USA > Massachusetts > Suffolk County > Boston > Romantic days in old Boston : the story of the city and of its people during the nineteenth century > Part 8
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" The many attentions I received from my friends are too numerous to mention; they flocked around me, unwearied in their exertions, and rendered me every needful assistance. How comforting and consoling the thought, that there were hearts who beat in unison with my own, and whose most fervent aspirations were ascending to the mercy-seat for a hasty and speedy deliverance from the dangers which looked so threatening.
" We are now at my Father's house, well and happy, where I think we shall remain through the winter, as I find it is impossible for us to keep house without endangering others' prop- erty, and frequently having our own domestic happiness broken in upon by a lawless mob. Husband thinks he likes the retirement of the country, and that he will be able to accom- plish much more in the way of editorial than if he was in the city, where so many duties necessarily devolve upon him. r 1
" My dear husband was deeply affected on perusing your consoling letter, especially that part of it which relates to himself. He desires
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me to convey to you his warm and heartfelt emotions of gratitude, and the same to the Christian heroines of the Female Anti-Slavery Society, for all your sympathies, kindnesses, and prayers, so freely elicited in our behalf. What he has been called to suffer he considers not worthy to be mentioned except joyfully, for it is a high honor and not a reproach to be dragged through the streets by a lawless mob, for his testimony against the great abomination of this wicked land. I desire to bless God
that his faith was superior to the trial which he was called to endure- that in the hour of peril he was undaunted and cheerful; and tho' I still tremble for his safety, yet, inexpressibly dear as he is to me, I had rather see him sacrifice his life in this blessed cause than swerve from a single right principle. He expects Boston next week, and will avail himself of the opportunity to see you. He desires to be remembered, with all respect and esteem, to your sisters and to Mr. and Mrs. Chapman, for all of whom he entertains an exalted opinion.
" Remember me very kindly to your sisters and the Miss Ammidons, to whom I am greatly indebted for the many favors I received the day I was taking my departure.
" I am, very affectionately yours,
" HELEN E. GARRISON."
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Surely a very beautiful and noble letter! It reminds me tardily that I have not told at all of Garrison's love-making or of the charming girl who was glad to share his uncertain income and troublous career. They had first met in Providence, just before Garrison set sail for England, and their attraction had from the beginning been mutual, though no words of love were exchanged until January, 1834, when they began a correspondence which soon cul- minated in an engagement. That spring, on his way to Philadelphia, the youth for the first time visited the maiden as an accepted suitor and was immensely pleased to observe that she had not " dressed up " for him! "Not one young lady out of ten thousand," he writes, - with remarkable acumen, consider- ing his life-study had been Slavery and not Woman -" but in a first interview with her lover would have endeavored falsely to heighten her charms and allure by outward attractions." Helen Benson, then as ever, though, was inclined, (as was her father before her), to Quaker garb and Quaker ideals. At the wedding which followed, September 4, 1834, there was neither cake nor wine, both bride and groom feeling the importance of their example to the colored population, whose tendency to show and parade they understood and deplored. After a journey to Boston by carriage, the
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young couple began housekeeping at " Free- dom's Cottage," on Bower Street, near Walnut Street, Roxbury, where they continued to live for some time. On the first anniversary of his marriage, Garrison thus wrote of his wife to her brother George,1 who was also an ardent abolitionist, "I did not marry her expecting that she would assume a prominent station in the anti-slavery cause, but for domestic quietude and happiness. So completely absorbed am I in that cause that it was undoubtedly wise for me to select as a partner one who, while her benevolent feelings were in unison with mine, was less immediately and entirely connected with it. I knew that she was naturally diffident and distrustful of her own ability to do all that her heart might prompt. She is one of those who prefer to toil unseen, to give by stealth - and to sacrifice in seclusion. By her unwearied attention to my wants, her sympathetic regards, her perfect equanimity of mind, and her sweet and endearing manners, she is no trifling support to abolitionism, inasmuch as she lightens my labors and enables me to find exquisite delight in the family circle, as an offset to public adversity."
One of the most striking things in connection with the anti-slavery struggle was the coterie
1 There are five large volumes of MS. letters by Garrison and twenty-one volumes of letters to him in the archives of the Boston Public Library, the gift to that institution of Garrison's children.
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of beautiful and gifted women who gave them- selves whole-heartedly to the cause. In Boston alone there were enough of these to make an imposing array, and when, to reinforce their ranks, there came from Philadelphia such women as Angelina and Sarah Grimké and from England such as Harriet Martineau and Fanny Kemble 1 the movement was sure to make headway apace. Many of the women workers in the anti-slavery cause grew to know intimately other women who had been slaves and so were moved by personal interest as well as by principle to strike down the accursed thing. Mrs. Cheney tells of her warm sympathy for Harriet Jacobs, who was born a slave in North Carolina and who suffered in her own person all the terrible evils to which beautiful young girls who were house servants were habitually exposed. Through incredible suffer- ing she escaped from slavery, being for almost seven years hidden away in a small loft where she could neither stand erect nor move with any freedom. In Linda, the Autobiography of a Slave Woman, a very rare book, she has herself told the history of her life. For many years this woman was in the service of N. P. Willis's family and subsequently she kept a
1 " I am sick and weary of this cruel and ignorant folly," wrote Fanny Kemble of slavery, which she had studied while living in 1838-9 on a Georgia rice plantation.
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boarding-house at Cambridge for Harvard stu- dents. Harriet Tubman, whose story has been told by Sarah H. Bradford, and Ellen Craft, a light mulatto woman, who escaped disguised as a young Southern planter, bringing her husband with her in the character of her body servant, likewise moved by their personal narrations the hearts and consciences of all who heard them, especially those " devout women not a few " who were already alive to the terrible wickedness of slavery.
Angelina Grimké, daughter of a Southern slave-owner, soon had an appalling example of that wickedness brought to her very door, - and she met the situation like the heroic creature that she was. Seeing in an anti-slavery paper (after the war) allusions to the academic honors being won at Lincoln University by two young colored men of her family name, she opened a correspondence with the youths, thinking they might be ex-slaves of one of her brothers. She found that they were the sons as well as former slaves of her favorite brother, who had recently died ! Immediately she journeyed to see them at their school, acknowledged to their professors the relationship of the young men and their claim upon her, invited them to visit her at her home in Hyde Park (she had by this time married Theodore Weld, an abolitionist like herself) and there introduced
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them to her friends, quite naturally, as her nephews. They were good-looking, intelligent, gentlemanly young men, and in their life since (one is now a Presbyterian minister in Washing- ton, the other a successful lawyer in Boston) they have nobly realized that " devotion to the eternal principles of justice and humanity and religion " which she solemnly enjoined on them as their duty.
No one felt the horror of the whole slave situation more than Harriet Martineau. She was the heroine of the adjourned meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society which came on November 19 at the home of Francis Jackson, and the modest little speech in which she then declared her entire sympathy with the cause of the Abolitionists brought down upon her head a tide of denunciation only less violent than that to which George Thompson himself had been subjected. Social ostracism was henceforth her lot in Boston, and from her experience at the hands of the city's élite sprang her book The Martyr Age of America, which did much to bind the hearts of the Abolitionists in England to the friends of the cause on this side of the water.
Another woman who by her pen and voice rendered very valuable service to the cause at this crisis and later was Mrs. Maria Weston Chapman, wife of Henry G. Chapman, a
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Boston merchant. Mrs. Chapman was a lady of Mayflower lineage, of European culture, of very unusual beauty and of great social charm. When she espoused the unpopular cause of the negro and set herself to work early and late at whatever task would help Garrison, Boston society was frankly disgusted. Lowell has described Mrs. Chapman as
" A noble woman, brave and apt, Cumæan sibyl not more rapt, Who might, with those fair tresses shorn, The Maid of Orleans' casque have worn; Herself the Joan of our Arc For every shaft a shining mark."
The picture of her that I like best is, however, that given by Miss Martineau in the following paragraph:
" When I was putting on my shawl upstairs, Mrs. Chapman came to me, bonnet in hand, to say, ' You know we are threatened with a mob again to-day; but I do not myself much appre- hend it. It must not surprise us; but my hopes are stronger than my fears.' I hear now, as I write, the clear silvery tones of her who was to be the friend of the rest of my life. I still see the exquisite beauty which took me by surprise that day, - the slender, graceful form; the golden hair which might have covered her to her feet; the brilliant complexion, noble profile, and deep blue eyes; the aspect, meant
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by nature to be soft and winning only, but that day (as ever since) so vivified by courage, and so strengthened by upright conviction, as to appear the very embodiment of heroism. 'My hopes,' said she, as she threw up her golden hair under her bonnet, 'are stronger than my fears.' "
Mrs. Chapman's husband was the cousin of Ann Terry Greene, the lady who was soon to become Mrs. Wendell Phillips. And this frail girl it was who won to the side of the Aboli- tionists its most valuable exponent. It was at the Chapmans' fireside, too, whither Phillips had gone to call on Miss Greene - that the most gifted spokesman of the slave met for the first time him who had long been his chief champion - another illustration of the old truth that it is love which makes the world go round.
For many years Mrs. Chapman was the prime mover in the annual anti-slavery fairs by means of which funds to carry on the work of the Society were raised. Through her wide circle of acquaintance she was able to secure for the tables many contributions from Europe - odd and beautiful things which could then be purchased at no Boston shop, and which, therefore, found a very ready sale. Garrison sent his wife, under date of December 30, 1835, the following description of one of these func-
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tions: " To-day has been the day for the Ladies' Fair - but not so bright and fair out of doors as within doors. The Fair was held at the house of Mr. Chapman's father in Chauncey Place, in two large rooms. Perhaps there were not quite so many things prepared as last year but the assortment was nevertheless various. There were several tables, as usual, which were under the superintendence of the Misses Weston, The Misses Ammidon, Miss Paul, Miss Chapman, Mrs. Sargent (who by the way spoke in the kindest manner of you), and one or two other persons whom I did not know. I bought a few things, and had one or two presents for Mrs. Garrison. . Our friend Sewall's 'intended,' Miss Winslow, is now in the city and was at the Fair today with two sparkling eyes and a pleasant countenance. How soon the marriage knot is to be tied, I cannot find out. Don't you think they are
unwise not to hasten matters? This eve- ning I took tea at Mr. Loring's. ... His amiable wife was at the Fair selling and buying and giving away with her characteristic assiduity and liberality. Both of them were very kind in their inquiries after my wife. This forenoon bro. May and myself, by express invitation, visited Miss Martineau at Mr. Gannett's house. The interview was very agreeable and satis- factory to me. She is a fine woman." Miss
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Martineau, on the other hand, pronounced Garrison "the most bewitching person " she had met in the United States!
To Miss Martineau's trenchant pen we are indebted for a picturesque description (in the Martyr Age of America) of an important State House hearing that occurred about this time (on March 4, 1836) on the question whether citizens of non-slaveholding States might or might not write and speak against slavery. "While the committee " she writes, " were, with ostentatious negligence, keeping the Abolitionists waiting, they, to whom this business was a prelude to life or death, were earnestly consulting in groups. At the further end of the chamber Garrison and another; somewhat nearer, Dr. Follen looking German all over, and a deeper earnestness than usual overspreading his serene and meditative coun- tenance. In consultation with him was Ellis Gray Loring, only too frail in form, but with a face radiant with inward light. There were May and Goodell and Sewall and several more, and many an anxious wife, sister or friend looking down from the gallery.
" During the suspense the door opened and Dr. Channing entered, - one of the last people who could, on that wintry afternoon, have been expected. He stood a few moments, muffled in his cloak and shawl-handkerchief,
MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN.
WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON AND WENDELL PHILLIPS From a photograph.
BOSTON'S FIRST HOLY CROSS CATHEDRAL, CHANNING'S CHURCH IN THE BACK- GROUND.
WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING.
Page 108.
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and then walked the whole length of the room and was immediately seen shaking hands with Garrison. A murmur ran through the gallery and a smile went round the chamber. Mrs. Chapman whispered to her next neighbor, ' Righteousness and peace have kissed each other! ' Garrison, the dauntless Garrison, turned pale as ashes and sank down on a seat. Dr. Channing had censured the Abolitionists in his pamphlet on Slavery; Garrison had, in the Liberator, rejected the censure; and here they were shaking hands in the Senate chamber. Dr. Channing sat behind the speakers, handing them notes, and most obviously affording them his countenance, so as to be from that day considered by the world as an accession to their principles, though not to their organized body."
From this time on, events in anti-slavery circles moved swiftly. In February, 1837, a woman for the first time spoke on the subject at a State House hearing, the lady thus dis- tinguished being the gifted Angelina Grimké, who laid down the important and far-reaching axiom that " Whatever is morally right for a man to do is morally right for a woman to do." She added that she recognized no rights but human rights and that, in her opinion, the time had gone by for woman to be " a second hand agent in regenerating the world!" Inas-
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much as many of the most valued workers for the anti-slavery cause had long been women it was considered by the Abolitionists very fitting that this woman, who knew slavery from intimate childhood association, and whose pow- ers as a speaker were soon famed throughout the country, should appear at a Boston hearing. But the other side did not enjoy the innovation. Lydia Maria Child has thus described the scene:
" The house was full to overflowing. For a moment her sense of the responsibility resting on her seemed almost to overwhelm her. She trembled and grew pale. But this passed quickly and she went on to speak gloriously, showing, in utter forgetfulness of herself, her own earnest faith in every word she uttered, ' Whatever comes from the heart goes to the heart.' I believe she made a very powerful impression on the audience. Boston, like other cities is very far behind the country towns on this subject; so much so that it is getting to be Boston vs. Massachusetts, as the lawyers say. The Boston members of the legislature tried hard to prevent her having a hearing on the second day. Among other things, they said such a crowd was attracted by curiosity, that the galleries were in danger of breaking down, though in fact they are constructed with remarkable strength. A member from Salem,
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perceiving their drift, wittily proposed 'that a committee be appointed to examine the foundations of the State House of Massa- chusetts to see whether it will bear another lecture from Miss Grimké.'"
One interesting result of the increasing ac- tivity of women in Massachusetts was the famous Pastoral Letter of the " General Associa- tion of Massachusetts to the Churches Under Its Care," an appeal which, after deploring the slavery agitation generally, invited atten- tion particularly "to the dangers which at present (1837) seem to threaten the female character with widespread and permanent in- jury." The author of this " bull," issued while the Massachusetts Orthodox churches were in session at Brookfield, was Rev. Dr. Nehemiah Adams, of Boston, who earned for himself, by his truckling to the slave power, the sobriquet of " Southside Adams." This gentleman shows himself in his "Letter " immensely solicitous for the beautiful bloom of womanhood. " If the vine whose strength and beauty is to lean upon the trellis-work and half conceal its clusters thinks to assume the independence and the overshadowing nature of the elm, it will not only cease to bear fruit," he declares, " but will fall in shame and dishonor to the dust. We cannot, therefore, but regret the mistaken conduct of those who encourage
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females to bear an obtrusive and ostentatious part in measures of reform and countenance any of that sex who so far forget themselves as to itinerate in the character of public lecturers and teachers." Maria Weston Chapman wittily replied to this pompous fulmination in a jingle which she called, " The Times that Try Men's Souls," and signed "The Lords of Creation." While from J. G. Whittier came the stirring verses beginning:
" So, this is all, - the utmost reach, Of priestly power the mind to fetter! When laymen think - when women preach - A war of words - a Pastoral Letter.
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" A Pastoral Letter, grave and dull - Alas! in hoof and horns and features, How different is your Brookfield bull, From him who bellows from St. Peter's!
" But ye, who scorn the thrilling tale Of Carolina's high-souled daughters, Which echoes here the mournful wail Of sorrow from Edisto's waters, Close while ye may the public ear, - With malice vex, with slander wound them, - The pure and good shall throng to hear, And tried and manly hearts surround them."
These last lines were prophetic. For the measures taken to suppress the women and to stifle the voice of the Abolitionists only served
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to enlarge their meetings and to win to their side converts of greater power than any they had yet known.
Chief of these was Wendell Phillips, who from 1837 on was the spokesman par excellence of the anti-slavery forces. Mr. Phillips' con- version to the cause came, as has been already said, through Miss Ann Terry Greene, whom he married on October 12, 1837. Ere their honey- moon was over, both were inexpressibly shocked by the news that Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy, a Presbyterian clergyman of New England birth, who in the church organ of which he was editor had condemned the barbarous burning of a negro by a band of lynchers, had been himself shot down by a mob while in the act of defending his press from the violence of marauders. The South openly exulted over this appalling act. The North condemned the mob but lamented the "imprudence " of the victim. A petition signed by Dr. Channing and others, asking that Faneuil Hall might be assigned them for a meeting in which to protest against this violation of the principles of liberty, was rejected by the Boston authorities. Where- upon Dr. Channing issued an appeal to the citizens of Boston, calling upon them to reverse this action of the municipal government. Simul- taneously, a meeting at the Supreme Court room, presided over by George W. Bond,
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prepared resolutions demanding that the mayor and aldermen change their course and give the use of the hall. They did so and the meeting was held, Jonathan Phillips, a wealthy kinsman of Wendell Phillips, presiding.
It was a morning meeting, for greater safety's sake, and the old hall was full to suffocation. Dr. Channing made an impressive address, in which he showed how the right of free speech had been violated by the murder of Lovejoy. Benjamin F. Hallett and George S. Hilliard followed in much the same vein. The next speaker was James Tricothic Austin, a parish- ioner of Dr. Channing's but one who did that saintly man little credit in the views he was now to set forth. For, declaring that Lovejoy died " as the fool dieth " and that the men who had killed him were as great patriots as those who threw the tea into Boston harbor, he had soon drawn to applauding approval the vast number of those unthinking and inimical folk who had come to the meeting because they hoped to prevent the passage of the Resolutions and so clog the progress of the Abolition cause whose power they were beginning to fear.
Wendell Phillips had, until this moment, been standing on the floor with the other listeners, but he now leaped upon the platform and pro- ceeded sternly to rebuke the speech of the demagogue, Austin. " When I heard," said he,
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" the gentleman lay down principles which placed the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips," pointing to their portraits, " would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead." And then followed a marvellous speech of which Oliver Johnson, who heard it, has said, "Never before did the walls of the old ' Cradle of Liberty ' echo to a finer strain of eloquence. It was a speech to which not even the completest report could do justice . . and the reporter [present] caught only a pale reflec- tion of what fell from the orator's lips."
Yet it is a good speech to read even in its imperfect form. Mr. Austin had said that Lovejoy had acted with imprudence, and Phil- lips caught this up. "Imprudent to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the defence was unsuccessful? Does success gild crime into patriotism and want of it change heroic self-devotion to imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard? Yet he, judged by that single hour, was unsuccessful. After a short exile the race he hated sat again upon the throne. Imagine yourself present when the first news of Bunker Hill battle reached a New England town. The tale would have run thus: 'The patriots are routed; the red-
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coats victorious; Warren lies dead upon the field.' With what scorn would that Tory have been received, who should have charged Warren with imprudence! who should have said that, bred as a physician, he was 'out of place ' in the battle and 'died as the fool dieth!' How would the intimation have been received that Warren and his associates should have waited a better time? But, if success be indeed the only criterion of prudence, Respice finem - wait till the end.
" Presumptuous to assert the freedom of the press on American ground! Is the assertion of such freedom before the age? So much before the age as to leave one no right to make it because it displeases the community? Who invents this libel on his country? It is this very thing which entitles Lovejoy to greater praise; the disputed right which provoked the Revolution - taxation without representa- tion - is far beneath that for which he died. (Here there was a strong and general expression of disapprobation.) One word, gentlemen. As much as thought is better than money, so much is the cause in which Lovejoy died nobler than a mere question of taxes. James Otis thundered in this hall when the king did but touch his pocket. Imagine, if you can, his indignant eloquence had England offered to put a gag upon his lips. (Great applause.)"
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