Sojourner Truth's America

16. Truth Is Powerful

272 I am pleading for the mothers Who gaze in wild despair, Upon the hated auction-block And see their children there. — sojourner’s hymn He that findeth his life shall lose it; and he that loseth his life for my sake, shall find it. — matt. 10:39 chapter 16 Truth Is Powerful I After the 1856 conventions, Sojourner Truth held meetings in upstate New York, visited her Rochester family, the Posts, and then went to Ohio. Among friends in Ashtabula County, she had a chance to celebrate J. W. Walker’s transition into the spirit world, but also to reflect on the void her friend left in the western movement. Walker had died in Michigan, helping Abolitionists revive their state organization. Although he had left an antislavery legacy “liberally scattered in the cities and towns, the hamlets and cabin settlements of Ohio and Michigan,” his excessive labors had ruined his health and caused his premature death. Who, easterners wondered, could replace the “Parker Pillsbury of the West” as “Kansas fever” emerged? Not even Sojourner Truth realized that she would fulfill that mission. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act, slavery was the burning national issue and shifted the center of antislavery action westward. Settlers from both the North and South flooded Kansas territory. Abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier reflected some Northerners’ attitudes toward Kansas migration: Truth Is Powerful 273 We go to rear a wall of men On freedom’s Southern line, And plant beside the cotton tree The rugged Northern pine.1 Despite such regional chauvinism, armed proslavery Missourians called “border ruffians” greatly outnumbered Northerners. Staking claims in northeastern Kansas (Leavenworth, Atchison, and Easton), Missourians indiscriminately and erroneously considered all Northern settlers “free lovers” and Abolitionists who hid “runaway Niggers.” Free Soilers and Emigrant Aid societies furnished boxes of Sharp’s repeating rifles to the poorly armed Northern settlers. However , the national government gave Missourians the upper hand. Democratic President Franklin Pierce appointed proslavery territorial governors, who then deputized Southerners into militia units, rigged elections, and winked at lawlessness . Reported outrages included the raping of Free Soil white women, the killing and maiming of free blacks, and putting a bounty on “the scalp of an Abolitionist.” One Northern settler was shot and scalped in front of his wife. “A civil war rages on the frontier,” Ohio’s Ashtabula Sentinel bellowed in 1856, under the headline “The Dead Lying in the Streets.”2 Sojourner Truth and the antislavery apostles vowed to transform the West, so that “no union with slaveholders” reverberated throughout the nation. The August Convention in Salem, Ohio, reflected what Ohioans long hoped for—the Executive Committee’s realization that winning the West was the key to abolition. The array of Abolitionists launching the fall campaign was the most impressive ever: Parker Pillsbury, returned after a long European convalescence; Henry C. Wright, now working in Michigan; black Republican John Mercer Langston, teamed with Charles L. Remond and William C. Nell; Sallie Holley and Giles Stebbins, paired with novices Aaron Powell and Susan B. Anthony. For the first time, two black sisters joined Sojourner Truth on the western circuit: Frances Ellen Watkins accompanied the veteran women but also branched off on her own; Sarah Parker Remond traveled with her brother but found the tour too grueling and returned East. Laura Haviland, a petite but powerful preacher, widow, and longtime Michigan Abolitionist, also joined the lecturers.3 An attempted escape that ended in tragedy also escalated western activism, dominated speeches, and filled private correspondence. In January 1856, the Garner family had escaped from Kentucky via the frozen Ohio River. While they were waiting at a safe house for underground “president” Levi Coffin, slave catchers surrounded them. As they “fought bravely,” but unsuccessfully, Margaret Garner, a young mother, began desperately slashing her sleeping children, determined to “save them all from slavery by death.” She cut the throat of her three-year- 274 sojourner truth and the antislavery apostles old daughter and badly injured her other three children. This gruesome event touched every Abolitionist, and women especially debated the complexities of infanticide versus bondage. Lucy Stone visited Margaret Garner in prison and spoke at the trial: “I would tear open my veins and let the earth drink my blood, rather than wear the chains of slavery.” But others, including Lucretia Mott and the Forten-Purvis women, opposed Garner’s actions and Stone’s dramatizations. Mott and her friends lamented that their...