Nothing daunted, she continued to speak wherever she could get a hearing, and at last came an invitation to make an address in Washington, D. C. Here indeed was a triumph! She hesitated long before accepting the invitation, for it would be a trying ordeal, as among her audience would be the President and many diplomats and high government officials. But with sturdy courage she accepted, and as a result faced, as she later said, the most brilliant audience ever assembled to hear her speak. It was a unique sensation for the dignitaries and men of mark to sit as listeners at the feet of this slender girl, who was speaking on profound questions of the day; but she made a deep impression, even on those who did not agree with her opinions, and it was a proud moment of her life when at the close of the meeting she met the President and his Cabinet. The Chief Executive gladly granted her an interview for the following day, and like other men of lesser rank, was carried out of himself as he watched the play of expression, the light and shade on her mobile face, as they talked together of the vital topics of the day.
Anna Dickinson was now an orator beyond a doubt; in fact, the only _girl_ orator the country had ever known. More than that, she made use of her eloquence, her magnetism, her flow of language, not for any minor use, but in presenting to the public the great problems of her day and in pleading for honor and justice, freedom and fullness of joy for the individual, with such intensity of purpose as few men have ever used in pleading a cause.
That she wrote and acted in a play dealing with one of the subjects nearest her heart, and that she published a novel of the same kind, added nothing to her fame. She was wholly an orator with an instinctive knowledge of the way to play on the emotions of her listeners. Her faults were the faults of an intense nature too early obliged to grapple with hard problems; her virtues were those of a strong, independent, unselfish nature. It has been said that she rose to fame on the crest of three waves: the negro wave, the war wave, and the woman wave. If that is so, then was her success as a public speaker something of which to be proud, for to have spoken on such subjects surely betokens a great nature. Anna Dickinson has been called the "Joan of Arc" of her day and country. If she had not the delicate spiritual vision of the Maid of France, she had her superb courage in reaching up toward an ideal. What she was and what she accomplished as an American girl, who was an orator at eighteen, gives an incentive and a new enthusiasm to young Americans of the twentieth century, for what girls have done girls can do, and we believe, with that greatest of poets, that "the best is yet to be."