American Men of Mind Part 16

The rioter stared down at her for a moment, his conflicting thoughts betraying themselves upon his countenance, then his better nature triumphed and he led her respectfully to a place of safety.

She seems to have possessed the power of charming any audience, and carried her anti-slavery campaign even into Kentucky, where she commanded respectful attention. She was one of the first to take up the question of woman suffrage, and in 1848, with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a few others, called the first Woman's Suffrage Convention ever held in this country. For fifty years she continued her public work, until she grew to be one of the best known and best loved women in the country.

She lived to see the slave freed, and when she died, a great concourse followed her body silently to the grave. As they stood there with bowed heads, a low voice asked, "Will no one say anything?"

"Who can speak?" another voice responded, "The preacher is dead."

In this day of pitying and enlightened treatment of the insane, it is difficult to realize the barbarities which they were called upon to endure a century ago. They were regarded almost as wild beasts, were kept chained in foul and loathsome places, fed with mouldy bread, filthy water, and allowed to die the most miserable death. For everyone used to believe that insanity was a mark of G.o.d's displeasure, and the outcast from His heart became equally an outcast from the hearts of men. The insane were regarded with fear and loathing, and it was not until the beginning of the nineteenth century that such men as Dr. Channing began to insist on the presence in human nature, even in its most degraded condition, of grains of good.

It was from Dr. Channing that Dorothea Lynde Dix drank in this theory with pa.s.sionate faith, and proceeded at once to convert it into action.

She was governess of Dr. Channing's children, and had long been interested in bettering the condition of convicts; but now her attention was turned to the insane and she proceeded at once to master the whole question of insanity, its origin, its development, and its treatment, so far as it was then known. Enlisting the aid of a number of broad-minded men, among them Charles Sumner, she went to work. In one prison, she found two insane women, each confined in a small cage of planks; others were locked in closets, cellars, and stalls; some of them were naked, some were chained, some were regularly beaten and scourged.

With all her data at hand, she addressed a memorial to the Ma.s.sachusetts legislature, setting forth, in page after page, the details of these almost incredible horrors, which she herself had witnessed.

It exploded like a bombsh.e.l.l, for it was a terrific arraignment of the whole state. Her statements were denounced as untrue and slanderous, but a little investigation proved their truth, and with such men behind her as Channing, Horace Mann, and Samuel G. Howe, it was soon apparent that something would be done. The obstructions and delays of politicians were swept away before a steadily rising tide of public indignation, and a large appropriation was made by the legislature to provide proper quarters and proper treatment for insane persons. So Miss Dix won her first great victory, the forerunner of similar ones in almost every state in the union; for she travelled from state to state making the same investigations she had in Ma.s.sachusetts, arousing public opinion, and compelling legislature after legislature to make adequate provision for the insane. The vastness of this campaign which Miss Dix planned deliberately and which she carried through until she had visited every state east of the Rocky Mountains, gives evidence to her extraordinary character. During the Civil War, she was superintendent of hospital nurses, having the entire control of their appointment and a.s.signment.

But the care of the insane was her life work. She resumed it at the close of the war, and carried it forward until her death.

We have already referred more than once, in the course of these chapters, to the anti-slavery agitation which ended in the Civil War.

During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it was the one great political question in America, upon which men were compelled to take one side or the other. From the first, there existed in the north a band of abolitionists--of men, in other words, who believed that the only solution of the slavery question was to put an end to that inst.i.tution at once and forever. Of the persecutions which were visited on the abolitionists we have spoken when telling the story of Lucretia Mott. Social ostracism was the least of them.

Perhaps no one person in America did more to crystalize public sentiment against slavery than Lydia Maria Child. An author at the age of seventeen, and writing continuously until her death, coming early under the influence of William Lloyd Garrison, that great leader of the abolitionists, it was inevitable that she should employ her pen to a.s.sist the cause. In 1833 appeared her "Appeal for that cla.s.s of Americans called Africans," the first anti-slavery work printed in America in book form, antedating Mrs. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by nineteen years. It attracted wide attention, enlisting the interest of such men as Dr. Channing, who walked from Boston to Roxbury to thank the author. But it was not without its penalties, for society closed its doors to Mrs. Child, many of her friends deserted her, and she was made the subject of much cruel comment. However, she became more and more interested in the anti-slavery crusade, edited the "National Anti-Slavery Standard," and wrote pamphlet after pamphlet. When John Brown was taken prisoner, she wrote him a letter of sympathy, which drew forth a courteous rebuke from Governor Wise, of Virginia, and a letter from the wife of Senator Mason, the author of the fugitive slave law, threatening her with future d.a.m.nation. These letters were published and had a circulation of three hundred thousand copies. Wendell Phillips paid an eloquent tribute to her character and influence, at her funeral: "She was the kind of woman," he said, "one would choose to represent woman's entrance into broader life. Modest, womanly, sincere, solid, real, loyal, to be trusted, equal to affairs, and yet above them; a companion with the pa.s.sword of every science and all literature."

But however valuable the services of women like Lucretia Mott and Lydia Maria Child and Harriet Beecher Stowe were in the fight against slavery, the leader and high priest of the movement was William Lloyd Garrison.

Born in Newburyport, Ma.s.sachusetts, in 1805, his was an unhappy boyhood, for his father, a sea-captain of intemperate and adventurous habits, left his family, soon after the boy was born, and was never seen again.

The mother, a woman of unusual strength of character, went to work to earn a living for herself and her son, and it was to her careful training that his development was due. At fourteen years of age, he was apprenticed to a printery and served until he was of age. From the first he was remarkable for his firmness of moral principle and for an inflexible adherence to his convictions, no matter at what cost to himself.

He soon showed, too, that he was destined for something more than a printer--a man who puts in print the ideas of others--that he had ideas of his own. His apprenticeship over, he started a paper of his own, but it was too reformatory for the taste of the day, and proved a failure.

The most noteworthy thing in connection with it was the publication of some poems which had been sent in anonymously, and which Garrison, recognizing their merit, discovered to be the work of John G. Whittier, then entirely unknown. He visited the poet, encouraged him to keep on writing, and laid the foundation of a friendship which was broken only by death.

Going to Boston after the failure of his paper, Garrison for a time edited the "National Philanthropist," devoted to prohibition. This paper, too, was a failure, but at Boston Garrison met a man whose influence changed the whole course of his life. His name was Benjamin Bundy. He was a Quaker, and at that time thirty-nine years of age. He was a saddler by trade, but for thirteen years had devoted his life to the anti-slavery cause, forming anti-slavery societies and editing a little monthly paper with a portentous name--"The Genius of Universal Emanc.i.p.ation." Bundy, whose home was in Baltimore, had journeyed to New England in the hope of interesting the clergy in the cause. In this he was bitterly disappointed, but he mightily stirred the heart of young Garrison, who soon became his ally and afterwards his partner in the conduct of the paper. His vigorous editing of it was soon a national sensation. He had seen with dismay the indifference with which the north regarded the great issue--an indifference grounded on the belief that slavery was intrenched by the const.i.tution and that all discussion of it was a menace to the Union. He realized that this indifference could be broken only by heroic measures, and he took the ground that since slavery was wrong, every slave had a right to instant freedom, and that immediate emanc.i.p.ation was the duty of the master and of the state.

Baltimore was at that time one of the centres of the slave trade. There were slave-pens on the princ.i.p.al streets, and Garrison soon witnessed scenes which would have touched a less tender heart. In the first issue of his paper, he denounced this traffic as "domestic piracy," and named some men engaged in it, among them a vessel-owner of his own town of Newburyport. This man immediately had Garrison arrested for "gross and malicious libel," he was found guilty, fined fifty dollars and costs, and as there was no one to pay this, was thrown into prison.

Garrison took his imprisonment calmly enough, but his old friend, John G. Whittier, was deeply distressed and appealed to Henry Clay to secure the release of the "guiltless prisoner." This Clay would probably have done, but he was antic.i.p.ated by another friend of Garrison's, Arthur Tappan, of New York, who sent the money to pay the fine, and the young agitator was free again, after an imprisonment of forty-nine days. He had not been idle while in prison, but had prepared a series of lectures on slavery, which he proceeded at once to deliver. Then, on the first day of January, 1831, he began in Boston the publication of a weekly paper called the "Liberator," which he continued for thirty-five years, until its fight was won and slavery was abolished.

How well that fight was waged history has shown. In his first number he announced: "I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, to speak, or write with moderation. No! No! Tell the man whose home is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--and I will be heard."

And heard he was. The whole land was soon filled with excitement; the apathy of years was broken. From the south came hundreds of letters threatening him with death if he did not desist, and the state of Georgia offered a reward of $5,000 for his apprehension. In the north, anti-slavery societies were formed everywhere, and the movement grew with great rapidity, in spite of powerful efforts to crush it. There were riots everywhere. Garrison was dragged through the streets of Boston with a rope around his body and his life was saved only by lodging him in jail; Elijah Lovejoy was slain at Alton, Illinois, while defending his press; Marius Robinson, an anti-slavery lecturer, was tarred and feathered in Mahoning County, Ohio; in the cities of the south, mobs broke into the postoffice and made bonfires of anti-slavery papers and pamphlets found there. Quarrels and dissension in the anti-slavery ranks developed in time, but when the Civil War was over, the leaders of the Republican party united with Garrison's friends in raising for him the sum of $30,000, and after his death the city of Boston raised a statue to his memory. Perhaps no better estimate of him has ever been made than that of John A. Andrew, war governor of Ma.s.sachusetts:

"The generation which preceded ours regarded him only as a wild enthusiast, a fanatic, or a public enemy. The present generation sees in him the bold and honest reformer, the man of original, self-poised, heroic will, inspired by a vision of universal justice, made actual in the practice of nations; who, daring to attack without reserve the worst and most powerful oppression of his country and his time, has outlived the giant wrong he a.s.sailed, and has triumphed over the sophistries by which it was maintained."

Closely second to Garrison in the awakening of the public conscience to the enormities of slavery was Theodore Parker, one of the purest, most self-sacrificing and interesting of personalities. He came of good stock. His grandfather, John Parker, commanded the little company of minute-men who held the bridge at Lexington on that fateful nineteenth of April, 1775; his father a farmer, and Theodore himself the youngest of eleven children. The family was poor and the boy was brought up to hard labor, with short intervals of schooling now and then. But his thirst for knowledge seems to have been insatiable, and he read everything he could lay his hands on, even to translations of Homer and Plutarch and Rollin's "Ancient History." A century ago, a book was a far greater treasure than it is to-day, when their very number has made us in a way contemptuous of them; and the few which young Parker could secure were read and re-read and learned through and through. His memory was amazing, and at the age of twenty he walked from his home in Lexington to Cambridge, took the entrance examination for Harvard College, pa.s.sed with honors, and, walking home again, told his unsuspecting father, then in bed, of his success. He could not be spared from the farm, however, nor was there any money to pay for his maintenance at Cambridge, so he continued working on the farm, keeping up with his cla.s.s by studying in the evenings and going to Cambridge only to take the examinations.

He undertook teaching after that, and gradually worked his way toward the ministry, to which he was admitted in 1837. He was soon called to Boston, to a congregation independent of sectarian bonds, and here he reached the culmination of his fame, attracting the most cultured people of the city by his breadth of knowledge, warmth of feeling and intensity of conviction. His interest in slavery began early, and by 1845, his share in the anti-slavery struggle had become engrossing. He threw himself into it heart and soul, and no one did more to awaken the conscience of the north. His speeches, letters, sermons, tracts and lectures had an immense influence; he took an active part in aiding runaway slaves to get to Canada, and his labors were incessant and prodigious. His health at last gave way, and the end came in 1860, at Florence, Italy, where he lies buried.

Parker's immense influence was due to the brain rather than to the heart. He possessed no grace of person, music of voice, or charm of manner, none of that fascination which is a part of the great orator. He was a white-hot flame which scorched and seared, an intellect pure and piercing, a self-made instrument to expose the shams of society.

Closely a.s.sociated with Garrison and Parker in the fight against slavery, and in some ways more famous than either, was Wendell Phillips.

The very opposite of Parker, handsome in person, cultivated in manner, with a charm of personality seldom equalled,--the two yet worked hand in hand for a common cause, the one, as it were, supplementing the other.

Wendell Phillips was the son of John Phillips, the first mayor of Boston, and was a year younger than Theodore Parker. He went the way of all well-to-do Boston youth through Harvard, graduating there in 1831, without distinguishing himself particularly, except by his skill in debate and his finished elocution. During one of the revivals of religion which followed the settlement of Dr. Lyman Beecher at Boston, he became a convert, and this marked the beginning of his interest in the great moral question of the day, slavery. It soon became overwhelming, and was given point and pa.s.sion by a spectacle which he witnessed on October 21, 1835.

He had studied for the law, been admitted to the bar, and opened an office, and looking from his office window on that October day, he saw a mob break up an anti-slavery meeting on the street below, pull William Lloyd Garrison off the platform, tear his clothes from his back, throw a rope around him and drag him through the streets, ready to hang him, and prevented from doing so only by a ruse of the mayor, who got Garrison into the jail and locked him up for safety. That spectacle moved the young lawyer through and through, and from that moment he was an avowed Abolitionist.

"If clients do not come," he had said to a friend a short time before, "I will throw myself heart and soul into some good cause and devote my life to it."

Clients would have come, no doubt, but the good cause came first. His opportunity came in 1837, when Elijah Lovejoy was murdered by a mob at Alton, Illinois, for publishing an anti-slavery paper. Phillips, stirred with indignation, arranged for a public meeting at Faneuil Hall, and was of course present, but with no expectation of speaking. Dr. Channing made an impressive address, and one or two others followed, when James T. Austin, attorney-general of the state, and bitterly opposed to the anti-slavery agitation, arose. He eulogized the Alton murderers, comparing them with the patriots of the Revolution, and declared that Lovejoy had "died as the fool dieth." Some instinct led the chair to call upon Wendell Phillips to reply. He consented, and as he stepped upon the platform won instant admiration by his dignity, his self-possession, and his manly beauty.

"Mr. Chairman," he began, "when I heard the gentleman who has just spoken lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hanc.o.c.k, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips [pointing to the portraits in the hall] would have broken into voice, to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."

The effect of the whole speech was tremendous. At last the abolitionists had found a champion equal to the best, and from that hour to the end of the anti-slavery conflict, he was foremost in the fight.

He accepted without reservation the doctrines which Garrison had formulated: that slavery was under all circ.u.mstances a sin and that immediate emanc.i.p.ation was a fundamental right and duty. Up and down the land, obeying every call so far as his strength would permit, he travelled, lecturing against slavery, asking no pecuniary reward. He was soon a great popular favorite--the greatest, perhaps, who ever mounted a lecture platform in America,--and gained a hearing in quarters where, before, abolitionists had been hated and derided. His tact in winning over a turbulent audience was extraordinary; the strongest opponents of the anti-slavery cause felt the spell of his power, and often confessed the justice of his arguments.

When that fight was won and the negro had gained his freedom, Wendell Phillips remained the foremost critic of public men and measures in America, and year after year, he devoted his great gifts to guiding popular opinion. A champion of temperance, of the rights of labor, of the Indians, of equal suffrage, he stood forth until his death an inspiring and august figure--a man who devoted his life wholly to the welfare of his country.

One of the reforms which Wendell Phillips advocated was that of woman suffrage, but this movement has come to be particularly a.s.sociated with the name of Susan B. Anthony. Like her great predecessor in that cause, Lucretia Mott, Miss Anthony was a Quaker, and the Quakers, it should be remembered, made no distinction of s.e.x when it came to speaking in their meeting-houses. Her father was well-to-do, and she received a careful education, and in 1847, first spoke in public. The temperance movement absorbed her energies at first; then the Abolitionist cause; and finally the work of securing equal civil rights for women. During the winter of 1854, she held woman suffrage meetings in every county in New York State, and the remainder of her life was devoted to this cause.

Her most prominent co-worker was Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose inspiration came directly from Lucretia Mott, whom she met in 1840, and with whom she joined, eight years later, in issuing a call for the first woman's suffrage convention. The convention was held at Mrs. Stanton's home at Seneca Falls, New York, and from that time forward, she devoted herself entirely to lecturing and writing upon the subject. That the cause of woman suffrage has made so little headway is certainly not because of a lack of devoted and accomplished advocates; it seems rather to be due to the fact that it has not yet succeeded in winning over the great body of women, who have held aloof and viewed the movement with indifference, if not with suspicion.

We cannot close this consideration of the anti-slavery movement without some reference to that strange fanatic, John Brown, who headed a forlorn hope and gave up his life for an idea. It was the custom at one time to consider John Brown a saint, at the north, and a very emissary of Satan, at the south. One estimate was as untrue as the other. He was merely a misguided old man, grown a little mad, perhaps, from long brooding over one subject.

He was born at Torrington, Connecticut, in 1800, his father being a shoemaker and tanner, who, five years later, moved to Hudson, Ohio, then a mere outpost in the wilderness. He was soon expert in woodcraft, and he relates how, when he was six years old, an Indian boy gave him a yellow marble, the first he had ever seen, and which he treasured for a long time. He had little or no schooling, and a project to educate him for the ministry was cut short by an inflammation of the eyes. He grew up into a tall, handsome man, headstrong, but humane and kind, and easily moved to tears. He married young and had many children, for some of whom a tragic fate was waiting.

He soon became interested in the anti-slavery movement, and, by 1837, was so absorbed by it that he made his family take a solemn oath of active opposition to slavery. Ten years later, he unfolded to Frederick Dougla.s.s a plan for a negro insurrection in the Virginia mountains, but nothing came of it. From that time forward, the project seems to have slumbered at the back of his mind, and he grew more and more certain that the only way to end slavery was to arm the blacks and encourage them to fight for freedom. In 1854, his sons emigrated to Kansas, then in the throes of civil war over the slavery question, and their father busied himself raising money to send arms and ammunition into the troubled state. Finally, in September, 1855, he himself removed to Kansas, became the captain of a band of Free State Rangers, took part in the fight at Lawrence, and in some other affairs, and then, proceeding to the sh.o.r.es of Pottawatomie creek, where several pro-slavery men lived, seized five of them and put them to death.

For this deed he never experienced any compunction; he believed that he was directed by Providence in these "executions," as he called them, and after they were over, he held divine services. His fearful deed sent a thrill of horror through the country, and Brown and his sons became marked men. Their houses were burned, and one of the sons went insane from brooding over the father's deed. Brown himself was charged with murder, treason and conspiracy, and a price put on his head, but no one attempted to arrest him. Another of his sons was soon afterwards shot and killed by pro-slavery men and Brown, hastily collecting a small force, attacked the marauders, and killed or wounded many of them, himself being injured by a spent rifle ball. The fight was known as "the battle of Osawatomie," and Brown was thereafterwards known as "Osawatomie" Brown.

But the fight in Kansas was about won, and Brown again took up the idea of a slave insurrection. He went to Boston to raise the necessary money, and succeeded in getting it without much trouble, though most of the people who gave it to him had only the haziest kind of an idea of what it was he proposed to do. He bought rifles and ammunition, and also had a thousand pikes made with which to arm the negroes, who, of course, would not know how to use the rifle. Then he got together a band of young men, secured a military instructor; and on July 3, 1859, he appeared at Harper's Ferry, Virginia, hired a small farm near there, and quietly a.s.sembled his men and munitions.

Harper's Ferry had been selected because there was a well-equipped a.r.s.enal there which would furnish the arms and munitions which he had been unable to buy, and would also serve as a base of operations. Brown intended to proceed to the mountains, gathering up the slaves as he went, and establish headquarters in some strong position, where he could drill his forces and prepare for a raid on the rest of the state. He believed the slaves would flock to him, and that he would soon be at the head of a great army. He tried to get Frederick Dougla.s.s to join him, but Dougla.s.s refused, and, at last, on the night of Sunday, October 16, 1859, at the head of a little band of twenty-two men, whites and negroes, he moved on the a.r.s.enal. They reached the covered bridge over the Potomac without adventure, crossed until they were near the Virginia side, seized the solitary sentinel who challenged them, broke down the armory gate with a sledge hammer, seized the remainder of the guard, and a few citizens, who attempted to interfere, and were soon firmly in possession of not only the a.r.s.enal, but also the little town.

Meanwhile, the country round about was arming, and by noon, of Monday, Brown was so surrounded that he could not escape. Why he had not got away to the mountains in the morning, as he had intended doing, no one knows. The Virginia militia gathered, and in the early evening, a company of United States marines arrived from Washington, under command of Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. They soon found out how small Brown's force was, carried the a.r.s.enal by a.s.sault, and took Brown and the survivors of his little band prisoners. Brown's two sons were dead, as were seven others of his followers, and seven more had succeeded in escaping, though two were afterwards captured.

The rest is soon told. Brown was swiftly tried and convicted of "treason and conspiring and advising with slaves and others to rebel, and of murder in the first degree," was sentenced to death, and was hanged on December 2, 1859. The affair made the South wild with rage and apprehension, for a slave insurrection was a thing to be trembled at, and Brown's execution similarly affected his friends at the North. He had once remarked, "I am worth a good deal more to hang than for any other purpose," and this was, in a sense, true, for in the words of the great marching song of the Northern armies during the war which followed, "his soul was marching on."

Another branch of philanthropy with which the name of a woman is closely identified is that of caring for the wounded and dest.i.tute in time of war or disaster, and the woman is Clara Barton. Born in Ma.s.sachusetts about 1830, she started in life as a school-teacher, but in 1854 secured a position in the patent office at Washington, where she remained until the opening of the Civil War. The sight of the suffering in the Washington hospitals revealed to her her real vocation, and she determined to devote herself to the care of wounded soldiers on the battlefield. This work of mercy was one that carried with it a wide appeal, and she soon secured influential backing and support.

Her work was so effective that in 1864, she was appointed "lady in charge" of the hospitals at the front of the Army of the James, and in the following year was sent to Andersonville, Georgia, to identify and mark the graves of the Union soldiers buried there. Soon afterwards she was placed by President Lincoln in charge of the search for missing men of the Union armies--a work of the first importance, to which she devoted all her energies, and which she carried on for some years after the war closed, raising the necessary money by lectures and appeals for donations. Thousands of families at the North have reason to thank her for definite knowledge as to the fate of their loved ones.

Her health broke down under the strain, at last, and she went for a rest to Switzerland, but the outbreak of the Franco-German war, in 1870, called her again to duty, a.s.sisting the grand d.u.c.h.ess of Baden in the preparation of military hospitals, and giving the Red Cross Society the benefit of her experience. In 1871, at the request of the German authorities, she superintended the supplying of work to the poor of Strasburg, after that city had been reduced by siege; and after the fall of Paris, she was placed in charge of the distribution of supplies to the dest.i.tute of that great city. At the close of the war, she was decorated with the golden cross of Baden and the iron cross of Germany.

Although the Red Cross societies in Europe had been established as early as 1863, and an international organization completed six years later, the society was not officially recognized by the United States until 1882. The American a.s.sociation of the Red Cross was at once organized, and Miss Barton chosen its president, a position which she held without opposition for many years. Its object as stated by its const.i.tution is "to organize a system of national relief and apply the same in mitigating suffering caused by war, pestilence, famine and other calamities." Since then, every such occasion has found the society in the forefront of relief work, and it has distributed many millions in a.s.suaging human suffering.