Mrs. Stowe spent the next day after the freedmen’s jubilee in driving frantically from fort to fort in search of the proper officer to give her permission to extract her son Fred for a time from the military harness. She was afraid they would not let him come with her; at last, however, she succeeded, and she was never happier than when he sprang into the carriage, free for forty-eight hours. He, too, was filled with uncontrollable delight. “Oh!” he exclaimed in a sort of rapture, “this pays for a year of hard fighting and hard work!” A year ago she had bade him farewell at Andover, and, after the trip of his regiment to New York, she had again seen him for an hour. At that time she found him even in the two days’ experience of soldierly life mysteriously changed--an expression of gravity and care marking his face. “It is thus that our boys,” she said in her heart, “come to manhood in a day!” But what she felt at that time was as nothing to the feelings that were now hers when this war-worn man came to her arms! For he was a lieutenant, having been promoted for bravery on more than one field. That evening in a quiet little parlor, by a bright coal fire, she sat with three children around her, the young lieutenant, a daughter, and the little son who lives now to remember the events of this Washington visit. Her cup was as full of joy as any mother’s could be who yet must think what the fortune of war might mean to many a mother’s breaking heart. It is now time to refer to the matter that Mrs. Stowe had in mind as one of the reasons for coming to Washington. During all these days she was carrying one special burden--something that seemed to her to be of national importance and also a matter of personal responsibility. To understand what this was we must recall the “Affectionate and Christian Address” which had been signed by those five hundred thousand women of Great Britain and Ireland, by duchesses, countesses, wives of generals and ambassadors, savants and men of letters, as well as by hands evidently unused to hold the pen. This “Address” had been sent to “their sisters, the women of the United States of America,” through that most representative of American women, Harriet Beecher Stowe, appealing to them to aid in the removal of slavery from the Christian world. “We acknowledge with grief and shame,” they said, “our heavy share in this great sin. We acknowledge that our forefathers introduced, nay, even compelled the adoption of slavery in those mighty colonies. We humbly confess it before Almighty God; and it is because we so deeply feel and unfeignedly avow our own complicity that we now venture to implore your aid to wipe away our common crime and our common dishonor.”