Reminiscences
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| Lucy N. Colman |
In the early years of the antislavery agitation in our country, it was my good fortune to become acquainted with Lucy N. Colman, author of these “Reminiscences” of her life-work; more particularly in the advocacy of the immediate emancipation of the slave, although she has not failed to demand the equal rights of her own sex with man, not only socially but politically. Since the time of our first acquaintance, we have lived on the most intimate terms of love and friendship.
I have never found her faltering in any dut popular or unpopular. If someone or some cause needed her help, she was ready to give it. Mrs Colman, by her own exertions, without help from anyone, removed from our city of Rochester the blot of the coloured school, thereby giving to our coloured people equal rights in our public schools, and helping to remove the prejudice so harmful to both races. Mrs Colman and I have in most things “seen eye to eye,” but in the matter of Spiritualism, we are widely apart. While to me the knowledge, for such it is to me, that my departed loved ones can and do come to me is a blessing so great that I cannot describe it, she has no faith in it whatever.
What matters? our friendship is too strong—too sweet to be disturbed by the difference of opinion. I cheerfully recommend the work to all reformers of whatever name and grade.
Amy Post.
Excerpt from Lucy's autobiography :
I do not remember at what age I learned the astounding lesson that -in this so-called republican country there were several millions of human beings who were bought and sold like the beasts of the field. But it must have been almost in my babyhood, for I well remember being taught the “ Cradle Song,” by my mother, who died when I was six years of age. Let me give a few verses of this song which Christian mothers taught their children: I thank the goodness and the grace
That on my birth hath smiled, And made me, in these Christian days, A happy English child. I was not born, as thousands are, Where God was never known And taught to pray a useless prayer To blocks of wood and stone. I was not born a little slave. To labour in the sun, And wish I were but in my grave And all my labour is done. I think my pious mother must have been sorely troubled to answer satisfactorily to herself the questions which I continually asked her:
Why did God let children be slaves? And if God made little children, why did he make them black, if that were the reason that they were slaves? And was God good? etc., etc. This being a slave seemed to me at that time the worst of all calamities, save one, that could happen to anybody, and that other was the going to hell, to be burned forever in an actual fire. My poor little brain was so excited in trying to find answers
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