I came back from Winchester for the last time after the election of
1828, to find a great change at home. My father, pressed more and more
by pecuniary difficulties, had quitted Harrow, and established himself
at Harrow Weald, a hamlet of the large parish in the direction of
Pinner. He had not given up his farm at Harrow. He would have been only
too glad to do so, for it involved an annual loss undeviatingly; but
that he could not do, for his lease tied him to the stake. But he took
another farm at Harrow Weald, on which there was an old farm-house,
which had once been a very good one, and, living there, carried on both
farms. How far this speculation was a wise one I have no means of
judging. Doubtless he took the Harrow Weald farm upon very largely more
advantageous terms than those which he had accepted from Lord Northwick
for the farm at Harrow; but having been absent all the time at
Winchester, I knew so little about the matter that I do not now know
even who his Harrow Weald landlord was. Possibly I did know but have
forgotten. But I think I remember to have heard my father say that the
Harrow Weald farm did in some decree alleviate the loss sustained by the
larger farm at Harrow, and that, could he have got rid of the latter,
the Harrow Weald farm might have paid its way. The excellent house he
had built at Harrow was in the meantime let to Mr. Cunningham, the
vicar.
The change from it to the old farm-house at Harrow Weald, as a home, was
not a pleasant one; but a very far worse and more important change
awaited my home coming, in the absence of my mother. She had gone to
America.
Where, or under what circumstances, my parents had first become
acquainted with General La Fayette I do not know. I myself never saw
him; but I know that it was during a visit to La Grange, his estate in
France, that my mother first met Miss Frances Wright, one of two
sisters, his wards. I believe she became acquainted with Camilla Wright,
the sister, at the same time.
It is odd, considering the very close intimacy that took place between
my mother and Frances Wright, that I never knew anything of the
parentage and family of these ladies, or how they came to be wards of
General La Fayette. But with Miss Frances Wright I did become
subsequently well acquainted. She was in many respects a very remarkable
personage. She was very handsome in a large and almost masculine style
of beauty, with a most commanding presence, a superb figure, and stature
fully masculine. Her features both in form and expression were really
noble. There exists--still findable, I suppose, in some London _fonds
de magasin_--a large lithographed portrait of her. She is represented
standing, with her hand on the neck of a grey horse (the same old gig
horse that had drawn my parents and myself over so many miles of
Devonshire, Somersetshire, and Monmouthshire roads and cross roads--not
that which so nearly made an end of us near Lynmouth, but his
companion), and, if I remember rightly, in Turkish trousers.
But these particulars of her bodily form and presentment constituted the
least remarkable specialties of her individuality. She was
unquestionably a very clever woman. She wrote a slender octavo volume,
entitled _A Few Days in Athens_, which was published by Longman. It was
little more than a _brochure_, and it is many years since I have seen
it, but the impression that it was very clever abides in my mind. I
remember the fact that the whole edition was sold. And the mention of
this book reminds me of a circumstance that seems to show that my
parents must have become to a considerable degree intimate with these
wards of General La Fayette at some period preceding the visit to La
Grange, which exercised in the sequel so large an influence over my own,
and my mother’s, and brothers’ future. This circumstance is that I
recollect my father to have been in communication with the Longmans on
behalf of Miss Wright in respect to her work.
Be this how it may, at the time of that visit to La Grange spoken of
above, Miss Wright’s thoughts and aspirations were directed with a
persistent and indomitable enthusiasm, which made the groundwork of her
character, to doing something for the improvement of the condition of
the slave populations in the southern states of the great transatlantic
republic. Both Frances and Camilla Wright were ladies of considerable
fortune; and I believe that General La Fayette wished much to induce his
ward Frances not to employ her means in the scheme she was now bent on.
But she was of age,--I fancy some six or seven years more than that--and
he had no authority to interfere with her purpose, with which besides,
otherwise than as likely to be pecuniarily disastrous to her, he
entirely sympathised.
Her purpose was to purchase a property in the valley of the
Mississippi--in Alabama I think it was--with the slaves upon it, to free
them all immediately, and to cultivate the estate by their free labour,
living there with them in a sort of community, the principles and plan
of which were, I fancy, very largely based upon the ideas and schemes of
Mr. Owen of Lanark. His son, Robert Dale Owen, subsequently well known
in Europe as the author of sundry works on spiritualism and political
speculations, and as United States Consul at Naples and perhaps other
cities, was a life-long friend of Miss Wright’s.
Now, my parents had taken with them to La Grange my next brother, Henry,
who has been mentioned as the companion of my early London rambles, and
who was then rapidly approaching manhood without having found for
himself, or having had found for him, any clear prospect of earning the
livelihood which it was clearly enough necessary that he should earn in
some way; and Miss Wright proposed to my mother to bring him to America
to join in her projected establishment and experiment at “New
Harmony”--such I believe to have been the name which Miss Wright gave to
her property. The original name, I think, was Nashoba, but my knowledge
of any of these matters is very imperfect. I know that the whole scheme
ended in complete disappointment to all concerned, and entire failure.
To Miss Wright it involved very considerable pecuniary loss, which, as I
learned subsequently from my mother, she bore with the utmost fortitude
and cheerfulness, but without any great access of wisdom as regarded her
benevolent schemes for the political and economical improvement of
human, and especially black, society. I never saw her again; but
remember to have heard of her marrying a French teacher of languages at
the close of a course of lectures given by her against the institution
of matrimony. All that I heard from my mother and my brother of their
connection with Miss Wright, of her administration of affairs at New
Harmony, and her conduct when her experiment issued in failure and
disappointment, left with me the impression of her genuinely highminded
enthusiasm, her unselfishness, bravery, and generosity, but, at the same
time, of her deficiency in the qualities which can alone make departure
from the world’s beaten tracks--mill-horse tracks though they be--either
wise, profitable, or safe. She had a fine and large intelligence, but
not fine or large enough for going quite unpiloted across country.
Whether my mother resided any time at Nashoba I am not sure, but I think
not. At all events, very shortly after her arrival in America she
established herself at Cincinnati. And when it became evident that there
was no prospect of permanent work for my brother in the business of
regenerating the negroes, it was determined--by the advice of what
Cincinnati friends I know not--that he should join my mother there, and
undertake the establishment and conduct of an institution which, as far
as I was able to understand the plan, was to combine the specialities of
an Athenæum, a lecture hall, and a bazaar! And it was when this
enterprise had been decided upon, but before any steps had been taken
for the realising of it, that I accompanied my father on a visit to
America.
When I returned from Winchester in July, there were still many months
before me of uncertainty whether I might get a vacancy at New College or
not, and my father, having determined on going for a short visit to
Cincinnati, proposed to take me with him. After what I have written in a
previous chapter of my early tastes and proclivities, I need hardly say
that the prospect of this travel was in the highest degree delightful to
me. I am afraid that, at the time, any call to New College, which
should have had the effect of preventing it, would have been to me a
very unwelcome one. Our departure was fixed for September, and the
intervening time was spent by me in preparations for the great
adventure, very much such as Livingstone may be supposed to have made on
quitting England for the “dark continent.”
I was, as it seems to me now, still a very boyish boy, all ex-Wiccamical
prefect as I was, and, I cannot help thinking, younger and more childish
than the youngsters of equal age of the present generation.
The voyage, however, really was a bigger affair in those days than it
has become in these times, for it was before the iron horse had been
trained to cross the Atlantic. And my father made it a very much more
serious business still by engaging for us berths in the steerage of a
passenger ship. I hardly think that he would have done so had he been at
all aware of what he was undertaking. It is true that he was undoubtedly
hard pressed for money, though I have not now, and had not then any such
knowledge of his affairs as to enable me to judge to what degree he was
straitened. But there was also about my father a sort of Spartan
contempt for comfort, and determination not to expend money on his own
personal well-being, which was a prominent feature in his character, and
which, I have no doubt, contributed to the formation of his resolution
to make this journey in the least costly manner possible.
But, as I have said, I think that he had no very clear notion of what a
steerage passage across the Atlantic implied. As for me, if he had
proposed to make the voyage on a raft I should have jumped at the offer!
It was, in truth, a sufficiently severe experience. But, as I was then
at eighteen, I should have welcomed the chance of making such an
expedition, even if I had accurately realised all the accompaniments and
all the details of it.
We went on board the good ship _Corinthian_, Captain Chadwick, bound for
New York, in the September of 1828. Ship and captain were American.
I confess that my first feeling on entering the place which was to be my
habitation during the next few weeks was one of dismay. It was not that
the accommodation was rough. I cared little enough about that, and
should have cared as little had it been much rougher. But it was the
first time in my life that I had had any experience of the truth of the
proverb that misfortune makes one acquainted with strange bedfellows! Of
course there was in that part of the vessel allotted to the steerage
passengers no sort of enclosure for the different berths, some dozen or
score of them, in which the steerage passengers had to sleep. No sort of
privacy either by day or by night was possible; add to which, the
ventilation was very insufficient, and the whole place was, perhaps
unavoidably, dirty to a revolting degree. My father almost at once
betook himself to his berth, and rarely left it during the entire
voyage--indeed he was for the most part incapable of doing so, having
been suffering from his usual sick headache more or less during the
whole time. If the voyage was a bad time for me, it must have been far
worse for him. Indeed I was scarcely ever below, except when attending
on him.
Before the first night came, I declared my intention of making no use of
the berth assigned to me. Where was I to pass the night then? I said I
should pass it on deck. I had a huge great coat, a regular
“dreadnought,” so called in those days, and made with innumerable capes;
and with that I thought I should do well enough during the September
night. My declared intention brought an avalanche of ridicule down on my
head, not only from my fellow inhabitants of the steerage, but from the
captain and his mates. A night on deck, or at the very most two, would
make me glad and thankful enough for the shelter of my berth. I did not
know what I was talking of, but should soon find out, &c.
Well, the first night passed! It was a fine moonlight. And I enjoyed it
and the novelty of my surroundings keenly. I slept, wrapped in my
capacious great coat, two or three hours at a time, and morning found me
none the worse. The second night was less delightful! I was weary and
began to feel the need of sleep after a fashion to which I was more
accustomed. And then came bad weather, wet and cold! I got some shelter
in an erection on the deck called the “round house;” but the want of
proper rest was beginning to tell upon me, and the fatigue was very
severe. I think that, despite my horror of the steerage and the world
that inhabited it, I should have succumbed and accepted its shelter, if
my determination not to do so had been confined to my own breast; and no
necessity had existed for triumphing over the ridicule and the unanimous
prophecies of the other passengers and the ship’s officers. As it was, I
was safe not to yield!
I did not yield! Our voyage was rather longer than an average one, and
during all the thirty-eight days that it lasted, I never passed a night
below, or went there at all save for the purpose of changing my clothes,
or attending on my father, who lay sick and suffering in his berth
during almost the whole time. It was a severer experience than it may
seem probably to the imagination of those who never made a similar
experiment. When I reached New York, I felt as if it would be heaven to
go to sleep for a week.
We had one short spell of very bad weather; and were, as I subsequently
learned, in considerable danger for an hour or so. We had been running
all day before a fair wind exactly aft, which, continually increasing in
violence, assumed at sun-down the force of a gale. Nevertheless Captain
Chadwick, against the advice of an old English merchant captain, who was
a passenger, could not prevail on himself to lose the advantage of so
good a wind, and determined to “carry on.” But as the night advanced
the wind continued to increase and the sea to rise, till the danger of
being “pooped,” if we continued to run before it, became too great to be
neglected. But the danger of putting about, “broaching-to” I believe is
the correct term, was also great.
It became necessary however to do this about midnight, and I was the
only passenger on deck during the operation. The English merchant
captain mentioned above kept running up for a few minutes at a time
every now and then. But he had a wife and young children aboard, and
would not remain long away from them. The good ship as she came round
into the trough of the sea, lay down on her side to such a degree that
my body as I clung to the bulwark on the weather-side swung away to the
leeward in such sort that I was for a minute hanging from a hold above
my head, instead of clinging to one at my side. And I saw and
heard--very specially heard--every sail blown away from the yards. I
heard, too, the shout of the men on the yards, “We can’t get an inch,”
as they strove to reef. Much danger was occasioned to the men by the
block at the foot of the mainsail remaining attached to the sail, which
was blown about, before it could be secured, with a violence which
knocked the cook’s galley to atoms.
And all this I saw to my great delight. For I considered a storm at sea
as a part of the experiences of a voyage which it would have been a
great pity to have missed, and was altogether unaware that we were in
any real danger. Towards daybreak the gale moderated, and before noon it
was perfectly calm, and all hands were busy in bending a new suite of
sails.
With all this I should have enjoyed the voyage immensely had it not been
for the nature of the companionship to which I should have been
condemned if I had not escaped from it in the manner I have described.
The utter roughness of the accommodation, the scanty and not very
delicate food, would all have signified to me in those days absolutely
nothing. But I could not tolerate the companionship of the men and women
with whom I should have lived. I could have no doubt tolerated it some
twenty years later, but it was at that time too new to me. I take it
that ill-luck had given us a rather specially bad lot as our destined
companions in the steerage. I had seen quite enough of the labourers on
the farm at Harrow to know what a man living with his family on a pound
a week was like, and I could have managed to live if necessary with such
men for a week or two without any insuperable repugnance. But some of
the denizens of that steerage _bolgia_ were blackguards of a description
quite new to me.
Two figures among them are still, after nearly sixty years, present to
my mental vision. One was a large, loosely-made, middle-aged man, who
always wore a long grey serge dressing-gown. He was accompanied by
nobody belonging to him, and I never had the least idea what grade or
department of life he could have belonged to. His language, though
horrible, as regards the ideas conveyed by it, was grammatically far
superior to that of most of those around him; and he was very clever
with his hands, executing various little arrangements for his own
comfort with the skill of a carpenter, and almost with that of an
upholsterer. His face was thoroughly bad, with loose, baggy, flaccid,
pale cheeks, and a great coarse hanging under lip. He always looked
exceedingly dirty, but nevertheless was always clean shaved. He was
always talking, always haranguing those who would listen to him; always
extolling the country for which we were bound, and its institutions, and
expressing the most venomous hatred of England and all things English. I
used to listen to him during my hours of attendance on my father with an
excess of loathing, which I doubt not I failed to conceal from him, and
which, acting like a strong brine, has preserved his memory in my mind
all these years.
The other was much less objectionable. He was a younger man, and called
himself a farmer, but his farming had evidently run much to
horse-dealing, and he dressed in a horsey style. He had a miserable
sickly wife with him, who had once upon a time been pretty. She wore the
remains of dresses that had once been smart, and was by far the most
slatternly woman I ever saw. Her husband, so far as I could observe,
did not ill-treat her, but he was constantly saying unkind things in
language which should have made her blush, if she had not left all
blushes far behind her, and at which the other worse brute used to laugh
with obstreperous approbation. He could sing too, as I thought at that
time very well, and used to sing a song telling how “The farm I now hold
on your honour’s estate, is the same that my grandfather held,” &c. &c.
The tune of it runs in my head to this day; and I remember thinking that
if the song related the singer’s own fortunes, “his honour” must have
gained by the change of tenant, however many generations of ancestors
may have held it before him.
By the time our voyage came to an end I was pretty nearly worn out by
want of rest and night and day exposure to the weather. But to own the
truth honestly, I was supported by a sense of pride in having sustained
an amount of fatigue which none other in the ship had, and few probably
could have, sustained, and which I had been defied to sustain. And after
I had had a sleep “the round of the clock,” as the phrase goes, I was
none the worse. Moreover, it was a matter of extreme consolation to me
to think that I was accumulating a store of strange experiences of a
kind which nothing in my previous life had seemed to promise me. But
above all the approach to New York, and the sight of the bay, was, I
felt, more than enough to repay me for all the discomfort of the voyage.
I thought it by far the grandest sight I had ever seen, as indeed it
doubtless was.
I do not remember to have been much struck by the town of New York. I
remember thinking it had the look of an overgrown colossal village, and
that it was very different in appearance from any English city. It
seemed to me too that there was a strange contrast between the roomy,
clean, uncity-like appearance of the place, and the apparent hurry and
energetic ways of the inhabitants. I remember also remarking the very
generally youthful appearance of those who seemed to be transacting most
of the business of the place.
We were received most kindly by an old friend of my parents, Mr. Wilkes,
the uncle, I think, or perhaps great-uncle of him who as Commodore
Wilkes of the _Trent_ subsequently became known to the world, as having
very nearly set his country and England by the ears! How and why old Mr.
Wilkes was a friend of my father’s I do not know, but suspect that it
was through the medium of some very old friends of my grandfather
Milton, of the name of Garnet. Two very old ladies of that name,
spinster sisters, I remember to have seen at Brighton some twenty or
five and twenty years ago. I remember that Mr. Wilkes struck me as a
remarkably courteous and gentlemanlike old man, very English both in
manners and appearance, in a blue dress coat and buff waistcoat, and
long white hair. I fancy that he was connected in some way (by old
friendship only, I imagine,) with the Misses Wright, and I gathered
that he altogether disapproved of Frances Wright’s philanthropic Nashoba
enterprise, and consequently of the share in it which my father and
mother, on behalf of my brother Henry, had undertaken. Of the wisdom of
his misgivings the result furnished abundant proof.
My recollections of the journey from New York to Cincinnati are of a
very fragmentary description, those of so very many other journeys
during the well nigh sixty years which have elapsed since it was
performed have nearly obliterated them. I remember being struck by the
uncomfortable roughness of all the lodging accommodation, as contrasted
with the great abundance, and even, as it appeared to me, luxury of the
commissariat department.
We passed by Pittsburg and crossed the Alleghany Mountains, the former
remaining in my memory as a nightmare of squalor, and the latter as a
vision of beauty and delight. We travelled long days through districts
of untouched forest over the often described “corduroy” roads. I was
utterly disappointed by the forests; all that I saw of them appeared to
me a miserable collection of lank, unwholesome-looking, woebegone stems,
instead of Windsor Forest on a vastly increased scale, which was, I take
it, what I expected. I remember, too, being much struck by the
performance of the drivers of the stages over the corduroy roads
aforesaid, and often over boggy tracts of half reclaimed forest amid the
blackened stumps of burned trees. The things they proposed to
themselves to accomplish, and did accomplish without coming to grief,
other than shaking every tooth in the heads of their passengers, would
have made an English coachman’s hair stand on end! To have seen them at
their work over a decent bit of road would on the other hand have
provoked the laughter and contempt of the same critics. Arms and legs
seemed to take an equal part in the work; the whip was never idle, and
the fatigue must have been excessive. I do not think that any man could
have driven fifty miles at a stretch over those roads.
Cincinnati was reached at last. The journey to me had been delightful in
the highest degree, simply from the novelty of everything. As things
were done at that time it was one of very great fatigue, but in those
days I seemed to be incapable of fatigue. At all events it was all
child’s play in comparison with my crossing the ocean in the good ship
_Corinthian_.
We found my mother and two sisters and my brother Henry well, and
established in a roomy bright-looking house, built of wood, and all
white with the exception of the green Venetian blinds. It stood in its
own “grounds,” but these grounds consisted of a large field uncultivated
save for a few potatoes in one corner of it; and the whole appearance of
the place was made unkempt-looking--not squalid, because everything was
too new and clean looking for that--by uncompleted essays towards the
making of a road from the entrance-gate to the house, and by fragments
of boarding and timber, which it had apparently been worth no one’s
while to collect after the building of the house was completed. With all
this there was an air of roominess and brightness which seemed to me
very pleasant. The house was some five or ten minutes’ walk from what
might be considered the commencement of the town, but it is no doubt by
this time, if it still stands at all, more nearly in the centre of it.