Part 41
Sallie Holley was one of the later anti-slavery speakers. She was generally accompanied in her lecturing trips by a friend, Miss Caroline F. Putnam, and after the war the two went to Virginia to live and work among the freed people.
Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony were also anti-slavery speakers before the Civil War. Anna Dickinson made a few speeches in her very early girlhood as agent of one of the anti-slavery societies. There were also women employed by the societies as workers in other ways, such as circulating petitions, raising money, distributing tracts, and talking with people in private ways.
Miss Mary Grew, of Philadelphia, occasionally addressed meetings. Miss Grew was one of a large number of women all over the North, who gave all their energies to anti-slavery work. These women helped fugitive slaves, cared for Abolition speakers, raised money, arranged meetings, distributed papers and pamphlets, corresponded, wrote articles for newspapers, sewed for fairs, went without luxuries and even necessities so as to be able to give to the cause, and spent themselves in body and brain without stint, and without asking any reward but the achievement of the end they sought. Mrs. Sidney Lewis, of Philadelphia, kept the anti-slavery office in that city. It would be impossible to name the half of these silent workers.
Lydia Maria Child[216] was one of the foremost literary women of her day, when she avowed herself to be an Abolitionist, and her popularity was greatly injured thereby. She edited the _Anti-Slavery Standard_ for two years, and did noble work. During the war there was a last outbreak of pro-slavery fury in Northern cities, and mobs assaulted Wendell Phillips in Boston. One night, after an anti-slavery meeting, the crowd threatened to kill him, and she took his arm and walked serenely by his side through the raging multitude, and it was considered that her presence with him awed them to such an extent that she really saved his life.
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”[217] when public sentiment was beginning to turn against slavery, and the book went all over the world, and was translated into many tongues, to make all men feel the wickedness of an institution which needed that the Fugitive Slave Law should be enacted and enforced for its support. The effect of the book was incalculable.
Maria Weston Chapman and her sisters brought grace, beauty, and wit, in social circles, to the aid of the Abolitionists in the very first years of the long moral warfare. They became so unpopular in Boston, in consequence of their course, that Mrs. Chapman told a friend that she feared to walk alone on Washington Street, because the very clerks in the stores would insult her as she passed. She was very energetic in getting up anti-slavery fairs on a scale which seemed large in those days, and she enlisted the sympathy of people in England, and secured large contributions from them.
Ann Green Phillips, the wife of Wendell Phillips, was a life-long invalid, but she first converted him to anti-slavery opinions, and then inspired and sustained him, and from her sick bed sent him forth to do the work she could not do.
Helen E. Garrison, the wife of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the shyest and most modest of women, encouraged her husband, and by her unselfish devotion at home, made it possible for him to use his time and strength combating the system which he held to be “the sum of all villainies.” When the mob dragged him through the streets of Boston, in 1835, and word was brought to this beautiful young woman, who was then a recent bride, that his life was in danger, her spirit rose at the tidings, and she proudly said, “I do not believe my husband will be untrue to his principles.”
XVII. WORK OF THE W. C. T. U.
BY
FRANCES E. WILLARD.
Let me try to set forth the sequel of that modern Pentecost called the “Woman’s Crusade.” That women should thus dare was the wonder after they had so long endured, while the manner of their doing left us who looked on bewildered between laughter and tears. Woman-like, they took their knitting, their zephyr work, or their embroidery, and simply swarmed into the drink-shops, seated themselves, and watched the proceedings. Usually they came in a long procession from their rendezvous at some church where they had held morning prayer-meeting, entered the saloon with kind faces, and the sweet songs of church and home upon their lips, while some Madonna-like leader with the Gospel in her looks, took her stand beside the bar, and gently asked if she might read God’s word and offer prayer.
Women gave of their best during the two months of that wonderful uprising. All other engagements were laid aside; elegant women of society walked beside quiet women of home, school, and shop, in the strange processions that soon lined the chief streets, not only of nearly every town and village in the State that was its birth place,[218] but of leading cities there and elsewhere; and voices trained in Paris and Berlin sang “Rock of Ages, cleft for me,” in the malodorous air of liquor-rooms and beer-halls. Meanwhile, where were the men who patronized these places? Thousands of them signed the pledge these women brought, and accepted their invitation to go back with them to the churches, whose doors, for once, stood open all day long; others slunk out of sight, and a few cursed the women openly; but even of these it might be said, that those who came to curse remained to pray. Soon the saloon-keepers surrendered in large numbers, the statement being made by a well-known observer that the liquor traffic was temporarily driven out of two hundred and fifty towns and villages in Ohio and the adjoining States, to which the Temperance Crusade extended. There are photographs extant representing the stirring scenes when, amid the ringing of church bells, the contents of every barrel, cask, and bottle in a saloon were sent gurgling into the gutter, the owner insisting that women’s hands alone should do this work, perhaps with some dim thought in his muddled head of the poetic justice due to the Nemesis he thus invoked. And so it came about that soft and often jeweled hands grasped axe and hammer, while the whole town assembled to rejoice in this new fashion of exorcising the evil spirits. In Cincinnati, a city long dominated by the liquor trade, a procession of women, including the wives of leading pastors, were arrested and locked up in jail; in Cleveland dogs were set on the Crusaders, and in a single instance a blunderbuss was pointed at them, while in several places they were smoked out, or had the hose turned on them. But the arrested women marched through the streets singing, and held a temperance meeting in the prison; the one assailed by dogs laid her hands upon their heads and prayed; and the group menaced by a gun marched up to its mouth singing, “Never be afraid to work for Jesus.” The annals of heroism have few pages so bright as the annals of that strange crusade, spreading as if by magic through all the Northern States, across the sea, and to the Orient itself. Everywhere it went, the attendance at church increased incalculably, and the crime record was in like manner shortened. Men say there was a spirit in the air such as they never knew before; a sense of God and human brotherhood.
But after fifty days or more, all this seemed to pass away. The women could not keep up such work; it took them too much from their homes; saloons reopened; men gathered as before behind their sheltering screens, and swore “those silly women had done more harm than good,” while with ribald words they drank the health of “the defunct crusade.”
Perhaps the most significant outcome of this movement was the knowledge of their own power gained by the conservative women of the churches. They had never seen a “woman’s rights convention,” and had been held aloof from the “suffragists” by fears as to their orthodoxy; but now there were women, prominent in all church cares and duties, eager to clasp hands for a more aggressive work than such women had ever before dreamed of undertaking.
Nothing is more suggestive in all the national gatherings of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, that sober second thought of the crusade, than the wide difference between these meetings and any held by men. The beauty of decoration is specially noticeable; banners of silk, satin and velvet, usually made by the women themselves, adorn the wall; the handsome shields of States; the great vases bearing aloft grains, fruits and flowers; the moss-covered well with its old bucket; or the setting of a platform to present an interior as cozy and delightful as a parlor could afford, are features of the pleasant scene. The rapidity of movement with which business is conducted, the spontaneity of manner, the originality of plan, the perpetual freshness and ingenuity of the convention, its thousand unexpectednesses, its quips and turns, its wit and pathos, its impromptu eloquence and its perpetual good nature—all these elements, brought into condensed view in the National Convention, are an object lesson of the new force and the unique method that womanhood has contributed to the consideration of the greatest reform in Christendom. It is really the crusade over again; the home going forth into the world. Its manner is not that of the street, the court, the mart, or the office; it is the manner of the home. Men take one line, and travel onward to success; with them discursiveness is at a discount. But women in the home must be mistresses as well as maids of all work; they have learned well the lesson of unity in diversity; hence, by inheritance and by environment, women are varied in their methods; they are born to be “branchers-out.” Men have been in the organized temperance work not less than eighty years—women not quite fifteen. Men pursued it at first along the line of temperance, then total abstinence; license, then prohibition; while women have already over forty distinct departments of work, classified under the heads of preventive, educational, evangelistic, social, and legal. Women think in the concrete. The crusade showed them the drinking man, and they began upon him directly to get him to sign the pledge and “seek the Lord behind the pledge.” The crusade showed them the selling man, and they prayed over him, and persuaded him to give up his bad business, often buying him out, and setting him up in the better occupation of baker, grocer, or keeper of the reading-room, into which they converted his saloon after converting him from the error of his ways.
But oftentimes the drinking man went back to his cups, and the selling man fell from his grace; the first one declaring, “I can’t break the habit I formed when a boy;” and the last averring, “Somebody’s bound to sell, and I might as well make the profit.” Upon this the women, still with their concrete ways of thinking, said, “To be sure, we must train our boys; and not only ours but everybody’s; what institution reaches all?—the public schools.” Under the leadership of Mrs. Mary H. Hunt they have secured laws requiring scientific temperance instruction in the public school system of thirty States.
To the inane excuse of the seller that he might as well do it since somebody would, the quick and practical reply was, “To be sure; but suppose the people could be persuaded not to let anybody sell? why, then that would be God’s answer to our crusade prayers.” So they began with petitions to municipalities, to legislatures, and to Congress, laboriously gathering up, doubtless, not fewer than ten million names in the great aggregate, and through fourteen years. Thus the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union stands as the strongest bulwark of Prohibition, State and national, by constitutional amendment and by statute. Meanwhile, it was inevitable that their motherly hearts should devise other methods for the protection of their homes. Knowing the terrors and the blessings of inheritance, they set about the systematic study of heredity, founding a journal for that purpose. Learning the relation of diet to the drink habit, they arranged to study hygiene also; desiring children to know that the Bible is on the side of total abstinence, they induced the International Sunday School Convention to prepare a plan for lessons on this subject; perceiving the limitless power of the Press, they did their best to subsidize it by sending out their bulletins of temperance facts and news items, thick as the leaves of Vallambrosa, and incorporated a publishing company of women.
It is curious to watch the development of the women who entered the saloons in 1874 as a gentle, well-dressed, and altogether peaceable mob. They have become an army, drilled and disciplined. They have a method of organization, the simplest yet the most substantial known to temperance annals. It is the same for the smallest local union as for the national society with its ten thousand auxiliaries. Committees have been abolished, except the executive, made up of the general officers, and “superintendencies” substituted, making each woman responsible for a single line of work in the local, State, and national society. This puts a premium upon personality, develops a negative into a positive with the least loss of time, and increases beyond all computation the aggregate of work accomplished. Women with specialties have thus been multiplied by tens of thousands, and the temperance reform introduced into strongholds of power hitherto neglected or unthought of. Is an exposition to be held, or a State or county fair? there is a woman in the locality who knows that it is her business to see that the W. C. T. U. has an attractive booth with temperance literature and temperance drinks; and that, besides all this, it is her duty to secure laws and by-laws requiring the teetotal absence of intoxicants from grounds and buildings. Is there an institution for the dependent or delinquent classes? there is a woman in the locality who knows that it is her duty to see that temperance literature is circulated, temperance talking and singing done, and that flowers with appropriate sentiments attached are sent to the inmates by young ladies banded for that purpose. Is there a convocation of ministers, doctors, teachers, editors, voters, or any other class of opinion-manufacturers announced to meet in any town or city? there is a woman thereabouts who knows it is her business to secure, through some one of the delegates to these influential gatherings, a resolution favoring the temperance movement and pledging it support along the line of work then and there represented. Is there a legislature anywhere about to meet, or is Congress in session? there is a woman near at hand who knows it is her business to make the air heavy with the white, hovering wings of prohibition for the better protection of women and girls, for the preventing of the sale of tobacco to minors, for the enforcement of the Sabbath or for the enfranchisement of women. Thus have the manifold relationships of the mighty temperance movement been studied out by women in the training-school afforded by the real work and daily object-lessons of the W. C. T. U. Its aim is everywhere to bring women and temperance in contact with the problem of humanity’s heart-break and sin, to protect the home by prohibiting the saloon; and to police the State with men and women voters committed to the enforcement of righteous law. The women saw, as years passed on, that not one, but three curses were pronounced upon their sons by the nineteenth century civilization; the curse of the narcotic poisons, alcohol and nicotine; the curse of gambling; the curse of social sin, deadlier than all; and that these three are part and parcel of each other. And so, “distinct like the billows, but one like the sea,” is their unwearied warfare against each and all. They have learned, by the logic of defeat, that the mother-heart must be enthroned in all places of power before its edicts will be heeded. For this reason they have been educated up to the level of the equal suffrage movement. For the first time in history the women of the South have clasped hands with their Northern sisters in faith and fealty wearing the white ribbon emblem of patriotism, purity and peace, and inscribing on their banners the motto of the organized crusade, “For God and Home and Native Land.”
“No sectarianism in religion,” “no sectionalism in politics,” “no sex in citizenship,”—these are the battle cries of this relentless but peaceful warfare. We believe that woman will bless and brighten every place she enters, and that she will enter every place on the round earth. We believe in prohibition by law, prohibition by politics, and prohibition by woman’s ballot. After ten years’ experience, the women of the crusade became convinced that until the people of this country divide at the ballot box, on the foregoing issue, America can never be nationally delivered from the dram-shop. They therefore publicly announced their devotion to the Prohibition party, and promised to lend it their influence, which, with the exception of a very small minority, they have since most sedulously done. Since then they have not ceased beseeching voters to cast their ballots first of all to help elect an issue rather than a man. For this they have been vilified as if it were a crime; but they have gone on their way kindly as sunshine, steadfast as gravitation, and persistent as a hero’s faith. While their enemy has brewed beer, they have brewed public opinion; while he distilled whisky, they distilled sentiment; while he rectified spirits, they rectified the spirit that is in man. They have had good words of cheer alike for North and South, for Catholic and Protestant, for home and foreign born, for white and black, but gave words of criticism for the liquor traffic and the parties that it dominates as its servants and allies.
While the specific aims of the white ribbon women everywhere are directed against the manufacture, sale, and use of alcoholic beverages, it is sufficiently apparent that the indirect line of their progress is, perhaps, equally rapid, and involves social, governmental and ecclesiastical equality between women and men. By this is meant such financial independence on the part of women as will enable them to hold men to the same high standards of personal purity in the habitudes of life as they have required of women such a participation in the affairs of government as shall renovate politics and make home questions the paramount issue of the State, and such equality in all church relations as shall fulfill the gospel declaration, “There is neither male nor female, but ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
The cultivation of specialties, and the development of _esprit de corps_ among women, all predict the day, when, through this might-conserving force of motherhood introduced into every department of human activity, the common weal shall be the individual care; war shall rank among the lost arts; nationality shall mean what Edward Bellamy’s wonderful book, entitled “Looking Backward,” sets before us as the fulfillment of man’s highest earthly dream; and Brotherhood shall become the talismanic word and realized estate of all humanity.
In concluding this portion of my article I cannot better express my view of what we are, and what we may be, than by the following quotation from my address before the Woman’s Congress at its meeting in Des Moines, Ia., 1885:
Humanly speaking, such success as we have attained has resulted from the following policy and methods:
1. The simplicity and unity of the organization. The local union is a miniature of the national, having similar officiary and plan of work. It is a military company carefully mustered, officered, and drilled. The county union is but an aggregation of the locals and the district of the counties, while each State is a regiment, and the national itself is womanhood’s “Grand Army of the Republic.”
2. Individual responsibility is everywhere urged. “Committees are obsolete to us, and each distinct line of work has one person, called a superintendent, who is responsible for its success in the local, and another in the State, and a third in the National union. She may secure such lieutenants as she likes, but the union looks to her for results, and holds her accountable for failures.
3. The quick and cordial recognition of talent is another secret of W. C. T. U. success. Women, young or old, who can speak, write, conduct meetings, organize, keep accounts, interest children, talk with the drinking man, get up entertainments, or carry flowers to the sick or imprisoned, are all pressed into the service. There has been also in our work an immense amount of digging in the earth to find one’s own buried talent, to rub off the rust and to put it out at interest. Perhaps that is, after all, its most significant feature, considered as a movement.
4. Subordination of the financial phase has helped, not hindered us. Lack of funds has not barred out even the poorest from our sisterhood. A penny per week is our basis of membership; of which a fraction goes to the State, and ten cents to the National W. C. T. U. Money has been, and I hope may be, a consideration altogether secondary. Of wealth we have had incomputable stores; indeed, I question if America has a richer corporation to-day than ours; wealth of faith, of enthusiasm, of experience, of brain, of speech, of common sense—this is a capital stock that can never depreciate, needs no insurance, requires no combination lock or bonded custodian, and puts us under no temptation to tack our course or trim our sails.
5. Nothing has helped us more than the entire freedom of our society from the influence or dictation of capitalists, politicians, or corporations of any sort whatever. This cannot be too strongly emphasized as one of the best elements of power. Indeed, it may be truly said that this vast and systematic work has been in no wise guided, molded, or controlled by men. “It has not even occurred to them to offer advice until within a year, and to accept advise has never occurred to us, and I hope never will. While a great many noble men are ‘honorary members,’ and in one or two sporadic instances men have acted temporarily as presidents of local unions at the South, I am confident our grand constituency of temperance brothers rejoice almost as much as we do in the fact that we women have from the beginning gone our own gait and acted according to our own sweet will. They would bear witness, I am sure, to the fact that we have never done this flippantly, or in a spirit of bravado, but with great seriousness, asking the help of God. I can say personally what I believe our leaders would also state as their experience, that so strongly do good men seem to be impressed that the call to Christian women in the Crusade was of God, and not of man, that in the eleven years of my almost uninterrupted connection with the National W. C. T. U. I have hardly received a letter of advice or a verbal exhortation from minister or layman, and I would mildly but firmly say that I have not sought their counsel.” The hierarchies of the land will be ransacked in vain for the letterheads of the W. C. T. U. We have sought, it is true, the help of almost every influential society in the nation, both religious and secular; we have realized how greatly this help was needed by us, and grandly has it been accorded; but what we asked for was an indorsement of plans already made and work already done. Thus may we always be a society “of the women, by the women,” but for humanity.