Mrs. Stowe spent the next day after the freedmen’s jubilee in driving frantically from fort to fort in search of the proper officer to give her permission to extract her son Fred for a time from the military harness. She was afraid they would not let him come with her; at last, however, she succeeded, and she was never happier than when he sprang into the carriage, free for forty-eight hours. He, too, was filled with uncontrollable delight. “Oh!” he exclaimed in a sort of rapture, “this pays for a year of hard fighting and hard work!” A year ago she had bade him farewell at Andover, and, after the trip of his regiment to New York, she had again seen him for an hour. At that time she found him even in the two days’ experience of soldierly life mysteriously changed—an expression of gravity and care marking his face. “It is thus that our boys,” she said in her heart, “come to manhood in a day!” But what she felt at that time was as nothing to the feelings that were now hers when this war-worn man came to her arms! For he was a lieutenant, having been promoted for bravery on more than one field.

That evening in a quiet little parlor, by a bright coal fire, she sat with three children around her, the young lieutenant, a daughter, and the little son who lives now to remember the events of this Washington visit. Her cup was as full of joy as any mother’s could be who yet must think what the fortune of war might mean to many a mother’s breaking heart.

It is now time to refer to the matter that Mrs. Stowe had in mind as one of the reasons for coming to Washington. During all these days she was carrying one special burden—something that seemed to her to be of national importance and also a matter of personal responsibility. To understand what this was we must recall the “Affectionate and Christian Address” which had been signed by those five hundred thousand women of Great Britain and Ireland, by duchesses, countesses, wives of generals and ambassadors, savants and men of letters, as well as by hands evidently unused to hold the pen. This “Address” had been sent to “their sisters, the women of the United States of America,” through that most representative of American women, Harriet Beecher Stowe, appealing to them to aid in the removal of slavery from the Christian world.

“We acknowledge with grief and shame,” they said, “our heavy share in this great sin. We acknowledge that our forefathers introduced, nay, even compelled the adoption of slavery in those mighty colonies. We humbly confess it before Almighty God; and it is because we so deeply feel and unfeignedly avow our own complicity that we now venture to implore your aid to wipe away our common crime and our common dishonor.”

Mrs. Stowe knew that her answer to this important letter would be a national matter—she could not make it otherwise. She must review the intricate history of the slave system and face its present problems, not one of the least of which was the fact that, in spite of letters and addresses to the contrary by an illuminated few, the great body of English sympathy was now being given to that party in this country that favored slavery. Therefore, the international situation was in a specially critical state. It seemed even possible that England as a nation would give aid to the forces that were trying to tear our republic apart. Mrs. Stowe saw that now in the fall of 1862 this was one of the greatest causes of apprehension. That this state of feeling should follow the outburst of enthusiasm for freeing the slaves that she herself had witnessed all over England and Scotland, seemed to her incomprehensible and heart-breaking, and it made her feel that she must not let the answer to the “Address” remain in the logic of events only, but that it now called for some direct expression from the one to whom it had been intrusted.

Under the circumstances what she should say in her public letter was a very delicate matter. She might describe the various important preparatory steps that the President had already taken; and she might describe the proclamation just given out, that document we now consider to have ushered in the political regeneration of the American people, in which the President had made solemn announcement that unless by the following January the states now in rebellion laid down arms to signify that they abandoned the system of slavery, the emancipation of all slaves in those states would at once be enforced.

So far, so good. She could tell what had been already done; but how much might happen between now and January 1, 1863! What battles and conquests and losses might be written upon our scroll! What a test the national spirit might be put to! What failures were perhaps possible! As Mrs. Elizabeth Browning in an anxious hour said in one of her last letters: “What I feared most was that the north would compromise; and I fear still that they are not heroically strong on their legs on the moral question (meaning slavery). I fear it much. If they can but hold up it will be noble.” And this expresses the better side of England’s interest in our national problem.

Mrs. Stowe’s heart cried, “We cannot, we must not fail!” But she had the wisdom to see that her opinion needed to be bolstered up by some more weighty judgment. So she said to herself, “When I go to Washington I will try to see the heads of departments and satisfy myself that I may refer to the Emancipation Proclamation as a reality, for I should be sorry to call the attention of my sisters in Europe to an impotent conclusion. And I mean to have a talk with Father Abraham himself if possible.”

For her to gain an interview with President Lincoln was comparatively easy, for one member of the President’s Cabinet, Mr. Salmon P. Chase, now Secretary of the Treasury, was an old Ohio friend of hers. Years back, in Cincinnati, he had been a member of the Semi-colon Club. It was natural that this former friend should now find it easy to arrange for Mrs. Stowe to call upon President Lincoln and to have a quiet conversation with him. Her son, Charles Edward, twelve years old, who still remembers the distinguished event of that day as though it had happened yesterday, and her grown-up daughter, Harriet, accompanied her. It was a wonderful experience for them. The White House with its Ionic pillars seemed to young Charles a palace of dreamland; as they passed through the halls and caught a glimpse through an open door of the wonderful East Room where the carpet, selected for that room by Mrs. Lincoln, was of a pale green tapestry worked with flowers, it must have seemed to him that the gleaming transparent waves of the ocean were tossing roses to his feet. They were conducted up a staircase and taken to the President’s reception parlor, then called the Red Room, where the interview was to be held. Though the room was richly furnished, it seemed like a quiet and cozy place to the little boy. Perhaps this was because it was a dark chilly day and there was a bright wood fire burning in the fireplace.

The President was sitting before the fire as they entered. His gaunt figure was bowed in a melancholy attitude, and he was warming his hands by turning them first the palms toward the flame and then the backs, seemingly just for the sheer enjoyment of the genial warmth.

Overcome by a natural feeling of reverence for the great man into whose presence they were being ushered, Mrs. Stowe and her little group held back for a moment and waited; but Mr. Chase led them forward and told the President that he had brought Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe to visit him. With that awkwardness which is one of our most appealing memories of him, Mr. Lincoln rose quickly from his chair, revealing his whole six feet and four inches of height, and came forward eagerly. “Why, Mrs. Stowe,” he exclaimed, holding out his hand, “I’m right glad to see you!” Leading her to a chair, he added with a mischievous twinkle in his eye, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.” With this pleasantry they sat down together before the fire.

The first thing he said was, “I do love an open fire; I always had one to home.” The homely phrase “to home!” How near it seemed to bring him! Like all the other common expressions he used, it only made us love him more! His advisers used sometimes to try to get him to write in a more polished manner, but he would say, “Well, it may not be so elegant or classical, but the people will understand it, the people will understand it!” And they always did. Mrs. Stowe could hardly have been more effectually made to feel “to home” than she was.

In response to the President’s humorous remark about her book, Mrs. Stowe no doubt answered, as she so many times did, by disclaiming any intention to do anything except to obey the inner voice that commanded her to write. “I did not write it, not I myself alone,” she always said. “It seemed to me that God himself made me write it, that I wrote it at his dictation.” And Lincoln, from the depths of his profoundly reverent nature, probably answered that he could understand how that could be said with all simplicity and true worship.

Gazing into that homely, noble, pain-marked face, and knowing so well how many reasons there were for its look of inexpressible sadness, her heart was touched with a great pity for him as a man. After they had talked for a few moments, some one came through the room and spoke with him for a little while; then in passing out the visitor said casually, “Where do you dine?” The President answered, “Well, I don’t dine; I just browse around a little now and then.” To the woman that sat there waiting and letting nothing escape her eye, there was something irresistibly pathetic in the tone in which this was spoken. Where indeed could President Lincoln find an hour of rest in the midst of his overweighted days? The whole city was one hospital of wounded soldiers, the borders outside were one vast camp looking for battle. Even the Emancipation Proclamation, that one firm stone in the wide morass of despondency on which the wearied man at last had set firm foothold, did not just now seem to lead toward the land of promise. Struggling with an extraordinarily difficult problem, he was at that moment misunderstood on all sides. People criticized him for what he did and for what he did not do. He was too hasty, he was too slow. They called him stupid blockhead, satyr, ape, gorilla. They named his military plans imbecility; his humor they took for irreverence. But Mrs. Stowe understood him, and she somehow struck the note at the beginning which made them at home with each other. If this had not been the case, he would never have said the things to her that we know he did say.

Of her interview with the President, however, Mrs. Stowe never gave any full account. I suppose it would not have been right for her to do so. It must, however, have been a very illuminating hour, for her sketch of Lincoln in a volume called “Men of Our Times,” which she wrote six years later shows a certainty of impression and an intimacy of view that could only have come from personal knowledge. Moreover, she tells us definitely of several things that were said; and from these as well as from references in that sketch, and from the influence of this conversation upon the “Reply” to the English “Address” which she was writing on the evening of the day when she saw the President, and from what we know was dwelling in the mind of the President and in hers in this month of November in 1862, we may to some extent reorganize that hour of vital converse between two souls that were sharing in the heavy woe of the national conflict.

As early in the conversation as possible, she called his attention to the “Address” on the part of the five hundred thousand women of England who had spoken to the women of America through her, and of the necessity that was upon her now to answer.

“They have called upon us,” she said, “in the name of a common origin, a common faith, and a common cause. They have said: ‘We appeal to you as sisters, as wives, and as mothers, to raise up your voices to your fellow-citizens, and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.’ Now,” she continued, “in this eight years we have been answering this appeal. Step after step has been taken; chain after chain has fallen; now the day of emancipation has been set. Mr. President, it is of that that I must speak with you to-day.” Thus Mrs. Stowe brought forward the question that was pressing upon her mind. “Mr. Lincoln,” she said, “I feel that I must ask you about your views on emancipation.” At this point the President withdrew with her to the embrasure of a window-seat, where they sat together for an hour or more in uninterrupted conversation.

Mrs. Stowe had much to tell him about the condition of thought in England which she had learned from observation during her visits there and through the letters she constantly received from people of weight and importance who were watching with intense interest the progress of our bitter conflict. He on his part was able to interpret to her his border state policy which had been a burden of misunderstanding upon her mind; he explained the reasons why it had been necessary for him to proceed slowly and why the time for a more decided step had come at last. We know comparatively little about the conversation that went on by the window, but we do know that these were its subjects. She said that she desired, if possible, to have it made clear to her that the government was not to take any steps backward in the course on which it had started out, before she could with dignity write the answer to the “Address.”

Abraham Lincoln made it clear. He set her mind quite at rest on that point. Before they parted he said in effect what he afterwards repeated in the Second Inaugural: “If this struggle were to be prolonged till there was not a home in the land where there was not one dead, till all the treasure amassed by the unpaid labor of the slave should be wasted, till every drop of blood drawn by the lash should be atoned by blood drawn by the sword, we could only bow and say, ‘Just and true are thy ways, thou King of Saints!’”

This was indeed a passage from his inmost soul. Sometimes a great man has an hour in which he finds it comforting to open his heart to the compassionate ear of a woman. Without disrespect to his revered memory we may believe that President Lincoln did on this day find such a relief in talking with a woman whose book with its key and whose letters and articles had proved not only the sensitive sympathy and flame-like patriotism of her soul, but also the statesman-like grasp of her mind.

Then perhaps in this interview with its high emotional tension there may have come a moment when personal things could be mentioned, for I do not know how otherwise to account for the great confidence he reposed in her in one of the things that he said in that interview. Perhaps the way may have been opened by her saying something about her own feelings in writing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” She may have told him how acutely she suffered when she was working on that book. Elsewhere she has said, “Many times, in writing ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ I thought my health would fail me utterly, but I prayed earnestly that God would help me till I got through, and still I was pressed beyond measure and above strength.” Something of this sort she doubtless told Mr. Lincoln. To this the President must have listened with full understanding. “It lies like lead on my heart,” she would continue. “It shadows my life with sorrow. The more so since I feel for the south as for my own brothers, and am pained for every horror I have been obliged to describe, as one who is forced by an awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace. Many times I have thought I must die, and yet I pray God that I may live to see the end of this struggle.”

These are the words of Mrs. Stowe; if she used the same words in speaking with President Lincoln it would surely be in response that he must have said what we know he did say in some part of this conversation, that he did not think that it would be given to him to rejoice in the successful outcome of the great rebellion. “Whichever way it ends, I have the impression that I shan’t last long after it is over,” was what he said. Mrs. Stowe afterwards said that she felt that no man had suffered more or more deeply than he, although it was a dry, weary, patient pain that seemed to some like insensibility, but was not—Oh, never was at all! After he was gone his countrymen understood this perfectly. Mrs. Stowe understood it then. She said, “When we have passed through this trouble we shall think that no private or individual sorrow can ever make us wholly comfortless. If my faith in God’s presence and living power in the affairs of men ever grows dim, that thought shall make it impossible for me to doubt.”

With her sensitive sympathy, Mrs. Stowe probably knew that Lincoln’s mind was dwelling upon his own painful loss in the death of his dear young son the spring before; and she, for her part, was reminded of the day when, as she stood by the grave of the most beautiful and most beloved of her seven children, she learned the woe a slave mother feels when her child is torn away from her. She thought also of the crushing sorrow that came to her at Andover in the loss by drowning of her first-born son, Henry Ellis. Perhaps in this hour of quiet, intimate conversation she was able, in order to give comfort to the man before her, to speak of these things, for it is by showing to those in deep suffering that we suffer with them that we comfort them most.

And then perhaps she told the President that she, too, had a son at Washington, and saw the smile that she remembered so well all her life afterwards, light up that homely-beautiful face as he said, “One of the twenty thousand encamped about the city?” and she answered that he was one of that vast company and that he had been made lieutenant for honorable service on several battlefields. And then she no doubt told how he was one of the first to volunteer when the First Massachusetts Infantry was formed. He had been a student of medicine under Dr. Holmes, who had tried to persuade him not to become a soldier, but to finish his studies and then go into the army as a surgeon. The boy would not hear of this; he threw his hat on the floor and cried, “I could not look my fellowmen in the face if I did not enlist. People shall never say that Harriet Beecher Stowe’s son is a coward!” And if in telling this she took a motherly pride, who shall blame her?

With this the interview ended. Mrs. Stowe was rejoined by her son and daughter, and the guests took their departure. That evening Mrs. Stowe wrote the greater part of her “Reply,” and it was soon on its way to Great Britain.

This “Reply” she wrote far more boldly and confidently than would have been possible if she had not talked with the President. She courteously acknowledged the compliment of the “Address” and its great weight with her and with the American people. She spoke of its influence upon north and upon south; and then she recounted the history of affairs in this country up to the Proclamation of Emancipation which was to take effect in the following January. She spoke frankly of the things that were filling her with pain and solicitude, especially of the lack of English sympathy toward us in our struggle for union. “Alas, then, is it so? In this day of great deeds and great heroisms ... do we hear such voices from England?” She went on to tell the story of the Jubilee she had witnessed the day before and of the psalm of the modern exodus, “Go down, Moses,” sung by that strange company with all the barbaric fire of the Marseillaise and the religious fervor of the old Hebrew prophet. Giving free rein to her impassioned eloquence, she said: “Sisters (in your ‘Address’), you have spoken well; we have heard you; we have heeded; we have striven in the cause, even unto death. We have sealed our devotion by desolate hearths and darkened homesteads, by the blood of sons, husbands and fathers.... Now we beg leave in solemn sadness to return to you your own words: we appeal to you, as sisters, as wives, as mothers, to raise your voices to your fellow-citizens and your prayers to God, for the removal of this affliction and disgrace from the Christian world.”

Mrs. Stowe’s “Reply” was published widely in Great Britain, and was one of the most powerful agents in changing the public sentiment from a hostile to a friendly attitude. Meetings were held all over England and the tone of the speeches and of the newspapers and of the discussions in Parliament was no longer favorable to the division of our country into two separate governments, a north and a south, but was for union and abolition. John Bright wrote to Mrs. Stowe stating that such had been the happy result of the outspoken and appealing home-thrust in her “Reply.” All this, we must remember, happened before the Battle of Gettysburg, which was the crisis following the 1862 phase of the war.

This assistance that Harriet Beecher Stowe was so fortunate as to be able to give in one of the epoch-making crises of our history, was one of her great services to our country. In the next chapter we are to see how she performed another real service, for which we owe her another debt of gratitude.