But all this was away back in the years when you and I were not born,
my friend, and, therefore, the only reason I tell you about it or expect
you to be interested in such simple and far-off lives is that you may
know something of the early habits and surroundings of the man who,
I began by warning you, became a lawbreaker; for, I hold it to be a
self-evident fact that however true it is that heredity stamps the
character with its basic principles and qualities, it is never wise to
forget that it is to environment, circumstance and education that we owe
its modifications and the direction of its final development. But now
that you will be able to picture to yourself the man as he then was, and
his surroundings and conditions, I will tell you as directly as I can
the story of his offense; but first I must explain that when his coming
marriage to Miss Katherine LeRoy was announced at his home, the old
Major objected again, but this time more mildly, to the choice his son
had made.
"Her people are good, wholesome, respectable folks, my son," he said;
"but--but, Grif, why couldn't you have found a girl of--well, one of the
families you were brought up with. Mind, boy, I'm not saying anything
against Miss Katherine. I've heard--and I don't doubt it--that she is a
mighty nice sort of a girl; but----"
The Major had grown milder in his methods with his son, and he hesitated
to speak words which might cause pain hereafter.
"Of course, Grif," he went, on after an awkward pause, "of course, if
you love each other--and--and--well, if the thing is settled, I have
only to congratulate you, and to say that I am truly glad to have
you settle down, so I'll be able to know where you are. It's deucedly
disagreeable not to know from week to week where to put a finger on
you--such a tacky sort of shifty sensation about it. I can know now
at least a year at a time. Perfectly ridiculous custom it is to move a
preacher just when he gets acquainted with the people, and they begin
to trust him! Infernal habit! I'd as soon live on a boat and just anchor
from time to time in another stream and call it home--and--and living.
I've come to respect your sincerity, Grif, but I can't respect the sense
of a denomination that has no idea of the absolute value of stability,
of continuity of association, between its pastor and its people. Why,
just look at the thing! It uproots the best sentiments in both, and
makes a wanderer of one who ought to be, not only by precept, but by
example, stable and faithful and continuously true to those who look up
to him. Why, a scamp can pose for a year or two as a saint; but it takes
real value to live a lifetime in a community and be an inspiration and
a guide to your members. Then just look at it! Nobody who has any
self-respect is going to talk of his inner life to a stranger! We
are all alike in that. We pose and pretend and keep our shutters up,
mentally and morally, with a new-comer. Gad! I can't see the wisdom nor
the sense of any such rules."
"Has its good points, father," said Grif, whose quiet chuckle from time
to time had stirred the Major to unusual earnestness. He wanted to get
at his son's real views on the subject. "Has some redeeming qualities,
after all, father, quite aside from the Bible teaching upon which
the leaders of our church base it. There are men--even ministers, I'm
afraid, whom one enjoys much better when they are on another circuit;
and I may as well confess to you that there are circuits a man enjoys a
good deal better when he's not on them--after he has left."
"Some of the old boy in you yet, Grif," laughed the Major, slapping his
son on the back. "Better not say that to Father Prout, or he will keep
you on one of that kind for discipline." Jerry was filled with delight
when told of the coming marriage of Mos' Grif. Jerry's own wife had long
since presented him with twins, and it was his delight to show off the
antics of these small ebony creatures to Griffith whenever he was at
home. It was at first arranged that this family only should go to form
the new household.
The mutterings born in a different clime and under other conditions had
now reached proportions which could not be wholly ignored. In many a
long ride oyer the mountain or valley paths in the past few years had
Griffith pondered the question, and he had definitely decided in his
own mind that for one who had cast his lot with the itinerant Methodist
clergy, at least, the ownership of slaves was wrong. He would never
buy nor sell a human being. Upon that point his mind was clearly and
unalterably made up. But Jerry and his family were to be a part of
the new household while yet they remained, as before, the old Major's
property. To this Griffith had consented readily, for Miss Katherine
must have an efficient cook and Jerry would be of infinite use. Griffith
had drawn a picture of a small house in the village in which this
beautiful dream of his was to be realized; but, as the time drew near,
the old Major developed his own plans with such skill as to carry his
point.
When the house was to be looked for he said: "See here, Grif, you are
a good deal younger than I am, and some of the older slaves are pretty
hard to manage. They can't work a great deal, and they get into mischief
one way and another. Look at that set oyer in the end cabin--they always
did like you best--and since you have been gone so much they are a good
deal of trouble to me. They've got to be cared for somehow. I wish you'd
take them. They can do a lot of useful things if they are away from the
others, and you can get twice as much work out of them as I can. They
are stubborn with me, and it wears my soul out to deal with'em. I've
needed your help a good many times since you've been away, but I did not
like to say much. I think, now you are going to settle down, that you
ought to think of your father's needs a little, too."
Grif winced. He recalled that he had always pushed his father's problem
aside in his thoughts when he had settled or solved his own. He realized
how unfair that was. He felt the force of the Major's complaint.
"Of course, I'll do anything I can, father, to help you; but I can't
take a lot of negroes to a village and--"
"That's just it! Just it, exactly! Of course you can't. I didn't intend
to ask you just yet, but I want you to give up that foolish idea of
taking Katherine to town to live. She can't stand it. You are asking
enough of a woman, God knows, to ask her to put up with your sort of
life anyhow, let alone asking a girl that has been respectably brought
up on a plantation to give all that up and go to a miserable little
village. It is not decent to live that way! Cooped up with a lot of
other folks in a string of narrow streets! I'd a good deal rather go to
jail and done with it. Now, what I want and what I need you to do, is
to take that other plantation--the one down, on the river--your
grandfather's place--and take some of the hands down there and you can
let them work the place. How in the name of thunder do you suppose you
and Katherine are going to live on your ridiculous salary? Salary! It
isn't enough to dignify by the name of wages--let alone salary! Y' can't
live on it to save your lives. Katherine can't----"
"But, father----"
"That farm down there is plenty near enough to town for you to ride in
every single day if you want to and--look here, boy, don't you think you
owe a little something to your father? I'm getting old. You don't begin
to realize how hard it is on me to meet all these difficulties that
other men's sons help them with."
The Major had struck that chord with full realization of its probable
effect, and he watched with keen relish the troubled and shamed look on
the face before him. Griffith made a movement to speak, but the Major
checked him with a wave of the hand.
"That farm is just going to wreck and ruin, and I haven't the strength
to attend to that and this both. Besides, these negroes have got to be
looked after better. Pete is growing more and more sullen every year,
and Lippy Jane's temper is getting to be a holy terror. She and Pete
nearly kill each other at times. They had a three-cornered fight with
Bradley's mulatto, Ned, the other day, and nearly disabled him. Bradley
complained, of course. Now, just suppose Ned dies and Bradley sues me?
It seems to me it is pretty hard lines when a man has a son and--"
"But, father----"
"Now, look here, Grif, don't 'but' me any more. I've had that house on
the other place all put in order and the negro quarters fixed up-. The
negroes can belong to me, of course, if you still have that silly idea
in your head about not wanting to own them, but you have got to help me
with them or---- Then damn it all, Grif, I don't intend it to be said
that a daughter-in-law of _mine_ has to live in a nasty little rented
house without so much as a garden patch to it. It is simply disgraceful
for you to ask her to do it! I------"
"Father, father!" said Grif, with his voice trembling; "I--you are
always so good to me, but I--I----"
The old Major looked over his glasses at his son. Each understood,
and each feigned that he did not. The Major assumed wrath to hide his
emotion. "Now, look here, Grif, I don't want to hear anything more about
this business! You make me mad! Who am I to go to for help in managing
my land and my niggers if I can't depend on you for a single thing?
That's the question. Confound it all! I'm tired out, I tell you, looking
after the lazy lot, and now you can take your share of the work. What
am I going to do with the gang if I've got to watch'em night and day,
to see that they are kept busy enough not to get into trouble with each
other, and get me in trouble with my neighbors. Just suppose Pete had
killed Bradley's Ned, then what? Why, I'd have been sued for a $1,000
and Pete would have been hung besides! I tell you, boy, I'm too old for
all this worry, and I think it's about time I had a little help from
you. I----"
The young preacher winced again under the argument, although he knew
that in part, at least, it was made for a purpose other than the one on
the surface. In part he knew it was true. He knew that his father had
found the task heavy and irksome. He knew that the negroes preferred his
own rule, and that they were happier and more tractable with him than
with the old 'Squire. He knew that as the times had grown more and more
unsettled and unsettling, his father had twice had recourse to a hired
overseer and that the results had been disastrous for all. He knew that
other sons took much of this care and responsibility from the aging
shoulders of their fathers. He hesitated--and was lost. He would take
the negroes with him and live on the other place--at least one year!
But when Miss Katherine brought with her her father's gift of
slaves--which Mr. LeRoy had tried hard to make sufficiently numerous to
impress the old Major--Grif, to his dismay, found himself overseer and
practically the owner of twenty-two negroes--and he on a salary of
$200 per year! With a plantation to work, the matter of salary was, of
course, of minor importance. But Griffith had not failed to see glimpses
of a not far-distant future, in these past few years as he had read or
heard the urgent questions of political policy which had now become so
insistent in the newer border states--a future in which this life must
be changed. Riots and bloodshed, he knew, had followed in the train of
argument and legislative action. Slaves had run away and been tracked
and returned to angry masters. But the basic question as to whether it
was right for man to hold property in man had, so far, been presented to
his mind in the form of a religious scruple and with a merely personal
application. _Should ministers of his Church_ buy and sell black men?
Griffith had definitely settled in his own mind that they should not.
But whether they should inherit or acquire by marriage such property,
had, until now, hardly presented a serious face to him. And now, in
the form in which they came to him, he saw no present way out of the
difficulty even had he greatly desired it.
I have no doubt that to you, my friend, who were not born in these
troublous times, and to you, my neighbor, who lived in another latitude,
the problem looks simple enough. "He could free the slaves which were
in his power," will be your first thought. "I would have done that," is
your next, and yet it is dollars to doughnuts that you would have done
nothing of the kind. Oh, no! I am not reflecting upon your integrity,
nor your parsimony--although I have not observed any tendency you may
have toward dispensing with your property by gift--but to other and more
complicated and complicating questions with which you would have found
yourself surrounded, and with which your private inclinations would
have come into violent collision, as Griffith Davenport discovered; and
surely, my friend, you would not care to be written up in future years
as a violator of the law--you who value so lightly "that class of
people" that you have often said, quite openly, that you cared very
little to even read about them, and deplored the fact that writers
_would_ thrust them into respectable literature!
Griffith had watched the coming storm in the southwest. He had hoped and
prayed (and until now he had believed) that for himself, at least, the
question was settled. He would never own slaves, therefore he would not
be called upon to bear any personal part in the coming struggle. But a
wife's property was a husband's property in Virginia, in those far-off
barbaric days, and so Griffith found himself in an anomalous position,
before he knew it, for Mr. LeRoy had given Katherine her slaves as a
marriage portion, and had striven to make sure that their number and
quality should do honor to the daughter-in-law of her prospective
husband's father. Mr. LeRoy had an exalted opinion of the position and
importance of the old Major--or as he always called him, of "old 'Squiah
Davenpoaht."
But so matters stood until, a few years later, an accident happened,
which resulted in the death of the old Major. When the will was opened,
Griffith found himself forced to confront the question of ownership of
slaves, fairly if not fully. The will left "to my beloved son, Griffith,
all the slaves now living with him, together with the farm upon which
he now lives and the old homestead; with the admonition that he care for
and protect the old slaves and train and employ the young." His other
property was devised in accordance with his wishes, leaving to his
grandchildren and distant relatives the other slaves and live stock.
Meantime, as this would indicate, there had been born to Griffith several
children--three boys and a little baby girl--which now filled the hearts
and home with life and joy.
The exigencies of his ministerial life had so far made it necessary for
him to leave the plantation but twice. Father Prout had managed to have
his "stations" rotate from one small town to another in the immediate
vicinity, and, with his growing stoutness, Mr. Davenport had taken to
driving, chiefly, since Selim had been retired from active service, to
and from his places of meeting week after week. Twice, for a year each
time, he had been compelled to leave the plantation in charge of
Jerry and remove to a more distant town, where the small house and
unaccustomed conditions had resulted in ill health for Katherine and the
children. But now they were on the "place" again and were owners of
much that required that they face larger and more complicated
responsibilities--and what was to be done? Griffith had made up
his mind, definitely, that he did not want his sons to grow up in a
slave-owning atmosphere. He had read and thought much of the struggle
over the Missouri Compromise Bill. He had hoped great things from
it, and had beheld its final repeal with dismay. He had seen, so he
believed, in it the arm that was destined to check if not to wipe out
human slavery. How this was to be done he did not know; but that he
hoped for it, for all men, he knew. For himself he was quite sure that
as a preacher, if not as a man, it was wrong. He had determined to so
educate his sons that they would not blame him for shutting them out
from at least the inherited possibilities of the institution which
had fallen upon him. But now, what could be done? The Major's will
had thrown the task definitely upon him and had greatly increased the
difficulties. He knew that it was against the laws of his state to free
the negroes and leave them within its borders. Exactly what the terms of
the law were, he did not know; but it was easy to realize its need and
force. Free negroes were at once a menace to all parties concerned, both
white and black. They had no work, no homes, no ties of restraint
and responsibility. They were amenable to no one and no one was their
friend. They could starve, or they could steal, or they could go North.
If they did the first--in a land of plenty--they were not made of that
stuff out of which human nature is fashioned, be that nature encased in
a white or in a black skin. If they did the second they fared far
worse than slaves--the chain-gang for home and the law for a driver has
horrors worse than even slavery--at least so thought the colored man
of 1852. But if they attempted to achieve the last of the three
alternatives their lot was hardest of all. They must leave home, family,
wife, children, parents and friends--all that made life endurable to a
patient, affectionate, simple nature--and find what? Neither friends,
welcome nor work! A climate in which they suffered, a people amongst
whom their rarity and the strangeness of their speech and color made
of them objects of curiosity and aversion--where the very children fled
from them in fright--little children like those whom they had nursed
and fondled and who always had loved them! They would find the prejudice
against their color intense beyond belief, for few indeed were the men
or women in the free states who would give work of any kind to these
strange-looking and stranger-speaking creatures. Indeed, no one was more
shocked to learn than was Griffith, that in some of the border states it
was illegal to give employment to these ex-slaves. All this Griffith was
destined to learn to his cost. He knew, already, that slaves trained as
his father's were, had no conception of hard and constant work such as
was demanded of the northern laborer. He knew that they could not hope
to compete with white workmen in a far-away field of labor even could
they get the work to do. He knew that they would be the sport--where
they were not the game and victims--of those white laborers. He knew
that the employer (were they so fortunate as to find one) would not be
slow to learn that they accomplished less and ate more than did their
white rivals. That alone would, of course, settle their chances of
competition, and starvation or crime would again become their only
alternative.
A freed slave, in a country where slavery still existed, was a sorry and
unhappy spectacle; but a freed slave in competition with freemen was a
tragedy in black!
Griffith had fought his battle alone. It is true that he had talked much
with his wife on the subject, and it is also true that her faith in and
love for him made her ready acquiescence in his final decision a matter
of course; but with no outlook into the political world, with no mental
scope beyond the horizon prescribed as suitable for women, she could
give him nothing but loyalty. She could echo his sentiments. She could
not stimulate or aid his thought. Attuned to follow, she could not lead,
and was equally unfitted to keep even step with him side by side. She
did not share, nor could she understand, her husband's acute mental
misgivings and forebodings. The few times she had spoken to her father
of them, he had said that she need not worry. "Griffith is no fool.
He'll get over this idiotic notion before long. It is reading those
damned Yankee speeches that is the trouble with him. You just be
patient. He'll get over it. The old 'Squire knew how to cure him. Like
to know what he'd do with all those niggers? But Griffith is no fool,
I tell you, if he is a Methodist." Katherine had not relished the last
remark, and she did not believe that her father quite comprehended how
deep a hold on Griffith the idea of freedom for the blacks--and freedom
from ownership of them for himself--had taken; but she was silenced.