Old Times in Dixie Land Part 8

The nation should look with encouragement and grat.i.tude to Booker T.

Washington as the real Moses who, by industrial education, proposes to lead his people out of their real bondage. Only by making themselves worthy will they be able to exist on kindly terms with the white race. The same slow process of the ages which has wrought out Anglo Saxon civilization will elevate this race. Nature's law of growth for them, as for white people, is struggle. The fittest will survive.

CHAPTER XI.

LAURA'S DEATH IN THE EPIDEMIC OF '78.

The war fully ended and our city home recovered, we removed to New Orleans. I devoted myself wholly to my family and to domestic affairs.

Friends gathered about us and some delightful people made our neighborhood very pleasant. It was in my present home that my daughter Laura was married to Louis J. Bright, and soon after, Clara was united to James B.

Guthrie; both young men were settled in New Orleans, so that I was spared the pain of total separation. My son David established himself on his own plantation in Point Coupe, and soon after married Miss Lula Dowdell of Alabama. Our summers were spent alternately in Myrtle Grove and the North, or the Virginia Springs.

Mothers are usually held responsible for the shortcomings of their children. Sometimes this is just, but children often cruelly misrepresent good parents. It should never be forgotten that mothers and children are very human, and that the vocation upon which young people enter with least training is parenthood. Children and parents get their training together.

It takes love and wisdom and proper environment to bring both to their best; but sometimes evil hereditary and vicious social inst.i.tutions prove stronger than all of these combined forces of the home. The nation can never know the power and beauty of the mother until it evolves a true protective tenderness for the child, and encompa.s.ses it with safest conditions for its development. It is a growing wonder that women have borne so long in silence the existence of establishments which the State fosters to the debas.e.m.e.nt of their sons. Only the habit of subjection--the legacy of the ages--could have produced this pathetic stoicism. If a horse knew his strength, no man could control him. When women realize their G.o.d-given power, the community in which their children are born will not tempt them to their death by the open saloon, the gambling den and the haunt of shame. Until that happy time the inexhaustible supply of love and sympathy which goes out from the mother-heart is the child's chiefest shelter. Obedience is what parents should exact from infants if they expect it from grown children. The slaves of the severer masters stayed with them during the war, when those of indulgent ones ran away. It is the petted, spoiled darlings whose ultimate "ingrat.i.tude is sharper than the serpent's tooth."

When friends were won by my daughters it was gratifying to me, for it proved that the womanly accomplishment of making themselves beloved was a lesson they had laid to heart--and they had learned it by their own fireside where love ruled and reigned. I was glad in all my children, and a devoted mother is sure of her ultimate reward. I was very proud when Clara replied to a friend who expressed surprise that she should visit me on my reception day: "I should be happy to claim a half-hour of my mother's society if she were not related to me." I was very content with my two daughters happily married and settled near me--doubly mine by the tie of congenial tastes and pursuits.

In 1878 my household had gone North for the summer. On September 1st a telegram reached me at Wilbraham, Ma.s.s., saying, "Laura died at 12 o'clock, M." I had plead with her to leave New Orleans with me, but in her self-sacrificing devotion to her husband, who was never willing that she should be absent from him, she remained at home and fell a victim in the great yellow fever epidemic.

Previous to her marriage she had spent all her summers in the country or in travel, and was wholly unacclimated. Clara wrote thus to Captain S. M.

Thomas from Sewanee, Tenn., in September of that dreadful year: "The pity of it, Uncle Milton! You will understand how it is with us at this time.

Mother is broken-hearted. You have ever been a large figure in Laura's and my girlhood recollections, and mother asks me to write to you. Laura Ellen's death was just as painful as it could be. Father and mother were in Wilbraham, and every one of us gone but dear, good cousin Louise Brewer, and Louis--her husband. Oh! he made a terrible mistake in remaining in that doomed city. I have an added pang that I shall carry with me till I too go away--that I was not with her in her supreme hour.

"The dear girl wrote daily to mother, David, and me, until death s.n.a.t.c.hed away her pen. 'Fear not for me, dearest mother,' was on her last postal card. 'My trust is in G.o.d.' It were enough to make an angel weep if the true history of this awful summer could be written. Our grief is without any alleviation--unless in sister's beautiful character and Christian life. If I had been there I should have tried with superhuman efforts to hold her back from death. It was Sunday--and Dr. Walker dismissed his congregation at Felicity church to go, at her request, to her deathbed. He has told us of her great faith, her willingness to go, the perfect clearness of her mind, and the calm fort.i.tude she manifested even when she kissed her children good-by. Breathing softly she went to sleep and closed her sweet blue eyes on this world--forever.

"Cousin Louise says Louis was nearly frantic. It is a terrible blow, and he has the added pain of knowing it might have been different but for the fatal mistake of judgment which brought such awful results. I have to school myself, and fight every day a new battle for calmness and resignation. I shall never grow accustomed to the hard fact that her bright and heavenly presence must be forever wanting in her own home, and shall never again grace mine. She died saying, 'Jesus is with me!' Well He might be, for she died, as He, sacrificing herself for others."

There was no one too old or too poor, or too uninteresting to receive Laura's attention. Sometimes this disposition annoyed me; but though I did not always recognize it, she was always living out the divine altruism of Christ. She was ever active in charities and a useful director of St.

Ann's Asylum.

Among many others I gather the following expressions in letters from those who had known her intimately: "n.o.body feared her, everybody loved her. She was an angel for forgiving. The brightness in her life came from the angelic cheerfulness of her own soul, which would not yield to outward conditions. She had an infinite capacity for getting joy out of barren places."--"I do not hope to know again a nature so blended in sweetness and strength. It is no common chance that takes away a n.o.ble mind--so full of meekness yet with so much to justify self-a.s.sertion. There was an atmosphere of grace, mercy and peace floating about her, edifying and delighting all who came near."

Coming from a long line of tender, gentle, saintly women--the Brewers on the Merrick side--she belonged to that type celebrated in story and embalmed in song, of which nearly every generation of Brewers has produced at least one representative human angel.

A more than full measure of days has convinced me that among our permanent joys are the friends who have drifted with our own life current. In addition to the pleasure of communion with lofty and sympathetic spirits such friendships have the "tendency to bring the character into finer life." "A new friend," says Emerson, "entering our house is an era in our true history." Our friends ill.u.s.trate the course of our conduct. It is the progress of our character that draws them about us. Among those friends whom the struggling years after the war brought to me was Mrs. Anita Waugh, a Boston woman; a sojourner in Europe while her father was U. S.

Minister to Greece, a long-time resident of Cuba, and, during the period in which I made her acquaintance, a teacher in New Orleans. In an old letter to one of my children I find: "Mrs. Waugh makes much of your mother. She is happier for having known me. I have been helped by her to some knowledge from the vast store-house which may never be taken account of--still I here make the acknowledgment."

Frances Willard said of her, "She is rarely gifted, and I enjoy her thought--so different from my own practical life. She is a seer (see-er)!"

Her wide acquaintance with remarkable people invested her with rare interest. In one of her many letters to me, dated in 1873, she says with fine catholicity of spirit and exceptional insight: "I think the so-called religious world lays too much stress on the infidelity of such men as Tyndall and Huxley and Spencer. They have not reached the point in their spiritual growth where knowledge opens the domain of real, pure worship; they are in a transition period, are still groping about in a world of effects, living in a world of results of which they have not yet found the cause. Spencer has given the most masterly exposition of the nervous system which has yet been made. The next step would have been into the domain of the spiritual. Here he stopped, because his mind has not yet reached the degree of development in which the utterances of truth perceived becomes the highest duty. When he shall have rounded and brought up all of his studies to a point equally advanced with his Psychology then he will be obliged to say, 'My G.o.d and my Lord!' I hope he may soon, as Longfellow said, 'Touch G.o.d's right hand in the darkness.'"

Science--and the Church--did not long have to wait for the Wallace and Henry Drummond of Mrs. Waugh's intuition.

During repeated visits to the Yellow Sulphur Springs in Virginia, Mr.

Merrick and I were seated at table with the famous Confederate Commanders, General Jubal Early and General G. T. Beauregard, who had become additionally conspicuous by their connection with the Louisiana lottery.

General Beauregard called frequently upon us, and I met him also at Waukesha, in Wisconsin. He was very kind to me, and greatly enjoyed hearing some of my nonsensical dialect readings. At the latter place the women were much impressed by his handsome and distinguished appearance and manners. When he called at my hotel many of them were eager in their entreaties to be introduced; our gallant general would bow graciously, but they were not to be satisfied unless he would also take them by the hand.

On February 24, 1893, General Beauregard was lying in state on his bier in the City Hall of New Orleans, and I was holding a convention of the Louisiana W. C. T. U. I could not help alluding to the death of this beloved old soldier, and I asked the women to go and look upon his handsome face for the last time. He was a perfect type of his cla.s.s--courtly, generous, chivalrous. He had been in the Mexican war, and was the only general of the old Confederacy who belonged in New Orleans.

The hearts of the people were touched, and when the meeting adjourned many groups of W. C. T. U. women were added to the crowds who went to look their last upon the face of the dead. Miss Points was pleased to say in the _New Orleans Picayune_: "It was a beautiful act on the part of our women; and it acquired a new significance and beauty in that it was the outgrowth of the strong friendship and appreciation of the wife of the distinguished man who was our Chief Justice of the Supreme Court in the days of the Confederacy." This was a tribute which she reminded them to offer to one of the dead heroes of our late war between the states!

"The great effort of courage I have made in my life was going in a skiff in an overflow, with Stephen and Allen, two inexperienced negro rowers, to Red River Landing in order to reach a steamboat for New Orleans, where, at the close of the war, I wanted to get supplies for my family and for my neighbors, who were in extremities by reason of the creva.s.se. That was an act of bravery--hunger forced it--which astonished into exclamation the captain of a Federal gunboat, Capt. Edward P. Lull, who made me take the oath of allegiance before I could leave. You know how afraid I am of water and of any _little_ boat; but give men or women a sufficiently powerful motive and they can do anything."

CHAPTER XII.

A FIRST SPEECH AND SOME NOTED WOMEN.

In those broken-hearted days Clara said with a pathetic earnestness: "Now I must try to be two daughters to you. You have not lost all your children--only your best child." We drew nearer and more mutually dependent as time pa.s.sed, each trying to fill the awful void for the other. How could I dream that the insatiable archer was only waiting, with fatal dart in rest, to claim another victim? We made common joy as well as sorrow, and tried to lead each other out into the sunlit places, the simple pleasures of home and social life.

Early in the year 1897 a State Const.i.tutional Convention was a.s.sembled in New Orleans. The legal inequality of woman in Louisiana had already challenged the notice of some women, and a recent incident was outraging the hearts of a few who had the vision of seers. The Board of Control of St. Ann's Asylum--an inst.i.tution in New Orleans for the relief of dest.i.tute women and children--was composed entirely of women. A German inmate on her deathbed revealed that she had $1,000 in bank, and by a will, witnessed by members of the Board, she bequeathed it to the inst.i.tution which had sheltered her. On submission of the will to probate, the ladies were informed that it was invalid, because a woman was not a legal witness to a will. The bequest went to the State--and the women went to thinking and agitating.

Mrs. Elizabeth L. Saxon urged that we should appear before the Convention with our grievances. I did not feel equal to such an effort, but Mrs.

Saxon said: "Instead of grieving yourself to death for your daughter who is gone, rise up out of the ashes and do something for the other women who are left!" My husband insisted that, having always wanted to do something for women, now was my opportunity. Mrs. Saxon and I drew up the following pet.i.tion:

"To the Honorable President and Members of the Convention of the State of Louisiana, convened for the purpose of framing a new Const.i.tution:

"Pet.i.tion of the undersigned, citizens of the State of Louisiana, respectfully represents:

"That up to the present time, all women, of whatever age or capacity, have been debarred from the right of representation, notwithstanding the burdensome taxes which they have paid.

"They have been excluded from holding office save in cases of special tutorship in limited degree--or of administration only in specified cases.

"They have been debarred from being witnesses in wills or notarial acts, even when executed by their own s.e.x.

"They look upon this condition of things as a grievance proper to be brought before your honorable body for consideration and relief.

"As a question of civilization, we look upon the enfranchis.e.m.e.nt of women as an all important one. In Wyoming, where it has been tried for ten years, the Lawmakers and Clergy unite in declaring that this influx of women voters has done more to promote law, morality and order, than thousands of armed men could have accomplished.

"Should the entire franchise seem too extended a privilege, we most earnestly urge the adoption of a property qualification, and that women may also be allowed a vote on school and educational matters, involving as they do the interests of women and children in a great degree.

"So large a proportion of the taxes of Louisiana is paid by women, many of them without male representatives, that in granting consideration and relief for grievances herein complained of, the people will recognize Justice and Equity; that to woman as well as man 'taxation without representation is tyranny,' she being 'a person, a citizen, a freeholder, a taxpayer,' the same as man, only the government has never held out the same fostering, protecting hand to all alike, nor ever will, until women are directly represented.

"Wherefore, we, your pet.i.tioners, pray that some suitable provision remedying these evils be incorporated in the Const.i.tution you are about to frame."

Four hundred influential names were secured to the pet.i.tion, Mrs. Saxon, almost unaided, having gained three hundred of them. It was sent to the Convention and referred to the Committee on Suffrage, which on May 7 invited the ladies to a conference at the St. Charles Hotel. Mrs. Mollie Moore Davis, Colonel and Mrs. John M. Sandige, Mr. and Mrs. Saxon were present. Dr. Harriette C. Keating, a representative woman in professional life, Mrs. Elizabeth L. Saxon, already a well-known and fearless reformer, and Caroline E. Merrick, as the voice of home, were chosen to appear before the Convention on the evening of June 16, 1879. Eighty-six members of the Convention were present; a half hundred representatives of "lovely woman" were there. Mrs. Myra Clark Gaines, the celebrated litigant, with a few other notables, occupied the middle of the floor, and youth and beauty retired into a corner. Mr. Poche, chairman of the Suffrage Committee, and afterward a member of the Supreme Court of the State, asked me if I were afraid. "Afraid," I said, "is not the word. I'm scared almost to death!"

He tried to encourage me by recounting the terrors of many men similarly placed.

Mrs. Keating was first introduced, and, at the Secretary's desk, in a clear voice, with dignified self-possession set forth the capabilities of women for mastering political science sufficiently to vote intelligently on questions of the day. Mrs. Saxon following, was greeted with an outburst of welcome. She reviewed the customs of various nations to which women were required to conform, and called attention to the fact that the party which favored woman suffrage would poll twelve million votes. She made clear that the fact of s.e.x could not qualify or disqualify for an intelligent vote: she mentioned that numbers of women had told her they wanted to be present that night, but their husbands would not permit them to come.

Mrs. Elizabeth Lyle Saxon is a woman possessed of fine intellect and an uncommonly warm and generous nature. She was a pioneer in the Suffrage Cause in the South, and has ably represented its interests in National gatherings. She was sent as delegate from this State to the International Suffrage a.s.sociation of the World's Auxiliary Congress in 1893. All along the way she has given of her best with whole-hearted zeal to further the cause of women, and should claim the undying grat.i.tude of those for whom she has helped to build the bridges of human equality.

Mr. Robertson, of St. Landry, then offered the resolution: "Resolved, That the Committee on elective franchise be directed to embody in the articles upon suffrage reported to this Convention, a provision giving the right of suffrage to women upon the same terms as to men."