USA > Ohio > The Western Reserve of Ohio and some of its pioneers, places and women's clubs, Vol. I > Part 11
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"A Fool's Errand" must be like my own life here. How hopeless it seems to educate the Southerners up to the Northern civilization.
I get the New York Semi-weekly Tribune, The Boston Commonwealth, and my home papers.
Lottsburgh, August 15, 1884.
We have had Mrs. Oaks Smith; she is 68 years of age, but the youngest human being I know; she is amazed at all my fruit, says she never ate so much in all her life and calls it Arcadian living.
We visited a church where the mother of George Washing- ton was married, Mary Ball, but the family church of the Balls was across the river in the same parish.
Miss Holly gave one day's occupation, a fair sample from 1870 to 1893: Rose at 5 a. m. Prepared a simple breakfast; made five loaves of bread; put my house in order; laid the fire for evening. At 9 o'clock called the roll at the schoolhouse; sent eggs to pay for candles; made a spice cake for the messenger; letter writing and then dressing for lunch; then went to the schoolroom for the classes of History and Natural Philosophy; heard some poems and Psalms in preparation for Washington's Birthday or some other celebration.
Miss Holly loved elegant surroundings, but she loved the cause better and put all she had intothe Lottsburgh plant. She said: "I don't know the meaning of the word lonely and only call it fatigue; I take delight in the books you sent and find Ramona is of interest, too.
"Miss Putnam is still postmistress, but we have had excite- ment over it. The one preceding her could not read or write his own name. Your interest has kept Miss Putnam in office, and without it she would have lost it. There is no express office
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nearer Lottsburgh than Baltimore; the 'Sue' discontinues her trips in the winter and the mail is carried by a colored boy in a sulky."
September 23, 1886.
This is the shortest summer of my life and it is a pleasure to be alive.
October 21, 1886.
We are now building a new room for our lady teacher, com- ing in December. I have four men to tear down and build, but every man, woman and child moves slowly in the south, which I lay to the amazing amount of tobacco they smoke and chew. We will not allow smoking on the grounds or in the postoffice.
I would like to have you see my garden; I have picked four bushels of strawberries in 30 days.
I have just read the personal memoirs of General Grant. With a grip on Vicksburg he crushed the Rebellion. He earned all the honor paid him.
Everything you send is gratefully received. The boards and nails of the boxes we used to make a little room for our washerwoman.
This life in its awful isolation had been exile and martry- dom to me.
Dear Maria, you are 82 and do you not think what are called "young people" are amazingly old and dreary? Bancroft celebrated his 87th birthday last year.
I fully believe in a life independent of the flesh, a spiritual life of unending growth of love, truth and holy obedience to God. "At the center of our grand universe is the Beneficent Power who holds us all in the 'hollow of His hand.'"
Lottsburgh, November 19, 1888.
Twenty years ago we started this school and have taught hundreds to read, write, cipher and the history of our govern-
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ment. Some of our pupils are now teaching public colored schools; some are in services in Baltimore and New York.
Not one man failed to vote the Republican ticket. We can see the little dark faces light up with new thought, as express- ively as do the Saxon children. This work is more and more a success every year. I want to persevere a few years longer. I and my 75 years, have been so overwhelmed with things to do in the postoffice and waiting upon poor people. My hard work- . ing days are over; I can't keep on working incessantly."
Intellectually and spiritually Sallie Holly was never more alive than in her last years.
She says: "These Virginians eat so much pork, they can't know what good health is. I mourn to have John G. Whittier and G. W. Curtis die. But they leave a glorious memory.
"You asked me what were my pleasures-I look up at the sky; I see the sun rise every morning; the little wrens build nests in the schoolhouse, all birds like my garden. My flowers now in bloom are nasturtiums, dahlias, roses, and the lavender; my Sabbath school which I hold for three hours, letters from friends and books sent to me. I am one who thinks it is not solitude to be alone.
"One of the ex-slaveholders said: 'The old Yankee (mean- ing me) has ruined these Lottsburgh niggers, making them think they are as good as anybody'; another said to me: ‘I am as great a rebel as I ever was.'" Later, Miss Holly wrote: "I expect to arrive in New York the day before Christmas. O happy day! after nine months of this Virginia labor, joyfully onward and upward I go."
She never saw the Virginia School again. She said : "I have no army of ragged, dirty, low-lived poor whites, and freed negroes to wait upon. In this dear old familiar Miller Hotel, no need to
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rise until six-thirty in the morning and find breakfast already, hallelujah !"
Saturday, Miss Holly went to Brooklyn to visit a friend; the day was bitter cold, and in a few days pneumonia caused her death; she had lived from February 19, 1818, to January 12, 1893, 75 years. On January 19 the New York papers stated : "A friend of the Negro Gone." In the same paper was the re- port of the death of Fanny Kemble, who had served God in quite another way and had had a harder lot.
Miss Holly was taken to Rochester and buried at Mt. Hope Cemetery beside her father. Many will mourn her loss, most of all those in Lottsburgh, and her friend, Miss Caroline Putnam. -From "Life of Liberty," by Rev. John Chadwick.
Rev. Antoinette L. Brown Blackwell, D. D., the first woman to be ordained a minister, was educated at Oberlin.
Antoinette Brown was born in a log cabin at Henrietta, N. Y., on May 20, 1825. Before she was sixteen she began to teach school, receiving a dollar a week and "boarding around." She longed to go to college, and cherished the hope of becoming a minister. Her parents and her brother thought it impossible. Her mother ured her to go as a foreign missionary instead. An- toinette stuck to her plan, and finally got her father's consent to go to Oberlin. Before she arrived she was warned against a student there named Lucy Stone, who was promulgating dan- gerous and radical ideas; but the two young women soon became great friends, a friendship cemented later in life by their mar- rying brothers.
Antoinette entered the ladies' literary course in the junior year, and was graduated in 1847, with Lucy, who was in the regular classical course. The account of their organizing their first debating society ever formed among college girls has al-
ANTOINETTE BROWN BLACKWELL
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ready been given. In Antoinette's senior year, a rumor got abroad that she meant to study theology, and she was sum- moned before Mrs. Finney and several members of the Ladies' Board. They pleaded with her earnestly to give up so wild a notion. After quoting many persons who thought women ought not to preach, Mrs. Finney said: "You certainly will never have the courage to put your opinion against that of all these wise, good men!" Antoinette answered: "Prof. Finney has done just that," referring to his dissenting from the orthodoxy of his day. And she added: "What he has done, why cannot I do?"
The students had to write essays. During her senior year in the literary course, Antoinette wrote an exegesis dealing with the texts, "I suffer not a woman to teach," and "If the women would know anything, let them ask their husbands at home." President Mahan heard of it. He was the most liberal of the faculty. He sent for her essay, and published it in the Oberlin Quarterly Review while she was still an undergraduate. He was editor of the Review. Prof. Fairchild was the assistant editor, and he wrote for the same issue an article on the ortho- dox side of the woman question. "When he came to the boarding house to see me, we could not help laughing in each other's faces," said Antoinette, in telling of it long after. "He had been my brother's classmate. His sister was mine. We were well acquainted, and he was as kind as kind could be, but determined in his own view. Years later, when I joined the Unitarians, they wondered if I had done anything for which I had to leave the Orthodox fold, and they asked me for a letter of recommenda- tion. I applied to Prof. Fairchild, who had then become Pres- ident Fairchild, and he gave me a beautiful one. The Oberlin men were the most kindly and generous possible in criticising and helping out people who trod on their tenderest feelings, as
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Lucy and I did. The Oberlin women were much less so. Prof. Morgan, Professor of Old Testament Literature and Theology, spent a whole class session discussing my paper and trying to show me that I was not altogether right. Prof. Finney said afterwards that he believed there were some women divinely or- dained to preach, and that I might be one of them. He was very kind, and gave me the benefit of the doubt."
After she had been graduated from the literary course, her father and brother renewed their efforts to dissuade her from entering the theological school, and refused her any financial help. Miss Adams, the lady principal at Oberlin, then promised to get her enough teaching to do in the preparatory department of the college to pay half the expenses of her theological course. But Miss Adams fell ill, and in her absence the Ladies' Board (composed principally of the professors' wives, and strongly opposed to women ministers) made a rule that no graduate of the college should be allowed to teach in the preparatory de- partment or in the lower classes. This was done on purpose to bar her out. Thereupon Miss Atkins, the assistant principal, got up a private drawing class for Antoinette, who had for some time taught drawing in the lower school. Her class in- cluded Prof. Fairchild and a number of the theological stu- dents, and proved so profitable that it enabled her to meet all her expenses.
When the theological school opened, each student, as part of the literary work, had in turn to read an essay, to take part in a discussion, and to give a sermon or oration. Antoinette's essay passed without objection. But when it was her turn to take part in a discussion-to "speak in public"-the trouble began. The students themselves made up the programs for these discussions. They handed the list, with her name on it,
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to Prof. Morgan. He was the kindest of professors, but also the most bigoted on the woman question. His face flushed and his voice trembled as he read the list. The young men who had prepared it were ordered to stay after class. Then the profess- or said to them: "Why did you make that appointment, when you knew I did not believe in having women speak?" They answered: "Why, our constitution requires every student to do it." "I'll see about that. You can go," he said curtly. Some little time passed. Rumor said there was faculty meeting after faculty meeting. Oberlin College had been founded with an express proviso that all its opportunities should be open to wom- en. It had never occurred to anyone that women might wish to go through the theological school, but there was no way to keep them out. "I went to the class not knowing what to expect," said Antoinette, in telling the story later. "But the dear old professor said, before the lesson began: 'Antoinette, I believe you are wrong. I should stop you in this if I could. But I have no authority to do it. I shall give you the very best instruction that I can while you are my pupil.' And he did, all through the three years." That was in 1848. When Oberlin celebrated its semi-centennial many years later, Antoinette was among the invited speakers. Prof. Morgan was the only one of the old pro- fessors left. He was very old and feeble. He spoke to her very kindly, laid his hand on her head, and his last words to her were: "Dear child, God bles you!"
Some of the students had been local preachers before enter- ing the theological school. They asked for a student's license to preach, and so did she. They granted licenses to all the young men, and told Antoinette that she might act on her own re- sponsibility. So she began to preach and lecture occasionally. Her first sermon was given in a schoolhouse in Henrietta, Ohio.
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One of her classmates, a young man, went with her and led the singing. She received many marks of good will from her fellow students. Another young woman, Lettice Smith (Holmes), was also following the course, but never took part in any speaking. During their three years in the theological school, the names of these two young women were never published with those of the other students, but were marked with a star and the words "Resident graduates pursuing the theological course." When the catalogue came out after they got through, their names were left out entirely, and continued to be left out of the list of grad- uates for about 40 years. Then they were put in as full-fledged graduates of the theological school.
Although the faculty at the close of her course did not rec- ognize Antoinette as a graduate, many people in the town felt a great deal of sympathy with her, including one of the founders of the college, Father Keep. Some of her classmates who had always stood by her went to Father Keep and proposed that she should be ordained, along with a young man in the class who was going out as a foreign missionary; and they hunted up enough other ministers who were in favor to fill out an ordina- tion service. But Antoinette thought it would be ungrateful on her part to take the Oberlin church for her ordination, when the faculty so decidedly disapproved of her entering the min- istry, and she refused.
A Mrs. Barnes, of New York, who had often attended the lectures and recitations at the theological school, offered An- toinette a good salary if she would work for a social purity so- ciety in New York and do missionary work there. She did so for a time; but the ladies were shocked by her attending and speaking at the first National Woman's Rights Convention held at Worcester, Mass., in 1850, and after that she worked as a free
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lance, lecturing and preaching where she could. Channing, Gar- rison, Gerrit Smith, Samuel May and others helped her to op- portunities. She went all through New York State with Susan B. Anthony, holding meetings in behalf of woman's rights, and she wrote much for the papers and magazines.
Horace Greeley and Charles A. Dana offered to engage a hall and give her $1,000 a year and her board (an almost un- heard of salary for a woman at that time) if she would preach regularly in New York City. But she felt in her modesty that she was too young and inexperienced to support the responsibil- ities of a great metropolitan pastorate. Instead, she accepted a call from the Congregational church at South Butler, N. Y., with a salary of $300 a year. Here she was regularly ordained as an orthodox Congregational minister in 1853. The event called down tremendous denunciation from pulpit and press. Dr. Cheever declared that any woman who would let herself be or- dained was an infidel, and any church that would ordain her was an infidel church.
She was appointed by her church a delegate to the World's Temperance Convention in New York, a convention composed largely of ministers. Her credentials were accepted, but when she rose to speak the convention went into a prodigious uproar which drowned her voice. This lasted two days. Despite the ef- forts made in her behalf by Channing, Phillips, Garrison, Powell and others, including Neal Dow, the president of the convention, she was not allowed to be heard.
A period of religious doubt led her to resign her pulpit. She emerged from this season of darkness a Unitarian, and her faith has ever since been steady and unclouded.
Soon after resigning her pastorate, she married Samuel C. Blackwell, a brother of Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, the earliest
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woman physician, and of Henry B. Blackwell, who had married, a few years before, her college friend, Lucy Stone. The cares of bringing up a large family made regular pastoral work im- possible, but she has always preached and lectured as she had opportunity.
She was one of the most active workers with Julia Ward Howe in the Association for the Advancement of Women, which for many years held its annual congresses all over the country. A beautiful girl in her youth, and gifted with a singularly buoy- ant and serene temperament, she is now a handsome and cheery grandmother. At the age of 88, she still preaches an occasional sermon with much acceptance in the Unitarian church of Eliz- abeth, N. J., where she resides with a married daughter. She is the author of several philosophical works, one of which, "The Sexes Throughout Nature," contains interesting reminiscences of her life at Oberlin. She has also written a novel and a vol- ume of poems.
Oberlin has given her, unsolicited, an honorary degree of A. M. It also offered her an A. B., which she declined. A few years ago it made her a Doctor of Divinity, thus royally atoning for its conservatism of more than sixty years ago.
LUCY STONE
LUCY STONE
Lucy Stone was born August 13, 1818, on a farm near West Brookfield, Mass. She was the daughter of Francis Stone and Hannah Matthews, and was the eighth of nine children. She came of good New England stock. Her great grandfather fought in the French and Indian War; her grandfather was an officer in the War of the Revolution, and afterwards captain of four hundred men in Shay's Rebellion. Her father was a pros- perous farmer, much respected by his neighbors, but fully im- bued with the idea of the right of husbands to rule over their wives, as were most men of his generation. Her mother was an excellent Christian woman, who submitted as a matter of con- science.
Little Lucy grew up a healthy, vigorous child, noted for fearlessness and truthfulness, a good scholar, and a hard worker in the house and on the farm, sometimes driving the cows bare- footed by starlight before the sun was up, when the dew on the grass was so cold that she would stop on a flat stone and curl one small bare foot up against the other leg to warm it. Every- one on the farm worked. The mother milked eight cows the night before Lucy was born, and said regretfully, when informed of the sex of the new baby, "Oh, dear! I am sorry it is a girl. A woman's life is so hard !"
The little girl early became indignant at the way she saw her mother and other women were treated by their husbands and by the laws, and she made up her childish mind that those laws must be changed. Reading the Bible one day, while still a child, she came upon the text, "Thy desire shall be to thy husband, and
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he shall rule over thee." At first she wanted to die. Then she resolved to go to college, study Greek and Hebrew, read the Bible in the original, and satisfy herself whether such texts were correctly translated.
Her father felt no surprise when his sons wanted to go to college; it was the usual wish of intelligent young men; but when his daughter wanted to go, he said to his wife, "Is the child crazy?" He would give her no financial help. The young girl had to earn the money herself. She picked barries and chestnuts, and sold them to buy books. For years she taught district schools, studying and teaching alternately. She soon became known as a successful teacher. Once she was engaged to teach a "winter school" which had been broken up for two years in succession by the big boys throwing the master head- foremost out of the window into a deep snowdrift. As a rule, women were not thought competent to teach the winter term of school, because then the big boys were released from farm work and were able to attend. In a few days she had this difficult school in perfect order, and the big boys who had made the trou- ble became her most devoted lieutenants; yet she received only a fraction of the salary paid to her unsuccessful predecessors. At the low wages received by women teachers, it took her until she was 25 to earn the money to carry her to Oberlin, then the only college in the country that admitted women. Crossing Lake Erie from Buffalo to Cleveland, she could not afford a state- room and fare, with a few other women who, like herself, could only pay for a "deck passage."
At Oberlin she earned her way by teaching in the prepara- tory department of the college, and by doing housework in the Ladies' Boarding Hall at three cents an hour. Most of the stu- dents were poor, and the college furnished them board at a
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dollar a week. But she could not afford even this small sum, and during most of her course she cooked her food in her own room, boarding herself at a cost of less than fifty cents a week. She had only one new dress during her college course, and she did not go home once during the four years; but she thoroughly enjoyed her college life, and found time also for good works.
Oberlin was a station on the "underground railroad," a town of strong anti-slavery sympathies, and many fugitive slaves settled there. A school was started to teach them to read, and Lucy Stone was asked to take charge of it. The colored men, fresh from slavery and densely ignorant, still felt it be- neath their dignity to be taught by a woman. Without letting her know this, the committee took her to the school and intro- duced her to them as their teacher, thinking they would not like to express their objections in her presence. But there was a murmur of dissatisfaction, and presently a tall man, very black, stood up and said he had nothing against Miss Stone per- sonally, but he was free to confess that he did not like the idea of being taught by a woman. She persuaded them, however, that it would be for their advantage to learn from anybody who could teach them to read; and her dusky pupils soon became much attached to her. When the Ladies' Boarding Hall took fire, during her temporary absence, many members of her col- ored class rushed to the fire, bent on saving her effects. She was told on her return that a whole string of colored men had arrived upon the scene one after another, each demanding breathlessly, "Where is Miss Stone's trunk?"
Her first public speech was made during her college course. The colored people got up a celebration of the anniversary of West Indian Emancipation, and invited her to be one of the speakers. The president of the college and some of the pro-
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fessors were also invited. She gave her address among the rest, and thought nothing of it. The next day she was summoned before the Ladies' Board. They represented to her that it was unwomanly and unscriptural for her to speak in public. The president's wife said: "Did you not feel yourself very much out of place up there on the platform among all those men? Were you not embarrassed and frightened?" "Why, no, Mrs. Mahan," she answered. ""'Those men' were President Mahan and my professors, whom I meet every day in the class-room. I was not afraid of them at all!" She was allowed to go, with an admonition.
The young men of the college used to hold debates. It was part of their work in English composition and rhetoric. The girls were required to be present, in order to help form an au- dience for the young men, but they were not allowed to take part. Lucy Stone, Antoinette Brown and some of the other young women asked to be allowed to do so. They were refused, on the ground that St. Paul told women to keep silence in the churches. They then organized the first debating society ever formed among college girls. An old colored woman who owned a small house was persuaded to give them the use of her parlor. Coming by ones and twos, so as not to attract notice, the girls used to gather there secretly, and hold debates on all sorts of high and deep subjects. In the summer they sometimes held their metings in the woods.
At the end of her course she was appointed to write an es- say to be read at Commencement, but was notified that one of the professors would have to read it for her, as it would not be proper for a woman to read her own essay in public. Rather than not read it herself, she declined to write it. Nearly forty years afterwards, when Oberlin celebrated its semi-centennial,
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she was invited to be one of the speakers at that great gather- ing. So the world moves.
She graduated in 1847, and gave her first woman's rights lecture the same year, in the pulpit of her brother's church at Gardner, Mass. Soon after, she was engaged to lecture regu- larly for the Anti-Slavery Society. She mixed a great deal of woman's rights with her anti-slavery lectures. One night, after her heart had been particularly stirred on the woman question, she put into her lecture so much of woman's rights and so little of abolition that her friend, Rev. Samuel May, the agent of the Anti-Slavery Society, who arranged her meetings, felt obliged to tell her that, on the anti-slavery platform, this would not do. She answered: "I know it, but I could not help it. I was a woman before I was an abolitionist, and I must speak for the women." She resigned her position as lecturer for the Anti- Slavery Society, intending to devote herself wholly to woman's rights. They were very unwilling to give her up, however, as she had been one of their most effective speakers; and it was finally arranged that she should speak for them Saturday even- ings and Sundays-times which were regarded as too sacred for any church or hall to be opened for a woman's rights meeting- and during the rest of the week she should lecture for woman's rights on her own responsibility.
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