MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE AND THE BLESSED COLORED PEOPLE.
As has been intimated, I became president of the New Orleans W. C. T. U.
not from deep conviction of duty on the temperance question, but because I
could not resist the inspirations of Frances Willard’s convictions. Once
in the work I gave my heart and my conscience to it with such measure of
success that in January, 1883, a State convention was called to meet in
New Orleans in the hall of the Y. M. C. A. Miss Willard was again present,
and was my guest. Rev. W. C. Carter, D. D., pastor of Felicity Street M.
E. Church South, was the knightly brother who stood beside us in this hour
when we were without reputation, nobly doing his sworn duty as a soldier
of the Cross, to speak the truth and defend the weak. Miss Willard spoke
twice in his church. At a table where a number of dignitaries of the
church were dining, referring to this event, a friend remarked that Dr.
Carter had said the only time his church was full was on this occasion of
Miss Willard’s address. “No,” the doctor replied, “I did not say that. I
said the _first_ time it was full. It was full again--but she filled it!”
There was a peculiar fitness in the time of Miss Willard’s early visits
to the South. Women who had been fully occupied with the requirements of
society and the responsibilities of a dependency of slaves, were now
tossed to and fro amidst the exigencies and bewilderments of strange and
for the most part painful circumstances, and were eager that new
adjustments should relieve the strained situation, and that they might
find out what to do. Frances Willard gave to many of them a holy purpose,
directing it into broader fields of spiritual and philanthropic culture
than they had ever known. For the local and denominational she substituted
the vision of humanity. It seemed to me that when Miss Willard and Miss
Gordon bravely started out to find a new country they discovered
Louisiana, and like Columbus, they set up a religious standard and prayed
over it--and organized the W. C. T. U. I was one result of that voyage of
discovery. It immersed me in much trouble, care and business--sometimes it
seemed as if I had more than my head and hands could hold--unused was I to
plans and work and burdens. I prayed to be delivered from too much care
unless it might set forward the cause. I was willing “to spend and be
spent,” but sometimes I felt as if I had mistaken my calling. I only knew
that I was on the right road, and tried to look to God to lead me. Doubts
might come to-morrow, but to-day I trusted. In ten years I saw the work
established in most of the chief towns of the State, and many men and
women afield who had learned the doctrine of total abstinence for the
individual and the gospel of prohibition for the commonwealth.
During these years I gathered numerous delightful associations in my
State work and in my annual attendance upon the conventions of the
National W. C. T. U. Among the National workers who aided me greatly in my
early work was Mrs. Judith Ellen Foster who, with her husband, was for a
week my guest, and spoke in crowded churches. Although I did not wholly
sympathize with her when later she withdrew from the National W. C. T. U.,
our friendly personal relations were never broken. Her brilliant abilities
as a temperance worker and as a pioneer woman-member of the bar commanded
my respect, and I have not ceased to be grateful for the sustaining power
of her inspirations and acts. For the first time in my life, at one of her
meetings in New Orleans, I sat in a pulpit--where Bishops Newman and
Simpson had officiated--and very peculiar were my feelings in such a
place.
Besides Mrs. Foster, Mrs. Mary T. Lathrop, Mrs. Clara C. Hoffman and Mrs.
Hannah Whitehall Smith from National ranks did much to create sentiment
for our cause in Louisiana. No speaker in America has excelled Mrs.
Lathrop in the vigor and the statesmanlike majesty of her arguments for
the dethronement of the liquor traffic. A distinguished judge, who was not
in favor of our propaganda, said there were few men in Congress who had
equalled her in logic and eloquence. We mourn yet that in her death the
world has lost so much that time can never replace.
One of the greatest victories won for our cause was the passage in 1888 of
a Scientific Temperance Instruction bill, by the State Legislature, for
the education of the youth in the public schools, on the nature of
alcohol and its effect upon the human system. Mrs. Mary Hunt of
Massachusetts, the originator of this movement for the safeguard of health
against the seductions and destructions of strong drink and narcotics,
spent a month at our legislature as the guest of Mrs. Mary Reade Goodale.
Daily I went with these two indefatigable workers, watched and manœuvered
the progress of this bill, until one of the best statutes passed on this
subject by any State was secured. Such a work for the world’s glory is
enough for any mortal, but we trust it has also placed Mrs. Hunt among the
immortals of earthly fame.
I visited the Capital at this time and was active in the lobby,
interviewing members. I sent my card to a Senator Gage, and was more than
surprised when in response a tall, dignified black man presented himself.
It was difficult for a moment to determine whether to make him stand
during the interview, as is usual with his color, but I said: “Senator
Gage: The people have put you in this respectable and responsible
position, and as other senators have occupied this chair will you please
be seated?” He sat down, and he afterward voted for our bill.
After this social intercourse with Mrs. Hunt and Mrs. Goodale great
impetus was given to the work in Louisiana by the establishment of a W. C.
T. U. booth at the World’s Exposition in New Orleans in the year 1885. It
was artistically decorated and made as attractive as ingenuity could
devise. Here the world’s great lights in the temperance cause were to be
heard daily--in pulpits and other public places in the city. In addition
to Miss Willard, Mrs. Lathrop, Mrs. Matilda B. Carse, Mrs. Caroline Buel,
Mary Allen West, Mrs. Josephine Nichols, Mrs. Mary A. Leavitt, Mrs. Sallie
F. Chapin of the National Guard, there were present from State work, Mrs.
Lide Merriwether of Tennessee, Mrs. I. C. de Veiling of Massachusetts,
Mrs. J. B. Hobbs and Mrs. Lucian Hagans of Illinois, Mrs. M. M. Snell of
Mississippi, and many others. Our Louisiana Prohibition militia were in
force all the time, and we had the pleasure and assistance of such
brotherly giants of the temperance reform as Geo. W. Bain, I. N. Stearn,
president of National Temperance Society, Jno. P. St. Johns, Hon. R. H.
McDonald of California, Rev. C. H. Mead, A. A. Hopkins, and hosts of other
loyal brethren who burnished our faith and fired our zeal.
Miss Willard in the _Union Signal_ of this date said: “Mrs. Merrick speaks
of the W. C. T. U. Booth as a ‘tabernacle.’ I consult Webster and find
that a tabernacle is ‘a place in which some holy or precious thing is
deposited.’ Aye, the definition fits. Our hearts are there, our holy
cause, our blessed bonds. Again, it is a ‘reliquary,’ says the redoubtable
Noah, ‘a place for the preservation of relics.’ Yea, verily. The women of
Israel never turned over their relics more keenly than have W. C. T. U.
women rifled their jewelry boxes for the ‘Souvenir Fund,’ which has gone
into the Tabernacle. It is ‘a niche’ too ‘for the image of a saint.’
Accurate to a nicety. Heaven keeps a niche to hold our treasures, and so
does the World’s Exposition. Our saints are there in person and in
spirit--the right hand of our power.”
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe had been called by the Exposition management to
preside over the Woman’s Department. There was much criticism of the
authorities that this honor had not been given to a Southern woman;
notwithstanding that this world-renowned Bostonian was not a stranger to
our people--they fully appreciated the power of her “Battle Hymn of the
Republic”--it seemed unnecessary to seek so far for a head of the Exhibit.
If Southern women could create it, some one of them was surely able to
direct it. Mrs. Howe came and performed this duty with marked ability, and
displayed a force of character which commanded respect though it did not
always win for her acquiescence in her decisions or affectionate regard
from all her colleagues. I myself had much expense to incur, and received
nothing, and individually I had naught special to excite my gratitude,
though from the first I was willing to welcome this distinguished lady,
and extend to her my co-operation and hospitality. My subsequent relations
to her though transient have been pleasant, and doubtless her memory of
her Exposition coadjutors matches our recollection of her own regal self.
Miss Isabel Greely was her secretary--a very useful and estimable woman.
Some interesting exercises took place during one afternoon of the
Exposition. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe addressed the colored people in a gallery
devoted to their exhibit. There was a satisfactory audience, chiefly of
the better classes of the race. Mrs. Howe had asked me to accompany her,
and when I assented some one said: “Well, you are probably the only
Southern woman here who would risk public censure by speaking to a negro
assembly.” Mrs. Howe told them how their Northern friends had labored to
put the colored people on a higher plane of civilization, and how Garrison
had been dragged about the streets of Boston for their sake, and urged
that they show themselves worthy of the great anti-slavery leaders who had
fought their battles. Her address was extremely well received. I was then
invited to speak. I told them: “The first kindly face I ever looked into
was one of this race who called forth the sympathy of the world in their
days of bondage. Among the people you once called masters you have still
as warm, appreciative friends as any in the world. Some of us were
nurtured at your breasts, and most of us when weaned took the first
willing spoonful of food from your gentle, persuasive hands; and when our
natural protectors cast us off for a fault, for reproof, for punishment,
you always took us up and comforted us. Can we ever forget it?
“Have you not borne the burdens of our lives through many a long year?
When troubles came did you not take always a full share? Well do I
remember, as a little child, when I saw my beloved mother die at the old
plantation home. The faithful hands from the fields assembled around the
door, and at her request Uncle Caleb Harris knelt by her bedside and
prayed for her recovery--if it was God’s will. How the men and women and
children wept! And after she was laid in the earth my infant brother, six
months old, was given entirely to the care of Aunt Rachel, who loved him
as her own life even into his young manhood, and to the day of her death.
And who can measure your faithfulness during the late war when all our men
had gone to the front to fight for their country? Your protection of the
women and children of the South in those years of privation and
desolation; your cultivation of our fields that fed us and our army; your
care of our soldier boys on the field of battle, in camp and hospital, and
the tender loyalty with which you--often alone--brought home their dead
bodies so that they might be laid to sleep with their fathers, has bound
to you the hearts of those who once owned you, in undying remembrance and
love.
“I do not ask you to withhold any regard you may have for those who
labored to make you free. Be as grateful as you can to the descendants of
the people who first brought you from Africa--and then sold you ‘down
South’ when your labor was no longer profitable to themselves. But
remember, now you are free, whenever you count up your friends never to
count out the women of the South. They too rejoice in your emancipation
and have no grudges about it; and would help you to march with the world
in education and true progress. As we have together mourned our dead on
earth let us rejoice together in all the great resurrections now and
hereafter.” At the close, many colored people with tearful eyes extended a
friendly hand, and Mrs. Howe too did the same.
Hon. R. H. McDonald, the California philanthropist, had been my guest
during Exposition days and had won our hearts by a face that reflected the
nobility of his deeds. In 1890 he sent me $150 to be used for prizes
offered in the public schools of New Orleans for the best essays written
on temperance. The school board and Mr. Easton, the able superintendent,
accepted the offer, and the presentation of the prizes was made a great
public occasion in an assemblage at Grunewald Hall.
There was a small contingent of Southern women whose platform services
were invaluable to me, and whose loving sympathy helped me over many
otherwise rough places. The first of these was Mrs. Sallie F. Chapin of
South Carolina. Both in appearance and speech she was intense, tragic, and
pathetic.--Her fiery eloquence captured the imagination and dragooned
convictions in battalions. She did splendid pioneer platform services as
superintendent of Southern Work, which place she filled until it was
abolished by the National Convention of 1889, at the request of the
Southern States, because the existence of that office misrepresented them
in their organic relations to the National W. C. T. U. and had a trend
toward violation of a platform principle against sectionalism. Mrs. Chapin
lived and died an “unreconstructed Rebel.” The bogey of secession of the
Southern States from the National seemed to haunt her brain; but I have
never been able to discover any other woman who believed that such a
phantom existed; it must have been but a queer instance of reflex action
from her over-stimulated Southern sentiment. Mrs. Chapin had extraordinary
ability and was a marvel of endurance when her temperament is taken into
the reckoning. Her heroic service deserves a lasting place in our annals.
Another Southern woman of large brain and larger heart who helped me in my
days of inexperience was Mrs. Mary McGee Snell (now Hall) of Mississippi.
Like the war-horse of Scripture she scented battle afar off and gloried in
combat. She was never so happy as in the heat of struggle. Her impetuous
nature took her into all sorts of unusual situations, and she did not seem
to be out of place--as did many other delegates--when, during a National
W. C. T. U. convention, she was seen in the streets of Chicago parading at
the head of a Salvation Army procession. She is essentially “a soldier of
the Cross,” and has carried her gifts of eloquence and the most vibrant,
persuasive of voices into the Evangelistic department of our National
organization. Her love of rescuing souls has kept her exclusively in
evangelistic work; in her power as a gospel worker she is a Sam Jones and
D. L. Moody boiled down.
The most original of our National staff-workers who came to my rescue was
another full-blooded Southerner--Miss Frances E. Griffin of Alabama. She
is gifted with an inimitable humor. An audience room is quickly filled
when it is known that she is to be the speaker of an occasion. Though a
woman of presence and dignity and a manner that befits the best, her
appearance as soon as she speaks a word is a promise of fun, and her
audience has begun to laugh before the time. Wit of tongue is rare with
women, but Miss Griffin’s equals in quality or rank the best of our
American humorists. At the same time that she enlivens the seriousness of
the public work which women have in hand, she is an intelligent reformer
and also a true woman of the home--having for many years been the
responsible bread-winner of her family, and has reared orphan children.
Miss Belle Kearney was too young during my term of office to be classed
with the workers already mentioned, for she had just begun to consecrate
her life to the service of humanity. At my request she brought her fresh
enthusiasm and great gifts to organize the Young Woman’s Temperance Union
of Louisiana. Repeated and most effective work in this State has made
Louisianians feel that they have an endearing right in this
Dixie-born-and-reared young woman; nor have they less pride than her
native Mississippi in her present national fame as a first-class platform
speaker and progressive reformer.
Hindrances and heartaches, however, were sandwiched between our helps and
happiness liberally enough to cause us to realize that she--as well as
he--who wins must fight. We were not strong swimmers accustomed to breast
the waves of an uneducated public disapproval; but we knew we must
encounter it and nerve ourselves for the shock, putting ourselves at war
against the liquor traffic and its political allies. Everywhere we found
the W. C. T. U. the underpinning (not one would have dared to think of
herself as a “pillar”) of the church. Very many of them had in tow the
whole church structure--missionary societies, pastor’s salary, the choir,
the parsonage, and the debt on the church. Most of them were mothers too;
some, God help them! sad-eyed and broken-hearted because of the ravage of
their own firesides which the open saloon had caused. We read our Bibles
and prayed, and the word of the Lord came to us that the mother-heart in
Christ’s people must protest against further slaying of the innocents at
the open doorways of the dram shops!
We went to our brethren in the church (to whom else should we go?) with
the Lord’s message. Some of them--not the dignitaries usually, but the
humble-minded, prayerful men, God bless them! who went about their work
unheralded--believed our report: but it was too hard a saying for the many
that God ever spake except by the word of mouth of a man. They forgot Anna
and Deborah, and practically sided with the “higher criticism” respecting
the errancy of the Scripture in its statement about woman’s relation to
the church. And so, after a while, I said at one of our conventions that I
could count upon one hand all the ministers in New Orleans who had come
forward to pray over one of our meetings.
We had to defend ourselves on the charge of being Sabbath-breakers,
because after doing the Lord’s work six days in the week, a W. C. T. U.
woman was said to have slept--“rested,” according to the commandment--on
Sunday. On this charge, and because a speaker in returning to my house
after a Sunday address took a ride in the last half hour of the day in a
street-car, a resolution of endorsement of the W. C. T. U. failed to pass
in a Louisiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and we
were cruelly hurt by the tone of the discussion.
General Conference lifted us out of despair by noble resolutions against
licensing the liquor traffic, and thereafter clerical dignitaries broke
our hearts by a masterly inactivity--or took a scourge of small cords and
proceeded, as it were, to drive us out with the hue and cry of “women’s
rights,” lest, should a woman vote, her natural function should cease, and
the sound of the lullaby and sewing machine be no longer heard in the
land. It was comical sometimes to see how the bishops and politicians
moved on the same line and for the same reason. But like some of our good
bishops of slaveholding times, these certainly will not shine with lustre
in the sky of history. Humbler ministerial brethren endured reproach with
us and fought our battles; then we had sometimes the sorrow of seeing them
removed from places of influence to obscure points in the service of the
church. At last we and they tacitly understood that a preacher who wrought
valiantly for prohibition jeoparded his “prospects.” So it came that some
who had led us “went back” in the holy cause, and “standing afar off,”
justified themselves, saying, “I’m as good a prohibitionist as you are,
but I’m more practical.” Desperation seizes the soul of women in reform
work when a preacher or politician uses the word “practical”; we know we
shall get his “sympathy” but never his influence or his vote. And the
diplomatic brother who has to _explain_ that he is a temperance man, may
hold clear qualifications for a citizenship in heaven, but is of no
account whatever as a citizen of the militant kingdom Of God on earth,
that must fight against “principalities and powers” if it would win the
world to the principles of Christ.
It should be clearly understood that the legitimate work of the Woman’s
Christian Temperance Union is to close the open saloon, and not, as many
mistake, to interfere with personal liberty by forcing total abstinence
upon the individual. The members of the organization in the interests of
consistency must be total abstainers; and because science pronounces
alcohol a poison and an active peril in the human body, a vigorous
educational propaganda is kept up in order that future generations may be
protected by knowledge against the dangers of alcoholic drinks. The main
point at issue is that the State has no right to license an institution
which is a corrupter of public morals and a menace to social life. The
Supreme Court of the United States has so interpreted. It is the sole duty
of the State to protect and develop citizens; to protect their lives,
their property, their morals and their rights; to develop the highest type
of citizen that education by law and schoolhouse can produce. The saloon
hazards the well-being of every citizen that is born to a State; it annuls
the work of the church and the college; it disintegrates, degrades and
destroys family life--the unit of the State; it impoverishes the home,
pauperizes the child and debases manhood; it fills almshouses, jails and
insane asylums; it lays the burden of the support of these institutions on
the State; the taxes which all the people have paid for their mutual
protection and development are unrighteously diverted to the sustenance of
the victims of the saloon; the State protects a small class of citizens
in doing injury to the interests of all other classes. For revenue, and
for revenue only, it gives a right and a power to the saloon to make an
unending army of criminals, paupers and lunatics out of the sons and
daughters which every mother has gone down into the shadow of death to
deliver into the keeping of her country.
The motherhood of the enlightened world is arousing against this treachery
of the commonwealth to her sacred trust. The State has no right to sell
her sons even unto righteousness; still less to deliver them into the
bonds of iniquity for a price. It is incredible that the mother’s revolt
did not begin long ago, for even the brute will fight for its young. But
now they have begun to understand their duty and their power, and “so long
as boys are ruined and mothers weep; so long as homes are wrecked and the
sob of unsheltered children finds the ear of God; so long as the Gospel
lets in the light for the lost, and Christ is King, there will be a
contest on the temperance question until victory. So long as this
Christian nation sanctions the destruction of its sons for revenue, and
sets on a legalized throne ‘that sum of all villainies,’ the saloon; so
long as ‘the wicked are justified for reward’ and cities are built with
blood, there will be a prohibition issue, and one day the right will
triumph.”