CHAPTER XVIII.
MEXICAN WAR.—AGE, 30-32.
James G. Birney was the presidential candidate of the "Liberty Party" in 1844, as he had been in '40. During the campaign I wrote under my initials for The Spirit of Liberty, and exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized forte. For using my initials I had two reasons—my dislike and dread of publicity and the fear of embarrassing the Liberty Party with the sex question. Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle, and one of the questions which divided them was the right of women to take any prominent part in public affairs.
In that campaign, the great Whig argument against the election of Polk was, that it would bring on a war with Mexico for the extension of slavery, and when the war came, Whigs and Liberty Party men vied with each other in their cry of "Our Country, right or wrong!" and rushed into the army over every barrier set up by their late arguments. The nation was seized by a military madness, and in the furore, the cause of the slave went to the wall, and The Spirit of Liberty was discontinued. Its predecessor, The Christian Witness, had failed under the successive management of William Burleigh, Dr. Elder, and Rev. Edward Smith, three giants in those days, and there seemed no hope that any anti-slavery paper could be supported in Pittsburg, while all anti-slavery matter was carefully excluded from both religious and secular press. It was a dark day for the slave, and it was difficult to see hope for a brighter. To me, it seemed that all was lost, unless some one were especially called to speak that truth, which alone could make the people free, but certainly I could not be the messenger.
For years there had ran through my head the words, "Open thy mouth for the dumb, plead the cause of the poor and needy." The streams sang them, the winds shrieked them, and now a trumpet sounded them, but the words could not mean more than talking in private. I would not, could not, believe they meant more, for the Bible in which I read them bid me be silent. My husband wanted me to lecture as did Abbey Kelley, but I thought this would surely be wrong. The church had silenced me so effectuately, that even now all my sense of the great need of words could not induce me to attempt it; but if I could "plead the cause" through the press, I must write. Even this was dreadful, as I must use my own name, for my articles would certainly be libelous. If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for 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 heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I.
The Pittsburg Commercial Journal was the leading Whig paper of western Pennsylvania, Robert M. Riddle, its editor and proprietor. His mother was a member of our church, and I thought somewhere in his veins must stir anti-slavery blood. So I wrote a letter to the Journal, which appeared with an editorial disclaimer, "but the fair writer should have a hearing." This letter was followed by another, and they continued to appear once or twice a week during several months.
I do not remember whom I attacked first, but from first to last my articles were as direct and personal as Nathan's reproof to David. Of slavery in the abstract I knew nothing. There was no abstraction in tying Martha to a whipping-post and scourging her for mourning the loss of her children. The old Kentucky saint who bore the torture of lash and brine all that bright Sabbath day, rather than "curse Jesus," knew nothing of the abstraction of slavery, or the finespun theories of politeness which covered the most revolting crimes with pretty words. This great nation was engaged in the pusillanimous work of beating poor little Mexico—a giant whipping a cripple. Every man who went to the war, or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the whole list of crimes of which slavery was the synonym. Each one seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul laid bare, and his idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule solemn denunciations, old truths from 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?
My style I caught from my crude, rural surroundings, and was familiar to the unlearned, and I was not surprised to find the letters eagerly read. The Journal announced them the day before publication, the newsboys cried them, and papers called attention to them, some by daring to indorse, but more by abusing Mr. Riddle for publishing such unpatriotic and "incendiary rant." In quoting the strong points, a venal press was constrained to "scatter the living coals of truth." The name was held to be a nom de plume, for in print it looked so unlike the common pronunciation of that of one of the oldest families in the county that it was not recognized. Moreover, it must be a disguise adopted by some man. Wiseacres, said one of the county judges. No western Pennsylvania woman had ever broken out of woman's sphere. All lived in the very centre of that sacred enclosure, 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.
But the men whom I ridiculed and attacked knew the hand which, held the mirror up to nature, and also knew they had a legal remedy, and that to their fines and imprisonment I was as indifferent as to their opinions. One of these, 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 church; his voice in prayer had soothed mother's hard journey through the dark valley; and now, as mayor of the city, had ordered its illumination 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 standards of his profession as an elder in the church, whose highest judicatory had pronounced slavery and Christianity incompatible; no one was more valuable 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 Pittsburg 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?"
I looked at it, then into his manly, handsome face, and answered:
"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 sake of the old church, for sake of the old man, for 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 that freedom he had betrayed in Mexico.
When Kossuth was on his starring tour in this country, he used to create wild enthusiasm by "Your own late glorious struggle with Mexico;" but when he reached that climax in his Pittsburg speech a dead silence fell upon the vast, cheering audience.
The social ostracism I had expected when I stepped into the political arena, proved to be Bunyan lions. Instead of shame there came such a crop of glory that I thought of pulling down my barns and building greater, that I might have where to store my new goods. Among the press notices copied by the Journal was this:
"The Pittsburg Commercial Journal has a new contributor who signs her name 'Jane G. Swisshelm,' dips her pen in liquid gold, and sands her paper with the down from butterflies' wings."
This troubled me, because it seemed as though I had been working for praise; still the pretty compliment gratified me.