December 22, 1870 — Commemorating the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in Plymouth, New England Festival, Washington DC

Mr. President: —

As this is not only Forefathers’, but Foremothers’ day, I recognize the propriety of a woman being invited to respond to this sentiment. Yet I feel that a better choice could have been made. Indeed, I hardly consider myself eligible. In the first place, I am not a New England woman by birth, though come of an old New England family, fed on the one side by stern English Puritan, on the other side by fiery Huguenot blood — a family distinguished, however, for not having had an ancestor among the Plymouth pilgrims. You may search through our entire stock of heirlooms without coming upon a table, a chest of drawers, a high-post bedstaed, or any other little article of household furniture brought over in the “Mayflower.” An intelligent friend over the water once startled me by the question: “Has not civilization advanced further in the New England than in the other states of the Union?” I said I thought it had, but was obliged to acknowledge myself “an outside barbarian” — born in the savage State of New York, though of missionary parents from connecticut. I remember that the first time I visited the home of my fathers — old Lebanon — a dear old lady, peering in my face, said: “Let me see! you were born after you left Connecticut.”

Seriously, I would not disparage my native state. I hold that I am, or, with the franchise, would be, a citizen of no mean commonwealth. Its name is not so sonorous a mouthful as Massachusetts; but somehow I love the sound of it. We have not the Atlantic; but we have a fine family group of young seas, and we have Niagara. We have no Bunker Hill and Lexington; but we have the watery battle-fields of Erie and Champlain. We have not Boston; but our seaport, on the island of Manhattan, is looking up. We have no Plymouth Rock; but we have a Plymouth church, which holds more people. We have no “Funnel Hall”; but we have old Tammany. We have no colossal bronze statue of Woester; but we have the Cardiff Giant. Secondly, I have never made a pilgrimage to Plymouth Rock. It is in such an out-of-the-way place. As removals are in fashion, why not move it to Boston? I confess that, before having seen our Plymouth, I never ought to have set my face toward the old English town of that name. I know that, never having saluted its immortal granite, I ought to have blushed as on the gray battlements of Blarney Castle I bent to kiss its magic stone.

I shall not presume to speak for those grand women of 1620 who, in their frail little ship, dared that wintry voyage for the men they loved and the faith they adored — an undertaking that, without that love and that faith, would have seemed like letting go of the dear old planet itself, and launching out into infinite distance, darkness, and cold. Their immortality is secure — a sacred legacy is their heroic and blessed memory. I woudl speak for the living women of New England — and I can speak lovingly, if not eloquently — with the thought of a New England mother warm at my heart. During the late dreadful days of civil war, did they not abundantly prove that in them still live even the stern virtues of the women of the olden time? When their hospital ministrations ended, hosts of New England women took up the scardcely less hard and perilous work of educating the poor freedmen, who thus saw Nightingales turned into Doves, bringing olive leaves, to tell that even for them a new earth of liberty had arisen from the wild, dark waters of slavery.

How many of teh greatest women of our time has New England nurtured? Maria Mitchell, who nigtly reads the illuminated missal of teh heavens, as we read the daily papers, and with far more profit; Harriet Beecher Stowe, whom nobody can write down — not even she herself; Charlotte Cushman, who while she kept the English stage was the grandest actress on it; Harriet Hosmer, whose name is carved in marble; and Ida Lewis, whose “name is writ in water,” and yet is imperishable. 

On the whole, I am glad I am not a born Yankee woman; for were I one, I might not feel free to say what I now say, and propose to stand by: that, among its other admirable manufacturers, New England produces the best-educated girls, the truest wives, the noblest mothers, and the most glorious old maids in the world.

Source:  “Products of New England,” in the Lowell Daily Citizen and News, March 30, 1871.

Also: New York Public Library, Misc. Personal Name Files, D-Z. MssCol 2016, b. 64, Lippincott.