivated people who espoused the new gospel for women was increased by the names of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Bronson and Abby May Alcott, Thomas W. Higginson, William I. Bowditch, Samuel E. and Harriet W. Sewall, Henry Ward Beecher, Henry B. Blackwell, Ednah D. Cheney, Hon. John Neal, Rev. William H. Channing, and Wendell Phillips. Space fails for a detailed statement of the grand personages who gave of their talents, their wealth, and themselves, that the cause of woman’s elevation might be advanced.

Meetings were now of frequent occurrence in various parts of the country. The ridicule of the press, the horror of conservatives, the anathemas of the pulpit, and the ostracism of society began to abate. Petitions to legislatures, that were at first received with derisive laughter, and then laid on the table, now received attention. Unjust laws, that bore down upon women with cruel severity, were modified. And papers established in the interest of women found their way to the people, increased in circulation, and their influence was felt for good. A dozen years were spent in severe pioneer work and then came the four years Civil War. All reformatory work was temporarily suspended, for the nation then passed through a crucial experience, and the issue of the fratricidal conflict was national life or national death.

The transition of the country from peace to the tumult and waste of war was appalling and swift, but the regeneration of its women kept pace with it. They lopped off superfluities, retrenched in expenditures, became deaf to the calls of pleasure, and heeded not the mandates of fashion. Their work was that of relief and philanthropy, and, for the first time in the history of the world, the women of America developed a heavenly side to war. They cared for the needy families of soldiers, nursed the sick in camp and the wounded in hospitals, ministered to the dying in the rear of battle-fields, and kept the channels of beneficence full to overflowing, which extended from Northern homes to the army at the front. For their multiform work they needed immense sums of money, and now the latent business abilities of women began to show themselves.

They went to Washington, and competed with men for government contracts for the manufacture of army clothing, and obtained them. When their accounts and their work were rigorously inspected by the War Department they received commendation, and were awarded larger contracts. They planned great money-making enterprises, whose largeness of conception and good business management yielded millions of dollars, to be expended in the interest of sick and wounded soldiers. The last two of the colossal Sanitary Fairs, held in New York and Philadelphia, yielded respectively $1,000,000 and $1,200,000. Women were the creators, the inspiration, and the great energizing force of these immense fairs, and also, from first to last, of the Sanitary Commission. Said Dr. Bellows, “There was nothing wanting in the plans of the women of the Commission, that business men commonly think peculiar to their own methods.” Men awoke to the consciousness that there were in women possibilities and potencies of which they had never dreamed.

Clara Barton, doing clerical work in a department of the government, and declining to receive compensation therefor, attracted no attention. But Clara Barton in hospitals, and on hospital transports, bringing order out of chaos, hope out of despair, and holding death in abeyance—Clara Barton at Andersonville, where twelve thousand soldiers had succumbed to the horrors of life in the military prison of the enemy and had been ignominiously buried in long trenches, unpitied and unknown, aroused the attention and awakened the gratitude of the nation. For she ordered the trenches opened, the unknown dead exhumed and decently buried, each man in a separate grave, with a headstone recording his rank, his name, and the date of his death, when it could be ascertained.[164]