Eighty Years and More; Reminiscences 1815-1897
according to the capacity or will of the speakers, and then, with a
dozen or more victims in hand, make arrangements with the committees in
various towns and cities to set them all in motion. As the managers of
the bureaus had ten per cent. of what the speakers made, it was to their
interest to keep the time well filled. Hence the engagements were made
without the slightest reference to the comfort of the travelers. With
our immense distances, it was often necessary to travel night and day,
sometimes changing cars at midnight, and perhaps arriving at the
destination half an hour or less before going on the platform, and
starting again on the journey immediately upon leaving it. The route was
always carefully written out, giving the time the trains started from
and arrived at various points; but as cross trains often failed to
connect, one traveled, guidebook in hand, in a constant fever of
anxiety. As, in the early days, the fees were from one to two hundred
dollars a night, the speakers themselves were desirous of accomplishing
as much as possible.
In 1869 I gave my name, for the first time, to the New York Bureau, and
on November 14 began the long, weary pilgrimages, from Maine to Texas,
that lasted twelve years; speaking steadily for eight months--from
October to June--every season. That was the heyday of the lecturing
period, when a long list of bright men and women were constantly on the
wing. Anna Dickinson, Olive Logan, Kate Field,--later, Mrs. Livermore
and Mrs. Howe, Alcott, Phillips, Douglass, Tilton, Curtis, Beecher, and,
several years later, General Kilpatrick, with Henry Vincent, Bradlaugh,
and Matthew Arnold from England; these and many others were stars of the
lecture platform.
Some of us occasionally managed to spend Sunday together, at a good
hotel in some city, to rest and feast and talk over our joys and
sorrows, the long journeys, the hard fare in the country hotels, the
rainy nights when committees felt blue and tried to cut down our fees;
the being compelled by inconsiderate people to talk on the train; the
overheated, badly ventilated cars; the halls, sometimes too warm,
sometimes too cold; babies crying in our audiences; the rain pattering
on the roof overhead or leaking on the platform--these were common
experiences. In the West, women with babies uniformly occupied the front
seats so that the little ones, not understanding what you said, might be
amused with your gestures and changing facial expression. All these
things, so trying, at the time, to concentrated and enthusiastic
speaking, afterward served as subjects of amusing conversation. We
unanimously complained of the tea and coffee. Mrs. Livermore had the
wisdom to carry a spirit lamp with her own tea and coffee, and thus
supplied herself with the needed stimulants for her oratorical
efforts. The hardships of these lyceum trips can never be appreciated
except by those who have endured them. With accidents to cars and
bridges, with floods and snow blockades, the pitfalls in one of these
campaigns were without number.
[Illustration: ELIZABETH SMITH MILLER.] [Illustration]
On one occasion, when engaged to speak at Maquoketa, Iowa, I arrived at
Lyons about noon, to find the road was blocked with snow, and no chance
of the cars running for days. "Well," said I to the landlord, "I must be
at Maquoketa at eight o'clock to-night; have you a sleigh, a span of
fleet horses, and a skillful driver? If so, I will go across the
country." "Oh, yes, madam!" he replied, "I have all you ask; but you
could not stand a six-hours' drive in this piercing wind." Having lived
in a region of snow, with the thermometer down to twenty degrees below
zero, I had no fears of winds and drifts, so I said, "Get the sleigh
ready and I will try it." Accordingly I telegraphed the committee that I
would be there, and started. I was well bundled up in a fur cloak and
hood, a hot oak plank at my feet, and a thick veil over my head and
face. As the landlord gave the finishing touch, by throwing a large
buffalo robe over all and tying the two tails together at the back of my
head and thus effectually preventing me putting my hand to my nose, he
said, "There, if you can only sit perfectly still, you will come out all
right at Maquoketa; that is, if you get there, which I very much doubt."
It was a long, hard drive against the wind and through drifts, but I
scarcely moved a finger, and, as the clock struck eight, we drove into
the town. The hall was warm, and the church bell having announced my
arrival, a large audience was assembled. As I learned that all the roads
in Northern Iowa were blocked, I made the entire circuit, from point to
point, in a sleigh, traveling forty and fifty miles a day.
At the Sherman House, in Chicago, three weeks later, I met Mr. Bradlaugh
and General Kilpatrick, who were advertised on the same route ahead of
me. "Well," said I, "where have you gentlemen been?" "Waiting here for
the roads to be opened. We have lost three weeks' engagements," they
replied. As the General was lecturing on his experiences in Sherman's
march to the sea, I chaffed him on not being able, in an emergency, to
march across the State of Iowa. They were much astonished and somewhat
ashamed, when I told them of my long, solitary drives over the prairies
from day to day. It was the testimony of all the bureaus that the women
could endure more fatigue and were more conscientious than the men in
filling their appointments.
The pleasant feature of these trips was the great educational work
accomplished for the people through their listening to lectures on all
the vital questions of the hour. Wherever any of us chanced to be on
Sunday, we preached in some church; and wherever I had a spare
afternoon, I talked to women alone, on marriage, maternity, and the laws
of life and health. We made many most charming acquaintances, too,
scattered all over our Western World, and saw how comfortable and happy
sensible people could be, living in most straitened circumstances, with
none of the luxuries of life. If most housekeepers could get rid of
one-half their clothes and furniture and put their bric-a-brac in the
town museum, life would be simplified and they would begin to know what
leisure means. When I see so many of our American women struggling to be
artists, who cannot make a good loaf of bread nor a palatable cup of
coffee, I think of what Theodore Parker said when art was a craze in
Boston. "The fine arts do not interest me so much as the coarse arts
which feed, clothe, house, and comfort a people. I would rather be a
great man like Franklin than a Michael Angelo--nay, if I had a son, I
should rather see him a mechanic, like the late George Stephenson, in
England, than a great painter like Rubens, who only copied beauty."
One day I found at the office of the _Revolution_ an invitation to meet
Mrs. Moulton in the Academy of Music, where she was to try her voice for
the coming concert for the benefit of the Woman's Medical College. And
what a voice for power, pathos, pliability! I never heard the like.
Seated beside her mother, Mrs. W.H. Greenough, I enjoyed alike the
mother's anxious pride and the daughter's triumph. I felt, as I
listened, the truth of what Vieuxtemps said the first time he heard her,
"That is the traditional voice for which the ages have waited and
longed." When, on one occasion, Mrs. Moulton sang a song of Mozart's to
Auber's accompaniment, someone present asked, "What could be added to
make this more complete?" Auber looked up to heaven, and, with a sweet
smile, said, "Nothing but that Mozart should have been here to listen."
Looking and listening, "Here," thought I, "is another jewel in the crown
of womanhood, to radiate and glorify the lives of all." I have such an
intense pride of sex that the triumphs of woman in art, literature,
oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can.
Hungering, that day, for gifted women, I called on Alice and Phebe Cary
and Mary Clemmer Ames, and together we gave the proud white male such a
serving up as did our souls good and could not hurt him, intrenched, as
he is, behind creeds, codes, customs, and constitutions, with vizor and
breastplate of self-complacency and conceit. In criticising Jessie
Boucherett's essay on "Superfluous Women," in which she advises men in
England to emigrate in order to leave room and occupation for women, the
_Tribune_ said: "The idea of a home without a man in it!" In visiting
the Carys one always felt that there was a home--a very charming one,
too--without a man in it.
Once when Harriet Beecher Stowe was at Dr. Taylor's, I had the
opportunity to make her acquaintance. In her sanctum, surrounded by
books and papers, she was just finishing her second paper on the Byron
family, and her sister Catherine was preparing papers on her educational
work, preparatory to a coming meeting of the ladies of the school board.
The women of the Beecher family, though most of them wives and mothers,
all had a definite life-work outside the family circle, and other
objects of intense interest beside husbands, babies, cook stoves, and
social conversations. Catherine said she was opposed to woman suffrage,
and if she thought there was the least danger of our getting it, she
would write and talk against it vehemently. But, as the nation was safe
against such a calamity, she was willing to let the talk go on, because
the agitation helped her work. "It is rather paradoxical," I said to
her, "that the pressing of a false principle can help a true one; but
when you get the women all thoroughly educated, they will step off to
the polls and vote in spite of you."
One night on the train from New York to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, I
found abundant time to think over the personal peculiarities of the many
noble women who adorn this nineteenth century, and, as I recalled them,
one by one, in America, England, France, and Germany, and all that they
are doing and saying, I wandered that any man could be so blind as not
to see that woman has already taken her place as the peer of man. While
the lords of creation have been debating her sphere and drawing their
chalk marks here and there, woman has quietly stepped outside the barren
fields where she was compelled to graze for centuries, and is now in
green pastures and beside still waters, a power in the world of thought.
These pleasant cogitations were cut short by my learning that I had
taken the wrong train, and must change at Harrisburg at two o'clock in
the morning. How soon the reflection that I must leave my comfortable
berth at such an unchristian hour changed the whole hue of glorious
womanhood and every other earthly blessing! However, I lived through the
trial and arrived at Williamsport as the day dawned. I had a good
audience at the opera house that evening, and was introduced to many
agreeable people, who declared themselves converted to woman suffrage by
my ministrations. Among the many new jewels in my crown, I added, that
night, Judge Bently.
In November, 1869, I passed one night in Philadelphia, with Miss
Anthony, at Anna Dickinson's home--a neat, three-story brick house in
Locust Street. This haven of rest, where the world-famous little woman
came, ever and anon, to recruit her overtaxed energies, was very
tastefully furnished, adorned with engravings, books, and statuary. Her
mother, sister, and brother made up the household--a pleasing,
cultivated trio. The brother was a handsome youth of good judgment, and
given to sage remarks; the sister, witty, intuitive, and incisive in
speech; the mother, dressed in rich Quaker costume, and though nearly
seventy, still possessed of great personal beauty. She was intelligent,
dignified, refined, and, in manner and appearance, reminded one of