No. 780 Henry Browne Blackwell
Published in What I Owe My Father, edited by Sydney Strong. 1931.
To Henry B. Blackwell by Alice Stone Blackwell, Boston
The tribute begins with a quotation from the book Edwin Brothertoft by Theodore Winthrop.
A tribute to Henry B. Blackwell by Theodore Winthrop in “Edwin Brothertoft.”
“It is a mighty influence when the portrait of a noble forefather puts its eye on one who wears his name, and says, by the language of an unchanging look: ‘I was a Radical in my day; be thou the same in thine!’ I turned my back upon the old tyrannies and heresies, and struck for the new liberties and beliefs; my liberty and belief are doubtless already tyranny and heresy to thine age; strike thou for the new! I worshipped the purest God of my generation—it may be that a purer god is revealed to thine; worship him with thy whole heart.”
Alice Stone Blackwell
My debt to my father is twofold, as a daughter and as a woman. He was not only a kind and loving father, but a powerful champion of equal rights for women. Many prominent men in America, from Abraham Lincoln down, favored woman suffrage, and not a few did valiant work for it; but Henry B. Blackwell was the one man of hight talents who really devoted his life to that cause.
I will speak first of my debt to him as a daughter. He transmitted to me a sound heredity on his own side, and he gave me a good mother. These are probably the greatest boons that any father can bestow upon a child. A young man was once asked by his friends why he did not try to marry a certain very beautiful but rather frivolous girl. He said, “Is she a person whom you would pick out to entrust with the bringing up of your children?” They had to admit that she was not. He answered, “Well, I do not choose to entrust her with the bringing up of mine.” My father did not make that mistake.
He also handed down to me a fine family tradition of public spirit and public service. Born in Bristol, England, May 4, 1825, he came to this country with his parents at seven years old. He came to this country with his parents at seven years old. His father, Samuel Blackwell, was a sugar-refiner, and set up in New York the first vacuum pans ever used in America. His business brought him in contact with slaveholders from the West Indies and elsewhere, and he was shocked at their attitude and that of the public towards the slaves. He joined the Anti-Slavery Society, and wrote a volume of “Slavery Rhymes/’ which he published anonymously, because slavery was then an “American institution/’ and any criticism of American institutions by a foreigner aroused the ire of those opposed to improvement, just as it does today. When George Thompson came over from England to help the abolitionists, his presence was made a pretext for mob violence.
The Blackwell family worked for the Anti-Slavery Fairs, and little Henry, who wrote a handsome hand, copied out antislavery mottoes to be wrapped up with the candies. When it was unsafe for William Lloyd Garrison to pass the night in New York City, he passed it at the Blackwell home on Long Island. Dr. Abram Cox also took refuge there when the mob of New York rose against him because he had said ; in an antislavery sermon, that Jesus did not belong to the Caucasian race, and word went out that he had said “Jesus Christ was a nigger.”
A few years later, Mr. Blackwell moved to Cincinnati, partly with the hope of introducing the cultivation of beet sugar, and thus indirectly striking a heavy blow at the slave-grown cane sugar of the South; but he died soon after his arrival. The widow and elder daughters opened a school for girls, and supported the family till the sons, all of whom were younger, were able to earn. Henry helped his mother by acting as cook for the family. All his life he was ready to lend a cheerful and energetic hand with the housework. He was given a year at Kemper College, near St. Louis. Here he distinguished himself greatly in his studies; but the family finances did not allow him to stay longer. At fourteen, he became an office boy, at $2 per week. At twenty, he was the manager of two mills. With the money earned in the milling business, he bought a small brick house at Walnut Hills, a suburb of Cincinnati. Characteristically, he placed the house in his mother’s name. It was the family home for years. It was close to Lane Seminary, and Harriet Beecher Stowe and her husband were their neighbors and friends.
Henry was a young man full of life and vivacity. He had curly black hair, blue eyes, remarkably bright and sparkling, and such beautiful teeth that his friends nicknamed him Carker, after the villain with glittering teeth in “Dombey and Son.’ 7 He had a kind heart and a most chivalrous disposition. He was a good writer, an eloquent speaker, and a fine singer. There is a saying, “A merry heart doeth good like medicine.” Henry overflowed by nature with wit and fun. He kept everybody laughing; and, as everybody likes to laugh, he was a great social favorite. In addition, he was an active and capable man of business. He became partner in a hardware firm, and for seven years he travelled on horseback, through Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and Wisconsin, securing orders; journeying often over unfathomably muddy roads, sometimes riding many miles by compass through unbroken forest, sleeping in log cabins, and meeting the plain people of the Middle West in a way that he always said was worth more to him than a college education. He worked in malarious regions where it was popularly believed that the only way for people to escape fever and ague was to keep themselves soaked in whiskey; but he steered clear of liquor, and remained well. He also kept up his English habit of a daily cold bath, though he often passed the night in primitive pioneer shanties where there was sometimes not even a wash-basin. He carried with him a rubber sheet with a broad hem, through which a rope was passed. Laying the sheet on the floor, he would set a pail of water on it and take a sponge bath; then pick up the sheet by the corners and pour the water back into the pail. This device may still be found useful by those who travel where there are no bath-tubs, or who cannot afford a “room with bath.”
He built up a large trade in the Wabash Valley. In addition, he obtained a quantity of wild lands. He wrote, long after:
“Wisconsin, wishing to use for school purposes the magnificent grant of wild lands made by the United States government, offered them in lots of forty acres each, on thirty years’ credit, at $1.25 per acre; and its sixteenth section lands on ten years’ credit. A friend suggested that I should go out and select a few thousand acres for him and myself. Having plenty of youthful energy, and very little money, I accepted, and in a single forenoon enlisted a number of other merchants, my friends, in an arrangement to locate 50,000 acres of these school lands, receiving ten per cent, of the certificates as my compensation for selecting them. “An advance payment of ten cents per acre was required in gold, and the next question was how to get this gold safely to Madison. There were no railroads running through the State then; Beloit was the ‘jumping-off place.’ I procured a strong, old-fashioned hair trunk, filled it with layers of cotton batting, distributed my $6,500 of gold coin between the layers of cotton, locked it, put the key in my pocket, and surrounded the trunk with a complication of strong cords, with knots not easily untied. The weight of the trunk thus packed was not unusual, the light cotton and heavy coin averaging each other. Taking stage at Beloit, I saw my trunk strapped up behind the stage, and on arrival at Madison it was piled up with fifty others in the entry of the hotel, where it remained for more than three weeks, while I was away prospecting.
“I resolved to visit Bad Axe County. It was winter; the snow was deep and the air bleak and frosty. But I started out from Madison on horseback with a pocket compass in my saddlebags, and made my way down the Black Earth Valley to the Wisconsin River, and thence to Viroqua, through an unbroken forest. At Richland Centre I found a single log cabin, where I spent the night. From there to the Kickapoo River there were no roads. I made my way by pocket compass through the majestic forests. The only sign of human presence I came across was a deer hanging by his hind legs from a hickory sapling, having been shot and swung up by some hunter who took this method of preserving his meat from the wolves.
“At length I reached Viroqua. The news of my errand quickly spread, and one afternoon, on my return from prospecting, I heard that an indignation meeting of the inhabitants of the county was called, to meet at the shanty which served as a Court House, with the intention of putting a summary stop to my proceedings. I attended it, much to the surprise of some, who had called it, and asked for a hearing. I explained to the crowd that these lands, when sold, became at once subject to State and local taxation for roads, school houses, etc.; that they could only be made profitable to the buyers by reselling them, thus bringing in population and capital; in short, instead of a grasping speculator and greedy monopolist, I was a public benefactor. In this view I was supported by Mr. McMichael, the County Clerk. My arguments prevailed; a revulsion of feeling took place, a resolution of approval was adopted, and the meeting, designed to expel* me, adjourned in an entirely good humor.”
It was many years, however, before the lands thus acquired became profitable.
He first met Lucy Stone in 1850, when she called at his hardware store to cash a small check from the treasurer of the Anti-Slavery Society. He was so taken with her that he advised his elder brother Samuel, who was looking for a wife, to make her acquaintance; and he put off paying the check till the next day, in order to send Samuel to her with the money. Samuel, though he found her pleasing, was not moved to pay court to her ; but the younger brother never forgot her. In 1853 he went east to attend the antislavery meetings of Anniversary Week. He heard Lucy speak in New York, and was filled with enthusiasm. A few days later, while listening to her plea for woman suffrage before a committee of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, he made up his mind to marry her if he could.
It took some courage even to think of such a thing. Although she was very popular with the abolitionists, the temperance people and the friends of woman’s rights, she was looked upon by the conservative public as the embodiment of unwomanliness, and was denounced by the press as a “she-hyena.” In reality, she was small and gentle, but gifted with entire courage, great natural eloquence, and a singularly sweet voice. Mobs would sometimes listen to her when they howled down every other speaker. He had a long and arduous courtship. Her mind was made up not to marry, and she had refused many offers; but she had never before been besieged by so charming and so formidable a wooer. “Your father could have got any woman to marry him/’ my mother’s sister said to me, when she was herself a grandmother.
An incident of his antislavery work advanced him very much in Lucy’s regard. When slaves were brought voluntarily by their owners into a free State, they became legally free. During an antislavery convention at Salem, 0., while he was on the platform reciting a poem of his own composition, a telegram announced that the train going west through Salem at 6 P.M. would bring a little slave girl, with her master and mistress, on the way to Tennessee. A committee was appointed to take the child off the train, and did so. For his active part in this affair, he was fiercely abused by the press, a reward of $10,000 was offered for his head at a large public meeting in Memphis, Tenn., and, for months after, Kentuckians would come into his hardware store, look at him long and hard, and say, a Ah, damn you, we shall know you if we ever catch you on the other side of the river ! ” This hurt his business and angered his partners, but endeared him to Lucy.
Even after her heart was won, she felt that she ought to stay single, in order to devote herself wholly to her work for equal rights. But he promised to devote himself to the same work, and persuaded her that, together, they could do more for it than she could alone. No promise was ever more faithfully kept.
The reactionaries had often expressed the wish that some one would marry Lucy and “shut her up.” A doggerel rhyme in the Boston Post closed with the lines:
“A name like Curtius’ shall be his,
On Fame’s loud trumpet blown,
Who with a wedding kiss shuts up
The mouth of Lucy Stone!”
But in after years the enemies of equal rights felt anything but gratitude towards my father. He added his own eloquent voice to hers, and together they made a great team.
The famous protest against the inequalities of the marriage laws, which they issued at the time of their wedding (May i, 1855), was his idea, and was written by him, with suggestions from her. It had wide publicity, and helped to get the laws amended. He heartily concurred in her wish to keep her own name.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had known him for years as a young fellow full of fun, frolic and audacity, was amazed by his marriage to the serious and earnest woman’s rights lecturer, seven years his senior. She said, “Is it possible that that wild boy has married Lucy Stone!”
One debt that I owed to my father was shared by the whole country. A comparatively small incident had great consequences. Public sentiment in Ohio in 1855 was about equally divided on the slavery question, but the free soilers were split into two factions, the Liberty party and the American party. Unless they could get together, they had no chance of defeating the proslavery men. A meeting held in Cincinnati to choose delegates was so stormy that union seemed hopeless, and the convention was about to break up in disorder, when, by an extraordinarily eloquent speech, he brought the two factions together, and secured the election of delegates favoring Salmon P. Chase. At the State Convention, the vote of the Cincinnati delegation turned the scale in favor of the nomination of Chase for Governor. A few years later, at the National Republican Convention, the vote of the Chase delegation turned the scale in favor of the nomination of Lincoln for President.
“We see dimly in the present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith, how weak an arm may turn the iron helm of fate.”
Much of my childhood’s happiness was owing to my father. He could spin fairy tales as enthralling as “Alice in Wonderland/’ making them up as he went along, with an unfailing flow of fancy. Some of them were serials, and ran for months. One was about a mermaid who had her nest in the reeds by the river. The eggs were square, pink at one end and purple at the other. She promised to reward him with three fairy gifts if he would come every night, for a certain length of time, and sit on the nest while she went away for rest and recreation. Her enemies were always trying to break the eggs. Sometimes they dropped down from the branches of the trees overhead; sometimes they came boring up through the nest from below. Sometimes they tried to make him late for his appointment. One evening a crowd of pigs got into the garden just as he was about to start. He chased them around and around, but they would not go out at the gate. At last it dawned upon him that they were goblin pigs, sent to delay him. He made a bee line for the river, arriving at the nest just in time. Once he was warned that some flour mills on his way had been set to grinding poisoned grain. Clouds of poisonous flour-dust came streaming out from the tall mills, and he had to make a long detour. Every night there was a fresh attack or a fresh stratagem each a new delight to the little girl into whose eager ears the tale was poured.
During the nearly forty years of their married life, he worked side by side and hand in hand with his wife for the equal rights cause, getting up conventions, circulating petitions, addressing Legislatures, and cooperating in all the hard and heavy work of pressing an unpopular reform. He helped to organize the New England Woman Suffrage Association in 1868, and the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869; he took part in the campaigns for woman suffrage amendments in many States, and helped the friends of equal rights in many others to organize their State Associations. His eloquence, wit, good humor and business ability were a tower of strength to the movement. When Lucy Stone raised the $10,000 with which the Woman’s Journal was started in Boston in 1870, with Mary A. Livermore as editor, he gave her the first $1,000 towards it. He told her he would always help the paper financially, but there was one thing he would never do, and that was to take any part in the labor of editing it. But later, when the $10,000 was all gone, and it became necessary to have editors who would serve without pay, he shouldered his share of that burden also, and continued to carry it as long as he lived, with such help as I was able to give him and my mother later. For forty years, he never missed attending the annual National Conventions. The story of his manifold activities cannot be told here. When Lucy Stone died, in 1893, he said to me, “We must try to keep Mamma’s flag flying”; and during the sixteen years that he survived her, he never ceased to work for it.
He was not only a champion of equal rights for all women, but was a friend to any individual woman who needed help, rich or poor, young or old, pretty or ugly; he was always ready to lend a hand to help carry her burdens, literal or metaphorical.
He was a man of cosmopolitan sympathies. He was a member of the first society of American Friends of Russian Freedom, was an officer in the Friends of Armenia, and addressed innumerable protest meetings against the Armenian massacres, the massacres of the Jews in Russia, and the attempts to deport political exiles. The great foreign audiences stood up instinctively when he rose to speak. They looked upon him as the ideal American. At the celebration of his eightieth birthday, William Lloyd Garrison, the son of the Liberator, said:
“It is his virtue that the conduct of his special cause does not diminish his interest in every struggle for human freedom. He breaks a lance for all down-trodden and oppressed peoples. Wherever a protest against tyranny is called for, you may be sure that Mr. Blackwell will answer ‘Adsum.’ Tonight an Armenian meeting may claim his presence, tomorrow Russian exiles enlist his aid; if the Chinese are in the toils of persecution, he counts himself among their friends. When his fellow citizens rise against the coal monopoly, he is at Faneuil Hall to make the rousing speech of the occasion. When prejudice against the Negro and lynching horrors are to be denounced, his eloquent indignation is assured. … He abhors Imperialism, advocates with enthusiasm reciprocity and freer trade, is numerous at the State House committee hearings, to speak the humanitarian word on topics of wide diversity. Having finished his four-score years with juvenile freshness, he celebrates the beginning of his eighty-first year by helping organize a movement for the Initiative and Referendum. How fortunate for us that he was early transplanted from English Bristol.”
He was closely connected with the progress of women in the professions. His elder sister, Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, pioneered the way for women into medicine, against tremendous opposition. When she died, at 89, there were more than seven thousand women physicians and surgeons in the United States. His sister-in-law, the Rev. Dr. Antoinette Brown Blackwell, was the first woman to be ordained a minister. She too was bitterly denounced. When she died, at 96, more than three thousand women were preaching.
Not long before his death, some one said, in introducing him to a friend, “This gentleman is the husband of Lucy Stone or was the husband of Lucy Stone.” “Is the husband of Lucy Stone,” he said, with an accent of tenderness and pride.
He passed away on Sept. 9, 1909. He left directions that his body should be cremated. He rather disliked the idea of cremation, but he wished to follow his wife’s example, and to have their ashes mingled in one urn. Dr. Borden P. Bowne, who conducted the funeral service, said, in part:
“I do not know whether Mr. Blackwell belonged to any church organization, and I am not much concerned to know;” but he belonged to the Church of churches, the Church of the Good Samaritan. He loved righteousness and hated iniquity. He had a passion for justice, and devoted his life to securing it. He lived with protest on his lips and with resistance in his will against everything that harmed or hindered humanity. His individual benefactions were many, and generally wise. His life has been a blessing to multitudes. It would be hard to find another man so widely beloved. Social conditions are more just, laws are more equal, public morality has a higher tone, and the public conscience is more keen and discerning because of his life and work.
Even the attorney of the “Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women who had gibed and jeered at him at the legislative hearings for years, said after his death, “He was a splendid man.” “Such a capable, wonderful man/’ a young business man remarked. “Such a wonderful, lovable man,” said the editor of one of the chief Boston daily papers. Of the many things that I owe to my father, the one for which I am most grateful is the example of a great and beautiful life.