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 brought upon me. But what matter? I had no children to disgrace, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be spared better than I. No Western Pennsylvania woman had ever broken out of woman’s sphere. All lived in the very center of that sacred inclosure, 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.
Her articles created a sensation, and no wonder that they did. For, although she had but little literary culture, she had simplicity and intensity. Her style was modeled on the English of the Bible (which she says was for years the only book that she allowed herself to read, in her dread of becoming wiser than her plodding husband), and on this sturdy stem she grafted the simple, homely, direct illustrations of the rural folk around her. Thus, it arrested the attention of learned and unlettered alike. But there was more than phraseology in her power. She was as intensely in earnest as if she were herself in bonds—that is what “remembering them as bound with them” means. She was one of a few who meant it; one of the kind of “fools” that “hear His word and do it.” McDuffee, when he heard that Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang the first seceder, said: “Yes, and he’s just dashed fool enough to do it.” She felt that two races, the white and the black, were to be rescued from the curse of slavery; and for such a cause it was with her as “Hosea Bigelow” says, “P’izen-mad, pig-headed fightin’.” She had been reared an abolitionist, and that which was bred in the bone had been converted into a clear, blazing passion by a year’s residence in Kentucky (1832), where she witnessed scenes, the narration of which make that awful chapter in her biography entitled “Habitations of Horrible Cruelty.” She says:
For years there had run through my head the words: “Open thy mouth for the dumb, plead the cause of the poor and needy.” From first to last my articles were as direct and personal as Nathan’s reproof to David. Every man who went to the war (i. e., against Mexico), or induced others to go, I held as the principal in the whole list of crimes of which slavery was a synonym. Each one seemed to stand before me, his innermost soul made bare and his idiosyncrasy I was sure to strike with sarcasm, ridicule, odium, solemn denunciation, old truths from the 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?
I think this keen sense for the weak places in men’s character and reasoning, and her reckless assaults thereon were what made her so formidable. She always struck for the heart, and rarely missed her aim. “Exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized forte,” she says. With what disregard of everything she rode after the oriflamme of humanity let her tell:
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 the church; his voice in prayer had smoothed mother’s hard journey through the dark valley; and now, as mayor of the city he had ordered it illuminated 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 standard of his profession as an elder in the church whose highest judicatory had pronounced slavery and Christianity incompatible, no one was more vulnerable 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 Pittsburgh 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.”