Sansculotte

“ For some time the Swiss made a stout stand against this raging mob; but being few against tens of thousands, and having exhausted their cartridges, they grounded their arms and called for quarter. They called in vain; the bloodthirsty sansculottes commenced a relentless massacre of them; women and children, armed with knives, assisted in their slaughter. The unhappy men, fixing their bayonets, drove the furious mass before them, resolving to cut their way through the Champs Elysées to Courbevoie, where was another detachment of their countrymen in barracks ”

“ Facing the juror, in a terrible voice vibrating with passion and despair:
"Villain, monster, murderer!" he screamed. "Strike me, coward! I am a woman! Have me arrested, have me guillotined, Cain! I am your sister,"—and Julie spat in his face.
The throng of tricoteuses and sansculottes was relaxing by this time in its Revolutionary vigilance; its civic zeal had largely cooled; Gamelin and his assailant found themselves the centre of nothing worse than uproar and confusion. Julie fought a way through the press and disappeared in the dark. ”

“ When we take into consideration the fact that no safeguard is thrown around virtue, and no inducement held out to slave-women to be pure and chaste, we will not be surprised when told that immorality and vice pervade the cities and towns of the South to an extent unknown in the Northern States. Indeed, many of the slave-women have no higher aspiration than that of becoming the finely-dressed mistress of some white man. ”

“ Also there was no doubt about it the social ostracism of Calcutta had followed her to Benares; she had not failed to notice that the people packing the hotel looked at her furtively, smiling spasmodically when caught in the act, and seemed ill at ease when left alone with her.
Another thing which annoyed her intensely was the habit she had developed of peering into the shadows of the compound at odd moments, and listening for a sound she could not even describe to herself, and which she never heard ”

“ You may be a beauty, and you may be the lawful wife of an English peer, but it is difficult to keep your dignity when you are turned out of a shop by a miserable working-woman as if you were the last of the last. Only by doing murder on her offender could the notorious Lady Sanquhar, who had been once the respected wife of an honest Spanish merchant, have redeemed the situation from utter ignominy. ”

“ As you say you have lived in the South, you know in your own heart that men and women are cruelly whipped, and that families are separated, and these cases of cruelty are neither few nor far between. I will tell you what I have done for a woman who was a slave in Kentucky when she came to me for advice in Cincinnati, as she had a daughter to be sold, and her mistress was going to sell the whole family down the river. ”

“ The faint, reluctant smile of the Indian crossed the Susquehannock's face. "The white man is very wise except when he is in the woods. Then he is as if every brook ran fire-water and he had drunk of them all. A pappoose could trick him. When these Algonquin dogs wake and find the fawn fled and the yellow slave killed, they will cast about for our trail, and they will find that we came up from the river. Then, when they find no backward track, but only that we entered the water there, before the maiden's hut, they will think that we have gone down the stream, back to the river. ”

“ You found a woman, Herr Baron, on your estate who had been your father's mistress. You found her degraded, defiled, dragged through the mire of wickedness and vice. Year-long slavery had robbed her of the respect of every living creature. She was treated as a mere animal by animals. This wretched woman belonged to my parish and to me. I reared her in the way she should go. It was my hand that sprinkled the baptismal water on her brow; my hand that held the chalice to her lips at the Holy Sacrament ”

“ THE fiendish and heartless conduct of a large number of the people of the South towards Union men during the war, and especially the unlady-like demeanor of rebel women at New Orleans and other points, is a matter that has passed into history. In few places were the women more abusive to those of Union proclivities than the female portion of the inhabitants of Greenville, Alabama. While passing through this town, on her return from Andersonville to New Orleans, Clotelle had to encounter the fierce ill-treatment of these chivalrous daughters of the South. ”

“ Wrongs at the South which shock us to-day,—or wrongs as great—were commonplace, were unnoted and unchronicled, under slavery. It is offenses against women that rouse the hottest resentment. But for centuries the black woman's chastity had absolutely no protection under the law, and her woes were pitiful beyond telling. For the Southern negro, true family life was impossible until within fifty years. ”

“ All this is little—is mild, when compared with the positive disgust and horror felt for the “white” who would ally himself in marriage with a slave! No matter how white she be, no matter how beautiful—even lovely as Aurore—he who would make her his wife must bear her away from her native land, far from the scenes where she has hitherto been known! His mistress—all! that is another affair. An alliance of this nature is pardonable. The “society” of the South is satisfied with the slave-mistress; but the slave-wife—that is an impossibility, an incongruity not to be borne! ”

“ And when you think that the masses of these women live in the rural districts; that they grow up in rudeness and ignorance; that their former masters are using few means to break up their hereditary degradation, you can easily take in the pitiful condition of this population and forecast the inevitable future to multitudes of females, unless a mighty special effort is made for the improvement of the black womanhood of the South. ”

“ For there arises unbidden, unavoidably, in the minds of such women the ugly question, whose daughter is she, and whose mistress is she to be? For in the girl's veins may flow the proudest blood of the South. And this possibility, aye, probability, so shameful to both races, no one in the South knows better than the Southern white woman. What happens? The most natural thing in the world, but not the wisest. The hatred, the suspicion, the fear of these women find expression in scorn, in active ill-will, not only toward that particular girl, but toward her whole class as well. ”

“ The dread of poverty in a strange country with three girls, the eldest of whom was only fifteen, induced her to stay. Many others, with less reason to expect protection, followed her example.
When the time allowed for the evacuation had expired, the negroes entered as masters. During the first days reigned a deceitful calm which was followed by a dreadful storm.
The proclamation of Dessalines, mentioned in my last letter was published. Armed negroes entered the houses and drove the inhabitants into the streets. The men were led to prison, the women were loaded with chains. ”

“ But there was no place a girl could go in Packingtown, if she was particular about things of this sort; there was no place in it where a prostitute could not get along better than a decent girl. Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers ”

“ In the same neighborhood, a short time before, a lady was attempted to be poisoned three times by her slaves for her cruelty to them. Was this lady a Louisiana lady? No, she was not, she was from the North, and was one who had to work for her living before going South; these are always the worst of mistresses. I remember a colored woman who was raised in Cincinnati, and her parents and family now live in the midst of our city; she is now a slave-holder in the city of New Orleans; the most tyranical, overbearing, cruel task-mistress that ever existed ”

“ Conditions in the South render the commission of this crime peculiarly easy. The white population is sparse, the forests are extensive, the officers of the law distant and difficult to reach; but, above all, the Negro population have appeared inclined to condone the fact of mere assault.
Twenty-five years ago, women went unaccompanied and unafraid throughout the South, as they still go throughout the North. To-day, no white woman, or girl, or female child, goes alone out of sight of the house except on necessity; and no man leaves his wife alone in his house, if he can help it. ”

“ And that is the problem that women have to face. It is a fact that the women of our family have always ruled the men; but they’ve done it by indirection—nobody ever thought seriously of “women’s rights” in Castleman County. But you see, women have rights; and somehow or other they will fool the men, or else the men must give up the idea that they are the superior sex, and have the right, or the ability, to rule women.’
“Then I saw how little he had followed me. ‘There has to be a head to the family,’ he said. ”

“ She hoped she could have gone out a little in Calcutta, to give her something to think of.’ And then, if these poor women have children, they must send them away just as they become amusing. It is an abominable place. ”

“ How Birdie Mason came to find herself the one woman on Suffering Creek––leaving out the later advent of Scipio’s wife––it is not for us to ask. Whatever her little tragedy it is hers alone, and does not concern us. All that we need think of is her future, and the pity that so well-favored a woman has not found her lot cast in places where her womanhood has its best chances. However, she is there, living the life of all such hired “helps,” drudging from morning till night in one long round of sordid labor, in an atmosphere stinking with the fetid breath of debased humanity. ”

“ He had come to warn the white man of the destruction of his dwelling, but he did not count the half-caste girl of any value one way or another. The blacks would attack the hut at sundown when they saw the coast clear. The white man would be angry at the destruction of his hut, he had ridden after him to tell him, and also because safety lay with the white man; but the girl—if there had been a horse in the little paddock, he might possibly have brought her out of danger, but even as a blackfellow he looked with contempt on a half-caste; and as a woman—well, a woman was worth nothing as a woman. ”

“ Susan is ignorant of the world, a flower in the mud. Groping for light, she escapes again, and tries to earn her living in a box factory, and undergoes all the horrors of tenement life. Starved out, she takes to the streets in Cincinnati, and we see the graft and cruelty of city government. She is taken up as the mistress of a politician and travels with him in Europe. But always she is reaching toward something better; her spirit remains untarnished, and in the end she becomes a successful actress. ”

“ In vain will the ghost of their favorite saint and moralist, Anthony Comstock, be traveling up and down the land, putting people in jail for daring to teach to poor women what every rich woman knows, and for attempting to change the entirely man-made state of affairs whereby an intelligent and self-governing Anglo-Saxon land is being in two or three generations turned over to a slum population of Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Portuguese, French-Canadians, Mexicans and Japanese! ”

“ Certain Southern ladies claimed, not long since, that they care as tenderly for slave mothers as Northern ladies care for poor white mothers. "Possibly that is true," was the reply, "but Northern ladies do not afterwards sell the baby!"—Besides this, it is the money-interest of Southerners to look well to the increase of their property, whereas a true humanity, as a principle, underlies and quickens the charitable attention of Northern ladies, above referred to. ”

“ When her husband is proved criminal, she must die as his accomplice; having, at least, strength enough to suffer. In Calcutta, women are the masons who keep the roof tight; and you may see them daily carrying their hods of cement, spreading it on the tops of houses, and flattening it with a wooden rammer like that with which our Irishmen pave the streets. ”

“ These Southern sisters are not demons, but made of the same flesh and blood, and passions and affections as yourselves. The difference between you is purely one of circumstances and training, of locality—above all, of education and institutions. It is as true that institutions are second nature as that habit is.
The peculiar faults of Southern women they share with their Northern sisters, only in a vastly enhanced degree; and besides these, they have others, born of and nurtured by that terrible slavery system under whose black shadow they live and die. ”

“ The basis of this sex equality under primitive communism is easy to understand. All goods belonged to the tribe, and were shared alike according to need. Children were the tribe's most precious possession; therefore the woman suffered little handicap from having a child to bear and feed. Primitive woman would bear her child by the roadside, and pick it up in her arms, and continue her journey; and when she needed food, she did not have to beg for it—if there was food for anyone, there was food for her and her child. ”

“ The colony of New South Wales is badly in want of wives and mothers, and cries out ceaselessly to the older countries that she cannot give to every man a wife. Yet here are her own flesh and blood, female forms of which she need not be ashamed, all hurrying down the sewer of crime, like drowning butterflies, to rot in the foul slums and gutters of the capital. ”

“ He made her show her teeth, coarse men came to feel of her ankles and the calves of her legs, to test the quality of her muscles. It was the most repulsive and disgusting spectacle we had ever seen. We felt that this scene and that at the hotel were showing us a side of slavery that we had learned nothing of in the hospitable homes of South Carolina. Near the town there were constantly camps of negroes, whom slave dealers had brought from the northern slave states. ”