Lowrie swore vengeance. “Let her alone, for God’s sake!” said one who knew her career. “Let her alone, or she will kill you. She has killed every man she ever touched. Let her alone.” He did not, and she did kill him with the truth. To his threats she returned the promise that she should continue to support Buchanan until she had broken him down in everlasting infamy. Her office was sacked one night and a notice left that if she revived the paper she would be tied to a log and cast into the Mississippi. The issue could not be avoided. An indignation meeting was called, and Mrs. Swisshelm said “I will attend and speak.” She made her will, settled her business, wrote a history of the trouble to testify if she could not, and employed a fighting man to attend the meeting by her side, and shoot her square through the brain if there were no other way to prevent her falling into the hands of the mob. Mrs. Sterns, a Yankee woman, held her arm, saying, “We will go into the river together; they can’t separate us.” So this descendant of the old Covenanter martyrs made her first speech to the, to her, doubtless, sweet music of a howling mob, stones and pistol shots.
The Visiter was reëstablished on new type, by a stock company, and the first issue brought down on them a libel suit from Governor Lowrie, to compromise which Mrs. Swisshelm published a retraction, which released the owners from $10,000 bonds. She then bought the material, suspended the bonded Visiter, and issued the St. Cloud Democrat. Its first issue rang the death-knell of Governor Lowrie and border ruffianism in Minnesota. It was useless to sue her for libel, and she was too well protected to fear force. The state election in 1859, when Governor Lowrie was a candidate for Lieutenant-Governor, turned on the policy of border ruffianism, press-breaking, and woman mobbing. “The large man who instituted a mob to suppress a woman of my size [i. e., 100 lbs.], and then failed, was not a suitable leader for American men,” and Lowrie was snowed under, and not long after was taken to an insane asylum. The next year Mrs. Swisshelm felt honored at being burned in effigy in St. Paul by her enemies, as “the mother of the Republican party in Minnesota.” She afterward lectured two years in the northwest.
Then came the terrible civil war. Mrs. Swisshelm engaged in hospital work, bringing to it the consecration, indomitable energy and eccentric gumption that she displayed in politics and business. She walked through the red tape and professional etiquette which were killing more than bullets were, as she had through conventional chains. She says: “It was often so easy to save a life, where there were the means of living, that a little courage or common sense seemed like a miraculous gift to people whose mental powers had been turned in other directions.” In one hospital she found gangrene, and to her call for lemons, specific for it, she was gravely told by the surgeon that he had made a requisition a week before for them, and could not get them. She telegraphed the Tribune:
Hospital gangrene has broken out in Washington, and we want lemons! LEMONS! LEMONS! No man or woman in health has a right to a glass of lemonade till these men have all they need. Send us lemons!
The next day lemons began to pour into Washington, and soon into every hospital in the country. Governor Andrew sent two hundred boxes, and at one time she had twenty ladies with ambulances distributing lemons. Gangrene disappeared.
She felt about equal anger and contempt for masculine indifference and the mushy inefficiency of women who flocked to Washington to nurse in the hospitals. She sarcastically says the vast majority of the women who succeeded in getting into hospitals were much more willing to “kiss him for his mother” than to render the soldier any solid service; they “were capable of any heroism save wearing a dress suitable for hospital work. The very, very few who laid aside their hoops—those instruments of dread and torture—generally donned bloomers and gave offense by airs of independence.”
Mrs. S. was one of three women who followed Grant’s advance upon the Wilderness. Her courage, endurance and good sense never showed to better advantage than during the Petersburg battles.
Mrs. Swisshelm’s marital experience was but an episode to her true career—the counter-irritant that brought out her character. Its unhappiness was due to four causes: 1. Religious differences. Both sides were fanatical, and her husband’s people felt a call to give her no rest till they had got her “converted and saved” by their theological scales. 2. It was a sad case of mother-in-law, on the husband’s side. 3. The brains, character and courage were all on one side. No woman had a higher reverence for strong manly character, and she was married to a male shrew and weakling. But above all she belonged to the last half of the nineteenth century in her ideas of woman’s sphere, and he to the last half of the eighteenth, in his. Aside from this, they loved each other, and after their separation each bore high testimony to the right intention and purity of the other.
Few women of this day appreciate how much of their freedom to work and think they owe to such pioneers as Jane Grey Swisshelm. Few men can be made to see how much of the great advance of American life is due to the nobler, broader womanhood made possible by the self-immolation of such pioneers. They made their impression on the point most needing change and strength, if our society and government were to become pure, strong and enduring. For it has become a law of sociology that the condition of its women is the measure of the civilization and possible growth of any people. Mrs. Swisshelm did more than her share to lengthen that measure for this people, and, happily, lived to see the fruits of her work. But it was a desolate life for a woman, for all that.
