Part 12 (1/2)

Lathrop in the vigor and the statesmanlike majesty of her arguments for the dethronement of the liquor traffic. A distinguished judge, who was not in favor of our propaganda, said there were few men in Congress who had equalled her in logic and eloquence. We mourn yet that in her death the world has lost so much that time can never replace.

One of the greatest victories won for our cause was the pa.s.sage in 1888 of a Scientific Temperance Instruction bill, by the State Legislature, for the education of the youth in the public schools, on the nature of alcohol and its effect upon the human system. Mrs. Mary Hunt of Ma.s.sachusetts, the originator of this movement for the safeguard of health against the seductions and destructions of strong drink and narcotics, spent a month at our legislature as the guest of Mrs. Mary Reade Goodale.

Daily I went with these two indefatigable workers, watched and manuvered the progress of this bill, until one of the best statutes pa.s.sed on this subject by any State was secured. Such a work for the world's glory is enough for any mortal, but we trust it has also placed Mrs. Hunt among the immortals of earthly fame.

I visited the Capital at this time and was active in the lobby, interviewing members. I sent my card to a Senator Gage, and was more than surprised when in response a tall, dignified black man presented himself.

It was difficult for a moment to determine whether to make him stand during the interview, as is usual with his color, but I said: ”Senator Gage: The people have put you in this respectable and responsible position, and as other senators have occupied this chair will you please be seated?” He sat down, and he afterward voted for our bill.

After this social intercourse with Mrs. Hunt and Mrs. Goodale great impetus was given to the work in Louisiana by the establishment of a W. C.

T. U. booth at the World's Exposition in New Orleans in the year 1885. It was artistically decorated and made as attractive as ingenuity could devise. Here the world's great lights in the temperance cause were to be heard daily--in pulpits and other public places in the city. In addition to Miss Willard, Mrs. Lathrop, Mrs. Matilda B. Ca.r.s.e, Mrs. Caroline Buel, Mary Allen West, Mrs. Josephine Nichols, Mrs. Mary A. Leavitt, Mrs. Sallie F. Chapin of the National Guard, there were present from State work, Mrs.

Lide Merriwether of Tennessee, Mrs. I. C. de Veiling of Ma.s.sachusetts, Mrs. J. B. Hobbs and Mrs. Lucian Hagans of Illinois, Mrs. M. M. Snell of Mississippi, and many others. Our Louisiana Prohibition militia were in force all the time, and we had the pleasure and a.s.sistance of such brotherly giants of the temperance reform as Geo. W. Bain, I. N. Stearn, president of National Temperance Society, Jno. P. St. Johns, Hon. R. H.

McDonald of California, Rev. C. H. Mead, A. A. Hopkins, and hosts of other loyal brethren who burnished our faith and fired our zeal.

Miss Willard in the _Union Signal_ of this date said: ”Mrs. Merrick speaks of the W. C. T. U. Booth as a 'tabernacle.' I consult Webster and find that a tabernacle is 'a place in which some holy or precious thing is deposited.' Aye, the definition fits. Our hearts are there, our holy cause, our blessed bonds. Again, it is a 'reliquary,' says the redoubtable Noah, 'a place for the preservation of relics.' Yea, verily. The women of Israel never turned over their relics more keenly than have W. C. T. U.

women rifled their jewelry boxes for the 'Souvenir Fund,' which has gone into the Tabernacle. It is 'a niche' too 'for the image of a saint.'

Accurate to a nicety. Heaven keeps a niche to hold our treasures, and so does the World's Exposition. Our saints are there in person and in spirit--the right hand of our power.”

Mrs. Julia Ward Howe had been called by the Exposition management to preside over the Woman's Department. There was much criticism of the authorities that this honor had not been given to a Southern woman; notwithstanding that this world-renowned Bostonian was not a stranger to our people--they fully appreciated the power of her ”Battle Hymn of the Republic”--it seemed unnecessary to seek so far for a head of the Exhibit.

If Southern women could create it, some one of them was surely able to direct it. Mrs. Howe came and performed this duty with marked ability, and displayed a force of character which commanded respect though it did not always win for her acquiescence in her decisions or affectionate regard from all her colleagues. I myself had much expense to incur, and received nothing, and individually I had naught special to excite my grat.i.tude, though from the first I was willing to welcome this distinguished lady, and extend to her my co-operation and hospitality. My subsequent relations to her though transient have been pleasant, and doubtless her memory of her Exposition coadjutors matches our recollection of her own regal self.

Miss Isabel Greely was her secretary--a very useful and estimable woman.

Some interesting exercises took place during one afternoon of the Exposition. Mrs. Julia Ward Howe addressed the colored people in a gallery devoted to their exhibit. There was a satisfactory audience, chiefly of the better cla.s.ses of the race. Mrs. Howe had asked me to accompany her, and when I a.s.sented some one said: ”Well, you are probably the only Southern woman here who would risk public censure by speaking to a negro a.s.sembly.” Mrs. Howe told them how their Northern friends had labored to put the colored people on a higher plane of civilization, and how Garrison had been dragged about the streets of Boston for their sake, and urged that they show themselves worthy of the great anti-slavery leaders who had fought their battles. Her address was extremely well received. I was then invited to speak. I told them: ”The first kindly face I ever looked into was one of this race who called forth the sympathy of the world in their days of bondage. Among the people you once called masters you have still as warm, appreciative friends as any in the world. Some of us were nurtured at your b.r.e.a.s.t.s, and most of us when weaned took the first willing spoonful of food from your gentle, persuasive hands; and when our natural protectors cast us off for a fault, for reproof, for punishment, you always took us up and comforted us. Can we ever forget it?

”Have you not borne the burdens of our lives through many a long year?

When troubles came did you not take always a full share? Well do I remember, as a little child, when I saw my beloved mother die at the old plantation home. The faithful hands from the fields a.s.sembled around the door, and at her request Uncle Caleb Harris knelt by her bedside and prayed for her recovery--if it was G.o.d's will. How the men and women and children wept! And after she was laid in the earth my infant brother, six months old, was given entirely to the care of Aunt Rachel, who loved him as her own life even into his young manhood, and to the day of her death.

And who can measure your faithfulness during the late war when all our men had gone to the front to fight for their country? Your protection of the women and children of the South in those years of privation and desolation; your cultivation of our fields that fed us and our army; your care of our soldier boys on the field of battle, in camp and hospital, and the tender loyalty with which you--often alone--brought home their dead bodies so that they might be laid to sleep with their fathers, has bound to you the hearts of those who once owned you, in undying remembrance and love.

”I do not ask you to withhold any regard you may have for those who labored to make you free. Be as grateful as you can to the descendants of the people who first brought you from Africa--and then sold you 'down South' when your labor was no longer profitable to themselves. But remember, now you are free, whenever you count up your friends never to count out the women of the South. They too rejoice in your emanc.i.p.ation and have no grudges about it; and would help you to march with the world in education and true progress. As we have together mourned our dead on earth let us rejoice together in all the great resurrections now and hereafter.” At the close, many colored people with tearful eyes extended a friendly hand, and Mrs. Howe too did the same.

Hon. R. H. McDonald, the California philanthropist, had been my guest during Exposition days and had won our hearts by a face that reflected the n.o.bility of his deeds. In 1890 he sent me $150 to be used for prizes offered in the public schools of New Orleans for the best essays written on temperance. The school board and Mr. Easton, the able superintendent, accepted the offer, and the presentation of the prizes was made a great public occasion in an a.s.semblage at Grunewald Hall.

There was a small contingent of Southern women whose platform services were invaluable to me, and whose loving sympathy helped me over many otherwise rough places. The first of these was Mrs. Sallie F. Chapin of South Carolina. Both in appearance and speech she was intense, tragic, and pathetic.--Her fiery eloquence captured the imagination and dragooned convictions in battalions. She did splendid pioneer platform services as superintendent of Southern Work, which place she filled until it was abolished by the National Convention of 1889, at the request of the Southern States, because the existence of that office misrepresented them in their organic relations to the National W. C. T. U. and had a trend toward violation of a platform principle against sectionalism. Mrs. Chapin lived and died an ”unreconstructed Rebel.” The bogey of secession of the Southern States from the National seemed to haunt her brain; but I have never been able to discover any other woman who believed that such a phantom existed; it must have been but a queer instance of reflex action from her over-stimulated Southern sentiment. Mrs. Chapin had extraordinary ability and was a marvel of endurance when her temperament is taken into the reckoning. Her heroic service deserves a lasting place in our annals.

Another Southern woman of large brain and larger heart who helped me in my days of inexperience was Mrs. Mary McGee Snell (now Hall) of Mississippi.

Like the war-horse of Scripture she scented battle afar off and gloried in combat. She was never so happy as in the heat of struggle. Her impetuous nature took her into all sorts of unusual situations, and she did not seem to be out of place--as did many other delegates--when, during a National W. C. T. U. convention, she was seen in the streets of Chicago parading at the head of a Salvation Army procession. She is essentially ”a soldier of the Cross,” and has carried her gifts of eloquence and the most vibrant, persuasive of voices into the Evangelistic department of our National organization. Her love of rescuing souls has kept her exclusively in evangelistic work; in her power as a gospel worker she is a Sam Jones and D. L. Moody boiled down.

The most original of our National staff-workers who came to my rescue was another full-blooded Southerner--Miss Frances E. Griffin of Alabama. She is gifted with an inimitable humor. An audience room is quickly filled when it is known that she is to be the speaker of an occasion. Though a woman of presence and dignity and a manner that befits the best, her appearance as soon as she speaks a word is a promise of fun, and her audience has begun to laugh before the time. Wit of tongue is rare with women, but Miss Griffin's equals in quality or rank the best of our American humorists. At the same time that she enlivens the seriousness of the public work which women have in hand, she is an intelligent reformer and also a true woman of the home--having for many years been the responsible bread-winner of her family, and has reared orphan children.

Miss Belle Kearney was too young during my term of office to be cla.s.sed with the workers already mentioned, for she had just begun to consecrate her life to the service of humanity. At my request she brought her fresh enthusiasm and great gifts to organize the Young Woman's Temperance Union of Louisiana. Repeated and most effective work in this State has made Louisianians feel that they have an endearing right in this Dixie-born-and-reared young woman; nor have they less pride than her native Mississippi in her present national fame as a first-cla.s.s platform speaker and progressive reformer.

Hindrances and heartaches, however, were sandwiched between our helps and happiness liberally enough to cause us to realize that she--as well as he--who wins must fight. We were not strong swimmers accustomed to breast the waves of an uneducated public disapproval; but we knew we must encounter it and nerve ourselves for the shock, putting ourselves at war against the liquor traffic and its political allies. Everywhere we found the W. C. T. U. the underpinning (not one would have dared to think of herself as a ”pillar”) of the church. Very many of them had in tow the whole church structure--missionary societies, pastor's salary, the choir, the parsonage, and the debt on the church. Most of them were mothers too; some, G.o.d help them! sad-eyed and broken-hearted because of the ravage of their own firesides which the open saloon had caused. We read our Bibles and prayed, and the word of the Lord came to us that the mother-heart in Christ's people must protest against further slaying of the innocents at the open doorways of the dram shops!

We went to our brethren in the church (to whom else should we go?) with the Lord's message. Some of them--not the dignitaries usually, but the humble-minded, prayerful men, G.o.d bless them! who went about their work unheralded--believed our report: but it was too hard a saying for the many that G.o.d ever spake except by the word of mouth of a man. They forgot Anna and Deborah, and practically sided with the ”higher criticism” respecting the errancy of the Scripture in its statement about woman's relation to the church. And so, after a while, I said at one of our conventions that I could count upon one hand all the ministers in New Orleans who had come forward to pray over one of our meetings.

We had to defend ourselves on the charge of being Sabbath-breakers, because after doing the Lord's work six days in the week, a W. C. T. U.