Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony were also anti-slavery speakers before the Civil War. Anna Dickinson made a few speeches in her very early girlhood as agent of one of the anti-slavery societies. There were also women employed by the societies as workers in other ways, such as circulating petitions, raising money, distributing tracts, and talking with people in private ways.
Miss Mary Grew, of Philadelphia, occasionally addressed meetings. Miss Grew was one of a large number of women all over the North, who gave all their energies to anti-slavery work. These women helped fugitive slaves, cared for Abolition speakers, raised money, arranged meetings, distributed papers and pamphlets, corresponded, wrote articles for newspapers, sewed for fairs, went without luxuries and even necessities so as to be able to give to the cause, and spent themselves in body and brain without stint, and without asking any reward but the achievement of the end they sought. Mrs. Sidney Lewis, of Philadelphia, kept the anti-slavery office in that city. It would be impossible to name the half of these silent workers.
Lydia Maria Child[[216]] was one of the foremost literary women of her day, when she avowed herself to be an Abolitionist, and her popularity was greatly injured thereby. She edited the Anti-Slavery Standard for two years, and did noble work. During the war there was a last outbreak of pro-slavery fury in Northern cities, and mobs assaulted Wendell Phillips in Boston. One night, after an anti-slavery meeting, the crowd threatened to kill him, and she took his arm and walked serenely by his side through the raging multitude, and it was considered that her presence with him awed them to such an extent that she really saved his life.
Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,”[[217]] when public sentiment was beginning to turn against slavery, and the book went all over the world, and was translated into many tongues, to make all men feel the wickedness of an institution which needed that the Fugitive Slave Law should be enacted and enforced for its support. The effect of the book was incalculable.
Maria Weston Chapman and her sisters brought grace, beauty, and wit, in social circles, to the aid of the Abolitionists in the very first years of the long moral warfare. They became so unpopular in Boston, in consequence of their course, that Mrs. Chapman told a friend that she feared to walk alone on Washington Street, because the very clerks in the stores would insult her as she passed. She was very energetic in getting up anti-slavery fairs on a scale which seemed large in those days, and she enlisted the sympathy of people in England, and secured large contributions from them.
Ann Green Phillips, the wife of Wendell Phillips, was a life-long invalid, but she first converted him to anti-slavery opinions, and then inspired and sustained him, and from her sick bed sent him forth to do the work she could not do.
Helen E. Garrison, the wife of Wm. Lloyd Garrison, the shyest and most modest of women, encouraged her husband, and by her unselfish devotion at home, made it possible for him to use his time and strength combating the system which he held to be “the sum of all villainies.” When the mob dragged him through the streets of Boston, in 1835, and word was brought to this beautiful young woman, who was then a recent bride, that his life was in danger, her spirit rose at the tidings, and she proudly said, “I do not believe my husband will be untrue to his principles.”
XVII.
WORK OF THE W. C. T. U.
BY
FRANCES E. WILLARD.