Love shall tread out the baleful fire of anger,
And in its ashes plant the tree of peace."
Whittier.
Sybil Jones was at work in the Southern States during a part of the year 1860, and returned to her Northern home only a few weeks before the attack on Fort Sumter. The sound of war carried sorrow to the hearts of herself and her husband. They were loyal to their country and the great cause of human freedom, but they were loyal also to the Prince of peace.
"They prayed for love to lose the chain;
'Twas shorn by battle's axe in twain!"
For years they had longed to see the light of freedom break in on the South, but they had hoped no less for the day "when the war-drum should throb no longer" and universal peace should gladden the long watchers for its dawn. Now they saw the oncoming of a most terrible civil war, threatening the life of the nation. They mourned for mothers and fathers who must see their boys go to the field; they thought of the homes shattered for ever; but they did not yet realize that their eldest son was to go forth to return only on his shield—that the son who had urged them to go forward in the work of love in Liberia, their noble son, was to be demanded as a sacrifice.
The war was hardly begun when James Parnel Jones resolved to volunteer. President Lincoln's call seemed a call to him. He had been a logical reader of Sumner, and had closely watched the development of slavery, and to his mind the war to save our nationality would necessarily free the slaves. He wrote from the South: "Did I not think this war would loose the slave's chains I would break my sword and go home."
That it was hard for him to go when his parents were praying for peace there can be no doubt, but his mind was filled with the thought of saving the life of a nation, and he certainly felt that the path of duty was in that direction.
The members of the Society of Friends felt almost universally that they owed allegiance to two fatherlands. "There was a patriotism of the soul whose claim absolved them from the other and terrene fealty," and there was a manifest inconsistency between being members of "Christ's invisible kingdom" and taking arms in support of a dominion measured by acres.[7] Some felt otherwise, and they took upon themselves the hard duty of turning from society and friends to do battle.