Marion City, on the Mississippi River, in the State of Missouri—a
village; time, 1845. La Bourboule-les-Bains, France—a village; time,
the end of June, 1894. I was in the one village in that early time; I
am in the other now. These times and places are sufficiently wide
apart, yet today I have the strange sense of being thrust back into
that Missourian village and of reliving certain stirring days that I
lived there so long ago.
Last Saturday night the life of the President of the French Republic
was taken by an Italian assassin. Last night a mob surrounded our
hotel, shouting, howling, singing the “Marseillaise,” and pelting our
windows with sticks and stones; for we have Italian waiters, and the
mob demanded that they be turned out of the house instantly—to be
drubbed, and then driven out of the village. Everybody in the hotel
remained up until far into the night, and experienced the several kinds
of terror which one reads about in books which tell of night attacks by
Italians and by French mobs: the growing roar of the oncoming crowd;
the arrival, with rain of stones and a crash of glass; the withdrawal
to rearrange plans—followed by a silence ominous, threatening, and
harder to bear than even the active siege and the noise. The landlord
and the two village policemen stood their ground, and at last the mob
was persuaded to go away and leave our Italians in peace. Today four of
the ringleaders have been sentenced to heavy punishment of a public
sort—and are become local heroes, by consequence.
That is the very mistake which was at first made in the Missourian
village half a century ago. The mistake was repeated and repeated—just
as France is doing in these latter months.
In our village we had our Ravochals, our Henrys, our Vaillants; and in
a humble way our Cesario—I hope I have spelled this name wrong. Fifty
years ago we passed through, in all essentials, what France has been
passing through during the past two or three years, in the matter of
periodical frights, horrors, and shudderings.
In several details the parallels are quaintly exact. In that day, for a
man to speak out openly and proclaim himself an enemy of negro slavery
was simply to proclaim himself a madman. For he was blaspheming against
the holiest thing known to a Missourian, and could NOT be in his right
mind. For a man to proclaim himself an anarchist in France, three years
ago, was to proclaim himself a madman—he could not be in his right
mind.
Now the original old first blasphemer against any institution
profoundly venerated by a community is quite sure to be in earnest; his
followers and imitators may be humbugs and self-seekers, but he himself
is sincere—his heart is in his protest.
Robert Hardy was our first _abolitionist_—awful name! He was a
journeyman cooper, and worked in the big cooper-shop belonging to the
great pork-packing establishment which was Marion City’s chief pride
and sole source of prosperity. He was a New-Englander, a stranger. And,
being a stranger, he was of course regarded as an inferior person—for
that has been human nature from Adam down—and of course, also, he was
made to feel unwelcome, for this is the ancient law with man and the
other animals. Hardy was thirty years old, and a bachelor; pale, given
to reverie and reading. He was reserved, and seemed to prefer the
isolation which had fallen to his lot. He was treated to many side
remarks by his fellows, but as he did not resent them it was decided
that he was a coward.
All of a sudden he proclaimed himself an abolitionist—straight out and
publicly! He said that negro slavery was a crime, an infamy. For a
moment the town was paralyzed with astonishment; then it broke into a
fury of rage and swarmed toward the cooper-shop to lynch Hardy. But the
Methodist minister made a powerful speech to them and stayed their
hands. He proved to them that Hardy was insane and not responsible for
his words; that no man _could _be sane and utter such words.
So Hardy was saved. Being insane, he was allowed to go on talking. He
was found to be good entertainment. Several nights running he made
abolition speeches in the open air, and all the town flocked to hear
and laugh. He implored them to believe him sane and sincere, and have
pity on the poor slaves, and take measures for the restoration of their
stolen rights, or in no long time blood would flow—blood, blood, rivers
of blood!
It was great fun. But all of a sudden the aspect of things changed. A
slave came flying from Palmyra, the county-seat, a few miles back, and
was about to escape in a canoe to Illinois and freedom in the dull
twilight of the approaching dawn, when the town constable seized him.
Hardy happened along and tried to rescue the negro; there was a
struggle, and the constable did not come out of it alive. Hardy crossed
the river with the negro, and then came back to give himself up. All
this took time, for the Mississippi is not a French brook, like the
Seine, the Loire, and those other rivulets, but is a real river nearly
a mile wide. The town was on hand in force by now, but the Methodist
preacher and the sheriff had already made arrangements in the interest
of order; so Hardy was surrounded by a strong guard and safely conveyed
to the village calaboose in spite of all the effort of the mob to get
hold of him. The reader will have begun to perceive that this Methodist
minister was a prompt man; a prompt man, with active hands and a good
headpiece. Williams was his name—Damon Williams; Damon Williams in
public, Damnation Williams in private, because he was so powerful on
that theme and so frequent.
The excitement was prodigious. The constable was the first man who had
ever been killed in the town. The event was by long odds the most
imposing in the town’s history. It lifted the humble village into
sudden importance; its name was in everybody’s mouth for twenty miles
around. And so was the name of Robert Hardy—Robert Hardy, the stranger,
the despised. In a day he was become the person of most consequence in
the region, the only person talked about. As to those other coopers,
they found their position curiously changed—they were important people,
or unimportant, now, in proportion as to how large or how small had
been their intercourse with the new celebrity. The two or three who had
really been on a sort of familiar footing with him found themselves
objects of admiring interest with the public and of envy with their
shopmates.
The village weekly journal had lately gone into new hands. The new man
was an enterprising fellow, and he made the most of the tragedy. He
issued an extra. Then he put up posters promising to devote his whole
paper to matters connected with the great event—there would be a full
and intensely interesting biography of the murderer, and even a
portrait of him. He was as good as his word. He carved the portrait
himself, on the back of a wooden type—and a terror it was to look at.
It made a great commotion, for this was the first time the village
paper had ever contained a picture. The village was very proud. The
output of the paper was ten times as great as it had ever been before,
yet every copy was sold.
When the trial came on, people came from all the farms around, and from
Hannibal, and Quincy, and even from Keokuk; and the court-house could
hold only a fraction of the crowd that applied for admission. The trial
was published in the village paper, with fresh and still more trying
pictures of the accused.
Hardy was convicted, and hanged—a mistake. People came from miles
around to see the hanging; they brought cakes and cider, also the women
and children, and made a picnic of the matter. It was the largest crowd
the village had ever seen. The rope that hanged Hardy was eagerly
bought up, in inch samples, for everybody wanted a memento of the
memorable event.
Martyrdom gilded with notoriety has its fascinations. Within one week
afterward four young lightweights in the village proclaimed themselves
abolitionists! In life Hardy had not been able to make a convert;
everybody laughed at him; but nobody could laugh at his legacy. The
four swaggered around with their slouch-hats pulled down over their
faces, and hinted darkly at awful possibilities. The people were
troubled and afraid, and showed it. And they were stunned, too; they
could not understand it. “Abolitionist” had always been a term of shame
and horror; yet here were four young men who were not only not ashamed
to bear that name, but were grimly proud of it. Respectable young men
they were, too—of good families, and brought up in the church. Ed
Smith, the printer’s apprentice, nineteen, had been the head
Sunday-school boy, and had once recited three thousand Bible verses
without making a break. Dick Savage, twenty, the baker’s apprentice;
Will Joyce, twenty-two, journeyman blacksmith; and Henry Taylor,
twenty-four, tobacco-stemmer—were the other three. They were all of a
sentimental cast; they were all romance-readers; they all wrote poetry,
such as it was; they were all vain and foolish; but they had never
before been suspected of having anything bad in them.
They withdrew from society, and grew more and more mysterious and
dreadful. They presently achieved the distinction of being denounced by
names from the pulpit—which made an immense stir! This was grandeur,
this was fame. They were envied by all the other young fellows now.
This was natural. Their company grew—grew alarmingly. They took a name.
It was a secret name, and was divulged to no outsider; publicly they
were simply the abolitionists. They had pass-words, grips, and signs;
they had secret meetings; their initiations were conducted with gloomy
pomps and ceremonies, at midnight.
They always spoke of Hardy as “the Martyr,” and every little while they
moved through the principal street in procession—at midnight,
black-robed, masked, to the measured tap of the solemn drum—on
pilgrimage to the Martyr’s grave, where they went through with some
majestic fooleries and swore vengeance upon his murderers. They gave
previous notice of the pilgrimage by small posters, and warned
everybody to keep indoors and darken all houses along the route, and
leave the road empty. These warnings were obeyed, for there was a skull
and crossbones at the top of the poster.
When this kind of thing had been going on about eight weeks, a quite
natural thing happened. A few men of character and grit woke up out of
the nightmare of fear which had been stupefying their faculties, and
began to discharge scorn and scoffings at themselves and the community
for enduring this child’s-play; and at the same time they proposed to
end it straightway. Everybody felt an uplift; life was breathed into
their dead spirits; their courage rose and they began to feel like men
again. This was on a Saturday. All day the new feeling grew and
strengthened; it grew with a rush; it brought inspiration and cheer
with it. Midnight saw a united community, full of zeal and pluck, and
with a clearly defined and welcome piece of work in front of it. The
best organizer and strongest and bitterest talker on that great
Saturday was the Presbyterian clergyman who had denounced the original
four from his pulpit—Rev. Hiram Fletcher—and he promised to use his
pulpit in the public interest again now. On the morrow he had
revelations to make, he said—secrets of the dreadful society.
But the revelations were never made. At half past two in the morning
the dead silence of the village was broken by a crashing explosion, and
the town patrol saw the preacher’s house spring in a wreck of whirling
fragments into the sky. The preacher was killed, together with a negro
woman, his only slave and servant.
The town was paralyzed again, and with reason. To struggle against a
visible enemy is a thing worth while, and there is a plenty of men who
stand always ready to undertake it; but to struggle against an
invisible one—an invisible one who sneaks in and does his awful work in
the dark and leaves no trace—that is another matter. That is a thing to
make the bravest tremble and hold back.
The cowed populace were afraid to go to the funeral. The man who was to
have had a packed church to hear him expose and denounce the common
enemy had but a handful to see him buried. The coroner’s jury had
brought in a verdict of “death by the visitation of God,” for no
witness came forward; if any existed they prudently kept out of the
way. Nobody seemed sorry. Nobody wanted to see the terrible secret
society provoked into the commission of further outrages. Everybody
wanted the tragedy hushed up, ignored, forgotten, if possible.
And so there was a bitter surprise and an unwelcome one when Will
Joyce, the blacksmith’s journeyman, came out and proclaimed himself the
assassin! Plainly he was not minded to be robbed of his glory. He made
his proclamation, and stuck to it. Stuck to it, and insisted upon a
trial. Here was an ominous thing; here was a new and peculiarly
formidable terror, for a motive was revealed here which society could
not hope to deal with successfully—_vanity_, thirst for notoriety. If
men were going to kill for notoriety’s sake, and to win the glory of
newspaper renown, a big trial, and a showy execution, what possible
invention of man could discourage or deter them? The town was in a sort
of panic; it did not know what to do.
However, the grand jury had to take hold of the matter—it had no
choice. It brought in a true bill, and presently the case went to the
county court. The trial was a fine sensation. The prisoner was the
principal witness for the prosecution. He gave a full account of the
assassination; he furnished even the minutest particulars: how he
deposited his keg of powder and laid his train—from the house to
such-and-such a spot; how George Ronalds and Henry Hart came along just
then, smoking, and he borrowed Hart’s cigar and fired the train with
it, shouting, “Down with all slave-tyrants!” and how Hart and Ronalds
made no effort to capture him, but ran away, and had never come forward
to testify yet.
But they had to testify now, and they did—and pitiful it was to see how
reluctant they were, and how scared. The crowded house listened to
Joyce’s fearful tale with a profound and breathless interest, and in a
deep hush which was not broken till he broke it himself, in concluding,
with a roaring repetition of his “Death to all slave-tyrants!”—which
came so unexpectedly and so startlingly that it made everyone present
catch his breath and gasp.
The trial was put in the paper, with biography and large portrait, with
other slanderous and insane pictures, and the edition sold beyond
imagination.
The execution of Joyce was a fine and picturesque thing. It drew a vast
crowd. Good places in trees and seats on rail fences sold for half a
dollar apiece; lemonade and gingerbread-stands had great prosperity.
Joyce recited a furious and fantastic and denunciatory speech on the
scaffold which had imposing passages of school-boy eloquence in it, and
gave him a reputation on the spot as an orator, and his name, later, in
the society’s records, of the “Martyr Orator.” He went to his death
breathing slaughter and charging his society to “avenge his murder.” If
he knew anything of human nature he knew that to plenty of young
fellows present in that great crowd he was a grand hero—and enviably
situated.
He was hanged. It was a mistake. Within a month from his death the
society which he had honored had twenty new members, some of them
earnest, determined men. They did not court distinction in the same
way, but they celebrated his martyrdom. The crime which had been
obscure and despised had become lofty and glorified.
Such things were happening all over the country. Wild-brained martyrdom
was succeeded by uprising and organization. Then, in natural order,
followed riot, insurrection, and the wrack and restitutions of war. It
was bound to come, and it would naturally come in that way. It has been
the manner of reform since the beginning of the world.