When our leading journals, orators, and brave men from the battlefield complain
that Northern women feel no enthusiasm in the war, the time has for us to speak
­ to pledge ourselves as loyal to Freedom and our Country.

Thus far there has been no united public expression from the women of the
North as to the public of the war. Here and there one has spoken and written
nobly. Many have vied with each in each other in acts of generosity and
self-sacrifice for the sick and wounded in camp and hospital. But we have, as yet,
 no means of judging how and where the majority of Northern women stand.

If it be true that at this hour, the women of the South are more devoted to their
cause than we to ours, the fact lies here. They see and feel the horrors of the
war; the foe is at their firesides; while, we, in peace and plenty, live and move as
heretofore.  There is an inspiration, too, in definite purpose, be it good or bad.
The women of the South known what their sons are fighting for. The women of
the North do not. They appreciate the blessings of Slavery; we do not the
blessings of Liberty. We have never yet realized the glory of those institutions in
whose defense it is the high privilege of our sires and sons this day, to bleed and
die. They are aristocrats with a lower class, servile and obsequious, intrenched in
feudal homes. We are aristocrats under protest, who must go abroad to indulge
our tastes, and enjoy in foreign despotisms the courts and customs which the
genius of a republic repudiates and condemns.

But, from the beginning of Government, there have been women among us,
who, with the mother of the immortal John Quincy Adams, have lamented the
inconsistencies of our theory and practice, and demanded for all the people the
exercise of those rights that belong to every citizen of a Republic.

The women of a nation mold its morals, religion, and politics. The Northern
treason, now threatening to betray us to our foes, is hatched at our firesides,
where traitor snobs, returned from Europe and the South, out of time and tune
with independence and equality, infuse into their sons the love of caste and class,
of fame and family, wealth and ease, and baptize it all in the name of
Republicanism and Christianity.

Let every woman understand that this war involves the same principles that
haveconvulsed the nations of the earth from Pharaoh to Abraham Lincoln ­
Liberty or Slavery ­ Democracy or Aristocracy ­ Christianity or Barbarism ­ and
choose this day, whether our republican institutions shall be placed on an
enduring basis, and an eternal peace secured to our children, or whether we shall
leap back through generations of light an and experience and meekly bow again
to chains and slavery.

Shall Northern freemen yet stand silent lookers-on when through Topeka, St.
Paul, Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and New York, men and women, little boys
and girls, chained in gangs, shall march to their own sad music, beneath a
tyrant's lash? On our sacred soil shall we behold the auction block ­ babies sold
by the pound, beautiful women for the vilest purposes of lust; where parents
and children, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters shall be torn from each
other and sent East and West, North and South? Shall our free presses and
free schools, our palace homes, colleges, churches and stately capitols all be
leveled to the dust? Our household gods all desecrated, and our proud lips, ever
taught to sing paeans to Liberty, made to swear allegiance to the god of Slavery?
Such degradation, and more than words can tell, shall be yet ours, if we gird not
up our free our giant freemen now to crush this Rebellion, and root out for ever
the hateful principle of caste and class. Men who, in the light of the Nineteenth
Century, believed that God made one race all booted and spurred, and another
to be ridden; who would build up a government with Slavery for its cornerstone,
cannot live on the same continent with a pure democracy.

To counsel grim-visaged war seems hard to come from woman's lips; but better
far that the bones of our sires and sons whiten every Southern plain, that we do
their rough work at home, than that Liberty, struck dumb in the Capital of our
Republic, should plead no more for man. Every woman who appreciates the
grand problem of national life, must say war, pestilence, famine, anything but an
ignoble peace.

We are but co-workers now with the true ones of every age. The history of the
past is but one long struggle upward to equality. All men, born slaves to
ignorance, superstition, lust and fear, crept through centuries of darkness,
discord and despair ­ now one race dominant then another ­ but in this
ceaseless warring, ever wearing off their chains and the gross material
surroundings of a mere animal existence, at last the sun of civilization and
Christianity dawned on the soul of man, and the precious seed of the ages,
garnered up in the Mayflower, was carried in the hollow of God's hand across
the mighty waters and planted deep beneath the snow and ice of Plymouth Rock
with prayers and thanksgiving. And what grew there? Men and women who
loved liberty better than life. Men and women who believed that not only in
person but in speech, should they be free, and worship the God who had
brought them this far, according to the dictates of their own conscience. Men and
women who like Daniel of old defied the royal lion in his den. Men and women
who repudiated the creeds and codes of despots and tyrants, and declared to a
waiting world that all men are created equal. And for rights like these Fathers
fought for seven long years, and we have no record that the women of that
revolution ever once cried, "hold, enough," till the invading foe was conquered
and our independence recognized by the nations of the earth.

And here we are, the grandest nation on the globe. By right no privileged caste
or class. Education free to all. The humblest digger in the ditch has all the civil,
social, and religious rights, with the highest in the land. The poorest woman at
the wash-tub may be the mother of a future President. Here all are heirs
apparent to the throne. The genius of our institutions bids every man to rise,
stand upright , perfect and use all the powers that God has given him.

It cannot be, that for blessings such as these, now twice baptized in blood, the
women of the North do not stand ready for sacrifice.

A sister of Kossuth, with him an exile to this country, in conversation one day,
called my attention to an iron bracelet, the only ornament she wore. In the
darkest days of Hungary, said she, our noble women threw their wealth and
jewels into the public treasury, and clasping iron bands around their wrists,
pledged themselves that these should be the only jewels they would wear till
Hungary was free.

If darker hours than these should come to us, the women of the North will count
no sacrifice to great. What are wealth and jewels, home and ease, sires and sons,
to the birthright of freedom, secured to us by the heroes of the Revolution ­
liberty to universal man? Shall a priceless heritage like this, be wrested from us
now by Southern tyrants, and Northern women look on unmoved, or basely bid
our freemen sue for peace? No! No!! The vacant places at our firesides, the void
in every heart says No!! Such sacrifices must not be in vain!! The cloud that hangs
o'er all our Northern homes is gilded with the hope, that through these present
sufferings the nation shall be redeemed.