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from James Parton, Noted Women of Europe and America [Springfield, Mass.: Bay State Publishing Co., 1884] pp. 26-43

      A GREAT war is usually preceded by a period of argument, more or less prolonged, more or less embittered, carried on sometimes only in the privacy of cabinets, sometimes in national legislatures and the public press as well. Our recent conflict had its prelude of verbal controversy, which lasted for more than thirty years, during which powerful words were spoken and brave deeds were done on both sides. In that prelude Mrs. Child sounded an early and a strenuous note, and of its history she is an essential part. She was a woman of singular nobility of character, wise, genial, disinterested, and resolute, one who redeemed the character of a period on which the patriotic historian will be pleased to linger only for the sake of a few such as she. I have called her disinterested. There are people who may be said to have a genius for a particular virtue, as Washington for fidelity. She had a genius for self-sacrifice, which to her was simply the most exquisite mode of self-gratification.

      Lydia Maria Francis was born on the eleventh of February, 1802, in Medford, Massachusetts. She was the descendant of an old New England family of revolutionary fame. Her paternal grandfather was killed in the fight at Concord; but not, according to local tradition, until he had slain five of the enemy. Her father, a baker by trade, and the introducer of the article of diet known as Medford crackers, was a thorough Yankee, active, industrious, and thoughtful. He was not a man of learning, but a great lover of books and peculiarly firm in his anti-slavery convictions.

      His daughter Lydia was the youngest of six children. She received the best part of her education from circumstances, rather than from schools. Her first teacher was a certain Ma'am Betty of local celebrity, who was extremely untidy in her habits, kept her school in her bedroom, chewed tobacco, and continually lamented, as the never-to-be-forgotten catastrophe of her life, that Governor Brooks had once seen her drinking from the nose of her tea-kettle. Whatever may have been the other qualities that fitted this amiable lady for the position she occupied, it is at least certain that her pupils became attached to her, and it was their unfailing habit to carry to her a Sunday dinner. At Thanksgiving, too, she shared the wide charity of the Francis household, where it was the custom at this genial season to summon to a preliminary feast in the large kitchen all the workmen, besides some of the obscurer friends and dependents of the family. Pumpkin pies of vast extent baked in milk-pans were there served to them; a chicken pie of immense size graced the center of the table, surrounded by large dishes containing a profusion of doughnuts, turnovers, and other like delicacies. The little girl was of course present on these occasions to enjoy the pleasure of the guests, and doubtless, also, for she was a healthy, hungry child, to appropriate a few stray cakes and tarts to her own use.

      Besides receiving instruction from Ma'am Betty, she attended the public school for a short period, and later spent a year in a young ladies' seminary. Her education was then considered complete.

      The earliest letter of hers which has been preserved was written at the age of fifteen, and is addressed to her brother, Couvers Francis. In it she discussed Milton's Paradise Lost, which she had just been reading, and, although she preferred Homer, she spoke with rapture and astonishment of the "heavenly sublimity" of Milton's style. She was not, however, at all afraid to criticize, and complained with reason of the "lordly style" in which Milton asserts the supremacy of his sex, quoting with disapproval the words he puts into the mouth of Eve when she is speaking to Adam:

"My author and disposer, what thou bid'st
Unargued I obey; so God ordained.
God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more
Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise."

      The work was published in the same year, and in spite of its evident crudity and extravagance, won sufficient favor to encourage her to make a second venture. This time it was a Revolutionary novel entitled The Rebels, which achieved an immediate and marked success. In it occur an imaginary sermon of Whitefield, and am imaginary speech of James Otis, both of which at once found place in the school readers of the period. Indeed, the speech of Otis is occasionally spoken by young patriots to this day, usually under the impression that Otis really composed and delivered it.

      Other works by Miss Francis soon followed -- The Mother's Book, which went through eight American editions, twelve English, and one German; The Girls' Book, the History of Women, and the Frugal Housewife, which attained the honor of thirty-five editions. In 1826, she founded the Juvenile Miscellany, one of the earliest magazines for children ever published.

      Her marriage to David Lee Child, a rising young Boston lawyer, took place in 1828. She was then, and during the next two or three years, at the height of her popularity. the newspapers spoke of her frequently and with praise. Her books sold well, and were widely read. She was sought after and lionized in society. The trustees of the Boston Athenaeum paid her the unprecedented compliment of granting her the free use of their library as if she had been a shareholder.

      It was about three years after her marriage that the event occurred which determined her future career. She met William Lloyd Garrison.

      "I remember very distinctly," she once wrote, "the first time i ever saw Garrison. I little thought then that the whole pattern of my life-web would be changed by that introduction. I was then all absorbed in poetry and painting, soaring aloft on Psyche-wings into the ethereal regions of mysticism. He got hold of the strings of my conscience, and pulled me into reforms. It is of no use to imagine what might have been, if I had never met him. Old dreams vanished, old associations departed, and all things became new."

      The first thing Mrs. Child did after her attention was thus turned to the anti-slavery movement, was to take from the Boston Athenaeum library a number of volumes which she used as books of reference while writing her "Appeal in favor of that class of Americans called Africans." This work, the character of which is indicated in its title, was undertaken with a fulll knowledge of the rooted prejudice it must encounter, and the violent opposition it must arouse. She knew that her fame, her fortune, and her "position in society" were all at stake; but her only anxiety was that her just and moderate little book should be read. her earnestness in the cause which she had adopted is revealed in the brief and pathetic preface to her Appeal. Here it is entire:

      "The subject I have chosen admits of no encomiums upon my country; but, as I generally make it an object to supply what is needed, this circumstance is unimportant; the market is so glutted with flattery, that a little truth may be acceptable, were it only for its rarity.

      "I am fully aware of the unpopularity of the task I have undertaken; but though I expect ridicule and censure, I cannot fear them.

      "A few years hence, the opinion of the world will be a matter in which I shall have not even the most transient interest; but this book will be abroad on its mission of humanity, long after the hand that wrote it is mingling with the dust.

      "Should it be the means of advancing, even one single hour, exchange the consciousness for all Rothchilds's wealth, or Sir Walter's fame."

      Not only ridicule and censure, but contempt and personal abuse, were lavished upon the authoress of this daring publication. Subscriptions to her magazine fell off, publishers no longer sought her out; and her next important work, a Greek romance entitled "Philothea," although in her best vein, by no means attained the success of her former novels. The Boston Athenaeum, too, prudently withdrew the privilege it had granted her -- it might prove "an inconvenient precedent." Society closed its doors in her face, and she received threatening and insulting letters from all parts of the South. One chivalric gentleman wrote to her from New Orleans ("postage double and unpaid," as she pathetically remarks), promising her, if she would but visit that interesting old city, "a warm reception and lodgings in the calaboose, with as much nigger company as you desire."

      She was not daunted by the universal outcry. Her courage rose to the occasion, and, while regarding such letters as the above in a purely humorous spirit, she was able, in the case of the far more cutting desertion of former friends, and the silence of once eloquent admirers, to remain indifferent to their contempt. In a letter written in 1857 to her old friend, Rev. Samuel J. May, she wrote finely of her treatment at this period.

      "With regard to society I was a gainer decidedly; for, though the respectables who had condescended to patronize me, forthwith sent me "to Coventry," anti-slavery introduced me to the noblest and best of the land, intellectually and morally, and knit us together in that firm friendship which grows out of sympathy in a good, but unpopular cause."

      From this time she devoted herself to the anti-slavery movement, giving wise counsel to its leaders, and assisting it herself with her tongue, her pen, and her presence, never faltering in the most trying scenes of those exciting days. She was in Julian Hall on the occasion of a memorable speech by George H. Thompson, the English orator. Before the address began. Mr. May came to her and called her attention, in a whisper, to a line of sturdy truckmen standing along the wall, armed with heavy whips, saying that they were part of a mob organized by a number of Southerners to carry off the speaker with the object of lynching him. Others were outside with a carriage and swift horses, waiting to convey him to the wharf, where a vessel lay ready; once on board of her he would be in their power. This plot could be defeated only with the assistance of the anti-slavery ladies, whom he directed to gather around Mr. Thompson when he had concluded, and talk earnestly with him, all the time moving imperceptibly back towards a curtain at the rear of the platform. Behind this was a secret door leading to an adjoining warehouse. If he could but succeed in passing this unperceived he would be safe. When he had slipped away, they were still to remain as if absorbed in conversation.

      "At the close of the meeting," she wrote, "twenty-five or thirty of us women clustered round Mr. Thompson and obeyed the directions we had received, When he had disappeared from our midst there was quiet for two or three minutes, interrupted only by our busy talking. But the Southerners soon began to stand on tiptoe and survey the platform anxiously. Soon a loud oath was heard, accompanied by the exclamation, 'He's gone!' Then such a thundering stampede as there was down the front stairs I have never heard. We remained in the hall, and presently Samuel J. May came to us so agitated that he was pale to the very lips. 'Thank God, he is saved!' he exclaimed; and we wrung his hand with hears too full for speech."

      She was among the audience, too, in Faneuil Hall, upon that famous day when Wendell Phillips, shouted down by the mob, addressed his speech to the country through the reporters.

      "The papers will tell you of their goings on," she wrote to her friend Mrs. Shaw. "Such yelling, screeching, stamping, and bellowing I never heard. It was a full realization of the old phrase, 'All hell broke loose.' Mr. Phillips stood on the front of the platform for a full hour, trying to be heard whenever the storm lulled a little. They cried, 'Throw him out!' 'Throw a brick-bat at him!' 'Your house is a-fire; don't you know your house is a-fire? go put out your house!' The they'd sing, with various bellowing and shrieking accompaniments, 'Tell John Andrew, tell John Andrew, John Brown's dead.' I should think there were four or five hundred of them. At one time they all rose up, many of them clattered down stairs, and there was a surging forward towards the platform. My heart beat so fast I could hear it; for I did not then know that Mr. Phillips's armed friends were stationed at every door and in the middle of every aisle. They formed a firm wall which the mob could not pass. At last it was announced that the police were coming. I saw and heard nothing of them; but there was a lull. Mr. Phillips tried to speak, but his voice was again drowned. Then, by a clever stroke of management, he stooped forward and addressed his speech to the reporters stationed directly below him. This tantalized the mob, and they began to call out, 'Speak louder? We want to hear what you're saying.' Whereupon, he raised his voice, and for half an hour he seemed to hold them in the hollow of his hand."

      It was not only by upholding its leaders and advocating its principles that Mrs. Child rendered service to the cause she had at heart. Her deeds spoke louder than her words. She devoted herself to individual cases; she wrote letters, collected money, gave her won money, and when she had not enough -- as was frequently the case -- she went to work and earned more. A letter from Thomas Simms, the fugitive slave whom Massachusetts had returned to servitude, chanced to come to her notice. It was written to his sister, and expressed his longing to regain his freedom. After reading it, it seemed impossible to her to allow him to remain in slavery. She resolved that he should be bought and freed, and, moreover, that this should be accomplished with "pro-slavery money." Her friends told her it was impossible, but she would not believe them, and the event proved that she was right. Eighteen hundred dollars was the sum demanded by Simms' master.

      "A large sum," as she wrote to a friend, "for an abolitionist to get out of pro-slavery purses! But I got it! I got it! I got it! Hurrah! I had written only eighteen letters, when one gentleman promised to pay the whole sum, provided I would not mention his name."

      This gentleman was major-General Devens, United States marshal at the time of Simms' surrender.

      After the raid on Harper's Ferry, when John Brown was lying wounded in prison, Mrs. Child wrote to him offering to come and nurse him, enclosing her letter in one to Governor Wise of Virginia. She received from the governor a courteous, cautious reply, hand from John Brown a grateful one declining her offer, since he was then much better, and asking her assistance for his family instead. But her generous proposal provoked from Mrs. Mason -- wife of Senator Mason, the author of the Fugitive Slave Law -- a letter couched in unusually forcible language. It began by requesting to know if Mrs. Child read her Bible, and threatening her with "two-fold damnation" as a hypocrite who sympathized with "the hoary-headed murderer of Harper's Ferry," while neglecting her duties to sufferers in the North, and it concluded with the statement that no Southerner ought thenceforward to read a line of her composition or of a magazine bearing her name in the list of contributors.

      To this effusion Mrs. Child returned a long, dignified, and effective reply. Mrs. Mason had sited the Bible in defense of slavery. Mrs. Child responded that "abolitionists also have their favorite texts" -- and quoted eighteen of them. Mrs. Mason had enumerated the kindnesses of Southern planters to their slaves. Mrs. Child retorted with an elaborate exposition on the necessary cruelty implied in a slave's situation, and gave also several examples of barbarous treatment of slaves -- all drawn from Southern sources. Mrs. Mason had inquired, contrasting Northern neglect with Southern charity. "Do you soften the pangs of maternity in those around you by all the care and comfort you can give?" Mrs. Child replied: "I have never known any instance where the 'pangs of maternity' did not meet with requisite assistance, and, here at the North, when we have helped the mothers we do not sell the babies."

      The second of December, the day of John Brown's execution, Mrs. Child spent with the colored people of Boston at a prayer-meeting. 'there was nothing there," she says, "to jar upon the tender sadness of my feelings. there was no one to question the old hero's claim to reverence, or to doubt his sanity of mind. All they knew about it was that he was the friend of their oppressed race, and that he proved it by dying for them."

      When the war broke out Mrs. Child was not eager for immediate success, because it was not yet recognized as a war for the abolition of slavery. "I am glad," she wrote in 1861, "to witness the universal enthusiasm for the United States flag, though the sight of that flag always inspires a degree of sadness in my own breast. I should so delight in having it thoroughly worthy of being honored! But every flap of the stars and stripes repeats to me the story of those poor slaves who, through great perils and sufferings, succeeded in making their way to Fort Pickens, strengthened by the faith that President Lincoln was their friend, and that his soldiers would protect them. They were chained and sent back to their masters, who whipped them till they nearly died under the lash. When such things are done under the U. S. flag, I cannot and i will not say, 'God bless is!' Nay, unless it ceases from this iniquity, I say, deliberately and solemnly, 'May the curse of God rest upon it! May it be trampled in the dust, kicked by rebels, and spit upon by tyrants!' But I think it will cease from this iniquity."

      The contrabands, of course, called forth her warmest sympathy, and her most earnest efforts. She was poor, but she gave continually, denying herself the books and pictures i n which her soul delighted, that she might send the money to those that needed it more than she. In thanking a friend who had sent her "John Brent," she relates how a few days before she had noticed the book in a shop window, and had paused, viewing it with longing in her eyes, and debating in her mind whether or not she should go in and purchase it. "No unnecessary expense till the war is over," she said to herself at last, and she walked away empty-handed.

      A letter to her life-long friend, Francis G. Shaw, gives some idea of the lavish generosity of this lady, who was never rich in her life, kept no servant, dressed in the plainest style, never wasted half a sheet of paper, and often used one envelope twice.

      "I enclose twenty dollars," she wrote, "which I wish you would use for the 'contrabands' in any way you may think best. I did think of purchasing shoes, of which I understand they are much in need, but I concluded it was best to send it to you to appropriate it as you choose. In November I expended eighteen dollars for clothing, mostly for women and children, and picked up all the garments, blankets, etc., that I could spare. last week I gave A. L. twenty dollars toward a great box she is filling for Port Royal. My interest in the 'contrabands' everywhere is exceedingly great; and at this crisis I feel that every one ought to be willing to do their utmost. I still have forty dollars left of a fund I have set apart for the 'contrabands.' I keep it for future contingencies; but if you think it is more needed now, say the word and you shall have it."

      Once, when she offered a hundred dollars of the freedmen, Wendell Phillips told her he did not think she could afford to give so much. She received his suggestion in the friendly spirit in which it was offered, and promised to consider the matter and to send him her decision on the morrow. The message he then received was:

      "Please send them two hundred."

      Most significant of all is a letter written in 1865, in which she told the secret of her helpful and joyous life. After speaking with exultation of the large sale of her latest book, "Looking Towards Sunset," she added:

      "This pleases me beyond measure, for the proceeds whether more or less, were vowed to the freedmen; and cheering old folks with one hand and helping the wronged and suffering with the other, is the highest recreation I ever enjoyed. Nobles and princes cannot discover or invent any pleasure equal with one hand and giving with the other."

      This lofty pleasure she enjoyed all her life. In her devotion to the oppressed negroes [sic], she never overlooked the sufferings and necessities of those around her. A drunkard sixty years ago who had burned down a stable with a number of cattle in it, to revenge himself upon the owner for having deprived him of his rum-bottle, was, after his release from prison, reformed by her zealous and unremitting efforts. he became an excellent husband to his wife, whom he had formerly abused, and a faithful assistant to the Child household, serving his benefactress with such devotion that she christened him her "Man Friday." At her death she left him in her will an annuity of fifty dollars, so long as he should abstain from intoxicating drink.

      Nor did she fail to speak a word in favor of all the enlightened and liberal movements of her day, nor to exult in every triumph of the oppressed. We find her expressing her joy when the Rothschilds compelled the Emperor of Austria to repeal an obnoxious law against the Jews; then writing an "Appeal for the Indians"; then uttering warm praise of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. She was, moreover, in sympathy with the most liberal thinkers of the time.

      The most important work of her later years, entitled the "Progress of Religious Ideas," in three volumes, was a review of the religious history of man. It was a work involving much research and laborious compilation. One of her objects was to show that religion, like science, is progressive. She dwelt upon the essential similarity of religions apparently the most dissimilar, and continually reminded her readers that under all religions of any considerable development, the ideal of goodness has been much the same. It is a work free at once from scoffing and credulity. She did not shrink from modestly avowing her dissent from the supernatural claims of the Christian religion, but at the same time she expressed the deepest veneration for the character and precepts of its founder.

      It could not be called a successful publication in the commercial sense, nor was she able in her restricted sphere and her limited knowledge of other languages, to draw information from its original sources. The work was read, however, with great interest by a considerable number of persons whose knowledge was less than her own, and to whom her rapid and plain-spoken review was a revelation.

      Mrs. Child's home life was happy and beautiful. She was blessed during her husband's lifetime with h is fullest sympathy and appreciation, and their days passed in usefulness and tranquillity, enlivened too, by mirth, for they both possessed the priceless gift of gayety. Once, when her husband said to her, "I wish for your sake, dear, that I was as rich as Croesus," she answered:

      "You are Croesus, for you are King of Lydia."

      For twenty-two years they lived together at Wayland, Massachusetts, entirely alone, without even a servant in the household, "mutually serving each other," as Mrs. Child wrote, "and dependent upon each other for intellectual companionship." Pictures hung upon their walls, plants glorified their rooms, and little rainbows shed from prisms suspended in the windows, danced upon the floor and ceiling.

      "Sometimes," she wrote, "the portrait of Charles Summer is transfigured by the splendid light, and sometimes the ears of my little white kitten, in the picture opposite, are all aglow. The moss on a stick of wood in the corner suddenly becomes iridescent, and the ashes on the hearth look like glittering soil where the metallic gnomes live. I am childish enough to find pleasure in all this, and to talk aloud to the pictures of a baby that is being washed."

      It is no wonder with such a home-spirit at his fire-side that David Child was fond of singing as he went about the house or watched the ripening of the fruit in his little orchard, --

      "There's nothing half so sweet in life

      As love's old dream."

      He was the first to die. His wife missed him sadly; but, comforted and sustained by the ceaseless exercise of her benevolence and by the devotion of her friends, she survived him several years. She died in 1880, tranquilly and unexpectedly.

      Her funeral took place on a half-clouded October day when the ground was strown [sic] with the red and gold of fallen autumn leaves. Her pall-bearers were chosen from among the farmers of the neighborhood, who were all her friends, and as her coffin was lowered into the grave the sun burst forth, and a perfect rainbow spanned the eastern sky.

      Many of her friends have paid tribute to her memory, and their words have found a tender echo in the hearts of hundreds more, whose lives have been blessed by her presence or cheered by her words. Wendell Phillips pronounced her funeral oration. Whittier's beautiful poem, "Within the Gate," was written soon after her death, and James Russell Lowell, long before, had described her in terms of glowing although half-humorous eulogy in "A Fable for Critics":

"Yes, a great heart is hers, one that dresses to go in
To the prison, the slave-hut, the alleys of sin,
And to bring into each, or to find there, some line
Of the never completely out-trampled divine;
If her heart at high floods swamps her brain now and then
'Tis but richer for that when the tide ebbs again,
As, after old Nile has subsided, his plain
Overflows with a second broad deluge of grain;
What a wealth would it bring to the narrow and sour
Could they be as a Child for but one little hour!

For More Information

      Transcendentalists.com

      Review of Appeal

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