the cause of freedom, the man who
gave his life in the attempt to bring from bondage an oppressed and
ill-treated race; and so completely had prejudice and fanaticism clouded
the conscience that when Wendell Phillips made of this man a certain
blasphemous comparison she was not shocked, but, carried away by her
enthusiasm, hailed the words as true and deserved. This does not apply
to all the daughters of the North; there were some who saw clearly and
were not blinded by the simoom of fanaticism which swept over that
section; but there was a minority which dared not lift its voice against
the clamor of the masses. The most fatal of all causes of strife had
fallen upon the North: it did not understand.

But this in turn the Southern woman could not comprehend. She could not
see that the peril to her honor, so plain to her, was beyond the scope
of Northern vision. Therefore she in her wrath accused her sisters of
the North of carelessness of her honor in their enthusiasm for the cause
of a race which would put that honor in peril; she held them indifferent
to the preservation of the crown of her womanhood, so that a few blacks
might be given a freedom which they would turn to the worst account. She
laid it all to sectional hatred, to the cherished anger of the Puritan
against the Cavalier; she was intolerant--and who can blame her, seeing
as she did?--of the canonization of John Brown, which was chiefly the
work of her Northern sisters, to whose enthusiasm that of the men, even
of such fanatics as Phillips, was as nothing. So, begun and fostered in
mutual misunderstanding, grew the breach between the sections; and of
all the hands that digged the grave of Peace, the most eager and rapid
were those of the women of our land.

Where shall we place the blame? Each side saw the other in utter
distortion, each twisted to its own understanding the acts and
utterances of the other, and each was justly incensed according to its
own view. In her ignorance of the certain results of the attempt whose
failure she deplored, the Northern woman saw in the rejoicing of
Southern womanhood over the failure and fate of John Brown only a savage
and unwomanly exultation over the martyrdom of one who had sacrificed
himself that others might live in freedom, the heritage of every
American, and who, in pursuit of his noble ideal, had of necessity
attacked the wealth of the South, which wealth was ill-gotten and
ill-held. The Southern woman looked