"Yes!"
Of course one general shout of derision ascended from the throng.
Nothing but the ringing of the bell prevented me from accepting on the
spot the challenge to a fist-fight of a boy whom Lee has since cashiered
from his colonelcy for selling the commissions in his regiment. After
school I was taken in hand by a gentleman, then one of our
belles-lettres teachers, but now a well-known and eloquent divine in New
York city, who for the first time showed me how to beat an antagonist by
avoiding his deductions.
"Tell G. the next time," said the present Rev. Dr. W., "that, if you saw
a poor beggar-woman dying of cold and hunger, you would do all in your
power to help her, though you might be far enough from wanting to marry
her."
How many a _non-sequitur_ of people who didn't sit in the boys' gallery
has this simple little formula of Dr. W.'s helped me to shed aside since
then!
* * * * *
Just after the John Brown raid, I went to Florida. I remained in the
State from the first of January till the first week of the May
following. I found there the climate of Utopia, the scenery of Paradise,
and the social system of Hell.
I am inclined to think that the author of the pamphlet which last spring
advocated amalgamation was a Floridian. The most open relations of
concubinage existed between white chevaliers and black servants in the
town of Jacksonville. I was not surprised at the fact, but was
surprised at its openness. The particular friend of one family belonging
to the cream of Florida society was a gentleman in thriving business who
had for his mistress the waiting-maid of the daughters. He used to sit
composedly with the young ladies of an evening,--one of them playing on
the piano to him, the other smiling upon him over a bouquet,--while the
woman he had afflicted with the burdens, without giving her the
blessings, of marriage, came in curtsying humbly with a tea-tray.
Everybody understood the relation perfectly; but not even the pious
shrugged their shoulders or seemed to care. One day, a lank Virginian,
wintering South in the same hotel with myself, began pitching into me on
the subject of "Northern amalgamators." I called to me a pretty little
boy with the faintest tinge of umber in his skin, and pointed him to the
lank Virginian without a word. The lank Virginian understood the answer,
and sat down to read Bledsoe on the Soul. Bledsoe, as a slave-labor
growth in metaphysics, (indeed, the only Southern metaphysician, if we
except Governor Wise,) is much coddled at the South. I believe, besides,
that he proves the divine right of Slavery _a priori_. If he begins with
the "Everlasting Me," he must be just the kind of reading for a slave
aristocrat.
* * * * *
It is very amusing to hear the Southerners talk of arming their slaves.
I often heard them do it in Florida. I have read such Richmond Congress
debates as have transpired upon the subject. I do not believe that any
important steps will be taken in the matter. I have known a master mad
with fear, when he saw an old gun-stock protruding from beneath one of
those dog-heaps of straw and sacking called beds, in the negro-quarters.
The fact that it had been thrown away by himself, had no barrel attached
to it, and was picked up by a colored boy who had a passion for carving,
hardly prevented the man from giving the innocent author of his fright a
round "nine-and-thirty." When I was in Florida, a peculiar set of marks,
like the technical "blaze," were found on certain trees in that and the
adjoining State westward. The people were alive in an instant. There
were editorials and meetings. The Southern heart was fired, and fired
off. There was every indication of a negro uprising, and those marks
pointed the way to the various rendezvous. When they were discovered to
be the work of some insignificant rodent, who had put himself on
bark-tonic to a degree which had never chanced to be observed before,
nobody seemed ashamed, for everybody said,--"Well, it was best to be on
the safe side; the thing might have happened just as well as not." I do
not believe that one thinking Southern man (if any such there be in the
closing hours of a desperate conspiracy) has any more idea of arming his
negroes than of translating San Domingo to the threshold of his home. I
should like to see the negroes whom I knew most thoroughly intrusted
with blockade-run rifles, just by way of experiment. Let me recall a
couple of these acquaintances.
* * * * *
The St. John's River is one of the most picturesque and beautiful
streams in the world. Its bluffs never rise higher than fifty or sixty
feet; it has no abrupt precipices; the whole formation about it is
tertiary and drift or modern terrace; but its first eighty miles from
its mouth are broad as a bay of the sea, and its narrow upper course
above Pilatka, where current supersedes tide, is all one dream of
Eden,--an infinitely tortuous avenue, peopled with myriads of beautiful
wild-birds, roofed by overhanging branches of oak, magnolia, and
cypress, draped with the moss that tones down those solitudes into a
sort of day-moonlight, and, in the greatest contrast with this,
festooned by the lavish clusters of odorous yellow jasmine and many-hued
morning-glory,--the latter making a pillar heavy with triumphal wreaths
of every old stump along the plashy brink,--the former swinging from
tree-top to tree-top to knit the whole tropic wilderness into a tangle
of emerald chains, drooping lamps of golden fire, and censers of
bewildering fragrance.
To the hunting, fishing, and exploration of such a river I was never
sorry that I had brought my own boat. It was one of the
_chefs-d'oeuvres_ of my old schoolmate Ingersoll,--a copper-fastened,
clinker-built pleasure-boat, pulling two pairs of sculls, fifteen feet
long, comfortably accommodating six persons, and adorned by the builder
with a complimentary blue and gilt backboard of mahogany and a pair of
presentation tiller-ropes twisted from white and crimson silk.
In this boat I and the companion of my exile took much comfort. When we
intended only a short row,--some trifle of ten or twelve miles,--we
always pulled for ourselves; but on long tours, where the faculties of
observation would have been impaired by the fatigue of action, we
employed as our oarsman a black man whom I shall call Sol Cutter,--not
knowing on which side of the lines he may be at present.
Sol, when we first discovered him, was hovering around the Jacksonville
wharves, looking for a job. It is so novel to see that kind of thing in
the South, that I asked him if he was a free negro. He replied, that he
was the slave of a gentleman who allowed him to buy his time. He said
"allowed"; but I suspect that the truer, though less delicate, way of
putting it would have been to say "obliged" him to, for the sake of a
living. Sol's "Mossa Cutter" had remaining to him none of the paternal
acres; and it never having occurred to him, that, when lands and houses
all are spent, then learning is most excellent, he possessed none of
that _nous_ which would have enabled a Northern man to outflank
embarrassments by directing his forces into new channels. Having worked
a plantation, when he had no longer any plantation to work he was
compelled to send his negroes into the street to earn an eleemosynary
living for him. This was no obloquy. How many such men has every
Southern traveller seen,--"sons of the first South Carolina
families,"--parodying the Caryatides against the sunny wall of some low
grog-shop during a whole winter afternoon,--their eyes listless, their
hands in their pockets, their legs outstretched, their backs bent, their
conversation a languid mixture of Cracker dialect and overseer slang,
their negroes' earnings running down their throats at intervals, as they
change their outside for a temporary inside position,--and all the
well-dressed citizens addressing them cheerfully as "Colonel" and
"Major," without a blush of shame, as they go by! Goldwin Smith was
right in pointing at such men as one of the former palliations for the
social invectives of the foreign tourist,--though any such tourist with
brains need not have mistaken them for sample Americans, having already
been in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The trouble is, that foreign
tourists, as a rule, do _not_ have brains. At any rate, they may say to
us, as Artemus Ward of his gifts of eloquence,--"I _have_ them, but--I
haven't got them with me."
Sol Cutter paid his master eight dollars a week. As he had to keep
himself out of his remainder earnings, he was naturally more
enterprising than most slaves, and I took a fancy to him immediately.
From the day I found him, he always went out with me on my long rows.
The middle of a river six miles wide is the safest place that can be
found at the South for insurrectionary conversation. Even there I used
to wonder whether the Southerners had not given secret-service money to
the alligators who occasionally stuck their knobby noses above the flood
to scent our colloquies.
Sol was pulling away steadily, having "got his second wind" at the end
of the first mile. I was sitting with tiller-ropes in hand, and studying
his strong-featured, but utterly expressionless face, with deep
curiosity. His face was one over which the hot roller of a great agony
has passed, smoothing out all its meaning.
"So your master sells you your time?"
"Yes, Mossa." (Always "_Mossa_" never "_Massa_," so far South as this.)
"Do you support your wife and children as well as yourself?"
A convulsive gulp on the part of Sol, but no reply.
"Have you never been married?"
"Yes, Mossa."
"Is your wife dead?"
"I hope so,--to de good God, I hope so, Mossa!"
Sol leaned forward on his oars and stopped rowing. He panted, he gnashed
his teeth, he frothed at the mouth, and when I thought he must be an
epileptic, he lifted himself up with one strong shudder, and turning on
me a face stern as Cato's,--
"Nebber, _nebber_, NEBBER, shall I see wife or chil' agin!"
I then said openly that I was an Abolitionist,--that I believed in every
man's right to freedom,--and that, as to the safest friend in the world,
he might tell me his story,--which he thereupon did, and which was
afterward abundantly corroborated by pro-slavery testimony on shore.
"Mossa Cutter" had fallen heir in South Carolina to a good plantation
and thirty likely "niggers." At the age of twenty-five he sold out the
former and emigrated to Florida with the latter. The price of the
plantation rapidly disappeared at horse-races, poker-parties,
cock-fights, and rum-shops. If Mossa Cutter speculated, he was always
unsuccessful, because he was always hotheaded and always drunk.
In process of time "debts of honor" and the sheriff's hammer had
dissipated his entire clientage of blacks, with the exception of Sol, a
pretty yellow woman with a nice baby, who were respectively Sol's wife
and child, and a handsome quadroon boy of seventeen, who was Mossa
Cutter's body-servant.
Sol came to the quarters one night and found his wife and child gone.
They were on their way to Tallahassee in a coffle which had been made up
as a sudden speculation on the cheerful Bourse of Jacksonville. Four
doors away Mossa Cutter could be seen between the flaunting red curtains
of a bar-room window, drinking Sol's heart's blood at sixpence the
tumblerful.
Sol, I hear they are going to put an English musket in your hands!
Sol fell paralyzed to the ground. A moment after, he was up on his feet
again, and, without thought of nine o'clock, pass, patrol, or
whipping-house, rushing on the road likely to be taken by chain-gangs to
Tallahassee. He reached the "Piny Woods" timber on the outskirts of the
town. No one had noticed him, and he struck madly through the sand that
floors those forests, knowing no weariness, for his heart-strings pulled
that way. He travelled all night without overtaking them; but just as
the first gray dawn glimmered between the piny plumes behind him, he
heard the coarse shout of drivers close ahead, and found himself by the
fence of a log-hut where the gang had huddled down for its short sleep.
It was now light enough to travel, and the drivers were "geeing" up
their human cattle.
Sol rushed to his wife and baby. As the man and woman clasped each other
in frantic caress, the driver came up, and, kicking them, bade them with
an oath to have done.
"Whose nigger are you?" (to Sol.)
"I belong to Mossa Cutter. I's come to be taken along."
"Did he send you?"
"He did so, Sah. He tol' me partic'lar. I done run hard to catch up wid
you gemplemen, Mossa. Mossa Cutter he sell me to-day to be sol' in de
same lot wid Nancy."
The drivers went aside and talked for a while, then took him on with
them, and, for a wonder, did sell Sol and Nancy in the same lot. Nancy's
and the baby's price had one good use to Sol, for it kept Mossa Cutter
for a week too drunk to know of his loss or care for his recovery.
Sol was the coachman, Nancy the laundress, of a gentleman residing at
the capital. Their master had the happy eccentricity of getting more
amiable with every rum-toddy; and as he never for any length of time
discontinued rum-toddies, the days of Sol and Nancy at Judge Q.'s were
halcyon.
They had not counted on one of the drivers going back to Jacksonville,
meeting Mossa Cutter over his libations, and confidentially confessing
to him,--
"I tuk a likely boy o'yourn over to Tallahassee in that gang month afore
last."
Sol, if they had put a British gun in your hands _then_!
Mossa Cutter swooped down on them in the midst of their
happiness,--refused to let Judge Q. ransom Sol at twice his value,--and
tore him from his wife and child. Returning with him to Jacksonville, he
beat him almost to death,--after which, he sent him out on the wharves
to earn their common living.
A few nights after the return of Sol, Mossa Cutter came home with _mania
a potu_. His handsome quadroon body-servant was sitting up for him.
Mossa Cutter said to him,--
"You have the sideboard-keys,--bring me that decanter of brandy."