That a Christian has a right to shout!
As the concluding strain of this psalm of praise and of prayer sank away into silence they carefully led a very old colored man to the platform. This was Old John the Baptist, as the negroes affectionately called him; he was looked up to as a sort of patriarch in Israel on account of his goodness and spirituality. The whiteness of his matted hair and the deep furrows in his face testified to the many, many years in which the pain of slavery had been burned into his soul. As they assisted him up the steps it could be seen that he was blind, and a deep hush fell upon the room as he raised his hands and lifted up his voice in prayer. He gave thanks for the joy of this day of emancipation and for their escape from the woe of slavery; he prayed for the friends and relatives so tenderly beloved that they had left behind, and, above all, he prayed that their feelings of joy and triumph at their own escape might not lead them into vainglorious pride and arrogance. The chief burden of his prayer was that humility might dwell in the hearts of his people. “O God, keep us humble, keep us humble,” he repeated. “Let not thy people be puffed up with pride and then forget the God that brought them out of Egypt into Canaan’s land!”
During these simple, but most impressive, ceremonies Mrs. Stowe sat on the platform, her heart throbbing with the tragedy of the scene. There was a deep, absorbed, dreamy look in her eyes as she sat there pondering on all this great national matter. As she looked out over the vast assemblage, a fragment only of the great exodus from slavery, she grew more and more assured in her mind that the steps that had been taken were right. She thought over what had already been done. It was right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and to exclude it from the territories of the United States; it had been a good stroke for the United States to make that treaty with Great Britain for the suppression of the slave trade, making it legal to hang a convicted slaver as a pirate. And it was clear to her that the government offer of compensation to the slave owners in the southern states, to whom the negro was property, was a just and fair offer. She believed in release from slavery as a growth rather than as a sudden cut-off, and thought that this offer had been a move in the right direction.
Therefore, she thought, it is right and sensible to lead up by these steps to the promise of full freedom to all—which the President had promised—or perhaps one should say, threatened, in the important document, the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had given out some four weeks before. “Oh, if he only will hold firm to this!” she prayed, “and if the Cabinet and the army and the country will only stand by him!”
Then she thought of her soldier son and she remembered the other mothers who had given their boys to the country’s need. With a gush of agony came the reflection that for the mothers to go themselves and to give their own lives would have been so much easier!
As these heavy thoughts were passing through her mind a thousand men just out of slavery were looking toward the quiet little woman on the platform who in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had so marvelously told their story. There were many among the freedmen present who had been able to acquire the valuable and dangerous art of reading printed words, and who had read the wonderful story Mrs. Stowe had written. There were others who had listened breathlessly behind closed doors in their little cabins while the book was being read in low tones to them. So a great glow of grateful love was being poured out in the direction of that inconspicuous member of the distinguished company, for they felt that they knew her heart. As the last strains of “Go down, Moses” were fading away and the company was dispersing, an aged negress met Mrs. Stowe in the doorway and, lifting up her hands in blessing, cried out, “Bressed be de Lord dat brought me to see dis first happy day of my life! Bressed be de Lord!”
At this time Mrs. Stowe must have looked very much like the picture which is reproduced as the frontispiece to this book, which is taken from a carte de visite made in 1862. At this meeting we may imagine her as this picture shows her, but we must add perhaps some kind of shawl or drapery for warmth, a pair of black silk mitts of ornamented net, and a bonnet tied with wide ribbons in a double bow knot under the chin. This bonnet must have concealed the abundant hair coiled up at the back, but not the soft wavy brown folds that came down on either side of the beautiful, refined face. The large breast-pin in the picture was made from a piece of softly clouded lava; the ring, worn in the fashion of the day on the first finger, had belonged to her son who was drowned while in college; this ring she wore and jealously guarded for his sake. Many people who knew Mrs. Stowe pronounce it one of the best likenesses of her that we possess.
CHAPTER XIX
A VISIT TO ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Mrs. Stowe spent the next day after the freedmen’s jubilee in driving frantically from fort to fort in search of the proper officer to give her permission to extract her son Fred for a time from the military harness. She was afraid they would not let him come with her; at last, however, she succeeded, and she was never happier than when he sprang into the carriage, free for forty-eight hours. He, too, was filled with uncontrollable delight. “Oh!” he exclaimed in a sort of rapture, “this pays for a year of hard fighting and hard work!” A year ago she had bade him farewell at Andover, and, after the trip of his regiment to New York, she had again seen him for an hour. At that time she found him even in the two days’ experience of soldierly life mysteriously changed—an expression of gravity and care marking his face. “It is thus that our boys,” she said in her heart, “come to manhood in a day!” But what she felt at that time was as nothing to the feelings that were now hers when this war-worn man came to her arms! For he was a lieutenant, having been promoted for bravery on more than one field.
That evening in a quiet little parlor, by a bright coal fire, she sat with three children around her, the young lieutenant, a daughter, and the little son who lives now to remember the events of this Washington visit. Her cup was as full of joy as any mother’s could be who yet must think what the fortune of war might mean to many a mother’s breaking heart.