The women of Louisiana have realized no advantage from this law. Their first demand was for a place on the school board of New Orleans, in 1885. The governor fills by appointment all school offices. Gov. McEnery ruled that Art. 232 of the Constitution was inoperative until there should be legislation to enforce it, the existing statutes of Louisiana barring a woman from acting independent of her husband, and would make the husband of a married woman a co-appointee to any public office; that a repeal of this in solido statute was necessary before he could place a woman on the school board.
Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s seventieth birthday was on Nov. 12 of this year. In her honor a special reception was held by the Woman’s Club of New Orleans. I here reviewed the action of the governor in a paper which set forth the following points: First, that the Constitution is imperative; that legislation for its self-acting and absolute provisions would be to place the creature in control of the creator. Second, that the legislature had no jurisdiction over the eligibility of women to appointment on school boards, as the Constitution had explicitly declared that “women twenty-one and upwards shall be eligible.” Third, if the governor’s objection against married women were valid it had no force against unmarried women and widows.
Protest, however, proved futile. No succeeding governor appointed a woman, so no test case was ever made, and the Constitutional Convention of 1898 repealed this little shadow of justice to women, even in the face of the fact that at the time the small concession was made one-half of the 80,000 children in the public schools of New Orleans were girls, and 368 out of the 389 teachers were women.
In 1880 I met General and Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, at a private reception given at the home of Hon. Walker Fearn, in New Orleans. The General was a handsome, soldierly man. I told him that we had mutual friends, and named Bishop Simpson, whom, with his wife, I had entertained, and liked because of his liberal views toward women. “That,” said General Grant, “is what I object to.” “Oh, General,” I answered, “I hope that you would not be unwilling that we should have the ballot?” “No, Mrs. Merrick, I should not be unwilling that you and Mrs. Grant should vote, but I should seriously object to confer that responsibility on Bridget, your cook.” I had always heard that General Grant could not talk, and was surprised to find him so genial and agreeable. Knowing me to be a Southern woman, he questioned me keenly and intelligently about the people of my section. I had a half-hour of delightful conversation with him, which he, equally with myself, seemed to enjoy.
During the year 1881 Miss Genevieve Ward was filling an engagement at the Grand Opera House in New Orleans. This winning actress was a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the renowned Puritan preacher, and at that time was in her prime. At the request of her husband’s relatives in New York, my daughter entertained this famous lady at a lunch party, where I was present. We found her a dignified, modest woman, and, like Charlotte Cushman, above reproach. She was an intimate friend of the great Ristori. Among our twelve guests was Geo. W. Cable, already become famous. His last book, with all of our autographs in it, was given to Miss Ward as a souvenir of the occasion.
My daughter had known Mr. Cable in his early literary ventures. He sometimes brought chapters of his manuscript to read to her. The South realized at once that a new literary artist had arisen out of its sea of ruin. That he wounded the feelings of some of his people is largely attributable to the fact that he spoke inopportunely; his work was cast upon the tolerance of public opinion when every nerve was bleeding and every heart hypersensitive to suggestion or criticism. It was too early an expression, and fell upon bristling points of indignant protest. But that he deeply loved his own city and people the most prejudiced can scarcely doubt, now that the perspective of three decades has softened the asperities of judgment. Only a soul that had made it his own could picture as he has done the silence, the weirdness, the majesty of the moss-draped swamps of lower Louisiana, the crimson and purple of the sunsets mirrored upon the glistening surface of her black, shallow bayous,—the sparse and flitting presence of man and beast and bird across this still-life making it but the more desolate. Cable was the first to see the rich types afforded to literature in the character, condition and history of the Creoles, and he has transformed them into immortals. Only love can create “pictures of life so exquisitely clear, delicately tender or tragically sorrowful” as he has made of the Latin-Americans. The South has already forgiven his historical frankness in its pride in the artist who has preserved for the future the romance, and color, and beauty of a race that, like so much else lovable and poetic and inspiring in our early history, by the end of another century will be blended indistinguishably with the less picturesque but all-prevailing type that is determining an American people.
I had been so impressed by his genius that I could not withhold from him my word of appreciation, and received in 1879 the following reply to my note: “I want to say to you that you are the first Southerner who has expressed gratitude to the author of ‘Old Creole Days’ for telling the truth. That has been my ambition, and to be recognized as having done it a little more faithfully than most Southern writers is a source of as hearty satisfaction as I have ever enjoyed. How full our South is of the richest material for the story writer!
“G. W. Cable.”
About this time Clara and the author of “Innocents Abroad” were guests together in the same home in Buffalo, New York, from which place she wrote me: “He is a wonderfully liberal yet clever talker. I think I shall be able to d-r-a-w-l like him by two o’clock to-morrow, when he leaves. He has written in my Emerson birthday book. When he found the selection for November 30th to be that high and severely noble type of an ideal gentleman, he laughed at its inappropriateness, and said: ‘With my antecedents and associations it is impossible that I can be a gentleman, as I often tell my wife—to her furious indignation;’—so he signs himself ‘S. L. Clemens, née Mark Twain,’ in allusion to his early career as a pilot, and the name by which the world first knew him. I like him immensely, and shall doubtless weary you some morning with a reproduction of his numerous unfoldings.”