“Beauties of the Sea”—First Views of Cracker Unionism.
On our return to the Fortress, the “Wayanda” was ready; there was a
hurried transhipment in the dark; not a little dismay at the straitened
proportions of the cabin; an assignment of state-rooms, which gave me
the D. D. of the party as chum; and so—amid the Doctor’s loud groans and
lamentations over confining a rational human being in a straight jacket
of a bed like that—to sleep.
There was a very hasty toilette next morning, and a very undignified
rush for the fresh air on deck. We had started in the night, were well
out on the ocean, a pretty heavy sea was running, and the mettlesome
little “Wayanda” was giving us a taste of her qualities. Nothing could
exceed the beauty of her plunges fore and aft, and lurches from port to
starboard; but the party were sadly lacking in enthusiasm. Presently
breakfast was announced, and we all went below very bravely and ranged
ourselves about the table. Before the meal was half over, the Captain
and the Doctor’s were left in solitary state to finish it alone. For
myself—although seasoned, as I had vainly imagined, by some experiences
in tolerably heavy storms—I freely confess to the double enjoyment of
the single cup of tea I managed to swallow. “For,” said the Dominie,
argumentatively, “you have the pleasure of enjoying it first as it goes
down, and then a second time as it comes up.”
To keep one another in countenance as we held our uncertain positions on
the rolling and plunging deck, we combined to rehearse all the old jokes
about sea sickness. One gave a definition of it, which, like many
another indifferent thing, has been unwarrantably fathered on the late
President. “Sea sickness is a disorder which for the first hour makes
you afraid you’ll die, but by the second hour makes you afraid you
won’t!” Another recited Artemus Ward’s groaning lamentation over Point
Judith, to the effect that he “never before saw a place where it was so
hard to keep inside one’s clothes and outside one’s breakfast!” “Sure,
it isn’t say sick yez are,” pleasantly suggested an Irish engineer,
among the officers, who looked provokingly happy amid all the
pitching—“it isn’t say sick yez are; but yez mighty sick of the say!” “O
si sic omnes!” punned the Chief Justice. How the rest stood it I don’t
know; but that was the last straw, and drove one unfortunate of the
party to his state-room, and a basin and towel.
Toward evening the sea calmed down, and one after another emerged on
deck. The air was delightfully bracing; the moon sent its broad streams
of light, shaking across the waters; the revolving light of Hatteras
shone out—guide and safeguard to a hundred eyes besides our own—and so
with calmest weather, and a delicious beauty of scene that no words need
be vainly employed in efforts to describe, we spent half the night in
watching the passage of the ship by the most dangerous part of the
Atlantic coast. Next morning, at breakfast, we were steaming under the
guns of Port Macon into the harbor where Butler and Porter rendezvoused
for Fort Fisher.
As a boat’s crew slowly pulled some of our party through the tortuous
channel by which even the lightest gigs have to approach the single
landing of Beaufort, the guns of the naval force began to thunder out a
salute for the Chief Justice. “How many guns does a Chief Justice
receive?” inquired one, as he counted the successive discharges. “You’d
a great deal better ask,” reprovingly hinted the Doctor, “how many guns
a Baptist minister receives!” “Well, how many, Doctor!” “Oh, just count
these up, and then you’ll know!” With which church-militant suggestion,
we rounded to at a crazy old wharf, climbed up a pair of rickety steps
that gave the Doctor premonitions of more immersion than even he had
bargained for, and stood in the town of Beaufort, North Carolina. In
front of us was the Custom House—a square, one-story frame building,
perched upon six or eight posts—occupied now by a Deputy Treasury Agent.
A narrow strip of sand, plowed up by a few cart wheels, and flanked by
shabby-looking old frame houses, extended along the water front, and
constituted the main business street of a place that, however
dilapidated and insignificant, must live in the history of the struggle
just ended. Near the water’s edge was a small turpentine distillery, the
only manufacturing establishment of the place.
* * * * *
The landing of a boat’s crew, with an officer in charge and a flag
fluttering at the stern, seemed to be an event in Beaufort, and we were
soon surrounded by the notabilities. A large, heavily and coarsely-built
man, of unmistakable North Carolina origin, with the inevitable bilious
look, ragged clothes and dirty shirt, was introduced, with no little
_eclat_, as “the Senator from this District.” “Of what Senate?” some one
inquired. “The North Caroliner Senate, Sir,” “Umph, Rebel Senate of
North Carolina,” growled the Captain, _sotto voce_; “you make a devil of
a fuss about your dignity! North Carolina Rebel Senate be hanged! A New
York constable outranks you.” But the Senator didn’t hear; and his
manner showed plainly enough that no doubts of his importance ever
disturbed the serene workings of his own mind. The Clerk of the Court,
the Postmaster, the doctor, the preacher and other functionaries were
speedily added to the group that gathered in the sand bank called a
pavement.
“How are your people feeling?” some one asked. “Oh, well, sir; we all
went out unwillingly, you know,” responded the legislator, fresh from
the meetings of the Rebel Senate at Raleigh, “and most of us are very
glad to get back.” “Have you no violent Rebels yet?” “Yes, quite a good
many, among the young bloods; but even they all feel as if they had been
badly whipped, and want to give in.” “Then they really feel themselves
whipped?” “Yes, you’ve subjugated us at last,” with a smile which showed
that the politician thought it not the worst kind of a joke after all.
“And, of course, then you have only to submit to any terms the
conquerors may impose?” “No, sir—oh, ah—yes, any terms that could be
honorably offered to a proud, high-minded people!” The rest of the
dignitaries nodded their heads approvingly at this becoming intimation
of the terms the “subjugated” State could be induced to accept. It was
easy to see that the old political tricks were not forgotten, and that
the first inch of wrong concession would be expected to lead the way to
many an ell.
“What terms do you think would be right?” The County Clerk, a
functionary of near thirty years’ service, took up the conversation, and
promptly replied, “Let Governor Vance call together the North Caroliner
Legislator. We only lacked a few votes of a Union majority in it before,
and we’d be sure to have enough now.” “What then?” “Why, the Legislater
would, of course, repeal the ordinance of secession, and order a
convention to amend the Constitution. I think that convention would
accept your constitutional amendment.”
“But can you trust your Governor Vance? Did not he betray the Union
party after his last election?”
“Yes, he sold us out clean and clear.”
“He did nothing of the sort. North Caroliner has not got a purer patriot
than Governor Vance.” And so they fell to disputing among themselves.
I asked one of the party what this Legislature, if thus called together,
would do with the negroes?
“Take ’em under the control of the Legislater, as free niggers always
have been in this State. Let it have authority to fix their wages, and
prevent vagrancy. It always got along with ’em well enough before.”
“Are you not mistaken about its always having had this power?”
“What!” exclaimed the astonished functionary. “Why, I was born and
raised hyar, and lived hyar all my life; Do you suppose I don’t know?”
“Apparently not, sir; for you seem to be ignorant of the fact that _free
negroes in North Carolina were voters from the formation of the State
Government_ down to 1835.”
“It isn’t so, stranger.”
“Excuse me; but your own State records will show it;[2] and, if I must
say so, he is a very ignorant citizen to be talking about ways and means
of reorganization, who doesn’t know so simple and recent a fact in the
history of his State.”
The Cracker scratched his head in great bewilderment. “Well, stranger,
you don’t mean to say that the Government at Washington is going to make
us let niggers vote?”
“I mean to say that it is at least possible.”
“Well, why not have the decency to let us have a vote on it ourselves,
and say whether _we’ll_ let niggers vote?”
“In other words, you mean this: Less than a generation ago you held a
convention, which robbed certain classes of your citizens of rights they
had enjoyed, undisputed, from the organization of your State down to
that hour. Now, you propose to let the robbers hold an election to
decide whether they will return the stolen property or not.”
“Stranger,” exclaimed another of the group, with great emphasis, “is the
Government at Washington, because it has whipped us, going to make us
let niggers vote?”
“Possibly it will. At any rate a strong party favors it.”
“Then I wouldn’t live under the Government. I’d emigrate, sir. Yes, sir,
I’d leave this Government _and go north_!”
And the man, true to his States’-Rights training, seemed to imagine that
going north was going under another Government, and spoke of it as one
might speak of emigrating to China.
Meantime, the younger citizens of Beaufort (of Caucasian descent) had
found better amusement than talking to the strangers in the sand bank of
a street. One of them wagered a quarter (fractional currency) that he
could whip another. The party thus challenged evinced his faith in his
own muscle by risking a corresponding quarter on it. The set-to was at
once arranged, in the back-yard of the house in front of which we were
standing, and several side bets, ranging from five to as high as fifteen
cents, were speedily put up by spectators.
One of our party, who joined the crowd at the amusement, reported that
half-a-dozen rounds were fought—a few “niggers” gravely looking on from
the outskirts of the throng—that several eyes were blacked, and both
noses bruised; that there was a fall, and a little choking and
eye-gouging, and a cry of “give it up;” that then the belligerents rose
and shook hands, and stakes were delivered, and the victor was being
challenged to another trial, with a fresh hand, as we left the scene of
combat; and so closed our first visit to a North Carolina town.
-----
Footnote 2:
North Carolina, by her Constitution of 1776, prescribed three bases of
suffrage:
1. All FREEMEN twenty-one years old, who have lived in the county
twelve months, and have had a freehold of fifty acres for six months,
may vote for a member of the Senate.
2. All FREEMEN, of like age and residence, who have paid public taxes,
may vote for members of the House of Commons for the county.
3. The above two classes may, if residing or owning a freehold in a
town, vote for members of the House of Commons for such town:
provided, they shall not already have voted for a member for the
county, and _vice versa_.
By the Constitution, as amended in 1835, all freemen, twenty-one years
of age, living twelve months in the State, and owning a freehold of
fifty acres for six months, should vote, except that
“No free negro, free mulatto, or free person of mixed blood, descended
from negro ancestors to the fourth generation inclusive (though one
ancestor of each generation may have been a white person), shall vote
for members of the Senate or House of Commons.”
The last clause would seem to have looked to amalgamation as a pretty
steady practice, for such zealous abolition and negro-haters. Under
the Constitution of 1776, free negroes, having the requisite
qualifications, voted as freely as any other portion of the voting
population.