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AMERICAN CHIVALRY

WENDELL PHILLIPS
From a photograph by J. W. Black, about 1875

American Chivalry

BY
LILLIE BUFFUM CHACE WYMAN
Author of "Poverty Grass," "Interludes," Etc.

W. B. CLARKE CO.
BOSTON 1913

Copyright, 1913
By Lillie Buffum Chace Wyman

Thanks are hereby given heartily to Mrs. Albert P.
Carter for assistance in preparing the chapter on Elizabeth
Buffum Chace ; and to Miss Anna Harvey Chace for a
paragraph concerning John Crawford Wyman, also to
Francis Jackson Garrison, Miss Sarah J. Eddy, Miss
Alia W. Foster, Miss Anna Harvey Chace, Mr. A. B.
Paine, Mr. Frank B. Sanborn, and Harper Brothers for
some of the illustrations.

Press of
Hooper Printing Company
Boston

I dedicate this book
to my son
Artlpxr Cdrawfarh OTtjman

TABLE OF CONTENTS PAGE
Wendell Phillips .... 1
Elizabeth Buffum Chace . . 35
Rebecca Buffum Spring . . 51
Parker Pillsburt and the Fosters 69
Sojourner Truth .... 93
John Crawford Wyman . . 114
Appendix  145

ILLUSTRATIONS

Wendell Phillips  Frontispiece
Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison
Facsimile Letter from Wendell Phillips  Facing page 1
Frank B. Sanborn ._  Facing page 2
Printed by permission of F. B. Sanborn.
Frank J. Merriam  :  Facing page 5
Printed by permission of Miss S. J. Eddy.
Ann Greene Phillips  Facing page 11
Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison.
Francis Jackson  Facing page 13
Printed by permission of Miss Sarah J. Eddy.
Elizabeth Bottom Chace  Facing page 35
In photogravure from a painted photograph taken
when she was fifty years old.
Samuel Buffington Chace  Facing page 40
In photogravure from a photograph taken when he
was 56 years old.
Arnold Buffum  Facing page 51
In photogravure from a pencil sketch made by
Edward A. Spring a few weeks before Arnold
Buffum's death.
Theodore D. Weld  Facing page 59
Three Great Grandsons of Arnold Buffum. . . After page 68
Abbt Kelley Foster  Facing page 72
Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison.
Frederick Douglass  Facing page 80
From a painting in 1883 by Miss Sarah J. Eddy,
printed by permission of Miss Eddy.
Mrs. Luct Stone  Facing page 91
Printed by permission of Alice Stone Blackwell.
Wendell Phillips  Facing page 104
Printed by permission of Francis J. Garrison. •
John Crawford Wyman  Facing page 114
In photogravure, representing him when 57
years old.
Emma Willard Wyman  Facing page 118
Residence of John C. Wyman in Valley Falis,
R. I  Facing page 128
Sir Henry Irving  Facing page 132
John Crawfprd Wyman, aged 75 years  Facing page 140
Joseph H. Twichell  Facing page 142
Printed by permission of Harper & Brothers.
Facsimile letters from Joseph H. Twichell  After page 143

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WENDELL PHILLIPS
It was early in the year of 1860; Mr. Phillips
was driving with Mrs. Elizabeth B. Chace in
Rhode Island. He said, "I did not mean to
lecture much this season. I told my wife in
the Fall that I would stay at home this winter
and be a very good husband; but then came
up this Harper's Ferry matter, and I had to
break my promise and go out. However she
encouraged me to do it."
He spoke of having been especially impressed
by the fact that John Brown's men were will
ing to give up their young lives. That seemed
a more remarkable sacrifice than did the old
man's surrender of ebbing existence.
I was a child, too young to realize the serious
nature of my question; I asked, "Did you
know beforehand of John Brown's plans ?'
He answered quietly, yet slightly correcting
his phrase as he spoke, "I knew there was such
a man. I did not know he intended to attack
Harper's Ferry; but I knew he was working
in such ways. I had seen him. I knew he
was down there in that vicinity doing some
thing about slavery, I did not know exactly
what."

2 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
It has been supposed even by persons inti
mately acquainted with the inner story of John
Brown's work that Mr. Phillips knew less of
it, before the denouement, than several other
persons in the North; but not even Col.
Higginson, Mr. Sanborn or Dr. Howe were
aware of what Mr. Phillips admitted, on that
evening in 1860, that he knew, before the out
break, that John Brown was in the borderland
between Maryland and Virginia.
* * * *
Late in 1861, I passed an evening with Mr.
Phillips in Providence, where he had come to
deliver his oration, "The Lost Arts," "They
asked for that lecture," he said. "I am sure I
can't imagine why they want it." He was
always inclined to make fun of this lecture,
and to wonder at the continued demand for it,
declaring at about this time that he "had made
a thousand dollars with it, since he had de
termined that he would never allow himself to
be persuaded to give it again."
It is very likely however that the committee
in Providence chose that oration in this season
from a deliberate desire not to provide him
with a chance to speak on the Times. His
talk this evening showed that he was depressed
about both the political and military situation.
He thought Lincoln was blind to the signifi
cance of events, and he profoundly distrusted

FRANK B. SANBORN

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 3
Seward. "If we fail," he said, "we shall be
under the harrow. I expect that, — but those
poor contrabands !" He uttered the last words
in a low tone, with an intense expression of
sympathy and pity, and he clenched his hands
as he spoke. This clenching of the
hands was a characteristic gesture of his, when
he was deeply moved. Pity was with him an
indignant sort of passion, and when he felt it
for persons whom he considered to be the
victims of injustice, there was something
terrific in the way he said little or nothing at
all, but seemed to become a silent spirit of
anguish for the sufferer and judgment upon
the offender. * * * *
During my school-girl period, he once ad
vised me as to methods of self education, say
ing, "I have kept up my studies by myself. I
have let my Greek go, but I have never failed
to read a Latin Classic through each year since
I left college. I know some German, — not
much. The way to read French is to read it
without mental translation into English." His
general remarks implied that he had an easy
mastery of the French language. At another
time, he told me, with some amusement, of the
way his class in college had evaded the study of
Spanish, by beguiling their instructor, who was
"an old European revolutionist," to talk

4 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
through the recitation hours about Revolu
tionary themes and experiences. "There was
one whole term" he said, "in which we did not
have a single real recitation. We did not
learn a great deal of Spanish," he admitted.
It is interesting in view of the later life of
this great moral revolutionist, to imagine the
scenes in that Harvard class room, when in
the first third of the nineteenth century, the
Boston boy listened to the eager talk and
strange stories of the old European of that
period. * * * *
All testimony as to Mr. Phillips's behavior
in the presence of mobs shows him to have
been possessed of superb physical courage,
and endowed on such occasions with a fineness
of manner which bore shining witness to the
gentlemanly quality in his blood. One of my
friends saw him face an infuriated New York
mob. He stood on the platform, controlling
their passions, as if the emotions of men were
his playthings, alternately rousing his listeners
to rage by some defiant utterance of opinions
that they hated, and exciting them to laughter
by his wit. Once some of the leaders rushed
forward; cut a curtain rope and cried out that
they would hang him. "Oh, wait a minute,"
said he quietly, "till I tell you this story."
On that May day of 1863, when the 54th

F. J. MERRIAM
One of John Brown's Men

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 5
Massachusetts Regiment made up of colored
soldiers marched out of Boston under the lead
ership of Colonel Shaw, the remnant of one of
the first regiments sent to the front many
months before, came back to the city. I saw
both processions, that of the homeward bound
veterans, and that of the men who were to
go forth and prove the quality of an untried
race. I was with Mr. Garrison, his daughter,
and a party of friends in Mr. Phillips' house,
when the colored regiment swept through Essex
Street. We waited its coming in a room which,
so far as I ever knew the house, appeared
to be at once the reception room and Mr.
Phillips' study. It contained as its most
prominent furniture a large table, covered
with pamphlets and other papers, a big sofa,
a bust of John Brown and another of one of
the Bowditch family. Mr. Phillips was not
iresent with us, but Mr. Garrison found
lim finally, and got permission to take the
Hist of John Brown out on the balcony. Miss
Garrison steadied the pedestal, and the bust
of the Harper's Ferry hero was placed on
it, and her father stood beside the young girl
as she held it firm while the regiment went
by. Some of the officers lifted their hats to
the great abolitionist, his daughter and to
the symbol of a consecration like their own.
Mr. Phillips, meanwhile, was in the room
above with his wife, watching the soldiers.

6 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
I give the following extracts from a letter
written in May, 1864, when I was a school
girl. They refer to a much perturbed con
vention of the New England Anti-slavery
Society. "The meeting opened, officers were chosen
and committees appointed. Mr. Quincy, of
course, was chairman. He seemed much as
usual, most decidedly the right man in the
right place, well versed in rules, impartial,
dignified. Mr. Garrison sat on the platform,
and near him, Phillips. Thompson was pres
ent, but excused himself from speaking be
cause of ill-health. Nobody came forward to
speak, though those wont to speak were there.
Mr. Phillips looked serious, a trifle anxious,
perhaps. A manifest reluctance to commence
a discussion that must be stormy kept them
silent. The hall rang with calls for 'Phillips,
Phillips,' but with unmoved countenance that
gentleman sat still. Mr. Garrison touched
im with his umbrella, but made no impres
sion. Still the call sounded. Mr. Garrison
at last spoke to Phillips, who shook his head,
and Mr. Garrison got up and said, the spirit did
not move Mr. Phillips, and they must wait till
it did. One or two short addresses followed
before Mr. Foster opened the discussion of the
Presidential campaign. The ice was broken and
in they went ! Mr. Phillips went into an inner
room connected with the platform, or stood on

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 7
the end of it at some distance from the speakers
Charles Burleigh spoke very finely 
Then came more wild calls for Phillips, who
looked more propitious than before, but stood
still, perhaps to increase his value when he did
come. Quincy got up to try and quiet the up
roar. 'Mr. Phillips,' he said, 'would come if
he chose to and wouldn't if he didn't.' A.
says they all treat Mr. Phillips as if he were a
baby, and it must be confessed he has his
caprices. Rather rough handling for a 'baby'
he got before that convention was through.
' At last Mr. Phillips began to move forward,
but by his delay he had lost the chance. Mr.
Wright had the floor. Mr. Phillips came on,
till suddenly perceiving, he stepped aside with
a gesture of apology. . . . Mr. Burleigh and
Mr. Phillips, as I said, were standing side by
side. In front and between them sat Mr.
Garrison, and the three formed a triangle of
remarkable faces in perfect repose, — Mr.
Burleigh with his face so like the portraits of
Christ, Mr. Phillips looking statue-like in the
immobility of his Roman features, and be
tween ana below both, the purely American
face of William Lloyd Garrison,"
The letter goes on to tell that during one
session a man got up in the back of the hall
and attacked Mr. Phillips in terms that seemed
to imply that the orator had been criticising
Lincoln "like a blackguard," and when a wild

8 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
uproar of disapproval greeted the insinuation,
the man retracted so far as to say, "I grant Mr.
Phillips that he is a gentleman," a retraction
which caused much laughter, in which Mr.
Phillips joined. The critic in the audience
continued his remarks undaunted, and finally
said, quoting from a speech that a young man
had made in another meeting in Boston that
same anniversary week, "If Wendell Phillips
would do as Lincoln did, kneel down and ask
counsel of God, he would change his opinions."
After this speech was done, Samuel May of
Leicester, Massachusetts, "came forward, say
ing he considered this remark 'a piece of in
expressible cant' — cheers and hisses — 'of
inexpressible cant,' repeated Mr. May. 'What
right had that man to drag Wendell Phillips
praying or not praying before a Boston audi
ence? It was the same thing as saying that
Mr. Phillips had gone through all his work of
thirty years without a God. Surely there was
no man in the country who had shown more
conclusively that God had been with him in
his life than Wendell Phillips. Everybody
knew that Mr. Phillips was orthodox, of the
Old South Church orthodoxy. If he did not
pray, who had been his teachers ?' As mother
and I," continues the letter, "were coming out
[of the hall], we heard a man say, T know what
kind of praying Wendell Phillips does. He
sends food to the hungry and clothing to the

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 9
naked, — and I know it, for I've carried them
for him.' "
Some romantic stories were told of Mr.
Phillips' marriage in his early youth to Ann
Greene. It was said that he fell in love with
her at first sight and that she converted him to
abolitionism, but apparently the seeds of his
future opinions had been sown before he met
this ardent girl Garrisonian, for he told a friend
that he and Charles Sumner expected to be
introduced to Ann at the same time, and that
Sumner and he disputed as to which was the
more likely to win her favor. "Charles,"
said Mr. Phillips, "claimed that he had the
better chance because he had read the Libera
tor longer than I had, — but when the time
came, I went and Charles didn't."
Mrs. Phillips' health failed before her mar
riage, and though she experienced a temporary
recovery during the first years of their union,
she led for from thirty to forty years what was
practically a shut-in life. We younger folk
of the anti-slavery clan used to hear her spoken
of as if she were a sort of Egeria, away from
all mortal eyes and ears, save those of her
husband, whose thought and action she was
said to inspire and guide. That strenuous
natured woman, Abby Kelley Foster, was one
of the few intimate friends who saw her more
or less often. Mrs. Foster had an intense ad
miration for her. She considered her to be

10 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
gifted with an almost super-human faculty for
sympathy and tenderness. "You never have
to tell her anything," said Mrs. Foster, "she
seems to know everything without being told."
Once when he and she must have been
towards sixty years old, I asked Mr. Phillips
what he really meant by his customary reply
to inquirers that his wife was "about as usual."
He meant, he said, that she was able to enjoy
looking out of the window upon Essex Street,
where she saw a good deal of the stir of life.
This enjoyment of hers in watching the pass
ing wagons and other vehicles was the reason
they preferred to reside on that street after it
had Become a thoroughfare. Sometimes, he
continued, she came down stairs to the floor
below her bedroom and looked around the
house, but she never stayed an hour outside of
her own chamber, and never took a meal out
of it. I have heard that he ate all of his meals
with her at her bedside but he did not tell me
so. "She was a very lively, high-spirited
girl," he said, "when I first knew her. It is as
if she had acquired some brightness and force
in those days which has stayed by and borne
her up through all these years."
Of course there was another part of the
story, — a daily sacrifice by him of social
gayety, of home comfort and personal freedom
in little things.
I myself, saw Mrs. Phillips twice, the first time

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 11
during my school days. Mrs. Foster wanted me
to see her, and arranged it with Mr. Phillips.
"It's a sight," he said with tender humor, to
see Ann." She made much the same impres
sion on my mind, both times I saw her, though
there was an interval of fully fifteen years be
tween the visits. She lay on a bed in a small
room, but during the first visit she sat up and
looked with frank eagerness over a box of
flowers which was brought to her, and before
I left, she got up on her feet for a few minutes.
She was of medium size and had bright brown
hair, very delicate features and the waxen
complexion that betokens the indoor life of the
invalid. She had a naive, girlish way of speak
ing. I fancied that her seclusion from society
had left her manner unchanged through all
her maturer years from what it had been in
the gay days of early love and hope, when she
and her brilliant lover had been together in
the outer world. It struck me that she had
lived in an atmosphere so free from criticism
that she had never tried to modify herself.
"We are one, you know," she said simply and
sweetly, speaking of herself and her husband.
* si * *
Once during the winter of 1865-6, 1 acciden
tally met Mr. Phillips, on a railroad train. I
was a school girl, and he treated me with play
ful kindliness, but as a child to whom he might

12 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
when he was tired of talking, say calmly,
"Now I am going to read," and having said it,
proceed to suit action to word, while I, feeling
that my good time was over, submissively
gazed out of the window. During this trip of
an hour, however, he said several notable
things to me and made some rather intimate
revelation of his inner moods.
He spoke of the wedding which he had re
cently attended of Mr. Garrison's daughter
Fanny to Henry Villard, "It was very pleasant,"
he said. "I saw Garrison in the hall, as I went
in. I am very glad his life is ending so happily
and so full of honor. He seems wholly at rest.
I am very much impressed by his serenity
every time I see him. It is as if he were living
in an atmosphere of peacefulness."
During the early Reconstruction period
much difference of opinion arose and con
tinued to prevail between Mr. Phillips and
several other prominent Abolitionists as to
men and measures connected with the nation-
building task. This difference affected their
views of their own duty both as to conduct and
the disposal of trust monies which were in their
charge. Some personal bitterness and aliena
tion followed as an inevitable result. Colonel
Higginson told Miss Forten and myself that
he once saw Edmund Quincy deliberately
turn his back on Mr. Phillips in the Ticknor
Building. "It seemed to me," commented

FRANCIS JACKSON

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 13
Col. Higginson, "the saddest thing I ever saw."
It must have been at about the time this
incident occurred, that Mr. Phillips was a
guest over night in Mrs. Chace's house. As
e was preparing to ascend the staircase, he
broke into sudden speech. Nothing whatever
had been said to lead up to such a confidence,
when he exclaimed, "Oh I don't think that
there is much satisfaction to be gotten out of
this life."
"Thee shouldn't feel so" said Mrs. Chace.
The tears came into his eyes, as he answered,
"Half the men I worked with for thirty years
will not speak to me when they meet me on the
street." "That is hard, I know," she half whispered.
He steadied himself and went on quietly,
"I was talking the other day with my friend
Mrs. Eddy, and I told her that I believed if
her father (Francis Jackson) were living he
would understand me now."
Astrain of melancholy in Mr. Phillips became
apparent to me during this general period, and
although I saw him afterwards seem very cheer
ful, the impression that he was sorrowful in his
later hfe remains with me still.
This effect, as of one who felt himself at odds
with those who should have been his natural
comrades, and who was reluctant to speak
what emphasized such difference, was once
strangely manifest when, at the Radical Club,

14 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
he defended the theory of the supernatural
origin of Christianity. He wholly beheved
this theory, but it seemed to me that he very
much disliked to take part in the discussion of
it with men like John Weiss and Dr. Bartol
who disagreed with him, although they then
treated him with reverence. I may have mis
understood his nature, but from what I saw of
him, I entirely dissent from a current opinion
that Wendell Phillips enjoyed the antagonistic
element in what he once called his "Arab life,
his hand against every man, and every man's
hand against his."
I believe that he was a man who loved to
love and loved to be beloved.
* * * *
Mr. Phillips ran up gaily once on the Com
mon, "Won't you stop and speak to anybody ?"
he cried.
The answer came, "We are going to Mrs.
Sargent's to meet you."
"1 am on my way to be met," he laughed,
"well, we'll have the reception begin now, I
find it pleasant to be met."
As we walked on, he spoke of Mrs. Liver-
more. I said, "She does something to an audi
ence like what you do. Most orators either
coax, excite or argue with an audience. She
simply stands before it and takes it up quietly
in her hands, turns it around as if it were a

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 15
plaything, and makes it behave as she wants
it to, and she acts from the beginning as though
she had not the least fear that she could not.
You do that, only a great deal better than she
does." "Ah!" he almost sighed, "I wish I
thought I did it half as well as she."
Mrs. John T. Sargent gave that day a noon
reception to celebrate the official close of his
work as leader of the American Anti-Slavery
Society through the Reconstruction period,
in the struggle to obtain for the negro political
equality with the white man.
Eight years later I told him that it had been
noticed at Brown University that in competi
tive declamation, any student was certain to
win the prize who chose for recitation a passage
from one of his speeches. "The professors
say," I added, "that there seems to be some
thing about your speeches which gives advant
age to the reciter. They do not know what it
is; do you?"
He answered, "It is because mine are speak
ing sentences. They were composed to be
spoken." * * * *
After an absence of twelve years, Moncure
D. Conway came back to this country in 1875-6.
A few evenings after his arrival in Boston, I,
having had much previous acquaintance with
him, chanced to meet him at a reception,

16 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
and the meeting had a significance for the
full comprehension of which a Uttle history
must be told.
Mr. Conway went to England in the spring
of 1863. He was unofficially sent there by
some of the Radical Anti-Slavery men in
this country, because it was believed that
his testimony to the rightfulness of the North
ern cause in the Civil War, would have great
influence in England on account of his being
himself a Virginian. He went intending
to stay about three months. Mason, the
rebel envoy, was then in London. There
was reason to fear that Parliament would
soon recognize the Southern Confederacy.
The pro-slavery party in England were rally
ing their forces to bring about such recognition,
but probably most of them desired to mask
their sympathy with slave-holders as such,
and much effort was making to disguise the
real purport of the war to the English masses.
It was comparatively easy to represent the
war as merely a conflict between two slave-
holding bodies, since Mr. Lincoln and Mr.
Seward had, in 1861, so represented it to the
English ministry; and Lincoln's later Eman
cipation Proclamation had been long de
layed; and had as yet procured no emancipa
tion within the rebel lines, while it left slavery
untouched in several technically loyal States.
At the time when Mr. Conway arrived in

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 17
London, some opinion prevailed that the
South itself, if victorious and really national
ized, was quite as likely to abolish slavery, as
the North was. Desiring to "unmask" Ma
son on this subject, and make him show his
true colors, Mr. Conway hastily wrote a
letter to him, and sent it on the very day
that the idea of doing so had occurred to
him in consequence of a talk with Robert
Browning, who had said that he thought
great good would come if the English people
could be shown clearly that the South had
no Anti-slavery purpose and that the North
was not waging a war merely for conquest.
The letter, so hurriedly conceived and pre
pared by Mr. Conway, contained what was
morally simply a verbal error in phrase. He
asked Mason to say whether the Southern
Confederacy would, through the adjudica
tion of some properly chosen European na
tion, pledge itself to abolish slavery, if it be
came a recognized nation, and he said that
he was in England as a representative of
the Abolitionists who would oppose the con
tinuance of the war, if the South would thus
inaugurate emancipation.
Within twenty-four hours, Mr. Conway
reaUzed that he had over-stated his author
ity to say what "the Abohtionists" would do
if, the slavery issue being removed by
Southern abolition, the war became merely

18 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
one for Union on the one side and disunion
on the other. He wrote to Mr. Mason
that he had made the proposition
simply in his own person. Mr. Mason wrote
to him a letter which practically declared
that the South would not abolish slavery,
and then immediately pubhshed his letter
and Mr. Conway's first one. He undoubtedly
did this hoping thus to embroil Mr. Con
way with the Abolitionists and the Abolition
ists with the Federal Government. But Ma
son was "hoist with his own petard," for his
own letter revealed the pro-slavery purpose
of the rebels who had sent him to England,
and helped to dispel the delusion as to the
true character of the Southern Duessa whom
Englishmen had been trying to fancy was Una.
Not long afterwards Parhament refused to
recognize the Southern Confederacy.
Mr. Conway however was left in an un
fortunate position. He had not realized that
in writing to Mason, a fellow- Virginian with
himself, and making such a proposition, he
was technically opening a treasonable ne
gotiation with an accredited rebel against
his own country. The matter was taken up
by our Minister in England, referred to
Mr. Seward in this country, and brought to
Lincoln's attention. Mr. Conway held him
self in readiness to return to America and
meet the consequences, but Mr. Lincoln and

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 19
Mr. Seward behaved sensibly, and decided
that there need be no consequences, if noth
ing further happened, Mr. Conway then took
a position as preacher and remained in Eng
land. In this country there was some diversity of
opinion as to Mr. Conway's conduct. The
first account of his correspondence with Ma
son came cut and garbled across the ocean, and
his error seemed greater than it really was, in
having made the unauthorized statement that
he was empowered by the AboUtionists to say
that they would not countenance a war merely
for the Union. Some persons even thought
that his offer was a disguised effort to get the
Confederacy recognized with slavery estab-
Ushed and confirmed. Conway had helped to
free forty of his father's slaves before Lincoln's
proclamation had freed them, but still, it was
not strange that in that period of 1863, his own
anti-slavery principle was doubted for a time.
Moreover, had his letter been taken quite
seriously by the Federal authorities, I suppose
that Secretary Stanton might have sent Mr.
Garrison or Mr. PhiLUps to Fort Lafayette on
the evidence which it furnished, that they
were negotiating through Conway with the
rebels. I had not known or had forgotten the exact
attitude which each one of the prominent AboU
tionists concerned had taken in 1863 towards

20 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
Mr. Conway, and on this evening in Boston,
I stood with him in a large, nearly empty
parlor facing the door. I asked him a few
questions and his answers made me know
that he had been in the city three or four days,
and had received no social overtures, except
the invitation to this reception, and I be
came also very sure that he had not been
sought out personaUy for welcome by any of
those persons whose attention and welcome
would mean some vital interest in his return
home. At the moment I had come to this conclu
sion, I saw a figure in the outer hall, which
was as crowded as the room where we stood
was empty.
"There is Mr. Philhps," I said, "Have
you seen him?"
"Not till now," answered Mr. Conway in a
low tone ; — and the man of whom he spoke was
renowned for never condoning a sin against
freedom! As I have said I had forgotten
Mr. Phillips' attitude in that long past war
time, and Mr. Conway's answer filled me
with instant apprehension that embodied
judgment and doom were approaching us.
I ventured another question, "Have you
heard from him?"
"No," said Mr. Conway.
"You know him?" I asked.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 21
Almost in a whisper he answered, "Oh, I
knew him — long ago."
At this moment, Mr. Phillips freed himself
from the throng, came into the room, and
seemed to bring with him "the splendor that
was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome,"
there being something even more than usually
magnificent in the appearance of the red-haired,
blue-eyed old Patrician as he entered.
Mr. Conway stood motionless and without
a gleam of recognition in his glance. I
think I stepped forward a little, but cer
tainly Mr. Philhps turned his eyes from Con
way, the instant he crossed the threshold,
and came directly towards me. He took my
hand, bowing with a decided gesture of
courtesy, saying, "So you are here!"
"Mr Phillips," I said immediately, "This
is Mr. Conway ! — This is Moncure Conway."
Mr. Conway made no movement which ac
knowledged the mention of his name. Mr.
Phillips did not look at him, but with a peculiar
directness of address to myself, said,
"Oh, I don't need any introduction to him.
I know Mr. Conway. He's the man to whom
F  's guards all lowered their weapons
when he marched up to them saying '/ am a
Virginian.' "
Mr. Phillips spoke the last words with dra
matic exaggeration of emphasis, wheeling
around as he did so to face Mr. Conway, who

22 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
suddenly sprang forward with a glad leap.
He caught Mr. Phillips' hand. He laughed,
he stammered out exclamations; — Mr.
Phillips threw back his head, and his laughter
which was like a musical cascade, flooded
through the room. The two men stood clasp
ing hands for a perceptible time.
"That was about the funniest thing I ever
saw," cried Mr. Conway.
"It was about the cleverest thing I ever
saw," responded Mr. Philhps and they stood
laughing and ejaculating, till I cried a Uttle
petulantly, "But I don't know what you
men are talking about" '
Mr. Conway relapsed into complete sil
ence. It was not for him to tell of the mo
ment when he had done something Mr.
Phillips could not do, and the latter per
ceiving instantly his chance to do the thing
he most loved to, namely to celebrate a
friend's achievement, bent his smile on me,
and explained;
"The trial of Anthony Burns was held be
hind closed doors. It was done to keep the
Abolitionists out. So that morning we anti-
slavery fellows all stood around outside the
Court House, just wild to know what was
going on, and not one of us had a pass and
could get in. Conway went to the sentinels
themselves who stood at the door. He did not
state his opinion, he merely said, Tm a Vir-

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 23
ginian, will you let me in?' They supposed,
of course, that he was on the slave claimant's
side. They knew the reason for the prohibi
tion. They took the responsibility on them
selves and let him in. Then he made report
to us of what was happening."
Of course, I know now that Mr. Phillips
had come into that room to greet Mr. Con
way, and had only taken me incidentaUy
on the way, because I was the girl in the
scene, and possibly also to relieve a momen
tary embarrassment of his own; but my in
troducing the two men as though they were
strangers, in order to force a friendly greeting
from Mr. Phillips, must have been an action
for which he had not prepared himself, and
it still seems to me, that his sudden grasp of
the situation and his immediate reference
to the old Fugitive Slave time, when he
and Mr. Conway had stood shoulder to
shoulder, years before the Mason imbroglio,
was the most tactful and most masterful
social thing which I ever saw done. I know,
however, that I have not here told the story
well enough to do justice to either of the two
men. * * * *
Nearly twenty years after the fugitive
slave Sims and the rights of the Common
wealth had both been tried and both been
condemned to bondage within its waUs, I

24 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
met Mr. Phillips opposite the Boston Court
House. Clad in gray, he stood, in his haughty
beauty, upon the gray stones of that Boston
pavement, "over which" his "mother had
held up" his "baby footsteps," and he flung
out his arm with a mighty movement, say
ing, "That is where I saw the chains stretched
around the Court House!"
The memory of these words and of the
emotion they displayed rendered it impos
sible for my husband and myself, as Wendell
Phillips' friends, to accept the offered cour
tesies of Gen. Devens who had drawn those
chains. * * * *
It must have been about the year 1876
that I happened to be alone with Mr. Phillips.
I said without preface, "Mr. Phillips, how the
papers have been pitching into you, lately!
You are not very popular just now."
He answered good-humoredly, but with
emphasis, "No, I am not in the least popular."
Why are you so intimate with Butler?" I
inquired. "Well," he said, "There is an old saying
that you must fight fire with fire; and some
times, when you are struggling with very
savage forces, the best man you can use for
the purpose is one whose original nature is a
little like that of the enemy. Butler is that
man today in this country. He is just the one

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 25
to fight those fellows on the other side, and this
Reconstruction trouble is not ended. It is
coming up all the time, and showing itself in
the most unexpected places. He is doing work
about it — all the time. Yes, that is why I am
intimate with him. That is what the inti
macy really is. That is under it all. Oh, I
know what kind of a man he is! I am not at
all deceived in him." * * * *
Mr. Phillips called on Mrs. Chace and my
self in New York, in the early winter of 1878-9.
He was on his way home from a lecturing trip.
He appeared depressed, and there were silent
moments during his visit. When he was going
away, we followed him into the hall. He
turned back towards us at the head of the stair
case, and said in an appealing tone, which
tried not quite successfully to be playful:
"You must make much of me while you
have the chance, — you will not have me long."
"Thee is getting to be an old man now,"
said Mrs. Chace, "Ought thee to be going
around lecturing ?"
"No," he answered," I am not well enough
to lecture and I ought not to have it to do."
"Does thee have to ?" she asked. The words
seemed to burst from his lips, "Yes," he said
desperately, adding very passionately, "And
it is not right that I should."

26 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
An instant of awed silence ensued, then he
spoke a hasty farewell, as if to prevent further
speech on the subject, and descended the stairs.
After his death five years later I first learned
that he was really a poor man working from
money need, and that at the time of this visit
he knew himself to be stricken by a mortal
malady. A little more than a year after this New York
call he came to see Mrs. Chace and myself in
Boston. It was a morning visit, he was very
scrupulously well dressed; he sat easily in a
large chair; he seemed like a society man
making a slightly formal call on mere ac
quaintances between whom and himself there
were no such past experiences as those which
had once made him write to Mrs. Chace, "We
have had so many joys and sorrows in common
that now what saddens or rejoices the one of
us must touch the other."
He led the conversation, which, indeed, be
came under his mastery, very nearly a mono
logue, although, so far as I knew his talk, mono
logue was not his usual method.
Very soon some inner passion rushed out
ward in his speech. "We have a strange fate
here," he said, and proceeded rapidly to tell
how five or six of his kinsmen had died in an
instant. "My father sat down in his chair, — and
was gone." Several such incidents, he related,

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 27
throwing them forth from his lips, like bitter
challenges to the Universe itself.
At last Mrs. Chace, who also believed her
self smitten with mortal illness and dreaded a
long suffering, spoke in a gentle tone, saying,
"I think it is a beautiful way to die."
Something in her words or manner affected
this mercurial natured man. He became soft
and humanly resigned to fate. He said only,
"Yes, I think so," to her declaration that sud
den death was comforting to expect, but his
words and manner had wholly lost the mad
dened element which a moment previously
had been their marked characteristic.
A year later, he was with us again for a
morning hour. He talked happily and quietly,
once in a while touching gravely on some seri
ous topic, but briefly, as though he preferred
a strain of comment on lighter matters.
"I don't do anything now," he said, but not
sadly, "I don't go anywhere. I have been
into my cousin's house a few times, but I have
not done anything that was regularly social, I
have not made a visit since I called here last
year." "Did you ever have a loan repaid?" he
asked. "I don't mean a large loan, or one of
a business nature. I mean the small sum of
money that you lend to help a person out of
some special difficulty. I have made many
such? loans, and I was never repaid, — On

28 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
yes, I was once. That was a funny case.
A friend asked me if I could lend him some
money, I said, 'Oh yes,' and gave it to him.
But having got it he did not go off, and he
looked very much troubled. He said, 'Mr.
Phillips, I can't give you a note.' He was a
financial crank, and that was his notion — that
it was wrong to give notes. He said, T hope
you don't mind.' I said 'No, indeed.' He
said, T shall pay you just the same. It won't
make any difference, my not giving you a note.
I hope you don't mind it?' I said, T don't
mind at all not having a note. I'm sure it
won't make any difference about your paying
me.' I didn't think it would," laughed Mr.
Phillips, telling the story. "I hadn't an idea
he would ever pay. So, at last, I got him
comforted, and he went away with the dollars.
And that man paid that debt. It was my
only case."
"I have had two such debts paid me," said
some one.
"Then you have been twice as fortunate as
I," answered the man who before his death
cancelled every such note he held.
"Doubtless," he said this morning, "An
enlightened and conscientious oligarchy would
provide the government that would produce
the best result of immediate order, — if you
could be sure of your ohgarchy. But that's

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 29
the impossible thing. You cannot get and
keep such an oligarchy."
In the June after this talk, Wendell Phillips
spoke his Phi Beta Kappa oration, made his
last great plea for universal suffrage and said,
"Trust the people — the wise and the ignorant,
the good and the bad — with the gravest
questions, and in the end you educate the
race." * * * *
Shortly after both Mr. and Mrs. Phillips
died it was my fortune to hear Frederick
Douglass and Susan B. Anthony talk together
of the dead orator. The voice of Douglass
came brokenly from his expressive mouth, as
he spoke of the time when Wendell Phillips
had walked a steamboat deck with him all
night, refusing to go below and take a berth,
because such accommodation was denied to
Douglass on account of his color. It was
thrilling to hear the old man, then honored
and accepted, in spite of that color, tell of that
companionship in hardship, when he was
young and despised, and his comrade was
beautiful in self-sacrificing youth. "That's
the sort of thing a man never forgets," he
murmured. Miss Anthony's reminiscence on this occa
sion gave a different picture from that sug
gested by Douglass, but the man of whom she

30 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
told was the same in old age as Douglass had
shown him to be in his splendid youth, —
one who sought to bear another's burden.
She said that she had a talk with Mr. Phillips
some time within the last two or three years of
his life. He said to Miss Anthony, "I remem
ber seeing my grandfather look out of the win
dow at my grandmother's funeral, and hearing
him say, T thank God I have lived to see her
go first!' I did not understand his_feehng
then, but I know now what it was. I have
hved to have every hope and desire merge it
self and be lost in the one wish that I may
outlive Ann."
That wish was not granted. He died and
left his wife to the chances of care from others.
This was given, however, by friends and rela
tives, and the household upon which her com
fort depended was maintained until her death,
about two years after his.
One of the pretty stories told of Mr. PhiUips
is that he found pleasure in stealing up to
children whom he saw gazing with wistful
hopelessness into shop windows, and slipping
money into their hands. "I think," said the
person who related this, "if they see his
face as he passes, they must think it is that of
an angel." * * * *
I saw him about eight months before the
February day when he murmured that he was

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 31
sorry to trouble any one to lift and care for
him and sorry, so sorry for "poor Ann."
In this hour with me, he was very sweet,
easily soothed yet deeply troubled.
"I have a poor old friend," he said, "a
crippled soldier. He cannot do many kinds
of work. He has had a little governmental
office. Now the Civil Service Rules have
been applied to such positions as his. He has
lost the place. I don't know what will become
of him. I am anxious about him.
"It does not seem to me that things are man
aged quite rightly for us down here. I have
been very much depressed."
I suddenly perceived that he was expressing
doubt of the Divine government of the world.
"Oh, Mr. Phillips," I begged, "Don't let
that mood be the end of your life. Don't
feel that way."
"Well, I have felt so," he answered as
simply as a Uttle child.
He smiled at last, such a smile as I have
seldom seen, so radiant was it with angelic
glory, so lovely was it in its humanity. I never
saw his Uving countenance again.
* * * *
After this last meeting came these letters.
"16th Aug.
My dear Mrs. Wyman:
Don't think I forgot you or could neglect

32 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
your wish or your letter. But my wife
has been so ill for the last three months that I
have done nothing but help nurse her. She
is helpless; does not lift her head from the
pillow without aid, cannot stand. We took
her in arms to the carriage to drive out here to
Waverly. But you shall not be forgotten.
Something from the home of forty years and
the picture Black insisted on taking, I will
see you have in due time.
Do excuse this long delay and silence ....
Faithfully yours,
Wendell Phillips."
"My dear Mrs. Wyman:
Did I not promise and is not Xmas with its
merrie greeting just the time to keep promises ?
If I promised anything more, please remind
me, by which means I shall have the pleasure
of seeing your sign manual.
My poor wife lies patient in weary helpless
ness, and my employment and pleasure is
waiting on her.
All loving messages of the season for mother,
John, and the baby. Thine, Wendell Phillips."
* * * *
He was the prophetic champion of moral
duty. He not only fulfilled the ideal of

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 33
Lowell's verse, and sided with Truth when to
do so was to share "her wretched crust," he
turned from the feasts that both Ambition and
Possession spread freely before his youth. He
did more; in middle life and again in age, he
went out from the harvest fields whose growth
of fruitage had arisen from his sowing to yield
to him their plenty. He sought Truth in the
desert where she had not even a crust to offer
him. He laid at her feet the sheaves of his
planting and reaping, and he went a-hungered
at her side, contented himself, because he had
strengthened her for her onward march. Then
he laid down his weary head, and the heart
which he had broken in the service of humanity
ceased its pained throbbing.
What was it that he had said in his mighty
recessional chant? I reverently borrow his
phrase, but I, also with deepest reverence,
substitute his own name for the one which his
lips uttered and say, "Wendell Phillips, in my
judgment the noblest human being who ever
walked the streets of yonder city, — I do not
forget Franklin or Sam Adams, Washington
or Fayette, Garrison or John Brown, — but
Phillips dwells an arrow's flight above them
all, and his touch consecrated the continent to
measureless toleration of opinion and entire
equality of rights. We are told we can find
in Plato *all the intellectual life of Europe for
two thousand years :' so you can find in Phillips

34 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
the pure gold of two hundred and fifty years
of American civilization, with no particle
of its dross."

% fycutvfC fl.

A-

<ljlJ

ELIZABETH BUFFUM CHACE
Elizabeth Buffum Chace was descended
from English families who settled in Massa
chusetts and Rhode Island, all, so far as known,
before 1650, and some before 1640.
She herself was always a very intense Rhode
Islander in feeling. Her father was Arnold
Buffum, son of William Buffum who was an
early abolitionist of the gradual emancipation
type, the only type existent in that day.
Arnold Buffum himself became, in 1832, the
first President of the first society ever formed
in this country to demand immediate
emancipation. His wife was Rebecca Gould, daughter of
John Gould, of Newport, R. I., a scholarly
man, who was proprietor of an estate which
had been in the possession of the Gould
family since 1638.
Elizabeth was the second daughter of Arnold
and Rebecca Buffum, and was born in Provi
dence, Dec. 9, 1806. She was educated at the
ordinary schools in Smithfield, R. I., and in
Connecticut and at the Friends' School in
Providence. When she was seventeen or
eighteen years old, the family moved to Fall
35

36 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
River, where she, at the age of twenty-one,
married Samuel Buffington Chace, son of
Oliver and Susan Chace.
She early became interested in the movement
for the abolition of slavery, and, under her
father's influence, she and her husband each
adopted the principle of Garrison, that slavery
should be immediately, not gradually, abol
ished. Mr. and Mrs. Chace also each re
pudiated the colonization scheme.
During the years between 1832 and 1840,
there was a female anti-slavery society in Fall
River in which Mrs. Chace was very active,
serving for a while as President. The society
was of course small, and a number of the meet
ings were held in her house, her husband being
in full sympathy with all her efforts. She
advocated the circulation of petitions and did
much minor work of a nature that was almost
domestic; sewing for anti-slavery fairs, and
keeping a small library of anti-slavery books
for distribution.
It is evident from the records of this society
that none of this work involved her in anything
like public speaking or presiding in a public
hall over a mixed assembly of men and
women. During this period she was the mother of
five children who all died before 1843. She
afterwards became the mother of five more
children, who lived to the period of early

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 37
adolescence, but only three of them survived
her. Mr. and Mrs. Chace moved to her
native state of Rhode Island in 1840, and from
that year until 1865, her anti-slavery work was
obscure, but very important.
She was the more or less formally recog
nized agent for getting up Anti-Slavery meet
ings all over the state, outside of Providence
and Newport, and correspondence, still in ex
istence, with the Boston Anti-Slavery office
shows that she was the important person in
arranging long courses of Sunday Anti- Slavery
lectures in Providence. This correspondence
also shows that she was consulted about a
large part of the work to be done or attempted
in Rhode Island. Of course she had much
local assistance in the state but the letters
from Boston indicate that her opinion and her
advice were practically final in the central
councils of the Garrisonian leaders. It is
impossible to over-estimate the value of Mrs.
Chace's unknown work in behalf of the anti-
slavery movement, and the co-operation of her
husband in it all.
She came to the Woman Suffrage movement
trained by this long schooling and labor in
anti-slavery propaganda.
In all consideration of her life work, it must
be noted that she was a Quaker, not only by
training but by nature. She severed her con-

38 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
nection with the Quaker body in 1843, because
she felt that the Quakers were not true to their
original principles, especially in their treat
ment of the anti-slavery cause. She did not
leave them because she felt herself no longer a
Quaker. She felt herself more true to the
principles of Quakerism than they. She
passed through various phases of intellectual
belief as to theological doctrine, but the doc
trine of the "Inner Light" was the only philo
sophical theory which she considered essential
to Quakerism. This doctrine she held all her
life. Although while slavery existed, her main
energies were all directed to its overthrow,
her name appeared in the Call for the
Woman's Rights Convention, held in Wor
cester in October, 1850. This convention was
gotten up and presided over by Mrs. Paulina
Wright Davis who was a very intimate friend
of Mrs. Chace's. It is a significant fact as to
the nature of their intimacy that Mrs. Davis,
when preparing the call for this Convention,
being in too much of a hurry to communicate
first with Mrs. Chace, put her friend's name
upon the Call, and afterwards informed her of
it, being sure that Mrs. Chace would endorse
her action. Her name is also on the list of
members present at that Convention.
During the early war time, an Association
was formed by former students of the Provi-

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 39
dence Friends School, which Mrs. Chace had
attended in her girlhood. She accepted with
great pleasure the invitation to go to the second
meeting of this Association and joined it, glad
to renew the social ties with her Quaker
friends which had been broken by her with
drawal from the Society. But she noticed that
the women members were not given any official
position in the Association. In her own ac
count of the affair, she says that she protested
only privately against this exclusion of women,
because she was entirely unfitted by nature to
make public speech on any subject. The
exclusion continued for one or two years and
she resigned from the Association, saying that
she was unalterably attached to the principles
of the Society of Friends, and she deemed such
ignoring of the women to be against those
principles. But she tried, not quite success
fully, to withdraw from the Association in a
manner which would attract no attention be
cause, she said, she had so often been
obliged to take an unpopular position that it
had become extremely painful to her.
She evidently felt very keenly this new
separation from her old friends. She had once
and apparently only once, spoken a half a
hundred words, at a Friends' Meeting long
before, on behalf of the slave, and her record
of it shows that it cost her a great deal of per
sonal pain to do that. She had absolute moral

40 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
courage, but great social timidity, and extreme
personal shyness. And yet this was the wo
man, who, under a sense of duty, took up the
Woman's Rights cause, in its most unpopular
period and carried on its work till the end of
her life.
On the 23d day of October, 1868, there
assembled in Boston a gathering composed
largely of old abolitionists, who organized the
New England Woman Suffrage Association.
Mrs. Chace and Mrs. Paulina W. Davis were
among the number. They returned home de
termined to form a State Society. They went
together from house to house in Rhode Island;
they wrote letters soliciting influence and sig
natures to a call which they prepared for a
convention. Mrs. Chace, herself, invited her
old abolitionist friends, Stephen and Abby
Kelley Foster.
The convention met on December 11th in
Roger Williams Hall and Mrs. Chace pre
sided. The Rhode Island Woman Suffrage
Association was formed. Mrs. Paulina W.
Davis was elected president and Mrs. Chace
was placed on the Executive Committee.
Mr. Chace's health failed seriously that
autumn, and the last time he ever went to
Providence was on the day of this Convention.
He went into the hall, sat down on a side seat,
and watched his wife who then, for the first
time, occupied a prominent position on a pubUc

&77Ut£& ¦

tf&C^

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 41
platform. Himself never a public worker in
any way, it was evident that he wished to give
to her work the endorsement of his presence.
During the next two years, various issues
divided the Woman Suffragists throughout
the country. The National Woman Suffrage
Association had been in existence since early
in the 1850 decade, and by this time its chief
leaders were Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony.
The marriage and divorce question was in
troduced by Mrs. Stanton into a Woman's
Rights meeting in New York in 1860. Mr.
PhilUps opposed its introduction on the theory
that the topic was irrelevant to the proper ob
jects of a "woman's" movement. He said that
marriage concerned men as vitally as it did
women. The Stantonites argued, in opposi
tion, that the nature of life made the marriage
institution affect women more essentially than
men. It would be entirely unfair to charge many
of the persons who favored the discussion of
marriage questions in Woman's Rights meet
ings, with holding objectionable moral opin
ions, but the question of whether it was proper
to admit such discussion was then very serious
among the different advocates of Woman's
Rights. There were in both parties
some honest differences of opinion as to the
laws which should regulate marriage, and of
course there were some foolish and immoral

42 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
ideas held here and there in the rank and file
of the Woman Suffrage workers.
Mrs. Chace came gradually to feel that the
discussion of the marriage question in Woman's
Rights meetings would lead to the expression
of obnoxious as well as irrelevant opinion.
Another cause of difference among the Suf
fragists was the question whether they should
support or oppose the passage of the 15th
Amendment to the United States Constitution,
which was not fully 'ratified until the Spring
of 1870. Opposition was based on the theory
that its passage would retard the granting of
suffrage to women and also that it was a new
affront to American white women to enfranchise
the negro first. Mrs. Stanton and Mrs. Davis
were leaders in this opposition. It was pain
ful to Mrs. Chace to be brought into a differ
ence with her old friend Mrs. Davis. But
she was faithful to her lifelong belief that it
was her duty to seek the elevation as well as
the freedom of the negro.
The consequence of all these differences was
the formation of the American Woman Suf
frage Association to which, largely as a result
of Mrs. Chace's decision, the Rhode Island
society became auxiUary. Mrs. Chace was
made President of the Rhode Island Society in
1870, and she held that position until her
death in 1899.
Her work in the Society was untiring, and

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 43
she deemed no effort too trifling. During the
first years the conventions were large and she
rejoiced. In later years, when the meetings
became smaller, she thought it all the more im
portant that they should be held, and she
worked all the harder to get them up.
When it seemed possible that petitions would
affect the action of the legislature, she favored
presenting them. When it seemed that they
would have no effect, she favored circulating
them as a means of propaganda among the
people. She did an amount of work in the way of
writing letters and newspaper articles, which
would have been astonishing in an unprofes
sional woman of any age. In one of her age
it was almost miraculous.
She held the office of President of the Ameri
can Woman Suffrage Association in 1882, and
was always an officer in that society, either as
a Vice-President for Rhode Island or as a mem
ber of the Executive Committee.
In July, 1882, she wrote the remarkable
letter of which parts are here given :
Mrs. Chace to Governor A. H. Littlefield.
"July 24 — The Annual Meeting of the
Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association is
to be held early in October, with some of the
best speakers in the country on its platform.
This Association will at that time, nave ex
isted fourteen years, and it has, throughout,

44 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
sustained a character and exerted an influence,
such as, in the future, the people of the State
will learn to appreciate and be proud of.
"Some of the women among its members,
have served the state in the few ways which are
open to women. Many of them contribute
financially to the support of its institutions,
and all of them are deeply interested in its
welfare. "For myself, I may be permitted to say that
both my paternal and maternal ancestors have
been land holders in Rhode Island since the
days of its earliest colonial hfe; — one of them
having been the first President of the Aquid-
neck Colony; — and, through all their suc
ceeding generations they have contributed to
the prosperity of the State, by their active
participation in its agricultural and manufac
turing industries.
"More than this; most of those of the early
time, came as exiles for conscience's sake to
Rhode Island, and aided largely in the estab
lishment of that 'Soul Uberty' for which our
State organization has been so justly dis
tinguished. "In my own person, I have obeyed the laws,
never refusing or in any way evading the pay
ment of the taxes imposed upon me by tne
State. "Now, I have a small favor to ask of the
State of Rhode Island, and I appeal first to

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 45
you, because at this time you are its highest
representative, and I want to enlist your ap
proval to the granting of my request.
"I am very desirous that this Annual Con
vention should be held in the Hall of our House
of Representatives; and as soon as I can learn
to what body of persons a request of this kind
should be submitted, I intend to make such
application. Both pohtical parties hold their
annual conventions there; and it seems to me
remarkably fitting that the women of the state
should have some representation in the house
they have helped to build; to the support of
which they have largely contributed.
"It is true, the State has not endorsed
Woman Suffrage; — neither does it endorse
the principles of the Democratic Party, but it
acknowledges the citizenship of the members
of that party and their equal right to such use
of the property of the State."
From this time on, Mrs. Chace continued
to ask for the use of the Legislative Hall, and
after the first one or two applications, the re
quests were granted.
In this wonderful period of activity after she
was sixty-two years old, Mrs. Chace carried on
simultaneously with her Woman Suffrage ef
fort, a work in behalf of the unfortunate
classes in her native state. No woman in
Rhode Island had ever held any State appoint
ment which gave her official relation with the

46 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
State penal and educational institutions, when
in about the year 1868, Mrs. Chace began her
effort to obtain legislative decree that women
should be placed on state boards of manage
ment of institutions in which females were
confined or given shelter. In connection with
Miss Phoebe Jackson, she made preliminary
investigation of the condition of the prisons
and the reform school ; talked with the inmates,
keepers, and superintendents and then made
up her mind what ought to be done and, with
characteristic determination, proceeded to do
it. She studied the statute law and finding
that the act providing for the appointment of
inspectors of penal institutions did not say
explicitly that they must be men, she directed
her first effort to obtain the appointment of
women without any special legislative action
on the subject. She enlisted the co-operation
of the Woman Suffrage Society in this effort,
but finding that the wise and learned thought
it would not do to slip women into office in this
manner, all the workers in the cause decided
to ask for a special law establishing
a board of lady visitors to these institutions.
She induced the Hon. Wm. P. Sheffield to
draw up a bill which should provide, as nearly
as was then deemed possible, for the appoint
ment of women to official connection with the
penal and correctional institutions in which
women and children were confined. In all

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 47
this work she had the hearty assistance of a
number of influential women of the reforming
class, and also of the Hon. Thomas A. Doyle
who for fifteen years held the office of Mayor
of Providence.
The State Legislature made partial conces
sion. A bill was passed in 1870, providing for
the appointment by the Governor of a board
of lady visitors who should be authorized to
visit and inspect all penal and correctional
institutions of which women were inmates,
and this board was instructed to render an
annual report to the Legislature, but beyond
this privilege of making recommendations the
board had no power.
Mrs. Chace personally felt rather scornful
of this legislative sop but she accepted position
on the powerless board and served faithfully,
visiting especially the reform school which was
then situated in Providence. She resigned
finally when she was a little more than seventy
years old, feeling that she could use her
strength better in some other way. She also
felt that the existence of the board satisfied
the legislative conscience and delayed the pass
age of a law which would provide for the ap
pointment of women to more efficient service.
Mr. Chace died late in 1870; Mrs. Chace's
youngest son died four months afterwards.
She was very much exhausted by these ex
periences, and in 1872 went abroad for a year

48 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
and a half of rest and travel. But she did not
entirely relinquish her special activities even
during this time. She was a delegate to the
World's Prison Congress which met in London
in the summer of 1872. She read there a
paper urging the appointment of women to
the management of penal and correctional in
stitutions, and, from all evidence now at hand,
it appears that she and Mrs. Julia Ward Howe
were the only women who were permitted to,
speak to the Congress assembled as a whole
body and according to Mrs. Howe's own testi
mony, her chance to speak was obtained
largely through Mrs. Chace's instrumentality.
She was also a delegate to the Peace Congress
which Mrs. Howe called that summer in
London. Soon after her return to America, Mrs.
Chace began her work for the establishment
of a state home and school for dependent chil
dren. There had been one or two similar in
stitutions in other states, but Mrs. Chace was
certainly one of the first two or three, if not
the first person, to move for the establishment
of such an institution in Rhode Island. She
memoriaUzed the State Legislature in her own
person, on this subject. The institution, as
established, was not quite what she wanted
as to its management, which was given to a
board already established for other work, and
too much overburdened by that work to

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 49
give proper attention to the new institution.
When she was about eighty years old, she
became wholly dissatisfied with the way in
which the school was conducted, and she called
for an investigation. One of the Providence
papers wrote that if Mrs. Chace said that some
thing was wrong at the state school, that fact
alone was enough to make investigation neces
sary. A committee was appointed. She
attended its meetings; she answered inquiries,
and the practical result was that the changes
she demanded were made, and a new board of
management was appointed.
During the last thirty years of her life, she
wrote about one hundred articles for the Provi
dence Journal, a large proportion of which
were upon Woman Suffrage and I believe no
article of hers was ever refused by that paper.
It was often editorially scornful of such opin
ions as those she held, but it treated her per
sonally and treated all direct expression and
noticed action of hers with a respect which,
as the seasons passed, deepened into a defer
ence almost reverential. This feeling of rever
ence surrounded her age like a benign atmos
phere. She printed her Anti-Slavery Reminiscences
in 1886. She sent a copy to George William
Curtis, who, in reply, said that "to receive that
book as a gift from her, was like having a hand
of benediction laid upon his brow."

50 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
She was a house-bound invalid during the
last six years of her life. She wanted to with
draw from the presidency of the Woman Suff
rage Association, but they preferred to elect a
vice-president who would do the active work,
saying in the words of Anna Garlin Spencer,
thatthe great name of Elizabeth Buffum Chace,
so long as she hved on earth, should be inscribed
on their banner as that of their leader.

REBECCA BUFFUM SPRING
The fourth daughter of Arnold Buffum was
Rebecca, born in Providence, R. I., on June 8,
1811. She married Marcus Spring, a New York
wholesale merchant, who by descent belonged
in Uxbridge, Massachnsetts.
Mrs. Spring had a piquant face, which had
the effect of more beauty than it quite
possessed. In her character was blended a
certain imperious frivolity with a fervid earnest
ness, which at times amounted almost to
religious ecstasy. She once revealed herself in
this latter mood on a steamboat when ship
wreck seemed imminent. She moved about
encouraging, consoling everybody, as if her
self sustained by a supernatural influence
which she, having received, radiated forth.
Mr. Spring was a handsome, lovable man,
who had a decidedly artistic endowment. He
early acquired wealth, and Mrs. Spring easily
became the richly dressed, luxuriously dis
posed woman who was a slightly unusual
figure among the serious folk, who in that
half century, were trying Fourieristic experi
ments in social salvation. But her character
51

52 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
fibre was strong, and her personal ethics suffi
cient to the need. She said: "Let us try to
fill people's minds with pleasant memories,"
and declared that an invalid should answer
eordially, "I thank you," when greeted with a
"how do you do," but make no report of health
if a cheerful one could not be made.
She became poor in her old age, laughed
and said: "I am glad that I did not do my
housework when I was younger. If I had I
should have used up all my strength and should
not have it now."
The following letter was written by Emma
Willard to Mrs. Spring about two years be
fore she married John C. Wyman. It seems
to me to have some historic value as showing
what were the thoughts and aspirations of
high minded young women of that day. In
this manner it illustrates the character of both
Mrs. Spring and Emma Willard.
"Uxbridge, March 16, 1845.
"Dear Mrs. Spring, * * You have strug
gled with a 'dying nature and a despairing
humanity' and have felt that it was good to
suffer — that the crown of thorns was indeed
a regal crown. It is not well always to breathe
the strong mountain air — we must also walk
through the valley, and I would not, if I
could, refuse to suffer. * * *
"I went to church this morning and heard

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 53
Mr. Clarke preach and pray — when will men
remember that God does not hear the long
prayer? * * * I was struck with the
thought of a rough, plain, truth-telhng indi
vidual not long since. He said to me, 'it seems
quite unnecessary to find a, way to God's
heart by telhng him how omnipotent and im
portant he is — this sounds to me like soft
solder, or as if men tried to come it over God?'
You may not appreciate these cant phrases,
but I thought there was some force in the idea,
and it proved to me that the man was a
thinker. The entire absence of supplication
in these pulpit prayers is painful to me, and I
so long for the simple 'Our Father Who art in
Heaven' — the prayer that, when a child , I
thought 'told everything,' seems as full of
meaning now, and a thousandfold more so,
than when I repeated the petitions looking the
while in my mother's face and wondering at
her great beauty. * * * Her beauty was
strange to me, and I gazed on her face and
wished that mine might grow so fair and pure.
* * * I am glad to know that Margaret
Fuller is with you, for I love her though from
afar, and the impulse was strong within me,
after reading her Woman in the Nineteenth
Century, to write to her and teU her the good
I had experienced. The weakest voices lend
their aid in swelling a full anthem of praise;
and will she give a willing ear to my hearty

54 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
thanks for her great loving kindness to me in
bestowing her book upon the world. I hailed
it with delight, and waited for it impatiently,
and it strengthened and enhghtened me, and
roused me to a higher and holier effort.
* * * God bless her, and I pray that we
may soon again be gladdened by the falling
music of her words. * * *
"Miss Converse writes me that she was
made very happy by her visit at Brooklyn
with you, and I am so glad — for it is dread
ful to breathe the air of Mrs. B's stately
mansion, and I felt myself encrusted with
paste during the whole sojourn — such mock
dignity, such airs and graces from the well-
preserved mistress, and such exquisite con
descension made me feel that pride was not
quite dead, for I could not bear the foot upon
my neck without wincing.
"Since my return, I have been interested
in an Anti-Slavery Fair in Upton, which was
very successful, and comfortably pleasant;
though the unusual exertions of such occasions
are very wearisome. Mr. Quincy was there,
and I was glad to know him better. * * *
"My love for Mr. Spring and Eddie, a kiss
for the sweet little bird, and God love and keep
you, ever and ever. Emma Willard."

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 55
In 1846 Mr. and Mrs. Spring took Margaret
Fuller with them to Europe. They travelled
almost entirely in private carriages, for which
Mr. Spring paid, so Margaret's expenses were
small. They hired parlors which she and her
guests were free to use. It was undoubtedly
because Margaret was their companion that
the Springs met many of the people they did,
but their social success was by no means
wholly derived from her influence. They be
came intimate with William and Mary Howitt,
and Mrs. Spring had special enjoyment with
Harriet Martineau. Long afterward, in 1876,
an English clergyman, the Rev. Goodwyn
Barnaby, wrote thus to Moncure Conway:
"Mrs. Spring was one of the most winning
women I ever met, and I was in raptures with
her." Of an evening party given by the
Springs in London, he says: "I had Mrs.
Spring and was I not content?" "Fox,"
who had to Usten to Miss Fuller, Barnaby
goes on to say, "was talked to death." He
would have liked a quiet hand at whist
better. * * * The Springs invited me to spend
a couple of years with them at Rhode Island
(?), but I never dared to go."
This unappreciative Fox was the radical
preacher whom fifteen years later, Moncure
Conway succeeded in London. Mrs. Spring
was not unappreciative. She always felt ad
miring affection for Margaret Fuller and said

56 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
of her: "Men fell in love with her wherever
she went and wanted to marry her."
The Springs were with Margaret in Rome
when she met the Marquis Ossoli accidentally
as related in the biographies. Mrs. Spring
thus told her part in the story:
"The first I knew of the acquaintance, I saw
that a man came every mormng and stood in
the street opposite to our windows and
Margaret would go out and walk off with him.
I said, 'Margaret, bring that young man in
and introduce him; ' so she did."
Ossoli proposed to Margaret then. "He
knew all her dresses," said Mrs. Spring,
describing the nature of his attachment. Mrs.
Spring thought him an attractive, childlike,
unambitious young fellow. Margaret was, in
the beginning, inclined to "make fun" of
Ossoli's affection, but the day the party went
away she said, as the carriage rolled along:
"I beheve I am leaving my heart in Rome."
"Not with that young man?" exclaimed
Mrs. Spring.
"Yes," answered Margaret Fuller.
The Springs returned to America. Margaret
went back to Rome and married Ossoli. In
December, 1849, she wrote, in evident refer
ence to Mrs. Spring's reception of the news of
the then two years old, but recently announced
marriage :

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 57
"Your letter, My Dear Rebecca, was written
in your noblest and most womanly spirit."
The ship in which the Ossolis attempted to
come to America was quarantined at Gibraltar
because its captain had died of smallpox.
This delay in the voyage gave opportunity for
a fumigated letter from Margaret to reach the
Springs before the date of the ship's arrival in
this country. Thus made aware of the coming
danger, they sent their children away, told
their servants, so they might go if they chose,
and themselves prepared to receive into their
home the visitors who might bring contagion
and death with them.
The ship was wrecked on the Jersey coast.
Margaret's mother hurried to the Springs,
who lived near the scene of the disaster.
Thither also came Charles Sumner, whose
brother had perished with Margaret Ossoli
and her child.
Of that time, Mrs. Spring wrote:
"Margaret's mother sat like a stone in our
house. She shed no tears, * * it was pitiful.
I sat down on a low seat before her, and told
her stories of our life and travels together
(with Margaret). Suddenly tears came into
her eyes; she laid her hand on my head and
said, 'You make me think of my child as
alive'." For years afterwards Mrs. Spring, when at

58 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
the seaside, habitually dreamed of Margaret
Fuller. Fredrika Bremer, the Swedish novelist,
became intimate with the Springs during her
stay in this country. In her book, 'The
Homes of the New World," she generally
designates them, "the good Marcus," and
"charming Rebecca."
Marcus Spring and William Henry Chan
ning were warmly attached to each other, and
sympathized in the desire to establish a happy
social order on earth, but Channing did not
quite believe in the plan, into which the Springs
went heartily, and heavily as to finances, to
found a community at Eagleswood, N. J.
Under the auspices of Mr. and Mrs. Spring
a community was founded there, whither men
and women of note flocked as temporary
visitors or permanent residents. Arnold
Buffum passed his last years there. So did
James G. Birney, the first Liberty Party Chief.
The artists Innes and Page both lived for
brief periods at Eagleswood.
The community, as such, did not long exist.
"But no," said Mrs. Spring, a little patheti
cally in her old age. "It was not all a mis
take, what we dreamed of with William Henry
Channing. That is the way people ought to
live." The community having lapsed, and the
Eagleswood Park become their private prop-

THEODORE D. WELD

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 59
erty, Mr. and Mrs. Spring made noble use of
their opportunity. It was a time of developing
but largely undeveloped educational thought.
They established Theodore D. Weld as Prin
cipal of a school at Eagleswood. This great
Abolitionist, who had married "Carolina's
high-souled daughter," Angelina Grimke, was
an intellectual pioneer. The Eagleswood
school was a wonderful institution. Boys and
girls, colored and white, were equal pupils in
it, and much fine young life was there stimu
lated to the throbbing effort of the years of war
that were soon to come.
In this decade Mrs. Spring made at least
one speech in favor of woman's rights, but she
was never exactly a public worker in reform.
In 1859 she was well-known, but more be
cause of her friends than herself. Then in a
single day she resolved to do and did what will
connect her name for centuries with a great
historic event.
Mr. Oswald Villard in his Life of John
Brown, quotes a few sentences from Mrs.
Spring which sound as if on this occasion she
first consulted her husband, but I am inclined
to believe she really acted independently of
him. I was told at the time that she did not
have to consult him because he chanced to be
from home on that important day.
She read in the paper that Mrs. Child had
written to Governor Wise and asked permis-

60 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
sion to visit John Brown, who had just been
sentenced to death in Virginia. Mrs. Spring
said, "If Mrs. Child is going to Harper's
Ferry, I am." She asked no governors. She
took her nineteen-year old son Edward and
started South, within two or three hours of
the moment in which she had said she would
It is hard now to realize that it was a
greatly heroic thing for a woman and a boy to
do — simply to go from New Jersey into the
northern part of Virginia to sympathize with
a noble old man — but great and heroic it was
for Rebecca Buffum Spring and her lad to go
on that errand in the early November of 1859.
If ever a woman was equipped by nature to
win permission from foemen, Mrs. Spring
was that woman, and she won consent from
the local magnates to enter John Brown's cell.
Once, before she gained it, she became afraid
that she had excited animosity that would lead
to refusal. She knew that she must not arouse
suspicion that she had come South with in
surrectionary purpose, but she sat in the hotel
at Harper's Ferry and heard people around
her telling how the men of the town had killed
the boy Thompson, after he was their helpless
and wounded prisoner. The incident has
passed into history as one of the most shame
ful in any annals. Mrs. Spring, hearing the
details within a few days of the occurrence,

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 61
failed to contain herself. She broke out into
vehement speech, denouncing the cowardly
murder. To her amazement as she flamed
Cassandra-like among them, her Usteners be
came speechless, and one by one in utter
silence went out of the room and left her alone.
When she and her son walked the streets
they played a little comedy. They were aware
that people passed or followed them, trying to
hear what they said to each other. They
carefuUy bestowed on such listeners remarks
like these : "Isn't that a lovely house over there !
Do look at it." They were never overheard
criticizing anything.
When at last she saw the man who stands
pre-eminent among human beings in wilhng
ness to die for the most despised and injured
people on the globe, the woman, who had been
the comrade of the most cultured persons in
two continents, found herself surprised.
"I had expected," she said, "to see a rough
backwoodsman sort of man. He was courtly
and magnificent in his bearing."
Her son made a sketch in the great prisoner's
cell. She saw John Brown's captured com
panions, and her heart was touched with
especial tenderness for Aaron D. Stephens.
She found that she could do nothing effectual
on the spot to relieve the prisoners, and she
returned North, to receive John Brown's wife
into her own home. Thomas Wentworth

62 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
Higginson had gone to North Elba and brought
Mrs. Brown thence. The plan was for her to
go to her husband, get private speech with him,
and try to induce him to consent to co-operate,
at least passively, in an attempt to rescue him.
John Brown had already sent a message of n
refusal, because he depreciated any effort to
save his life that might sacrifice others, and
also because he had promised his jailer that
he would not try to escape.
It was however, thought by his Northern
friends, that his wife might persuade him to
change his unselfish resolution. That wife was
an extremely noble woman. She had been
a perfect stepmother to his older children.
She had borne him thirteen of her own. She
had been his chief est friend. She was sixteen
years younger than he, and she had been httle
more than a child when he married her.
So far as can be judged from the recorded
story, the man, who could calmly wait for the
hour of his own execution, had not the nerve to
meet and refuse the entreaty which he expect
ed his wife to make. He stopped her by message
that reached her in Baltimore. He would not
see her till the day before that appointed for his
death. Much of his correspondence with her
passed through Mrs. Spring, to whom he wrote :
My dear Friend. * * May the God of my
fathers bless and reward you a thousandfold."
That sentence with his name added there-

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 63
unto should be Rebecca Buffum Spring's
epitaph. To his wife on Nov. 16, the death-conse
crated martyr wrote: "My dear Wife: I write
you in answer to a most kind letter from Mrs.
Spring. I owe her ten thousand thanks for
her kindness to you, particularly and more
especially, than for what she has done and is
doing in a more direct way for me personally."
On Nov. 24, he wrote to Mrs. Spring: "I
am always grateful for anything you do or
write. You nave laid me and my family under
many and great obligations."
John Brown was executed on December
second. Four of his men were hung on De
cember sixteenth, but the two remaining ones,
Stephens and Hazlitt were sentenced to die
in March, 1860.
Mrs. Spring corresponded all that winter
with the two young heroes whom their country
had decided to dismiss from all earthly service.
She sent them needed supplies. "Oh," she
said afterward, when reading aloud one of
Stephens' grateful letters. "He did not know
that while we were packing that box, his dearest
friend stood by it, and said, 'Mrs. Spring, I
wish forty men were going to him in this box
and I was one of them!' '
She wrote to Thomas Wentworth Higginson,
insisting that an attempt should be made to
rescue Stephens and Hazlitt. She was so

64 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
i
urgent that Col. Higginson once told me that
her influence determined him to make the
attempt. He has related the story in his
"Cheerful Yesterdays." He and Montgomery
of Kansas and others, went into the vicinity
of Harper's Ferry, planned the method,
and even got word to the condemned lads
that such effort would be made, but finally
Montgomery (probably wisely) decided that
success was impossible, and the effort was
abandoned. I was still a child when I heard Mrs. Spring
say: "I went into my parlor, and there stood
a beautiful girl, who said, T am Jennie D.
They told me to come to you. They said you
would help me. I want to go to Virginia and
beg for Aaron Stephens' life.' "
The girl went. Letcher, afterward a con
spicuous Confederate, had then succeeded
Henry A. Wise to the governorship. She got
down on her knees to Letcher. "He was
brutal to her," said Mrs. Spring.
Stephens' sister and Jennie D — took
breakfast with the condemned boys on the
last morning, Stephens was so bright he even
made those women smile once.
"I could walk miles today, if they would
only let me," said he, who a few days before
had written to Mrs. Spring that he sometimes
wished he might bear all the sorrows of the
whole world, and so save it from suffering.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 65
The good-bys were spoken, the men stiU
cheerful. The women left them.
"But afterwards," said Mrs. Spring, "some
body went back and looked into the cell —
and was sorry to have seen the sight. I sup
pose it must be awful for two strong young
fellows to know they are to die in an hour."
Who was it that went back? Was it the
sister — was it the heroic maiden ? I know
only that there were tears in Mrs. Spring's
voice as she told me the story.
The bereaved women came North to Eagles
wood. The Springs had made arrangements.
The funeral services for Stephens and Hazlitt
were held in their house. The bodies were
buried in their ground.
Southerners withdrew their trade from Mr.
Spring's firm. His partners were inclined to
complain at having to suffer with him for what
he and his wife had done. When told of the
loss and disturbance, she merely said: "I
don't care a copper."
About this time she became a grandmother,
and a fond one, but she gaily declined to be
called "grandmother." Her daughter's name
for her was always "the Madre," and now the
madre wore her gray hair in lovely puffs above
her brow, and no longer liked to tell her age.
But she continued to relate her John Brown
experiences. She said: "It makes my head
hot and my feet cold to talk of John Brown."

66 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
Mr. Spring died in 1874 — "a good man,"
as Dr. Bellows called him. The widow of
Marcus Spring wore a white muslin gown at
his funeral, and I never saw a more really
beautiful face and figure than hers as, thus
robed in white, she stood by his open grave.
In after years she always called a California
white rose the "Marcus rose."
She was over 70 when she went to California,
whence she never came back to us who loved
her in the East.
The Los Angeles Woman's Club celebrated
Mrs. Spring's 93d birthday, and she played
the part of a queen in a little farce written by
her daughter, and enacted on that occasion.
Her great-grandson, Loring Mackaye, had a
part in the play with her.
Her daughter, Mrs. Peet wrote: "There was
a pillow fight between the Queen and her page
before the throne, and anything more spirited
than the madre no one ever saw."
Mrs. Spring was taken ill on Christmas day,
1910, and sank steadily after that, but she said,
"I am not sick, I am awfully old," then indicat
ing herself, she added in her quaintest, prettiest
way, "Jack's alive and is going to stay aUve."
She lay awake till twelve o'clock one night
and recited poetry. It is not probable that she
suffered much, but she had always borne pain
so stoically that her watchers could not always
tell whether or not she was in bodily distress.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 67
Once she moaned for several hours, and being
asked if she were suffering, she answered with
a touch of sweet wilfulness in her manner:
"No, that's my way of singing myself to sleep."
She was exactly 99 years and 8 months old,
when silence came to her clear voice.

THREE OF ARNOLD BUFFUM'S
GREAT-GRANDSONS

PARKER PILLSBURY AND THE
FOSTERS
It was my good fortune in early girlhood to
spend a few summer weeks on a farm in Wor
cester County, Massachusetts, my hosts were
the aboUtionists, Stephen S. and Abby Kelley
Foster. They were a thoroughly united pair,
completely one in affection and purpose, but
it is doubtful if it ever occurred to any one who
knew them to speak or think of the wife as
Mrs. Stephen Foster. They had come to love
each other in consequence of association in a
struggle of grim incident and grand signifi
cance, — a struggle which had led them to
underestimate the value of many social con
ventions. He was one of those unique characters who
come to the front in periods of storm and stress.
In an anti-slavery or woman's rights meeting,
he might have been most fitly described by the
Unes which LoweU wrote about Theodore
Parker: "Every word that he speaks has been fierily
furnaced
In the blast of a life that has struggled in
earnest." 69

70 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
He was logical to the point of unreason.
Mary Grew, one of the Philadelphia abolition
ists, in later years said of him, smiling the while
at some recollection, "Logic was the death of
Stephen!" His style of argument was as fol
lows: "slavery is the sum of villanies, such as
theft, murder, and rapine, the Southern
church supports slavery, hence Southern clergy
men are guilty of aU villanies ; Northern clergy
men extend the right hand of fellowship to
Southern clergymen, thus they condone and
partake of their guilt." From such general
premises he would proceed with unfaltering
energy to the close personal conclusion, that
the Rev. Z, a Northern gentleman of the most
amiable character conceivable, was guilty, be
fore God, of theft, murder, and rapine. An
argument of this sort was presented one Sun
day afternoon to Theo. Brown, Harry Blake,
and John C. Wyman of Worcester, to their
utter discomfort and bewilderment. Blake,
who loved the Rev. Mr. X., was a Trans-
cendentalist of that New England type of
character which is helpless in the clutches of
its conscience and can be frightened into the
conviction that anything is sinful by the mere
suggestion that it may be. "Foster has proved
it,"lamented Blake to his Ughter minded com
panions as they all walked away after the argu
ment, "Foster has proved that X is a murderer
and a thief, — and yet he isn't !"

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 71
Mr. Foster was, as nearly as it is possible
for a man to be, free from unkind personal
feeling. His attitude towards opponents was
always such as once impelled him to say in a
public meeting, "I love my friend Higginson,
but I loathe his opinions." In his home life, as
I knew him, this doughty warrior upon evil
was the most lovable of men, gently lenient
to girlish impertinence, and sympathetically
disposed to the spirit of youth.
He was a sturdy farmer of his New England
fields. "I should hate farming in the West,"
he once said. "I should hate to put my spade
into ground where it did not hit against a
rock." His features were as rugged as the
rocks he loved, and his hands were hard and
gnarled with toil. His gestures were ungainly,
but his voice was beautiful. His eyes were
blue and kind, but sometimes there was a look
in them as of a man bent indeed on going his
appointed way in this world, but who did not
always see a light upon that way.
There was more effect in Foster than in his
wife of what may be called richness of nature.
She was a person in whom heart, intellect,
and conscience were undisturbed by temper
ament, which in his case was an atmosphere
which trailed its own mists and colors across
the true image of his character. The study
of Stephen Foster's life during the years be
fore he married Abby Kelley, discloses one of

72 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
those obscure portions of history, the knowl
edge of which is necessary to a perfect com
prehension of the action that nations take in
critical hours. The seed that he sowed in
many a New England valley, and scattered
over the plains of Ohio, ripened red and rich
on Southern battlefields.
Stephen Symonds Foster was the ninth in a
family of thirteen children and was born in
Canterbury, New Hampshire, in November,
1809. His father, Colonel Asa Foster, had
been a Revolutionary soldier. His mother
was a beautiful and gracious woman, and she
and her husband both lived to be nearly a
hundred years old. The home was a farm of
several hundred acres, situated on a hillside
overlooking the Merrimac. Stephen, predes
tined by every faculty of his being to do a
reformer's work in the world, began his service
on earth as a carpenter and builder. At
twenty-two he entered upon a course of col
legiate study to prepare himself for the min
istry of the Orthodox Congregational Church.
The son of a soldier, he had already adopted
the principle of non-resistance, and when he
was called on while in Dartmouth College to
perform military duty, he resisted, was arrested
and put into jail in Haverhill. He found the
jail in a terribly unsanitary condition. Men
were there imprisoned for debt as well as for
crime. Stephen moved among these wretched

ABBY KELLEY FOSTER

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 73
creatures like a pitying angel, receiving their
confidences and observing their condition,
after which he published an indignant letter
calling attention to the state of affairs. This
protest excited so much interest that an effort
was made to clean the prison, when the filth
on the floors was found to be so deep and hard
that men were obliged to dig it up with pick
axes. The reform in this jail led to investi
gation and an effective movement to improve
the whole prison system of New Hampshire,
as a consequence of which imprisonment for
debt was soon abolished.
His college studies finished, Stephen entered,
for a theological course, the Union Seminary
in New York.
In 1834 Foster made the acquaintance of
Parker PiUsbury, a dark-eyed, broad-should
ered youth, also a teacher, hoping and working
to become a minister. Foster gave him lessons
in ethics which made of him an abolitionist,
and the hearts of the two men 'lave at once to
each other. PiUsbury had the temperament
of a Hebrew prophet, and when he spoke
against the institution which his soul abhorred,
it was in the language of Jeremiah, and with
a voice whose rich melancholy tones could
never be forgotten by the ears that heard them.
It was not until 1839 that Foster entirely
relinquished his purpose to become a minister.
By that time his experience in anti-slavery

74 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
work had shown the utter impossibility
of any such service for him. For some years
he pursued the ordinary life of the peregrinat
ing anti-slavery apostle of his day, going from
town to town, almost begging people to come
to hear his message. In few places could he
get an adequate hearing. The church digni
taries forbade him the use of their meeting
houses, and if he obtained places in which to
speak, they forbade the people to go to hear
his gospel. The town of Stratham furnished
a couple of amusing incidents to the history of
this tragi-comic warfare between a reformer
and the nation which he sought to reform.
Once he and PiUsbury found there a meeting
house opened and warmed for them at the
hour for which they had requested it, but not
a soul came to sit on its benches and Usten to
their words. Foster made a second visit in
the next springtime to the town, and a dozen
persons gathered in the hall, and he began his
address. Suddenly, when he was in the middle
of a sentence, every one of his hearers arose,
probably at some prearranged signal, and
walked solemnly and quietly out of the room,
leaving him with mouth open, and arms in the
air, his gesture half made, and his spirit per
haps more disconcerted than at any other
moment of his life.
In the summer of 1841, a three-days' con
vention was held on Nantucket Island, and

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 75
there Frederick Douglass, then a young and
unknown fugitive slave, made a great speech,
which was a revelation alike to the abolition
ists and to himself of his capacities. Parker
PiUsbury came away from this convention
much excited but also much dissatisfied with
all past achievements. He wrote to Foster:
"After all, I must come to New Hampshire,
brother Stephen. The rocks must echo there
the coming era, and the adjacent hills must
reply, as we proclaim through the state the
doctrines and demands of universal brother
hood of man. We must show ourselves what
we are already called, 'dangerous men.' De
vise some plan, if you can, by which we may
improve on the operations of the past. If we
scourged the pro-slavery church and clergy
last year with whips, let us this year chastise
them with scorpions! To the popular pre
vailing denomination we are infidels indeed,
and we mean to be and are willing to be
scandalized as such."
A month after this letter was written, Foster
answered its appeal to inaugurate new
methods. On the seventeenth of September,
1841, he went in to the old North Church, the
first Congregational church in Concord, New
Hampshire, and just as the minister was about
to begin his sermon, he stood up and in a
solemn and dignified manner claimed the
right in his character as a man and a Christian,

76 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
to be heard in behalf of the people who were
enslaved in this country. He was seized by
two keepers of the state prison who were
present and was dragged out of the church.
Stephen Foster's daughter said once of her
parents, "My mother found it hard to like
people with whom she differed, but my father
loved everybody." As a speaker, Foster was
forcible and witty, and ever ready in retort.
One of the stories told of him is that on one
occasion a slaveholder, availing himself of the
freedom of speech always granted on the anti-
slavery platform, ventured upon it to argue in
behalf of the "pecuhar institution." Foster
contradicted some assertion made by this man,
who, in return, asked indignantly, "Do you
think I would lie ?" "Well," returned Stephen
in his rich kindly voice, "I don't know as you
would he, but I do know that you will steal."
During the years of the early forties,
Foster and Parker PiUsbury traveUed much
together on their apostolic errands. They
collected money for their "cause," but let their
own needs wait. After a meeting in Pem
broke, N. H., the two comrades secured one
bed, and also lodging and care for the horse
with which they were driving across the
country from meeting to meeting, but they
went supperless to their own slumbers. The
next morning they spent four cents for baker's
biscuits, and four more for raisins, and sitting

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 77
down by the stove in the store where they had
made their purchases they broke their long
fast. This trip lasted eight days, and when
they returned to Concord, N. H., which was
Pillsbury's home, they found that although
they had induced a goodly number of people
to subscribe five dollars each towards liquidat
ing an anti-slavery publishing debt, they had
left as salary for their labors just thirty-seven
cents. PiUsbury, who had a delicate wife,
tells the story in his "Acts of the Anti-Slavery
Apostles," and admits that he did not smile,
though Foster may have done so, when the
latter commented genially on the situation, by
saying, "Well, Parker, I have no wife and you
have; so this time we will not divide." PiUs
bury went home to find his wife without money,
and so nearly destitute of food that he broke
a resolution which he had formed never to be
in debt, and contracted a grocery bill for three
dollars, the money to pay which came in some
almost miraculous manner before night.
A typical experience occurred to Foster in
May, 1842. He tried to obtain the loan of
a place in Amherst in which to speak. The
meeting-houses were all refused, and appar
ently for no reason except aversion to his sub
ject, save in the case of the Universalist Church
which was engaged for another purpose at the
desired time. Foster then asked the Baptist
and the two Congregational ministers of the

78 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
town to permit him to address their congrega
tions at the regular meetings on the next day,
which was Sunday. They all refused, but on
Saturday evening he attended a meeting in the
vestry of one of the Congregational churches,
and spoke for twenty minutes to the audience
there assembled, and received respectful atten
tion. The next forenoon he reflected calmly
upon the situation, offered "fervent prayer for
divine guidance," and then wended his way to
the Baptist Church. The minister, who was
about to begin his sermon when Foster arose,
took the alarm, and called out to him to be
silent, as he wished to go on with the regular
services. Foster gave no heed to this but pro
ceeded to speak, whereupon a deacon sprang
at him from behind, and as Foster would not
forcibly resist force, succeeded in speedily
dragging him off the platform, which he had
mounted, and three or four other men lending
their assistance, carried the interloper into the
street. Once out in the open air, Foster asked
the deacon if he was his prisoner, and was told
that he was not. Being then released, the un
daunted abolitionist turned immediately to go
back into the church, whereupon the deacon
and his associates caught him again and this
time held on to him. A messenger was dis
patched for the constable who was found at
tending service in the Universalist Church.
This "village dignitary came hastily to the scene,

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 79
and, aided by the deacon, dragged Foster along
the road, holding him by the arms and collar.
They thus conveyed him some fifteen rods, to
a tavern, where they tumbled him on to the
bar-room floor. Foster, on occasions like this,
would never help his captors by voluntary
locomotion, and so it chanced that, a little
later, he was carried up two flights of stairs,
and thrown into a small room, where he was
left in charge of two keepers.
"Having secured me," he says, "in this
temporary prison, the deacon returned to his
meeting, to tender to the church the emblems
of the body and blood of the Prince of Peace.
During the evening one of my keepers left.
The other remained through the night, and
slept with his clothes on, the door locked and
the lamp burning. Indeed, I was as strictly
guarded as though I had been a felon, waiting
only an opportunity to escape. At ten o'clock
on Monday morning I was put on trial before
Israel Hunt. The complaint set forth that I
had entered the Baptist meeting-house 'with
force and arms,' and disturbed the meeting by
making a noise, by rude and indecent behavior,
etc., etc. Mr. Pratt testified that I treated
him ungentlemanly. On being asked what I
said or did that was ungentlemanly, he could
not recollect, he said, then, but he was certain,
very, that I treated him 'ungentlemanly.' As
I do not acknowledge allegiance to any human

80 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
power, I made no defence. I asked the wit
nesses some questions, and said a few words,
but they were designed to influence the audi
ence present, rather than the decision of Mr.
Hunt. In that I felt no interest. Mr. Hunt's
sentence was that I pay a fine of three dollars
and costs of prosecution; intimating that a
repetition of the offence would be followed by
a much heavier penalty. I assured him I had
done my duty in attempting to preach the
gospel to the Baptists, and it was contrary to
my sense of propriety to pay a fine for it. Mr.
Hunt then ordered me to be imprisoned in
Amherst jail till the fine was paid. At ten
o'clock the next day this order was carried into
effect, by my incarceration in this loathsome
prison, where duty to God and my countrymen
requires me to remain at present. Relief is
kindly offered me from various sources, when
ever 1 shall think proper to accept it. But I
feel that the object is not yet accomplished that
my heavenly Father had in view in sending me
to this dismal abode. And till that is done, I
have no wish to be relieved. To one as rest
less as I am, imprisonment is oppressive. I
can now surely 'remember them that are in
bonds, as bound with them.' "
It was not at all certain to these itinerant
apostles of freedom that death at the hands of
the mob might not be their final portion.
PiUsbury admits that he always dreaded an

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AMERICAN CHIVALRY 81
encounter with mob violence, though his
courage invariably rose to meet it when the
hour of its fury had fairly set in, but he never
discerned in Foster any signs of agitation,
either while the tempest of human wrath was
gathering or after it had burst over their heads.
Yet, in a letter Foster speaks as though he had
dreaded to enter upon the path he was pursu
ing, not indeed from fear of bodily injury, but
because he shrank from the contumely and
mockery to which he must expose himself.
"I was a slave," he says, "I am a slave no
longer. My Ups have been sealed by man.
They wiU never again be sealed till sealed in
death. My body is freely yielded to the perse
cutors to torture at pleasure. But my spirit
must and shall be free."
One Sunday Foster attempted to speak dur
ing the forenoon meeting in the South Church
of Concord, New Hampshire, and having been
summarily ejected from the building, he went
again in the afternoon, and began his harangue
the moment he entered the body of the house.
He was dragged out by some young men, who
did not wait even to receive orders from the
pulpit. The fellows handled their victim so
roughly that he was hurt to such an extent
that his companion, PiUsbury, was alarmed
and had to venture into the church again to
summon the doctor forth from the sanctuary.
Foster was then taken to the home of a sym-

82 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
pathizing friend, and there he remained till
the next afternoon, when the sheriff came to
arrest him. PiUsbury and other friends, hav
ing heard of the proposed arrest, proceeded to
the house to behold a scene as in a comedy,
but it was a comedy with a significance which
had to do with grave issues in the history of
reform. Foster was found to be still very
lame as an effect of the yesterday's encounters,
and he was seated in an easy chair. The
sheriff did not wholly relish the job he had in
hand, and was as polite as possible. "Mr.
Foster," he said, I have authority here to
take you before Judge Badger, to answer to a
charge of disturbing public worship." Foster
replied blandly, "I do not know of any business
between me and my friend Badger requiring
my attendance today, and must decline to
answer your call."
The sheriff insisted, but very kindly, and
undoubtedly with much misgiving as to the
outcome of the interview with this terrible
non-resistant antagonist. Foster would not,
and indeed could not, easily stir to accompany
the officer of the law, so at last that worthy
requested some of Foster's anti-slavery friends
who were in the room to help carry his desired
prisoner out to the carriage. The aboUtionists
refused to give their aid, but Foster himself
good-naturedly suggested that the minister
and the young heroes of the preceding day

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 83
would be the proper helpers on this occasion.
Meanwhile the townsfolk gathered in excited
groups about the house. Public sympathy ap
pears to have been with Foster, for the sheriff
had difficulty in persuading any man to come
to his aid. "Finally, one member of the church
and a working man not of the church came in
with the officer, and taking Foster gently in
their hands and arms, bore him bareheaded to
the door and placed him on the carriage seat.
The sheriff said that it was "a very unpleasant
duty to perform.' which we well understood.
A crowd followed the prisoner to the
judgment hall. It was on the second story,
and the stairway being narrow, it was truly a
ludicrous operation for the officer and his
posse to chmb it with so unseemly a burden.
Foster said afterwards that he felt rather seri
ous than otherwise, till ascending the stairs,
feet foremost, high above his head, and yet
handled with the utmost caution, he could not
help laughing outright, and did not recover
his gravity again through the whole farcical
trial." The trial had the characteristic peculiarity
which the prisoner was apt to impart to such
occasions in his experience. He disconcerted
one witness who testified that Foster had vio
lated the regulations of the church, by asking
whether it would be contrary to those regula
tions to come into the church and give the

84 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
alarm if the child of the witness were being
kidnapped. When the bothered man had
been forced to admit that he did not think
that would be an unjustifiable interruption of
the services, Foster drew his prompt conclu
sion, and asked if it would be violating the
regulations of the South Church to give alarm
when two millions and a half of the witness's
countrymen were being kidnapped. The
audience listened with delight to Foster, and
the poor witness cried in despair, "These ques
tions are asked for sport."
PiUsbury claims that there was no existing
law against which Foster had really offended,
but the judge was determined to convict, and
he sentenced the prisoner to pay a fine of five
dollars and costs. Immediately the men in
court, who were listening, threw the necessary
money on the table. These contributors were
not professed abolitionists, and their action
convinced the judge that the people of Concord
were not with him in his decision, so he made a
hasty moral retreat, and remitted the fine.
Foster had, of course, protested against the
recognition of the sentence imphed by the pay
ment of the fine, but his friends had not heeded
him, and now that the court refused the money,
they handed it to him, and he accepted it as a
contribution to the anti-slavery cause.
The people of Lynn, Massachusetts, passed
a very exciting Sunday during the year of 1842.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 85
On the Saturday evening, Parker PiUsbury,
Nathaniel P. Rogers, Stephen Foster, and
Thomas Parnell Beach all found themselves
in the town, and immediately began to lay
plans for vigorous work to be done on the
morrow. Foster went to Mr. Cook, the Con
gregational minister, and requested to be al
lowed to preach for him at some one of the
Sunday services. Mr. Cook refused, and then
the abolitionist asked if the use of the church
might be granted for an anti-slavery meeting
at any hour when it was not needed for ordi
nary purposes. Mr. Cook refused this request
also, and added gratuitously the threat that if
Foster ever came into the house to speak with
out invitation, he should be "taken care of."
Mr. Foster replied with unruffled serenity that
it was uncertain where he should speak the
next day, but probably somewhere in Lynn.
Meanwhile, PiUsbury and Beach visited Over
seer Nathan Breed of the Friends' Society, and
asked of him permission to occupy the Friends'
meeting-house during a part of Sunday. When
this request was refused, the two agitators told
Breed that he must not be surprised if they
spoke in the regular meeting. This would be
a proceeding presumably in complete harmony
with the principles and practices of Friends,
and Breed answered to the suggestion, "You
will find us a peaceable people.'
The next day, June twenty-fifth, was a

86 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
lovely day, and the abolitionists sallied forth
in the perfect weather, to bear their testimony
upon practical righteousness. Foster, Pills-
bury, and Rogers repaired to Mr. Cook's
church, and as soon as the long prayer was
finished, Foster, who had been standing with
the rest of the congregation, instead of sitting
down, began at once to speak. His manner
was solemn and his voice low and serious.
"Sit down," cried the indignant minister; and
"Sit down, sir," he cried again; and as the
deep warning voice went on, the minister
thundered out, "I command you in the name
of the Commonwealth to sit down." At this
word the sexton and two other men seized
Foster, and the application of force to his pas
sive body and non-resistant soul resulted, this
time, in his being carried out from the church,
face downward, two men bearing his shoulders
between them, while one comically short man
held on to his ankles, as if they were the handles
to a wheelbarrow. Outside the edifice they
released him. He rose to his feet, looked at
his captors, and remarked pleasantly, "This,
then, is your Christianity, is it ?" He further
improved the opportunity by speaking to a
number of the audience who had followed the
ridiculous procession in which he had been the
principal figure, till the sexton interrupted,
ordering the people to go back into the church :
"No breaking in upon worship, friend sexton,"

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 87
said Rogers. "Don't drive folks in, if you do
drag them out." This remark broke the ten
sion of the moment, and sexton and aboUtion
ists, all Yankees alike, joined in a good-
humored burst of laughter.
After a few minutes more of anti-slavery ex
hortation, the undismayed Foster walked
across the common and entered the Baptist
meeting-house, not many rods distant from
the church whence he had just been expelled.
Here he sat down and waited quietly tiU the
services were through, then arose and began to
speak as the audience was moving towards
the door. Instantly he was pounced upon and
hurried along the aisle, out of the door and
down the steps with such violence that his
clothing was torn and he was somewhat hurt.
He rose from the ground on to which he had
been hurled, addressed some gentle words to
the multitude, and walked away to the house
of William Bassett, an anti-slavery Quaker.
Rogers remained, meditating upon the scene,
and some young Baptists began to rail at him,
telling him that he and his fellow reformers
ought to be tarred and feathered and cow-
hided. "Ah," said Rogers, "Does your gospel
run like that, my friends ?"
At noon the abolitionists issued notices that
they would hold a meeting that afternoon at
six o'clock, in Lyceum Hall, which they had
secured. Rogers, Beach, and Foster then at-

88 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
tended an afternoon meeting of the Friends'
Society. Beach was a young man who had
given up the Congregational ministry to work
for the slave. He broke the silence of the
Quaker gathering, bearing a testimony against
the indifference of Friends towards the evils of
slavery, war, and intemperance, till a Friend
rose from one of the high seats and said, "Thy
speaking is an interruption of our worship."
This was a rebuke, delivered according to the
manner sanctioned among Friends, when it
was deemed necessary to check unwelcome or
ill-considered speech in their meetings. Beach
made answer that he had supposed speech to
be free in Friends' meetings, and proceeded
with his remarks. Another voice from the
high seats requested his silence, and finally,
a third elder got on his feet and asked to be
heard. Beach answered him in phraseology
akin to that used by his hearers, saying, 'Tf
anything is revealed to thee, I will hold my
peace." But all that the elder had to say was
again to request the abolitionist not to disturb
the meeting by further speech, and Beach went
on with his exhortation and criticism. The
elders, now in despair, gave the signal for clos
ing the meeting. As the drab-garmented folk
began to pass down the aisles, William Bassett
called, entreating them to stay and hear the
truth. His mother rushed forward at this,
and with every sign of great distress, begged

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 89
her son not to take the part of the abolitionists.
"Mother," said young Bassett, tenderly but
firmly, "I am about my Heavenly Father's
business and cannot hear thee now." Most
of the older men left the house, but the women
and the young men lingered to hear Bassett,
and when he had finished, Foster began to
speak with unusual fervor, having been much
moved by the scene between Bassett and his
mother. The older men now made a rush
back into the house, seized Foster and hurried
him towards the door. The young men, how
ever, interfered energetically, and secured for
him at last a full and free opportunity to speak
in a rehgious house in Lynn.
When they all finaUy left the Quaker meet
ing house, Beach took a notice of the pro
posed anti-slavery meeting in Lyceum
Hall to the First Methodist Church, from
which he was speedily cast out with a dislo
cated thumb. Foster went with a similar
notice to the Baptist Church, whence he had
been dragged only a few hours previously.
Both men intended to wait till the services
were through before reading their notices, but
Foster, too, was grabbed and carried out as
soon as he was seen in the church. The
Quakers had torn off part of his coat collar in
their assault upon him, and the Baptists now
tore one of his sleeve cuffs. More than that,
they actually shut him up for fifteen or twenty

90 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
minutes in a dark closet under the staircase, a
place where the sexton kept the lamps, oil cans,
and similar utensils belonging to the estab
lishment. In the final years of the anti-slavery conflict
conditions had somewhat changed, and Mr.
Foster did not consider it necessary to go un
invited into churches, there to interrupt the
services with his appeals and denunciations,
but at times, when he felt with especial pain
the moral indifference of the nation, he would
think of that old method of his, and tell his
friends that he was not sure but that he should
again hear the inner voice, commanding him
to resume his former habit and startle the
American people into listening to the truths
which he had to utter. His life was always
"strenuous," and it was in the thick of his con
test with the churches that he wrote a notable
letter to Rogers, dated at Canterbury, New
Hampshire, January 15, 1842.
"I am now laid on the shelf for the pres
ent, perhaps for the winter. Possibly even
for a longer period. Indeed, when I dare look
on my shattered form, I sometimes think
prisons will be needed for me but little longer.
Within the last fifteen months four times have
they opened their dismal cells for my reception.
Twenty-four times have my countrymen
dragged me from their temples of worship, and
twice have they thrown me with great violence

LUCY STONE

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 91
from the second story of their buildings, care
less of consequences. Once in a Baptist meet
ing house they gave me an evangelical kick in
the side, which left me for weeks an invalid.
Times out of memory have they broken up
my meetings with violence, and hunted me
with brickbats and bad eggs. Once they in
dicted me for assault and battery. Once, in
the name of outraged law and justice, have they
attempted to put me in irons. Twice have
they punished me with fine for preaching the
gospel; and once in a mob of two thousand
people have they deliberately attempted to
murder me, and were only foiled in their de
signs after inflicting some twenty blows on my
head, face, and neck, by the heroism of a brave
and noble woman. To name her in this be
sotted age would be to cast pearls before swine;
but her name shall be known in other worlds.
Still, I will not complain, though death should
be found close on my track. My lot is easy
compared with that of those for whom
I labor. I can endure the prison, but save me
from the plantation."
Mobs accompanied the abolitionists to the
end. Lucy Stone came later than many into
the field of labor, but Parker PiUsbury once
saw her hit on the head by a large prayer book
hurled" across the hall, and she gives an ac
count of Foster's facing with her a furious mob
on Cape Cod. It was not tiU twenty years

92 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
after the above letter was written that slavery
was abolished. Those years in the life of
Stephen Foster can best be studied in his con
nection of love and labor with the woman
whom he married. No permanent record has
been made of much of the work done by this
husband and wife. They travelled and toiled
in obscure districts, and only occasionally do
their struggling figures come clearly into the
view of the student of the times, but always
when thus glimpsed they are seen to be indeed
strange, almost grotesque, but HebraicaUy
impressive and worthy of utmost reverence.
"Washington, D. C, Feb. 21, 1899.
My Dear Mrs. Wyman: —
I knew Stephen Foster and his wife
very well. I remember meeting her at the
church the Sunday before I took my departure
for Washington to take my seat in the House
of Representatives at the beginning of my
public life, and her sincere benediction, as she
took my hand; T wish you all holy success.'
She was absolutely veracious and sincere, with
the spirit of a Hebrew prophetess.
Faithfully yours,
George F. Hoar"

SOJOURNER TRUTH
Sojourner Truth was the name assumed late
in life by one Isabella, a negro woman, born a
slave in New York State. Her mother's par
ents were brought from Africa. Her father
was the child of a negro and a Mohawk Indian
woman. The date of Isabella's birth is not
known. There is evidence to show that she
was emancipated in 1817 under a law which
freed aU slaves in New York who had attained
the age of forty years; but this evidence is not
conclusive, and it is possible that she was not
then forty, and did not receive her liberty until
1827. Isabella's first owners were Dutch people
named Ardenburgh; and Low Dutch was the
language in which her mother, Mau-mau Bett,
told her, when she was a child, that there was
a God in the sky, and bade her kneel and pray
to Him after she had been beaten. She also
taught her to obey her master and not to lie
nor steal. Poor Mau-mau Bett had had many
chUdren sold away from her, and she used
often to groan aloud; but if anyone asked her
what was the matter, she would answer only,
"Oh, a good deal ails me!" She would point
at night to the stars and moon and tell Isabella
93

94 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
that her lost children, wherever they were in
the world, could also look up and see those
lights in the sky. In spite, however, of the
yearning tenderness with which the mother
mourned for these sons and daughters who
had been torn from her, the famfly was so little
removed from the savage condition that
Isabella, in after years, did not know how
many children her mother had borne and
yielded to the slave market.
Isabella's recollections of slavery in New
York do not testify to much humanity on the
part of the masters in that state, and the rude
ness of the climate added its peculiar hard
ship to the lot of the slave. When a child, she
had to sleep in a cellar where men and women
were huddled together in one room. They
had a little straw to rest on, but between the
loose boards of the floor they could see the mud
and water on the ground beneath. Her feet
were badly frozen. She was often whipped.
One Sunday morning she was beaten with
rods bound together by cords, and the scars
produced by this punishment remained on her
flesh to the end of her long life.
As the years passed, she was sold several
times. For some of her owners she did house
work, but for one she hoed corn and carried
fish, did errands and brought roots and herbs
from the woods to make beer.
Womanhood brought its natural experi-

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 95
ences. She fell in love with a boy named
Robert, whose master forbade their union.
The lad came surreptitiously to see her, and
his master accompanied by his son, followed
him. The white men seized the negro, beat
him with heavy canes, and drove him home at
the end of a rope, the blood streaming from
his wounds, and with this sight the girlish
dream of love and joy faded for Isabella.
During this period of her life, she had a
sort of rehgion. She looked upon her master
as a god, and thought he knew everything that
she did, even when he was not present. Some
times she confessed her errors to him, because
she believed that he already knew them and
would be more likely to pardon her if she per
formed the ceremony of confession. She
thought he had a right to hold her as a slave;
but this belief seems to have worn away in
time, for, having had her freedom promised
her a year before the date at which it legally
must be bestowed upon her, she ran away
when she found that her owner did not intend
to fulfil his promise.
She believed in God and in His power to see
her; but she had no idea that He could read
her thoughts, and supposed it necessary to
speak aloud when she prayed to Him. Her
prayers were very familiar talks with God;
and if she was whipped, she thought it would
not have happened nad she known beforehand

96 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
what her master intended, and had the chance
to ask God audibly to save her from the
chastisement. She would begin her prayers
by saying in Low Dutch, "Our Father in
heaven," and then go on telling Him all her
troubles and inquiring as she related her
grievances : "Do you think that's right, God ?"
Sometimes her petitions to God were peril
ously like commands. She felt that God was
under much more obligation to her than she
was to Him. She thought He ought to do her
bidding, and she endeavored to bribe Him by
{>romising to be very good if He would. She
ooked upon goodness as a remunerative ser
vice to God, not as a thing beneficial to herself
or her fellow creatures.
She married a man named Thomas, and
became the mother of five children. One of
her sons, a little boy named Peter, was sold to
a Mr. Fowler, who took him to Alabama.
This was an illegal transaction, as the law for
bade the sale of any slave out of New York
State. The mother of Fowler's wife was a
Mrs. Gedney, who lived in New York; and
after Isabella herself became free, she went to
her and indignantly complained of the loss of
her boy. Mrs. Gedney laughed inhumanly
at the distress of the negro mother, and said
that Isabella had no more reason to grieve
than she had, for her daughter had also gone
to Alabama with Fowler.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 97
"Yes," answered Isabella, "your child has
gone there, but she is married, and my boy has
gone as a slave, and he is too little to go so far
from his mother."
Mrs. Gedney, unmoved by this plea, con
tinued to scream with laughter; so Isabella
left her and began to tell her story to the people
she met, till the matter was actually brought
before the courts, and Fowler was forced to
return the little Peter. The judge gave him
at once into his mother's custody, releasing
him forever from slavery. His whole body was
covered with ridges in the flesh and with scars.
He told Isabella that the blood ran, and that
when at last he got away from his tormentor,
he would creep under the stoop of the house in
Alabama, and there hide himself, a tiny black
morsel of human misery.
After this recital, the mother cried: "O
Lord, render unto them double." But when
a little later, word came that Fowler had killed
his wife, the daughter of the woman who had
been so merry over another's anguish, Isa
bella's heart softened, and she said: "O,
Lord, I didn't mean all that. You took me up
too quick."
Isabella had a peculiar religious experience
about the time she became free. She thought
she met God face to face one day, and she said
to Him: "O God, I didn't know as you was
so big." The consciousness of God's presence

98 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
became like fire around her, and she was
afraid, till she began to feel that somebody
stood between her and this burning terror; and
after a while she knew that this somebody
loved her. At first, she thought it must be
Cato, a preacher whom she knew, or Deencia
or Sally, people who had been her friends.
We are not told whether these persons were
then living or dead, or whether she thought
they had come in flesh or in the spirit to her
relief. However this may be, she soon per
ceived that their images looked vile and
black and could not be the beautiful presence
that shielded her from the fires of God. She
began to experiment with her inner vision,
ana found that when she said to the presence,
"I know you, I know you," she perceived a
light; but when she said, "I don't know you,
I don't know you!" the hght went out. At
last she became aware that it was Jesus who
was shielding and loving her, and the world
grew bright, her troubled thoughts were ban
ished, and her heart was filled with praise and
with love for all creatures. "Lord, Lord," she
cried, "I can love even de white folks."
Before this time she had not associated the
name or idea of Jesus with religion. She had
heard of Him, but she had supposed, she said,
that He was like General Lafayette or some
similar character. Now she began to wonder
about Jesus, and one day she heard something

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 99
read aloud which led her to ask if Jesus were
married. She was told that Jesus was God;
but she could not accept that idea of his nature,
because she had seen Him standing between
her and God. In later years she worked out
for herself the belief that Christ was in some
mysterious sense the spirit that was in Adam
and Eve till they sinned, when it fled to heaven
and was afterwards reincarnated in Jesus.
She held, moreover, that men were purely
animal in their nature until united to the spirit
of Christ.
Even in the darkest hours of her early re
ligious experience she appears to have had no
fear of a material hell; and as her mind de
veloped she was afraid only of the anguish in
her own heart, the consciousness of sin and of
separateness from God. Her views of prayer,
after the clearer spiritual vision and the deeper
religious feeling came to her, still remained
for some time essentially the same as when she
had thought she must talk aloud to God to
make Him know that she wanted Him to save
her from being whipped. While she was try
ing to get her child back from Alabama, she
would say: "Now, God, help me get my son.
If you were in trouble as I am, and I could help
you, as you can help me, think I wouldn't do
it? Yes, God, you know I would do it. I
will never give you peace till you do, God."
Isabella's husband died a few years after his

100 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
emancipation. He was older than she, and
she could not earn enough to take care of him
and their children too; so he passed his last
days in a poorhouse.
She worked as a domestic servant in New
York City, and there became associated with
two men named Pierson and Matthias, who
claimed, the one to have a mission like that of
John the Baptist, and the other to be God
himself on this earth. They had a few follow
ers, but their efforts to propagate their notions
resulted finally in scandal and the suspicion of
crime. Isabella happily kept clear of all that
was degrading or immoral in the little com
munity of fanatics, but for a time she inclined
to share in its religious vagaries. Her strong
common sense, however, quickly asserted it
self. She tried abstaining from food because
Mr. Pierson fasted, and said that the practice
"gave him great light in the things of God."
After abstaining from food for three days,
Isabella become satisfied that all the "light
ness" she could obtain in that manner was
lightness of body and not of mind.
After she ceased to work for Pierson and
Matthias, she continued her humble labors in
New York City for sometime; but a trouble
came to her spirit. In some vague way her
untutored intellect conceived the idea that there
was essential evil in the social systems of the
day, and especially in the great city where she

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 101
hved. "The rich rob the poor," she said,
"and the poor rob one another." She had not
taken money unless she earned it; but she
grew to feel that in doing work for which she
received pay she prevented some one else from
doing it and obtaining money. Occurrences
like the following incident disturbed her. A
gentleman gave her half a dollar to hire some
man to clear the snow from the sidewalk. She
rose early, did the work herself and kept the
money, and then was unable to convince her
self that she had not defrauded some poor man
who needed the job in order to provide for his
family, although she knew that she also was
poor and needed the money. She came to feel
that it was selfish in her to seek for work when
so many other people were suffering because
they had no work, and a horror of the whole
situation took possession of her. She felt that
she had not obeyed the Golden Rule in her
dealings with her fellow men; and at last her
soul submitted itself to a new vision of duty,
and she cried: "Lord, I will give all back
that I have ever taken away. Lord, what wilt
Thou have me to do ?"
The inward answer came, "Go out of the
city." She replied: "I will go — just go. Lord,
whither shall I go?"
Then a voice said, "Go East."
On the first day of June, 1843, she fled from

102 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
the city, taking the rising sun for her guide.
She carried a few clothes rolled up in a pillow
case, a basket of food, and in her pocket the
sum of two shillings. The morning that she
started she told a woman that her name was no
longer Isabella, but Sojourner. A Quaker
lady whom she met early on her pilgrimage,
inquired what was her second name and
Sojourner was obliged to admit that she had
not thought of the necessity of a new surname.
She had been called by the name of her last
master in slavery. She seems to have sup
posed that God had called her Sojourner and
whereas she had been pleased with the title, she,
now felt very dissatisfied, because it did not
prove sufficient for the requirements of earthly
customs. She plodded on her road, praying:
"Oh, God, give me a name with a handle to
it !" At last she thought that Truth was God's
name, and God was in deep verity her last
master, so she must call herself Sojourner
Truth. "Why, thank you, God," she cried
joyously, "that is a very good name."
She went into New England, singing, preach
ing, and praying, in religious or reform meet
ings, or to gatherings of people assembled
especially to hear her. She wrote back to her
children, whom she had left in New York,
without first divulging her plans to them.
She kept her moral balance, and was as ready
to work with her hands as to pray and preach.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 103
She lodged where she could. Sometimes she
paid for her entertainment in labor, sometimes
in money given for her services, elsewhere
performed; but she never allowed herself to
take more than two or three shillings at any
one time for any work she had done.
Her notions of God constantly clarified.
Once she thought of Him as a being who got
tired and who could not see by night; but at
last she worked out for herself the belief that
He was a spirit above all physical limitations;
and then she decided that the Sabbath might
be necessary for the benefit of man, but that it
could not have been instituted to commemor
ate God's rest, because God could not have
got tired in any work. As this idea indicates,
she came to hold the opinion that the scriptural
writers mixed their own notions up with the
spiritual truths revealed to them.
Soon after her pilgrimage began she attended
meetings held by the Second Adventists, and
was repelled by their noisy and excited ways.
She told them that "the Lord might come,
move all through the camp and go away again,
and they never know it." they were in such a
state of unspiritual agitation. Once she ex
claimed in disgust: 'Here you are talking
about being changed in the twinkling of an
eye. If the Lord should come, He'd change
you to nothing, for there is nothing to you!"
The Second Advent preachers received her

104 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
opposition kindly, and after some discussion
with her decided that, though she was ignorant
of their doctirne, "she had learned much that
man had never taught her."
She resided for a while in a community in
Northampton, and was a servant in that town
about the year 1850. She had hoped to find
her ideal of life realized there, but after the
community broke up she seems to have re
signed the expectation or effort to live accord
ing to socialistic ideals, and bent some of her
energy towards getting a home for her old age.
She gradually became known to the Aboli
tionists, and as a speaker against slavery dis
played a quaint oratory, and was powerful in
sudden attacks upon error or an opponent.
She sang effectively; and an interesting story
is told of her quieting a mob of rioters who
were violently disturbing a camp meeting, one
moonlight night, by going a little way outside
the assembly and singing:
"It was early in the morning, — it was early
in the morning,
Just at the break of day —
When he rose — when he rose — when he
rose,
And went to heaven on a cloud."
She never learned to read, but Wendell
Phillips wrote of her: "I once heard her de
scribe the captain of a slave ship going up to

WENDELL PHILLIPS
About Sixty-nine Years Old

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 105
judgment, followed by his victims as they
gathered from the depth of the sea, in a strain
that reminded me of Clarence's dream in
Shakespeare, and equalled it. The anecdotes
of her ready wit and quick, striking replies are
numberless. But the whole together give
little idea of the rich, quaint, poetic, and often
profound speech of a most remarkable person,
who used to say to us: 'You read books; God
Himself talks to me.' "
Mr. Phillips spoke to Mrs. Stowe of the
power possessed by the French actress Rachel,
to overwhelm with emotion a whole audience by
uttering a few simple words, and said that the
only other person who could do it as she could
was Sojourner Truth.
On one occasion Frederick Douglass was
addressing an audience in Salem and drawing
a very gloomy picture of the condition of the
country, declaring that slavery could only go
down in blood, and that church and state
were too deeply steeped in sin to escape.
Probably something pessimistic in his tone or
words stirred her religious nature, for sud
denly Sojourner rose in the back of the hall
and startled speaker and audience by crying
out these words: "Frederick, is God dead?"
"We were all," wrote Mr. Douglass of the
scene, "for a moment brought to a standstill;

106 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
just as we should have been if some one had
thrown a brick through the window."
Her religious faith was unfaltering, for she
believed, as she once said to a friend, "I tell
you, dear lamb, dat when a thing is done inde
right spirit, God takes it up and spreads it all
over the country."
The veteran Abolitionist,. Parker PiUsbury,
in a letter to the writer, describes a scene in an
anti-slavery convention held about the year
1855, in Ashtabula County, Ohio. The
audience was mostly in sympathy with the
Abolitionists, Joshua R. Giddings and his
family being present at the meetings. On
Sunday afternoon Mr. PiUsbury made a speech
denouncing "the church and clergy of the
country as accomplices in the guilt of slave
breeding and slave holding." A young law
student arose to defend Doth church and
clergy. He said that the negroes were fit
only to be slaves, and if any of them showed
intelligence it was because they had some
white olood, for, as a race, they were but the
connecting link between man and animals.
While he spoke a violent thunderstorm came
up. "The house," writes Mr. PiUsbury, "was
almost as dark as night, except when illumined
by flashes of lightning. Quite ingeniously the
young man spoke of the thunder and lightning
as the voice of God and flash of His eye in

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 107
indignation at our holding such meetings and
preaching such doctrines, especially on the
holy Sabbath day; and he said he was 'almost
afraid' to be there."
All the time that he spoke, Sojourner Truth
sat and looked at him; and when he ended
she came forward to answer him. "She
seemed," says Mr. PiUsbury, "almost to come
up out of the deep darkness or out of the
ground. There she stood before us as a vision.
Her tall, erect form, dressed in dark green, a
white handkerchief crossed over her breast, a
white turban on her head, with white teeth and
still whiter eyes, she stood, a spectacle weird,
fearful as an avenger — doubtless to the young
man more dreadful than the thunderstorm,
the clouds of which had not yet cleared away.
She spoke but a few minutes. To report her
would have been impossible. As well attempt
to report the seven apocalyptic thunders. I
have heard many voices of men and women,
in a vast variety of circumstances, on land and
sea, but never a voice like hers then and there.
She spoke not loud, nor in rage. She was
singularly calm, subdued, and serene. In her
peculiar dialect and tone she began :
" 'When I was a slave away down there in
New York, and there was any particularly bad
work to be done, some colored woman was
sure to be called on to do it. And when I
heard that man talking away there as he did,

108 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
almost a whole hour, I said to myself, here's
one spot of work sure that's just fit for colored
folks to clean up after.'
"She referred to the young lawyer's com
parison of negroes to the brutes, and cried out :
'Now, I am the pure African. You can all see
that plain enough.' She straightened herself
up proudly and repeated: T am the pure
African; none of your white blood runs in my
veins.' And then she uttered a fierce scoff at
the greedy passions of the white race, which
had made it almost a marvel that any negro
should be of unmixed blood. She passed on
to speak of the youth's terror lest God had
sent the storm in wrath at the opinions ex
pressed at that meeting. 'He better be afraid,'
she cried out contemptuously, 'if the Lord has
ever heard tell of him yet.' "
Mrs. Stowe wrote an article about Sojourner,
which was published in the Atlantic Monthly in
1863. She says: "I do not recollect ever to
have been conversant with any one who had
more of that silent and subtle power which we
call personal presence than this woman. In
the modern spiritualistic phraseology she
would be described as having a strong sphere."
Mrs. Stowe related Sojourner's history to
the sculptor, Mr. Story, in Rome. A few
days afterwards he told her he wanted to make
a statue to be called the Libyan Sibyl. Two
years later he asked Mrs. Stowe to repeat the

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 109
account of Sojourner and describe again her
manner and appearance; and in a day or two
more he showed the clay model of his statue,
in which he typified the mysterious African
nature, of which this negro woman was such a
notable impersonation.
When the civil war came, Sojourner, aged
as she was, travelled all over the North, speak
ing for the Union and freedom. She com
posed a battle song for the first Michigan regi
ment of colored soldiers, and sang it herself in
Detroit and Washington.
"We hear the proclamation, massa, hush it as
you will;
The birds will sing it to us, hopping on the
cotton hill;
The possum up the gum tree couldn't keep it
still,
As we went climbing on."
During the war a Democrat once asked her
what business she was then following. She
answered; "Years ago, when I lived in de
City of New York, my occupation was scouring
brass door knobs; but now I go about scouring
copperheads." In October, 1864, she had an interview with
Abraham Lincoln from whom she sought
authority for work among the freedmen. He
treated her with much consideration, and
when she told him she had never heard of him

110 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
till he was a candidate for the presidency, he
smiled and answered: "I had heard of you
many times before that." He wrote in her
autograph book, which she called her "Book
of Life," and showed her a Bible which had
been given him by the colored people of
Baltimore. A month later she was commissioned by the
National Freedmen's Relief Association, and
spent a year at Arlington Heights, devoting
herself especially to teaching the freed women
good household and personal habits.
The negroes there then held their freedom
by such an insecure tenure, that Marylanders
often came over and kidnapped the children;
and if the bereaved mothers, disturbed the
peace in consequence, they were sometimes
put in the guardhouse by irresponsible officials.
Sojourner took up the cause of these outraged
women so energetically that some angry Mary
landers threatened to get her also put into the
guardhouse. She dared them to try to im
prison her, saying that she "would make the
United States rock like a cradle."
She visited and nursed in the Freedmen's
Hospital. While she was thus engaged a law
was passed giving colored people a right to
ride in all the street cars. Sojourner was
speedily seen on the street holding up her old
black hand as a signal to a car to stop and take
her on. Conductors and drivers paid no at-

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 111
tention to her. Two cars passed, and when
the third came in sight, she "gave three tre
mendous yelps: T want to ride! I want to
ride! I WANT TO RIDE!'"
A crowd collected, and the car was blocked.
Sojourner jumped on board. A great shout
arose from the men on the street. The in
furiated conductor told her twice to go for
ward where the horses were or he would throw
her out. She sat down among the passengers
and told him that she did not fear him, for she
knew the laws as well as he did. She rode
farther than she needed to, and finally left the
car and said: "Bless God! I have had a
ride." Another day a conductor kept her running a
long way after a car, till the other passengers
complained aloud that it was a shame. When
she entered the car at last he came towards her
with a threatening gesture to put her off. She
said to him that if he touched her "it would
cost him more than his car and horses were
worth." A man in the uniform of a general
interfered on her behalf, and the conductor
left her alone.
FinaUy, a conductor, unmindful of her great
age, pushed her against the door so roughly
that a bone in her shoulder was displaced.
She had him arrested. The Freedman's
Bureau furnished her with a lawyer, and the
man lost his situation. Soon after a conductor

112 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
was known to stop his car unasked and say to
some colored women standing timidly upon
the street: "Walk in, ladies!"
Thousands of homeless negroes were swarm
ing in that troubled period in the vicinity of
Washington. Sojourner realized that idleness
was ruining both adults and children. She
found places for many in the North, and the
Government sent them where she directed.
She advocated the establishment of industrial
schools and an industrial colony in the West.
She tried to get Congress to institute such an
undertaking. She went through many North
ern states advocating this plan in public meet
ings, and for a number of years continued to
try to get it adopted. In these journeys she
was received almost everywhere with courtesy
and honor. The Abolitionists delighted to
open their homes to her. In her wanderings
she was often accompanied by a favorite
grandson; but she was destined to live long
after he died. ' As she grew older what people
cared most to hear from her lips was the mar
vellous story of her own varied experiences.
Her home in these last years was in Battle
Creek, Michigan, where she owned a house.
There in 1883, she died, her age being prob
ably a little over or under a hundred years.
A few days before her death, as she lay on her
couch with closed eyes, a friend bent over her
and said: "Sojourner, can you look at me?"

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 113
Slowly the dying woman opened her wonder
ful eyes. They seemed filled with spiritual
and prophetic light; and earnestly they gazed
upon the tender face above her. Then they
closed, never to open again on earth.

JOHN CRAWFORD WYMAN
John Crawford Wyman was born in 1822 at
Northboro, Massachusetts. He narrowly es
caped being trained for the Baptist ministry, but
so escaping, he never went to school after he was
twelve. He never became a really well-read
man, nor was he a profound thinker, yet,
throughout his life, he faced all men with level
eyes and met respectful glances. He had the
fift of that fervid, impromptu oratory which is
est suited for short addresses. He delivered
them in a marvellous voice which possessed
the quality that sets to throbbing the pulses of
the listener.
He was endowed with a genuine dramatic
genius. He used it only in amateur fashion.
He had a curious aversion to making of his
peculiar genius a marketable commodity, and
while he frankly enjoyed the use of his own
powers, he really underrated their possibility
of development. Moreover he lacked am
bition and persistency in such mental effort as
was not inspired by his affections or his moral
sentiments. So he flashed like a benign
meteor from an intellectual nowhere, to
nowhere, while the great human planets
rolled in their self determined orbits.
114

Jk**,/?*

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 115
When he was twenty-four, he married Emma,
the daughter of Dr. Willard of Uxbridge.
She was beautiful and had the power to win
and hold ardent devotion. She influenced
him greatly and nobly, though she was several
years older than he and soon became a chronic
invalid, whose support taxed all his young
ability. For some years he resided in Worcester, and
it was in this period that, overflowing with
amusement, he said one day to the Concord
Sage. "I have just met a man who says, 'there
ain't no savin' grace in them words of Mr.
Emerson's.' "
Whereat Mr. Emerson made slow and ap
parently reflective reply, "I think he is about
right." John Wyman was a member of the Town
and Country Club, founded in 1849 by Mr.
Emerson. Not four weeks before his own
death, Col. Higginson wrote to John Wyman's
widow, "I remember full well your brilliant
husband and how Mr. Emerson used to de-
Ught in him and ask 'where is he ?' when miss
ing him from literary meetings.' "
Emma Wyman was a Garrisonian Aboli
tionist, and her husband joined that non- voting
phalanx, and though for a very brief time in
the early days of the Free Soil Party, and again
in the Presidential campaign of 1860, he

116 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
wavered from it into the political ranks, he was
all his life proud because his main anti-slavery
connection had been Garrisonian. Many di
verse opinions prevailed as to the legal relation
of the Federal government to slavery, so that
a little wavering between these opinions and
consequent change in action, such as this of
John Wyman's, while perhaps it implied some
lack of intellectual certainty, did not in his
case imply moral flexibility.
He was in the employ of PhilUps and Samp
son when they started the Atlantic Monthly.
Edmund Quincy offered an anti-slavery ar
ticle entitled Where Will It End ? for pub
hcation in one of the first numbers of the
magazine. The publishing and editorial au
thorities on the management were not aU
in accord as to the character which they
should impose upon the new magazine. LoweU
and Underwood were ready and probably eager
to make it an engine for carrying the Gospel
of Freedom over the whole country, but
the decision did not rest entirely with them
and one of their superiors in management
was unalterably opposed to the publication
of Quincy's article. There was however an
other man in authority who was then ill at
home in a rural district some miles from Bos
ton. John Wyman got the idea that this
man might be influenced. He secured a
buggy and in the evening of the day in which

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 117
matters had become critical upon the subject,
he drove out into the country, found his man,
assured him that the hour had come to issue
a great anti-slavery monthly, argued, ex
horted, very hkely jested, and won. He
returned to Boston with the order which
check-mated the opposition, Quincy's article
appeared, and thereby the mighty force of
The Atlantic Monthly was hitched like Emer
son's "wagon to a star."
John Wyman was, by this time, what
Higginson pronounced "a wonderful artist"
in telling a story, though that competent critic
considered "his original sayings finer (even)
than his recitations," and "John, I have a capi
tal story I want to give you to work up," thus
Wendell Phillips greeted him. He attended
the famous Atlantic Monthly dinners, where
once he heard Oliver Wendell Holmes say
briskly. "Mr. Longfellow, what do you do when
people write to you for your autograph ?"
"Well," answered the poet gently, "If they
send stamps, I usually return autographs."
"Do you?" in his gravest manner asked
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "7 rely on stamps so
acquired to pay my own postage."
John Wyman made a speech in The Wig
wam at the close of the Chicago Convention
which nominated Lincoln, — that meeting
of which Mary A. Livermore said, "Talk of

118 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
women as too emotional to take part in poli
tics! . I never saw women behave as men did
that night in the Wigwam, — jumping, hug
ging, and rolling over each other !"
Emma Wyman died in December, 1861,
and then the man who need no longer give his
strength to her care, recognized his duty, "I
have talked against slavery," he said, "Now I
must work."
He insured his life for his mother's benefit
and entered the 33rd Massachusetts Volunteers
with the rank of Captain. He was almost im
mediately detached from his regiment and ap
pointed provost marshal at Alexandria,Virginia,
where a vast, dusky congregation went mad
with joy because he assured them that in his
rule, he should make no distinction between
black and white. He kept his pledge, and —
"You're the first officer in this town that ever
took a nigger's word against a white man's,"
was the comment on his conduct.
It was not always easy, in those days, for the
civilian soldier to grasp instantly the whole
bearing of the military situation upon himself.
Soon after John Wyman's arrival in Alex
andria, he went to Washington. On his re
turn, he was summoned into the presence of
his commanding General who asked sternly.
"Capt. Wyman, why did you leave your post
of duty without permission ?"
The nature of his action revealed itself for

Emma Willard Wyman

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 119
the first time to the offender's consciousness.
"Well," he said, "I think I went because I
have been a citizen for forty years, and a
soldier only about a month."
His frank wit and his own charm saved him,
— the General laughed.
The proclamation of martial law in Alex
andria was resented by the residents and a
group of young men of aristocratic families
entertained themselves by making trouble for
the Yankee provost marsnal. An insult offered
on the street to a beautiful quadroon girl made
occasion for the arrest of the ringleader of the
party of hot-blooded young men.
The man in jail was freely visited by his
friends and, after a time, he had them announce
that unless he was liberated so he could go to
New York to spend Christmas with his fiancee,
he would shoot the provost marshal when he
did get out. After hearing of this threat,
Capt. Wyman visited the jail and asked the
young man if it were true that he had made
such a threat. Upon the admission, Captain
Wyman said quietly. "I'm sorry you said that,"
The defiant response came, ' I said it and I
mean it," but when the gentle voice continued
slowly; "I'd like to let you go and spend
Christmas with the girl, but, don't you see,
you have made it so I can't ? " the Southerner
realized that there was no more cowardice in
the Northern blood than in his own.

120 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
The two men became good friends and the
jail door was set open as soon as Christmas
was over.
During Captain Wyman's service as provost
marshal, it was announced to him that the
President, with attending party was to visit
the town and take a horse-back ride of inspec
tion. Capt. Wyman ordered horses got ready
in number to match the expected dignitaries,
and being mindful of Abraham Lincoln's
inches, he included among the animals selected,
a very tall though somewhat bony and un
gainly steed. He had however no intention of
trying to suggest a choice to thePresident. The
horses were brought up to the Marshal's office
at the proper moment. Capt. Wyman came
out with the President and his suite, Lincoln
gave one comprehensive glance at the saddled
steeds, and walked straight to the big gaunt
creature, saying, "I think this one looks as
though it was meant for me."
Capt. Wyman came once again in contact
with this man of enigmatical character, who
has since become almost a mythical personage
to common imagination. The Captain was
sent to him at the White House; and was alone
with him for a few minutes, then a Congress
man from the far West came in, and Lincoln
joked about mileage perquisites, and told. a
not very remarkable story of his own Con
gressional time as related to mileage privilege.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 121
While, however, Lincoln and the Captain
were alone together, an incident occurred, ap
parently trifling yet suggestive. When the
business of the interview was finished, the
President volunteered thus, "Would you like
to know what the army is doing?" and he
showed the Captain a marked map and ex
plained to him the marks as indicating army
position in field and camp. Perhaps the in
formation thus conveyed was so slight that to
impart it could have served only to gratify
Lincoln's love of pleasing a visitor, but it may
also be that this anecdote illustrates a phase
of his character which seems intimated by
Grant in his Memoirs. Grant says that when
he came to take command of the army, he was
warned by wise and weary men, not to let the
President know his plans, "and so," says Grant,
"I did not tell him."
In the second year of his service Captain
Wyman was put on the staff of Gen. Mac-
CaUum, who was at the head of the Depart
ment of Transportation and Military Railroads
for the Eastern Army. This work took the
staff officer into some scenes of danger. The
department business, however, included not
merely the duty of riding at night over derailed
tracks on newly captured railroads through
territory still haunted by rebels, but also the
innocent employment of forwarding supplies

122 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
to the army, even such as condensed milk and
desiccated vegetables.
Capt. Wyman was ordered to report to Gen.
Sherman at Atlanta. He appeared before the
General in shabby citizen's dress, and he
apologized for his clothes.
"Captain," replied the amiable Conqueror,
"You may wear what you please, if you will
get us all the consecrated milk and desecrated
vegetables we want."
The Captain asked the happy Marcher to the
Sea about his recent journey : "It was a picnic,"
laughed Sherman, "A perfect picnic all the
way." After Lee's army disbanded, Capt. Wyman
met a rebel lad stranded in Richmond, and he
bought the boy a mule and gave him twenty-
five dollars in cash so he could go home and
earn an honest living. But the close of the
Civil War left the Northern soldier also
practically penniless.
He served for a season as clerk of a Con
gressional Committee. That winter, a dra
matic scene occurred in the Senate Chamber,
where somebody declared that, in a previous
session, Charles Sumner had voted to re-admit
to the Union a State which disfranchised
colored men.
"I did not," protested Sumner, and his asser
tion was met by retorts equivalent to a storm

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 123
of "You dids." At last he called for the read
ing of the Record. The book was opened,
there was Sumner's name with NO written
opposite. The next morning, Capt. Wyman said to him
on a street car, "Mr. Senator, it must have
been very gratifying to you yesterday to find
your statement sustained by the Record."
"Mr. Wyman,' answered the stately Senator,
"I had not the slightest recollection of the
occasion, but I knew I never could have voted
to admit into this Union a State which brought
the word 'white' in its Constitution."
Capt. Wyman thought, "What a thing to
have a character so sure of itself, that a man
without memory of the event, would dare call
for the reading of the record before a Senate
Chamber full of his peers, ready to scoff at
him, if its testimony disproved his word."
John Wyman himself had a character full
of surprise places. One day, in New York,
he either lost or was robbed of three hundred
dollars which chanced just then to be his
"Uttle all," and he was out of employment.
A fit of rage seized him. He walked up one
of the city avenues feeling as though he were
pushing his way towards nothing through a
thick, black cloud. A beggar accosted him
with a whining petition. He ought to have
been moved either to Christian compassion or
scientific study of social conditions. He was

124 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
not so moved. He strode on in sullen silence,
and the beggar kept at his side reiterating his
complaining demands, till at last the exas
perated mendicant cried out, "Damn
you, I hope you will be as poor as I am, some
day." Capt. Wyman flashed back unholy
retort, "Damn you, I am as poor as you are,
now." The astonished beggar departed" as though
he had been shot into distance and the other
poverty-stricken man strolled on, so delighted
with the incident and his own speech that life's
enveloping cloud seemed now only a rose-hued
mist through which the Future beckoned to
new gayety.
His dominant mood was well suggested
when he once indignantly asked a tradesman
why he had cheated him, "Well," answered the
fellow confidently, "I didn't think you were
the kind of man who would trouble me."
Jay Gould took a fancy to him, drew him
aside one day and offered his assistance in
"the market." Capt. Wyman did not approve
of Jay Gould, and declined the offer. "Why,"
said the financier, "I could make a million
dollars for you if I chose."
"Yes," replied Capt. Wyman, "and then I
should be at your mercy; you could take it
away when you chose. If I stay poor, you
can't do anything to me, and I am your equal."
For five or six years after 1867, he revelled

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 125
in the joy of earning a sufficient income. If he
bought a thousand dollar horse because he
wanted one, he gave, because he wanted to, a
thousand dollars to a person who had been
Emma Wyman's friend. He gave his mother
a regular allowance, and also a house which
she willed back to him. This house, which he
had first given, was the only property he ever
inherited. Throughout his whole career, like
a true knight of the Round Table, he "for
bore his own advantage," and once he threw a
fortune, which he might honorably have se
cured for himself, into the hands of those who
were not even akin to him.
He informally adopted, as though it were a
near kinsman's, the family of the distinguished
engineer, Alexander Holley; and during these
years, what he probably loved best in the
world, was a child, by whose crib he sat each
evening for a playful half hour. One day he
entered the study of the pastor of Plymouth
Church. "The most awful thing has happened," he
said, "Uttle Alice Holley has died."
Then he and Henry Ward Beecher sat down
and cried together.
In the spring of 1872, I, being twenty-four
years of age, cherished an appropriately
girlish ideal. I sat with my mother on the
deck of the steamer Cuba. A gray haired man
was passing. He was of medium height

126 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
stout, ruddy-complexioned and furnished with
a double chin. He resembled a portrait I had
seen of George Fox. My mother stopped him,
asking, "Is thee the John Wyman whose name
I used to see in the Liberator reports of anti-
slavery fairs?" "I should say I was," he
answered with cordial energy, and then with
out further prefacing word, continued, "I be
lieve Emma Willard was a born Abolitionist.
Once I went to Uxbridge on the morning of
Thanksgiving Day, and I found a colored man
at Dr. Willard's. He was an agent for some
thing, but having done his errand, he did not
go away. The old doctor grew troubled and
got me aside to tell me that Emma said if that
man stayed until the dinner hour, she should
ask him to come to the table, and he wanted to
know how I was going to feel about it. I said
that I thought any table where Emma Willard
sat was good enough for me or anybody else to
sit at."
He seated himself on the deck floor beside
our party, the same day that he told the above
story of Emma Willard, and spoke of an hour
in their married home saying, "Ralph Waldo
Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Wendell
Phillips were all there to dinner. I have al
ways felt that nobody could claim that higher
honor had been his as host than that, — to
have had those three men together at his table."
Once or twice during this voyage, Capt.

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 127
Wyman made fun of himself, as though he
had no uneasy fear that his dignity might col
lapse like a toy balloon if tossed on the breeze
of a witticism.
One day he stood on the deck before me and
thus told a story of the Nation's tragedy.
"My last military service was to go on the
train which carried the body of Lincoln from
Washington to Springfield. It was like attend
ing a funeral all the time for three weeks. We
saw people kneeling in the field, men dropping
between the handles of their ploughs as the train
went by. We stopped in all the large towns
for funeral ceremonies. At every station we
were met by mourning crowds and delegations,
and everybody, everywhere, was crying, and I
got into such a state that I kept crying myself."
So, he spoke with the ocean around us.
What did I do with my tall, slender, poetic
ideal ? I dropped it over the ship's railing to
the mermaids. I hope they liked it as much
as I had.
A few weeks before Grant's second election
to the Presidency, he and Capt. Wyman were
guests of George M. Pullman at Pullman's
Island in the St. Lawrence River. Others in
the house party were excited over the daily
news about election possibilities, but the Presi
dent was so unperturbed that Capt. Wyman
asked Gen. Porter.
"Does this man realize that he is on trial

128 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
with the whole country acting as Court?"
"Yes," rephed Gen. Porter.
Capt. Wyman afterwards reported Grant as
a devoted husband, and said, "his children
tumbled all over him and treated him as though
he were a foot-ball."
One day, Capt. Wyman was on the Island
wharf, when the President and a lady came up
in a^ rowboat. She sprang out, and, in so
doing, upset the tiny skiff. Grant had been
steering and was sitting in such a cramped
position that he was whirled into the water,
and the boat turned over him. He was really
in danger, but Capt. Wyman got at him and
pulled him out. Grant came up to the surface
with his extinguished cigar held firmly in his
teeth, and his rescuer informed him that he
had never before seen him carry an unlighted
cigar. On the way back to the house, the
dripping President said, "The papers wfll say
I fell in because I was drunk." The papers
did say so, but it was not true.
Capt. Wyman and I were married in 1878.
Wm. Lloyd Garrison was one of the few wed
ding guests. The death of an anti-slavery
friend prevented Wendell Phillips from being
present. He wrote instead to me, "Mr.
Wyman and I were friends."
To live with John Wyman was hke Uving in
an iridescent atmosphere, so constantly gleam
ing were his changeful fancies. He was the

VALLEY FALLS RESIDENCE OF JOHN C. WYMAN

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 129
most spontaneously witty person in ordinary
conversation I ever knew. Mark Hanna,
when with him, could match him in a duel of
repartee, but his talk, was not, I think, so uni
versally flooded with humor. Capt. Wyman
used his wit only for genial beneficence, never as
a weapon in real, warfare. He was never sar
castic, and he had no black, melancholy drop
in his temperament such as often lurks under
the humorous imagination.
His were abiding constancies of the heart,
yet there was an elusive element in his nature,
which made him seem at times like a phantom
fleeting from the mental grasp of whomever
would have held him. On the other hand, he
was never half-hearted or uncertain of his
loves or his hatreds, — but he loved to be loved,
and he felt affectionate kindliness towards
most people.
Capt. Wyman was fifty-seven when his only
child was born. He took his belated father
hood seriously enough, but also a little whimsi
cally. He said, ' if the boy ever inherits
property, I hope he willl consider that he holds
it as a trust, and not merely for his own use,"
and he said also, "I am old enough to be the
child's grandfather, and I wish I were.
Then I could have aU the fun of owning him,
and his father would have the responsibility
instead of my having it." He commented on
the difference he discovered between his real

180 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
experience and his previous imagination of it,
saying, "I always felt sure that if ever I had a
boy I should know how to train him properly,
and that I could and would do it. I find that
I can't, — and that in all my calculations as
to the management of my child, I had omitted
to reckon in one important factor. I had left
out the child's mother!"
Every appeal from childhood touched him.
The street newsboys ran affectionately as well
as enterprisingly after him. Boys and girls
in many families not his kin, called him uncle,
and the family baby of his inner circle, when
he was more funny than usual, said serenely,
"Uncle John, I didn't know you was such a
fool," and met gracious response. He had
passed his sixty-seventh year, and had just
returned from a fatiguing journey when he re
ceived a queerly-spelt letter from a six year old
infant. 'Uncle John, will you come and get
me and take me to Wianno ? Will you tele-
raph first, so I can have time to pack my
iag?" The veteran did not hesitate. He hated a
dusty summer drive but he mounted the next
stage for the distant railroad station. He
traveUed a hundred miles in August weather
to deposit a black-eyed boy where that imp "of
mischief wished to be deposited.
Capt. Wyman read aloud with marvellous
effect of beauty. Like The Lost Chord is now

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 131
to memory his recitation, in a twilight hour
among the White Hills, of Emerson's poem
beginning: 'Fixed on the enormous galaxy
Older and more steadfast seemed his eye."
And never again will the story of Browning's
Pompilia thriU to mortal ears, as I once heard
it, borne upon the cadence of John Wyman's
voice. In his young time, Lowell had urged
him to become an actor, and later, Joseph
Jefferson said, "that had he gone on the stage
the rest of us would have had to walk behind."
To me, once, Ellen Terry said, "I love your
husband's genius . ' '
Capt. Wyman met Irving in London in
the first part of the 1880 decade, and Irving
then introduced him to Ellen Terry. One or
two years later I was with him in a Providence
theatre where Irving, not then Sir Henry, was
playing Louis the Eleventh. He recognized
the Captain in the audience and sent for him
to come behind the scenes. The two men meet-
after that as frequently as circumstances per
mitted, in this country and in England, Sir
Henry paid to his friend attention, which I can
not forbear noting in some detail, because it
showed a quality offender consideration as from
a younger to an elder, as well as the inevitable
liking of one agreeable man of genius for
another. Sir Henry said in an anxious tone,
"You will not try to ride a bicycle, will you ?"

132 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
He showered theatre seats and boxes upon
him. He invited him to suppers, provided a
midnight carriage, and went with nim to its
door to see that he got safely into it; he sent a
farewell telegram, and fiUed the Captain's sick
room with flowers.
Once Capt. Wyman heard him discussing
with a play- writer a proposed plot. The main
subject was the struggle between labor and
capital but the author had represented a would-
be seducer on the capitalist side of the action.
"Why do you bring in such a theme ?" said Sir
Henry, "It is not needed. It is very unpleas
ant. Leave it out."
Of Ellen Terry, who was then Mrs. Wardell,
Sir Henry said to me, as we sat opposite her
and Capt. Wyman at Sir Henry's own dining
table, "1 never saw such a mother. She is one
of God's creatures."
In that same hour, he said, ''A long time ago
a young man came to England and played
Hamlet. I took the part of Laertes, and did
not see quite the whole of his representation,
but, in what I saw, he gave the brooding and
mysterious quality of Hamlet's character better
than any one else I ever saw. It was Edwin
Booth." I described to Sir Henry the way Modjeska,
as Lady Macbeth, wailed out the words, "But
in them Nature's copy's not eterne," and I told
him that, it seemed evident to me, that Mod-

^4s~>^

'Jto>*f:

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 133
jeska considered that speech as a cry of de
spair; that she spoke and acted as though a
sudden realization had come to her, that
Macbeth meantto murder Banquo and Fleance,
that they did not possess earthly immortality,
and that she herself was powerless to check
her husband's murderous impulses which were
now passing far beyond her original intention,
and exciting pain and horror in her mind.
This interpretation agreed with Sir Henry's
own conception of the comparative guilt of
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, but Ellen Terry
in her representation had followed Fletcher's
theory and had spoken that mysterious sen
tence in a careless, business-like tone, as though
she meant merely to suggest to Macbeth that
he need not worry because natural events
might remove all cause for jealousy of Banquo.
Modjeska's interpretation was new to Sir
Henry, and he seemed much impressed by it.
"Perhaps that is the true meaning," he said,
"How do we know ? Modjeska is a charming
actress. I wish you would tell that to Miss
Terry. She would be interested to hear it."
Later in this same day, Sir Henry sat
alone with Capt. Wyman. It was near the
end of the latter's life.
"You have always been very kind to me,"
said Capt. Wyman. "I don't see why."
Sir Henry laid his hand on his companion's
knee and answered.

134 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
"You are one of the men I love."
Capt. Wyman became a resident of Rhode
Island in 1882, and so remained until his death
in 1900. He served a term in the Legislature,
and he was Rhode Island Commissioner at the
Columbian and two or three other expositions.
He was in constant demand as a speaker for
both gay and serious occasions. His social
experience was wide in his later as in his earlier
years. Lord Randolph Churchill was "Ran
dolph" to him, and in Washington he sprang
from his carriage into the street to clasp the
hand of Frederick Douglass. Yet admiring
men in New Orleans decorated him as "Duke
of Lincoln" when he attended their Carnival
festivities, and during the brief period in which
it was possible to be such, he was the sympa
thizing friend in this country of the Russian
Revolutionist, Sergius Stepniak.
This mysterious person was a man appar
ently about forty-five years old when he came
with his wife for a brief lecturing and propa
gandist effort in America. He had the simple
and childlike manner which pre-eminently char
acterizes the European man of talent. He
made no secret of the fact that Stepniak was a
name he had assumed. He told, either di
rectly or by implying reference, certain things
about himself, and he told, so far as I know,
nothing more definite. He had become a
Russian reformer in his early youth, not, he

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 135
said, because of any special virtue in himself,
but in obedience to a sense of duty which had,
as it were, descended upon the youth of his
class and generation, — the duty to atone to
the Russian peasantry for their own immunity
from the hardships which those people had
suffered. He had, he said, adopted the peaceful
methods of the early day of the reforming effort.
He had gone about among the peasants trying
to teach and help them. The Government
had interfered, and the Russian political and
social reformer had become the Nihilist and
the Terrorist. He thoroughly disapproved of
Terrorism in any country where any freedom
of speech obtained. He had left Russia for
reasons connected with the Revolution. He
had often secretly returned, but it was fully
understood that he could not go there openly.
In his exile, he had developed ability as a
writer, and "it had been decided" that his best
work was to live outside of Russia and try to
influence opinion in Europe and America.
He himself felt that he would have preferred
to remain in Russia and do the more dangerous
labor there, because it seemed manlier to him.
Intellectually, Stepniak was a great literary
critic and a very great writer upon political
themes and national characteristics. He was
also a powerful delineator of personalities
which he had known.

136 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
His wife was a beautiful womanly creature,
with a soul fuU of noble ardor and lovely
tenderness, and both he and she were rather
singularly endowed with that indescribable
quality which arouses affection, almost con
temporaneously with first acquaintance.
A few years after their return to England,
his dead body was found on a railroad track
near London, and there were those who beheved
that he had not met with an accidental death.
On one charming day Capt. Wyman and I
were members of a lunch party at Gov.
Claflin's Mt. Vernon Street residence. That
perfect hostess, Mrs. Claflin, diffused good
cheer around the table. The other guests
were Mrs. Margaret Deland, Mrs. Alice Free
man Palmer, and Prof. Francis Moulton of
England. Prof. Moulton discussed Shakes
peare, and informed me that he had long since
adopted the theory that Macbeth was far
wickeder than Lady Macbeth who was, in his
opinion, prompted to evil mainly by ambition
for her husband rather than for herself. Capt.
Wyman uttered witticisms, told stories and gave
character delineations, to the great delight of
everybody, but especially of Mrs. Palmer. I
never saw any person who seemed more sym
pathetically and immediately responsive to the
influence of his genuis. It was a rare scene, —
the intellectual woman convulsed with happy
laughter, the dramatic raconteur stimulated

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 137
by her appreciation till his whole being ap
peared illuminated into a sort of throbbing
radiance. After the lunch Mrs. Palmer walked with us
along Beacon Street, to the dweUing of Mrs.
Julia Ward Howe. There we met Sergius
Stepniak who unfolded to the company his
plan for the formation of a Society of American
Friends of Russian Freedom, and also ex
plained "Nihilism." "Do not judge us for
our resort to terrorism" said Stepniak there
as he had said before at a reception at Capt.
Wyman's, "you cannot understand. It is
war we are waging. I do not ask you to ap
prove, — merely, not to condemn."
The desired Society was formed, and Capt.
Wyman retained his interest in it. Colonel
Higginson was its president, Edwin D. Mead,
Arthur Hobart, and Mrs. Howe were among
its officers and Mr. Frank J. Garrison became
its most active and influential member, while
Stepniak passed onward to his tragic doom.
Some one on this day at Mrs. Howe's sug
gested that Stepniak could make his effort
more acceptable to certain classes in America,
if he would refrain from pledging his projected
Society to espouse the cause of the Jews in
Russia, — the Jewish people not being then
high in American favor. Capt. Wyman,
trained in the Garrisonian school of ethics, was
deeply impressed by Stepniak's reply, "I can-

138 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
not help it. Whether it hurts my work or not,
we must condemn the persecution of the Jews
by the Russian Government."
A few weeks later, Stepniak and his wife
came for some lovely hours to Capt. Wyman's
house in Valley Falls. The Russian couple
were very fond of children. He wanted to
take Capt. Wyman's little boy with him on a
visit to Mark Twain, for whom the great
foreigner felt an enthusiastic admiration. This
desire could not be gratified and Stepniak
walked with the boy and his father in a neigh
boring grove, and carried the child in his arms.
Finally, when the hour for departure arrived,
two children were packed into the carriage
with Mr. and Mrs. Stepniak, so that they
might at least accompany him as far as to the
railroad station.
Once when walking away from an evening
meeting at Mrs. Howe's, Frank J. Garrison
being also with us, Stepniak spoke of the
Woman's Rights movement and expressed his
conviction that woman suffrage, as such, would
never be an issue in Russian politics. He said
that the Russian women had kept such perfect
step with the men in the effort for general
liberty, that he believed they would be en
franchised as a matter of course, whenever
real political freedom was given to the men.
At this time, Stepniak's opinion was that the
desired Russian revolution would finally be

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 139
accomphshed by disaffection in the Russian
army. Of Wendell Phillips' allusion, in his Phi
Beta Kappa oration, to Russian Revolution
ists, Mrs. Stepniak said, "His words were the
first sympathetic ones that came through from
the outer world to us in Russia. It was
wonderful to us that he should understand
and care for us and say such things in our be
half, at that early time of our work."
The group of Stepniak's American friends
to which Capt. Wyman and I belonged did not
express, nor I believe, generally feel approval
of Revolutionary Terrorism, even to the extent
which Mr. Philhps expressed it, but they be
heved in Stepniak himself, and fully sym
pathized with the purpose of the effort to ob
tain a change in the Russian governmental
method. Capt. Wyman's admiration for Mrs. Howe
was fervid. It pleased him to stand up in an
audience to salute her appearance on the plat
form, and her Battle Hymn stirred every fibre
in the old Abolitionist and soldier. "It sounds
bigger to me each time I hear it sung than it
ever did before," he said. Nevertheless, he
inwardly laughed and afterwards made good-
humored comment, when her tongue once
stumbled on to the wrong word, and she in
troduced him to some one, saying that she was
presenting "a very fashionable man." She

140 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
probably meant to say "popular." He
thought "fashionable" a singularly inappro
priate characterization of his personality.
While political parties separated and formed
new combinations around him he remained a
staunch Republican. He personally esteemed,
yea, verily loved, some Democrats and "Mug
wumps," still, to this particular old Abolition
ist, the Democratic party as such was always
the party of the Wrong, and the "Mugwump"
was always the party of Unwisdom. Into
this intellectual easy chair of opinion his
sweet -natured old age settled comfortably.
But to his everlasting honor be it spoken, he
had not one tiny speck of snobbishness in his
whole being, and he was always true to the
humanitarianism he had shared with Emma
Willard. "Where can such a man go?" asked a
doubter of social prerogative when speaking of
a colored graduate from Harvard.
"Into my house," answered John Wyman,
beside whom "Nature might stand up and
say to all the world, This was a man."
We passed a summer hour once at Cotuit,
Massachusetts, in company with Miss Mary
Wilkins; Capt. Wyman gave some recitations
and read aloud her story of Gentian. When
we were to leave, the small feminine creature
of genius looked earnestly up at the beautiful
old man and thanked him for the pleasure

JOHN CRAWFORD WYMAN

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 141
which he had given her. The crown of his
seventy winters was white upon his brow. His
life was behind him. He turned upon her the
indescribable tenderness of his smile and said,
"Ah, my child, you are for all time, — I am
only for a day."
Well, perhaps so in one sense, — but what a
radiant day it was, and when the night had
fallen, Frank Sanborn borrowed the old phrase,
and said that John Wyman's death "had
eclipsed the gayety of nations."
Then these words were written, "Your hus
band's death calls up — Oh, so many memories.
How much he ever told you about that curious
Worcester life of the '40's and '50's I do not
know. But he should have told you how
much he did to help my people upward and
forward. _ _ TT „
Edward E. Hale.
"I read with the deepest regret of your sad
loss. My true sympathy is with you. I re
joice that my dear old friend passed so peace
fully away. Believe me with kindest feeling,
ever yours sincerely. T_ T „
J Henry Irving.
"My associations with John were so many
and varied from the Worcester period onward
through the Atlantic Monthly period and later,
that it (his death), seems to me a great sub
traction from the world. I always said that

142 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
the most charming and original compliment I
ever had — deserved or undeserved — was
when he said that an ideal public meeting
would be to have me preside and introduce
each speaker, and then have each successive
speech omitted. T w Higginson/,
"Alas, that I shall not again shake the hand,
be warmed by the great heart, be charmed by
the unique personality, be delighted by the
good sense and wit- and humor of my old
friend. Moncure D. Conway."
"My thoughts go back to the time when
John's name was familiar to me as a speaker
at anti-slavery meetings. Frank J. Garrison."
* * * *
Capt. Wyman's friendship with Rev. Joseph
H. Twichell, dated back to the war time. He
himself thus told the story of their meeting.
"I sat one day in my office at Alexandria, and
a beautiful young man came in, and said at
once, 'Are you Mary Holley 's John Wyman?
because I am Mary Holley's Joe Twichell."
The two men took to each other immedi
ately, though Capt. Wyman was a dozen years
the older.

Copyright, 1912, by Harper & Brothers
REV. JOSEPH H. TWICHELL, D.D.
From " Mark Twain : A Biography "

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 143
Long afterwards, Dr. Twichell went on
with the story of that old time, "I saw your
husband next at Atlanta; I found him there
surrounded by crowds of men, all following
him about, listening to him, worshipping him.
I was jealous; I felt like saying to them, 'I
knew this man before you did!'
At the funeral Dr. Twichell said of his
friend. ' 'He did his duty as soldier and citi
zen. I saw him first when he was in the prime
of his radiant manhood. Nothing but good
came to me from him."

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APPENDIX
Whatever may have been my fancy, when
I asked Mr. Philhps about it, I have, today,
no criticism to make upon his friendship for
Gen. Butler, or upon any regard he may have
felt for him, or any belief he may have had
in him.
Gen. Butler's character, apart from the
impression it made on Mr. Philhps, is one,
concerning which, experts have made and
may weU continue to make differing diagnoses;
and it seems to me that Sumner's early one
is likely to be very nearly correct. He said
of Butler in 1853, "He is a gallant fellow.
What a splendid man he would be if he had
more of the moral in him."
Unto this "gallant fellow," who was at
least a man at all times, and not a puppet,
came the war experience which made of him
a doer of justice to an oppressed people.
From the smoke of that experience he emerged
into public sight as the friend of Wendell
Philhps. I, for one, am wilhng that all
thoughtful students of character and his
tory should see those two figures, that of
Wendell Phillips and of Benjamin F.Butler,
near each other as the unrolled panorama
145

146 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
of the twenty years after the war, occasion
ally discloses them to the view. I think such
a student may comfort himself so far as Mr.
Phillips is concerned, as Mr. Howells' coun
try minister did, when told that the nineteen
year old "Lydia" was, the only woman on the
ship"Aroostook." He felt sure that, wherever
"Lydia" was, she "would exert a good influ
ence." I doubt not that Mr. Philhps exerted
"a good influence" over Gen. Butler; and so
far as any so-called economic heresy is
concerned, which they may or may not have
shared together, I hold that any person who
considers it a proof of special imbecihty or
ignorance, to advocate any special economic
theory, which is naturally suggested in a
time of fluctuating thought or of new ex
periment, or which naturally belongs to the
established order, in any given time or
country, merely proves himself to be unin
formed as to thought and thinkers in rela
tion to economic and institutional develop
ment. Still, after thus endorsing so far as I may,
Mr. Philhps' friendship with Gen. Butler,
I feel at liberty to add, that it is not necessary
that the public should wrongly estimate his
real attitude toward the General. In this
respect, he has suffered at the hands
even of his biographer, George L. Austin.
In the summer of 1872, Charles Sumner,

AMERICAN CHIVALRY 147
gave his approval to the nomination for
President of Horace Greeley, by the Demo
cratic party. Early in the following Sept-
tember, he went to Europe; the voyage was
ten or eleven days long. During this time,
he was nominated for governor of Massachu
setts by the Democratic party of that State.
He did not learn of his nomination until he
reached England, and he cabled back his
refusal, but he was the Democratic nominee
for some time, before his cable was received.
George L. Austin says in his IAfe and
Times of Wendell Phillips; Page 291;
"In September, Mr. Phillips followed Gen
eral Butler, in a speech at Lynn, Massachusetts,
and again advocated the election of Grant."
His opening remarks were in a strain of pleasant
and evidently sincere compliment to Gen.
Butler, and showed that the two men were
working and speaking in pohtical harmony,
but the biographer, after repeating these first
sentences as direct quotations from some re
port of Mr. PhiUips' speech, continues thus,
stiU in direct quotation from Mr. PhiUips.
"I never found myself before on a Repub-
Ucan platform. When I came here tonight,
as some of you know full weU, I came to the
Republican platform at a moment when the
greatest, the oldest and most honored
friend (Gen Butler) of my life has quitted it."
I do not know, nor does the manner of

148 AMERICAN CHIVALRY
printing make it certain,whether Austin or some
reporter, whom he quoted, inserted the name of
"Gen. Butler," but the hterary style of the
sentence shows that Mr. Phillips himself could
not have uttered it, in order to tell the audi
ence who was the friend to whom he referred;
and it is difficult to see how anybody could
have supposed that he meant Gen. Butler.
Butler had not quitted the Republican
party, he was there on the platform beside
Mr. Phillips, he was not Mr. Philhps' oldest
friend; their acquaintance began when Butler
was eighteen years old.
The one man, in the world at that hour,
of whom Mr. Phillips could have spoken in
such phrase, as "the greatest, the oldest
and most honored friend of my life," and
who had just quitted the Republican party,
was Charles Sumner.
Mr. Phillips and he had certainly known each
other since they were ten and eleven years old,
and probably before they were that age.
Later in the speech, Mr. Phillips spoke of
"the great, the honored name of the Demo
cratic candidate for the governorship of
this State", this of course was another re
ference to Sumner; while one of his refer
ences to Butler is thus worded; "I do not
call my friend, the General, a converted
Democrat, I call him a sifted Democrat."
Let honor be given where honor is due.

YALE UNIVERSITY