Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 2.djvu/101

Rh of tracts and petitions and appeals—in our lectures and letters, public and private, have done as much to kill the rebellion, by educating the people for the final blow, as any other organization, civil, political, military, or religious, in the land. Could you but read the many earnest, thrilling letters we have received from simple men and women, in their rural homes, you would have fresh hope for the stability of our Republic; remembering that the life of a nation depends on the virtue of its people, and not on the dignity of its rulers.

One poor, infirm woman in Wisconsin, who had lost her husband and all her sons in the war, traveled on foot over one hundred miles in gathering two thousand names. Her letter was filled with joy that she, too, had been able to do something for the cause of liberty. Follow her, in imagination, through sleet and snow, from house to house; listen to her words—mark the pathos of her voice, as she debates the question of freedom, or tells some tale of horror in the land of slavery, or asks her neighbors one by one, to give their names to end such wrongs. Aside from all she says, the fact that she comes in storm, on foot, is to all an argument, that there is something wrong in the republic, demanding haste and action from every citizen. You who, in crowded towns, move masses by your eloquence, scorn not the slower modes. Remember the seeds of enthusiasm you call forth have been planted by humbler hands— by the fireside, the old arm-chair in the workshop, at the plow—wherever man communes alone with God.

Our work for the past year—and what must still be our work—involves the vital question of the nation's life. For, until the old Union with slavery be broken, and our Constitution so amended as to secure the elective franchise to all its citizens who are taxed, or who bear arms to support the Government, we have no foundations on which to build a true Republic. We urge our countrywomen who have shown so much enthusiasm in the war—in Sanitary and Freedmen's Associations—now to give themselves to the broader, deeper, higher work of reconstruction. The new nation demands the highest type of womanhood. It is a holy mission to minister to suffering soldiers in camp and hospital, and on the battlefield; to hold the heads and stanch the wounds of dying heroes; but holier still, by the magic word of freedom, to speak a dying nation into life.

Four years ago the many thought all was well in the land of the free and the home of the brave; but we knew the war was raging then through all the Southern States. We knew the secrets of that bastile of horrors; we heard, afar off, the shrieks and groans of the dying, the lamentations of husbands and wives, parents and children, sundered forever from each other. Then we fed, and clothed, and sheltered the fugitives in their weary marches where the North Star led, and crowned with immortal wreaths the panting heroes, pursued by the bloodhounds from the everglades of Florida, who asked but to die in freedom under the shadow of a monarch's throne.

Yes, the rebellion has been raging near a century on every cotton field and rice plantation. Every vice, hardship, and abomination, suffered by our soldiers in the war, has been the daily life in slavery. Yet no