“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 assembled around the door, and at her request Uncle Caleb Harris knelt by her bedside and prayed for her recovery—if it was God’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 emancipation 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 nobility 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 assemblage 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 classed 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-class 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, God 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, God bless them! who went about their work unheralded—believed our report: but it was too hard a saying for the many that God 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. woman was said to have slept—“rested,” according to the commandment—on Sunday. On this charge, and because a speaker in returning to my house after a Sunday address took a ride in the last half hour of the day in a street-car, a resolution of endorsement of the W. C. T. U. failed to pass in a Louisiana Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and we were cruelly hurt by the tone of the discussion.