“_There is blood on it!_ The blood of women and children slain
at their own altars, on their own hearthstones, that you might
spread the glorious American institution of woman whipping and
baby stealing.”
“Oh,” he exclaimed, “This is too bad! I swear to you I never
killed a woman or a child.”
“Then you did not fight in Mexico, did not help to bombard Buena
Vista.”
His friends joined him and insisted that I did the Colonel great
wrong, when he looked squarely into my face, and, holding out his
hand, said:
“For the sake of the old church, for the sake of the old man, for
the sake of the old times, give me your hand.”
I laid it in his, and hurried away, unable to speak, for he was
the most eloquent man in Pennsylvania. He fell at last at the
head of his regiment, while fighting in the battle of Fair Oaks,
for the freedom he had betrayed in Mexico.
Her destructive attack on the private character of Daniel Webster, in
1850, also illustrates her reckless courage and her sagacity. She was
in Washington pending the fugitive slave bill. Webster was supporting
the measure—a damaging defection from the anti-slavery side, because of
his supposed moral as well as intellectual greatness. Mrs. S. discovered
“that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell—that his life was
full of rottenness. Then I knew why I had come to Washington.” She
put the facts into one short paragraph, and published it in her own
paper, against the advice of all her friends, and even of such stanch
anti-slavery men as Giddings, Julian, and Dr. Snodgrass. They said it
was true, and no one would dare to deny it; yet no one had dared to
make it public; the publication would ruin her and her influence. She
said: “The cause of the slave hangs on the issue in Congress, and Mr.
Webster’s influence is against him; his influence would be less if the
public knew just what he is. I will publish it and let God take care of
the consequences.” Eccentric conduct, surely! It was published, and it
did bring ruin—but on Daniel Webster, instead of Jane Grey Swisshelm. It
killed Webster’s influence with the conscientious part of the Whig party,
and probably gave the _coup de grace_ to his presidential prospects. She
was long known as “the woman who killed Webster.”
It was in 1847 that Mrs. Swisshelm took the decisive plunge by founding
the Pittsburgh _Saturday Visiter_. The sensation created by this
unprecedented appearance of politics in petticoats she characteristically
describes:
It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did
the American eagle catch sight of it than he swooned and fell off
his perch. Democratic roosters straightened out their necks and
ran screaming with terror. Whig ’coons scampered up trees and
barked furiously. The world was falling, and every one had “heard
it, saw it, and felt it.”
It appeared that on some inauspicious morning each one of
three-fourths of the secular editors from Maine to Georgia had
gone to his office suspecting nothing, when from some corner of
his exchange list there sprang upon him such a horror as he had
little thought to see. A woman had started a political paper! A
woman! Could he believe his eyes? A woman! Instantly he sprang to
his feet and clutched his pantaloons, shouted to the assistant
editor, when he, too, read and grasped frantically at his
cassimeres, called to the reporters and press-men and typos and
devils, who all rushed in, heard the news, seized their nether
garments and joined the general chorus, “My breeches! oh, my
breeches!” Here was a woman resolved to steal their pantaloons,
their trousers, and when these were gone they might cry, “Ye have
taken away my gods, and what have I more?” The imminence of the
peril called for prompt action, and with one accord they shouted,
“On to the breach, in defense of our breeches! Repel the invader
or fill the trenches with our noble dead!”
“That woman shall not have _my_ pantaloons,” cried the editor
of the big city daily; “nor my pantaloons,” said the editor of
the dignified weekly; “nor my pantaloons,” said he who issued
manifestoes but once a month; “nor mine,” “nor mine,” “nor mine,”
chimed in the small fry of the country towns.
Even the religious press could not get past the tailor shop, and
“Pantaloons” was the watchword all along the line. George D.
Prentice took up the cry, and gave the world a two-third column
leader on it, stating explicitly, “She is a man all but the
pantaloons.” I wrote to him, asking a copy of the article, but
received no answer, when I replied in rhyme to suit his case:
“Perhaps you have been busy
Horsewhipping Sal or Lizzie,
Stealing some poor man’s baby,
Selling its mother, may be.
You say—and you are witty—
That I—and ’tis a pity—
Of manhood lack but dress;
But you lack manliness,
A body clean and new,
A soul within it, too.
Nature must change her plan
Ere you can be a man.”
Mrs. Swisshelm was scourged into the woman’s rights agitation as she had
been into the anti-slavery struggle, by her own troubles, brought on her
again by her husband.
The house left to her by her parents she wished to sell. Under the laws
of Pennsylvania a wife could not alone give title, and her husband in
this case refused to sign the deed unless the purchase money were given
to him to be put into improvements on his mother’s estate, where all his
wife’s earnings had so far been put out of her reach. Upon the death of
her mother, whom she idolized and had nursed tenderly for some weeks
against the opposition of her husband, the latter filed a claim against
the mother’s estate for his wife’s wages as nurse. Of these applications
of the law she writes:
I do not know why I should have been so utterly overwhelmed by
this proposal to execute a law passed by Christian legislators
for the government of a Christian people, a law which had never
been questioned by any nation or state or church, and was in
full force all over the world. Why should the discovery of its
existence curdle my blood, stop my heart-beats, and send a flush
of burning shame from forehead to finger-tips? Why blame him for
acting in harmony with the canons of every Christian church? Was
it any fault of his that “all that she (the wife) can acquire
by her labor, service, or act during coverture belongs to the
husband?” Certainly not!
It occurred to me that all the advances made by humanity had
been through the pressure of injustice, and that the screws had
been turned on me that I might do something to right the great
wrong which forbade married women to own property. So, instead of
spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for
the heart of that great tyranny. I studied the laws under which
I lived and began a series of letters on the subject of married
women’s rights to hold property.
The result of the agitation thus begun was an amendment to the statute
in 1848, securing to married women the right to hold property. The
predictions of evils to follow from this introduction of “an apple of
discord into every family,” made by sage and serious men then, sound
marvellously like some of the warnings we hear from objectors to woman
suffrage now. But Mrs. Swisshelm refused to join the organized suffrage
movement, and had many hot debates with its organs as to method, not as
to principles; she herself, curiously enough, predicted evils to flow
from woman suffrage, similar to those her critics had predicted would
flow from granting property rights.
She opposed the Washingtonian temperance movement, scornfully rejecting
the plan of reforming drunkards by coddling them; waged warfare against
the encroachments of the Church of Rome; and on more than one occasion
successfully resisted the tyranny of trade unions. To defeat the latter
she herself learned and taught other women the art typographic, and
became independent. It is a notable fact that she was driven into this
contention, also, by her own troubles with union printers. She seems to
have been generally a conscript, not often a volunteer to fight, but the
result always was to advance the interests of oppressed classes more than
her own interests. It was to establish a precedent in behalf of other
female correspondents that she applied for and secured a seat in the
reporter’s gallery in the Capitol, Washington, being the first woman who
ever sat there. She was then (1850), as for many years before and after,
a correspondent of the New York _Tribune_.
In 1847, after twenty years of vain efforts to “live up to the lights”
of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Swisshelm and her husband parted, she taking
their only child and going to Minnesota to live with her sister.
Her Minnesota experience was almost tragic. Before reaching there she
was informed that Governor Lowrie allowed no abolition sentiments in
St. Cloud. “Then there is not room there for General Lowrie and me,”
stoutly replied the little crusader. General Lowrie was the territorial
governor under Buchanan’s administration; he was a Mississippian who
kept slaves in Minnesota, and ruled the territory with so high a hand
that he was called dictator. When Mrs. Swisshelm started the St. Cloud
_Visiter_ she invited the governor, among others, to subscribe, and
received from him a letter promising it “a support second to that of no
paper in the territory, if it will support Buchanan’s administration.”
To the confusion of her friends, Mrs. Swisshelm accepted the terms, and
frankly announced in the paper that General Lowrie owned everybody in
Minnesota, and so she had sold herself and the paper to him and would
support Buchanan’s administration—its object being, as she understood it,
the subversion of all freedom in the United States, and the placing of a
master over every northern “mud-sill” as over the Southern blacks; that
Governor Lowrie had promised to support the paper in great power and
glory for this, and she was determined to earn her money. It was simply
the unconventional, blunt truth-telling of a child applied to a lying
system of politics, and it cut like a knife.
Lowrie swore vengeance. “Let her alone, for God’s sake!” said one who
knew her career. “Let her alone, or she will kill you. She has killed
every man she ever touched. Let her alone.” He did not, and she did kill
him with the truth. To his threats she returned the promise that she
should continue to support Buchanan until she had broken him down in
everlasting infamy. Her office was sacked one night and a notice left
that if she revived the paper she would be tied to a log and cast into
the Mississippi. The issue could not be avoided. An indignation meeting
was called, and Mrs. Swisshelm said “I will attend and speak.” She made
her will, settled her business, wrote a history of the trouble to testify
if she could not, and employed a fighting man to attend the meeting by
her side, and shoot her square through the brain if there were no other
way to prevent her falling into the hands of the mob. Mrs. Sterns, a
Yankee woman, held her arm, saying, “We will go into the river together;
they can’t separate us.” So this descendant of the old Covenanter martyrs
made her first speech to the, to her, doubtless, sweet music of a howling
mob, stones and pistol shots.
The _Visiter_ was reëstablished on new type, by a stock company, and the
first issue brought down on them a libel suit from Governor Lowrie, to
compromise which Mrs. Swisshelm published a retraction, which released
the owners from $10,000 bonds. She then bought the material, suspended
the bonded _Visiter_, and issued the St. Cloud _Democrat_. Its first
issue rang the death-knell of Governor Lowrie and border ruffianism in
Minnesota. It was useless to sue her for libel, and she was too well
protected to fear force. The state election in 1859, when Governor
Lowrie was a candidate for Lieutenant-Governor, turned on the policy of
border ruffianism, press-breaking, and woman mobbing. “The large man who
instituted a mob to suppress a woman of my size [_i. e._, 100 lbs.], and
then failed, was not a suitable leader for American men,” and Lowrie was
snowed under, and not long after was taken to an insane asylum. The next
year Mrs. Swisshelm felt honored at being burned in effigy in St. Paul by
her enemies, as “the mother of the Republican party in Minnesota.” She
afterward lectured two years in the northwest.
Then came the terrible civil war. Mrs. Swisshelm engaged in hospital
work, bringing to it the consecration, indomitable energy and eccentric
gumption that she displayed in politics and business. She walked through
the red tape and professional etiquette which were killing more than
bullets were, as she had through conventional chains. She says: “It was
often so easy to save a life, where there were the means of living, that
a little courage or common sense seemed like a miraculous gift to people
whose mental powers had been turned in other directions.” In one hospital
she found gangrene, and to her call for lemons, specific for it, she was
gravely told by the surgeon that he had made a requisition a week before
for them, and could not get them. She telegraphed the _Tribune_:
Hospital gangrene has broken out in Washington, and we want
_lemons!_ LEMONS! LEMONS! No man or woman in health has a right
to a glass of lemonade till these men have all they need. Send us
lemons!
The next day lemons began to pour into Washington, and soon into every
hospital in the country. Governor Andrew sent two hundred boxes, and
at one time she had twenty ladies with ambulances distributing lemons.
Gangrene disappeared.
She felt about equal anger and contempt for masculine indifference and
the mushy inefficiency of women who flocked to Washington to nurse in
the hospitals. She sarcastically says the vast majority of the women
who succeeded in getting into hospitals were much more willing to “kiss
him for his mother” than to render the soldier any solid service; they
“were capable of any heroism save wearing a dress suitable for hospital
work. The very, very few who laid aside their hoops—those instruments of
dread and torture—generally donned bloomers and gave offense by airs of
independence.”
Mrs. S. was one of three women who followed Grant’s advance upon the
Wilderness. Her courage, endurance and good sense never showed to better
advantage than during the Petersburg battles.
Mrs. Swisshelm’s marital experience was but an episode to her true
career—the counter-irritant that brought out her character. Its
unhappiness was due to four causes: 1. Religious differences. Both sides
were fanatical, and her husband’s people felt a call to give her no
rest till they had got her “converted and saved” by their theological
scales. 2. It was a sad case of mother-in-law, on the husband’s side.
3. The brains, character and courage were all on one side. No woman had
a higher reverence for strong manly character, and she was married to
a male shrew and weakling. But above all she belonged to the last half
of the nineteenth century in her ideas of woman’s sphere, and he to the
last half of the eighteenth, in his. Aside from this, they loved each
other, and after their separation each bore high testimony to the right
intention and purity of the other.
Few women of this day appreciate how much of their freedom to work and
think they owe to such pioneers as Jane Grey Swisshelm. Few men can be
made to see how much of the great advance of American life is due to the
nobler, broader womanhood made possible by the self-immolation of such
pioneers. They made their impression on the point most needing change
and strength, if our society and government were to become pure, strong
and enduring. For it has become a law of sociology that the condition of
its women is the measure of the civilization and possible growth of any
people. Mrs. Swisshelm did more than her share to lengthen that measure
for this people, and, happily, lived to see the fruits of her work. But
it was a desolate life for a woman, for all that.