Half a Century Part 20

THE REBELLION.

When, after Mr. Lincoln's election, the South made the North understand that her threats of disunion meant something more than "tin kettle thunder," there was little spirit of compromise among the Republicans and Douglas Democrats of Minnesota, who generally looked with impatience on the abject servility with which Northern men in Congress begged their Southern masters not to leave them, with no slaves to catch, no peculiar inst.i.tution to guard.

I was in favor of not only permitting the Southern States to leave the Union, but of driving them out of it as we would drive tramps out of a drawing room. _Put_ them out! and open every avenue for the escape of their slaves. But from that spirit of conciliation with which the North first met, secession, the change was sudden. The fire on Sumter lit an actual flame of freedom, and the people were ready then to wipe slavery from the whole face of the land. When Gen. Fremont issued his famous order confiscating the slaves of rebels in arms, I was in receipt of a large exchange list, and have never seen such unanimity on any subject.

I think there were but two papers which offered an objection; but this land was not worthy to do a generous deed. So, President Lincoln rescinded that order, and the great rushing stream of popular enthusiasm was dammed, turned back to flow into the dismal swamp of const.i.tutional quibbles and statutory inventions. There it lay, and bred reptiles and miasmas to sting and poison the guilty inhabitants of this great land; and never since have we been permitted to reach an enthusiasm in favor of any great principle; for history has no record of a great act so thoroughly divested of all greatness by the meanness of the motive, as is our "Act of Emanc.i.p.ation."

Long after the war was in progress, the old habit of yielding precedence to the South manifested itself so strongly as to sour and disgust the staunchest Republicans. The only two important military appointments given by Mr. Lincoln's administration to St. Cloud were given to two Southern Democrats, officeholders under Buchanan and supporters of Breckinridge, the Southern candidate for President in '60. In the autumn of '61, I asked a farmer to take out and post bills for a meeting to send delegates to the county convention. He had been an active worker in the campaign of '60, had never sought an office, and I was surprised when he declined so small a service, but his explanation was this:

"If the Democrats win the election, the Democrats will get the offices.

If the Republicans win the election, the Democrats will get the offices, and I don't see but we may as well let them win the election."

When I explained that the more false others were to a party or principle, the more need there was for him to be true, he took the bills and managed the meeting; but running a Republican ticket under a Republican administration was not so easy as running the same ticket under Buchanan. Then men had hope and enthusiasm, but this was killed by a victory through which the enemy was made to triumph.

As Gov. Ramsey was the first to tender troops to President Lincoln for the suppression of the Rebellion, so the men of Minnesota were among the first to organize and drill. Stephen Miller raised a company in St.

Cloud, with it joined the first regiment at Ft. Snelling, and was appointed Lieut. Col.

We went to Ft. Snelling to see our first regiment embark. It was a grand sight to see the men in red shirts and white Havelocks march down that rocky, winding way, going to their Southern graves, for very few of them ever returned.

More troops were called for, and two companies formed in St. Cloud.

While they waited under marching orders, they and the citizens were aroused at two o'clock one morning by the cry from the east side of the river of, "Indians, Indians." A boat was sent over and brought a white-lipped messenger, with the news of the Sioux ma.s.sacre at Ft.

Ridgley.

CHAPTER XLVI.

PLATFORMS.

My first public speech was the revelation of a talent hidden in a napkin, and I set about putting it to usury. I wrote a lecture--"Women and Politics"--as a reason for my anomalous position and a justification of those men who had endorsed my right to be a political leader, and gave sketches of women in sacred and profane history who had been so endorsed by brave and wise men.

The lecture gave an account of the wrongs heaped upon women by slavery, as a reason why women were then called upon for special activity, and I never failed to "bring down the house" by describing the scene in which the tall Kentuckian proposed to the tall Pennsylvanian that he should horsewhip an old woman one hundred and two times, to compel her to earn two hundred dollars with which his mightiness might purchase Havana cigars, gold chains, etc., or to elicit signs of shame by relating the fact of the United States government proposing to withdraw diplomatic relations with Austria for whipping Hungarian women for political offenses, while woman-whipping was the princ.i.p.al industry of our American chivalry.

I stated that men had sought to divide this world into two fields--religion and politics. In the first, they were content that their mothers and wives should dwell with them, but in the second, no kid slipper was ever to be set. Horace Mann had warned women to stand back, saying: "Politics is a stygian pool." I insisted that politics had reached this condition through the permit given to Satan to turn all the waste water of his mills into that pool; that this grant must be rescinded and the pool drained at all hazards. Indeed the emergency was such that even women might handle shovels.

Chicago had once been in a swamp, but the City Fathers had lifted it six feet. Politicians must "raise the grade," must lift their politics the height of a man, and make them a habitation for men, not reptiles. At this an audience would burst into uproarous applause.

As for the grand division, no surveyor could find the line; for no line was possible between religion and politics. The attempt to divide them is an a.s.sumption that there is some part of the universe in which the Lord is not law-giver. The Fathers of the Republic had explored and found a country they thought was outside the Divine jurisdiction, and called it Politics. Because old world government had bowed to popes and prelates, they would ignore Deity, and say to Omnipotence what Canute did to the sea: "Thus far shalt thou go but no further, and here shall thy proud waves be stayed." But G.o.d laughed them to scorn, and would certainly dash them to pieces. The government which they had set up like the golden image of Nebuchadnezzer, and demanded that all should bow before it, this same government was bound to sustain men in scourging women for chast.i.ty. Every man who voted a democratic ticket voted to put down as insurrection any attempt to stand between the cradle and its robber.

I never spoke of the St. Cloud trouble--there was too much else to talk about. I was seldom interrupted by anything but applause; but in Stillwater I was hissed for denouncing Buchanan's administration. I waited a moment, then lowered my voice, and said I had raised a good many goslings, and thought I had left them all in Pennsylvania, but found some had followed me, and was sorry to have no corn for them.

There was no further interruption.

I was at that time the guest of a son of my Pittsburg friend, Judge McMillan, who led the singing in our church, and with whom I expect to sing "St. Thomas" in heaven. My host of that evening afterwards became U.S. Senator from Minnesota.

A considerable portion of three winters I traveled in Minnesota and lectured, one day riding thirty miles in an open cutter when the mercury was frozen and the wind blew almost a gale. Have crossed houseless prairies between midnight and morning, with only a stage driver, and I never encountered a neglect or a rudeness: but found gentlemen in red flannel shirts and their trowsers stuffed into the tops of their boots, who had no knowledge of grammar, and who would, I think, have sold their lives dearly in my defense.

Late in '60 or early in '61, I lectured in Mantorville, and was the guest of Mr. Bancroft, editor of the _Express_, when he handed me a copy of the New York _Tribune_, pointed to an item, and turned away. It was a four line announcement that he who had been my husband had obtained a divorce on the ground of desertion. I laid down the paper, looked at my hands, and thought:

"Once more you are mine. True, the proceeds of your twenty years of brick-making are back there in Egypt with your lost patrimony, but we are over the Red Sea, out in the free desert; no pursuit is possible, and if bread fails, G.o.d will send manna."

While I sat, Mrs. Bancroft came to me, caressed me, and said:

"Old things have pa.s.sed away, and all things have become new."

CHAPTER XLVII.

OUT INTO THE WORLD AND HOME AGAIN.

In my first lecturing winter I spoke in the Hall of Representatives, St.

Paul, to a large audience, and succeeded past all my hopes. I spoke there again in the winter of '61 and '62, on the anti-slavery question, and in a public hall on "Woman's Legal Disabilities." Both were very successful, and I was invited to give the latter lecture before the Senate, which I did. The hall was packed and the lecture received with profound attention, interrupted by hearty applause.

The Senate was in session, and Gen. Lowrie occupied his seat as a member. It was a great fall for him to tumble from his dictatorship to so small an honor. He sat and looked at me like one in a dream, and I could not but see that he was breaking. I hoped he would come up with others when they began to crowd around me, but he did not.

I had come to be the looked-at of all lookers; the talked-of of all talkers; was the guest of Geo. A. Nurse, the U.S. Attorney, dined with the Governor, and was praised by the press. I was dubbed the "f.a.n.n.y Kemble of America," and reminded critics of the then greatest Shylock of the stage. A judge from Ohio said there was "not a man in the State who could have presented that case (Woman's Legal Disabilities) so well."

Indeed, I was almost as popular as if I were about to be hanged!

A responsible Eastern lecture-agent offered me one hundred dollars each for three lectures, one in Milwaukee, one in Chicago and one in Cleveland. I wanted to accept, but was overruled by friends, who thought me too feeble to travel alone, and that I would make more by employing an agent. They selected a pious gentleman, whose name I have forgotten, and we left St. Paul at four o'clock one winter morning, in a prairie schooner on bob-sleds, to ride to La Crosse.

One of the pa.s.sengers was a pompous Southerner, who kept boasting of the "buck n.i.g.g.e.rs" he had sold and the "n.i.g.g.e.rs" he had caught, and his delight in that sort of work. His talk was aimed at me, but he did not address me, and for hours I took no notice; then, after an unusual explosion, I said quietly:

"Can you remember, sir, just exactly how many n.i.g.g.e.rs you have killed and eaten in your day?"

He looked out on the river and seemed to begin a calculation, but must have found the lists of his exploits too long for utterance, for he had spoken not another word when we reached La Crosse, where we took cars for Madison, Wisconsin.

We reached that beautiful city of lakes in time to meet news of the Ft.

Donelson fatal victory; that victory made so much worse than a hundred defeats by the return to their masters of the slaves who remained in the fort and claimed the protection of our flag--the victory which converted the great loyal army of the North into a gang of slave-catchers. Alas, my native land! All hope for the preservation of the government died out in my heart. What could a just G.o.d want with such a people? What could he do but destroy them?

That victory was celebrated in Madison with appropriate ceremonies. Men got drunk and cursed "n.i.g.g.e.rs and abolitionists," sat up all night in noisy orgies drinking health and success to him who was the synonym of American glory.

The excitement and sudden revulsion against abolitionists with the total incompetence of my agent, caused a financial failure of my lecture, but I made pleasant friendships with Gov. Harvey, Prof. Carr and their wives.

I started along the route we had come, and everywhere, in cars, hotels, men were hurrahing for Grant and cursing "n.i.g.g.e.rs and abolitionists."

The hero had healed the breach between the loving brothers of the North and South, who were to rush into each others arms across the prostrate form of Liberty. Thank G.o.d for the madness of the South; for that sublime universal government which maketh "the wrath of man to praise him." Even in that hour of triumph for despotism, I did not doubt but Freedom would march on until no slave contaminated the earth; but before that march this degraded government must share the fate of that other Babylon, which once dealt "in slaves and souls of men."

My first small town lecture was another financial failure, and in the hall I paid and dismissed that highly respectable incubus--my agent.

That night I slept in a hotel, and going to a bed which had not been properly ventilated, wondered if it could be my duty to breast that storm of popular frenzy. Could I at any time be required to drink tea out of a coa.r.s.e delf cup and sleep in such a bed? Luxuries I wanted none; but a china cup, silver spoon and soft blankets were necessaries of life. As I lay, uncertain always whether I slept, I seemed to sit on a projecting rock on the side of a precipice draped with poisonous vines. There was no spot on which I could place my feet, while out of holes, snakes hissed at me, and on ledges panthers glared at me with their green fiery eyes, and the tips of their tails wagging. Far below lay a lovely green valley, walled on both sides by these haunted precipitous banks, but stretching up and down until lost in vista. I knew that to the right was north--the direction of home; and to the left, south--the way out into the great unknown. If I could only reach that lovely valley and the clear stream which ran through it; but this was a vain longing, until there appeared in it a young man in a grey suit and soft broad-brimmed black felt hat. He came up the precipice toward me, and a way made itself before him, until he held up his hand, and said:

"Come down!"

I saw his face, and knew it was Christ. After seeing that face, all the conceptions of all the artists are an offense. Moreover, the Christ of to-day, in the person of his follower, has often come to me in the garb of a working man, but never in priestly robes. He led me down the precipice without a word, pointed northward and said:

"Walk in the valley and you will be safe." He was gone, and I became conscious that I had been seeking popularity, money, and these were not for me; I must go home, but first I would try to repair the loss incurred by that agent. I lectured in a small town, a nucleus of a Seven Day Baptist settlement, and was the guest of the proprietor, who had built a great many concrete walls. Coming out into a heavy wind, I took acute inflammation of the lungs. My hostess gave me every attention; but I must go home for my symptoms were alarming, so took the train the next morning, with my chest in wet compresses, a viol of aconite in my pocket, and was better when by rail and schooner I reached the house of the good Samaritan, Judge Wilson, of Winona.

Here I was made whole, lectured in Winona and other towns, and got back to St. Paul with more money than when I left. I started for home one morning in a schooner. At one the next morning our craft settled down and refused to go farther. The snow was three feet deep; it had been raining steadily for twelve hours, and when the men got out to pry out the runners, they went down, down, far over their knees. The driver and express agent were booted for such occasions, but the two Germans were not. Myself, "these four and no more," were down in the book of fate for a struggle with inertia. It was muscle and mind against matter. To the muscle I contributed nothing, but might add something to the common stock of mind. The agent, and driver concluded that he should take a horse and go to the nearest house, two miles back, to get shovels to dig us out. I asked if there were fresh horses and men at the house.