Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

“ Abolitionists were at a discount. They had gone like the front ranks of the French cavalry at Waterloo, into the sunken way, to make a bridge, over which moderate men were rushing to honors and emoluments. Gideon's army had done its work, and given place to the camp followers, who gathered up the spoils of victory. None wore so poor that they need do them reverence, and I recognized Mrs. Lincoln as a loyal, liberty-loving woman, more staunch even than her husband in opposition to the Rebellion and its cause, and as my very dear friend for life. ”

“ His suit was of the finest black broadcloth, satin vest, a pompous display of chain, seals, studs and rings, his beaver on the back of his head, his thumbs in the arms of his vest, and feet spread like the Collossus of Rhodes.
This new use for Pennsylvania muscle seemed to strike my husband as infinitely amusing, for he burst out laughing, and informed the "gentleman" that he did not follow the profession of whipping women, and must decline his offer. But I wanted to be back on free soil, out of an atmosphere which killed all manhood, and furnished women-whippers as a substitute for men. ”

“ I said, "Yes; the winter of your life is past; for you the reign of sorrow is over and gone; the spring time appears on the earth, and the time for the singing of birds has come; your immortal summer is close at hand; Christ, who loveth us, and has suffered for us, has prepared mansions of rest, for those who love him, and you are going soon."
"Oh, yes; I know he will take me home, and provide for my wife and children when I am gone."
"Then all is well with you!" He told me his name and residence, in Pittsburg, and I remembered that his parents lived our near neighbors when I was a child. ”

“ On its bank sat poor little I, looking out on its solemn march to the sea, thinking of Minnesota; sending a wail upon its bosom to meet and mingle with that borne by the Missouri from Kansas; thinking of a sad-faced slave, who landed with her babe in her arms here, just in front of my unfinished loft, performed the labor of a slave in this free Northern land, and embarked from this same landing to go to a Tennessee auction block, nobody saying to the master, "Why do ye this?" ”

“ I used to wonder if the Creator had invented a new variety of idiot, and made a lot in order to supply the army with medical inspectors, or, if by some cunning military device, the Surgeon-General had been able to select all those conglomerations of official dignity and asinine stupidity, from the open donkey-market of the world. Inspecting a hospital was just like investigating an Indian fraud. ”

“ Pigs were the scavengers, mud and garbage the rule, while men literally wallowed in the mire of licentiousness and strong drink. In Congress they sat and loafed with the soles of their boots turned up for the inspection of the ladies in the galleries. Their language and gestures as they expectorated hither and thither were often as coarse as their positions, while they ranted about the "laws and Constitution," and cracked their slave-whips over the heads of the dough-faces sent from the Northern States. ”

“ Days before that he should have been "a boy again;" aye, a baby, a very infant—should have been soothed and softened and comforted with all the tenderness of mother-love; but even now, in this cruel extremity, every sign of sympathy was denied him. Some one put a hand gently but firmly on each of my shoulders, turned my back to him, took me out of the room, and I hurried away, while the air shuddered with his shrieks and groans. After he had been brought back to his place in the ward I could often hear him as I passed to and from my room, and even while I occupied it. ”

“ Women were capable of any heroism save wearing a dress suitable for hospital work. The very, very few who laid aside their hoops, those instruments of dread and torture, generally donned bloomers, and gave offense by airs of independence.
Good women would come long distances to see dying husbands, brothers and sons, and fill the wards with alarm by their hoops. When any one was hurt by them they were very sorry, but never gave up the cause of offense, while their desire to look well, and the finery and fixings they donned to improve their appearance, was a very broad and painful burlesque. ”

“ From the action of the slave power, it must by that time have been apparent to all, that adverse votes was what it most dreaded; but old-side Covenanters, Quakers, and Garrisonians could not cast these without soiling their hands by touching that bad Constitution. But that moral dilettanteism, which thinks first of its own hands, was not confined to non-voting abolitionists; for the "thorough goers" of the old Liberty Party, could not come down from their perch on platforms which embraced all the moralities, to work on one which only said to slavery "not another foot of territory." ”

“ I had no wish to court danger—shrank from the thought of brute force; but if I let this man escape, his power, now tottering, would be re-established; slavery triumphant in the great Northwest; Minnesota confirmed a democratic strong-hold, sending delegates of dough-faces to Congress to aid in the great conspiracy against the nation's life. So I told the messenger that I would continue to support Buchanan's administration, that I would pile my support upon it until it broke down under the weight and sunk into everlasting infamy. ”

“ One day I walked the seven miles and back, when the family carriage went to take two preachers to an appointment; three horses stood in the old stone barn, and my husband at home with his mother. This gave great offense as the advertisement of a grievance, and was never repeated.
During all my childhood and youth, I had been spoiled by much love, if love can spoil. I was non-resistant by nature, and on principle, believed in the power of good. Forbearance, generosity, helpful service, would, should, must, win my new friends to love me. ”

“ So thoroughly was Minnesota under the feet of slavery, that in September, '60—after we thought the State redeemed—the house of William D. Babbitt, in Minneapolis, was surrounded from midnight until morning by a howling mob, stoning it, firing guns and pistols, attempting to force doors and windows, and only prevented gaining entrance by the solidity of the building and the bravery of its defense. It was thus besieged because its owner and occupant had dared interfere to execute the common law in favor of freedom. ”

“ He was hidden in fence corners and behind bushes on the roadside, and Mary's little lamb was never half so faithful as my phantom panther.
My husband could not understand the fear I felt, nor realize the danger of keeping him. He enjoyed his own mastery over him, and with a box on the side of the head he made Tom whine and crouch like a spaniel. I have often wondered that in all the accounts I have ever read of lights with wild animals, no one ever planted a good fist-blow under the ear of his four-legged antagonist, and so stretch it out stiff to await his leisure in disposing of it. ”

“ It was some time before I learned that this was the advance guard of a great army of woman-whippers, which stretched away back to the Atlantic, and around the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, and that they were out on duty as a staring brigade, whose business it was to insult every woman who ventured on the street without a male protector, by a stare so lascivious as could not be imagined on American free soil. I learned that they all lived, in whole or in part, by the sale of their own children, and the labor of the mothers extorted by the lash. ”

“ I agreed to accept such gratuitous suit, and a Mississippi planter, who seemed to realize the situation, said gently:
"Indeed, madam, it is not safe for you to talk as you do."
"When reminded of constitutional guarantees for freedom of speech, and his enjoyment of it in my native State, he replied:
"There is no danger in Pennsylvania from freedom of speech, but if people were allowed to talk as you do here, it would overthrow our institutions." ”

“ We all pay heavy taxes to other people's eyes; but on none is the levy quite so onerous as on the patients of a model hospital! I saw that he breathed and slept, and knew his time was short; but sought the head nurse, and asked why he had not waited for me; he hesitated, stammered, blushed and said:
"Why, the fact is, sister, he has another wound that it would not be pleasant for you to see."
"Do you mean that that man has a groin wound in addition to all else?" ”

“ People had gone there to make homes, not to fight the Southern tiger, and any attempt against such overwhelming odds seemed madness, for Lowrie's dominion was largely legitimate. He was one of those who are born to command—of splendid physique and dignified bearing, superior intellect and mesmeric fascination. His natural advantages had been increased by a liberal education; he had been brought up among slaves, lived among Indians as agent and interpreter, felt his own superiority, and asserted it with the full force of honest conviction. ”

“ I knew Harry and my brother-in-law, Henry Swisshelm, had organized for defense, and asked no questions, but went with them. Elizabeth carried her camphor bottle as coolly as if mobs and public meetings were things of every day life, while Mrs. Hyke, a New England woman, held my arm, saying:
"We'll have a nice time in the river together, for I am going in with you. They can't separate us." ”

“ I told her I could not leave my husband.
"Then let him support you, or send you home until he can! I have seen too many like you go to destruction here. Go home."
I said that I could never go to destruction, but she interrupted me:
"You know nothing about it. You are a mere baby. They all thought as you do. Go home to your mother!"
"But I never can go to destruction! No evil can befall me, for He that keepeth Israel slumbers not nor sleeps." ”

“ So, President Lincoln rescinded that order, and the great rushing stream of popular enthusiasm was dammed, turned back to flow into the dismal swamp of constitutional quibbles and statutory inventions. There it lay, and bred reptiles and miasmas to sting and poison the guilty inhabitants of this great land; and never since have we been permitted to reach an enthusiasm in favor of any great principle; for history has no record of a great act so thoroughly divested of all greatness by the meanness of the motive, as is our "Act of Emancipation." ”

“ Barlow, I am not going to die—am in no danger whatever, and will hold out until help comes. This cannot last; Government will come to the rescue, and my men will be here when it comes. After all is over, I will fall to pieces like an old stage coach when the king-bolt drops out; will lie around as lumber for a while, then some one will put me together again, and I will be good as new. It is you who are killing yourself. You must change your arrangements or you will take typhoid fever, and after such a strain, recovery will be hopeless. I take nobody's disease—am too repellant ”

“ Under this arrangement we have the spectacle of a Christian people arrayed in open hostility to those who plant Christian churches, schools and libraries on the lair of the wolf; and in alliance with the savage who coolly unjoints the feet and hands of little children, puts them in his hunting pouch as evidence of his valor, and leaves the victim to die at leisure; of those who thrust Christian babies into ovens, and deliberately roast them to death; of those who bind infants, two by two, by one wrist, and throw them across a fence to die ”

“ I stood in his range of vision, until the surgeon closed the lids, when he said: "Now, mother, I shall always remember just how you look."
I found in my visit to those men that some orderlies needed some one to keep them in order, and that a helpless man is not always sure his servant will serve him. Often the orderlies themselves were powerless, and those men would have suffered if I had not cared for them. More than once some of them said: "I wish, mother, we were back with you in the Old Theater?" ”

“ Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle, and one of the questions which divided them was the right of women to take any prominent part in public affairs.
In that campaign, the great Whig argument against the election of Polk was, that it would bring on a war with Mexico for the extension of slavery, and when the war came, Whigs and Liberty Party men vied with each other in their cry of "Our Country, right or wrong!" ”

“ As I passed to the kitchen I found that blue lips and pinched noses had suddenly come into fashion; that there were more of them than I had time to count; but did not, for a moment, dream of letting a man get into the graveyard by that gate.
The merry, young Irishman who had volunteered as my orderly, had a period of active service; and no more willing pair of hands and feet ever were interposed between men and death. Hot bricks, hot blankets, bottles of hot water, hot whisky punch and green tea were the order of the forenoon, and of a good many hours of night and day after it ”

“ When I sat on one heel to bathe a hot face, give a drink or dress a wound, some man took hold of me with his well hand and steadied me, while another held my basin. I had half of an old knapsack to put under a wound, keep the floor dry and catch the worms when I drove them out—and no twenty early birds ever captured so many in the same length of time. I became so eager in the pursuit that I kept it up by candle-light, until late midnight, when I started to go to my stateroom. ”