“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 the sake of the old church, for the sake of the old man, for the 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 the freedom he had betrayed in Mexico.
Her destructive attack on the private character of Daniel Webster, in 1850, also illustrates her reckless courage and her sagacity. She was in Washington pending the fugitive slave bill. Webster was supporting the measure—a damaging defection from the anti-slavery side, because of his supposed moral as well as intellectual greatness. Mrs. S. discovered “that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell—that his life was full of rottenness. Then I knew why I had come to Washington.” She put the facts into one short paragraph, and published it in her own paper, against the advice of all her friends, and even of such stanch anti-slavery men as Giddings, Julian, and Dr. Snodgrass. They said it was true, and no one would dare to deny it; yet no one had dared to make it public; the publication would ruin her and her influence. She said: “The cause of the slave hangs on the issue in Congress, and Mr. Webster’s influence is against him; his influence would be less if the public knew just what he is. I will publish it and let God take care of the consequences.” Eccentric conduct, surely! It was published, and it did bring ruin—but on Daniel Webster, instead of Jane Grey Swisshelm. It killed Webster’s influence with the conscientious part of the Whig party, and probably gave the coup de grace to his presidential prospects. She was long known as “the woman who killed Webster.”
It was in 1847 that Mrs. Swisshelm took the decisive plunge by founding the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter. The sensation created by this unprecedented appearance of politics in petticoats she characteristically describes:
It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did the American eagle catch sight of it than he swooned and fell off his perch. Democratic roosters straightened out their necks and ran screaming with terror. Whig ’coons scampered up trees and barked furiously. The world was falling, and every one had “heard it, saw it, and felt it.”
It appeared that on some inauspicious morning each one of three-fourths of the secular editors from Maine to Georgia had gone to his office suspecting nothing, when from some corner of his exchange list there sprang upon him such a horror as he had little thought to see. A woman had started a political paper! A woman! Could he believe his eyes? A woman! Instantly he sprang to his feet and clutched his pantaloons, shouted to the assistant editor, when he, too, read and grasped frantically at his cassimeres, called to the reporters and press-men and typos and devils, who all rushed in, heard the news, seized their nether garments and joined the general chorus, “My breeches! oh, my breeches!” Here was a woman resolved to steal their pantaloons, their trousers, and when these were gone they might cry, “Ye have taken away my gods, and what have I more?” The imminence of the peril called for prompt action, and with one accord they shouted, “On to the breach, in defense of our breeches! Repel the invader or fill the trenches with our noble dead!”
“That woman shall not have my pantaloons,” cried the editor of the big city daily; “nor my pantaloons,” said the editor of the dignified weekly; “nor my pantaloons,” said he who issued manifestoes but once a month; “nor mine,” “nor mine,” “nor mine,” chimed in the small fry of the country towns.
Even the religious press could not get past the tailor shop, and “Pantaloons” was the watchword all along the line. George D. Prentice took up the cry, and gave the world a two-third column leader on it, stating explicitly, “She is a man all but the pantaloons.” I wrote to him, asking a copy of the article, but received no answer, when I replied in rhyme to suit his case: