numbers and receipts of the association. The first impulse of the first
partnership of means and work, which began the active movement,
resulting in the organization of a national society, was an impulse of
protection for Indians and their lands from the robberies and horrors of
enforced removals, and it voiced itself in pleas for treaty-keeping and
the honest observance of all compacts with the Indians until their real
consent to changes should be justly won. The impulse was one of common
humanity, and recognized the manhood and womanhood of Indians, and their
claims in common with all men because human beings. The facts gained
from the first investigations, given in the first leaflets, and sent
forth into many States, laid hold upon the minds of free white men and
women by revealing to their consciences the responsibility of silence
while our native Indians were still the victims of wholesale robbery by
military ejectment from their own territory, often to be sent to
unwholesome, non-supporting lands, into utter helplessness, or out of
perishing need into wars for mere subsistence. The facts popularly made
known that Indians were practically under the supreme control of the
United States agent over them; that they could not sue or be sued,[213]
make contracts, sell their lumber, or work their mines; that they had no
law; that it was legally not a crime to kill an Indian; that Indian
women and girls could be and often were appropriated to become mothers
of agricultural slaves to till their master’s soil,—all these facts,
startling to republican minds, thrilling to humane hearts, and
thundering out appeals to Christian consciences, led to this impulse of
protection. But soon the question of “How most wisely to protect” led to
still more thoughtful study of the situation, and to the rapidly grown
conviction that only law, education, and citizenship could be the real
cure of such oppressions. This conviction was embodied in petitions for
law, land in severalty, education, and citizenship, while yet the
popular idea was that Indians could not be civilized and were not worth
civilizing, and while even some so-called Christian ministers still
counseled treating them as Israel of old felt commanded to treat the
Canaanites. That the quiet but far-reaching work of the association, as
has often been said by those publicly and conspicuously devoted to
Indian welfare, has probably done more than the work of any other one
organization for Indian liberation and elevation, no one familiar with
its quality and quantity can well doubt. Its members recall the many
testimonies to this effect, and, with grateful pride, that the Honorable
H. L. Dawes, Chairman of the Indian Committee of the United States
Senate, author of the long-needed Severalty Bill which became law in
March, 1887, and ever the faithful friend of the women’s work, stated in
a public speech that the “new Indian policy,” to-day everywhere
approved, was “born of and nursed by the women of this association.”
And, indeed, all the features of the new policy are found in the early
petitions[214] and literature of the society. That the Indian Rights
Association, the evening that it was organized, just as the women’s
association, was ready to present its fourth annual petition,
crystallized its plans of work, after reading the constitution of the
women’s society, and adopted its lines and methods of work; that the
Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, and that the new Commissioner of
Indian Affairs and the present administration have but done and are
doing, what the association’s literature and petitions have for years
advocated is a sufficient testimony to the principles and aims of the
association. That its leaders have been divinely led many humbly and
gratefully feel, for, as said the venerable Bishop Whipple, “The women
have builded better than they knew;” and as said Hannah Whitall Smith,
now of London, England, well known on two continents as an uplifting
writer and speaker on religious subjects, one of the early treasurers
and still a patron of the association, “This Indian work is but the
Christian motherhood of the nation obeying its instincts toward our
native heathen.” It would require a portly volume to mention the names
and deeds of the earnest and eminent women who have had share in this
work for the aborigines of our country. Among its honorary officers and
members, as seen in its annual reports and those of its auxiliaries, are
names distinguished in the world of letters and in political and social
circles, as well as those known in philanthropic and Christian work,
while many in its corps of active officers and in its executive board
are widely known and honored. But the temptation to catalogue these in
this chapter, must manifestly be resisted or restricted to incumbents of
the leading offices and to the chairmen of departments. Among those most
active in State work, Mrs. Sara Thomson Kinney, president of the
Connecticut auxiliary, and now first vice-president of the national
association, has given very largely of time, thought, and labor, has
compactly organized her State with branches in its leading towns, has
inaugurated in her association a variety of important work and brought
it to its present standard of excellence. Under Miss Fletcher’s
inspiration she introduced Indian Home Building by loan funds and is
chairman of that department in the national association, forty or fifty
Indian homes having, under her management, been built or remodeled in
civilized fashion, and among ten or fifteen tribes. Many smaller loans
she has also made, enabling individual Indians to adopt civilized and
self-supporting industries. Mrs. Elizabeth Elliot Bullard, president of
the Massachusetts auxiliary, and chairman of the new national Committee
on Special Education of bright individual Indians brought to her
association influence and new friends, and has, with the aid of a corps
of eminent women, achieved large results, having in her society more
branches than are to be found in any other State, her association having
been also the largest and most enthusiastic supporter of the Missionary
Department. In New York City an admirable board of officers, led by the
accomplished Mrs. Theodore Irving and Mrs. Edward Elliott, are
supporting a new station of the Ramona Missions, and are meeting with
other new successes, as is the Brooklyn association, which, under the
leadership of Mrs. Lyman Abbott, assisted by the former president of
that society, Mrs. Jerome Plummer, inaugurated the Kiowa Mission and is
preparing to open a station among the Piegans of Montana. Miss Sarah M.
Taylor, of Philadelphia, a devoted and far-seeing worker and generous
giver, is now chairman of the Missionary Department which, in six years,
has planted directly or indirectly, missions in twenty different tribes,
building four missionary cottages and four chapels in these,
transferring them, one after another, when well established, to the care
of the permanent denominational societies. Miss Kate Foote, president of
the auxiliary at the national capital, whose bright letters from that
city and whose charming magazine articles are so widely enjoyed, is
chairman of the Department of Indian Legislation, her racy reports of
laws secured, and notices of the more numerous ones needed, having both
a popular and legislative value, while her prescient watchfulness is
constantly achieving other and important help for Indians. The
supplemental work for Indian civilization at Crow Creek Agency, Dakota,
for furnishing on the reservation, to returned Indian students,
civilized employments and continued religious nurture, thus making them
self-supporting and an aid to their entire tribes, led to the election
of Miss Grace Howard, of New York, who originated, successfully
inaugurated, and continues it, as chairman of the association’s
department of Indian Civilization Work. The Young People’s Department
has for chairman Miss Marie E. Ives, of New Haven, whose first effort so
inspired a quartet of young girls in New York City that their first
entertainment placed $327 in the treasury for the association’s new
Seminole Mission, and, naturally, awakened large hope for the success of
this important division of work. The chairman of the committee on Indian
Libraries, Miss Frances C. Sparhawk, of Massachusetts, originated and is
vigorously serving her own department, while the latest committee, that
on hospital work, is led by Miss Laura E. Tileston, of Virginia, though
the first hospital, for which funds are already in hand, will soon be
built by the National Missionary Committee for the Omahas. The devotion
of our corresponding secretary, Miss Helen R. Foote; of our late
recording secretary, Mrs. Rachel N. Taylor; the generous service of our
recent treasurer, Mrs. Harriet L. Wilbur, and of the present one, Miss
Anna Bennett, and the labors of other workers in different sections of
the country come up in remembrance, and it would be a pleasure to record
the names of all these did space permit. Many women have wrought well
during and since the inauguration of the new Indian policy, by the
influence of which already more than one third of the forty-eight
thousand Indian pupils are in the various government and other schools,
and under which the people of more than twenty tribes are receiving
lands in severalty. By the success of this policy, developed with the
aid of all officials, individuals, and organizations friendly to them,
the quarter of a million Indians of our country are, by taking
individual farms or by adopting civilized avocations, at last really
passing out of barbarism into civilization, and from the oppressions,
disabilities, and helplessness of the reservation system into the
freedom, protection, and development of United States citizenship. The
work of the association for these ends has been pressed with all the
vigor which its numbers and means permitted, and it has given its whole
thought to the accomplishment of its purposes. Not contemplating a
permanent existence, it has given small though adequate attention to
mere form. One of its members, a poet, Indian educator, an able writer
on Indian topics, and now a government superintendent of Indian schools,
Miss Elaine Goodale, says: “This association stretches out sympathetic
hands and loses itself in all other good work for the Indians so that
the measure of its influence may not be expressed in any rows of figures
however significant, or set down in any report however complete. The
striking and hopeful feature, after all, of this Women’s National Indian
Association is, as its president constantly reminds us, that it is not
intended as a permanent organization. The women have undertaken to meet
a particular crisis, to bridge a dangerous gap. As fast as the regular
missionary societies are ready to accept its independent missions, these
are placed entirely in their hands. As soon as our rich and powerful
Government comprehends and faithfully discharges its duty to the Indians
the women will cease to urge their needs and their rights, and the
association will cease to exist. Its work will have been done. Its
demand is not for its own honor or extension but that the object for
which alone it lives may speedily be accomplished.”
Until this object is gained, The Women’s National Indian Association
will not sound retreat nor its great company of consecrated workers
disband. It is possible that its best and longest record may be made in
the future and its work be finished by wholly new laborers. God grant
that this may be so if the work, political, educational, industrial, and
religious, still so imperatively demanded by justice for our native
Indian Americans, cannot otherwise be done.
XVI.
WORK OF ANTI-SLAVERY WOMEN.
BY
LILLIE B. CHACE WYMAN.
Prudence Crandall, a Quaker school teacher in Canterbury, Conn., was the
woman whose name we encounter in the earliest records of anti-slavery
labor in this country. She took counsel with Mr. Garrison in 1833, and
opened a school for colored pupils, which she bravely maintained for
over a year, although she was subjected therefore to a great amount of
persecution. She was arrested, and even thrown temporarily into jail,
and her house and its inmates were made the mark for every species of
insult and outrage which her neighbors dared to perpetrate. She married
the Rev. Calvin Philleo, and still survives him, living in Kansas. The
Legislature of Connecticut, a few years ago, granted her a pension in
atonement for the wrongs she formerly suffered in that State.
Hatred of slavery was the motive which first called women in this
country into public life. Sarah and Angelina Grimké were two sisters
belonging to a prominent slaveholding family in South Carolina. As a
child, Sarah was shocked by the cruelties practised upon the slaves
around her, but her first deep interest in early life was in religious
questions. The family were Episcopalians, and she remained for many
years of the same faith. She made a visit to the North, came under
Quaker influences, and finally joined the Society of Friends, and this
led to her going to live in Philadelphia, in 1821. Angelina, who was
twelve years younger than Sarah, remained in Charleston. She manifested,
like Sarah, a tendency to extreme asceticism in dress and manner, and
she became a Presbyterian. She detested the evils of slavery, but she
does not seem to have thought slaveholding sinful in itself, till after
she had visited Philadelphia in 1828, when she was twenty-three years
old. After that, she grew to feel more and more keenly that she was
living amid a great wrong, and she suffered intensely at the
participation in it of her family. She entreated and argued, begged her
brother to be merciful to his slaves, besought her mother and sisters to
feel as she did. In May, 1829, she wrote in her diary, “May it not be
laid down as an axiom, that that system must be radically wrong, which
can only be supported by transgressing the laws of God.” A little later,
she determined to leave her home, because of her inability to do any
good there in regard to the slaves, and she writes, “I cannot but be
pained at the thought of leaving mother.... I do not think, dear sister,
I will ever see her again until she is willing to give up slavery.” In
the autumn of 1829 she left Charleston and her mother, whom she never
saw again.
She went to Philadelphia and joined the Society of Friends. After some
years of comparatively quiet life, Angelina wrote in 1835 a sympathetic
letter to Wm. Lloyd Garrison, which he published in _The Liberator_. She
wrote next “An Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” a pamphlet
which “produced,” says Mrs. Birney, “the most profound sensation
wherever it was read.” Not long afterward “the city authorities of
Charleston learned,” writes Mr. Theodore D. Weld, “that Miss Grimké was
intending to visit her mother and sisters, and pass the winter with
them. Thereupon the mayor called upon Mrs. Grimké and desired her to
inform her daughter that the police had been instructed to prevent her
landing while the steamer remained in port, and to see to it that she
should not communicate, by letter or otherwise, with any persons in the
city; and further, that if she should elude their vigilance and go on
shore, she would be arrested and imprisoned until the return of the
vessel.” Threats of personal violence were also made, should she come.
A year later Sarah published “An Epistle to the Clergy of the Southern
States,” and the sisters began to address meetings of women on the
subject of slavery. They proposed at first to hold parlor meetings, but
found it necessary at once to engage the session room of a Baptist
Church in New York. The gathering there was “the first assembly of
women, not Quakers, in a public place in America, addressed by American
women.” Two clergymen performed the opening ceremonies, offered prayer
and made an address of welcome, and then left, so that none but women
should hear women speak. Similar assemblies were held afterward, and in
a letter dated “second month, 4th, 1837,” Angelina writes, that one man
had got into the last meeting, and people thought he must be a Southern
spy. She says, “somehow, I did not feel his presence embarrassing at
all, and went on just as though he had not been there.”
After this, the sisters went to New England to pursue their labors. In
Dorchester two or three men “slyly slid” into the back seats of the hall
and listened to the speakers, and one of them “afterward took great
pains to prove that it was unscriptural for a woman to speak in public.”
From this time a few men were generally present at the gatherings, and
on the 21st of July, 1837, Angelina wrote, “In the evening of the same
day addressed our first _mixed_ audience. Over one thousand present.”
“The opposers of abolitionism, and especially the clergy, began to be
alarmed,” says Mrs. Birney. The sisters were denounced, halls were
refused them, the Society of Friends condemned their course, and
violence was threatened; but Sarah writes, “They think to frighten us
from the field of duty; but they do not move us.” Even some of the
Abolitionists doubted the propriety of their labors, and the question of
Womans’ Rights was fairly launched on the tide of the anti-slavery
movement.
The General Association of Congregational Ministers of Massachusetts
passed a resolution censuring the sisters, and issued a pastoral letter,
containing “a tirade against female preachers.”
Sarah next published letters on “The Province of Woman.”
In February, 1838, Angelina addressed a committee of the Massachusetts
Legislature on the subject of slavery. She wrote of this memorable
occasion, “My heart never quailed before, but it almost died within me
at that hour.” She was given two hearings, and she says “We abolition
women are turning the world upside down, for during the whole meeting
there was sister seated up in the speaker’s chair of State.”
Angelina was the more eloquent of the two sisters, and although Sarah
spoke, she preferred to serve the cause by writing.
In May, 1838, Angelina married Theodore D. Weld, who was an earnest and
eloquent abolition orator. After this marriage she spoke once again, and
then was obliged to relinquish all public work on account of her health,
while Mr. Weld’s loss of voice, prevented him from continuing his
lecturing service. They never faltered, however, or relaxed in their
principles. They were all three engaged in schoolwork and received
colored pupils as readily as white ones. When the war came, and slavery
was abolished, some peculiar family trials fell to the lot of the Grimké
sisters, and old wounds were reopened. They bore these renewed
sufferings with fortitude, and with patient and loving spirits. They
succored their impoverished kindred, who had long been alienated from
them, and they fulfilled some difficult and delicate duties which grew
out of the old ties which their Southern relatives had discarded.
Lucretia Mott was a Quakeress, and a very beautiful woman. She exercised
a singular power over people with whom she came in contact, influencing
and inspiring them to all high and holy purposes. She became an
Abolitionist in early life, and was sent as a delegate to the World’s
Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, in 1840.[215] Like the other
women who were delegates, she was refused admission to the body, and
attended its sessions only as an outsider.
She was an eloquent and persuasive speaker in anti-slavery and religious
meetings. She, with other Philadelphia women, used to attend the courts
whenever a fugitive slave case was tried, in the hope that the silent
protest of their presence, would have some effect on judges and juries,
who were inclined to be subservient to the slave power. On one occasion,
she and her companions sat all night in the court-room, the commissioner
deferring his sentence, thinking that the women would be tired out, and
would leave and, finally, unable to get rid of them, he availed himself
of a legal quibble, and ordered the fugitive to be set free. Years
later, when the Civil War came, the lawyer who acted in this affair on
behalf of the slaveholder, and who had been an ardent supporter of the
interests of slavery, wheeled around, and gave in his allegiance to the
Union party. Some one asked him how he dared thus oppose all his former
friends, and he replied that the man who had endured to sit all night
before Lucretia Mott and knew what she was thinking of him all the time,
would fear nothing else on earth.
She was herself brave, and once, when an old colored woman was refused a
seat in a horse-car, and forced to ride on the front platform, exposed
to a pelting winter storm, she went out and stood by her side, and rode
for nearly an hour, in all the bitter weather.
She was very charming, and she retained her great personal beauty to the
last, dying finally in 1880, at the age of eighty-seven.
Abby Kelley was a New England girl, a Quaker, and a school-teacher. She
began her anti-slavery work by giving half of all she earned to the
cause. Afterward she decided that it was her duty to lecture and talk to
people about slavery. She received no salary from the anti-slavery
societies for her labor, but went from town to town, staying with
friends when it was possible, going by private conveyance if she could,
getting up meetings, and everywhere, in season and out, pleading for the
slave. When her clothes were worn out, she went to a sister’s and did
housework, till she had earned enough money to get what she needed, and
then she started again on her mission. She encountered great opposition
from press and pulpit. Every epithet was hurled at her which was most
calculated to wound the spirit of a sensitive woman. Nothing overcame
her. The cry of the slave mother sounded in her ears and drowned the
clamor about herself. She pursued her way, fighting, as it were, for
every inch of the ground she traversed.
It is no exaggeration to say that what she did and suffered, has made
the path easier for every woman, since her day, who has sought to work
in any public manner in America. The Grimké sisters retired early from
the field, and Abby Kelley bore the brunt of a long and painful contest
with prejudice and opposition, which were directed not only against the
anti-slavery cause, but against her personally, for doing what women had
not till then done.
Abby Kelley married Stephen S. Foster, an Abolitionist, so resolute,
unflinching and uncompromising as to be a fit mate for her. They
established a home, but both of them often went from it on anti-slavery
lecturing trips, until she had entirely worn out her voice, and was
obliged to refrain from using it in public. Once in a while, however, in
later life, she addressed some convention for a few minutes at a time,
when the impulse to speak in behalf of something she thought right,
proved too strong to be resisted. A hoarse whisper was all that remained
to her from the young voice, with which she had once challenged the
scorn of men and the timid contempt of women, but her listeners almost
hushed their hearts to hear these faint breathings, remembering
reverently all the sacrifice and pain she had endured.
Mrs. Foster lived in all respects a conscientious life. She was a
careful housekeeper and a devoted wife and mother. She and her husband
were ardent Woman Suffragists and they protested against the payment of
taxes to a government which allowed her no representation. Their home
was in Worcester, Mass., and they both lived to see slavery abolished.
She survived him for several years, without abating her interest in the
general principles to which their lives had been consecrated.
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.