Remarkable experiences—The Edmonson Sisters—Pinky and her Freedom-Ring—Slave Auction in Plymouth Church—John Brown—The Wrong and Right Way—Election of Abraham Lincoln—Secession—Buchanan’s Fast.

While these larger public matters were engaging his attention there was an equally engrossing field of private activity in which he was constantly engaged, and which developed into some very peculiar and remarkable experiences. As early as 1848 we find him conducting an auction sale, in New York City, of the two Edmonson sisters.

This case at the time attracted wide attention. Two respectable young women of light complexion, living in Washington City, had the misfortune to be born while the mother was a slave. After they had grown to womanhood they found that the former owner of their parent was about to sell them to a slave-dealer for exportation to New Orleans and the market. Despairing of being able to raise the exorbitant sum at which they were valued, and not knowing how to escape from a doom far more dreadful than death, they risked everything by going on board the Pearl schooner with seventy-seven others, in the hope of escaping to a land of liberty and purity. The ship was captured and they were hurried off to Slater’s Den, Baltimore, and thence to New Orleans. By some most extraordinary providences they were brought back from New Orleans to Washington, and their sad case at length reached the ears of those who had hearts to feel and means to save. A meeting was held in the Tabernacle October 23, at which Dr. Dowling and Mr. Beecher spoke with so much effect that $2,200 were raised and the captives were free. Mr. Beecher’s speech is described by an eye-witness, himself a minister, as beyond anything he has ever heard before or since. He extemporized there on the stage an auction of a Christian slave. The enumeration of his qualities by the auctioneer, and the bids that followed, were given by the speaker in perfect character. He made the scene as realistic as one of Hogarth’s pictures and as lurid as a Rembrandt. Physical excellences, mental, moral, and spiritual qualities, are each dwelt on with an emphasis and moving effect that proved that he would have made a capital auctioneer if he had chosen that business.

“And more than all that, gentlemen, they say he is one of those praying Methodist niggers; who bids? A thousand—fifteen hundred—two thousand—twenty-five hundred! Going, going! last call! Gone!”

The audience were wrought up to a perfect frenzy of excitement while that picture was being drawn, and when real contributions instead of imaginary bids were called for, the sum was easily raised and the girls were free. He says of it: “I think that of all the meetings that I have attended in my life, for a panic of sympathy I never saw one that surpassed that. I have seen a great many in my day. An amount of money was subscribed, and they were bought and set free. The mother was a very old woman. She had been a nurse of a great Richmond lawyer whose name has died out of my memory. He owed his conversion to her. He was famous in the days of Webster.”

We have lying before us as we write a little leather-covered account-book, soiled and worn by use, which has upon its first pages letters from various humanitarians—William Lloyd Garrison being among the number—recommending to the Christian public one Pomona Brice, who “is engaged in collecting money to secure the ransom of her daughter and two grandchildren who are scattered somewhere in North Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri.” The names of subscribers follow, with the sums subscribed—ranging from twenty-five cents to ten dollars—among which stands the familiar autograph “H. W. Beecher, if the whole is made up, five dollars.” Receipts from the different savings-banks where she had deposited the money; a letter from her lawyer to Mr. Beecher telling him that at her request he had examined the laws of the above-mentioned States, and found them all against her; a bill for his services and a judgment of the court against her for $100, all either directed or entrusted to Mr. Beecher, give us an inkling of another kind of work that wore upon his time, sympathy, and purse.

Not only did he help by his subscriptions some poor mother or grandmother to buy the liberty of her children or grandchildren, but sometimes brought the slave upon Plymouth pulpit and raised the money for its redemption on the spot. A handful of letters in our possession gives the preliminaries to such a transaction.

One is from a Mr. Blake, who has called on the “nigger trader” and obtained the refusal of the child for $900, and has also “obtained four or five good names to a bond for the payment of the money or return of the child. When I told the grandmother what I had done the poor old soul cried for joy. ‘God bless you!’ she said. ‘I will sit up all night to get you some breakfast. You have saved my child.’” Then comes a hitch in the proceedings. A partner to the trader before spoken of appeared. He hated “the d——— Abolitionists, and would not let the child go among them.” “Do you not think something could be done without the child? She has light flaxen hair. Her owner said I would easily get her on the cars, for no one would know her from a white child. The grandmother has purchased herself. She has also saved up about $200 to support her in her old age. She is willing to give this. If we take it we shall want $700 more. If you can do anything, in God’s name do it and save the child.

In some way, the letters do not tell us how, the difficulties were overcome. The permission of the joint owners of this flaxen-haired girl was obtained, bonds were given to the railroads as well as the owners to secure them from loss in case this property should not be returned, and the child was brought to the auction-block of Plymouth pulpit and was bought for liberty.

The following is Mr. Beecher’s farther account of this matter:

“Before the passage of the Red Sea, before the escape of the Israelites (in this country, not in Egypt), I was accustomed, from time to time, to buy slaves here; and it was thrown up that this was one of the best slave-auction places anywhere to be found—that better prices were obtained for slaves that were put up for sale here than for any others. Some thought there was an inconsistency in it. I did not. I was always glad, at suitable times, as often as was proper, to bring before you living men and women, and let them stand and look you in the face, that you might see what sort of creatures slaves were made of. I was glad by every means in my power to arouse men’s feelings against the abomination of slavery, which I hated with an unutterable hatred, and which I hate still in memory as much as then I hated it in substance and in fact.

“Well, at one time there was a girl named ‘Pink,’ or ‘Pinky,’ brought here. She came through the agency of G. Faulkner Blake, a brother of one of our own members. He was studying in the Episcopal Seminary at Alexandria, I believe. He learned from her old grandmother that ‘Pinky,’ who was too fair and beautiful a child for her own good, was to be taken away from the grandmother and sent South.

“To make a long story short, those interested in the girl wrote me to see if I could purchase her. I replied, ‘I cannot unless you send her North’; and there was trouble in bringing her here. I wrote that I would be responsible for her, and that she would be lawfully purchased or sent back.

“I remember that the pen-keeper paid me a compliment which I shall never forget, by saying that if Henry Ward Beecher had given his word he considered it better than a bond. So she was brought here and placed upon this platform; and the rain never fell faster than the tears fell from many of you that were here. The scene was one of intense enthusiasm. The child was bought, and overbought. The collection that was taken on the spot was enough, and more than enough, to purchase her. It so happened (it is not wrong to mention now) that a lady known to literary fame as Miss Rose Terry was present; and as, like many others, she had not with her as much money as she wanted to give, she took a ring off from her hand and threw it into the contribution-box. That ring I took and put on the child’s hand, and said to her, ‘Now remember that this is your freedom-ring.’ Her expression, as she stood and looked at it for a moment, was pleasing to behold; and Eastman Johnson, the artist, was so much interested in the occurrence that he determined to represent it on canvas, and he painted her looking at her freedom-ring; and I have a transcript of the picture now at my house in the parlor, and any of you can see it by asking.

“So the girl was redeemed. She went back South after her redemption; but she was in the North for a time and received some rudiments of education. At length I lost sight of her until 1864, I think, when she was at Chief-Justice Chase’s, and I received word that she wished to see me.

“It seems that ‘Pinky’ was not a good enough name for her when she was free, though it was when she was a slave; so they mixed things and called her ‘Ward,’ after my name, and ‘Rose,’ after the name of this lady; and ever since her name has been Rose Ward—a very nice name indeed. She then had grown to be a young woman, and was very fair. I supposed she would probably live and die in labor to support herself and her grandmother, who was becoming infirm; but it seems that she has shown uncommon intelligence, and has manifested a very earnest desire to become a laborer for her people, and she is to be educated and to become a teacher and missionary among them.

“Now, it suits me exactly to have this child brought out of slavery, redeemed on this platform, and grow up and develop a Christian disposition, and go back and labor for her people. She does not know anything about it, but if we can raise $150 she shall have a year’s schooling in the Lincoln University at Washington. It seems to me as though there was poetic justice and fitness in it. As you redeemed her in the first instance from slavery, in the second instance you must redeem her from ignorance by contributing the amount necessary to send her a year to that university.“ And it was done.

An account of another is found in the weekly press:

A handful of photographs of children, white and beautiful, who had been set free, have come to my hand with the above letters. Having to do with white-faced, flaxen-haired children born under the curse of slavery; with mothers carrying their little account-books from house to house, gathering funds wherewith to accomplish the apparently hopeless task of first finding their children who had been swept away from them in the black maelstrom of slavery, and then of purchasing them; of grandmothers who wept for joy at the prospect of saving their grandchildren, and willingly surrendered all the money which they had laid aside for their old age if it could be accomplished, would make a man tender toward the victims and hard against the system which caused their trouble.

Through this course of training he walked in these years, his heart now dissolved in tears and now hot with righteous indignation. No compromise, no surrender, no betrayal, no yielding, but the destruction of slavery and the salvation of the Union.

The Kansas and Nebraska troubles had resulted in more than establishing certain theories or in deciding the status of portions of our territory. It had intensified the feeling in both sections of our country, and men were being irreconcilably divided upon the subject of slavery. Out of these troublous times sprang John Brown, originally a farmer, born in the northern part of Connecticut, and emigrating to Ohio when a child. In 1854 his four elder sons migrated to Kansas, joining with the thousands from the North to make that a free State and to secure homes for themselves and their families. Plundered and harassed, they wrote to their father to procure arms. To make sure that they should get these he went with them. This was his introduction into Kansas. We have no design of following out his history in detail, but only claim that his fanatical zeal and his unreasonable expectations were the product of the times in which he lived and the experiences which he suffered, acting upon a temperament peculiarly unselfish, heroic, and religious. Enough for us is it to know that his course led him, with an army of sixteen men, to the capture of Harper’s Ferry and to a conflict with the whole State of Virginia, in fact with the power of the whole United States government, and ultimately to the scaffold. His courage, his calmness, his undoubting faith in the future deliverance of the slaves, crowned by his heroic death, made his name the war-cry of the future legions of the loyal States, who sang as they marched:

The attack on Harper’s Ferry was made October 17. On Sunday evening, October 30, Henry Ward Beecher preached upon “The Harper’s Ferry Tragedy,” and gives his judgment of the principal actor in the following language:

“An old man, kind at heart, industrious, peaceful, went forth with a large family of children, to seek a new home in Kansas. That infant colony held thousands of souls as noble as liberty ever inspired or religion enriched. A great scowling slave State, its nearest neighbor, sought to tread down this liberty-loving colony and to dragoon slavery into it by force of arms. The armed citizens of another State crossed the State lines, destroyed the freedom of the ballot-box, prevented a fair expression of public sentiment, corruptly usurped law-making power and ordained by fraud laws as infamous as the sun ever saw, assaulted its infant settlements with armed hordes, ravaged the fields, destroyed harvests and herds, and carried death to a multitude of cabins. The United States government had no marines for this occasion! No Federal troops were posted by cars night and day for the poor, the weak, the grossly-wronged men in Kansas. There was an army there that unfurled the banner of the Union, but it was on the side of the wrong-doers, not on the side of the injured.

“It was in this field that Brown received his impulse. A tender father, whose life was in his sons’ life, he saw his first-born seized like a felon, chained, driven across the country, crazed by suffering and heat, beaten by the officer in charge like a dog, and long lying at death’s door! Another noble boy, without warning, without offence, unarmed, in open day, in the midst of the city, was shot dead! No justice sought out the murderers. No United States attorney was despatched in hot haste. No marines or soldiers aided the wronged and weak!

“The shot that struck the child’s heart crazed the father’s brain. Revolving his wrongs and nursing his hatred of that deadly system that breeds such contempt of justice and humanity, at length his phantoms assume a slender form and organize such an enterprise as one might expect from a man whom grief had bereft of good judgment. He goes to the heart of a slave State: one man—and sixteen followers! He seizes two thousand brave Virginians and holds them in duress.

“When a great State attacked a handful of weak colonies the government and nation were torpid; but when seventeen men attacked a sovereign State, then Maryland arms, and Virginia arms, and the United States government arms, and they three rush against seventeen men!

“Travellers tell us that the Geysers of Iceland—those singular boiling springs of the North—may be transported with fury by plucking up a handful of grass or turf and throwing them into the springs. The hot springs of Virginia are of the same kind! A handful of men was thrown into them, and what a boiling there has been!

“But meanwhile no one can fail to see that this poor, child-bereft old man is the manliest of them all. Bold, unflinching, honest, without deceit or dodge, refusing to take technical advantages of any sort, but openly avowing his principles and motives, glorying in them in danger and death as much as when in security—that wounded old father is the most remarkable figure in this whole drama. The governor, the officers of the State, and all the attorneys are pigmies compared to him.

“I deplore his misfortunes. I sympathize with his sorrows. I mourn the hiding or obscuration of his reason. I disapprove of his mad and feeble schemes. I shrink from the folly of the bloody foray, and I shrink, likewise, from all the anticipations of that judicial bloodshed which, doubtless, ere long will follow—for when was cowardice ever magnanimous? They will kill the man, not for treason, but for proving them cowards!

“By and by, when men look back and see without prejudice that whole scene, they will not be able to avoid saying: ‘What must be the measure of manhood in a scene where a crazed old man stood head and shoulders above those who had their whole reason? What is average citizenship when a lunatic is a hero?’”

He also availed himself of this opportunity to show the wrong way and the right way in our treatment of this whole question of slavery. I can only mention the heads, but they so far outline his whole principle of action during the war that I give them that his position may be understood:

“1st. We have no right to treat the citizens of the South with acrimony and bitterness because they are involved in a system of wrong-doing.”

“2d. The breeding of discontent among the bondmen of our land is not the way to help them.”

“3d. No relief will be carried to the slaves or to the South as a body by any individual or organized plans to carry them off or to incite them to abscond.”

As to the right way:

“1st. If we would benefit the African at the South we must begin at home. No one can fail to see the inconsistency between our treatment of those amongst us who are in the lower walks of life and our professions of sympathy for the Southern slaves. How are the free colored people treated at the North? They are almost without education, with but little sympathy for ignorance. They are refused the common rights of citizenship which the whites enjoy. They cannot even ride in the cars of our city railroads. They are snuffed at in the house of God, or tolerated with ill-disguised disgust. Can the black man be a mason in New York? Let him be employed as a journeyman, and every Irish lover of liberty that carries the hod or trowel would leave at once or compel him to leave! Can the black man be a carpenter? There is scarcely a carpenter’s shop in New York in which a journeyman would continue to work if a black man were employed in it. Can the black man compete in the common industries of life? There is scarcely one in which he can engage. He is crowded down, down, down, through the most menial callings, to the bottom of society. We tax them, and then refuse to allow their children to go to our public schools. We tax them, and then refuse to sit by them in God’s house. We heap upon them moral obloquy more atrocious than that which the master heaps upon the slave.”

“2d. We must quicken all the springs of feeling in the free States in behalf of human liberty, and create a public sentiment based upon truth and true manhood.”

“3d. By all the ways consistent with a fearless assertion of truth, we must maintain sympathy and kindness toward the South. If, in view of the wrongs of slavery, you say that you do not care for the master but only the slave, I reply that you should care for both master and slave! If you do not care for the fate of the wrong-doing white man, I do care for the fate of the wrong-doing white man! But even though your sympathy were only for the slave, then for his sake you ought to set your face against, and discountenance anything like, an insurrectionary spirit.”

“4th. We are to leave no pains untaken, through the Christian conscience of the South, to give to the slave himself a higher moral status.”

“5th. The few virtues which shall lead inevitably to emancipation are to be established and insisted upon—the right of chastity in the woman, unblemished household love, and the right of parents to their children. The moment these three stand secure, that moment slavery will have its death-blow struck.”

“6th. And, lastly, among the means to be employed for promoting the liberty of the slave we must not fail to include the power of true Christian prayer. When slavery shall cease it will be by such instruments and influences that shall exhibit God’s hand and heart in the work. May He, in His own way and time, speed the day!”

With such radical yet conservative and kindly speech, bringing home to his audience their own deficiencies and pointing out the way that must be taken, did he temper and direct the hot passion of those fiery days.

The heat occasioned by the John Brown raid in the fall of 1859 was not cooled by the after-events that occurred both in and out of Congress during the following winter; and the country came to nominating its candidates in 1860 in a state of the most intense feeling. Four parties were in the field, each representing as its essential characteristic some phase of feeling towards slavery. Among them stood the Republican party, with a well-defined purpose, clearly understood and openly declared—no interference with and no extension of slavery. Abraham Lincoln was its nominee for President. Mr. Beecher had met him in 1859 when he came to New York to deliver his speech at Cooper Institute, and, with his quick perception of the ability of men, and already well acquainted with his record, had placed confidence in this tall, gaunt Westerner from the first. He had doubted the policy of nominating Mr. Seward, and one of his first interviews with a member of the New York delegation, who had labored earnestly but vainly for his nomination, is thus described: “With a laugh that was almost a roar he burst into the editorial room where Mr. Raymond sat, his chair tilted upon its two fore legs, and, grasping him cordially, heartily, vigorously, said: ‘Young man, I know the people of this country at heart better than you do. Your friend Seward has too much head and too little heart to succeed in any such crisis as this.’

“‘And yours,’ replied Mr. Raymond, ‘I fear, has too much heart and too little head for such a crisis as will assuredly be precipitated.’

“‘Trust, then,’ replied Mr. Beecher, ‘in God, and keep your powder dry.’”

For the election of their nominee Mr. Beecher labored with pen and voice to the utmost of his ability. His sermons Sunday evenings often had reference to the great questions of the day. His lectures of this period were little more than political addresses, and by his Star Papers in the Independent, which were largely copied in other papers, he made his views known to the reading public throughout the land. Believing that the election of Abraham Lincoln was of the utmost importance, he gave himself unreservedly to make it an accomplished fact, and made himself as obnoxious to the timid and time-serving as he was admirable to the opposite party. Of this period he says: “We next had to flounder through the quicksands of four infamous years under President Buchanan, in which senators sworn to the Constitution were plotting to destroy that Constitution; in which the members of the Cabinet, who drew their pay month by month, used their official position, by breach of public trust and oath of allegiance, to steal arms, to prepare fortifications, and make ready disruption and war. The most astounding spectacle the world ever saw was then witnessed—a great people paying men to sit in the places of power and offices of trust to betray them.”

Most portentous events followed the election. State after State in the South called their conventions and passed decrees of secession, in every case, except in South Carolina, by the jugglery of political leaders, in spite of the popular vote.vote. Representatives withdrew from the House, senators from the Senate, and members from the Cabinet, and flocked to Montgomery, Ga., where a rebel government was being organized. The most specious arguments were urged in justification of secession, were substantially admitted even by so excellent an authority as the New York Tribune, and the right to coerce a sovereign State, as well as the expediency of the attempt, was denied by a large portion of the Northern press. Preparations to make secession successful, if resisted, were made openly, while the denial of the right to prevent the same tied the hands of the government and left it powerless in the toils of its enemies. In the meantime different schemes of conciliation, all amounting to some species of concession or compromise, were advanced both in and out of Congress, and urged to the very utmost possible limit of forbearance and kindness. Against “peace at any price” and all patched-up compromises Mr. Beecher, together with a multitude of others of like feeling at the North, threw his influence.

His Thanksgiving sermon this year was upon this topic: “Against a Compromise of Principle.” He recounts the common but abundant blessings of the year, and gathers assurance that they are from God on the following testimony.

“All the sons of God rejoice and all good men rejoice. It needs but one element to complete the satisfaction. If we could be sure that this is God’s mercy, meant for good and tending thereto, we should have a full cup to-day. That satisfaction is not denied us. The Mayor of New York, in a public proclamation, in view of this prodigal year that has heaped the poor man’s house with abundance, is pleased to say that there is no occasion apparent to him for thanksgiving. We can ask no more. When bad men grieve at the state of public affairs, good men should rejoice. When infamous men keep fast, righteous men should have thanksgiving. God reigns and the devil trembles. Amen. Let us rejoice!”

He then describes the true nature of the compromise that is asked, and shows the impossibility of making any that shall be satisfactory to either side:

“We are told that Satan appears under two forms—that when he has a good, fair field he is out like a lion, roaring and seeking whom he may devour; but that when he can do nothing more in that way he is a serpent and sneaks in the grass. And so it is slavery open, bold, roaring, aggressive, or it is slavery sneaking in the grass and calling itself compromise. It is the same devil under either name. If by compromise is only meant forbearance, kindness, well-wishing, conciliation, fidelity to agreements, a concession in things, not principles, why then we believe in compromise, only that is not compromise, interpreted by the facts of our past history.

“We honestly wish no harm to the South or its people; we honestly wish them all benefit. We will defend her coast; we will guard her inland border from all vexations from without; and in good faith, in earnest friendship, in fealty to the Constitution, and in fellowship with the States, we will, and with growing earnestness to the end, fulfil every just duty, every honorable agreement, and every generous act within the limits of truth and honor; all that and no more—no more though the heavens fall; no more if States unclasp their hands; no more if they raise up violence against us—NO MORE! We have gone to the end.”

He did not agree with Mr. Lincoln in his hope that the South would be satisfied by the careful explanations given in his inaugural, nor with Mr. Seward in his expectation that the difficulty would be settled in ninety days; but he did believe with all his heart that God was in the work, and that the trouble would be settled some day, and that it would be settled right. In the turmoil of that turbulent time his mind was kept in perfect peace, because it was stayed on God.

The Republican party was charged with having brought about this unhappy state of the country. This charge he answers in a sermon preached January 4, 1861, the day appointed by President Buchanan for Fasting and Prayer:

“What is the errand of this day? Why are we observing a sad Sabbath? a day of humiliation? a day of supplication? It is for the strangest reason the world ever heard. It is because the spirit of liberty has so increased and strengthened among us that the government is in danger of being overthrown! There never before was such an occasion for fasting, humiliation, and prayer! Other nations have gone through revolutions for their liberties; we are on the eve of a revolution to put down liberty! Other people have thrown off their governments because too oppressive; ours is to be destroyed, if at all, because it is too full of liberty, too full of freedom. There never was such an event before in history.... Meanwhile we have had no one to stand up for order. Those who should have spoken in decisive authority have been—afraid! Severer words have been used; it is enough for me to say only that in a time when God, and providence, and patriotism, and humanity demanded courage, they had no response but fear. The heart has almost ceased to beat, and this government is like to die for want of pulsations at the centre. While the most humiliating fear paralyzes one part of the government, the most wicked treachery is found in other parts of it.”

So closes in shame and fear the second era of the great conflict.

“Buchanan’s Fast” marks the lowest point of degradation the government of the United States ever reached—a point of abject fear of the consequences of its own sins, of feeble persistence in them, and of cowardice in applying the remedy for its trouble.

Instead of abandoning its policy of falsehood and injustice, and making a manly use of the means still at hand to avert the threatening dangers, it held to its course, declared that it could do nothing more under the Constitution than to advise and remonstrate with treason, and made a frantic appeal to the Christians of the land to plead with Jehovah to save it from the inevitable consequences of its folly and wickedness.

It was a failure. The Call of the President to his kind of Fast awakened little response from the people. Another Proclamation was ringing in their ears. It was that of the old prophet uttered centuries before. “Is not this the Fast that I have chosen? to loose the bands of wickedness, to undo the heavy burdens, and to let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?”

This Fast of the Lord was rapidly approaching, and for it the people were getting ready.