I HAVE ALL THE RIGHTS I WANT

When Dr. Johnson had published his English Dictionary, and was asked by a lady how he chanced to make a certain mistake that she pointed out, he answered, “Ignorance, madam, pure ignorance.”  I always feel disposed to make the same comment on the assertion of any woman that she has all the rights she wants.  For every woman is, or may be, or might have been, a mother.  And when she comes to know that even now, in many parts of the Union, a married mother has no legal right to her child, I should think her tongue would cleave to her mouth before she would utter those foolish words again.

All the things I ever heard or read against slavery did not fix in my soul such a hostility to it as a single scene in a Missouri slave-jail many years ago.  As I sat there, a purchaser came in to buy a little girl to wait on his wife.  Three little sisters were brought in, from eight to twelve years old:  they were mulattoes, with sweet, gentle manners; they had evidently been taken good care of, and their pink calico frocks were clean and whole.  The gentleman chose one of them, and then asked her, good-naturedly enough, if she did not wish to go with him.  She burst into tears, and said, “I want to stay with my mother.”  But her tears were as powerless, of course, as so many salt drops from the ocean.

That was all.  But all the horrors of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the stories told me by fugitive slaves, the scarred backs I afterwards saw by dozens among colored recruits, did not impress me as did that hour in the jail.  The whole probable career of that poor, wronged, motherless, shrinking child passed before me in fancy.  It seemed to me that a man must be utterly lost to all manly instincts who would not give his life to overthrow such a system.  It seemed to me that the woman who could tolerate, much less defend it, could not herself be true, could not be pure, or must be fearfully and grossly ignorant.

You acquiesce, fair lady.  You say it was horrible indeed, but, thank God! it is past.  Past?  Is it so?  Past, if you please, as to the law of slavery, but as to the legal position of woman still a fearful reality.  It is not many years since a scene took place in a Boston court-room, before Chief Justice Chapman, which was worse, in this respect, than that scene in St. Louis, inasmuch as the mother was present when the child was taken away, and the wrong was sanctioned by the highest judicial officer of the State.  Two little girls, who had been taken from their mother by their guardian, their father being dead, had taken refuge with her against his wishes; and he brought them into court under a writ of habeas corpus, and the court awarded them to him as against their mother.  “The little ones were very much affected,” says the “Boston Herald,” “by the result of the decision which separated them from their mother; and force was required to remove them from the court-room.  The distress of the mother was also very evident.”