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[Illustration: Drawn by Emma Roche.
Abaché.]
Historic Sketches of
the South
By
Emma Langdon Roche
_Drawings and Photographs by Author_
The Knickerbocker Press
New York
1914
COPYRIGHT
BY
EMMA LANGDON ROCHE
1914
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY 1
II. EARLY LEGISLATION AGAINST THE SLAVE TRAFFIC 19
III. ILLEGAL TRAFFIC IN SLAVES 49
IV. PREPARATIONS FOR “CLOTILDE’S” VOYAGE 65
V. THE CAPTURE OF THE TARKARS 74
VI. VOYAGE OF THE “CLOTILDE” 84
VII. THE RETURN 92
VIII. THE TARKARS AT DABNEY’S PLANTATION 98
IX. TARKAR LIFE IN AMERICA 103
X. IMPRESSIONS OF ALABAMA IN 1846[1] 129
ILLUSTRATIONS
PAGE
ABACHÉ _Frontispiece_
Drawn by Emma Roche.
POLEETE 73
Drawn by Emma Roche.
ABACHÉ AND KAZOOLA 79
MAP DRAWN BY KAZOOLA 89
(_1_) Tarkar Village. (_2_) Dahomey’s Land. (_3_)
Wavering line showing stealthy march of Dahomeyans
through forest. (_4_) Route by which captive
Tarkars were taken to the sea. (_5_), (_6_), (_7_), (_8_),
Eko, Budigree, Adaché, Whydah, towns through
which Tarkars passed. (_9_) River. (_10_) Beach
and sea.
KAZOOLA 97
Drawn by Emma Roche.
WRECK OF THE “CLOTILDE.” 103
CHARLEE 109
OLOUALA 117
Drawn by Emma Roche.
CHARLEE, HEAD OF THE TARKARS 127
Drawn by Emma Roche.
KAZOOLA 131
ZOOMA, THE LAST TARKBAR 139
Historic Sketches of the South
CHAPTER I
THE BEGINNINGS OF AMERICAN SLAVERY
To fully understand the opposition of thought wherein our
“irrepressible conflict” had its inception and lay so long in embryo,
to burst forth at last in the awful and bloody travail of a nation
divided and at arms, some knowledge of the history and psychology
of the peoples who settled the American colonies is necessary; for
a nation’s cataclysms are not spontaneously generated, but are the
result of forces which though for generations are silent and hidden
are gathering strength under the evils of superstition, oppression, or
fanaticism, and only need such an explosive as the tongue of a Danton,
Robespierre, Garrison, Beecher, or Stowe to hurl the people into death
and desolation.
The early settlers who have left their impress on American life and
character were of the same country and traditions, but their manners
and ideals had been developed by the opposing forces which began to
stir England during the Renaissance--a hundred and fifty years before
the Reformation--forces of which our own Civil War seems as direct
a sequence as were the religio-political feuds of the 16th and 17th
century England. In the New World the exponents of these contrasting
forces were divided for the first century and a half by what afterwards
became known as Mason’s and Dixon’s Line and by vast areas of
uninhabited wilderness.
Virginia was no Mecca for the religiously or politically oppressed, but
drew to her soldiers of fortune--men impelled by a spirit of adventure,
or those who for some delinquency wished to lose their identity in the
vast, unknown New World; among them were many gentlemen who more often
than not possessed the vices and follies of a corrupt age. The first
who became permanent settlers were divided on the outward voyages by
jealousies and dissensions. These differences were carried into the
colony; aggravated by the greed and selfishness of those placed in
authority, they became greater hardships than the illness, starvation,
and Indian treacheries which hampered early progress. There were “poor
gentlemen, Tradesmen, Servingmen, libertines, and such like, ten times
more fit to spoyle a Commonwealth, than either begin one, or but helpe
to maintain one. For when neither the feare of God, nor the law, nor
shame, nor displeasure of their friends could rule them here, there is
small hope ever to bring one in twenty of them ever to be good there.
Notwithstanding, I confesse divers amongst them, had better mindes and
grew much more industrious than was expected.”[2] Amid treacheries and
deceits, John Smith stands forth a hero. Through his thought and action
the colony not only survived the vicissitudes of fire, starvation, and
massacre, but was saved from itself, for the evils of its own lawless,
disturbing elements were greater dangers than those which came from
without. The hope of gold was ostensibly the colony’s _raison d’être_:
“The worst of all was our gilded refiners with their golden promises
made all men their slaves in hope of recompenses; there was no talke,
no hope, no worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, loade gold,
such a bruit of gold, that one mad fellow desired to be buried in the
sands least they should by their art make gold of his bones.” This
search for gold proved futile; in 1615 the land was parceled off to
each settler in fifty-acre lots, tobacco was planted, and thus began
Virginia’s prosperity.
Tobacco was introduced into Europe by the first Columbian voyagers
and into England by Raleigh and Drake. Despite the strong social and
religious pressure--even King James instituting a propaganda which
led him to write the _Counterblast to Tobacco_--the habit spread with
alarming rapidity, and was not confined to the men alone; chewing
and smoking were indulgences common to the older women, while snuff
was the favorite with the younger ones. This new taste created a
demand which increased Virginia’s population and greatly extended her
cultivated fields. Women were scarce, and the planters growing rich had
a natural desire to return to England. This, however, was obviated by
the importation of widows and virgins who were shipped to the colony
as any other cargo. The nature of this bartering, which is unique in
American history, may best be described from a letter, dated August
21, 1621, which accompanied one of these cargoes of colonial dames:
“We send you in this ship one widow and eleven maids for wives for the
people of Virginia. There hath been especial care had in the choice of
them, for there hath not any one of them been received, but upon good
recommendations.
“In case they can not be presently married, we desire that they be put
in several households that have wives, till they can be provided with
husbands. There are near fifty more which are shortly to come, are sent
by our most honorable lord and treasurer, the Earl of Southampton (the
patron of Shakspere), and certain worthy gentlemen, who taking into
consideration that the plantations can never flourish till families be
planted, and the respects of wives and children fix these people on
the soil, therefore have given this fair beginning for the reimbursing
those charges. It is ordered, that every man that marries them give
one hundred and twenty pounds of the best leaf tobacco for each of them.
“Though we are desirous that the marriage be free according to the law
of nature, yet we would not have these maids deceived and married to
servants, but only to such freemen or tenants as have means to maintain
them. We pray you, therefore to be as a father to them in this business
not enforcing them to marry against their wills.”
Labor for the ever-increasing fields was another problem confronting
the planter. King James decided that the London Company should solve
this by transporting to Virginia English convicts, who thus removed
from old environments and temptations might form a valuable industrial
asset. Only one shipload of a hundred was sent, for about the same
time a Dutch man-of-war arrived at Jamestown (August, 1619) and twenty
negro slaves were sold to the planters. Qualms about such a transaction
could scarcely be expected, for through all historic times it was only
as a slave that the negro had been associated with other races. In
ancient times he had been subservient to the Egyptians, bought for
the Carthaginian galleys; slave to Assyrian, Arabian, Indian, Greek,
Etruscan, and Roman; and in early Christian centuries sold by the
Venetians to the Moors of Spain.[3]
When the existence of new lands became known and labor was needed
for their development, the negro’s native country became a hunting
ground where he was not only stalked by the Dutch and Portuguese,
but by the French and English who also had posts for that purpose in
Africa. In fact the English, including therein the colonists of New
England, became more extensively engaged in the traffic than all other
slave-trading European nations combined. Compunctions about slavery
as about many other things came only with the moral awakening of a
later generation. “Scarcely any one seems to have regarded the trade
as wrong. Theologians had so successfully labored to produce a sense
of the amazing, I might almost say generical, difference between those
who were Christians and those who were not, that to apply to the latter
the principles that were applied to the former, would have been deemed
a glaring paradox. If the condition of the negroes in this world was
altered for the worse, it was felt that their prospects in the next
were greatly improved. Besides, it was remembered that, shortly after
the deluge Ham had behaved disrespectfully to his drunken father, and
it was believed that the Almighty had, in consequence, ordained negro
slavery.”[4] The utility of the negro being at once proven, African
slavery had become something of an institution in Virginia, before the
_Mayflower_ with its handful of men, women, and children landed on
Plymouth Rock.
The stern, uncompromising attitude of these people in whom there was
no quibbling with right or wrong as they perceived it, which gave them
the physical courage to endure persecution, mutilation, and even death,
was the result of the religious agitations which began in England with
Wycliffe and were directed against the oppressions and corruptions
which flourished within the Church’s powerful organization. Though
suppressed, the leaven had sifted down to the people who, stultified by
centuries of grossest superstition, had silently and patiently borne
the yoke. In the stirrings of this religious Renaissance the book that
reached them was Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible; this gave to them
the Semitic conception of God--the one God--which the voices of those
“primitive Puritans the Prophets” had saved from the obliterating
dangers of idolatry and superstition. The stolid somberness of the
Northern races responded to the majestic swing of this wonderful
collection of Hebrew documents which traced a people’s struggles and
thought development. Some of its characters as Huxley says of “Jepthah,
Gideon, and Sampson are men of the old heroic stamp, who would look
as much in place in a Norse Saga as where they are.” Stray chapters
sometimes came into the possession of some yeoman who was fortunate
enough to read; in silence and secrecy, when the day’s work was done,
there would gather round him eager listeners. To know what this book’s
message meant to them, one needs but read their subsequent history.
To hear it, possess it, and believe it, they suffered the diabolical
tortures and fiendish perpetrations which at once made martyrs and
tyrants of men, and which laid in England the foundation of what Ranke
calls the “heroic age of Protestantism in Western Europe.” Of this
breed were the Pilgrims of Plymouth Rock. Their inherent independence
had been fostered by a long exile in Leyden; there the old Teutonic
spirit of freedom had survived, and had given her men that sublime
courage and determination, when besieged by the Duke of Alva and
starving, “that rather than yield they would devour their left arms
to enable them to continue the defense with their right.”[5] Leyden
afterwards became a haven for those of other countries who, breaking
from prescribed thought, dared to act accordingly. It was also a
university center; political and religious tenets were subjects of
common debate. Robinson who became one of the Pilgrim fathers took an
active part in these discussions.
To these exiles the New World became a hope. Though homeless, they were
loyal to James. While petitioning the London Company for lands, they
begged of him the freedom to there worship God according to their own
consciences. Though this was not actually granted it was permitted.
An unkindly fate seemed to preside over their voyage--buffeting
storms drove them farther north than their proposed destination; some
historians state they were purposely steered out of their course by
their Dutch pilot, and were forced to land on Plymouth Rock.
By a solemn covenant entered into aboard ship, they agreed that while
they would be faithful to the English Crown, the polity they would
establish among themselves would be an ideal state--a community of
interests--fascinating as expounded by Plato, More, and Rousseau, but
unfeasible for human nature as yet evolved since complete barbarism.
United by a common faith--gloomy, austere--putting aside as mortal
sin all the joys of life--forced to endure together in a wild, bleak,
strange land, starvation, disease, frightful cold, and the terror of
hostile Indians, by whom they would have probably been exterminated
had not a deadly pestilence broken out among these savages--possibly
no better opportunity for such an experiment has ever been offered
civilized man. But among them too was the natural inequality of
individuals which will probably always render futile and unenduring
similar sociological experiments.
The Puritan settlements were gradually augmented by the persecuted from
their native land, and it would seem that they could at last possess
the religious security and contentment for which they had so long
clamored, but dissent had become second nature; combativeness seemed
essential to zeal, and as there was no Established or Roman Church
at which to hurl themselves, their own tenets became mooted points;
bitter differences arose. They showed themselves as intolerant in the
New World as they had been intolerable in the Old, and those without
the might to prove their right were driven forth. In this manner
Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire were settled. Much of
their later history has to do with religious bickerings, mutilations,
and witch-burnings. It was an outgrowth of this same spirit which
confronted the South for thirty years before the final rupture which
resulted in the War of Secession.
Thus from the beginning the North and the South were necessarily
distinctive; settled under different circumstances, the one drew
from England the stern, severe, and rigorously religious, while the
other became the habitat for the Puritan’s opposite--the impecunious
gentleman, the roistering cavalier, the insolvent debtor, and the
Catholic nobleman--a class in which there had been a very general
“reversion from virtuous and noble manhood to the lewdness of the
ape and the cunning ferocity of the tiger.”[6] In the New World all
alike were brought face to face with a great, overshadowing nature
which presented the diversified physical conditions along which each
section’s economic development would tend. Agriculture in austere New
England would have been a too uneven wrestling with nature; existence
wrought from the soil meant unending toil and often heart-breaking
disappointment, so the New Englander’s pursuits became mercantile and
seafaring--occupations in which the negro could be of little value, but
following England’s initiative he found the slave-trade profitable, and
the Southern planter a ready buyer. To repress Nature’s exuberance,
the fields of tobacco, cotton, rice, indigo, and cane required man’s
watchful care, and the negro, inured through all previous generations
to the sun and rain, the jungle and the swamp, properly directed,
became, and still is, the ideal laborer for work of the soil.
Since then our “mental endyses” have been many; we have associations
for the prevention of cruelty to animals, and sympathetic and indignant
thrills pass through us at sight of ill-treatment to one of these, so
we cannot bring our attitude of to-day or of the last hundred years
to judge the beginnings of American slavery. To 16th and 17th century
Europeans it was palpable that the difference between the negro and
the man-like apes was no greater than that existing between the negro
and themselves, and it was debatable “with that brutishness which
commonly appeareth in all their actions whether the people generally
may be thought to be men in the skins of beasts; or beasts created in
the likenesse and shape of man.”[7] The sentimentality which obtained
some years ago and which led to such bitter hatred and seems almost
maudlin when that phase of the question in which the indescribable
wretchedness of the negro in his native land is considered--his gross
and pitiable superstitions, his indifference to death and his regard
for cruelty as a virtue; what slavery did for him seems analogous to
what we suppose primitive man accomplished with the wolf--adopted it
from the wild and made of it a faithful, domestic animal. True, the
motives were utility and gain, but who can deny the mighty uplift in
value and sagacity, both for the dog and the negro? Among the African
tribes described in Pigafetta’s account of Lopez’s _African Travels_
(1598), and spoken of by Heylyn in his _Cosmographie_ (1657), are the
Anziques, “the cruellest Cannibals in the world; for they do not onely
eat their Enemies, but their friends and Kinsfolk. And that they may be
sure not to want these Dainties, they have shambles of man’s flesh, as
in other parts of Beef and Mutton. So covetous withall, that if their
Slaves will yield but a penny more when sold joynt by joynt than if
sold alive, they will cut them out, and sell them upon the shambles.
Yet with these barbarous qualities they have many good ... of so great
fidelity to their masters and to those which trust them, that they
will rather choose to be killed than either abuse the trust, or betray
their Masters. For that cause more esteemed by the Portugals than
other Slaves.” So even the most bloodthirsty possessed potentially the
quality of faithfulness, which when he was removed from his natural
environment--where for thousands of years he had not progressed--made
all his later development possible, and which aside from the cases
where there has been an infusion of white or Indian blood, is largely
responsible for what the best type of American negro is to-day. It was
this quality, fostered by care and kindness, that has filled Southern
tradition with touching and oftentimes heroic incidents of the slave’s
devotion. When the old differences of Puritan and Cavalier, under other
guises, called men to arms, it was to the fidelity of these blacks that
the Southerner trusted wife, children, and home. That this trust was
seldom violated is sufficient encomium for master and slave. Under the
régime established in many places, after emancipation had converted the
“slave from a well-fed animal into a pauperized man” (Huxley), when he
was incited to open rebellion and nameless atrocities, to what sorrows
would the desolated South have been subjected, had the old status
of master and slave been different? Had the South been guilty of the
charges laid to her door, despite Klu-Klux Klans and other precautions,
the negro’s temper would have been much the same as that of the French
canaille, who during the Commune “drank blood to vomit crime.” They had
shown, in the San Domingo insurrections, that revenge lay within their
nature.