The life of Frances E. Willard

Front matter

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Preface

As the sharer of the intimate life of Frances E. Willard for more than a score of her heroic years, it is at once a pleasure and a privilege to record a few of the memories of this great leader who made the world wider for women and more homelike for humanity. In this sacred task the co-operation of Lady Henry Somerset, Dr. F. W. Gunsaulus, Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, and many other friends, is gratefully acknowledged.

The accompanying biography is revised and abridged from a memorial volume issued in 1898. Subsequent honors paid to her sainted memory, the transient character of much of the material formerly used, the demand for a smaller book with wider perspective of this life as unique as it was great, and the fact that there is within the reach of the public, no complete record of one of America's most noble citizens — these comprise a sufficient reason for the appearance of this work.

Anna A. Gordon

Contents

CHAPTER PAOE

Introduction by Lady Henry

Somerset . • vii

Introduction

LADY HENRY SOMERSET

Frances E. Willard is the greatest woman philanthropist of our generation. I do not hesitate at the use of this word "greatest." I am persuaded that when the annals of the nineteenth century are written and the record of the modern movement that has metamorphosed the position of woman comes to be told, her name will stand pre-eminent as the one who saw with a keen prophetic eye ahead of her time, who realized the dangers, who steered clear of the rocks and shoals that beset any great change, and who furnished the women, not only of a great continent but the world over, with a just realization of their rightful position, by her safeguarding gospel: "Womanliness first — afterward, what you will."

The temperance cause was the open door through which she entered into her service for the world. The defense of woman, her uplift, her education for the widening way, was the task she set herself to accomplish. But to no special cause did Frances Willard belong; her life was the property of humanity, and I believe that there was not a single x INTRODUCTION

cry that could rise from the world, not a single wrong that could be redressed, not a "wail of weakness" of any kind that did not find an immediate echo in her heart, that did not call her to rise and go forth in that chivalric strength and gentleness which, in the battle of life, have clad her as with a holy panoply.

For years her name has been a household word among all those who work for the uplift of humanity in England; and I well remember the day when I first received a letter of encouragement and cheer from her, words so sisterly and sympathetic that it seemed as though a new light had shined in the darkness and difficulty of our temperance reform. In that letter she sent me a little knot of white ribbon, and all these years that little bow has been pinned into my Bible. It came as a promise of the most beautiful friendship that ever blessed any life.

Thinking of her as I saw her in the fulness of her power at the great Boston Convention, in 1891, it seems to me that no other will ever fill the place she has left vacant, for to no other could be given that rare combination of power and perfect gentleness, of playful humor and tender pathos, that strange mixture of reserve with an almost childlike confidence, and, above all, that sublime spirituality that always made one feel how near she was to the

INTRODUCTION xi

invisible, how lightly the mantle of the material lay upon her.

She came to us in England in the summer of 1892, bowed with grief at the loss of the mother who had been the strong staff of her life, who had upheld her through her work, cheered her in her discouragements, pointed her onward in her days of weariness. I think I have never known a human soul feel sorrow so acutely as did this daughter, when for a while a cloud hid that mother from her sight. It was like the grieving of a little child that holds out its hands in the dark and feels in vain for the accustomed clasp that sent it happily to sleep. She was welcomed in this country as I suppose no other philanthropist has been welcomed in our time. The vast meeting that was organized to greet her at Exeter Hall was the most representative that has ever assembled in that historic building; and certainly no more varied gathering of philanthropists could be brought together with one object than met there that day. On the platform sat members of Parliament, dignitaries of our own church, and temperance leaders from the Roman Catholic Church, leaders of the Labor movement and of the Salvation Army, and delegations from the Methodist, Baptist, and Congregational Churches, and the Society of Friends. The chief Jewish rabbi sent a congratulatory letter and signed the address of welcome, xii INTRODUCTION

which was also signed by hundreds of local branches of the British Women's Temperance Association.

"What went ye out for to see?" was the question that one asked one's self as that frail form stood in the midst of the vast assembly. A woman called of God; a woman who preached Christ in politics, Christ in the home, the equality of and the same standard of purity for men and women, the liberation of the oppressed, the destruction of legalized wrong, the upbuilding of all that was great in home, in government, and in the nation. And she who had gone forth without money and without influence, but with an untarnished name, a clear brain, an indomitable will, and a God-given inspiration had in her twenty years of work gathered round her, not only the sympathies of her own land, but the admiration and good-will of the whole English-speaking race. The time she spent in England was a triumphal procession, and greetings awaited her in every city of importance throughout the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. The Synod Hall in Edinburgh, the historic temperance town of Preston, Dublin and Glasgow, vast assemblies in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, packed audiences in Liverpool and Birmingham — all vied to do her honor; and wherever she went, her clear, incisive thought, the pathos and |>ower of her words, and, perhaps most of all, the sweet, gentle woman, won the

INTRODUCTION xiii

heart as well as the intellect of all who met to greet her and assembled to hear her. There was no trait in Miss Willard's character that was more prominent than her generous power of help. If an idea came to her, she had no thought but to share it with her fellow- workers. Anything that she had said was common property, anything that she could write might bear another's signature; to help, to help — this was her only thought; for she was inspired by a love which "seeketh not her own," but that gave of the treasure that had been poured into her life as freely as the sunshine ripens and blesses the world.

I saw a saint — how canst thou tell that he

Thou sawest was a saint?

I saw one like to Christ so luminously By patient deeds of love, his mortal taint Seemed made his groundwork for humility.

And when he marked me downcast utterly,

Where foul I sat and faint, Then more than ever Christ-like kindled he; And welcomed me as I had been a saint, Tenderly stooping low to comfort me.

Christ bade him, "Do thou likewise." Wherefore he

Waxed zealous to acquaint His soul with sin and sorrow, if so be He might retrieve some latent saint : "Lo, I, with the child God hath given to me!"

— Christina Rossetti.

Only the golden rule of Christ can bring the golden age of man. ^^ .

Chapter I Ancestry And Childhood

No great soul appears suddenly. Mental and moral capital are investments made for us by our forefathers. Oliver Wendell Holmes would have us think that the child's value to society is determined # a century before its birth, and such souls as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell go far to prove his theory. Certainly, the measure of greatness in a man or a woman is often decided by the intellectual and ethical streams flowing down from the ancestral hills into the new human soul.

Yet in every great soul remains something that must be referred to God only. The secret of greatness may be in part ancestral, but the gift is divine, the source of genius veiled in clouds and thick darkness forever eluding the seeker. In the last analysis we may only say that it is God who, for some appointed mission, baptizes a soul with a power not its own; it is He who girds the man or the woman for the life task.

Miss Willard's father, Josiah Flint Willard, born in Wheelock, Vermont, and her mother, Mary Thompson Hill Willard, a native of Danville in the same state, fell heir to all the best qualities of the rich soil of New England, and they in turn bequeathed their united treasure to the daughter, whom they trained for her career as teacher, author, orator, philanthropist, and social reformer.

Major Simon Willard, of Horsmonden, Kent, the first Willard to settle in the New World in 1634, was one of the founders of Concord, Massachusetts — afterward famous as the home of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and the Alcotts — the literary center of New England. Major Willard was a Puritan who took for his intellectual motto, "Truth for authority, not authority for truth." The early history of Massachusetts is full of allusions to his many and varied services in an official capacity, all reflecting high honor upon his character as a man of integrity, ability, and energy. "He was early called into positions of public trust, disciplined by the teachings of toil, deprivation, and varied experience, and had the confidence and affection of an enlightened community throughout all the emergencies of a new state." Among the immediate descendants of this rugged and righteous ancestor are two presidents of Harvard University, also Rev. Samuel Willard, pastor of the Old South Church,

Boston, who opposed the hanging of the witches, and Solomon Willard, of Quincy, Massachusetts, the architect of Bunker Hill Monument, who refused pay for his services, and of whom Edward Everett said, "His chief characteristic was that he wanted to do everything for everybody for nothing." Miss Willard's great-grandfather, Rev. Elijah Willard, was for forty years pastor of a church in Dublin, near Keene, New Hampshire, and he served as chaplain throughout the Revolutionary War.

Miss Willard's father was elegant in person, and charming in manner. He was devoutly religious, endowed with a fine mind, an inflexible will, and unusual powers of thought and speech. His daughter Frances further described him as "thoroughly intellectual, an insatiable reader, and a man possessing exceedingly fine taste."

Miss Willard's mother, Mary Thompson Hill, was of New England stock and one of a singularly gifted family. Her grandfather Hill was a man of self-sacrificing integrity, as is averred in this recorded incident: "When, early in his career, he had become security for a friend who failed, men of good conscience came to him, urging that a man's family was a 'preferred creditor' in all business relations, and that he should not give up all he had to satisfy another man's creditors. But he was a man of clean hands — swearing to his own hurt and changing not. He only answered, 'It is the nature of a bondsman when the principal fails to stand in the gap.' And he stood in the gap, losing all his fortune rather than fail to be true to the implied promise of his bond."

In Mrs. Willard's maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Thompson, of Durham, New Hampshire, we find the moral courage that characterized our fearless reformer. He was once a guest at a dinner where everyone drank the health of the tyrant whom Americans were fighting, each saying as glasses were clinked, "King George's health, and it shall go round !" Then the young hero, Nathaniel, startled the disloyal Tories by crying out, "Washington's health, and it shall go round!" and was nothing daunted, though driven from the room and in danger of his life. Her father, John Hill, was a kind of moral Hercules, a man of great courage and decision, widely known for his democratic principles and his deep interest in all those agencies that were fitted to develop the intellectual and moral forces of the community, while his wife, gentle Polly Thompson, possessing a character described as "almost angelic," was equally well known for her zeal for school, college, and church.

Scientists tell us that climate affects character; that children of ease and abundance in the tropics, without tools, without books, without home, church,

BIRTHPLACE. CHURCH YILLE. NEW YORK

X

FOREST HOME or school, are the children of lassitude and laziness; meanwhile civilization follows the belt of the snowdrift, and in the rigorous warfare with winter, adversity, poverty, struggle, man develops selfreliance, hardihood, courage — the true material for intellectual culture and moral wealth. And certain it is that the oak and the rock of the New England hills seem to have repeated themselves in the iron will and the unyielding courage of the Willard family. The very name means " one who wills," and this doubtless explains the family motto, "Gaudet patientia duris" (Patience rejoices in hardships) .

It was a rarely endowed home into which Frances Elizabeth Willard was born on September 28, 1839, in Churchville, New York, a home sheltered from adverse chance to soul or to body by the father's strength of heart and arm and will; with the motherclimate warm within, winning out and fostering all wholesome developments — a richly nurtured childgarden, where the sturdy small plants struck deep root and spread wide leafage to the air, catching every drop of pure knowledge and every beam of home-love falling within its rays. Here the "rosywhite flower of the child's consciousness unfolded its five-starred cup to the bending blue above." Baby Frances talked before she could walk, "speaking quite wisely at fourteen months," but not until she was two years of age did her little feet begin their world-wide pilgrimage in obedience to the dictates of that electric brain and humanity-loving heart.

Seventy years ago the hegira from the East to the West was still in progress. The rough line of the pioneers, the sappers and miners of civilization, had finished their task, and made clear paths through the wilderness and the woods. Then everywhere, from cultured and thoughtful homes in the East, the exodus began. No longer was the going forth by individuals, man by man, each fighting for his own hand, but by families, friendly and allied. The future would bring to them new outward conditions, but they carried the means and appliances to alter them to their will. Indeed, they were in themselves, in aptitude and skill of heart, mind, and hand, the mature human harvest of all the fulness of the past — that human harvest which is at once the treasuring or garnering up of the old and the seed of the new.

In this onward march it was fitting that the Willards should have their place. Reared amid the loveliest surroundings, royal Americans in heart *and mind, members of the old stone church which bore the simple name, "The Church of God in Ogden," and which recognized no lines of doctrinal difference in worship and life, but united on the ground of obedient acknowledgment of the Lord and

His Word, it was no wonder that in the providence of God these two were sent out as chosen seed for the new lands of the West.

Their first journey overland from Church ville, New York, terminated at Oberlin, Ohio, where these discerning parents, who had both been successful teachers in the Empire State, invested five years of student life at the college. Here the beloved sister Mary was born, and here the older children, Oliver and Frances, received in awe and love their early impress of the ideas of religion and scholarship. The ardent desire for learning which had hitherto led the parents on as by a pillar of fire, changed to the threatening cloud of the father's failing health, which imperatively demanded the free air of the open West and the simplest out-door life; so in the spring of 1846 we find them again "stepping westward." Three of the quaint, roomy, white-hooded prairie schooners, which were then the common feature of Western highways, carried the intrepid family. The father led the way. The little son, ambitious of manhood, with gravely assumed responsibility guided the strong and gentle horses which pulled the second vehicle over the smooth prairie miles or the jolting corduroy lengths that bridged inconvenient morasses. The mother, with her baby girls perched safely beside her, in the fine seat father's old-fashioned desk made when it was properly pillowed, brought up the rear.

They passed through Chicago, then chiefly notable as the possibility of a future city, and, continuing their three weeks' journey, save the Sunday "rests," which were strictly observed, came at length to the banks of the beautiful Rock River, near Janesville, Wisconsin, about fourteen miles from Beloit. Here they stopped. To the west was the winding river, serene and broad, with its spacious outlook to the setting sun; to the east, the illimitable prairie, to be for ages green with the springing wheat, yellow with the ripening grain, and every morning glorified in all its level miles by the streaming light and abundant promise of the sun at its rising. To right and left the wooded hills, like softly sheltering arms, gathered protectingly around. What more perfect place for a new home-nest !

"Forest Home," a picturesque cottage, with rambling roof, gables, dormer-windows, little porches, crannies, and out-of-the-way nooks, was soon built. "The bluffs, so characteristic of Wisconsin, rose about it on the right and the left. Groves of oak and hickory were on either hand; a miniature forest of evergreens almost concealed the cottage from the view of passers-by; the Virginia creeper twined at will around the pillars of the piazza and over the parlor windows, while its rival, the Michigan

FRANCES AND MARY WILLARD [From a daguerreotype made in 1847. Shown in the original locket frame)

rose, clambered over the trellis and the balustrade to the roof. The air was laden with the perfume of flowers. Through the thick and luxuriant growth of shrubbery were paths which strayed off aimlessly, tempting the feet down their mysterious aisles." Here for twelve happy years the Willard children lived an idyllic life of love and labor, play and study, thought and prayer.

Happy the mother who could say of her child, "She was affectionate, confiding, intuitive, precocious, original. She early manifested an exceeding fondness for books. She believed in herself and in her teachers. Her bias toward certain studies and pursuits was very marked. Even in the privacy of her own room she was often in an ecstasy of aspiration. She strongly repelled occupations not to her taste, but was eager to grapple with principles, philosophies, and philanthropies, and was unwearyingly industrious along her favorite lines."

Happy the daughter who could say of her mother, "My mother held that nature's standard ought to be restored, and that the measure of each human being's endowment was the only reasonable measure of that human being's sphere. She had small patience with artificial diagrams placed before women by the dictates of society in which the boundaries of their especial 'sphere' were marked out for them, and one of her favorite phrases was, 'Let a girl grow as a tree grows — according to its own sweet will.' She looked at the mysteries of human progress from the angle of vision made by the eyes of both the man and the woman, and foresaw that the mingling of justice and mercy in the great decisions that affected society would give deliverance from political corruption and governmental onesidedness."

Before the days when Froebel's name became familiar to the tongue, this mother, as good mothers always have done, lived with her children. Their visitors at first were chiefly chipmunks and birds. "I had many ambitions," she said, "but I disappeared from the world that I might reappear at some future day in my children." They made believe the country was a city; they organized a club with as many rules as a parliamentary manual, and printed a newspaper of which Frances was the editor, to say nothing of "breaking the calf" to circus antics. In all this childish activity the mother was aider and abettor, and we have never learned that she discouraged that marvelous novel of adventure, four hundred pages long, written by the aspiring Frances as she sat in the top of her favorite old oak, where she needlessly guarded herself from all intruders by fastening to the tree a board with these words printed upon it in large letters :

THE EAGLE S NEST BEWARE !

While the mother certainly fostered every characteristic impulse of the more daring, firmer-handed Frances, she did not fail to note, encourage, and assist the growth of Mary's quieter genius, and reward its achievements also with love and approbation. "I do not know which of us she loved the more. I do not think the question ever occurred to us. Each had her own heaven in our mother's heart," said Frances, years afterward, when the name of Mary and the life motto she gave to Frances with her last breath, "Tell everybody to be good," had been carved for many a year on the headstone at Rose Hill. "We were content, and oh, how we loved one another!"

Amid all the fun and frolic and endless experiment in activity, there was much solid and systematic study. Before the time when the little brown schoolhouse was built in the woods, the father arranged a study room in the house, with desks and benches made by his own hands. The mother gathered in some neighbors' children, themselves without other advantages, to be all together with her own brood, under her own eyes. A bright, charming, accomplished young woman, Miss Anna Burdick, just from the East and Eastern schools, came daily, and was a loved and delightful teacher. The Institute for the Blind, located not far away, gave the children opportunities for musical training, while they themselves, in the establishment of various outdoor clubs, the "Rustic" and others, continued to study afield what they had learned in books of botany and natural history; and the exercises of the "Studio," with the consequent sketching trips, carried a little way further the art instruction Miss Burdick began. In art, however, Mary was easily first. Frances liked better to dream, philosophize, and plan in the presence of a beautiful scene than to patiently draw it. Her part consisted chiefly in stating the "objects," arranging the routes, and drafting the rules. These rules were very practical: "If one member goes off alone, he shall let Margaret Ryan know of it, so the folks needn't be scared." "There shall always be something good to eat." "We, the members of this club, hereby choose Fred as our dog, although once in a while we may take Carlo. Carlo can go when he has sense enough." This club was doubtless the one having for its object "to tell what great things we have done ourselves, or what Oliver and Loren or the Hodge boys have, or Daniel Boone, or anybody else. "

Great frolics were enjoyed in Forest Home, and it is no reflection on the "Peace" principles dominating her later life that here Frances was the ringleader in the exciting "Indian fights" when mother and girls tried to "hold the fort" against the invading enemy — two boys and a dog! Then it was that Frances as Commanding-General, issued her famous order to "have ready a piece of sparerib to entice the dog away from those two dreadful Indians!" and so weaken the forces to be encountered — a piece of strategy she remembered in after days as possibly applicable to politics.

Forest Home always had its "Fourth of July," celebrated with intense enthusiasm. "Thanksgiving was passed lightly over in that new country where there were no absent members of the family to come home; Christmas found stockings hanging up, with but little in them; New Year hardly counted at all; birthdays cut no great figure, even Washington's going for almost nothing, but the Fourth of July ! — that came in, went on, and passed out in a blaze of patriotic glory. This does not mean fireworks, though, and a big noise, for never a cracker or a torpedo snapped off its Yankee Doodle 'sentiments' on the old farm in all the years. The children had no money to spend, but if they had had, it would not have been allowed to pass away in smoke. So much had their mother talked to them about America that their native land was to them a cherishing mother, like their own in gentleness and strength, only having so many more children, grateful and glad, under her thoughtful care. They loved to give her praises, and half believed that some time, when they grew big enough and got out into the wide, wide world, they should find her and kneel to offer her their loving service and to ask her blessing." Nothing could be more interesting than Miss Willard's graphic description of those glorious "Fourths," prophetic of the temperance reform, the independence of women, and the bringing of the home spirit into all the world's affairs; "for when temperance triumphs," she was wont to say, "there will be no drinking on the Fourth; when women march in the procession there will be no powder; when father, mother, and the children have equal part in the great celebration it will be very peaceable and more an affair of the heart than of the lungs."

We are told on the best authority that the only piece of sewing Frances Willard ever attempted without complaint was when she helped make a flag for the patriotic procession the children had planned for one of these great days. To be sure, this flag was only an old pillow case with red calico stripes sewed on and gilt paper stars pinned in the corner, and they lifted it up on a broomstick (again a bit of prophecy, mayhap), but it was their country's flag, and Oliver, who marched proudly at the head of the procession, flag in hand, was gallant enough to say to Frances when half the distance agreed upon had been traversed, "Wouldn't you like to carry the flag half the time?" Frances tells us she was not at all backward about coming forward in that kind of business, and that her father and mother laughed heartily when she changed the order of exercises by saying, "That * Yankee Doodle* we were playing does not go very well; let us try * Forever Float'!" so they all joined in singing as she held the flag :

"Forever float that standard sheet

Where breathes the foe but falls before us, With freedom's soil beneath our feet, And freedom's banner streaming o'er us."

Frances slyly whispered to her sister Mary, "That's a clear case of We, Us and Company; why can't it always stay so?"

Mary's neatly written journal gives a glimpse of those halcyon days :

Frank said we might as well have a ship, if we did live on shore; so we took a hencoop pointed at the top, put a big plank across it and stood up, one at each end, with an old rake handle apiece to steer with; up and down we went, slow when it was a calm sea and fast when there was a storm, until the old hen clucked and the chickens all ran in, and we had a lively time. Frank was captain and I was mate. We made out charts of the sea and rules about how to navigate when it was good weather, and how when it was bad. We put up a sail made of an old sheet and had great fun, until I fell off and hurt me.

To-day Frank gave me half her dog Frisk, that she bought lately, and for her pay I made a promise which mother witnessed and here it is :

"I, Mary Willard, promise never to touch anything lying or being upon Frank Willard 's writing desk which father gave her. I promise never to ask, either by speaking, writing or singing, or in any other way, any person or body to take off or put on anything on said stand and desk without special permission from said F. W. I promise never to touch anything which may be in something upon her stand and desk; I promise never to put anything on it or in anything on it; I promise if I am writing or doing anything else at her desk to go away the minute she tells me. If I break this promise I will let the said F. W. come into my room and go to my trunk or go into any place where I keep my things and take anything of mine she likes. All this I promise, unless entirely different arrangements are made. These things I promise upon my most sacred honor."

From "Frank's" journal of the same period we quote her first poem, composed in her tenth year, which proves afresh that the thoughts of youth "are long, long thoughts":