● ● ●  Testament tragedy of John Brown striding toward doom in the smoky light of Harper’s Ferry—here was a crescendo of moral challenges that came to its climax when Old Abe Lincoln came out of the wilderness to his appointed task.

In the anxious months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration, as the nation waited and watched the suspended drama at Fort Sumter, Mrs. Patterson wrote a poem charged with astonishing if uneven energy and directed to the commander of the beleaguered fort. Written on February 6, 1861, and entitled “Maj Anderson and Our Country,” it read in part:

Brave Anderson, thou patriot-soul sublime
Thou morning Star of errors’ darkest time!
Prince of the lion-hearted Jackson mould,
Thy valor mocks the rebel at his hold
.  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .  .
O! thou Supreme, who reign’st o’er human power,
God of our fathers, still avert the hour
When sins’ repentance shall be sealed in blood,
To stain this nation blessed o’er field and flood.⁹⁷

The hour was not averted, war came in mid July, and the defeat at Manassas plunged the North into despair. A month later Mrs. Patterson addressed a letter to General Benjamin F. Butler of Massachusetts, called forth by his July 30 letter to Secretary of War Cameron. Though an unscrupulous politician and an iron-fisted general, Butler argued with both moral eloquence and legal persuasiveness against returning to the southern lines the slaves who fled to the northern army for protection. Mrs. Patterson, with an oversimplified estimate of Butler but an earnest regard for man, wrote him: