Chapter 16: the Civil war, 1860-1865.
- The outbreak of Civil war. -- Mrs. Stowe's son enlists. -- Thanksgiving day in Washington. -- the proclamation of emancipation. -- Rejoicings in Boston. -- Fred Stowe at Gettysburg. -- leaving Andover and settling in Hartford. -- a reply to the women of England. -- letters from John bright, Archbishop Whately, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Immediately after Mrs. Stowe's return from Europe, it became only too evident that the nation was rapidly and inevitably drifting into all the horrors of civil war. To use her own words:
It was God's will that this nation — the North as well as the South--should deeply and terribly suffer for the sin of consenting to and encouraging the great oppressions of the South; that the ill-gotten wealth, which had arisen from striking hands with oppression and robbery, should be paid back in the taxes of war; that the blood of the poor slave, that had cried so many years from the ground in vain, should be answered by the blood of the sons from the best hearthstones through all the free States; that the slave mothers, whose tears nobody regarded, should have with them a great company of weepers, North and South,--Rachels weeping for their children and refusing to be comforted; that the free States, who refused to listen when they were told of lingering starvation, cold, privation, and barbarous cruelty, as perpetrated on
