History of the Woman's Temperance Crusade

Annie Wittenmyer

Sep 2020 · Library of Alexandria

About this ebook

Ours is a famous country for protection. There is the tariff to protect industry, while the patent laws are a safeguard to invention. There are the land grants for railroads, subsidies for steamship companies, charters for corporations. In many of the States we have societies for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and in nearly all, laws for the protection of game. Busy with all these gentle, wise, and patriotic measures, there is one place our brothers have forgotten adequately to protect, and that is—Home. The Women’s Temperance Crusade, embalmed in the pages that follow, was a protest against this forgetfulness and this neglect. It was the wild cry of the defenceless and despairing, whose echo rose to Heaven and still resounds in every ear that is not deaf. At the height of that wonderful uprising, a sweet-voiced Quaker woman led her band to the chief saloon in an Ohio village. “What business have you to come here?” roared the affrighted dealer. Going to the bar she laid her Bible down and said: “Thee knows I had five sons and twenty grandsons, and thee knows that many of them learned to drink right in this place, and one went forth from here maddened with wine and blew his brains out with a pistol ball; and can’t thee let his mother lay her Bible on the counter whence her boy took up the glass, and read thee what God says: ‘Woe unto him that puts the bottle to his neighbor’s lips?’”

The saloon-keeper had but to point to the wall behind him, where hung his “License to sell,” bearing the names of prominent citizens of the village, and emblazoned with the escutcheon of the Commonwealth. They all met in that little scene—Gospel and Law, man’s failure, woman’s grief; while the reason why, and the place in which they met, gave ample answer to the question heard so often: What did the Crusade mean?

There is another question quite as often asked: What did the Crusade do? One of its leaders made this reply to the Temperance Sojourner, who writes these lines: “Well, let me answer from my own experience. Until it swept over our place, though I had lived there twenty years, I knew so little about this drinking business that I couldn’t have pointed out a saloon in the whole town. I thought the queer-looking places with blinds and screens were barber-shops. Since then I have found out that they are shops where men get shaved—not of their beards, but of their honor. Since then, too, I took my little four-year-old boy to market with me one morning, and feeling his clasp of my hand tighten, I looked down and saw his head turned backward apprehensively. ‘Why, Willie, what’s the matter?’ I exclaimed. There were volumes of meaning in the reproachful roll of his solemn blue eyes as he whispered: ‘Didn’t mamma know that her little boy was a-passin’ a saloon?’ Surely it was the crowning achievement of the Crusade that it opened the eyes of millions of women and children in this land to the existence and the dangers of the rum-shop. In consequence of this the public finger points to-day with imperious gesture at the saloon, and woman’s voice in tones of irresistible persuasion cries, ‘Look there!’”

What did the Crusade do? Take another illustration. In front of a saloon that had refused them entrance, knelt a crusading group. Their leader was also the most prominent Methodist lady of the community. Her head was crowned with the glory of gray hairs; her hands were clasped, her sweet and gentle voice was lifted up in prayer. Around her knelt the flower of all the churches of that city—Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians—many of whom had never worked outside their own denominations until now. At the close, an Episcopal lady offered the Lord’s prayer, in which joined Unitarians, Swedenborgians, and Universalists; and when they had finished, a dear old lady in the dove-colored garb of the Friends’ Society was moved to pray, while all the time below them on the curbstone’s edge knelt Bridget with her beads and her Ave Marie.

“Going out on the street” signified a good deal when one comes to think about it. First of all, it meant stepping outside the denominational fence, which, properly enough, surrounds one’s home. The Crusaders felt that “unity of the Spirit” was the one essential, nor feared to join hands with any who had the Bible and the temperance pledge for the two articles in their “Confession of Faith”—who rallied to the tune of “Rock of Ages cleft for me,” or had for their watchword: “Not willing that any should perish.”

Best of all, “going out on the street” brought women face to face with the world’s misery and sin. And here I may be pardoned a bit of personal reminiscence. Never can I forget the day I met the great unwashed, untaught, ungospelled multitude for the first time. Need I say it was the Crusade that opened before me, as before ten thousand other women, this wide, “effectual door?” It was in Pittsburgh, the summer after the Crusade. Greatly had I wished to have a part in it, but this one experience was my first and last of “going out with a band.” A young teacher from the public schools, whose custom it was to give an hour twice each week to crusading, walked arm-in-arm with me. Two school-ma’ms together, we fell into the procession behind the experienced campaigners. On Market street we entered a saloon the proprietor of which, pointing to several men who were fighting in the next room, begged us to leave, and we did so at once, amid the curses of the bacchanalian group. Forming in line on the curbstone’s edge in front of this saloon, we knelt, while an old lady, to whose son that place had proved the gate of death, offered a prayer full of tenderness and faith, asking God to open the eyes of those who, just behind that screen, were selling liquid fire and breathing curses on his name. We rose, and what a scene was there! The sidewalk was lined by men with faces written all over and interlined with the record of their sin and shame. Soiled with “the slime from the muddy banks of time,” tattered, dishevelled, there was not a sneering look or a rude word or action from any one of them. Most of them had their hats off; many looked sorrowful; some were in tears; and standing there in the roar and tumult of that dingy street, with that strange crowd looking into our faces—with a heart stirred as never until now by human sin and shame, I joined in the sweet gospel song:

“Jesus the water of life will give

Freely, freely, freely!”

Just such an epoch as that was in my life, has the Crusade proved to a mighty army of women all over this land. Does anybody think that, having learned the blessedness of carrying Christ’s gospel to those who never come to church to hear the messages we are all commanded to “Go, tell,” we shall ever lay down this work? Not until the genie of the Arabian Nights crowds himself back into the fabulous kettle whence he escaped by expanding his pinions in nebulous bars—not until then! To-day and every day they go forth on their beautiful errands—the “Protestant nuns” who a few years ago were among the “anxious and aimless” of our crowded population, or who belonged to trades and professions overfull—and with them go the women fresh from the sacred home-hearth and cradle-side, wearing the halo of these loving ministries. If you would find them, go not alone to the costly churches which now welcome their voices, while to those who are “at ease in Zion” they gently speak of the great, whitened harvest. But go to blacksmith shop and billiard hall, to public reading-room and depot waiting-room, to the North End in Boston, Water street, New York, the Bailey coffee-houses of Philadelphia, the Friendly Inns of Cleveland, the Woman’s Temperance Room of Cincinnati, and Lower Farwell Hall, Chicago, and you will find the glad tidings declared by the new “apostolic succession,” dating from the Pentecost of the Crusade.