One day twenty farmers came to the Stone Cabin in Andover where the Stowes lived and sat down with Professor Stowe to ask the question, Will it be a long war? And he had answered buoyantly, Oh, no, short and decisive it will certainly be!

A year passed and it was not yet over; 1862 came in and the fierce battles of Shiloh, Cedar Mountain, Manassas and Antietam formed the bitter record of that one summer alone. In the very heart of the country soldiers by the thousand from the north and from the south stood glaring at each other, pressing forward, warding off, moving warily even upon the critical spaces about the city of Washington, while occasionally the Confederate raiders slipped through and ran almost up to the city itself. The resistance of the Confederate army was proving much more stubborn than had been dreamed possible, and by November of 1862 long streets of tents full of soldiers waiting for orders were making white cities for miles and miles throughout the surroundings of Washington. The people began to fear the horror of a long, devastating war.

Almost worse than this was the feeling of criticism into which discouragement was concentrating. Grief at the defeats of the army of the Potomac was reacting in troubles among President Lincoln’s advisers. The northern abolitionists could not understand why he was so slow—why he did not stop the war at once. And he, poor man, in the midst of the most harassing executive difficulties, with personal sorrow for the recent death of his little son eating at his heart and national sorrow for the loss in deadly battle of many hundreds of soldiers overshadowing him, did not know which way to turn for strength, wisdom and good generalship. “I cannot create generals,” he said.

As the month for Thanksgiving Day, 1862, approached it would seem that no one could have the heart to celebrate. On the farms of New England and Ohio and Nebraska the women were beginning to have to carry the whole burden of home and town. In a New Hampshire countryside, not far from where the Stowes were living, fourteen strong daughters of the mountains went one night after their own farm work was done to the barn of an aged neighbor whose three sons had gone to the war, and before morning had husked for him one hundred bushels of corn. This sort of thing was being done everywhere.

As for the homesick soldiers in their distant camps, certainly the approach of the time for the giving of thanks was not specially welcomed, for they did not know what a day might bring forth of new horror and disaster. They, too, together with statesmen and citizens everywhere, were beginning to realize distinctly that the war was no little quarrel to be lightly settled, but a fierce interlocking of stubborn wills. That it was the wills of brothers thus conflicting added to the poignancy of their grief.

Under circumstances so depressing as these, what could the governors of states think of to say in their Thanksgiving Day proclamations? Yet in the midst of the national dismay they had the courage and faith to send out their appeals. They called upon the people to come away and praise God even in the midst of the gloom. They found heart to be glad for something. The war, for instance, had not been followed by pestilence—that they could say; they begged the people to reflect that these national chastisements might possibly be blessings in disguise; they besought them not to think of the vacant chairs and the silent voices by the home firesides, but instead to remember that strength was being given to endure; they pointed out that if the people would give thanks in the right spirit, it would be for the exalted patriotism, the heroic courage, the fortitude and humanity, of the soldiers. “Let the high praises of God be in our mouth,” they quoted, “and—the two-edged sword in our hand!”

In the Stone Cabin at Andover there was one in whose heart the whole terrible drama was being enacted as if it were an oppressive and unbearable nightmare. “It is our agony,” she said. “We tread the wine press alone. We are in the throes and ravings of the exorcism.” The heart of Mrs. Stowe had been broken by the loss of her eldest son by the accident of drowning. Now she was called upon to make another supreme sacrifice in giving up a son to the service of her country. Could she rejoice and give thanks?

With a sad patience she accepted an invitation to come to Washington and join in helping people even more stricken than herself to a little Thanksgiving cheer. The response in the capital city to the appeal for Thanksgiving testimonials had been as generous as the limited and disastrous circumstances would allow. For the city itself was at this time one great hospital of wounded soldiers; the churches and public buildings were all filled with the maimed, the sick and the suffering, who had been brought there after the battles of the summer and fall. Not every one, however, was in hospital and those that were well made the sufferers have a happy day. There were banquets for the convalescents, and banquets for the men in temporary hospitals in the Patent Office, the Church of the Ascension, the Armory, the Marine Barracks and elsewhere.

The regiments of Union soldiers were not the only special guests of the season that were gathered in large numbers in and near the city. Many hundreds of negroes who had heard the call of freedom on the plantations of the south and had managed to escape from their masters and to make their way through the military cordons had come to the city as to a harbor of refuge. When the last Thursday in November drew near good friends planned to give to those desolate people a homelike Thanksgiving dinner that would gladden their hearts and give them a foretaste of what freedom was to mean to them. Encouraging speeches were to be made and distinguished people from various parts of the country were invited to come. It was to this sorrowful-happy banquet that Mrs. Stowe had been asked, and she was the more willing to make the journey, since she hoped to have an opportunity to see her son, Frederick, who was staying near the city with his regiment, the First Massachusetts Infantry. She had also another great purpose in coming, as will soon appear.

The Contraband Dinner, as the dinner of the freed men was called, was held on November 27, 1862, in the church that had been used as a hospital and place of rendezvous for the freedmen’s camp at the end of Twelfth Street East. As Mrs. Stowe entered the room she saw that a great deal of affectionate pains had been spent in decorating it for the occasion. Garlands of evergreen had been hung all about, and wreaths encircled the portraits of great people who had been working for the cause of the down-trodden. Back of the platform were the picture of the President with the mottoes, “God bless Abraham Lincoln,” and “Liberty to the Captive.” Upon the walls were arranged the portraits of various sympathizers and philanthropists: Senator Pomeroy and Professor Stowe, Horace Greeley and General Wadsworth were in one group, and the professors from Oberlin—Finney, Morgan, Dascomb and Coles, with Thomas Clarkson and Horace Mann were in another circle. Another group, whose connection will perhaps be a puzzle, contained Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, Queen Hortense, Mary Queen of Scots, Charles V, General Cavaignac and General Havelock. Elsewhere on the walls were also Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, John Bunyon, John Knox, Hugh Miller, Peter Melanchthon, Mozart and Haydn. Under this array of inspiring portraits tables with a comfortable supply of good things to eat were spread for some hundreds of guests.

Mrs. Stowe was accompanied by a daughter and by her little son, Charles Edward. To greet them at the foot of the platform stood the Rev. John Pierpont with Bishop Payne, Senator Pomeroy, Dr. Channing and other celebrities. Mrs. Stowe’s thoughts, however, were more with the wonderful audience that was beginning to gather than with the speakers who were to make the addresses. It was a marvelous sight that greeted her eyes as she took her seat and looked out over the white expanse of the tables that filled the audience room of the church. Already the long procession of strange guests was filing in; from the platform they looked like rivers of inky blackness flowing through the aisles and around the table. To the eyes of Mrs. Stowe it was a tragic scene, for she knew that these poor people had made their escape with untold sufferings. She saw that many were still in the tattered garments they had worn as they crept through the swamp; some had no jacket or coat at all but only a hempen sack with holes cut through for head and arms. But the look in their eyes was something wonderful to see!

The guests took their places at the tables which were loaded with meat, cake and fruits. One table also held a great pyramidal cake with an inscription that read, “To the Contrabands, from the Contraband Relief Association,” and the banquet began. At the beginning prayer was offered by Bishop Payne and then the contrabands were invited to fall in, and the food began to disappear rapidly. When one tableful had been well supplied the Superintendent said, “Men, you who have been eating, take something in your hands and give place to others. There,” he added, “don’t take the plates!” At this point the disappearance of drumsticks, et cetera, was marvelous to behold.

After some two thousand contrabands had been fed the company on the platform adjourned to an improvised speakers’ stand where the addresses were made. Dr. Channing presided and Senator Pomeroy repeated once more to these poor freedmen the heavenly news that they had a good right to be where they were, and that universal freedom was at hand. This was a story that they could not hear told too often; it made every swarthy face in the room glow with broad delight and every voice break forth into shouts of joy. No wonder that from every throat burst that one great song, that psalm of their modern exodus, “Go Down, Moses.”

This most famous of negro melodies had so strange a moving power that the negroes all through the south had been forbidden to use it because it made them so wild for freedom that nothing could restrain them. But these freedmen had come through fire and water to reach a place where they could shout it out freely; and the rich and vital tones of those negro voices rang out the twenty-five stanzas of the hymn as their hearts rose in the exaltation of the hour. When they came to the line,

the emotional impulse of the great appeal made an uncontrollable sob rise to the throats of those that heard it. The agony and the faith and the triumph of a whole people seemed to breathe forth from that great company of rescued slaves in the minor swell of this solemn chorus. Here is the simple music that went with this wonderful primitive song; but no notes can give any idea of the weird and mystically yearning effect of it as it was sung by the negroes themselves.

The words of the song went on to record in a sort of ballad fashion the dealings of the Lord with the Children of Israel; under this Old Testament symbolism the negroes always pictured themselves as a nation and felt they were telling their own sorrows as they followed the Bible story.

The Red Sea incident follows:

The story of the destruction of Pharaoh they must have sung with special gusto:

Then comes a song of hope for the Israelites:

A general application follows:

An exhortation:

Then comes the cheering prospect of Heaven:

And this concluding stanza:

As the concluding strain of this psalm of praise and of prayer sank away into silence they carefully led a very old colored man to the platform. This was Old John the Baptist, as the negroes affectionately called him; he was looked up to as a sort of patriarch in Israel on account of his goodness and spirituality. The whiteness of his matted hair and the deep furrows in his face testified to the many, many years in which the pain of slavery had been burned into his soul. As they assisted him up the steps it could be seen that he was blind, and a deep hush fell upon the room as he raised his hands and lifted up his voice in prayer. He gave thanks for the joy of this day of emancipation and for their escape from the woe of slavery; he prayed for the friends and relatives so tenderly beloved that they had left behind, and, above all, he prayed that their feelings of joy and triumph at their own escape might not lead them into vainglorious pride and arrogance. The chief burden of his prayer was that humility might dwell in the hearts of his people. “O God, keep us humble, keep us humble,” he repeated. “Let not thy people be puffed up with pride and then forget the God that brought them out of Egypt into Canaan’s land!”

During these simple, but most impressive, ceremonies Mrs. Stowe sat on the platform, her heart throbbing with the tragedy of the scene. There was a deep, absorbed, dreamy look in her eyes as she sat there pondering on all this great national matter. As she looked out over the vast assemblage, a fragment only of the great exodus from slavery, she grew more and more assured in her mind that the steps that had been taken were right. She thought over what had already been done. It was right to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia and to exclude it from the territories of the United States; it had been a good stroke for the United States to make that treaty with Great Britain for the suppression of the slave trade, making it legal to hang a convicted slaver as a pirate. And it was clear to her that the government offer of compensation to the slave owners in the southern states, to whom the negro was property, was a just and fair offer. She believed in release from slavery as a growth rather than as a sudden cut-off, and thought that this offer had been a move in the right direction.

Therefore, she thought, it is right and sensible to lead up by these steps to the promise of full freedom to all—which the President had promised—or perhaps one should say, threatened, in the important document, the Emancipation Proclamation, which he had given out some four weeks before. “Oh, if he only will hold firm to this!” she prayed, “and if the Cabinet and the army and the country will only stand by him!”

Then she thought of her soldier son and she remembered the other mothers who had given their boys to the country’s need. With a gush of agony came the reflection that for the mothers to go themselves and to give their own lives would have been so much easier!

As these heavy thoughts were passing through her mind a thousand men just out of slavery were looking toward the quiet little woman on the platform who in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” had so marvelously told their story. There were many among the freedmen present who had been able to acquire the valuable and dangerous art of reading printed words, and who had read the wonderful story Mrs. Stowe had written. There were others who had listened breathlessly behind closed doors in their little cabins while the book was being read in low tones to them. So a great glow of grateful love was being poured out in the direction of that inconspicuous member of the distinguished company, for they felt that they knew her heart. As the last strains of “Go down, Moses” were fading away and the company was dispersing, an aged negress met Mrs. Stowe in the doorway and, lifting up her hands in blessing, cried out, “Bressed be de Lord dat brought me to see dis first happy day of my life! Bressed be de Lord!”

At this time Mrs. Stowe must have looked very much like the picture which is reproduced as the frontispiece to this book, which is taken from a carte de visite made in 1862. At this meeting we may imagine her as this picture shows her, but we must add perhaps some kind of shawl or drapery for warmth, a pair of black silk mitts of ornamented net, and a bonnet tied with wide ribbons in a double bow knot under the chin. This bonnet must have concealed the abundant hair coiled up at the back, but not the soft wavy brown folds that came down on either side of the beautiful, refined face. The large breast-pin in the picture was made from a piece of softly clouded lava; the ring, worn in the fashion of the day on the first finger, had belonged to her son who was drowned while in college; this ring she wore and jealously guarded for his sake. Many people who knew Mrs. Stowe pronounce it one of the best likenesses of her that we possess.