After Preston Brooks’s attack on Charles Sumner, “Bleeding Sumner” joined “Bleeding Kansas” as a rallying cry for abolitionists, including the prolific author Lydia Maria Child of Massachusetts. In the following letters, Child expresses her support for Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont and reveals her thoughts on the Sumner attack, women’s rights, and sectional politics. In doing so, she offers a prophetic view of the years to come.

To Mrs. S. B. Shaw, Wayland, 1856. [no month/date given]

The outrage upon Charles Sumner made me literally ill for several days. It brought on nervous headache and painful suffocations about the heart. If I could only have done something, it would have loosened that tight ligature that seemed to stop the flowing of my blood. But I never was one who knew how to serve the Lord by standing and waiting; and to stand and wait then! It almost drove me mad. And that miserable Faneuil Hall meeting! The time-serving Mr.—talking about his “friend” Sumner’s being a man that “hit hard!” making the people laugh at his own witticisms, when a volcano was seething beneath their feet! poisoning the well-spring of popular indignation, which was rising in its might! Mr. A., on the eve of departing for Europe, wrote to me, “The North will not really do anything to maintain their own dignity. See if they do! I am willing to go abroad, to find some relief from the mental pain that the course of public affairs in this country has for many years caused me.” But I am more hopeful. Such a man as Charles Sumner will not bleed and suffer in vain. Those noble martyrs of liberty in Kansas will prove missionary ghosts, walking through the land, rousing the nation from its guilty slumbers. Our hopes, like yours, rest on Fremont. I would almost lay down my life to have him elected. There never has been such a crisis since we were a nation. If the slave-power is checked now, it will never regain its strength. If it is not checked, civil war is inevitable; and, with all my horror of bloodshed, I could be better resigned to that great calamity than to endure the tyranny that has so long trampled on us. I do believe the North will not, this time, fall asleep again, after shaking her mane and growling a little.

I saw by the papers that Mr. Curtis was in the field, and I rejoiced to know he was devoting his brilliant talents and generous sympathies to so noble a purpose. I envy him; I want to mount the rostrum myself. I have such a fire burning in my soul, that it seems to me I could pour forth a stream of lava that would bury all the respectable servilities, and all the mob servilities, as deep as Pompeii; so that it would be an enormous labor ever to dig up the skeletons of their memories.

We also talk of little else but Kansas and Fremont. What a shame the women can’t vote! We’d carry our “Jessie” into the White House on our shoulders; wouldn’t we? Never mind! Wait a while! Woman stock is rising in the market. I shall not live to see women vote; but I’ll come and rap at the ballot-box. Won’t you? I never was bitten by politics before; but such mighty issues are depending on this election that I cannot be indifferent.

To Miss Lucy Osgood, Wayland, July 9, 1856.

I did not intend to leave your New York letter so long unanswered, but the fact is, recent events have made me heart-sick. My anxiety about Charles Sumner and about the sufferers in Kansas has thrown a pall over everything. The fire of indignation is the only thing that has lighted up my gloom. At times my peace principles have shivered in the wind; and nothing could satisfy my mood but Jeanne d’arc’s floating banner and consecrated sword. And when this state of mind was rebuked by the remembrance of him who taught us to overcome evil only with good, I could do nothing better than groan out, in a tone of despairing reproach, “How long, O Lord! How long?” Certainly there are gleams of light amid the darkness. There has been more spirit roused in the North than I thought was in her. I begin to hope that either the slave power must yield to argument and the majesty of public sentiment or else that we shall see an army in the field, stout and unyielding as Cromwell’s band.

Source: Letters of Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), 78–80.