The Duty of American Women to Their Country

by Catharine Esther Beecher

See, in Philadelphia, one class of citizens arrayed in arms against another, both excited to the highest pitch of rage, both thirsting for each other’s blood, while the civil authority can prevent universal pillage, misrule, and murder, only by volleys that shoot down neighbours, brothers, and friends.

See, too, how the rage of political strife has threatened the whole nation with a civil war. South Carolina declares that she will not submit to certain laws, which she claims are unconstitutional. Her own citizens are divided into fierce parties, so exasperated that each is preparing to shoot down the other. Even the women are contributing their ornaments to meet the expenses of the murderous strife. From neighbouring states, the troops are advancing, the ships of war are nearing their harbours. One single act of resistance, and the state had been the battle-field of that most bitter, most cruel, most awful of all conflicts, a civil and a servile war.

And all these materials of combustion are now slumbering in our bosom, pent up a while, but ready to burst forth, like imprisoned lava, and deluge the land. How easy it would be to bring the nation into fierce contest on the subject of slavery, that internal cancer which inflames the whole body politic! How easy to array native citizens against foreign immigrants, who at once oppose the prejudices and diminish the wages of those around them! How easy to make one section believe that tariff, or tax, is sacrificing the prosperity of one portion to gratify the envy, or increase the luxuries of another!

How easy to make one class of humbler means, believe that bank, or monopoly, is destroying the fruit of their toil, to increase the overgrown wealth of a class above them!

And here is no standing army, such as is wielded by all other governments in sustaining law. When our communities are divided by interest or passion, the lawmakers, the judges, the jury, and the military are all partisans in the strife.

Nor can one part of the Union suffer, and the other escape unharmed, as might be supposed, amid this reckless talk about the dissolution of the Union. An overt attempt to dissolve the Union is treason; and it can never be carried out without fierce parties in every state, ready to fight to the last gasp against such a suicidal act. Such a national dislocation would send a groan of agony through every city, town, and hamlet in our land; civil war would blow her trump, citizen would be arrayed against citizen, and state against state, and the whole arch of heaven would be inscribed with “mourning, and lamentation, and wo.”

What, then, has saved our country from those wide-sweeping horrors that desolated France? Why is it that, in the excitements of embargoes, and banks, and slavery, and abolition, and foreign immigration, the besom of destruction has not swept over the land? It is because there has been such a large body of educated citizens, who have had intelligence enough to understand how to administer the affairs of state, and a proper sense of the necessity of sustaining law and order; who have had moral principle enough to subdue their own passions, and to use their influence to control the excited minds of others. Change our large body of moral, intelligent, and religious people to the ignorant, impulsive, excitable population of France, and in one month the horrors of the Reign of Terror would be before our eyes. Nothing can preserve this nation from such scenes but perpetuating this preponderance of intelligence and virtue. This is our only safeguard.

What, then, are our prospects in this respect? Look at the monitions recorded in our census. Let it be first conceded, that the fact that a man cannot read and write is not, in itself, proof that he is not intelligent and virtuous. Many, in our country, by intercourse with men and things, by the discussions of religion and politics, and by the care of their affairs, gain much reflection and mental discipline. Still, a person who cannot read a word in a newspaper, nor a line in his Bible, and who has so little value for knowledge as to remain thus incapacitated, as a general fact, is in the lowest grade of stupidity and mental darkness. So that the number who cannot read and write is, perhaps, the surest exponent of the intellectual and moral state of a community. For though this list may embrace many intelligent and virtuous persons, on the other hand, there are probably as many, or more, of those classed as being able to read and write, who never have used this power, and who are among the most stupid and degraded of our race.

Look, then, at the indications in our census. In a population of fourteen millions, we find one million adults who cannot read and write, and two millions of children without schools. In a few years, then, if these children come on to the stage with their present neglect, we shall have three millions of adults managing our state and national affairs, who cannot even read the Constitution they swear to support, nor a word in the Bible, or in any newspaper or book. Look at the West, where our dangers from foreign immigration are the greatest, and which, by its unparalleled increase, is soon to hold the sceptre of power. In Ohio, more than one third of the children attend no school. In Indiana and Illinois scarcely one half of the children have any schools. Missouri and Iowa send a similar, or worse report. In Virginia, one quarter of the white adults cannot even write their names to their applications for marriage license. In North Carolina, more than half the adults cannot read and write. The whole South, in addition to her hordes of ignorant slaves, returns more than half her white children as without schools.