Griffith Davenport was a clergyman. I tell you this at the outset, so
that you may be prepared to take sides with or against him, as is your
trend and temperament. Perhaps, too, it is just as well for me to
make another statement, which shall count in his favor or to his
disadvantage, according to your own prejudices or convictions. He was a
Southern man. He had been a slave-owner, and now he was neither the
one nor the other. But in connection with, and in explanation of these
last-mentioned facts, I may say that he had been a law-breaker in his
native State, and was, at the very time of which I tell you, evading the
law in the State of his adoption.
Both of these facts were the direct results of having been born to
slave-ownership, and, at the same time, with a conscience which was of,
and in harmony with, a different latitude and heredity. I trust that you
will not infer from this last remark that I am of the opinion that the
conscience of the Northern habitant is of more delicate fiber than
is that of his Southern brother, who is of the same mental and social
grade; for nothing could be farther from either the facts or my
intentions herein. But that it is of a different type and trend is
equally beyond controversy. The prickings of the one are as regular and
as incessant, no doubt, as are those of the other; but the stimulating
causes have different roots. Perhaps, too, it may sound strange to
you to hear of one who can be spoken of as having a somewhat sensitive
conscience and at the same time as being both a law-breaker and a
law-evader. But certain it is, that with a less primitive conception
of laws and of men, you will be able to adjust, to a nicety, the
ideas therein conveyed, and also to realize how true it is that times,
conditions, and environment sometimes determine the standard by which
the rightfulness or wrongfulness of conduct is measured, and that it is
quite within the possibilities for a man to be at once a law-breaker and
a good man, or a law-keeper and a bad one.
But I am not intending to warp your judgment in advance, and you are to
remember that whatever my opinion of the quality of the Rev. Griffith
Davenport's conduct may be, there is another side to the matter, and
that I shall not take it greatly to heart if you should find yourself on
the other side.
But if, as I have sometimes heard readers say--who looked upon
themselves as of a somewhat superior order--you do not take an interest
in people who have placed themselves outside of the beaten pathway of
legal regularity, it will be just as well for you to lay this little
story aside now, for, as I have said, it is a story of a clergyman, a
slave-holder, a law-breaker, and a law-evader, which, I admit, does not
at the first blush present a picture to the mind of a person in whom you
and I, my lofty and immaculate friend, would be greatly interested, or
with whom we would care to associate for any protracted period. Still,
I intend to tell the story, and in order to give you a perfectly clear
idea of how all the more important events in this curiously complicated
life came about, I shall be compelled to go back to the boyhood of young
Davenport, so that you may catch a glimpse of the life and training,
which were a prelude and a preparation--if you do not wish to look upon
them as exactly a justification--of and for the later years of the life,
which experienced such strange trials, complications and vicissitudes.
It was in the year eighteen hundred and twenty-four that the great sea
of Methodism first began to beat with a force that was like that of a
succession of mighty tidal waves upon the previously placid State of
Virginia. Young Davenport had, at that time, just turned his fifteenth
year, but it was not until nearly four years later, when the tide of
interest and excitement had swept with a power and influence impossible
to picture in these days of religious indifference and critical inquiry,
into the homes and over the barriers of long-established things, that
young Griffith's home felt the invasion to be a thing which it behooved
gentlemen to consider seriously, or even to recognize as existing, if
one may so express it, in an official sense.
As I suggested before, it would be difficult, in these later and less
emotional days, when every school-boy knows of doubts and questionings
in the minds of his elders, to picture adequately the serene lack of all
such doubts and questionings in Griffith Davenport's boyhood.
To be sure there were, and, I venture to assume, always had been,
disagreement and disputes over forms, methods, and meanings; but these
were not fundamental doubts of fundamental beliefs, of which it would be
entirely safe to say that young Davenport had never in his whole life
heard one little doubt expressed or intimated, or that a question
existed that could tend to make any one suspect that there were or could
be unsettled realms in the system and plan of salvation as laid down by
Christianity. He supposed, of course, that Christianity was an
incontrovertible, fixed, and final religion. Different sects he knew
there were, but all of these accepted the basic principle of
Christianity. All sprang from the same root. Some grew eastward, some
westward, and some made straight for heaven like the center shaft of a
great oak; but each and all were true limbs of the same healthful trunk
whose roots found anchorage in the bed-rock of eternal truth. He did not
know that there were other trees quite as vigorous and even more
expansive, each of which had sprung from the seed of human longing to
solve the unsolvable. The "heathen" he had heard of, of course, in a
condemnatory or pitying way, but he did not know or think of their
worship as "religion." It was "fetichism," idolatry, superstition. Of
Deists, he had heard, if at all, but vaguely; for it must be remembered
that in the year of our blessed Lord eighteen hundred and twenty-seven
the name of that famous Deist, Thomas Paine, who had done so much for
the liberty and dignity of the great new nation, was not honored as it
is to-day, and, indeed, so dense was the philosophical ignorance of that
time, that the mention of the name of the author-hero of the Revolution
was seldom made except in execration and contumely. Even of the Jews,
from whom his religion came, Griffith had heard no good. They had slain
the Christ, had they not? Their own God condemned the act, did he not?
Young Davenport supposed that this was all true. He also supposed that
because of a blunder, made in ignorance and passion, in an age long
past, a whole race had ever since been under the chastising hand of a
just Jehovah, who had decreed that their humiliation and the expiation
of the fatal blunder should be eternal. That there were Jews who were
to-day good, devout and religious who still approved the attitude
of Pilate toward the Christ, he did not know. He counted this class,
therefore, as in some sort, Christians also. Mistaken in method, no
doubt; superstitious and blundering perhaps; but still secretly filled
with sorrow and shame for the awful crime of their race, and accepting
the verdict of God and the disciplining punishment of time, he had
no doubt of their final acceptance of what he believed established
as eternal Truth, and their consequent redemption and salvation. The
easy-going, gentle Episcopalianism of his home-training, with its
morning and evening, perfunctory, family prayers, its "table grace" and
its Sunday service, where all the leading families of the county were
to be seen, and where the Rector read with so much finish and the choir
sang so divinely, the same old hymns, week after week, had so far been
as much a part of his life,--and were accepted as mechanically,--as were
the daily meals, the unpaid negro labor, and the fact that his father,
the old "Squire," sat in the best pew, because he had built and endowed
the finest church in the State.
All these things had come to Griffith as quite a matter of course; as
some equally important things have come to you and to me--and not at all
as matter of surprise or as questions for argument.
That his father, the old major, swore roundly, from time to time, at
the slaves, did not appeal to the boy's mind as either strange or
reprehensible; so true is it that those things which come to us
gradually, and in the regular order of events, do not arouse within
us doubts and questionings as do sudden or startling additions to our
development or intellectual equipment, when thrust unexpectedly in
upon our ordinary surroundings. Such moral or social questions as were
involved in the ownership of slaves had, up to that time, produced
no more mental qualms in the boy than have the same questions as to
ownership of lands or of horses upon you or me at the present time.
Jerry had been Griffith's own particular "boy" ever since he could
remember, and, although Jerry was the older of the two, it would be
wholly unfair to all parties concerned not to state clearly and fully
that the righteousness and inevitability of the relationship of owned
and owner, had no more sinister meaning for Jerry than it had for his
young "Mos' Grif." So prone are we all to accept as a finality that to
which custom has inured us.
Was Jerry an Episcopalian? Most assuredly! Were not all of the
Davenports members of the established order in all things? And was not
Jerry a Davenport? Not one negro on the whole plantation had ever for
one little moment thought of himself as other than an Episcopalian,--in
so far as the Almighty would permit one whose skin was black to be of
the elect. They one and all felt a real and eager pride in the social
and religious status of the Davenports, and had never even harbored
a doubt that they would be permitted to polish the harps and hold the
horses of that fortunate family when all should again be reunited in
that better world, where all might be free but not equal--for "as one
star differed from another," etc. No different dreams had ever, so far,
visited master or slave.
"I could never be happy in heaven without Jerry," had settled the
question in Griffith's mind, for of course his own destination was sure.
And the negro felt equally secure when he thought, "Mos' Grif ain't
gwine ter go nowhah widout me. Nobody else ain't gwine ter take cahr ob
him. Nobody else know how."
But the unsettling times which brought Methodism, in a great and
overwhelming wave, into the ranks of established things, brought also
mutterings and perplexities and awakenings of another sort. Aroused
energies, stimulated consciences, excited mentalities are ever likely to
find varying outlets. Progressive movements seldom travel singly, and
so it came about that, mingled with the new religious unrest, there
were other and, perhaps you will say, graver questions so inextricably
joined, in some minds that the one appeared to be the root and cause of
the other.
"Is slavery right? If it is right for the laity, at least, is it not
wrong for one who is an apostle of the Son of God, who had not where
to lay His head? Should black men be free men?" and all the disturbing
horde of questions which followed in the train of the new religion,
began to float, at first in intangible ways, in the air. A little later
they took form in scowl or hasty word, and at last crept into sermons,
social discussions and legislative deliberations, as by degrees the echo
of these latter floated down from Washington or filtered through other
sources, from the Border States, where the irrepressible conflict had
arisen in a new form to vex the souls and arouse the passions of men.
The pressing question of free soil or slave extension had already begun
to urge itself upon the public mind and to harass the Border States,
finding utterance for or against that Congressional measure known as
the Missouri Compromise Bill. Young Griffith Davenport had spent his
seventeen years in an atmosphere of scholarly investigation and calm,
where little of even the echoes of these disturbing influences had come.
His home was a comfortable one--indeed, the finest in all that part of
the valley; the library quite unusual in extent and quality for the
time and place. Grif's tutor was a University man, his pleasures those
of a country 'squire; for in Virginia, as in England, the office of
"esquire," or justice of the peace, was wont to pass from father to
eldest son, in families of consideration; and, indeed, at that early age
Grif's father had, by degrees, turned the duties of the office over to
the boy, until now no one expected to consult the "old 'squire" upon any
ordinary topic. The "young 'squire" settled it, whether it were a dispute
over dog-slain sheep or a misunderstanding about the road tax.
Upon this placid, "established" finality of existence it was, then,
which descended a cyclone. Formalism in religion had run its course. The
protest was swift, impassioned, sincere. Vigorous, earnest, but often
unlearned men sprang into prominence at a single bound. Arguments arose.
Men began to ask if the Almighty was pleased with forms in which the
soul was dead--if mere words, and not sincere emotion of the heart,
gratified God. Was it worship to simply read or repeat the words of
another? Must not one's own soul, mind and heart furnish the key, as
well as the medium, to aid in real devotion? Had the letter killed the
spirit?
Young Griffith heard. The ideas fascinated him. Oaths from his father's
lips struck him with a new meaning and a different force. Whereas they
had been mere vocal emphasis, now they were fearful maledictions--and
from a leading Christian, _the_ leading Christian of the county!
Griffith pondered, trembled, listened again to the new religious
teachers--to whose meetings he had, at first, gone in a spirit of
mild fun, not in the least reprobated by his father--and had, at last,
tremblingly, passionately believed.