NUNC PRO TUNC.
The first step in the progress from the prison-house of bondage
to the citadel of liberty was a strange one. The war was over. The
struggle for autonomy and the inviolability of slavery, on the part
of the South, was ended, and fate had decided against them. With
this arbitrament of war fell also the institution which had been
its cause. Slavery was abolished--by proclamation, by national
enactment, by constitutional amendment--ay, by the sterner logic
which forbade a nation to place shackles again upon hands which
had been raised in her defence, which had fought for her life and
at her request. So the slave was a slave no more. No other man
could claim his service or restrain his volition. He might go or
come, work or play, so far as his late master was concerned.
But that was all. He could not contract, testify, marry or give
in marriage. He had neither property, knowledge, right, or power.
The whole four millions did not possess that number of dollars
or of dollars' worth. Whatever they had acquired in slavery was
the master's, unless he had expressly made himself a trustee for
their benefit. Regarded from the legal standpoint it was, indeed,
a strange position in which they were. A race despised, degraded,
penniless, ignorant, houseless, homeless, fatherless, childless,
nameless. Husband or wife there was not one in four millions.
Not a child might call upon a father for aid, and no man of them
all might lift his hand in a daughter's defence. Uncle and aunt
and cousin, home, family--none of these words had any place in
the freedman's vocabulary. Right he had, in the abstract; in the
concrete, none. Justice would not hear his voice. The law was still
color-blinded by the past.
The fruit of slavery--its first ripe harvest, gathered with swords
and bloody bayonets, was before the nation which looked ignorantly
on the fruits of the deliverance it had wrought. The North did not
comprehend its work; the South could not comprehend its fate. The
unbound slave looked to the future in dull, wondering hope.
The first step in advance was taken neither by the nation nor by the
freedmen. It was prompted by the voice of conscience, long hushed
and hidden in the master's breast. It was the protest of Christianity
and morality against that which it had witnessed with complacency
for many a generation. All at once it was perceived to be a great
enormity that four millions of Christian people, in a Christian
land, should dwell together without marriage rite or family tie.
While they were slaves, the fact that they might be bought and sold
had hidden this evil from the eye of morality, which had looked
unabashed upon the unlicensed freedom of the quarters and the
enormities of the barracoon. Now all at once it was shocked beyond
expression at the domestic relations of the freedmen.
So they made haste in the first legislative assemblies that met in
the various States, after the turmoil of war had ceased, to provide
and enact:
I. That all those who had sustained to each other the relation of
husband and wife in the days of slavery, might, upon application
to an officer named in each county, be registered as such husband
and wife.
2. That all who did not so register within a certain time should
be liable to indictment, if the relation continued thereafter.
3. That the effect of such registration should be to constitute such
parties husband and wife, as of the date of their first assumption
of marital relations.
4. That for every such couple registered the officer should be
entitled to receive the sum of one half-dollar from the parties
registered.
There was a grim humor about this marriage of a race by wholesale,
millions at a time, and _nunc pro tunc;_ but especially quaint
was the idea of requiring each freed-man, who had just been torn,
as it were naked, from the master's arms, to pay a snug fee for
the simple privilege of entering upon that relation which the law
had rigorously withheld from him until that moment. It was a strange
remedy for a long-hidden and stubbornly denied disease, and many
strange scenes were enacted in accordance with the provisions of
this statute. Many an aged couple, whose children had been lost in
the obscure abysses of slavery, or had gone before them into the
spirit land, old and feeble and gray-haired, wrought with patience
day after day to earn at once their living and the money for this
fee, and when they had procured it walked a score of miles in order
that they might be "registered," and, for the brief period that
remained to them of life, know that the law had sanctioned the
relation which years of love and suffering had sanctified. It was
the first act of freedom, the first step of legal recognition or
manly responsibility! It was a proud hour and a proud fact for the
race which had so long been bowed in thralldom and forbidden even
the most common though the holiest of God's ordinances. What the
law had taken little by little, as the science of Christian slavery
grew up under the brutality of our legal progress, the law returned
in bulk. It was the first seal which was put on the slave's
manhood--the first step upward from the brutishness of another's
possession to the glory of independence. The race felt its importance
as did no one else at that time. By hundreds and thousands they
crowded the places appointed, to accept the honor offered to their
posterity, and thereby unwittingly conferred undying honor upon
themselves. Few indeed were the unworthy ones who evaded the sacred
responsibility thus laid upon them, and left their offspring to
remain under the badge of shame. When carefully looked at it was
but a scant cure, and threw the responsibility of illegitimacy
where it did not belong, but it was a mighty step nevertheless.
The distance from zero to unity is always infinity.
The county clerk in and for the county of Horsford sat behind
the low wooden railing which he had been compelled to put across
his office to protect him from the too near approach of those who
crowded to this fountain of rehabilitating honor that had recently
been opened therein. Unused to anything beyond the plantation on
which they had been reared, the temple of justice was as strange
to their feet, and the ways and forms of ordinary business as
marvelous to their minds as the etiquette of the king's palace to
a peasant who has only looked from afar upon its pinnacled roof.
The recent statute had imposed upon the clerk a labor of no little
difficulty because of this very ignorance on the part of those whom
he was required to serve; but he was well rewarded. The clerk was
a man of portly presence, given to his ease, who smoked a long-stemmed
pipe as he sat beside a table which, in addition to his papers and
writing materials, held a bucket of water on which floated a clean
gourd, in easy reach of his hand.
"Be you the clerk, sail?" said a straight young colored man, whose
clothing had a hint of the soldier in it, as well as his respectful
but unusually collected bearing.
"Yes," said the clerk, just glancing up, but not intermitting his
work; "what do you want?"
"If you please, sah, we wants to be married, Lugena and me."
"_Registered_, you mean, I suppose?"
"No, we don't, sah; we means _married_."
"I can't marry you. You'll have to get a license and be married by
a magistrate or a minister."
"But I heard der was a law---"
"Have you been living together as man and wife?"
"Oh, yes, sah; dat we hab, dis smart while."
"Then you want to be registered. This is the place. Got a
half-dollar?"
"Yes, sah?"
"Let's have it."
The colored man took out some bills, and with much difficulty
endeavored to make a selection; finally, handing one doubtfully
toward the clerk, he asked,
"Is dat a one-dollah, sah?"
"No, that is a five, but I can change it."
"No, I'se got it h'yer," said the other hastily, as he dove again
into his pockets, brought out some pieces of fractional currency and
handed them one by one to the officer until he said he had enough.
"Well," said the clerk as he took up his pen and prepared to fill
out the blank, "what is your name?"
"My name's Nimbus, sah."
"Nimbus what?"
"Nimbus nuffin', sah; jes' Nimbus." "But you must have another
name?"
"No I hain't. Jes' wore dat fer twenty-odd years, an' nebber hed
no udder."
"Who do you work for?"
"Wuk for myself, sah."
"Well, on whose land do you work?"
"Wuks on my own, sah. Oh, I libs at home an' boa'ds at de same
place, I does. An' my name's Nimbus, jes' straight along, widout
any tail ner handle."
"What was your old master's name?"
"Desmit--Colonel Potem Desmit."
"I might have known that," said the clerk laughingly, "from the
durned outlandish name. Well, Desmit is your surname, then, ain't
it?"
"No'taint, Mister. What right I got ter his name? He nebber gib
it ter me no more'n he did ter you er Lugena h'yer."
"Pshaw, I can't stop to argue with you. Here's your certificate."
"Will you please read it, sah? I hain't got no larnin'. Ef you
please, sah."
The clerk, knowing it to be the quickest way to get rid of them,
read rapidly over the certificate that Nimbus and Lugena Desmit had
been duly registered as husband and wife, under the provisions of
an ordinance of the Convention ratified on the---day of---, 1865.
"So you's done put in dat name--Desmit?"
"Oh, I just had to, Nimbus. The fact is, a man can't be married
according to law without two names."
"So hit appears; but ain't it quare dat I should hev ole Mahs'r's
name widout his gibbin' it ter me, ner my axin' fer it, Mister?"
"It may be, but that's the way, you see."
"So hit seems. 'Pears like I'm boun' ter hev mo' names 'n I knows
what ter do wid, jes' kase I's free. But de chillen--yer hain't
sed nary word about dem, Mister."
"Oh, I've nothing to do with them."
"But, see h'yer, Mister, ain't de law a doin dis ter make dem lawful
chillen?"
"Certainly."
"An' how's de law ter know which is de lawful chillen ef hit ain't
on dat ar paper?"
"Sure enough," said the clerk, with amusement. "That would have
been a good idea, but, you see, Nimbus, the law didn't go that
far."
"Wal, hit ought ter hev gone dat fur. Now, Mister Clerk, couldn't
you jes' put dat on dis yer paper, jes' ter "commodate me, yer
know."
"Perhaps so," good-naturedly, taking back the certificate; "what
do you want me to write?"
"Wal, yer see, dese yer is our chillen. Dis yer boy Lone--Axylone,
Marse Desmit called him, but we calls him Lone for short--he's
gwine on fo'; dis yer gal Wicey, she's two past; and dis little
brack cuss Lugena's a-holdin' on, we call Cap'n, kase he bosses
all on us--he's nigh 'bout a year; an' dat's all."
The clerk entered the names and ages of the children on the back
of the paper, with a short certificate that they were present,
and were acknowledged as the children, and the only ones, of the
parties named in the instrument.
And so the slave Nimbus was transformed, first into the "contraband"
and mercenary soldier _George Nimbus_, and then by marriage
into _Nimbus Desmit_.