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7 to the person sitting in darkness Global Missions, Religious Belief, and the Making of the Imperial White Republic On February 17, 1898, the United States lost its most powerful female leader. After battling anemia intermittently for several years and influenza for weeks, Frances Willard died at her home in New York. Women and men from all over the nation mourned. At her funeral in Brooklyn and at hundreds of memorial services throughout the country, thousands gathered to honor Willard’s life and lament her death. Some hoped that she would rise from the dead like Christ. “[T]he angels watched and waited,” Anna Gordon wrote of the women who cared for Willard in her last days. “Surely in more than one heart was heard a voice saying, ‘She is not here; she is risen.’”1 Another woman depicted Willard’s grieving compatriots as “mournful and helpless, talking in low, awe-stricken tones of the one dearest in all the world to them. . . . I thought of the little band of disciples in the long ago who stood desolate, gazing, ‘steadfastly toward heaven’ after their departing Lord, and the appearance of the angels in their midst.”2 Others compared the outpouring of emotion wrought by her demise to that shown after President Lincoln’s assassination thirty-three years previously. “The death of what private individual since Abraham Lincoln’s time has called forth a thousand memorial funeral services upon the afternoon of one day?” asked Anna Gordon.3 As in her life, Willard served as a national reconciler in her death. When southern and northern white women lamented their loss, they engaged in cooperative efforts of bereavement. Many WCTU women acknowledged that Willard’s illness and passing created “a common sorrow and a common joy.”4 Scores of southerners stood side by side with northern whites at the Brooklyn funeral, while those who could not attend expressed their solidarity with Willard’s followers. In South Carolina, one woman wrote in her diary, “Miss Frances Willard died . . . and I feel like I have lost a friend. I am so glad I entertained her when in our town two years ago. . . . I have a lead pencil that was hers, and several letters she wrote, and a book she sent me afterward, ‘Do Everything.’”5 Willard’s death shook Belle Kearney’s 210 / reforging the white republic entire spiritual existence. “On hearing of her death I felt that one of the foundations of my existence had slipped from under me and had drifted out to sea,” she recalled. “Miss Willard was like no other human being. There was a divineness about her and a personal influence that no one else possessed. There will be many leaders, and great ones, but the world will never see just such a ‘chieftain’ among women as Frances E. Willard.”6 In summing up Willard’s numerous contributions to the world and to the nation, several eulogists drew attention to her ability to heal the wounds of the Civil War for northern and southern white women. “If no other work had been accomplished,” observed Great Britain’s Lady Henry Somerset, “one of the greatest achievements of Frances Willard’s life has been her mission of reconciliation to the women of the South while yet the scars of war throbbed in their breasts, and new-made graves stretched wide between sections that had learned the misery of hated.”7 Another Briton interpreted Willard and the WCTU as carrying even broader significance than just helping to reunite the antagonistic sections of the United States. To journalist and reformer William T. Stead, the woman’s temperance crusade was one of the dynamic forces driving “the Americanization of the World.” While northern WCTU leaders succeeded in bringing southern women into the crusade, their vision expanded to encompass lands and peoples across the globe. In the 1880s, Willard and other leaders in the WCTU had formed the World’s Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) to unify women’s temperance groups throughout the world. By 1902, the WWCTU had a worldwide membership of more than half a million women in a host of nations, including the United States, Great Britain, Australia, Bengal, Bulgaria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, and Hawaii. In Stead’s opinion, the WWCTU was one of the key players in transforming the United States into a global power. “The advent of the United States of America as the greatest of world-Powers,” he bellowed, “is the greatest political...

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