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of this object, many of these women found a new scope for their activities, and developed abilities hitherto unsuspected by themselves.
Even in gay Newport there were sad reverberations of the strife; and I shall never forget an afternoon on which I drove into town with my son, by this time a lad of fourteen, and found the main street lined with carriages, and the carriages filled with white-faced people, intent on I knew not what.
Meeting a friend, I asked, ‘Why are these people here?
What are they waiting for, and why do they look as they do?’
‘They are waiting for the mail.
Don't you know that we have had a dreadful reverse?’
Alas! this was the second battle of Bull Run.
I have made some record of it in a poem entitled ‘The Flag,’ which I dare mention here because Mr. Emerson, on hearing it, said to me, ‘I like the architecture of that poem.’
Prominent among the helpers called out by the war was our noble war governor, John Albion Andrew.
My first acquaintance with him was formed in the early days of the Free-Soil Party, of which he and my husband were leading members.
This organization, if I remember rightly, grew out of an earlier one which marked the very beginning of a new movement.
Its members were spoken of as ‘young Whigs,’ and its principles were friendship for the negro and opposition to
Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1899.
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