This artificial arrangement called society seems to be possible only
upon unreal standards of truth and morality; it has a system of “white
lies”—as if any lie _could_ be white and true. It is because children
haven’t learned the difference between real truth and the “play
truth” of the world that they are such a holy terror in society. We
have to squelch their questionings and hide our blushes. Children and
fools—distinguished puritans!—always tell the truth, we say, and confess
our false lives in the saying; but occasionally one who is not a fool,
but who preserves a child’s truth, comes into this masquerade of life and
insists on recognizing the real persons behind the masks. Heavens, what a
disturbance! Put him out! He’s an Eccentric.
Give one of these uncomfortable persons the clairvoyant insight into
character and motives and the clear-speaking tongue or pen; put him on
a higher moral plane than society about him travels, and two things
will likely come to pass, viz.: martyrdom for himself and an uplift for
his neighbors. Such a touch for truth, such a power to convey it, such
a purpose had Jane Grey Swisshelm, and it’s safe to say that she has
put more people to bed with uncomfortable bed-fellows in the shape of
smarting consciences than any other woman of her time.
She was a rare combination of feminine and masculine qualities. Timid
and courageous; yielding to kindness, hard as steel on questions of
principle; domestic in all her tastes, public in all her life; slight
of form and sickly by heredity, for fifty years she “endured hardship
as a good soldier.” To a fanatical religious nature and a wonderfully
analytical mind, she brought that childlikeness of conscience, and with a
rare command of language for a weapon, she became a moral blizzard in a
half century of upheaval in our political elements.
No one, I think, can read her autobiography without the conviction that
this life of controversy was foreign to her nature, that the pugnacious
pen was forced into her hand when it would have preferred to wield the
pencil of the artist, or even the distaff in a happy home. She was thus
forced aside from her natural course by an incompatible theology and an
incompatible marriage. Benevolence was her mastering trait, but her hard
theology gave no exercise to it. Perhaps better to say in her own words,
she “obeyed the higher law of kindness under protest of her Calvinistic
conscience.” Her religion taught her that everything that she liked to
do and enjoyed in the doing, was, by that token, sinful; and her husband
and his family by thwarting her in all such enjoyments, unconsciously
executing her theology against herself, set her upon expiating her
sinfulness by engaging in the most disagreeable and trying work that
she could find. Men and women before her have sought “in the world’s
broad field of battle” relief from disappointment of the heart’s wishes,
but few have put on the armor to punish themselves for not enjoying
that disappointment. It is, therefore, to the crucial tenets of her
Calvanistic faith and the exorbitant demands of her conscience that we
owe the great work Mrs. Swisshelm did in the cause of humanity. What it
cost her only God and herself know; but we are not without evidence that
she got some recompense as she went along, in achievements which must
have been grateful to the heroic side of her nature.
For in the veins of this slight girl ran the blood of a race of heroes
and martyrs—a family which fetched its line direct from signers of The
Solemn League and Covenant. “My kith and kin,” she says, “had died at
the stake, bearing testimony against popery and prelacy; had fought on
those fields where Scotchmen charged in solid columns, singing psalms.”
She hated the devil of her theology, because she considered him a sneak,
“but I never was afraid of him,” she says—a statement we can well believe
of one who at the age of six watched an alleged haunted place by night
to catch a ghost. She never knew the time when she did not believe the
cast-iron creed of her ancestors; read her Bible, understood all of Dr.
Black’s metaphysical sermons, and was converted before her third year,
and completed her theological education before she completed her twelfth
year. Truly she “had no childhood,” as she says.
Born in Pittsburgh in 1815, she married at the age of sixteen a
too-well-to-do farmer, and spent most of her life in the country. “I
spent my best years cooking cabbage,” she says. She taught school much
of the first ten years of her married life. She found her pen-power and
her work in 1844, at the age of twenty-nine. Mrs. Swisshelm was one of
the first, if not the very first, American woman to enter the field of
political journalism. At this day, when all the avenues of literature
throng with gifted women, when no considerable daily paper is without
female contributors and staff writers, and some of our best magazines
are conducted by women, it is hard to appreciate what it cost a timid,
devout woman like Mrs. Swisshelm to take that step in 1844; it was in
her mind voluntary consecration to martyrdom. This call came to her
during an illness brought on by an attack on her by her husband and his
mother, so outrageous that she had fled wildly to the woods, and been
taken up and cared for by kindly neighbors. Her afflictions came to her
as chastisements for not remembering those in bonds as bound with them;
specifically for assisting to build a church for the “Black-gagites.” She
wrote her first attack in an anti-slavery cause, propped up in bed, and
it was in verse. She states the situation:
No woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold
up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be
brought upon me. But what matter? I had no children to disgrace,
and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one
could be spared better than I. No Western Pennsylvania woman
had ever broken out of woman’s sphere. All lived in the very
center of that sacred inclosure, making fires by which husbands,
brothers and sons sat reading the news; each one knowing that she
had a soul, because the preacher who made his bread and butter
by saving it had been careful to inform her of its existence as
preliminary to her knowledge of the indispensable nature of his
services.
Her articles created a sensation, and no wonder that they did. For,
although she had but little literary culture, she had simplicity and
intensity. Her style was modeled on the English of the Bible (which
she says was for years the only book that she allowed herself to read,
in her dread of becoming wiser than her plodding husband), and on this
sturdy stem she grafted the simple, homely, direct illustrations of the
rural folk around her. Thus, it arrested the attention of learned and
unlettered alike. But there was more than phraseology in her power. She
was as intensely in earnest as if she were herself in bonds—that is what
“remembering them as bound with them” means. She was one of a few who
_meant it_; one of the kind of “fools” that “hear His word and _do_ it.”
McDuffee, when he heard that Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang the first
seceder, said: “Yes, and he’s just dashed fool enough to do it.” She
felt that two races, the white and the black, were to be rescued from
the curse of slavery; and for such a cause it was with her as “Hosea
Bigelow” says, “P’izen-mad, pig-headed fightin’.” She had been reared an
abolitionist, and that which was bred in the bone had been converted into
a clear, blazing passion by a year’s residence in Kentucky (1832), where
she witnessed scenes, the narration of which make that awful chapter in
her biography entitled “Habitations of Horrible Cruelty.” She says:
For years there had run through my head the words: “Open thy
mouth for the dumb, plead the cause of the poor and needy.” From
first to last my articles were as direct and personal as Nathan’s
reproof to David. Every man who went to the war (_i. e._, against
Mexico), or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the
whole list of crimes of which slavery was a synonym. Each one
seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul made bare and his
idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule, odium,
solemn denunciation, old truths from the Bible and history, and
the opinions of good men. I had a reckless abandon, for had I not
thrown myself into the breach to die there, and would I not sell
my life at its full value?
I think this keen sense for the weak places in men’s character and
reasoning, and her reckless assaults thereon were what made her so
formidable. She always struck for the heart, and rarely missed her aim.
“Exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized
forte,” she says. With what disregard of everything she rode after the
oriflamme of humanity let her tell:
Hon. Gabriel Adams had taken me by the hand at father’s funeral,
led me to a stranger and introduced me as: “The child I told you
of, but eight years old, her father’s nurse and comforter.” He
had smoothed my hair and told me not to cry; God would bless me
for being a good child. He was a member of the session when I
joined the church; his voice in prayer had smoothed mother’s hard
journey through the dark valley; and now, as mayor of the city he
had ordered it illuminated in honor of the battle of Buena Vista,
and this, too, on Saturday evening, when the unholy glorification
extended into the Sabbath. Measured by the standard of his
profession as an elder in the church whose highest judicatory
had pronounced slavery and Christianity incompatible, no one was
more vulnerable than he, and of none was I so unsparing, yet as I
wrote, the letter was blistered with tears; but his oft repeated
comment was: “Jane is right,” and he went out of his way to take
my hand and say: “You were right.”
Samuel Black, a son of my pastor, dropped his place as leader
of the Pittsburgh bar and rushed to the war. My comments were
thought severe, even for me; yet the first intimation I had
that I had not been cast aside as a monster, came from his
sister, who sent me a message that her father, her husband
and herself, approved my criticism. Samuel returned with a
colonel’s commission, and one day I was about to pass him without
recognition, where he stood on the pavement talking to two other
lawyers, when he stepped before me and held out his hand. I drew
back, and he said:
“Is it possible you will not take my hand?”