Part 40

Nor has the advance of ideas been less marked than the increase of the numbers and receipts of the association. The first impulse of the first partnership of means and work, which began the active movement, resulting in the organization of a national society, was an impulse of protection for Indians and their lands from the robberies and horrors of enforced removals, and it voiced itself in pleas for treaty-keeping and the honest observance of all compacts with the Indians until their real consent to changes should be justly won. The impulse was one of common humanity, and recognized the manhood and womanhood of Indians, and their claims in common with all men because human beings. The facts gained from the first investigations, given in the first leaflets, and sent forth into many States, laid hold upon the minds of free white men and women by revealing to their consciences the responsibility of silence while our native Indians were still the victims of wholesale robbery by military ejectment from their own territory, often to be sent to unwholesome, non-supporting lands, into utter helplessness, or out of perishing need into wars for mere subsistence. The facts popularly made known that Indians were practically under the supreme control of the United States agent over them; that they could not sue or be sued,[213] make contracts, sell their lumber, or work their mines; that they had no law; that it was legally not a crime to kill an Indian; that Indian women and girls could be and often were appropriated to become mothers of agricultural slaves to till their master’s soil,—all these facts, startling to republican minds, thrilling to humane hearts, and thundering out appeals to Christian consciences, led to this impulse of protection. But soon the question of “How most wisely to protect” led to still more thoughtful study of the situation, and to the rapidly grown conviction that only law, education, and citizenship could be the real cure of such oppressions. This conviction was embodied in petitions for law, land in severalty, education, and citizenship, while yet the popular idea was that Indians could not be civilized and were not worth civilizing, and while even some so-called Christian ministers still counseled treating them as Israel of old felt commanded to treat the Canaanites. That the quiet but far-reaching work of the association, as has often been said by those publicly and conspicuously devoted to Indian welfare, has probably done more than the work of any other one organization for Indian liberation and elevation, no one familiar with its quality and quantity can well doubt. Its members recall the many testimonies to this effect, and, with grateful pride, that the Honorable H. L. Dawes, Chairman of the Indian Committee of the United States Senate, author of the long-needed Severalty Bill which became law in March, 1887, and ever the faithful friend of the women’s work, stated in a public speech that the “new Indian policy,” to-day everywhere approved, was “born of and nursed by the women of this association.” And, indeed, all the features of the new policy are found in the early petitions[214] and literature of the society. That the Indian Rights Association, the evening that it was organized, just as the women’s association, was ready to present its fourth annual petition, crystallized its plans of work, after reading the constitution of the women’s society, and adopted its lines and methods of work; that the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, and that the new Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the present administration have but done and are doing, what the association’s literature and petitions have for years advocated is a sufficient testimony to the principles and aims of the association. That its leaders have been divinely led many humbly and gratefully feel, for, as said the venerable Bishop Whipple, “The women have builded better than they knew;” and as said Hannah Whitall Smith, now of London, England, well known on two continents as an uplifting writer and speaker on religious subjects, one of the early treasurers and still a patron of the association, “This Indian work is but the Christian motherhood of the nation obeying its instincts toward our native heathen.” It would require a portly volume to mention the names and deeds of the earnest and eminent women who have had share in this work for the aborigines of our country. Among its honorary officers and members, as seen in its annual reports and those of its auxiliaries, are names distinguished in the world of letters and in political and social circles, as well as those known in philanthropic and Christian work, while many in its corps of active officers and in its executive board are widely known and honored. But the temptation to catalogue these in this chapter, must manifestly be resisted or restricted to incumbents of the leading offices and to the chairmen of departments. Among those most active in State work, Mrs. Sara Thomson Kinney, president of the Connecticut auxiliary, and now first vice-president of the national association, has given very largely of time, thought, and labor, has compactly organized her State with branches in its leading towns, has inaugurated in her association a variety of important work and brought it to its present standard of excellence. Under Miss Fletcher’s inspiration she introduced Indian Home Building by loan funds and is chairman of that department in the national association, forty or fifty Indian homes having, under her management, been built or remodeled in civilized fashion, and among ten or fifteen tribes. Many smaller loans she has also made, enabling individual Indians to adopt civilized and self-supporting industries. Mrs. Elizabeth Elliot Bullard, president of the Massachusetts auxiliary, and chairman of the new national Committee on Special Education of bright individual Indians brought to her association influence and new friends, and has, with the aid of a corps of eminent women, achieved large results, having in her society more branches than are to be found in any other State, her association having been also the largest and most enthusiastic supporter of the Missionary Department. In New York City an admirable board of officers, led by the accomplished Mrs. Theodore Irving and Mrs. Edward Elliott, are supporting a new station of the Ramona Missions, and are meeting with other new successes, as is the Brooklyn association, which, under the leadership of Mrs. Lyman Abbott, assisted by the former president of that society, Mrs. Jerome Plummer, inaugurated the Kiowa Mission and is preparing to open a station among the Piegans of Montana. Miss Sarah M. Taylor, of Philadelphia, a devoted and far-seeing worker and generous giver, is now chairman of the Missionary Department which, in six years, has planted directly or indirectly, missions in twenty different tribes, building four missionary cottages and four chapels in these, transferring them, one after another, when well established, to the care of the permanent denominational societies. Miss Kate Foote, president of the auxiliary at the national capital, whose bright letters from that city and whose charming magazine articles are so widely enjoyed, is chairman of the Department of Indian Legislation, her racy reports of laws secured, and notices of the more numerous ones needed, having both a popular and legislative value, while her prescient watchfulness is constantly achieving other and important help for Indians. The supplemental work for Indian civilization at Crow Creek Agency, Dakota, for furnishing on the reservation, to returned Indian students, civilized employments and continued religious nurture, thus making them self-supporting and an aid to their entire tribes, led to the election of Miss Grace Howard, of New York, who originated, successfully inaugurated, and continues it, as chairman of the association’s department of Indian Civilization Work. The Young People’s Department has for chairman Miss Marie E. Ives, of New Haven, whose first effort so inspired a quartet of young girls in New York City that their first entertainment placed $327 in the treasury for the association’s new Seminole Mission, and, naturally, awakened large hope for the success of this important division of work. The chairman of the committee on Indian Libraries, Miss Frances C. Sparhawk, of Massachusetts, originated and is vigorously serving her own department, while the latest committee, that on hospital work, is led by Miss Laura E. Tileston, of Virginia, though the first hospital, for which funds are already in hand, will soon be built by the National Missionary Committee for the Omahas. The devotion of our corresponding secretary, Miss Helen R. Foote; of our late recording secretary, Mrs. Rachel N. Taylor; the generous service of our recent treasurer, Mrs. Harriet L. Wilbur, and of the present one, Miss Anna Bennett, and the labors of other workers in different sections of the country come up in remembrance, and it would be a pleasure to record the names of all these did space permit. Many women have wrought well during and since the inauguration of the new Indian policy, by the influence of which already more than one third of the forty-eight thousand Indian pupils are in the various government and other schools, and under which the people of more than twenty tribes are receiving lands in severalty. By the success of this policy, developed with the aid of all officials, individuals, and organizations friendly to them, the quarter of a million Indians of our country are, by taking individual farms or by adopting civilized avocations, at last really passing out of barbarism into civilization, and from the oppressions, disabilities, and helplessness of the reservation system into the freedom, protection, and development of United States citizenship. The work of the association for these ends has been pressed with all the vigor which its numbers and means permitted, and it has given its whole thought to the accomplishment of its purposes. Not contemplating a permanent existence, it has given small though adequate attention to mere form. One of its members, a poet, Indian educator, an able writer on Indian topics, and now a government superintendent of Indian schools, Miss Elaine Goodale, says: “This association stretches out sympathetic hands and loses itself in all other good work for the Indians so that the measure of its influence may not be expressed in any rows of figures however significant, or set down in any report however complete. The striking and hopeful feature, after all, of this Women’s National Indian Association is, as its president constantly reminds us, that it is not intended as a permanent organization. The women have undertaken to meet a particular crisis, to bridge a dangerous gap. As fast as the regular missionary societies are ready to accept its independent missions, these are placed entirely in their hands. As soon as our rich and powerful Government comprehends and faithfully discharges its duty to the Indians the women will cease to urge their needs and their rights, and the association will cease to exist. Its work will have been done. Its demand is not for its own honor or extension but that the object for which alone it lives may speedily be accomplished.”

Until this object is gained, The Women’s National Indian Association will not sound retreat nor its great company of consecrated workers disband. It is possible that its best and longest record may be made in the future and its work be finished by wholly new laborers. God grant that this may be so if the work, political, educational, industrial, and religious, still so imperatively demanded by justice for our native Indian Americans, cannot otherwise be done.

XVI. WORK OF ANTI-SLAVERY WOMEN.

BY

LILLIE B. CHACE WYMAN.

Prudence Crandall, a Quaker school teacher in Canterbury, Conn., was the woman whose name we encounter in the earliest records of anti-slavery labor in this country. She took counsel with Mr. Garrison in 1833, and opened a school for colored pupils, which she bravely maintained for over a year, although she was subjected therefore to a great amount of persecution. She was arrested, and even thrown temporarily into jail, and her house and its inmates were made the mark for every species of insult and outrage which her neighbors dared to perpetrate. She married the Rev. Calvin Philleo, and still survives him, living in Kansas. The Legislature of Connecticut, a few years ago, granted her a pension in atonement for the wrongs she formerly suffered in that State.

Hatred of slavery was the motive which first called women in this country into public life. Sarah and Angelina Grimké were two sisters belonging to a prominent slaveholding family in South Carolina. As a child, Sarah was shocked by the cruelties practised upon the slaves around her, but her first deep interest in early life was in religious questions. The family were Episcopalians, and she remained for many years of the same faith. She made a visit to the North, came under Quaker influences, and finally joined the Society of Friends, and this led to her going to live in Philadelphia, in 1821. Angelina, who was twelve years younger than Sarah, remained in Charleston. She manifested, like Sarah, a tendency to extreme asceticism in dress and manner, and she became a Presbyterian. She detested the evils of slavery, but she does not seem to have thought slaveholding sinful in itself, till after she had visited Philadelphia in 1828, when she was twenty-three years old. After that, she grew to feel more and more keenly that she was living amid a great wrong, and she suffered intensely at the participation in it of her family. She entreated and argued, begged her brother to be merciful to his slaves, besought her mother and sisters to feel as she did. In May, 1829, she wrote in her diary, “May it not be laid down as an axiom, that that system must be radically wrong, which can only be supported by transgressing the laws of God.” A little later, she determined to leave her home, because of her inability to do any good there in regard to the slaves, and she writes, “I cannot but be pained at the thought of leaving mother.... I do not think, dear sister, I will ever see her again until she is willing to give up slavery.” In the autumn of 1829 she left Charleston and her mother, whom she never saw again.

She went to Philadelphia and joined the Society of Friends. After some years of comparatively quiet life, Angelina wrote in 1835 a sympathetic letter to Wm. Lloyd Garrison, which he published in _The Liberator_. She wrote next “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” a pamphlet which “produced,” says Mrs. Birney, “the most profound sensation wherever it was read.” Not long afterward “the city authorities of Charleston learned,” writes Mr. Theodore D. Weld, “that Miss Grimké was intending to visit her mother and sisters, and pass the winter with them. Thereupon the mayor called upon Mrs. Grimké and desired her to inform her daughter that the police had been instructed to prevent her landing while the steamer remained in port, and to see to it that she should not communicate, by letter or otherwise, with any persons in the city; and further, that if she should elude their vigilance and go on shore, she would be arrested and imprisoned until the return of the vessel.” Threats of personal violence were also made, should she come.

A year later Sarah published “An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern States,” and the sisters began to address meetings of women on the subject of slavery. They proposed at first to hold parlor meetings, but found it necessary at once to engage the session room of a Baptist Church in New York. The gathering there was “the first assembly of women, not Quakers, in a public place in America, addressed by American women.” Two clergymen performed the opening ceremonies, offered prayer and made an address of welcome, and then left, so that none but women should hear women speak. Similar assemblies were held afterward, and in a letter dated “second month, 4th, 1837,” Angelina writes, that one man had got into the last meeting, and people thought he must be a Southern spy. She says, “somehow, I did not feel his presence embarrassing at all, and went on just as though he had not been there.”

After this, the sisters went to New England to pursue their labors. In Dorchester two or three men “slyly slid” into the back seats of the hall and listened to the speakers, and one of them “afterward took great pains to prove that it was unscriptural for a woman to speak in public.” From this time a few men were generally present at the gatherings, and on the 21st of July, 1837, Angelina wrote, “In the evening of the same day addressed our first _mixed_ audience. Over one thousand present.” “The opposers of abolitionism, and especially the clergy, began to be alarmed,” says Mrs. Birney. The sisters were denounced, halls were refused them, the Society of Friends condemned their course, and violence was threatened; but Sarah writes, “They think to frighten us from the field of duty; but they do not move us.” Even some of the Abolitionists doubted the propriety of their labors, and the question of Womans’ Rights was fairly launched on the tide of the anti-slavery movement.

The General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts passed a resolution censuring the sisters, and issued a pastoral letter, containing “a tirade against female preachers.”

Sarah next published letters on “The Province of Woman.”

In February, 1838, Angelina addressed a committee of the Massachusetts Legislature on the subject of slavery. She wrote of this memorable occasion, “My heart never quailed before, but it almost died within me at that hour.” She was given two hearings, and she says “We abolition women are turning the world upside down, for during the whole meeting there was sister seated up in the speaker’s chair of State.”

Angelina was the more eloquent of the two sisters, and although Sarah spoke, she preferred to serve the cause by writing.

In May, 1838, Angelina married Theodore D. Weld, who was an earnest and eloquent abolition orator. After this marriage she spoke once again, and then was obliged to relinquish all public work on account of her health, while Mr. Weld’s loss of voice, prevented him from continuing his lecturing service. They never faltered, however, or relaxed in their principles. They were all three engaged in schoolwork and received colored pupils as readily as white ones. When the war came, and slavery was abolished, some peculiar family trials fell to the lot of the Grimké sisters, and old wounds were reopened. They bore these renewed sufferings with fortitude, and with patient and loving spirits. They succored their impoverished kindred, who had long been alienated from them, and they fulfilled some difficult and delicate duties which grew out of the old ties which their Southern relatives had discarded.

Lucretia Mott was a Quakeress, and a very beautiful woman. She exercised a singular power over people with whom she came in contact, influencing and inspiring them to all high and holy purposes. She became an Abolitionist in early life, and was sent as a delegate to the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, in 1840.[215] Like the other women who were delegates, she was refused admission to the body, and attended its sessions only as an outsider.

She was an eloquent and persuasive speaker in anti-slavery and religious meetings. She, with other Philadelphia women, used to attend the courts whenever a fugitive slave case was tried, in the hope that the silent protest of their presence, would have some effect on judges and juries, who were inclined to be subservient to the slave power. On one occasion, she and her companions sat all night in the court-room, the commissioner deferring his sentence, thinking that the women would be tired out, and would leave and, finally, unable to get rid of them, he availed himself of a legal quibble, and ordered the fugitive to be set free. Years later, when the Civil War came, the lawyer who acted in this affair on behalf of the slaveholder, and who had been an ardent supporter of the interests of slavery, wheeled around, and gave in his allegiance to the Union party. Some one asked him how he dared thus oppose all his former friends, and he replied that the man who had endured to sit all night before Lucretia Mott and knew what she was thinking of him all the time, would fear nothing else on earth.

She was herself brave, and once, when an old colored woman was refused a seat in a horse-car, and forced to ride on the front platform, exposed to a pelting winter storm, she went out and stood by her side, and rode for nearly an hour, in all the bitter weather.

She was very charming, and she retained her great personal beauty to the last, dying finally in 1880, at the age of eighty-seven.

Abby Kelley was a New England girl, a Quaker, and a school-teacher. She began her anti-slavery work by giving half of all she earned to the cause. Afterward she decided that it was her duty to lecture and talk to people about slavery. She received no salary from the anti-slavery societies for her labor, but went from town to town, staying with friends when it was possible, going by private conveyance if she could, getting up meetings, and everywhere, in season and out, pleading for the slave. When her clothes were worn out, she went to a sister’s and did housework, till she had earned enough money to get what she needed, and then she started again on her mission. She encountered great opposition from press and pulpit. Every epithet was hurled at her which was most calculated to wound the spirit of a sensitive woman. Nothing overcame her. The cry of the slave mother sounded in her ears and drowned the clamor about herself. She pursued her way, fighting, as it were, for every inch of the ground she traversed.

It is no exaggeration to say that what she did and suffered, has made the path easier for every woman, since her day, who has sought to work in any public manner in America. The Grimké sisters retired early from the field, and Abby Kelley bore the brunt of a long and painful contest with prejudice and opposition, which were directed not only against the anti-slavery cause, but against her personally, for doing what women had not till then done.

Abby Kelley married Stephen S. Foster, an Abolitionist, so resolute, unflinching and uncompromising as to be a fit mate for her. They established a home, but both of them often went from it on anti-slavery lecturing trips, until she had entirely worn out her voice, and was obliged to refrain from using it in public. Once in a while, however, in later life, she addressed some convention for a few minutes at a time, when the impulse to speak in behalf of something she thought right, proved too strong to be resisted. A hoarse whisper was all that remained to her from the young voice, with which she had once challenged the scorn of men and the timid contempt of women, but her listeners almost hushed their hearts to hear these faint breathings, remembering reverently all the sacrifice and pain she had endured.

Mrs. Foster lived in all respects a conscientious life. She was a careful housekeeper and a devoted wife and mother. She and her husband were ardent Woman Suffragists and they protested against the payment of taxes to a government which allowed her no representation. Their home was in Worcester, Mass., and they both lived to see slavery abolished. She survived him for several years, without abating her interest in the general principles to which their lives had been consecrated.