Rhoda of the Underground

by Florence Finch Kelly

From the veranda steps Rhoda bade Charlotte and Horace Hardaker good-night, and as they passed down the broad front walk between the lilac hedges called out gay nothings after them and laughed at her sister’s saucy rejoinders. When they disappeared down the street she went back into the house, softly humming to herself, for the merriment still stirred in her heart. She peeped into her mother’s bedroom and smiled with gratification as she saw that the invalid was at last sleeping soundly. Then she made a trip to the kitchen to give Lizzie directions concerning breakfast and afterward sat down in the living-room for a quiet hour or two of reading.

It was in the early days of October, and the presidential campaign of 1856 was at its height. Mighty waves of political enthusiasm were sweeping the country and stirring it to its depths, as it had never before been stirred. The youthful Republican party was already showing a marvelous growth. From the South were coming open threats of secession in case Frémont should be elected.

Rhoda was intensely interested and under the guidance of her father was eagerly following the progress of the campaign. She sat down now with a little pile of its literature on the table beside her and took up first a pamphlet containing George William Curtis’s oration on “The Duty of the American Scholar to Politics and the Times.” The quiet, intense conviction which glowed through its polished phrases set her pulses to throbbing. She read it through rapidly once, then went back and studied carefully the arguments, breathing high aspirations and noble ideals, by which he advanced to the conclusion that the prime duty of the scholar in that crisis was to work to his utmost for the election of Frémont.

She knew that the oration was being read by scores upon scores of thousands, for her father had told her of its enormous circulation and of its effect upon thinking people throughout the North. Her hand trembled as she laid it down and went out upon the veranda. She tried to form in her mind some idea of all those masses of people moved as she was feeling herself moved at that moment by the orator’s inspiring sentences and stirred as she was stirred by the desire to go forth as to a crusade and with mind and heart and hand work for the success of the party that would put an end to the extension of slavery.

“Oh, he will surely be elected—he must be elected!” she whispered, nervously clasping her hands. Then she wondered, if Frémont should be successful, would there follow secession and war—the war which her father believed to be the only means for the cutting of the Gordian knot into which North and South had tangled themselves. And then came quickly apprehensive thought of that ardent and determined lover, on the other side of the fateful river. She shivered a little and told herself that the nights were already growing much cooler. Presently she would go upstairs, she thought, and, perhaps, she would read again the letter that had come two days before from Jefferson Delavan.

She went back to her reading and looked through some recent newspapers. In the New York “Times” she read an account of a great meeting in Wall Street, where, from the steps of the Merchants’ Exchange, Speaker Banks, of the House of Representatives, had addressed a mighty assemblage of twenty thousand earnest men. In Pittsburg had been held a monster mass-meeting of a hundred thousand. Everywhere there had been meetings, speeches, torchlight processions, bands, cheers, enthusiasm.

Rhoda had herself joined in that staccato cry of the campaign, “Free speech, free soil and Frémont!” only a few nights before when she and Marcia Kimball and Mrs. Hardaker and others of her friends had leaned from the windows of Horace Hardaker’s office and with waving handkerchiefs and responding cheers had added to the enthusiasm of the Republican procession sweeping down the street. Her father, heading one division and Horace leading another, had saluted them with waving torches and louder cheers. Her mother and sister had stayed at home that night and neither of them, by word or look, had shown afterwards that they knew a torchlight procession had taken place. But when the Democrats had had their meeting and procession a week earlier Mrs. Ware and Charlotte had gone under the escort of Billy Saunders.

With close attention she read too of the great meetings that were being held all over the North, and the money that was being donated by rich and poor alike in aid of the free-soil settlers in Kansas. Recently she had had a long letter from Julia Hammerton, Horace’s sister, giving intimate account of the perilous times through which they were passing and of the riot and pillage and bloodshed which ravished the border. Her anxiety for her friend doubled the interest with which she perused the reports from Lawrence and Topeka. She exclaimed with horror every now and then, and at last with head bowed upon her clasped hands she whispered: “Oh, God in heaven, grant the election of Frémont, and stop all this, I pray, I pray!”

“Inside were a withered rose and a letter.”