Chapter 23
Speechmaking in Sacramento

They had offered to put me up in a big hotel in Sacramento, but I said I preferred to stay with Miss Baxter in her boardinghouse.

The meeting was scheduled for the afternoon after we arrived. I must have taken an hour to get ready. Just pulling the dress over my head and trying to button the buttons with my trembling fingers was so hard I finally had to ask Miss Baxter to help me. The dress was a light brown cotton, with full sleeves, navy piping around the collar and lapels, and a matching navy ribbon around the waist. I wished Almeda had been there to help me get it all just right and brush my hair and tie it up with its ribbon. But Miss Baxter was a fine substitute. It was so nice to have a woman there to share the anxious moments with me!

Cal came to pick me up in a fancy buggy and complimented me on how I looked. But I was still dreadfully nervous.

A platform had been built downtown near the capital buildings and decorated with red, white, and blue banners. Flags were flying, and a band was playing peppy patriotic songs. Quite a crowd had already gathered, and wagons and buggies were still pulling up. It reminded me of the festive day in Miracle Springs back in ’52, but one look around told me this was a much bigger and more important event. All the men were dressed in expensive suits, and just the looks on their faces told me they were probably important men in California’s politics.

Most of them were, too. Cal introduced me to more than a dozen people that day, and I can hardly remember a single one of them. I was so nervous before and so relieved after my brief time up on the platform that my mind was blank of everything else.

There were going to be speeches on behalf of all three of the candidates for president. In addition to me, Mr. Stanford and some other of his friends, Mr. Dalton and a famous orator named Edward D. Baker, all spoke for Abraham Lincoln. The Republicans were in the minority in California, as they were in the rest of the country. Up until this time, in the national elections California had always sided with the party that favored slavery. But now in 1860, when the line came to be drawn so clearly between North and South, and between slavery and antislavery, the Republicans hoped to break this record and bring California around and make it a free, pro-Union Republican state.

The split of the Democratic party, Cal told me, would help more than anything to make this possible. After the nomination of Stephen Douglas by the moderate wing of the party, the southern faction set up John Breckinridge as a candidate as well. On this day in Sacramento, many prominent Californians came out in favor of both men.

Governor Downey gave a speech in support of Douglas. I was surprised at how many famous western politicians were in favor of the southern cause and slavery. Former governor Latham supported Breckinridge, although he wasn’t there that day because he was now serving in the U.S. Senate representing California. California’s other senator, William Gwin, formerly from Mississippi, did happen to be present, and spoke on behalf of the southern cause and candidate Breckinridge. John Weller, also speaking for Breckinridge, actually brought up the issue of the South seceding from the Union. I couldn’t believe slavery could be so important to the South that they would actually try to start a new country rather than to see the slaves set free.

I had my journal with me and I tried to write down some of what was said. But all the newspapers told about the speeches anyway, and I got copies the next day so I could read them over again. Weller said this: “I do not know whether Lincoln will be elected or not. I will personally urge every Californian to vote instead for John C. Breckinridge of the Southern Democratic party. I do know this, that if our efforts fail and if Lincoln is elected, and if he attempts to carry out his doctrines, the South will surely withdraw from the Union. And I should consider them less than men if they did not.”

One speech got the biggest applause and was written up in all the newspapers of the state during the next few days—the one delivered by Edward Baker. He had been defeated a year before as candidate for Congress and then had gone up to Oregon where he had been elected to the Senate from the new state. He had come down to California and had been called upon to speak on behalf of the Republican party, freedom, and the election of Abraham Lincoln. People said afterward it was one of the greatest political speeches ever delivered in California. Baker said:

Where the feet of my youth were planted, there, by Freedom, my feet shall stand. I will walk beneath her banner. I will glory in her strength. I have watched her, in history, struck down on a hundred chosen fields of battle. I have seen her friends fly from her. I have seen her foes gather round her. I have seen them bind her to the stake. I have seen them give her ashes to the winds, regathering them again that they might scatter them yet more widely. But when they turned to exult, I have seen her again meet them, face-to-face, resplendent in complete steel and brandishing in her strong right hand a flaming sword, red with insufferable light. I take courage. The people gather round her. The Genius of America will at last lead her sons to freedom.

After Baker’s speech I wasn’t any too anxious to walk up there on that platform, with four or five hundred people standing all around listening, and open my timid little mouth to try to say something. What could I say that could compare in any way with what Mr. Baker had said?

But there was no getting around it. And eventually I heard Mr. Dalton start to introduce me. I sat there listening to him, my whole body sweating and shaking, terrified at the ordeal that was about to come.

“Ladies and gentlemen, fellow Californians,” he said, “you have heard from eminent statesmen today, from senators and governors and political leaders and men of industry and commerce. But I now want to introduce to you a young lady of perhaps equal reputation in some circles, a young lady whose simple and honest words have been read in newspapers from one shining sea of this great land all the way to the other; a young lady who, I must tell you, is a bit nervous about all this. She is a country girl, yet her words ring with truth whenever she sets pen to paper. Therefore I know what she says to you today comes directly from the heart. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Miss Cornelia Belle Hollister.”

I stood up. I glanced at Cal, sitting beside me, and he gave me a smile of encouragement. I walked up the steps and to the front of the platform.

I stood there for a moment. Everyone was quiet, all eyes looking up at me, waiting.

“I’ve never made a speech before in my life,” I began. “I don’t know if this will even qualify as one now. They told me all I had to do was say what I felt and thought about things, and that would be good enough. I suppose I can do that.”

My voice sounded so tiny, like a little mouse! All the other men had loud, deep voices, and I sounded like a little girl. I didn’t think the people more than ten feet away would be able to hear a thing I said!

“I’ve been thinking a lot about this election,” I said after clearing my throat and trying to speak up a little louder. “I had to think about which side I’d be on and what I ought to do about it. I can’t say as I’m a Democrat or a Republican, and it hardly matters much since I can’t vote anyway.”

A small wave of laughter spread among the men who were listening. There were a good number of women there too, and by now most of them had come forward as close to the platform as they could. They were all watching me intently.

“I don’t know Mr. Lincoln or Mr. Douglas, or Mr. Breckinridge, for that matter, who I just found out today is running too. To tell you the truth, I don’t really know too much about any of the issues except for the issue of slavery and freedom. But if you want a woman’s point of view, that’s just about the most important issue of all. And that’s the one I spent nearly all my time thinking over when it came to this election.

“The conclusion I came to is that freedom is a mighty important thing in this country of ours. The Constitution talks about it, and I guess it seems to me that if people in the United States of America can’t be free, then I don’t know where else in the world freedom’s going to find a place to grow. Some of the Democrats might say that the freedom the Constitution talks about doesn’t apply to Negroes because they aren’t people in the same way as the rest of us are, so they don’t have the same right to be free. But I don’t agree with that. I’m a woman, and I don’t have the right to vote. But that doesn’t make me feel any less of a human being, and I don’t figure too many Negroes feel like they’re less than human, either.

“It looks to me like freedom’s a thing that’s got to apply to everybody, or else it doesn’t mean much. It’s got to apply to women and Negroes, to rich people and poor people, to folks in California just like it does to folks in Alabama or anywhere else. Some of these men we’ve been listening to today have said you ought to vote for Mr. Douglas or Mr. Breckinridge because it’ll be better for the South, and the whole country, or because Mr. Lincoln’s made so many strong remarks about being against slavery that the South will be so mad if he gets elected, there’s no telling what they might do.

“All of that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with freedom, if you ask me. The Democrats have been the party that supported slavery all these years. Now the Republicans are trying to change that by standing for freedom. It seems to me that’s about the most important thing of all. I don’t know much about money and the economy and all that. But if folks in these United States aren’t free, then it doesn’t seem to me that our money means much, or the word freedom or our Constitution either.

“Four years ago I tried to write some things to help Colonel Fremont get to the White House, because he was against slavery too, just like Mr. Lincoln is. He got defeated, and I figured my efforts had been wasted.

“But now I’ve got a chance to try to do something again, and I hope the people of this country will do better by the cause of freedom for our people than last time. That’s why I decided, after thinking about it a good long while, to support Abraham Lincoln. No, I can’t vote. But if I could, I’d vote for Mr. Lincoln, and it seems to me you all ought to vote for him too.”

I turned and walked back down the steps and sat down. I was sweating and trembling from head to foot. I never heard any of the applause, but Cal told me they loved it, especially all the women.

The next morning, on the front page of the Sacramento Union, I was shocked to read the headline over a two-column article: BAKER, DOWNEY, WELLER, HOLLISTER ADDRESS SACRAMENTO ELECTORATE. And toward the end of the article, they actually quoted from my speech!