That the women of our country were largely instrumental in bringing about the fratricidal strife which shook that country to its centre cannot be denied. Even such firebrands as Phillips and Garrison did not incite so bitter a spirit as did the many women who espoused their cause. It was a time of fanaticism in the North and fury in the South; and both these feelings reached their culmination in the women of the sections. One of the most powerful influences for the making of discord was from the hand of a woman, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ and thereby led much of the thought and prejudices of both sections into utterly false channels. The South, and especially its women, saw in the book a vile libel upon its culture, a base slander of its most representative institutions; the North, especially its women, accepted the book as literal fact and looked upon their brothers and sisters of the South as slave-drivers and cruel task-mistresses, building the structure of their wealth and luxury upon the crushed bodies of their weaker and more degraded fellows and careless of the bitter moans of the oppressed. The acceptance by the North of the book as fact embittered the South, conscious of the injustice of the thing, to the last degree, while the North upon that utterly inadequate authority reviled the South for the imaginary crimes which were rife in its midst.
The question of the limitation of slavery had been long before the country and had produced much bitterness of feeling on both sides; but the idea of the sudden abolishment of the institution, "peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must," was of new growth in the decade preceding the war, at least in any coherent and prominent form. In the South were many women as well as men who, while they accepted and tried to make the best of the institution which had been handed down to them by their ancestors, were at heart as eager Abolitionists as any of the North; but they knew that such a radical change must be brought about by gradual steps or it would open the way to yet greater evils, of which the sudden impoverishment of the section was not the greatest. In the North were men and women who held themselves aloof from the rabid fanaticism of their day, and while they heartily desired the eradication of the taint of slavery from the country which boasted of its freedom, yet were willing to trust to time and the growth of principle for the result which they desired. But on both sides these conservatives were unfortunately in the minority and their influence was of no avail; on both sides they were looked upon as traitors to the cause which they loved best and most wisely of all.