APPENDIX.
Chapter XIV—Page [229].
ADDRESS TO PRESIDENT LINCOLN.
Adopted by the Women's National Loyal League, May 14, 1863.
... We ask not for ourselves or our friends redress of specific grievances or posts of honor or emolument. We speak from no considerations of mere material gain; but, inspired by true patriotism, in this dark hour of our nation's destiny, we come to pledge the loyal women of the Republic to freedom and our country. We come to strengthen you with earnest words of sympathy and encouragement. We come to thank you for your proclamation, in which the nineteenth century seems to echo back the Declaration of Seventy-six. Our fathers had a vision of the sublime idea of liberty, equality and fraternity; but they failed to climb the heights which with anointed eyes they saw. To us, their children, belongs the work to build up the living reality of what they conceived and uttered. It is not our mission to criticise the past. Nations, like individuals, must blunder and repent. It is not wise to waste our energy in vain regret, but from each failure we should rise up with renewed conscience and courage for nobler action. The follies and faults of yesterday we cast aside as the old garments we have outgrown. Born anew to freedom, slave creeds and codes and constitutions all now must pass away. "For men do not put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles break and the wine runneth out and the bottles perish; but they put new wine into new bottles and both are preserved."
Our special thanks are due to you, that by your proclamation 2,000,000 women are freed from the foulest bondage humanity ever suffered. Slavery for man is bad enough, but the refinements of cruelty ever must fall on the mothers of the oppressed race, defrauded of all the rights of the family relation and violated in the most holy instincts of their nature. A mother's life is bound up in that of her child. There center all her hopes and ambitions. But the slave-mother in her degradation rejoices not in the future promise of her daughter, for she knows by experience what her sad fate must be. No pen can describe the unutterable agony of that mother whose past, present and future all are wrapped in darkness; who knows the crown of thorns she wears must press her daughter's brow; who knows the wine-press she treads those tender feet must tread alone. For, by the law of slavery, "the child follows the condition of the mother."