A Family Portrait

MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN deserves a medallion in the historic hall of her generation. Indeed she looked and bore herself like bronze and marble, and made upon all observers the impression of heroic womanhood. There are women who have a maturity in their walk even in their teens, and who carry a girlish bearing into old age. There is a unity and a focus in their being which makes them distinguished. In all they do or say there is some natural force which is inevitable and spontaneous. All this is largely a matter of physical endowment, and goes with abundant health. In my grandmother’s case it went with a kind of victorious beauty which became accentuated as the ‘cordage of the countenance’ declared itself in her latest years.

As a small child I was immensely impressed with her. I had never seen anyone like her. She looked like a cameo, and yet had a buoyant — I had almost said bounding — quality which cameos do not suggest. Many persons in her generation were imposing, but she was the first of them that I ever saw, and this gave me a new idea of how people of the great world might or ought to appear. She had a talent for conduct, she had a genius for appearance. She was exactly fitted to lead a cause; and the cause of Abolition, which broke into flame during her girlhood, was a most perfect and typical example of what a cause can be. It was a religious awakening. It began with great and sudden fervor in the breasts of a few people, and worked in such a manner as to separate these people from the rest of the community. To awaken the rest of America became their one idea. Converts came to them, as is usual in such cases, chiefly from the humbler classes; and the emotional fervor of the movement burned with a steady heat for thirty years, till in one way or another every individual in the nation was reached by it. The Abolitionists are sometimes blamed for causing the war; but the real cause of the war was human nature. The war was the final working out of a great change. Abolition was merely the symptom that a change had begun.

Mrs. Chapman was an early convert, and was well fitted to take the lead in such a movement, or, more accurately speaking, to stage and conduct the cause; for Garrison was her leader, and she was in every sense a standard-bearer and a lieutenant, — never, properly speaking, the leader. She was always handsomely dressed, smiling, dominant, ready to meet all comers. She entered a room like a public person. She was a doughty swordswoman in conversation, and wore armor. There was something about her that reminded me of a gladiator, and I sometimes wondered how she had ever borne children at all and whether she had nursed them, or had just marched off to the wars in Gaul and Iberia, while the urchins were being cared for by a freedwoman in the Campania. She was fond of children nevertheless, and used to invite her grandchildren to come to her room, where she would inaugurate the most ceremonious and important sessions of book-covering, and the making of scrap-books, cuttings, and pastings. The gum-arabic must be bought, and melted down on the previous day, the figured papers and prints were produced from European sources, and the whole manufacture was conducted with pomp and mystery. She used to read Shakespeare to us when the youngest was about three, and she would arrange the drawing-room to represent the stage. She had Cæsar on his bier covered with drapery, and a bit of hidden marble to represent his Roman nose. When she read aloud she was so particular about the state of her voice, her enunciation, and her delivery that she would eat no dinner before a performance, but take only the juice of a lemon — as if she were to sing in grand opera.

I think that her temperament and physique must in early life have marked her as a figure-head, and that the many years she afterwards spent in Europe as the representative of a cause gave her, perhaps, the habit of the part. She was, in fact, an embodiment; and this is the reason why her presence conveyed more than her spoken or written words, and why people were so astonished at her, and have left so many descriptions of her. At the basis of her effectiveness was a perfectly phenomenal fund of physical health. She was beaming and ruddy down to her last, days — for she was nearly eighty when she died, and had spent many years toward the end of her life in nursing a paralyzed brother.

One great and rare merit she shared with Garrison. When their cause triumphed they retired, and both of them deserve in this to be canonized for their good taste, — a virt ue not always found in Abolitionists. She retired, then, and lived in Weymouth, Massachusetts, for twenty years or more, with a mother and several sisters, all of them highly educated, bookish people, and two of them, Anne and Dora Weston, staunch anti-slavery veterans. The house was full of souvenirs of Europe, and of presentation copies of the works of midcentury European writers. To be an exile for opinion’s sake is the best introduction to the liberals of all foreign countries; and Paris, during the Second Empire, contained many distinguished Frenchmen who felt that they too were in exile. The French intellectuals were hospitable to the leaders of American anti-slavery, who, so far as social life went, found in France more than they had lost at home.

All the glamour and excitement of life must have gone out of it for my grandmother with the close of the war; yet she continued to live as freshly and to talk as gladly as if some persecution were still in progress, and she were Joan of Arc on the way to the pyre.

Certain failings she had, — perhaps I ought rather to call them never-failings. The sword would leap from the scabbard at any allusion to past controversy in which she or Mr. Garrison had been concerned, or in which any one in the world had held opinions condemned by the Garrisonians. The sword of Gideon flashed with unabated grace. The indignation was as fresh as manna in Arabia — renewed with every matin. She really believed that the memory of the wicked should rot, and that the wicked were — almost every one in the past, and a good many among the survivors. If Channing had been wrong in 1828, she would excoriate him in 1882. If Sumner had hesitated at some moment to see the white light of truth, then his bones must be dragged from their resting place and his habitation become a dunghill. Among the true, inner-seal Garrisonians the wrong kind of anti-slavery was always considered as anti-Christ; and the feats of memory which the Old Guard of Abolition exhibited with regard to the ins and outs of ancient controversy went far to explain the survival of Homer’s poems throughout the long centuries before writing was invented. So, as by fire, are certain things burned into men’s souls.

I must here sorrowfully record a distinction between my grandmother and Garrison himself. Garrison was never rancorous, at least he was never really rancorous. His rancor was political and done for effect. He assumed a tone of malevolence for rhetorical reasons. Now, my grandmother became, by a kind of necessity, more religious than the Pope himself. She was a partisan: she had not t he liberty which the leader enjoys of changing her mind, or of being inconsistently good-humored when she felt like it. She was a halberdier and body-guard. She never seemed to disagree with Mr. Garrison or to turn a critical eye on him. I believe it would have done them both good if she had lifted her battle-axe against the hero now and then.

For twenty-five years she was manager of the Annual Anti-slavery Bazaar which raised the funds for the cause. Europe was laid under contribution for interesting and odd things, which should draw Pro-slavery Boston to the booths. The preparation for the great Fair went on pretty steadily during the rest of the year, and t his branch of anti-slavery propaganda was useful in keeping the liberals in Europe in touch with our struggle. Mrs. Chapman edited a little annual volume or keepsake, called The Liberty Bell, which contained many articles by herself. As the executive of an unpopular cause her business was to be always in good spirits, always in the right, always insuperably competent. It is clear that her activity belongs to a very noble species of political activity rather than to the field of philosophy. The religion of labor makes character, but is injurious to mind. And I cannot help thinking of all the anti-slavery people as being earth-born, titanic creatures, whom Nature spawned to stay a plague — and then withdrew them, and broke the mould. Heroic they remain.

It will be remembered that our struggle over slavery showed up the organized churches of Christianity in a terrible light. What was the use of such churches as ours were shown to be? Where was Christ to be found in them? If an Abolitionist were by nature a mystic, or an evangelical person (like Garrison or S. J. May), he naturally took refuge in the New Testament itself. If he were by nature neither mystical nor romantic, he was apt to become a stoic; and it was to this class that my grandmother belonged. We may see the same tendency exhibited on a great scale in the history of France. The hold which the classics have on the French temperament is due to this, — that the French are not sufficiently emotional to be in sympathy with Hebrew thought: it. offends them. The morality of France is stoical. My grandmother was, in her endowments, and in her limitations, very much such a person as a virtuous stoic of the ancient world may have been. Her religion was a totality as to conduct, but was fragmentary in statement. It was made up of proverbs, poems, and anecdotes from all ages, — wisdom-scraps of an encouraging and militant nature. When the original Garrisonians began their work in 1832 they supposed that slavery would fall before their strokes in a very few years, — five or ten perhaps. And so subtly does the alchemy of activity sustain hope, that they never for a moment lost their conviction that victory was imminent, throughout the thirty years during which victory kept receding before them like the mirage of water in the desert. They only wondered at the delay.

A Cause like this solves all questions whether they be matters of metaphysical doubt or of practical life. One’s business is ruined, of course. A child dies; alas, it is severe, but let the Cause consume our grief. All social ties were snapped long ago; it is a trifle. The old standard-bearers are dropping out from time to time through death; peace be unto them, we have others.

The discipline of such a life — so unusual, so singular — wore down men and women into athletes; the stress made them strong. Thus the anti-slavery fighters grew hardy through a sort of Roman endurance, which shows in their physiognomy. It is this force behind the stroke of fate that we see in people’s faces, — the power behind the die that mints them.

A very notable feature in my grandmother’s life was her friendship with Harriet Martineau, whose literary executor she afterwards became. The friendship was a flawless and enduring union. It began in 1835, and was a source of unalloyed happiness to both women; it ended with Miss Martineau’s death in 1876. The attachment was accompanied by independence on both sides, but my grandmother used to speak of Harriet Martineau with the same sort of reverence that Miss Martineau uses in speaking of her.

At one time Miss Martineau thought of coming to America to work in the Abolition cause. She writes: ‘The discovery of her [Mrs. Chapman’s] moral power and insight were to me so extraordinary that, while I longed to work with and under her, I felt that it must be morally perilous to lean on any one mind as I could not but lean on hers.’

The beginning of their intimacy was not without dramatic interest. When Miss Martineau arrived in this country on a pleasure trip, at the age of thirty-three, she was probably the best krlown, and certainly the most powerful woman in England. Her writings and her opinions had brought her unprecedented popularity both in that country and in America. It was therefore of great importance to the struggling Abolitionists to gain her adherence to their cause. My grandmother wrote to Miss Martineau while the latter was on her travels in the South, but received a rebuff from the authoress.

The time soon came, however, when Miss Martineau felt forced by her conscience to support the unpopular and hated cause of Abolition. She was, as she says, unexpectedly and very reluctantly, but necessarily, implicated in the struggle. The occasion of her declaration of faith was a meeting of the Ladies’ Anti-slavery Society at the house of Francis Jackson on November 18, 1835. She accepted an invitation to this meeting, to the great scandal of her Boston hosts. She attended the meeting and, when called upon, gave, in a few words, the enormous prestige of her name to the cause. This cut short her social career in America, and she became the victim of every kind of vilification. She understood this consequence and did not enjoy it, for it ruined her trip and prevented her seeing American social life.

But the greater moral triumph at the back of this small unpleasantness was also understood both by Miss Martineau and by the audience of women in the hushed parlor of Francis Jackson, at the time she expressed her anti-slavery conviction in a few solemn words. It must be noted parenthetically that every one who speaks of my grandmother always dwells upon the way she looked. It is her looks that they cannot forget.

Miss Martineau in her account of the meeting at Mr. Jackson’s says: ‘ When I was putting on my shawl upstairs, Mrs. Chapman came to me, bonnet in hand, to say, “You know we are threatened with a mob again today: but I do not myself much apprehend it. It must not surprise us; but my hopes are stronger than my fears. ”

' I hear now, as I write, the clear silvery tones of her who was to be the friend of the rest of my life. I still see the exquisite beauty which took me by surprise that day; the slender, graceful form, the golden hair which might have covered her feet; the brilliant complexion, noble profile, and deep blue eyes; the aspect meant by nature to be soft and winning only, but that day (as ever since), so vivified by courage, and so strengthened by upright conviction, as to appear the very embodiment of heroism. “ My hopes,” she said as she threw up her golden hair under her bonnet, “are stronger than my fears.” ’

In the same account Miss Martineau describes the extreme tension that existed concerning her own attitude toward Abolition. No one knew just where she stood, or what she was going to say. She describes also the wave of emotion that swept over the little assemblage upon her unequivocal announcement of her hatred of slavery, and continues: ‘As I concluded Mrs. Chapman bowed down her glowing face on her folded arms, and there was a murmur of satisfaction through the room, while outside, the growing crowd (which did not, however, become large) was hooting and yelling and throwing mud and dirt against the windows.’