FIRE UP!
“What is the end and essence of life? It is to expand all our faculties
and affections. It is to grow, to gain by exercise new energy, new
intellect, new love. It is to hope, to strive, to bring out what is
within us, to press towards what is above us. In other words, it is to
be Free. Slavery is thus at war with the true life of human
nature.”—_Channing._
At the conclusion of Vance’s narrative, Mr. Onslow rose, shook him by
the hand, and walked away without making a remark.
Mrs. Berwick showed her appreciation by her tears.
“What a pity,” said her husband, “that so fine a fellow as Peek did not
accept your proposal to free him!”
“Peek freed himself,” replied Vance. “He escaped to Canada, married,
settled in New York, and was living happily, when a few days ago, rather
than go before a United States Commissioner, he surrendered himself to
that representative of the master race, Colonel Delancy Hyde, to whom
you have had the honor to be introduced. Peek is now on board this boat,
and handcuffed, lest he should jump overboard and swim ashore. If you
will walk forward, I will show him to you.”
Greatly surprised and interested, the Berwicks followed Vance to the
railing, and looked down on Peek as he reclined in the sunshine reading
a newspaper.
“But he must be freed. I will buy him,” said Berwick.
“Don’t trouble yourself.” returned Vance. “Peek will be free without
money and without price, and he knows it. Those iron wristbands you see
are already filed apart.”
“Are there many such as he among the negroes?”
“Not many, I fear, either among blacks or whites,” replied Vance. “But,
considering their social deprivations, there are more good men and true
among the negroes—ay, among the slaves—than you of the North imagine.
Your ideal of the negro is what you derive from the Ethiopian minstrels
and from the books and plays written to ridicule him. His type is a low,
ignorant trifler and buffoon, unfit to be other than a slave or an
outcast. Thus, by your injurious estimate, you lend yourselves to the
support and justification of slavery.”
“Would you admit the black to a social equality?”
“I would admit him,” replied Vance, “to all the civil rights of the
white. There are many men whom I am willing to acknowledge my equals,
whose society I may not covet. That does not at all affect the question
of their rights. Let us give the black man a fair field. Let us not
begin by declaring his inferiority in capacity, and then anxiously
strive to prevent his finding a chance to prove our declaration untrue.”
“But would you favor the amalgamation of the races?”
“That is a question for physiologists; or, perhaps, for individual
instincts. Probably if all the slaves were emancipated in all the Cotton
States, amalgamation would be much less than it is now. The French
Quadroons are handsome and healthy, and are believed to be more vigorous
than either of the parent races from which they are descended.”
“Many of the most strenuous opponents of emancipation base their
objections on their fears of amalgamation.”
“To which,” replied Vance, “I will reply in these words of one of your
Northern divines, ‘_What a strange reason for oppressing a race of
fellow-beings, that if we restore them to their rights we shall marry
them!_’ Many of these men who cry out the loudest against amalgamation
keep colored mistresses, and practically confute their own protests. To
marriage, but not to concubinage, they object.”
“I see no way for emancipation,” said Berwick, “except through the
consent of the Slave States.”
“God will find a way,” returned Vance. “He infatuates before he
destroys; and the infatuation which foreruns destruction has seized upon
the leading men of the South. Plagiarizing from Satan, they have said to
slavery, ‘Evil, be thou our good!’ They are bent on having a Southern
Confederacy with power to extend slavery through Mexico into Central
America. That can never be attempted without civil war, and civil war
will be the end of slavery.”
“Would you not,” asked Berwick, “compensate those masters who are
willing to emancipate their slaves?”
“I deny,” said Vance, “that property in slaves can morally exist. No
decision of the State can absolve me from the moral law. It is a sham
and a lie to say that man can hold property in man. The right to make
the black man a slave implies the right to make you or me a slave. No
legislation can make such a claim valid. No vote of a majority can make
an act of tyranny right,—can convert an innocent man into a chattel. All
the world may cry out it is right, but they cannot make it so. The
slaveholder, in emancipating his slave, merely surrenders what is not
his own. I would be as liberal to him in the way of encouragement as the
public means would justify. But the loss of the planter from
emancipation is greatly over estimated. His land would soon double in
value by the act; and the colored freedmen would be on the soil,
candidates for wages, and with incentives to labor they never had
before.”
The bell for dinner broke in upon the conversation. It was not till
evening that the parties met again on the upper deck.
“I have been talking with Peek,” said Berwick, “and to my dismay I find
he was betrayed by the husband of my step-mother. You must help me
cancel this infernal wrong.”
“I have laid my plans for taking all these negroes ashore at midnight at
our next stopping-place,” replied Vance. “I am to personate their owner.
The keepers of the boat, who have seen me so much with Hyde, will offer
no opposition. He is already so drunk that we have had to put him to
bed. He begged me to look after his niggers. Whiskey had made him
sentimental. He wept maudlin tears, and wanted to kiss me.”
“Here’s a check,” said Berwick, “for twenty-five hundred dollars. Give
it to Peek the moment he is free.”
Vance placed it in a small water-proof wallet.
What’s the matter?
A rush and a commotion on the deck! Captain Crane left the wheel-house,
and jumped over the railing down to the lower deck forward, his mouth
bubbling and foaming with oaths.
There had been a slackening of the fires, and the Champion was all at
once found to be fast gaining on the Pontiac.
“Fire up!” yelled the Captain. “Pile on the turpentine splinters. Bring
up the rosin. Blast yer all for a set of cowardly cusses! I’m bound to
land yer either in Helena or hell, ahead of the Champion.”