A COLLEGE NEIGHBORHOOD—THE WORLD WIDENS—A BELOVED TUTOR—COLONIZATION
DREAMS AND DISAPPOINTMENT—MAJOR MORTON
“RICEHILL, _February 3d, 1843._
“DEAR DORINDA,—I suppose mother has told you of our
privileges and pleasant situation. I only want some of my
friends to enjoy it with me to make me perfectly happy. Oh,
how I wish you were here to go to the debating society with
me and to hear the young men preach! I went to college last
night to hear some speeches delivered by the Senior Class.
They have questions given, and one takes one side and one
another. The two best speeches were made on the question
‘Is a love of fame more injurious than beneficial?’ One
young man took the affirmative, and one the negative. They
made the best speeches. Then the question was whether ‘the
execution of Charles I. was just or not.’ Both of these
speakers needed prompting; that is, one of those who had
spoken or was to speak took the speaker’s speech which he
had written off, and, if he forgot, set him right again. The
young man who performed this office was very well qualified
for it; he spoke in a low, distinct tone, and seemed to find
no difficulty in reading the writing. They speak again in
about six weeks. But the chief enjoyments I have are the
religious privileges. I can go to the prayer-meeting at the
Seminary every Wednesday, and can hear three sermons every
Sunday. Don’t you wish you were here, too? Aunt Rice and
sister went to the Court House last Sunday evening to hear
Mr. Ballantine’s lecture, and as they did not come back very
soon the young men came in to supper. While sister and Aunt
Rice were away I wrote an account of Mr. Hoge’s and Mr.
Howison’s sermons. Well, when Mr. Howison came in, ‘Well,
Miss Virginia, have you been by yourself all this evening?’
‘Yes, sir.’ ‘Did you not feel very lonely?’ ‘Not at all.’
‘Why, what have you been doing?’ ‘I have been writing.’ He
paused, laughed, and then said, ‘And what have you been
writing?’ And when I told him, I wish you could have seen
him! He looked at me for a while as if he did not understand
me, and then laughed heartily. He is very easy to laugh, but
his manners are as different from Mr. Tayloe’s as can be—but
hush! what am I drawing comparisons for? I do not feel in
the least restrained where he is, and can talk to him better
than to any other gentleman here. Would not you like to have
such a teacher?
“_Feb. 6th._—I wonder when father will come up; I have
been looking for him every day for more than a week. Mr.
Nevius was here the other day. I inquired after you, but
he had never seen you when he went to Mr. Miller’s. I was
quite disappointed, and I wish you would show yourself next
time—that is, if you can.
“I very often think of the times we ate roasted corn and
turnips in the midst of the corn-field; don’t you remember
the evening when the supper-bell rang and we hid our corn
among the leaves of the corn that was growing? I never
knew how much I loved you or any of my friends until I was
separated from them. Mr. Nevius brought a letter for sister
from Anne Carus. She still writes in that desponding style
you know she was so remarkable for in school, but I am glad
to see from her letter that she has come to the conclusion
to be contented with her lot.
“I hope you do not indulge in such feelings, and, indeed,
you have no reason to do so, for you are only six miles from
your mother and friends, and you are with your brother, and
I think you will find a valuable friend in Malvina. How do
you like your new teacher and situation? If you are ever
home-sick, study hard and forget it.
“I have made many pleasant acquaintances here, and among
them Mr. Tayloe’s flame! I do not think they are engaged,
but he goes there very frequently, and the students plague
him half to death about her, and he never denies it. He
boards here. She has a fair skin, blue eyes, and almost red
hair, but she is very pretty ‘for all that.’ She is about
seventeen. There is a little girl about my own age here, who
takes your place in my affections while _here_; she is a
granddaughter of Professor Wilson, and lives in his house.
Her name is Louisa Caruthers. I will speak to Lou about you,
for you _must_ be acquainted. But a truce to this nonsense!
Do not show this letter to any one of Mr. Miller’s family,
for I feel restrained if I think that my letters are to
be shown to any except my particular friends. I will not
show yours. Show this to mother, your mother, E. D., and V.
Winfree. Give my respects to all Mr. M.’s family, take some
of my best love for yourself, and divide the rest among my
friends.
“Now farewell, do not forget me, and I will ever be
“Your sincerely attached friend,
“M. V. H.”
The foregoing priggish and stilted epistle begins the next chapter of
my life-story.
After Miss Wilson’s departure, and divers unsuccessful attempts to
obtain a successor to his liking, my father determined upon a bold
departure from the beaten path of traditional and conventional usage in
the matter of girls’ education.
The widow of Reverend Doctor Rice lived in the immediate neighborhood
of Union Theological Seminary, founded by her husband, and of which
he was the first president. The cluster of dwellings that had grown
up around the two institutions of learning—Hampden-Sidney College and
the School of Divinity—made, with the venerable “College Church,” an
educational centre for a community noted for generations past for
intelligence and refinement. Prince Edward, Charlotte, and Halifax were
closely adjacent counties peopled by what nobody then ridiculed as some
of the “first families” of the state. Venables, Carringtons, Reades,
Bouldins, Watkinses, Randolphs, Cabells, Mortons, Lacys—had borne a
conspicuous part in state, church, and social history. The region was
aristocratic—and Presbyterian. There was much wealth, for tobacco was
the most profitable crop of Central and Southern Virginia, and the
plantations bordering the Appomattox River were a mine of riches to
the owners. Stately mansions—most of them antedating the Revolutionary
War—crowned gently rolling hills rising beyond the river, each, with
its little village of domestic offices, great stables, tobacco-barns,
and “quarters,” making up an establishment that was feudal in character
and in power.
Every planter was college-bred and a politician.
The local atmosphere of “College Hill” was not unlike that of an Old
World university town. The professors of the sister institutions of
learning occupied houses in the vicinity of seminary and college, and
the quaint church, the bricks mellowed to red-brown by time stood
equidistant from both.
One feature of the church impressed my youthful imagination. “Cousin
Ben,” of Montrose—afterward the senior professor in the seminary, and
as Rev. B. M. Smith, D.D., known throughout the Southern and Northern
Presbyterian Church as a leader in learning and in doctrine—had,
when a student of Hampden-Sidney, brought from Western Virginia a
sprig of Scotch broom in his pocket. “The Valley”—now a part of West
Virginia—was mainly settled by Scotch-Irish emigrants, and the broom
was imported with their household stuff. The boy set the withered slip
in the earth just inside of the gate of the church-yard. In twenty
years it encompassed the walls with a setting of greenery, overran the
enclosure, escaped under the fence, and raced rampant down the hill,
growing tall and lush wherever it could get a foothold. In blossom-time
the mantle of gold was visible a mile away. The smell of broom always
brings back to me a vision of that ugly (but dear) red-brown church
and the goodly throng, pouring from doors and gate at the conclusion
of the morning service, filling yard and road—well-dressed, well-born
county folk, prosperous and hospitable, and so happily content with
their lot and residence as to believe that no other people was so
blessed of the Lord they served diligently and with godly fear. Without
the church-yard were drawn up cumbrous family coaches, which conveyed
dignified dames and dainty daughters to and from the sanctuary.
Beyond these was a long line of saddle-horses waiting for their
masters—blooded hunters for the young men, substantial cobs for their
seniors. None except invalided men deigned to accept seats in carriages.
As may be gathered from the formally familiar and irresistibly funny
epistle, indited when I had been four months an insignificant actor
in the scene I have sketched, “religious privileges” was no idle term
then and there. Our social outings were what I have indicated. There
were no concerts save the “Monthly Concert of Prayer for Foreign
Missions” (held simultaneously in every church in the state and
Union); not a theatre in Virginia, excepting one in Richmond, banned
for the religious public by the awful memories of the burning of
the playhouse in 1811. “Dining-days,” which their descendants name
“dinner-parties,” were numerous, and there was much junketing from one
plantation to another, a ceaseless drifting back and forth of young
people, overflowing, now this house, now that, always certain of a
glad welcome, and contriving, without the adventitious aid of cards or
dancing, to lead joyous, full lives.
Once a week the community turned out, _en masse_, for church-going.
They were a devout folk—those F. F. V.’s, at which we mock now—and
considered it a public duty not to forsake the assembling of themselves
together for worship, prayers, and sermons. These latter were
intellectual, no less than spiritual pabulum. Oratory had not gone out
of fashion in these United States, and in Virginia it was indigenous
to the soil. Pulpit eloquence was in its glory, and speech-making at
barbecues, anniversaries, and political gatherings, in court-rooms and
upon “stumps,” was an art learned by boys in roundabouts and practised
as long as veterans could stand upon their shrunken calves.
People flocked to church to attend reverently upon divine service, and,
when the benediction was pronounced, greeted friends and neighbors,
cheerily chatting in the aisles and exchanging greetings between the
benches they had occupied during the services—men and women sitting
apart, as in the Quaker meeting-house—as freely as we now salute and
stroll with acquaintances in the _foyer_ of the opera-house.
Such were some of the advantages and enjoyments included in the
elastic phrase “religious privileges,” vaunted by the epistolary
twelve-year-old.
“Rice Hill” was a commodious dwelling, one mile from the seminary, and
not quite so far from the college. Doctor Rice had literally spent and
been spent in the work which had crowned his ministry—the foundation
and endowment of a Southern School of Divinity. At his death, friends
and admirers, North and South, agreed that a suitable monument to him
would be a home for the childless widow. She had a full corps of family
servants, who had followed her to her various residences, and she eked
out her income by supplying table-board to students from college and
seminary. Thus much in explanation of the references to the coming in
of “the gentlemen” in the “evening”—rural Virginian for afternoon.
A kindly Providence had appointed unto us these pleasant paths at the
impressionable period of our lives. The goodliest feature in that
appointment was that Robert Reid Howison, subsequently “LL.D.,” and
the author of a _History of Virginia_, and _The Student’s History of
the United States_, became the tutor of my sister and myself.
He came to us at twelve o’clock each day, and we dined at half-past
two. Hence, all our studying was done out of school-hours. The
arrangement was eccentric in the extreme in the eyes of my father’s
acquaintances and critics. Other girls were in the class-room from
nine until twelve, and after recess had a session of two hours more.
That this, the most _outré_ of “Mr. Hawes’s experiments,” would be
a ludicrous failure was a foregone conclusion. Whereas, the cool
brain had reckoned confidently upon the fidelity of the tutor and the
conscientiousness of pupils accustomed to the discipline of a home
where implicit obedience was the law.
Never had learners a happier period of pupilage, and the cordial
relations between teacher and students testified to the mutual desire
to meet, each, the requirements of the other party to the compact.
To the impetus given our minds by association with the genial scholar
who directed our studies, was added the stimulus of the table-talk that
went on in our hearing daily. It was the informal, suggestive chat of
men eager for knowledge, comparing notes and opinions, and discussing
questions of deep import—historical, biological, and theological. In
the main, they were a bright set of fellows; in the main, likewise,
gentlemen at heart and in bearing. It goes without saying that the
exception in my mind to the latter clause was our late and hated tutor.
I might write to Dorinda, in constrained goody-goodyishness, of the
impropriety of “drawing comparisons” between him and Mr. Howison,
whose “easy” laugh and winning personality wrought powerfully upon my
childish fancy. At heart I loved the one and consistently detested the
other.
To this hour I recall the gratified thrill of conscious security and
triumph that coursed through my minute being when, Mr. Tayloe having
taken it upon himself to reprove me for something I said—pert, perhaps,
but not otherwise offensive—Mr. Howison remarked, with no show of
temper, but firmly:
“Mr. Tayloe, you will please recollect that this young lady is now
under _my_ care!”
He laughed the next moment, as if to pass the matter off pleasantly,
but all three of us comprehended what was implied.
We began French with our new tutor, and geometry! I crossed the _Pons
Asinorum_ in January, and went on with Euclid passably well, if not
creditably. Mathematics was never my strong point. The patience and
perfect temper of the preceptor never failed him, no matter how far I
came short of what he would have had me accomplish in that direction.
“Educate them as if they were boys and preparing for college,” my
father had said, and he was obeyed.
Beyond and above the benefit derived from the study of text-books
was the education of daily contact with a mind so richly stored with
classic and modern literature, so keenly alive to all that was worthy
in the natural, mental, and spiritual world as that of Robert Howison.
He had been graduated at the University of Virginia, and for a year or
more had practised law in Richmond, resigning the profession to begin
studies that would prepare him for what he rated as a higher calling.
My debt to him is great, and inadequately acknowledged in these halting
lines.
Were I required to tell what period of my nonage had most to do with
shaping character and coloring my life, I should reply, without
hesitation, “The nine months passed at Rice Hill.” A new, boundless
realm of thought and feeling was opened to the little provincial from
a narrow, neutral-tinted neighborhood. I was a dreamer by nature and
by habit, and my dreams took on a new complexion; a born story-maker,
and a wealth of material was laid to my hand. We were a family of mad
book-lovers, and the libraries of seminary and college were to my eyes
twin Golcondas of illimitable possibilities. Up to now, novel-reading
had been a questionable delight in which I hardly dared indulge freely.
I was taught to abhor deceit and clandestine practices, and my father
had grave scruples as to the wisdom of allowing young people to devour
fiction. We might read magazines, as we might have confectionery, in
limited supplies. A bound novel would be like a dinner of mince-pie and
sweetmeats, breeding mental and moral indigestion.
So, when Mr. Howison not only permitted, but advised the perusal of
Scott’s novels and poems, I fell upon them with joyful surprise that
kindled into rapture as I became familiar with the Wizard and his work.
We lived in the books we read then, discussing them at home and abroad,
as we talk now of living issues and current topics. _The Heart of
Midlothian_, _Marmion_, _The Lay of the Last Minstrel_, _Peveril of the
Peak_, and _Waverley_ were read that winter on stormy afternoons and
during the long evenings that succeeded the early supper. Sometimes Mr.
Howison lingered when his comrades had gone back to their dormitories,
and took his part in the fascinating entertainment. Usually the group
was composed of Aunt Rice, her sister (Mrs. Wharey, lately widowed, who
was making arrangements to settle upon an adjoining plantation), Mrs.
Wharey’s daughter, another “Cousin Mary,” my sister, and myself.
Aunt Rice was a “character” in her way and day; shrewd, kindly
sympathetic, active in church and home, and with a marvellous
repertoire of tale and anecdote that made her a most entertaining
companion. “The Seminary” was her foster-child; the students had from
her maternal interest and affection. Like other gentlewomen of her
time and latitude, she was well versed in the English classics and in
translations from the Latin and Greek. Pope, Swift, and Addison were
household favorites, and this winter she was reading with delight the
just-published _History of the Reformation_, by Merle d’Aubigné. She
always wore black—merino in the morning, black silk or satin in the
afternoon—and a regulation old lady’s cap with ribbon strings tied
under a double chin, and I think of her as always knitting lamb’s-wool
stockings. Hers was a pronounced individuality in every capacity she
assumed to fill—mistress, housewife, neighbor, and general well-wisher.
She never scolded, yet she managed the dozen or more servants that
had come down to her by ordinary generation—seven of them men and
boys—judiciously and well. Even then she was meditating a scheme she
afterward put into successful execution—namely, liberating all her
slaves and sending them to Liberia. To this end she had taught them
to read and write, and each boy was trained in some manual trade.
She superintended their religious education as faithfully. Every
Sunday night all the negroes who were beyond infancy assembled in the
dining-room for Scripture readings expounded by her own pleasant voice,
and for recitations in the Shorter Catechism and Village Hymn-book.
They were what was called in the neighborhood vernacular, “a likely
lot.” The boys and men were clever workers in their several lines of
labor. The women were skilled in the use of loom, spinning-wheel, and
needle, and excellent cooks. One and all, they were made to understand
from babyhood what destiny awaited them so soon as they were equipped
for the enterprise.
I wish I could add that the result met her fond expectations.
While the design was inchoate, her example served as a stock and
animating illustration of the wisdom of those who urged upon Virginia
slaveholders the duty of returning the blacks to the land from which
their fathers were stolen. Colonization was boldly advocated in
public and in private, and the old lady was a fervent convert. In the
fulness of time she sent out five families, strong and healthy, as
well-educated as the average Northern farmer and mechanic. She sold
Rice Hill and well-nigh impoverished herself in her old age to fit
out the colony with clothes and household goods, and went to spend
the few remaining years of her life in the home of her sister. The
great labor of her dreams and hope accomplished, she chanted a happy
“Nunc Dimittis” to sympathizer and to doubter. She had solved the Dark
Problem that baffled the world’s most astute statesmen. If all who
hearkened unto her would do likewise, the muttering of the hell that
was already moving from its depth under the feet of the nation, would
be silenced forever.
The competent colonists had hardly had time to send back to their
emancipated mistress news of their safe arrival in the Promised Land,
when they found themselves in grievous straits. These, duly reported
to Aunt Rice, were African fevers that exhausted their strength
and consumed their stock of ready money; the difficulty of earning
a livelihood while they were ignorant of the language and customs
of the natives; lack of suitable clothing; scarcity of provisions,
and a waiting-list of etceteras that rent the tender heart of the
benefactress with unavailing pity. She was importuned for money, for
clothes, for groceries—even that she would, for the love of Heaven and
the sake of old times, send them a barrel of rice—which, infidels to
her faith in colonization did not fail to remind her, was to be had in
Liberia for the raising.
The stout-hearted liberator never owned in word her disappointment
at the outcome of long years of patient preparation and personal
privation, or gave any sign of appreciation of the truth that her
grand solution of the Dark Problem was the song of the drunkard and a
by-word and a hissing in the mouth of the unbeliever. But she ceased
long before her death, in 1858, to tax her listeners’ patience by
setting forth the beauties of colonization as the practical abolition
of negro slavery in America. If her ancestors had sinned in bringing
the race into bondage, and her teeth were thereby set on edge, she hid
her hurt. This significant silence was the only token by which her best
friends divined her consciousness of the humiliating revelation which
had fallen into the evening of a well-spent life. She had exchanged for
the five families born and reared in her home, dependence, comfort, and
happiness, for freedom, pauperism, and discontent. The cherished bud
had been passing sweet. The fruit was as bitter as gall.
At the time of which I am writing, the dream-bubble was at the
brightest and biggest. She was in active correspondence with the
officers of the Colonization Society; subscribed to and read
colonization publications, and dealt out excerpts from the same to all
who would listen; was busy, sanguine, and bright, beholding herself,
in imagination, the leader in a crusade that would wipe the stain of
slavery from her beloved state.
One event of that wonderful winter was a visit paid to Aunt Rice by her
aged father, Major James Morton, of High Hill, Cumberland County, the
“Old Solid Column” of Revolutionary story. The anecdote of Lafayette’s
recognition of his former brother-in-arms was related in an earlier
chapter. It was treasured in the family as a bit of choice silver
would be prized. I had heard it once and again, and had constructed my
own portrait of the stout-hearted and stout-bodied warrior. Surprise
approximated dismay when I behold a withered, tremulous old man,
enfeebled in mind almost to childishness, his voice breaking shrilly as
he talked—a pitiable, crumbling wreck of the stately column.
He had definite ideas upon certain subjects still, and was doughty in
their defence. For example, during this visit to his daughter, he sat
one evening in the chimney-corner, apparently dozing, while a party of
young people were discussing the increasing facilities of travel by
steam, and contrasting them with the slow methods of their fathers. The
Major drowsed on, head sunken into his military stock, eyes closed, and
jaw drooping—the impersonation of senile decay—when somebody spoke of a
trip up the Hudson to West Point the preceding summer.
The veteran raised himself as if he had been shaken by the shoulder.
“That is not true!” he said, doggedly.
“But, Major,” returned the surprised narrator, “I did go! There is a
regular line of steamers up the river.”
The old war-horse reared his head and beat the floor with an angry heel.
“I say it is not true! It could not be true! General Washington had a
big chain stretched across the river after Arnold tried to sell West
Point, so that no vessel could get up to the fort. And, sir!” bringing
his cane down upon the hearth with a resounding thump, his voice clear
and resonant, “there is not that man upon earth who would dare take
down that chain. Why, sir, _General Washington put it there_!”
A fragment of the mighty chain, forged in the mountains of New Jersey,
lies upon the parade-ground at West Point.
Forty years thereafter I laid a caressing hand upon a huge link of
the displaced boom, and told the anecdote to my twelve-year-old boy,
adding, as if the stubborn loyalist had said it in my ear,
“And there it stands until this day,
To witness if I lie.”
We read _Ivanhoe_ in the open air when the spring wore into summer.
The afternoons were long, and when study-hours were over we were wont
to repair to the roomy back-porch, shaded by vines, and looking across
a little valley, at the bottom of which were a bubbling spring, a
twisting brook, and a tiny pool as round as a moon, to the hill crowned
by “Morton,” a plain but spacious house occupied by the Wharey family.
Not infrequently a seminary student, attracted by Mary Wharey’s
brunette comeliness and happy temper, would join our group and lend a
voice in the reading. Moses Drury Hoge, a cousin of my mother and of
Aunt Rice, was with us at least twice a week, basking in the summer
heat like a true son of the tropics. He was a tutor in Hampden-Sidney
while a divinity student, and, as was proved by his subsequent
career, was the superior of his fellows in oratorical gifts and other
endowments that mark the youth for success from the beginning of the
race. I think he was born sophisticated. Already his professors yielded
him something that, while it was not homage in any sense of the word,
yet singled him out as one whose marked individuality and brilliant
talents gave him the right to speak with authority. At twenty-three,
without other wealth than his astute brain and ready wits, his future
was sure.
He won in after years the title of “the Patrick Henry of the Southern
Pulpit.”
Of him I shall have occasion to speak further as my story progresses.
X