By COLEMAN E. BISHOP.

IX.—A PIONEER ECCENTRIC WOMAN.

This artificial arrangement called society seems to be possible only upon unreal standards of truth and morality; it has a system of “white lies”—as if any lie could be white and true. It is because children haven’t learned the difference between real truth and the “play truth” of the world that they are such a holy terror in society. We have to squelch their questionings and hide our blushes. Children and fools—distinguished puritans!—always tell the truth, we say, and confess our false lives in the saying; but occasionally one who is not a fool, but who preserves a child’s truth, comes into this masquerade of life and insists on recognizing the real persons behind the masks. Heavens, what a disturbance! Put him out! He’s an Eccentric.

Give one of these uncomfortable persons the clairvoyant insight into character and motives and the clear-speaking tongue or pen; put him on a higher moral plane than society about him travels, and two things will likely come to pass, viz.: martyrdom for himself and an uplift for his neighbors. Such a touch for truth, such a power to convey it, such a purpose had Jane Grey Swisshelm, and it’s safe to say that she has put more people to bed with uncomfortable bed-fellows in the shape of smarting consciences than any other woman of her time.

She was a rare combination of feminine and masculine qualities. Timid and courageous; yielding to kindness, hard as steel on questions of principle; domestic in all her tastes, public in all her life; slight of form and sickly by heredity, for fifty years she “endured hardship as a good soldier.” To a fanatical religious nature and a wonderfully analytical mind, she brought that childlikeness of conscience, and with a rare command of language for a weapon, she became a moral blizzard in a half century of upheaval in our political elements.

No one, I think, can read her autobiography without the conviction that this life of controversy was foreign to her nature, that the pugnacious pen was forced into her hand when it would have preferred to wield the pencil of the artist, or even the distaff in a happy home. She was thus forced aside from her natural course by an incompatible theology and an incompatible marriage. Benevolence was her mastering trait, but her hard theology gave no exercise to it. Perhaps better to say in her own words, she “obeyed the higher law of kindness under protest of her Calvinistic conscience.” Her religion taught her that everything that she liked to do and enjoyed in the doing, was, by that token, sinful; and her husband and his family by thwarting her in all such enjoyments, unconsciously executing her theology against herself, set her upon expiating her sinfulness by engaging in the most disagreeable and trying work that she could find. Men and women before her have sought “in the world’s broad field of battle” relief from disappointment of the heart’s wishes, but few have put on the armor to punish themselves for not enjoying that disappointment. It is, therefore, to the crucial tenets of her Calvanistic faith and the exorbitant demands of her conscience that we owe the great work Mrs. Swisshelm did in the cause of humanity. What it cost her only God and herself know; but we are not without evidence that she got some recompense as she went along, in achievements which must have been grateful to the heroic side of her nature.

For in the veins of this slight girl ran the blood of a race of heroes and martyrs—a family which fetched its line direct from signers of The Solemn League and Covenant. “My kith and kin,” she says, “had died at the stake, bearing testimony against popery and prelacy; had fought on those fields where Scotchmen charged in solid columns, singing psalms.” She hated the devil of her theology, because she considered him a sneak, “but I never was afraid of him,” she says—a statement we can well believe of one who at the age of six watched an alleged haunted place by night to catch a ghost. She never knew the time when she did not believe the cast-iron creed of her ancestors; read her Bible, understood all of Dr. Black’s metaphysical sermons, and was converted before her third year, and completed her theological education before she completed her twelfth year. Truly she “had no childhood,” as she says.

Born in Pittsburgh in 1815, she married at the age of sixteen a too-well-to-do farmer, and spent most of her life in the country. “I spent my best years cooking cabbage,” she says. She taught school much of the first ten years of her married life. She found her pen-power and her work in 1844, at the age of twenty-nine. Mrs. Swisshelm was one of the first, if not the very first, American woman to enter the field of political journalism. At this day, when all the avenues of literature throng with gifted women, when no considerable daily paper is without female contributors and staff writers, and some of our best magazines are conducted by women, it is hard to appreciate what it cost a timid, devout woman like Mrs. Swisshelm to take that step in 1844; it was in her mind voluntary consecration to martyrdom. This call came to her during an illness brought on by an attack on her by her husband and his mother, so outrageous that she had fled wildly to the woods, and been taken up and cared for by kindly neighbors. Her afflictions came to her as chastisements for not remembering those in bonds as bound with them; specifically for assisting to build a church for the “Black-gagites.” She wrote her first attack in an anti-slavery cause, propped up in bed, and it was in verse. She states the situation:

Her articles created a sensation, and no wonder that they did. For, although she had but little literary culture, she had simplicity and intensity. Her style was modeled on the English of the Bible (which she says was for years the only book that she allowed herself to read, in her dread of becoming wiser than her plodding husband), and on this sturdy stem she grafted the simple, homely, direct illustrations of the rural folk around her. Thus, it arrested the attention of learned and unlettered alike. But there was more than phraseology in her power. She was as intensely in earnest as if she were herself in bonds—that is what “remembering them as bound with them” means. She was one of a few who meant it; one of the kind of “fools” that “hear His word and do it.” McDuffee, when he heard that Andrew Jackson had sworn to hang the first seceder, said: “Yes, and he’s just dashed fool enough to do it.” She felt that two races, the white and the black, were to be rescued from the curse of slavery; and for such a cause it was with her as “Hosea Bigelow” says, “P’izen-mad, pig-headed fightin’.” She had been reared an abolitionist, and that which was bred in the bone had been converted into a clear, blazing passion by a year’s residence in Kentucky (1832), where she witnessed scenes, the narration of which make that awful chapter in her biography entitled “Habitations of Horrible Cruelty.” She says:

I think this keen sense for the weak places in men’s character and reasoning, and her reckless assaults thereon were what made her so formidable. She always struck for the heart, and rarely missed her aim. “Exposing the weak part of an argument soon came to be my recognized forte,” she says. With what disregard of everything she rode after the oriflamme of humanity let her tell:

Her destructive attack on the private character of Daniel Webster, in 1850, also illustrates her reckless courage and her sagacity. She was in Washington pending the fugitive slave bill. Webster was supporting the measure—a damaging defection from the anti-slavery side, because of his supposed moral as well as intellectual greatness. Mrs. S. discovered “that his whole panoply of moral power was a shell—that his life was full of rottenness. Then I knew why I had come to Washington.” She put the facts into one short paragraph, and published it in her own paper, against the advice of all her friends, and even of such stanch anti-slavery men as Giddings, Julian, and Dr. Snodgrass. They said it was true, and no one would dare to deny it; yet no one had dared to make it public; the publication would ruin her and her influence. She said: “The cause of the slave hangs on the issue in Congress, and Mr. Webster’s influence is against him; his influence would be less if the public knew just what he is. I will publish it and let God take care of the consequences.” Eccentric conduct, surely! It was published, and it did bring ruin—but on Daniel Webster, instead of Jane Grey Swisshelm. It killed Webster’s influence with the conscientious part of the Whig party, and probably gave the coup de grace to his presidential prospects. She was long known as “the woman who killed Webster.”

It was in 1847 that Mrs. Swisshelm took the decisive plunge by founding the Pittsburgh Saturday Visiter. The sensation created by this unprecedented appearance of politics in petticoats she characteristically describes:

Mrs. Swisshelm was scourged into the woman’s rights agitation as she had been into the anti-slavery struggle, by her own troubles, brought on her again by her husband.

The house left to her by her parents she wished to sell. Under the laws of Pennsylvania a wife could not alone give title, and her husband in this case refused to sign the deed unless the purchase money were given to him to be put into improvements on his mother’s estate, where all his wife’s earnings had so far been put out of her reach. Upon the death of her mother, whom she idolized and had nursed tenderly for some weeks against the opposition of her husband, the latter filed a claim against the mother’s estate for his wife’s wages as nurse. Of these applications of the law she writes:

The result of the agitation thus begun was an amendment to the statute in 1848, securing to married women the right to hold property. The predictions of evils to follow from this introduction of “an apple of discord into every family,” made by sage and serious men then, sound marvellously like some of the warnings we hear from objectors to woman suffrage now. But Mrs. Swisshelm refused to join the organized suffrage movement, and had many hot debates with its organs as to method, not as to principles; she herself, curiously enough, predicted evils to flow from woman suffrage, similar to those her critics had predicted would flow from granting property rights.

She opposed the Washingtonian temperance movement, scornfully rejecting the plan of reforming drunkards by coddling them; waged warfare against the encroachments of the Church of Rome; and on more than one occasion successfully resisted the tyranny of trade unions. To defeat the latter she herself learned and taught other women the art typographic, and became independent. It is a notable fact that she was driven into this contention, also, by her own troubles with union printers. She seems to have been generally a conscript, not often a volunteer to fight, but the result always was to advance the interests of oppressed classes more than her own interests. It was to establish a precedent in behalf of other female correspondents that she applied for and secured a seat in the reporter’s gallery in the Capitol, Washington, being the first woman who ever sat there. She was then (1850), as for many years before and after, a correspondent of the New York Tribune.

In 1847, after twenty years of vain efforts to “live up to the lights” of her mother-in-law, Mrs. Swisshelm and her husband parted, she taking their only child and going to Minnesota to live with her sister.

Her Minnesota experience was almost tragic. Before reaching there she was informed that Governor Lowrie allowed no abolition sentiments in St. Cloud. “Then there is not room there for General Lowrie and me,” stoutly replied the little crusader. General Lowrie was the territorial governor under Buchanan’s administration; he was a Mississippian who kept slaves in Minnesota, and ruled the territory with so high a hand that he was called dictator. When Mrs. Swisshelm started the St. Cloud Visiter she invited the governor, among others, to subscribe, and received from him a letter promising it “a support second to that of no paper in the territory, if it will support Buchanan’s administration.” To the confusion of her friends, Mrs. Swisshelm accepted the terms, and frankly announced in the paper that General Lowrie owned everybody in Minnesota, and so she had sold herself and the paper to him and would support Buchanan’s administration—its object being, as she understood it, the subversion of all freedom in the United States, and the placing of a master over every northern “mud-sill” as over the Southern blacks; that Governor Lowrie had promised to support the paper in great power and glory for this, and she was determined to earn her money. It was simply the unconventional, blunt truth-telling of a child applied to a lying system of politics, and it cut like a knife.

Lowrie swore vengeance. “Let her alone, for God’s sake!” said one who knew her career. “Let her alone, or she will kill you. She has killed every man she ever touched. Let her alone.” He did not, and she did kill him with the truth. To his threats she returned the promise that she should continue to support Buchanan until she had broken him down in everlasting infamy. Her office was sacked one night and a notice left that if she revived the paper she would be tied to a log and cast into the Mississippi. The issue could not be avoided. An indignation meeting was called, and Mrs. Swisshelm said “I will attend and speak.” She made her will, settled her business, wrote a history of the trouble to testify if she could not, and employed a fighting man to attend the meeting by her side, and shoot her square through the brain if there were no other way to prevent her falling into the hands of the mob. Mrs. Sterns, a Yankee woman, held her arm, saying, “We will go into the river together; they can’t separate us.” So this descendant of the old Covenanter martyrs made her first speech to the, to her, doubtless, sweet music of a howling mob, stones and pistol shots.

The Visiter was reËstablished on new type, by a stock company, and the first issue brought down on them a libel suit from Governor Lowrie, to compromise which Mrs. Swisshelm published a retraction, which released the owners from $10,000 bonds. She then bought the material, suspended the bonded Visiter, and issued the St. Cloud Democrat. Its first issue rang the death-knell of Governor Lowrie and border ruffianism in Minnesota. It was useless to sue her for libel, and she was too well protected to fear force. The state election in 1859, when Governor Lowrie was a candidate for Lieutenant-Governor, turned on the policy of border ruffianism, press-breaking, and woman mobbing. “The large man who instituted a mob to suppress a woman of my size [i. e., 100 lbs.], and then failed, was not a suitable leader for American men,” and Lowrie was snowed under, and not long after was taken to an insane asylum. The next year Mrs. Swisshelm felt honored at being burned in effigy in St. Paul by her enemies, as “the mother of the Republican party in Minnesota.” She afterward lectured two years in the northwest.

Then came the terrible civil war. Mrs. Swisshelm engaged in hospital work, bringing to it the consecration, indomitable energy and eccentric gumption that she displayed in politics and business. She walked through the red tape and professional etiquette which were killing more than bullets were, as she had through conventional chains. She says: “It was often so easy to save a life, where there were the means of living, that a little courage or common sense seemed like a miraculous gift to people whose mental powers had been turned in other directions.” In one hospital she found gangrene, and to her call for lemons, specific for it, she was gravely told by the surgeon that he had made a requisition a week before for them, and could not get them. She telegraphed the Tribune:

The next day lemons began to pour into Washington, and soon into every hospital in the country. Governor Andrew sent two hundred boxes, and at one time she had twenty ladies with ambulances distributing lemons. Gangrene disappeared.

She felt about equal anger and contempt for masculine indifference and the mushy inefficiency of women who flocked to Washington to nurse in the hospitals. She sarcastically says the vast majority of the women who succeeded in getting into hospitals were much more willing to “kiss him for his mother” than to render the soldier any solid service; they “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.”

Mrs. S. was one of three women who followed Grant’s advance upon the Wilderness. Her courage, endurance and good sense never showed to better advantage than during the Petersburg battles.

Mrs. Swisshelm’s marital experience was but an episode to her true career—the counter-irritant that brought out her character. Its unhappiness was due to four causes: 1. Religious differences. Both sides were fanatical, and her husband’s people felt a call to give her no rest till they had got her “converted and saved” by their theological scales. 2. It was a sad case of mother-in-law, on the husband’s side. 3. The brains, character and courage were all on one side. No woman had a higher reverence for strong manly character, and she was married to a male shrew and weakling. But above all she belonged to the last half of the nineteenth century in her ideas of woman’s sphere, and he to the last half of the eighteenth, in his. Aside from this, they loved each other, and after their separation each bore high testimony to the right intention and purity of the other.

Few women of this day appreciate how much of their freedom to work and think they owe to such pioneers as Jane Grey Swisshelm. Few men can be made to see how much of the great advance of American life is due to the nobler, broader womanhood made possible by the self-immolation of such pioneers. They made their impression on the point most needing change and strength, if our society and government were to become pure, strong and enduring. For it has become a law of sociology that the condition of its women is the measure of the civilization and possible growth of any people. Mrs. Swisshelm did more than her share to lengthen that measure for this people, and, happily, lived to see the fruits of her work. But it was a desolate life for a woman, for all that.