The agitation had not yet become so strong as greatly to affect the children of the household. We played about the garden as usual and knew little of the Commonwealth undertaking, save as it brought some delightful juveniles to the editorial sanctum. The little Howes highly approved of this by-product of journalism!
Our mother’s pen had been used before this time to help the cause of the slave. As early as 1848 she contributed a poem to The Liberty Bell, an annual edited by Mrs. Maria Norton Chapman and sold at the anti-slavery bazars. “In my first published volume, Passion Flowers, appeared some lines ‘On the Death of the Slave Lewis,’ which were wrung from my indignant heart by a story—alas! too common in those days—of murderous outrage committed by a master against his human chattel” (Recollections of the Anti-Slavery Struggle, Julia Ward Howe).
Another method of arousing the conscience of the nation was through the public platform. My father and his friends were anxious to present the great question in a perfectly fair way. So a series of lectures was given in Tremont Temple, where the speakers were alternately the most prominent advocates of slavery at the South and its most strenuous opponents at the North. Senator Toombs, of Georgia, and General Houston, of Texas, were among the former.
It was, probably, at this lecture course that my father exercised his office as chairman in an unusual way. In those days it was the custom to open the meeting with prayer, and some of the contemporary clergymen were very long-winded. Dr. Howe informed each reverend gentleman beforehand that at the end of five minutes he should pull the latter’s coat-tail. The divines were in such dread of this gentle admonition that they invariably wound up the prayer within the allotted time.
At this time no criticism of the “peculiar institution” was allowed at the South. Northerners traveling there were often asked for their opinion of it, but any unfavorable comment evoked displeasure. Indeed, a friend of ours, a Northern woman teaching in Louisiana, was called to book because in his presence she spoke of one of the slaves as a “man.” A negro, she was informed, was not a man, and must never be so called. “Boy” was the proper term to use. This was a logical inference from Judge Taney’s famous Dred Scott decision—viz., that “such persons,” i. e., negroes, “were not included among the people” in the words of the Declaration of Independence, and could not in any respect be considered as citizens. Yet, to quote Abraham Lincoln again, “Judge Curtis, in his dissenting opinion, shows that in five of the then thirteen States—to wit, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and North Carolina—free negroes were voters, and in proportion to their numbers had the same part in making the Constitution that the white people had.”
Events now began to move with ever-increasing rapidity. The scenes of the stirring prelude to the Civil War grew ever more stormy. Men became more and more wrought up as the relentless purpose of the Southern leaders was gradually revealed. The deadly serpent of slavery became a hydra-headed monster, striking north, east, and west. The hunting of fugitive slaves took on a sinister activity in the Northern “border” States; at the national capital the attempts to muzzle free speech culminated in the striking down of Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber itself; in Kansas the “border ruffians” strove to inaugurate a reign of terror, and succeeded in bringing on a local conflict which was the true opening of the Civil War.
The men who combated the dragon of slavery—the Siegfrieds of that day—fought him in all these directions. In Boston Dr. Howe was among the first to organize resistance to the rendition of fugitive slaves. An escaped negro was kidnapped there in 1846. This was four years before the passage by Congress of the fugitive-slave law made it the duty (!) of the Free States to return runaway negroes to slavery. My father called a meeting of protest at Faneuil Hall. He was the chief speaker and “every sentence was a sword-thrust” (T. W. Higginson’s account). I give a brief extract from his address:
“The peculiar institution which has so long been brooding over the country like an incubus has at length spread abroad its murky wings and has covered us with its benumbing shadow. It has silenced the pulpit, it has muffled the press; its influence is everywhere.... Court Street can find no way of escape for the poor slave. State Street, that drank the blood of the martyrs of liberty—State Street is deaf to the cry of the oppressed slave; the port of Boston that has been shut up by a tyrant king as the dangerous haunt of free-men—the port of Boston has been opened to the slave-trader; for God’s sake, Mr. Chairman, let us keep Faneuil Hall free!”
Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and Theodore Parker also spoke. John Quincy Adams presided at the meeting.
The meeting resulted in the formation of a vigilance committee of forty, with my father as chairman. This continued its work until the hunting of fugitives ceased in Boston. Secrecy necessarily characterized its proceedings. An undated note from Dr. Howe to Theodore Parker gives us a hint of them: