o the calmer suggestions of reason, the women of the
country became divided into two bitterly hostile camps because of the
matters which their husbands and brothers discussed in the councils of
the nation. It is true that in this case the main question at issue had
unwonted appeal to the women themselves; for she of the South saw her
wealth and luxury threatened by the Abolitionists, while she of the
North made herself a part of the cause of ill-treated humanity, as she
deemed it. Had the men been able to restrain the passions which at this
time stirred them almost to frenzy, the women would not have permitted
the glowing embers to become extinguished without being fanned into red
flame.

That the women of our country were largely instrumental in bringing
about the fratricidal strife which shook that country to its centre
cannot be denied. Even such firebrands as Phillips and Garrison did not
incite so bitter a spirit as did the many women who espoused their
cause. It was a time of fanaticism in the North and fury in the South;
and both these feelings reached their culmination in the women of the
sections. One of the most powerful influences for the making of discord
was from the hand of a woman, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote
_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and thereby led much of the thought and prejudices
of both sections into utterly false channels. The South, and especially
its women, saw in the book a vile libel upon its culture, a base slander
of its most representative institutions; the North, especially its
women, accepted the book as literal fact and looked upon their brothers
and sisters of the South as slave-drivers and cruel task-mistresses,
building the structure of their wealth and luxury upon the crushed
bodies of their weaker and more degraded fellows and careless of the
bitter moans of the oppressed. The acceptance by the North of the book
as fact embittered the South, conscious of the injustice of the thing,
to the last degree, while the North upon that utterly inadequate
authority reviled the South for the imaginary crimes which were rife in
its midst.

The question of the limitation of slavery had been long before the
country and had produced much bitterness of feeling on both sides; but
the idea of the sudden abolishment of the institution, "peaceably if we
can, forcibly if we must," was of new growth in the decade preceding the
war, at least in any coherent and prominent form. In the South were many