The records of that Vigilance Committee have never been published. It is to be hoped that some day they will be, unless they have been destroyed. Thomas Wentworth Higginson has told us that my father’s part in the anti-slavery movement was almost unique and wholly characteristic of the man, who was a natural crusader or paladin.
The little Howes did not know of the existence of this committee. Neither did we know of our father’s strenuous labors in connection with the election to the Senate of his friend Charles Sumner. We were too young to be intrusted with state secrets. But from our early childhood my father taught us to love freedom and to hate slavery. He told us of the successive aggressions of the slave power and of the steps by which it had grown to threaten the whole land. We learned of the Missouri Compromise, the Dred Scott Decision, the Kansas and Nebraska Bill.
We knew these, not as dry political facts from the office of a lawyer, but as the successive invasions of a fire that was destined, ere many years had passed, to involve our beloved country in the terrible conflagration of the Civil War. To my father and his co-workers in the anti-slavery cause, these successive encroachments of slavery on the territory which the framers of our Federal Constitution had declared should remain eternally free, were a growing menace of evil. He strongly impressed upon our minds the sin of compromise of principle. Did he not see, in the bloody struggle in Kansas, the sinister results of those weak yieldings of the North?
The electric current of indignation that thrilled through our home we felt very strongly, as we did the stir of action. Lowell’s lines, splendid in themselves, gained a new force and intensity as my father repeated them to us.
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above His own.
Sometimes I would hear him and his friends talking together over the political situation with deep earnestness and indignation. Those were exciting days. As children, we knew nothing of the approaching storm, but we felt the stir in the air!
Brother Harry, a child of eleven, wrote an indignant letter, after the capture of John Brown, to Governor Wise of Virginia. As it was couched in abusive terms, I fear it was never mailed. Since few of our young mates agreed with us in opinion, we had many arguments. In the early days one of our friends at the Stevenson School laughingly called us “Little Free-dirters,” because we belonged to the Free Soil party. As events moved rapidly forward feeling grew more intense. We were very indignant at the deadly assault in the Senate Chamber upon our friend, Charles Sumner. As he sat pinioned down by his desk, and so unable to rise, blows with a loaded cane were showered upon his head. Some of the girls of our acquaintance sought to justify the attack. We countered with the testimony of Henry Wilson (later Vice-President of the United States), who had witnessed the scene where a colleague of Preston Brooks stood guard, a pistol in either hand, to prevent any interference in behalf of Sumner. For a long time, the victim’s life was in danger. His seat in the Senate remained “eloquently empty” for three years. Yet Charles Sumner lived to see slavery overthrown and the United States a free country. Within a year his young assailant died of membranous croup. It was thought that remorse for his brutal deed hastened his death.
We children heard of Sumner’s great sufferings, and of the cruel “Mochsa” treatment—the burning of his back.